In Jewish and Christian traditions, an exorcism is a ritual intended to drive demons, evil spirits, or the devil out of a human body, in the belief that these entities can take possession of a body and remain within it until forced to leave. Most exorcists, however, are members of the Roman Catholic clergy; the church has established procedures—updated in 1999—for exorcizing demons. Under these procedures, exorcists begin their work with prayers, a blessing, and the sign of the cross; they then sprinkle holy water on the supposedly possessed person and, while denouncing Satan and ordering him to leave the body, lay their hands on the person. The full ritual is taught at a Vatican university, the Pontifical Regina Apostolorum University in Rome, Italy, using a Vatican book entitled Ritual for Exorcism and Prayers for Particular Circumstances. (Beginning in 2004, approximately 120 students a year have received this instruction.) The first official Christian exorcists appeared in about A.D. 250, when the exorcism ritual was routinely conducted before baptizing someone. Soon, however, it was only used in what Christians believed were clear cases of demonic possession. Prior to the fifteenth century, witches as well as clergymen were sometimes asked to perform such rituals, but during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, witches were often accused of causing demonic possessions instead of being asked to end them. During this period, Roman Catholic priests came to be seen as the only ones capable of ending the victims’ suffering by performing exorcisms, and the church therefore developed an official rite for the procedure. In the sixteenth century, the Church of England used this rite as well, but in 1603 it decided to prohibit its clergymen from acting as exorcists. This decision was made because several clergymen were caught staging fake exorcisms in an attempt to gain fame and/or to receive gifts from the grateful families of exorcized loved ones. One such priest was John Darrell, whose fraudulent exorcisms were eventually exposed. Similarly, some “victims” of demonic possession faked their symptoms in order to get attention. One such fraudulent victim was a seventeenth-century English boy named William Perry, commonly known as the Boy of Bilson. In other cases, however, the exorcism appeared genuine. For example, in the early twentieth century Anna Ecklund experienced a demonic possession and exorcism seemingly without any evidence of fraud. This welldocumented case is often cited by believers in demonic possession as proof that the phenomenon is real. Nonetheless, skeptics say that all apparently genuine cases of demonic possession are caused by serious mental problems and that, in such cases, exorcism works because the patient believes it will work.
SEE ALSO:
- Demonic Possession
- Demons and the Devil
SOURCE:
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena – written by Patricia D. Netzley © 2006 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning