M. Scott Peck - Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist’s Personal Accounts of Possession

Satan is spirit, and spirit is mysterious. Some things can be said about it; most cannot. Those things that can be said, I have tried to say with clarity, but take them with a grain of salt. That is how I take them myself. If and when it seems I am speaking with excessive certainty, I hope you will remember that had I expressed all of my own reservations, much of the book would have been unreadable. My only alternative would have been to write nothing at all. But that, I believe, would have been the greater sin. These things need to be talked of.

Satan is evil spirit. Evil is a dangerous word. Speak it carefullyfull of care. It is not to be used lightly. Try your best to do no harm with it. Be gentle with yourself as well as others. Yet remember those three famous monkeys covering their eyes and ears and mouth: See no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil. I think the wise person who thought them up was trying to tell us they were stupid little monkeys, monkeys of denial.

The focus of this work has been Satan first, possession second, and only slightly on evil. Readers interested in the general phenomenon of evil should read my 1983 book, People of the Lie.

The pope recently directed that every Roman Catholic diocese should have a diocesan exorcist. People with a serious personal concern about possession in regard to themselves or others should seek out the exorcist in their diocese. How well trained or experienced that person might be I have no idea. Regrettably, on account of my health and retirement, I myself am no longer able to be of any assistance as a clinician or advisor except to the church. Remember that genuine possession is a very rare phenomenon. The diagnosis, like that of evil, is not one to be bandied about.

In large part, this is a book of personal history and, in particular, an account of two experiences I had during my forties. They constitute, so far as I know, the first full accounts of possession and exorcism by a modern psychiatristwhich is to say, a medical scientist.

Still, what I write is not autobiography. Here I am not the subject; the subject is Satan and I have included only those experiences of mine that relate to that subject.

To most in our culture the subject of Satan seems esoteric indeed. But then I am not sure how seriously most take God either, beyond a touch of superficial piety. The problem is that ours is a materialistic culture. Materialism is a philosophy or attitude that holds that what you can see and touch and measure is all you get, and anything else is not worth serious consideration. But both God and Satan are Spirit. Since spirit cannot be seen, touched, or measured, it is impossible to obtain hard evidence of its existence and thereby pin it down in our collection box like a captured butterfly.

The evidence of spirit is, at best, indirect. As one very early Christian theologian put it, in relation to God, The most we can hope for is to get a glimpse of His footprints on the ramparts He has walked.

Because Satans the lesser of the two spirits, it is even more unusual to obtain glimpses of Satans manifestations. Still, if we pay attention, it is sometimes possible.

And for some, myself included, the notion of Satan is far from esoteric. In my book People of the Lie, after quoting a description from Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin in which a priests struggle between good and evil was described in depth, I wrote that the issue of free will is a paradox. On the one hand, there is no question in my mind that we humans possess free will. Indeed, I believe this is the essence of what is meant when we say that God created us in His own image. He gave us free will. Like Himself, we are free to choose. But then I went on to state:

On the other hand, we cannot choose freedom. There are two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond ones own willwhich refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil. We must ultimately belong either to God or the devil. This paradox was, of course, expressed by Christ when he said, Whosoever will save his life shall lose it. And whosoever shall lose his life, for my sake, shall find it. I suppose the only true state of freedom is to stand exactly halfway between God and the devil, uncommitted either to goodness or to utter selfishness. But that freedom is to be torn apart. It is intolerable. As Martin indicates, we must choose.

One enslavement or the other.

In People of the Lie there was a brief chapter, Of Possession and Exorcism, which was based on my experiences with two very different cases of satanic possession and their exorcisms. The subject of that book was the entirety of human evil. Because the phenomenon of demonic possession is such a tiny part of the mystery of iniquity (a phrase of St. Pauls), my two case descriptions were extremely condensed. While this condensation was appropriate to that book, it did not do justice to the extraordinary nature of both happenings. In the course of those happenings, I was privileged to witness things that very, very few other people have seen. It seemed to me that there should be a reasonably thorough historical record of these almost unique events.

The full account of these two cases, along with my commentaries on each case, constitutes this book. It should be noted that the entirety of both exorcisms was videotaped, and thus the characters dialogue could be faithfully rendered.

My Mentor, the Leprechaun

Perhaps like the ancient Roman god Janus, I always see at least two sides to everything. Consequently, there are always two sides to me. I do not think that either side is more important than the other.

One side, however, comes first. It is that of a scientist. The other side is that of a religious person. It is only somewhat more passionate. Whenever I approach a new issue, it is the scientist in me that begins the exploration. Yet the moment the scientist is done, my religious passion is unleashed upon the matter. If that matter is of major importance, eventually Ill be working on it with both sides simultaneously.

No matter how different my two identities have appeared to the world, I never felt them to be anything but me. In my mind, psychology and theology are so integrated as to be interdependent branches of the same science.