The Online Reflector

University of Indianapolis Associate Adjunct Professor of Spanish Ricardo Iman was once an exorcist priest as part of the Mexico City Archdiocese. The Archdiocese included five men who studied cases of people claiming to be possessed by demons or satanic figures.

All of the men had degrees in medicine, psychology and parapsychology. Four of the men were theologists.

The population of Mexico City is 18 million, making it the second largest city in the world. However, in the six years that Iman worked in the diocese, he had only about 20 cases of possession, making the total about three to four cases a year.
Iman now believes that no one was under an actual satanic possession because every case, when treated with therapy, got better.

In order to prove a possession is real, and an exorcism is necessary, it must be proven that there is no medical proof or explanation.

“In one case, a woman could contort her neck and twist it around so that you could hear each bone in her neck cracking,” Iman said. “The explanation for this, we found later, was that she had extreme paranoia and schizophrenia.”

In some cases, the men had to walk as far as 12 miles to the secluded areas of Oaxaca and Chiapas in Mexico to perform exorcisms.

“We [archdiocese] knew they weren’t sick. They just needed therapy, which wasn’t practical given that they lived so far away. So I performed an exorcism just to make them feel better,” Iman said. “We know it’s fake, but we did it to all 30 people living there, so they would think they were healed.”

Iman also said that he rarely hears of possession happening in developed societies. He said that it mostly happens in poor countries where the media aren’t prevalent and in places where there is little communication with the outside world, which may cause mental problems. People then feel they are being possessed, because they have no external knowledge that mental disorders even exist.

“I don’t believe you can become possessed, because if you are a living temple of God, he’s always living through you. Therefore Satan cannot bring you down,” Iman said. “You would have to do a lot of bad things for demons to inhabit you.”
The old way of performing exorcisms was under the Roman Ritual, which is a lengthy process used to extract the demons from the possessed body, until Pope John Paul II restructured the ritual.

Iman explained that in a Catholic baptism, a person is given a small exorcism before he or she is renewed.
“In houses that were possessed, we would put ultrasounds on the walls and set up a lot of equipment,” Iman said. “The way we would explain these phenomena was that there were a lot of energies. And when you can provide a means to discharge these energies, they will go away.”

In one case, which actually took place in Indianapolis, a woman claimed to be possessed by Lucifer and was speaking in different languages.

So Iman asked his friends, who served as witnesses, to go to the nearest gas station, fill up a vial with water and then bring it back to him.

Iman then proceeded to talk to the woman in fluent Spanish. When she didn’t understand, he knew that she wasn’t actually possessed.

He then threw the water on the woman, and she yelled that she was melting and Lucifer was leaving her body.
Iman explained that in a lot of cultures, especially Native American, there are different rituals that are very similar to exorcisms.

“Exorcisms are for all cultures,” he said, “and they work.”