From:
Richard
Gallagher, Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years As a Psychiatrist Investigating
Possessions, Diabolic Attacks, and the Paranormal (New York: HarperOne,
2020)
A number of ex-gang members have openly testified
to their worship of what they regard as demons. “Sometimes when we wanted to
find out if people were snitching on us, we would summon the devil,” a former member who called himself Speedy told the New York Post in June 2017. “We used
a Ouija board to call him.”
Speedy and other former members of MS-13 have also
described their experiences under a kind of “variant” possession, an
unmistakably voluntary and temporary state of possession. For brief
periods of time, they went through the typical trance state, markedly increased
their strength, and gained the ability to uncover detailed and previously hidden
information about complete strangers—all of which are characteristics of the
possessed condition. “Once, the devil took over my body,” Speedy told the Post,
“I didn’t know what was happening and it took 10 members of the gang to hold me
down. In a trance, some gang members would give up names of people to target.
It was a loyalty test, and we called it ’taking a soul.’ If the devil gave you
a name, you had to go out and mess that person up. You had to take their soul.”
In Juan’s case, however, his possession was not
temporary nor voluntary. When the police finally moved in on his drug
operation, he was convicted and sentenced toa
lengthy time in prison. But in jail he started to experience states of
possession, slipping into persistent and prolonged trances during which the
telltale voice of a demon spoke in foreign languages unknown by Juan. (p. 76)
Diagnosing possessions (at the risk of some repetition
here) is a complicated process. As with many complex subjects, not everyone
agrees on its strict definition, with either a broader or a narrower view of
the term “possession” variously employed by different thinkers over the
centuries. . . . As opposed to more serious mental illnesses—where the rule is
generally a fairly continuous level of disturbance for prolonged periods,
albeit with exacerbations—in severe possessions the demon seems to “do its
thing” and then generally lies low for a while; it even apparently more
definitively “leaves” in some voluntary cases. In rarer cases, the victim’s
usual consciousness may be “submerged” by the demon’s action for a much more
extended period, though that behavior is the exception, not the rule.
In a serious possession (and at least especially
during the involuntary type, the sort we are mostly discussing in this book),
the spirit openly acts belligerently, especially attacking anything of a holy
or religious nature. The entity refuses to leave the victim’s body, while attempting
during a typical exorcism to have the affected individual assault, or at least
try to escape from, those restraining it. The extreme aversion to the sacred—frequently
the initial symptom to appear—is an invariable feature of such a possession.
The demonic voice, if and when it announces itself, tends to use vile and
blasphemous language with a decided arrogance. (pp. 80-81)
. . . mentally ill patients do not exhibit these
paranormal traits . . . Nor do mentally ill patients possess accurate hidden
knowledge. (p. 83)
The comparisons don’t hold up to careful scrutiny.
Psychotic individuals may have fantasies and false impressions of occultlike communication
or “thought reading” of others, but such delusional states in psychiatric
patients are nothing compared with the humanly impossible frequency and uncanny
accuracy of such displays of knowledge in those who are possessed. Truly
possessed individuals do not engage in “thought reading” at all; they are merely
fed information by spirits themselves. (p. 83)
One victim I met spoke perfect Bulgarian though
she had never once been exposed to the language at any point in her life. An
American priest of Bulgarian descent, the target of the spirit’s spoken-word vitriol,
confirmed the language. Several possessed victims I have encountered
spontaneously spoke either Latin or Greek without previous knowledge. More
typically, many demons easily follow the Latin prayers of Catholic exorcists
and then may comment in either Latin or English. Being highly intelligent and
having observed humans for millennia, this capacity seems characteristic of
evil spirits, though it may serve to confound onlookers, again, to surmise some
deceased human is appearing. (p. 84)
