More thoughts on demon possession.

Sixteen-year-old Anneliese Michel suffered from epilepsy and mental illness and was subjected to numerous exorcisms. Her parents and the priests were charged with negligent homicide. Learn more >

I previously wrote about possession (A Halloween Memory >) and how even though there is no immediate explanation for paranormal phenomena, that doesn't mean there isn't one.

Here are two insights that came to me after writing that…

1. The presence of spirits and demons is often accompanied by cold. It's possible that the person experiencing the spirits is responding to a temperature change, and so subconsciously manifests behavior we associate with demon possession.

2. The possessed are sometimes said to speak in a language they never heard. Noam Chomsky (learn more >) postulated that we come into this world wired with a universal language that is then programmed with the details of the one we happen to be born into.
   
   Now, we all have heard of savant syndrome (formerly "idiot savants"), those who have extraordinary gifts in music or mathematics or memory. It's not unreasonable to conjecture that the possessed who speak in a language they never knew have this capacity and picked up a language from such little exposure that the rest of us would say they had no exposure at all.
   
   Even if you never stepped into a Latin classroom, you've been exposed to Latin in many places (money, buildings, movies, potentially church). And the often garbled nature of possessed speech adds a layer of gauzy uncertainty that may let us hear what we want to here.

All that said, it bears repeating that this doesn't eliminate the paranormal, but contextualizes it.

[2014-11-01]

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