For thousands of year, all forms of madness, of grossly abnormal behavior and sometimes, of physical disease have been explained in terms of spirit possession. The spirit might be a good, a neutral or an evil one. The numbers of gods, spirits or devils, which have been believed to seize control of human personalities, were legion. What is particularly interesting about so many accounts of possession and exorcism is their marked similarity to modern psychiatric cases.

The term ”possessed” is double-edged in his definition and illustrates the confusion that exists on the whole subject. Literally, the root of the word “possessed” implies that person is actually being inhabited by an alien spirit “sitting within” it, as distinct from “obsessed” which linguistic roots means “sitting by”. As witches were commonly being considered by the devil in the sense of owned by him and also has sexual intercourses either with him or “possessing” demons, the assertion that one was “possessed” applies to both witches and their victims.

However, St Thomas Aquinas argued that possession when it occurs must be due to a willing surrender on the part of the man or the woman because of the opacity of the human soul to devilish scrutiny. Such views excluded that men could be bewitched against their will and identify them during the witch-craze as guilty, not victims.

The signs of possession

According to the doctor of Louis XV, Monsieur de St André in 1725, it was believed that somebody displaying the following signs was convinced of being possessed by the Devil.
People being able to levitate without any exterior help or art
People being able to speak foreign or unknown languages (glossolalia) without any prior knowledge of them. Inquisitors used to ask questions in foreign languages (german, latin,) and expected answers in the same language.
People being able to inform about events occuring in distant places or in the future.
People being able to discover hidden things without any knowledge of them.
People being able to guess thoughts and feelings that are not expressed to them

Other visible signs of possessions include contortions, unnatural body movements, insults, blasphemies, stigmata or wounds that vanish as quickly as they appear

Hysteria and paranoïa

Much has been written in the last 50 years on the psychology of the witch. It seems obvious, on the evidence of the trials and personal testimonies that in every era a number of people who were accused of witchcraft did believe they to be witches.

Some came even sometimes spontaneously to confess their “crimes”, feeling persecuted or abandoned. We find in much of these cases the symptoms of the classical psychosis, which are senility characterized by delusions as to her own importance and powers.

Frequently, as much emotional abnormality, irrationality and sheer ill will was displayed by the inquisitors, witch-hunters and victims of witchcraft as by the witches themselves.

Even if the number of real cases of mental illness was very low at the time, one isolated case in a town could have excited the milder more generalized but equally irrational paranoid tendencies and prejudices found among otherwise sane members of the community. In such a tense and macabre time, it was easy to raise the fear and justify any individual and collective disaster by the devil’s hand.

In every society and era, there are a certain number of people who believe themselves harmed or threatened. The paranoiacs who today believe that “they” (the police, the government, the aliens, the Jews, the Blacks, the American,) are conspiring against him or his society are the same man as the suspicious citizen of past centuries who accused witches. The focus of the paranoia may vary with times and beliefs but the type of emotions remain constant: the desire to suppress the object of fear. Unchanging too is the paranoid tendency to assign the evil not just to one individual’s malevolence but also to an organized conspiracy of ill-doers; hence the collective prejudice against a mythical-secret society of Jews, witches or aliens. Other constant features include the physical differences between the scapegoat-group and the norm and their plot to multiply their number in order to gain control over society.

Since it was also believed that witches could “shape-shift”, go forth in the spectral form and send their own spirits or those of attendant demons out to inhabit hapless bodies, a plea that somebody was possessed could also be regarded as a protestation of innocence. “Unvolontary possession” could also be considered as legal defense and a let-out. This process was used by Johannes Wier, the father of modern psychiatry, to defend accused witches. In De Preastigiis Daemonum” he blamed the “uninformed and unskilled physicians» for attributing to witchcraft all the disease they were not able to cure.

Self-induced symptoms

A lot of possession cases include the production of hysterical ailments. The person accused in a desire to attract attention and sympathy will readily cast an accusation to justify its own delirium. While the paranoiac develops a distrust and fear of a particular person and then invents his injuries, the hysteric produces symptoms of injury and only then casts out around for a scapegoat on which the blame can be laid. It seems possible that in some cases the hysteric is not completely unconscious about the origin of his self-induced afflictions and therefore finds it necessary to have a good explanation for himself.

There was little realization, in the centuries of persecution, that vomiting pains, disturbance of the senses, impotence, paralysis and fits could be hysterical and psychosomatic ailments. Usually believed by the subject himself to be genuine, they are provoked by the sufferer’s own fear and desire for attention rather than any organic interference.

Hysteria due to repression

One of the oldest charges against witches was that they caused impotence, either by stealing the male organe, or by impeding the conjugal actions of men and women in some less drastic ways. Widely interpreted, it may be taken as distortion of the original fertility cults into a “black” form as well as a manifestation of the Freudian “castration fear” (the rejection of the mother figure and the primitive fear that she is all-powerful and has the power to castrate). As this accusation gradually disappears, it was replaced by symptoms of hysteria among women that pretended to be possessed by male demons or incubes. The earliest such recorded case occurred among a group of nuns at Cambrai in France in 1491. The nuns had fits in which they showed superhuman forces, barked like dogs foretold the future. Eventually the nun who had first begun to have fits and who was therefore the ringleader of the hysteria was “unmasked” as the witch herself. The Loudun, Louviers and Salem affairs were also due to collective hysteria and share the same deadly consequences

Exorcism

The expulsion of an evil spirit by a command, ritual or prayer is called exorcism. At the root of exorcism lies belief in the power to transfer a spiritual being from place to place by ritual acts and words. Exorcism may have originated from old rituals of propritiation dating back from the Hittites of Asia Minor who transmitted to the early romans. The romans before the final assault against a hostile town carried out the evocation. It was a solemn ritual of calling the gods of the enemy. The gods were invited to join Rome with promises of worship and good treatment if they did.Josephus also mentions a method of exorcism prescribed by Solomon, which had "prevailed or succeeded greatly among them down to the present time." Unfortunately, Josephus does not describe the method used.

In the Old Testament, there are no stories of exorcism except the episode of Tobias and Sarah in the Apocryphia (Tobit 6-8). Sarah was not in fact possessed but guarded by a demon, much as in later stories princess were guarded by dragons. In The prayer of Nabodinus, one of the manuscrits from the Qumarn discovery, a Jewish exorcist is credited from the forgiveness of sins and consequent healing. Another apocryphal, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs bears witness to it. Josephus made the claim that God had taught Solomon the art of exorcism but the Scripture has no trace of this. By the time Christ came on earth, exorcism was well known among Jews. All the Gospels refer all the time to the many exorcism conducted by the Christ. Diabolical infection is never confused with exorcism, disease with possession even if some patients suffered from both.

Waterless places are spoken out in the Gospels (Matthew 12.43), as an unsatisfactory abode for evil spirits and it was generally believed that water was their element. As early as 150 AD, the Church began to have an exorcism for the water used for baptism.

Even the coming of Jesus on earth can be interpreted as a giant exorcism on a planet Earth controlled by the Demon. Jesus fooled Satan as he exchanged his life against the world but eventually resuscitated and went back to Heaven.

The practice grew of treating all mental and epileptics as if they were possessed by the Devil. A part of the Church was set aside for those who came within this broad category and exorcists were appointed to stay with these sufferers during the service and keep them quiet. In 251, Pope Cornelius had a total of 52 men as exorcists, readers and doorkeepers. Having preceded baptism, exorcism became to be integrated to it.

The whole world was considered in the power of the Devil and demons were even supposed to live inside the bodies of newborn children. A voluntary renunciation was required of the candidate, because the human will was a key element in the possession, no one could be manoeuvered by the Devil unless he had given his consent. When infants were baptized, sponsors on their behalf undertook the renunciation.

Exorciso te immunde spiritus
Exib ab

In early Christian times every Christian could exorcize but later the Church created a special Order. The ritual has been enriched and amended several times. Leon X imposed the method created by Alberto Castellani in 1523 in his Liber sacerdotalis. In 1614, Paul V created the Roman Ritual that is slightly revised in 1926 and 1952 and still in use.

Human suggestion, by hypnosis or even by telepathy, can go to work upon bodily flaw and weakness and cure the “possessed» by removing the psychosomatic affection.
 

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