Demonic Possesion: Sacrifice In Modern Society

Demonic possession is something of a mystery in modern society; it is thought to occur when the human body is controlled, against its will, by a demon or evil spirit. In order to eradicate these demons, the priests, saints and leaders of many different cultures and religions are called forth to perform each cultures’ own form of an exorcism. During the middle ages, these practices took place often and were mostly performed on women due to the lack of medicine and technology that is used today to determine the presence of a mental illness. In modern-day society these beliefs are not as prevalent because there are now many different ways to explain the natural human oddities. The everyday psychiatrist needs to keep in mind the contemporary

This was known as a “manifestation of demonic power based on the belief that demons could enter the bodies of human beings against their will and take control of their physical movements and mental faculties” (Levack 924). There are many broad ideas of what constitutes being possessed. Brian Levack stated that a possessed person typically “displayed a wide variety of symptoms, including violent convulsions, abnormal swelling, muscular contortions, rigidity of the limbs, preternatural strength, and vomiting of extraneous substances” (295). These possessed people were also known to display other disturbing scenes such as: “They conversed in languages of which they had no previous knowledge, spoke in deep, beastly voices that differed from their normal voices, displayed contempt for sacred objects, uttered blasphemies, went into trances, and foresaw the future. In a few cases they were reported to have levitated” (Levack 295). Most of the reported cases of demonic possession, that Levack takes his information from, occurred during the middle ages where exorcisms were a typical treatment for any human that acted

During the past centuries, when exorcisms were on a rise, there were not many medications around and the ones that were did not have a good percent chance of being effective: “given the shortcomings of premodern medicine, almost all afflictions could ultimately be attributed to a demonic appropriation of the human body” (Sluhovsky 15). During this time religious means seemed like a much more obvious choice, therefore the typical diagnosis was that a human was possessed by some sort of evil spirit rather than a mental ailment of some kind: “demonic possession was originally a catch-all term that was used in premodern times to describe all sorts of both physiological and psychological afflictions, the causes of which were not self-evidently organic, or afflictions that failed to respond to standard naturalist medical cures” (Sluhovsky 14). In modern-day however, scientists and doctors have technology and information to determine illnesses which explains why exorcisms are much less common