Selected Possession Readings, and the Books That Would Correct Us

The load-bearing eight

Of the filings on the register, eight carry the rest: a procedure, three contracts, three households and a department. Read these and the other forty-six stop being surprising, because almost everything on the register is either downstream of one of them or an attempt to get out of it.

1. Rituale Romanum, Title XII Promulgated under Paul V · 1614

   The only monster in the season whose remedy is a published procedure with prerequisites, an emendation history and a later revision. It is the ground this register stands on, the way an exhumation report is the ground under the vampire file, and it asks for the medical exclusion four hundred years before anybody films one.

2. Historia von D. Johann Fausten Anonymous; printed by Johann Spies · 1587

   The founding contract, and every signature on the register afterwards is a copy of this one. Disclosed terms and a signature in the debtor's own hand. Read as procurement, which is what it is.

3. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Christopher Marlowe · 1604

   The instrument on stage, with a clock attached. The only filing in which the debtor watches the deadline arrive, and the only one on the whole register where the agreement is enforced without challenge.

4. Faust, Part One Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1808

   Where the sale becomes a wager, and therefore where the loopholes begin. Every later escape that turns on wording rather than on argument is working from this redraft, which makes it the most consequential document on the contract half of the file.

5. The Exorcist William Peter Blatty · 1971

   The modern case file. Built from a real case of 1949 and from a diary kept at the time, which is an unusual provenance for a founding document. The case itself is filed separately on this register and handled with care.

6. Rosemary's Baby Ira Levin · 1967

   The tenancy filing, and this register's rather than the witch file's: the neighbours are a coven but the transaction is not theirs. Consent is present at every step and worthless at every step, because it was obtained by telling somebody a different story.

7. The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov · 1966

   The purest household filing in the run. A city acquires a supernatural visitor and the plot of the book turns out to be an apartment number. In a novel with the Devil in it, the load-bearing object is a residential address.

8. The Screwtape Letters C. S. Lewis · 1942

   Hell as a department with a reporting line. Take the theology out and what remains is a management file, which is the register's procurement finding stated decades before the filings that confirm it.

The shelf

These are the works that would let a reader check the register, correct it, or settle the one question the register deliberately left open.

• Rituale Romanum (1614) and De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam (1999) The Holy See · 1614 and 1999

  Primary, and both already cards. Read the prerequisites rather than the prayers: the requirement to exclude medical and psychiatric causes is the part this register grades, and it is the part almost nothing downstream depicts.

• The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West Brian Levack · 2013

  The spine of this shelf and the book to start with. Scholarly and wide, and the reference I would hand to anybody wanting to check the shape of the whole file rather than one card of it.

• The Devil, Satan, Lucifer and Mephistopheles Jeffrey Burton Russell · 1977–86

  Four volumes, and where the register went to find out at which point each trait enters the record. If you want to know when something started rather than what it means, it is here.

• Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France Sarah Ferber · 2004

  Scholarly, and the reference I point to for the 1634 proceedings, in preference to anything written for a general reader.

• The Devils of Loudun Aldous Huxley · 1952

  Already a card. Literary nonfiction, reconstructed from the record.

  Readable and not neutral. Cite it for the account, not for the verdict.

• Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism Thomas B. Allen · 1993

  Popular, and the book in which the contemporary diary from the 1949 case is reproduced.

  Takes the diary at face value. Nobody here has checked the reproduction against anything, and the register prints no account of what the diary does or does not contain.

• "The Haunted Boy of Cottage City" Mark Opsasnick, in Strange Magazine · 1999–2000

  The sceptical investigation of the 1949 case, and the only item on either list where somebody went and did the legwork on it.

  A magazine piece, not peer-reviewed. The register cites its existence and its method; readers who want the case should read it alongside the scholarship rather than instead of it.

• Goodman, 1981 — an anthropologist's account of the Bavarian case Felicitas D. Goodman · 1981

  An anthropologist's account of the case carried by the register's paired 2005 and 2006 filings. Its own printed title names the young woman it describes; this register cites it by author, year and subject instead, on the same rule the lunar register applies to a pamphlet and a journal article. Author and year will find it in any catalogue.

  Sympathetic to the exorcists. Read with something adversarial next to it.

• Satan's Silence Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker · 1995

  The corrective to the 1980 filing, and to the decade it started. If you read only one item on this shelf about how an uncorroborated account becomes a fact, read this one.

• An Exorcist Tells His Story Gabriele Amorth · 1990; English translation 1999

  A primary memoir by a practitioner, and useful for what the work looks like from inside it.

  Partisan by design, and nobody here has confirmed either date against the publisher; both are printed as reported. Cite it for the practitioner's account of his own method and for nothing else.

• The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist Matt Baglio · 2009

  Already a card. Popular journalism, and the only observer's account on the register of how the remedy is taught.

  Popular. Use it for the institutional shape, not to settle a claim about an outcome.

• William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel to Film William Peter Blatty · 1974

  Primary on the adaptation, and the obvious place for a reader to go who wants to settle the question this register left open about which of the two filings supplies the best-known physical sign.

  A self-report by the author about his own work. The register has not used it to close the question and does not present it as having closed it.