World Over, People Exorcise Their Rites

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 29, 2004

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Recent dispatches from Reuters of a (more or less) spiritual nature seem to be in greater supply than usual. Perhaps it's the effect late winter has on folks as they await the marvels of spring and the rebirth it brings.

The first of these accounts to catch the eye of for the people was news from the city of Frome in Somerset, England, where a "white witch" was called in to use her powers to remove a curse believed by the local soccer team, Frome Town, to have been called down on its playing surface. True, the team lost 2-1 to a rival club called the Paulton Rovers, but witch Titania Hardie claimed success, nonetheless. She said that her curse-removing ritual worked in the game's first half, but the team's concentration had "evaporated" in the second half.

After closely analyzing the situation, the consultant witch decided that the team's failure to win at home might not lie on the field at all but in its dressing room, where she said a sizable amount of negativity had accumulated.

Frome Town spokesman Ian Pearce explained the need for a witch by noting, "We're quite successful as a team and have scored goals by the dozen, but can't score goals at home, so we thought maybe there is a curse on the pitch." He praised Hardie's efforts, saying: "She walked on the pitch and waved her hands around, and then she talked to the players and gave them confidence." Pearce added, "She told them to think there was a white circle around them."

Meanwhile, in Genoa, Italy, requests for exorcisms have been on the increase for some time and Catholic church officials have established a task force to deal with the rapidly growing demand for the rite. The team of professionals, which will meet on a regular basis, consists of three priests, one psychiatrist, one psychologist and one neurologist. The committee will decide on a case-by-case basis whether those brought before it are mentally or physically sick and therefore require standard medical care, or whether the case is one of genuine possession that can be resolved only by exorcism.

An irreverent Italian press has dubbed the exorcism team the "anti-Satan pool."

Exorcism has been around for a long time and, on well-documented occasions, has proved itself capable of bringing peace to people who are troubled by evil. For the people understands that both historically and psychologically. This column also can understand how a group of otherwise highly respected teachers in the north German town of Lueneburg reported themselves as feeling very high indeed perhaps even spiritual after downing a rich chocolate cake.

It wasn't the fantastic confection of chocolate that caused the high felt by these teachers, who numbered 10 altogether and who subsequently suffered hangovers of nausea and dizziness. The culprit was the hashish that someone had baked into the anonymously donated cake in the style of Alice B. Toklas' marijuana brownies that were infamous among hippies in the 1960s.

Yes, that's the sort of thing for the people readily can understand. But what about the group of 200 protesters who assembled in Moscow recently before the Lenin Mausoleum? The marchers, many of them carrying communist flags, paraded across Red Square, laid wreaths, then reverently filed through the mausoleum.

They said they'd heard rumors that Lenin's body was about to be removed from the site and they wanted to mark the 80th anniversary of his death. "We must safeguard this place as a sacred site of our fatherland," Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov declared. Sacred? To whom and for what reason? Lenin laid the bulwark of a Soviet state whose victims number in the tens of millions.

What's encouraging is that there were only 200 present to honor Lenin's memory. Alas, millions may well march worldwide on his birthday, April 22. It was named Earth Day back in the days following the Vietnam War, presumably to keep young people marching for causes such as conservation, ecology and environmental movements and to co-opt their youthful enthusiasm for the left.

Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight.