True or False Possession?: How to Distinguish the Demonic from the DeMented

Unhinged or unholy? Fiend or fraud? That's what authorities had to decide about the French nun Marie-Thérèse Noblet (1889-1930). She suffered sudden diseases that were as quickly cured, chokings, night beatings, unclean visions of blasphemous scenes, violent shakes witnessed by onlookers, foul assaults from filthy beasts, including one she recalled as "full of terrible beauty with eyes full of hate."

Then there's Sr. Jeanne of the Angels, the seventeenth-century prioress of her Ursuline convent, plagued by diabolical visits with an explicitly erotic element, which spread, epidemic-like, to the Ursuline sisters under her care, whose convulsive attacks and obscene contortions scandalized all who witnessed them. Were these sisters really demonic? Deranged? Or merely deceitful?

With sober clarity and reserve, he reviews the detailed clinical records of scores of cases that startled and alarmed our forefathers as well as the cases of many souls that he personally examined