Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, which won the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Exorcism is back. For many of us, our most vivid images of exorcism come from the 1973 movie The Exorcist, based on the William Peter Blatty novel of the same name. Who can forget Linda Blair’s screaming, spinning head and green projectile vomit? But the latest waves of exorcism are both make-believe and real. In the world of make-believe, there have been many sequels to the original movie, and Fox recently aired two seasons of a series, The Exorcist, that provided new chapters to the story. In addition, a new stage play based on Blatty’s novel debuted in Los Angeles and London and is scheduled to tour the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning in September.
All these scary stories are very entertaining, but for many people—perhaps for a growing number of them—devils, demons, and embodied evil are not just fantasy. Although it is difficult to get trustworthy data on the number of exorcisms conducted—in part because the Catholic Church discourages media coverage—according to a recent report in The Daily Beast, in Italy there are 500,000 requests per year for exorcisms or prayers of the liberation of evil spirits (Nadeau 2019). In addition, Father Vincent Lampert, the official exorcist for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, told The Atlantic that he received 1,700 phone or email requests for exorcisms in 2018 (Mariani 2018). Finally, this spring, for the first time, the Vatican opened its course on exorcism to members of other Christian denominations, including Lutherans, Anglicans, Greek Orthodox, and Pentecostals.