The Devil is Not Behind the Magic
I picked up a book written by Rome’s renowned exorcist, Fr. Gabriele Amorth. It is called “An Exorcist Explains the Demonic,” wherein he rails against the dangers of magic, Satanism, black masses, and superstition on pages 38-39. Drawing heavily from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he defines magic:
“All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others-- even if this were for the sake of restoring their health-- are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.” [1]
Gabriele ascribes all magic to a single source: the Devil. Beliefs of this kind are so typical of the Christian Church in general. Maybe you raise an eyebrow. Maybe you are not annoyed at all. Maybe you laugh. Maybe you are ready to unleash your retorts like rapid gunfire. For me, it is amazing to see how beliefs such as this exceed the boundaries of inductive reasoning and the rules of statistical generalization. Obviously, we have not visited all cultures and all peoples and assessed every form of magic they are using to confirm that the Devil is hiding behind them all?
Many generalizations are doubtable while still somewhat decent in this world. But this one about the Devil takes the cake. Quite often, it is a premise accepted without question in the Christian culture. Meanwhile, there are plenty of less faulty inductive reasoning forms that not many people could get away with. Let us pretend that you assume all of the world's grocery stores workers are studying business management because all of your grocery store workers are studying business management. That kind of inductive reasoning seems foolish. Right? The belief that the Devil is the mastermind behind all of the magic in the world will earn you less scowling looks, unfortunately.
Hopefully, I have made my point clear on this; religion’s history is rife with the use of magic, probably going back to its earliest days, and we could not possibly interview all those people to know if they sold their souls to the Devil.
Fr. Gabriele would like to have us believe that maledictions, spells, and other forms of magic not done in the name of Christ are all things used in the course of fulfilling self-serving agendas whether they involve killing someone or not, healing someone or not, getting or losing a job, falling in love, and/or arousing environmental events. Whether it is “white” or “black” or “red” magic, the Devil is the mastermind behind it all, for Fr. Gabriele, who claims that he once knew a woman who used a wizard to supernaturally disband a couple so she could marry the man she fell in love with. For Fr. Gabriele, whoever uses magic contravenes Exodus 20:3 (“You shall have no other gods before me”) and is guilty of superstition. His definition is rather ironic:
“Superstition...indicates when something is superimposed on another, distorting the original sense. One is superstitious when one believes that something innocent in itself brings misfortune (the classic black cat that crosses one’s path, spilling salt on the pavement, breaking a mirror) or that it brings luck (the rabbit’s foot, an iron horseshoe, crossing one’s fingers)-- that is, when one attributes to certain objects or deeds a power based on their intrinsic essence”(pg. 39) [1]
The psychology behind this observation of inanimate objects appears to be unexplained or may contain an ulterior motive. For Fr. Gabrielle, hanging a horseshoe around a Madonna statue is superstitious, but he says nothing to distance himself from the other glaring and commonplace superstitions of the Catholic Church, such as the veneration of saints, relics, and images. He implies his approval of divinizing the Virgin Mary when he states on page 55 that the use of foul language offends her.
Secondly, he also consults with “sensitives and seers” who he believes “are inspired to do good and sense or see spiritual realities.” Allegedly, they can pinpoint the types and origins of spells and damage caused by them. Though he believes he can distinguish between the trustworthy ones and the vainglorious money-grabbers, it is hard to categorize him differently than those he apparently identifies as “superstitious” (pg.53) [1].
I believe Fr. Gabriele does not go far enough in defining superstition and that Merriam-Webster’s dictionary does the job quite nicely. Superstition is:
“a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation.”
It is also
“an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition.” [2]
I suppose for Fr. Gabriele, being “irrational” or “abject” in this regard would entail a mere failure or refusal to exalt God highly enough that you would not need to consult anything of the occult. As a secular humanist, I am applying the terms “irrational” and “superstitious” in regards to how logical validity and consistency are cast to the wind here.
Many people nowadays already know to equate superstition with irrationality even while admittedly holding to one or a few superstitions. Superstitions have a religious layer, a cultural layer, and, probably most importantly, a personal layer. Emperor Constantine slapped the superstition label on non-Christians. Roman historian Tacitus labeled Christianity as a “pernicious superstition.” Whatever someone specifically holds as sacred and religiously valid, another finds to be superstitious. Protestants believe Catholics are superstitious for their attention to the Virgin Mary. Christians derogate Hindus as superstitious for their genuflection before idols. It appears to me that most religious people would regard the Australian Aboriginal people as superstitious for their attention to their totem [3].
“Superstitious” is a term that becomes subjective and obscured when it is arbitrarily applied to anything not adhering to any of the world’s most preponderant religions. The world’s most preponderant religions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam) set the stage, the tone, and the path, evidently. But preponderance does not drain the superstition from their veins. And that should be obvious to us all.
Objectively, anything is superstitious to me if it intransigently clings to a misunderstanding of causality, nature, and evidence, especially in regards to fear of the unknown.
Fr. Gabriele states, “I always exhort everyone, above all my particular clients, to invoke often their guardian angels, who protect us from dangers and who give us the proper suggestions at the right moments, even if they cannot impede us from being under temptation and from eventually falling into sin” (pg. 19) [1].
To make ourselves un-superstitious, we cannot believe that angels can make “suggestions” in times of peril and temptation. By making suggestions, I suppose he would like to imply that they can offer counter-thoughts against our temptations to do wrong. Instead, why can we not believe that we humans have particular brain regions interconnected with the whole experience of activating and deactivating temptation?
Temptations come in many forms. As I see it now, it is hard to identify a particular region of the brain that is specifically in charge of “temptations.” Scientists have found brain regions that are more connected to self-control, inhibition, self-regulation, self-evaluation, self-adjustment, etc. A 2013 U.S. National Library of Medicine report discusses willpower and its association with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), posterior parietal cortex (PPC), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and precommitment engaged lateral frontopolar cortex (LFPC) [6].
But willpower can be dwindled by emotions over time. No wonder Fr. Gabriele believes that the Devil works on your “weak points” slowly.
The report discusses moderating your exposure to temptations as a self-control strategy (called precommitment). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study the neural structures and circuits said to be in charge of these strategies. Choices that have been promoted by precommitment have helped individuals with impulsivity problems [6].
So, is it really an angel or your spirit that enables you to be abstemious, or is it human anatomy and biology alone that accomplishes this? I’ll go with the latter.
I have often heard that suicide is a great sin in Christianity. I cannot count the number of times I have heard the sin of suicide credited to demonic influences. Alternatively, could we look at this from a neuroscientific perspective and blame it on a damaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex?
From a February 8th, 2020 Nature article, we read: “An accumulating body of evidence suggests that suicidal behavior is facilitated by impaired decision-making, particularly in complex and dynamically evolving critical situations. Both impaired value-based decision-making in the laboratory and self-reported impulsivity are associated with suicidal behavior. We have found disrupted ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) value encoding in people who have attempted suicide. This disrupted value encoding scaled with trait impulsivity, suggesting that decision-making deficits and impulsivity may represent overlapping manifestations of a single neural diathesis to suicidal behavior” [7].
What about the temptation to steal? Is there a brain region responsible for that, or is stealing so beyond the purview of scientific explanation that we must resort to appealing to the supernatural? What is going on in the brains and nervous systems of kleptomaniacs that they cannot resist the compulsion to steal, even things of little to no value?
Genetics and biology would be a good starting ground for identifying the influences of kleptomania. Healthline .com proposes a variety of causes discussed below:
1) Bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, substance use disorders, or personality disorders can have a strong connection. 2) Low serotonin levels can exacerbate impulsivity. 3) Since stealing can give you a dopamine rush, addiction to dopamine and addictive disorders, in general, can be a cause. 4) A disrupted opioid system would make you unable to restrain your urges. 5) Kleptomania or addiction may run in your family. The stealing could symbolize your power to seize and reclaim the losses of your childhood. 6) And lastly, concussions and head trauma could be risk factors [8].
The temptation to overeat is one that psychological scientist Rich Lopez and his colleagues studied. They looked at “response inhibition” in the inferior frontal gyrus, a prefrontal brain region related to self-control, and “food-cue-relation activity” in the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with affective states and reward. They used functional MRI technology to study the relationship between these parts and the possible brain markers that present probabilities about whether people will seek to sate their daily food desires [4] [5].
31 females were recruited for the study. For the first task, they were asked to look at high-calorie food images and judge whether the image was situated indoors or outdoors. Participants were also asked to report on the severity of their cravings and how well they could abstain. They measured the responsive nucleus accumbens activity and discovered that food images intensify the nucleus accumbens activity, which then predicted that those individuals were more likely to succumb to temptation. They found that those with higher inferior frontal gyrus activity had more self-control and those with low IFG activity were 8.2 times more likely to gratify themselves. Researchers were astounded by their results. Lopez and Heatherton are quoted: “Reward-related brain activity, which can be considered an implicit measure, predicted who gave in to temptations to eat, as well as who ate more, above and beyond the desired strength reported by participants at the moment...This could help to explain a previous finding from our lab that people who show this kind of brain activity the most are also the most likely to gain weight over six months” [4].
Getting back to Fr. Gabriele, I suppose anatomy and biology are not great determinants of behavior in dire circumstances. Otherworldly forces must be a better explanation when certain human behaviors get too knotty for him. Perhaps entertainment and fashion are underestimated chess pieces on the board that put us under a trance unbeknownst to us.
Listening to Satanic rock music or any music with “Mephistophelian sounds” along with using profane language, watching horror movies, and getting tattoos and piercings makes people vulnerable to diabolical influences; but frequenting the sacraments and living a life devoted to God that eschews those things should also eschew the temptations to do what he believes is “evil.” If Gabriele had ever read this report on precommitment, I imagine he would say that exposure to those non-Christian things ruins one’s precommitment strategies and resolve. But do those non-Christian things truly compel or tempt anyone to do anything “evil”? Perhaps that is worthy of discussion in another post.
Stay tuned for more information on my opinion about this book.
General Disclaimer: All sources are hyperlinked in this article. The author has made their best attempt to accurately interpret the sources used and preserve the source-author’s original argument while avoiding plagiarism. Should you discover any errors to that end, please email thecommoncaveat@gmail.com and we will review your request.
All information in this article is intended for educational/entertainment purposes only. This information should not be used as medical/therapeutic advice. Please seek a doctor/therapist for health advice.
Works cited:
[1] Amorth, Fr. Gabriele, An Exorcist Explains the Demonic--The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels, Manchester, New Hampshire, Sophia Institute Press, 2016.
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superstition
[3]https://www.britannica.com/topic/superstition
[4]https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/individual-brain-activity-predicts-tendency-to-succumb-to-daily-temptations.html
[5]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614531492
[6]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3725418/
[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0632-0
[8]https://www.healthline.com/health/stealing#risk-factors
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