The Chief Exorcist of Rome

Fascinating article from Smithsonian -

Before his death in 2016, Father Gabriele Amorth claimed to have performed over 100,000 exorcisms. Working as the official exorcist of the Vatican, he performed a service that many have never seen outside of horror films. Now, his story is the basis of such a film: The Pope’s Exorcist, starring Russell Crowe, which came out last week.

Born in Modena, Italy, in 1925, Amorth joined the Italian resistance during World War II. He earned a law degree and worked as a journalist before becoming a priest in 1951.

In 1986, Amorth was appointed as an assistant to Cardinal Ugo Poletti, the chief exorcist of the diocese of Rome, whom he later succeeded. He remained in the position until his death. In 1990, he wrote the book An Exorcist Tells His Story, which was translated into 30 different languages and became a bestseller. Around the same time, Amorth founded the International Association of Exorcists. The association, which still exists today, is not impressed with the new film. 

“This way of narrating Don Amorth’s experience as an exorcist, in addition to being contrary to historical reality, distorts and falsifies what is truly lived and experienced during the exorcism of truly possessed people,” says the association in a statement, per the Catholic News Agency’s Kevin J. Jones. 

Exorcism has a long history in Christianity. The practice appears in the New Testament, which depicts Jesus casting out evil spirits in the Gospel of Mark. “Jesus’ exorcisms were evidence of his authority over the devil,” Rob Haskell, a theologian specializing in the New Testament, told History.com’s Elizabeth Yuko last year. “They showed that he had spiritual power.” 

While Protestants performed exorcisms, the practice fell out of vogue around the 1600s. Today, exorcism is associated primarily with Catholicism. As recently as 2017, Pope Francis told a group of priests that they “should not hesitate” to call in exorcists when necessary. 

Exorcisms have long been a subject of fascination for Hollywood and horror fans. The Pope’s Exorcist is the latest in a long line of films pitting priests against demonic forces, the most famous of which being The Exorcist (1973). Amorth was a fan of the film: When he met with its director, William Friedkin, decades later, he explained that he was not afraid of the devil, and that, in fact, the devil feared him.

“Do you know why the Devil is afraid of me? Because I’m uglier than he is,” Amorth told Friedkin in a 2016 Vanity Fair interview. While he was known to have a surprising sense of humor, considering his line of work, Amorth believed that the work he was doing was essential. Throughout his life, he claimed to have performed tens of thousands of exorcism rituals. According to Deepa Bharath of the Associated Press (AP), Amorth has said that 98 percent of those who seek him out need a psychiatrist, not an exorcist. His focus, however, is on the 2 percent.

While some in the Catholic community are critical of The Pope’s Exorcist, one of the film’s executive producers, Edward Siebert, who is also a Jesuit priest, has maintained that his goal is to cast men like Amorth in a positive light. “It’s good to see a priest talking about prayer, forgiveness, God’s love and, on top of all that, vanquishing demons,” Siebert tells the AP. “It feels good to finally see a priest as a hero.”

 

Carolyn Hagler | READ MORE

Reading the Future Using Eggs

Atlas Obscura's Diana Hubbell writes about telling the future using eggs. A fascinating history. Here is an excerpt -

The Long, Extremely Witchy History of Telling the Future With Eggs - From ancient Greece to the Salem Witch Trials.

Shortly before his death in 1700, John Hale, a Puritan reverend from Beverly, Massachusetts, decided to document a dark historical moment. His posthumously published work, A Modest Inquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft, is one of the few written records from someone present at the Salem Witch Trials.

Hale’s accounts described one particularly interesting form of divination: oomancy, or using eggs to interpret the future. Even by the 17th century, the idea of oomancy was aleady age old. Ancient Greek soothsayers coined the term, which stems from the words for “egg” (oon) and “divination” (manteia). Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a Roman historian who lived from 69 to 122 B.C., once described how the Empress Livia Drusilla kept a chicken egg in her cleavage believing that its sex would foretell the sex of her unborn child.

Cultures around the world, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, have relied on eggs to unscramble the mysteries of the future. One method, described by Hale as the “Venus glass,” may have its roots in Scotland. The concept is simple: take a glass of warm water, slowly pour in a raw egg white, and watch what shapes form as the proteins denature. Much like tea leaf-reading, or tasseomancy, the resulting shapes offer clues as to whom you might marry or how you might die.

“If you see that the egg whites kind of look like a plow or a horse, your husband might be a farmer,” Muise explains. “Or if it looks like a fortress, your husband might be a soldier, or if it looks like a boat, your husband might be a fisherman.”

For the ancient Druids, oomancy was often an important part of the celebrations for Samhain, the pagan holiday from which most Halloween traditions originated. German pagans used a similar fortune-telling technique with egg whites in water, which they sometimes referred to as Eierorakel, or an “egg oracle.” In his 1878 book Deutschen Mythologie, Jakob Grimm describes tossing an egg in water to find out if a child was bewitched.

Part of its widespread appeal may lie in the egg’s inherent connection to birth and the cycle of life; a greater part has to do simply with its near-universal accessibility. “[Puritans] didn’t have a lot of material stuff,” Muise says. “You see magic with apples, eggs, cabbage, nuts, because that’s what people had around the house. They didn’t have tarot cards or crystals.”

It’s not a coincidence that food-centric magic features so prominently in the lore of the witch trials. Tales of witches from the 1600s often fixate on their culinary elements. “The butter won’t churn, because a witch has bewitched the cream itself,” Muise says. “They may make food spoil, they may make a cow give rotten milk out of its udders. So often the witch is very much imagined to be disrupting the domestic production of food.”

At the time, women were responsible for virtually all food production, from the beer that kept the Puritans hydrated in the absence of sanitary water, to the bread on their tables. Any woman who dared to disrupt her domestic lot in life, was a threat to the social hierarchy and stability of these small, fragile societies. It’s little wonder that many of the women accused of black magic in Salem were those who lived somewhat outside the social norms; or that their supposed transgressions often started in the kitchen.

As the mass hysteria around witches began to fade, so did the moral panic around fortune-telling. Food-centric methods of fortune-telling, from oomancy to dumb cakes, which the Puritans had regarded as dangerous entry points to Devil worship, were increasingly regarded as harmless party games. While the “Venus glass” may have fallen out of fashion, there’s nothing to stop modern-day Halloween celebrants from attempting to decipher their future in a swirling mass of egg whites.

 

Native Ghosts and the Supernatural

Dennis Zitogh of The Smithsonian writes about a new book, “Living Ghosts and Mysterious Monsters,” where a Native storyteller shares ancient and contemporary scary stories.

Here is an excerpt of the article.

"Stories of the unknown come in many shapes and forms that tell of unexplainable—sometimes horrible—things. Some are about demons or evil spirits," says writer and storyteller Dan SaSuWeh Jones (Ponca). 

"Others are about inanimate objects, like glowing orbs, apparitions, or even dolls that take on the breath of life. In this book, I have divided the world of American Indian ghosts into five categories: “Ghosts,” “Spirits,” “Witches,” “Monsters,” and “The Supernatural,” to give a clearer, more defined picture of what you may encounter—from an unseen noise to a hideous face to maybe something no one else has ever experienced." 

The supernatural aspects of American Indians are not normally shared with the outside world. Superstition and tribal protocols keep many stories from becoming public domain. Recently, I read a book that picked up where my grandparent’s scary stories left off: of Native tricksters; shape shifters, skin-walkers and entities that thrive in the shadows of darkness. In Living Ghosts and Mysterious Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories (Scholastic Press, 166 pp., $26.99 and $12.99) Dan SaSuWeh Jones (Ponca Nation) writer and storyteller, and Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva) illustrator, weave ancient and contemporary scary stories from tribal groups from Canada, the United States and Mexico. Thirty-two short stories are told in chilling vivid detail and collected from the thriving tradition of telling Native ghost stories. Tribal definitions and their meanings are explained to help give the reader valuable information to preface each story.

Stories of the unknown come in many shapes and forms that tell of unexplainable—sometimes horrible—things.

In a time when the internet, social media and cell phones were not the principal means of communication, Native people looked forward to sharing good stories. Winter was especially chosen as the primary storytelling season as tribal communal groups were not traveling and had to remain inside for long periods during inclement weather.

In the Western Hemisphere trading stories is an integral part of Native culture, a norm that is still carried on by modern Native peoples. At the end of this book, the writer gives credit in detail of how each of his stories was obtained. As a Native writer this consideration made me feel good that these stories were obtained and are being passed on “in a good way.” With this being said … wait until nightfall, pick up the book and prepare to enter the world of Native ghosts and the supernatural.

The Washington Post Digital Access

Pardoning Witches in Scotland

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, Scotland is considering pardoning those who perished during the witch hunts in Scotland in the early years. It would be an effort to right a passed wrong.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Advocates are calling on leaders to exonerate the thousands of women and men targeted in witch hunts during the 16th through 18th centuries

Nora McGreevy

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Officials have moved one step closer to pardoning the nearly 4,000 people accused of witchcraft in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries, reports Paul English for the London Times.

Witch hunts swept across much of Europe between roughly 1450 and 1750. Fear of the devil, social unrest and mass hysteria contributed to the frenzy of accusations and trials, which often arose from local disputes and typically targeted unmarried or widowed women, per the National Galleries of Scotland.

Scotland in particular was a hotbed of supposed “witchcraft” during the early modern era, writes James Hookway for the Wall Street Journal. A 2003 University of Edinburgh report found that at least 3,837 people were accused of witchcraft in the country between 1563 and 1735—the years in which the Scottish Witchcraft Act was passed and repealed, respectively. Around 84 percent of those accused were women, and more than half were over the age of 40. Five large-scale witch hunts took place in Scotland between 1590 and 1662 alone—a much higher rate than in England, according to the British Library.

Speaking with the Times, lawyer Claire Mitchell, who leads Witches of Scotland alongside schoolteacher Zoe Venditozzi, notes that “[p]er capita, during the period between the 16th and 18th century, [Scotland] executed five times as many people as elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of them women.”

One of Scotland’s first major witch hunts broke out in the coastal town of North Berwick in 1590. As Caroline Davies explains for the Guardian, James VI of Scotland believed that the town’s residents had used witchcraft to summon storms that delayed the ship carrying his Danish bride, Anne. Sixty or so people were accused over several months, including the servant Geillis Duncan.

In 1597, James himself wrote a treatise, Daemonologie, about demons and magic more broadly. He identified several signs of witchcraft, including the presence of a devil’s mark, interpreted loosely as any “marke upon some secreit place of their bodie.” The text amounted to a passionate defense for the punishment and persecution of witches, per the British Library.

James’ treatise became a bestseller. It even inspired playwright William Shakespeare to incorporate details from the North Berwick trials into his play Macbeth, which debuted shortly after the king was crowned James I of England and Ireland in 1603. Colloquially known as the “Scottish play,” Macbeth’s opening acts feature three witches who make prophecies, control the weather and incite powerful storms. As the Royal Shakespeare Company notes, the play was most likely performed for the first time in James’ court in August or December 1606.

The North Berwick trials took place almost a century before the infamous Salem Witch Trials broke out in colonial Massachusetts. The worst mass hysteria event in early American history, the trials resulted in some 150 accusations and 25 deaths.

Nora McGreevy can be reached through her website, noramcgreevy.com.

Haunted Lighthouses

Move Over, Haunted Houses

Pft. Haunted houses. Child’s play. Lighthouses are where the nightmares are at. Lighthouses are full of stories involving death, isolation, madness, and in some cases actual murder. While their light can be a beacon of hope to lost sailors, darkness has often haunted them. Almost every one seems to have a few ghostly inhabitants. Perhaps it’s time crumbling Victorian mansions made way for a different kind of haunted house, one that has always shone a light for both the living and the dead. 

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