In the Netflix documentary “Hostage to the Devil,” Martin’s pal and former CIA agent Robert Marrow recalled how when Martin went to greet the girl at her home, the child said to him: “So you’re Malachi Martin, and you think you can help her?”

Marrow frequently drove Martin to carry out exorcisms and said he was there the day of the creepy interaction, according to the Mirror.

“Robert is a former CIA agent and this is the most disturbing thing he’d ever seen in all of his years working for the US government,” the documentary’s producer/writer Rachel Lysaght told the Mirror.

Martin died at age 78 after suffering from head trauma in the fall, the Daily Mail reported.

The doc, which debuts Sunday, takes a look into Martin’s work as a Jesuit priest, professor, author and, most notably, an exorcist – a career he turned to after moving to New York in 1966, according to the Mirror.

“When he left the church he moved to New York in 1966 and he had various jobs including taxi-driver, waiter and as a writer too, but really he saw that there was a need there for people to be assisted and to be given support in terms of relief, I suppose, from some sort of either demonic infestation of someone themselves or their home and felt that the church wasn’t providing that support anymore,” said Lysaght.

Martin’s decades of work as a spiritual healer inspired the cult classic 1973 movie “The Exorcist.”

Witnesses believed Decker was possessed by the devil and even recounted the events for two popular TV shows — "Unsolved Mysteries" in 1993 and most recently "Paranormal Witness," which aired in November on the Syfy Channel. The case came to the attention of New Zealand medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew after a fellow researcher heard of the events but could find no scientific explanation for them.

Bartholomew, who is originally from Whitehall, N.Y., and is now a teacher at the Botany Downs Secondary College in New Zealand, frequently writes about the paranormal for medical and sociology journals. He co-authored the "Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior," and his work has appeared in many publications, such as The British Journal of Psychiatry, The International Journal of Psychiatry and New York Folklore Magazine. "I have no ties to Stroudsburg. Perhaps as an outsider I can be seen as an impartial third party," he said. "My goal is to understand what happened."

The following account is drawn from "Paranormal Witness" and a draft of Bartholomew's research report:

Decker's grandfather had just died, and he was on compassionate leave from Monroe County Correctional Facility, where he was serving time for receiving stolen property.

During his leave, Decker stayed at the Ann Street home rented by family friends Bob and Jeannie Kieffer. (The home has since been demolished.)

Decker said he was in the upstairs bathroom washing up for supper when suddenly he felt strange and confused.

He fell to the floor and had a vision of an old man wearing a crown in a window. Decker also had deep scratches that suddenly appeared on his wrist.

Kieffer noticed the blood when Decker sat down to eat and asked what happened. Decker told him about his vision and attributed the wound to Satan.

Shortly after, the family heard a loud noise from above and noticed water dripping from the walls and ceiling.

Kieffer phoned his landlord, Ron Van Why, and the pair went to investigate. According to Kieffer's interview on "Paranormal Witness," the two thought it might be leaky pipes, but the only pipes were to the kitchen and bathroom, located on the other side of the house.

The men noticed Decker seemed to be in a trance, so Kieffer decided to call police.

According to reports of the event, Officer John Baujan, who now serves as chief of Stroud Area Regional Police, and Officer Richard Wolbert responded.

Not only was it raining indoors, it appeared to be coming up from the floor, "defying gravity," they said.

After the police left, Kieffer and Van Why confronted Decker. During the confrontation, they said pots and pans began clanging in the kitchen and Decker levitated off the floor.

He was flung against the wall and more scratches appeared, this time in the shape of a cross near his inner elbow.

Baujan later returned to the house to find Jeannie Kieffer in the living room reading the Bible, trying to "exorcise" Decker.

In his interview with "Paranormal Witness," Baujan said he, too, believed Decker was possessed and decided to call then-Chief of Police Gary Roberts to the house.

Roberts was not convinced that anything unnatural was going on and ordered his officers to leave and not file a report.

The next day, officers William Davies and John Rundle visited the Kieffer home against Roberts' wishes. Davies said he handed Decker a gold cross, which Decker dropped, claiming it burned his skin.

All of a sudden, Decker lifted up off the ground and was thrown across the room with a "force as though a bus had hit him," the men said, and three claw marks appeared on Decker's neck, Bartholomew said in his paper.

Bartholomew believes science can explain what happened.

The draft of his research quotes theories on stress, the weather at the time and the possibility the mysterious rain could have come from an ice dam on the roof of the home where Decker was staying.

Ice damming can happen when warm air enters an attic space and melts snow on the roof.

When temperatures drop at night, ice can form. Water can become trapped under the ice and eventually leak into the house.

According to Bartholomew's research, ice damming is common after major snowstorms in areas where temperatures rise above freezing during the day and below 32 degrees at night.

Weather records show daytime highs in the 40s and 50s and nighttime lows in the 20s and 30s in the days leading up to the events.

There was also a major snowstorm in the Poconos 13 days before the indoor "rain."

"Before, I wasn't superstitious. I didn't really think much about this kind of thing until it happened. I believe now. I believe this stuff can go on," said Ron Van Why, who still lives in Stroudsburg with his wife Romayne, both of whom are now 65.

Van Why remembers getting the call from Bob Kieffer that something was wrong. It was a Friday night, and Kieffer wouldn't tell Van Why what was happening, only that he had to get to the house right away.

When Van Why arrived at the house that night in February, he didn't notice anything at first.

"As I sat there, I got wet, and I thought it was one of the kids with a squirt gun," he said. "I looked at Bob and said, 'What's going on?' He said, 'I have no idea, that's why I called you down here.'"

The "rain" was very light, but it was everywhere, coming from the ceiling, walls and up from the floor, Van Why said.

Everyone was in shock about what they were seeing, and so that's why they phoned the police.

At one point during the investigation, police circled Decker and put a bag over his head to make sure he wasn't spitting, Van Why said.

It was then that Van Why saw Decker levitate.

"It lifted him off the ground and threw him half-way across the room," Van Why said.

Kieffer says it was the "weirdest weekend of my life." "I knew the rain had nothing to do with the plumbing, and I just wanted someone to come down there and help. Let's put it this way, I was scared s—-less."

The family became really frightened when their Labrador retriever, who normally slept upstairs in the bathroom, refused to even go near the stairs. "We thought maybe someone else was in the house. We didn't know what, or who, but we just knew we needed someone there to help."

The "rain" lasted from Friday through Sunday night, Kieffer said. It stopped on Sunday after he called family friend and Philadelphia-based pastor Justina Hall. When Hall entered the home, she immediately started praying. After about an hour, the rain stopped and Decker looked "like he was at peace," Kieffer said.

The Kieffers lived in the house for about two more years after the experience, but they never were able to remove the stains on the "rain" splattered walls. Kieffer believes the rain could have had to do with Decker's grandfather. "Donny's grandfather was not a nice person," Kieffer said. "I don't know what you want to call it, but I think it was the old man's spirits."

Attempts to reach Decker for comment were unsuccessful.

The day after the "rain" stopped at the Ann Street home, Decker was taken back to Monroe County Correctional Facility. Back at the jail, reports of Decker's "rain" followed him. Witnesses say his cellmate was so panicked that he asked to be moved. Dave Keenhold was working the 3 to 11 p.m. shift as a supervisor one night after Decker returned to the jail. Some of the other officers on duty described water seeming to defy gravity as it traveled "up" the cell walls and flew sideways through the air, Keenhold said, although he did not go into the cell himself. Keenhold had just been called to a holding cell for new inmates, about 150 feet from the cell where Decker was located. 

Officers would have had to go through a set of solid doors to get to Decker's cell. "One of the officers called me over and he looked at me, his eyes got real big, he pointed to my shirt and said, 'Your shirt!'" The officer explained to Keenhold that Decker was dared to prove his powers and make it "rain" on the shift supervisor. At first, Keenhold thought he spilled something on his shirt, but he hadn't been around any water recently. 

The "rain" on his shirt had a strange consistency, almost like silicone, he said. The other officer said, "Decker did that," and as he spoke the words, both men looked down the hall toward Decker's cell, Keenhold recalled. "At that time, we both saw this little ball, about the size of a pencil eraser. It came whipping around the corner and came straight at us, it didn't arc like how when you throw a ball," Keenhold said. The little ball of water struck Keenhold in the chest and "kind of splashed off."

Keenhold said he called a plumber to investigate the reports of water in Decker's cell. When the plumber went into the cell, he became so upset he turned around and walked out. "He said, 'Don't call me for this kind of stuff.' He didn't really say what he saw, but I knew what he saw," Keenhold said.

The officers in the jail were so shocked by the events they agreed not to discuss it with anyone. They were afraid people would think they were crazy and they would lose their credibility — or worse, their jobs, Keenhold said. The event convinced Keenhold that Decker was possessed, and he called on the jail's chaplain, William Blackburn, to perform an exorcism. After the ritual, the events never happened again.

The story was covered up for about 10 years until "Unsolved Mysteries" came to town to film. Keenhold decided to come forward after seeing how many credible witnesses there were in the case. As for Bartholomew's scientific explanations, Keenhold calls them "hogwash." "I do not believe any of that for one iota," he said. People have questioned Keenhold's experience. "People asked why didn't we have the water analyzed when it hit any of us. We all said the same thing, including the police: It evaporated within a moment or so," Keenhold said.

The experience solidified Keenhold's faith in God. "We were just sick to our stomachs over this whole thing," Keenhold said. "One of the officers actually told me, 'We were looking into the eyes of the devil. We didn't realize who we were messing with.'"

EXORCIZO, te, immundissime spiritus, omnis incursio adversarii, omne phantasma, omnis legio. (I cast thee out, thou unclean spirit, along with the least encroachment of the wicked enemy, and every phantom and diabolical legion.)

— From the Roman Ritual of the Catholic Church, its Rite of Exorcism

That evening, the young JeApril 17, 1988 — One night in 1949, when Verhagen Hall at St. Louis University was a residence for Jesuits, a priest just back from a year of study at Harvard University heard a diabolical laugh that froze his blood. 

That evening, the young Jesuit had been saying his office - a priest's daily prayers - as he sat in his small room directly across from the old rectory at the back of St. Francis Xavier (College) Church. He was not 20 feet away from a rear window in the rectory, he recalled.

The old priests' house - which has since been razed and replaced with a newer building - was nestled between the creaky, wood-and-brick splendor of DuBourg Hall and its nearby 19th-century cousin, Verhagen, now home to the university's theological studies department.

"I heard this wild, idiotic, diabolical laughter, '' said the Rev. Lucius F. Cervantes, whose late brother, Alfonso Juan, was mayor of St. Louis. ''I hadn't heard a thing about the exorcism at the time. So I tried to find out what it was about. I looked toward the window from where the light was coming, but saw nothing.''

What he had heard was a 14-year-old boy from Mount Rainier, Md., a Washington suburb, who many believe was possessed or obsessed by demons.

In these nocturnal episodes (the boy's bizarre behavior occurred mostly at night), he would supposedly become incredibly strong, his body distorting and transforming, heels touching the back of his head, the body forming a loop - all reported by priests who were witnesses.

Curiously, during these convulsions, the doctors attending him could find no change in his pulse rate or blood pressure. The bed would shake violently. Obscene words and images appeared on his skin, in raised red welts, like bas reliefs.

''These brandings on the boy's skin - it happened as many as 30 times each day - were unquestionably paranormal, '' says William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel ''The Exorcist, '' inspired by the incident. ''Some of the markings were on the back, and some were pictures, often lasting from three to four hours. All over the (official) diary were accounts of these brandings.''

Blatty claims to have a copy of the official report of the exorcism that was conducted here, the secret log or diarycompiled by the late Rev. William S. Bowdern, who conducted the exorcism. Blatty supposedly received it after he wrote the book.

(A sequel novel by Blatty called ''Legion'' will be made into a movie for release next summer, in time for the 40th anniversary of the event, which occurred mostly in St. Louis. After ''The Exorcist, '' Blatty sold the film sequel rights to Warner Bros. and a movie by a different writer, called ''The Heretic, '' with Richard Burton, was released. ''I wish they'd called it 'Son of Exorcist, ' so everybody would think they meant to be funny, '' Blatty said.)

Blatty and a Jesuit priest named John Walsh, a friend of Bowdern's, talked about the Roman numeral X that appeared on the boy's chest. It was believed that 10 demons were involved, Walsh said.

A voice coming from the boy supposedly told an attending Jesuit, who was assisting Bowdern, that he would die in 10 years and would burn in hell. The Jesuit had a fondness for strong drink, and the voice so unnerved him that he stopped drinking, for a time.

Blatty recalled one of the strangest incidents in the official diary.

''One night, sitting on the bed beside the boy, Bowdern watched a tiny, nearly invisible pitchfork, or lines, move from under the boy's upper thigh all the way to the ankle, '' Blatty said. ''Droplets of blood occurred. Bowdern was only a foot away, and there were the usual four or five witnesses.''

The boy supposedly spat a foul substance at the priests who attended him, all the way across the room and with incredible accuracy. According to this account, the pea-soup vomit shown in the movie version of ''The Exorcist'' was not too far-fetched.

Often, according to the priests, he had to be forcibly restrained. In one of these incidents, he broke the nose of a Jesuit seminarian named Walter Halloran, who was at St. Louis U. working on his master's degree in history. For three weeks, Halloran assisted Bowdern.

Halloran now works in the alumni office at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. Recently, he recalled his involvement in this strange case. Halloran used to drive the boy from the St. Louis home of his aunt and uncle, who were instrumental in bringing the boy here, to the College Church rectory and the old 19th-century wings of Alexian Brothers Hospital on South Broadway, where most of the exorcism was conducted. Those wings of the hospital were torn down in 1976.

''I was a real goodfriend of Billy Bowdern's, '' he said. ''I got in on the business with the prayers of exorcism, and the little boy would go into a seizure and get quite violent. So Father Bowdern asked me to hold him.'' (Halloran is a former high school football player.) ''Yes, he did break my nose.''

Halloran said he observed the streaks and arrows and words like ''hell'' that would rise on the child's skin. ''That happened a number of times. And it wasn't a case of taking a pin and scratching himself. It just appeared, and with quite a bit of pain.

''On Holy Thursday that year, this phenomenon started occurring as I was reading the prayers. 'Don't talk about it anymore, this hurts too much, ' the kid said. The markings were most visible, and there were many obscenities. He was a nice little kid.''

''It all tallied after I read the script by Father Bowdern, '' John Walsh said of the Bowdern diary. He is certain, these many years later, that the wails and laughter that Cervantes heard were those of the boy, possessed or obsessed with the devil, or with something. Walsh, also a Jesuit, was away for most of 1949, studying drama at Yale University.

In 1949, Bowdern was the pastor of College Church. Because he was there, Bowdern would, reluctantly, become the man to lead a team of Jesuits in the famous St. Louis exorcism.

Bowdern died five years ago this month, never publicly acknowledging that he was the exorcist.

But he was.

Over the years, Bowdern and others who know have kept the identity of the victim secret. Those who are living are very upset that the story leaked to a Washington newspaper in 1949. That was the beginning of the whisper campaign that has surrounded the event.

''It should have been kept a secret, '' said the Rev. William Van Roo, one of two Jesuits known to be alive who officially assisted in the exorcism. ''The whole chronicle was leaked to the Washington Post. The young man has had to suffer so much; it caused severe pain and resentment, because the confidentiality was violated.''

Bowdern would never talk about it, not even to family members, said his nephew, Ned Bowdern of St. Louis. ''He was a Barry Fitzgerald type, '' said his nephew. ''A wonderful sermonizer, a dear man.''

''I can't imagine a more totally fearless man than Billy Bowdern, '' Walsh said. ''He came to me apparently on the day that (Archbishop Joseph) Ritter told him that he would be the exorcist and said, 'John, John, John, I don't know a thing about exorcism.' And then he went off to the library looking for books. He always repeated things 20,000 times.

''It sure messed up a lot of people's lives for a year. (Bowdern) was such a tough baby. It would have destroyed most people.''

Throughout the ordeal, Bowdern fasted on bread and water. ''He looked terrible, '' said his brother, Dr. Edward H. Bowdern of St. Louis. He looked thin and wasted, and developed styes and boils, Dr. Bowdern said.

Under the church's Rite of Exorcism, a priest who performs an exorcism does so only after the approval of a local bishop or archbishop. In the St. Louis case, Bowdern was so designated by the late Cardinal Ritter.

The archbishop is required to select someone of proven virtue, according to Roman Ritual. The exact wording is that the priest ''must be properly distinguished for his piety, prudence and integrity of life. Especially, he should not believe too readily that a person is possessed by an evil spirit.'' All medical means of treatment must be exhausted before any exorcism is approved.

''When the archbishop named him, Billy said, 'Nothing doing, ' '' Halloran said. ''And Ritter said, 'You got it.' ''

It all supposedly began at the boy's home in suburban Washington in January 1949. In what exorcists call the infestation phase, the child's grandmother, who lived in a room above her grandson's bedroom, heard sounds like marching feet.

Then there were scratching noises, falling pictures and flying fruit, according to Walsh and Blatty. Later, as his condition worsened, the child's voice and behavior pattern changed, Walsh said.

‘’He had been a nice, well-behaved boy. They called in the family's minister; they were Lutheran. They just thought it was something weird; there's no mention of possession, '' Walsh said.

The minister thought a change of scenery would help the boy, and he took him to the parsonage. But his condition got worse. It was the Lutheran minister who suggested that the family consult a Catholic priest.

Blatty offers this version of why the boy came to St. Louis:

‘’Billy Friedkin (the movie's director) tracked down an aunt of the boy's. And she said that in phase one, the obsession phase - there's obsession, poltergeist and possession - the boy was washing or shaving in the bathroom and red welts appeared on his back.

''One formed a word, 'Go.' And then someone asked where, and the words 'St. Louis' appeared. I first heard about the case in theology class at Georgetown from Father Eugene Gallagher.''

(Blatty was a student at Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, from 1946 to 1950. His roommate was Charles ''Stormy'' Bidwill, who, with his brother Bill, once owned the football Cardinals.)

Despite his silence about exorcism, Bowdern, to the astonishment of his Jesuit colleague, showed Walsh the 25-page, typewritten exorcist's diary that he kept through the three months of the ritual. The two men were on retreat at Liberty, Mo., in the late 1960s, almost 20 years after the event, when Bowdern handed Walsh the report.

We met up with Walsh recently at Jesuit Hall, a building across Lindell Boulevard from where the old rectory used to be, the place where some of this occurred. Walsh showed the way through the security door, a white-haired imp of a man in a dazzling green, Irish-knit sweater.

A cold rain pelted the awning of Jesuit Hall. ''A good day for the devil, '' Walsh said with a sly grin. Walsh became an important link to this strange event because he is one of the few people still alive who read Bowdern's secret report. And he did not take an oath that would keep him from divulging any of the document's contents.

Included, he said, are all the grotesque, unbelievable and fantastic things that purportedly happened to the boy during the 12 weeks of the exorcism.

And at the end of each day, Bowdern met with the witnesses and participants in the room; at times there were as many as six or seven Jesuits, not to mention members of the boy's family and members of the Alexian Brothers order. Together, they would ''go over what he had written and verify that this was exactly what happened, '' according to Blatty.

''I can assure you of one thing: The case I was involved with was the real thing, '' Bowdern once wrote to Blatty. ''I had no doubts about it then, and I have no doubts about it now.'' But he would tell nothing beyond that.

By some accounts, the exorcism that took place here in 1949 was considered by church officials to be the most significant reported and documented case in 300 years.

However, Jesuits being Jesuits, there are many skeptics among members of the Society of Jesus about just what it was that tormented the boy. There are those who doubt that it was a case of demonic possession. A prominent Jesuit psychologist at Georgetown, Juan B. Cortes, suggested that calling the devil produces ''a manifestation of the victim's ideas of him. The boy began acting as a possessed person is supposed to act.''

There are reports that a Washington University physicist was called in to see the things that were happening.

''The name I had was Professor Bubb (the university has no record of such a person), who reportedly said he witnessed a hospital bedside table levitate slowly to the ceiling, '' Blatty said. '' 'Well, ' he supposedly said, 'there's much about electromagnetism that we don't know.' ''

''This guy was a complete skeptic, '' Walsh said. ''After this, he just beat it out the door and tried to pretend the thing never happened.''

Van Roo, who was there, is guarded about whether he believes this was a case of demonic possession.

''I'd rather not commit myself on that, '' he said, speaking by telephone from his apartment at Marquette University. Not long ago, he was on the faculty of Gregorian University in Rome.

Walter Halloran expressed similar sentiments when interviewed by Jennifer Baker of Ladue, a student at Georgetown University who wrote an article for the school paper, the Voice.

''I wouldn't be able to say whether it was valid or not, '' . I've withheld judgment. I'm not saying Father Bowdern's wrong. I was just more comfortable not coming to a decision.

''A lot of incidents are (individually) explainable'' by reasons of psychosomatic illness. ''But I don't know if the reasons can explain everything when taken together.''

Van Roo is a renowned Jesuit theologian who spent 38 years in Rome teaching and writing. He was caught up in the exorcism because he was assigned to St. Francis Xavier Church in 1949 as part of his tertianship, the third period of a Jesuit's novitiate, which is undertaken after ordination. In those days, a tertianship came in the 15th year of study to be a full-fledged Jesuit.

''Billy Bowdern grabbed Bill Van Roo by the arm and said, 'I've got just the project for you, ' '' John Walsh said.

''Bowdern definitely believed it was a demonic possession. I'm not so sure about Van Roo.''

‘’I went into that thing without any previous knowledge, '' Van Roo said. ''And this thing was draining my nights. After it was over, I never made that one of my interests. What I don't know (about exorcism) is almost everything.

''I was sort of a monitor, '' he said. ''I would sit at his bedside. I watched his eyes.

''I didn't get involved in this immediately, but they soon needed help with the boy. It was all unpredictable; I can't recall a pattern.

''I didn't read Blatty's book; I didn't want to. I personally felt that the movie was utterly disgusting, utterly false and quite dangerous because of the affect it might have on emotionally disturbed persons. The movie has been melodramatized, especially the ending, which was utterly absurd.''

Bowdern's brother, Edward, has said that his late brother did not like Blatty's book.

Like other Jesuits, Walsh is aware of the fact that much mythology has grown around the St. Louis exorcism.

''You never know, it's so easy to fabricate things, to make them mythical, '' he said. ''That's why I'll never know why he broke down and let me read it.''

And indeed, in a letter that Blatty said Bowdern sent to him, the priest made the following remark: ''Some of the Jesuits living with me at St. Louis University at the time were conversant with some of the events of the case and, as often happens, as the sto ry was passed on, it became more fanciful and inaccurate.''

After his book but before the movie, Blatty said he came in possession of the secret exorcism diary when one of the documents was sent to him by an Alexian Brother, who found it in a drawer in the room of a religious colleague who had died. There have been rumors of a Jesuit who participated in the exorcism having lost a copy of the report.

''I, in fact, did not base my book on either of the publicized North American cases, '' said Blatty, referring to both the St. Louis event and a 1929 exorcism involving a woman, which reportedly occured in Earling, Iowa. Blatty could find no living witnesses to the latter exorcism, so he abandoned his research of that case.

''The '49 case inspired me, '' Blatty said from his home in Connecticut. ''It was notoriously publicized in the Washington area. I believe this one was the real thing.

''The three-month exorcism that took place in St. Louis gave me the conviction to go on, '' he continued. ''Had I not heard from (Bowdern), I don't think I would have written the book. I was a comedic writer then - 'A Shot in the Dark, ' that sort of thing.''

In deference to Bowdern's concerns, he changed the possessed character in ''The Exorcist'' from a boy named Jamie to a 12-year-old girl.

From his wallet, Walsh pulled out a small newspaper clipping. It contained three quotations about the devil from diverse sources - Mark Twain, an English priest and a Bible translator named Ronald Knox, who died in 1957. He passed the clipping over.

''It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation of it, '' Knox wrote.

And Twain, in usual droll fashion, had this to say about the case of Lucifer: ''Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs millions.'' Walsh grinned.

According to Walsh, the boy who was the object of the exorcism is now married and living in Omaha, and has been fine since the exorcism. He named his first child Michael, for the archangel, the scourge of demons. He works for an airline.

Is he a pilot? Walsh was asked. ''No, my word! I wouldn't want to fly with him.'' And he chuckled.

However, Halloran said he was under the impression that the boy became a doctor. There are other reports that the man changed his name and is still living in the Washington area. Walsh said the man reportedly recalled little or nothing of his ordeal.

According to these reports, the man is 54 and has converted to Catholicism, as did his entire family, save the grandmother who first reported her grandson's odd behavior. She remained a Lutheran until her death.

We were referred to Walsh by a St. Louis U. theologian named Francis X. Cleary, who was a student at the school when all of this was occurring.

Cleary, also a Jesuit, claims expertise in only one area of the exorcism business, the tall tales and mythology that have arisen among the students and faculty, particularly after Blatty's book and the movie that followed.

His office in Verhagen Hall is not far from a spooky stairwell and little room at the top, which generations of students have believed is the room. Although it isn't, seance tables and horror-story messages have been found in the pigeon-littered room. Repeated attempts to board it up and make it impossible to gain entry have failed.

''The kids gather outside on Halloween and look up at the window, '' he said.

''I suppose every school has its ghost stories, '' Cleary said. ''Ours just happened to become a best-selling book and movie.''

How a scientist learned to work with exorcists

In the late 1980s, I was introduced to a self-styled Satanic high priestess. She called herself a witch and dressed the part, with flowing dark clothes and black eye shadow around to her temples. In our many discussions, she acknowledged worshipping Satan as his “queen.”

I’m a man of science and a lover of history; after studying the classics at Princeton, I trained in psychiatry at Yale and in psychoanalysis at Columbia. That background is why a Catholic priest had asked my professional opinion, which I offered pro bono, about whether this woman was suffering from a mental disorder. This was at the height of the national panic about Satanism. (In a case that helped induce the hysteria, Virginia McMartin and others had recently been charged with alleged Satanic ritual abuse at a Los Angeles preschool; the charges were later dropped.) So I was inclined to skepticism. But my subject’s behavior exceeded what I could explain with my training. She could tell some people their secret weaknesses, such as undue pride. She knew how individuals she’d never known had died, including my mother and her fatal case of ovarian cancer. Six people later vouched to me that, during her exorcisms, they heard her speaking multiple languages, including Latin, completely unfamiliar to her outside of her trances. This was not psychosis; it was what I can only describe as paranormal ability. I concluded that she was possessed. Much later, she permitted me to tell her story.

The priest who had asked for my opinion of this bizarre case was the most experienced exorcist in the country at the time, an erudite and sensible man. I had told him that, even as a practicing Catholic, I wasn’t likely to go in for a lot of hocus-pocus. “Well,” he replied, “unless we thought you were not easily fooled, we would hardly have wanted you to assist us.”

So began an unlikely partnership. For the past two-and-a-half decades and over several hundred consultations, I’ve helped clergy from multiple denominations and faiths to filter episodes of mental illness — which represent the overwhelming majority of cases — from, literally, the devil’s work. It’s an unlikely role for an academic physician, but I don’t see these two aspects of my career in conflict. The same habits that shape what I do as a professor and psychiatrist — open-mindedness, respect for evidence and compassion for suffering people — led me to aid in the work of discerning attacks by what I believe are evil spirits and, just as critically, differentiating these extremely rare events from medical conditions.

Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.

The Vatican does not track global or countrywide exorcism, but in my experience and according to the priests I meet, demand is rising. The United States is home to about 50 “stable” exorcists — those who have been designated by bishops to combat demonic activity on a semi-regular basis — up from just 12 a decade ago, according to the Rev. Vincent Lampert, an Indianapolis-based priest-exorcist who is active in the International Association of Exorcists. (He receives about 20 inquiries per week, double the number from when his bishop appointed him in 2005.) The Catholic Church has responded by offering greater resources for clergy members who wish to address the problem. In 2010, for instance, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops organized a meeting in Baltimore for interested clergy. In 2014, Pope Francis formally recognized the IAE, 400 members of which are to convene in Rome this October. Members believe in such strange cases because they are constantly called upon to help. (I served for a time as a scientific adviser on the group’s governing board.)

Unfortunately, not all clergy involved in this complex field are as cautious as the priest who first approached me. In some circles, there is a tendency to become overly preoccupied with putative demonic explanations and to see the devil everywhere. Fundamentalist misdiagnoses and absurd or even dangerous “treatments,” such as beating victims, have sometimes occurred, especially in developing countries. This is perhaps why exorcism has a negative connotation in some quarters. People with psychological problems should receive psychological treatment.

But I believe I’ve seen the real thing. Assaults upon individuals are classified either as “demonic possessions” or as the slightly more common but less intense attacks usually called “oppressions.” A possessed individual may suddenly, in a type of trance, voice statements of astonishing venom and contempt for religion, while understanding and speaking various foreign languages previously unknown to them. The subject might also exhibit enormous strength or even the extraordinarily rare phenomenon of levitation. (I have not witnessed a levitation myself, but half a dozen people I work with vow that they’ve seen it in the course of their exorcisms.) He or she might demonstrate “hidden knowledge” of all sorts of things — like how a stranger’s loved ones died, what secret sins she has committed, even where people are at a given moment. These are skills that cannot be explained except by special psychic or preternatural ability.

I have personally encountered these rationally inexplicable features, along with other paranormal phenomena. My vantage is unusual: As a consulting doctor, I think I have seen more cases of possession than any other physician in the world.

Most of the people I evaluate in this role suffer from the more prosaic problems of a medical disorder. Anyone even faintly familiar with mental illnesses knows that individuals who think they are being attacked by malign spirits are generally experiencing nothing of the sort. Practitioners see psychotic patients all the time who claim to see or hear demons; histrionic or highly suggestible individuals, such as those suffering from dissociative identity syndromes; and patients with personality disorders who are prone to misinterpret destructive feelings, in what exorcists sometimes call a “pseudo-possession,” via the defense mechanism of an externalizing projection. But what am I supposed to make of patients who unexpectedly start speaking perfect Latin?

I approach each situation with an initial skepticism. I technically do not make my own “diagnosis” of possession but inform the clergy that the symptoms in question have no conceivable medical cause.

I am aware of the way many psychiatrists view this sort of work. While the American Psychiatric Association has no official opinion on these affairs, the field (like society at large) is full of unpersuadable skeptics and occasionally doctrinaire materialists who are often oddly vitriolic in their opposition to all things spiritual. My job is to assist people seeking help, not to convince doctors who are not subject to suasion. Yet I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners nowadays who are open to entertaining such hypotheses. Many believe exactly what I do, though they may be reluctant to speak out.

As a man of reason, I’ve had to rationalize the seemingly irrational. Questions about how a scientifically trained physician can believe “such outdated and unscientific nonsense,” as I’ve been asked, have a simple answer. I honestly weigh the evidence. I have been told simplistically that levitation defies the laws of gravity, and, well, of course it does! We are not dealing here with purely material reality, but with the spiritual realm. One cannot force these creatures to undergo lab studies or submit to scientific manipulation; they will also hardly allow themselves to be easily recorded by video equipment, as skeptics sometimes demand. (The official Catholic Catechism holds that demons are sentient and possess their own wills; as they are fallen angels, they are also craftier than humans. That’s how they sow confusion and seed doubt, after all.) Nor does the church wish to compromise a sufferer’s privacy, any more than doctors want to compromise a patient’s confidentiality.

Ignorance and superstition have often surrounded stories of demonic possession in various cultures, and surely many alleged episodes can be explained by fraud, chicanery or mental pathology. But anthropologists agree that nearly all cultures have believed in spirits, and the vast majority of societies (including our own) have recorded dramatic stories of spirit possession. Despite varying interpretations, multiple depictions of the same phenomena in astonishingly consistent ways offer cumulative evidence of their credibility.

As a psychoanalyst, a blanket rejection of the possibility of demonic attacks seems less logical, and often wishful in nature, than a careful appraisal of the facts. As I see it, the evidence for possession is like the evidence for George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. In both cases, written historical accounts with numerous sound witnesses testify to their accuracy.

In the end, however, it was not an academic or dogmatic view that propelled me into this line of work. I was asked to consult about people in pain. I have always thought that, if requested to help a tortured person, a physician should not arbitrarily refuse to get involved. Those who dismiss these cases unwittingly prevent patients from receiving the help they desperately require, either by failing to recommend them for psychiatric treatment (which most clearly need) or by not informing their spiritual ministers that something beyond a mental or other illness seems to be the issue. For any person of science or faith, it should be impossible to turn one’s back on a tormented soul.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/01/as-a-psychiatrist-i-diagnose-mental-illness-and-sometimes-demonic-possession/

This was Julia, who claimed to be a high priestess of Satanism possessed by demonic forces. Her remarkable case was among the first of many that Gallagher would encounter in a long career spent distinguishing psychosis from alleged possession. Julia exhibited a series of behaviors that, as Gallagher sees it, constituted a “once-in-a-century” possession, from speaking in languages she claimed not to know to allegedly levitating for over half an hour during an exorcism.

“I know I’m possessed,” Julia later told Gallagher during a consultation. “I space out and then don’t recall what happens. They tell me a voice comes out of me. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything. It’s a demon, I’m sure.”

So began Gallagher’s long immersion into the world of supposed demonic possession. In the decades since encountering Julia, Gallagher has consulted with faith leaders from numerous religions on hundreds of cases, assisting them in the process of distinguishing “troubles of the mind” from what he believes are “troubles of the spirit.” As a result, Gallagher has been present at scores of exorcisms, leading him to become a sought-after resource on demonic possession. Since the early 1990s, Gallagher has been an active member of the International Association of Exorcists, serving for a time as a scientific advisor on its governing board. Gallagher recounts his experiences in Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks, and the Paranormal, a new book spanning the depth and breadth of his unusual medical career. Gallagher spoke with Esquire about his own faith, the rigorous process of gathering evidence, and the complicated interplay of science and spirituality.

Esquire: You mention in the preface that you were hesitant to write this book. What compelled you to write it?

Richard Gallagher: It involves a controversial subject and I'm an academic psychiatrist, so I wasn't sure that it was a great idea, professionally speaking, to publicize a belief that is unacceptable to a lot of people in my field. However, that wasn't the major consideration. I had another consideration about revealing people’s stories. These individuals were never patients of mine, but people about whom I consulted with clergy. I was hesitant about confidentiality. I eventually decided that I could disguise the characters well enough; I also had the permission of these individuals to write about them.

I think there are a certain people, both psychiatric patients and the rare cases of people who suffer, who should understand this. There are people with mental problems who think they're possessed and the reverse. I did think it could enlighten a certain population. I also thought it would be of public interest. Obviously it's a topic that people tend to be interested in, but often there are a lot of misconceptions and confusion. I thought I was in a unique position, both with my extensive experience in this field and having it studied scientifically, as an academic professor of psychiatry. I thought that my vantage point would allow me to write a book that would be enlightening to a lot of people.

ESQ: You write early in the book that some of your physician colleagues would agree with your findings, but would be reluctant to reveal their agreement openly. Why is that?

RG: In America, there are a lot of Christian psychiatrists. All over the world, there are plenty of spiritually-oriented psychiatrists, who truly accept the possibility of possession by spirits, sometimes with different ideological frameworks. A lot of them are reluctant to speak out. They may think, "This is a little out of the mainstream for the mental health field, so maybe I ought to keep this to myself." Also, many of them lack the extensive experience I have. It's not like they have a database or much familiarity with the literature on this subject, as I've developed over the years.

ESQ: What role does your own faith system play in your involvement with possessions?

RG: I'd be naive not to assume that my Catholic upbringing piqued my interest in the subject. I’m the type of person who has always questioned my faith, so it's not as if I accepted it without inquiry. I really tried to study it dispassionately as a phenomenon. It hasn’t come to be a central part of my thinking about religion, but it was certainly a set of phenomena that intrigued me, both as a doctor and as a thinking human being. I allowed myself to get involved with a few priests who asked me for my opinion; then I got involved with the International Association of Exorcists, who have taken a somewhat scholarly approach to this whole thing. I became versed enough in the subject matter that I then became considered an expert to consult.

ESQ: What are the typical conditions that lead to demonic interference in a person's life? Who is particularly vulnerable to these attacks?

RG: Possession is not something that's going to happen willy-nilly to anybody. People don't have to go to bed at night worried that they're going to wake up possessed in the morning. There’s a spectrum of attacks, but the people who become possessed are almost invariably—and I'm choosing my words carefully here, because there are a few exceptional cases—people who have turned in a serious way to something evil. That could mean serious dabbling or immersion in dark, occult areas of behavior, like Satanism. That said, you can't go around saying that Satan is everywhere. More people become involved in the serious pursuit of what they regard as magic or witchcraft.

The second category of people vulnerable to possessions, which often overlaps with the first, is people who have seriously turned to evil in their lives. Surprisingly, some people who have turned to evil in a serious way will turn to beliefs that we would regard as occult or dark, like cults. They get involved in that, then they expect favors in return, and after awhile, they find that it was a fool’s bargain. They’re in over their heads, and the occult forces they've committed to have spun out of control, effectively possessing them.

ESQ: Doesn’t it seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy that most victims of demonic possession are involved in a spiritual practice? What about people who are agnostics or atheists? Are they vulnerable to possessions?

RG: People will often say, "How come it's only these Christians, especially Christian fundamentalists, who get possessed?" It’s true that certain fundamentalist religious people are going to misinterpret psychiatric problems or other medical problems as possession. They may be the most exhibitionist about it, but possession can happen to anybody—and it has, throughout history. Possession has attacked any and all cultures. Pretty much all religions and all cultures have seen cases of possession; it doesn't in any way depend on the particular religious tradition, nor does it even depend on a person’s belief or disbelief in God. It's not going to happen to your average atheist of good will, but if somebody has no religious belief and they’ve turned to evil, in some ways, they're in a worse condition, because they don't know how to get help. I've met people with completely agnostic or atheistic beliefs who somehow dabbled in the occult, then found themselves way in over their heads. They didn't know who to turn to, so sometimes they were more willing to speak to a psychiatrist than to a clergy member. Although, an awful lot of the cases referred to me do come my way through clergy.

People don't have to go to bed at night worried that they're going to wake up possessed.

ESQ: You write that, in order to recover from demonic possession, a person has to work at it and want it. What does that work look like?

RG: Considering that these possessions usually happen to people who have turned to evil or the occult, you have to renounce that. You have to say, "I'm not going to do that again." Or, "I'm not going to get involved in Satanism. I'm not going to get involved in witchcraft." Some people are very reluctant to do that. Julia was one of them. I had the strong impression that she liked her activity in the cult, although she was also frightened by it and afraid to leave. She was afraid she would be harmed if she left the cult.

Julia was an extreme case, because she credibly convinced me that she was what she said she was, which was a high priestess in a Satanic cult. To be liberated, she would have had to renounce the cult and renounce a sinful life, because these cults are not innocent. They do some nefarious things. She also would have had to build herself up spiritually. She would have had to turn to God. She would have had to develop some kind of religious practices. That's how people get better, often in conjunction with prayers and exorcisms, in extreme cases. Many exorcists have said to me that it's 90% the patient's own efforts and 10% the exorcisms. I'm certainly not saying that exorcisms are inefficacious, but they're only part of the process of liberation. They're not magic.

ESQ: What’s a typical exorcism like, and how do you know when a series of exorcisms has been effective?

RG: In one sense, there’s no such thing as a typical exorcism, because they're all different. Different spiritual traditions have different ceremonies and rituals. The Catholic exorcism is perhaps the most ritualized. Orthodox Christians also have a fairly set ritual prayer that they say. A typical session may go on for 45 minutes. The prayers are said. Sometimes the demon surfaces; sometimes it doesn't. I’ve seen a person delivered in one exorcism, but I've seen other exorcisms that go on for months or years. Sometimes the person is never delivered.

ESQ: What’s the variance you see in these demons? What’s the range of personalities you've observed?

RG: They don't reveal their personalities very much. What they do reveal is invariably nasty, prideful, and arrogant. Some of them seem sillier than others. Some of them appear super silly while others are quite malevolent. Clearly you're dealing with different levels of personality, but we're seeing the side of them that is particularly bitter. They don't want to leave, so invariably they lie. They are constantly trying to confuse people, so they may say they're a dead soul. In ancient times, Jewish and Christian writers felt that demons pretended to be gods possessing people. This was a common belief in the Greek world.

There’s no such thing as a typical exorcism, because they're all different.

In modern times, especially in the developed world, many people think the possessed are just mentally ill. There's a real difference. As I often say to people, mentally ill people can't all of the sudden speak foreign languages. They don't exhibit levitation. They don't have superhuman strength, and as Julia exhibited on many occasions, they don't have psychic abilities enabling them to reveal information called hidden knowledge. All of these symptoms are a good indication that there's a separate creature involved. I leave the official diagnosis process to the clergy, but I'm well aware that, to constitute a possession, you have to rule out psychiatric and medical illnesses, some of which have superficial similarities, but are really quite different. You must have clear and rigorous evidence. In the Catholic church, the diagnostic process is rigorous, intended to result in a moral certainty. You're not supposed to assume that this happens without a lot of very hard evidence.

ESQ: You write in the book that demand for exorcisms is rising. Why is that?

RG: There are two theories about that. I think they both have some merit. One is that there's more preoccupation with this stuff, so people think they need an exorcism when they don't. Young people nowadays are brought up on movies, TV shows, and paranormal beliefs. That's different from when I was a kid, when this stuff was dismissed and frowned upon. Part of it may be that there are more people who think they're possessed. They may even have prayer said over them when in fact they're mentally ill.

It becomes a question of when to start believing people.

The second factor that most experienced exorcists believe, likely with credibility, is the decline of traditional religions. It's quite clear that mainstream religions, not just Christianity, have had a decline in recent decades. When people give up a mainstream or more orthodox type of religion, they generally develop some kind of substitute belief system. That often involves ideas about energy forces, occult themes, and visitation by spirits. A lot of exorcists feel that, through alternate spiritualities, these people have opened themselves up to evil forces and evil spirits, in ways that more mainstream religious people are protected from.

ESQ: For somebody seeking the services of an exorcist, how can they tell a true professional from a huckster?

RG: There are many hucksters. People find these topics outlandish, but there are plenty of shamans in New York City and California. There are the people who call themselves psychic healers. There was a craze in France a couple of years ago where a lot of people were styling themselves as alternative healers and exorcists. I’m sure some of them are well-meaning, but they often charge a lot of money. One criteria is to find someone who does this as a spiritual ministry, or someone from a more mainstream religious tradition rather than someone who sets themselves up as a self-styled expert in exorcisms. I've almost never seen anyone who goes to someone who charges money get successfully delivered.

ESQ: You mention late in the book that your colleague Father Jacques felt endangered by cult members, and that those cult members wanted to suppress his testimony to the media. Can you tell me more about that tension between cult members and clergy?

RG: I'm a psychiatrist, and in at least part of my professional life, I was exposed to a lot of people who were hysterical about cults and Satanism. The famous Christian writers said, "Demons are happy that we don't believe in them, and they're also happy that we become over-preoccupied with them." There were subcultures in America where people were seeing Satanists and cultists everywhere. I don't think organized Satanic cults are very common. However, there are certain people who turn to a type of true Satanism or diabolism. Those people hate all authentically spiritual people, but they especially hate clergy of the different key faiths, because they see them as the enemy, teaching people to lead righteous lives and to combat evil forces.

ESQ: Plenty of people will view your findings and your experiences with skepticism. They might say it's unscientific or superstitious. What do you say to skeptics?

RG: I wouldn't say that I proselytize in any way. I'm not overly ambitious about convincing people. The victims of these possessions are suffering in the extreme. I'm a physician, so I try to help suffering people. One can say, “I don't believe in that stuff." Okay, so what are these people supposed to do? Just assume that this is all nonsense when they know that it’s a real condition they're suffering from? In the last few hundred years in the western world, this has been a very controversial subject. I think people have misconceptions, which I try to address in the book, about what science can verify and what it can't verify.

You can't do experiments in this area. I went to medical school and I went to a mainstream residency at Yale. I was taught science and the scientific method. The scientific method of the modern age is built on what we call methodological naturalism. In other words, we don't assume that spiritual forces are operating, because you can't study them in the same way. You can't study them empirically. You can't do experiments on them.

You're also dealing with creatures who know you're studying them, observing them, or trying to tape them. A lot of people think they're going to capture evidence on a camera and prove the existence of demons to the world, but these creatures know when they're being filmed. They're not about to cooperate when a large part of their efforts has been to hide themselves. They're not about to make their existence obvious to people.

What people don't understand is that you can use a broader definition of science, which was the classical view of science in the western world, where science was knowledge. Then you have to decide: “Is there enough knowledge based on historical evidence?” You can't really prove how many people crossed the Delaware with George Washington; you have to accept it on the basis of sound testimony. It's the same with exorcisms. You have to look at the testimony. Does it seem to be reasonable? Is it consistent with other teachings? For instance, teachings of the major faiths, all of which believe in evil spirits. It's a historical subject.

You have to look at the testimony. Does it seem to be reasonable?

I never suggest to people, “I want you to believe me.” My job is not to convert anyone. My job is to present the evidence for the reasons that I want to help people and enlighten those who are open to the evidence. I belong to an organization called the International Association of Exorcists, comprised of about 400 exorcists. They all have stories like those I tell in the book. I get calls from all over the country and all over the world. I tell people, "Look, I don't care if you believe me. If you're interested in the subject, talk to these exorcists." They're usually perfectly willing to talk to somebody.

ESQ: Is there any verification process to what you do? When family members of the possessed come to you describing strange behavior, how do you verify their accounts?

RG: I try to verify things as much as I can. Some of it is based on personal observation. With Julia, as I described in the book, she would tell me things about people that I could verify. She told me about my mother, who died of ovarian cancer. I don't know what her motive was to tell me that, but that's exactly what happened. She once told me what a priest was wearing even though they were hundreds of miles apart. I've gotten verification through my personal observations, but I often speak to family members and to priests, as well as to people who conduct the exorcisms, to find out what happened in the exorcism.

Some of the most dramatic manifestations go on during the exorcisms. I've never seen a levitation, but I've had about thirty people tell me that they've witnessed a levitation. Julia had a levitation, and there were eight or nine people at that exorcism. I've been to many exorcisms in my life, though I didn't go to that one. These are salt of the earth, honest people who are just trying to help by doing all this pro bono. They swore to me that she levitated for half an hour. Many priests have told me that. A renowned professor in Europe and his assistants told me they performed an exorcism, and the person levitated.

It becomes a question of when to start believing people. 400 of these exorcists at the International Association have similar stories. I'm sure there are many Protestant ministers in America who have seen some very weird phenomena, both during exorcisms and outside of exorcisms. You listen to them and you decide, like anything else. But it's a historical question; it's not going to be decided by lab tests or X-rays. Do you believe the testimony? Does this make sense to you, and do you think the testimony is sound enough? Otherwise, why would you believe it? I wouldn't have believed it until I had a lot of experience with it.

Source: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a34226478/dr-richard-gallagher-demonic-possession-expert-isnt-trying-to-convince-you/

A small group of nuns and priests met the woman in the chapel of a house one June evening. Though it was warm outside, a palpable chill settled over the room.

As the priests began to pray, the woman slipped into a trance -- and then snapped to life. She spoke in multiple voices: One was deep, guttural and masculine; another was high-pitched; a third spouted only Latin. When someone secretly sprinkled ordinary water on her, she didn't react. But when holy water was used, she screamed in pain.

"Leave her alone, you f***ing priests," the guttural voice shouted. "Stop, you whores. ... You'll be sorry."

You've probably seen this before: a soul corrupted by Satan, a priest waving a crucifix at a snarling woman. Movies and books have mimicked exorcisms so often, they've become clichés.

But this was an actual exorcism -- and included a character not normally seen in the traditional drive-out-the-devil script. Dr. Richard Gallagher is an Ivy League-educated, board-certified psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University and New York Medical College. He was part of the team that tried to help the woman.

Fighting Satan's minions wasn't part of Gallagher's career plan while he was studying medicine at Yale. He knew about biblical accounts of demonic possession but thought they were an ancient culture's attempt to grapple with mental disorders like epilepsy. He proudly calls himself a "man of science."

Yet today, Gallagher has become something else: the go-to guy for a sprawling network of exorcists in the United States. He says demonic possession is real. He's seen the evidence: victims suddenly speaking perfect Latin; sacred objects flying off shelves; people displaying "hidden knowledge" or secrets about people that they could not have possibly have known.

"There was one woman who was like 90 pounds soaking wet. She threw a Lutheran deacon who was about 200 pounds across the room," he says. "That's not psychiatry. That's beyond psychiatry."

Gallagher calls himself a "consultant" on demonic possessions. For the past 25 years, he has helped clergy distinguish between mental illness and what he calls "the real thing." He estimates that he's seen more cases of possession than any other physician in the world. "Whenever I need help, I call on him," says the Rev. Gary Thomas, one of the most famous exorcists in the United States. The movie "The Rite" was based on Thomas' work. "He's so respected in the field," Thomas says. "He's not like most therapists, who are either atheists or agnostics."

Gallagher is a big man -- 6-foot-5 -- who once played semipro basketball in Europe. He has a gruff, no-nonsense demeanor. When he talks about possession, it sounds as if he's describing the growth of algae; his tone is dry, clinical, matter-of-fact. Possession, he says, is rare -- but real. "I spend more time convincing people that they're not possessed than they are," he wrote in an essay for The Washington Post.  Some critics, though, say Gallagher has become possessed by his own delusions. They say all he's witnessed are cheap parlor tricks by people who might need therapy but certainly not exorcism. And, they argue, there's no empirical evidence that proves possession is real.

Still, one of the biggest mysteries about Gallagher's work isn't what he's seen. It's how he's evolved. How does a "man of science" get pulled into the world of demonic possession?

His short answer: He met a queen of Satan.

A 'creepy' encounter with evil

She was a middle-age woman who wore flowing dark clothes and black eye shadow. She could be charming and engaging. She was also part of a satanic cult. She called herself the queen of the cult, but Gallagher would refer to her as "Julia," the pseudonym he gave her.

The woman had approached her local priest, convinced she was being attacked by a demon. The priest referred her to an exorcist, who reached out to Gallagher for a mental health evaluation. Why, though, would a devil worshipper want to be free of the devil?

"She was conflicted," Gallagher says. "There was a part of her that wanted to be relieved of the possession." She ended up relieving Gallagher of his doubts. It was one of the first cases he took, and it changed him. Gallagher helped assemble an exorcism team that met Julia in the chapel of a house.

Objects would fly off shelves around her. She somehow knew personal details about Gallagher's life: how his mother had died of ovarian cancer; the fact that two cats in his house went berserk fighting each other the night before one of her sessions. Julia found a way to reach him even when she wasn't with him, he says.

He was talking on the phone with Julia's priest one night, he says, when both men heard one of the demonic voices that came from Julia during her trances -- even though she was nowhere near a phone and thousands of miles away. He says he was never afraid.

"It's creepy," he says. "But I believe I'm on the winning side."

How a scientist believes in demons

He also insists that he's on the side of science.

He says he's a stickler for the scientific method, that it teaches people to follow the facts wherever they may lead.

Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family in Long Island, he didn't think much about stories of possession. But when he kept seeing cases like Julia's as a professional, he says, his views had to evolve.

"I don't believe in this stuff because I'm Catholic," he says. "I try to follow the evidence."

Being Catholic, though, may help.

Gallagher grew up in a home where faith was taken seriously. His younger brother, Mark, says Gallagher was an academic prodigy with a photographic memory who wanted to use his faith to help people.

"We had a sensational childhood," Mark Gallagher says. "My mother and father were great about always helping neighbors or relatives out." Their mother was a homemaker, and their father was a lawyer who'd fought in World War II. "My father used to walk us proudly into church. He taught us to give back."

Gallagher's two ways of giving back -- helping the mentally ill as well as the possessed -- may seem at odds. But not necessarily for those in the Catholic Church.

Contemporary Catholicism doesn't see faith and science as contradictory. Its leaders insist that possession, miracles and angels exist. But global warming is real, so is evolution, and miracles must be documented with scientific rigor.

One of Gallagher's favorite sources of inspiration is Pope John Paul II's encyclical "Fides et Ratio" ("On Faith and Reason"). The Pope writes that "there can never be a true divergence between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals the mysteries and bestows the gift of faith has also placed in the human spirit the light of reason."

The church's emphasis on faith and reason can even been seen in the birth of its exorcism ritual.

The Rite of Exorcism was first published in 1614 by Pope Paul V to quell a trend of laypeople and priests hastily performing exorcisms on people they presumed were possessed, such as victims of the bubonic plague, says the Rev. Mike Driscoll, author of "Demons, Deliverance, Discernment: Separating Fact from Fiction about the Spirit World."

"A line (in the rite) said that the exorcist should be careful to distinguish between demon possession and melancholy, which was a catchall for mental illness," Driscoll says. "The church knew back then that there were mental problems. It said the exorcist should not have anything to do with medicine. Leave that to the doctors."

Learn about the true story that inspired the movie "The Exorcist"

Doctors, perhaps, like Gallagher.

Gallagher says the concept of possession by spirit isn't limited to Catholicism. Muslim, Jewish and other Christian traditions regard possession by spirits -- holy or benign -- as possible.

"This is not quite as esoteric as some people make it out to be," Gallagher says. "I know quite a few psychiatrists and mental health professionals who believe in this stuff."

Dr. Mark Albanese is among them. A friend of Gallagher's, Albanese studied medicine at Cornell and has been practicing psychiatry for decades. In a letter to the New Oxford Review, a Catholic magazine, he defended Gallagher's belief in possession.

He also says there is a growing belief among health professionals that a patient's spiritual dimension should be accounted for in treatment, whether their provider agrees with those beliefs or not. Some psychiatrists have even talked of adding a "trance and possession disorder" diagnosis to the DSM, the premier diagnostic manual of disorders used by mental health professionals in the US.

There's still so much about the human mind that psychiatrists don't know, Albanese says. Doctors used to be widely skeptical of people who claimed to suffer from multiple personalities, but now it's a legitimate disorder (dissociative identity disorder). Many are still dumbfounded by the power of placebos, a harmless pill or medical procedure that produces healing in some cases.

"There's a certain openness to experiences that are happening that are beyond what we can explain by MRI scans, neurobiology or even psychological theories," Albanese says.

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia, arrived at a similar conclusion after he had an unnerving experience with a patient.

Lieberman was asked to examine the videotape of an exorcism that he subsequently dismissed as unconvincing.

Then he met a woman who, he said, "freaked me out."

Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, says he and a family therapist were asked to examine a young woman who some thought was possessed. He and his colleague tried to treat the woman for several months but gave up because they had no success.

Something happened during the treatment, though, that he still can't explain. After sessions with the woman, he says, he'd go home in the evenings, and the lights in his house would go off by themselves, photographs and artwork would fall or slide off shelves, and he'd experience a piercing headache.

When he mentioned to this to his colleague one day, her response stunned him: She'd been having the exact same experiences.

"I had to sort of admit that I didn't really know what was going on," Lieberman says. "Because of the bizarre things that occurred, I wouldn't say that (demonic possession) is impossible or categorically rule it out ... although I have very limited empirical evidence to verify its existence."

The tragic case of the real 'Emily Rose'

If you want to know why so many scientists and doctors like Lieberman are cautious about legitimizing demonic possession, consider one name: Anneliese Michel.

Michel was a victim in one of the most notorious cases of contemporary exorcism. If you have the stomach for it, go online and listen to audiotapes and watch videos of her exorcisms. The images and sounds will burn themselves into your brain. It sounds like somebody dropped a microphone into hell.

Michel was a German Catholic woman who died of starvation in 1976 after 67 exorcisms over a period of nine months. She was diagnosed with epilepsy but believed she was possessed. So did her devout Roman Catholic parents. She reportedly displayed some of the classic signs of possession: abnormal strength, aversion to sacred objects, speaking different languages.

Learn about Anneliese Michel

But authorities later determined that it was Michel's parents and two priests who were responsible for her death. German authorities put them on trial for murder, and they were found guilty of negligent homicide. The 2005 film "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" was based on Michel's ordeal and the subsequent trial.

One of the leading skeptics of exorcism -- and one of Gallagher's chief critics -- is Steven Novella, a neurologist and professor at Yale School of Medicine. He wrote a lengthy blog post dissecting Gallagher's experience with Julia, the satanic priestess. It could be read as a takedown of exorcisms everywhere.

He says Julia probably performed a "cold reading" on Gallagher. It's an old trick of fortune tellers and mediums in which they use vague, probing statements to make canny guesses about someone. (Fortune teller: "I see a recent tragedy in your family." Client: "You mean my sister who got hurt in a car accident? How did you know?")

Or take the case of a person speaking an unfamiliar language like Latin during a possession.

"A patient might memorize Latin phrases to throw out during one of their possessions," Novella wrote. "Were they having a conversation in Latin? Did they understand Latin spoken to them? Or did they just speak Latin?"

Learn why Novella thinks exorcisms are fake

Novella says it's noteworthy that no one has filmed any paranormal event such as levitation or sacred objects flying across the room during an exorcism. He's seen exorcism tapes posted online and in documentaries and says they're not scary.

"They're boring," he says. "Nothing exciting happens. The most you get is some really bad play-acting by the person who is being exorcised."

In an interview, Novella went further and criticized any therapist who believes his patient's delusions.

"The worst thing you can do to a patient who is delusional is to confirm their delusions," says Novella, who founded the New England Skeptical Society.

"The primary goal of therapy is to reorient them to reality. Telling a patient who is struggling that maybe they're possessed by a demon is the worst thing you can do. It's only distracting them from addressing what the real problem is."

Driscoll, the Catholic priest who wrote a book about possession, is not a skeptic like Novella. Still, he says, it's not unusual for people on drugs or during psychotic episodes to display abnormal strength.

"I have seen it take four grown guys to hold one small woman down," says Driscoll, a chaplain at St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Ottawa, Illinois. "When a person has no fear and is not in their right mind and they don't care about hurting themselves or hurting others, you can see heartbreaking things."

That doesn't mean he thinks possession isn't real. He says the New Testament is full of accounts of Jesus confronting demons.

"Do I still believe it happens? Yes, I do," he says. "It happened then. I don't know why it would be totally eradicated now."

Gallagher agrees and has answers for skeptics like Novella.

He says demons won't submit to lab studies or allow themselves to be easily recorded by video equipment. They want to sow doubt, not confirm their existence, he says. Nor will the church compromise the privacy of a person suffering from possession just to provide film to skeptics.

Gallagher says he sees his work with the possessed as an extension of his responsibilities as a doctor.

In a passage from a book he is working on about demonic possession in America, he says that it is the duty of a physician to help people in great distress "without concern whether they have debatable or controversial conditions."

Gallagher isn't the first psychiatrist to feel such duty. Dr. M. Scott Peck, the late author of "The Road Less Traveled," conducted two exorcisms himself -- something Gallagher considers unwise and dangerous for any psychiatrist.

"I didn't go volunteering for this," he says. "I went into this because different people over the last few decades realized that I was open to this sort of thing. The referrals are almost invariably from priests. It's not like someone is walking into my office and I say, 'You must be possessed.' "

What happened to Satan's queen

He may not have asked to join the "hidden" world of exorcism, but he is an integral part of that community today. He's been featured in stories and documentaries about exorcism and is on the governing board of the Rome-based International Association of Exorcists.

"It's deepened my faith," he says of the exorcisms he's witnessed. "It didn't radically change it, but it validated my faith."

He says he's received thanks from many people he's helped over the years. Some wept, grateful to him for not dismissing them as delusional. As for letting a journalist talk to any of these people, Gallagher says he zealously guards their privacy.

Julia, though, gave him permission to tell her story. But it didn't have a happy ending.

He and a team of exorcists continued to see her, but eventually, she called a halt to the sessions. She was too ambivalent. She relished some of the abilities she displayed during her trances. She was "playing both sides."

"Exorcism is not some kind of magical incantation," Gallagher says. "Normally, a person has to make their own sincere spiritual efforts, too."

About a year after she dropped out, Gallagher says, he heard Julia's voice on the phone again. This time, she had called to tell him she was dying of cancer.

Gallagher says he offered to try to help her with a team of priests while she was still physically able, but her response was terse:

"Well, I'll give it some thought."

He says he never heard from her again.

Inevitably, there will be others. His phone will ring. A priest will tell him a story. A team of clergy and nuns will be summoned. And the man of science will enter the hidden world of exorcism again.

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The critics, the souls that aren't saved, the creepy encounters -- they don't seem to deter him.

"Truly informed exorcists don't tend to get discouraged," he says, "because they know it is our Lord who delivers the person, not themselves."

Is Gallagher doing God's work, or does he need deliverance from his own delusions?

Perhaps only God -- and Satan -- knows for sure.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/04/health/exorcism-doctor/index.html

Details: Born in the Philippines in 1929, Teresita Basa had moved to the United States in the 1960s to study music. She later became a respiratory therapist at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. Quiet and unassuming, she was the last person one would expect to be victim of a violent crime. However, at 9pm on the night of February 21, 1977, the fire department was called to put out a fire in her apartment. In the blaze, they found her nude body under a burning mattress with a butcher knife buried in her chest. Investigators believed that the fire had been set to cover up the murder. There was evidence that she was the victim of a sexual crime. The autopsy, however, determined that she had not been raped. There seemed to be no apparent motive for the crime. Investigators could also find little physical evidence, as most had been destroyed by the fire. One piece of evidence that was found, however, was a memo that stated: "Get Theatre Tickets for A.S." 

Suspects: The police pursued several leads, but they were all subsequently dismissed. They suspected that A.S. may have been involved in the crime, but they did not know what the initials stood for. Her boyfriend, whom she allegedly argued with, was considered a possible suspect.

Extra Notes: This case first aired on the April 25, 1990 episode. It was also covered in the book, Houses of Horror, by Richard Winer, and the movie Voice from the Grave. It served as inspiration for a "Fact" segment on Beyond Belief. This case was one of the few profiled that had been solved prior to the broadcast. It focused mainly on the supernatural aspects surrounding the murder.

Results: Solved. More than five months after Teresita's murder, her coworker, Remibias "Remy" Chua, another native from the Philippines, and her husband, Joe, contacted detective Joe Stachula, claiming to have information about her murder. Remy told Joe that shortly after, she began having visions and dreams in which Teresita appeared to her, begging her to go to the police and tell what had happened to her. One night, Remy took a nap at home; according to Joe, she began speaking in another voice. It said that she was Teresita. She told Joe that her killer's name was Allan Showery. The voice claimed that he was an orderly that worked at the hospital. She urged Joe to go to the police. However, when she woke up, she claimed to have no memory of what had happened. Joe decided, at first, not to go to the police.

Then the voice possessed Remy a second time, asking Joe why he did not go to the police. He said that he had no evidence against Showery. The voice then told Joe that he had taken Teresita's jewelry after her murder and given it to his girlfriend.

Detective Stachula did not know if he could trust this information or not. He decided to do a background check on Showery. He found that Showery lived close to Teresita. Coworkers confirmed that he was planning to go to her apartment that night to repair her television.

Stachula brought Showery in for questioning. He confirmed that he went to her apartment to repair the television. He claimed that he did not have the tools to do so, so he went back home. Stachula did not believe this, so he contacted Showery's girlfriend. He asked if Showery had given her any jewelry recently, and she said that he had. She agreed to let Teresita's friends and family inspect it. They confirmed that some of it was Teresita's.

Confronted with the evidence, Showery confessed to Teresita's murder. He said that after he left her apartment, he made a plan to return and rob her. When he returned, he said that she let him back in. When she turned around to lock the door, he grabbed her from behind and attacked her. He disrobed her to make it look like a sexual crime. He then took her mattress, placed it over her body, and set it on fire.

Despite his confession, Showery pleaded not guilty to Teresita's murder. When a mistrial occurred, he decided to plead guilty on February 23, 1979, receiving only a fourteen-year sentence for his cold blooded crime. He was released on parole in 1983.

Modern science questions much of the knowledge gained through the collective memory of humanity over the course of millennia. “Every culture and religious belief system throughout human history has its traditional beliefs of spirit possession in some form or another with corresponding rituals for the release or exorcism of spirit entities,” wrote Dr. Terence Palmer, a psychologist and the first person in the U.K. to earn a Ph.D. in spirit release therapy.  Some psychologists are returning to the methods developed by our ancestors to help patients with symptoms of possession.

Dr. William Baldwin (1939–2004) founded the practice of spirit release therapy and he also used past-life regression treatments. Baldwin was cautious about saying whether he believed in reincarnation or not, but he did say his treatments helped patients, and that’s what matters.

Spirit release practitioner Dr. Alan Sanderson wrote in a paper titled“Spirit Release Therapy: What Is It and What Can It Achieve?”: “I want to stress that the concept of spirit attachment and the practice of spirit release are not based on faith, as are religious and mystical beliefs. They are based on the observation of clinical cases and their response to standard therapeutic techniques. This is a scientific approach, albeit one that takes account of subjective experience and is not confined by contemporary scientific theory.”

Dr. Palmer commented in the introduction to a lecture titled “The Science of Spirit Possession”: “SRT [spirit release therapy] sits uncomfortably between the disbelief of a materialist secular society and the subjective experience of spirit possession: whether that experience is a symptom of psychosis, symbolic representation, socio-cultural expectation or a veridical manifestation.”

Parapsychology has been called a “pseudoscience,” as have other scientific approaches to phenomena that cannot be entirely explained by conventional science. However one views the method, it appears a revival of ancient wisdom has been effective in many cases.

Here’s a look at some of the thinkers, including those already mentioned, who have approached possession scientifically.

Frederick W.H. Myers

Frederick W.H. Myers (1843–1901) wrote in his book “Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,” which was published posthumously in 1906: “The controlling spirit proves his identity mainly by reproducing, in speech or writing, facts which belong to his memory and not to the automatist’s memory.”

He noted that the brain is little-understood; scientists don’t have a solid understanding of many of its ordinary functions let alone extraordinary functions (and this still holds true today). He theorized about a sort of radiation or energy that could be behind the telepathic influence of one person on another.  He tried to consider how the memory centers might be related to the gaps in memory experienced by people said to be possessed.

Myers has not been shown to have any formal education in the field of psychology and much of his work relied on two mediums he worked with. It was his belief in a science that takes fuller account of human consciousness that has continued to inspire scientists. Myers also noted that the origin of the idea is not as important as its effectiveness or veracity.

“Instead of asking in what age a doctrine originated—with the implied assumption that the more recent it is, the better—we can now ask how far it is in accord or in discord with a great mass of actual recent evidence which comes into contact, in one way or another, with nearly every belief as to an unseen world which has been held at least by Western men.

“Submitted to this test, the theory of possession gives a remarkable result. It cannot be said to be inconsistent with any of our proved facts. We know absolutely nothing which negatives its possibility.

“Nay, more than this. The theory of possession actually supplies us with a powerful method of co-ordinating and explaining many earlier groups of phenomena, if only we will consent to explain them in a way which at first sight seemed extreme in its assumptions.”

Dr. Terence Palmer

Dr. Palmer’s Ph.D. thesis revived Myers’s work. He said that Myers and others have tried to bring the mental, emotional, and spiritual elements of human experience into natural science.

“To permit the accommodation of all human experience into a broader scientific framework is a scary prospect for several reasons. But fear is the cause of all human suffering, and only when medical science puts aside its own fears of being proven wrong can it treat sickness effectively by showing how fear is to be remedied,” Dr. Palmer wrote.

In a recorded lecture on his thesis, he looked at ways in which we come to know things. Some of the ways include learning from others, using logic and deduction, and through personal experience. He noted that in these ways, a good deal of evidence exists for the possibility of real spirit possession.

Funding, he said, has been one of the obstacles to conducting more rigorous scientific research of spirit possession. He said further studies must be done with remote telepathic intervention. This would bypass any placebo effect or any psychological impact a patient’s belief system may have.

Dr. Alan Sanderson

Dr. Sanderson asked in his paper “So where is the research to back these heretical claims [about spirit possession]?”

He gave three reasons for minimal research in this field of study. First, spirit release is a new study, which has only been systematically taught and practiced for about a decade. Second, much mistrust and many misconceptions still present obstacles. Third, research funds are hard to come by.

He is hopeful the field will progress and funds with come forth. In the meantime, he said, “individual cases have much to say.” Dr. Sanderson uses the method developed by Dr. Baldwin to treat spirit possession. Following is an outline of Dr. Baldwin’s work and an example of how Dr. Sanderson used it to help a woman allegedly possessed by the ghost of her father.

Dr. William Baldwin

Dr. Baldwin developed a method of helping people exorcise their demons so to speak. It is thought that traumatic experiences can especially cause a person’s consciousness to withdraw and give the body over to other forms of consciousness.

In spirit release therapy, the patient is hypnotized so it is easier to access the other consciousnesses in the person’s mind. The therapist asks the possessing entity to look inside. Dr. Baldwin has said that about half of his hypnotized patients could see silver threads, like those described in Ecclesiastes in the Bible as connecting the human spirit to the body, according to author Kerry Pobanz. 

The therapist is said to help the spirits resolve issues so they will no longer have a negative impact on the patient and the therapist may even ask for divine intervention.

Dr. Sanderson’s Case Study of a Woman With Multiple Personalities

Pru, 46, had long-term psychological problems found to stem from sexual abuse by her father when she was a child. Under hypnosis in a session with Dr. Sanderson, she identified herself as her father, Jason. Jason would become angry and threaten Dr. Sanderson.

“In deep trance, Jason agreed to look within himself, where he saw blackness,” Dr. Sanderson wrote. “I called for angelic help. With the use of Baldwin’s protocol for dealing with demonic spirits, the blackness left. Thereafter, Jason was amenable. He agreed to leave. Other destructive entities responded similarly.”

Not all spirits found inside a person are malevolent, say spirit release practitioners.

Pru wrote a paragraph to describe her experience: “‘The spiritual approach left me freer from the remaining daily distress than anything tried before. Whilst under hypnosis I found myself talking about some experiences that I had definitely not had and places I certainly had not been to. So, was this spirits, split off parts of my personality, ancestral memory or even false memory/imagination? I very much doubt the latter. There was reluctance, yet at the same time relief, to be spoken to, accepted and contacted. The release from the darkness, into the light and to the beyond had to be experienced to be believed. It was amazing and I still marvel at the sight of these ‘entities’ disappearing and freeing me.”

T.J. Palmer notes that, while there are many negative connotations to the term spirit possession, there are also positive examples. He describes his encounter with an ostensible spirit who identified itself as Lao Tsu. He also presents an example of a negative encounter. He notes that it can be extremely difficult to distinguish between an autonomous spirit entity, such as the spirit of someone who is deceased, and thought-forms of our own creation. Both types of phenomena can possess an individual. 

Terry Palmer, PhD, is author of The Science of Spirit Possession. He is a member of the Society for Psychical Research as well as the Scientific and Medical Network. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.

T.J. Palmer suggests that there exists an immune system for the human psyche that serves to protect us from invading thought forms and spiritual entities. This system is traditionally identified by spiritists as the “perispirit” and by Theosophists as the “etheric body”. It can be enhanced through the use of visualization and mental imagery. A number of examples are discussed, and the viewer is invited to link to a seven-minute exercise prepared by Dr. Palmer. While such a discussion may appear to be steeped in superstitious thought, he maintains that there are regularities in his observations that invite one to apply scientific thinking.

Terry Palmer, PhD, is author of The Science of Spirit Possession. He is a member of the Society for Psychical Research as well as the Scientific and Medical Network. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.

More Things in Heaven and Earth: Spirit Possession, Mental Disorder, and Intentionality

Abstract

Spirit possession is a common phenomenon around the world in which a non-corporeal agent is involved with a human host. This manifests in a range of maladies or in displacement of the host's agency and identity. Prompted by engagement with the phenomenon in Egypt, this paper draws connections between spirit possession and the concepts of personhood and intentionality. It employs these concepts to articulate spirit possession, while also developing the intentional stance as formulated by Daniel Dennett. It argues for an understanding of spirit possession as the spirit stance: an intentional strategy that aims at predicting and explaining behaviour by ascribing to an agent (the spirit) beliefs and desires but is only deployed once the mental states and activity of the subject (the person) fail specific normative distinctions. Applied to behaviours that are generally taken to signal mental disorder, the spirit stance preserves a peculiar form of intentionality where behaviour would otherwise be explained as a consequence of a malfunctioning physical mechanism. Centuries before the modern disciplines of psychoanalysis and phenomenological-psychopathology endeavoured to restore meaning to 'madness,' the social institution of spirit possession had been preserving the intentionality of socially deviant behaviour.

Introduction

Spirit possession refers to a broad range of phenomena whose basic defining feature is the involvement of a non-corporeal agent with a human host in a variety of ways. These agents— commonly referred to as spirits—may be ghosts of departed ancestors or foreign visitors, divine beings, demons, spirits of fire; in general, ethereal creatures of various origins.1 Spirit possession is ubiquitous in almost all regions of the world. In a cross-cultural survey published in the 1960s, anthropologist Erika Bourguignon (1968) documented the presence of institutionalised possession in 74% of the societies included (360 out of 488 societies). In Sub-Saharan Africa and the Circum-Mediterranean (which includes North Africa) the figures were higher than the average, 81% and 77% respectively.2 Judging by more recent ethnographies, reports and reviews, and my own research in Africa, the prevalence and everydayness of spirit possession in many communities are not waning (e.g. Boddy 1994; Cohen 2007; Rashed 2012). In these societies, spirit possession is not only an explanatory theory for illness; it informs people's understanding of themselves and others in such domains as agency, responsibility, identity, normality, and morality.

In this paper I draw some connections between spirit possession and the concepts of personhood and intentionality, prompted by my engagement with the institution of spirit possession in Egypt. Considerations of spirit possession offer an occasion to articulate a perspective on the phenomena that makes use of the aforementioned concepts, while at the same time extending understanding of the variety of intentional explanation/prediction of behaviour as the latter had been formulated by the philosopher Daniel Dennett.3 Specifically, I argue that spirit possession—or as I shall call it the spirit stance—is a variant of the intentional stance in that it aims at predicting and explaining behaviour by attributing to an agent (the spirit) beliefs and desires but is only deployed once the behaviour of the subject (the person) is judged to have failed specific normative distinctions. Applied to behaviours commonly associated with mental disorder, and in contrast to an every-day disenchanted folk psychology, the spirit stance preserves some intentionality where the alternative is likely to be an explanation of behaviour as a consequence of a dysfunctional physical or psychological mechanism.

I proceed by exploring ways of approaching spirit possession, cognizant of the affinities between possession and dissociative phenomena, and the apparent metaphysical impossibility of spirit possession. After treading a cautious line through these issues, I attend next to personhood. I begin with a vignette describing a case of spirit possession and continue by arguing that the attribution of beliefs and desires to 'spirits' arises from their representation as persons. By appealing to contemporary debates on personhood, I demonstrate that in the manner they are represented, spirits possess many of the requirements considered essential to personhood. I then outline the different ways in which knowledge pertaining to a specific spirit-person is gained, for instance the spirit's name, gender, traits, and dispositions. Having articulated the status of spirits as persons, I proceed to describe the connections between spirit possession and intentionality. I present a brief outline of Dennett's conception of intentional systems, the development of this theory by Derek Bolton, and its application to mental disorder. With the ground prepared I present the proposal for the spirit stance. The remainder of the paper is then devoted to explaining and clarifying how the spirit stance works, and responding to some potential objections.

How are we to approach spirit possession?

The involvement of spirits with their human hosts is understood by adherents and practitioners to take various forms. The spirit may intrude into the person causing physical and psychological maladies or, less commonly, generating positive effects such as heightened capacities and powers. Social misfortunes such as financial problems and interpersonal discord may also be attributed to spirit influence through the effects of the spirit on the person's mental states. The involvement of spirits with their human hosts is not limited to the effects of intrusion and may manifest in displacement of the host's agency. This displacement may be complete, in which case the spirit's identity and agency effectively replace that of the person, whose physical body now becomes a vehicle through which the spirit(s) speaks and acts. Or it may be partial, in which case only certain actions are understood to emanate from the spirit's agency. With full displacement, the person—typically, but not always—would not have conscious awareness for the duration of the episode, a state commonly referred to in the literature as a trance state. Following Cohen's (2008) typology, I will refer to intrusion (whatever the effects) as pathogenic possession and to displacement (whether partial or total) as executive possession.4 Executive possession is particularly important for the institution of spirit possession as it is a central means by which the identity of the spirit can be known through conversing with it. Given this brief outline, how do we approach spirit possession?

Pathogenic possession may be the easier of the two to approximate as it resembles what we would normally think of as a causal attribution theory of illness. For example, instead of explaining a depressed mood by citing a neuro-chemical imbalance, the person would do so by citing the effects of a spirit. The explanation may stop there without any specification of a detailed causal pathway. But I found in my research that healers sometimes employ a representation of human biology of various degrees of sophistication to argue that spirits achieve their effects by directly targeting the bodily organ or centre responsible for that effect (Rashed 2012). In any case, pathogenic possession can be thought of as a theory of illness based on the idea of the intrusion of an agent (e.g. virus, carcinogen) into the body, albeit the causal agent here—the spirit—is one that many would object to on various grounds. I will address how we can approach the spirit component of both forms of possession towards the end of this section. But first, what about executive possession?

Executive possession is a familiar albeit fringe notion in modern popular culture. The idea that a person's agency and identity can be displaced or eclipsed by an incorporeal agent is the subject of many movies, features in the historical record, and is currently endorsed and practiced by certain churches in the form of demonic possession. Even though it is a familiar notion, it remains one that resists understanding by its apparent exotic nature. How are we to approximate possession within a naturalistic view of the world? Possession, at the very least, makes a statement pertaining to agency. As Vincent Crapanzano (1977) had expressed, possession serves as

a very powerful metaphor for the articulation of that range of experience in which the subject feels “beside himself,” not fully responsible for his own condition, as in extreme love, intense hatred, tantrums, furore, excessive courage, compulsive ideation, the idée fixe, obsessional acting out, and, of course, fascination itself. (7)

Metaphorical as that may be, the idea is that when one is intensely in love or obsessional about an object, one is moved by emotions and compulsions powerful enough to evoke the experience of being driven if not against one's will then against one's rational judgment. However, executive possession has a further component of identity switch, which implies a partial or total loss of agency vis-a-vis the identity in question—similar to Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or, as it is now known, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In DID the person has several alters, one of which dominates the others (or one’s core identity) at any given moment. While the imaginative leap from possession-as-infatuation to DID may seem too great, the seeds for conceiving DID can already be found in possession-as-infatuation. To be driven against one's rational judgement is a few steps removed from being driven against one's conscious will. The latter is an experience of a source of agency within us that is sufficiently distinct so as to become salient. Through various imaginative increments of objectification and alienation we can see how that source of agency may be identified with a persona. This persona may acquire independence with dispositions of its own, responsible for certain actions and emotions: it becomes an alter. Perhaps we can conceive a continuum of possession states from the more familiar pull of infatuation to the unnerving cases of DID. The continuum does not suggest a shared causal structure to these phenomena, only that they can be seen as gradations of each other.5

Depth psychology accounts for the full range of possession phenomena without having to posit any outlandish beings. Depth psychology refers to any theory that posits a layered psyche with hidden motivations and processes and which is capable of deceiving itself or, in extreme situations, of fragmenting. For instance, a typical explanation for DID would cite the impact of childhood abuse on ego development such that splitting (dissociation) becomes the primary response to severe distress. Conversely, a typical explanation for DID by a Qur'anic healer in the Western desert of Egypt is, in some ways, simpler: the person has been possessed by a spirit that had targeted him or her due to sorcery, attraction, bad luck or some such reason. There is no splitting in this case, distress need not be a precipitating feature, nor are childhood experiences necessarily relevant. For the psychologist the 'entity' is part of the ego (where else would it come from?), while for the Qur'anic healer it is external to the subject. This is reflected in treatment strategies: psychological treatment usually consists in managing the different personalities by fostering awareness and communication among them, seeking their integration, or cultivating the original 'core self' (see Littlewood 2004). While in spirit possession interventions range from exorcising the spirit to developing an ongoing relationship with it by which the host may become a medium.

The similarities between DID and spirit possession have long been noted: both evince radical identity alteration and discontinuity, total or partial loss of control over behaviour, and limited memory of such states (Bourguignon 1989). Writing from a historical perspective, Kenny (1981, 1986) observes that in 19th century spiritism, interpretations of what we would now call DID included the idea that individuals were possessed by spirits. The decline in belief in spirit possession has seen a concurrent decline in such phenomena. The return of DID to Europe and America in the second half of the 20th century was in the context of a developed depth psychology that could no longer see DID as the incarnation of external agents but as the manifestation of an ego forced into such contortions by childhood abuse. This perspective gained popularity through publicised cases, books and movies, bringing with it the problem of false memories of abuse (Littlewood 2004). The idea of possession by demonic and alien entities can still be found today among some British and American psychiatrists, doctors and clergy (ibid.). On the basis of descriptive and phenomenological similarities we can consider MPD/DID and spirit possession to be, at least in these respects, equivalent phenomena.

Having partially approximated the notion of pathogenic and executive possession within a naturalistic worldview, there remains an important question: what about the spirits? Is spirit possession a dissociative identity disorder in which the alters are conceived as super-natural? Is spirit possession a phenomena in its own right mediated by other-worldly entities? Can spirits be blamed for the illnesses and maladies they supposedly cause? The answer to these questions will depend on many things but mainly on our metaphysical commitments; they amount to asking if spirits and spirit possession are possible. A materialist ontology, naturally, would deny this possibility. In fact this is the assumption implied by almost every single scholarly work on spirit possession.6 Something like: given that spirits do not exist, how then do we explain/understand what is going on when people say they are possessed by spirits? The psychological theory of dissociation is, at present, a popular answer for executive possession. And for pathogenic possession there are numerous theories at our disposal to explain the effects in question. But, really, what about the spirits?

Consider the physicalist doctrine that any state that has physical effects must itself be physical. This doctrine leaves two options for those who wish to defend spirits, neither of which is promising. On one hand if they insist that spirits do have effects in the physical world they would have to concede that spirits are not, after all, the ethereal creatures they are claimed to be: they are either physical or supervene on the physical. On the other hand if they concede that spirits do not have effects in the physical world (and hence spirit possession is not possible) while maintaining that they exist outside the causal realm, the very possibility of spirits becomes questionable on epistemological grounds. The problem here is that an entity that cannot have any physical effects poses epistemological problems: how else would we know about it if not through our senses, which requires of such entities to be capable of influencing the physical world?7 In fact, spirit possession is probably only possible given a substance-dualist interactionist ontology: Cartesian Dualism. Spirit possession requires that there are two distinct substances in the universe (material/physical and immaterial/spiritual), and that two-way causal interactions between these substances are possible. Displacement of the human host's mind/soul by the spirit would then be a switch of immaterial substances which assume control of the physical body. However, interactionist dualism is not a popular view in philosophy despite being an everyday, common-sensical view: the physical world affects our thinking and emotions, both of which affect our actions.8 It also remains essential to monotheistic theology.

If we are tempted by physicalism, then it is unlikely that spirit possession is possible. On the other hand, if we are committed Cartesians, then we might have other objections to spirit possession—say the nature of spirits—but it won't be its prima facie impossibility. We may assume that physicalism is true, in which case what is called spirit possession is just a fancy DID (executive possession) or a mistaken theory of illness (pathogenic possession). This position, in my view, diminishes our inquiry into spirit possession. I propose that despite descriptive and phenomenological similarities between spirit possession and DID, and despite the fact that scientific explanations of illness are often superior (prediction, outcome), we have reason in many instances not to reduce spirit possession to either. This claim does not arise out of respect for alternative worldviews—important as that may be—nor is it out of aesthetic preference for a term over another: spirit possession embodies moral, social, practical, and psychological consequences entirely different to the reductive nature of the disenchanted psy disciplines.9 For instance, in DID, the person is expected to grapple with persons/identities that, according to current psychological wisdom, his own mind had created. By contrast to this myopic focus on the person, spirit possession immediately places the possessed in a much wider interpretive, experiential, and social space: in a prior existing and developed institution. Boddy (1994) expresses this well in relation to biomedical, but I may also add psychological, frameworks:

Unlike biomedicine, which collapses into the body, possession widens out from the body and self into other domains of knowledge and experience—other lives, societies, historical moments, levels of cosmos, and religions—catching these up and embodying them ... Phenomena we bundle loosely as possession are part of daily experience, not just dramatic ritual. They have to do with one's relationship to the world, with selfhood - personal, ethnic, political, and moral identity. (414)

In what follows I offer a perspective on spirit possession that makes use of the philosophical concepts of personhood and intentionality. I shall extend understanding of the variety of intentional explanation and prediction of behaviour, and of the kind of work spirit possession can do in a community. The aim is partly to reveal what can be learnt from the remarkably resilient and widespread institution of spirit possession, especially with regards to behaviours that are taken by societies around the world to imply 'madness' or 'mental disorder.' I assume for the sake of exposition that there are spirits and that spirit possession is possible, and resist reducing either to psychological or biological categorization. Eventually I bring things back to earth by examining the implications of this exercise for a range of concerns. For now, however, I urge the reader to suspend disbelief and to accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. I begin with a short story.

Spirits and personhood

Girgis is a fifty-year-old Coptic-Christian male who lives with his wife and two children at the far end of the oasis where you can see the edge of the desert. He became involved with a farmer who had unknowingly trespassed upon and damaged his habitat. Angered by this incident and by the damage sustained to his home, Girgis began harassing the farmer. He would wake him up at night, put him in a bad mood all day, prevent him from praying at the mosque, and generally make everything difficult for him. The farmer sought one of the local healers to intervene and arbitrate between them. The healer agreed to do so, and upon meeting with Girgis, he reminded him that both Christians and Muslims are people of the Book and should not harass each other like this. He assured Girgis that the farmer had no intention of trespassing upon his habitat, and that it is time to end this misunderstanding. 10

The reader may be surprised to learn that Girgis is not a human person; he is a spirit of a variety known in Egypt and in Muslim societies across the world as a jinni (plural jinn). Despite not being human persons, spirits are represented as persons. They are deemed to display features required for personhood, and it is on the basis of these features that people in the community consider it possible to reason with them.

Providing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood is fraught with difficulty and disagreement, and it would seem that there are several, as opposed to one, concept of the person (see Braude 1995, ch.8). Features that are commonly put forward include the following: a person is a member of a "significant and ordered collectivity" (Carrithers 1985) pertaining to which the entity in question has (or will have) rights and towards which it has (or will have) obligations. It is considered a requirement for this sense of personhood that the entity must be capable (now or at a future time) of practical reasoning: of generating goal-directed action through deliberative reflection. Moreover, some accounts require that a person must not only be capable of acting on the basis of reasons, but must have a sense of oneself as an agent for whom things matter in accordance with certain standards. Taylor (1985) calls these standards the "particularly human significances" such as shame and guilt (263).

Requirements for this sense of personhood are not met by all individuals, for example those with severe brain damage or who are in a coma. Braude (1995) distinguishes this sense of personhood from what he refers to as the forensic concept of the person (194). This refers to entities that do not have the capacity for practical reasoning—and who thus might be free of obligations—but who nevertheless are, or should be, considered bearers of rights. Current debates on the moral status of individuals with severe cognitive impairment and certain non-human animals can be understood as pertaining to the forensic concept of the person (see Kittay and Carlson 2010). These debates have become an occasion to revise what we take to be constitutive of (forensic) personhood. A recent account, for example, argues that the capacity to care rather than the capacity for practical reasoning should be the basis for ascribing to others moral status as persons (Jaworska 2010). Recognition of forensic personhood evinces cultural and historical variation. In some societies, attributions of personhood admit of a temporal process and are part of an ongoing “moral career” culminating in a series of initiation rites (Harris 1978, see also 1989). Historically, personhood was denied certain individuals on the basis of their status as slaves (Mauss 1985). In both cases, the individual may be capable of practical reasoning but is only recognised as a person, and hence worthy of respect, on completion of the relevant initiation rites or after being granted his or her freedom.

The assumption in the previous discussion has been of a one to one correspondence between a person and a living organism (see Braude 1995, 199). However, certain conceptions of the person do not require this. Of note is the fact that in many cultures and religious traditions entities considered persons can inhabit many bodies and one body can be inhabited by several persons. Moreover, personhood and embodiment come apart. Spirits, as indicated earlier, are regarded as disembodied persons who are able to acquire executive control of a human individual. But acquiring a body does not add to their status as persons. This status is evident if we consider the manner they are represented and which fulfills several of the criteria listed above. The jinn are members of a significant and ordered collectivity: they are socially organised, work, marry, and procreate. They are gendered, have human-like traits and concerns. They are capable of goal-directed action and possess moral agency which renders them subject to trial and punishment. It is by virtue of these features that it is possible for the healer to reason with them and to appeal to their sense of right and wrong as the vignette above demonstrates. The jinn also enjoy recognition as persons in the forensic sense. Thus, healers are wary of harming the spirits in so far as it is not necessary to do so, and this stems not only from fears of retaliation, for instance, but from an understanding that spirits are persons and are, at least, worthy of respect on that basis. By contrast to the jinn, in Islam, angels are not persons; they are emanations of god's will and hence are incapable of agentic behaviour.

Given their status as persons, how do people attain knowledge of these spirits? How is the general and impersonal category 'spirit' individualised into a specific spirit-person with an identity, name, gender, religion, history, traits, dispositions, and intentions?

Gaining knowledge about spirits

Observations of spirit possession in Egypt demonstrate that knowledge about spirits is gained through various modalities each with its own claim to certainty and level of detail: religious texts, traditions and social interaction, direct communication, embodied experience, and frank emergence.

Religious texts such as the Qur'an and the compendiums of hadiths (sayings) attributed to the Prophet of Islam do speak of a category of being known as the jinn. The jinn are mentioned many times in the Qur'an, the most famous of which is a verse stating the purpose of their creation: "I have created jinn and mankind only to worship Me" (Al-Dhariyat: 56), and another usually interpreted as referring to harm accruing from "satan’s touch" (Al-Baqara: 275).11 Nevertheless, the extent of the attribution of illness and misfortune to spirits and the more colourful ways of exorcising them cannot be accounted for through the content of the Qur'an, though they do have a basis in some hadiths. For believers, such texts while they are high on certainty are nevertheless low on detail as they can only offer knowledge of a general nature. By contrast, the oral history of the community and the exchange of stories pertaining to recent or present experiences of possession, offer more detail about the nature of spirits and how they behave.

The remaining three modalities all involve an experience of the spirit rather than hearing a story about it from other sources. As the name implies, direct communication pertains to persons having auditory and visual experiences of certain spirits, thereby coming to learn about them. Embodied experience and frank emergence may occur spontaneously or at a healing session. Consider this typical description of a diagnostic and healing session as would be conducted by a Qur'anic healer in the community I studied. With his right hand placed over the subject's forehead, the healer reads loudly the ruqya (incantation of specific Qur'anic verses) and registers the subject's response: four possibilities are recognised. The first possible outcome is that the jinni emerges and animates the subject's body, whose voice and identity are now replaced. The healer proceeds, through conversing with the jinni, to identify his or her name, religion, whether or not there is sorcery, the reasons behind possessing the subject, intentions at the present moment, and other questions relevant to getting to know the spirit. The healer then proceeds to negotiate with the spirit and secure its exit from the human host. The second and most common outcome is that the person responds with symptoms and signs such as mild tremors or numbness in the limbs, headache, screaming, stiffness, blurring of vision, arousal, violence, attempts to leave the room, crying, or perhaps would be seen scanning the room in disdain and with an incongruent smile. Any of these are sufficient indications that a jinni is involved.12

Applying this to the vignette mentioned previously we find the following: initially the farmer experienced insomnia and dysphoria. He suspected spirit interference (pathogenic possession) and went to the healer who administered the incantation. A jinni emerged (executive possession), and the healer began conversing with it. This is how the healer was able to learn the jinni's name, religion, and understand the circumstances that occasioned the possession incident. Note that knowledge regarding the spirit's intentions can already be suspected from more general information pertaining to it. For example, a pagan jinni—in this community—is regarded as potentially dangerous as it would have no regard for God and religious morality; it would have no qualms to harm the host or to behave in capricious ways. On the other hand for a Muslim host, a Muslim jinni is generally considered less likely to harm the host or behave insolently, and is easier to negotiate with by appealing to his or her sense of right and wrong.

The exposition, so far, sought to portray spirits as social persons who may interact with humans under various circumstances. Their identity as beings with such and such traits and capable of agentic behaviour is demonstrated and further refined when a spirit displaces the host's agency and makes its presence explicit or otherwise directly communicates with the host. This is how spirits are perceived in some societies where the institution of spirit possession exists. In order to further understand spirit possession and appreciate some of its consequences in relation to behavioural disturbances, I will introduce for this purpose Daniel Dennett's conception of the intentional stance, and the development and application of his theory by Derek Bolton in the case of mental disorder.

Mental disorder and attributions of intentionality

According to Daniel Dennett (1981, 1987), we can assume three stances to explain or predict the behaviour of an organism or machine—a system. From the physical stance we appeal to our knowledge of the physical constitution of the system and the laws that govern its conduct. From the design stance we assume that the system has a particular design and that it will function as designed; we do not require, for this purpose, knowledge of the physical implementation of the functions in question. From the intentional stance we attribute to the system beliefs and desires, and by assuming that it is rational—i.e. optimally designed relative to goals—we predict that it will act to further its goals in light of its beliefs and desires. The intentional stance underpins the power of folk psychology at providing predictions of other people's behaviour as well as of some higher animals and complex machines such as chess-playing computers. It is the stance most commonly adopted in everyday interaction with others. Dennett (1987) notes that there will be cases beyond the power of the intentional stance to describe and, by way of analogy, cites the difficulty in discerning the behaviour of an artefact from its design if the artefact is physically damaged (28). In the case of human beings he implies that fatigue and malfunction may similarly hamper prediction from the intentional stance (ibid.). When there is such breakdown in function, Dennett (1981, 5) suggests, we drop to the physical stance to explain behaviour.

This idea has been substantially remarked upon and developed by Derek Bolton (Bolton 2001; Bolton and Hill 2004) in the context of the apparent absence of intentionality that is generally considered a hallmark of mental disorder. Starting with the point that failure to recognise intentionality in the mental states and actions of others underpins attributions of 'madness,' he points out that attributions of intentionality are observer-relative (Bolton 2001, 187). Upon encountering activity, different observers "may see different patterns of intentionality at work, including the vacuous case of seeing no such patterns" (Bolton and Hill 2004, 98). The assumption that apparent lack of intentionality signals physical dysfunction may thus indicate hastiness in dropping to a lower level explanation (2001,188). Bolton then proceeds to demonstrate that there are a number of options from within the design as well as the intentional stances to explain breakdown in function. That aside, the key point here is that the intentional stance is abandoned when the mental states or activity in question fail certain normative distinctions as judged by the observer. Bolton and Banner (2012) express some of these distinctions as applied to action and various mental faculties:

Perception of reality can be veridical or mistaken, or in an extreme, hallucinatory. Beliefs may be true or false, reasonable or unreasonable, based on good evidence or otherwise. Desires are reasonable or otherwise depending on their relation to the person’s needs. Emotions may be understandable reactions to events, for example, anger is an understandable response to being hurt, or not understandable, being angry for no reason; and so on. The will may fail to control action. Action may be reasonable or otherwise, depending on whether it follows from beliefs and desires, or on whether those beliefs and desires are themselves reasonable. Behaviour may be random, without any relation to the achievement of goals, without method, and in this sense may fail to be real action... (83)

The observer relativity and hence the wide range of possible evaluations and interpretations at each of these faculties is evident. Different observers may see in a child's tantrum an attempt to coerce the parents to provide yet another toy or in that same behaviour merely that the child is 'tired.' In the first case intentionality is still at play, in the second the parents are (perhaps wisely) reluctant to pursue it. Observer relativity also has a cultural dimension. An example, further discussed below, is the tendency in some societies to see certain emotions— say unhappiness in a marriage—as having nothing to do with the personalities involved or other relational issues, but rather as states imposed by an interfering spirit. Many readers are likely to understand interpersonal emotions as having to do with the person and the relationship.

The idea I want to pursue in what follows is that spirit possession—or as I shall call it henceforth the spirit stance—occupies a peculiar position: it is an intentional strategy in the sense that it aims at predicting and explaining behaviour by ascribing to an agent (the spirit) beliefs and desires, but it is only deployed once the mental states and activity of the subject (the person) are deemed to have failed normative distinctions of the sort just outlined. It thus subverts the person's agency, while simultaneously maintaining a peculiar form of intentionality where otherwise one might expect a drop to the physical stance. Whether it achieves this and the manner by which it does will be subsequently discussed. First I will describe some of the situations in which the spirit stance is adopted and the normative distinctions that occasion this. These examples will serve to illuminate the way in which the spirit stance cuts across the ascriptions of what may be described as a disenchanted folk psychology.

Encounters with spirits in Egypt

For both the healer and the possessed person, a question arises as to why the spirit had targeted that person in particular. In the Dakhla oasis of Egypt, where I had conducted research, three answers are available. The first is bad luck, such as in the case of the farmer (cited above) who inadvertently stepped upon a jinni's habitat. The second is infatuation ('eshq/mekhaweyya): a spirit is attracted to and selects a human host. The third, and most common, is sorcery (se'hr): here a person who would like to see another disadvantaged visits a sorcerer who is able to direct a jinni at the victim. The jinni is instructed to wreak havoc usually in a specified domain—physical health, behavioural, psychological—with the final purpose of imposing various sorts of social failures (e.g. problems at work, marital discord, impeded marriage possibilities, impotence). Whatever the means by which person and spirit are brought in proximity, the understanding is that a person is made more vulnerable to possession if he or she fails to secure protection through prayer and other forms of worship.

The spirit stance is adopted to explain a wide range of behaviours and is certainly not limited to 'illness.' Table 1 illustrates some examples from Dakhla, together with an indication of the normative distinctions that the behaviours or mental states are deemed to have failed. In each of these cases, un-understandability, unreasonableness, inappropriateness, etc., signal that the mental state or behaviour in question is imposed from without, hence deployment of the spirit stance.

Full size table

In order to draw out the implications of the spirit stance it is helpful to have a view on what to contrast it with. I will take the contrast to lie in a disenchanted folk psychology, the kind, for example, where interpersonal conflict is usually explained by consideration of the personalities involved and, say, their temperaments. It is also one in which 'madness' tends to be seen as a consequence of dysfunctional physical or psychological mechanisms. Given this, and in light of the preceding examples, it can be seen that the spirit stance cuts across ascriptions of such a folk-psychology: it extends into areas that would normally—though by no means exclusively—be described from the intentional stance (marital discord, other social and interpersonal problems), as well as into areas that would normally be described from the physical stance ('madness,' mental disorder). We can say that in both areas the spirit stance subverts the agency of the person but in the latter (mental disorder) it preserves another form of intentionality, where otherwise there may have been a drop to a physical stance explanation of the person's behaviour and mental states.

The spirit stance in the explanation and prediction of behavior

The spirit stance is a variant of the intentional stance in that it explains the inappropriate or un-understandable behaviour of a human-agent by positing a non-corporeal entity now seen as the agent of this behaviour. To demonstrate how it works, consider behaviours that may attract a social judgement of 'madness'; a few have been listed in table 1. These will vary from one socio-cultural context to another. Now recall that spirits are (represented as) agents with beliefs, desires, and dispositions, capable of setting goals and acting on them. What does it mean to say that the person is behaving in this way because he or she is possessed by a spirit? The first sense in which this can be understood is executive possession; that is, the behaviour witnessed is literally the spirit's. As indicated at the beginning of this paper, displacement of the host's agency need not be accompanied by a trance state—an altered state of consciousness. Thus the behaviour is understood as intentional by virtue of the spirit's agency. Most generally, it would be said that it is in the nature of a spirit to seek deserted places and isolation, to be pre-occupied with fire, to be restless. The second sense in which behaviour is ascribed to a spirit is pathogenic possession. Here, the spirit is 'making' the person behave in those bizarre ways. While behaviour in this case is not, strictly speaking, the spirit's, it remains describable in an intentional idiom in those cases where sorcery is involved. Sorcery is a common reason why spirits become involved with human hosts. As practiced in Dakhla, sorcery typically involves three agents: the seeker (the person who wants the harm arranged); the sorcerer; and the spirit that will do the work. The purpose is to make the person behave in a 'mad' manner and thus to harm that person socially. The victim's behaviour is therefore goal-directed but the beliefs and desires that direct the behaviour, and the goals that are being served, have been established elsewhere in the nexus of relations that constitute sorcery.

In terms of prediction of behaviour, this requires that the applied theory (e.g. folk psychology) tracks some pattern in the world in order for predictions to obtain in actuality. What pattern does the spirit stance aim to track? Here we return to issues raised earlier when discussing approaches to spirit possession. If there are such things as spirits, then the spirit stance tracks the intentionality of spirit-persons in the same way that the intentional stance tracks the intentionality of human persons: assumptions are made concerning the beliefs and desires the agent ought to have and, being rational, that the agent will act to further its goals. Here, procurement of individualised knowledge pertaining to the dispositions and intentions of spirit-persons (as outlined earlier) will facilitate the prediction of behaviour. On the other hand if spirits do not exist, and the only source of agency is the person, then it is not clear how individualised knowledge of the spirit—now seen merely as a fiction of the person's mind arising during a trance episode or direct communication—can play any role in the prediction of behaviour. It would not matter what the 'spirit's' dispositions are as there is only one actor here: the person.

The only situation in which it may be possible to predict the person's behaviour by tracking the 'spirit's' intentionality is when the person actually takes on the dispositions and features of the spirit (or the unconscious/unacknowledged/alienated—however you would like to put it—part of his personality) he had come to learn about. And this actually does occur; consider these examples from the Dakhla oasis: a Muslim man possessed by a Christian spirit stops attending the mosque, begins reading the Bible and praying to Jesus; a woman possessed by a capricious, mischievous spirit behaves in such a manner where this is out of character for her. Pressel (1977) makes a similar point, here pertaining to the Brazilian Umbanda religion: "After learning to play the role of each spirit, the novice may extend that personality trait into his own everyday behaviour" (346). She cites the case of an "extremely impatient woman" she knew who "had learned to be calm from her preta velha spirit [spirits of old African slaves known for being peaceful, compassionate, patient, and wise]" (ibid). Thus, even if we reject spirits as possible agentic entities, there is still room for the spirit stance to allow for the prediction of a person's behaviour. This will depend on the extent to which the personality of the individualised 'spirit' is integrated by the person who supposedly is possessed by that spirit.

Objections and clarifications

The proposal for a spirit stance raises some objections and requires further clarification. One objection concerns its presumed uniqueness. It could be argued that the spirit stance is really nothing but the intentional stance, only that the agent is distinguished from the person whose behaviour is being described. Alternatively, it could be pointed out that the spirit stance is really a physical stance as in many cases the person's behaviour is described through non-intentional processes (spirits enter the person and affect bodily organs). My argument in this paper has been that the spirit stance is a variant of the intentional stance. Hence, in response to the first objection, I agree that it is an intentional stance but not that it is thereby indistinguishable from it. The crucial point here is that the spirit stance is adopted only once the intentional stance is abandoned. The spirit stance includes the recognition that mental states and behaviour have failed certain normative distinctions—the reason the intentional stance is abandoned—yet continues to describe both in an intentional idiom. In response to the second objection—that the spirit stance is a physical stance—I agree that intrusion by spirits sounds a lot like, say, infection by viruses. And the latter is a common physical stance account for tiredness, moodiness, etc. However, as I have endeavoured to elucidate throughout this paper, spirits are represented as persons whose nature can be known and who are capable of intentional behaviour. That is why it is possible in some cases to explain as well as predict behaviour by positing such entities, irrespective of whether spirits are independent agents or cultural-psychological fictions.

Earlier I noted that the spirit stance subverts the person's agency by abandoning the intentional stance, yet preserves another form of intentionality mediated by the spirit-person. This thesis requires further remark. The subversion of agency need not be a conscious decision on behalf of the observer though it certainly can be; there is a thin-line separating the inability from the unwillingness to see intentionality in the behaviour of others. The examples listed in table 1—in particular those applying to relationships—might seem to a modern sensibility as blatant attempts to subvert action and mental states of their (inter)personal meanings in favour of an externally imposed efficient cause. For example, blaming marital discord on spirit influence and sorcery subverts the couple's moods of the usual interpersonal referents such as personality 'clashes'; the problem is not in the relationship. Now, some may find it problematic that a society disapproves of adulation towards one's wife and homosexual urges—the other examples in table 1—to the extent that they can only be understood as externally imposed states. However, in principle what is going on here is no different from what occurs in communities where there are no spirits: earlier I used the example of a toddler whose parents are unable to/do not wish to see in his tantrum anything more than tiredness. And we are all aware of pejorative references to 'hormones' when someone wishes to cast doubt on the rationality and intentionality of another's behaviour. The difference is not in kind, rather, it is in the values and the behaviours that attract non-intentional explanation. Abandonment of the intentional stance is common in everyday life, even if the reasons and normative distinctions that occasion this vary relative to cultural contexts and observers.

Turning to the second part of the thesis: that the spirit stance preserves a form of intentionality where otherwise one might expect a drop to the physical stance. This applies to inappropriate and un-understandable behaviour, as is commonly attributed to 'madness' or 'mental disorder.’ The idea of 'preservation' implies that something is at risk of being completely lost. As discussed in the previous section, it is common to both enchanted and disenchanted varieties of folk psychologies not to see method in the madness. In the former the person is 'possessed,' in the latter he is 'ill' due to a dysfunctional physical or psychological mechanism. Physical stance explanations of 'madness' are also present in societies where the institution of spirit possession is established. In this respect, the difference between such societies and disenchanted ones is that spirit possession preserves some intentionality where elsewhere the predominant option would be a physical explanation. Note that the issue here concerns the resources of an everyday folk psychology, and not of a theoretically driven account that may render behaviour understandable.

Conclusion

Consideration of the connections between spirit possession, personhood, and intentionality afforded a novel perspective on spirit possession and a developed understanding of the intentional stance. Understanding spirit possession and intentionality in this light suggests the following insight: Centuries before the modern disciplines of psychoanalysis, phenomenological-psychopathology and the philosophy of mental health came on stage and tried to address the prejudices of folk psychology by restoring meaning to 'madness,' the social institution of spirit possession had been preserving the intentionality of socially inappropriate and un-understandable behaviour. By contra-posing a world of human-persons to that of spirit-persons and by allowing the latter the capacity to affect, or be the agent of, human behaviour, social deviance is not seen, at least initially, as 'mental disorder.’ The representation of spirits as agents with beliefs, desires and goals lends to socially problematic behaviour an intentionality that it may otherwise lack. And this allows, in some cases, for the explanation and prediction of behaviour. The exposition and analysis offered in this paper raise a question of importance with which I shall conclude: Is the spirit stance (and hence some intentionality) preferable to the physical stance (and therefore no intentionality) in terms of the social explanation of apparently meaningless behaviour in contexts where these are the predominant options? It is perhaps in understanding the issues relevant to thinking about this question, that some insight can be achieved into the value we place on meaning as such, and whether preserving meaning is a sufficient reason for us to relax our conceptions of agency and personhood.

Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10912-018-9519-z#Abs1