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Modern man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by powers beyond his control.

The gods and demons have not disappeared at all. They have merely got new names.

For millennia, in cultures spanning the globe, men and women believed in the existence of demons and saw possession by such forces as an ever-present risk.

Most cultures developed practices and rituals to ward off demonic possession and to exercise

them from possessed individuals.

In the modern day we consider ourselves to be more enlightened and view demonic possession

as a superstitious belief of a bygone era.

In this video, we explore why the Swiss

psychiatrist Kral Jung considered this view to be misguided. The demons that wreaked havoc on our

ancestors are still with us today. They continue to possess us, to drive us into error, and to push us

towards acts of evil. Or as Jung writes, we are possessed by the demons of sickness

no less than our ancestors. Our psyche is just as much in danger of being struck by some hostile

influence. We are just as much the prey of malevolent spirits of the dead, or the victims of a

magic spell cast by a strange personality.

Only we call all these things by different names, and that is the only advantage we have

over primitive man.

To understand how our conception of the demonic has evolved and why we see demons as a superstition

while our ancestors saw them as real, we need to explore a defining feature of the primitive

mindset, namely, its participation mystique. Participation mystique was a concept introduced

by the French philosopher Lucien Levi-Bruel in the early 20th century, to describe how primitive

...