Halloween Special: The Behavior of Spirits

On gods, ghosts, and demons

This is my third Halloween edition. The last two dealt with fictional monsters: “The Sociology of Zombies” and “Dracula vs. Blacula.” My schtick was analyzing the in-universe sociology of the monsters in the manner of those Physics of Star Trek books. This year I’m going to talk about supernatural beings that people actually believe in.

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Sociologist Guy Swanson distinguished two major classes of supernatural phenomena: manna and spirits. Manna is supernatural substance. It can grant supernatural powers and fuel supernatural action, but it has no agency of its own. Spirits are supernatural beings, able to initiate supernatural action or, at least, carry it out with some degree of autonomy.

The two categories might overlap in some cases. Some forces require the actions of people or gods to set them in motion, but once in motion run their course regardless of further actions. The machine cannot be stopped, the curse cannot be undone.

And some manna, once acquired, seems to influence or dictate its own use.  For example, the price for magical powers might be a tendency to use those powers in evil ways.  This is the case with witches.

Even spirits proper are quite variable. Some are highly personified, resembling normal people in their motives, dispositions, and appearance. Othe spirits are abstract and ineffable. Some are weak and inconsequential, others are omnipotent. Some spirits act completely independently or are even the prime movers of the universe. Others are part of a hierarchy and follow the orders of superior beings.

Gods

The most powerful spirits are gods. The greatest of these are what Swanson calls high gods. Other scholars prefer the term big gods. The Almighty God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the clearest example.

Such a God creates all of existence and is responsible for all that happens within it. Though lesser spirits like angels may be granted some degree of autonomy, their actions are ultimately set in motion by Almighty God.

Somewhat less almighty are pantheons of what Swanson calls superior gods, like the Greek gods who resided on Olympus. They are a supernatural aristocracy, with the squabbling and venal desires of a human one. They wield substantial power over the physical world, but their will can be defied — especially by their fellow gods. None being much stronger than the others, they tend to keep each other in check: Sea-god Poseidon might keep you from getting home, but goddess of wisdom Athena will keep you alive on your odyssey.

Truly small gods have even less power and more limited domains. They also tend to be a bit dumber. Psychologist Justin Barret argues that ritual precision is more important when dealing with such “dumb gods”: they don’t know your wishes and intentions, and can’t infer the meaning of an incomplete message from the context clues.

Gods in general exist independently of humans and have freedom of action relative to them. They might be influenced by prayers and offerings, and on the rare occasion they might even bet tricked, but they cannot be summoned and given commands.

The wrath of God Almighty is terrifying — ask the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the victims of the Great Flood. And divorced from the rest of the Bible, the tale of Job treads close to Lovecraftian cosmic horror story where a person is crushed by an alien being he can’t possibly comprehend.

The machinations of lesser gods can also be frightening, and often divorced from morality. Smaller gods don’t much care how humans treat one another. They just want their incense and sacrifices.

But believers know God Almighty is good. Even if they’re somewhat amoral, polytheistic gods are rarely outright evil. And such powerful spirits just aren’t scary and spooky in the manner of evil lesser spirits that plague human society. To find good fodder for a Halloween post, let’s turn to a class of evil spirit that stalk humankind: Demons.

Demons

Demons are evil inhuman spirits that are at least semi-autonomous, wide-ranging, and with substantial power to inflict harm. Some directly attack humans. For instance, in March 2019, a school in Kenya was closed after students reported that a loose demon had been sucking their blood [link broken, Archive.org down], resulting in several students fainting. Another Kenyan school was shut down in 2018 after girls reported the demons had sexually assaulted them.

Other demons act by taking possession of human bodies, making their host act in uncharacteristic and frightening ways. In the late eighteenth century, a possessed Englishman would have fits “in which he sang and screamed in various sounds, some of which did not resemble a human voice.” Former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal recalls similar behavior during the possession of a friend while the two were in college:

After a period of group prayer, a student made a movement to end the meeting. Suddenly, Susan emitted some strange guttural sounds and fell to the floor. She started thrashing about, as if in some sort of seizure. Susan’s sister must have recognized what was happening, for she ordered us to gather around and place our hands on Susan’s prostrate body. I re­fused to budge from my position and froze in hor­ror. I will never forget the first comprehensible sound that came from Susan; she screamed my name with such an urgency that the chill still travels down my spine whenever I recall this moment.

In Kenya, a church meeting was interrupted by a man confessing that demonic possession had led him to commit a string of local murders.

Kenya seems to have an unusually high amount of demon activity, much of it in schools.  Ugandan schools have also had their share of attacks. Sometimes these demons are ambitious enough to engage in mass possessions. In 2016 a school in Uganda was closed after 250 students were simultaneously possessed by demon: for three days the students engaged in “screaming and uncoordinated noise.”

Those possessed by demons might display supernatural powers as well. In America in the 1940s, a possessed boy (whose story inspired the novel and film The Exorcist) not only spoke in a low guttural voice and engaged in acts of violence against a visiting priest, but could reportedly cause the bed to shake violently and objects to move around the room without being physically touched.

In contrast, the demons reported by some modern American therapists engage in more of an infiltration and sabotage mission than full possession. Entering the human mind, they act as a negative facet of personality, making the person think less of themselves and make self-destructive decisions.

While they may make trouble of their own accord, demons are not completely autonomous. They might obey the commands of a superior malevolent entity such as the Devil. And some can be conjured and set to work by mortal humans.

But once summoned, demons are exceedingly difficult to control. For instance, when a demon attacked an African school in the early 2000s, a local man soon confessed that he had summoned it to help him become wealthy, only for it to run wild when he could not meet its increasingly excessive demands for payment (which included human flesh).

Demons are by and large unkillable, but they can be defeated. Mortal humans can banish them, though usually it requires enlisting the help of a powerful god. In a ritual known as exorcism a supernatural specialist, such as a priest, enlists the help of angels, gods, or Almighty God to cast the demon or demons out of a possessed individual.

In Catholic tradition the exorcist is an ordained priest who invokes the power of Christ and uses various ritual weapons, such as Saint Michael’s Prayer against Satan and the Rebellious Angels, “the strongest prayer against cases of diabolic possession,” to expel the demon. The practice is well-known enough that even some Protestants view Catholic priests as especially skilled or knowledgeable in combating demons. Scott Alexander relates a similar view some non-Christian Chinese had of Christian missionaries:

Reverend John Nevius, a sober-minded Protestant missionary in late 1800s China. He learned that the Chinese mostly appreciated Christianity for its ability to cast out demons, and that they expected his help with this task. After great reluctance, he agreed, and was surprised to find himself effecting miracle cures and winning converts. “After experiencing casting out demons himself, he sent circular letters to all the other missionaries in China, almost all of whom had similar experiences. Seventy percent of them had come to believe in possession and re-evaluate their faith.”

Religious laity might also attempt exorcism. Bobby Jindal relates the spontaneous effort of a group of college students to perform an exorcism on his friend:

The students, led by Susan’s sister and Louise, a member of a charismatic church, engaged in loud and desperate prayers while holding Susan with one hand. Kneeling on the ground, my friends were chanting, “Satan, I command you to leave this woman.” Others exhorted all “demons to leave in the name of Christ.” It is no exaggeration to note the tears and sweat among those assembled. Susan lashed out at the assembled students with verbal assaults.

In cases of mass possession, mass exorcism may be necessary – something which occurred at a South African school in 2011. Notably, some South African exorcisms do not go well for the allegedly possessed individual.

Demons are definitely scary. Maybe too scary for Halloween. To get to something that’s more in the realm of merely spooky, let’s talk about ghosts.

Ghosts

Ghosts are spirits that were once mortal beings, usually ordinary humans.

Ghosts range in strength from power levels that are similar to those of demons to merely being able to make strange and fleeting sensory oddities, such as causing living humans to hear a whispered voice or feel an odd sensation of being watched.

They also tend to have a constricted range, often being limited to a particular locale such as their place of death or burial. Though often frightening, they are not invariably malevolent, and those that are might only direct their ire toward particular individuals or families against whom they have some sort of personal grievance.

Ghosts in tribal and traditional settings appear to be somewhat stronger than the ghosts that live in modern industrial societies. In medieval England, for instance, people might abandon the house in which a person had committed suicide because it was believed that the ghost of such a person was dangerous to the living.

In societies with beliefs like this, those in weak social positions might kill themselves with the explicit purpose of becoming a vengeful ghost. In colonial Tanganyika, “When a man has a grievance, and receives no redress, he will, as a final resort, go before the wrongdoer and say, ‘I shall commit suicide, and rise up as an evil spirit to torment you.’” Similar behaviors occurred in traditional India and Taiwan.

Medieval English ghosts were also more physically substantial than modern ghosts: There are reports of them being physically wrestled and restrained until a priest could arrive to hear their confessions. By the Victorian era, though, ghosts had become much more insubstantial, appearing as mists and vapors.

In modern times, the most powerful ghost one usually hears about is the poltergeist — or “noisy spirit” — which is capable of moving physical objects, sometimes violently so. Though the famous 1982 film showed them having awesome and varied powers, real life poltergeists tend to engage in much more mundane activities. The most violent have been known to throw crockery across the room, but more typical is slamming shut doors (in a manner similar to a mild breeze) or sliding small objects a short distance across a table.

Most modern ghosts do not even display this level of mastery over the physical world. Their manifestations are limited to such things as making an inexplicable “cold spot” in an otherwise warm room, whispering someone’s name, or creating the odd sensation that a “presence” is nearby. Notably, some attribute these sensations not to the supernatural, but to the physical effects of ultra-low frequency sounds.

Indeed, perhaps the most noteworthy thing about modern ghosts is that they still tend to inspire great fear despite being almost laughably weak. A friend one talked of how frightening his cousin’s haunted house was. The ghost made itself known through photographs: Whenever anyone took a picture of a man inside the house, the resulting photo would show him with a slight aura around him. This only seemed to happen to males, something he and his cousin attributed to the house being a former brothel and the ghost being a deceased prostitute. I guess even in death she was on the clock.

My first thought was that if he was scared of auras around photos, the simplest solution was not to take photos, and that I wasn’t very impressed with a ghost that used supernatural powers to accomplish what I could do in five minutes using Photoshop. But even if weak, the supernatural is spooky, and few people are comfortable with the presence of ghosts.

The Social Structure of Spirits

When will spirits be more numerous, active, and powerful?

Focusing on gods, Guy Swanson explained their power as a function of hierarchy: The high gods of monotheistic religions were more likely to arise in societies with three or more levels of political administration, and the greater the political hierarchy, the more active they are.

Sociologist Donald Black generalizes and simplifies: The participation of the supernatural in social life increases with social stratification. Compared to large civilizations, hunter-gatherers have comparatively little stratification, and their spirits tend to be comparatively weak and inactive. State societies are more likely to have high gods or big gods than are stateless societies, and in more complex societies the gods are more likely to be moralistic entities that are active in human affairs.

More complex and stratified societies also seem more prone to powerful malevolent spirits. Anthropologist Colin Turnbull reports that Bantu farmers live in fear of demons, while nearby Mbuti foragers find such beliefs amusing and exploit them to their benefit. Those who live under high gods are also plagued by demons, ghosts, witches, and other supernatural adversaries.

Black also proposes that the activity of the supernatural is a direct function of social solidarity — that is, the overall intimacy and cultural homogeneity of the social group.

Spirits are more active in tight-knit tribal and traditional settings than they are in atomized, fluid, and diverse world of modern cities and suburbs. Tribal people might see their world as saturated in spirits that reside in animals, trees, and geographic features. In so-called animistic beliefs, nearly everything has a spiritual component, will, and agency.

Combining these ideas, the greatest supernatural power should be found in societies where powerful and centralized organizations rule over masses of peasants living in small, solidary villages. Thus medieval people were not only God-fearing, but lived in a demon-haunted world. And ghosts in traditional times were more powerful and frightening than modern ghosts.

As society modernized demons became fewer and farther between, while ghosts became intangible and less dangerous. The terrifying gives way to the spooky.

Yet ghosts and demons still thrive in African and other poor countries, where tribal and village solidarity prevail. And they have not completely disappeared from the modern West, either. One survey shows that 18 percent of Americans have witnessed a ghost in some form or other.

And for reasons that aren’t clear, the influence of the supernatural may be growing again. The percentage reporting ghostly experiences is up from a similar survey conducted in the 1990s, and so too for the percentage believing in demonic possession. Since 2018, priests report that requests for exorcism are on the rise, and they continue to rise still.

Perhaps the spirits are growing powerful again, and in the future the world will be demon-haunted once more.

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