Out, Out Damn Spot

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. [Ephesians 6:11-12]

BAUDELAIRE ONCE SAID that the devil's deepest wile is to persuade humans that he doesn't exist. There is no danger of Malachi Martin making that mistake; he is convinced that Satan and the Pit do and always have existed. Modern Christians who no longer believe in hell or the devil as realities will find in Martin's Hostage to the Devil a well-articulated, and disturbing reaffirmation of traditional doctrines about evil and Lucifer.

Martin holds an orthodox Catholic view of spiritual history: God and his fallen angel Satan are engaged in a struggle for the souls of men. One of Satan's tools, through lesser spirits, is the possession of humans. And so Martin provides us with the case histories of five possessed Americans and details their successful exorcisms.

What distinguishes Martin's book from the sensationalism of Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist is that he sees a complex battle between good and evil involved in making even the most prosaic decisions of everyday life. He asserts that the five cases he has chosen to examine,

...are dramatic illustrations of the way in which personal and intelligent evil moves cunningly along the lines of contemporary fads and interests, and within the usual bounds of experience of ordinary men and women.

The possessed in Hostage to the Devil all make conscious choices to turn away from Christian teachings. A priest, misled by his worship of the rational methods of science, doubts the basis of Christ's divinity; a transexual distorts the meaning of gender and of love; and a young coed rejects the Catholic verities and asserts there is no difference between good and evil, "that all values are subject only to one's personal preference." The degree to which each person is demonically possessed differs. Martin is careful, however, to only suggest reasons for possession; he maintains that Satan's actual choice of victims is a mystery, tied in with predestination.

Martin does not stop there: using tape recordings (now a standard procedure at exorcisms) and entries from the diaries of participants, he reconstructs the five exorcisms. The material varies: at times he evokes nothing more than memories of William P. Blatty's lurid prose or of bad National Enquirer exposes; alternately, without warning, Martin produces rather alarming dialogues between exorcist and spirit that touch at the heart of modern evil. This is the strength of Hostage to the Devil; it offers an insight into the evil not only of Buchenwald and My Lai but also into the more personal evil of everyday life. Whether you believe in possession and the devil or not, Martin presents a chilling look at people stripped of their humanity.

MARTIN IS QUITE AWARE of the skepticism that greets exorcism. He stresses the precautions that the Catholic Church takes. First, anyone who is believed to be possessed by "Evil Spirit" must undergo a battery of physical and psychological tests. Only when qualified doctors cannot find a medical reason for the symptoms will an exorcist be called in to expel the spirit. Martin describes the procedure and ceremony carefully, even to the point of printing the text spoken by attending priests, the Roman Ritual of Exorcism, as an appendix.

In some ways, Martin's book deals more with exorcists and the price they pay for battling with spirits than the possessed themselves. As he relates their stories, it seems the physical and spiritual price is very high indeed. One exorcist, a virgin, makes the near fatal mistake of personally challenging the spirit named "Girl-Fixer," without attacking it in the name of Jesus Christ. The virgin priest is "raped," the spirit clawing his buttocks and genitals so badly that he must be hospitalized. Another, Father Peter, faces humiliation as his personal secrets are exposed during the course of an exorcism. A spirit called "The Smiler" gleefully recounts Peter's sexual adventures, before entering the priesthood, with a girlfriend in Ireland. Only Peter and the girl, who has long since died, knew of the incident. There are other costs for an exorcist, according to Martin:

He must consent to a dreadful and irreparable pillage of his deepest self. Something dies in him. Some part of humanness will wither from such close contact with the opposite of humanness--the essence of evilness; and it is rarely, if ever, revitalized.

THERE IS a decidedly medieval cast to Martin's mind that undermines the credibility of Hostage to the Devil. His claims are hurt by not divulging the names of the possessed or offering to release the tape recordings. And he has an unreasoning prejudice against psychology and liberal reform in the Catholic Church. The little humor found in this book centers around psychiatrists who meddle in exorcisms. A New York psychiatrist advises a college professor who is plagued by a spirit that his problem is religious guilt and that he should "lay some broads." "That 'll do the trick," he counsels. Martin tells of another psychiatrist who during an actual exorcism tries to question the possessed despite the objections of the priest. "This may be a landmark case of multiple personality," the psychiatrist says, only to be claimed by the spirit himself.

Martin, a former Jesuit professor and religion editor of The National Review, also takes a dim view of any deviation from orthodox Catholicism. The French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who tried to rationalize evolution and scientific discovery with Christianity, is attacked for contributing in a roundabout way to the possession of two priests because of his potentially heretical views. All of the hero figures in the book--the exorcists--are not intellectuals; they are middle-aged plodders from rural backgrounds, deeply rooted in god, country and Church.

There are valid scientific objections to Martin's portrayal of possession. Skeptics note that in the past, both physical and mental diseases have been mis-diagnosed as demonic possession; these range from psychiatric disorders like paranoia and schizophrenia to diseases which affect the nervous system. Parapsychologists working with ESP, telekinesis and other psychic phenomena can also raise questions about the demonic origins of the possessed individual's reputed ability to mentally hurl objects around and read minds. Martin tries to deal with this criticism; one of the exorcists challenges a group of parapsychologists dabbling in astral travel and reincarnation by asking whether, if preternatural powers exist, they must be good, or whether they might not be diabolic in nature.

While Hostage to the Devil is not convincing, or satisfying about the nature of possession, Martin does sound a currently pervasive message, a call for a return to certain Christian doctrines. There has been an increased interest in the supernatural among organized churches. The Anglicans have published a new exorcism ritual. Pope Paul VI announced in November 1972 that one of the greatest needs of the Catholic Church "is defense from that evil which is called the devil." After reading Hostage to the Devil, Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School wrote: "It did make me realize that as the currently fashionable worldviews around us collapse, we are entering a world in which the classical Christian vision will have a lot to say to us."

To his credit, Martin has captured the sense of confusion about moral choices that pervades twentieth century societies. He suggests a reason for it: "Confusion is a prime weapon of evil." But from that premise he asks us to take a dubious leap of faith with him and accept the Devil as the force wielding that weapon. It is a view that will encounter great hostility from psychologists and social historians; still, Hostage to the Devil, for all its flaws, advances an old theory about an old problem in a new and challenging way.