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Those who associate "possession" with the gullible old days before the rise of modern science should consult Thomas B. Allen's Possession: The True Story of an Exorcism, a detailed and disturbing account of the actual case in 1949 upon which the novel and film The Exorcist were based.
Allen, who identifies himself as an agnostic, has located more than a dozen eyewitnesses who will attest to paranormal phenomena involving a 14-year-old boy whose aunt had introduced him to a Ouija board. Family members, neighbors, priests, and therapists claim to have seen objects floating in midair, a heavy chest of drawers sliding across the room, its drawers opening and closing at random, and welts spontaneously appearing on the boy's body, which formed letters and numbers. Most chilling perhaps is the testimony of the Jesuit priest who says that the boy, from a nominal Lutheran home, answered one of his queries in perfect Church Latin: "O sacerdos Christi, tu sci me esse diabolum. Cui me derogas?" (O priest of Christ, You know I am the devil. Why do you bother me?)
Of course, the Puritans' understanding of the symptoms they observed was inextricably linked to their supernaturalist world-view. Later commentators would dismiss not only their claims to have witnessed paranormal events, but also their credulity in believing such things were possible. The tragedy of Salem was not that the Puritans believed in the demonic, but rather that they equated demon possession with bewitchment. That is, they went beyond any scriptural precedent in assuming that the symptoms they observed were caused by human agents of Satan in their midst.
After centuries of commentary on Salem that often descended into caricature, Chadwick Hansen published a landmark study in 1969 called Witchcraft at Salem. Hansen exploded a good many popular myths, showing that accusations of witchcraft were rare in Puritan New England as compared to Europe, where thousands were executed as witches in the early modern era. Hansen also demonstrated that the Boston clergy discouraged rather than encouraged the public excitement over witchcraft, and that folk magic and witchcraft were indeed widespread in both old and New England at the time.
In dealing with the afflicted children themselves, Hansen records the severity of their symptoms, asserting that the children were not frauds but rather hysterics. He refers the reader to classic studies on hysteria, such as those by nineteenth-century French clinicians Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) and Pierre Janet (1859-1947).
Indeed, it was Charcot who pioneered the idea that religious ecstasies and demonic possessions were hysterical in nature. At his Paris clinic in the 1870s, Charcot gave public lectures, bringing his patients on stage to demonstrate a variety of neurological disorders. His demonstrations, as well as the 120 case studies of Janet, record most of the symptoms associated with possession: seizures and contortions, paralysis, anesthesia, restrictions of the senses, hallucinations, and altered personalities.
Nineteenth-century French physicians were fascinated by seemingly paranormal abilities of their hysteric patients, such as the ability to move about, read, and write in the dark, and even an apparent ability to see into the future (for which the doctors coined the word "clairvoyance"). British physicians, on the other hand, with their strong tradition of Scottish empiricism and common-sense philosophy, would admit only to their patients' remarkably improved abilities in penmanship, playing the piano, or parsing Greek sentences.
In Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations, Mark S. Micale surveys theories of this malady, ranging from the ancients' conjectures about "wandering wombs" (hysterion means "womb") to recent feminist readings of the disease. Especially intriguing is Micale's discussion of the relations between psychology and religion in nineteenth-century France. For example, when asked late in his life about purported healings at the Roman Catholic shrine near Lourdes, Charcot--generally considered a scientific naturalist--wrote that many of those who journeyed there were undeniably hysterics, but that some of the healings there were "well-authenticated" and that he sometimes sent his own patients there. He added that physicians should not neglect "the great resources of the faith cure," ending with Hamlet's famous observation that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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