Hostage To The Devil Read online

  Hostage To The Devil

  Malachi Martin

  Preface to the New Edition:

  Possession and Exorcism in America in the 1990s

  In the blink of God's eye since Hostage to the Devil was first published in 1976, nothing has changed on the one hand. And everything has changed on the other.

  Nothing has changed in the process by which an individual is Possessed by personal and intelligent evil. Nothing has changed, either, in the requirements for successful Exorcism of a Possessed individual. All of that remains as described and summarized in the chapters and cases that follow.

  What have changed are the conditions of the society in which we all now live. To a far greater degree than most of us could have imagined fifteen or so years ago, a favorable climate for the occurrence of demonic Possession has developed as the normal condition of our lives.

  In 1976 Satanism was presented, and was probably regarded by most Americans, as a box office and a bookstore draw. In fact, Hostage to the Devil was intended as a clear warning that Possession is not—nor was it ever—some tale of dark fancy featuring ogres and happy endings. Possession is real; and real prices are paid.

  Now, in America of the 1990s, there is little question of demonic Possession as an entertainment. Among families everywhere and at every level of society, there is instead a justifiable fear. Most of all, this fear is for children. And in point of fact, there are few families not already affected in some way by Satanism. Even by ritualistic Satanism-formal ceremonies and rites organized and performed by individuals and groups in professed worship of Satan.

  For obvious reasons, we don't know everything about organized Satanist groups, or covens as they are called, in the United States. But the ample knowledge we do have justifies the fear among average families for their children and their way of life in the future.

  We know, for example, that throughout all fifty states of the Union, there are now something over 8,000 Satanist covens. We know that in any major American city or large town, a Black Mass—almost always organized by covens—is available on a weekly basis at least, and at several locations. We know that the average membership of Satanist covens is drawn from all the professions as well as from among politicians, clergy, and religious.

  We know further that within those covens, a certain amount of “specialization” has come about. One can choose either a heterosexual or a homosexual coven, for example. In at least three major cities, members of the clergy have at their disposal at least one pedophiliac coven peopled and maintained exclusively by and for the clergy. Women religious can find a lesbian coven maintained in a similar way. We know, too, that in many public schools in any major city, it is a virtual surety that there is at least one group of teenagers engaged in ritualist Satanism. And though we know very little—again for obvious reasons—about human sacrifice as an element in ritualist Satanism, we do know that in certain covens in which confidentiality is an absolute, life-or-death condition, the penalty for attempting to quit the coven is ritual death by knife, with one stab wound inflicted for every year of the offending member's life.

  Hard admissible evidence concerning human sacrifice as an element in Satanist rituals is limited by the fact that disposal of human remains has been developed into one of the dark art forms within Satanist circles through use of portable incinerators and cremetoria; and because there are no birth or baptismal records—no records of existence—of intended Victim infants.

  Nevertheless, we have enormous amounts of anecdotal evidence indicating that some thousands of infants and children are intentionally conceived and born to serve as Victims in Satanist sacrificial rites. In the world of Satanist worship, boys are preferred as gender-replicas of the Christ Child. But girls are by no means excluded.

  In this regard, the emergence of child abuse as a characteristic of our time must claim particular attention. Not all—perhaps not even most—child abuse originates in ritualist Satanism per se. Each case must be weighed on the evidence. But the extent of child abuse in America today and the concrete evidence of Satanism as a factor in many such cases, begins to give some idea of the degree to which the inverted standards that are the prime hallmark of Satanist activity in any form—and of ritualist Satanism above all—have infiltrated and influenced all levels of our society.

  As horrifying as even that much information is—though it is not all of the information we have, by any means—still more shocking is the realization of the fact that in this, the America of the 1990s, one is never far from a center where such activity is carried out on a routine basis. No one lives far from some geographical area where some form of ritualistic Satanism is practiced. Ritualistic Satanism and its inevitable consequence, demonic Possession, are now part and parcel of the atmosphere of life in America.

  That a more favorable climate exists now than ever before for the occurrence of demonic Possession among the general population is so clear, that it is attested to daily by competent social and psychological experts, who for the most part, appear to have no “religious bias.”

  Our cultural desolation—a kind of agony of aimlessness coupled with a dominant self-interest—is documented for us in the disintegration of our families. In the breakup of our educational system. In the disappearance of publicly accepted norms of decency in language, dress and behavior. In the lives of our youth, everywhere deformed by stunning violence and sudden death; by teenage pregnancy; by drug and alcohol addiction; by disease; by suicide; by fear. America is arguably now the most violent of the so-called developed nations of the world.

  Parents do have every reason to be concerned, then. For above all, the greatest changes in the conditions in which we have come to live over the past twenty years or so have meant that young people are left as the most defenseless against the possibility of Possession. Raised more and more in an atmosphere where moral criticism is not merely out of fashion, but prohibited, they swim with little help in a veritable sea of pornography. Not merely sexual pornography, but the pornography of unmitigated self-interest. Whether spoken or acted.

  Just as the practical impact of large numbers of faithful clergy among us was once so great, so now are the practical consequences for us all-believers and nonbelievers alike—of large numbers of unfaithful churchmen.

  Among the general population of Catholics and Christians of other denominations, large numbers of people no longer learn even so basic a prayer as the Our Father. In churches and parochial schools alike, the subject of Hell is avoided, as one midwestern priest put it, in order not to put people “on a guilt trip.” The idea of sin is likewise avoided, according to the same source, in order not to do “irreparable damage to what has been taught for the past fifteen years.”

  That much alone leaves every Christian at a profound and needless disadvantage in the confrontation with evil that life brings to each of us. Deeply felt prohibitions against mixing what is termed the “rational” with the faith that is necessary for the recognition of evil is, for many, an insurmountable obstacle. And without the grace that is born of true faith, Satan does what he does best—he ceases to exist in the eyes of those who do not see.

  Still, the most dramatic and immediate harm by far that results from such an extensive and pervasive lack of instruction falls upon the true and valid victims of Possession. The individual victims of personal evil, in their thousands.

  The Church is the only element in society with the authority and the availing remedy to counteract such manifest evil. If, then, the officials charged with this basic duty of the Church deny the very legacy of that Church—if they turn their backs even on Scriptural descriptions of Christ casting out demons; if they characterize those accounts as false and as literary license—then actual victims
of true demonic activity are left with no hope.

  “If the salt has lost its saltiness,” St. Mark quotes Christ, “wherewith will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another.” In a nutshell, that is the condition of some of our clergy; and it is the plight of the Possessed in America of the 1990s. If the Church Fathers no longer believe, then victims of demonic Possession have nowhere to turn. They have no place to seek the help they require and to which they have every right as afflicted Christians.

  To combine known, valid Possession with hopelessness must surely cause the worst kind of insanity, if not death. It is a terrible condemnation. But at least as terrible is that those very men whose vocation is to believe and carry out all that the Church has held since its beginning, have abandoned those they still profess to serve in the name of Christ.

  The circle of helplessness and suffering caused by such unfaith among churchmen does not stop with ordinary Christians and with the Possessed, however. It widens much further.

  Because of the nature of the outrages that occur in the course of ritualistic Satanism—some extreme cases of child abuse and serial killings are but two ready examples—officers of the law frequently enter the picture. Faced with undeniable evidence of a Satanist context-evidence such as Pentagrams, broken crucifixes, Satanist graffiti, and other such paraphernalia-law officers were once able to call on the help of clergymen expert in dealing with demonic Possession.

  Such help is rarely available today. Rather, ignorance, disinterest, disbelief, even adamant unwillingness on the part of many Church officials to so much as discuss demonic Possession and Exorcism, is literally the order of the day.

  In point of fact, in the Roman Catholic Church, the Order of the Exorcist-part of every priest's ordination since time immemorial—has been omitted from the new rite of priestly ordination, as drawn up by innovators after 1964 in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.

  Because both demonic Possession and its remedy, the Rite of Exorcism, are thus seen by many officials and their advisors to be irrelevant—to be as negligible as, say, training in the use of a medieval astrolabe—many Catholic dioceses, large and small, in the United States have no official Exorcist.

  In some of the more fortunate dioceses, where priests bring in ad hoc Exorcists from out of town, the bishops of those dioceses know nothing and want to know less. But if they are not exactly benign, at least they turn a blind eye. And as permission of the bishop is required for Exorcism to proceed, that blind eye can be, and is, taken as “tacit permission.”

  In other dioceses, however, bishops are expressly opposed to the rite of Exorcism. Even in such situations, there are priests who still bring Exorcists from out of town. Their canonical justification even here is that the bishop has given “presumed permission.” That is, if the bishop believed what he should believe as bishop, and further, if he knew about and recognized as valid a particular case of demonic Possession, then it can be presumed he would authorize the Exorcism.

  Such theological reasoning and canonical shenanigans are not only tortuous. They present a scenario that comes right out of the catacombs. For the result is what can only be called an Exorcism underground. A group of priests in one diocese networks in great and guarded secrecy with those of other dioceses, in order to fulfill their obligations to the faithful in need.

  Ecclesiastically, this situation gives rise to irregularities, to be sure. It also leads in some cases to unjustly imposed canonical sanctions by irate and unbelieving bishops who maintain that their authority is thus being flouted.

  Even in such difficult circumstances, however, the incidence of Exorcism has been on a steady rise. There has been a 750 percent increase in the number of Exorcisms performed between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s. Over the same period, there has been an alarming increase in the number of requested Possessions—that is, cases in which the Possessed formally request Satan to possess them—in comparison to the cases of incurred Possessions, which result from other sorts of activities of the Possessed that facilitate Possession.

  Each year, some 800 to 1,300 major Exorcisms, and some thousands of minor Exorcisms are performed. For experts in the field, this is a sobering barometer of the increase in known cases of Possession. But it is still more sobering to realize how many more cases of Possession cannot be addressed at all. The thousands of letters I receive from people who are desperate for help—Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, and unchurched—are eloquent, anguished, and a steadily mounting testimony to the crisis.

  Law officers, meanwhile, are increasingly confronted on every side by the incontrovertible signs of crimes committed in the course of ritualistic Satanism or as a grisly result of an individual's participation in such rituals. They are very often left out of the shrunken loop of expert advice and assistance. Advice and assistance that was once routinely to be found.

  To those who are active in the field of Exorcism, and who therefore acquire a greater than usual ability to uncover and recognize the marks of ritualistic Satanism for what they are, it is clear that in many police precincts the Satanist character of a crime is either relegated to the background or not mentioned at all—at least in public reports.

  By and large, the police have no other choice. They have neither competence nor authority in the rarefied, and dangerous field of Satanist behavior. Beyond the fact that a meaningless recounting of Satanist details often inspires imitation, any attempt by an officer—or by anyone, including a trained and authorized Exorcist, as the five cases recounted in Hostage to the Devil make clear—to free an individual from a possessing demon places the aspiring rescuer in great danger of demonic attack.

  A similar lack of help is faced as well by therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and others who, like police, must deal with aberrant individuals. For, within the present context of life in America, the probability of Possession having occurred in overtly sadistic or otherwise violent, antisocial individuals is impressively high.

  To the problem faced by law officers and others who must deal with the afflictions of Satanism, the most effective answer would be the development of a close and balanced collaboration with those who are knowledgeable and experienced in the confidential, personal, and dangerous field of Possession and Exorcism.

  To develop such a grid of cooperation in the present era, however, may be next to impossible—given all the circumstances outlined above, and others besides. Like the Possessed with whom they regularly come in contact, such professionals are left to deal with the problem as best they can, using the ultimately inadequate tools provided in secular codes of law and common behavior.

  As usual, however, it is the men and women of the general public who pay the greatest price. For, even though most of us pass all our years without coming directly across any Satanist coven as such, and without being approached with a view to joining a coven, the absence of any such interdisciplinary grid of cooperation among experts and professionals has consequences that affect every one of us.

  Concrete evidence in a substantial number of crimes—in certain cases of child abuse again, for example; and in the rising national plague of seemingly motiveless or unprovoked teen-age murders, suicides, and rapes—lead some secular investigators to the correct idea that one ring of child abusers, say, may be organizationally linked to other such groups.

  Yet, as things stand at the moment, there is no lawfully admissible evidence that a national organization of Satanist groups, or covens, exists. Or that coven members in the United States and Canada are consciously and deliberately engaged in a nationwide and cross-border conspiracy. Indeed, in the United States covens can claim the constitutional protection of law for their rites and ceremonies, provided no infraction of that law can be attributed to them during their professional activities as coven members.

  Although the Satanist element in such groups may not be a direct and official concern of secular law—may, indeed, be officially off limits to the law—laws are neve
rtheless broken in the pursuit of Satanist worship. Understanding that such groups exist in large numbers from coast to coast, that some of those groups may be linked with other groups, and that their activities frequently and expertly turn secular law on its head, would doubtless go some distance in enlarging the circle of legal competence to deal with some part of the problem, at least on one level.

  If to disbelieve is to be disarmed, the reverse is equally true. Given the general conditions that surround us in our present society, it becomes all the more important to realize that even in the worst conditions, no person can be Possessed without some degree of cooperation on his or her part. It is extremely important to be aware of at least some of the factors that are likely to facilitate collaboration between a possessing demon and the Possessed.

  The effective cause of Possession is the voluntary collaboration of an individual, through his faculties of mind and will, with one or more of those bodiless, genderless creatures called demons.

  While there are no causes of demonic Possession that can be physically dissected or otherwise reduced to our currently shrunken, laboratory standards of “objectivity,” it is and always has been both possible and necessary to speak of those causes with theological accuracy.

  Demonic Possession is not a static condition, an unchanging state. Nor does one become Possessed suddenly, the way one might break an arm or catch the measles. Rather, Possession is an ongoing process. A process that affects the two faculties of the soul: the mind, by which an individual receives and internalizes knowledge. And the will, by which an individual chooses to act upon that knowledge.

  Ample experience with the Possessed has clearly demonstrated that there are certain identifiable factors that dispose an individual to collaborate, in mind and will, with a Possessing demon. Disposing factors, therefore.

  The presence of such disposing factors in a person's life does not in itself portend that the person will surely one day be numbered among the Possessed. At the same time, and with only rare exceptions in my experience, one or several of these disposing factors are operational in genuine cases of Possession.