Modern scientists (particularly atheists) will claim that demons, gods, etc. don’t “exist,” meaning they don’t appear on cameras or they’re not traceable through scientific measurement. By this logic, language doesn’t exist either until it is manifested in audio or visual form. This is consistent enough. And yet, the modern scientist has faith in the existence of language, despite it not “existing” until it triggers some kind of measurable effect.
The Catholic priest similarly has faith that demons exist, which will trigger measurable effects like convulsions, screaming, etc. These are well documented. Modern science agrees that these are real symptoms but would say that there are no demons at their root; rather “mental health issues” underlie these symptoms. The priest has various exegetical responses to this, but the differences between the two parties cannot be reconciled. The priest has a totally different definition of the person than the modern psychiatrist does. I want to dive into where this divide happens.
Priests and believers will often claim to have witnessed unmeasurable effects like climbing on walls, levitating, witches flying around, etc., for which there is zero recorded proof aside from verbal and written testimony. Entire crowds swear on their lives to having witnessed such supernatural things. The scientist will claim they are lying, or that they are delusional. He falls back on his understanding of “mental health”; the scientist would probably have these people locked up in hospitals.
However, modern science lacks any kind of understanding of what actually undergirds possession. There’s a simpler (more minimal) middle ground that could be taken here: shared intent loading among ritual participants can invert reality and create false memories. In other words, in a highly mimetic environment where someone is apparently possessed, or having some kind of neurotic episode, the participants find they are not being correctly reciprocated by the subject (the “patient”). The possessed victim froths at the mouth, says seemingly random things, and responds in ways that are highly unorthodox or “demonic”. When someone witnesses this episode, if they do not receive the “correct” reciprocation from the patient (the “center” of attention), they will question their own desires/intents. The participants’ own, healthy desires/intents can then become inverted, and the memory here becomes reversed. An event A will occur, and the possessed patient will say B in response, but the group’s memory is incorrectly stored as “the patient said B which predicted event A, therefore the patient was predicting the future”. Similarly, the participants might have said or thought “I will see the patient float” and though the patient in fact does not float, the memory is stored as “he stopped floating after we all saw it”. The same might happen in a dream: event A occurs and dream B processes it, but the inverted node produces the memory “I dreamed B which predicted A, and then A happened, therefore someone in my dream predicted the future.” An inverted node contaminates the entire group and produce a mass of fairly consistent eye witness testimony.
Lea’s histories of Medieval European law are filled with interesting episodes where entire groups claimed to have witnessed witches doing supernatural things. The women were not in fact witches, but the crowd did not necessarily have to “lie” to itself to believe this. The crowd will say “she will fly to a witches’ sabbat” and then, when encountering the woman (who might be a hysteric), are party to a person who does not reciprocate intents “properly.” The crowd then questions their own intents and invert them, and when they deliver her to the authorities, the memory has been stored on an inverted node reading “we saw her fly to a witches’ sabbat and then questioned her.”
In short, unmeasurable claims (like mass sightings of witches flying, werewolves, virgin Mary in the clouds, aliens, etc.), which elude photography, are mass fits of possession. The “measurable” aspect of this is the crowd’s shared attesting to having witnessed the supernatural. Possession has produced a massive fit of “delusion” for which modern science has very bad responses – pharmaceuticals, increased mechanization of life, etc. These “responses” are our modern version of an exorcism: an attempt to set nodes properly so memory is attuned to reality. Some forms of psychiatry will insist on the precedence of the ego: “You made this up.” Other forms are more pragmatic, like Ericksonian Hypnosis: “You were influenced by someone, now let’s Parse that from your memory so we can set the node properly.” (This is my personal translation of the Ericksonian Hypnosis kernel, though it doesn’t use these terms. My terms are far more blunt.)
Modern science cannot account for possession because it doesn’t believe in contagious intent-loading, which is an issue of throwing the baby out with the bathwater around the Cartesian era. “Christians believe in demons and witches, but these are not measurable, therefore mass possession is purely delusional.”
Therefore, the modern scientific take on possession is also an inverted node: “Christians believe in possession” -> “there is no possession”. This is easily one of our greatest failures and people are dying in hospitals from it.
Therefore, I would argue, possession is as “real” as language, but we require better Parsing to understand and resolve it.