Several hundred years later, and for the first time on this scale since the great war between Catholicism and Protestantism, the Devil is back on stage in impressive style. And in his wake, so is the Exorcist.
Who was Malachi Martin, and what exactly was his relationship with the Prince of Darkness? None of the available sources fully answers these questions, not even the English-language version of Wikipedia. So, without a doubt, all we can say about this Irish former Jesuit – released from his vows of poverty and obedience by Pope Paul VI in person in 1964 – who died 20 years ago is that he is one of the most mysterious figures in the recent history of the Catholic church.
And he’s also hugely responsible for the great renascence of interest in exorcism that we’ve been witnessing in the West for the past few decades. Right now it’s at its zenith, as the statistics unarguably confirm. But it started to gain momentum in the mid-1970s, when Malachi Martin published a book with the ominous title Hostage to the Devil.
Oh be a demon / outside all class! If you’re a woman / or even an ass / Still be a demon / beyond the mass.
At least that is the view of American historian Brian Levack, one of the most insightful scholars on the topic of possession. In his acclaimed monograph, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, he mainly covers the period from the 15th to the 18th centuries. That was when demons and their tireless destroyers, the exorcists, first became rife on the territory of Western culture, torn as it was by conflict between Catholics and Protestants.
In analysing this phenomenon from various angles, Levack sceptically examines both the purely religious interpretations – naturally, as a genuine scholar he does not recognize the existence of invisible evil forces – and also the medical ones that categorize possession in psychiatric terms. He painstakingly interprets the considerations of theologists, official church documents, and spectacular stories of strange incidents involving the entry of evil spirits into human bodies. And the earliest contemporary newspaper articles describing battles against Satan
