The Exorcist

by William Peter Blatty

WHAT WE GIVE TO THE POOR IS WHAT WE TAKE WITH US WHEN WE DIE. He paid for his tea and left a tip of fifty fils on a splintered table the color of sadness.

More rooted in logic was the silence of God. In the world there was evil and much of it resulted from doubt, from an honest confusion among men of good will. Would a reasonable God refuse to end it? Not finally reveal Himself? Not speak?

In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. —Aeschylus

Chris looked up. Then to the side. And froze. Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon, her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she sibilantly hissed and moved her head very slightly back and forth like a cobra. Staring numbly, Chris said, “Sharon?” Sharon stopped. So did Regan. Sharon turned and saw nothing. And then screamed and jumped away as she felt Regan’s tongue snaking out at her ankle. Chris threw a hand to her cheek, her face ashen. “Call that doctor and get him out of bed! Get him now!” Wherever Sharon moved, Regan would follow.

“Hysteria,” he continued, “is a form of neurosis in which emotional disturbances are converted into bodily disorders. Now, in certain of its forms, there’s dissociation. In psychasthenia, for example, the individual loses consciousness of his actions, but he sees himself act and attributes his actions to someone else. His idea of the second personality is vague, however, and Regan’s seems specific. So we come to what Freud used to call the ‘conversion’ form of hysteria, which grows from unconscious feelings of guilt and the need to be punished. Dissociation is the paramount feature here, even multiple personality. And the syndrome might also include epileptoid-like convulsions, hallucinations and abnormal motor excitement.”

“There’s a similar state, of course,” he said, “but we don’t know very much about it.” “What is it?” The psychiatrist turned to her. “Well, it’s a form of somnambulism where the subject suddenly manifests knowledge or skills that he’s never learned, and where the intention of the second personality is to—” He broke off. “Well, it’s terribly complicated,” he resumed, “and I’ve oversimplified outrageously.” He had also not completed his statement, for fear of unduly upsetting Chris: the intention of the second personality, he would have said, was the destruction of the first.

Black Mass … a form of devil worship, the ritual consisting, in the main, of (1) exhortation (the “sermon”) to performance of evil among the community, (2) coition with the demon (reputedly painful, the demon’s penis invariably described as “icy cold”), and (3) a variety of desecrations that were largely sexual in nature. For example, communion Hosts of unusual size were prepared (compounded of flour, feces, menstrual blood and pus), which then were slit and used as artificial vaginas with which the priests would ferociously copulate while raving that they were ravishing the Virgin Mother of God or that they were sodomizing Christ. In another instance of such practice, a statue of Christ was inserted deep in a girl’s vagina while into her anus was inserted the Host, which the priest then crushed as he shouted blasphemies and sodomized the girl. Life-sized images of Christ and the Virgin Mary also played a frequent role in the ritual. The image of the Virgin, for example—usually painted to give her a dissolute, sluttish appearance—was equipped with breasts which the cultists sucked and also a vagina into which the penis might be inserted. The statues of Christ were equipped with a phallus for fellatio by both the men and the women, and also for insertion into the vagina of the women and the anus of the men. Occasionally, rather than an image, a human figure was bound to a cross and made to function in place of the statue, and upon the discharge of his semen it was collected...

“Ah, yes, Dennings, Burke Dennings, Burke Dennings…” He looked up and turned his gaze to Karras, who was wiping sweat from his forehead with a corner of his towel. “Burke Dennings, good Father,” the detective said evenly and quietly, “was found at the bottom of those steps at exactly five minutes after seven with his head turned completely around and facing backward.”

There’s a clinical name for that kind of disturbance, in fact; it’s called satanism—meaning people who can’t have any sexual pleasure unless it’s connected to a blasphemous action.

“Well, the sex, maybe so, this I can see; that’s a whole other story altogether. Never mind. But the ritual murders now, Father? That’s true? Now come on! Using blood from the newborn babies?” The detective was alluding to something else he had read in the book on witchcraft, describing how the unfrocked priest at Black Mass would at times slit the wrist of a newborn infant so that the blood poured into a chalice and later was consecrated and consumed in the form of Holy Communion. “That’s just like the stories they used to tell about the Jews,” the detective continued. “How they stole Christian babies and drank their blood. Look, forgive me, but your people told all those stories.”

“Well, I really don’t know about ritual murder,” Karras said; “about that I have no clue. But I do know that a midwife in Switzerland once confessed to the murder of thirty or forty babies for use at Black Mass. Oh, well, maybe she was tortured into saying that,” he amended with a shrug. “But she sure as heck told a convincing story. She described how she’d hide a long, thin needle up her sleeve, so that when she was delivering the baby, she’d slip out the needle and stick it through the crown of the baby’s head, and then hide the needle again. No marks,” Karras said as he turned a glance to Kinderman. “The baby looked stillborn. You’ve heard of the prejudice European Catholics used to have against midwives? Well, that’s how it started.”

“Look, one thing that we sometimes tend to forget is that people psychotic enough to confess to such things might also be psychotic enough to have done them.

For example, the myths about werewolves, let’s say. So, okay, they’re preposterous: no one can turn himself into a wolf. But what if a person were so disturbed that he not only thought that he was a werewolf, but he also acted like one?” “This is theory now, good Father, or fact?” “Fact. There was a William Stumpf, for example. Or maybe his first name was Karl. I can’t remember. Anyway, a German in the sixteenth century. He thought he was a werewolf and murdered maybe twenty or thirty young children.” “You mean, he—quotation marks, Father—confessed it?” “Yes, he did and I think the confession was valid. When they caught him, he was eating the brains of his two young daughters-in-law.”

“… fewer and fewer lucid moments, and now there’s a total blacking out of her consciousness during the fits, I’m afraid. That’s new and would seem to eliminate genuine hysteria. In the meantime, a symptom or two in the area of what we call parapsychic phenomena have…”

“… syndrome of a type of disorder that you rarely ever see anymore, except among primitive cultures. We call it somnambuliform possession. Quite frankly, we don’t know much about it except that it starts with some conflict or guilt that eventually leads to the patient’s delusion that his body’s been invaded by an alien intelligence; a spirit, if you will. In times gone by, when belief in the devil was fairly strong, the possessing entity was usually a demon. In relatively modern cases, however, it’s mostly the spirit of someone dead, often someone the patient has known or seen and is able unconsciously to mimic as to the voice and the mannerisms, even the features of the face at rare times.”

“… Cases where it’s spirits of the dead are easier to deal with; you don’t find the rages in most of those cases, or the hyperactivity and motor excitement. However, in the other main type of somnambuliform possession, the new personality’s always malevolent, always hostile toward the first. Its primary aim, in fact, is to damage and sometimes even kill it.”

“Possession is loosely related to hysteria insofar as the origin of the syndrome is almost always autosuggestive. Your daughter might have known about possession, believed in it, and possibly known about some of its symptoms, so that now her unconscious is producing the syndrome. Follow? Now if that can be firmly established, and you still won’t agree to hospitalization, you might want to take a stab at something that I’m going to suggest.

“It’s a stylized ritual pretty much out of date in which rabbis and priests tried to drive out an evil spirit. It’s only the Catholics who haven’t discarded it yet, but they keep it pretty much in the closet as sort of an embarrassment, I think. But to someone who really thinks he’s possessed, I’d have to say that the ritual’s pretty impressive, and it used to work, in fact, although not for the reason they thought; it was purely the force of suggestion. The victim’s belief in possession helped cause it, and in just the same way his belief in the power of the exorcism can make it disappear. It’s—I see that you’re frowning. Well, of course; I know it sounds far-fetched. So let me tell you something similar that we know to be a fact. It has to do with Australian aborigines. They’re convinced that if some wizard thinks a ‘death ray’ at them from a distance, why, they’re definitely going to die. And the fact is that they do! They just lie down and slowly die! And the only thing that saves them, most times, is a similar form of suggestion: a counteracting ‘ray’ by another wizard.”

“As a last-ditch, desperate measure—well, yes. I suppose that I’m saying exactly that. Take her to a Catholic priest. That’s a rather bizarre little piece of advice, I know, and maybe even a little bit dangerous, unless we can definitely ascertain whether or not your daughter knew anything at all about possession, and particularly exorcism, before any of her symptoms came on. Do you think she might have read it somewhere?” “No.” “Seen a movie about it? Something on the radio? TV?” “No.” “Read the gospels, maybe? The New Testament?” “No, she hasn’t. Why are you asking?” “There are quite a few accounts of possession in them and of exorcisms by Christ. The descriptions of the symptoms, in fact, are the same as in possession today, so—”

Immediately derivative of the prevalent belief in demons was the phenomenon known as possession, a state in which many individuals believed that their physical and mental functions had been invaded and were being controlled by either a demon (most common in the period under discussion) or the spirit of someone dead. There is no period of history or quarter of the globe where this phenomenon has not been reported, and in fairly constant terms, and yet it is still to be adequately explained. Since Traugott Oesterreich’s definitive study, first published in 1921, very little has been added to the body of knowledge, the advances of psychiatry notwithstanding.

What is known is the following: that various people, at various times, have undergone massive transformations so complete that those around them feel they are dealing with another person. Not only the voice, the mannerisms, facial expressions and characteristic movements are sometimes altered, but the subject himself now thinks of himself as totally distinct from the original person and as having a name—whether human or demonic—and a separate history of its own. In the Malay Archipelago, where possession even now is an everyday, common occurrence, the possessing spirit of someone dead often causes the possessed to mimic its gestures, voice and mannerisms so strikingly, that relatives of the deceased will burst into tears. But aside from so-called quasi-possession—those cases that are ultimately reducible to fraud, paranoia and hysteria—the problem has always lain with interpreting the phenomena, the oldest interpretation being the spiritist, an impression that is likely to be strengthened by the fact that the intruding personality may have accomplishments quite foreign to the first. In the demoniacal form of possession, for example, the “demon” may speak in languages unknown to the first personality.

… In cases of possession by the dead, there are manifestations such as Oesterreich’s account of a monk who, abruptly, while possessed, became a gifted and brilliant dancer although he had never, before his possession, had occasion to dance so much as a step. So impressive, at times, are these manifestations that Jung, the psychiatrist, after studying a case at first hand, could offer only partial explanation for what he was certain could “not have been fraud”…

The demoniacal form of possession is usually thought to have had its origin in early Christianity; yet in fact both possession and exorcism pre-date the time of Christ. The ancient Egyptians as well as the earliest civilizations of the Tigris and the Euphrates believed that physical and spiritual disorders were caused by invasion of the body by demons. The following, for example, is the formula for exorcism against maladies of children in ancient Egypt: “Go hence, thou who comest in darkness, whose nose is turned backwards, whose face is upside down. Hast thou come to kiss this child? I will not let thee…”

“Yes, worse. That’s right. Because the ritual of exorcism is dangerously suggestive. It could implant the notion of possession where it didn’t exist before, or if it did, it could tend to fortify it.” “But—” “And secondly,” Karras overrode her, “before the Catholic Church approves an exorcism, it conducts an investigation to see if it’s warranted, and that takes time. In the meantime, your—” “Couldn’t you do it yourself?” Chris’s lower lip was slightly trembling now, her eyes filling up with tears. “Look, every priest has the power to exorcise, but he has to have Church approval, and frankly, it’s rarely ever given, so—” “Can’t you even look at her?” “Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could, but—” “She needs a priest!” Chris cried out suddenly, her features contorted with anger and fear. “I’ve taken her to every god-damn, fucking doctor, psychiatrist in the world and they sent me to you; now you send me to them?” “But your—” “Jesus Christ, won’t somebody help me?”

… The exorcist should not believe too readily that a person is possessed by an evil spirit; but he ought to ascertain the signs by which a person possessed can be distinguished from one who is suffering from some illness, especially one of a psychological nature. Signs of possession may be the following: ability to speak with some facility in a strange language or to understand it when spoken by another; the faculty of divulging future and hidden events; display of powers which are beyond the subject’s age and natural condition; and various other conditions which, when taken together as a whole, build up the evidence.

He who abides in love, abides in God, and God in him… —Saint John

We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives.

hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops—which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.

… “My name is Legion,” answered the man, for many demons had entered into him. And they begged Jesus not to command them to depart into the abyss. Now a herd of swine was there, feeding on the mountain-side. And the demons kept entreating Jesus to let them enter into them. And he gave them leave. And the demons came out from the man and entered into the swine, and the herd rushed down the cliff and into the lake and were drowned. And…