Exorcism

views updated

Exorcism

In the United States today, a surprising number of groups and individuals believe not only that demons, or evil spirits, exist but that they routinely cause trouble in the lives of ordinary women and men. Many of these groups and individuals attempt to counteract demonization through exorcism, a religious rite aimed at expelling evil spirits or, at the very least, restraining their influence. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, exorcism was more widely practiced in the United States than perhaps ever before. Its popularity, especially in certain Christian circles, may be attributed to a curious conjunction of religious conviction, the influence of the broader therapeutic culture, and the enormous suggestive powers of the entertainment industry.

As recently as the late 1960s, Roman Catholic exorcism was all but dead and forgotten in the United States—a fading ghost long past its prime. It was rarely spoken of and even more rarely assumed to possess any practical significance. By the mid-1970s, however, the ghost had sprung miraculously back to life. Suddenly, thousands of people were convinced that they themselves, or perhaps a loved one, were suffering from demonic affliction. Exorcism was in hot demand. What brought this about? A number of factors, but none more important, arguably, than the release of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist and the publication of Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil. The dramatic (and seductively grotesque) arrival of demons on the screen and the best-selling page helped create an unprecedented popular demand for Catholic exorcisms. The chances of anyone actually procuring an exorcism through official Catholic channels during the seventies and eighties, however, were exceedingly slim. Relatively few bishops believed in the possibility of diabolic possession, and no more than two or three Catholic dioceses in the United States at any given time over this period had bona fide priest-exorcists at their disposal. There was, however, a considerably greater chance of obtaining a Catholic exorcism through unofficial channels. Beginning in the mid-1970s, a small (but significant) number of maverick priests, most of whom inhabited the right-wing fringes of American Catholicism, attempted to respond to the burgeoning market for Catholic exorcisms by going into business on their own. For the most part, the exorcisms performed by these priests were clandestine, underground affairs, undertaken without the approval of the institutional Catholic Church and without the rigorous psychological screening that the church (at least in theory) required. In subsequent years the institutional Catholic Church took more aggressive action on the demon-expulsion front. Since the mid-1990s approximately a dozen priests have been appointed to the office of exorcist in American Catholicism; and in January 1999 the Vatican published a revised version of the Roman Catholic rite of exorcism, which superseded an earlier rite that had stood virtually unchanged since its publication by Pope Paul V in 1614.

For all its Hollywood-dusted glamour, Roman Catholic exorcism has been just a small part of the total picture. During the mid- to late 1960s, a number of prominent charismatic Christians (including Don Basham, Erwin Prange, and Francis MacNutt) began practicing a modified form of exorcism, which they referred to as deliverance. (Deliverance had been widely practiced by classical Pentecostals earlier in the century, but by the early 1950s it had fallen into a state of relative dormancy.) Most charismatic deliverance ministers made a distinction between demonic possession and affliction. While it was highly unlikely that true spirit-baptized Christians could actually become possessed, which meant falling completely under the sway of Satan, they argued, there was no reason to think that they could not be tormented or afflicted in some area of their lives by demonic powers. Deliverance eventually gained broad (if not universal) acceptance within the charismatic-renewal movement, and by the mid-1970s thousands of middle-class charismatics from virtually all of the nation's mainstream Christian churches were having their personal demons expelled. While charismatic deliverance was undoubtedly motivated by genuine religious conviction, it was also more in tune with the times than most of its practitioners would have cared to admit. Despite being cloaked in the time-orphaned language of demons and supernatural evil, the ritual was very much at home in the brightly lit, fulfillment-on-demand culture of post-1960s America. It could be engaged in as often as anyone wanted and for virtually any reason under the sun. If an individual charismatic complained of being afflicted by demons of cigarette-smoking or demons of marital infidelity or demons of anything in between, the solution was close at hand.

Exorcism experienced a major growth burst during the eighties and early nineties, this time in connection with mounting concerns on the part of many Americans that a satanic conspiracy was stalking the land. Indeed, one could describe, with a measure of sarcasm, the ten-year stretch from 1983 to 1993 as Satan's decade in America. From California to New York, alarm bells rang out: Satanists seemed to be lurking everywhere, torturing helpless toddlers in day-care centers, brainwashing adolescents through the sinister lyrics of heavy-metal music, sowing destruction through the drug trade, and savaging their own children in Black Mass orgies. These satanic scares were exploited by the popular media, which found them an irresistible (and highly profitable) source of entertainment, and once again, thousands of people, believing that they themselves or someone they knew had fallen victim to demonic influence, sent out calls for emergency assistance. This time, however, the demon-expulsion front got some unexpected reinforcements. Partly because of the heightened satanism scares of the day and partly for more complex theological reasons, exorcism had succeeded during the 1980s in gaining favor within certain sectors of evangelical Protestantism, and by the early 1990s several hundred evangelical-based exorcism (or deliverance) ministries had sprung up across the country. Some evangelical deliverance ministers, especially socalled "third-wavers" such as C. Peter Wagner and Charles Kraft, have been influenced by Pentecostalism and the charismatic renewal movement in their practice of exorcism, but most are strict theological conservatives who believe that the time has arrived for all Christians in America to commit themselves to a full-fledged campaign of spiritual warfare against the satanic realm.

Charismatic and evangelical exorcism is usually performed in private, following the norms of a typical client-practitioner relationship. Occasionally, however, entire auditoriums of people may be relieved of their demons all at once in what are referred to as public or mass exorcisms. Public exorcisms are usually accompanied by dramatic and visceral manifestations: vomiting, thrashing, wailing, and so forth. The majority of exorcism ministers (in both private and public settings) are men; the majority of subjects on the receiving end of exorcism are women. During the 1990s Christian exorcism in general underwent a kind of professionalization; it was incorporated by many Christian psychotherapists into their regular practice. Given the dearth of long-term, follow-up studies, the actual therapeutic benefits of exorcism (quite apart from the putative purpose of casting out demons) is very much an open question.

Although exorcism in the United States has experienced its greatest growth of late in specifically Christian circles, the ritual is also practiced in diverse forms in various other communities of faith. In many American urban centers today, one may find a wide variety of Afro-Caribbean exorcisms, Afro-Latin exorcisms, Asiatic folk exorcisms, and even New Age exorcisms. Exorcism (broadly conceived) is embroidered in the ceremonial complexes of Santería, vodou, syncretistic pentecostalism, Puerto Rican spiritualism, and more than a dozen other faiths. The driving away or the subduing of demons is accomplished through the use of cathartics or emetics, the recitation of spells, bodily massage or manipulation, shamanic sucking, and incantatory chanting. In some ritual contexts, demon expulsion is a deadly earnest enterprise, and demons themselves are regarded as literally real spiritual entities, with their own personalities and appetites and sometimes even their own telltale odors. In other contexts, it is rather more playful and metaphoric, with the boundaries between the natural and supernatural realms fluid and negotiable. In virtually all contexts, exorcism is a culturally scripted performance, with a carefully calibrated choreography of roles, behaviors, and expectations.

Exorcism

Exorcism

Bibliography

More From encyclopedia.com

About this article

Exorcism

Related Content

NEARBY TERMS