With a population of around 60 million, this means the Devil is apparently active in one of every 120 Italians. That’s a lot of demoniacs and a lot of demons – at least some 500,000 of them if they’re not multi-tasking. [...]
Why the sudden increase in possession by the Devil? Palilla attributes it to an increase in practices that “open the door to the Devil” – such as people seeking out wizards and fortune tellers, reading tarot cards, and generally dabbling in magic and the occult. [...]
All this seems rather odd coming out of a Vatican under the reign of the apparently “modern” Pope Francis. Yet, while the pope is socially progressive, he is theologically quite conservative. The Devil is a real person, “armed with dark powers”, he declared in a television interview in December 2017. [...]
In the golden age of demonic possession from 1500 to 1700, demoniacs and exorcists multiplied. It was difficult to tell then, as now, whether the increase in exorcists was a consequence of the increase in the possessed, or vice versa. Possession was undoubtedly very contagious. [...]
This re-emergence of the Devil in popular Western culture is part of a new engagement with an enchanted world. Popular culture has embraced a realm of preternatural beings both good and evil – vampires and fairies, witches and wizards, werewolves and wraiths, shape-shifters and superheroes, succubi and incubi, elves and aliens, hobbits and the denizens of Hogwarts, not to mention zombies.
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