The Dark Sacrament (46 page)

Much of what we know of Ireland's patron saint derives from his
Confessio,
a document comprising a little over ten thousand words and written in Latin—probably his first language. It is part memoir, part meditation.

In later life he wrote in Irish, his adopted language. The “Lúireach Phadraig” may or may not be from his hand, and there are a number of variations in existence. Though commonly known as “St. Patrick's Breastplate,” “Lorica of St. Patrick” is perhaps a better translation, since the lorica was segmented Roman upper armor offering protection on
all
sides. This would be in keeping with the spirit of this beautiful prayer, of which a new translation is given here.

P
RAYER
A
GAINST
M
ALEFICE
(F
ROM THE
G
REEK
O
RTHODOX
R
ITUAL
)

God, our Lord, King of Ages, All-powerful and Almighty, you who made everything and who transformed everything simply by your will. You who in Babylon changed into dew the flames of the “seven-times hotter” furnace and protected and saved the three holy children. You are the doctor and the physician of our soul. You are the salvation of those who turn to you.

We beseech you to make powerless, banish, and drive out every diabolical power, presence, and machination; every evil influence, malefice, or evil eye and all evil actions aimed against your servant [name here]. Where there is envy and malice, give us an abundance of goodness, endurance, victory, and charity.

O Lord, you who love mankind, we beg you to reach out your powerful hands and your most high and mighty arms and come to our aid. Help us, who are made in your image; send the angel of peace over us, to protect us body and soul. May he keep at bay and vanquish every evil power, every poison or malice invoked against us by corrupt and envious people. Then under the protection of your authority may we sing, in gratitude: The Lord is my salvation; whom should I fear? I will not
fear evil because you are with me, my God, my strength, my powerful Lord, Lord of Peace, Father of All Ages.

Yes, Lord our God, be merciful to us, your image, and save your servant, [name here], from every threat or harm from the Evil One, and protect him by raising him above all evil.

We ask you this through the intercession of our Most Blessed, Glorious Lady, Mary ever Virgin, Mother of God, of the most splendid archangels and all your saints. Amen.

P
RAYER
A
GAINST
E
VERY
E
VIL

Spirit of our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Most Holy Trinity, Immaculate Virgin Mary, angels, archangels, and saints of Heaven, descend upon me.

Please purify me, Lord, mold me, fill me with yourself, use me. Banish all forces of evil from me, destroy them, vanquish them, so that I can be healthy and do good deeds.

Banish from me all spells, witchcraft, black magic, malefice, ties, maledictions, and the evil eye; diabolical infestations, oppressions, possessions; all that is evil and sinful, jealousy, perfidy, envy; physical, psychological, moral, spiritual, diabolical ailments.

Burn all these evils in hell, that they may never again touch me or any other creature in the entire world.

I command and bid all the powers who molest me—by the power of God All Powerful, in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior, through the intercession of the Immaculate Virgin Mary—to leave me for ever, and to be consigned into everlasting hell, where they will be bound by St. Michael the Archangel, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael, our guardian angels, and where they will be crushed under the heel of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. Amen.

Alexander, William Menzies.
Demonic Possession in the New Testament: Its Historical, Medical and Theological Aspects. Eugene,
OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001.

Allen, Thomas B.
Possessed: The True Story of the Most Famous Exorcism of Modern Time. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

Amorth, Gabriele.
An Exorcist: More Stories.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002.

——.
An Exorcist Tells His Story.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999.

Clark, Stuart.
Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Cornwell, John.
Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light: Travels in Search of the Miraculous and the Demonic.
London: Penguin, 1991.

Crabtree, Adam.
Multiple Man: Exploration in Possession and Multiple Personality.
London: Grafton Books, 1988.

Cuneo, Michael.
American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty.
New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Curran, Robert.
The Haunted: One Family's Nightmare.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

De Certeau, Michel.
The Possession at Loudun.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Ebon, Martin (ed.).
Exorcism: Fact Not Fiction.
New York: Signet, 1974.

Ferber, Sarah.
Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France.
London: Rout-ledge, 2004.

Finlay, Anthony.
Demons! The Devil
,
Possession and Exorcism.
London: Cassell Illustrated, 1999.

Klass, Morton.
Mind over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Lendrum, Canon Revd. W. H.
Confronting the Paranormal: A Christian Perspective.
Belfast: Self-published, 2002.

Lewis, I. M.
Ecstatic Religion: Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism.
London: Penguin, 1971.

Lutzer, Erwin W.
Serpent of Paradise: The Incredible Story of How Satan's Rebellion Serves God's Purposes.
Chicago: Moody, 2001.

——.
Seven Snares of the Enemy: Breaking Free from the Devil's Grip.
Chicago: Moody, 2001.

Martin, Malachi.
Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

McAll, Kenneth.
Healing the Family Tree.
London: Sheldon Press, 1982.

McConnell, Brian.
The Possessed: True Tales of Demonic Possession.
London: Headline, 1995.

McNutt, Francis.
Deliverance from Evil Spirits: A Practical Manual.
Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995.

Oughourlian, Jean-Michel.
The Puppet of Desire: Psychology of Hysteria, Possession and Hypnosis.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Peck, M. Scott.
Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

——.
People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983.

Pelton, Robert W.
Confrontations with the Devil: Arts of Exorcism.
New York: Yoseloff, 1980.

Pocs, Eva, and Gabor Klaniczay (eds.).
Communicating with the Spirits: Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology: Demons, Spirits and Witches.
Vol. 1. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2005.

Richards, John.
But Deliver Us from Evil: An introduction to the Demonic Dimension in Pastoral Care.
London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974.

Seymour, St. John D.
Irish Witchcraft and Demonology
(1913). New York: Causeway, 1973.

Van der Toorn, Karel, et al. (eds.).
Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible.
Leiden & Grand Rapids: Brill, 1999.

INTRODUCTION: EXORCISM IN OUR TIME

B
URNING LAKES AND CAVERNS:
The Christian conception of hell has an intriguing history. The notion of a flaming pit dates from biblical times, when the inhabitants of Jerusalem burned their rubbish in the Valley of Hinnom, to the south of the city. In Hebrew the name was rendered as Ge Hinnom, which came to be corrupted to Gehenna. Fires burned day and night in Gehenna, as the city disposed of its detritus—which included, rather brutally, the corpses of those who had been executed, i.e., those condemned to death.

The metaphorical step from “the condemned” to “the damned” was an easy one for the ancients to take, particularly because the Valley of Hinnom was also the site of an old temple to Moloch, the malevolent solar (or fire) deity of the Canaanites. Moloch's enormous bronze statue was hollow, and a fire burned perpetually within. The Israelites sacrificed their firstborn to him. Evidently, they were confusing the entity with Yahweh, whom they sought to propitiate. The victims, after being ritually killed, were placed in the idol's hands and raised to the mouth by a system of pulleys, thereby simulating their devouring by the fire-god. The practice continued into the sixth century bc.

V
AST HOSTS OF DEMON ARMIES:
Milton was relying for the most part on
Pseudo-monarchia Daemonum,
a catalogue of demons compiled in 1583 by the German necromancer Johann Weyer (1515–88). Derived from earlier works of magic, it lists 7,405,926 demons, all under the command of sixty-nine Princes of Hell, each of whom commands legions of lesser demons. The Englishman Reginald Scot published a translation the following year in
The Discoverie of Witchcraft.
In 1904 S. L. McGregor Mathers, who cofounded the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical society based in London, published a new translation of
The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King,
with the addition of a further three chief demons, bringing the total to seventy-two.

A
DMONISHMENTS OF THE BESTIARY:
Bestiaries were medieval books illustrating mythical creatures such as the unicorn and the manticore. Each drawing was accompanied by a morality lesson. The earliest form dates from second-century Greece, and they were extremely popular in twelfth-century France and England. The bestiary often served as a legitimate zoological guide, but toward the close of the seventeenth century its influence waned as science overtook myth and superstition.

T
IMOTHY
L
EARY:
The son of an Irish-American dentist, Timothy Francis Leary (1920–96) was educated by the Jesuits in Massachusetts. He completed degrees in psychology in Alabama and California, becoming a lecturer at Harvard. Having taken magic mushrooms in Mexico, he went on to explore the therapeutic benefits of hallucinogens, such as psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). He was dismissed from Harvard for allowing his students to experiment with the latter. Leary protested that his work had importance in the treatment of alcoholism and in criminal reform, but he is remembered chiefly for his advocacy of “mind-expanding” drug use, as encapsulated in his catch-phrase: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

T
HE MOMENT THE MOVIE WAS SHOWN:
The Exorcist
was never banned in Ireland, but was screened with some of the more lurid scenes and those containing blasphemy deleted. The uncut version was re-released for Irish cinemas in 1998. In 1995, twenty-five years after the film's debut, it was finally allowed on video and
DVD
in the
UK.
The delay was caused by a number of allegations, such as claims that its showing had led to the suicides of young people and the “satanic” child-abuse scandals of 1989.

Criticism in Europe and elsewhere was mixed. The Tunisian authorities banned it outright, claiming it was “propaganda” for Christianity. At the same time, the film reviewer in
The Times
of London commented that “
The Exorcist
lacks any kind of resonance and shows little sense of the way in which good and evil might be seen to function in our society.” All the same, a video release was banned in both Britain and Finland, as well as in other countries. The ban was lifted only recently. In 2001, the state of Victoria, Australia, refused to allow a television network to screen the movie on Good Friday—which happened to fall on the thirteenth of the month.

P
SYCHIATRIST
D
R
. K
ENNETH
M
C
A
LL:
Robert Kenneth McAll (1910–2001) was born in China and worked as a doctor in a mission hospital when
the country was under Japanese occupation. When the United States entered
WWII
, he and his family were interned and suffered great hardship. After the war the McAlls moved to Britain, and Kenneth went on to qualify as a psychiatrist, eventually progressing to private practice. A devout Christian, he came to perceive the spiritual dimension in many cases of mental illness. His first book,
Healing the Family Tree
(1984), advanced the revolutionary—and hotly disputed—proposition that the deeds of one's ancestors can have a bearing on contemporary mental problems.

Dr. McAll relates the case of a patient whom he calls Margaret. After her mother died, the seventy-three-year-old began having outbursts of aggression, which took the form of unprovoked attacks on Violet, her younger sister. Margaret would go wild, breaking things and being uncharacteristically abusive. Afterward, she would be genuinely remorseful but unable to explain her behavior. The doctor learned that her mother had behaved in much the same way throughout her life.

With the help of Violet, Dr. McAll drew up a family tree covering six generations. They found that in 1750 a murder had been committed in the family and that subsequently the eldest daughter died from alcoholism, but not before she had destroyed much of the family property.

From that time on, the eldest female in each generation presented similar disturbing behavior. This continued on down to Margaret, who was born in 1904.

Moreover, Margaret's thirty-two-year-old niece, Rhonda, the eldest daughter of her youngest sister, was undergoing psychiatric treatment for a similar malady. Her husband had threatened divorce when, on returning home on several occasions, he found the house trashed—an eerie echo of the ancestor's destructive bouts.

Dr. McAll, together with two clergymen and Violet, offered a Eucharist for Margaret and Rhonda, and for the eldest females of the previous six generations. The service was held in private and without the knowledge of Margaret and Rhonda. The doctor records that, with the conclusion of the service, neither woman required any further psychiatric care. Rhonda's husband dropped his threat of divorce, and Margaret became the loving, quiet sister that Violet had always known.

T
HE
C
URÉ D'
A
RS:
Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney (1786–1859) is perhaps France's most celebrated saint. He was born in Dardilly, near Lyons, of poor farming stock. He started school at the age of twenty and proved to be a below-average student. It took him ten years to struggle through his exams (he failed Latin twice) and so realize his ambition of becoming a priest.

In 1815 he was given his first parish. The parishioners were not impressed, believing him too stupid for the task, and they circulated a petition to have
him removed. When the petition reached Jean he agreed that he was indeed inadequate and duly signed it too. On reading the list of signatories, the bishop was amused but took Jean's side.

In 1818 he was sent to Ars to be parish priest, or curé. Soon word spread about the holy man's ability to “see into people's souls” and his extraordinary healing ability. By 1855, thousands were flocking to him for healing.

He would fast for days, hear confessions for eighteen hours a day, and get by on only one or two hours' sleep. For thirty-five years Satan is said to have attacked him, trying constantly to break his will. The abuse took the form of severe beatings and strident noises—singing in a deafening voice and shouting, “Vianney! Vianney! Potato Eater!” This last was a reference to what the Curé d'Ars would eat after days of near starvation.

The Devil allegedly told him, in frustration, that if there were just three men on earth like him, Satan's kingdom would be at an end.

A
“SUITABLE” EXORCIST:
In
Hostage to the Devil,
the former Jesuit Malachi Martin offers a more elaborate definition of what constitutes the ideal exorcist.

T
HE
F
AITH
M
OVEMENT:
Michael Cuneo is bringing together the various strands of evangelism operating in America today. They are the successors to preachers of earlier decades like Oral Roberts and A. A. Allen. Their leaders include charismatic individuals such as Benny Hinn, the team of Robert Tilton and Marilyn Hickey, Kenneth E. Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and Paul Crouch and his wife, Jan, whose Trinity Broadcasting Network has assets exceeding $600 million.

THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE DEMON DUBOIS

C
ASES OF
D
EMONIC ATTACK:
Possession or infestation is usually defined as the appropriation of a person's psyche by a preternatural entity. Most com
mentators are of the opinion that such an entity can only gain access when the person chooses to allow it. Julie, in contrast, fought against the entity, and it was never able to possess her to any extent. It goes without saying that it is far more difficult to banish an entity that has gained full or partial control of its victim.

O
NE WHO LIES UPON:
Incubus
has the same root as
incubation,
originally the process by which a bird hatches her eggs, i.e., by sitting on them. With the naming of the hospital incubator, the device that assists a premature infant, the idea of lying or sitting upon was lost. It is perhaps significant that the Latin
incubito
means “to defile.”

The word
nightmare
has curious origins. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with horses. We can trace the root of
mare
to the Anglo-Saxon verb
merran
or
myrran,
meaning “to obstruct” or “to impede,” which is related to Old Icelandic
merja
(pronounced “mer-ya”), meaning “to bruise” or “to crush.” According to Nordic folklore, the
mare
or
mara
was an evil spirit known to visit women at night and paralyze them. Often there was a sexual dimension to the haunting but certainly not in all cases. It was believed that other demons actually had sexual intercourse with humans while they slept; the entity that attacked women was known as the incubus, while the succubus molested sleeping men.

I
N THE NAME OF
J
ESUS
C
HRIST:
It will be seen that the uttering of the Lord's name is a common feature of the cases covered in this book. From earliest Christian times it was held that the name of Jesus contained great power and could be used for the subjugation of demons. In Acts of the Apostles 16:18 we read: “But Paul, being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And he came out the same hour.”

See also Appendix 2, p. 361.

THE BOY WHO COMMUNES WITH DEMONS

A
MILD FORM OF EPILEPSY:
There are a number of misconceptions surrounding epilepsy, not least being the belief that it is a mental illness. In fact, it is a type of physical dysfunction that takes the form of a seizure, which can occur (and recur) at any time. Epilepsy is caused by abnormal electrical activity in the brain and can be treated with medication or surgery, although not all sufferers respond equally well. It is more common than many people imagine. Dr. John Wilkinson, author of “The Bible and Healing: A Medical and Theological Commentary” in
Review of Biblical Literature
(2000), is among those who have researched the historical incidence of epilepsy and a possible link to possession. “If demon possession is a fact, there seems no reason why it could not be the cause of some cases of epilepsy,” he argues. “We do not know enough about the spirit world to disprove demon possession nor enough about epilepsy to deny that it may be caused by such possession.”

C
OMMONLY CALLED A SEIZURE:
In brief, a seizure is a sudden and erratic firing of neurons that effects a change in behavior. The so-called myoclonic seizure would be the first suspect in Gary Lyttle's attack, as it results in muscle spasms on both sides of the body. It is, however, of short duration, in contrast to Gary's attacks or “spells.”

Epileptic seizures were undoubtedly one cause of the persecution of Europe's witches in earlier centuries, since frequently the seizures suffered by epileptics were identified as the mark of a witch.

In 1494, T
WO GERMAN MONKS, AT THE BEHEST OF THE
V
ATICAN, PRODUCED THE DEFINITIVE HANDBOOK ON WITCH HUNTING,
Malleus Maleficarum
(the Hammer of Witches), which linked seizures and diabolic control. Apart from Hitler's
Mein Kampf
and the
Thoughts of Chairman Mao,
there can hardly have been a more incendiary book in the history of mass murder. The
Malleus
was largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, mainly women. We have no way of knowing how many of its victims were actually epileptics.