​Exorcism 

​(from Greek ἐξορκισμός, exorkismos - binding by oath) is the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or an area which they are believed to have possessed.[1] Depending on the spiritual beliefs of the exorcist, this may be done by causing the entity to swear an oath, performing an elaborate ritual, or simply by commanding it to depart in the name of a higher power. The practice is ancient and part of the belief system of many cultures and religions.

Requested and performed exorcisms occurred rarely until the latter half of the 20th century where the public saw a sharp rise due to the media attention exorcisms were getting. There was “a 50% increase in the number of exorcisms performed between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s”.

Eric Sorensen's Hypothesis
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The origins of exorcism can be found in the effects of Zoroastrian and ancient Near Eastern beliefs on early Judaism and Christianity. Zoroastrianism’s dualistic beliefs and apocalypticism is a nurturing ground for ideas of exorcisms and possession. “The spirit of Ahura Mazda is said to be with the one who chooses good [Yasna 33.14], and one can assume the same of the evil spirit for those who chose evil. Mary Boyce underscores the importance of possession in Zoroastrian doctrine: ‘The concepts of divinity and of humanly possessed power seem frequently to blend, through the thought of that power proceeding from the divinity, who has himself actually entered into the person.”) Zoroastrianism also introduces a connection between the spirit world and its human host, albeit not in the same manner that characterizes later Jewish and Christian thought. After person choses between good and evil, a “mutually supportive symbiosis, takes place between the individual and the spirit of choice,” according to Eric Sorensen.Identifying a person with his good or evil benefactor converges with the rhetoric used by Jewish sectarians and early Christians to consecrate their fellow believers and demonize their opponents – Sorensen gathers the evidence for this from E.H. Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. (p. 39) Evidence for quasi-exorcisms in Zoroastrianism lie in the laws of the Vendidad that provide purification rituals for physical contaminations caused by demons. According to James Darmesteter, the Zoroastrian understanding of “impurity or uncleanness may be described as the state of a person or thing that is possessed of a demon; and the object of purification is to expel the demon.”This however, is not considered an exorcism in the manner in which it is thought of today. “The closest analogy to exorcism in the early Zoroastrian literature is a reference to the followers of the Wise Lord (Ahura Mazda) as the “expellers of fury,” where “fury” is thought to be Aeshma, “the only demon mentioned by name in the Gathas, according to Boyce. However, this is still unlike the Christian accounts of demonic possession in which a demon invades the host’s body and must be cast out to restore the body to its natural and healthy state. The difference lies in the nature of choice that is associated with Zoroastrian dualism. A person who allies himself with evil is not necessarily a victim of it from whom malevolent influence must be driven out; instead, he is seen to voluntarily involve himself with evil. The “expulsion” of demons was more an attempt to destroy those who sided themselves with evil than remove evil influence. Yet, such “expulsions,” don’t directly translate to exorcisms. A possible influence is seen in the use of incantations for physical purifications from demons, seen in the Vendidad. Despite the likely evidence, “the influence of Zoroastrianism upon Hellenism and Judaism has so far been difficult to prove,” according to Sorensen. It is, however, widely noted that there are, “striking affinities between Zoroastrianism and Judaism…the angelologies, demonologies, and the subjugation of evil evident in late canonical and intertestamental writings such as Tobit, Daniel, and Qumran’s Community Rule offer tantalizing suggestions of Zoroastrianism’s influence upon Jewish thought. The most explicit evidence of Zoroastrian views on early Judaism is the demon Asmodeus in Tobit (II BCE). The name Asmodeus derives from the Avestan words aēšma daēuua (“Demon of Wrath”). There is an increasing emphasis on possession, not in terms of physical ailments, but with ethical decision-making that is seen in early Jewish Pseudepigrapha; in a Sibylline Oracle, the Sibyl dictates that God will “dwell in the maiden.” Ethical decision-making is reminiscent of the choice one has to make in dualistic Zoroastrianism. Sven Hartman sees an example of Zoroastrian’s influence on Judaism’s apocalyptic thought in the figure of the devil, “whom he considers the Jews to have modeled after Angra Mainyu after their exposure to the Achaemenian and Parthian periods of dominance in the Near East.” (p. 45)
Exorcism finds its closest analogies in the Hebrew Bible in two specific passages: “David’s soothing of Saul in 1 Samuel and God’s rebuke of Satan in the book of Zechariah.” In the former passage, an evil spirit plagues, but does not explicitly possess, Saul’s body; David plays a lyre as, “an exorcistic function,” to restore Saul to a well state of being by making the evil spirit depart. (p. 53) In the latter passage, God’s rebuke of Satan contains language similar to what is found in New Testament exorcisms. Other evidence is found in Tobit, the only apocryphal book in the Septuagint that supplies to the ideas of exorcism. Eric Sorensen’s linguistic research has concluded that in the stories of Moses, Daniel, and Joseph, “four of the six terms used of magical practitioners have their origins in the Mesopotamian cultures of Assyria and Babylonia. Linguistically, then, the Mesopotamian cultic and occult practices influenced how Hellenistic Judaism interpreted magic and illicit conjurations [precursors to exorcism].” The practice of exorcism and demonology becomes more prominent in language and content in other Jewish intertestamental literature. Particularly in their testaments and apocalypses, the documents from the scrolls from the Judean desert and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, offer near-contemporary views of possession and exorcism as viewed in the New Testament; this is seen an sign that Near Eastern practices and beliefs came into the same setting from which New Testament writings and other the synoptic sources were to emerge.
In the words of Eric Sorensen, “Although the Hebrew Bible does not offer explicit evidence of exorcism, the Hellenistic period does introduce the semantic groundwork for the demonology that would become standard to the later presentations of exorcism in the New Testament. During this time the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, and most of the apocryphal documents were composed in Greek. Though Near Eastern demonic personalities do not enter into the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Old Greek Version), its derivatives are used to translate various Hebrew terms for spiritual entities. These will come to refer often and exclusively to evil spirits in the New Testament.