I just read the most fascinating article on demon possession in, of all places, Vanity Fair. The author is William Friedkin, the man who directed the demon-themed horror classic The Exorcist in the 1970s. It recounts his time spent with Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist of the Vatican. (Amorth died in the time Friedkin was working on this article.) Read the article. Seriously.
Amorth, and his pseudonymous patient (is that what she should be called?) Rosa, allowed Friedkin to film an exorcism. What he witnessed shook him to his core. I don't want to give too much away. I very much encourage you all to take the time required to read the article. It made my skin crawl. To recount briefly, this calm, attractive woman starts screaming and shaking and claiming to be Satan during this exorcism. She is being restrained by a number of priests who help Amorth and they are visibly straining to hold her back, sweat pouring down their brows.
One thing worth noting is that Amorth doesn't agree to see and treat every kook who walks through his door. He makes sure that people have been to professional therapists before and even then he acknowledges that only 1-2% of the people he meets with are actually demon possessed. It is not as if, in the language of C.S. Lewis, Amorth sees a demon behind every bush. Nevertheless, he is convinced that active spiritual evil is a force in the world today.
Apart from the frightening telling of the exorcism, perhaps the most illuminating part of Friedkin's essay is when he lets neurosurgeons and psychiatrists weigh in on what they see in Friedkin's film. The neurosurgeons are stumped. None of them are able to categorize what they see. It is not delirium because Rosa's verbal power is beyond what you can see with a delirious patient. The psychiatrists are likewise perplexed. They all agree that Rosa isn't faking it, another argues that the psychiatry community can acknowledge something called "possession" without assenting to divine machinations (a weird sort of compromise), and another, in a story that's making me regret typing this at midnight in a creaky house, recounted a time when he was experiencing a particularly intractable patient. He said her behavior was "psychotic-like" but didn't exhibit other normal traits of schizophrenia. After seeing her and conferring with a colleague he returned home. There was a weird blue light emanating from his house and he felt a piercing pain in his head. He called his colleague to tell her what had happened; she had just experienced the same thing at her home.
Friedkin helpfully quotes Hamlet's famous line to Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth. . . than are dream't of in your philosophie." How can you rationalize something like that away?
Ultimately I'm a novice on these matters. I don't tend to spend much time thinking about the supernatural in this capacity. The standard skeptic response seems to be that everything called possession throughout ancient history would simply be diagnosed more appropriately as a mental disorder today. But does naming something remove spiritual power? Does claiming something emanates from imbalances in the brain explain why it happens? Does the physical, of necessity, obviate the spiritual? Again, I am totally ignorant on this matter, but to read experts and skeptics unable to process what they see in these situations ought, at the very least, to inject a bit of humility into all of us. There are limits to what we can understand; there are things we cannot dream of knowing.
As I finished the article I was left with a major question. I'll pose it first like a skeptic: is it only previously religious people who experience possession of this type and seek the help of a figure like Amorth? In other words, do you need an a priori belief in demons and the supernatural in order to feel that there is something like this happening to you? More succinctly, do you have to be predisposed to believe to believe?
As I said, that's the skeptical way of framing the question. Here's another: is it only religious people that are able to discern what is happening to them and that it is beyond the boundaries of explanation and treatment provided by contemporary neuroscience and psychotherapy? In other words, does religion help us name things science is powerless to name? Or, another way: was Rosa possessed by Satan in some unique and real way and was Gabriele Amorth doing the work of his Savior?
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