A still from a video of Maria’s exorcism
This is part four of a true series of stories about a surreal and unsettling medical experiment in Mexico City in 2017. You can read the other parts here in case you missed them:
03: A murder ignored
DR. MOSSO’S EXPERIMENT WAS CLEAR IN HIS MIND. He wanted to find a person who was possessed by a demon.
He wanted to bring that person for assessment by specialists in exorcism, in psychiatry and in various facets of physiology. And then he wanted to bring the group to a giant hospital MRI machine.
As the patient was pulled entirely into the scanner, a priest would begin the exorcism rites, and the same specialists would observe and note what happened. His aim was to see inside the human brain in the grip of evil, and to banish that evil, and to watch it all in real time. To see God at work.
He was aware that it was not traditional science. But half of his family were shamans, who lived in the mountains and barely spoke Spanish. His aunt could leave her body and possess others. “She did it with me,” he says. “She did a series of things to me that, well, I think now is not the time to go into it. But she awakened in me the study of those areas that humans can’t explain yet.”
Dr. Mosso assembled a team of specialists: the medical director of a psychiatric hospital in Mexico City; a priest, Father Cuitlahuac, who performed exorcisms at Rectoría del Espíritu Santo, an old yellow church in the east of Mexico City; a neurosurgeon; and a gynecologist.
They began to search for the perfect subject, a person who was, according to the Catholic Church, definitively possessed. It was complicated by the fact that many people, usually young women, in Mexico claim to be possessed. It has the effect of getting fathers and brothers, and the mothers who fear them, to listen. The devil has a power that overcomes the word “hysterical.”
They found Maria in 2016. She was 29 and pretty, with short, black curly hair. For her whole life, her family had seen her as difficult. Troubled. They prayed for her. If only Maria could get it together. So much potential.
The team conducted tests and quickly ruled out “anatomical and functional defects of the central nervous system.” So they commissioned a psychological profile — functionally, a long conversation in which they listened to Maria’s story — in December 2016.
She was an only child, they discovered. Her family seemed highly dysfunctional. Her father, 60, was a doctor. He had rejected his daughter at first and was described as a heavy drinker, intolerant, abusive and unfaithful. He, and the other men in the family, Maria’s uncles, were hardcore Freemasons who believed in ancient rituals. Her mother, 56, a secretary and floral designer, was submissive. Scared. She had been beaten by Maria’s father as Maria watched, powerless and distraught.
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RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.