Exorcism

"It just seems like capitalism masquerading as religion": Sarah tells Mike how a horror movie resurrected a ritual and established an industry. Digressions include “Avatar,” the NFL and the ethics of book publishing. The final five minutes are an unintentionally concise description of the core moral principle of this show.

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Transcript

Sarah: The first time this has happened for us where I was like, “I've always thought that the priest from The Exorcist is pretty sexy”. And you're like, “I don't remember what he looks like. Send me a picture”. And I texted you a photo and you were like, “Ehh” 

Mike: Yeah, that's true, new frontiers, this is the first time that’s ever happened.

Sarah: I really like Greek guys.

Mike: So welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we remember the history so you don't have to. 

Sarah: I like that. We're like a cloud.

Mike: What? 

Sarah: We’re the cloud. 

Mike: Oh, like the cloud, not a cloud. 

Sarah: Whatever. The cloud, a cloud. No one– it's just a bunch of servers in California somewhere. Right? It's not really any kind of a cloud. 

Mike: No, it's like big gray boxes next to a Wendy's somewhere.

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the big gray boxes next to a Wendy's somewhere.

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall, and I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. 

Mike: And today we're talking about exorcism. 

Sarah: Yes. We're getting into my book wheelhouse. 

Mike: Yeah. I'm very nervous to find out what I'm wrong about, about exorcism. I'm always afraid when we do these topics that it's going to turn out that it's like it's real and it works and that I'm going to have to update my entire worldview. 

Sarah: I have bad news for you. It's real and it works.

Mike: Shit.

Sarah: And “real’ and “works” are both words that I'm putting in air quotes here, because they have very complicated meanings.

Mike: Okay. 

Sarah: But, like, in the scale of other things that are also “real” and “work,” exorcism appears to be pretty good. 

Mike: Wow. Huge.

Sarah: Yeah. So tell me, what are your perceptions of exorcism at this time in your life? 

Mike: Well, as I've mentioned before, I grew up in a Christian household. But in a left-wing Christian household where we believed in evolution, and we didn't do any fire and brimstone stuff. 

Sarah: Which is why you're not currently a state Senator who's getting arrested for soliciting undercover cops in bathrooms.

Mike: Not yet, although the day is young. So we never did exorcisms. We never really talked about it. It was never a thing that my parents referred to. It was something I was vaguely aware of through obviously the movie. But other than that, I'm not even sure what an exorcist is.

Sarah: You know what its purpose is, right?

Mike: It's to get the devil out of you. But I don't get, what are the symptoms of having the devil out of you? Like, how it actually works. Like, literally all I know is from the movie, which I have seen once like thirteen years ago.

Sarah: What I found most interesting at the very start of this in researching exorcism was this is one of those things where you're like, you know, there's a movie that comes out in 1973, which is based on a bestseller. Probably, this is reflective of a turning tide generally, and America getting more interested in exorcisms as a whole because of various factors. No. The movie overnight made Americans want to get exorcised. 

Mike: Oh, what did we know about exorcisms before? Like, what is the origination of the exorcism phenomenon?

Sarah: There are many places in the history that I could take you back to. But specifically William Peter Blatty, who is the author of The Exorcist, is inspired to write it when he's a student at Georgetown in 1949 and he reads an article in the Washington Post. Which I shall now read you the opening of. Title: “Priests frees Mount Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip.”

Mike: Oh my God. 

Sarah: “In what is perhaps one of the most remarkable experiences of its kind in recent religious history, a fourteen year old Mount Rainier boy has been freed by a Catholic priest of possession by the devil,’ Catholic sources reported yesterday. ‘Only after between twenty and thirty performances of the ancient ritual of exorcism here and in St. Louis, was the devil finally cast out of the boy,’ it was said.”

Mike: What?

Sarah: “In all except the last of these, the boy broke into a violent tantrum of screaming, cursing, and voicing of Latin phrases, a language he had never studied. Whenever the priest reached the climactic point of the ritual: ‘In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost, I cast thee out.’ The ritual was undertaken by a St. Louis priest, a Jesuit in his fifties, who devoted himself to the task through prayers and fasting. The ritual began in St. Louis, continued here, and finally ended in St. Louis.”

Mike: So they took this kid, this demon possessed teenager, on a flight, like on Delta. 

Sarah: They took him on a train, because it was the forties.

Mike: I wonder if they were in a quiet car. It’s like, “Shhhh.”

Sarah: “For two months the priest stayed with the boy, accompanying him back and forth on the train, sleeping in the same house, and sometimes in the same room with him.”

Mike: Yikes.

Sarah: “Even through the ritual of exorcism, the boy was by no means cured readily. Repeatedly, each time the ritual was performed, the final violent reaction would come from the boy when the words were spoken, ‘I cast thee out.’ A reaction of profanity and screaming and the astounding use of Latin phrases, the priest was reported as saying. Finally, at the last performance of the ritual, the boy was quiet. Since then, it was reported, all manifestations have ceased.”

Mike: Oh, I mea 

Sarah: What do you think by the way of that amazing use of passive voice?

Mike: It’s like the opposite of both-sides journalism. It's like one-side journalism. It's like, here's this completely fantastical thing that an institution has a reason to make up that we're just going to take as real. I don't know. It's like the NFL reporting that football has saved the lives of 100 children, says the NFL. Like, it just seems like a weird, journalistic practice to just accept this story. 

Sarah: I mean, it’s kind of an ad for Catholicism. 

Mike: It’s 100% an ad for Catholicism. 

Sarah: And like, what is it about Catholicism? And I ask you this as someone who grew up in a Protestant home, because I feel, you know, as someone who grew up essentially not believing anything, that I've always felt that Catholics are somehow legit. It’s something about that there are these ancient rituals that have changed and grown, but kind of seem from my outside understanding, to be focused on consistency and figuring something out and then replicating it forever and ever. And the church remaining the same as the world changes around it. That there's clothes that you wear and that nuns literally marry Christ. Like, even if you don't believe in anything, you kind of take Catholicism more seriously somehow. Like, I can't really articulate how this works in my own head. 

Mike: Yes. I mean, I think it's part of the cultural fabric of the United States. It's always been seen as legitimate. Like, there's the kooky religions and there's the legit religions that have a couple of differences and it's always the Christian religions that are seen as fundamentally legitimate as opposed to polytheistic religions. We think about it when we do yoga or something, but we don't see it as something that actually plays a meaningful role in people's lives. 

Sarah: Right. Just because of the way that we're programmed. I don’t know, the same way that we'd see the Senate as a real thing. We're very responsive to ceremony, I think, and to consistent ceremony and that if we are brought up with the idea of something having an inherent legitimacy, it's hard to shake that even if we don't actively believe in it at all 

Mike: Your own traditions never feel like tradition. 

Sarah: Yeah. Can you tell us the basics of what The Exorcist is about? Like, what is the plot of The Exorcist for those of us who are not yet old enough to see it, regardless of how old we are.

Mike: I barely remember it. It's a woman, played by Linda Blair, is possessed by the devil and she starts cursing and her head spins around and vomiting and it's very theatrical and very huge and she's like, “You suck cocks” or something to the priest. It's like… 

Sarah: “Your mother sucks cocks in hell.”

Mike: That's what it is. 

Mike: I think that was my Grindr profile name for a while. And then the priest comes and does various things and then eventually the satanic being is exorcised from her.

Sarah: Crucially, by the way, she attracts the demon by playing with a Ouija board we were meant to understand. So it's also an early piece of anti-Ouija propaganda. And also crucially, Linda Blair's character is twelve years old, little Regan MacNeil and puberty is a lot like being possessed, because suddenly your angelic child starts behaving in ways that you don't know where they came from. They start swearing. They start disrespecting adults. There's this, you know, I think a feeling that a lot of parents have of, like, the child they knew is suddenly possessed or afflicted by some other presence that they did not choose to welcome into their homes. 

Mike: That was extremely my puberty. So, yes.

Sarah: Mine too. Yeah, and like, weird substances come shooting out of your body and, yeah. So in The Exorcist, Regan starts presenting with these weird symptoms and like the good, secular person that her mom is – and her mom's also a movie star played by Ellen Burstyn – she takes her in for all these medical tests and they can't figure anything out. She avails herself to every other authority. They have no idea what's going on. So finally she avails herself of the very hunky father, Damien Karras. He feels he didn't take adequate care of his mother and is sort of doubting his faith. The ending of the movie is that the demon jumps from Regan into Father Karras and he jumps out the window and kills himself.

Mike: Oh.

Sarah: And sacrifices himself to save this little girl. 

Mike: Okay.

Sarah: And so this movie comes out. It immediately becomes a sensation. There are stories about people fainting in the theater when they see it and someone, like, sues the theater or the movie because they passed out and hit their head on the theater seat and injured themselves. Like, it quickly develops this notoriety around, you know, this movie is dangerous to you, and you will see something that feels so extremely real that you won't know how to handle it. After The Exorcist comes out, especially the movie, because the book does well but you know, there's nothing quite like movies to reach the imagination of the public, people want exorcisms, and they turn to the Catholic church. And the Catholic Rite of Exorcism had kind of all but disappeared by the late sixties. It was not something that was really practiced in the United States. 

Mike: Do you have a sense of what the actual ritual is?

Sarah: Yeah. You do the Catholic Rite of Exorcism. 

Mike: Which is what exactly? What does that entail? 

Sarah: I think you mostly say words.

Mike: You know what I’m imagining? Have you seen the footage of the Avengers movies before all the post-production and it's just the actors waving their arms around really goofily and saying stuff? That's what I'm imagining the priests are doing. 

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, it's like any other rite, right? You have this kind of choreographed order of saying things. “Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Christ hear us. Holy Mary pray for us.” And then you call on the Virgin Mary. You call on various saints. You call on saints for a while. You ask to be delivered from evil. You know, you read Psalms and you say, you know, “Save your servant. Let him find a new Lord, a fortified tower. Let the enemy have no power over him. Lord, send him aid from your holy place. Lord, hear my prayer.” Demonic affliction and possession are the things that priests are looking for. There's also a difference between possession and affliction. 

Mike: What?

Sarah: Yeah. So there's possession and affliction. You’re afflicted for a long time usually before you're fully possessed and affliction is like, you know, sometimes the demons speak through you. They have fluctuating levels of control over you. They try to tempt you into self-harm, sexual violence. Like, all of the stuff that we don't want to do and don't want to think of ourselves as being capable of doing and, you know, depression and mental illness can also be seen as a product of demonic affliction. So like, whatever you experience in yourself that you want to be like, “This is not me. This is something else. Like, I am not this person. If I have these scary impulses or doubts or fears or just these aspects of myself that I cannot reconcile or control, then those are the demons.”

Mike: Okay.

Sarah: And then if the demon fully takes over you and is just occupying you 24/7, that's when you have a possession on your hands. 

Mike: Okay. 

Sarah: And by the way, what I've seen the most researching exorcism is the idea that people are possessed by demons.

Mike: Oh.

Sarah: Not by the actual devil, but by– cause there's an infinite number of demons. 

Mike: Right. So like, little middle managers, not the CEO. 

Sarah: Yes, exactly. It's like being followed around by a hitman who's not actually Al Capone but someone who works for him.

Mike: Right. 

Sarah: And of course people do claim to be possessed by the devil, which I feel like in that cosmos it's like Katie Holmes having a picture of Tom Cruise on her bedroom wall and then actually ending up marrying him. It's like, all right, like, go for the long shot, you know? And then it gets tough when there's multiple women claiming that they were tapped to be the bride of Satan and you imagine Satan in a Sister Wives type situation. 

Mike: Right. 

Sarah: You know, how many wives does Satan want? I don't know. See, once you introduce all these levels, it's like, “No, no, no. People aren't claiming to be possessed by the devil. That would be silly. We're saying that people are afflicted by demons.”

Mike: Okay.

Sarah: Which I think of essentially as unwanted thoughts a lot of the time, where demons are afflicting you, they're trying to tempt to, they're trying to tempt you into doubt and despair, which is kind of the light motif of the movie and book, The Exorcist, and the answer to that is, you know, to just plunge blindly and purposefully into your faith. If doubt is what a demon tempts you with, then the answer is more faith.

Mike: That's like your CrossFit coach finding out that your knee hurts and he's like, “The only thing we can do is more CrossFit. I'm terribly sorry. It's just going to have to be more CrossFit.”

Sarah: I like how we're getting into mall exercise fads. There is a connection here, right? Like, anything that we do to make ourselves feel like the people that we want to be, like, this is all part of that same world of activities, I think. 

Mike: Sure. I mean it just sounds like another framing of mental illness, which is fine, right? Like, if somebody is suffering from depression and anxiety and the thing that helps them understand it and the thing that helps them work on it is that it's one of the deities of the religion they follow then like, yeah. Okay. If it helps people, it helps people. It sounds okay.

Sarah: Yeah. And also in the seventies we had medical science and the mental health fields had a pretty weak understanding of depression and almost no way of treating it. Right? You could get the electroshock, or you could have talk therapy, but there wasn't really medication that addressed depression in a meaningful way. So like, what are we going to do? You know? That wasn't very long ago that people were just essentially fucked, you know. Even now with such stigma around all categories of mental illness, like things are so much better than they were forty years ago.

Mike: It’s also useful to take away the stigma that if you have mental illness, it's your fault and you're a broken person intrinsically versus “I'm actually a victim of an external being possessing me” in the same way that alcoholism was reclassified as a disease, which is really helpful for reducing the stigma against it.

Sarah: Yeah. It's not me. It's the demons. 

Mike: Yes. 

Sarah: So exorcisms. There starts being a desire, you know, among Catholics and non-Catholics alike for exorcisms in the seventies after the release of the movie and so I have a quote I'm going to read you. So there are two Jesuit priests who were used as consultants in the movie. One is named Father Tom Birmingham, and they both also had bit appearances in the movie. 

Birmingham says in an interview in a book called, American Exorcism, “Making the movie was strange enough, but the aftermath was completely bizarre. I knew very little about exorcism and demonic possession prior to helping Blatty do research for his book and working on the movie. But when the movie came out, I found myself in the hot seat. People saw my face and my name on the screen, and they assumed I was the answer to their problems. For quite a while dozens of people were trying to contact me every week and they weren't all Catholics. Some were Jewish, some Protestant, some agnostic, and they all believed that they themselves or someone close to them might be demonically possessed. These were truly desperate people, and I did my best to meet with as many of them as possible and discuss their problems. Of course, I approached these discussions with a great deal of skepticism. Demonic possession is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. The rite of exorcism in fact, is the only Catholic rite in which the officiating priest is advised to take an initial stance of incredulity. Rather than assuming possession straight away and proceeding.” Stop giggling.

Mike: Sorry. I’m sorry.

Sarah: “Rather than assuming possession straight away and proceeding with an exorcism, the priest is supposed to rule out all other possibilities from organic disorder to psychological pathology to outright fraud. Simply because someone tells you they're possessed doesn't mean they are. Almost always, in fact, this is an indication that they're not. Of all the people who came to me, not one struck me as being genuinely possessed. I arranged psychological counseling for some people, but this was sometimes a big disappointment for them. They assumed, because of my association with the movie, that I'd be able to resolve the various difficulties with an exorcism. The funny thing is I wouldn't have been able to do this, even if they were possessed. I've never even participated in a genuine exorcism, and I certainly don't regard myself as qualified to perform one.” All right. What do you think? 

Mike: I mean, I don't know. I always find it very difficult to take seriously this intersection between religion and science, where they're almost applying a scientific methodology, like testing a hypothesis, to this phenomenon that they've completely made up. It's that thing, like in football games where when you tackle somebody, the ref just eyeballs where he thinks the ball should be. He's like, “Yeah, it looks like you fell down around here” and he puts the ball down and then they bring out this super detailed ruler to measure whether it's been ten yards. So they're measuring ten yards to this completely arbitrary spot, and it seems like that's what they're doing. They're using the scientific method to find out whether this arbitrary thing that they've made up is happening.

Sarah: Yeah. There are those within the Catholic church who argued at the time and would argue still that Vatican II opened the door to a lot of demons entering the United States.

Mike: What? What does that mean? 

Sarah: What do you think it means?

Mike: I have no idea what Vatican II is.

Sarah: Vatican II was the 21st ecumenical council of the Catholic church. So it was a three-year period from 1962 to 1965 where there were four major conferences. Thousands of priests and nuns and church officials convened at St. Peter's Basilica and basically went through a series of reforms and sort of re-explorations of what is the Catholic church and what is it for. 

Mike: It’s a strategy session. It's the thing that you do when you work at any organization and you have a team away day and you go to a Radisson with a chalkboard and you write down your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s just like a day with consultants. It sounds fine. 

Sarah: Yeah. My understanding of it is that the Catholic church was like, “We need to engage with the world because we cannot continue to exist as, you know, ‘We're doing our rituals and our traditions the same way in perpetuity forever and people can come in or not and you're part of our world or you're not and if you're not, then we're not interested in you and the world beyond the church is of no concern to us.” Like, this is the moment when the Catholic church, from what I understand, was like, “The world beyond us is of great concern to us and we need to think about it.” So it encourages relationships of any kind between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians or people of other religions. You know, you are not challenging your faith if you step into the non-Catholic or the secular world. This is the end of Latin mass, which people are still upset about. 

Mike: Oh, where they started doing mass in English.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: Or whatever the local language is.

Sarah: Or whatever the local language is. Yeah. This is where that came from, which would be, I've thought about this and how if I were a Catholic person in the mid-sixties and suddenly mass which has been in Latin for my entire life and for my parents entire lives and their parents and their parents' parents and like, this is how you speak to God. It's in Latin and it's in this language that you as a churchgoer probably do not really understand, but like that's how you speak to God is, like, in this language God has chosen for you. Suddenly you're talking to God in English. Like, that would feel incredibly weird. It would be like, you know, saying your prayers every night and suddenly being like, “Hey, God, what's up? How you doing?” 

Mike: Right. Like, all of a sudden you can text with God or something. 

Sarah: Right. It wouldn't be like that.

Mike: But so it’s basically the Catholic church rebranding and being like, “We're going to try to modernize a little bit.”

Sarah: Yeah. Nuns also stop living cloistered lives. Nuns start learning how to drive and living in the neighborhoods that they're serving and not wearing the whole outfit all the time. 

Mike: Were they not doing that before? They weren't driving? 

Sarah: Haven't you seen Black Narcissus? 

Mike: Jesus. 

Sarah: Yeah, but there's this wonderful quote in an NPR retrospective on the significance of Vatican II about this sister named Maureen Fiedler who joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1962 when she was 19 and then a month later is the start of Vatican II and she says, “I found this to be the most exhilarating time in my whole life as a Catholic, because it felt like the petals of a flower were opening and that there was a whole new fragrance in the air of the church.”

Mike: Okay. That's nice. 

Sarah: So for some people, this is this amazing thing. Nuns are driving. Mass is happening in a language people can actually understand, but that also means according to some people that the devil has a foot in the door because the Catholic church has become more worldly now and the worldly is the enemy of the sacred. 

Mike: And it’s the whole thing of, like, the decline of morality that we always hear about. It's like you're lowering your standards to the standards of the society around you rather than trying to bring standards of the society around you up to your standards.

Sarah: Right. And so that's how the demons get in. 

Mike: Okay. 

Sarah: And suddenly all these demons are like, “Oh my God. All of these good Catholics are being told by their church to lower their standards of religion, lower their degree of faith  according to the very narrow definition of faith that we've created. Like, this is the moment for the demons to flood into the secular world and to attack Catholics and anyone else they can find.  

Mike: So it's like the old school Catholics who still believe in this stuff like exorcism, they explain the rise in exorcism by the devil coming back to pay his due basically.

Sarah: Yeah. It's not that there's a movie out. It's that there's no Latin mass anymore and so if you're blaming all of the woes of the Catholic church on the sixties and what the secular world is going through and just the prevalence of demons generally, then again, the solution to everything is more faith, more priests.

Mike: Or CrossFit.

Sarah: So things really get ramped up with the publication in 1976 of a book, by a former Jesuit priest named Malachai Martin, called Hostage to the Devil. 

Mike: Nice. 

Sarah: Have you ever heard of this book? 

Mike: No.

Sarah: This is one of those books like Michelle Remembers that was huge in its time, and then everyone completely forgot about. 

Mike: Oh, forgot-buster.

Sarah: Yes. Forgot-buster. Yes. And this is a book where the author very cleverly is like, “In order to conceal the identities of all of these people whose exorcisms I have watched and helped out with, I cannot tell you their names or any real details about their lives and so this book hasn't been fact checked to protect their anonymity.” Anyway… 

Mike: Classic.

Sarah: Classic. And then writes a book about, you know, working on all these exorcisms. If Americans needed a reason to believe that, you know, no, this is not just a Hollywood thing, this happens and it happens to people like you, this is the book. 

Mike: Okay, great. 

Sarah: Okay. So here's another quote from this book American Exorcism describing one of the cases in Hostage to the Devil: “And then finally there's Rita, a transsexual of Lutheran Jewish background, whose story gives Hostage several of its most memorably lurid moments. Following her sex change operation, which she undergoes as part of a lifelong quest for a state of perfect androgyny,” which is bad. That's how you invite demons is by disobeying binary gender. “Rita is sexually ravaged by a church of Satan minister named father Samson during a black mass orgy and then subjected to serial cunnilingus by Father Samson's entire congregation.”

Mike: No, what? 

Sarah: Which like, come on. That's too much.

Mike: Serial cunnilingus?

Sarah: Serial cunnilingus! “Although this counts as the most satisfying sexual experience of Rita's life, it paves the way for her eventual enslavement to demonic forces.” 

Mike: Jesus Christ. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: So she had multiple orgasms. She had the best sex of her life and that's opening the gates for the demon to come in.

Sarah: Pleasurable sex for women is, like, that's how you invite the demons in.

Mike: Yes. 

Sarah: That's the last straw. 

Mike: Wow. 

Sarah: “I have not gone without noticing the fact that in 1973 The Exorcist comes out, 1976 Hostage to the Devil comes out. These are the same years that the book and movie of Sibyl are released, which is the classic text on multiple personality disorder, which we talked about a few dozen episodes back and which offers people in an America living in what we now can recognize as a mental health dark ages a surprisingly attractive way of dealing with the parts of themselves that they don't know what to do with. MPD as people understand it in the seventies is, you know, you had a traumatic memory. You repressed it. You're not aware of it, but it's lurking somewhere inside of yourself and it's coming out as you engaging in all these behaviors that, you know, are bad or inappropriate or violent or sexual, but they're not really you. It's the trauma.

Mike: Right. 

Sarah: And so one of the things that I've really thought about in comparing exorcism to this recovered memory and multiple personality disorder therapy that we see starting in the seventies and really becoming huge in the eighties and then, you know, being roundly debunked by everyone who studies the way that memory actually functions in human beings, is that what happens for so many women in the eighties is that they go into therapy for anything and so what happens is that in order to cure you, you will be told you need to recover a memory of trauma and the techniques that you use for this are things like, you know, live for six months believing that you've been abused even if you have no memories. 

Mike: Yikes.

Sarah: And as you're not getting better your therapist is telling you this means that there's worse stuff that you've repressed. This means there's more memories we have to dig out of you. 

Mike: More CrossFit. 

Sarah: More CrossFit! So you have to keep digging and if you're not made better by decentering a memory of a family member molesting you, then you surely will be made better when you, you know, find something more traumatic, which is that you were, you know, impregnated by a family member and then you have to get something worse than that, which is that you were, you know, used as a breeder of babies for a satanic ritual for all of high school and then something worse than that is that you had to, you know, coming up with a memory of having to kill your baby and just, you know, more CrossFit. You just have to keep going deeper and these patients just decompensate.

Mike: Okay. 

Sarah: And that's the course that recovered memory therapy and MPD therapy took for hundreds, if not thousands of women in the 1980s whereas if you get an exorcism, you're done. 

Mike: Oh.

Sarah: Like, maybe you get multiple exorcisms but, you know, the priest comes, he determines that you need an exorcism, he does the rite of exorcism, he prays over you, he casts the demons out, you know, you struggle against your restraints if you've been restrained, but ultimately if it works you feel the demon depart you and you're told like, “You're clean, it's fine. It's over. Like, we're done.” You don't have to revise your beliefs about your history or your family or yourself. You don't have to journal about it. You don’t have to orientate your life around rewriting your history to understand how did the demon get there and where's the demon from and what is the demon like and focusing your whole life around the demon. Like, the demon’s gone. It's over. And if the demon comes back, you get exercised again. 

Mike: Right. 

Sarah: And it doesn't have to be that every time the demon is worse and worse and that it means that your life has been more and more traumatic than you ever realized, and you have to continue thinking about each time the trauma was worse than you realized it was the last time. Each time your whole life to this point has been more of a lie. It's just like, “Oh, the demon’s back. Well, get rid of him again.”

Mike: That sounds good. Let's do that. That sounds great.

Sarah: I'd rather be exercised than go to CrossFit. 

Mike: I mean, it does sound like it's not like CrossFit in that you don't have to actually do anything. It sounds awesome. It's like you sit there in a chair and somebody else does all this incantation around you and then you're better. Whereas the other options at the time were much more onerous and it was all about you recovering these memories, like, you doing work.

Sarah: Yeah. There's so much work in recovered memory therapy. There's so much journaling. 

Mike: Yeah. Whereas the nice thing about exorcism is that, like…  it's like you just go in for your 60 minute acupuncture appointment and somebody else does it and then you’re done.

Sarah: Acupuncture is of course my favorite of all these options, because you literally lie on a table. You know, to me, the one sticky wicket is that because of the movie people have developed the belief that puking is a part of being exercised and some exorcists are like, “You know, the puking thing is kind of theatrical. Like, people are doing that because of the movie.”  

Mike: I love that that's the only part that's theatrical and that people are doing it because of the movie. Everything else is legit. This tiny little detail on the margins, “Uh, I don't know if that holds up under scrutiny.” 

Sarah: I mean, yeah. There are many differences of opinion, but yeah. It's like, “Oh yeah, sure. It's real but the puking part is too much.” 

Mike: So is there a whole industry that forms around this? I mean, do priests get into this line of work based on the demand? 

Sarah: Yeah, and this is a really interesting area because in the seventies and eighties, there's this huge spike in demand for exorcisms and if people go to their local archdiocese, then, you know, there are– what are you picturing? What's your mental image as you make that little, delightful, little scoff? 

Mike: I’m just imagining those wedding chapels in Vegas where you can go– they're open twenty four hours. I'm just imagining a drive-through exorcism.

Sarah: I feel like it's surprising that that has never existed as far as we know. So there's this demand for exorcists and if you go to your archdiocese, they'll be like, “No, we don't do that. Like, we're the Catholic church. We are respectable. Like, demonic affliction and possession is very rare. Like, it's probably not that, but what you can do instead is find a renegade priest who will kind of under the table do an exorcism for you.” So it's like getting an abortion. 

Mike: I was just going to say, yeah. So it's like little entrepreneurs that are making this their business model due to the demand. 

Sarah: Yeah, and I don’t know if people are even getting paid to do this. 

Mike: What? 

Sarah: Yeah, I'm sure that some priests want payment, but, you know, people do this because they believe in it.

Mike: This is a fucking great deal, Sarah. I don't have to journal. I don't have to write down my dreams. I don't have to pay for it. I just go in. 

Sarah: Maybe throw up a little, maybe don’t.

Mike: Yeah, and Father Yonas just waves his hands a little bit and then I'm cured. This is way better than therapy. 

Sarah: It can take a while, you know, like it depends on just, like, what are the dramatic needs of the priest. It's like performing a marriage. Like, there's kind of a set way to do it and then you can elaborate as you wish. So there are these renegade priests and a lot of them knowing that if the archdiocese finds out what they're doing, they are going to have some explaining to do so it's kind of secretive thing that people are doing, you know, against the wishes of the church, but feeling that it is their way of honoring their true faith basically. Another interesting aspect of this is that there is also protestant exorcism. 

Mike: Oooh.

Sarah: Rather a lot of it. 

Mike: What, like Southern Baptist or something, like the talking in tongues people? Like, who? 

Sarah: By which you mean the Pentecostals.

Mike: I guess. Yeah.

Sarah: Like Jim and Tammy Faye, and yes, also just the charismatic movement, which sweeps through, you know, pretty much every Christian denomination in the United States. You know, there's a Methodist, there's an Episcopalian, there is a Catholic charismatic movement. Everyone gets in on exorcism. I mean, do you know the phrase deliverance ministry?

Mike: No.

Sarah: So I found an article in Charisma Magazine, which is a Pentecostal and charismatic aimed magazine published out of Florida. You look so excited. 

Mike: They’re called Charisma Magazine?

Sarah: Of course there is. Isn’t it just surprising that it's not for, like, flight attendants learning how to be charming when someone gropes you? Charisma Magazine. So this article in Charisma Magazine I love because it’s like, “Exorcism and deliverance are totally different” and it's like, oh, do tell. Right? Because it's like, “Exorcism is what Catholics do and that's bad.”

Mike: Okay.

Sarah: In my Satanic Panic research, I've also read Protestant material sort of alleging that Catholicism is a gateway drug for Satanism, because Catholics love candles and they wear ropes and they have incense and they love rituals. And this is what we see alleged Satanists doing during this, too. 

So, there's an interesting sort of anti-Catholic smear happening in the Satanic Panic that I really was not aware of before. But in Charisma Magazine, basically the argument is that exorcism and deliverance are totally different, but in that way where if you're saying that two things are completely different from each other, it's like, sure. I would buy an argument that they're different in some significant ways but like, they're both about freeing people from demons. 

Mike: Right. It’s like when Danish people call Swedish people socialists. They're like, “Eh, you know, I guess, but…”

Sarah: Right. So here's a quote from Charisma Magazine: “Exorcists consult with demons, talk to them, ask them their names, and what is their entry point. Jesus did not consult with demons. He said be quiet. The only one time Jesus spoke to a demon and asked its name was after it was cast out in Mark 5:9. When Saul consulted with a medium in the Bible it ended up costing him his life. Why should we consult with a demon when Satan is the father of lies, when we have the Holy Spirit in us to give us the discernment we need?”

Mike: Oh my God. It's like a legal document. They're like, “Well, technically my client was already out of the possessed person by the time we talked to him.” 

Sarah: Right. It's like Catholics are just very confused and Catholics love talking to demons and that's just one of their many problems.  

Mike: I mean, isn’t all of this just a demonstration of the ways in which institutions will respond to market forces and convince themselves that that's not what they're doing? I mean, it seems like as exorcism gets much more popular, probably a lot of Protestants went to their pastors and were like, “Hey, why don't we have this thing? This sounds great what the Catholics have” and so the pastors in their heads were like, “Uh, we do you have that…” 

Sarah: “But it’s different and it’s better.”

Mike: Yeah, exactly. Like, “No, no, we do have that, but ours really works and theirs is bullshit.” It's like, don't do yoga. Come do Pilates. I don't know. It just seems like this thing that's basically capitalism masquerading as religion.

Sarah: Yeah. And so in 1990, the International Association of Exorcists is founded by six priests in Rome. It still exists. They have a newsletter. They have conventions and this is the Catholic church responding to the fact that for twenty years people have been like, “Excuse me, really need a Catholic exorcism. Do you want me to go to the Protestants? Do you want me to get some back alley priests or are you going to take care of it?” And so exorcism, which after The Exorcist comes out is, you know, seen by the mainstream Catholic hierarchy in America as like, “You know, like, yeah, it's real, but like, you probably don't need it. You're probably thinking of the movie, like, just settle down.” The Catholic church responds to demand and starts coming up with the supply. 

Mike: Wait so it becomes like an actual thing?

Sarah: I mean, it’s always been an actual thing, but it was kind of forgotten. Nobody wanted it. There wasn't really popular interest in it and church hierarchy has responded by, you know, in the nineties more official exorcists were appointed within the Catholic church in the United States. 

Mike: Wow. What forms does it take on now?

Sarah: Like, how do people get exercised? 

Mike: Yeah. Can I go get one? 

Sarah: You can get an exorcism this week. I was just, like, right before we recorded, I just searched like, “Exorcism near me” and there's a deliverance ministry pretty close to where I am now in Pittsburgh where I could go and get exercised.

Mike: I mean, how do you feel about all this? 

Sarah: I feel fine about it. That to me is the most interesting thing. I feel as if it is a very human thing to feel like there is something inside of me that I don't like and I don't know what to do with and that makes me feel potentially like a danger to myself or others and placebo effects are very real and if I'm going to go get a placebo from something, then better something that tells me it's getting rid of the demon and I'm free now and I can move ahead with my life. You know, speaking of multiple personality disorders, you know, or speaking of recovered memory therapy, I would rather be told, “Oh, there's this thing inside of you. We took it out. We're doing this kind of spiritual, psychic surgery on you. You're better now.” Maybe I will feel better. 

Mike: Sure. 

Sarah: And maybe I will feel like, “Well, the demon’s out. So, like, the hard part is over and now I can work on myself. And like, I know that, like, I'm made of good stuff.

Mike: Right. 

Sarah: This is my human self now and I can deal with that.

Mike: Right.

Sarah: From my position as someone who does not personally believe in demons, I would rather they cast out an imaginary demon than do any number of other things, including CrossFit because people need both their knees for as long as they can have them. 

Mike: Sure. Yeah. 

Sarah: In conclusion, exorcism is better than CrossFit and much cheaper.

Mike: I mean, a moral principle that I take very seriously is not taking things away from people. If somebody says that they are better from doing Freudian psychoanalysis or acupuncture or CrossFit, I think it's very important on an individual level to not take that away from them or not try to invalidate that. I feel like as an individual, if somebody comes to you and says, “I had an exorcism and I feel better now and it really worked for me,” then in a genuine way, congratulations. That's awesome. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: It's important for those people not to think that it's necessarily going to work for everybody else. It's, I think, important for institutions not to use those understandable feelings that individuals have and make profit out of them or exploit those feelings. That's very important to me as well, but I also think that if an individual says to you that they feel better after going gluten-free to not be like, “Well, actually the peer review literature says…” Like, that's just being mean.

Sarah: Yeah and, you know, as with everything else, there are dangerous power imbalances that are possible. I mean, people have died during attempted exorcisms carried out by religious authorities or by family members. Like, these tragedies have happened. 

Mike: And that’s where I think the moral culpability comes in, is in the institutions, not necessarily in the individuals that are benefiting from the procedures.

Sarah: Right. Right. If we're talking about the responsibility of the patient, then there's no harm in saying, “I want an exorcism.” There is potential harm in saying, “I can perform exorcisms.” 

Mike: Yes. Even with things like Multiple Personality Disorder or repressed memories, I don't know. I'm not going to walk around telling people that their memories aren't real. I think now there are huge institutional problems with the way that psychology was being practiced. 

Sarah: Right. Yeah, I think the accountability is always at issue when we look at the people who are practicing these methods of healing and alleging themselves to have these powers, that's where it gets dangerous.

Mike: Yeah. I also just think we should take all of our psychological advice from Hollywood movies that end with the death of the practitioner. That’s also a generalizable rule.

Sarah: I’m trying to remember how Prince of Tides ended.