Metaphysical Articles: Interesting Articles, Links and Other Media: A Priest-Exorcist's Firsthand Account of Being Demonically Possessed (1635)

This montage shows the priest, the cover of the book making available this verbatim account, the Ursuline Convent that was the focus of this 'possession' case chronology and aspects of Father Surin's predicament as illustrated by AI chatbots Grok (right top & center) and ChatGPT.

Presented in this article in the entirety is an English translation of a letter written by Father Surin (1600-1665)—Jesuit priest and exorcist of the Ursuline Sisters of Loudon—to his friend Father Datichi, a Jesuit in Rennes. The letter was written in Loudon, France on May 3, 1635. The letter is one of the documents featured in Possession, Demonical & Other (1930) by T. K. Oesterreich, who introduced this text by identifying it to be "Surin's chief testimony . . ." Most people may not yet realize that the experiences revealed herein reflect the spiritual cosmology involved with the life of every human being.

Pax Christi. [translation: Peace of Christ.]
To my Reverend Father,
There are scarce any persons to whom I take pleasure in recounting my adventures, save your Reverence, who listens to them willingly and derives from them reflections which would not readily occur to others who do not know me as does your Reverence. Since the last letter which I wrote you I have fallen into a state very different from anything I had anticipated, but in full conformity with the Providence of God concerning my soul. I am no longer at Marennes, but at Loudun, where I received your letter recently. I am in perpetual conversation with the devils, in the course of which I have been subject to happenings which would be too lengthy to relate to you and which have given me more reason than I ever had to know and to admire the goodness of God. I wish to tell you something of them, and would tell you more if you were more private. I have engaged in combat with four of the most potent and malicious devils in hell. I, I say, whose infirmities you know. God has permitted the struggles to be so fierce and the onslaughts so frequent that exorcism was the least of the battlefields, for the enemies declared themselves in private both by night and day in a thousand different ways. You may imagine what pleasure there is in finding oneself at the sole mercy of God. I will tell you no more, it suffices that knowing my state you should take occasion to pray for me. At all events, for the last three and a half months I have never been without a devil at work upon me.

Things have gone so far that God has permitted, I think for my sins, what has perhaps never been seen in the Church, that in the exercise of my ministry the devil passes out of the body of the possessed woman and entering into mine assaults and confounds me, agitates and troubles me visibly, possessing me for several hours like a demoniac. I cannot explain to you what happens within me during that time and how this spirit unites with mine without depriving me either of consciousness or liberty of soul, nevertheless making himself like another me and as if I had two souls, one of which is dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs and stands aside watching the actions of the other which has entered into them. The two spirits fight in one and the same field which is the body, and the soul is as if divided. According to one of its parts it is subject to diabolic impressions and according to the other to those motions which are proper to it or granted by God. At the same time I feel a great peace under God's good pleasure and, without knowing how it arises, an extreme rage and aversion for him, giving rise to violent impulses to cut myself off from him which astonish the beholders; at the same time a great joy and sweetness, and on the other hand a wretchedness which manifests itself by cries and lamentations like those of the demons; I feel the state of damnation and apprehend it, and feel myself as if transpierced by the arrows of despair in that stranger soul which seems to be mine, while the other soul which is full of confidence laughs at such feelings and is at full liberty to curse him who is the cause; I even feel that the same cries which issue from my mouth come equally from the two souls, and am at a loss to discern whether they be caused by joy or by the extreme fury with which I am filled. The tremblings with which I am seized when the Holy Sacrament is administered to me arise equally, so far as I can judge, from horror of its presence which is insufferable to me and from a sincere and meek reverence, without it being possible for me to attribute them to the one rather than the other or to check them. When I desire by the motion of one of these two souls to make the sign of the cross on my mouth, the other averts my hand with great swiftness and grips my finger in its teeth to bite me with rage. I scarcely ever find orisons [prayers] easier or more tranquil than in these agitations; while the body rolls upon the ground and the ministers of the Church speak to me as to a devil, loading me with maledictions, I cannot tell you the joy that I feel, having become a devil not by rebellion against God but by the calamity which shows me plainly the state to which sin has reduced me and how that taking to myself all the curses which are heaped upon me my soul has reason to sink in its own nothingness. When the other possessed persons see me in this state it is a pleasure to see how they triumph and how the devils mock at me saying: "Physician, heal thyself; go now and climb into the pulpit; it will be a fine sight to see him preach after he has rolled upon the ground." Tentaverunt, subsannaverunt me subsannatione, frenduerunt super me dentibus suis. [They tempted me, they mocked me with mockery, they gnashed upon me with their teeth.]

What a cause for thankfulness that I should thus see myself the sport of the (evil) spirits, and that the justice of God on earth should take vengeance on my sins! What a privilege to experience the state from which Jesus Christ has delivered me, and to feel how great is the redemption, no longer by hearsay but by the impress of that same state; and how good it is to have at once the capacity to fathom that misery and to thank the goodness which has delivered us from it with so many labours! This is what I am now reduced to almost every day. It is the subject of great disputes, and factus sum magna quaestio [I became a big problem], whether there is possession or not, and if it may be that such untoward accidents befall the ministers of the Gospel. Some say that it is a chastisement of God upon me to punish an error; others say some other thing, and I am content and would not change my fortune with another, having the firm persuasion that there is nothing better than to be reduced to great extremities. That in which I am is such that I can do few things freely: when I wish to speak my speech is cut off; at Mass I am brought up short; at table I cannot carry the morsel to my mouth; at confession I suddenly forget my sins; and I feel the devil come and go within me as if he were at home. As soon as I wake he is there; at orisons he distracts my thoughts when he pleases; when my heart begins to swell with the presence of God he fills it with rage; he makes me sleep when I would wake; and, publicly, by the mouth of the possessed woman, he boasts of being my master; the which I can in no way contradict. Enduring the reproach of my conscience, and upon my head the sentence pronounced against sinners, I must suffer it and revere the order of Divine Providence to which every creature must bow. It is not a single demon who torments me; there are usually two; the one is Leviathan, the adversary of the Holy Spirit, for according to what they have said here, they have in hell a trinity whom the magicians worship: Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Leviathan, who is third in hell, as some authors have already observed and written. Now the works of this false Paraclete [Holy Ghost] are quite contrary to those of the true, and impart a desolation which cannot be adequately described. He is the chief of all our band of demons and has command of this whole affair which is perhaps one of the strangest ever seen. In this same place we see Paradise and Hell, nuns who taken in one way are like Ursula and in the other worse than the most abandoned in all sorts of disorders, filth, blasphemy, and rages. If it please your Reverence, I do not at all desire that you should make my letter public. You are the only one to whom, except for my confessor and my superiors, I have been willing to say so much. It is but to maintain between us such communication as may assist us to glorify God in whom I am your very humble servant.
Jean-Joseph Surin.

And by way of post-scriptum, I beg you to have prayers said for me of which I have need, for during whole weeks I am so stupid towards heavenly things that I should be glad if someone would make me say my prayers like a child and explain the Pater Noster [the Lord's Prayer] to me simply. The devil has said to me: I will deprive thee of everything and thou shalt have need to keep thy faith for I will make thee besotted. He has made a pact with a witch to prevent me from speaking of God and so that he may have strength to keep my spirit broken, and I am constrained, in order to have some understanding, to hold the Holy Sacrament often against my head, using David's key to unlock my memory. . . .

I am content to die since Our Lord has done me this grace to have retrieved three consecrated Hosts which three witches had delivered into the hands of the devil, who brought them back to me publicly from Paris where they were under the mattress of a bed and left the Church in possession of this honour, to have given back in some measure to her Redeemer what she had received of Him, having ransomed it from the devil's clutches. I do not know if Our Lord will soon take my life, for being hard put to it in this affair I gave it to Him and promised to part with it for the price of these three Hosts. It seems that the devil, by the bodily ills which he inflicts on me, desires to exercise his right and gradually wear me out.

Oesterreich commented about this letter:

This narrative is a document of the utmost value, which offers striking confirmation of all that we have hitherto said as to the nature of possession . . . The quotations which we have made from Surin are supplemented by the still unpublished manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. Delacroix has given extracts from it in his excellent work, Etudes d'histoire et de psychologic du mysticisme. (Paris, 1908, chapter on Peines mystiques [mystical punishments]) I have borrowed from him the following:

Surin's turbulent state of possession, to which the quotation given above relates, ceased after he had succeeded in his exorcisms at Loudun and brought about the recovery of the principal case of possession in the convent, Jeanne des Anges. It was, however, not given to Surin to regain his first state; he traversed a peculiar state of depression which did not show the same excitement as the first, but which visibly belongs to the group of phenomena of possession. He came out, as he himself relates, "of the manifest obsession which rendered the presence of the Evil One in his person sensible to him, and passed into an inner travail of the most extreme nature." [. . . two further paragraphs were quoted.]

Included in Oesterreich's book are quotations of Ursuline convent mother superior Jeanne des Anges (Jeanne de Belcier 1602-1665) and there are correlations noticeable between her testimonial of the phenomena experienced and the what is reported in Surin's letter.

At the commencement of my possession I was almost three months in a continual disturbance of mind, so that I do not remember anything of what passed during that time. The demons acted with abounding force and the Church fought them day and night with exorcisms.* (*Bibliothèque diabolique, p. 65)

My mind was often filled with blasphemies and sometimes I uttered them without being able to take any thought to stop myself. I felt for God a continual aversion and nothing inspired me with greater hatred than the spectacle of his goodness and the readiness with which he pardons repentant sinners. My thoughts were often bent on devising ways to displease him and to make others trespass against him. It is true that by the mercy of God I was not free in these sentiments, although at that time I did not know it, for the demon beclouded me in such a way that I hardly distinguished his desires from mine; he gave me, moreover, a strong aversion for my religious calling, so that sometimes when he was in my head I tore all my veils and such of my sisters' as I could lay hands on; I trampled them underfoot, I chewed them, cursing the hour when I took the vows. All this was done with great violence, I think that I was not free.* (*Sœur Jeanne des Anges, p. 71)

. . . As I went up for Communion the devil took possession of my hand, and when I had received the Sacred Host and had half moistened it the devil flung it into the priest's face. I know full well that I did not do this action freely, but I am fully assured to my deep confusion that I gave the devil occasion to do it. I think he would not have had this power if I had not been in league with him. I have on several other occasions had similar experiences for when I resisted them stoutly I found that all these furies and rages dispersed as they had come, but alas, it too often happened that I did not strongly constrain myself to resist, especially in matters where I saw no grievous sin. But this is where I deluded myself, for because I did not restrain myself in little things my mind was afterwards taken unawares in great ones. . . .* (*Ibid, p. 79)

At this reply the evil spirit got into such a fury that I thought he would kill me; he beat me with great violence so that my face was quite disfigured and my body all bruised with his blows. It often happened that he treated me in this way.* (*Ibid, p. 85)

As for outward things, I was much troubled by almost continual rages and fits of madness. I found myself almost incapable of doing any good thing, seeing that I had not an hour of the liberty to think of my conscience and prepare myself for a general confession although God caused me to be moved towards it and I was so minded.* (*Ibid, p. 108)

Preceding Articles In This Series

"Understanding The Significance of 'Possession' and 'Obsession' Phenomena (Series Preface)"

"The Conclusive Solution to 'The Poltergeist Puzzle' Is Also The Key to Placing In Perspective So-Called 'Possession' / 'Obsession' Phenomena"