French Guiana is a small country of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants situated on the northern coast of South America, nestling between Suriname and Brazil. It seldom makes world news, but when it does it's often for the wrong reasons. Take, for example, this report from Agence France-Presse:
A French Guiana court has jailed four church members for up to 12 years for the exorcism of an epileptic teenager who was found dead attached to a cross.
The members of the Celestial Church of Christ were jailed yesterday [24 June] for terms of three to 12 years for "wilful violence that caused death'' for 15-year-old Roger Bosse in 2005 in the south American territory.The court heard that the mother of the boy, who suffered from mental illness, had brought him to the church for help and was told he was possessed by the devil.
The church members beat the boy repeatedly over a three-day period with reeds and belts and attached him to a cross for the last two days, the position in which he died.A post-mortem examination showed that he had probably died from suffocation.
The Celestial Church of Christ was founded in the west African state of Benin in 1947 and claims millions of adherents worldwide.
It's so tragic that a young life was taken so cruelly and needlessly. Superstition is still rife in our world, even in the 21st century. I'm glad the boy's tormentors were given tough jail sentences. That should deter others, or at least make them think twice before seeing demons where there are none.
Our pic shows another 15-year-old boy being crucified in the Philipines on Good Friday. The difference is that he presumably endured it willingly, unlike the boy in French Guiana.
News reaches me that in Lakhimpur, a town in northern India close to the border with Nepal, a five-year-old girl was hacked to death and her corpse disposed of like garbage. She'd been beheaded during what appears to have been an "amateur" exorcism.
The Press Trust of India quotes the local Superintendent of Police, Piyush Mordia, on July 28:
Vandana, a resident of Mudia Hemsingh village, was hacked to death by Ram Niwas and his uncle Mewa Lal, who later dumped the beheaded body in the fields, from where it was recovered this morning.Both the accused had been arrested," Superintendent of Police Piyush Mordia told reporters. The SP also said that Ram Niwas was under depression as his wife was failing to conceive and his brother Ram Sahay was ill. "Ram Niwas's uncle Mewa Lal, who practised exorcism, advised him to sacrifice a girl, which the latter claimed can remove his hardship," the SP said adding that Ram Niwas and Mewa Lal picked Vandana from her house on Monday night.
He "advised him to sacrifice a girl". It's hard to know where such abhorrent ideas emanate from. I'd hesitate before outrightly condemning the men involved, because obviously they were following what they believed to be sound religious advice. At the same time, they must surely have sensed that the murder of a child is terribly wrong in any circumstances.
All too often humankind has allowed its culture to be shaped by poisonous beliefs and superstitions such as this. There are no easy answers as to how to prevent a recurrence. Education? India has one of the finest education systems in the world. Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics at Cornell University, notes that:
India's production of professionals is phenomenal. With over 300 universities and 15,600 colleges spewing out 2.5 million graduates each year, in terms of the volume of production India trails behind only the US and recently China.
I can only conclude that the culture or society in that part of India is at fault. At some time in its past something went wrong: women (or in this case girl children) were scapegoated for the ills of society. That this has endured up to the present day is both sad and despicable.
Let us by all means be on our guard for the presence of demons. That they exist and that they exercise a baleful influence in many countries should be beyond question. That they are present in a five-year-old child, who must be brutally murdered in order that the demons be expelled?
The blog Pink News notes that several fundamentalist churches in England may be attempting to "exorcise" gays and lesbians.
This comes hard on the heels of our July 3 article, which discussed a video of a similar demon hunt in the United States.
Jessica Geen reports that:
... a Pentecostal church in north-west London offers the controversial 'cure'. It is one of hundreds of fundamentalist churches in the UK.
Rev John Ogbe-Ogbeide, who runs the United Pentecostal Ministry in Harrow, said he carried out exorcisms on gays four or five times a year and that the procedure always worked.
He said: "The evil spirits are telling you what's wrong is right, the opposite sex is not attractive."
He cited a recent case where he exorcised a young man who was about to get married but was in love with a man.
Rev Ogbe-Ogbeide added that the procedure could be carried out at any age, as demons could take hold of a person at any time.
Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has called for protest against the practice and a thorough police investigation.
He said: "The exorcism rituals involve the casting out of alleged demons and witches that supposedly possess a gay person's soul and turn them away from heterosexuality.
"There are claims that gay teenagers and young adults are being subjected to exorcisms at the insistence of their parents and pastors, in an attempt to rid them of same-sex attraction.
"The exorcisms can include traumatic emotional scenes where the victims are surrounded by a group of church elders who scream at them to drive out the evil spirits and who sometimes shake their bodies.
"When this is done to youngsters under 18, it is a form of child abuse and the police should intervene to stop it.
"Some gay adults have been pressured into exorcisms by their family members or faith communities. Other victims are people with learning difficulties or mental health problems. They have been preyed upon when they are in a vulnerable state and are not capable of giving fully informed consent."
Tatchell called for gays and lesbians to write to Rev Ogbe-Ogbeide and their local MP to complain.
A Metropolitan Police Service spokesman told PinkNews that police would consider investigating the church if complaints were received.
Peterson Toscano, a gay rights activist who spent 17 years in ex-gay therapy, has been subjected to three exorcisms.
He told PinkNews: "The premise of these was that foreign demonic forces infiltrated my body and manipulated me so that I could not turn from being gay.
"I felt desperate for a cure especially after trying so hard to change through other means. I could not comprehend why I was still gay especially after all the promises."
"In one case in New York," he said, "the exorcist and her team yelled and screamed at me in English and in 'tongues' for over an hour touching me all over my body, jabbing me in my gut, getting close into my face, peering deeply into my eyes in hopes of provoking these evil spirits. It got so loud and out of control that a neighbour called the police who, when they came, broke it up.
"This is a form of religious abuse and spiritual violence. I found the experience traumatised me."
Where will it all end I wonder. And who's going to tell the fundamentalists that homosexuality is common to just about every species of animal on the earth? Odd that the Creator should have allowed this state of affairs.
A recent article in Scientific American considered whether homosexuality might have an important role to play in the evolution of species – including our own.
In short, if the evangelical "exorcists" are trying to eradicate homosexuality then they could have their hands full. I mean to say: how does one go about exorcising a gay rabbit, or a dung-beetle with superior taste in interior decorating?
We tend to think of Australians as being hard-headed no-nonsense folk. We'd be wrong. The occult is burgeoning at a great rate Down Under. Mostly harmless stuff, propagated by the like of rock diva and staunch pagan Wendy Rule (right) who regularly makes the cover of one of Australia's witchcraft magazines.
But there's a serious side to all this. Exorcisms are being performed by lay people, often with disastrous consequences. Just recently an Australian policeman was suspended following an allegation that he attempted to exorcise a teenage boy.
Apparently the Lutheran Church were running a youth camp near Adelaide and Senior Constable Roger Sketchley, 28, a church member, was helping out. He was off duty at the time.
The boy, who hasn't been named, had complained of stomach pains. Not, one would think, a symptom of demonic possession, yet three adults believed otherwise. Having tied him up, Sketchley and the others subjected the teenager to a twelve-hour ordeal involving "exorcism".
Sketchley, an Englishman, had been recruited to the South Australian police force some months before. He's been charged with false imprisonment and aggravated assault, and been suspended from the force pending the outcome of the charges.
The Lutheran Church condemned the incident and stated that it "does not endorse or encourage any actions which are abusive or which results in the limitations or freedoms of any individual."
So much for the amateurs, it would seem that professional exorcists have their hands full in Australia.In February of last year a Queensland journalist, Hannah Davies, reported how "a growing interest in satanism and the occult has led to a rise in exorcisms across the state".
She spoke to a Catholic priest, who preferred to remain anonymous, for fear of "reprisals". He claimed to be carrying out "at least one exorcism a fortnight".
His exorcisms appear to concentrate on the Gold Coast, the prosperous stretch of beach resorts to the south of Brisbane, than anywhere else. The priest explained:
"There has been a recruitment of pagan practices, and it's sheer poison. The Gold Coast is not good at all. I do far more exorcisms there than Brisbane."
The priest, whose parish is in the Australian capital, is the designated exorcist for Queensland, and his duties take him to many parts of the state. He lamented the small number of trained exorcists, "too few to cope with the big occult following that is emerging today".
In conclusion, he cautioned children to take extra care. He'd had to exorcise a woman who'd been "plagued by demonic manifestations since taking part in a playground witch game as a child".
She played the sweet twelve-year-old touched by evil in the film version of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. Linda Blair, with more than a little help from the make-up department, horrified audiences in 1973. Cinema-goers actually threw up during and after the screening. Given what has appeared on our screens since, it seems unlikely that the same could happen today.
San Franciscans have a chance to find out this week, when The Bridge Theatre launches its midnight movie series. Linda Blair, looking rather better than her possessed self (see pic), will be on hand to introduce two of the movies she starred in. Friday's offering is the eminently forgettable Roller Boogie, of 1979 vintage.
The good news is that the outfit Linda wore in the film will be auctioned on Friday (10 July). Proceeds will go to the animal charity she founded: the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation.
But of course the bigger crowd is expected for Saturday's showing: The Exorcist, for which child star Blair won an Oscar. As they say, never bettered and seldom equalled, it's the film that sparked off a renewed interest in a Catholic rite that had rarely impinged on the public consciousness since the Middle Ages.
On both nights Linda will be taking questions from the floor.
Tickets can be ordered at https://tickets.landmarktheatres.com/Landmark.aspx?TheatreID=222.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody tried it. A religious community in Connecticut attempted to exorcise the "demon" of homosexuality from a young man. Here's how CBS News reported it:
The video shows the 16-year-old boy lying on the floor, his body convulsing, as elders of a small Connecticut church cast a "homosexual demon" from his body.
"Rip it from his throat!" a woman yells. "Come on, you homosexual demon! You homosexual spirit, we call you out right now! Loose your grip, Lucifer!"
The 20-minute video posted on YouTube by Manifested Glory Ministries is being called abuse by gay and youth advocates, who are demanding an investigation. But a church official this week denied that the teenager was injured or that the church is prejudiced.
"We believe a man should be with a woman and a woman should be with a man," the Rev. Patricia McKinney told The Associated Press. "We have nothing against homosexuals. I just don't agree with their lifestyle."
The church posted the video on YouTube but has since removed it; it is still available on some Web sites that copied it. The church declined to make the video available for distribution by The Associated Press.
It shows church members standing the youth on his feet by holding him under his arms, and people shouting as organ music plays.
"Come out of his belly," someone commands. "It's in the belly _ push."
Later, the teenager is back on the floor, breathing heavily. Then he's coughing and apparently vomiting into a bag.
"Get another bag," a participant says. "Make sure you have your gloves."
As the youth lay back on the ground, limp, church members put a white sheet over him.
It's nearly impossible to say how often similar exercises occur in churches nationwide. But Kamora Herrington, who runs a mentoring program at True Colors and has worked with the youth, said she believes it's fairly common.
"This happens all the time," she said. "This is not isolated."
Robin McHaelin, executive director of True Colors, an advocacy group for gay youths, said her organization is aware of five cases in recent years in which youths in her program were threatened with exorcism.
In one case, she said, a child called to report that his caregiver had called a priest who was throwing holy water on his bedroom door.
"I think it's horrifying," McHaelin said of the video by Manifested Glory. "What saddens me is the people that are doing this think they are doing something in the kid's best interests, when in fact they're murdering his spirit."
McHaelin said she planned to report the situation to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. An agency spokesman said the agency does not comment on complaints or investigations.
"They have this kid in a full nelson," she said. "That just seems abusive to me."
McKinney said the youth was 18. The boy confirmed he is 16 but otherwise declined to comment, citing the advice of his pastor.
McHaelin said the boy told her staff that the church performed the ritual three times at his request. She said the boy has been engaging in risky behavior that she blames on the church's treatment.
McKinney said the youth went to the church last year and collapsed on the floor during a service.
"He was out of control in the church," she said. "This young man came to us. We didn't go to him."
McKinney denied the ritual was an exorcism, describing it instead as a casting out of spirits. She said the church took care of the youth, providing him clothes.
"He was dressing like a woman and everything. And he didn't want to be like that," McKinney said.
The teen had been in reform school for stealing but was eager to get out and go to the church to have what he thought were his demons driven out, Herrington said.
Exodus International, a Christian group that believes gays can become straight through prayer and counseling, does not advocate the church's approach, said Jeff Buchanan, director of church equipping.
The Rev. Roland Stringfellow, a minister in Oakland, Calif., said he was subject t demon casting in the 1990s when he was at a Baptist church and was struggling with his sexuality. He said he was put in front of the church as members shouted "demon of homosexuality come out of him."
"It caused nothing but shame and embarrassment," Stringfellow said.
McKinney also has a weekly radio program. She talked on Wednesday's program about being "persecuted" in recent days but did not mention the video specifically.
"It's been a hard time for me, but I'm looking good and I'm standing strong because when you have a mandate like mine you're not going to say what you want without the adversary coming after you," she said. "If you are a true prophet you're not going to be popular with the people."
Indeed. I couldn't help noticing that most of the congregation were, er, big. Wonder how long it'll be before somebody decides to exorcise the "foul demon of fat". Or perhaps that would make the true prophet even more unpopular.
Yes, it's official: the ouija board has claimed yet another victim. This time it's British film director Shane Meadows, whose credits include the 2004 thriller Dead Man's Shoes.
At the Edinburgh Film Festival this year he announced that he'd secured the film rights to Beware the Devil by Robert Lee. Based on true events, it tells the story of a sceptic who falls foul of ouija. Shane spoke to Empire magazine.
“Yeah, I’ve got the rights sorted now, so it’s not such a hidden thing,” he told Empire over the course of a long chat about his latest film and festival entry Le Donk & Scoz-ayz-ee. “It’s based on a book of the same name, based on the life of a guy who, by getting involved with ouija boards and the occult by trying to disprove it, trying to take the piss out of it, got possessed, had to be exorcised, and later became an exorcist himself. The guy it happened to has died, but his son [Robert Lee] is a novelist, and he helped him turn it into a book before he passed away, and now I’m working with him to turn it into a film.”
Beware The Devil, though, which has previously been described to us by Meadows as “making Dead Man’s Shoes look like Play School”, is one of what the filmmaker is now referring to as his ‘bigger’ films (the inference being that he will be making more ‘smaller’ films as part of his Five Day Feature initiative, a la Le Donk & Scorz-ayz-ee) and is currently second on a busy production slate as director.
“Yeah, the big news is that we’re already thinking about doing another Le Donk. It’ll be another ‘Le Donk And...’, something completely not music based. We’ve come up with a few ideas, and we might just go straight back and do another one, because we had such a laugh doing this one. Not like a sequel in terms of trying to be like the other one, but he’s got his missus and his kid’s a bit older, and a whole different set of events. So maybe before I do this next big film, might just go out, grab five days somewhere and knock another out so we can come back (to Edinburgh) next year."
"So it’ll be something like Le Donk & The Tomb Of The Cursed Fanny,” and we’ll stress that title was right off the top of his head “and then Beware The Devil. Two complete poles apart opposites, but I think it’s important to keep people guessing a bit, rather than doing the sort of Mickey Shyamalan thing where he does eight scary ones in a row, with the spooky twist at the end.”
Sounds scary. If we didn't already know that messing about with ouija boards is a dangerous pursuit, Mr. Meadows is all set to show us.
