He was taller than I remembered: about six foot six, but he wasn’t the sort of giant embarrassed by his own height, who stoops to avoid attention. No; he strode like a colossus, consuming all the space that was available, and when he sat down, his legs filled most of the cafá, like overturned lamp-posts. His English was almost flawless and there was that startling, plummy private school accent again, as if he were a cousin of the Queen. If he’d stuck a monocle over one eye, it wouldn’t have looked out of place. At the same time, though, there was none of the balding inbred about him, as you might expect from a British royal. In fact he was built like a bull, an extremely big bull, and though friendly and enthusiastic there was knowledge of darkness in his black eyes.
I sat there, waiting for his opening conversational gambit. This meeting was his idea after all. But instead of talking about exorcisms or ‘the material’, he started grilling me about my life in Moscow. What did I do? How long had I been living there? At the time I wasn’t doing much except thinking about my second book, so I wasn’t sure about the answers myself. I fobbed him off with some vague responses. Edward nodded, listening, trying to penetrate the ink I was squirting at him, like a shark chasing an octopus. Perhaps I was disappointing him: about the only thing I did make clear was that I had no secret access to the BBC or Channel 4. He had an inexplicably high opinion of British TV, and thought that maybe a film like his would be more suited to that market, which was more ‘serious’. I told him that TV in the UK was as crap as TV anywhere else. In fact, I said, I preferred Russian TV, which, in addition to the usual reality-show fodder, also supplied the viewer with a steady, brain-debilitating feed of hallucinatory violence and stomach-twirling variety shows filmed in the Kremlin. It, at least, was brutally direct in its rubbishness. Edward laughed: he thought I was joking.
I decided to nudge him towards discussing his film. I was wary of opening the conversation with a reference to demons so I asked about funding instead. Surely it was difficult to raise money for his documentary?
‘That’s why I’m late,’ said Edward. ‘I just came from a meeting at Alfa Bank. I was trying to negotiate a loan for my film – I’m sure you understand that it’s very difficult to persuade a bank manager to give you thousands of dollars to make a documentary about demonic possession. Russia isn’t like Britain. There isn’t a market for non-fiction films, especially those with a strange and unsettling subject like mine. I explained that demonic possession is a very serious problem in our society and that the people must know about it, but he just wouldn’t listen.’
‘Maybe you should try another bank.’
Edward shrugged. ‘I’ve been to all of them. I even approached a Ukrainian oligarch for funding.’ He paused. He had put that one out there for me, as bait. I took it. ‘How do you know him?’
‘An exorcist I know arranged a meeting for us. He is a priest; the oligarch built a church for him. At first he was interested, but then his wife banned him from pursuing it any further. She didn’t want him getting mixed up in a war with the occult.’
‘Wives can be like that,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Edward, sipping on his hot chocolate. ‘They can.’ A shadow of gloom passed across his features, as though a cloud had just moved in front of his own personal sun. ‘But she is foolish, for she is at risk as surely as anyone else. After all, we know that demons exist, because in Matthew’s gospel chapter eight, verses twenty-eight to thirty-four Christ exorcised the two demoniacs, and sent the evil spirits into the herd of swine, which charged over the hill.’
He paused, and looked at me, deep sincerity in his eyes. ‘So if the founder of Christianity accepted the existence of the diabolic, then I think we must also, no?’
Edward continued:
‘Let me tell you, I used to live life my own way. I had no interest in these matters. But a few years ago, while I was staying at my dacha in northern Russia a friend invited me to attend an exorcism in the local church there. I was nominally Christian up until that point, but it was not a large part of my life. But I am interested in all forms of intellectual pursuit and it sounded interesting, and so I went along. During the service, I saw a man fall to the ground, and begin speaking in an inhuman voice. It was low and guttural, and he was saying terrible things, about the priest, about Christ. And then – his body began to produce smoke! Smoke, do you hear? How do you explain that? That is not hysteria. I am not stupid. I have a lawyer’s education. I have an analytical cast of mind. But I could not deny what I had seen with my own eyes! And that’s not all. Since then I have travelled all over Russia and I have seen other strange phenomena: levitation, for example.’
‘Real levitation?’
‘Close to it. This man, he started to quake and shudder and then rise up off the ground, but he did not hover in the air. Another time, in Siberia, however …’ The sentence tailed off; Edward fixed me with a piercing stare, allowing me to fill in the blank. He was waiting for some response. ‘That’s … pretty extreme,’ I said, immediately embarrassed by the feebleness of my adjective. I knew he was expecting better.
‘Extreme? It is more than that – it’s diabolical! And just last week in a church in the Moscow region I saw a young girl, about fourteen, snarling and thrashing and snapping her teeth like a wild beast. It took two men to hold her down for the priest to pray over her.’
The words streamed out of him, so many, and so quickly, that it was overwhelming. Listening to him was like being arm-wrestled to hand-crushing defeat in seconds again and again. The way Edward told it, all over Russia, and not just in the remote regional darkness but also in the neon-lit capital city, bearded priests were mumbling incantations over possessed children and adults, with the same frequency that plumbers patched up the pipes in the crumbling tower blocks of the former Soviet Union. Right now, perhaps, somewhere in the hopeless abyss, a filthy, evil presence was being cast out of the mortal shell of a young, trembling girl. There was one thing that puzzled me:
‘How are you able to watch all these exorcisms?’ I asked. In my mind I saw a locked room, the possessed tied to a chair, and a priest reading out Latin prayers and passages from the Bible, burning incense and splashing holy water around the place. But there was a problem with the image. I couldn’t see Edward in it. He wasn’t ordained, and more than that, he was too lanky. His long lamp-post limbs would be all over the place.
‘Oh, I know lots of priests involved in the exorcism ministry all over the world. In America, in Germany. Even in Scotland. Have you heard of Father James MacManus?’ Edward enunciated the sounds of the surname with pleasure, exaggerating its Scottishness, like Mel Gibson declaiming in Braveheart.
‘No.’
‘He is a Catholic exorcist who lives in Perth.’
‘I’m not Catholic and I’m not from Perth.’
‘Hm. It’s interesting. There don’t seem to be many Protestant exorcists. I wonder why that is …’
‘I couldn’t tell you.’
‘I could put you in touch with him if you’d like. Do you live far from Perth?’
‘About two hours by car.’
‘Well, if you ever want to talk to him, let me know and I will give you the Father’s telephone number.’
I thanked him. ‘But that’s not what I was asking. I meant – how are you able to get access to so many exorcisms?’
Edward laughed. ‘It’s easy. It’s not always easy to film but it’s simple to get access. Exorcisms in the Russian Orthodox Church are held in public.’
I was silent for a second: surely I had misunderstood. ‘You mean anyone can walk in and watch?’
‘Yes. Or be exorcised. There are special services for this purpose; not in every church of course, but there are at least two in the Moscow region where such services are held regularly.’
Russia: no matter how long I lived there, it was always possible to be startled afresh.
But there was something I didn’t quite grasp.
I had met a lot of Orthodox Christians, but none of them had ever mentioned public exorcisms. Edward explained that this was because the ‘deliverance ministry’ was not in the mainstream of Russian Christianity and those priests who practised it often did so in the face of opposition from their bishops. The subject was taboo, even among the devout. This made life difficult for Edward, as many exorcists were scared of talking on film for fear of attracting unwanted attention. His large network of exorcist contacts had been painstakingly put together over a period of two years, entirely through word of mouth. First he had to earn the trust of one priest involved in ‘deliverance’, which sometimes led to contacts with others. But it was always a difficult, laborious process, and priests on his list could ‘vanish’, when their bishops found out what they were doing. Where exactly they vanished to, Edward never knew, but they dropped out of sight and he rarely found them again.
The attitude of the Church’s hierarchy, he thought, was a major problem. As the existence of the demonic was ignored or even suppressed by the Church, ordinary people were more vulnerable to the lures and snares of evil spirits. His film, therefore, would function as a corrective. He envisaged it as a series of exorcisms and testimonies. He needed to catch extreme manifestations on camera to persuade both believers and non-believers alike of the reality of the phenomenon, and then interview priests and the formerly possessed to get across the effectiveness of exorcism as a defence. Right now he was travelling all over Russia and Ukraine gathering material.
‘Exorcism needs to be brought out of the shadows and given its rightful place in religious life. Of course, it is not the solution to everything: people needed to live in accordance with the teachings of the gospel. Right now, though, the pressing issue is to get the subject above ground, so people will be aware of how omnipresent the demonic is, and thus be better prepared to fight it. For as long as the issue remains taboo, for as long as the Church shies away from discussing it, then the greater is the danger and the more souls will be lost!’
Suddenly though, and with no loss of passion, Edward switched to an exploration of the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, quoting biblical chapter and verse and the thoughts of various mediaeval theologians on the topic. Edward was trying to put the whole thing on a logical basis. He was, after all, a man of an analytical mind, with a lawyer’s education. I didn’t have much to contribute, so I muttered something about ‘the mysteries of faith’ in the hope that Edward might find inner peace and get back to discussing demons; I still had questions. He wasn’t buying it, though, and soon we were embroiled in a wide-ranging discussion about Russian Orthodox rite. Or rather he was: I just sat there and nodded at appropriate moments. Edward thought the Church needed to focus more closely on the gospel and less on dogma accreted over two thousand years. But the Russian Orthodox Church is deeply conservative and its members are not supposed to query the decisions of the hierarchy or the traditions of old. My silence made him nervous: he interpreted it as disapproval.
‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Do I shock you? Are you holding a dagger behind your back?’
‘No. What you say makes sense; but I’m not a member of the Russian Church. I’m not in a position to make any judgements in front of someone who is.’
He wasn’t satisfied with my explanation. As far as he was concerned the matter was too important not to have an opinion on it. And so he continued on for about two hours, until my dissolving brains were ready to come bubbling out of my ears and nostrils. I kept thinking about how to leave, but he had me in a psychological headlock and I couldn’t find an opening. Then, suddenly, he looked at his watch and drew our meeting to a close himself. He reached into his bag and whipped out a video cassette.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is the “material” I want to give you. There are a number of films on the tape, some of which I was involved in making,’ he said. ‘Watch the tape. If you are interested, then there is a church, not far from Moscow, where they hold exorcisms. I know the priest. I could take you there.’
ORIGINS: The Russian Orthodox Church is a member of the family of Eastern Churches that became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church after the division of the Church in 1054 into the Western – Catholic – Church and the Eastern – Orthodox – Church. The cause of the division was the Bishop of Rome’s claim to primacy over the whole Church. The Eastern Patriarchs were willing to acknowledge the Bishop of Rome as primus inter pares – first among equals – but they were not willing to accept the Bishop of Rome’s claim to be the sole leader of the whole Church. Since then Russian Patriarchs have been autonomous (from Roman control at least, if not state), and the Russian Church considers the whole area of the former Soviet Union as its spiritual property, at least as far as Christians are concerned; Roman Catholic attempts to proselytise on its territory are met with great hostility.
Since the fifteenth century, with the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Moscow has been referred to as the Third Rome. The first Rome (in Italy) fell spiritually. Constantinople, the second Rome, fell to the Muslims. Moscow is now the Third Rome and the task of world evangelisation has now become the destiny of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In addition to saints shared with the other Eastern Orthodox churches and with the Catholic Church in the West, the Russian Orthodox Church has also large numbers of indigenous Russian saints, and holy places located on sacred soil. The Virgin Mary too is revered.
SOVIET PERIOD: According to Marx, the Church was meant to wither away in the face of the superior challenge of scientific materialism, but the communists were impatient and decided to spur the process along. Thousands of priests were shot, and churches were demolished or turned into workers’ clubs, cinemas, grain warehouses – even public toilets. Membership of the Orthodox Church was not illegal, but nor was it good for one’s career or educational opportunities.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: Since the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union the Church has grown in influence and has called on the government to take action against foreign ‘sects’ operating on Russian soil, many of which flooded into the country after 1991. These ‘sects’ include not only groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, but also the majority of Protestant churches, especially those of an evangelical bent, which are considered heretical.
In 1997 Boris Yeltsin signed off on a law promoted by the Orthodox Church requiring religious organisations in Russia to prove fifteen years of activity in the country to qualify for full rights, thus effectively discriminating against any church that hadn’t been in the country before the 1917 revolution, as in 1982 the country was officially atheist. These ‘new’ groups would have to register with the authorities and face restrictions, especially regarding the ownership of buildings. In the Soviet period, however, the Pentecostals, Baptists and Evangelical Christian Brethren were forcibly unified as one denominational group so that they could be more easily controlled. These churches have also experienced difficulties and restrictions under the 1997 law.
The spirit of ecumenism then is alien to the Russian Orthodox Church. Outsiders are looked upon with suspicion. It is a measure of the strength of the Russian Orthodox Church that the Patriarch, Alexei II, was able to veto a visit to Moscow from Pope John Paul II, even when it was reportedly Vladimir Putin’s personal wish that the visit should go ahead.
PRIESTS: Priests may marry and have children. Only monks are required to take a vow of celibacy. The Patriarch and the metropolitans and bishops are all celibate and are therefore drawn only from the ranks of the monks.
LEADERSHIP: The head of the Russian Orthodox Church is Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow and All Russia. Born in Estonia, he has been in the job since 1990, though he studied and started his priestly career under Stalin in the 1950s. In 1999 it was alleged that Alexei II had been a KGB agent. The Church strongly denies this claim.
LANGUAGE: The Bible and liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church are written in a language separate from but related to Russian called Old Church Slavonic that was developed from a southern Slavonic dialect reduced to writing by the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius. Centuries later it is still the language of the Russian Orthodox Church liturgy and remains a distinct language that many, if not most, Russians do not understand – as if the Church of England insisted on holding its services in Chaucer’s English.
THE AESTHETIC: Attending an Orthodox Church service is like travelling a thousand years backwards in time. Priests have beards and long hair and wear black robes. Churches have richly painted interiors, featuring frescoes of scenes of the Last Judgement, scenes from the Bible, and the lives of saints. Incense burns. Little old ladies with dried walnut faces in headscarves cross themselves. Mobsters give money to atone for their crimes. There are no chairs or pews because it is disrespectful to sit in the presence of God; a worshipper must stand or kneel or prostrate himself instead. The liturgy is sung/spoken by the priest and lasts about three hours.
MAJOR FESTIVALS: The Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas on 7 January, but the most important date on the religious calendar is Easter, which is preceded by a forty-day fast. Candle-lit services are held at midnight on Easter Sunday.
Atheist archbishops: Nyet.
Women bishops: Nyet.
Gay priests: Shutish?*
I
In the northern city of Pskov men and women dressed against the cold were standing inside a bleak barn of a church. These were the true poor, those who suffered every time Russia experienced social upheaval, the ones who never got near a whiff of the money or power. The priest, Father Miron, was swinging a censer, praying in a deep, commanding voice as women wept, cursed, howled, moaned, barked, collapsed all around him. As they cried out, little smoky puffs of winter vapour escaped their lips.
Outside, the women were calmer. They discussed how much better they felt after ‘deliverance’, though it seemed that multiple exorcisms on a regular basis were necessary to deal with demons effectively. One beefy woman dragged her husband in front of the camera. He stood there, like a scolded little boy, mumbling through his ragged beard about his alcoholism and how his wife had been on the verge of leaving him until he had agreed to let Father Miron cast out his demon: he no longer drank. Another woman had been afflicted not only with the torment of demons but cancer: Father Miron had cured her. Meanwhile, Father Miron himself was hanging around in the background, staring into the camera. He didn’t speak, but he had a dangerous, unpredictable glint in his eye; there was something wily and peasant-like about him, as though he might clock you with his fist as soon as he’d bless you.
II
A sunny green zone somewhere in Ukraine. This Church looked much more inviting: it was painted a bright yellow and had shiny gold cupolas. But inside, it was the same scene: women and men wailing and trembling as a priest relieved them of their demons. This priest had a ginger beard and a dyspeptic look. He was articulate and combative, accustomed to defending himself against critics. Of course, he said, sometimes he was approached by the mentally ill. But those cases he referred to a psychologist. Only after he had ruled out all the other options would he accept the presence of the diabolical, and then he reserved the right to perform exorcisms.
Next came the dialectic compulsory to all TV documentaries on ‘the supernatural’: the materialist saying it was all mass hysteria, the priest’s retort, and then in between the moderate theologian who believed in God but suspected that exorcism would not help those who believed themselves possessed, but rather make them worse.
III
Siberia. Edward was onscreen, sharing a taxi with some journalists he was guiding to the dark side. A grimy winter cityscape slid past the mud-spattered windows of the cab.
Edward took a flirty blonde reporter to a church in Novokuznetsk. A sad-eyed priest with a long grey beard was intoning over his congregation. Suddenly one of the women went wild, cursing and swearing so much she had to be held down by several deacons. The flirty blonde was so scared she began crossing herself furiously, as tears streamed down her cheeks.
IV
A Russian translation of a German documentary on Anneliese Michel, a young woman from Bavaria whose exorcism culminated in her death. A scientist in wire-framed spectacles pointed at a bearded man in paisley-pattern pyjamas who was wired up to a brain-monitoring device. The scientist said: ‘This man is epileptic. He has spasms. The possessed also have spasms. Therefore all demonic possession is merely epilepsy.’
QED.
As winter dragged on, I met Edward several times, as he sought to further my education in matters demonic. Usually he had a book to give me, invariably written by a Catholic. I always read these volumes, but didn’t learn too much: one priest revealed that there were six different types of demon and explained the various stages of exorcism, but later I read other accounts that contradicted his definitions, and even discovered that this priest, whom Edward considered the ultimate authority on the subject, was considered half-renegade by the Vatican. In other books I learned that there was such a thing as holy salt, and of the efficacy of St Benedict medals against evil spirits. Maybe the most interesting fact was that Pope John Paul II himself had tried to cast a demon out of a tormented woman, but had failed. This demon was too powerful for even the infallible head of one billion Catholics. It said something for the man’s honesty that he went public with this failure.
But I was disappointed in the books. After a while they became repetitive, simply listing the phenomena (flying objects, bizarre voices, a drop in temperature, violence) and cure (prayer, incense, readings from the Bible) over and over again. I was hoping for something more mediaeval, with lists of demons identified by name, perhaps some gruesome methods of torture and extracting confessions; at the very least some profound metaphysical ramblings. Instead the writers dealt in things that were already familiar from movies and documentaries. None referred to the cold, wild practices I had seen in Edward’s film. These were Western devils that were being cast out, in the Western style.
What I did like, though, was that Edward would always choose fast-food joints as a place to meet. There was something almost avant-garde about discussing demonic possession over a background of rancid Russian pop music while teenage romance blossomed in the booth next to ours, or a weary office drone gnawed on processed food beside us. We spoke in a language that was foreign to our neighbours in more ways than one; they had no idea of the darkness we were discussing. And I liked the jarring estrangement from the dreary world of slush and the struggle to survive that I got from juxtaposing burgers and demonology with Edward, although he saw nothing remarkable about discussing possession under the sign of the Golden Arches. Indeed, the world of demons was so pressing to Edward, so obvious and immediate, that sometimes he lost himself and forgot that others didn’t live inside it with him: one time we were in the leather-upholstered MakKafe section of a McDonald’s in the centre of town. He was repeating himself, so I started looking around. A girl was sitting across from us, dressed in cheap clothes, but nibbling on an expensive cake.
Suddenly Edward, growing especially passionate, started waving his finger at her: ‘Do you see that girl? That one there, eating the cake! I was at a church and have a recording, it is sound only, but in it, a girl, just like her, is growling. And it took six men to hold her down. A girl, like that! Look at her!’
She was lost in some private world, a glacial expression on her face. She spooned another fragment of cake between her lips. But with all the noise Edward was making, I knew she would soon become aware of the six-foot-six man-mountain gesticulating wildly at her. It was a struggle to calm him down.
But the truth is: I enjoyed these outbursts. I felt as though I was taking part in a performance no one else knew was taking place, and I was entering that dark, surreal world again, the one Sergei had hinted at the first time he talked about the Digger: that strange, other place I wanted to live in …
However often I saw Edward, though, in many ways, he remained an enigma. Sometimes there was deep darkness visible behind his gaze, and it looked as though he was teetering on the brink of a steep precipice. It was hard then to get him to talk, and he would sit in his chair heavy and sullen and distracted while I did most of the work. At other times he was ebullient, endlessly cracking corny jokes. Personal details, however, were hard to prise out of him. I learned that he was 28 and the son of Soviet diplomats who had been based in London during the 1980s. He had gone to a plush English school for four years, hence his uncanny accent and excellent command of the language. This, though, had left him with a distorted view of the UK. He thought that most British people were highly cultured ladies and gents who liked to discuss Tchaikovsky and fine wines. When I suggested that they were as thick as everybody else and were more likely to watch reality TV, go out on the lash and then vomit on a stranger’s rose bushes, he laughed, as if to say: How absurd! Obviously you are joking.
As a student he had developed an obsession with Russian Orthodox chant and had even produced a CD which he later licensed to be sold around the world. (This had led to encounters with expensively educated English enthusiasts for this kind of music, thus entrenching him in his belief that the UK was a land of incomparably sophisticated philosopher-kings). He appeared, therefore, to be a man of organisational skill and considerable entrepreneurial energy, able to make his enthusiasms a profitable reality. But no sooner had this career begun than he encountered the possessed man in the north, after which he had immediately started to make his film, casting all thoughts of CDs and royalties aside. He had now been filming it for two years. Like the Digger, he had no money and no job and no backers, but dedicated himself full time to his vision in the face of colossal indifference. He worked endlessly, travelling around Russia whenever he had the funds, and filming un-navigated areas of human suffering. He would occasionally lend his expertise to some TV company and get a little cash, but it came seldom, and he had to make it last a long time. He lived with his parents, but that is not unusual for unmarried Muscovites of Edward’s age.
As for what Mum and Dad thought of his radical departure from a career in law, he didn’t say. All I could get out of him was that they weren’t especially religious. And as for women, or friends, although he seemed less radically alone than the Digger, he was so obsessed with his film and mission it was hard to understand how he could develop normal relationships. But then, what did relationships matter? In his own words:
‘If there are demons, and they are trying to lure people from the path of salvation, then it is vital that I make this film, to alert people to their existence and the danger they pose to our souls.’
For Edward, his Christian duty to alert his society to this danger was everything. His personal life was secondary, if it even ranked that highly. His career didn’t rank at all. For there was a ruthless clarity of vision with Edward, and he would not spare himself. His arguments and extrapolations were almost mathematical in their rigour, as long as you accepted his starting points: the truth of scripture and his own observed experience of the demonic. When he had seen the smoking man in that northern church, therefore, his world had changed completely. Knowing now that demons existed, everything else had become instantly trivial. He was faced with a question – what is to be done? The answer was obvious.
By the time spring arrived my theoretical education in matters demonic was complete, and he invited me to join him in filming the next instalment of his documentary, so I could witness the phenomenon in practice.
I didn’t hesitate to accept.