The Catholic Church Is Far More Dreaded by the Devil Than by God Himself

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 9 pages

Nine pages assembled from three numbers of The Theosophist in 1883, and the argument is comparative rather than doctrinal. The purpose, she says at the outset, is not to defend Asian peoples against the charge of superstition, but to show that in Western countries, under all their boasted enlightenment, the self-same belief in demoniac obsession obtains as among them.

The evidence is chosen so that it cannot be dismissed. The narrative reprinted comes from the Catholic Mirror of Baltimore, which announces itself as the official organ of the Archbishop of Baltimore, the Bishops of Richmond and Wilmington, and the Vicar-Apostolic of North Carolina — so what it admits, she notes, is not to be coughed down: its voice is that of authority. What it admits is a case of obsession with a strong mediaeval flavour, dealt with by bell, book and candle. The value of it to the intelligent psychologist, on her account, is in showing that the phenomenon survives into the present despite scientific progress. The proposition at the head of the document states the wider point: that those capable of believing in a just and omnipotent deity are unable to believe in a Devil.

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