How to Perform an Exorcism

Source: How to Perform an Exorcism, Horses, 1:01:20, uploaded 2023-11-09.

The Catholic Church has published rules for diagnosing demonic possession and performing an exorcism. Horses begins there, then follows the subject into Christian mysticism, a tradition that treats the relationship between a human soul and God as direct, hidden, and capable of producing phenomena that sit beyond ordinary experience. The ritual is the visible promise of the title. The larger subject is a Christian world in which demons can act on the body, God can give supernatural gifts, and language can only approach the divine from a distance.

Horses says that he is not Christian and does not want the essay to evangelise. He treats the traditions with respect because the subject depends on taking the mystical worldview seriously from within. The claims that follow belong to that worldview. They are presented as theological descriptions and historical reports, rather than as established accounts of what happens in the world.

Demonic intervention and the limits of possession

In the mystical account, diabolical intervention means an intrusion into human life by a demon or the devil. Demons are fallen angels who joined Satan’s rebellion against God. They can affect people physically and spiritually, although they cannot take possession of the human will. A person’s will moves through God or through the person’s own freedom. The demon’s task is persuasion.

That persuasion can take the form of counterfeit miracles. Demons can produce visions, imitate religious ecstasy, create sensations of light and heat, and cause an illness before appearing to cure it. They can make a person admire their power and follow them. Their powers remain limited within the theology Horses describes. They cannot create a substance, raise the dead, heal a genuine injury, make a true prophecy, or enter a person’s intellect and discover a secret. Their intelligence lets them predict behaviour with great accuracy, which can look like knowledge of the future.

Mystical writers distinguish temptation from demonic obsession. Obsession leaves the person’s agency intact whilst subjecting the person to satanic activity. Internal obsession enters the imagination as a fixed idea, vivid image, or sound. It can impose duties that the person would otherwise find repellent. Prayer, self-denial, confidence in God, and the sacraments are presented as its remedies. External obsession takes a more bodily form. A person may see a devilish apparition, hear screams or blasphemies, smell pleasant odours or unbearable stench, taste spoiled food, and feel bruises, blows, caresses, or embraces.

The video gives three possible causes for obsession. God may permit it as a test of faith. The devil may attack out of pride when a soul tries to glorify God. A person may also be predisposed to it through melancholy, anxiety, or sadness. These causes remain internal to the mystical explanation. They do not give the viewer a way to distinguish a spiritual event from a mental or physical illness.

Possession is more severe. Obsession attacks a person from outside whilst possession takes control of the victim’s body. The devil can move the body’s faculties and organs as if they were his own, although the soul remains free because only God can enter it fully. The purpose is to disturb the soul and draw it towards sin.

Horses divides possession into crisis and calm. During a crisis, the devil may appear through convulsions, seizures, obscenities, blasphemy, or acts that expose his presence. A victim may lose consciousness and remember nothing afterwards. The video also describes cases in which the person remains aware. Father Jean-Joseph Surin, a seventeenth-century Jesuit, was allegedly possessed for twelve years. In a letter quoted by Horses, Surin describes a divided experience in which one spirit watches another act through the same body. Prayer remains his consolation whilst his tongue, attention, sleep, and movements seem to resist his intentions.

During calm periods, possession can resemble an unexplained chronic illness. The devil may leave and return according to his own desires. The mystics acknowledge that nervous disorders can produce symptoms that look almost identical to possession, and that an unstable person can imitate it. This admission leads to the Church’s rules for discernment.

Discernment before ritual

The first rule is to assume that possession is rare. Agitation, blasphemy, or horror at holy images cannot establish possession on their own because natural causes can produce all of them. The signs that permit a certain diagnosis, as Horses presents them, are the ability to speak or understand an unknown language, to perceive hidden or distant objects, and to display superhuman powers.

Each sign requires further checking. A forgotten language may have entered a person’s memory through earlier contact, so genuine proof would require an absolute lack of contact with the language. Seeing a distant or hidden object must happen repeatedly and without failure. Superhuman powers can include extraordinary strength, levitation, flight, or walking on a ceiling with the head turned fully towards the floor. The video keeps these tests inside the Church’s supernatural framework whilst acknowledging that symptoms need careful evaluation.

The video gives several possible causes for possession, including punishment for sin, a test of faith, and the victim’s own request. Its first remedies are ordinary parts of Catholic worship. Holy Communion may help during a calm period. Holy water, crucifixes, blessed objects, and relics of saints can repel the devil. The names of Jesus and Mary, together with the sign of the cross, also carry power within this account. Exorcism comes after these measures fail.

The authority to exorcise

Horses draws the ritual from two Catholic books. The Roman Ritual sets out rules and procedures for an exorcism and contains roughly twenty-one qualifications for the priest who conducts one. Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications is an eighty-four-page official document that contains the current ritual. The video says that the ritual was revised in 1614 and again in 1999, with a slightly updated version published in 2004. An English translation endorsed by the Church became available in 2016. The two books describe much the same practice, although Horses relies more heavily on the latter.

The Church limits the rite to priests whom a bishop has designated. The bishop gives a candidate the book from the Roman Ritual and speaks a Latin phrase. From that act the priest receives the power and title of an exorcist. The rite cannot take place as a public performance. The knowledge, virtue, and discretion it requires are reasons for keeping it within the authority of the Church.

The first step is to verify the possession. The exorcist must consider psychological and physical illness, mistakes about temptation, and the possibility that the devil is trying to persuade someone that an exorcism is unnecessary. If the possession seems authentic, everyone involved begins a period of prayer and fasting. The book gives no fixed duration. When possible, the victim also practises mortification of the flesh, which can mean fasting, voluntary poverty, sexual abstinence, or more severe forms of self-denial such as self-flagellation.

The rite should take place in a holy location such as a church or chapel. Popular images often show victims tied down to prevent self-harm. Horses says that the official book gives a different instruction: if the person is violently troubled, the exorcist should allow the suffering to take place because restraint would express distrust in God. The ritual must remain private and free of spectacle. The Church forbids media and social communication before, during, and after the rite, and participants cannot disclose details of the individual case. Loved ones may attend when the exorcist permits it.

Before the rite, the priest privately recites a prayer that asks God to strengthen him against the evil spirit and recalls Satan’s fall from heaven. He then arrives wearing an alb or surplice with a violet stole. The exorcist leads the group in prayer, sprinkles holy water over the victim and the attendees, and kneels for the Litany of Supplication. Psalms and further prayers may follow.

The priest displays the cross and commands hostile powers to leave. He breathes towards the victim’s face and asks God to drive out evil spirits. The ritual then uses two main formulas. The deprecatory formula addresses God and asks for mercy and protection. The imperative formula addresses the devil and orders him to depart. The priest can repeat, add, or omit further formulas according to his judgement. The Roman Ritual allows a rite to last from one to four hours or longer. It ends with thanks to God.

Christian mysticism as a direct relation

Exorcism occupies a small place within what Horses presents as the wider tradition of Christian mysticism. Mysticism is not a denomination. It is a set of theological ideas and practices that seek a direct union between the human soul and God. The word comes from the Greek muo, which the video associates with closing the eyes, closing the mouth, and entering into a mystery. Christian writers have used mystical since late antiquity for hidden meanings in the Bible, including meanings that lie beyond the text’s most obvious reading.

Mystical theology describes knowledge that human reason cannot reach by itself. God is unspeakable because he is the source of everything and cannot be reduced to a human description. Words, meditation, prayer, and ritual can mediate a relationship with God. They are means towards union rather than union itself. That union changes how the practitioner experiences existence and may, within the tradition, appear through visions, prophecy, stigmata, or other gifts.

The tradition’s roots reach back into Jewish scripture. In 1 Samuel, Samuel tells Saul that the spirit of the Lord will possess him, send him into a prophetic frenzy, and turn him into a different person. Horses connects this transformation to the mystical goal of union with God. The burning bush, Elijah’s encounter with God in a sound of sheer silence, Isaiah’s vision of divine majesty, and Ezekiel’s chariot of fire provide further examples of divine contact through altered perception and sensory withdrawal.

Origen of Alexandria reads Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs as a hidden map of mystical development. Proverbs supplies virtue and ethical discipline. Ecclesiastes supplies the insight that comes from surrendering worldly attachments. The erotic language of the Song of Songs becomes, in Origen’s reading, an image of intimate union with God.

Christian scripture continues the pattern. The Transfiguration places Jesus on a mountain where human and divine meet through radiant light. Two disciples on the road from Jerusalem feel their hearts burning whilst Jesus speaks to them without being recognised. Paul describes being taken up to a third heaven and hearing things that cannot be repeated. Horses treats these passages as the source of a persistent Christian interest in experiences that are both transformative and difficult to describe.

From hermits to ordinary mysticism

By the Middle Ages, Christian mystics across Europe were recording their encounters with God. Francis of Assisi was said to have received the wounds of the stigmata. Simeon the New Theologian was associated with experiences of fire and light that transformed his consciousness. Other practitioners withdrew from sensation and maintained long periods of prayer.

The Reformation weakened the place of personal experience within Western Christianity. Protestant reformers placed greater weight on obedience to the Bible whilst Catholics treated the Church as the authority for lay believers. Horses calls this a simplification, since the divisions were more complex. Moral discipline and obedience became the public signs of a good Christian life, while the rise of modern science made mystical events look like superstition.

Mysticism survived that rejection through monastic life, Eastern Orthodoxy, and private practice. Some mystics were labelled heretics or excommunicated. Others folded mystical prayer into their lives within monasteries. The Quakers preserved a democratic form of mysticism in which God’s light could appear within anyone during collective prayer. Pentecostal worship carried the tradition into the twentieth century through ecstatic singing and dancing, together with gifts such as speaking in tongues.

The tradition returned to wider attention through translations of early mystical texts, new interest in Eastern spirituality, and changes within the Catholic Church during the 1960s. The internet then made a large body of spiritual writing available to ordinary readers. Early mystics lived as hermits in forests and deserts. Medieval mysticism moved into monasteries. Contemporary mysticism can take place through a person’s own reading and practice.

Scripture, prayer, solitude

Mystical reading treats the Bible as divine speech with layers hidden beneath the words on the page. A reader studies, interprets, and meditates in order to make contact with God. The aim is an experiential understanding that exceeds an academic or literary reading of the text.

Mystical prayer is called contemplative prayer. Origen describes it as an attempt to clear the mind of worldly memories so that a person can receive a higher form of consciousness. The practitioner does not pray to change God’s will or request help with ordinary problems. Prayer opens a way towards union. Origen’s account is deliberately difficult at the point where it asks what remains to be said after the mind has been cleared. The prayer itself, he says, will be given by God.

This prayer continues beyond a set devotional moment. Origen describes the mystical life as uninterrupted prayer and says that the more familiar form of prayer should happen at least three times a day. Solitude and silence belong to the same discipline. The Sermon on the Mount tells a person to enter a private room, close the door, and pray to the Father who sees what happens in secret. The mystics read this as an instruction to meet God through verbal and mental silence.

Horses uses the Philokalia and its account of Abba Philemon to show how far this practice can go. Philemon probably lived around 600 CE in a desert cave. He is said to have braided ropes from natural material, exchanged them for small amounts of bread, eaten only bread and salt, and remained silent even when he attended church. His life aimed to remove worldly pleasure and purify the intellect through stillness.

Philemon believed that the mind could become so absorbed in the mysteries of the Bible that it would have no reason to leave mystical practice. Sensual pleasure could be quieted through stillness, although a sudden sensation could then become overwhelming and lead to sin. The example presents extreme asceticism as a means of concentrating the mind for union with God. It also shows why the video keeps a distance between describing a tradition and recommending its practices.

Natural, supernatural, and preternatural

The theological system in The Theology of Christian Perfection gives Horses a vocabulary for the phenomena that follow. Natural powers are the effects an entity can produce through its own abilities and the properties required for its development. The supernatural exceeds the powers and laws of the natural order whilst working within it. The video divides the supernatural into what surpasses the power of every possible creature and what exceeds the power of a particular creature.

The first category includes things that are supernatural in their substance, such as God, the Trinity, and divine grace. It also includes natural things that God produces towards a supernatural end, such as a human speaking a prophecy. A preternatural power exceeds human ability whilst remaining within the power of an angel or demon. The distinction lets mystics ask whether an event comes from God or from a created spirit with greater abilities than a human being.

The system also makes the source of certainty difficult. Psychosomatic conditions can look like mystical phenomena. Demons can imitate phenomena that appear supernatural. Most extraordinary gifts are treated as gratiae gratis datae, graces given freely for the good of the Church rather than as rewards for personal merit. The list includes faith, healing, prophecy, miracles, and speaking in tongues.

Ecstasy, visions, and words from elsewhere

Union with God can overwhelm the body and produce ecstasy. In the state Horses describes, a person does not respond to verbal or physical stimuli. Breathing and circulation appear absent, although the person remains alive. The face looks joyful and the person seems to have entered another world. Return to consciousness may depend on a command from an authorised person.

The video distinguishes delightful ecstasy from violent ecstasy. The first fills the body with euphoria and may improve physical health. The second brings pain, weakness, dislocation, and coldness that can make the body appear dead. Exhaustion can last for days after the experience. Horses presents these as categories within the mystical literature, with no external evidence that would establish their cause.

To see God does not necessarily mean to see a body. Christian mystics describe contemplation as experiential knowledge of everything that exists. In Confessions, Augustine records visions of divine light and a rapture experienced with his mother. He later divides visions into the corporeal, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The first uses the physical senses. The second reveals divine knowledge. The third reaches neither the senses nor the ordinary mind.

Visions may come with locutions, or words experienced as speech. Auricular locutions are heard through the physical sense and may come from God, angels, or demons. Imaginative locutions arise within the imagination and may also have divine, demonic, or natural causes. Intellectual locutions appear as the thoughts of another person within the mind. The proposed test is the effect on the soul. A divine voice produces humility, fervour, and obedience. A demonic voice produces violence or insubordination.

Revelation means that a hidden truth becomes known for the good of the Church or an individual. It can be public or private. The mystical tradition treats revelation and prophecy as evidence of God’s continuing power, although the source offers no independent way to check the reports.

Stigmata and other phenomena

The stigmata is the spontaneous appearance of Christ’s wounds on a person’s hands, feet, sides, or head. The wounds may remain, recur, disappear, or cover the body in a form associated with Christ’s flagellation. Mystics connect genuine stigmata to intense physical and moral suffering, ascetic practice, and a desire to share Christ’s suffering.

The wounds alone do not settle the matter. The criteria Horses lists require them to appear where Christ’s five wounds appeared, bleed at times connected to the Christian calendar, produce blood in a quantity that cannot be explained naturally, resist medicine without becoming infected, occur in a person who practises heroic virtue, and appear suddenly. The devil could imitate the stigmata through hallucination or by persuading a person to injure themselves.

Mystical writers also describe an exchange of hearts, in which a person’s heart is replaced with the heart of Christ and a scar remains over the chest. The video attributes to Pope Benedict XIV the view that this exchange is spiritual and mystical rather than physically explainable. Demons could imitate it through hallucination, self-inflicted injury, or other forms of trickery.

Levitation appears in three forms. Ascensional ecstasy involves slight suspension. Ecstatic flight involves a greater rise. Ecstatic march involves rapid movement or flight above the earth. Horses attributes to Benedict XIV the judgement that levitation cannot be explained by natural causes whilst remaining within the power of angels and demons. Other recorded phenomena include crying blood, teleportation, bodies that do not decompose or burn, long periods without sleep, and unending fasting.

Horses says that he finds these reports difficult to believe whilst valuing the mystical perspective. He sees Christian mysticism as a form of faith that can resist worldly ambition and encourage introspection. The same openness to interpretation can also cause suffering when people use religious texts to justify their own desires. The essay closes with a judgement that keeps both possibilities in view: the idea of God can become beautiful or horrendous, and religion can produce either form.

Limits

This note follows Horses’s account of Catholic ritual, Christian mysticism, and reported phenomena. The video names theological books and Church documents, yet its description gives titles rather than links or page references. The historical sequence, translations, classifications, and quotations from those works therefore remain claims made by the video until the underlying texts are checked directly.

The account also compresses large subjects into a single essay. The Reformation, the relationship between Jewish and Christian mysticism, the history of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the modern return of mystical practice each receive a short treatment. The diagnostic signs of possession and the reported phenomena belong to the mystical sources Horses uses. They do not establish a medical or historical diagnosis, and the video’s acknowledgement of psychological and physical alternatives remains the strongest limit on its supernatural claims.

Further reading / references

The video description names these sources:

• Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications, Catholic Church.
• The Roman Ritual.
• Antonio Royo Marín, The Theology of Christian Perfection.
• Carl McColman, The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism: An Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality.
• Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism.