Minimum 1400 words.
Due by Feb 12 Sunday 9:00 PM. ( Central Time)
– Included one video please watch it and include few information from that video.
Sources for my research
Exorcism:real or superstition?
1. Article: Shackles of superstition
Citation: Shrivastava, Parveen. “SHACKLES OF SUPERSTITION.”
Alive (New Delhi, India), no. 410, 2016, p. 57–.
2. Article: Fakecraft
Citation: Paul Christopher Johnson. “Fakecraft.”
Journal for the Study of Religion, vol. 31, no. 2, 2018, pp. 105–37,
https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a5
.
3. Video: Your Bleeped Up Brain
Citation:
Your Bleeped up Brain. Episode 1, Deception. A&E Television Networks, 2013.
4. Article:
Somewhere between science and superstition’: Religious outrage, horrific science, and The Exorcist (1973)
Citation: Chambers, Amy C. “‘Somewhere Between Science and Superstition’: Religious Outrage, Horrific Science, and The Exorcist (1973).”
History of the Human Sciences, vol. 34, no. 5, 2021, pp. 32–52,
https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951211004465
.
5. Book:
The Devil Within : Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West.
Citation: Levack, Brian.
The Devil Within : Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, Yale University Press, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central.
Summary of book:
The Devil Within formed a key addition to the bibliography list as the resource provided in-depth information on possession and exorcism cases that have taken place over the years. Incorporation of this book was essentially a no-brainer as it featured wide range of instances whereby the problem of possession was easily observable across the populations involved. Generally, the book encompasses multiple centuries and integrates various instances of possession and exorcism as have been recorded across history. It importantly includes well depicted scenarios such as
The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The book is a vital addition as it features an extensive regard of the cases of possession and exorcisms which have taken place. The book also presents true story based film which concludes “..The trial of two German parish priests in 1973 for killing twenty-three-year-old woman, Anneliese Michel, after exorcising her sixty-seven times…” (Levack 242). In this way, the authors are able to provide insight on the developments that took place thus enabling the readers to be informed about the reality or lack thereof of demonic possession and exorcism. The coverage of lengthy timeframe is instrumental in depicting how the subject matter has been a part of the lives of individuals for a long while. It was necessary to include this book in the research process mainly because of the knowledge base that it has contributed towards.
Note: You can use this information from book in the rough draft
Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 105-137 105
Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a5
Fakecraft
Paul Christopher Johnson
paulcjoh@umich.edu
Abstract
The essay defines and explores the dimensions of ‘fakecraft’. It unpacks
authenticity in relation to problems of identity, the aura of the original, and
commodification. It then shows how notions of authenticity and the fake
generate centers and peripheries in the study of religion. The essay explores
how traditions of African descent in the Caribbean and Brazil have long been
marginalized in the study of religion as lacking depth or authenticity. The essay
then takes up a specific example of fakecraft and its prolific work, namely in
early modern Christianity’s process of purification and self-definition through
evaluations of demonic possession as ‘real’ or ‘fake’, terms that were then
applied to the west coast of Africa. In the broadest terms, the article argues that
fakecraft – discourses of the real versus the merely mimetic – is basic to
religion-making.
Keywords: fake, fakery, authenticity, African religions, demon possession,
mimesis, religion, Christianity
Fakes disguise their tracks. Their origins are uncertain. The term ‘fake’ may
be related to the folds of nautical lines and sails, or to street slang for theft. As
a verb it at one point implied ‘to clean away’. To ‘fake someone out and out’
in the early 1800s meant to kill them. In every sense the term conveyed
transformations, though of diverse kinds. Much later, in the 20th century, jazz
musicians used ‘fake’ to play notes other than those on the printed sheet – to
improvise. Jazz artists kept their own dossiers of chord changes for standard
tunes, called fakebooks. Another variation still active in the dictionary but
otherwise retired is ‘fakement’ – an early term for an efficacious forgery.
http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a5
Paul Christopher Johnson
106
Despite the range of uses, all the etymologies suggest doubling, a visible effect
pointing to a reality below. Every forgery points toward an original, like a
visible fold of rope that implies many coils beneath the surface, of unknown
reach. Every improvisation riffs on and calls to ear the notes of an absent
musical score, even when only the fakebook is visible on the stand.
Some of the old glosses related to the fake are faded or gone, but others
(‘fake news’) have sprung to life. ‘Fakelore’, first penned by Richard Dorson
in 1950, was coined as an inversion of folklore. Dorson (1950:336) called the
stories of ‘fake lore’ inauthentic because they were produced by entertainment
industries like Disney, or by states rather than living communities. Dorson’s
fiery invective was directed especially against a post-WWII spate of popular
Paul Bunyan books, and against nationalist claims invoked through such works
and their overlarge footprint that buried the tracks of more genuine backwoods
hero-tales, like those of French Canadians, Finns, North Michiganders, Poles,
Chippewa, or of labor groups like lumberjacks (Dorson 1950:336-337). More
distantly, Dorson was concerned with fascism’s use of fake lore. Authentic
folklore, Dorson insisted, must be alive, told by actual people in groups
(Dorson 1950:342). Abstractions like nation-states do not sit rapt around a fire,
or even any longer (one can imagine Dorson saying) in the shared glow of a
television. By 1959 he joined the term, fake lore, into one, ‘fakelore’ (Dorson
1959:4).
David Chidester (2005:191) points out that fakelore, like fake religion,
produces real effects in the world. In Alan Dundes’ diagnosis, for example, it
fills a national psychic need in times of crisis when folklore fails, or in the face
of national insecurity (Dundes 1989:50-51). Dundes adds the intervention that
fakelore is material and spatial as much as verbal or textual, and that fakelore
can easily become folklore. Just so for Chidester, who argues that fake religion
veers easily into ‘real’ religion in its effects. This is largely in keeping with the
‘invented tradition’ idea (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983), pointing to the
functions of allegedly age-old histories of only recent coinage. Only think of
how versions of the home depicted in Laura Ingall Wilder’s Little house on the
prairie – a work of fiction only loosely drawn from her own life – are now the
most visited historical sites in the middle U.S. (McClellan, In Press).
While Ranger and Hobsbawm, like Dorson and Dundes, were
concerned with the nationalist risks of invented traditions – the ways they use
ritual to impose ‘tacitly accepted rules’ to ‘inculcate certain values’
(Hobsbawm 1983:1) – one might also think of fakery in relation to play. In the
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107
lighter terms of pretend or fabrication, and following the lead from jazz, one
can also see fakes as improvisations. Children are terrific fakers, including of
ritual. Children in Cuba ‘fake’ Santería possession events as a way of marking
aspiration and their future trajectory (Palmié 2013:296). Children play at ritual
as a way of learning it, including faking spirit possession, all over the African
Americas (Landes 1947:174; Richman 2012:283; Segato 2005:103; Opipari &
Timbert 1997; Halloy & Naumescu 2012), just as elsewhere they play at Mass
or masking (Caillois 1961:62). There is a dark side to the question of the fake
– say, the fascist invented traditions of Aryanism, or the ‘epistemic murk’
blurring of truth and fiction that births a culture of terror (Taussig 1984:192-
193). And there is a lighter side, presented in the creative play of children
working out the craft of ritual. This lighter side is often apparent in popular
culture too. Still, as Adorno writes, it is precisely the appearance of
superficiality that can make popular culture dangerous, including religion –
astrology, like racism, provides a useful ‘short-cut…bringing the complex to a
handy formula’ (Adorno 1994:61).
Chidester (2005:2) signals the relation between the serious work of
religion, engaging the sacred, the transcendent and questions of ultimate
meaning, and the ‘comparatively frivolous play of popular culture’. Elsewhere
he blurs the line between the sacred and play, by noting that ‘religious’ work
is also done by popular culture (Chidester 2005:231), whether in the form of
baseball, rock ‘n’ roll, or Burning Man. His point can even be taken further in
order to say that religion itself is often quite unserious. The play and the pop
even within devoted ritual practice is part of its modus operandi and its appeal.
Adorno (2000:78-79) went so far as to call this constitutive of the ‘religious
medium’ as such, whose ‘sentimentality, blatant insincerity and phoniness’ are
part and parcel of good performance. These qualities fulfill the ‘longing of the
people for “feigning” things’. Here Adorno steers toward the longing for the
fake.
We need not fully indulge Adorno’s cynicism to nevertheless pursue
the point: People like to play, blur categories of performance, and suspend
disbelief. So much is this the case that the lines dividing play or pretend from
‘real’ ritual are difficult if not impossible to discern. From this perspective, the
crafting of ritual scenes and procedures that undo the distinctions of fake and
real ritual is a central part of the work of making and maintaining a religion, as
‘the play of presence’ (Taussig 1999:142). It is a refined art, a techne in
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Heidegger’s nomenclature; the art of bringing forth, of causing something new
to appear (Heidegger 1977:184).
The first half of this essay explores key dimensions of what I call
‘fakecraft’, including the way it plays on and against issues of authenticity.
Authenticity is unpacked in relation to problems of identity, the aura of the
original, and commodification. The ways in which notions of authenticity and
the fake have generated centers and peripheries in the study of religion, are
also considered. Traditions of African descent in the Caribbean and Brazil, for
example, have long been marginalized in the study of religion as lacking depth
or authenticity – as syncretic – though that has by now begun to change. The
second half of the essay then takes up a specific example of fakecraft and its
prolific work, namely in early modern Christianity’s process of purification
and self-definition through evaluations of demonic possession as ‘real’ or
‘fake’.
I. Fakecraft
Fakecraft is basic to religion-making. The term ‘craft’ in the conjunction is
suggestive for my purposes because it joins at least three meanings from its
Germanic etymology and its English vernacular use: 1) a power wielded and
deployed (Kraft); 2) a skill that is honed and practiced; and 3) a vessel of
transport. These three senses – as power, skill, and transport from one bodily
state to another, or one vision of the world to another, usefully summarize the
kinds of work often gathered under the usefully fuzzy term ‘religion’. Fakecraft
gestures toward the craft of making multiplicity visible – the forgery that
implies a real; the top of a coiled rope or sail that conveys many more loops or
folds below; the improvisation that plays off – always imply an absent written
score.
Note, though, that religious traditions constitute their notions of
fakery, as well as the margins and terms of opacity and indecipherability, in
very different ways. For example, the notion of the fake as a lack of sincerity
– the mismatch between external appearance or words and a putative internal
state – has a distinctly Protestant character, both in the nature of the question
and in its particular linguistic form (Keane 2002). The centrality of sincerity to
Protestant ideas of the fake even poses severe challenges for Protestant
Fakecraft
109
expansion in New Guinea and elsewhere. There, the effort to intentionally
know the internal states of others is considered terribly impolite and improper.
This is the ‘opacity of mind’ problem (Robbins & Rumsey 2008). In other
traditions, meanwhile, a ‘fake’ is someone who does not enjoy proper
authorization (Chidester 1996:33). This particular notion of fakery requires a
level of bureaucratic rationalization perhaps typical of only a narrow range of
religious groups. African diasporic traditions in Brazil and the Caribbean,
meanwhile, are often oriented around discerning authentic and fake claims of
deep African knowledge, or valid spirit possession performances in ritual
compared with those deemed mere ‘acting’. This is because spirit possession
events always suppose a gap between the forensic claim of a god’s true
presence and the inchoate means and measures of determining authentic
presence. The possibility of the fake is ever-present. However, while
accusations of fakery may be intended to deauthorize or discredit spirit
possession, they also help to constitute spirit possession as eventful, through
the ‘interpretive ferment’ (Wirtz 2007) its opacity marshals and calls into
being. The ambiguity and uncertainty of genuine spirit-presence lend frisson
to the ritual gathering. Working in the Cuban city of Santiago, Kristina Wirtz
explored what she calls the ‘aesthetics of sensibility’, the ways practitioners of
Afro-Cuban religions develop particular techniques of discernment, and skills
of perception beginning with bodily sensations like shivers or prickling on the
skin and ascending to full-blown sensations of possession (Wirtz 2007:130-
135). ‘To discern spirits’, Wirtz writes, ‘requires being inculcated into a
culturally-specific phenomenology in which the material effects of immaterial
agencies become sensible experiences’ (Wirtz 2014:100).
In addition, Afro-American religions and elsewhere are often heavily
invested in questions of spatial authenticity, or proximity to a putative original
in what one might call, following Benjamin (1970), an auratic mode. Is it
genuinely ‘African’? The question sometimes is attached to racial authenticity.
Thus, Roger Bastide, writing on mid-century Brazil, sees commercialized and
‘whitened’ Afro-Brazilian ritual events as necessarily ‘fake’ (Bastide
1978:230):
I am not speaking of the fake candomblés or macumbas opened up
nowadays to exploit tourists, sanctuaries that live on the superstition
of whites and concentrate on expensive magic rituals for sensation
seekers and night club patrons. Although these centers may be directed
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by mulattoes and offer their sophisticated clientele a ballet performed
by girls who are quite likely to be black, culminating in simulating
African rites, they represent white rather than black religion.
Bastide saw fakeness and authenticity in candomblé in racial terms, and
presumably he was not alone, though it is by now clear that the question of
Africanity may or may not be tethered to social Blackness (Palmié 2002:197;
Johnson 2007:217-219).
II. Authenticity
Let’s turn now to authenticity, a term Chidester foregrounds as indispensable
to the problem of the fake (Chidester 2005:xii). Chidester observes that fake
religion does ‘authentic’ religious work (Chidester 2005:vii) and, citing
Lawrence Grossberg, that there can be (and indeed the U.S. may be essentially
characterized by) ‘authentic inauthenticity’, public and even prideful artifice
rather than covert fraud or dissimulation.
As Chidester (2005:3) notes, authenticity can work under various
guises: As transparency, or as a cipher for earnest earthiness (rather like terroir
for wine), the latter a burden under which especially so-called ‘primitive’
societies, and perhaps African societies in particular, have long labored. Many
groups compete for prestige in those or similar terms. Scholars of religion
played a heavy hand in reinforcing this kind of status competition over African
authenticity. Melville Herskovits (1941; 1945) famously invoked a dubious
comparative register called ‘the scale of intensity of New World Africanisms’.
In Herskovits’ dangerous game, the Maroons of Suriname won first prize,
followed by those of Guiana and, in third place, practitioners of Haitian Vodou.
Many scholars in Brazil as elsewhere, similarly, endorsed the Yoruba-derived
practices in the New World as ‘more authentic’ than Kongo-descended ones,
often based on specious Eurocentric analogies of the Yoruba pantheon, or
sculpture, to those of classical Greece or Rome (Johnson 2007:205-214;
Capone 2010:206-210; Dantas 1988).
While it is true that this version of authenticity is recurrent in the
African Americas, it seems also typical of diasporic situations in general. The
lurking question of the fake (as adjudicated in relation to the alleged distance
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111
from an ‘original’) always hovers over and around replicant Sikh temples,
Catholic grottos, and traveling Zen masters. Are they real enough? And by
what criteria? Corrosive accusations are likely, especially when there are
venues of both touristic and ‘actual’ ritual performance (Chidester 2012:115,
202; Capone 2010:206; Johnson 2002:9, 177), genres that, at least in the
African Americas, in fact are often merged (Hagedorn 2001; Van de Port 2011;
Wirtz 2014).
The idea of authenticity gauged as legitimate replication of an original
model is perhaps less at issue, though, for so-called ‘world’ or overtly
‘mission’ traditions – classically, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity – which
necessarily imagine their traditions as replicable and detachable from spatial
versions of the authentic local. They embrace artifice as part and parcel of their
global extension. In this sense, Jonathan Smith describes the Reformation as
first and foremost a shift in how ritual makes and communicates meaning in
detachable ways. Ritual for the 16th-century reformed Christians was not ‘real’
in a literal, material, and spatial sense; it was rather a matter of ‘signification’
(for Zwingli), or ‘metonymy’ (for Beza). A wedge now divided symbol and
reality in Christendom (Smith 1987:100). It narrowed the gap between the fake
and the real with a bridging middle term, ‘the symbolic’.
The point to reinforce here is that different traditions summon distinct
versions of authenticity, and attribute authenticity with varying levels of value.
In so doing they inscribe particular contents and edges of the inchoate, in
relation to given ritual processes. In spite of this diversity, though, one should
not lose sight of a key comparative hinge: Potential fakery is part of the
furniture of every religious enactment. In fact, it is a necessary prop, the empty
box in the middle of the stage. The box is built to different specifications
depending on the tradition. Learning how the box is built is part and parcel of
understanding and interpreting a given religious practice. There are at least two
parts to this hermeneutic problem: One is learning how specific versions of
fakecraft help to make and maintain insider definitions of shared terms of a
tradition; the second is seeing how the different constructions of the box are
used to mark and patrol the boundaries between religions.
Identity
Let’s consider several versions of authenticity available for activation in
religious practice. One kind of authenticity is continuity over time between
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something in the present and in the past (Is that authentically Victorian? Is this
truly biblical?), or a relative identity across space (the authentic Turkish song;
the genuinely African initiation). Either something now is sufficiently like it
was then, or something here is sufficiently like things there. Authenticity may
also describe the relative degree of conformity between outside appearance and
an actual internal veracity. On that score, Lionel Trilling calls Wordsworth’s
protagonist in the poem ‘Michael’ a first exemplar of literary authenticity
(Trilling 1972:93): As he sits grieving the death of his son, he radiates nothing
but grief. There is no dissimulation or distraction, no mask. He is transparent,
authentic, ‘truly himself’.
All of the above senses of authenticity-as-identity raise the question of
the relative continuity of an object, idea or person with an original (Benjamin
1970:220). Yet even that notion of ‘originality’ is fluid. Raymond Williams, to
wit, describes the key transition from the term ‘original’ as denoting a point in
time from which all things arose, to the denotation of that which is singular –
a shift that took place in the late 17th century (Williams 1983:230). Williams
shows how singularity carries both temporal and spatial connotations. It marks
a thing, person or event as utterly discrete, as thoroughly situated. Such notions
of singularity, originality, and realness are expressions of spatial power; they
found and justify ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ (Long 2004:92).
Authenticity as originality or as singularity supposes a need for
continuity maintained across time and space by reference to singular beings
and spatial centers. As a discourse, however – and to follow the familiar
foucauldian argument – it presupposes rupture, a crisis of continuity overcome
only with the labor of memory and language. Authenticity is a noun that only
thinly veils a question or a wish.
Aura
Another vector of the fake and the authentic applied in religions is the question
of sufficient likeness or, in other terms, the adequacy of mimesis (Taussig
1993). Walter Benjamin’s essay, The work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction (1970) remains the touchstone essay on this problem. The essay
treats the dislocation of art objects from a denotation of situated, local things
to a series of reproducible and transmissible images. Benjamin’s primary data
was the move from the painting to the film, but here I seek to draw an analogy
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to the move from indigenous to diasporic styles of ritualization, vis à vis
Benjamin’s problematic of the aura.
In Benjamin’s description, ‘the presence of the original [object] is the
prerequisite to the concept of authenticity…The authenticity of a thing is the
essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its
substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’
(Benjamin 1970:220-221). (This is roughly what Max Weber referred to as
‘authentic transmission’, delivered ‘by a closed chain of witnesses’ – Weber
1954:206.) Benjamin’s argument proceeds: With the dislocation of paintings
from the sites where they were embedded, in a given church for example, to
reprints, authenticity shifts from being a relatively given temporal essence to
something achieved and authorized. It becomes a special effect. The crisis that
may result, derives from the fact that even as authentic objects must now be
authorized to achieve their effects, ‘history’ itself is anchored by nothing but
those once-authorizing objects – objects that authorize history by virtue of their
singular originality – such that history and authenticity comprise a dialectical
relation. ‘Historical testimony’ suffers when substantive duration, or temporal
authenticity, ceases to matter. When historical testimony loses value, the
authority of objects (in what Benjamin calls their cult-value) declines as well
(Benjamin 1970:221). The special effect of authenticity is all that remains, an
aura that guides a sense of history, but now only as a present absent.
The aura of a thing, then, is its authenticity. A thing is authentic in so
far as it generates an authoritative effect of duration in time, in relation to a
place and moment of origin. History, as the sense of continuity in time, must
rely upon the aura acquired by authorizing procedures, whether by carbon
dating or by tradition; hence the danger posed to ‘history’ when aura is reduced
to a special effect. It is this vulnerability that gives a palpable sense of loss to
Benjamin’s essay. History is rendered dangerously surreal, from his view, as
indeed it had already become when Benjamin penned the essay in 1935. Still,
the tone of irretrievable loss is not one-sided. If the mechanical reproduction
of authoritative objects, based on a desire to overcome distance and hold
uniqueness near, diminishes aura, it also brings a democratic ‘emancipation’
of the object from its original place and ritual meaning (Benjamin 1970:223-
225). Ritual gains its capacity to be resignified against new diasporic horizons
(Johnson 2007). It is able to generate new histories.
For Benjamin, the image’s mechanical reproducibility in mass media
leads to the auratic decline of its authoritative temporal force. Paradoxically, it
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is at that juncture that ‘the authentic’ becomes fetishized as a social and
historical need. The temporal authentic – the question of continuity in time –
is eclipsed by the authentic artist or author – the question of an object’s
original, situated authorship. Authenticity from this point entails a persistent
need for its persuasive effect in the social process.
There is, then, a triangular relation here linking the aura of uniqueness,
the historical sense of embeddedness in time and space, and the use of objects
in social practice (Benjamin 1970:223-224). When the located, ritual quality
of objects loses ritual force, it may become mobile in space and re-embedded
in another kind of political or ideological practice (Benjamin 1970:224). The
problem of authenticity is related to the condition of exile; the copied object,
detached from any single location, now meets its users in their own particular
situations, reactivating the object in infinite new ways (Benjamin 1970:221).
The reproduced object links and distinguishes its users. It links them in a shared
orbit of practice. At the same time, it distinguishes them through distinct
procedures and terms applied to the same object.
Religion, Inc.
One of the dominant terms of the mass-reproduction of the art-object is as a
commodity. On this front, many scholars have extended Benjamin’s insights
to analyze the ways ‘cultures’ or ‘religions’ have become saleable. In Ethnicity,
Inc., John and Jean Comaroff point out the tension between the commonly held
idea of ‘cultural identity’ as inalienable, the essential aura of a given society,
and the plain evidence of its commodity value and merchandized production
(Comaroff & Comaroff 2009:22-23). Adorno’s reflections on authenticity are,
they argue, turned into a farce. Adorno’s 1973 The jargon of authenticity casts
authenticity as a linguistic fetish utterly detached from objects. If it once
expressed genuine location in place – cultural homelands – now it is words, or
jargon, that bestow the aura of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), as compensation
for the loss of a real sense of history and place. In Adorno’s view, just as
Benjamin invoked aura when it was cast into crisis, so the existentialists’
discourse of authenticity invokes its absence. Adorno casts the post-World War
II jargon of authenticity as a subjective mystification, a reification of
emptiness, and itself a form of alienation. Authenticity is a quixotic quest for
origins when none can be found.
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115
In the assessment of David Harvey (1990:87), ‘the preoccupation with
identity, with personal and collective roots, has become far more pervasive
since the early 1970s because of widespread insecurity in labor markets, in
technological mixes, credit systems, and the like’. Harvey’s comment helps
explain why today, when perusing a Pottery barn catalogue, consumers gain
unlimited historical opportunities: There is the Weathered wood table and file
cabinet: ‘The appeal of vintage painted farmhouse furniture lies in its rustic
simplicity and the subtle wear patterns created by years of use’; or the
Nostalgic diner chair: ‘American diners of the 1950s seated a steady stream of
families on chairs just like ours’; or the Vintage map: ‘This map of North
America was reproduced for us from an original dated 1864, when work on the
Transcontinental Railroad had just begun’. Don’t forget the Manhattan leather
collection: ‘New York nightclubs of the 1930s had opulent furniture that was
rich in comfort and style’. It is not only history that is regained in such
purchases, but space: ‘No vacancy’ rustic sign: ‘Straight off the old highway,
a weathered, timeworn sign evokes long drives across rugged country’.
This is not just authentic leather chairs for sale. As John and Jean
Comaroff write, authenticity is now ‘the specter that haunts the
commodification of culture everywhere. If they have nothing distinctive to
alienate, many rural black South Africans have come to believe, they face
collective extinction’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009:10). This authenticity-
stress produces ethnicity in the forms of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ Bushmen (Comaroff
& Comaroff 2009:52, 92, 143). The authenticity market at the Religion Hall is
surely no less cutthroat than at the Ethnicity Store. It is only by being
recognized as an authentic religion, after all, that subaltern traditions can gain
legal rights. This requires marketing work. As examples, consider the
practitioners of Santería in Hialeah, Florida, who made themselves into the
‘Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye’, founded in 1974. This rebranding helped
them win their U.S. Supreme Court case on animal sacrifice in 1993 (Palmié
1996; Johnson 2005). Similarly, Amerindian peyote users sought incorporation
in certain states in 1918 by renaming their group as the Native American
Church. Becoming a ‘church’ helped these groups gain authenticity and then
legitimacy. They became ‘real religions’ through the adept mimicry of U.S.-
style churchness (Johnson, Klassen & Sullivan 2018:4-8).
This work of multiplicity, of selective mimicry, is a kind of agency.
Judith Butler describes agency as ‘the double movement of being constituted
in and by a signifier, where “to be constituted” means “to be compelled to cite
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or repeat or mime” the signifier itself’ (Butler 1993:167). But it is also to then
be able to apply that citation to new acts, in what Butler calls the ‘hiatus’ of
iterability. Similarly, William Sewell defines agency as ‘the capacity to
transpose and extend schemas to new contexts; the actor’s capacity to
reinterpret and mobilize an array of resources in terms of cultural schemas
other than those that initially constituted the array’ (Sewell 2005:142). In so
doing, one becomes ‘capable of exerting some degree of control over the social
relations in which one is enmeshed…to transform those social relations’
(Sewell 2005:143). The most sophisticated analyses of agency always invoke
its doubleness, the taking of a schema from one scene and transposing it in
another. The agentive performance points to two sites at once: A current
iteration and an ‘original’ elsewhere – much like fakecraft.
The trick, though, is that the agency gained in fakecraft can break in
different directions. Subaltern groups use it to shape themselves into
‘churches’ and carve out a space in which to work. Colonial agents applied
discourses of fakery – another genre of fakecraft – in order to discredit African
and Afro-American religions, as is shown below.
Caribbean authentic
If the ‘authentic’ does well in sales, it is also ever-present in language, as an
intentional adjective that always begs the question of positionality and
intentionality: ‘Authentic in relation to what?’ In African diasporic religious
communities, that question motivates much wringing of hands and internal
dialogue. For if such questions are typical, even constitutive, of diasporic
situations tout court, they have especially been important in the Caribbean, a
polyglot, multiracial region allegedly lacking roots or enduring identity. In the
history of the study and teaching of religion, after all, the Caribbean was for
decades pressed into service primarily as a site of absence: A void of authentic,
deep-rooted religious traditions. That void – marginal even to the categories of
order/utopia/savage (Trouillot 1991) – was so-called syncretism.
In Hamlet, Polonius famously admonished, ‘To thine own self be true’.
But what would Polonius’ advice have meant to Prospero’s slave, Caliban, in
The tempest, who neither enjoys the pleasure nor suffers the burden of any
‘true’ self at all? Caliban is written by Shakespeare as a synecdoche of the
Caribbean, ‘a freckled whelp, hag-born, not honour’d with a human shape’
(Caliban Act I, Scene II). The figure of Caliban shows the Caribbean’s
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inauthenticity from the view of 17th-century Europe in both racial and cultural
terms: The Caribbean was sinister because of primitiveness, but even more
because of its promiscuous mix1. Any ‘deep Caribbean’, in the bodies of the
indigenous Ciboneys, Tainos, and Caribs, succumbed to diseases delivered by
the European landing. Thereafter it was all Calibans on the stage, Africans and
Europeans and Asians; Black Caribs, Creole metissages, and gente de color –
turtles all the way down.
Caliban is indexical of the exogenous inauthenticity of the Caribbean,
both standing for it and comprising part of it. Such inauthenticity begins with
the chronic lack of roots, as described by Fernando Ortiz under the neologism
of ‘transculturation’ (Ortiz 1995:97-103, 153). Ortiz’s term ‘transculturation’
was born of Cuba. It took account of the experiences of exile and loss, rather
than long duration and deep tradition, as constitutive of Caribbean-ness2. One
might pose transculturation and authenticity as opposed if related terms. They
rub against each other. If the invocation of ‘authenticity’ points to a sentiment
of loss (Benjamin 1970:244; Adorno 1973:9; Trilling 1972:93),
transculturation hails and celebrates a distinct Caribbean singularity.
African diasporic religious communities in Brazil and the Caribbean
wager claims of African authenticity, then, with high stakes in play. They must
grow roots from a land seen as lacking in subsoil. Much depends on their
claims’ success, in terms of the reputation that attracts devotees, in the
legitimacy conferred by the state, as ‘heritage’ or in other forms bestowing
resources along with cultural capital, and, not least, in the particular African
diasporic experience of religious meaning. The claims are also notoriously
competitive. Articulating a tradition’s ‘authenticity’ is a means of finding a
voice and presenting a public face. But the need to do so, often incurs from the
posture of a minority group of color in a plural society, as Chidester proposes
is the case for many African religions. Subaltern groups, one might say, are
1 Frantz Fanon wrote of ‘the Prospero complex’ (Fanon 1967:33, 83, 107), citing
Dominique Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: Psychology of colonization
(Manonni 1964). Invoking the same founding problematic is Paget Henry’s
Caliban’s reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean philosophy (Henry 2000).
2 ‘I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different
phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does
not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word
acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or
uprooting of a previous culture’ (Ortiz 1995:102).
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forced to perform their authenticity, to ‘emit signs’ (Foucault 1979:25;
Bourdieu 2000:173). Moreover, subaltern religious communities must perform
authenticity in terms recognized by the state and its publics. This by necessity
leads to distortion and static. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it, ‘experiences undergo
nothing less than a change of state when they recognize themselves in the
public objectivity of an already constituted discourse’ (Bourdieu 1977:170;
original emphasis).
This idea of distortion caused by translating a tradition into ready-
made formulas was already proposed by Max Müller in 1862, albeit for quite
different purposes, as Chidester (2004) reminds us. According to Chidester
(2004:75-76), Müller wrote that the ‘continual combustion’ of language
becomes bound by ‘literary interference’. The context was different – in our
time the ‘literary interference’ includes religion’s commodity-value, which is
material as much as literary, economic, or linguistic – but his broader point on
the risks of translation still stands.
While religions of the African diaspora have had to perform the
authentic to find and defend a place (legal, spatial, social) whatsoever against
accusations of shallow mimicry and mélange – of being mere derivative and
syncretic copies – colonial religions deployed discourses of the real and the
fake to patrol, police, and purify their own boundaries. Christianity did so, in
part, by exiling demon possession from Europe to Africa and the African
Americas.
III. Fakecraft and inter-religious boundaries:
Or, how Christianity cleansed its soul
Fakecraft works internally by establishing a tradition’s parameter of the given
and the unknown, and the discursive terms of debate about the inchoate
remainder at the center of every ritual event. Afro-American traditions have a
developed internal fakecraft. Internal discourses of the real and the fake are
part of the lifeblood of Candomblé, Umbanda, Santería, Palo Monte, Vodou,
Garifuna, and other communities. As mentioned above, the objects of debate
are often related to the authenticity of spirit possession. In 1938, Zora Neale
Hurston wrote of the abundant fakecraft in Haiti, in which people spoke in the
idiom of being possessed – Parlay cheval ou (‘Tell my horse’) – in order to
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‘express their resentment general and particular’ (Hurston [1938] 2009:221).
The dancer Katherine Dunham (1969) describes a U.S. Marine, Doc Reeser,
who remained in Haiti after the occupation, who ‘set himself up’ as a horse of
the Vodou deity (lwa) Guedé, governor of the dead and the cemetery, and
performed a ‘seeming state of trance’. ‘It was convenient for Doc because he
could drink as much clairin – raw white rum – as he wished and indulge in
certain extravagances of behavior and obscenities which most of the gods of
the pantheon would not tolerate in their mounts’ (Dunham 1969:19). Cuban
santeros distinguish santos, the legitimate presence of possessing saints
(orichas), from santicos, ‘little saints’, here meaning fakes (Wirtz 2007:124).
Jim Wafer describes false trance as a familiar phenomenon in Brazilian
candomblé, known as equê, ‘a type of theater’ (Wafer 1991:34). Many more
examples of internal fakecraft in the Afro-American traditions could be cited.
Without any central authority or canon, authenticity is an ongoing
social process. Yet there is an ample consensus about what to disagree about:
Spirit possession, roots, Africanness, commodification, respect, hierarchy,
orthopraxy, or the efficacy of a given ritual event. The shared terms of fakecraft
and debate form and constitute the religious community. Note what the terms
are mostly not about in this set of traditions: Belief, the soul, sincerity,
institutional authority, the afterlife, or the text. If every tradition applies
discourses of the fake and the real, they apply that hinge to different sets of
concerns – to different doors and windows, so to say. To continue the
metaphor, the doors and windows open out to religious worlds pocked by
distinct landscapes of value, aspiration, and healing. These varying notions of
the fake and the authentic also constitute and maintain boundaries between
religions.
Christian fakecraft
How has fakecraft been applied to making and maintaining boundaries between
religions? The ways early modern European Christians wrote about their own
fakecraft were consequential for African and Afro-American religions.
Elsewhere I have given close attention to the transfer of European ideas of
demonic possession to the idea of Africans as possessable and enslavable
(Johnson 2011). Here, the early modern English and French Christian fakecraft
are discussed, in order to better understand the terms in which they first read
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and classified African religions in relation to possession, and African persons
in relation to their ‘porousness’ or permeability (Taylor 2007).
If the possibility of sham was integral to the making of the category of
‘religion’ whatsoever, the problem of deciphering internal spiritual states was
a key part of the spread of Christianity in particular. What did the Apostle Paul
mean in Galatians 2:20, when he wrote, ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ
who lives in me’? The sentence seems to acknowledge multiple possible
interior guides. At the very least two agents in one body are named: A self and
another being. Chidester shows how the control over (bad) spirits, as well as
the difficulties of working out doctrines of flesh and spirit, were central issues
in the founding and expansion of the early church (Chidester 2000:19-22).
Indeed, early texts stabilizing and disseminating the term ‘religio’, like
Augustine’s Of true religion, made the question of spirits plain. Augustine
works out ‘true’ religion not only vis à vis Manichaeism – his stated target –
but also in relation to the ambiguity of interpreting human internal states –
‘crowds of phantasms’, and ‘the things which deceive dreamers and madmen’
(Augustine 1953:50, 258).
The issue of spirits and internal discernment recurred. St Ignatius,
writing between 1522-1524, was shaken to his core by the challenge of
recognizing the diabolical spirits and the angelic spirits at work in his own
body. In Rules for the discernment of spirits, he described the capacity of the
evil spirit for duplicity: To console, and even to disguise itself as an angel of
light (Ignatius of Loyola 2000:119). This is an example of divine fakecraft, and
there are many others. Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie (1580) observed that ones
who write to protect those accused of being possessed by Satan are themselves
probably possessed. Yet, as his enemies noted, that statement itself could have
been ventriloquized to throw even careful observers off-track. Bodin, a public
alarmist against demonic possession, was himself suspected of witchcraft, and
his home searched for incriminating objects on 3 June 1587. As Stephen
Greenblatt puts it, ‘If Satan can counterfeit counterfeiting, there can be no
definitive confession, and the prospect opens to an infinite regress of disclosure
and uncertainty’ (Greenblatt in Almond 2004:12). Thus, Milton’s Paradise lost
has Satan impersonating a good angel in the world, and indeed, the story is a
constant confusion of spirits in matter (Milton 1667).
The radical uncertainty inspired fear. The porous self could always be
taken over and possessed (Taylor 2007:35-36). It also motivated the refining
of diagnostic tools and terms. Cotton Mather wrote that, in one case,
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‘enchantment’ by evil spirits seemed to be growing very far towards an actual
‘possession’ (Mather 1684:9). ‘Possession’ and ‘obsession’ were distinguished
during the same period. It was during the 17th century, argues Ernst Benz
(1972), that the beatific versus demonic notions of possession were firmly
divided, Ergriffenheit/Bessenheit (pneuma/daimon). Through the refinement
of terms interpreting and evaluating the body’s surface, true possession was
distinguished from the counterfeit. The problem of spirits in Christianity
peaked in the 17th century (Thomas 1971; Gibson 1999; Caciola 2003;
Sluhovsky 2007; Ferber 2013). During that period, debates about possession
and fakery circulated widely in so-called ‘possession pamphlets’, which
established a clearly delineated demonic paradigm, script and template (De
Certeau 2000:21).
According to that script, the problem of fake versus real possession
was central. Being legitimately possessed was not merely a subjective
experience. It had to properly persuade. Through the refinement of terms and
techniques to determine its authentic presence, or not, possession as a
phenomenological object was interpolated from the beginning through the
prospect of the counterfeit. Indeed, fakery had to be part of its discourse, not
least because possession required matching thoroughly underdetermined
symptoms whose source was finally unverifiable against a scale of judgment.
For Ignatius of Loyola, it was only by the closest observation of the after-
effects of spirits’ comings and goings in his own soul that it could be
determined whether the visitation had been evil or good3. For Puritans, reading
possession against scripture was the proof-test. Thus the convicted Puritan
pastor, Darrell, in his pamphlet defense of the ‘genuine’ possession of William
Sommers, concedes after his long summation: ‘It followeth not that he is
possesst, because he is not counterfeyte, and this will we do out of the
Scriptures, for by them only can we discerne, and know when one is possessed’
3 Fifth Rule, Greater discernment of spirits: We ought to note well the course of the
thoughts, and if the beginning, middle and end is all good, inclined to all good, it
is a sign of the good Angel; but if in the course of the thoughts which he brings it
ends in something bad, of a distracting tendency, or less good than what the soul
had previously proposed to do, or if it weakens it or disquiets or disturbs the soul,
taking away its peace, tranquility and quiet, which it had before, it is a clear sign
that it proceeds from the evil spirit, enemy of our profit and eternal salvation
(Ignatius of Loyola 2000:65).
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(Darrell 1599, image 31; emphasis added)4. In Catholic France, by contrast, it
was typically the number and status of witnesses, the ‘large number of Gens
d’honneur and de piété’, that defined and justified approved possession events
(Aubin 1693:51). Multiple codes for authorizing authentic versus fake
possessions were in play, and in competition.
The most frequent method of establishing legitimate possession,
though, and which crossed sectarian bounds, was by reading the surface of the
victim’s body to verify a set of symptoms. Was the patient diseased, or
fraudulent? (Schmidt 1998:30). How to know if they were truly possessed?
The diagnoses focused especially on the skin, eyes, and mouth. Verification
procedures were onerous, including the burning of flesh, or presenting the
embodied demon with fake holy objects, in order to gauge the bodily response.
Only a fake demon would offer a visceral reply to a fake holy object, or flinch
at burned skin. Through such physical tests, often spectacularly public, the cues
for an authentic possession became widely known. They included a standard
set of symptoms marking the body’s perimeter. Symptoms were concentrated
on the border dividing interior from exterior; the visceral drama of the body
marked and defined the just-visible edges of the hidden soul.
In a series of well-documented examples from England, for example,
the skin and the mouth were key foci of interpretation. The skin would
sometimes turn black in places (Darrell 1599) or reveal a moving lump just
beneath its surface. A captive spirit’s force within sometimes pressed outward
to reveal the outline of a cross on the skin, as in the case of Joyce Dovey
(Dalton 1646:3). The skin’s surface was often unusually sweaty (Barrow
1664), or emitted a foul odor (Hooper, Hooper, Sky, Eglestone, Westgarth &
Egleston 1641), or felt cold to the touch (Barrow 1664; Darrell 1599). In some
cases, the evidence for true demon possession lay in the fact that the skin
neither bled when pierced nor burned when held to the fire (Darrell 1599;
Dalton 1646).
Torture was important in determining authentic possession, because it
established deviance from ‘normal’ skin’s reaction to burning and piercing. As
to the mouth of the authentically possessed, it foamed (Hooper et al. 1641),
4 The statement is also noteworthy because it expands our purview from merely the
really possessed and the fakers, to include those who truly believe they are
possessed but who are misguided. They are credible persons, but not credibly
possessed persons.
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produced bizarre variations in voice, or was incapable of emitting speech
whatsoever, remaining mute (Kirby 1693). The mouth of the truly possessed
could make sounds without moving the lips, perfectly ventriloquized (Darrell
1599), but it could not say certain words at all – like ‘Christ’, in the tale of
Thomas Sawdie, instead producing animal sounds liking neighing, or the
croaking of a frog (Anonymous 1664; Barrow 1664). The loss of humanness,
as indicated by convincing animal sounds, was key to determining a demon’s
occupation of the body.
Striking on this score were observations of the tongue in the mouth of
the possessed: The tongue was always very large or could be doubled (Barrow
1664); sometimes hanging out (Kirby 1693), sometimes immovably fixed
inside, or in other cases completely retractable into the throat (Darrell 1599;
Kirby 1693), like the tongue of a frog or eel. There were additional physical
signs that traced the line of the internal and external, like those of bodily waste
or clothing: Urine containing black dust and rags of brown paper (Anonymous
1664), for example, or the unexpected removal or tearing of clothes (Barrow
1664; Anonymous 1664).
Next, genuine possession was often reported to have begun after
physical contact with a mysterious figure. Several cases described an exchange
with a man in black offering money (Anonymous 1664:5; Kirby 1693). One
case included an allegedly demonic figure who posed as a Master of Arts
offering quick and easy comprehension of difficult topics, and admission to the
University of Padua (Dalton 1646:5). Other possession narratives described
contact with persons or animals of a specific color, usually black, increasingly
the patina of possession par excellence – ‘an ugly black man with shoulders
higher than his head’ (Thomas 1971:480) – or, also common, as a black dog
(Kirby 1693).
The proper manifestation of bodily codes was key to verifying real
possession, but bodily comportment after a given episode of exorcism was
often remarked in case descriptions. Following the cessation of demonic signs,
true victims appeared reliably calm, rational, reverent, and self-possessed:
After the spirits that had afflicted him were cast out, observers described
Thomas Sawdie as ‘demeaning himself soberly and modestly’ (Anonymous
1664:14). Following the departure of a fifth spirit, the possessed boy in
Barrow’s account ‘sat very still, with a very sober countenance, lifting up his
hands and eyes, as though he had a matter of praise on his mind’ (Barrow
1664:16).
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Despite the detailed criteria for the physical verification of real
possession, exorcists were aware that many patients exhibited symptoms that
merely appeared demonic, but were not, and that the discernment of true fakes
was key to their own reputation and status: One exorcist recounted that,
the Doctor told him, he could take him up into his Chamber, and shew
him the appearances of Spirits: I desired the Doctor he would do so,
and I would stay-below; but, to put me off, he called for a Latine Bible,
and read some words in Latine to him; with that he told me, that
thereby he knew he [the patient] dissembled, because he did not roar
as at other times, when the word God is read in Latine (Barrow
1664:12; emphasis added).
The possibility of sham was integral to discernment, and this seems to have
added a quality of theater and spectacle to the entire process. Accounts of
discernment circulated widely, as a class of popular literature called
‘possession pamphlets’ (Gibson 1999; 2015; Almond 2004). Such pamphlets
were often penned by exorcists, who invoked accusations of fraud precisely to
defend against them. They countered with detailed descriptions of their own
evidence, and lists of named witnesses to the possessions and exorcisms. The
circulated stories’ hearsay status only added to their value, as revealed gossip.
James Dalton’s letter to his brother on 14 December 1646 offers a glimpse of
how this market worked. In reference to the case of Joyce Dovey he wrote, ‘It
is the property of humane nature to desire newes’ (Dalton 1646:1), even if that
news is ‘received at the second or third hand’ (‘yet by such persons, as I
nothing doubt the truth of’).
If the purpose of the pamphlets was in many cases a defense against
accusations of fabrication, such defenses merely opened further questions:
Who, exactly, was taken to be dissimulated: The victim? The exorcist? The
pamphlet’s author? The publisher? The devil? Accusations of fraud and fakery
were lodged against all of the above, and legal claims levied against all but the
devil himself. For Protestants especially, exorcists were something like witches
themselves, frauds applying the same kind of magic as the afflicted (Thomas
1971:478, 485). There were charges levied against simulating victims, as well
against fraudulent exorcists accused of seeking to enhance their own
reputations (Thomas 1971:482-483, 492). Puritan pastor John Darrell was
convicted of training his patients to appear possessed, in order to best
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showcase his power over demons. The printer of the pamphlet defending
Darrell’s dramatic dispossession of Thomas Darling was likewise imprisoned
for confirming and amplifying such theatrics with his pen (Thomas 1971:483-
484).
Purification: Controlling possession
When the Anglican Church dismissed possession whatsoever, in 1604 (Canon
72), with the position that the biblical ‘age of miracles’ was past, accusations
of fakery still circulated widely, now typically turned against ‘sect’ Protestants,
especially Puritans and Quakers. The proliferation and relative standardization
of the possession narrative made particular cases dubious even to those who in
principle accepted their veracity. Thus did the Catholic Church begin to
regulate and standardize possession and exorcism techniques in the Roman
Rite of 1618. The star exorcist of the Loudun possession spectacle, Father
Surin, was withdrawn and reprimanded by the Jesuit superior general in 1636
for ‘giving himself over to spiritual inventions’ (De Certeau 2000:212).
While different branches of the Christian church restricted and
rationalized possession, states did too. In the wake of the massive possession
cases at Aix-en-Provance, Loudun, and Louviers in France, official support –
including payment of a royal pension to its enactors – for possessing spectacles
waned after 1634. Spirits continued to be manifested in British North America
for at least another half-century, most famously that of Salem (Boyer &
Nissenbaum 1974), and indeed they continued perforce everywhere, but never
with the same public weight as before. As a spectacle of the public sphere,
démonomanie – to take Jean Bodin’s title of 1580 – was losing its sponsors and
its audience.
The popularity of possession cases had grown by ricocheting between
performance, representation, repression, and defense. Possession as a
phenomenological object was interpolated through the foil of its testing and
the prospect of counterfeit. It was in light of this insurmountable
indeterminacy, Foucault suggested, that the progressing medicalization of
demonology engendered a novel hermeneutics of the self. Determining who,
and what, possesses you, required an articulated system of interior life
(Foucault [1962] 1999:76). Here we near the inaugural moment of the
‘modern’ individual, where Descartes began his 1641 Meditations with the
question of his own possession: ‘There is some unidentified deceiver…who is
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dedicated to deceiving me constantly. Therefore, it is indubitable that I also
exist, if he deceives me’ (Descartes 1641:24). Alongside the standard Cartesian
quip, ‘I think therefore I am’, we must take account of this other Cartesian line
of thought: ‘I may be deceived, therefore I am’.
Into Africa
Outside of Europe, on new colonial frontiers, possession was everywhere
found and floridly described, and this was especially true in Africa and the
Americas (e.g. De Léry [1578] 1990; De Marees [1602] 1987). The transfer
and translation of European demon possession to spirit possession phenomena
encountered on faraway shores was a complex operation of colonial semiotics.
It required pivots or hinges to link otherwise disparate phenomena of
indigenous Amerindian or African ritual procedures to familiar if polemically
disparaged rites in Europe. One way the linkage and transfer were made was
through the codes of color. As mentioned above, European demonic events
were in various ways narratively coded as ‘black’. Many famous possession
cases, widely circulated in Great Britain, described an exchange with a man in
black, offering money (cf. the Thomas Sawdie case, Anonymous 1664; Kirby
1693). Others described contact with persons or animals, usually black, the
patina of possession par excellence. In fact, the color black was central to
persuasive possession narratives: The tongue turned black (Aubin 1693:79),
urine turned black, and the skin turned black. The skin would turn black in
places (Darrell 1599). Black dust and rags are named, along with the sight of a
black dog, a black bird (Baddeley 1622:50, 65), or contact with a man in black,
a black man or black child. In British America, Increase Mather documented
that many in the Morse family, in Newberry, Massachusetts, reported seeing a
‘Blackmore Child’ while hearing spirit voices (Mather 1684:153-154). In
Flanders, 1649, Antoinette Bourignon witnessed 32 cloistered girls with ‘a
great number of little black children with wings’ flying around their heads, a
sure sign of their compact with the devil (Hale 1693:24).
Demonic blackness as a mark of possession was simultaneously
discerned on the west coast of Africa, sometimes in non-human signs and
ciphers, sometimes in the skin-color of Africans themselves. Pieter de Marees’
1602 description of West Africa described dancing, drumming, and other
possession-like ‘antics’, during which a black dog appeared (De Marees [1602]
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1987:66, 71), recapitulating a standard prop of the European mis-en-scene5.
The French cartographer, Reynaud Des Marchais’ account repeats the
appearance of the black dog by the ‘fetich tree’. He asserted that the Marabous
tell the people that this is their God (who is black) (Labat 1730:341).
Describing possession required attending to possession’s components
– a proper story with key elements for recounting and dissemination and
comparison. That is to say, possession was scripted. As script, it was mobile
and could be carried around the world to match local ritual action to its
conventions. It could also be fantasized and imposed, according to prismatic
conventions that governed not just ways of writing, but even ways of seeing.
By the mid-18th century, according to some of the earliest proto-
anthropological texts that generated a vocabulary for comparative religion,
such as Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1759) or Charles de
Brosses’ Du culte des dieux fétiches ([1760] 1970), possession had become a
freestanding, objective morphological class that could be applied to the
purpose of advancing comparisons of rituals and beliefs across groups, and
yoked to the task of defining religion as such. These proto-anthropological
descriptions usually marked the alterity of African practices. It is equally
important, though, to recall possession’s use as a hinge with which others’
ritual practices were first named real religions whatsoever, by being routinely
classed as similar to Christian ritual practice – especially via Protestant-
Catholic polemics on the status of magic and ritual – and so drawn into a
comparative field. The chief merchant of the Dutch West Indies Company,
Willem Bosman, summed up this translation in describing the port of Ouidah
in West Africa: ‘To conclude the Subject of their Religion, I must add, that
they have a sort of Idea of Hell, the Divel, and the Apparition of Spirits. And
their Notions, concerning these, are not very different from those of some
People amongst us’ (Bosman 1705:384), or elsewhere: Their priests exorcise
demons ‘like a Pope’ (Bosman 1705:123). Noteworthy is how Bosman’s
discovery of African ‘religion’ depends first of all on locating its likeness with
European practices. He found a resemblance in their overlapping repertories of
spirits, demons, apparitions, and exorcisms. If possession signaled Africa’s
ultimate difference (e.g. Atkins 1735:34), spirit possession also provided a
5 Also the color black: ‘[T]hey say their God is as black as they are, and is not
good…We answered that our God is as white as we are, is good, and gives us many
blessings’ (De Marees [1602] 1987:72).
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shared intersubjective domain of truth. Des Marchais’ report, another key text
used in De Brosses’ classic, stated that
the inhabitants of the Gold Coast say that their God is black, and their
Marabouts assure that he often appears at the foot of the fetish-tree in
the figure of a great black dog. They have learned from the whites that
this great black dog is called the devil; one needs but say that name
before them and add some imprecation such as ‘may the devil take you
and ring your neck’, to make them tremble and faint (Labat 1730:341)6.
Texts like Bosman’s and Des Marchais’ serve as a reminder of how
comparative categories misrecognize and distort, even as they are necessary to
the constitution of meta-frames like ‘religion’ whatsoever.
I’ve described the emergence of a possession script that was applied
as a hinge term for the colonization of the Americas and the African coast.
‘Possession’ as a comparative category was forged at the crossroads of early
modern demonology, the proto-anthropological colonial descriptions of the
ritual practices of ‘others’ – above all Africans and Afro-Americans – and, not
least, the prospect of the fake. West European Christian fakecraft produced a
purified occidental idea of the rational individual, on the one hand, and
possessed Africa, on the other. The two projects were closely bound up
together.
IV. Conclusion: Fake Africa
From the early modern period forward, ‘religion’ was increasingly defined in
relation to Africa, as Chidester (1996; 2014) has vividly described it. One of
the oft-registered features of African religions was ‘spirit possession’. The
trope of the possessed person was transferred from European to African shores
6 ‘Les habitans de la côte d’Or dissent que leur Dieu est noir, et leurs Marabous
assurent qu’il leur apparoît souvent au pied de l’arbre des Fetiches sous la figure
d’un grand chien noir. Ils ont appris des blancs que ce grand chien noir s’appelle le
Diable; il ne faut que prononcer ce nom devant eux et y joindre quelque
imprécation, comme le diable t’emporte et te torde le col, pour les faire trembler et
tomber en défaillance’.
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by around the year 1700. The geographic shift marked the move toward Africa,
and then the African Americas, as the possessed places par excellence. The
extension of the possession script to colonial shores created further problems
of distinguishing between real and fake, between authentic possession and its
fraudulent enactments.
Western travelers’ descriptions of African phenomena of spirit
possession were almost always accompanied by the question of authenticity.
As European Christians were purified, or subjected to rationalized procedures
of spirit-presence, the profile of allegedly permeable African persons only
became clearer. S/he was analogous to ‘fetish-gold’, composed of unknown
and potentially false contents (Pietz 1988). The guts of persons, like the value
of metals, could only be measured through the technology of outer signs – by
scales and filters – and, of course, through discourse about the fake7.
Even though possession was taken to be bizarre, dangerous, primitive,
and ultimately ‘false’ as a religious practice, observers of Africa also detected
true and untrue falsehoods, real and faked fakery. The distinction between them
lay in the attribution of intent: Intentional chicanery versus unknowing error.
The confusion stemmed in part from the problem of the fetish, again linking
economic considerations (gold of unknown internal content; the fetish as an
object used to seal business deals; the fetish as a form of property – Atkins
1735:84); aesthetic ones (‘fetishing’ women – Atkins 1735:61)8, and
‘religious’ ones – random objects or sites attributed with special powers, both
personal and public (Pietz 1988).
7 De Marees’ 1602 description of the Gold Coast already closely allies false gold,
false religion, and untrustworthy business partners: ‘We once imprisoned a Black
or Negro in the Ship to atone for bringing false Gold. Every morning he took a Tub
of water, washed his face in it, then scooped up handfuls of water and threw them
over his head, saying many words to himself, spitting in the water and doing a lot
of Monkey-buffoonery. We asked him why he did this. He answered that he was
praying to his god that it might rain and that his people might find much Gold, so
that they would come to ransom him and he might soon go home’ (De Marees
[1602] 1987:73).
8 Atkins reports that the women in Sierra Leone, for example, love fetishing, ‘setting
themselves out to attract the good Graces of the Men’ (Atkins 1735:61; cf. 88, 95);
and that, at Cape Apollonia, the Natives are ‘better fetished than their Neighbours’
(Atkins 1735:73).
Paul Christopher Johnson
130
Charles de Brosses’ 1760 work carried extraordinary influence for the
comparative study of religion. De Brosses, crucially, located spirit possession
as closely proximate to fetishism and dubiously permeable personhood. For De
Brosses, fetishism became a stage in universal human progress, presaging the
well-known narratives of Comte and then Tylor. Yet in this universal progress
of necessary deceptions, Africa was exemplary. Within Africa, it was the
serpent cult at the slave port of Ouidah that represented fetishism par
excellence. It was here that De Brosses described the faking of possession
(‘hysterical vapours’) by women otherwise under the control of men (De
Brosses [1760] 1970:26). His gloss, derived from Bosman’s description, reads
as follows:
He being a Stranger to the Religion of this Country, had a Wife of this
Nation, which fell Mad and pretended to be seized by the Serpent: But
he instead of sending her to the Snake-house, clapt her in Irons; which
so enraged this She-Devil…that she privately accused her Husband to
the Priests; who not willing to make any publick Attempts on him,
because he was a Gold-Coast Negroe who differed from them in
Religion; yet secretly Poison’d him (De Brosses [1760] 1970:375-
376).
What is worth noting here is that Bosman goes well beyond the fakery of
possession to note the imposture of the woman – thus, faked fakery – and even
the presence of those who know that ‘this is all nothing but a pure Cheat’ (De
Brosses [1760] 1970:375) but act otherwise. Thus Bosman gives us nothing
less than Africans performing faked belief in faked fakery. This is offered here
as an apposite concluding example of how Europe honed its ‘possessive
individualism’ (MacPherson 1962) over against its ‘discovery’ of African
spirit possession and imagined fickle, porous persons.
* * *
Marcel Mauss’s classic 1938 essay, Une catégorie de l’esprit humaine: La
notion de personne celle de ‘moi’ (The notion of the person Mauss [1938]
1985), suggests a sequence in which the personnage, a traditional role that
Fakecraft
131
possesses a tribe-member9 then (after detours to China and India), yields to the
legal category of the persona or citizen (as in Rome), and then to the Christian
‘person’ – a being combining both civil status and interiorized conscience. His
story’s protagonist is the human spirit itself, moving from the so-called
primitive to the citizen, to the Christian person, and finally the psychological
being, a ‘self’ with metaphysical and moral value; a body inhabited by a
bounded, buffered soul. Mauss locates himself and his readers among the heirs
and protectors of this special heritage: ‘Nous avons des grands biens à
défendre. Avec nous peut disparaître l’Idée’ (We have great possessions to
defend. With us the idea could disappear). In this fable, human consciousness
ends its journey magically evacuated of social and material relations and
possessed of the Idea10 – powerful fakecraft indeed.
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paulcjoh@umich.edu
‘Somewhere between
science and superstition’:
Religious outrage, horrific
science, and The Exorcist
(1973)
Amy C. Chambers
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Abstract
Science and religion pervade the 1973 horror The Exorcist (1973), and the film exists, as
the movie’s tagline suggests, ‘somewhere between science and superstition’. Archival
materials show the depth of research conducted by writer/director William Friedkin in
his commitment to presenting and exploring emerging scientific procedures and accu-
rate Catholic ritual. Where clinical and barbaric science fails, faith and ritual save the
possessed child Reagan MacNeil (Linda Blair) from her demons. The Exorcist created
media frenzy in 1973, with increased reports in the popular press of demon possessions,
audience members convulsing and vomiting at screenings, and apparent religious and
specifically Catholic moral outrage. However, the official Catholic response to The Exorcist
was not as reactionary as the press claimed. The United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops’ Office of Film and Broadcasting (USCCB-OFB) officially and publicly condemned
the film as being unsuitable for a wide audience, but reviews produced for the office by
priests and lay Catholics and correspondence between the Vatican and the USCCB-OFB
show that the church at least notionally interpreted it as a positive response to the power
of faith. Warner Bros. Studios, however, were keen to promote stories of religious
outrage to boost sales and news coverage – a marketing strategy that actively contradicted
Friedkin’s respectful and collaborative approach to working with both religious commu-
nities and medical professionals. Reports of Catholic outrage were a means of promoting
The Exorcist rather than an accurate reflection of the Catholic Church’s nuanced response
to the film and its scientific and religious content.
Corresponding author:
Amy C. Chambers, Manchester Metropolitan University, Department of English, 101 Bellhouse, Lower
Ormond Street, Manchester M15 6BX, UK.
Email: amy.c.chambers@mmu.ac.uk
History of the Human Sciences
ª The Author(s) 2021
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Keywords
psychiatry, science and cinema, science and religion, science communication, The Exorcist
(1973)
One of the best things that could happen is if the Pope denounces it.
– William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist1
The Exorcist appears to have everything – including Catholic approval.
– Rev. Lester Kinsolving (1974), Episcopalian newspaper columnist
The entanglement of Catholicism with psychiatry, science, and medicine possessed the
popular American imagination in the 1970s. This fascination was crystalised in William
Friedkin’s iconic film The Exorcist, released in the United States in December 1973, in
which an innocent young girl is seemingly demonically possessed and subjected to tests
to decipher where specifically her affliction sits in terms of the realms of science and
superstition. The Exorcist became a long-term cultural touchstone for discussions of the
tension between science and religion, the representation and treatment of mental health,
and the position of religion in contemporary North America.
The Protestant magazine Christian Century ran an article connecting The Exorcist
with the Watergate scandal, referring to the two events as ‘psychodramas of the Amer-
ican soul’.2 Responses like this were frequent and articulated fears of a church seemingly
losing its control over American society and its soul, whilst simultaneously highlighting
the prevalence of the psy-sciences in US popular discourse. Protestant commentator Carl
Raschke claimed that the Devil was having ‘his day’ and that the film reflected ‘the
cynical mood of our age [arising] by default from the wreck of traditional religious as
well as social values’.3 Thus, The Exorcist is positioned at the intersection of a hugely
volatile and disruptive moment in US history. Although The Exorcist was part of a series
of popular culture texts to reflect upon these ideas, it did so with such a level of
compelling scientific and religious fidelity that it should be understood as cultural
moment that engaged with the social and cultural issues of the long 1960s – an era
where Americans were questioning many of their central authorities and institutions.
The Exorcist connects the worlds of science and religion through their individual
responses to the seen and unseen, and the known and unknown. For science, these
apparent binaries are at the centre of research across discovery, observation, and critical
and peer review of findings in attempts to ensure ‘a special kind of reliability’ (Chalmers,
1999: ixx). The Exorcist offers a critique of what might be considered ‘the objectifying
tendency of science’ (Crawford, 1998: 36). The increasing commodification and
mechanisation of medicine delegates decisions about medical treatment and ethics to
modern medical technologies. Yet this is not taking place in ‘some abstract, science
fictional future’ or in horrific cinematic imagination; it is happening in the present
(Wald, 2012: 202). The medical and psychiatric space (the hospital and the clinic) takes
on a different role – that of the space not of logic, cure, and control but of trial and (more
than often) error, as these professionals are unable to diagnose their patient. The most
33Chambers
visibly horrific scenes, as pertaining to the horror film genre, occur in the operating
theatre and not in the realms and representation of the supernatural.
Medico-psy-scientific and religious authority was under public scrutiny during the
period surrounding The Exorcist’s release: ‘Ordinary Americans were overhauling how
they understood cultural authority . . . and how professional experts represented reality
itself’ (Quinlan, 2014: 328). Doctors, scientists, and priests, as traditional authority
figures, ‘appeared potentially self-interested or ineffective, proffering biased knowledge
under the guise of scientific-institutional objectivity’ (ibid.). They seemingly failed to
adequately explain or eradicate the national and international traumas of the 1960s and
1970s, including the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the dismantling of traditions and
intolerances by the counterculture, including civil rights, women’s rights, and the emer-
gence of ‘alternative’ approaches to science and religion. In a blending of ‘the conven-
tional and the countercultural’, young people were not rejecting science and religion
entirely but rather seeking experiences beyond the state-sponsored ‘big science’ that had
defined the US post-1945, and more personal transcendent experiences inspired by
‘Eastern religions and chemically enhanced spirituality’ (Kaiser and McCray, 2016:
2). Films of the era, including A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Exorcist, One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Halloween (1978), and When a Stranger Calls (1979),
‘articulated long-standing American fears of tyranny, control, and gendered disorder’
(Rondinone, 2020: 902). These films, as Troy Rondinone (ibid.: 925) argues, can be used
to ‘trace the trip from distrust to institutional annihilation’, specifically of US mental
health facilities, but more broadly of the major US institutions of power, including
government, church, business, and the sciences.
As a reflection of and an engagement with the issues of the era, The Exorcist was
inevitably permeated with discussion and critique of science and religion. The film
exists, as the movie’s tagline suggests, ‘somewhere between science and superstition’,
but it is not simply a battle between the two but rather a ‘critique of strict allegiance to a
set of extremes, whether “good or evil” or “faith or science”’ (Dudenhoeffer, 2010: 76).
The Exorcist was also released in the aftermath of the Second Ecumenical Council of the
Vatican (1962–5), which addressed the relationship between the Catholic Church and the
modern world. Vatican II, as it is commonly known, was announced in 1959 with three
purposes: ‘the spiritual and pastoral renewal of the Catholic Church, the updating of the
Church’s outlook and institutions . . . , and ecumenical reconciliation with non-Catholic
Christians’ (Marshall, 2017: 999). The church wanted to be seen as a modern institution
that was not in conflict with science, shown through a willing acceptance of ‘sociology,
psychology, and psychoanalysis’ over the concept of evil for explaining humanity’s
problems (Jancovich, 1992: 93–4). This more liberal approach to the sciences is imitated
in The Exorcist through the scientist-priest characters, Fathers Karras (Jason Miller) and
Merrin (Max von Sydow).
The Exorcist is adapted from William Blatty’s novel The Exorcist (1971) and follows
the experiences of 12-year-old girl Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) and her actress mother
Chris (Ellen Burstyn) as they take up temporary residence in Georgetown in Washing-
ton, DC for an on-location movie shoot. Regan begins to behave strangely, and then
profanely and violently. Chris seeks medical attention, and several visceral invasive
medical procedures are used to attempt to diagnose somatic causes, but Regan’s apparent
34 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
illness appears to be beyond the expertise and experiences of hospital doctors and
psychiatrists. What Regan needs is an exorcist. Chris meets with Father Karras (Jason
Miller), a Roman Catholic priest and psychiatrist who is losing his faith and dealing with
a terminally ill mother, whose medical care he cannot afford. As it becomes apparent to
Karras that Regan is possessed and an appropriate candidate for the ancient ritual of
exorcism, he requisitions the services of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), an elderly
priest and archaeologist who has just returned from Iraq with premonitions of coming
evil. The demon, or perhaps the Devil itself, is exorcised from Regan at the cost of both
priests’ lives: Merrin dies from a heart attack and Karras is willingly possessed by the
demon, killing himself in a moment of faith and sacrifice. Where a clinical and at times
seemingly barbaric adherence to science fails, ancient ritual and the power of restored
faith save the possessed child from her demons.
The Exorcist was originally released on 26 December 1973 in the Christmas period
(Thanksgiving to New Year) of the US blockbuster calendar (Neale, 2003: 55). This
release date was considered inappropriate by the Catholic Church but was seen as one
that, as one priest in correspondence with Friedkin explained, ‘ought to get the crowds
[because] weary shoppers are always calling upon the devil and wishing others to reside
in hell at that time’.4 International release dates were spread across 1974 from the March
of that year into early 1975. The film caused controversy wherever it went because of its
salacious and blasphemous religious content, including scenes of the possessed child
masturbating with a crucifix, and this controversy was exacerbated by increasing reports
of requests for exorcisms and strange behaviour at cinema viewings.
The intensity of The Exorcist’s cultural impact ‘stretched far beyond its power to
overwhelm audiences’ (Poole, 2009: 156). As W. Scott Poole argues, in the late 1960s
into the 1970s, there was ‘a moment in American cultural life when the Devil occupied a
place in the public discourse’, serving as a character and a cumulative site for a variety of
cultural narratives of the 1970s, often including mistrust in the institutions of both
science and religion (ibid.). The Exorcist tapped into the fears of the zeitgeist, including
invasion of society by the other (individuals, groups, or ideologies) and the disruption of
the morals, minds, and bodies of America’s future. This corruption is often represented
by possessed children in the Satanic movies of the era, because they are ‘the carriers for
the group’s and species’ genetic future’ (Fry, 2015: 19). The Exorcist became a reference
point for decades to come – with its continued receivership ensured by its controversies
and urban legends – in the discussion of uncontrollable youth, the psy-sciences, and the
positioning of religion in the long 1960s. ‘The reality of history deconstructed the deeply
held belief in American innocence’ that had emerged and been entrenched by the 1950s
but had become increasingly difficult to uphold following the civil rights movements and
anti-war protests of the 1960s (Poole, 2009: 156). As an exemplary film of the era, The
Exorcist communicates an image of a United States in an unstable state of change that
can no longer avoid its real and historical systemic evils.
Recently released archival materials show the depth of research conducted by writer
and director William Friedkin in his commitment to presenting and exploring emerging
scientific procedures alongside accurate Catholic ritual.5 The Exorcist created a media
circus in December 1973 and throughout 1974, with increased reports in the popular press
of demon possessions, audience members convulsing and vomiting at screenings, and
35Chambers
apparent religious and specifically Catholic moral outrage. The official Catholic response
to The Exorcist, however, was not as reactionary as the press claimed. The United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office of Film and Broadcasting (USCCB-OFB) offi-
cially condemned the film as being unsuitable for a wide audience.6 But reviews produced
privately for the office by priests and lay Catholics, and correspondence between the
Vatican and the USCCB-OFB, show that the church at least notionally interpreted it as
a positive response to the power of faith. Warner Bros. Studios, however, were keen to
promote stories of religious outrage to boost sales and news coverage – a marketing
strategy that actively contradicted Friedkin’s respectful and collaborative approach to
working with both religious communities and medical professionals. Reports of Catholic
outrage were a means of promoting The Exorcist rather than an accurate reflection of the
Catholic Church’s nuanced response to the film and its scientific and religious content.
Science, religion, and post-classical Hollywood
From around 1930 to 1968, most films released by Hollywood studios were censored in
some way. This was an era of censorship that was in part the result of Christian cam-
paigns as well as of industry fears of direct government intervention. At the end of 1960s,
the US Catholic Church was emerging from the cessation of a long period of notable
cultural control as movie censors after over 30 years of direct influence. The authority
that the US Catholic Church felt it had over US society and its values as expressed in the
Hollywood movie was diminished from censor to commentator.
During the late 1920s and into the 1930s, several Christian denominations were
involved in the popularisation and ultimate acceptance by Hollywood studios of a moral
code of production that aligned with Christian values (Black, 2013; Leff and Simmons,
1990). The Motion Picture Production Code (1930–68) allowed censors and religious
groups – the Production Code Administration (PCA) and the National Legion of
Decency – to request changes to film content in pre- and post-production. Studios were
required to submit treatments and screenplays for approval and make changes to shoot-
ing scripts in accordance with the advice given, and then submit the final cut of the film
for consideration, which would often result in edits and reshoots. In order for a film to be
given general release and considered appropriate for all audiences, film-makers had to
work with censors and religious commentators.
Religious groups and predominately mainline Christians have ‘often attempted to
influence the way stories about science have appeared on cinema screens’, crediting the
movies with the power to influence and even corrupt their viewers (Kirby and Chambers,
2018: 279). Between the 1930s and the 1960s, religious censors had the power to request
changes to Hollywood movie science that they found incompatible with their faith, such
as Christian notions of the human mind, body, and soul. They could control to an extent
which stories were being told about science and how audiences would receive them. The
Production Code lost much of its power by the 1960s due to broader cultural changes,
including the rise of television, an increasingly permissive social stance towards sexual
matters, and a more socially progressive attitude in the Catholic Church. The end of this
era of censorship saw a shift in the intersection of science, religion, and cinema, as
Christians lost their direct control over movie content.
36 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
Despite the relaxation of the US Catholic Church’s official attitudes to on-screen
depictions of science, concerns amongst religious groups about scientific content in films
remained after the end of official censorship. Without the power to censor movies, how-
ever, these groups had to find other ways to influence the way audiences interpreted
cinematic stories about science. They were engaging with science narratives rather than
altering or preventing them, and began producing and disseminating ratings, reviews, and
educational viewing guides and organising boycotts and picket lines. These interceptions
at the point of reception were not the only way that the Catholic Church gained influence;
the popularity and wide dissemination of the Catholic Film Newsletter and its extensive
reviewing of films on general release did lead to some film-makers choosing to consult
with the church and voluntarily offering changes in their content in order to gain a
favourable rating that would affect audience numbers in religious communities (Kirby
and Chambers, 2018).
The introduction of a ratings system and the resultant shift to the Catholic Church
acting as a critic rather than a censor signalled an apparent loosening of control and
public morals – a moral decline that coincided with the release of ‘a Catholic horror film
[and] more specifically . . . a Jesuit horror film’ called The Exorcist (McDannell, 2008:
199). The Exorcist quickly became a cultural touchstone that would thereafter be asso-
ciated with the church. The film acted as a bellwether for the New Hollywood that would
arise, as ratings replaced censored and essentially Catholic-approved and mediated
content. ‘Boycotts, picketing, and “C” ratings had not staunched the flow of ever more
daring Hollywood films’ throughout the 1960s (Skinner, 1993: 153). In 1965, the
National Legion of Decency’s name was changed to the National Catholic Office for
Motion Pictures (NCOMP), and the dreaded C rating was replaced with the more ambig-
uous A-IV rating.7 These changes were a ‘concession to shifting mores’ and indicated
that the church had accepted that in order to remain relevant, it would need to adapt its
public-facing approach to movies (ibid.: 154).
The new freedom given to film-makers by the industry’s rating system allowed for
movies that ‘positioned controversial science and scientific ideas at the core of their
narratives’ (Kirby and Chambers, 2018). The Exorcist could show bloody and painful
medical procedures and demonstrably negative or satirical images of the Catholic Church
that would have been strictly prohibited by the PCA (Leff and Simmons, 1990). The
Exorcist was also part of a series of post-classical Hollywood films that relied on Catholic
storytelling and themes: the lapsed Catholic faith in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the deprav-
ity in The Devils (1971), the hypocrisy of The Godfather (1972), the urban Catholicism of
Rocky (1976), and the violence of the Devil in The Omen (1976). New rules made New
Hollywood, and the end of restrictions against scientific images and the critique of religion
opened up opportunities for film-makers as well as new challenges for US Catholics and
members of other Christian denominations (including Lutherans and Protestants) who
sought to ‘control’ the interpretation of such cinematic ideas.
The Exorcist: Exploitations, exaggerations, and exorcisms
The 1973 Christmas release of The Exorcist was accompanied by a media frenzy; the
most extreme reports conveyed patrons going into cardiac arrest and spontaneous
37Chambers
abortion (Kermode, 1998: 84). These were accompanied by more frequent stories of
cinemagoers fainting, vomiting, and shouting during screenings, and of increased reports
of breakdowns, suicide, and possession in the weeks after seeing the film. The North
American weekly Newsweek (Figure 1), in its 11 February 1974 edition, ran a cover story
titled ‘The Exorcism Frenzy’ (Woodward, 1974: 60–6). It featured stories about janitors
up to their ankles in vomit in cinemas in Illinois, a Californian moviegoer charging at the
screen to ‘get the demon’, Boston Catholic Centers receiving daily requests for exor-
cisms, and psychiatrists’ opinion pieces mooting the idea that possession was ‘not
inconceivable’. These stories were underpinned with narratives about the moral outrage
of the Catholic Church and highlighted the cautionary classification given to the film by
the Catholic Office of Film and Broadcasting in the Catholic Film Newsletter.
The official review published in the Catholic Film Newsletter on 15 January 1974
gave the film a rating of A-IV, with quite a conservative and negative write-up. This
response was officially built from the responses of the priests and lay Catholics who had
seen and commented on the film, but it also seemed to reflect wider concerns about how
the film would inevitably be aligned with the church.8 The collated review was quick to
highlight the rarity of exorcism in the Catholic Church and the fact that ‘modern knowl-
edge of psychosomatic disorders [explained] why the Church in recent times has rarely
approved the use of the rite of exorcism’ (NCOMP, 1974). The piece also suggested that
Figure 1. Front cover of Newsweek (11 February 1974).
38 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
the film was a reflection of ‘sick faddist trends in contemporary society’ and ‘fascination
with the occult and devil worship’, with the film being at risk of confirming rather than
rejecting such blasphemous approaches – especially since the film ended in a particularly
problematic way for Catholics, as ‘either the devil kills the priest or he, in an act of
heroism, commits suicide’ (ibid.). Other Christian publications and commentators used
the film to critique the Catholic Church, the USCCB-OFB, and the A-IV rating (which
was often incorrectly reported as a C rating in the popular press), and the USCCB’s
cooperation with the film-makers.
Drawing upon the rhetoric surrounding The Exorcist in the popular and religious
press, the ecumenical (Protestant) Christian weekly The Courier ran the headline ‘Satan
Goes to the Movies’ alongside their coverage of the film and its controversies (Carter,
1974: 5). Interviews appeared with key figures, which seemingly gave them the oppor-
tunity to defend their inclusion. Father John J. Nicola, SJ, who served as a credited
advisor for the movie, was frequently quoted and profiled, but he often alerted journalists
to the fact that he had ‘staged his own small protest’ by resigning from the project as an
actor; he was originally cast as the president of Georgetown University, a role later
played by Father Thomas Bermingham, SJ (Gildea, 1974). Father Nicola’s refusal to
literally play a part in The Exorcist followed disagreements with William Friedkin over
the inclusion of the simulated desecration of the Madonna at Holy Trinity Catholic
Church (Georgetown) and the infamous crucifix masturbation scene (ibid.).9 Even those
who were directly involved in the project and suggested positive responses to the film
were still eager to keep their distance.
Protestant revivalist the Rev. Billy Graham, who was a full-time evangelist of the
Youth for Christ organisation, condemned The Exorcist by remarking that watching the
film was akin to exposing oneself ‘to the devil’ (Graham, 1974) and claimed that the film
was ‘a sort of spiritual pornography, pandering to man’s innate superstition’ (Cox, 1974:
10). His opinions on the film aligned with his own history of undermining the Roman
Catholic Church and the exorcism ritual, claiming that it was ineffective against the
Devil. Here, The Exorcist became a neat touchstone in the discussion of the evils of
society across several institutions, but most often the Catholic Church and the politics
and procedures of medical facilities. In his widely syndicated weekly ‘Inside Religion’
column, Episcopalian priest the Rev. Lester Kinsolving (1974) argued that ‘The Exorcist
appears to have everything – including Catholic approval’ and incorrectly reported that
the film had been classified as A-III (suitable for adults).10 In an ‘editorial departure
from its usual ecumenical stance’ (Woodward, 1974: 61), The Christian Century
denounced The Exorcist as a ‘hard-core pornography’, opining that ‘by our protestant
standards [The Exorcist offers] a completely impossible solution’ to the real possibility
of evil. Newsweek reported that in Washington, DC there were ‘waiting teams of Metho-
dist evangels passing out leaflets inviting standees to decide whether “you will be
controlled by the spirit of darkness or by the spirit of God”’ (ibid.: 61–3). Numerous
local and national predominately Protestant groups organised boycotts and campaigns
outside cinemas to warn people about the evil of the film, and in some cases, groups
offered support to audience members after seeing the film, providing local parishioners’
phone numbers and details of support meetings. Although the Catholic Church was said
to have contributed to a film that was tantamount to a ‘recruiting poster’ (Kael, 1974: 60),
39Chambers
the Protestant denominations utilised The Exorcist to criticise the Catholic Church, high-
light their own piety and ‘correct’ understanding of the Christian faith, and promote
Protestant publications and pews.
Newspapers were fascinated with how the audience was physically and mentally
affected by ‘vicariously experiencing super-natural events’ (Fiske, 1974; Heisler,
1975). There were reports in local, national, and syndicated press about apparent resul-
tant increases in church numbers (Ho and Wermiel, 1974; Keegan, 1974), requests for
exorcisms (Page, 1974), and visits to medical professionals (Greenson, 1974). The furore
surrounding The Exorcist essentially marketed the film for the studio and distributors
(both domestic and international), and as Pauline Kael (1974: 60) adroitly noted in her
New Yorker review, ‘complainers became accessories’ to the film’s success.11 The more
religious groups, whether Catholic or not, increasingly pushed back against the film and
its content the higher the box office figures rose, which also led to greater coverage in the
press at home and abroad in advance of the international release in March 1974. Warner
Bros. were delighted by the stories of religious outrage, as they correlated the news
coverage with boosted sales – with internal memos remarking that the best thing that
could happen would be a public condemnation from the Pope. However, this was a
marketing strategy that did not align with Friedkin’s attitude to working with both the
Catholic Church and medical professionals.
Systems of science: Diagnosis/cure
The purpose of interpolating fresh scientific material into The Exorcist was, as director
William Friedkin explained, to ‘root the picture in time, recent time’ and as far as
possible to enable modern audiences to have realistic and rational perceptions of what
was happening to the seemingly innocent Regan.12 In an internal Warner Bros. memo,
Friedkin explained that he and Blatty wanted to include what was ‘most up to date’ in
the film:
If we were making the picture a year from now, there’d be even greater advances in
diagnosis and treatment to the brain. The more you diagnose and are able to treat the brain,
the less one relies on exorcism.13
As researcher P. B. Ross remarked in the same memo, they actively explored ‘provo-
cative branches of medicine, psychsurgey [sic], arteriography, [and] pneumo-encepha-
lography’.14 Friedkin and Blatty’s approach to science and religion suggested that
Regan’s unexplained behaviour was unfixed, and that The Exorcist reflected the scien-
tific knowledge of the time. If new technologies and treatments had been available,
which they claim they would have included, perhaps the movie’s outcome and possible
interpretations might have been different.
Science, and specifically medicine, is presented as being unstable and inconclusive
but evolving, with the underlying suggestion that it was only a matter of time before
these unexplained phenomena would receive a reasonable scientific explanation. The
Exorcist shows the processes of science: the frustration of failure and the reality of using
new and old mechanical medical technologies. It demonstrates the objective reality of
40 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
the practice whilst also raising more subjective social and ethical issues surrounding
medical research and testing. Regan is framed as an experimental subject to be con-
trolled, probed, dissected, and resolved. Regan is extensively cannulated and scanned in
attempts to uncover hidden intracranial lesion or blood clotting. She undergoes a cerebral
angiography by direct carotid arterial puncture, wherein dye is injected in order to make
the structure of the brain easier to view on an X-ray, and then the more extreme but older
procedure of pneumoencephalography (PEG), which was phased out soon after the film
was released (Figure 2). The Exorcist offers the ‘most notable depiction’ of PEG and
‘provides us [neurosurgeons] with the most readily accessible historical documentation
of the procedure’ (Ishaque, Wallace, and Grandhi, 2017: 6). The processes are shown to
be painful, and then uncomfortable, clinical, noisy, and ultimately inconclusive.
A review in the British-based New Scientist magazine by comedian and trained
physician Graeme Garden argued that the medical scenes were ‘irresponsible’:
The really irresponsible feature of this film is its presentation of the medical sequences
. . . with squirting carotid blood, screaming child and mother, and badly oiled x-ray
equipment which screeches and crashes with a sound of a trip hammer exterminating old
trams. A genuinely disturbing scene, hardly likely to be welcomed by neurologists.
(Garden, 1974: 38)15
The medical scenes were the cause of much of the distress in the cinemas, rather than the
images of the occult. In 1988, William Blatty gave an interview to film journalist Nat
Segaloff where he irately rejected claims of such physical responses to the film, saying,
‘All this stuff about people vomiting – it’s nonsense’ and that it was always the scene
Figure 2. Regan’s (Linda Blair) pneumoencephalogram in The Exorcist. On location at Bellevue
Hospital (New York) with doctors and radiologists working at the hospital in August 1972.
41Chambers
with the lumbar needle and not the exorcism that led to walk-outs.16 As he explained,
‘That’s the point at which everybody got ill and which I always have to hang my head’.17
Although it was religious content and ‘frenzy’ that got the majority of the press attention,
it was the medical sequences that affected audiences the most. Friedkin’s attention to
medical accuracy is where many of the horror components of the film are founded; the
exorcism was intense but the medical sequences actually scared people out of their seats.
The medical space is made spectacular and horrific in The Exorcist not through the
presentation of Regan’s behaviour or the demon, but through the clinical nature of her
treatment and how this is communicated through shots and sound.18 As Ilkka Mäyrä
(1999: 159) notes, ‘The violent movements and noises of arteriographic machinery reach
diabolical dimensions’ and the Latin medical terms for possible medication ‘gain occult
resonances: Ritalin, Librium’. Behind-the-scenes photography and footage for The Exor-
cist show William Friedkin playfully entertaining Linda Blair (Regan) as she is dressed
in hospital robes with a milkshake in hand; the scenes that appear in the movie place
Regan under a clinically medical and cinematic gaze. Scenes with doctors and nurses
taking blood and conducting non-invasive tests are softened with questions about how
Regan is doing. In contrast, technical and medical detail take centre stage over the patient
in the angiography and PEG sequence (Figure 2): intimate close-ups and medium close-
ups stress Regan’s discomfort, with establishing shots highlighting Regan’s smallness in
comparison to the large, loud machinery.
Once the possible physical somatic causes of Regan’s affliction are exhausted, the
medics turn to the psy-sciences. Regan is sent to the Barringer Clinic, which Troy
Rondinone (2020: 905) identifies as ‘an apparent riff on the famed psychiatric facility
the Menninger Clinic’. The scene in the clinic further visualises Regan’s dislocation and
distance from a diagnosis, let alone a treatment or cure. Regan is projected into the
Barringer Clinic scene as a spectre on a grainy closed-circuit television screen as her
mother Chris faces a wall of white-coated doctors. Chris is analysed by the director and
his staff as her religious beliefs are interrogated. Chris’ response that she is atheist and
that her daughter has not been raised in a faith further highlights her frustration. Regan is
then presented as a possible case of clinical cacodemonomania, where the patient
believes they are possessed – a delusion that might be ‘treated’ through the ‘stylized
ritual’ of exorcism.
Research conducted in pre-production included meetings with medical practitioners
and visits to hospitals and labs. Friedkin created extensive diagrams and notes about the
internal workings of the body and how advances in medical technology (particularly
neuroimaging19) would increase the likelihood of diagnosing brain tumours and other
diseases of the central nervous system.20 Friedkin consulted with doctors working at the
New York University Medical Center, Colombia Presbyterian Hospital, and Georgetown
Medical Center – the ‘three of the best hospitals for X-ray of the brain and psychosur-
gery . . . [with] the leading men in the field’ – and used the facilities of Goldwater
Memorial Hospital and Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan for on-location shoots.21 He
discussed emergent technologies as well as those currently available in most hospitals
with the doctors he consulted. Extensive notes were made on draft scripts, including
three sides of handwritten notes in Blatty’s editor’s script from April 1972 concerning
filming and editing in clinical techniques and instruments. Science advisors included
42 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, hospital clinicians, and interventional radi-
ologists, who provided step-by-step instructions for depicting the procedures. Friedkin
creates a ‘striking medical realism’ by including graphic shots of medical practices that
had not been shown on screen before and detailed images of the brain following exten-
sive X-rays (Quinlan, 2014: 323). Friedkin (2012) later claimed that The Exorcist’s
carotid arteriogram and X-ray imaging footage was used for training radiologists due
to his attention to accuracy in these scenes.
The history of cinema is ‘bound up with medical cinematography’ and the processes
of recording new ways of knowing and visualising a world that is both seen and unseen,
known and unknown (Crawford, 1998: 24). The Exorcist was the first time that such
graphic medical scenes and detailed clinical images were made easily available to the
general public in mainstream cinema. The audience are not simply being told about
medical and psychiatric treatments and then being asked to believe the conclusion.
Instead, they are asked to believe their own eyes, as evidence is sifted and presented
with a visual accuracy that reflects the director’s attention to technical detail and the film
industry’s changing responses to on-screen representations of science and religion.
The Exorcist shows ‘science in action’, where the instruments and medical technol-
ogies become ‘crucial elements’ to the understanding of the science and the story rather
than mere theatrical settings and props (Latour, 1987: 69). As the rules and expectations
surrounding Hollywood changed in 1970s, graphic medical imagery became more fre-
quent as a site of both knowledge and body horror. Graeme Garden’s New Scientist
review claimed that the medical scenes were irresponsible and unnecessarily graphic, but
they provided a scientific realism that film-makers had rarely presented, or had been
censured from presenting to audiences, prior to this moment in cinematic history. The
doctors fail to diagnose Regan, but this is achieved through clinical and methodical
experiments – The Exorcist does not so much question science as present it as an
incomplete and evolving process. The Exorcist shows medical technology in use with
the reality of the discomfort and noise, rather than presenting it with depersonalised
resultant images and conclusive diagnoses; the processes of science are shown rather
than just being assumed, and the research into the medical is as vital as the collaboration
with the US Catholic Church.
Between science and superstition
William Friedkin was committed to exploring emerging scientific procedures alongside
presenting accurate Catholic ritual. Both sides of the story were researched to a similar
degree, ensuring that representations of both scientific method and religious ritual were
correct at the time of the film’s release. Whilst contemporary audiences might not even
flinch at the visceral arteriogram, the original audience were seeing one on screen for the
first time. The inclusion of these images of medical technology was intended to give the
medical scenes a futuristic edge to heighten the contrast with the ancient ritual.
Friedkin was considerate of the Catholic Church with the USCCB-OFB, who acted as
a point of contact with the Catholic Church in the United States and the Vatican. Friedkin
remained in contact with key figures at the USCCB-OFB throughout the process of
adapting and shooting William Blatty’s novel; he liaised with bishops and priests in
43Chambers
Georgetown, where The Exorcist is set, and more broadly with the Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of Washington.22 There were detailed discussions of the use of church
locations and whether scenes should be recreated on studio lots rather than on hallowed
church grounds. Friedkin, in his commitment to authenticity and accuracy, wanted to
shoot the film entirely on location but was denied access especially for the scene with the
mutilated ‘Statue of Our Lady’ at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.
The balance and indeed ‘tension’ at the centre of The Exorcist’s film adaptation is
between ‘the religious or mythical’ and a demand for realism, authenticity, and scientific
believability (Mäyrä, 1999: 144). When Blatty’s novel was optioned for adaptation, he
asserted that the film should have the ‘look of documentary realism’ (Travers and Reiff,
1974: 28), which aligned with the narrative he spun around the novel, in which he
claimed that he did not ‘consciously [formulate] the plot for The Exorcist’ and that his
main contribution was ‘researching the symptomology of possession and the medical
information’ (Blatty, quoted in ibid.: 16). Sara Williams (2011) argues that the ‘com-
plexity’ of the novel is often overlooked and perhaps overshadowed by the film, which
offers a far more conservative view due in part to the ‘abandonment of the [novel’s]
psychological realism’ concerning Regan’s diagnosis (see also Kinder and Houston,
1987). As Williams (2011: 218–19) contends:
The original text presents a psychological diagnosis of hysteria that precedes and challenges
the metaphysical explanation of Regan’s behavior which has been accepted culturally due to
the enduring popularity and notoriety of the film.
Friedkin’s adaptation does not offer the viable choice presented by the novel. Despite the
meticulous attention to scientific accuracy, the possible medico- or psy-scientific expla-
nation for Regan’s behaviour is dismissed, and the film conservatively ‘re-establishes
and asserts the patriarchal Christian moral order’ as Regan and indeed 1970s America’s
saviour (ibid.: 221).
Science advisors are now common practice in contemporary Hollywood (Kirby,
2008), but it was still relatively unusual for film-makers to consult with a whole team
of scientists and medical professionals in the preparation, shooting, and dissemination of
their films. The director also worked with a number of technical consultants (both
religious and scientific), who were listed together in the film’s end credits and in
the press packs: Rev. John Nicola, SJ; Rev. Thomas Bermingham, SJ; Rev. William
O’Malley, SJ; Prof. Norman E. Chase, MD; Herbert E. Walker, MD; and Arthur I.
Snyder, MD. In personal correspondence with hospitals, research centres, and specific
churches, further members of both the scientific and religious communities were recog-
nised for their advice, support, and in some cases on-screen involvement.23 The majority
of the nurses and doctors seen in the medical sequences were employees of the Gold-
water Memorial Hospital, where the scenes were shot.24 Again, Friedkin sought preci-
sion, this time scientific, to give balance and to underpin the validity of the science in
order to allow for faith to be logically positioned as the last hope for salvation.
William Friedkin had built a relationship with the USCCB-OFB, and correspondence
between him and the officials at the office were cordial and supportive. As Brother
Thomas Allen, a central figure at NCOMP, remarked in his personal review of The
44 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
Exorcist (dated 26 December 1973), ‘The film is strong propaganda for Christ, the
Jesuits, and the Catholic Church’, and Allen openly endorsed Blatty and Friedkin’s
‘risky venture’. This review was not released publicly but was included in clergy and
lay Catholic reviews amalgamated into a collective Catholic response to the film later
published in the Catholic Film Newsletter. Internal discussions reflected this attitude and
the grudging approval of a film that offered ‘salutary reflections on religious belief and
the limits of science’ in spite of its foul language, inappropriate images of child sexu-
ality, and violence (NCOMP, 1974).
Science, the body, and the Devil
The Exorcist signified and solidified the emergence of ‘A-movie’ horror, stretching the
limits of a newly liberal Hollywood. Alongside its place within a turn of Catholic-
themed narratives, the film also formed part of a subgenre of horror film focussing on
medical procedures and the horrors that could be enacted upon the human body in the
name of science, including Rabid (1977) and Coma (1978). In the medical horrors of
the 1970s, ‘medical technocracy replaced the Gothic villain and the hospital became the
castle’ (Badley, 1995: 24). Increasing trust and reliance on medical technology emerged
as a core locus of fear in this nascent subgenre that extrapolated advances in the bios-
ciences in the wake of the 1960s biotech revolution, where ‘fascination mingled with
fear’ (Wald, 2012: 188). Scientific innovation and the business of science and medicine
became part of the genre and reflected broader considerations of how the male-
dominated medical profession viewed and commodified the patient body. The Exorcist
revelled in ‘body horror and its powers of revulsion’ (Cruz, 2012: 161), and advances in
medicine were ‘recast’ as the ‘unknown’ in the place of supernatural spectres or mon-
strous humans (Boss, 1986: 19).
The on-screen battle between science, God, and the Devil is fought in The Exorcist
with unprecedented clinical detachment on and in a child’s body. As Octavia J. Cade
(2016: 67) argues, the archaeologists digging the historical Iraqi site in the film’s pro-
logue are doubled in the later hospital scenes, where ‘Regan’s body is excavated’ by
medics sifting through possible somatic causes. Like archaeologists methodically
exhuming evidence of past civilisations, medical professionals dig deeper into Regan
physically in increasingly invasive and painful procedures. However, it is only once a
psychiatrist is able to breach Regan’s subconscious through hypnosis and speak to the
‘demon’ buried inside her that those attempting to diagnose begin to consider possible
causes and supernatural solutions. Although it should be noted that the clinical opinion
expressed by the hospital doctors – that Regan’s mother should contact an exorcist – is
based upon the notion that Regan’s illness is psychological and that the exorcism would
be ‘a form of shock treatment’ to relieve the patient of her delusion of demonic posses-
sion (ibid.: 68). Doctors must invade and harm the child’s body in their attempts to
diagnose her affliction; Regan’s body is not her own as she becomes an object for
scientific experimentation.
The demonic bodily invasion means that priests must also harm Regan in order to
save her in mind and body. Whereas in the medical sequences Regan loses her bodily
autonomy to machines and scientists, in the scenes where demonic possession is
45Chambers
identified as the cause, she has lost her body, mind, and morals to the Devil. The
incongruence of the obscene tirades and vile actions enacted by an innocent child further
underscores the difficulty the scientist-priests have with concluding that an exorcism is
required.25 There is no concrete medical explanation, and Karras, framed as the religious
sceptic, eventually and begrudgingly accepts that the Catholic Church and the ancient
rite of exorcism is their only option. His ultimate sacrifice, which results in his death,
saves the child from further physical and psychological harm, although Regan, once
relieved of her affliction/possession, does not remember the period when the demon
emerged as the dominant personality, nor its eventual exorcism. Only the memories of
medical testing and bodily experimentation linger.
Conclusion
In The Exorcist, Regan is not the only subject to be probed and morally usurped; the
inherent trust in science and its apparent capacity for logic, realism, and healing is also
questioned. Where clinical and at times seemingly barbaric science fails, faith and ritual
save the possessed child. Medical science neither diagnoses nor cures Regan, but that is
not to say that it could not in the future; in the film, figures from both the religious and
the scientific community are open to being wrong and hope that science could provide an
answer. They both search for alternatives and evidence rather than immediately resorting
to worst-case-scenario actions: exorcism and invasive procedures.
Reports of Catholic outrage were a means of promoting The Exorcist rather than an
accurate reflection of the Catholic Church’s nuanced response to the film and its scien-
tific and religious content. Warner Bros.’ marketing team was, however, eager to exploit
reports of fainting fits, demonic possession, and religious outrage to boost sales and news
coverage – a strategy that actively contradicted Friedkin’s respectful and collaborative
approach.26 Yet the Catholic Church did not reject the film and its message – in internal
correspondence, letters, and even some centrally released film reviews, the church
acknowledged the film’s positive portrayal of the power of faith and the Catholic
Church. This encouraging response was not undermined by their rejection of the way
this message was framed with obscene language and disturbing sexual imagery.
By 1973, mainline Christian groups had lost their direct influence over the Hollywood
film industry but had managed to develop alternative ways of communicating their
responses to individual films and responding to the changing societal attitudes those
films reflected. Instead of vilifying the industry, the Catholic Church in particular chose
to engage with the films being released and hoped to shape the discussions taking place
both in and outside their congregation. They placed the onus on and their trust with the
audience, who could make their own decisions about what they would see and how they
would respond. Many of the science-based films released in the immediate post-
censorship era were thought to deify science, with scientists providing salvation through
their own sacrifices, most notably in the Omega Man (1971), where a scientist’s blood
sacrifice saves humanity (Chambers, 2019). The Exorcist, however, presents scientists as
fallible in a situation where their best efforts cannot explain away the mystery.
Over the decades since the release of The Exorcist, the Catholic Church’s reception of
the film has transformed, just as attitudes to what is acceptable on screen have also
46 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
continued to change. The Catholic Church now more openly embraces films that might
be seen to contradict or disturb Catholic rites and values, seeing them as an opportunity
for discussing faith. For example, early viewing guides produced in the mid 1970s began
this trend and included pamphlets on The Exorcist alongside a broad range of movies
intended as a tool for discussion. The Exorcist viewing guides showed an understanding
that viewers would interpret the film as fiction and not documentary. For the original
audience, The Exorcist was shocking in its portrayal of realistic science, sex, and vio-
lence (physical and verbal), but it was the beginning rather than the peak of horror
imagery. The Exorcist became an iconic film not only in cinema history but also in
US cultural history and its responses to the psy-sciences and religion. This discussion has
closely focussed on The Exorcist because it became a metonym for broader discussions
of science and religion and the unknown and seemingly uncontrollable evils that
emerged in 1970s America. This was a moment in US history when science and religion
were critiqued together as fallible institutions despite their apparent incompatibilities –
and The Exorcist offered a contained cultural space for these valuable discussions to take
place. Even as the The Exorcist nears its 50th anniversary, it continues to create fear and
discomfort for both the viewers and its characters due to what is seen and unseen and
known and unknown in both religion and science.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: Wellcome Trust 100618.
ORCID iD
Amy C. Chambers https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3801-3582
Notes
1. Nat Segaloff, telephone interview with William Friedkin, January 1974, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles (hereafter ‘Margaret
Herrick Library’), Nat Segaloff Research Papers, The Exorcist Box 1, no. 8.
2. Raschke, C. (1974, 18 December) ‘Exorcising the Devils of Watergate: Why the Prince of
Darkness Is Having His Day’, The Christian Century: 1196–8 (1196), microform, Library of
Congress, vol. 91, reel 44, Christian Century (1900–) collection, BR1.C45.
3. Raschke, ‘Exorcising the Devils of Watergate’, 1198.
4. Letter from Rev. John S. Banahan to William Friedkin, 10 September 1973, Margaret Herrick
Library, William Friedkin Papers, 1959-1997, The Exorcist correspondence files, file 27. Rev.
John S. Banahan was the director of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office of Radio and
Television (1957–78).
5. Released for researcher consultation in 2015: Margaret Herrick Library, William Friedkin
Papers, 1959-1997.
47Chambers
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3801-3582
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3801-3582
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3801-3582
6. The film was given an A-IV classification, which was applied to films that were ‘morally
unobjectionable for adults, with reservations’, and ‘while not morally offensive themselves,
require caution and some analysis and explanation as a protection to the uninformed against
wrong interpretations and false conclusions’ (Skinner, 1993: 153).
7. Prior to 1965, the Legion’s film classification system, intended as a guide for Catholics in
deciding whether a movie was appropriate for family viewing, was split into three categories:
A (morally acceptable), B (morally objectionable in part), and C (condemned). B and C
classifications could seriously affect the box office receipts for a movie, so film-makers were
eager to avoid them (Black, 1998). The A classification was then subsequently divided into A-I
(suitable for all audiences), A-II (suitable for adults and adolescents), and A-III (suitable for
adults only). In 1965, A-IV was added to replace the C rating and was approved for adults only
with reservations. In 1978, a new O rating was incorporated to condemn ‘morally offensive’
films.
8. All information in this article on NCOMP’s activities comes from the individual film files in
the NCOMP review files: American Catholic History Research Center, Catholic University of
America, Washington, DC, Series 1, Review Files, ca.1931-2010, Records of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Communications Department/Office of Film
and Broadcasting (hereafter ‘USCCB Records’).
9. Further evidence of the pre- and mid-production discussion concerning Friedkin’s use of
actual Catholic consecrated venues and liturgy can be found in the USCCB Records. For
example, in the Exorcist files held in this collection, a letter (8 May 1972) from Rev. Mon-
signor E. Robert Arthur (chairman, Liturgy Commission, Chancery Office, Archdiocese of
Washington, DC) to Rev. Patrick J. Sullivan, SJ (Department of Film and Broadcasting,
USCCB NY) noted that they would not allow for ‘a scene of desecration in the church itself’
even though the church ‘appreciates [that] the total impact of the film would seem to be
commendable’.
10. The weekly ‘Inside Religion’ column was syndicated across newspapers in Pennsylvania,
Maine, and New York state, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Press, the
Palm Beach Post, the Sumter Daily Item, the Erie Daily Times, and the Plain Dealer. See
Library of Congress Microfilm Collection, Washington, DC.
11. A phone call recorded between Warner Bros. publicists and the manager of Town and Country
Cinema (Columbus, OH), Gary Foulkes, showed the impact that boycotts and flyering had,
with Foulkes remarking that ‘we’re getting prodded by local churches, they’re passing out
anti-Exorcist material, which is really helping more than anything else . . . They’re using the
scare factor as a deterrent . . . it’s the thing that’s drawing them the most’ (ellipses in original).
Telephone call with Gary Foulkes, 27 February 1974, Margaret Herrick Library, William
Friedkin Papers, 1959-1997, The Exorcist Exhibition, Folder 36.
12. P. B. Ross, ‘Memo: Friedkin’, 1973. Collection of documents that follow a Warner Bros.
memo: ‘“Exorcist” – Material for Bill Friedkin’s Book’, Margaret Herrick Library, William
Friedkin Papers, 1959-1997, ‘Background Material on “The Exorcist”’, The Exorcist Publicity
Files – Stories, File 65.
13. Ibid.: 7–8.
14. Ibid.: 7–8.
15. Although based in London, New Scientist was and continues to be widely distributed in the
United States and Australia.
48 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
16. Nat Segaloff, interview with William Peter Blatty (annotated transcript – Blatty notes), 10 April
1988, Margaret Herrick Library, Nat Segaloff Research Papers, The Exorcist Box 1, no. 8.
17. Ibid.: 10 (emphasis in original).
18. The hospital sequences with Karras’ dying mother also highlight the horrific nature of a
medical system that punishes the poor – even when, like Father Karras, their ‘vow of poverty’
is grounded in devotion to God and His congregation, it has ‘brutal’ consequences on the
treatment and later death of his ailing parent (Phillips, 2005: 115–16).
19. The first static magnetic resonance (nuclear MR) images appeared in Nature in March 1973
(Lauterbur, 1973), as the film was in production. Computed tomographic (CT) scans, which
replaced the procedures shown and suggested in the film, were not installed into hospitals until
1973, after film production had wrapped (Hoeffner et al., 2012).
20. These notes and hand-drawn and annotated diagrams are not available for reproduction but
can be seen in Margaret Herrick Library, William Friedkin Papers, 1959-1997.
21. Friedkin, quoted in Ross, ‘Memo: Friedkin’, p. 7. See also Margaret Herrick Library, William
Friedkin Papers, 1959-1997, The Exorcist Correspondence File, Folder 27.
22. As with Blatty’s novel, the film focussed specifically on the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus), the
largest male religious order within the Roman Catholic Church, devoted to education, the
mission, and charitable works.
23. Correspondence between Friedkin and actor Max von Sydow made reference to set visits from
Fr Nicola to check that everything was ‘technically correct’ – he praised checking on Catholic
detail in the same way as he did medical terms and imagery. Letter from William Friedkin to
Max von Sydow, 23 January 1973, Margaret Herrick Library, William Friedkin Papers, 1959-
1997, The Exorcist Script-Exorcism, Folder 74.
24. One of the radiology technicians, Paul Bateson, was convicted for the murder of Variety
theatre critic Addison Verrill, and was known to the New York City tabloid press as ‘the
Trashbag Killer’. He confessed to multiple murders (although he was not charged) and
partially inspired Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising, about a serial killer targeting gay men;
Bateson was an uncredited consultant for the film (see Friedkin, 2013: 358–61).
25. Merrin is an archaeologist and Karras is a psychiatrist; one physically digs for the evidence
and the other attempts to resolve problems that are psychologically buried beneath the surface.
26. See the inter-office memo between Warner Bros. publicists attached to an article clipping
from the Los Angeles Times article about extreme responses to The Exorcist (the article in
question is Goodman, 1974). The note said: ‘Be advised that this type of story and coverage is
possible and all possible efforts should be expended to get this type of coverage in each city’.
Inter-office Warner Bros. memo from Leo Wilder to Marty Weiser, subject: The Exorcist, 8
January 1974, Margaret Herrick Library, Marty Weiser Papers, The Exorcist, Folder 184.
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51Chambers
Author biography
Amy C. Chambers is a science communication and screen studies scholar at Manchester
Metropolitan University. Her research examines the intersection of entertainment media and the
public understanding of science. Recent publications explore the science fiction films of religious
icon Charlton Heston; the mediation of women’s scientific expertise in mass media; sociology,
technoscience, and science fiction literature; and women-directed horror and science fiction
cinema.
52 History of the Human Sciences 34(5)
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The prolific composer Haydn,
with 104 symphonies and hundreds
of compositions to his credit, said:
“When my work does not advance, I
retire into the oratory with myself
and say an Ave: immediately ideas
come to me.”
Practically everyone
has experienced cre-
ative thinking. You
have weighed pros and
cons and yet couldn’t
procure solutions.
Later, the solutions cas-
cades seemingly from
nowhere.
Although the
human brain weighs
only two and half
mula concerning electricity. It’s said
to be one of his best inventions.
“Without receptivity there can be
no insight”, said Aldous Huxley,
“Reading especially emotional litera-
ture may produce a propitious
mood.”
On the eve of impor-
tant military engaga-
ments, Napoleon
diverted his conscious
mind by playing soli-
taire. Presumably, the
card game left his sub-
conscious mind free to
work out the plans to
accomplish his task
Russian novelist
Fydor Dostoevski
insisted that he did his
finest works after he had heat-
ed argument with his spouse.
Suggestive power
The French novelist
Alexandre Dumas talked to his
imaginary characters all alone
that gave him further ideas to
sketch his factitious characters.
James Watt saw how the
wastage of heat in a steam
engine could be prevented by
condensing steam, in a flash of
inspiration while walking to
play his golf.
Sound sleep yielded remarkable
results to Sir Walter Scott. This great
novelist used to soliloquies: “Never
mind. I shall have the plot of my work
at 7 o’clock in the morning.”And he
did have it as stated by him to himself.
Van Gogh described how he had
terrible lucidity at moments which
was so glorious. “In those moments, I
became hardly conscious of myself
and my painting came to be like
pleasant dreams,” he said.
Geniuses describe the creativity
moments in rapturous terms. Their
spirits soar and they sometime become
oblivious of their surroundings. Lord
Tennyson described the experiences as
a kind of walking
trance.
pounds it recalls and records to it
10,000 bits of information every sec-
ond, nearly 20 billion impulses dur-
ing a lifespan.
“The conscious mind can recall
only about 10 per cent of these data.
The remaining 90 per cent lies in the
subconscious that illuminates the
consciousness,” said the renowned
psychologist William James who
regarded intuition as the highest
form of creativity. ■
IN A TRANCE
Geniuses describe
the creativity
moments in
rapturous terms.
Their spirits soar
and they sometime
become oblivious of
their surroundings.
Lord Tennyson
described the
experiences as a
kind of walking
trance.
Human sacrifice
A four-month-old baby girl was
rescued from a burial ground in
Ghaziabad (UP) a little before she
was to be sacrificed by a so-called
Tantrik (occultist). Police arrested the
tantrik who wanted to do a human
sacrifice to enhance his power! An
accomplice was also arrested. The
child’s maternal uncle was also
arrested for selling her to the tantrik
for Rs 40,000, said the police.
The tantrik is married and has
three children. He told the police
that he had just completed his
‘tantrik vidya’ and wanted to be a
graduate in it! For this he had to per-
form a “bali” of a human being.
Police, with the help of local intel-
ligence, zeroed in on the maternal
uncle of the baby and rushed to the
spot where they rescued the baby,
arrested the accused and also recov-
ered the “sacrificial instruments.”
— Om Prakash Bajaj
SHACKLES OF SUPERSTITION
Send your entry written neatly on white paper to: ALIVE
Delhi Press, E-3, Jhandewala Estate, New Delhi-110 055.
A prize of Rs 200 is given to all published items.
Kekule
Marie Curie, the
most famous
female scientist
of all time.
ALIVE JULY 2017 73
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