Exorcism

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Exorcism is the rite of driving out a spirit or demon that has taken hold of a person, a place, or an object. Its method is verbal and relational. The exorcist does not negotiate with the intruding power, does not strike a bargain, does not coax — he commands it to leave, and he commands not on his own authority but in the name of a greater one. The Greek behind the word carries this whole structure. Exorkizein is built from horkos, an oath: to exorkize is to put a thing under solemn adjuration, to bind it by oath to obey, and the prefix ek- gives the binding its direction — to swear something out. The related noun exorkistēs surfaces only once in the Greek New Testament, in the scene at Ephesus where wandering Jewish exorcists try to expel a spirit “by Jesus whom Paul preacheth,” and the attempt fails — a warning, in the narrative’s own terms, that the binding name cannot be borrowed by those with no standing in it. The legal-religious gesture at the center of the practice is therefore the oath imposed from a position of higher right: not a request the spirit may decline, but a sworn order it is bound to answer.

That structure travels. Wherever the rite appears, the same grammar holds — a ritual of command delivered in a borrowed authority, addressed to a spirit treated as a person capable of being named, sworn, and ordered. What varies across the traditions is the name invoked, the diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the afflicted, and the office empowered to speak.

Antecedents: the incantation against the demons of sickness and the dead

The expulsion of hostile spirits is far older than the Christian rite that made the word familiar. In Mesopotamia a whole profession was devoted to it. The āšipu — the exorcist-incantation priest, called mašmaššu in later periods — stood among the recognized scholarly specialists of cuneiform civilization, alongside the diviner and the lamentation priest, and his charge was apotropaic ritual: the protection of the household and the body against the unseen sources of harm. Sickness was frequently read as seizure. The disease-causing ghost, the eṭemmu (Sumerian gidim) of someone unburied or dead by violence, could lay its hand on the living; “the hand of a ghost,” qāt eṭemmi, was a formal diagnostic category in the Babylonian medical handbook, blamed for fever, headache, ringing in the ears, paralysis, and disturbance of mind. Against such attacks the āšipu deployed incantation series of great age and length — the Maqlû (“Burning”), nearly a hundred incantations performed across a single night into dawn in the month when ghosts walked, and the Šurpu, a long ritual against the curse that bound a sufferer. The figure of the malignant agent was confronted, named, and driven off; the form was already the form of an exorcism, minus the single sworn name.

Egypt worked the same ground through heka, the generative power of authoritative utterance that the gods themselves used to make the world and that the ritualist borrowed to defend it. Execration texts cursed named enemies and powers; amulets fenced the body; spells were spoken against the demons of illness and against the dangerous dead who would not stay in their place. The Anglophone survey that first put much of this material before a wide readership, E. A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Magic (1899), gathers the protective formulae alongside the funerary ones — historiographically dated now, but a direct window onto a world in which the spoken word, correctly framed and backed by a name of power, was held to act on the unseen with real force.

It was Second Temple Judaism that gave the practice the shape Christianity would inherit: adjuration by the name of a higher power, attached to a master of spirits. The role accumulated around Solomon, remembered not only as king and sage but as the one to whom God had given knowledge over the demons. The historian Josephus, writing in the 90s, reports as eyewitness a Jewish exorcist named Eleazar releasing the possessed before Vespasian and his soldiers, drawing the spirit out through the nostrils with a ring whose root Solomon had prescribed, reciting incantations ascribed to Solomon, and — to prove the spirit had truly gone — ordering it to overturn a basin of water as it left. Josephus calls the art God-given and curative. The structure is fully formed here: a designated agent, a higher name standing behind the command, a sign demanded as proof of expulsion, and a horizon of healing rather than mere combat.

Jesus and the deputized command

Into this world the Gospels place Jesus, shown again and again casting out demons. The texts are careful about the manner. He uses no ring, no root, no catalog of borrowed names; the spirits are driven out by a word, and the word is his own. The contrast was not lost on his contemporaries, who within the narratives ask by what authority he acts, and answer it variously — that he casts out demons by the prince of demons, or by the finger of God. The Synoptic writers read the expulsions not as feats of technique but as signs: where the unclean spirit goes out, the reign of God has come near. The exorcisms belong, in these texts, to the same order as the miracles of healing and to the announcement of the kingdom of God — they are its arrival made visible on a single afflicted body. He then deputizes: the followers are sent out with authority over unclean spirits, and they too cast them out, now explicitly in his name. With that, the borrowed-name structure returns, but the name has changed. The exorcist no longer swears by Solomon or by an ancestral formula; he swears by Jesus, and the failure of the sons of Sceva at Ephesus marks the boundary — the name binds only for those who stand inside the authority it carries.

Critical scholarship has had little difficulty locating the historical figure within his setting. Graham Twelftree, the leading specialist on the question, argues that Jesus is recognizable as a first-century Jewish exorcist working with the recognized vocabulary of the role, while the heightened theological reading of his expulsions — as the decisive defeat of the demonic and the in-breaking of the kingdom — belongs to the work of the communities that transmitted the accounts. The man and the meaning are separable in the analysis without dissolving either; what the texts preserve is both a practitioner the period would have recognized and a claim about what his practice signified. For the wider figure and the disputes around him, see Jesus Christ; for the matrix that produced both the role and the literature of spirits, Second Temple Judaism.

The early Church: catechumen, office, and rite

From these beginnings exorcism entered the Church not as an emergency measure but as a routine of initiation. Before baptism the catechumen — the convert under instruction — was exorcised, the renunciation of the old powers staged as their expulsion, so that the sacrament of new birth was entered from cleared ground. This baptismal exorcism, woven into the liturgy of initiation, made the rite a normal part of the Church’s life long before dramatic deliverances became its public face. Out of it grew an office: a minor clerical order of exorcist, one of the lesser grades a man passed through on the road to the priesthood. The order persisted for many centuries as a recognized step, even after the actual power to confront the possessed had in practice been reserved to ordained priests, and it was formally suppressed only in 1972, when Paul VI’s Ministeria quaedam reduced the minor orders to the ministries of lector and acolyte.

The solemn rite against possession itself was codified in the Rituale Romanum, the Roman Ritual authorized by Pope Paul V in 1614, whose exorcism chapter — De exorcizandis obsessis a daemonio, on the exorcizing of those held by a demon — became the Western standard for nearly four centuries. The Ritual draws a line that governs the whole practice. On one side stands the solemn exorcism of a person believed possessed: a grave act, reserved to a priest who must have the local bishop’s express permission, granted case by case, and hedged with cautions. On the other side stand the many minor exorcisms folded into ordinary blessings — over water, over salt, over the catechumen — which any priest performs in the routine course of the rites and which command no possessing demon at all. The reservation is the load-bearing feature: the binding name may be invoked solemnly only through an office authorized from above, so that the chain of authority in the rite mirrors the authority the rite claims to wield. The 1614 chapter held until the close of the twentieth century, when it became the last book of the old Ritual to be revised after the Second Vatican Council; the new Latin form, De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam (“Of exorcisms and certain supplications”), approved in 1998 and promulgated in 1999, replaced it.

The Latin West is not the only keeper of the rite. The Orthodox churches preserve their own exorcistic prayers, prominent in the baptismal service and ascribed in part to Basil and to John Chrysostom; the Lutheran tradition retained a baptismal exorcism in its early orders, a point of long controversy within Protestantism; and forms of deliverance persist across other Christian bodies and far beyond them. The Christian rite is one provincial codification of a phenomenon the whole record attests. For the entity the rite confronts, see demon; for the systematic effort to name and rank such beings, demonology. The word daimōn itself, it is worth recalling, did not begin as a name for the malignant: in Greek usage the agathos daimōn was a benevolent guardian spirit, toasted at the close of a meal, and the narrowing of the whole class to the evil is a later development that exorcism presupposes rather than created.

Discernment: affliction and possession

How the rite is understood divides on the question of what, exactly, is being expelled — and that question turns out to be old, not modern. Traditions that practice exorcism hold that genuine malign agencies can inhabit a person and must be confronted as persons: addressed, named, sworn at, and ordered out. Much modern medicine and psychology reads the same presentations as illness — neurological, dissociative, psychotic — and many religious authorities now require that medical and psychiatric explanations be excluded before possession is so much as entertained. The two readings are not strangers meeting for the first time. The careful sorting of affliction from possession is a discernment the older rite already insisted upon: the Roman Ritual warned its exorcists against credulity, set out signs to be weighed rather than assumed, and the modern Catholic practice that demands a physician’s examination before any solemn rite is continuous with that caution rather than a break from it. Reports of cure run through the whole history, from Josephus’s curative art to the present; reports of mistaken diagnosis run through it as well. The descriptive record holds both, and the rite’s own procedure was built around the threshold between them.

The threshold is in fact where the whole architecture concentrates. The diagnostic gate that separates the sick from the seized, the reservation that withholds the solemn command from any but an authorized office, and the oath that swears the spirit out in a name not the exorcist’s own are three locks on the same door — each one a check on the power to declare that a self has been invaded and to speak the word that orders the invader gone. The rite is most itself not in the moment of expulsion but in the prior weighing: in deciding that the case has crossed the line, that the speaker has the standing, and that the name being invoked is one with the right to bind.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The phenomenon is documented across several distinct literatures, each with its own critical apparatus.

• The Mesopotamian incantation corpus is the oldest layer. The anti-witchcraft and anti-ghost series Maqlû received its first edition in Knut Tallqvist’s Die assyrische Beschwörungsserie Maqlû (Leipzig, 1895), now public domain; the standard modern edition is Tzvi Abusch, The Witchcraft Series Maqlû (Society of Biblical Literature, Writings from the Ancient World 37, 2015). The transliterated corpus is being published online by the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals project at oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cmawro.
• The Egyptian protective and magical material is surveyed in E. A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Magic (Kegan Paul, 1899), hosted in full in the site Library and useful as a period entry-point to heka and the apotropaic spells, read with awareness of its dated Egyptology.
• The Jewish Second Temple testimony to adjuration and the Solomon tradition is concentrated in Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 8.42–49 (the Eleazar episode), available in the William Whiston translation at the Perseus Digital Library: perseus.tufts.edu.
• The decisive study of the Christian material is Graham H. Twelftree, In the Name of Jesus: Exorcism among Early Christians (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), reviewed in detail at the Johns Hopkins University Press journals platform; it builds on his Jesus the Exorcist (1993).
• The governing liturgical books are the Rituale Romanum of 1614 and its successor, De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam (Congregation for Divine Worship, editio typica 1998, promulgated 1999), whose history and content are summarized at Wikipedia’s “Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications”.

There is no entry yet for the Rituale Romanum as such, nor for the office of the exorcist as a distinct institution; both are candidates the literature would support.

A discernment, then, before a deliverance — and an authority borrowed before a word is spoken. The command that ends an exorcism is the smallest part of it. The weight sits earlier, in the oath that binds the spirit to a name with the right to bind, and in the gate that decides, against the sick body’s protest, whether there is anything there to swear out at all.

→ In the library: Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

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