PART ONE
THE SILVER LINING
For many viewers, the demonic possession concept presented in The Exorcist was a terrifying one. Some were haunted by images of possessed Regan’s deformed and discoloured face, her horrifying self-mutilations and the demon’s sadistic desire to mercilessly torment the living. The movie has also prompted many debates about spiritual possession possibly being a real phenomena.
But something that has stood out to me while exploring the movie, its production and its legacy, is that The Exorcist carries an indirect but powerful wish fulfilment message – it satisfies, or at least massages, our desire for immortality. It does this by presenting extreme evil as an indirect proof of God and the afterlife. So this is going to be the central premise of this study on the novel and movie of The Exorcist, but we’ll also be exploring interesting related concepts like the grief for lost loved ones, the documented history on claims of spiritual possession, symbols of death in the story and the prices of faith.
Perhaps the most authoritative source of information on the mortality wish fulfilment factor is the writer of The Exorcist novel, William Peter Blatty. Sourced from his book, “On writing the Exorcist: From novel to film” I found the following quote relating to a newspaper article Blatty read while researching historical documents as basis for the story. The article reported a supposedly genuine demonic possession case. Blatty stated:
“I was excited. For here at last, in this city, in my time, was tangible evidence of transcendence. If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.” (underline added)
While he does talk about his motives of wanting to write a successful fiction novel, his first response is one of immortality wish fulfilment. Personally I don’t follow the logic. Demons don’t prove the existence of angels, nor do either of them prove the existence of the Devil or God. And the existence of any of these spirit forms doesn’t in itself prove we mortals have an afterlife.
Now I must emphasize immediately here that I do not intend any disrespect to the now deceased William Peter Blatty. He was a very intelligent and skilled writer. The Exorcist novel is full of nuance and detail demonstrating Blatty had done a great deal of research on his subject from many angles including the psychological and the scientific. And incidentally I separate out psychology and science as separate branches of research because the mathematical rules of science largely fall apart in the realm of psychology, just as they do in the realm of spiritual belief. I have a great respect for Blatty’s efforts in writing The Exorcist and for his efforts in writing and directing The Exorcist 3, which I personally find scarier (though not better).
Blatty was a believer in the spiritual afterlife, or at the very least wanted to believe. Director William Friedkin, on the other hand, has identified in interviews as agnostic – as in he thinks it isn’t possible for we mortals to understand the true nature or intentions of God, if God exists. The differences in spiritual belief appear to create a divergence between Blatty’s Exorcist book and Friedkin’s Exorcist film. Personally my spiritual beliefs are more aligned with Friedkin’s, but I still like a lot of elements in the novel that didn’t make it into the movie.
In the novel, most of the key characters have a specific fear of death and, in turn, a longing for God and the assurance of afterlife. Chris Macneil has recurring dreams about death that also haunt her when awake (p119). Before Regan, she’d had another child who died at age three, killed by a new antibiotic on the market (p58-9). So she’s afraid to be too emotionally close to Regan. Her housemaid, Sharon, keeps trying different spiritual fads in search of belief. And near the end of the story, both of these characters, Sharon and Chris, rush into the bedroom where the exorcism is taking place to witness the levitation of Regan’s bed – proof of spiritual forces at work (p258).
For me the novel gets a little bit too preachy at the end about this. Despite witnessing the levitation and the possession of Regan, Chris still says she doesn’t believe in God because of his silence, but she also says that the Devil does a lot of advertising (p317). Dyer responds that if seeing evil accounts for the existence of the Devil then what accounts for good? Chris replies, “that’s a point”. That felt a bit forced for me. (By the way, the etymology for the words good and evil is that they relate to the words God and Devil. That had never occurred to me until I wrote this study.) Ultimately, Sharon and Chris’s experiences of Regan being demonically possessed, open them a bit more to believing in God and the afterlife.
Even Regan has issues with death in the novel. Before the possession kicks in she attends a funeral with her Mother and asks why people have to die, as well as being quiet for the rest of the day. Though all that is missing in the film, her statement of mortality to the astronaut in the party is, “you’re gonna die up there.”
With Damien Karras the movie version keeps his faith dilemma at the forefront of the story, but the novel features significant expansions. At one point he prays there is someone to pray to (p91). Like Chris he is tormented by what he perceives to be the silence of God (p55).
A nice visual touch in the film is that when Merrin arrives at the house and when Karras is out getting items for the exorcism, the streets are shrouded in lit fog, but when Karras dies the fog is gone. Fog typically gives an impression of spiritual proceedings as well as confusion. Fog is also seen when Regan postures in parallel with the Pazuzu statue, both backlit. The shot is as much a “seeing the light” wish fulfilment confirmation of the spirit realm as it is a confirmation of the demon itself.
While there are some quotes at the beginning of the book’s major parts, which seem to try and edge the reader toward belief in evil and therefore God and the afterlife, Blatty also included an opposite opinion for the character Burke Dennings. He tells Chris that “Death is a comfort” (p101). She also thinks of his stardom as a form of immortality. We could say the same about her stardom as an actress – celluloid immortality. Blatty also made sure to include, on p128, a reference to thanatophobia, which is the fear of death.
Whilst the movie version was bound to end up deleting a lot of info from the novel, the choices of what to delete and what to keep I think fit well with the different spiritual positions of Blatty and Friedkin. Blatty wanted the afterlife to be confirmed. Friedkin didn’t hold that particular hope and so the movie discards with nearly all of the wishful thinking thanatophobia-related elements for most of the characters. Instead that paradigm is concentrated in Father Karras.
Last example before we move on, and this comes from the most unexpected source in the novel. On p258 Karras is reading the transcript of possessed Regan’s reverse dialogue. Among the gibberish spoken by Pazuzu are the words “Let her die. No, no, sweet. It is sweet in the body … better than the void”. Isn’t it the void of death that people fear in their pursuit of afterlife confirmation?
PART TWO
WISHFUL HISTORY
In order to prop up the case for spiritual possession being a real phenomenon, a lot of books, documentaries and websites covering the subject will refer to historically documented claims of possession as if the claims are actual proof. But Blatty’s Exorcist is much cleverer in its approach. It seems that he had explored every real world scientific or psychological explanation for demonic possession that he could find across the literature and he’s included near enough all of them in his novel, but the story then debunks them one by one, leaving the reader with no other explanations to turn to. It’s a really smart balancing act. On the one hand the story is presenting us with fantastical and impossible events like beds shaking on their own, objects moving about by themselves, Regan’s head twisting around (somehow not killing her) and levitation. These are events that normally we would dismiss as ridiculous, but because the novel is also offering us a lot of technical talk about brain scans, medications, hypnosis, autosuggestion and even ESP (which the novel treats as separate from spirituality) – these factors of perceived academic realism counter our disbelief of the supernatural elements in the story. This is true of the movie as well, but it’s much more detailed in the novel.
While this wrestling back and forth between academia and supernatural belief is being played out, Blatty occasionally sprinkles in historically documented cases of supposed possession. The vast majority of these aren’t made up by Blatty, they are from real world records, but his novel bends the known facts about those cases. The apparent merits of the cases are given, but sometimes the published debunks aren’t, though in Blatty’s defense some of the debunks were published after The Exorcist novel was. I’m not going to give an exhaustive breakdown as it will drag this study out. I’ll give a handful of examples then outline some more general thoughts on the topic.
The supposed real life werewolf Peter Stumpp gets a mention in the novel, but it isn’t mentioned that his confession was reportedly extracted by torture, which renders the confession unreliable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stumpp The wiki page cites him as being a wealthy famer (so possibly a financial motive in framing him for crimes) accused of cannibalism, killing fourteen children, ripping babies from the uteruses of women and eating them alive. It all sounds so fantastical that I wonder if he was even guilty of anything at all. He was apparently subjected to an utterly barbaric execution and his daughter executed with him. If anyone was possessed by evil it was the people who sentenced, tortured and killed him. In The Exorcist novel his case is bluntly stated as factual, including reports of him being caught eating his own child’s brain.
There’s the Loudoun possessions cited on p213 of the novel as an event involving multiple real possessions, but historians have cited this case as having been a political scam to dispose of a wealthy priest by multiple parties who had opportunity to gain from his demise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudun_possessions
Another is the so-called Watseka Wonder possession case in the late 1800’s. A whole book was published about this and the version that I found, a downloadable copy, included a publisher’s note near the beginning saying fifty thousand copies had been sold. So immediately the fact that decent profit was made from the book invites consideration of a charlatan profit motive. Much to my surprise, at the start of the book, the main thrust of this article you’re now reading is presented as a precursor to the case – the quotes, quite explicitly, frame the story in terms of fulfilling the reader’s wishes for confirmation of life beyond death and the comfort of knowing our dead loved ones are not lost. In the publisher’s final note at the very end of the book, it’s even more explicit. The publisher is …
“Firmly convinced by rigid evidence, that life continues beyond the grave.”
The Exorcist novel also cites on p213 that the psychologist Flournoy dealt with a possession case involving a girl called Helene Smith, who could change her facial features rapidly to present different personalities. But the novel doesn’t tell us the girl claimed she could speak with Martians and that Flournoy considered the whole thing a clever fabrication.
There are more of these mentioned either in the Exorcist novel or in William Peter Blatty’s reports of how he conceived the story. They are frequently pointed to as evidence, but I’ve read up on about ten of them and in every case where I could acquire additional information there have been accusations of fraud, hysteria and other explanations by those investigating the events.
Some of the cases involve reported possibilities of parental abuse of the victims, perhaps even sexual, or other forms of sexual disturbance, leading to guilt or rage based conflicts in the personality of the supposedly possessed, especially in teenage subjects. Carl Jung cited the different personalities of one subject as being angelic and whore by comparison, indicating unresolved sexual issues.
As I noted in my video on potential sexual abuse themes in The Exorcist, Regan displays many of the symptoms of sexually abused children, but neither the film nor Blatty’s novel ever explore it as an explanation to be debunked. It is conspicuous in its absence. Did Blatty block it out mentally, due to pre-occupation with the desire for immortality confirmation, or did he consciously choose to exclude it? I think he just blocked it out. And at the same time, in cases of supposed possession, parental abuse wouldn’t be admitted of course, so the perpetrators of the abuse would likely go along with the demonic possession narrative to admonish themselves of guilt or suspicion. A related interesting point is that in his book On writing The Exorcist: From novel to film, Blatty cites the more recent discovery of Tourettes Syndrome as a possible explanation for some of the seemingly possessed behaviour in certain cases. Tourettes tends to cause the individual to shout out swear words and similar remarks randomly, as if there’s a nasty person inside trying to take control.
The Exorcist novel rides a difficult line in pursuing its approach of using actual documented history in supposed support of possession being real. Is it ok for a fiction author to distort real world historical events to fit a desired narrative? Arguably not, but at least the book, by being a work of fiction, isn’t taken as gospel truth about the subject. Non-fiction studies, which distort a given issue through bias, conscious or unconscious, are extremely common anyway, even in academia. Blatty’s efforts to include rational non-supernatural explanations in his work of fiction can be equated to balanced journalism.
I’ll add some more random points of interest on the supposed merits of possession before we move on. There are quite a few actually.
In the film and on a few pages of the novel, possessed Regan says “I am no one”. The reason for this is never explained. P109 and 123
A very famous possession case, known as Roland Doe, has been cited by Blatty, but a full book’s worth of debunks of the case was published in 1993.
The novel claims that the symptoms of possession have been the same across all cultures as far back as recorded claims have been made. I think Blatty got this from paranormal psychologist Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich’s book on possession, published in 1930. This book is cited a couple of times in The Exorcist novel and its opening chapter claims the symptoms of possession are the same across the globe. However, I’ll counter this by saying that just because the symptoms are similar doesn’t mean only demonic possession can be the cause. People across all cultures once believed the Earth was flat, but that doesn’t make it true. Other psychological problems that underpin debunked possessions can also be present across history, resulting in the same symptoms. For example, the widely reported desire of the invading spirit to destroy the host. Self-harm and suicide also have common patterns across cultures too, due to basic human psychology. Incidentally, Oesterreich notes in the conclusion of his book that demonic possession is “mainly responsible for inspiring and maintaining belief in the existence of demons and the survival of the souls of the dead”. It’s funny how this silver lining of immortality pops up across much of the literature
On p213 of The Exorcist it’s mentioned that the possessed are usually women, but no explanation is given. I’ll offer a theory for consideration. Women tend to have more sexual guilt pressures placed on them by society, and are more likely to blame themselves than others for life’s problems. In some cultures they’re more likely to suffer sexual abuse as well.
On p214 it’s explained that possessions usually come on gradually. I’ll add that mental declines such as depression, schizophrenia and dementia do as well. There’s also a conceptual continuity error in the book and film in this respect. Regan’s possession takes a long time to build up, but once the demon is out, Karras is fully possessed in just a few seconds to the point of pale skin and discoloured eyes.
Merrin states in the novel that he doesn’t know why demons don’t repossess (p294). Well, one interpretation is that if a purely psychological problem in the subjects mind is resolved during the ritual of exorcism then it wouldn’t need to come back.
Psychologists like Carl Jung had conducted lengthy examinations of supposed possession cases and concluded non-supernatural causes. Jung published a detailed paper on the subject titled On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena.
With all the video recording devices now being carried everywhere by the general public for many years and the availability of other recording devices for decades before that – why have there been no captures of supposedly possessed people displaying the kinds of physically and mentally impossible feats attributed in written accounts from centuries ago when they were harder to debunk? It seems that demons are camera-shy. Actually there’s a great little quote from Pazuzu, the demon possessing Regan, in the novel version of the scene where Karras interviews her. Pazuzu says, “Have you noticed how few miracles one hears about lately? Not our fault Karras. Don’t blame us. We try!” (p223) Actually the whole expanded version of the scene is very good – full of well-written demon dialogue.
Director Billy Friedkin made a movie later in his career called Rampage, which involves a deranged man killing a priest in a church and drinking his blood on the altar. He is revealed later to have a brain defect that causes his delusion that he was a vampire. Friedkin, by choosing to make that film, comes off like he is rejecting the possession concepts of his most famous hit move The Exorcist.
From my experience of working with the mentally ill, the belief in external mind control forces is a common factor – I’ve met people who think the TV talks to them, the radio talk to them, God or the Devil talks to them, I even met one guy who used to throw his clothes away because he thought they were talking to him. At one point he got lost in the street because he threw his glasses away thinking they were talking to him too! Typically, these perceived external voices are expressing thoughts, fears or desires that the conscious mind has suppressed and does not want to reconnect with – an elementary example being one patient who told me he was hearing voices in his head telling him to masturbate. When I asked him why he doesn’t just do the deed, as every normal person does from time to time, he looked shocked.
As I said earlier in the video, I’m not knocking Blatty or trying to discredit his novel. If you read it you’ll still find in his novel more insight and a broader range of theories on possession than you will from most other sources. In fact I’m going to side with Blatty, not in terms of believing in demons or spiritual possession, but in terms of academic science not having the answers regarding the fundamentals of our existence. What we have in science is a set of mostly mathematical models of reality which are incredibly useful for manipulating the physical world and, sometimes, incredibly useful at manipulating our organic bodies. But how the universe came to exist and the nature of consciousness are realms in which science has failed to provide answers. Many academics have tried, but all they seem to come up with is unverifiable theories that hold no more weight than religious explanations. On p203 of The Exorcist Karras talks about the mysterious ability of billions of brain cells being able to send signals in a co-ordinated manner. He suggests that each of those brain cells has a consciousness of its own and that in cases of dual personality there’s a conflict between groups of brain cells as to which is running the overall ship. It’s theoretical and the novel was released in 1971, but here we are fifty years later in 2021 as I write this study … and these questions of the nature of consciousness and the ability of the brain to co-ordinate itself remain unanswered. The impression of magic, of forces beyond the supposed scientific “rules” of reality, remains.
Karras’s monologue raised in my mind the question of how we even identify consciousness in the first place. We communicate our awareness as human beings through the tools of dialogue and physical behaviour. Whether there are other methods of communication I’m not sure. But does the family cat or dog have consciousness? Or do we write those organisms off as purely automated organic entities, lacking in conscious choice, because they don’t speak in words? Cats and dogs can and do defy the orders of the masters, and sometimes engage in mysterious behaviours. Is this evidence of consciousness? And do we attribute unpredictable behaviours in smaller creatures, such as mice, as evidence of consciousness? How far down do we take it? Do insects, bacteria or viruses have consciousness? Where is the line drawn? Or are there degrees of consciousness depending on the complexity of biological container? Is there an, as yet, undetected force of consciousness for which organic bodies are merely a vessel. Does the limited complexity of the physical vessel mean that the life force is less than that of a human being … or does it merely inhibit communication of conscious thought in the same manner that a physicist like Stephen Hawking was born into a body that limited the ability to speak without the assistance of scientific aids? I think these are crucial questions, and academic science hasn’t provided conclusive answers.
Sometimes in biology, these questions are brushed aside by the implied, and sometimes verbally stated, assumption that consciousness does not exist. Consciousness basically means awareness and the scientific confusion on this is evident in the confused dictionary definitions around the topic. They usually describe consciousness as being awake or aware. Look up definitions of awake and the phrase “not asleep” comes up a lot, and yet definitions of asleep often are described with the phrase “not awake”. In the absence of scientific understanding of consciousness, negative definitions are given in the dictionaries. We could also say awake is not a tomato, which would be true, but gives no understanding. Go explore the dictionary descriptions around the issues of consciousness or awareness and you’ll find circular verbal references. In fact think about how self-contradicting it is of some biologists to claim consciousness, and therefore awareness, doesn’t exist. They are conscious of their belief that consciousness doesn’t exist.
Interestingly, the Exorcist novel explains that Father Merrin writes books about faith from a scientific position. Regan’s mother reads one of his books and finds a chapter where Merrin outlines the scientific position that matter cannot be destroyed and that this means that when we die we don’t disappear. From a materialist scientific view every aspect of our existence, every atom in our body, is merely distributed elsewhere in the cosmos. It can be argued to be a form of immortality.
PART THREE
THE GRIEF FACTOR
A much shorter chapter here, but an important one. Witness accounts of supposed possession are suspect on account of the general desire of human beings for confirmation of the afterlife, which we’ve already explored. And this would certainly be a factor if the family of a “possessed” individual held strong religious beliefs. But, in some of the cases I’ve read about, the desire for assurance that dead relatives aren’t actually dead might be an even stronger factor. Many reported possessions involve the subject being supposedly invaded by the spirit of a deceased family member.
In the novel version of the Exorcist scene where the doctors talk about primitive cultures believing in possession, the doctor states that it usually involves invasion by the spirit of a dead relative. So it’s possible that the person who is “possessed” is in denial of the relative’s death and is merely acting like the relative to comfort themselves. I’ll give this a name, NORMAN BATES SYNDROME. Remember Norman in the movie Psycho? He couldn’t handle his mother’s death so he took on her personality to comfort himself. Bates is an extreme example and a fictional one at that, but in real life people often engage in little behaviours indicating denial of a deceased relative’s departure. Some will maintain the bedroom space of the deceased in a pristine condition, as if the person is still alive and occupying the room. Some will even sleep in that space, as if they are the lost loved one. And many of us do this by keeping portrait photos of the dead relative in our daily living space. Grief is an incredibly painful emotion and the desire for the dead to resurrect is perhaps most evident in our tendency to have dreams in which the relative is still alive.
The frequency of children and teenagers being supposed targets for spiritual possession I believe fits well with the grief factor. Kids and teenagers are usually more sensitive around the issue of mortality than adults. They haven’t accustomed themselves as much to the grim fate. They also are less in control of their emotions. Kids and teens are more likely to fly into fits of rage, more likely to act out their frustrations in bizarre ways instead of talking openly, and more likely to suppress awareness of things they find painful. Kids and teens are also more preoccupied with imitating their peers and elders. All of this makes kids and teens more susceptible to Norman Bates Syndrome – taking on the personification of a lost loved one as a way of denying that they are gone.
There are elements of this in The Exorcist too. Specifically, Karras’ grief at losing his mother. When he sees Mother in Regan’s place on the bed, how much of that is Pazuzu playing head games and how much of it is his own wishful thinking? He then checks Regan’s heart and is concerned about it, but is he mentally checking his dying mother’s heart? He also has nightmares about the lost relative as happens to most of us in real grief scenarios.
There could be an element of this regarding the death of Burke Dennings, though Regan never seemed all that fond of him, so this would be more of a factor in Chris MacNeil’s perception of the situation. The Karras grief dilemma is the stronger of the two by a long shot, though it’s complicated by his guilt about not having been there for her when she died. And his fears that she may have gone to hell add to his torment.
To finalize the importance of the grief factor, it’s not just about the person who is claimed to be possessed. If the witnesses of the possession are also family members in grief, and strongly religious, then they too could be inclined to perceive the return of a loved one in possession form. In fact their reaction might even encourage it in the living subject.
PART FOUR
SYMBOLS OF DEATH
Let’s now step aside from the largely verbal debate of whether demonic or spiritual possession is real or not, and examine some of the more aesthetic elements of the film that play on our fear of mortality.
One major issues is the age and frailty of Father Merrin. Actor Max Von Sydow was given an incredible make-up job to make him look really old. And his acting performance in the film involves shuffling slowly about with the difficulty of an old man and having the shakes of a man who is close to his death bed. His body’s motor skills are beginning to wind down. Just before his death he takes a bathroom break and he looks like he’s about to collapse, A couple of scenes later and he is actually dead.
As well as communicating the film’s subtext about fear of mortality, Merrin’s age I think is important in another way. Pazuzu had been defeated by Merrin in a previous exorcism in Africa. If the exorcism “nearly killed him” then how’s he going to perform the same feat being much more physically frail? So I think part of Pazuzu’s scheme was to wait for Merrin to grow old and frail before challenging him to another exorcism duel, one which would allow Pazuzu to kill him off easily. When the Demon talks backward of fearing the priest, the novel version includes the statement “he is ill”. (p258)
Naturally, the fear of death makes a lot of us fear the ageing process itself. As Regan is gradually taken over she appears to age too. She becomes pale, just as Merrin is. Her skin becomes cracked and slightly wrinkled. And perhaps the most important element in terms of ageing – her voice becomes unrecognizable. She starts to sound old.
Pazuzu is, itself, an ancient Demon, much older than any living man on Earth. In the moments when we catch a glimpse of Pazuzu’s face (one instance is a flash frame in Karras’ dream about his dead Mother) the skin may be fairly smooth, but the paleness of the skin and the darkness around the eyes and mouth are clearly intended to look like a skull – itself one of the great symbols of death and mortality in the human psyche. So I think on the strength of that facial appearance alone it can be argued that Pazuzu represents death itself.
Isn’t it interesting how good spirits and God himself are almost universally depicted in art with the facial features of a living human being, and yet evil spirits and their conceptual kindred, known as zombies, tend to be depicted with skeletal elements on display, as if the flesh has died and rotted away. Good is depicted as physically alive and evil is depicted as physically dead. But this makes no sense in terms of spiritual realms. If there is an afterlife then the physical body dies for both good and evil people doesn’t it? … Apparently not. In the human psyche across cultures evil is frequently cross-symbolized with physical decay, with mortality itself. And evil spirits are frequently feared to be bringers of death. This is true of Pazuzu as well, who brings death to Merrin and Karras and tries to bring death to Regan. He wants to possess her “… until she rots and lies stinking in the earth.”
With Pazuzu there is yet another element that further links to our fear of physical decay, and hence death. He inflicts Regan with symptoms of disease … green eyes, green vomit, yellow phlegm. Regan appears to be infected physically and obviously hasn’t had her hair washed for quite a while. She smells bad, has open cuts all over, urinates on the floor and, in the novel, frequently defecates to torment those trying to care for Regan. To put it bluntly, she’s gross-burger.
The deterioration of Regan is even paralleled in the weather of the story. We start with sunny Iraq and go from there to Georgetown USA in October, which is Autumn. Decaying leaves are literally falling from the trees and dying as Chris walks home after a day’s filming. The blowing wind is relevant too. Pazuzu is a wind God and I don’t mean flatulence, I literally mean wind. As Regan’s possession progresses to the point where Doctors are considering an exorcism cure, an establishing shot outside the hospital has more leaves blown by a stronger wind and trees that are now almost bare and looking like skeletons, as they typically do in winter. Winter, when trees become skeletons! I like that. Same when Karras goes to meet Chris for the first time – first shot of the sene has bare trees and dying leaves blown about. And when Merrin receives his letter requesting he perform the exorcism, I love the setting of the shot. He’s on his way up a hill full of skeleton trees surrounded by dying leaves, as if he is departing this world already and on his way up to heaven. But wait, hang on Father, before you die and join the Lord we have one final task for you. No big deal, Just do battle with a powerful Demon one more time, and he’s like shit haven’t I done enough good deeds, I’d rather rest in peace than pea soup (Regan’s projectile vomit reference of course). And although we don’t reach full winter during the exorcism, the fog of Merrin’s arrival at the house gives the feel of winter.
The last element for this chapter is the death of Regan’s youth. There are lots of transformational issues going on at the age of puberty, not just the sexual change, and one of them is the death of innocence, or we might call it the death of childhood. That’s right, puberty is a form of death in itself. We keep photos of our loved ones at different stages in their physical life cycle. Particularly we treasure photos of them as children. I think this is partially because we have an underlying grief for the fact that the adorable child is gone, even when the adult version of them is still alive. Maybe this is a subconscious element in The Exorcist. The desire to protect Regan is the desire to protect the concept of youth, an age when mortality is less prominent in our minds. Regan is at that age where we can still see the child, but it’s clear that the child will soon be gone and replaced by a full grown woman, who will look and behave dramatically different. And with boys the vocal change in puberty kills off the child image even more. Regan also has her twelfth birthday as a key event in the story. In the novel it is noted that her birthday triggers a big change in the advancement of the possession condition (p50 and 57). Remember also that in the novel Regan attends a funeral with her Mother, which makes her sad and prompts her to ask questions about mortality.
Regarding aq case of supposed possession he studies, Jung had the following to say in his published paper on the subject.
Remembering that our patient’s age at the beginning of the disturbances was 14 and a half, that is, the age of puberty had just been reached, one must suppose that there was some connection between the disturbances and the physiological character-changes at puberty. There appears in the consciousness of the individual during this period of life a new group of sensations, together with the feelings and ideas arising therefrom; this continuous pressure of unaccustomed mental states makes itself constantly felt because the cause is always at work; the states are co-ordinated because they arise from one and the same source, and must little by little bring about deep-seated changes in the ego. Vacillating moods are easily recognisable; the confused new, strong feelings, the inclination towards idealism, to exalted religiosity and mysticism, side by side with the falling back into childishness, gives to adolescence its prevailing character. At this epoch, the human being first makes clumsy attempts at independence in every direction; for the first time uses for his own purposes all that family and school have contributed hitherto; he conceives ideals, constructs far-reaching plans for the future, lives in dreams whose content is ambitious and egotistic. This is all physiological. The puberty of a psychopathic is a crisis of more serious import. Not only do the psychophysical changes run a stormy course, but features of a hereditary degenerate character become fixed. In the child these do not appear at all, or but sporadically. For the explanation of our case we are bound to consider a specific disturbance of puberty. The reasons for this view will appear from a further study of the second personality. (For the sake of brevity we shall call the second personality IVENES as the patient baptised her higher ego).
Jung continues regarding the sexual conflict in the teenager …
… The patient’s romances throw a most significant light on the subjective roots of her dreams. They swarm with secret and open love affairs, with illegitimate births and other sexual insinuations. The central point of all these ambiguous stories is a lady whom she dislikes, who is gradually made to assume the form of her polar opposite, and whilst Ivenes becomes the pinnacle of virtue, this lady is a sink of iniquity. But her reincarnation doctrines, in which she appears as the mother of countless thousands, arises in its naive nakedness from an exuberant phantasy which is, of course, very characteristic of the period of puberty. It is the woman’s premonition of the sexual feeling, the dream of fruitfulness, which the patient has turned into these monstrous ideas. We shall not go wrong if we seek for the curious form of the disease in the teeming sexuality of this too-rich soil. Viewed from this standpoint, the whole creation of Ivenes with her enormous family is nothing but a dream of sexual wish-fulfilment, differentiated from the dream of a night only in that it persists for months and years.
Thank you very much, Carl Jung. So, to sum up this chapter, we have puberty, ageing, disease, the autumn season and the skull-like face of Pazuzu as symbols of mortality in the story.
PART FIVE
THE FAITH DILEMMA
While The Exorcist carries mortality wish fulfilment as a silver lining, there’s no denying the dark cloud element. Personally, I’ve never found the film to be very scary, probably because it never convinced me to start believing in demons. Even seeing the movie for the first time at about age twelve the only moment that disturbed me was the crucifix self-harm scene. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the film. It was, and still is, one of my favourite horror films on account of the solid story, fascinating subject matter, acting performances and Friedkin’s direction.
However, I have met quite a few people who were deeply disturbed by the film, and usually they were people who believed in the supernatural a lot more than I did. So there is a major emotional price to be paid for believing in demons, angels and the afterlife. The anxiety and terror people endure on account of belief in demons and the possibility of spending all of eternity in hell, in my view, is far more terrifying than the idea of mortal death being the absolute end of our existence. And just as I’ve argued that the desire for immortality confirmation motivates people to believe in spiritual possession, a counter-argument could be made that my lack of belief in the afterlife is motivated by fear of hell. I don’t think this is the case though. If someone showed me proof that ghosts exist I’d probably jump for joy at confirmation of the afterlife. The traditional religious notions of good vs evil and the supposed justification for casting people to hell I’ve always considered ridiculous anyway, even if souls do exist.
In The Exorcist, fear of hell is a major problem for Karras. When he dreams of his Mother after her death he sees her walking down into a subway. I’m pretty certain than this is a representation of her soul being taken to hell. And the novel has convinced me further of this. On p87 Karras despairs that his Mother “may not be in heaven”. A couple of pages later comes the dream sequence of Mother standing by the subway tunnel. The Pazuzu face insert, seen in the film, isn’t mentioned in the novel, but it is stated that Karras imagines his Mother lost and helpless in the maze of tunnels below. But there’s also another scene in a subway. Karras sees the beggar who claims to be an old altar boy. The beggar’s face staring coldly under the flashing light from the passing train has always given me the impression that the beggar is Pazuzu tormenting Karras. But in the novel it’s less sinister. Karras interacts with the beggar and gives him a dollar. Given the Mother in hell concept, and Karras himself having probably once been an altar boy (show him in church), I suspect that another subtext going on here is that the ex-altar boy represents Karras’s fear that not only will he end up a poor beggar if he clings onto his faith in God, but also that he might end up in hell on account of losing his faith. I like the beggar scene because it carries multiple overlapping implications – a great representation of the how complex Karras’s faith struggles are.
The notion of his Mother being in hell is directly stated to Karras later, “Your Mother sucks cocks in hell …”. There also seems to be an implication that Regan, Dennings and Karras’s Mother, by being apparently trapped inside Regan, is equivalent to them being in hell. “Why you do this to me Dimmy?” And the lunatic hospital ward where his mother was placed when he last saw her alive itself is a scenario often equated to hell. “Momma I’m gonna get you out of here.” Sounds of the hospital ward are dubbed over the scene where Karras sees his Mothe in place of Regan … again hell and lunatic asylums are cross-symbolized. And the laughing heard in lunatic asylums, which can be heard in this scene also, tend to give the impression of demons laughing at those who are imprisoned.
So, the fear of hell as a price for believing in the afterlife is a huge price to pay, and that fear applies to the self and to the afterlife of loved ones.
A few paragraphs back, I stated that I thought the reasoning behind religious beliefs about why people would be sent to hell are ridiculous. Let me expand on this. In my view institutional, money-hungry, power-hungry versions of spirituality play guilt trips on people for, often petty, so-called sins as a means of psychological, and hence behavioural, control. In my view, if there is a God, it is no more akin to man than it is to ants. I don’t personally believe that humans, as a species, hold special space in the realm of the supernatural, if it exists. And if the soul exists, I consider it to be something fundamentally different to the arms, legs and sense organs of the biological vessel we call the human body.
Depictions of heaven and hell in religious art typically depict the soul as human in form, with the pleasure rewards of heaven and the pain rewards of hell directly equivalent to the human body vessel, even though that body is supposedly already dead. I’m not sure why but I find is amusing that the soul is so often assumed to be human body shaped. The most frequent variation seems to be the soul as a ball of light, somewhat like the sun. But again the perception of the soul as light is still based on the organic sense organs we call eyes, which die along with our bodies. If there is a soul I believe its experience would be in an entirely different realm to organic senses.
By using our living fears of organic pain and pleasure as representations of an afterlife choice between heaven and hell, organized religion controls its members. Historically it has even sought to manifest the hell portion of the equation through real life physical torture. Meanwhile the heavenly afterlife is, across most cultures as far as I can tell, considered to be a realm much more pleasurable than Earth or, at least, much less painful. Souls are usually considered floating entities, freed from the grounding restrictions of gravity. Again it all seems like wishful thinking.
It may seem like I’m being blasphemous in describing religion in these ways, but in The Exorcist novel on p294 Father Merrin talks about Satan as possibly serving God’s will. I’ll take that further and describe Satan as a henchman of God, a controlled opponent. Satan terrifies believers in God with the threat of eternally burning in hell if they don’t obey God’s rules. The result is wider and stronger allegiance to God … fanatical allegiance at times. Ever heard the term “God-fearing” as a description of believers? It makes God sound like a tyrant.
Consider Father Dyer’s last lines to Karras p311. He wants Karras to apologize for offending God, so that he won’t be sent to hell. This whole paradigm could be called a protection scam. In fact the infamous prayer line “The Lord is my Shepherd” furthers the case. The shepherd uses a sheepdog to scare wandering, self-motivated sheep back into the fold under the barked threat of vicious attack. Satan and his army of demons are, in a way, sheepdogs working for the shepherd, but the sheep probably don’t understand that. And hey, in the opening of The Exorcist we have dog barks representing the attacks of Pazuzu.
This plays out very clearly between human beings. Religion-based governments, monarchies and leaders within religious institutions – you know, people with big fancy hats and gowns who get to write down the rules and pass them off as God’s will – they become the henchmen, they become God and Satan in organic form, burning and torturing people as punishment for disobeying the rules of God.
Another, less dramatic, way of putting all this is that God and the Devil represent the conscious and subconscious. The conscious convinces itself and others that the whole person is fundamentally good in intention, while the darkest selfish and destructive urges are pushed down into the subconscious, where their very existence can be either denied or projected onto other human beings who can then be attacked as part of the denial process.
Here’s another way of thinking about how powerful the spiritual controlled conflict is. Ask people if they believe in God and many will say no, but most atheists still talk about the force of evil existing in the world. They hear a news story about a sadistic murder, a child abuser or a mass murderer like Hitler or Stalin, and they are quick to describe the perpetrator as evil. But evil is a religious concept. Despite the abundance of research showing correlation between childhood conditioning by parental figures as a factor in adult crime, many people still perceive society’s worst criminals as being born evil, as being evil in their very nature. In my view, this is a way for people to suppress their awareness that dark criminal urges are present in us all. People don’t typically call themselves angels, but by calling criminals inherently evil, they imply themselves to be angels, or at the least, inherently good.
Other common verbal habits suggest subconscious belief in supernatural forces, such as people crying out to God or the Devil in moments of frustration or pleasure. Chris Macneil does this a lot in The Exorcist. Her statements can be considered to be tiny momentary prayers. In fact, on p300 of the novel, it is described that Karras realizes that his thoughts about wanting Regan to live are prayers.
All of these complexities lead me to believe that verbally stated belief or dismissal of spirituality only equates to the conscious mind. Subconsciously people can think and feel very differently. And so, even those who claim to be “non-believers” or “atheists” can still emotionally engage with a good quality ghost story or horror film.
Whether you believe in Christianity or it’s oppositely framed alternative, the occult, either way you are embracing a belief system that promises immortality beyond the grave. And this brings me to a strange irony in the belief system of life everlasting. The desire to be alive conflicts with the desire not to suffer. In an important difference between Exorcist novel and film, in the novel Karras discovers that Merrin had taken a nitroglycerin pill because he knew he was dying of a heart attack. At least that’s the way it reads to me on p308. And yet, in Christianity suicide is considered a sin, but surely the yearning for immortality should make believers not only accept the death of their physical body, but actually look forward to it, even long for it? If suicide is a sin then wouldn’t the desire for death be a sin too? No wonder religion confuses people.
A lot of spiritual movies involve a protagonist character dying at the end only to discover life everlasting. And The Exorcist includes this factor. Dying at the bottom of the steps, Karras uses his fingers to confirm his belief in God and the afterlife as Dyer prays for him. The novel describes a look of happiness in his eyes, as he looks beyond this world, and a sense of triumph p318. Dyer sees this and “feels lighter”. There’s the spiritual anti-gravity again.
CONCLUSION
So there you go. Human spiritual belief in ghosts and the afterlife is fairly complicated. It has lots of nuances that take quite a bit of unravelling. Volumes upon volumes of books and published studies have tried, for centuries, to identify, explain and resolve the subject. The Exorcist, with its historical references and complex psychology of youth, mortality and related factors, struck a lot of psychological nerves and continues to do so today, half a century later. I consider it to be an important contribution to the spirituality debate.