In polite society we have not wanted to talk much of demons and the demonic. In our liberal, educated culture, we have believed that sin was due mostly to ignorance and that evil could be eradicated by education. In our psychologically enlightened times we have avoided the more ancient religious and mythological language of devils and evil. We have instead preferred words like repression, impulses, sublimation, drives, complexes, phobias, regression, neuroses, psychoses, manic-depressive, schizophrenic and schizoid -- to name a few.

If we have been suspicious of religious healers and exorcists and spiritual counselors, we have been implicitly trustful of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, counselors and therapy groups. If we have been doubtful of prayer, meditation and conversion, we have been trustful of amphetamines, barbiturates and tranquilizers, not to mention alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. If in our time witch doctors have disappeared, strangely enough witches have reappeared by the thousands. Even exorcists are making a small comeback after considerable media exposure and hype.

Whether demons and the demonic are widely acknowledged in our time may be debated, but that they were common in Jesus' time we can have no doubt. In his time, when most illness was attributable to sin, it was but a short step to attribute all mental illness or epilepsy to demonic powers actually residing in the person and controlling him or her. Thus to cure a person of seizures or dementia or schizophrenia or melancholia, the healer had to have power not only to name the demon, but power to cast him out, to throw him out of the person's life.