Possessed or Not Possessed? Anneliese Michel

This is a gothic thought experiment, not a factual claim. I am not diagnosing anyone across the distance of decades, I am not excusing anyone, and I am not suggesting that a real young woman was harmed by supernatural forces. I am reading a real case through the old language of possession — and in this one, more than any other I have written about, the old language is not a game. It is the thing that killed her.

I usually enjoy this. I should say that honestly before we begin, because it will not be true today.

Most of the time, Possessed or Not Possessed? is a genuine pleasure — a haunted house that turns out to be a real-estate scam, a poltergeist that turns out to be a bored child, a demon that turns out to have been invented over a bottle of wine. The pleasure is real because nobody, in the end, was truly hurt by the ghost; they were hurt, if at all, by the people selling it, and taking those people apart is honest work.

This one is different. This one is a young woman who is dead, and the reason she is dead is that the people who loved her, sincerely and to the end, decided her illness was a demon and treated it accordingly. There is no scam here to enjoy taking apart. There is only a grief, and a lesson, and I am going to try to render both without a single ounce of the usual fun, because the usual fun would be obscene.

The text

Anneliese Michel was born in Bavaria in 1952, into a devout Catholic family, and at sixteen she had her first seizure. She was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, and later with the psychiatric conditions that so often ride alongside it. If you know anything about temporal lobe epilepsy, the rest of her symptoms will not surprise you and will not, for a moment, look supernatural: the seizures, yes, but also the hyperreligiosity that the condition is documented to produce, the voices, the smells no one else could smell, the sudden aversion to sacred objects, the terrible sense that her own will was not her own. Every single one of these is in the medical literature. Every one of them was also, to a family steeped in an older explanation, the signature of something else.

By 1975 the medication was not working — partly because, as the illness and the belief fed each other, she had begun to refuse it — and her family had come to understand her suffering as demonic possession. A bishop authorized an exorcism. Two priests performed it, following the old rite, and they performed it again, and again: sixty-seven times over roughly ten months. She stopped eating. She knelt until her knees broke. And on the first of July, 1976, at around thirty kilograms, she died — not of a demon, and not of an exorcism exactly, but of malnutrition and dehydration, which is to say she died of not being fed and not being treated, in a house full of people who were trying, with everything they had, to save her soul.

The ordinary explanation, offered with no pleasure at all

Here is where I am supposed to weigh the mundane reading against the supernatural one. I will, but understand that in this case the weighing is not a contest, it is an autopsy.

The mundane reading is simply the medical one, and it is complete. A young woman had a serious, treatable neurological illness with well-documented psychiatric features, and instead of being treated for it she was subjected to ten months of exorcism while she starved. That is not my clever skeptical overlay on the case. It is what the doctors testified to at the trial that followed — because there was a trial, and her parents and both priests were convicted of negligent homicide, and the court heard, plainly, that she was not possessed, that her symptoms were her epilepsy and the shape her devout upbringing gave it, and that medical care could have saved her life at almost any point.

The most damning fact in the entire case is not lurid. It is administrative. The bishop who authorized the exorcism did so without reviewing her medical records. The old rite the priests followed said nothing about their responsibility for her body. There was, built into the whole sincere apparatus of her rescue, no one whose job it was to notice that she was dying, because the thing they were fighting was not understood to be a thing that could be measured in kilograms. That is the horror of Anneliese Michel. Not a demon. A gap in the paperwork where a doctor should have been.

The possession reading

I will give it its due, because the series requires it and because her family deserve to be understood rather than mocked. They believed. They were not stupid or cruel; they were faithful, and their faith had an old and coherent account of exactly the suffering they were watching, and that account told them to fight for her soul, and they did, past the point of reason, because they loved her. To this day some people regard her as a kind of martyr, and pilgrims visit her grave. I do not think they are monsters. I think they are the most frightening thing in the whole story, which is ordinary people, acting out of love, inside a belief that could not see a sick girl in front of it.

And that is the only “possession” I will grant this case: not that anything entered Anneliese, but that an idea had entered everyone around her, and would not let go, and could not be reasoned with, and cost her her life.

The verdict

I have to say it, and it gives me nothing.

Verdict: Not Possessed.

There was no demon. There was a sick young woman and a treatable illness and a catastrophic, loving, institutional refusal to see it, and the single rule that this entire series exists to defend — never mistake an illness for a possession — is not, in her case, a clever debunker’s principle. It is the exact rule whose breaking killed her. This is the one where the mundane verdict is not a victory lap. It is a lament. When I run the other cases through the rubric and land on Not Possessed, I feel the small clean satisfaction of a thing seen clearly. When I run this one, I feel only that a girl is dead who did not have to be, and that the language of demons — which I love, which I have spent my life inside — was the instrument of it.

So there is no knife-twist today, and no last dry line. There is only her name, which was Anneliese, and the plain fact that she was ill, and could have been helped, and was instead exorcised sixty-seven times until she starved. Read the demons out of it. What is left is the whole of it, and it is unbearable, and it is true.