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Deliverance or exorcism in the past
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Message 1.Â
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Thursday, 26th May 2011
I am reading a crime novel or thriller or something by Phil Rickman, where the main thesis is that the woman vicar is training to become a deliverance worker, what used to be called (as far as I am concerned still IS called) exorcism. I was amazed at one statement in the book saying that there is a person doing such work in any parish of Britain. I think it was parish, may have been diocese, but I think it said parish. Can this be true either way?
I couldn’t think offhand of passages in the Bible which mention this practice of getting rid of demons, but my knowledge of the Bible is somewhat restricted to what we learn at Suncday, church and school in the 1960s, and they concentrated on the early books of both the Old and New Testament mostly.
One site I saw said there are no examples of exorcism in the Hebrew Scriptures. I interpret this as the Bible, but may be wrong about that. It may have a wider (or narrower) scope, but either way, does seem to indicate that it isn’t a particularly Biblical idea. (They did talk of it being a common belief in pagan people at the time of the Israelites.) So when did the idea of people being possessed by demons penetrate Christianity and what’s been its main period? And are there really so many people/places still in need of the services of deliverance from this sort of evil?
Caro. -
Message 2
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Thursday, 26th May 2011
Didn't Christ cast out demons from a man possessed and then send them into the Gadarene swine?
Going off topic as ever, I was at Gadara, or Umm Quais as it's called these days, in Jordan and saw something quite disturbing. We'd been exploring the ruins when a convoy of buses turned up and disgorged a large number of small boys. They were escorted by their, I assume, teachers and taken to the edge of the hill which overlooks the Golan Heights where they were lined up and led in chanting 'Allah Akbar' while pointing and then shaking their fists towards Israel in the distance. After that they all went and played football in the old forum.
Sorry, it just came back to me, I can see the scene now. -
Message 3
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Friday, 27th May 2011
Even more off-topic, ferval. You have reminded me of a similar disturbing thing I saw, presumably without the same effects, but the same tribal teaching. At a soccer/football match in England I was a bit distressed to notice a boy of 7 or 8 shouting insults at his opposition team. (I suppose it must have been my opposition team too, since we were sitting not far behind them, and teams in Britain are sadly segregated. (We were supposedly segregated when we watched a Wales/New Zealand match - bit tricky since my dil and her father is Welsh, and we were NZ.) ) Two brackets again!
I have my share of patriotism when it comes to watching my team play, but it doesn't descend to having to insult the opposition. Not even when it's Australia.
Cheers, Caro.
I thought Jesus did some of that sort of work, but can't remember. Do have a Bible with a compendium which I could look up. -
Message 4
Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Friday, 27th May 2011
Caro, just going out,so I will come back to this later. afaik there is an exorcist available in a diocese but I doubt if there would be one for each parish.
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Message 5
Posted by Tim of Acleah (U1736633) on Friday, 27th May 2011
Hi Caro
there are a lot of references to exorcism of demons by Jesus in the New Testament and also to there being Jewish exocists. I belive that Josephus also refers to Jewish exorcists and describes an exorcism.
If one takes Mark's gospel which scholars agree is the earliest of the 4 gospels; in chaper 1 Jesus casts out a demon from a man in Capurnaum. In chaoerter 3 Jewish leaders claim that Jesus drives out demons because he is in league with the devil (Beelzebub). In Chapter 5 is the story of the Gerasa or Gadara demon possessed man. In chpater 7 the Syrophoenician women is said to have a dughter possessed by an evil spirit. In chapter 9 ther disciples are said to be unable to drive out an 'evil spirit' from an epileptic boy.
In the Old Testamant there are hardly any references to Satan and so there are not likely to be references to exorcism. The belief in the devil was one that developed between the Old Testamant and the new probably as a result of Persian influence through Zorastorianism.
Concerning exorcism today in the Church of England, my former vicar told me of a family in the parish who had called in an Anglican exorcist, not through her, after their son had been badly affected by dabling in ouija boards.
regards
Tim -
Message 6
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Friday, 27th May 2011
Yes I agree Silver Jenny, I doubt there would be the demand for an exorcist in every parish. Every diocese would be more like.
Which church are we talking about btw? Wiki has this on exorcists in the RC church
"The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that: "Jesus performed exorcisms and from him the Church has received the power and office of exorcizing".[3] Recently, many dioceses have formally appointed priests to the function of Exorcist as a result of reaffirmation of exorcism as a necessary ritual by Pope John Paul II (who reportedly performed three exorcisms himself during his pontificate) and Pope Benedict XVI."
Although it has to be said that until recently exorcists within the RC church were both clerical and lay and could be either priest, monk, nun, a healer or any other person prepared and instructed to be an exorcist as "every christian has the power to drive out demons in the name of Christ". -
Message 7
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Friday, 27th May 2011
Not exactly exorcism but where I used to work was in an old school building built beside the graveyard of the local catholic church. Plumbers were called in to unblock a drain and while digging where the downspout emptied into the drain at the back of the building they came across human remains. The police were called and the forensic team excavated, unsurprisingly the remains were 19th c from the graveyard, but our secretary was so freaked out she got the parish priest to come in and perform a cleansing and blessing in her office. Unfortunately I was on holiday that day so missed the event so I didn't see what he did.
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Message 8
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Friday, 27th May 2011
That sort of thing would be the subject of Maori blessings to remove the tapu (sacredness/taboo) from the area and allow it to be used again normally. Sometimes a place has to be forbidden to people for some time for the tapu to be removed.
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Message 9
Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Friday, 27th May 2011
Caro, Christian churches are deconsecrated when they are no longer used by a congregation.
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Message 10
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Friday, 27th May 2011
In a way, we still do this in lay terms, too. Think of those nightmare places where serial killers did their evil - those houses tend to be pulled down because who would want to live there? It's a kind of obliteration or purging, or even exorcism. Whether we are religious or not, a sense of evil, created by past evil deeds, can create a desecrated space where no one wants to be, or needs, if possible, to be cleansed in some way.
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Message 11
Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Friday, 27th May 2011
Caro, I was just looking up the quote 'where no birds sing'* which came into my head when thinking of sites where spirits or evil deeds might haunt a place. And found this book. Have you read it?
*from Keats 'La Belle Same sans merici' -
Message 12
Posted by raundsgirl (U2992430) on Friday, 27th May 2011
The houses are pulled down because they become a focus of morbid curiosity and people actually come and take away bits as souvenirs!
We once lived in a house that had an unpleasant atmosphere as if it was the scene of deep unhappiness. If we had not moved because OH got a new job, I would have had it exorcised. -
Message 13
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Friday, 27th May 2011
I haven't read this, Silver Jenny - I am not really very interested in the paranormal or anything I think of as 'new-agey'. But I have certainly seen this book, may even own it. I have been to Culloden but I didn't feel any sense of ghosts there, though I was shocked to hear there had been at one stage a road put through the site, where soldiers had fallen.
My neighbour, with some Maori blood, said she had seen her dead parent (I can't now remember if it was her father or mother) at the bottom of her bed once. I am a little dubious about that, but Maori people do seem to have a connection with the spiritual world. But if you've been brought up with these ideas, perhaps it is easy to imagine these things. I don't think it would take much to spook me.
Cheers, Caro. -
Message 14
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
I'm not sure that you'd have to be bought up with paranormal ideas to experience anything, I think it is just that some people are more sensitive to this sort of thing or to various atmospheres than others. For whatever reason I don't think it can be denied that certain places do have something eerie or mysterious about them.
Nor could the paranormal be classed as "new-agey", tales of hauntings and possession have been around for millenia and they spread through all cultures across the globe. -
Message 15
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
The point about obliterating or changing the names places where serial killers did their evil seems valid. For example try finding Rillington Place on a current London A-Z for example. And although an attempt to deter ghoulish sightseers etc may be one reason for this - there's more to it than just that.
I have a friend who is an avid member of a ramblers' club in Yorkshire which organise walks and treks all over Britain and Ireland several times every year. He says that the walkers have 2 favourite times of day - dawn 'uplifting' and dusk 'romantic'. With his young family he lives at the foot of the Yorkshire Pennines and obviously takes advantage of the closeness of the moors for short excursions from home. He says, however, that neither he nor any member of his club has ever been to Saddleworth Moor (only about 20 miles from where they live) and just across the Lancashire/Manchester boundary. He reckons that even on a sunny day in June, the knowledge of what happened there would weigh heavy - but that maybe as the generations pass and as the collective public memory of the 1960s murders recedes and heals then this might change. Shades of an English 'tahu' perhaps?
On the other hand there was a program on television a few years back about the difficulty some estates agents have selling houses with unhappy histories. In one case highlighted a house was on the market in which a middle-aged woman had been stabbed to death the previous year. A young couple who were interested in buying the property were interviewed by the program makers. They said that - yes - they were aware of what had happened but that that would not put them off. In fact they said that they intended to see their own presence as being a clean sweep of any bad aura in the house and to top it all they intended that when their child was born (the woman was expecting) that not only would they go for a home birth but that they intended this to take place in the very front room where the murder had taken place. Their attitude was that new life and hope would drive out any evil memories and also restore dignity to the place where the unfortunate woman had died.
The Culloden story is interesting. There does indeed seem to be a popular belief that no heather grows on the graves there and no birds sing. This, however, is in marked contrast to, say, accounts of the Somme battlefield where even during the battle itself in July 1916 a 'Times' reporter wrote that, somewhat incongrously, birds were heard singing 'whenever there was a lull in the almost incessant fire'. Other accounts from the Western Front are equally revealing regarding birdlife. Earlier that year 'The Scotsman' newspaper noted that starlings 'would sweep out in a semicircle from some building which had been struck by a shell, and then swing back to it and settle almost before the brick dust had completely cleared away.' An in another incident a magpie was seen to ‘fly to a crater, made by a shell a few seconds previously, and begin to feed on the grubs among the freshly scattered earth.’ Another Times reporter noted ‘a flock of a few score linnets was always on or about a derelict clump of telegraph wires at Epehy, where shells fell not infrequently’.
The writer Saki (Hector H Munro) himself a casualty of the Somme (dying at Beaumont-Hamel in November 1916) before he died wrote a short story called ‘Birds on the Western Front’ on this very subject.
The following year in Spring 1917 (when the war still had 18 months to run) some of the war painters and writers re-visited the site of the battle. In March 1917 the war painter Paul Nash wrote in a letter to his wife:
“There in the ‘back garden’ of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful. The mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet (and between the sandbags even!) the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze while dots of bright dandelion, clover, thistles and twenty other plants flourish luxuriously - brilliant growth of bright green against the pink earth.â€
And a few months later the Irish painter William Orpen wrote:
‘Now in the Summer of 1917 no words could express the beauty of it. Everything shimmered in the heat. Clothes, guns, all that had been left in confusion when the war passed on, had now been baked by the sun into one wonderful combination of colour - white, pale grey and pale gold. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure - a dazzling white. White daisies, red poppies and a blue flower (great masses of them!) stretched for miles and miles. The sky a pure dark blue and the whole air, up to a height of about forty feet, thick with white butterflies.’
More often than not, therefore, it seems that the natural world is oblivious to or even contemptuous of man’s folly. -
Message 16
Posted by raundsgirl (U2992430) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
It's always said that no birds sing at the site of Auschwitz, but the author Ludovic Kennedy tells how he interviewed a woman who had been an inmate. She sat under a tree just outside the former death camp and all the time he was interviewing her (for a radio broadcast) a thrush was singing loudly.
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Message 17
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
Thanks for all that. I think it is easy for myths to arise round places that turn out not to be actually correct when a bit more research is done. Eerieness arises, I think, usually with darkness and dankness (and on the screen by the use of music to portray that), but I don't know if that necessrily means there is anything supernatural there. I don't believe in an afterlife which rather puts ghosts and spirits out of my beliefs too. But can so many people seeing them all be wrong?
I agree, Vizzer, that it is more than a wish to keep away sightseers that makes people burn or otherwise destroy houses where murders have taken place. My first thought was of one on the West Coast of NZ where a farmer had gone berserk and killed half a dozen people, including police. His home was burnt down, but it is in an isolated area not likely to attract many people. I think it is done more the benefit of the locals who want their area wiped free of obvious reminders of crimes like this. I find it rather a shame, as eventually - I am thinking of 100 years' timeframe - these places can become tourist spots. Still I suppose locals can't always be thinking of the historical future. I think police find it very frustrating if places are destroyed before they can get all the forensc evidence. We had a killing of a family in Dunedin in 1994 which has since been the subject of numerous court cases (did the dead father do it, or the live son? finally the Privy Council ordered a retrial and he was acquitted), but the house where the evidence was found and the rooms it was found it (or disputed to be in) was burnt down by the fire service two weeks after the murders. This has not been helpful to the enquiry.
ID, this was an Anglican vicar in my novel and the book is set around Hereford Cathedral with the saint Thomas of Cantilupe a major focus. I think Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins' novels are all set round Hereford, but this is the first one I have read.
Thanks, Tim, for the Biblical information. Hebrew Scriptures means the Old Testament? or a lot more writings than that?
Cheers, Caro. -
Message 18
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Sunday, 29th May 2011
Well, I don't think that places where evil or tragedy took place should ever become tourist spots per se - ie, just a sort of voyeurististic 'fancy that!' visiting. It's one thing for them to become a pilgrimage or a tribute place, like Ground Zero, and to keep alive the memory of what happened and why it should never happen again (Ground Zero, Auschwitz, WWI battlefields etc).
If residential houses could be 're-claimed' in the way that was described about the couple determined to 'exorcise' the bad karma from the murdered pregnant woman, that would be good indeed, but I suspect that places where real, 'evil-evil' (the Fred West kind) happened, that might just be impossible, and too risky.
As for nature reclaiming the battlefields, I think it is very redemptive, and it's especially poignant to think of soldiers facing (their totally pointless) deaths at least seeing some life and greenery around them.
"And buttercups have pressed with gold
Their slow boots coming up..." (Owen, I think.) -
Message 19
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Sunday, 29th May 2011
Well, I don't think that places where evil or tragedy took place should ever become tourist spots per seÂ
But they do Jenny, the supreme example being the Coliseum. Oddly, that is one of the least atmospheric places I have ever visited, probably because of the scrum of people milling about and it feeling so very familiar.
Another example would be the Mexican pyramids. I have a horrible feeling that the legacy of suffering and death that haunts these kinds of sites is a large part of their attraction. -
Message 20
Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Sunday, 29th May 2011
I was just thinking of the castles we have visted which had episodes of bloody conflict in times past but which have no feeling of menace left.
Only time I have had that was in a cottage in Scotland where I did feel the presence of what I can only descrbe as choking evil, and only in one room. I have never before or since felt such an atmosphere. It was in an estate village where houses had been renovated and refurnished to look as they had when people lived and worked on the estate. I had ventured into the cottage because there was a patchwork quilt which I had been told about. Got outside again as quickly as possible feeling very peculiar.
I don't think it was drains because they wouldn't have had those, would they!. -
Message 21
Posted by Tim of Acleah (U1736633) on Monday, 30th May 2011
Hi Caro
Hebrew Scriptures basically means the Old Testament. Other Jewish 'scriptures' were not written in Hebrew. There is very little OT Hebrew other than that contained in the bible which can make translation tricky.
regards
Tim
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