How do you cast out a demon?

Answer 1

Other answers from our community:

• witchcraft

• The best I can recommend is that this sort of thing is too big, too complex and has too much potential to go wrong to do it yourself. Find someone with experience to undertake it.

Answer 2

Exorcism is a practice that claims to drive evil spirits or demons out of a person, to relieve alleged symptoms of mental illnesses or other unusual behaviour. However, we now know conclusively that mental illnesses and unusual behaviour are not caused by spirits. Belief in possession by evil spirits has not entirely died out and a few people sometimes still take part in "exorcisms", whether for entertainment, financial gain or out of misplaced piety. In this context the most important thing is to use the gullibility of the person being 'exorcised' and the gullibility of the audience.

The Catholic Church places much mystique around its rites of exorcism, thereby assuring the faithful of how powerful the rituals are and therefore, through the knowledge and use of rituals such as these, how powerful the Church is in overcoming evil. The Church defines a hierarchy of simple exorcism and solemn exorcism, adding to this mystique, saying that these are not practices to be caried out by lay persons. Priests who claim to cast out demons are called exorcists.