MODERN DEMONOLOGY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 13 December 1924, Page 13

MODERN DEMONOLOGY.

A POSSESSED ITALIAN. In one of the vaiieys which lead down from the great mass of Monte Dos a to Piedmont (in Italy) there lives an unhappy man possessed by 2400 demons. They first entered into aim three months ago, and displayed their malign power Dy depriving him of the power to walk, and compelling him to twist his legs into knots. The clergy came to his help, and after many exorcisms drove the demons out of him. He testified that they mustered 2400, and were gone. So there were thanksgivings in his Esterino Fuisello from the powers of darkness (says the Daily Telegraph). But the demon came back in force. “He was taken to church for further exorcisms,” says the report, which reads like a mediemovable between the first and second door, held fast by invisible power.” Holy water brought him no deliverance. When the priests put holy meda s on him, though without his knowledge, he will not or cannot speak, sometimes he writes “horrible blasphemies,” and writes fast, plainly, at the dictation of the demons. “The local clergy,” we are-told, “are in great distress and affliction of being unable to expel the evil spirits.’’ The local doctors say that the case is merely “an unusual form of hysteria.” But it does not appear that they see their way to a cure. When we ask our medical men what is the cause of these strange proceedings they can only tell us that the processes of the mind are not working together in harmony. Some of them will suggest that the personality of the patient fs disintegrating, and a secondary self in control of the body. Some may tell us that out of the . unconscious depths of the mind has risen some morbid force. And no doubt a ease may be made out for all these theories. But it is to be observed that they bear an odd resemblance to a restatement of the old theory of demoniac possession in modern terms. Nor are the processes which modern psycho-therapy, ordains I —with careful examination, as by the confessional, of the secrets of the patient’,s heart, its demand for perfect trust in the practitioner, as in a spiritual father, and its confident use of the authority of science, as once of the great name of the Church, to give the patient hope—so very different in plain from the old-age process of religion.