Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  “Lord Jesus, if I must die, let me die. If I live, it will be your will. As long as I remain in life, let me abide in your presence, so completely that, despite my sins and my enemy, when I die, I merely go from your presence to your presence. Amen.”

  Carl repeats every word. But at the “Amen,” his eyes are glazing over. His face is hardening. His head jerks back on the couch.

  “Hold his head,” Hearty tells the assistants.

  He stands up and takes his place at the foot of the couch, holding the crucifix up in front of him. This is the last stage of the exorcism.

  Hearty today is loath to go into details of what Carl and he saw at that moment. Clearly from the tapes, it was some vision of Tortoise, but not as in the Aquileia mosaic medallion, and not simply as the animal whose name Tortoise took as his own. Hearty gave the nearest measure I could get of the character of what they both saw when he commented that only because something of human joy had been seared in him was he able to see Tortoise, and, to use his words, “not have a brainstorm or a heart attack or go into permanent shock.”

  It was apparently some view of Tortoise as a mass of suffering and punishment illuminated and glowing with a hatred and vicious contempt. It was Tortoise as an angel who had been damned to eternal pain by love itself and who only increased in hatred of love according as his pain increased with the infinity of eternity. “Damnation unrelieved in any way,” Hearty commented in one of our meetings.

  Hearty viewed Tortoise as a threatening enemy, but Carl was now seeing Tortoise, his master, who held him in his actual condition of damned misery.

  After a little waiting, Hearty speaks with evident urgency.

  “This is Tortoise, Carl, your friend and master. This is the world our enemy would have us accept.” He stops and waits.

  Carl never takes his eyes off Hearty now.

  “Enclosed and shut up within its hard shell, Carl. Imprisoned in Hell. It’s the same. Only—” Carl interrupts with a choking sound. Hearty goes on: “Only multiplying its own shape in endless succession, soul-killing succession, banal as graves in a row, Carl.”

  Carl is beginning to shake again. Hearty assures the assistants with a look, then he continues:

  “This is our enemy, Carl. The one who possesses you and has fascinated you and wills you to die the death of the Pit.”

  If Carl is listening and taking it all in, he is far from uneasy or fearful. His eyes are full of the old fire. There is a look on his face that reminds Hearty of the “twist” or askewness that Carl used to acquire during his trances in his heyday as a psychic.

  Hearty’s voice gets a special edge to it. “It is all deception, Carl. And it is all about to be destroyed.”

  Hearty is interrupted by a sound that shakes him severely. Carl has started to cry in sobs. For that moment. Hearty recalls, “I felt like the most uncouth and cruel person that ever existed. I was hurting a baby, it seemed to me.”

  He forced himself to go on.

  “It must be destroyed, Carl. And your Non-Self aura, your non-thingness, your voices, your visions, all will go into the Pit of Oblivion with that Tortoise.”

  Carl is beginning to struggle against the restraining hands of the assistants.

  Hearty grits his teeth for the last effort. He has been on his feet now for over 21 hours. His legs are tired. He has shooting pains across his back. His chest is stiff. His arms and fingers ache from holding the crucifix. His voice is hoarse. The migraine is splitting across his forehead still. Within him, the strange, deep wound in his soul bleeds. All his physical pain is only a dull accompaniment in the background of that inner agony so sharp and present and intimate to him. He will not recover from that wound for a long time.

  Carl is trying to get up, to stretch out his arms.

  “Nothing can save you, Evil Spirit. And nothing can hold you against the power of Jesus. As you took the form of Tortoise for this creature of God, so as Tortoise depart and fall back where you belong, with your Non-Self aura, with your deceptions, with your lies, with your death.”

  Hearty makes the sign of the cross over Carl slowly and very deliberately three times.

  “Sink into the primeval slime of your punishment where God thrust you after your own rebellion. Be dissolved in the mud and waters and air and fire of that Hell from which Jesus saved Carl and all human beings. Depart!” Hearty pauses. Then in a loud shout: “Depart! Unclean Spirit! In the name of Jesus, depart! Go!”

  “DON’T GO!” Carl screams. “Don’t leave me now. I cannot live without you. Don’t go! Please! My friend! Master!”

  Hearty’s voice breaks in sharply.

  “Look at it, Carl! Look at this chair!”

  Carl swivels around, twisting his head. Then he starts to groan: the chair, he sees, has no aura. The Non-Self glow is gone. The chair is there. That is all. Simply there. In all its isness. Just a thing. Just a chair. Frantically he looks around the room. As he sees it now, all the lights are out. Things. Things. Things. Things. Among more things. Yellowed ceiling. Faded rose-colored wallpaper. Oaken door and windowsill, parquet flooring. The table with candles and crucifix. The bodies of the assistants and of Hearty. Six brutish lumps. Clods of flesh standing in a darkened world of crass things.

  Carl screams and screams until darkness and unconsciousness smother him.

  When he forced Carl to look at the objects around him—chairs, windows, flooring, people—Hearty already knew he had vanquished Tortoise. As with any crisis that has carried with it the threat of death, there had been at its ending an abrupt sense of a “lifting off” of stifling oppression; it was the same sudden relief that Father Gerald and his assistants described when Girl-Fixer was beaten and Richard/Rita was freed. It was something akin to the feeling so often recalled by those who were in London the morning everyone expected the final wave of Hitler’s blitz that would crush London altogether. In previous weeks, the whining rain of bombs had brought unending destruction, death, mutilation, and growing helplessness. But on that morning of expected horror the eastern sky was empty, tranquil. There was a lifting off of dread. There was the sound of silence. It was over. They had defended and persevered and survived. They knew.

  Hearty knew.

  And when he forced Carl to see it too, the rest of Hearty’s fears for Carl were in large measure justified again. When Carl screamed as Hearty showed him all the things in the room, Hearty knew that, along with Tortoise, the more spectacular elements that had gilded Carl’s real psychic abilities had left him. The “Non-Self” aura was gone, as Hearty knew it would be.

  With it, Hearty was sure, had gone all those elements that Tortoise—under Hearty’s relentless prodding during the Confrontation—had admitted to producing: astral travel, bilocation, and all the rest. Remaining were only those more modest talents Carl had possessed since his early childhood and which he still possesses today.

  So desperate was Carl’s fear to let go of those privileges and of all his life structure built around them that he cried in pain at the departure even of purest evil. He screamed in horror as all that he had been convinced was “normal” left him forever. He saw again only what everyone sees. Carl in that moment knew with his heart and soul that every warning Hearty had given him was accurate. He had listened to Hearty’s warnings before the exorcism only with a cool and detached mind, because with his will he had chosen to follow the fascinating secrets Tortoise offered to share with him.

  Now, with Tortoise expelled and the truth of Tortoise’s identity crystal clear and admitted by him, a frightful disillusionment ran through Carl with the speed of an electric shock, searing and twisting all his thinking and remembering. This was the shock Hearty had tried to warn Carl of, the shock he was not sure Carl would survive with his sanity, perhaps not even with his life.

  The doctor who had assisted at the exorcism continued with Carl’s case. Carl remained unconscious for several hours. When he came to, he was unable to converse. He barely reacted to any stimulus and was seemingly al
ienated from his surroundings. He seemed to recognize no one. But there was no trace of violence.

  Carl was transferred to a private clinic, where he remained for just over 11 months. At first, he was not able to care for himself at all. He remained in bed all the time, motionless and apparently caring about nothing. Little by little, he regained awareness of his surroundings. But, even with returning awareness, it was quickly evident that, if he had not lost his memory, it was blurred and incomplete.

  During the first few months of his convalescence, Hearty spent hours sitting by Carl’s bedside. Sometimes he read excerpts from the daily newspaper, or a chapter from some book about current events, or prayers from the ritual book. At other times, Hearty talked to Carl, for all the world as if the sick man were listening and understanding every word, even though for quite a while there never was the slightest sign or response from Carl.

  All this while, as he read or talked by Carl’s bedside, Hearty was probing psychically for some stirring in Carl, some little break in the congealed immobility that now enveloped Carl’s spirit, some motion out of that deadening passivity he “felt” held Carl captive now that he was free of Tortoise. Each time he left Carl, Hearty carried away with him to haunt his waking hours the memory of that still, drawn face and Carl’s staring eyes.

  One afternoon at the end of a short visit, as he opened the bedroom door to leave, Hearty turned back to wave goodbye to the man he left each day lying inert, impassive on his bed. But what he saw now held him rooted in the doorway. Carl had turned his head. He was returning Hearty’s look. His eyes shone with meaning and recognition and intention.

  Hearty remained still for some silent seconds, receiving the first weak but unmistakable indication that Carl would mend. He said Mass in Carl’s room every two or three days after that. Speech and movement came back slowly to Carl. It was some weeks before he could receive Holy Communion. And it was still longer before he would venture out into the sunlight.

  Today Carl is well, but so changed in appearance and so frail that no one who had seen him on that sunny road to Aquileia would easily recognize him now as the same man.

  “I want to tell you the truth as I now see it,” Carl wrote* later to his former students and colleagues. “I was wrong in my personal instructions to each one of you about your lives.

  “All through my childhood and youth, I had an affinity with God. Especially after my first vision.

  “I’m certain God was there. Somewhere. But then came Princeton. Stanford. Tubingen. Cambridge. London. After that, my guruship and the efflorescence of the gifts I had. I became confused. Somehow I lost God. At the same time, I wanted to help. Really to help. To be of service. All around me, I could see floating neon images of pain, of putrefaction, of illness, of corruption and decay. I saw strange people who did not give a damn. Give a damn, please, I said. They took God’s name in vain. As I did. They were bright and cold and hard as storage ice. They liked gratuitous evil and upholstered innocence.

  “I signed a moral contract to change all that. I was young, eager-beaver. I was determined to succeed. All up-tight, you might say. I was going to be a good psychologist, an honest and conscientious and understanding servant of mankind. Servant. Not slave. And then I was going to be a good parapsychologist. And then a thoroughgoing guru.

  “I groped, even prayed, searched, never took no for an answer. And I found that lyrical liar, the Devil.

  “I knew with whom I had to deal, of course. But, first of all, the Devil was not the Devil preached by the Churches. There was no room in my universe for a principle of Evil. Not at that time of my life. And, I thought, the bond and contract would be, could be temporary. Of course, it could not be. But when pride gets hold of your mind and heart, you cannot see clearly.

  “Solemnly and of my own free will, I wish to acknowledge that knowingly and freely I entered into possession by an evil spirit. And, although that spirit came to me under the guise of saving me, perfecting me, helping me to help others, I knew all along it was evil.

  “After my conversations with Father F. [Hearty], I put everything into perspective intellectually. And I must ascribe my liberation, or, to speak correctly, my desire to want to be free (because I was not allowed any simple desire to be free) I must ascribe all this to what Father F. calls the grace of God and the salvation of Jesus.

  “I never enjoyed astral body-travel, only the illusion of it. I never achieved the privilege of a double—if that be a privilege. Bilocation never succeeded, never was a fact for me. Of myself, I could not see things happening hundreds of miles away, read the future, see the past, peer with minute detail into people’s minds. I could give the illusion of these only by being prompted by someone who could see from a great distance, could read the future, had a detailed knowledge of the past, could peer into people’s minds. Any idea of reincarnation I championed was an attempt to trick. I was not a shaman. Just a sham.

  “I never willed to be rid of possession until the day that Father F. explained my basic error about consciousness and spirit.

  “My central error, which was both intellectual and moral in character, concerned the nature of ordinary human consciousness. Like many before me and many others nowadays, I found that with rigid and expert training I could attain a fascinating state of consciousness: a complete absence of any particular object (in my awareness). I found I could attain a permanency on this plane of consciousness. It finally became a constant environment within me, during my waking hours, no matter what I was doing. It seemed to be pure and therefore sinless, undifferentiated and therefore universal, simple and therefore without parts—and therefore incorruptible and unchangeable, and therefore eternal.

  “My error started when I took this psycho-biological condition of life as the life of spirit. Consciousness basically means awareness, being alert. And such awareness can be measured by certain physiological data. It can be phenomenally described, because it is a phenomenon.

  “If it were not for one further mistake, that initial error would, I believe, have been corrected as time went on—simply because finally the scientific imperative would have taken over and forced us to look at the facts in the face.

  “With the passage of time, I began to experience a further state of consciousness. It is difficult to put it into words. Before that, I was in a sort of state of suspension about my aware state. I was aware that I was in awareness. One day, I realized through a faculty which I have not been able to identify, that there was some other activity taking place which was so refined and subtle that, while I was dimly aware of it, I knew absolutely nothing about it—what it was, where it was, what it accomplished, whether it began and ended, or whether it had always existed, did then exist continuously, and would go on existing—whether I was aware of it or not.

  “It lay beyond all my developed capacity to reach. It was utterly transcendent. Indeed, this was its mark; and this is how I realized its differentiation from my other levels of consciousness. They, no matter how subtle, were subject finally to my senses—at least to representation in images drawn from my sense-life. This further state of consciousness was not so subject.

  “But this was sufficient indication for me, I thought. I took this as the absolutely spiritual state of my being. I took it for granted that religiously speaking I was out beyond that Dark Night of the Soul described by John of the Cross and well into something the Eastern mystics had called by various names like satori and samadhi. The fact that, at least in afterthought and reflection, I could measure and quantify this state of consciousness never struck a warning note. And that was crass enough on my part. What confirmed me in my error was that I refused to take into account the fact that this state was in complete disjunction from all historical religion—and without any chance of linking up with historical religion. It was, in other words, pure subjectivism. And from then on, the door was open to any influence and any distortion. What crawled through that door was Evil Spirit. Tortoise.

  “I did arrive at
part of the truth about spirit—the nether part, the negative part. But in the flux of spirit life, that was the only part it uncovered. And it necessarily attacked the human in me. For it is not that I am part animal, part human. I am not a human animal. I am a human spirit. We are of the spirit in its fluid, non-static, non-quantifiable existence. And, in matters of spirit, nether and upper, bad and good, these are terms that refer to its approximation to or distance from the source and sum of all spirit.

  “I have been the subject of the cleverest of illusions: that spirit was a static quantum of more or less determinable dimensions; that Christian authorities had obscured the truth about the spirit; and that only by parapsychology and preternatural gifts could one arrive at the truth.

  “The truth is that all along, despite my triumphal career until Aquileia, since the advent of possession I had a sorrow I could not shake. Such a deep sodden sadness. I looked for joy everywhere and lived beneath a winter moon that made a carcass of all my days.

  “My advice for all who engage in the study and pursuit of the parapsychological is simple but vitally important: do not confound effects with causes, or systems with what maintains the systems. Do not take it that a photograph of Kirlian dots or auras is a photograph of spirit. Do not accept the feats of seance mediums as results of spirit from God. But do not, on the other hand, tamper with or treat of parapsychological phenomena as if you could do this without ultimately impinging upon spirit. You cannot. And that fact will, depending upon what you do, be to your detriment or to your betterment—in spirit.”

  Manual of Possession

  Good, Evil, and the Modern Mind

  The surest effect of possession in an individual—the most obvious and striking effect common to all possessed persons, whether observed in or apart from Exorcism—is the great loss in human quality, in humanness.

  Curiously enough, the difficulty in talking nowadays about possession and in describing its progress and effects in those attacked does not come from the weird, bizarre, or “unimaginable” happenings that may accompany possession.