Possession, Demoniacal And Other

by T K Oesterreich

  The devils having resolved to bring about his death … they attacked him more fiercely than ever on the day of Pentecost when he was to preach, and the time for the sermon having come he was not disposed for it. His confessor commanded the devil to leave him alone and the Father to go into the pulpit from obedience, which he did and preached with more satisfaction to his hearers than if he had passed weeks in preparation.… After this sermon the devils besieged him yet more than before. He said mass on three or four days, at the end of which he was constrained to remain in bed until the Monday when he died. He vomited filthy stuff which was thought each time to be a token of the expulsion and from which those around contrived to gather some hope of relief, but the surgeon judged him to be in a very serious condition and said that unless God soon arrested the course of this diabolic work it was impossible that he should survive, for as soon as he had taken any food, although with appetite, the demons made him spew it out with such violent palpitations of the heart that the strongest would have died of them. They gave him headaches and nausea of a kind not mentioned either in Galen or Hippocrates and in order to explain the nature of which one must have suffered them like the good Father. They cried out and raged through his mouth and nevertheless his mind was always clear. All these torments were joined to a continuous fever and various other unexpected complications which cannot be understood by those who have not seen them and who have no experience of the ways in which devils act upon the body.… Thus he died in the forty-third year of his age … 1

  The caution which should be exercised when the equivocal word “possession” is used in bald accounts is also necessary in dealing with the formulæ of exorcism. No one of them may be considered as evidence of the presence of true possession. Such charms were applied to ordinary physical maladies when these were mistaken for demoniacal possession.

  The idea of possession, in all its original scope, still persists in our own time. At bottom the ecclesiastical benediction of a church is an echo, for it signifies putting the building into a state of resistance to anti-divine forces. The blessing of livestock and their fodder has this same meaning and is often carried out by simple people even to-day. Corresponding inversely to this blessing is the exorcism of one who is already given over to the powers of darkness. These two, benediction and exorcism, need not, moreover, be very sharply discriminated from the practical point of view. The blessing is often the expulsion of supposititious demoniac intruders who may possibly be present. The “Manual” already quoted above gives numerous examples of exorcism of this kind. Here is one:

  Exorcismus pro maleficato in proprio corpore.

  Alia formula exorcisandi maleficiatos quoscumque.

  Remedia contra febres, pestem et alias infirmitates naturales.

  Remedia spiritualia contra philtra amatoria.

  Remedia spiritualia pro impeditis per maleficia, ope dæmonum, in matrimonio.

  Modus exorcisandi circa quævis animalia per maleficia et veneficia afflicta.

  Exorcismus contra maleficia lacticiniorum (foods composed of eggs and milk) et aliorum comestibilium, frugum, etc.

  Exorcismus pro lacte.

  Exorcismus pro butyro (butter).

  Here is an example of exorcism for milk:

  Ecce Crucem Domini, fugite partes adversæ, vicit leo de tribu Juda, radix David. Exorciso te, creatura lactis in nomine Dei patris omnipotentis , et in nomine Jesu Christi filii eius Domini nostri, et in virtute Spiritus sancti, ut fias exorcisatum in salutem fidelium, et sis omnibus ex te sumentibus sanitas animæ et corporis, et effugiat atque discedat a te nequitia omnis ac versutia diabolicæ fraudis, omnisque nocendi facultas in te omnis modo per ministros satanicos introducta.1

  The following is an example of ancient exorcism against children’s maladies. It comes from Egypt; sickness itself was there considered as a demoniacal being.

  Go hence, thou who comest in darkness, whose nose is turned backwards, whose face is upside down and who knowest not why thou hast come (repeat). Hast thou come to kiss this child? I will not let thee kiss him. Hast thou come to send him to sleep? I will not let thee do him harm. Hast thou come to take him with thee? I will not let thee carry him away. I have secured his protection against thee with afa root, onions and honey, sweet to men but evil to the dead.2

  In the Bibliothèque universelle suisse3 Henri A. Junod has depicted under the title: Galagala, Tableau de mœurs de la tribu des Rongas (Delagoa coast) and in the delightful form of a novel, a personal experience of primitive exorcism in the case of a man suffering from pulmonary inflammation. In spite of the witch-doctor’s formal diagnosis of possession and his violent exorcism by noise, the patient showed not the slightest symptom of possession.

  Yet more interesting is the account given by a traveller in Guiana of a primitive cure for headache. In that case also there is no question of exorcism proper since the fever was not taken for possession, but nevertheless treatment by primitive exorcism is so nearly allied that the case should be cited. It is the only one where, to my knowledge, the traveller himself underwent the cure. It is in Bastian’s work: Ueber psychische Beobachtungen bei Naturvölkern.4 It gives a very clear impression of the terrible nature of primitive medical treatment which temporarily plunges the patients into an entirely abnormal state of mind. Such being the case with a European ethnologist it may be imagined to what degree the native, far more suggestible, must be thrown off his psychic balance.

  This closes our survey of the typical states of possession. Their nature has always consisted in phenomena of pyschic compulsion, the aggravation of which not infrequently renders the victims somnambulistic. Motor hyperexcitement, however frequent it may be, is not necessarily a constituent part of possession.

  The appearance of possession, particularly in its gravest forms, is always in point of fact associated with belief in the devil. It is this belief which by means of autosuggestion nourishes possession and maintains it.

  So far as age is concerned, the first appearance of possession is not connected with any given time of life. But as regards sex, the predominance in women is extraordinarily marked. Out of thirteen cases related by Kerner and in part observed by him, there are only two men, aged 37 and 71; all the other cases concern girls and women, aged, so far as particulars are available, 8, 10, 11, 20, 31, 32, 34, 36 and 70 years. Thus the climacteric periods are almost solely involved. These numbers are in essential agreement with those derived from other sources, except that perhaps the male sex is slightly, but not much, better represented. The epidemics of possession have almost always smitten convents of nuns or similar establishments, men being only occasionally affected. For the rest, the possessed almost all belong to the uneducated lower classes.

  In addition to the states which we have studied there are others, rarer, it is true, in which the persons concerned affirm in the same way that they are possessed, that there is a spirit within which torments them, but where the general condition is nevertheless different in that it attests no phenomena of compulsion. These are cases of mere delusion or even of real hallucinatory ideas which may have a very different origin. The mildest cases concern uneducated people who, in order to explain maladies, particularly of a psychic nature, adopt the vulgar notion of possession. The more serious ones concern paranoiacs, paralytics and other persons suffering from diseases of the mind which produce hallucinatory ideas and in whom the delusion of possession arises. Such affections defy exorcism, or if not, a new illusory idea will immediately take the place of a former one. It must be admitted that such a purely intellectual form of possession exists, but it is undoubtedly very much more rare indeed than the true states of possession; so rare, in fact, that I cannot quote one indubitable case in all the documents known to me. I shall therefore give up all idea of dealing with it further.

  It is impossible to concur in the description of “true cases of possession” which Pelletier and Marie apply to patients who harbour the delusion of having parasites in the body.1 Such a terminology must lea
d to the most mischievous confusion. Possession should only be spoken of in cases where derangements exist of the nature of those analyzed in this book. Naturally they may be associated with these ideas of parasites, but the latter alone do not authorize us to speak of possession.

  A further development of these ideas of parasites into states of possession seems to Séglas to be frankly a modern form of possession:

  This assimilation of the delirium of possession by small animals to the early demoniacal delirium may be demonstrated by the evidence of mixed cases. I have observed several very clear ones, amongst others that of a woman who professed to be possessed by the devil who had entered her body in the form of microbes which she designated by a strange name and which played all sorts of malicious tricks on her. This case shows the association of the two ideas, demoniacal possession united with the modern conception of the microbe, the form which the devil was supposed to have taken.

  This woman had, moreover, very severe cœnesthesic troubles, a particular form of delirium and a very clearly marked duplication of personality; she also had ideas of negation, such as that of having no stomach, no intestines, no tongue.

  I have made similar observations concerning another woman patient who was possessed by a tænia (tapeworm).2

  Furthermore it must be emphasized that in French psychological literature another state is included under the name of “possession.” In this state, at least according to the Franco—Anglo-Saxon school of psychology headed by P. Janet, the psychic processes attributed to the “possessing spirit” are no longer in the consciousness, lucid or somnambulistic,3 of the individual, but remain completely unconscious.

  The patient observes that his arms and legs execute without his knowledge and in his despite complicated movements, he hears his own mouth command or mock him; he resists, discusses, fights against an individual who has sprung up within him. How can he interpret his state, what is he to think of himself? Is he not reasonable when he pronounces himself possessed by a spirit, persecuted by a demon which dwells within him? How can he be in doubt when this second personality, taking its name from the most well-known superstitions, declares itself as Ashtaroth, Leviathan or Beelzebub? The belief in possession is only the popular rendering of a psychological truth.1

  This psychological truth consists precisely, according to Janet, in the fact that beside the conscious psychic phenomena belonging to the normal individual, yet others unfold in the organism which do not belong to this first individual but are bound up into a second ego. (Janet and almost the whole of the new Franco—Anglo-Saxon psychology hold the view that the ego is merely a synthesis of psychic processes.) Such states would naturally be quite different from those which we have hitherto studied. If they existed, the expression “possession” would be much less metaphorical when applied to them than to other cases, for there would really exist in the individual a second mind, entirely autonomous, side by side with the first and disputing with it for the control of the organism.

  Whatever bearing it may have upon our subject, we cannot here go into the question of ascertaining whether such cases exist. But it is indissolubly connected with the problem of the unconscious, that is to say, whether there exist psychic processes which are completely “unconscious,” as Janet understands the word, and what is their extent. The above-mentioned state of possession would then represent the maximum development of the unconscious. I will reserve the elucidation of this question for a general study of the unconscious, as it can only be resolved along such broad lines.

  As we have already observed, it is of great importance to the criticism of sources2 to know that in an early stage of civilization no psychic disturbance is counted amongst the distinguishing symptoms of possession, whereas simple bodily derangements are regarded as sufficient proof of its existence. According to the belief of primitive peoples, not only every spiritual affection but also every physiological one is the consequence of an intruding spirit within the sufferer. This idea has persisted far into the higher realms of civilization; that of the Euphrates and Tigris region was completely permeated by it as wel as that of Egypt.

  In other words, by no means all the states designated as “possession” in the raw materials of history are such within the meaning of the present work, and, moreover, by no means every exorcism transmitted to us envisages these latter states, many examples relating only to physiological disturbances and their conjuration.

  This identification of all sorts of maladies with possession is of great importance as a suggestive factor in the genesis of true, i.e., psychological possession, because such a belief by its universal prevalence creates an atmosphere particularly favourable to autosuggestion; conversely the present-day conception that, generally speaking, nothing of the nature of possession exists, is a powerful obstacle to the development of the states which we have analyzed.

  Naturally the present time does not show a complete absence of states akin to possession: Possession has appeared to us as a particularly extensive complex of compulsive phenomena, which naturally exist in great numbers to-day, every marked nervous state habitually bringing them in its train. But these processes do not now develop with the same ease as formerly when the autosuggestion of possession supervened.

  Literature contains innumerable examples of such compulsive functions. I have given some particularly characteristic ones in connection with the psychological analysis of psychic compulsions in my Phänomenologie des Ich (vol. i, chap. xiii).

  Yet more interesting is another state which is apt to produce in the persons concerned the idea that they are guided by an extraneous power and which still to-day produces the idea of possession although generally in a transitory form. It is the state of affective and voluntary inhibition which so strikingly dominates the clinical picture of acute psychasthenia.

  In such states of psychasthenic inhibition the individual loses all consciousness of his activity yet nevertheless sees himself act. The “determining tendencies” create action but are only feebly felt, so that the person considers his own actions as an enigma. This state readily produces the idea that the actions have originated in an extraneous power, another individual. The fact remains, however, that educated patients of to-day do not, on the mere suggestion, really accept this idea.

  When I was small, says Rp., I used to feel a mysterious power which compelled me and took away my liberty; I believed then that it was the Holy Virgin; to-day I feel the same thing, and wonder whether I am not under a malign spell.

  “I am exasperated,” says Nadia, “always to feel something mysterious which holds me back and prevents me from succeeding in my ambitions … it seems to me that the fates are against me and always will be so long as I live … it is as if there were a fatal destiny hovering over my head which never leaves me … it is my fate which will bring about what I am most afraid of and make me grow fat, so that I may be still more worried … there is a force which drives me to take ridiculous oaths, it is the devil who drives me.”

  “I have incessantly,” says Gisèle, “the feeling of a stronger power which holds me, the feeling that I struggle against something greater; it is this power which I have called God and which I am also tempted to call the devil …;” and Lise always speaks in the same way: “It seems to me that I profane something sacred by struggling against this greater power; that is what constantly makes me think of the devil.”1

  In the same way a case of acute psychasthenia handed over to me by O. Vogt for thorough psychological enquiry had in the beginning shown a certain idea of possession. Under the influence of the doctor’s explanations this had at once disappeared, so little resemblance do these psychasthenic ideas bear as a rule to obsessive ideas.

  Certain of the graver forms of hysteria, at which we shall now glance, show a much greater likeness to the classic cases of possession than do these psychasthenic states, so quiet in their demeanour.

  It was Charcot and his school who recognized that such a relationship existed to some extent.
Charcot has spoken definitely of a “demoniacal attack,” and it is described in detail, with numerous suggestive documents, in the admirable work of Richer.1 If the descriptions there given of certain hysterical states—to which I can only here refer the reader—are compared with accounts of possession, we are driven to the conclusion that the phenomena involved are essentially the same. The contortions and violence of excitement are alike in both, and it seems agreed that in both certain patients retain full consciousness and memory of their states.

  During this kind of attack the loss of consciousness is not complete. Some patients even remain fully conscious of their state, and at the end of the fit assert that during its course they were unable, for all their efforts, to master their agitation. When they succeeded in doing so for a few moments they only ended by bringing on a more violent fit soon afterwards.2

  Marc … and Ler … (two of Richer’s patients) themselves distinguish quite clearly the attacks which they call their “twistings” (tortillements) from the others which are the severe attacks. They can even foretell from the intensity of the phenomena of the aura what kind of attack is coming on. They greatly prefer the severe attacks to the twistings: in the first they completely lose consciousness, whilst in the second they say that they lose consciousness for only a few minutes at a time (during the epileptoid period) and complain of suffering the most frightful tortures imaginable.3