Word: martinisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BAUDELAIRE ONCE SAID that the devil's deepest wile is to persuade humans that he doesn't exist. There is no danger of Malachi Martin making that mistake; he is convinced that Satan and the Pit do and always have existed. Modern Christians who no longer believe in hell or the devil as realities will find in Martin's Hostage to the Devil a well-articulated, and disturbing reaffirmation of traditional doctrines about evil and Lucifer...
...Martin holds an orthodox Catholic view of spiritual history: God and his fallen angel Satan are engaged in a struggle for the souls of men. One of Satan's tools, through lesser spirits, is the possession of humans. And so Martin provides us with the case histories of five possessed Americans and details their successful exorcisms...
What distinguishes Martin's book from the sensationalism of Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist is that he sees a complex battle between good and evil involved in making even the most prosaic decisions of everyday life. He asserts that the five cases he has chosen to examine...
...transexual distorts the meaning of gender and of love; and a young coed rejects the Catholic verities and asserts there is no difference between good and evil, "that all values are subject only to one's personal preference." The degree to which each person is demonically possessed differs. Martin is careful, however, to only suggest reasons for possession; he maintains that Satan's actual choice of victims is a mystery, tied in with predestination...
...Martin does not stop there: using tape recordings (now a standard procedure at exorcisms) and entries from the diaries of participants, he reconstructs the five exorcisms. The material varies: at times he evokes nothing more than memories of William P. Blatty's lurid prose or of bad National Enquirer exposes; alternately, without warning, Martin produces rather alarming dialogues between exorcist and spirit that touch at the heart of modern evil. This is the strength of Hostage to the Devil; it offers an insight into the evil not only of Buchenwald and My Lai but also into the more personal evil...