In his book The Devils of Loudun, Aldous Huxley described the delusions of demonic possession that swept over the French village of Loudun in 1634, starting with a mother superior and all the nuns in an Ursuline convent. What began as Sister Jeanne’s religious obsessions were magnified to a state of hallucination and hysteria, in part by the exorcists themselves, who, in effect, confirmed the entire community’s fear of demons. Some of the exorcists were affected as well. Father Surin, who had been closeted for hundreds of hours with Sister Jeanne, was himself to be haunted by religious
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