What the discovery actually is

For most of the modern period the West has run two separate systems for the same phenomenon. On one side, medicine: a body to be examined, a brain to be dosed, a symptom to be removed. On the other, religion: a soul to be saved, a demon to be commanded, a ritual to be performed.

Each system has its own successes and its own long list of failures. Neither has ever been able to explain why the other sometimes works.

The traditional picture of possession — and Keppe’s starting point — assumes that a demon is something like a human being: a being still more or less with God who from time to time manifests unreasonable attitudes, becomes violent, loses touch with reality.

Keppe’s correction is precise and uncomfortable. Demons are not beings who occasionally fall out of reality. They are already out of it, permanently, and they cannot tell. They are, in his phrase, schizophrenic spiritual beings: locked in a fiery vortex, destroying their own existence while being unable to die, blind and deaf and without intuition, knowledge, love or emotion — like pieces of stone trying to insinuate themselves into living humans so as to feel a little bit of life.

If that is what a demon is, then possession is not an invasion by a powerful enemy. It is a resonance with something pathetic — a misery that needs our energy to keep going.

Keppe spent his clinical life in Vienna and São Paulo with patients the twentieth century called psychotic, and what he recorded is a behavioural mirror. The progressive loss of logic in conversation. The collapse of affectionate life. The adoption of animal postures and animal sounds. The strength that seems to exceed the body.

He concluded that psychosis can be identified with demonic possession — not as an insult to the patient, but as a description of the same structure seen from inside. The patient is not being attacked by a healthy outside force. The patient is consenting, moment by moment, to an attitude against reality, and the attitude has a corresponding life of its own in the spiritual world.

How does the connection happen? Not by possession in the cinematic sense, and not by metaphor either. Keppe’s account is that as soon as a person begins to resonate with envy, bad intentions and dishonesty, he is resonating with other beings, visible and invisible, that hold the same intentions.

The pathology is the tuning. Our own inverted attitude makes the connection, and then we are influenced by what we have tuned into. This is why the same temptation returns in the same shape, and why moral effort alone so rarely dislodges it: the effort is aimed at the symptom, while the frequency is set somewhere deeper.

It also explains the ordinary case. There is no person alive, Keppe says, who is not in contact with spirits — good ones or, especially, evil ones — whether religious or thoroughly materialist. That is simply the human condition.

The philosophical decision behind modern medicine was made by Descartes, who divided the human being into two independent parts, body and soul. Medicine took the body, and took it seriously; it has been studying an organism ever since, which is secondary and, on its own, provides insufficient information to understand disease.

This is not a complaint about doctors. It is a claim about the limits of a method. A discipline that has agreed in advance not to consider the psychological and spiritual life will find, reliably, that the problem is not there.

The symmetrical error belongs to the exorcist who treats demons as though they could be removed without the patient’s participation. A possessed person can only be exorcised if he accepts becoming free of his demons, just as the psychotic improves only when he admits his insanity.

Command the spirit and you have changed nothing about the consent that invited it. This is why the process can run for years, session after session, and why the exorcists who report success are usually describing a person who has, in some unspoken way, stopped agreeing with his own evil.

The treatment, then, is neither a rite nor a molecule but a movement of consciousness. Keppe calls it conscientization: the process of becoming aware of reality, external and internal, through a mixed act of feeling and knowing — and of becoming aware, specifically, of one’s own errors.

It is not a comfortable process. Consciousness is connected to ethics: the moment an ethical person perceives his mistake he is compelled to correct it. That is why we resist it, and why we build entire lives — sex, power, money, hyperactivity, travel, alcohol — to keep the perception at arm’s length.

But it is the only thing that works on both halves of the problem at once. And it is available to anyone, which is the real scandal of the book.