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“Playing with Fire: An Examination of theAesthetics of Collusion in NBC’s Hannibal”

By

Richard Logsdon

NBC’s two-season series Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller,

may be the goriest show on TV. It is certainly one of the

darkest, evoking a dread indispensable to good Gothic horror.

Indeed, dread is an almost tangible by-product of a series that

focuses upon one of the most evil characters in the history of

American cinema, Hannibal Lecter. Occasionally, this dread

builds to a form of devotion verging on religious adoration.

Such is the case with NPR’s Libby Hill, whose recent review of

NBC’s Hannibal has apparently found support from the show’s fan

base (See Leary and Bruce). In one section of her essay, she

makes the following observation:

Intentional or otherwise, Hannibal Lecter is not the devil;

he is god. He is that force in his universe that exists in

concert with but still wholly outside the world at large. He is

something unnatural. Uncanny. He is the danger. He is the

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unknowable presence lurking in the shadows. He is omnipotent. He

is omniscient…. Devil as god, manipulation as love, feminine as

masculine, these are how Hannibal crafts a story and re-imagines

a known quantity. And in doing so, Fuller et al. have succeeded

in making not just a cogent adaptation but one of the finest

dramas on television, all by tapping into the inherent terror of

being made over not in God's image, but in Lucifer's.

In a chat with Melanie McFarland, Fuller touches upon the

aesthetic that may help explain Hill’s reverence for a character that

embodies almost pure evil: “[E]very moment consciously plays with the

juxtaposition of gorgeousness and visceral terror with the effect, at

times, of slowly luring the audience into a sense of being in

collusion with Hannibal.” What Fuller has in mind is not so much an

aesthetic trickery but the use of several elements that establish a

bond connecting the viewer with Fuller’s version of the pre-Silence-o- the-

Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter.

Perhaps the most obvious element is point of view. Throughout

the series, Fuller uses FBI agent Will Graham to pull the viewer into

the dark, mad world of the serial killer. In the first episode, Will

admits that he is a borderline sociopath who is capable of murder and

who suffers from a combination of Asperger’s, autism, and narcissism.

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As Lecter observes, Will has the ability to completely empathize with

another. Certainly, Fuller’s unique rendering of Will’s perspective

contributes greatly to creating an effect that approaches the sublime.

Eighteenth century Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke offers

this definition of the sublime:

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is

astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which

all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The

mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot

entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it.

Astonishment is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree….

Thus, in the very first episode, reason and logic are pushed aside as

viewers watch Will enter the two-story house where a murder has just

occurred, mentally return the bloodied crime scene to its original

condition, back out of the house, assume the mind of the killer, and

then seem to physically reenact the murders of a Mr. and Mrs. Marlow,

even to the point of allowing himself to be splattered by the victims’

blood.

In fact, Fuller has created in Will Graham a man whose talents

verge on the uncanny. These talents come into play in the very next

case involving Elise Nichols, who has disappeared and is presumed

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dead. As FBI Agent-in-Charge Jack Crawford talks with Elise’s

parents, Will quickly deduces that if he can find the family cat,

which really belongs to Elise, then he can find the daughter’s body.

That the family cat has spent the day outside Elise’s bedroom door

leads to the discovery that the victim’s body has been in bed all day

and to Will’s conclusion that that the corpse was returned to the bed,

in an act of apology from the killer, after Elise was kidnapped and

murdered. Beyond his capacity for startling insights is Will’s

“visionary” capacity. One night after the discovery of her corpse,

Will awakens to sees Elise Nichols lying next to him. Locked in a

nightmare, Will watches the girl’s body, impaled on antlers, float

away into the darkness. Fuller continues to build on Will’s

extraordinary abilities: assigned the case of Elise’s killer, the

Minnesota Shrike, Will examines the photos of the Shrike’s victims and

quickly deduces that this killer’s victims are all versions of a young

woman who is still alive and that the victims’ bodies, all missing,

have been impaled and eaten. The opening episode builds to a gory

climax in which Will, accompanied by Hannibal Lecter, tracks the

Shrike (aka Garret Jacob Hobbes) to a house in rural Minnesota. He

arrives too late to prevent Hobbes from murdering his wife but just in

time to prevent the man from completely slitting the throat of his

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daughter Abigail, who, as the model for the Shrike’s previous victims,

was to be her father’s final kill.

After this episode, Fuller continues to use Will’s point of view

to pull the viewer into the world of Hannibal Lecter, to witness the

carnage that Will must see, and ultimately to build between the viewer

and Will Graham a sympathetic, possibly empathic bond that, in turn,

allows the viewer to connect with Hannibal Lecter. According to TV

critic Noel Kirkpatrick,

Will's response to… all the death and destruction arguably

would/should mirror our own response to the copious amounts

of violence and gore we consume in our media, both fictional

and (sadly) non-fictional. Will's struggle to cope and

Hannibal's implication that we, too, should be struggling to

cope helped to set the show apart from its other serial

killer TV brethren.

The sense of “collusion” between the viewer and Hannibal builds

as Fuller develops Lecter’s character through Will’s point of view.

To Will, and therefore to the viewer, Hannibal seems admirable,

honorable, even likable at times. Always, the doctor seems calm,

controlled, pleasantly detached—just the sort of person one would rely

upon in a crisis. Additionally, Hannibal has about him an Old World

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European charm that he expresses through his love of classical music,

classical art, and classical cuisine, and he gives the impression of

remarkable erudition with the shelves of his two-story office lined

with hundreds of books. Along with his charm and erudition, Hannibal

is a genius, a fact that he has already established with expertly

drawn depictions of debilitating physiological conditions and a

doctoral thesis that focuses upon the evolution and survival of

socially marginalized groups.

In fact, at first Will and the viewers see in Hannibal a man

whose actions compliment his seemingly honorable disposition.

Certainly, Lecter seems heroic as he finds in Garret Jacob Hobbes’

slitting of his daughter’s throat an opportunity to assume the role of

savior. With Hobbs dying in the corner of his own kitchen (Will has

just shot him ten times), Hannibal kneels next to the daughter

Abigail, places his hand over and around the girl’s throat, and stems

the bleeding. (It’s an ambivalent act suggesting compassion and

strangulation and pointing to the complexity of Hannibal’s character.)

Later, Will finds Hannibal asleep in a hospital room and holding the

sleeping Abigail’s hand in another ostensibly compassionate gesture

that conceals the doctor’s ulterior motive to claim this young woman

and use her for his own bloody purposes. In the second episode,

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Hannibal even seems quite genuine in his attempts to befriend Will.

On the morning following his introduction to Will, Lecter drives out

to Will’s house in the Virginia countryside and shares with Will an

already-fixed breakfast that contains parts of the lungs of his most

recent victim, Cassie Boyle, a young woman whom he has impaled on

antlers in a killing intended to replicate the murder of Elise

Nichols. By the middle of season one, the viewer may find it

difficult not to like Fuller’s Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant

psychopath, who has created a public persona to ensure his survival

and to guarantee the gratification of his craving for human flesh.

A further element that helps build a sense of collusion between

the audience and Hannibal Lecter is the relationship that develops

between Will and the doctor. From Will’s point of view, and to the

viewers who identify with Will, Lecter reveals a tenderness rarely

seen in the original Hannibal novels and films, all inspired by writer

Richard Harris. Thus, because Fuller’s Hannibal is yet to become the

monster of The Silence of the Lambs, his intent in helping Will cope with

the work of serial killers may in part be born out of his fondness for

the one character whose intelligence, combined with a sociopathic,

narcissistic nature, allows a connection between the two men. In

fact, the bond between the two men, and between Hannibal and the

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viewer, survives Will’s confinement to a prison for the criminally

insane (Will’s incarceration is the work of Hannibal Lecter) and

surfaces most powerfully in episode ten of season two. In this

episode, in the same frame, Fuller juxtaposes two scenes to emphasize

the passion that these two men have for each other: on the left side

of the screen, Hannibal makes love with Dr. Alana Bloom, who did her

residency with Hannibal and for whom Hannibal still seems to have some

affection; on the right side of the screen Will is having sex with

Margot Verger. The homo-erotic overtones are obvious—the juxtaposition

suggests the two men’s desire to enjoy each other—and carry over to a

scene in which the two men appear to be sharing Dr. Alana Bloom. In a

later episode, Hannibal reveals his affection for Will when he

compares himself to the demi-god Achilles and Will to Achilles’ friend

Patroclus, both Trojan War heroes, who have a passionate relationship

with subtle sexual overtones. Certainly, this marginally erotic

relationship between a cannibalistic serial killer and a sociopathic

profiler with a huge empathy disorder proves fascinating enough to

cause the viewer and Will to temporarily ignore the evil that lies at

the core of Hannibal’s character. Taking this observation one step

further, TV critic Matt Seitz remarks that the relationship between

the two men is a metaphor for the relationship developing between the

artist/director Fuller and the viewer, whose admiration for Lecter

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through the first two seasons has much to do with Fuller’s decision to

“humanize” Hannibal and give him a seemingly tender nature, which

ambivalently manifests itself, in the season two finale, as Hannibal

embraces and shoves a large kitchen knife into the body of Will

Graham.

Aesthetic renderings of death represent another factor that

contributes to the “collusion” building between Hannibal and the

viewer. These displays, not confined to Hannibal’s victims, include

corpses mounted on deer antlers, bodies used as mushroom fertilizer,

corpses flayed to look like angels, body parts used to create a totem

pole on a beach, a human skull re-purposed as a beehive, and the

corpse of Dr. Beverly Katz sectioned into pieces. The scenes are

revolting—I am sure that Fuller intended them to be so—but they are

also fascinating and astonishing as they help destroy any barrier that

the viewers may have erected between the sacred and the profane and

between themselves and Hannibal Lecter. Consequently, Hannibal fans

are left longing for more scenes in which the blood and gore,

aesthetically rendered, pull them further and further into the world

of the serial killer.

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Fuller’s decision to use aesthetic displays of gore has found

support. Responding to writer Mark Harris, who thinks the gore in

the series is excessive, TV critic Art Posocco makes the point that

we do indeed see many murders grotesquely presented. These

scenes are gory and explicit, and when we see Special Agent

Will Graham… act out the murders in his mind in an attempt

to empathize with the killers, the blood flows plentifully.

Does this detract from the show being scary, or does it

serve another purpose? I would like to counter Harris by

demonstrating how Hannibal‘s focus on the aesthetic

dimensions of murder necessitates an emphasis on the visual

(and visceral) properties of the victims. This is especially

true in regard to Hannibal Lecter’s (Mads Mikkelsen)

victims, parts of whom inevitably end up as ingredients in

his exquisitely crafted meals. Also, I believe that we can

better understand Will Graham’s struggles with his empathy

disorder by seeing how extreme the murders are that he must

reenact in his mind. Harris’ idea of “less is more” would

weaken our sympathy with Will in this regard, just as it

would weaken our aesthetic and emotional responses to the

murders….

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In fact, this perverse, perhaps demonic artistry takes viewers where

they want to go: into “the deeply sinister side of human nature,”

the presentation of which “approaches…a beautiful art form” (Taylor).

Surely, it is the vicarious experience of being drawn into this mad

surrealistic world, filtered through the eyes of someone who battles

to retain his own sanity, that contributes to the sublime dread that

these images evoke and enable a deeper bonding with Hannibal, clearly

the moral, psychological, and spiritual center of the depraved world

into which Will and the viewer have been cast.

Of course, the success of Fullers’ series must have something to

do with factors external to this series. One factor is the profound

spiritual emptiness that, as the European and American literature of

the period reveal, emerged in Western Civilization during the early

part of the twentieth century. This emptiness is one effect of

replacing the JudeoChristian world view with a paradigm according to

which the universe has no order or meaning. Existence becomes an

absurdity that, in the absence of traditional models, simply cannot be

explained. It’s this paradigm, materialistic and existential in

nature, that students are unconsciously exposed to in our schools and

universities and that many either take for granted or fail to

recognize. Seeking to explain this crisis, twentieth century

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psychologist Vicktor Frankl, a survivor of the Holocaust, observes

that we live in is an

…existential vacuum [which] may well be considered a

sociogenic neurosis. No doubt our industrialized society is

out to satisfy all human needs, and its companion, consumer

society is even out to create ever new needs to satisfy; but

the most human need—the need to find and fulfill a meaning

in our lives—is frustrated by this society. In the wake of

industrialization, urbanization tends to uproot man from

traditions and to alienate him from those values which are

transmitted by the traditions. (140)

In other words, following World War II, Western Civilization’s

abandonment of the traditional, God-centered paradigm and its embrace

of the belief that the universe is without order and meaning has

contributed to the creation of a malaise, a pathological malady, that has

been passed from one generation to the next. This “sociogenic

neurosis” has brought with it a longing for something or somebody that

will explain a universe seemingly void of meaning. In the world of

Hannibal’s followers, this longing may have been partially satisfied

by Fuller’s characterization of Dr. Lecter, who, like Joseph Conrad’s

Kurtz, becomes the god of a very dark world but who, unlike Kurtz,

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takes on larger-than-life dimensions. Thanks to our social media,

Mads Mikkelson’s Hannibal Lecter even assumes a status that puts him

in a category reserved for those celebrities whose wisdom,

questionable at best, has become the stuff of afternoon talk shows and

the staple of our daily conversations.

It’s a crisis that we no longer seem to recognize. Professor of

Hebrew and comparative literature Richard Friedman attributes this

crisis, marked by the seeming disappearance of the JudeoChristian god

in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to the cumulative effect

of living through a century of almost unceasing international warfare:

Suffering in unprecedented, inconceivable quantity has been part

of our lot in [the twentieth] century; and, without denying that

these disasters have moved some to seek an explanation or at

least consolation in religion, one must admit that they have

contributed to a widespread feeling that God is not present and

that humans are left on their own, responsible for their own

fate.(206)

The incredible destruction caused by the world wars left in their wake

a spiritual emptiness verging on despair, and it is in the context of

this despair that the Judeo Christian God has apparently vanished,

leaving in His absence a void or vacuum in which violent acts, whether

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committed by radical religious extremists or individual psychopaths,

give to the perpetrators a twisted sense of order and purpose in

universe that seems to have no meaning beyond these acts. To

Friedman, the writer-philosopher who has done the most to create this

culturally-pervasive sense that God has either disappeared or never

existed at all is Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s notion that the

world would one day be dominated by a race of supermen that embrace

the death of the JudeoChristian God and reject traditional moralities

had significant impact upon the rise of the Third Reich in Germany,

and it is briefly alluded to during a private dinner in which Will

Graham’s admission that he admires Nietzsche’s concept of a the

“Ubermench” is calculated to seemingly deepen his relationship with a

Hannibal Lecter who has already given in to the demands of his

gigantic ego and elevated himself, at least in his own eyes, to the

level of a god. (See episode ten, season two.). Within the context

established by Nietzsche and those he influenced, the unholy

reverence that people felt for Adolf Hitler and the strange and

unsettling reverence that viewers feel for the character of Hannibal

Lecter signals a perverse kind of spiritual fulfillment, one that

sustains the illusion that, even with the rejection of the

JudeoChristian world view, things can and do work together to endow

one’s existence with a darkly unifying purpose. I think that it is

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within this context that we can at least begin to understand Libby

Hill’s belief, articulated in her review, that NBC’s Hannibal Lecter

offers the purest form of agape love on TV (Historically, “agape” love

has only been applied to the JudeoChristian god) and becomes a symbol

for a Satanic energy that infuses his and our universe. In her own

words, “[Hannibal] is that force in his universe that exists in

concert with but still wholly outside the world at large.”

Indeed, this temporary sense of spiritual fulfillment is a

perhaps unsettling verification that Bryan Fuller has succeeded in

forming a collusion between Hannibal and the viewer. The success of

Fuller’s design is evident in the numerous fan sites devoted to the

series, in the proliferation of fan art, generally in the form of

portraits of the main characters, and in written responses from those

who have found themselves moved to a reverence- approaching-awe for

Hannibal and, by extension, for the deity he represents. Actor Mads

Mikkelson, who plays Hannibal in Fuller’s series, has commented that

Hannibal Lecter is Lucifer, the fallen angel (“Interview”).

Mikkelson’s observation, supported by Fuller, does not really touch

upon the full significance of the fact that Hannibal, representative

of the demonic, is a cannibal. The association of Satan with

cannibalism can be seen in numerous artifacts, associated with the

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history of Christianity, that depict the devil as a monster who

devours his prey. For instance, in his first letter, the Apostle Peter

writes, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion

looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). St. Cyril of Jerusalem

has something similar in mind when he writes, “The dragon sits by the

side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you.

We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the

dragon.” In St. Giovanni’s baptistery in Florence and in the

Southward Cathedral in England, the devil is depicted as devouring

Judas. Intentional or not, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal Lecter becomes

almost one with the demonic being who consumes the damned by eating

them. It is this being, masquerading as Hannibal Lecter, that seems

to have inspired the misplaced reverence displayed by many of

Hannibal’s fans.

At least two of the series’ symbols reinforce the connection of

Hannibal Lecter with the demonic. Consider, for instance, the man

with antlers. The man with the antlers “represent[s] the killer Will

is trying to catch…. [But] the man with antlers is [also] a Wendigo, a

creature from Algonquian mythology [that is] associated with

cannibalism.” In fact, the character of the Windigo has been joined

with the term psychosis to suggest “a culture-bound disorder that

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features…an intense craving for human flesh and a fear the sufferer is

a cannibal”(Windigo). Will experiences this demonically-inspired fear

in a terrifying nightmare (season two) in which he bloodily emerges

from an elk and temporarily seems to become one with the Windigo—and,

by extension, he temporarily is fused with Hannibal Lecter. Again,

the activity of the supernatural—and possibly the demonic—is

symbolized by the image of the Hindu deity Shiva. In episode eleven of

the second season, Hannibal Lecter has remolded one of his victims

into a grotesque representation of Shiva. Another allusion suggesting

the presence of this deity appears later in the same episode.

Following their attempts to murder each other, Will and Hannibal are

sitting across from each other in Hannibal’s office, and between them

is Shiva, or an image of Shiva, who has traditionally represented the

power to create and destroy (Das). At the very least, Fuller has used

these symbols to suggest a demonic basis to the relationships between

Will and Hannibal and, collusively, between the viewers’ reverence and

adoration for the cannibalistic doctor.

The question now arises: did the demonic, or a sense of the

demonic, have anything to do with Libby Hill’s statement that

“Hannibal Lecter is not the devil; he is god”? Any attempt to answer

this question must take into consideration Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the

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Holy, the book that inspired Hill’s review. Chair of Theology at

Marbug-on-the-Lahn, Otto focuses in his book upon that “non-rational”

dimension of worship towards which Christianity has historically been

moving, a dimension that awakens in the believer something referred to

as “Numen ineffabile.” According to Otto, this “Numen ineffabile” is

a feeling of transcendence that goes beyond the rational and that

“must be evoked, awakened in the mind” by the presence of God (7).

Within this context, the awe that Hill expresses as she romanticizes

and deifies Hannibal Lecter must proceed from what Otto refers to as

“daemonic dread,” a spiritual condition that is “primitive” because it

is “antecedent” to the “Numen inffabile” experienced by Christian

mystics. In fact, what Libby Hill experiences, in contemplating

someone who from an Orthodox perspective can only be termed an

abomination, comes very close to Otto’s “’mysterium tremendum’” in one

of its “wild and demonic forms” (12-13). Of greater concern is that

Hill’s application of Otto’s terminology and the passion with which

she writes her review suggests a conviction that Turner’s Hannibal

Lecter represents a presence that has its being both within and

without the TV series. Certainly, driven by reverence and awe, Hill

has even approached blasphemy as she puts the devil, incarnate in

Hannibal, onto the throne that the angel Lucifer had hoped to claim

before God banished him from His Heavenly Kingdom.

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To speculate that the “collusion” connecting the viewer to

Hannibal is demonic in nature puts us on shaky ground, particularly in

an age that has embraced a form of naturalism, which can trace its

beginning to Darwin’s Origin of Species. According to this thinking, there

can be no authentically supernatural realm in this world because the

supernatural, at least in the traditional sense of the word, cannot

exist. Thus, while current research does not deny the existence of the

demonic, most scholars proceed from a framework predicated upon

naturalism’s core principle that the course of one’s life, and thus

the mere existence of a deity, can be explained only in terms of those

larger social/cultural/religious frameworks of which the demonic, in

this case the JudeoChristian devil, can be nothing more than a

construct that has no existence beyond the culture that created it.

This assumption lies at the basis of M. Scott Poole’s Satan in American

Culture. Poole comments, “American culture maintains a belief in lurking

evil. The American self is actually divided within itself, as we

refuse to acknowledge that the roots of horror and pain in the world

lie in our own motivations, our own capacity for evil that finds

expression in a thousand small choices.” Poole labels belief systems

that incorporate the demonic as simplistic and primitive (xiv) and

clearly suggests that Satan is little more than a psychological or

sociological construct that reveals the darkest impulses of a country

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that has consistently refused to acknowledge that the evil it sees in

its adversaries is really a projection of its own dark heart. Indeed,

Poole makes the point that America’s obsession with the devil, or the

culturally accepted construct of the devil, can be explained in terms

of those occasionally horrific activities that have made the this

country one of the greatest forces for evil in the history of the

world today(xviii). Poole’s is an impressive work, but his insistence

that Satan is really no more than a construct of a Puritan-based

culture obsessed with its own evil does not allow for the conclusion

that an absolute evil, or beings that embody evil, cannot exist

wholly apart from the world’s various cultures. Too, Poole’s work

does little to explain the reverence and adoration many viewers

experienced in reaction to Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, and it certainly

does not allow us insight into Fuller’s uncanny ability to affect

viewers in ways that cannot be explained in terms of Marxism,

Darwinism, or Freudian psychology. Finally, Poole’s work provides

little explanation for the power and popularity of Otto’s The Idea of the

Holy. (1)

Considerations of the demonic, as they apply to Fuller’s series,

leave more questions than answers and can be discussed only

hypothetically in an age given over to naturalism, materialism, and a

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pseudo- existentialism. Specifically, if the demonic does play a role

in the development of the relationship between the two lead male

characters, does it also contribute to establishing the collusion

between Hannibal and the viewer? Does it help account for those

reactions to Hannibal that verge on religious adoration? I suspect

that Viktor Frankl, and Richard Friedman would almost certainly answer

every question in the affirmative. I also suspect that they would view

the popularity of Turner’s Hannibal series less as a work of breath-

taking art and more as a symptom of a culture and an age has lost its

spiritual and moral bearings. Whatever the case, Bryan Fuller’s

Hannibal remains a gory masterpiece, the effect and design of which

have everything to do with Fuller’s ability to select and arrange the

elements of his story in not-so-obvious ways that, in turn, create at

times an almost overwhelming sense of dread while effectively

building a bond between Hannibal and the viewer. END

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Endnotes

1. In fact, to such writers as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor

Dostoevsky, C. S. Lewis, Thomas Mann, Flannery O’Connor,

Sharon Olds, and even Cormack McCarthy, the demonic is a reality.

It may govern human behavior, or it may foster ideas that run

counter of Orthodox Christianity, or it may provide the only

plausible explanation for the rise of an evil world power, or it

is something that can be summoned in the writing of poetry, but

it is always there. Acknowledging the existence of the demonic,

Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Cal State

Bakersfield Betty Stafford writes, “[T]here is mounting evidence

today that evil spirits do oppress and occasionally even possess

the unwary, the weak, the unprepared, the unlucky, or the

targeted”(14). She adds that she is using the phrase “evil

spirits” to refer to “more or less intelligent beings, insensible

to us, who have a will of their own and who seem to bother or

oppress people or, in rare cases, possess their bodies outright,

and with whom we can relate in a variety of ways”(14). Stafford

supports her thesis by relating several incidents in which actual

exorcisms provided healing for people tormented by “the demonic.”

Her argument is supported by hundreds of twentieth and twenty-

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first century books and essays that explore the demonic from

perspectives ranging from the personal and experiential to the

objective and scientific. Strong support for Stafford’s thesis

can be found in books written by practicing exorcists, such as

psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, his mentor Malachi Martin, and Dr.

Patrick McNamara, author of Spirit Possession and Exorcism: History,

Psychology, and Neurobiology. Former head of the school of neurology at

Boston College, McNamara focuses in his book upon the presence

and activity of the demonic in people’s lives and dreams. He

calls these beings “dark spirits” and, apparently rejecting an

entirely supernatural explanation, suggests that these beings,

while real and independent of the humans they harass, can be

explained as terrifying memories that belong to a darker age and

that represent a genetic aberrations somehow embedded in the

human genome.

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Endnotes (demonic possession almost always explained in terms of

naturalistic framework according to which the course of our

lives, many individual events, can be explained only in terms of

larger internal/external factors. Thus, the supernatural takes a

variety of forms, and is always considered a specific construct

of a specific culture.

Levack, Brian P. "The Horrors of Witchcraft and Demonic Possession."

Social Research 81.4 (2014): 921,939,980. ProQuest. Web. 12 Apr.

2015.

Traister, Barbara H. "The Demonic Side of Witchcraft." Clio 35.3

(2006): 395,406,463. ProQuest. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

*Pfeifer, Samuel. "Demonic Attributions in Nondelusional Disorders."

Psychopathology 32.5 (1999): 252-9. ProQuest. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

**Stirrat, R. L. “Demonic Possession in Roman Catholic Sri Lanka.”

Journal of Anthropological Research33.2 (Summer 1977): 133-157.

Mercer, Jean. "Deliverance, Demonic Possession, And Mental Illness:

Some Considerations For Mental Health Professionals." Mental

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Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/362973

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