Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste

Rod Dreher interviews with Matt Baglio whose journey into the world of contemporary exorcism is detailed in "The Rite," which has just been published.

You write in great detail about things your protagonist, Father Gary Thomas, saw in his training sessions with Father Carmine. Were you there to witness them? If so, what was that like for you?

I was able to see about 20 exorcisms, some of which Father Gary participated in. The thing that most surprised me was the relative normalcy of the people who had come to be prayed over. You could even have conversations with them. Of course once the exorcist began praying the Ritual then all that would change and the person would react, sometimes violently. Most of the cases I saw were of the milder sort where the person coughed, or just sat completely still. However I did see a few violent ones in which the person thrashed and their personality changed and they began speaking in a gruff and guttural voice that to me sounded very unnatural. In those instances I was really struck by the intense suffering that these people undergo.

[snip]

Many people today scoff at the idea of Satanic cults, but the exorcists you interviewed insist that they are a reality. Is the threat mostly real, or mostly imagined - and how, precisely, do cults threaten?

[snip]

The first thing to understand is that these groups can be very different as not everyone believes the same thing. Some consider the devil to be kind of a natural force that they see as being repressed by organized religion. Other groups apparently do believe in a personified devil, and they perform rituals, which are said to involve drugs, orgies and in extreme cases even human sacrifice. Another group could be classified as just young kids into the trappings of certain music and primarily looking for a way to rebel. In fact some experts feel that Satanism is more of a cultural phenomenon. Others, including exorcists, see Satanic cults as a real threat that can open a person up to demonic attack.

[snip]

Of course this doesn't mean that Satanic cults are harmless. In fact even skeptics point out the damage that these groups can cause to society because they preach a doctrine of hate and despair, and create narcissistic individuals who are incapable of feeling any kind of empathy for others. One police detective from Florence told me how hard it is for him to confront these groups because their members essentially take the shared values that we all have and flip them upside down. They take pleasure in lying and they celebrate death. He found it difficult to even talk to them because there was no common ground from which to start from.

Your exorcist contacts advise you, as mine - the late Father Mario Termini - did me, that people should absolutely stay away from the occult, even in its most apparently benign forms, because that is a gateway to the demonic. Yet occultism seems ever more present in popular culture. Does this concern you?

I think it is very troubling even just from the standpoint that it really reflects on how we have become a society of instant gratification. Nobody wants to struggle anymore, or accept the notion that there may be mystery, or things outside our control. I think there is also this notion that life should always be dramatic, and that we should be constantly pushing our senses to the limit or we're not really living. Seen in this context, for some people, just going to Church is pretty boring and so they go looking for answers elsewhere.

One of the things the course talked about was the concept that where faith decreases, superstition grows. And as more and more people turn away from traditional religions, other beliefs are rushing in to fill the void. What people don't realize is that there can be a consequence. Exorcists of course are adamant that this can lead to demonic attack. But even looking at this from a secular standpoint, you can have impressionable people becoming victims to "magicians" or "psychics" who defraud them out of thousands of dollars, destroying families and ruining people's lives.

Exorcists tend to have great concern, and even disdain, for contemporary priests and bishops who deny the reality of the demonic. In your opinion, how widespread is that denial in the ranks of the clergy, what are its roots, and what is its result? In my personal experience, once you've seen this sort of thing with your own eyes, it takes a superhuman act of will to deny the reality of malevolent spirits.

One of the first things I found fascinating at the course was this notion that some priests didn't believe in the devil. When I first met Father Gary he was quite candid about the fact that he'd never been taught anything about the devil or exorcism. He also told me of a few instances that had happened to him in Rome where he'd shared with some of the other priests he was living with that he was the exorcist and how some of them had dismissed him out of hand.

[snip]

The result was that many priests saw the devil as a metaphor for evil and didn't believe in things like demonic possession or exorcism, which is the biggest complaint that exorcists make. This meant that Christians who in some way felt their lives were being affected by evil spirits had to go outside the Church to get help. Interestingly, Father Gary told me that the newer generation of seminarians is more apt to believe in the reality of Satan.

This made me recall one of my previous posts on Grant McCracken and the significance of the loss of ritual within modern culture and life...

The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least freeform. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was exuberantly transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.

The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs. The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them. [em: mine]

Which is to say that there was once a time when ritual had a truly transformative effect on ourselves and our world, and by that I don't just mean a ceremonial one. Anyone familiar with the intensity of the placebo effect is aware of the dramatic and measurable impacts that are possible from simply believing something to be true.

But while I don't believe in a disembodied intelligent evil (as Dreher and Baglio seem to), or to quote the inimitable Ulysses Everett McGill:

Well, there are all manner of lesser imps and demons, Pete, but the great Satan hisself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hay fork.

This is different than saying that I don't believe in evil itself, which is to say a darkness that is beyond seemingly rational comprehension or simplistic explanation.

From CNN:

Rosalio Reta sits at a table inside a Laredo Police Department interrogation room. A detective, sitting across the table, asks him how it all started.

Reta, in Spanish street slang, describes his initiation as an assassin, at the age of 13, for the Mexican Gulf Cartel, one of the country's two major drug gangs.

"I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person," Reta says on the videotape obtained by CNN. "They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from kid."

Rosalio Reta and his friend, Gabriel Cardona, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later.

[snip]

"One thing you wonder all the time: What made them this way?" Garcia told CNN. "They were just kids themselves, waiting around playing PlayStation or Xbox, waiting around for the order to be given."

[snip]

Prosecutor and investigators say Reta and Cardona were recruited into a group called "Los Zetas," a group made up of former members of the Mexican special military forces. They're considered ruthless in how they carry out attacks. "Los Zetas" liked what they saw in Cardona and Reta.

Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.

The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.

As the teens became more immersed in the cartel lifestyle, their appearance changed. Cardona had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. Reta's face became covered in tattoo markings. And both sported tattoos of "Santa Muerte," the Grim Reaper-like pseudo-saint worshipped by drug traffickers.

[snip]

Just hours before they were arrested, federal authorities taped a phone conversation between them in which Cardona brags about killing 14-year-old Inez Villareal and his cousin, a Cardona rival.

Cardona laughs as he describes torturing the two boys and dumping their bodies in large metal drums filled with diesel fuel. He says he made "guiso," or stew, with their bodies.

As the call ends, Cardona says, "There are three left to kill, there are three left."

Rosalio Reta


Gabriel Cardona

Dreher would be tempted to look at these faces and pick up on the story of Santa Muerte and see the devil infiltrating their hearts. I'm not sure it is quite that simple. I doubt their "faith" in Santa Muerte can be considered a philosophy or belief in any coherent sense, but there is a reversal of ethics in such a life where the good becomes bad, and evil is celebrated. It's an ex post facto way of explaining to yourself why you are doing the things you are doing.

But once you accept that, anything is possible. To kill is to succeed, to gain power, to exalt oneself. To decline to do so in the context of their world would be to be weak, robbed of one's masculinity, powerless and defeated.

It is the story of Tolkein's ring, is it not? The allure of absolute power and the darkness that lurks one step beyond it. I won't call it the devil, but I don't know that I have a better explanation either.