In the World but Not of it: Ideology, Demonic Possession and Exorcism

I’ve been reading Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father as I prepare for my online Atheism for Lent online course . In it she offers up some fascinating insights into the realm of demonic possession and exorcism. In writing about the need for emancipation Daly writes about how oppressed groups suffer from a divided consciousness,

As contradictory, divided beings, the oppressed do not fully grasp the paralyzing fact that the oppressor, having invaded the victims’ psyches, now exists within themselves. They are caught in a web of of self-defeating behavior.

Because of this, truly revolutionary action requires that the oppressed realize that they are ‘in a real sense possessed by a demonic power within the psyche,’ and work to exorcise it.

Writing primarily about the suffering woman face in a patriarchal society, she notes that this exorcism is not something that happens in isolation. The battle against false consciousness requires solidity because the individual attempting psychic emancipation is immeshed in, and pitted against, too big a system,

The sense of reality that such an individual is trying to sustain would be pitted against a system with enormous resources for persuading her of her error, sinfulness or mental illness.

For Daly, the liberation of a part is ultimately liberation for the whole. Therefore standing up against the abuse of one particular group is a way of standing up for a world that is richer for everyone. While it is obvious that these demonic ideological forces actively destroy those who are not valued by the system, even those who have willingly sold their soul to the devil engage in a transaction that ultimately costs far more than it pays out.

So what do we do when we become aware of how we are inhabited, either willingly or unwillingly, with a demonic force?

The challenge involves creating cells that are in the world and yet not of it. Clandestine communities of disruption that engage in forms of communal exorcism. An exorcism that aims at tearing out that internal force that places us at odds with our own, and other peoples, liberation and freedom.

Oppressive ideology is not simply “out there” in the world. We are inculcated into it from before we have the ability to critically assess it.  Just as we are born into the material world without having been consulted, we are born into an ideological world before ever being given an option. To cut against the various oppressive realities out in the world, we need to root out the power they have inside us.

Transformance Art is concerned with attempting to create collectives of exorcism that help to expose and extricate the ideology that lurks within us as an alien, deathly presence. Such micro-societies of subtraction are spaces where experiments in different forms of life and ways of interacting can be undertaken. In this way they act as draining sites, for they endeavor to unplug us from the oppressive ideologies that we inhabit. Ideologies maintain their power via our material participation, whether as active apologists, passive participants or perverse transgressors. To truly break free from the part of ourselves that has been invaded by a self-destructive spirit involves no longer acting as one of the batteries that feeds it.

This is something I’ll be exploring over two days in LA this January. If you’d like to join me, click here.