Branding the devil in New Age and Catholicism : a sociology of exorcism

This article makes some observation on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the New Age. It explores the rituals of exorcism as a case study to analyse the tension and connection between the two religious groups. To do this, it first explores the history of exorcism, and especially the tension between the Catholic Church and Quietism (a somewhat precursor to the New Age, at least for what concerns the individual's relationship with the transcendent, which goes beyond the liturgical practice of traditional religions). In this section we also find how exorcism is used to validate one religion's strength over another one. This leads to the next section on religious competition in late modernity, and especially to Mara Einstein's concept of the branding of religion (Einstein 2008). We will afterwards argue that exorcism is branded differently from one religion to the next. We will then move to a specific case study which provides a sociological account of the file of an established exorcist in Europe. This exorcist has collected information on his patients for the last 10 years. This paper reveals how, and in what proportion, this exorcist attributes close to half of his patient's affiiction from the devil because of their involvement in what could be interpreted in broad terms, New Age activities.