Devil's Best Trick (eBook)
352 Seiten
Grove Press UK (Verlag)
978-1-80471-077-7 (ISBN)
Randall Sullivan was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone for over twenty years. He is the author of Graveyard of the Pacific, Dead Wrong, The Price of Experience, LAbyrinth, The Miracle Detective, and Untouchable. His work has been published in, among many other places, Esquire, Outside, Men's Journal, Washington Post, and the Guardian. He lives in Oregon.
How we explain the evils of the world - and the darkest parts of ourselves - has preoccupied humans throughout history. In The Devil's Best Trick, Randall Sullivan investigates historical, religious and cultural conceptions of evil, from Biblical times to European witch hunts to the devil-worshipping 'Black Mass' ceremony. He travels to Mexico to participate in the 'Hour of the Witches' - an annual ceremony in which hundreds of people congregate in the jungle south of Vera Cruz to negotiate terms with El Diablo. He takes us through the most famous exorcism in American history. And he delivers original reporting on the shocking story of a small town in Texas that, in 1988, unravelled into paranoia and panic after a seventeen-year-old boy was found hanging from a tree and rumours about Satanic worship and cults flourished. Nimble and expertly researched, The Devil's Best Trick brilliantly melds cultural and historical commentary with a suspenseful true-crime narrative. Randall Sullivan, whose reportage and narrative skill has been called 'extraordinary' and 'enthralling' by Rolling Stone, takes on a bold task in this book that is both biography of the Devil and a look at how evil manifests in the world.
Randall Sullivan was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone for over twenty years. He is the author of Graveyard of the Pacific, Dead Wrong, The Price of Experience, LAbyrinth, The Miracle Detective, and Untouchable. His work has been published in, among many other places, Esquire, Outside, Men's Journal, Washington Post, and the Guardian. He lives in Oregon.
Preface
In the summer of 1995, I was living in a country at war. Where I kept my billet, in the westernmost province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the worst atrocities had been committed two years before my arrival. Nevertheless, it was amid the blast craters and bullet holes of Mostar, a demolished city that now lay under a psycho-terror siege of random mortar launches and sporadic sniper shots, that I began to recognize “the problem of evil” as an obstacle to religious faith.
The tales of horror I heard in Mostar were moral quicksand. I kept my head above the horror by floating the surface of it in a cracked shell of professionalism, refusing either to believe or disbelieve the story of those Catholic nuns who claimed to have been captured by a unit of so-called četniks, gang-raped until each was pregnant, then given a choice between abortion, suicide, and bearing a Serb bastard. For me, it was enough to dip my toes in the citywide seep of sadness that lingered after the very public deaths of a young Muslim mother and her two children, blown apart by a direct missile strike as they attempted to flee down the Neretva River in a rubber raft. I could deflect everything except the expressions of the orphans on street corners. Seven and eight years old, they stood smoking cigarettes and flipping off passersby with a stony insolence that you couldn’t have wiped off their faces with an assault rifle. Looking into their agate eyes, I knew it was too late for us all.
Picking a path through the gigantic pile of scorched rubble that had once been Mostar’s city center, a place where two years earlier Catholic and Muslim survivors of the Serbian bombardment had fought each other with artillery at close range, I asked myself, as so many had before me, “How can a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good abide such depravity?” And what about justice? Maybe God wasn’t who I thought he was. Maybe God wasn’t, period.
It didn’t help my sleep that the most impressive people I met that summer made a point of telling me that the Devil, at least, was real. The first to speak these words was Mirjana Soldo, a religious visionary in Medjugorje, the Bosnian Croat “peace center” twelve miles from Mostar. There, a rapturous cult of devotion had formed around apparitions of the Virgin Mary that were already the most controversial and closely observed purported supernatural phenomena to appear on earth in at least a half century. As Mirjana urged me to recognize the Devil as an actual being who was determined to steal my soul, her pale blue eyes seemed to darken, and her expression became a discomfiting combination of pity and reproach. My sense was that she felt obliged to give me a warning she knew I wouldn’t heed.
Rita Klaus was more successful in suspending my disbelief. A large, handsome, white-haired woman from Pittsburgh, Klaus was famous for her spontaneous healing from an advanced case of multiple sclerosis, the most celebrated and thoroughly documented of the many medical miracles associated with Medjugorje. Klaus had seemed to appear out of nowhere one afternoon in the village’s parish office. She sat down across from me, leaned over the table, laid a hand on mine, and introduced herself with these words: “Satan exists.” I felt as if I had been shot with some drug that causes a temporary paralysis. Klaus seemed to wait until the effect was complete before continuing: “The evil inside you comes from temptation. You have to make a decision, either for the good or for the bad. So the evil is inside us, as you believe, but it’s also out there, and believe me, it is very real and very pervasive.” Klaus then told me the story of a diabolic attack on her family that had begun when one of her daughters began to experiment with a Ouija board. The part that disturbed me most at the time, and that would haunt me later, involved a series of attacks on Klaus and her family by something that took the form of a large black dog with red eyes. “I don’t want to scare you, but I think you need to hear my story,” Klaus told me at one point. The emphasis she put on the word “need” troubled me.
The person I admired more than anyone I met in Medjugorje was a Franciscan priest named Slavko Barbarić, spiritual adviser to Mirjana and the other visionaries. Shortly after my meeting with Rita Klaus, Father Slavko attempted to breach my skepticism with a phenomenological report. Slavko was, among other things, an intellectual whose multiple PhDs included one in psychology. He lowered my guard by admitting straight out his own reluctance to believe in supernatural evil, then described the series of events that had changed his mind. One experience that made a deep impression involved his participation in the exorcism of a woman who was able to distinguish consecrated hosts from those that had not been consecrated. He and the other priests participating in the exorcism each had left the room on multiple occasions, Slavko recalled, only to return a few minutes later with either a wafer that had been consecrated or one that had not yet been blessed. The woman who lay on the bed never reacted once when they came into the room with an unconsecrated host, Slavko told me, but went into paroxysms of writhing and cursing whenever a consecrated host came near her. “What in her could possibly have known the difference?” Slavko asked. In reply, I simply shook my head.
I was to witness an exorcism myself only a few days later. I’ve attempted to deconstruct that experience many times in the years since, mainly in the hope that I would be able to put it out of my mind. Those I’ve spoken to about it always make reference to the “altered state” I was in at the time. I don’t deny this. That night and the days leading up to it were almost unbearable in their intensity. The Youth Festival Mass in which the exorcism occurred was the most fervid and enthralling religious service I’ve ever experienced. The thousand or so young adults who made their way to Medjugorje from all over the world had braved warnings from the United Nations and the European Union that the situation was especially unstable at the moment and that travel to the former Yugoslavia was “strongly discouraged.” The Croats were mobilizing for a final push against the Serbs, and the climax of the war was upon us. A sense that the armies of light were rallying against the forces of darkness imbued that evening’s mass from the moment it began. Father Slavko was as I’d never seen him before, ferocious in his ardor, swinging an enormous gilded monstrance and the consecrated host within like a holy weapon as he stormed through the crowd. Each time Slavko turned the monstrance in a new direction, repeating the words “Body of Christ,” I heard an eruption of bonechilling noises from out of the crowd, shrieks of agony and gasps of terror, animal howls and loud, throaty curses. There were several raspy barks of “Fuck you!” The choir on the stage behind Slavko only sang louder, faces aglow with the conviction of imminent victory. As Slavko approached, his expression frightened me; the gaunt priest’s reliably warm gaze was replaced by a piercing glare. He pointed the monstrance directly at me and in a booming voice shouted, “Jesus!” It was as close as I’ve ever come to keeling over in a dead faint. The roars of rage and cries of pain seemed to be swelling around me. A young woman standing perhaps twenty feet to my left began to produce a noise unlike any I’d ever heard, a cough so dry and deep that it sounded as if she was trying to bring up a lung. It went on and on, like an echo that did not fade but rather amplified. She bent over, then shuddered uncontrollably, a white foam issuing from her mouth in a copious stream. She dropped to the ground, kicking and writhing, and began to scream obscenities. I heard “Fuck you, Jesus,” in very clear English, but also curses—or what I assumed were curses—in a variety of languages I did not recognize. The girl’s voice became impossibly deep and guttural, and the white lather continued to pour from her mouth. A crowd of people gathered around, reciting the exorcism prayer of Pope Leo XIII. At one point, the girl on the ground seemed to go still and silent, but then her screams started up again, louder than ever, gruesomely desperate. At the moment of what I could sense as a climax, she arched her back into a position that not even a world-class gymnast could have held, impossibly extended, with her weight resting entirely on her heels and the crown of her head, and let forth a hoarse, croaking expulsion of breath that must have emptied her lungs utterly. It was the smell, though, that shocked me, a ghastly stench that was like the exponential product of rotted flesh. In that moment I became utterly convinced that something was leaving her, that what I had just witnessed was not emotional or psychological or imaginary but real, whatever that meant.
I remember very little of what happened next, just blurred images of the girl being helped to her feet and led away, of Slavko finishing the mass, of the shining faces of the choir as they sang. I have no idea how I made it back to the Pansion Maja, into my room, and out onto the tiny balcony where I awoke at dawn, sprawled on the concrete floor, shivering with cold and happy in a way that was completely unfamiliar.
Two days later I was in Rome, on my way home. It was mid-August, and to escape the suffocating heat I sought the cooling mists of the Fountain of the Four Rivers on the Piazza...
Erscheint lt. Verlag | 3.10.2024 |
---|---|
Verlagsort | London |
Sprache | englisch |
Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen | |
Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Weitere Religionen | |
Schlagworte | 666 • Baudelaire • Black Mass • Catemaco • el diablo • Exorcism • exorcisms • Hour of the Witches • John Milton • Satan • satanic cult • satanic panic • serial killer • serial killing • the Devil • William Blake |
ISBN-10 | 1-80471-077-6 / 1804710776 |
ISBN-13 | 978-1-80471-077-7 / 9781804710777 |
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
Größe: 2,2 MB
DRM: Digitales Wasserzeichen
Dieses eBook enthält ein digitales Wasserzeichen und ist damit für Sie personalisiert. Bei einer missbräuchlichen Weitergabe des eBooks an Dritte ist eine Rückverfolgung an die Quelle möglich.
Dateiformat: EPUB (Electronic Publication)
EPUB ist ein offener Standard für eBooks und eignet sich besonders zur Darstellung von Belletristik und Sachbüchern. Der Fließtext wird dynamisch an die Display- und Schriftgröße angepasst. Auch für mobile Lesegeräte ist EPUB daher gut geeignet.
Systemvoraussetzungen:
PC/Mac: Mit einem PC oder Mac können Sie dieses eBook lesen. Sie benötigen dafür die kostenlose Software Adobe Digital Editions.
eReader: Dieses eBook kann mit (fast) allen eBook-Readern gelesen werden. Mit dem amazon-Kindle ist es aber nicht kompatibel.
Smartphone/Tablet: Egal ob Apple oder Android, dieses eBook können Sie lesen. Sie benötigen dafür eine kostenlose App.
Geräteliste und zusätzliche Hinweise
Buying eBooks from abroad
For tax law reasons we can sell eBooks just within Germany and Switzerland. Regrettably we cannot fulfill eBook-orders from other countries.
aus dem Bereich