Is it enough to proclaim to be a Satanist, or an exorcist, to be a real one? Accepting these claims at face value may end up endangering religious liberty.
by Marco Respinti
In Idaho, the Attorney General said he defeated Satan, while in fact he won a case against “a ‘cult’ of lawyers” paradoxically using religion as a tool to affirm secularism. In Sicily, Italy, a man allegedly assisted by two friends and by his daughter killed his wife and two sons whom he believed were possessed by the devil. In Romania, the leader of the yoga school MISA (Movement of Spiritual Integration into the Absolute), Gregorian Bivolaru, was once sentenced for a sexual relationship with one of his students when she was 17. Satan enters this scene in the form of a “pact with the Devil” that an unknown man offered the girl: money against her false testimony that the relationship happened while she has always denied it did. Near Turin, Italy, a 43-year-old man from North Africa was suffocated to death as the result of a home-made practice of an alleged ‘Islamic exorcism’ performed by his relatives, who believed he was possessed by demons.
Table of Contents
Of exorcisms
All religions and spiritual groups, since the dawn of human times, had some form of exorcism to fight the evil-bringer, whatever the name they give to both exorcistic practices and the ultimate enemy of all that is good. In his 2020 “The Penguin Book of Exorcisms,” Joseph P. Laycock, assistant professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University and a coeditor of the academic quarterly journal “Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religion,” offers an anthology that “endeavors to show the range of stories, beliefs, and practices surrounding exorcism from across time and cultures.”
Assembling documents that include “poetry and popular legends, treatises by physicians and theologians, letters and diary entries by clergy, reports from missionaries and colonial officers, scientific papers, and legal proceedings,” the book peruses mostly the Western tradition, but makes deep incursions also into India, China, Japan, Tibet, Sudan, Haiti, and the Yakama nation.
Laycock concludes that, “[i]f we look across cultures, there is almost no phenomenon, whether it be a behavior, an illness, a strange experience, or an act of nature that has not been attributed to spirits and treated using exorcism,” adding that “[t]echniques of exorcism vary across cultures and are nearly endless in variety.”
The works of Nicole Bauer should also be mentioned, including the book she recently published with Gerhard Ammerer and Carlos Watzka “Daemonen: Besessenheit und Exorzismus in der Geschichte Oesterreichs—Eine kritische Betrachtung” (Salzburg: Pustet Verlag, 2023), and a forthcoming study of possession as a global phenomenon co-authored with J. Andrew Doole and to be published by Oxford University Press.
Nonetheless, there are cases where exorcisms need to be performed according to strict rules and with a special permission. For example, in the Roman Catholic Church only a bishop or a priest with a specific mandate from his bishop can perform “official” exorcisms. A simply ordained priest exercises an “exorcistic” power per se, in imitation of Christ and by the endowment of his unique capacity of consecrating the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, but this is not the same as a formal exorcism. Of course, simple ways of fighting demons are available to every Catholic believer: a cross in commemoration of the cross upon which Jesus died to defeat death and the personal blessing granted by the sign of the cross, as well as holy water, the ring of a church’s bells, and of course prayers, especially the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, the commander of the heavenly host. Since the 17 century, Catholic Missals used in the celebration of the Roman Rite included exorcistic formulas. The 1964 liturgical reform eliminated them, but after the sexual scandals involving the clergy, in 2018 Pope Francis asked Catholics to recite traditional prayers with a distinctive exorcistic function.
Another example is Islam and “ruqyah,” or the practice of reciting Quranic verses and invocations to cure from black magic and to battle evil “jinn,” or supernatural spirits (not all jinn are evil, though). Performed by or under the guidance of an expert in the Quran, “ruqyah” excludes do-it-yourself rituals that are not strictly Quranic and include spurious procedures.
Of exorcists
Surely, strict rules such as those regulating exorcisms in the Roman Catholic Church do not automatically imply that a licensed exorcist priest is a scholar on demonology, much less on devil-worship and Satanism. While it would be desirable that he would be one, good spiritual intentions are not enough to earn scholarly expertise. All that is requested to be an exorcist priest in Roman Catholicism is that he strictly adheres to the church’s rules for fighting devils in cases where possession is ascertained. In fact, it is not the personal qualities of the exorcist priest that make an exorcism valid, but the proper ritual, which is a sacramental, or, in Catholic belief, a sacred sign or ceremony with similarities to sacraments (with which it should not be confused), granting a spiritual effect by the intercession of the church. All the efficacy and effectiveness of sacraments and sacramentals performed by a priest in Catholicism do not depend on the personal qualities of the priest himself, but on the sacrament of the priest’s ordination—even if a priest should of course always pursue high moral qualities, and possibly acquire some intellectual expertise too.
For sure, what in Catholicism a licensed exorcist priest has the power to do is to make a devil go away when a devil is there, but what he has not the power to do is to make a devil appear when a devil is not there. Instead, in the realm of scholarship specialists have always the power to keep devils only where they are and to show where they are not, as it is done by “Bitter Winter”’s editor-in-chief Massimo Introvigne’s monumental “Satanism: A Social History” or Prussian occultist-turned-theologian Egon von Petersdorff’s (1892‒1963) two-volume “Daemonologie” (München, Germany: Verlag für Kultur und Geschichte, 1956–1957; 2nd ed. Stein am Rhein, Germany: Christiana Verlag, 1982).
Importantly, Laycock notes: “Another common misconception about exorcism is that it is a relic of the Dark Ages that will soon fade away from the modern world. This belief is tied to the so-called secularization narrative, or the assumption that science will inevitably eradicate both belief in the supernatural and the social influence of religion. However, the secularization narrative has increasingly few supporters among social scientists today. In fact, exorcism is arguably more popular today than at any point in history, with the exception of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.”
But this is of course a matter for churches and religious groups’ ultimate authorities, clergy, theologians, and historians of religions. What is of interest here is that, as some of the above-mentioned cases show, serious problems arise when rogue exorcisms are invented by naïve believers based on their own understanding of religion. This raises a fundamental question I have always been passionately intrigued with: when people claim to be Satanists, do they ask Satan’s permission?
Of devils
Reversing the question may help clarifying it. People are not Christians simply by claiming it.
Self-perception must always be considered but is not sufficient. Those who acknowledge Jesus Christ as their divine savior may be correctly called Christians. But if someone claims to be Christian out of a self-made patchwork of doctrines, doubts arise. Thus, Christians are those who acknowledge Jesus Christ as their divine savior and adhere to the dogmas and morals of Christianity. The same can be said by using any other religious belief and adapting the example.
So, for a person to be a Satanist, Satan must come in. One is truly a Satanist if he or she is part of something called Satanism. Now, what is Satanism? Probably, there are as many Satanisms as Satanists, imaginary Satanists included. Claiming to be a Satanist and really being one is not the same—just as claiming to be a Christian and really being a Christian are two different things.
My question bears also a variant. When media and commentators, public officials included, report or discuss that a Satanist or a Satanist group performed this or that act, possibly a crime, are they merely affixing an arbitrary label—or mirroring unquestioningly the self-perception of a certain group?
This variant of my question derives from the fact that, while the job of the media is to report facts in the most objective way, today most of them tend to be secular, if not anti-religious, with a variety of attitudes ranging from skepticism to open mockery of religious beliefs and spiritual creeds. It is as their religious reporting were only for pleasing and appeasing their readers—based on their own perception of what pleases and appeases them.
This also happens in case of events involving esoteric or occult themes. Be it because they believe it or simply play the devil’s advocate, cases become bizarre when secular media, commentators and public officials behave as if they had the authority to judge beliefs—the apex being the Chinese Communist Party picking-and-choosing which Tibetan Buddhist lama can reincarnate with the government’s permission or not.
That attitude become quite dangerous for religious liberty when authorities and the media claim they can decide, and common opinion validates their supposed authority to do it, whether a would-be Satanist is really a Satanist, or a would-be exorcist is a real exorcist.
Of C.S. Lewis
A superlative answer to the question whether Satanists and anti-Satanists do ask Satan the permission to use the Satanist brand, in all its variants and nuances, seems to remain the one given by C.S. Lewis (1898‒1963) in his 1942 book “The Screwtape Letters:” “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race,” i.e., human beings, “can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.” The quote comes from the “Preface” of that witty small book, or Lewis’ cautionary advice to his readers.
Born in Northern Ireland, Lewis was a talented scholar of Medieval and Renaissance literature, a writer of novels and short-stories, and came to be considered a refined Christian theologian and apologist once he had converted to Anglicanism, of a quite conservative persuasion, coming from an agnostic-to-atheistic brand of rationalism. “The Screwtape Letters” is a fictional epistolary in which senior devil Screwtape counsels his young nephew, Wormwood, on the best way to send humans to hell, correcting all the misunderstandings, mistakes, and clumsiness of the junior tempter. Quite interestingly, while the names Screwtape and Wormwood, as well as those of all the other devils in the book, are Lewis’ creation, in Italian translations they have been substituted with names of devils in Malebranche, or the guardians of Bolgia Five of the Eighth Circle in Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) “Inferno,” being the first part of the “Divine Comedy.” It was the initiative of Catholic priest and literary critic, later to become archbishop, Alberto Castelli (1907–1971), who prepared the first Italian translation of Lewis’ book, published in 1947 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore in Milan, and it has been maintained ever since.
As Lewis explains, some Satanists do ask Satan the permission to use the Satanist brand, others do not. We may feel authorized to add that would-be anti-Satanists did and do the same. While, according to Lewis, Satan is equally pleased with both a materialist and a magician, it can be added that Satan also hails “heretic” anti-materialists and anti-magicians.
Of lies and killers
When would-be anti-Satanists perform rogue exorcisms injuring or killing people out of offhand perceptions of what demonic possession is, they greatly contribute to the general smears of religious beliefs, whatever they may be. One may wonder, in Lewis’ footsteps, whether Satan is not himself pleased by their deeds as they greatly contribute to discredit religion.
Similarly, when would-be Satanists use the Satanist brand to cover abuses and crimes rooted atheism, rationalism, and the hatred of religion or Christianity, Satan may be pleased as well. In all cases, an authentic religious spirit is the first victim. Public opinion starts crying that, be they Satanists or anti-Satanists, all believers are fanatics who endangers people with their crazy creeds and may end up committing crimes. Then public authorities come in and curtail religious liberty.
This is indeed Satan’s masterstroke. One should never forget Lewis’ admonition: “[r]eaders are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.” Thinking that religions kill is a devilish lie. Religions do not kill: people kill. Of course, people may kill in the name of religions, but religions remain innocent of the use that some religionists do of them. There are ideas that may kill, but interestingly they are not religious ideas. Sometimes the killing ideas are even anti-religious creeds that dress up as religions to discredit them, as a 1995 collection of essays by Introvigne, “Idee che uccidono” (“Ideas That Kill”) perfectly demonstrated.
If the devil lies, we are entitled to assume that real devil-worshippers, the usurpers of the devil’s brand, and caricatural believers in self-styled religions, rogue exorcists included, are lying too.
