Nuggets from Occult Invasion—Demonic Possession

Nevertheless, increasing numbers of psychologists and psychiatrists—former doubters such as M. Scott Peck—are now, like Freud, Jung, and James before them, admitting their belief in the existence of evil spirits. A former doubter, psychiatrist Ralph b. Allison, says, “I have come to believe in the possibility of spirit possession…by demonic spirits from satanic realms, and that’s an area I don’t care to discuss or be a part of….”

A host of psychologists and researchers could be quoted who came come to the same conclusion. In The Unquiet Dead, psychologist Edith Fiore tells how the failure of psychotherapy to treat, and psychological theory to explain, certain behaviors led her on a search that resulted in her belief in demonic possession. In Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti, the stark terror of possession is described:

“I have left possession until the end, for it is the center toward which all the roads of Vodoun converge…. Never have I seen the face of such anguish, ordeal and blind terror as the moment when the loa [spirit] comes.”

Wade Davis is a young scientist with degrees from Harvard University in anthropology and biology and a Ph.D. in ethnobotany. He has explored not only the physical world but the “spirit world” of a number of indigenous religions. He has ventured where few white men have ever gone—into the inner sanctum of the secret societies of the Haitian vodoun masters who hold the power of life and death over that tortured island. As an eyewitness, Davis writes:

“For the nonbeliever, there is something profoundly disturbing about spirit possession. Its power is raw, immediate and undeniably real, devastating….. The psychologists who have attempted to understand possession from a scientific perspective…come up with some bewildering conclusions…. These wordy explanations ring most hollow when they are applied to certain irrefutable physical attributes of the possessed…[such as] the ability of the believer to place with impunity his or her hands into boiling water…. [I watched] a woman in an apparent state of trance carry a burning coal in her mouth for three minutes…. She did it every night on schedule. In other societies believers affirm their faith…by walking across beds of coals, the temperature of which has been measured at 650 degrees Fahrenheit…. Western scientists have gone to almost absurd lengths to explain such feats…citing the effect that makes drops of water dance on a skillet…. To my mind, it begs the question entirely. After all, a water droplet [bouncing] on a skillet is not a foot on a red-hot coal, nor lips wrapped about an ember. I still burn my wet tongue if I place the lit end of a cigarette on it…. The woman had clearly entered some kind of spirit realm. But what impressed me the most was the ease with which she did so. I had no experience of knowledge that would allow me either to rationalize or to escape what I had seen.”