Being CONSUMED by Satan

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A convent of nuns writhe in front of a packed church screaming, screaming the name of the priest who cursed them. These are some of the world's most famous exorcisms. You might have thought that they were just Hollywood stories or maybe they only happened way back in the day and you could read about them in the Bible. But demon possession, spiritual warfare, and casting out Satan are still practiced by the Catholic Church all over the world. And today, we are opening up the rule book for fighting the devil. We'll trace exorcism from a synagogue in first century Galilee to a priest burned alive to a hospital room in St. Louis, a courtroom that sat in silence listening to the voices of demons on tape. So what does a real exorcism actually look like? And who exactly has the authority to command a demon? Well, today we're going to find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, dude? Happy Sunday and welcome to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from every religion from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do in this tent. As I sit down and I try to understand what everybody believes. You got to understand, I grew up very Catholic, okay? And I would still profess that I am a Catholic to this day. I'm not a perfect Catholic. I'm actually pretty bad at it, but I'm trying my best, all right? But I always find myself walking around the world seeing people of different religions. Maybe they look a little different from me. And I'm always curious, what do they believe? Is their version of God different? My version of God? Are we all trying to worship the same version of God through a different lens? Are there fundamental differences? What do they think about aliens or the end times or anything like that? And these are the questions that have caused me to make this show today. That's the reason I do it. Not only because I find the topics interesting, I'm trying to become a better religious citizen of the world. You know, there's a little hubris where it's like, there's billions of people out there that all believe different things. And who am I to not at least know the basics, you know? So I try my best to educate myself and bring it to you. Speaking of you, I want to say thanks for tuning in because every time you click or comment or like an episode, you are the reason the show exists. You tell the algorithm lords, which in some ways is almost more important than the actual Lord in the current paradigm. And you say, hey, Mark and Christos are doing a pretty good job. So you keep the lights on in the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, yes, I just said a name of a person. Maybe you've never heard of him. He shares the name of my Lord and Savior, and that is Jesus. Christos Papadopoulos. How are you, Christos? You weren't kidding about being a bad, I'm not great. Okay, I'm trying my best. You just said the algorithm lords are better than the. Not better, but more important on the day-to-day lives of most people. Okay. Right? Most people are probably trying to appease the algorithm lords more than the real Lord. And I think that's a problem. That is a problem. But I'm just saying it's a fact. But if you do want to drop a like or subscribe. Help the algorithm lords tell us what's going on and tell them people about the real Lord. Yes. That's what I'm saying. We're using the algorithm lords to get to the. I think we're going a roundabout way, but at the end of the day, we're trying to get to the truth. That's what matters. Right, Creosos? Absolutely. Thank you. Now, it is almost time for Halloween. Okay. And so I figured what better topic to dive into than maybe the spookiest religious topic of all, and that's exorcisms. Now, I want to be in the interest of being as fair and honest as I can be. I want to approach this with a lot of sensitivity because honestly, exorcism is not something that just happens in movies. Demon possession has been a very real and very scary phenomena in people's lives. So whether you believe it or not, there are people out there that hold this very close to their heart and to their religious journey. And it is based on a real practice that's been done in the Catholic Church for thousands of years, going all the way back to the man himself, Jesus Christ. It's honestly a huge part of the story. Like in the Gospel of Mark, for example, casting out demons is the miracle that Jesus performs the most often. Like if you were to ask people at the time of Jesus that didn't really know a ton, but knew the basics of what was going on, they'd be like, hey, who's the Jesus guy? They'd be like, oh, he's the guy that casts out demons. It was one of the most popular things that he did. More than healing the blind, more than raising the dead, almost more than anything else, he was an exorcist. And actually the very first miracle in Mark's Gospel is an exorcism. And to my understanding, Mark is actually the oldest Gospel. It is the one written to the closest date of Christ's death, if I'm not mistaken on my Gospel history here. So here's what actually happens in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus walks into a synagogue in a fishing town called Capernaum. And it's on the Sabbath. It's a pretty important day in the Jewish calendar. And he starts teaching. And in the middle of a service, a man in the congregation starts screaming. Mark says, the Gospel writer, that he has an unclean spirit and the spirit recognizes Jesus and it cries out, calling him the Holy One of God. Now, Jesus doesn't debate the unclean spirit or perform a ritual or anything. He just rebukes it. He says, be silent and come out of him. The man convulses, cries out, and then the spirit leaves him. Now, the crowd's reaction is basically like, what was that? Mark says that they were amazed and they started asking each other what this new teaching was and who this guy was even before the unclean spirits, you know, like the unclean spirits basically just obeying this man just at his word. So they're all pretty impressed. They're like, oh, maybe he's a rabbi. Maybe he's one of the high priests. Maybe there's something going on. Now, here's what's important to understand. Jesus' first audience was not shocked that demons existed. They were shocked that Jesus could cast him out just like that, like so easy, like light work, but they weren't necessarily shocked that someone had an unclean spirit in them. They were like, yeah, this is pretty common. Got to understand, first century Judaism was already full of beliefs about these hostile spirits and there were actually already Jewish exorcists around doing this kind of thing. The historian Josephus even describes one, which we don't even have time to really get into for full context, but it's something that is documented within first century Jewish demonology, so to speak. But what shocked and impressed the people here wasn't that the guy was possessed. It was the authority of this guy, Yeshua, of Jesus, and that this unclean spirit just listened to him. There was no spell, no incense, no spiritual tools like what all the other exorcists would have used at the time. There was just a command and then obedience. And Jesus himself explains how this happened. In Luke, the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11, verse 20, he says that if he casts out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come to you. So in the Gospels, exorcism isn't a magic trick. It's a sign of God's authority present in you. It's more like proof that a spiritual war is being fought and ultimately won. Now, one of the most famous battles in that war that's told about in the Bible happens in a graveyard. So in the Gospel of Mark, chapter five, Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee into the country of Gerasenes, which is Gentile territory. And the moment he steps off the boat, a man comes running towards them from the tombs. Now, this is a guy who's a, a pretty interesting character. He lives among the dead. The locals have tried to chain him, but he keeps ripping the chains apart. Day and night, the demons that live inside of him make him howl in the hills and basically make him cut himself with stones and do all sorts of creepy demonic behavior. And then Jesus asks him a simple question. What is your name? And the answer is one of the creepiest lines in the entire Bible. He says, my name is Legion, for we are many. Now, a Legion at that time was a, not an airline. It was a Roman military, of roughly about like a, like a unit of roughly a thousand soldiers. So that's how they knew that this wasn't just one spirit. It was an entire army, an entire Legion of spirits. And some scholars have pointed out that in a region occupied by actual Roman legions, that name probably had like a double meaning for the readers of this gospel in that time. So the spirits basically begged Jesus not to send them away. They ask instead if they can be sent into a herd of pigs grazing nearby. And Jesus is like, I'll allow it. The unclean spirits leave the man and the, you know, they basically go to possess this herd of pigs. And then according to the gospel, about 2000 pigs stampede down a steep bank into the sea and drown. So when the townspeople come out to see what's going on about all these pigs flying off into the ocean, they find the possessed man sitting there, clothed and in his right mind. There are a few other stories like this in the Bible, and each one adds a piece of what exorcisms look like and what they would ultimately become. Like in Mark chapter seven, a Syrophoenician, this is a woman, meaning a non-Jewish woman begs Jesus to heal her possessed daughter. So Jesus never even sees the girl. He just tells the mother, "Hey, it's done." When she gets home, it's true, the demon is gone. So again, it's authority, not necessarily technique or the fact that demons do or don't exist. For the people that were reading this, it just was. Jesus didn't even have to be there. And the demons still listened to him. And then in Mark chapter nine, Jesus' own, His own disciples tried to cast a spirit out of a boy, and they fail. The boy's symptoms are described in detail. He falls to the ground, he's foaming at the mouth, he's grinding his teeth, he's going rigid. When the disciples ask Jesus why they couldn't do it, they basically tell him, this kind can come out only through prayer. And that line becomes the foundation for centuries of exorcists fasting and praying to prepare themselves. It confirms the idea that some cases are more difficult than others, that there are sort of categories, and some come out through prayer, others don't. So there are different approaches depending on what kind of demon you're dealing with if we're basing this off of the biblical record. Now, there's a bunch of different scholars who have tried to understand this boy's condition in the light of modern medicine. If you heard kind of the way I described it, you might be thinking like epilepsy, for example. Well, when Matthew tells the same story, the word he uses for the boy's condition literally means moonstruck. So even back then, people were trying to figure out when something was an illness. And when something might be something else. Like, apparently, there's a lot of associations with the moon and like being ill or being senile. That's why they call someone a lunatic. Comes from the word loon. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's interesting, right? I mean, double check me on the exact definition or the etymology, so to speak, of lunatic. Now, there's actually a story in the book of Acts that is pretty crazy. In Acts chapter 19, seven sons of a Jewish priest named Siva saw the apostle Jesus. And they said, I'm going to tell you a story. I'm going to tell you a story. And the apostle Paul cast out demons in Jesus's name. So they figure, hey, we'll just use the name too. So they find a possessed man and they say, basically, we command you by the Jesus that Paul has been preaching about. And then the spirit answers, Jesus, I know. And Paul, I know. But who are you? Whoa, literally, the demon kind of just checks him. The demon's just like, yo, like, I know your boys, but who you with? You know what I'm saying? The demon's like, well, who you claim? And so then the possessed man attacks all seven of them and beats them so badly that they run out of the house naked and bleeding. It's kind of a funny story if you kind of take it out of the context. But it's also the first appearance of a rule the church will spend the next 2000 years enforcing. You can't just say the words and use the name of Jesus. You have to have an actual spiritual authority behind the words, because trying to command a demon without the power of God behind you, according to how people understand this type of demonology, is dangerous. It puts yourself at risk. It puts yourself at risk without some type of divine protection to back you up. So to kind of sum up things so far, the exorcism and demonic stories in the New Testament give us the framework that we and all Christians, to an extent, are building from. We have Jesus who commands spirits, Paul who commands them in Jesus's name, a possessed man restored to his right mind, a warning that some of these cases require prayer, a warning that the words alone don't do the trick and can actually expose you, and the understanding that some cases are tougher than others. So that's kind of where the, in a very brief kind of overlook, you could do like multiple episodes on demonology in the Bible, but a brief overview of kind of what the Bible talks about in reference to this topic. Now it leaves the early church with a terrifying problem. All right, Jesus is gone. The apostles are getting killed and dying off one by one, but the demons, demons are unfortunately still here, right? So how does an ordinary human get the power of God on their side? How do you make sure that when you speak to the darkness, that the demons actually listen to you instead of like killing or attacking you or just possessing you? Well, in the first centuries after Jesus, Christians didn't just believe in exorcisms. They would actually brag about it. Like they practically dared the Roman empire to come and watch what they were doing. So for example, 197 AD, there's a Christian writer in North Africa. Maybe you've heard of him. His name is Tertullian. And he wrote a defense of Christianity addressed to the Roman authorities. And in it, he offers a pretty crazy challenge. He says, hey, bring a possessed person into your court. Any Christian command the spirit to speak, and it will confess that it is in fact a demon. And if it doesn't, he says, then go ahead and just execute the Christian on the spot. Kind of a bold claim, right? That's some real Babe Ruth kind of calling your shot type vibes, but that's just how confident they were in what they were doing. So as the church grew, exorcism became kind of like its own functioning branch. When new converts prepared for baptism, they went through a series of exorcism prayers, you know, for weeks. Not because anyone thought that they were possessed. It was more like a spiritual deep clean before starting like a new chapter, so to speak. And that's actually still true, believe it or not. If you've ever been to a Catholic baptism, you've probably witnessed a version of an exorcism. The church calls this a minor or ordinary exorcism. It's a short prayer for protection from evil built directly into the right. So a lot of Catholics have already been exorcised as babies. If you're a Catholic and you had a baptism, I've been exorcised. Not in the exercise way, in like the exorcism way. Did you get baptized, Christos? I did. There you go. That's two for two. And I acknowledge the Greek Orthodox right of baptism. They also do a lot of, do you renounce the devil? I do. Yeah. And all of his dastardly tricks. I do. Yeah. And then the third one is really long. I actually don't like that. It'll be like, do you renounce the devil? Yes. And his tricks, a hundred percent. And a bunch of other stuff. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. I feel like you kind of rope and doped me with the first two and now you're kind of packing a bunch of stuff in. I want to know what I'm agreeing to. And then they make you repeat it. Yeah. All right. I have it right here. The renewal of your baptismal vows. Are you ready, Christos? I'm ready. Do you renounce Satan? I do. And all his works? I do. And all his empty show? I do. Do you renounce sin as to live in the freedom of the children of God? I do. See, that one, all of a sudden you're like, wait, hold on. The first two were super easy to understand. Wait, say it again. I kind of just said that. See, but now you kind of just fell into it and you're like, wait, did I fully agree to that? Yeah. And do you renounce any type of pay increase for the next five years? Nope. No, no, no. Is it part of the vow? Well, you should have done it in succession with the other ones. Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth? I do. Or do you agree to be happy with what you have and not ask for more? No. See, this is where- You're not going to catch me. All right. Regardless, you understand the baptismal vows. I'm not taking these things lightly. It's just, it's fun to have a little bit of a goof. Now, anyway, a lot of Catholics have already been exorcised as babies. That's what baptism sort of is. So by the third century, exorcists even became an official job title in the church. That is, that's where it really starts. And it was like, basically that exact same way for over a thousand years. Actually, exorcist was one of the minor orders that every priest had to pass in order to even get ordained. And it wasn't even stopped until 1972. So just to keep everyone on the same page, in 1614, Pope Paul V issued the Rituale Romanum. And it's basically like the Roman ritual. It was the church's official handbook for all the sacraments and blessings. And tucked inside it was a section on how to exorcise the possessed. This is the rite that you've seen in movies, the speaking in Latin, like the Vare, Satana, Begone Satan, like all that stuff. The lines where the priest speaks directly to the demon itself, like, what is it? Exorciso te emudissime spiritus. It literally means, I cast you out, most unclean spirit, every legion. You can see how it's pulling directly from the biblical source. And yeah, the same word for the man in the tombs. It's all connected from that original source material in the New Testament. But before the prayers even begin, the rite opens with a set of rules for the exorcist themselves. A couple of rules, 21 specifically. Let's go through a couple of them real quick. Rule number one, essentially, don't be quick to believe that someone is possessed. I think it's actually a pretty important and interesting rule. It's basically saying like, hey, before you go through this whole spiritual ritual, make sure that there's even a possession going on. There might be another solution, right? Someone might be having like a medical emergency or they might be overdosing on drugs, like rule out everything else. You know, the rules then list the signs that might suggest whether it's legit or not. These become like the classic signs of possession within Catholic tradition. So things like speaking or understanding a language that the person has never learned, revealing hidden or distant things that they couldn't possibly know, showing strength beyond their age or physical condition or. Home of the save. Open soon. BJ's, home of the save. Human ability. And tradition would add this up. This other trait, a violent aversion to anything holy. Again, you've probably seen this in movies. Holy water, the crucifix, the name of Jesus, the Bible. But above all, the exorcist is told to be on guard against being deceived. He's warned that people suffering from what the 17th century would call melancholy or other illnesses can look like possession. He's told not to ask the spirit pointless questions out of curiosity. He's told not to let the exorcism become a spectacle for a bunch of people to come watch and to not treat it as a replacement for legitimate medicine. I mean, think about that. Even in 1614, the rulebook for casting out demons was a rulebook for not getting tricked or treating someone that had like an actual medical condition, which you would think back in the 1600s, like, oh, if you had a fever, they would assume you're possessed. It's like, no, they had a certain amount of discipline and method for making sure they weren't just, you know, performing rituals on just random people. Now, sure, it probably happened. There's probably a couple of epileptics that got treated here and there. I'm not doubting that. But it was something that they were aware of. Now, the part that honestly freaks me out, the rulebook isn't only worried about the the exorcist being tricked by a sick person or a faker, it's worried about being tricked by demons. So the rules warn that the spirit will lie, that it might hide inside the person and go quiet. So, you know, you're doing this whole ritual and nothing's happening. So you're like, oh, it's gone. And then it might pretend to leave or the person might seem completely cured. And so the priest stops. So the exorcist is told to keep going to demand the demon's name, to ask how many of them there are, when they entered, how, when they're going to leave, and basically to not stop until there are real signs that it is actually gone. So think about what that means from the church's perspective, okay? Their official manual treats this like a very intelligent and cunning opponent, someone that is watching and waiting and lying. And then after all that, the church says that no one may perform an exorcism on the possessed without the special and expressed permission of the local bishop. So that puts in like a chain of command. So the bishop is only supposed to grant it to a priest known for his piety, knowledge, prudence, and integrity, okay? So by the early 1600s, the church had like a literal rite, a set of signs, a list of warnings, and a chain of command regarding exorcisms. If you were a priest, you couldn't just willy-nilly be exercising everyone. You needed to discern if this was even legitimate, see if there was a medical issue happening, like purify yourself, and then get approval from the bishop in your area. So on paper, it's pretty controlled and careful and pretty cautious. And less than 20 years after the rule book was published, a small town in France, every single one of those rules was about to get broken. Fellas, this episode is sponsored by Blue Chew. Look, life is about preparation. You got to prepare for a camping trip, for your job, for a podcast, and you got to prepare for all of the things happening in your life. And you know, sometimes when the vibe is right, everyone's, you know, being an adult, you're on the same page. Sometimes people forget to prepare for the bedroom, and that's why you need Blue Chew Gold. Blue Chew Gold is going to take you to the next level in the bedroom. It combines four ingredients into one powerful solution. 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And in the middle of a town sat a small convent of Ursuline nuns, basically women living in enclosed, quiet, highly kind of regulated lives of prayer. It was just a specific religious order of nuns. And it's what they would call the prioress. Kind of like one of the people sort of running the convent was a young noble woman named Jeanne d'Angers. Literally Joan of the angels. And in town, there was a priest that everybody talked about. His name was Orbain Grandier. He was brilliant and handsome and just like an amazing preacher and would deliver these beautiful homilies. And let's say he wasn't super committed to like the celibacy part of the job. If you don't know, priests are supposed to take a couple of vows of like poverty, celibacy, and like severity. It was taught to me one time as no money, no honey, and nothing funny. That's pretty, that's fun. That's kind of cute, right? Now, it was said that this guy, Father Grandier, was rumored to have fathered a child with the daughter of a local official. He'd been charged with immorality once before and used his connections to get like a lot of the charges thrown out. He had a lot of admirers. He also had a lot of enemies. Regardless, in 1632, strange things started to happen inside this particular convent. So the nuns inside the convent, began reporting visions at night. They said that there were figures and voices and bodily torments. And some of them said that they saw a figure and the figure that they saw was none other than Father Grandier. A man that most of them had never even met because of the seclusion of their lifestyle. They wouldn't really interface with men that often. And so all of a sudden they're saying, they're saying that he's appearing, right? So eventually they started exorcisms. And the spirits speaking through the nuns confirmed that they were demons. And they offered names like Asmodeus, Leviathan, Behemoth, which we should do a whole episode on. We've done a lot of them with different comedians on demonology and like the significance of their names and all that kind of stuff. But regardless, the demons also said that Grandier had sent them. Think about that. That he made a pact with the devil and basically cursed the entire convent. Now, remember the rules from 1614. Don't believe too easily. You know, don't question the spirit out of curiosity. It's practical, all those rules, right? But in this little French town of Leudon, they did all of that. The exorcisms moved into the town's churches and became like public events. Like people would start showing up. Crowds of people, clergy, doctors, tourists, people came from all over France to watch these nuns be possessed and contort their bodies and scream and answer questions that were posed to the demons. And then the demons would answer and it was written down and treated like a testimony. And then pamphlets started spreading across the country of this crazy thing happening. Happening in Leudon. And crazy enough, Grandier was arrested and the case was actually taken out of regular courts and the appeals were blocked. And then things got crazy. So at one point, Grandier, the man accused of causing the possessions was ordered to perform an exorcism on the nuns himself. So he put on the specific exorcist stole, which was like a part of the outfit that priests would wear for this type of religious work. And he opened the ritual book and started the rite of exorcism. And the spirits through the nuns reportedly mocked him. So in the case, the prosecution even produced a document, a signed pact with the devil, allegedly written by Grandier himself and countersigned by demons, including a signature for Satan himself. It is one of the strangest documents in European history. And to this day, no one knows who made it. Now, as a result, Grandier was tortured. They saw this document as proof of his pact with the devil and they tortured him for it. And he never confessed. And on August 18th, 1634, he was found guilty of sorcery and causing the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns. That same day, he was burned alive in the public square of Loudun in front of a massive crowd. But here's a twist. After Grandier burned, the possessions didn't stop. The nuns kept manifesting and the exorcisms went on for years. Just a few months after the execution, a new exorcist showed up in town, a young Jesuit priest named Jean-Joseph Sorin, and he was given one job, Jean d'Angers herself, the woman who was running the convent. So Sauron threw himself into it, so much so that he reportedly offered up his own soul. He basically told the demons like, "Hey, possess me, take my soul and put all this torment onto me so that the nuns could be set free." And according to Sauron, he got what he asked for. He soon came to believe that he himself was possessed and it didn't last a few weeks or a few months. It apparently, according to the story, lasted for close to 20 years. At different points, he would lose the ability to speak. He couldn't read or write or dress himself. He was like completely incapacitated, almost in like a fugue state. He spent years convinced that he was damned and the exorcist basically caught it. Meanwhile, Jean d'Angers eventually became like a celebrity and she started touring France, even meeting the king and cardinal. Riche alliou, with sacred names that had, like she said, miraculously appeared on her hand. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Francis de Salais. The names reportedly faded over time and then reappeared. And then as a result, crowds would line up to see them. Believers of this would obviously call it a miracle while skeptics said like, "Oh, she's making the marks herself." So if you're the church, what do you learn from this event, from this whole saga that happened in Loudun? Well, on paper, the church, kind of already had the answer. The rule book from 1614 ruled, like it warned about everything that went wrong here. Like, hey, don't believe too easily. Don't question the spirits out of curiosity. Don't make it a spectacle. And at Loudun, every one of those warnings was kind of ignored. And the moment the exorcism stopped being about freeing the woman in the convent and started being about politics and crowds and getting a guilty verdict, it became a witch trial, literally. The rite was designed to like heal all of this and it ended with probably an innocent man getting burned in a town square. So in other words, the danger at Loudun wasn't only about what may or may not be possessing the nuns, it was also about what happened to everyone else around them that was watching it. And for some of them, it didn't end in the town square. According to accounts from the time, the men who helped send Grandier to the stake, they didn't fare that well afterwards either. So for example, Father Lactance, one of the exorcists who had tormented him, died about a month after the execution, reportedly, raving and delirious. Some retellings even claim that Grandier predicted it. And then Father Tranquil, another one of the exorcists, died a few years later after, in convulsions, convinced that he was now possessed. A surgeon who had actually searched Grandier's body for the marks of the devil reportedly died haunted by visions of the priest that he helped condemn. So what's going on here? Is this a coincidence? Is it a placebo effect of a guilty conscious? Is it a curse? Is it demon possession? Well, obviously, the records don't say. They just kind of report what happened and leave it there. And that's a lesson that the church would have to learn again and again. Because 300 years later, this old rite would be opened up. But this time in America, in a quiet Maryland suburb with a boy and a Ouija board and a priest who was keeping a diary. So let's go to January 1949. It's fairly recent, right? This is not medieval history anymore. We're in the modern era. And just outside Washington, D.C., there's a 13-year-old boy known in the records only by pseudonyms like Roland Doe or Robbie. And he just recently lost his aunt. And he was very close to her and she passed away. And he was. Heartbroken. But it's important to note that his aunt was a spiritualist. And she was very interested in these kind of new age spiritual movements that were sweeping the country at this point in American history. And according to later accounts, she had introduced him to a Ouija board. Basically to the phenomena of these sort of spelling spiritual devices. So after she dies, the family say that strange things start happening. They start hearing scratching noises on the walls. They start feeling the mattresses. The mattresses shake and objects are mysteriously moving around the house. And most terrifying of all, scratches start appearing on the boy's body. Now, here's a detail that a lot of people forget in retelling the story. The family wasn't Catholic. They were Lutheran, which is a specific kind of Protestant Christian. So they went to their own pastor first. And according to later accounts, even he ended up concluding that this was beyond him. And he basically suggested that they try the Catholic Church. Not trying to brag. I'm just saying that's what the history says. Now, there's a reason why this Lutheran pastor would say, hey, go talk to the Catholics. Because according to accounts of the case, the pastor took the boy home to spend the night just so that he could observe him himself. And during that night, he reported that a heavy armchair tipped over with the boy sitting in it. And later, when the boy tried to sleep on the floor, the pastor said that his bedding slid across the room with the boy still lying on it. So what happened next in Maryland is disputed, of course. Some versions of the story have a first exorcism attempt at a hospital that went very badly. Other researchers say that there's no evidence that it happened at all. But what we do know is that the family eventually traveled to visit relatives in St. Louis. And that's where the story finally becomes clearly, closely documented. And some tellings of the story say that the family chose St. Louis because of a word that appeared scratched on the boy's skin. Apparently, the word Louis had actually appeared on his skin. But again, that's only in certain tellings. Regardless. One of the boy's cousins was a student at St. Louis University, which is a Jesuit school. And she brought the case to one of her professors, Father Raymond Bishop. And he brought in a senior Jesuit, a guy by the name of Father William Bowdern. And then they did what the rules say to do. They went to the bishop. This is the Archbishop Joseph Ritter of St. Louis. And he basically gave his permission to perform the exorcism. So on March 16th, 1949, Bowdern began the rite. This is the same book. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta. 3 cases of protein bars. 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork. And BJ's knows savings. This is your home, Coach. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for 6 months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the save. Book from 1614. This is the Roman ritual. But it did not go over quickly. For weeks, the priest prayed over the boy at the relative's home, at a rectory, and eventually in the psychiatric wing of the Alexian Brothers Hospital. Father Bishop kept a diary of all of it. And according to that diary, the boy was calm and ordinary during the day. But at night, he would fall into these trances and spit and curse and thrash and speak. And strange voices and fight the priests violently. A young Jesuit named Walter Halloran brought in to basically hold the boy down. Later said that the boy broke his nose. Now, Halloran also said that the words and marks would rise on the boy's skin and it would look like welts. And you would be able to read clearly legible words like evil and hell. And through all of it, Father Baudern reportedly fasted, trying to follow Jesus' words from Mark chapter 19. That this kind only comes out. Through prayer. The priest also laid religious objects on him. So things like crucifixes. But if you don't know crucifix, it's Jesus Christ on the cross. You'll see these in basically every church, every Catholic church in America. But they would also lay like miraculous medals and rosaries and relics of saints. We did a bunch of episodes on like these holy objects. So you can check that out and why they're useful to Catholics. But along the way, the boy was received into the Catholic Church. He was baptized and given his first communion in the middle of this. Weeks long exorcism. And then on the night of April 18th, Easter Monday, according to the priest's account, the boy suddenly became calm. And he said that he had a vision of St. Michael the Archangel driving the devil out. And then he simply said, he's gone. According to everyone involved, the strange events just stopped. And the boy went home and then the priests went on with their lives. And that summer, a short article about an anonymous boy freed from the devil appeared. In the Washington Post, a Georgetown student named William Peter Blatty read it. And it stayed with him for 20 years. And he eventually tracked down Father Bowdern, got access to the diary and changed the boy to a 12-year-old girl, partly to protect the real family and the identity of this child. And then in 1971, he published The Exorcist. And in 1973, it became a film that literally was the most horrifying, like scary movie. Ever up until that time. And if you've watched our episode we did on Rosemary's Baby, you're going to remember this era, right? It's the late 60s, early 70s. Hollywood kind of discovered that Catholic exorcisms are some of like the scariest, like most hardcore, like source material on earth. So after the boy's death, reporters published his real identity. He'd gone on to live a pretty ordinary life and had a pretty long career as an engineer and never spoke publicly about his possession. And the hospital room that a lot of this happened. Well, according to local legend, it was locked. After the exorcism and was never used again, the psychiatric wing where it all happened was eventually torn down in 1978. And the story goes that when workers went inside, they found a copy of the priest's diary still sitting there waiting. Now, that part almost certainly feels like it's legend, but it's the exact kind of legend that a story like this has that it kind of leaves behind because it's so palpable. So to sum this up, the most famous exorcism in modern history was authorized by the church. The church was documented, was witnessed by multiple priests and ended for all its questions with a boy who survived and went home and lived a long and relatively happy life. But the next one I'm about to tell you doesn't end that way. Annalisa Mikkel was born in 1952 in Bavaria in what was then West Germany. She grew up in the small town of Klingenberg in a devout Catholic family. People who knew her described her as very religious and very serious. They were very curious about her faith, even as just a young teenager. But when she was 16, she began having seizures. Now, at the time, there was, you know, relatively modern medicine. So she was diagnosed with epilepsy. And over the following years, she was treated with medication and at times a proper psychiatric regimen. But she kept getting worse. And then she became depressed. And then she said that she saw frightening faces while she was praying. And she said that she heard voices. And she began to recoil from religious objects, things like the crucifixion. And holy water and sacred places. And over time, Annalisa Mikkel and her family came to believe that medicine had failed her. Because what she was suffering from wasn't medical. They started to believe that she was possessed. And so they went looking for priests who would believe them as well. And so in September 1975, the Bishop of Würzburg authorized a major exorcism under the Rituale Romanium. This is, again, the same Roman ritual that we've been talking about. Now, over roughly the next 10 months, two priests, Father Ernst Alt and Father Arnold Renz, performed the rite on Annalisa Mikkel again and again. Around 67 sessions in total. Some of them lasted for hours. And many of them were actually recorded on audio tape. And during that same time, her physical condition just collapsed. She was eating less and less. And by the summer of 1976, she was severely malnourished and dehydrated. And yet, her parents left her with no food. Slater said that shortly before she died, she performed around 500 deep knee bends. Like genuflections that you would see someone do in a Catholic church. And she did them in a single day. So many that she reportedly injured her knees very badly. And her parents believed that the strength behind it came from the devil himself. On July 1st, 1976, Annalisa Mikkel died in her family's home. She was only 23 years old. And according to reports at the time, she weighed only 68 pounds. And even after her death, the strangeness didn't stop. Rumors spread that her body would be found. found incorrupted, basically untouched by decay the way that the bodies of some saints are said to be. And her parents asked permission to exhume her. In an early 1978, her coffin was opened, and according to officials, her body had decayed just as expected. But the fact that anyone expected otherwise just tells you how deeply the beliefs around this whole story really ran. Now, there's a lot of internet folklore about this case. There's a lot of unverifiable claims about what she supposedly said or what she did. We're not going to go through all of those stories right now because what's documented, I think, is honestly more than enough. So in 1978, her parents and two priests went on trial in the town of Aschaffenburg, charged with negligent homicide for basically failing to get her medical help. So the trial drew international attention. The exorcism sessions. And what was on those tapes was strange and chilling. You would hear, growling and snarling voices that identified themselves by name like Lucifer, Judas, Cain, Nero, even the name Hitler. On some of those recordings, the voices even seemed to argue with each other about which one of them would have to leave her first. The prosecution pointed to epilepsy and psychiatric illness. The defense argued that the possession was real and that she had asked for the exorcism herself. But on April 21st, 1978, all four were found guilty. The two priests received a death penalty. The two priests received six-month prison sentences suspended with probation. Her parents were convicted but not punished at all. And the courts basically said that they had suffered enough. The court didn't doubt that everyone involved believed that they were helping. That wasn't the question. The question was whether sincere belief releases you from the duty to make sure that someone you're responsible for gets the medical care that they need. Now, the story didn't end there. Of course, it became books and documentaries and eventually a very famous movie, The Exorcism of Emily Rose. For some believers, she became like a martyr. For others, she became a warning, a case where in the eyes of her critics, a young woman's illness was interpreted as a spiritual battle until it was too late. So think about everything that we've covered so far. A man in the tombs restored to his right mind by Jesus Christ. A convent in France where the exorcisms became a spectacle and a probably innocent priest just burned in the town square. A boy in St. Louis who woke up one night after Easter and said, he's gone. And a young woman in Bavaria whose exorcism got dragged into a literal courtroom. Some of these stories ended in freedom, at least according to the people that were there. Others ended in tragedy. But every single one of them began the same exact way, with something unseen, uncontrollable, taking charge of a person's body, which leaves the church facing a new problem in the modern day. It still believes that the devil is real. It still believes that possession can happen. And it still believes that in the rarest cases, a priest has to stand in that room, command something to leave. But after centuries of spectacle and scandal and tragedy and sensationalism from Hollywood, the church knew that it couldn't keep doing it the same old way. So it wrote a new book. For centuries, the exorcism text from 1614 had barely changed. But after the second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the church started revising all of its rituals. And the exorcism rite was one of the last to be finished. And it finally arrived in 1999. An official English translation, Exorcisms and Related Sorrows. Now, to be clear, it did not abandon the idea of exorcisms. When the Vatican presented the new rite, they began by reaffirming that the church believes Satan and evil spirits are very real and actively work against human salvation. That wasn't the church quietly retiring like this medieval practice. They actually kind of doubled down and just put it under tighter control. Hey guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I want to tell you about one of the experts seems to recommend a different AI tool. And every time I start a project, I'm asking myself, I'm like, do I use this one for this? Or should I use another? Like, one is better at research, a different, you know, LLM or another AI is better at like writing, another one's better at coding or like finding flights. And then I need something that can turn all those answers into like, actual information that I can really digest. 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I don't have to become an expert in every AI model for all my different needs. I can explain what I need done, and then let computer handle the tools I can focus on being creative. So for a limited time, our listeners can try perplexity computer for free. All you got to do is head to pplx.ai slash camp. That is pplx.ai slash camp and try computer today. Most AI tools are still answering questions, but perplexity computer is completing full projects. Now let's get back to the show. So what does an exorcism actually look like today? Let's go through it. And in order to do that, let's follow one real case from just a few years ago. So step one, it usually starts with someone calling their parish or their diocese because something is wrong. So in November of 2011, a mother named Latoya Ammons moved into a rental house in Gary, Indiana, with her mother and three kids. And almost immediately the family said that something was wrong. Swarms of big black flies on the porch in the middle of winter. And then the kids started acting strange. The family said that their voices would change, that they would black out, that they were thrown around the room by something that no one could see. And it escalated to the point where police, doctors, and even the Indiana Department of Child Services all got involved. And that's where the story goes from spooky to genuinely difficult to explain. In my opinion, this is perhaps the most compelling haunting or exorcism case that I'm familiar with. Because according to official child services records, later obtained by the Indianapolis Star, a family case manager and a registered nurse both said that when the nine-year-old boy was at the hospital, they watched him walk backwards up the wall to the ceiling and flip over onto his feet. That's, I mean, it's not a family member. It's not a priest. It's a state employee writing down an official report. And then a well-educated nurse that is also in the hospital watching this happen in America in 2011. This is not medieval history from Europe. This is America pretty recently. Eventually, the family found their way to a local Catholic priest, Father Michael Maginot. Because step two is discernment, the church's word for figuring out what exactly is going on. And today, this explicitly includes medical and psychological evaluations. So the U.S. bishops describe a very thorough examination, which can include medical, psychological, and psychiatric assessment before any kind of medical examination. And so, the church's word for figuring out what anyone is referred to an exorcist. The exorcist is told to use the utmost care and prudence in deciding whether someone is truly afflicted by a demon or not. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure every diocese has an exorcist within their diocese and no one really knows who it is. Like, only the bishop and the exorcist slash priest knows who it is. So, like, if you go to church at your church, the priest that you're listening to might be the exorcist of the diocese. And if it's not, then it's not a priest. So, like, if you go to church at your church, the priest that you're listening to probably doesn't know who the exorcist is. It's like a very tightly kept secret in the sort of modern structure of the Catholic church. Is that not the case? It says, no, not every Catholic diocese necessarily has its own exorcist. And no, an exorcist is not automatically kept secret. But is there any secrecy around the exorcist? The priests I've talked to say, I don't know who the exorcist of the diocese is. So, to my knowledge, it says that it's not legally mandated by church law to keep the identity secret, though many keep them discreet for practical or pastoral reasons, which tracks with my personal experience talking to priests. They say, like, yeah, no one really knows. I mean, maybe they're just keeping it from me. Maybe they just don't rock with your boy. But regardless, it's a fascinating kind of like subculture that exists. Now, the first question exorcist asks isn't, you know, what's your name? It's basically, is there anything here at all? So, in the case of Latoya Ammons and her family, Father Maginot spent time with the family and visited the house himself. And afterward, he said that he had seen enough to be convinced that something supernatural was really there. Now, step three, if the case still looks serious, the church has tools that aren't a full-on exorcism to try and treat the situation first. This can look like prayers of protection, blessings of a home, prayers a priest can say with the bishop's permission when there seems to be some type of evil influence on a place or an object or a person who isn't actually possessed, and even prayers that the ordinary Catholics can say for themselves. And that's exactly what Father Maginot tried first, a minor exorcism and a blessing of the house. And then there's step four. Only when all the other options have been exhausted, the bishop may authorize a major exorcism. And only a bishop or a priest with his explicit permission can perform it. So, for Latoya Ammons, that permission actually came. And it was a pretty big deal. Reportedly, the first major exorcism the Bishop of Gary had authorized in its 21 years on the job. So, in June of 2012, Father Maginot three major exorcisms on her. And honestly, I it looks like a liturgy. There are readings from scripture, including a gospel, the litany of the saints calling on Mary, the angels, and the saints to basically intercede on behalf of the exorcism, the Lord's prayer, blessings with holy water, the sign of the cross, the crucifix is presented like as a symbol of Christ's victory. And then there are two kinds of prayer driving the heart behind it. First, prayers asking God to free the person. And then second, the imperative prayers, the commands spoken directly to whatever the church believes is there. So the demon, multiple demons, or Satan himself, ordering it to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. The priest's power comes from the same place that it came for Paul. Authority received and granted, not personal charisma or a vigilante attitude that an individual has. It comes from the church. And it actually doesn't have to be in Latin. The new rite was designed to be translated. In fact, of LaToya Ammon's three exorcisms, the first two were done in English and only the last two were done in English. And so, the new rite was designed to be translated into Latin. And also, this is typically not a one-night event. It can be repeated over weeks or months, honestly, without any type of guarantee that it's going to end quickly. It's not like some final showdown one Tuesday night. So, for the Ammons family, they moved to Indianapolis and eventually got custody of the kids back. And LaToya Ammons later said that they now live without fear. Now, the house, well, a paranormal TV host actually bought it. And a few years later, it was demolished, torn down to the ground. So, whatever did or didn't happen, but inside that house, there's nothing left to investigate. So, is anybody actually performing exorcisms? Well, yes. In 1990, an Italian priest named Father Gabriele Amor, the official exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, co-founded the International Association of Exorcists. Now, Amor became the most famous exorcist in the world and was reported to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms. Though, to be clear, that number comes from him and it almost certainly includes a lot of those minor, you know, minor kind of exorcisms, not just like the major like famous ones you would see in movies. So, he also was openly critical of the new rite, which he thought was like weaker than the original one from 1614. And so, some of what Amor describes in his book is honestly the stuff of nightmares. People, you know, that he's exorcising are like vomiting up nails and shards of glass. Again, these are his claims from his book. As a Catholic, I'm choosing to believe him. But again, I don't know if it's true. I'm not sure. I don't know if it's true. I don't know. But some of them say that they have seen things that they can't explain. The most famous is Dr. Richard Gallagher, a board-certified psychiatrist who trained at Yale. He teaches at Columbia and New York Medical College. And he actually started out as kind of a skeptic. He says that he assumed the biblical stories of possession were just like an ancient culture's way of explaining like epilepsy or some other type of like, you know, mental phenomena like DID or schizophrenia. And then a priest asked him to evaluate a woman he calls D.I.D. Julia. And Gallagher says that in a trance, she spoke in languages that she didn't know, including Latin. She could pinpoint people's secret weaknesses. She knew how people who she had never met had died, including Gallagher's own mother. In another case, he describes a woman that he says was about 90 pounds, and she threw a 200-pound Lutheran deacon across a room. Now, Gallagher has spent decades working with exorcists. And his conclusion as a psychiatrist is that in very rare cases, possession is real. But to be fair, there is another side to every story that we've told today. Other skeptics and psychiatrists and researchers argue that things of the traditional list of signs like strange voices, hostility towards religious objects, going into a trance, those can be explained by no- Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Own conditions and the power of what a person in their community already believes is just kind of how it manifests. Now, modern psychiatrists even associate of conditions can take the form of what feels to the person experiencing it like a possession. So the debate that started with Matthew's, you know, moonstruck boy is still being had 2000 years later. It's easy to think of possession as something that, you know, belongs somewhere else. It belongs like in a house from like a Hollywood movie or the tombs outside of some first century village where Jesus Christ is performing exorcisms. But for millions of people, the spiritual realm isn't a movie or ancient history. It is something that they pray against every single morning. Something that they bless their homes to keep out. Something that they believe is close enough to touch in a way that most of us probably never will, hopefully. And the church still takes it pretty seriously, so much so that they keep priests on call in many dioceses around the world. Because tonight, somewhere, a phone is ringing in a diocese office and the priest who answers will ask the same question that the rule book has asked for 400 years. Is there anything here at all? Maybe it's illness. Maybe it's trauma. Maybe it's grief or some type of delusion. Maybe it's something else entirely. Where demonology and spiritual warfare and the human mind meet, that line has never really been clear. And if the old rules are right, that's exactly where something or someone would want to hide. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history on the phenomena that we as Catholics know as exorcisms. I mean, pretty spooky. The Ammons case is, I think, the weirdest. That this boy, we've talked about it with Nathaniel Gillis and I think a few other people that have worked in the space, but a boy climbing up the wall, seen by not necessarily religious people. These are people that, I know nurses, I'm married to a nurse, and they have to document things that happen throughout the case. Like, oh, my patient was doing drugs. My patient was behaving in this way. You have to document all of that so much so that if there's litigation later, you have a record minute by minute of what's going on in the room. And for these people to document, like, oh, this boy climbed the wall onto the ceiling, did a backflip, landed on his feet. Why are they writing that? If nothing happened, like, why are they writing that? Yeah, this is clinical journaling. Yeah, it's weird. It's not like, again, if a priest says, oh, there's a demon, there's a party that's like, all right, well, if you already believe in demons, like, your testimony is not as strong but if an independent third person of a medical background in America in 2011 witnesses this, all of a sudden to me, I'm like, that is an extremely credible case. Now, the Ammons case got made into a movie. I forget what the movie is called. But it was a, yeah, Deliverance. That's what it was. The Deliverance. Not the, it's a new one, 2024, The Deliverance. And it's, I haven't seen it. I don't think I want to see it, to be honest with you. It's also only got, like, five stars on Rotten Tomatoes. Also, you don't watch movies. Also, I don't watch movies. Well documented. I did see Street Fighter. Fantastic. Of course. Everyone should go see that. Yeah. That was an amazing movie. Yeah. Deadly serious. I know it seems like I have a bias because my boy's in it, but it's an amazing movie. I wasn't invited, but. But you're invited to the new one. Yes. When we do an official premiering in a few weeks, I'm sure we're going to do it. Yeah. I'll see you there. But regardless, the exorcism stuff is just, it's so weird. Like, I get, like, the fact that even Gallagher, that, like, Yale-trained, Columbia-teaching psychologist is like, yeah, there's some stuff that we can't explain. That, to me, is the most credible part, where you go, what is he saying that's so convincing to him? Like, this is a very sober-minded skeptic that's just documenting these things from a medical perspective. And even he's like, this is strange. You know what? We should get him on the pod. Let's do it. He's in New York. I'll send an email. Call him today. Yeah. We should immediately. Get him here right now. I'll go right now. I'm not stopping this pod until he's sitting in front of me. Do it, Christos. I'll be right back. Thank you. Well, while we wait for Christos, I just want to say a few things. First off, what do you think? Have you ever witnessed an exorcism? Do you have a personal story? Is there something that has happened in your life that makes you extremely compelled that Satan and the demonic exist? I personally don't have any of these stories. Thank God. Literally. Capital G. God. I don't wish to have this type of faith. I have enough faith. I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ. I don't need. I don't need the faith where it's like, all right, show me a demon so I can believe it. I'm good on all that. I'll take your word for it. With that said, I haven't experienced anything, so it's difficult for me to fully wrap my head around all this stuff. But if you have, I would love to know what your thoughts are. Please drop a comment. If there's anything I missed or anything I overlooked, please let me know. Additionally, if you like crazy deep dives on the occult, on spiritual matters, like the conversation I had with Nathaniel Gillis, well, great news. You can check out the main channel. That is Camp Gagnon. That is where we drop all of the crazy episodes with interviews and we deep dive on all this kind of stuff at detail. Also, if you like to go through history, we talked about a little bit of history today. Well, great news. We have history camp. That's where we talk about everything that ever happened. And if you just like to chill and talk about the religious vibe, well, good news. We do these episodes every single Sunday, whatever your religious persuasion is, whether it's some other religion, maybe it's Catholic, maybe it's nothing at all. Well, you are welcome to, at the very least, learn why other religions are cool, learn what they believe and why and why it affects their life and how it orients their behavior and how it affects cultures and individuals on a personal level. Now, thank you all so much. I appreciate it dearly. And truly, you make my dreams come true every time you tune into the show. God bless you all. Have a beautiful Sunday. Believe in something. Go to church or temple or mosque or wherever you go to worship. And I will see you all next Sunday. God bless you all. Peace. Peace. Peace. Espelon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof Copyright 2026, Comparia America, New York, New York Drink responsibly