Killing in the N arne of the Lord Cases and Reflections Regarding Reli-Criminality In the Western World

In Christian circles the tendency exists to deny that the causes of manslaugther and homicide may be due to the existence of a biblically based frame of orientation indeed, that frame teaches respect for other persons' lives . However, it is shown that the presence of such a frame may also lead to gruesome forms of manslaugh­ ter, usuallly represented by Christians as absolutely un-Christian, devilish , or heathen aberrations, worse than homicides committed out of pure hatred, aggres­ sion, or self-defence. The purpose of this article is, first, to present a typology of biblically inspired fatal crimes (or 'reli-crimes') as they occurred in the last two centuries in Europe, and, second, to present an interpretation of the relationship between religious imagination and representation on the one hand and atrocious forms of physical violence towards fellow human beings on the other.


Introduction1
'It is not the violence of the Westerner that has to be explained, but its combination with such a peace-loving religion as Christianity,' wrote sociologist of religion Ter Borg at the end of 1994 in a Dutch Newspaper (Trouw d.d. 17 December 1994). According to him this violence is an unrecognized paradoxical effect of Chris tianity: '(B]y prohibiting violence and even sac rifice, Christianity [as a matter of fact] un chained the violence of Christians.' This is an interesting though somewhat simplistic ( Girar dian) vision. Not only does it rest on the ques tionable assumption that every Westerner is Christian, but it also implies that the Christian taboo on physical violence (vide the sixth com mandment) in general and on violent sacrifices in particular would generate this kind of vio lence. When Christians kill, Ter Borg seems to argue, they do so because of these prohibitions.
If this is correct, it would certainly have been better if Moses had not come down fr om the mountain with the Ten Commandments. The author ofthe He idelberger Catechismus wasted his time composing it, and if priests and preach ers had left all references to the sixth command ment out of their sermons, then less or even no killing and murdering would have taken place. I think that there is much more to say about the relation -a topic that has already been studied by many scholars2 -between Christian religion and physical violence practiced by its adher ents.
In this paper I will try to shed some light on that intriguing relationship by presenting and analyzing what I once labelled 'reli-murders' (Verrips 1991). A reli-murder is a 'murder in spired by religious motives' in the sense that 'the committing of homicide or heavy physical abuse resulting in the death [of the victim(s)] by one or more persons who act under the influ ence of delusions in which religious moments are predominant' (Plokker 1948:147). By this definition one could consider a human sacrifice to a god to be a kind of particular reli-murder.
Th is, of course, is an outsider's view, for those who make such a sacrifice would not call it murder at all, but, for example, a very precious 'gift' to a deity. Though I realize that my defini tion does not do justice to the fa ct that commit ters of reli-murders may be totally convinced that they correctly interpret and implement th eir religion and therefore are not murderers at all, I still consider this act of religious loyalty to be murder. That it is not easy to decide what one can define as a 'crime' inspired by 'a reli giou� belief system' is extensively shown by Lanning (1992:117/18). What X will character ize as an absolute misinterpretation of a belief system and as a crime may viewed by Y as a completely correct interpretation of the same system and as a benefit to a person or even to humanity.
In Christian circles the tendency exists to attribute manslaughter and homicide not to a biblically based (ethical) fr ame of orientation after all, that fr ame teaches respect for other persons' lives -but rather to its absence. Be cause it is not there, so one reasons, it may happen that a person loses his self-control in a fit of extreme anger, jealousy, greediness, etc., and takes a person's life. However, that a bibli cally based fr ame of orientation also may lead to gruesome fo rms of manslaughter is mostly denied or else represented as an absolutely un Christian, devilish, or even heathen aberration worse than homicide committed out of pure hatred, aggression, or self-defense. One comes across such a representation in the case of the killing of a fa rmhand in the Dutch village of Appel tern at the beginning of this century who was perceived by his murderer, a fa natical or thodox Protestant fa rmer, as a devil that should be crushed in order to bring the Lord's Kingdom closer. Abraham Kuyper, the fo under of the Gereformeerde Ke rk in the Netherlands, as cribed this homicide to: '[H) eathen customs that contrary to God's word partly remained alive in some regions of our country' (Van Belzen 1996:37).
Some years ago I developed a tentative typol ogy of religiously inspired fatal crimes as they happened to occur -luckily infrequently but nevertheless with a certain regularity-in West ern Europe and the USA (Verrips 1991). The 30 purpose of that exercise was to create some order in the rather confusing a mo u n t of duta and cases and by doing so to reach more insig-ht into reli-criminality. I tried to make sense of differences in the background and nature of reli-murders and to estimate the probability of their disappearance. However, in the mean time several new cases have occurred . Though I am still convinced that my typology holds water, my ideas with regard to particular reli murders underwent some elaboration . What I therefore intend to do in this paper is (]) to present and illustrate my typology of reli-crim inality and (2) to sketch my latest ideas with regard to this fa scinating phenomenon. It is my hope that our insight into the relation between religion (or religious imagination and represen tation) and physical violence will be th us deep ened.

A Typology of Reli-murders
In the movie The First Power, directed by Rob ert Resnikoff, a detective specialized in tracing serial killers catches a ruthless murderer who used to carve five-pointed stars in the bodies of his victims. Although this satanic criminal has been executed, he returns in a miraculous way.
'Only a nun specialized in mystical skills is able to bring relief. She gives the detective a crucifix that contains a dagger. By stabbing the Devil in the heart he can stop him fr om doing his evil works' (NR C HB d.d. 4 October 1990). If one thinks that one is confronted here with just a figment of the imagination or a kind of crime that never takes place in reality, then one is really mistaken. For in this film two types of reli-murder occur that every now and then also occur in reality, i.e., (1) killing to please Satan ('sacrifice to Satan') and (2) killing somebody because he or she is deemed to be or to be associated with the Devil. The second type can be subdivided into three (sometimes overlap ping) subtypes: killing a person, because one thinks he or she is (a) a satellite of demons and/ or the Devil ('execution of witches'), (b) pos sessed by the Devil or devils ('exorcism mur der'), and (c) the Devil himself ('Devil's mur der').
Next to the two main types one can discern a third, i.e., killing �:�omcbody beca use one thinks that it is nccc�:�sa ry to make a sacri lice to God in accord with a biblical example.  (Hellwig 1909: 173).
In court the accused declared that he had to kill his aunt in order to get peace. God would not at all be angry with him because killing a harmful witch was something totally different 'als wenn einer den anderen a us Luxus totschlage' (Hell wig 1908b:16). The man was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Though there is evidence that 'murders of witches' took place elsewhere in Europe at the beginning of this century (cf. Hellwig 1908b), I did not come across clear-cut cases for the Netherlands. However, recently there was a court case that illustrates that belief in witch craft in connection with threatening or even killing a person is not totally absent.7 In 1988 the fo llowing remarkable message could be read in a Dutch newspaper: Man is sentenced to five years for strangling his wife. Utrecht (ANP) -Last Tuesday O.A., (51) fr om Utrecht was sentenced by the court of Utrecht to five years imprisonment. October last year the man left his 22-year-old wife whom he had strangled in a ditch alongside the road in Utrecht. A. told the judge that his wife had been 'bewitched' (Volkskran.t d.d. 6 April 1988).
Though in this case, about which I unfortunate ly could not collect more material, no 'witch' was involved but only a 'bewitched' woman, I present it in order to demonstrate that belief in witch craft is still capable of inspiring persons to kill a human being.H It may be possible that the murderer intend ed to say not so much that his wife was 'be witched' as that she was 'possessed (by the Devil) .' If this is correct, his crime would be an illustration of the next subtype.

'Exorcism Murder'
The fa ct that the special office of exorcist in the Roman Catholic Church no longer exists does not mean that within this church exorcism takes place no longer. Priests are still allowed to cast out demons and devils when they deem it necessary. In such cases they are bound by strict rules and not allowed to exorcise unless they have permission fr om their bishop. The same holds true for the Anglican Church. In Protestant churches, however, the ritual expul sion of the Devil or devils is nonexistent.!' The idea that people may be possessed by evil spirits that may then be driven out is prevalent in the New Te stament. There one may find the origin of exorcism as it has been practiced through ages and as it still takes place in the Roman Catholic and Anglican as well as in the Pente costal churches. Though the purpose of exor cism has always been positive to rid people of evil spirits that occupied their bodies it some times resulted in the death of the possessed. Maquart, for example, remarks: Malgre la severite de l'Eglise a ce sujet, il fa ut regretter parfois chez certain pretres adonnes a ce dangereux ministere, la pratique inconsi deree et imprudente de l'exorcisme (1948:328).
But not only fanatical priests have been guilty of practicing exorcism with fa tal consequences, but also laypeople.10 Though the number of cases since the end of the 19th century has not been large, which by the way holds true for all the reli-murders I deal with in this essay, the world has not been disenchanted io such an extent thai they occur no longer. Tn order io illustrate this I will present a lew spectacular recent cxampleR. Precisely twelve years after Anneliese Michel died in consequence of an exorcism, almost all Dutch newspapers reported that the police of Ve lp (a small town in the province of Gelder land) had arrested a local couple and a woman fr om Maassluis because they had burned a baby to death after trying in vain to cast out the demons that possessed it.
The burning of the baby .. .in the lavatory of the house of the couple in Ve lp was, according to police, the climax of an exorcism ritual that lasted 48 hours. Initially the fa ther (30), the mother (27), and their fr iend (31) assaulted the baby with pillows and knives. Afterwards they poured alcohol, paint, and hydrochloric acid over the baby and set it on fire. The police speak of a ritual murder (NR C HB d.d. 1 July 1988).12 Because there are indications that the little victim was deemed to be the Devil himself, I will return to this case when treating 'Devil's mur ders.'13 Though the tragic event in Ve lp was fr ont page news, a few other cases that occurred shortly before and after it got almost no atten tion fr om journalists. However, there were two remarkable short items in the newspapers with regard to the type of killing I am dealing with here. On 29 ,J anuary 1988 one could read the fo llow ing: P�;yd1 iatric confinement demanded for the stab bing of a woman in order to cast out the Devil.
Groningen (ANP) -Before the court of Gronin gen publ ic prosecutor M. Severein ... demanded unconditional psychiatric confinement of a 28year-old inhabitant of Groningen who commit ted homicide. The man is suspected of having killed hi s 37-years-old girlfriend on 8 August last year because he believed that she was possessed by the Devil. During the four months that he and the victim were involved, they regularly indulged in the exorcism of spirits. Just before the tragic event took place, the man became convinced that the Devil had taken possession of his girlfriend. In order to cast him out he stabbed her. The public prosecutor fo l lowed the psychiatric report, which says that L. suffers fr om paranoid psychosis and is of un sound mind. Ve rdict on 11 February (Volks krant d.d. 29 January 1988).
In November, the newspapers reported a case against a German woman of 7 4 who was ac cused ofhaving killed in February 1988 (togeth er with her since deceased sister) a widow of66 because they thought that she was possessed by This case is interesting, because the main sus pect was no one else but Magdalena Kohler 34 whom we met before. In the 80s Magdalena, who after her early release fr om prison was expelled fr om Switzerland and settled in Sin gen, still believed that she was cho�;en by th.e Lord. She now claimed that the Madonna had appeared and told her to gather a fa mily around herself, just as she had done before, in order to survive a coming catastrophe. Magdalena's vic tim had been a member of the sect founded by herself and Jozef Stocker. A unique case of recidivism! During the trial Magdalena'�; law yer made the interesting remark that she had once again made a mistake 'nicht weil, sondern obwohl sie fr omm war. ' We can observe here that killing someone is not seen as the result of religious beliefs held by the offender, but rather as the consequence of something totally ditler ent, for example, a state of mental derangement or an attack of insanity that has no relation with these beliefs at all. That such attacks have a clear-cut connection with religion and can be seen as a kind of pathological implication seems to be toned down or even denied, especially by the experts, for example, psychiatrists and psy chologists, who are recruited to make sense of such cases (cf. Van Meer 1988, Ve rrips 1988, Van Belzen 1996. By defining the state of mind of what I would call 'reli-delinquents' in techni cal jargon as, fo r example, 'ontoerekeningsvat baarheid als gevolg van een paranoi"de psychose veroorzaakt door schizofr enie' ('mental incom petence as a consequence of a paranoid psycho sis caused by schizophrenia') one conceals more than one clarifies about the pathological turn that the religious thinking of specific people can take under particular circumstances. Such la belling deprives us of a clear perspective on the logic of the offenses and on how that logic can originate fr om, for example, the Bible or theo logical treatises.14 These writings may fu nction as a source not only of orientation but also of disorientation such that people may become totally confused and fa ll into criminal behavior, though they would not admit it to be such. On the contrary, they often think that they did something to benefit a particular person or even humanity.15 It is striking that journalists who write about such misdeeds often describe them as 'devilish.' For example, the two elderly sisters who exorcised the lady of 66 until she died were more th an once characterized as ' die teuflischcn Schwestcrn' just as their homicide was called 'tcut1isch.' We arc confronted here with the relative nature of what people experi ence as good or evil.
Also in the 90s a number of fa tal exorcisms took place. In 1993, fo r exa mpl e , two fo rtune tellers in Spain who tried to exorcise a ten-year old girl manhandled her in such a way that she died of her injuries (VPRO-Gids d.d. 19 May 1993). And in 1995 a ch ild died in Canada after her grandmother had poured water i n her throat in order to cast out the Devil who possessed her (VPRO-Gids d.d. 16 December 1995).w The people who start an exorcism do not intend to kill a possessed person. On the contra ry, they want to deliver him or her fr om tor menting spirits . However, if these demons do not go away, the exorcists sometimes intensify their healing efforts in such a way that the possessed succumbs. In the beginning they still distinguish between the possessed and his or her possessors, but as the ritual goes on because the demons will not leave the distinction may become sometimes so vague that the exorcists start thinking that the possessed is the Devil in person who must be destroyed. This dramatic development typically occurs when laymen undertake deliverance 'rituals' (vide the case of Magdalena Kohler). There exists smooth tran sition to the cases I shall treat now.17

'De uil's Murder'
Characteristic ofthis kind ofreli-murder is that the victim is perceived not as possessed by the Devil but as the Devil in person. In the eyes of the murderers their victim is not somebody who suffers fr om demonic powers who took posses sion of his or her body, but is Satan himself whom they can expel only by radically destroy ing him. Sometimes, but not always, this de struction is preceded by a kind of exorcism. During this century several spectacular 'Devil's murders' took place in the Netherlands. The most sensational Dutch cases occurred in the village of Appeltern (1900), at sea aboard a lugger fr om Katwijk (1915), and in Weverwijk, a small hamlet near Meerkerk (1944).18 Since they fo rm prototypical cases I will briefly sketch each of them here.19 On the night of 2 to 3 February l 900, the ultra-orthodox Calvinist fa rmer Mettinus Scherff (also called Marius) smashed -in his fa rm-house and whilst his wife, live chi ld ren,

maidservant, and the girls Mina en Emma
Levoir were present -the skull of his Roman Catholic fa rmhand Piet with a blowpipe be cause he thought him to be the Devil himsclf.�11 After this Marius fa ncied that he was the re turned Jesus Christ, and he and his fo llowers expected the coming of the millennium. Preced ing the event various things had happened, ft)r example , an effort of Marius to deliver Emma Lcvoir from dark fo rces. During this exorcism he ordered his servant to hold the chamberpot in order that Emma could spit the Devil into it. Marius then screwed up her eyes, hit her in the fa ce, and asked: 'Do you fe el that?' She answered: 'No.' What hap pened afterwards, she does not remember very well. She saw how Piet fe ll down, 'hit by God's hand.' Then the Devil came out of her mouth and eyes. She saw flames and heard roaring. She thinks that the Devil came out of her and took possession ofPiet. At that moment she fe lt enlightened. She remembers how the slain body lay upon the floor and how it was treaded upon and beaten by Marius and the others ... She also saw how Marius trampled on the corpse's chest till blood was flowing out of it. Afterwards she was very happy just like all the others who were present. She fe lt so well, so very well, for they had conquered the Devil. And they sang: Blessed be the Lord, the Devil has been slain! (Ruysch 1900:89).
The participants were never brought to court and sentenced. Though this case differs in sev eral respects fr om the one in Ve lp I dealt with above, there is a remarkable resemblance.21 In both cases the reli-delinquents started with an effort to cast out demons or the Devil but later grew convinced that the Prince ofDarkness had materialized in a human being.22 Fifteen years after the reli-murder in Appel tern, the crew of the saillugger KW 171 fr om Katwijk literally and figuratively went adrift when an ultra-orthodox Calvinist sailor claimed that the world had ended. After having several visions, fi1r example, of th e New Jerusalem, he th ought to recognize Satan in nne of the crew members and ordered his death, whereupon the unl ucky man was killed and thrown over boa rd. The next day the sailor and a companion cleft the s kull of another hand because he also was considered to be a devil. Finally, a third devil was discovered aboard the lugger and also killed in a horri1ic way. After these murders the sailor ordered them to throw everything over board since th e crow needed nothing anymore.
After Lhe remaining !ishermen had unrigged the ship, they lay down hoping soon to be in heaven, where Lhey thought their fe llow hu mans would already be . However, the rudder less wreck was noticed by the crew of a Norwe gian merchantman who took the exhausted fishermen aboard and brought them to Grims by. In this case also no prosecution fo llowed because the men were deemed to be mentally incompetent when the killings took place.
In 1944 another sensational reli-murder oc curred in the N ether lands, this time in an ultra orthodox Calvinist peasant family consisting of a fa ther, mother, three daughters, and six sons living in a hamlet near Meerkerk. Religion and especially the question whether one belonged to God's chosen few fo rmed the pivot on which everything hinged in this fa mily. At the begin ning of 1944 one of the sons was troubled by an unprecedented test offaith that lasted for hours and ended with prophecies. The end of the world was near, Satan who went roaring around would be crushed, Jesus would appear on the clouds, and the Kingdom of the Lord would come down to earth. Except for one son, every one believed what the anguished man predict ed. Hereafter life on the farm took an exception al turn. The fa mily neglected normal daily chores, hardly ate or drank any longer, stopped the clocks, and instead of sleeping sung and prayed. At a certain moment one of the fa mily members came to the conclusion that the unbe liever in their midst was the Devil in person and that he had to be destroyed in order to speed up the coming of the Lord's Kingdom. Thereupon the man was killed in a horrendous way by his next of kin.23 Again no prosecution fo llowed because of the supposed mental incompetence of the actors.

36
Striking in this and similar cases�4 is th at people imagine that someone is a devi l or even Satan himself and that his destruction is a conditio �;; ine qua non Ior deliverance from evil and a quiet life in this world or a new one to come. In the other two subtypes this idea is lacking. There seems to be no final reckoni ng with the Prince of Darkness and his accomplic es, or at best a temporary one, and that is exactly what distinguishes these subtypes fr om the one I deal with in this section. Although the result in each case is the same, that is, the death of human beings, the ideas and motives which lead to it are different. However, in each case the deeds originate from the same source, name ly a firm belief -well-founded in the Bible and axe. Since this case has different aspects that are important for developing deeper insight into the occurrence of 'Devil's murders,' I will sketch them here. Although Margrit Muller was originally Protestant, she made a pilgrim age to Lourdes with her sick mother three times. -In vain, for the old woman died in 1979.
After that Margrit was not only seriously trou bled by hallucinations, but also started hearing voices. This condition became worse after her relation with an ultra-orthodox Catholic man suddenly came to an end. Next to words of consolation she also got threats from what she called the 'Lourdes-Sau' ('Lourdes sow') or sex ually perverted 'Satansnutte' ('Satan's whore').
Her skin would be ripped off and given as fo od to all kinds of carnivorous birds. Neither pray ing nor stays in clinics brought relief. Also her entry into the Roman Catholic Church did not silence the voices of the 'Lourdcs-Sau' or the 'Satansnuttc.' When she then g-ot the message that she still had one task to accomplish, she decided to di�:�putch a Ro man Catholic. She announced her mission in several letters, but in vain, for no one paid any attention to her horrif� ic warn ings (cf. Stern no. 28 1995). 'l'he special ists wh o treated Margrit M i.illcr after her lugu brious homicide cal led her p:;ychotic a:; seem:; to be the custom in cases like this. Earl ier on I remarked th at such a label can seriously im pede better insight into the logic on which these cases arc based and their origin in the Bible and theological treatises. In my conclusion I will come back to this case.
A striking phenomenon in the publications about 'Devil's murder' is that they are very often represented as a ritual oflering or a sacri ficial killing (cf. , for example, SchoLman 1946:34 and Van Rooy 1949:24), whilst the perpetrators almost never use that terminology. 1'h is does not mean, however, that it would be impossible to interpret the murders as sacrifices. I have done so at an earlier occasion (Verrips 1987), when -referring to Hubert & Mauss' [18981 fa mous theory on the nature and fu nction of sacrifice -I tried to answer the question wheth er these murders would serve to reach a state of sacredness or to get rid of something polluting? I had to conclude that they served both these purposes, and that the pollution one wanted to get rid of had to do with sexuality experienced as sinful. 25 Meanwhile, several reli-offenses took place that undoubtedly were motivated by a desire to make a sacrifice (in the sense of an offering to God).

The ' A braham's Sacrifice'
The Bible (especially the Old Te stament) teems with passages about the sacrifice of human beings, for example, small children (cf. Dron kert 1955). Almost without exception it con cerns acts committed by heathen idolaters that are disliked by the Lord and therefore sharply condemned. However, there happen to be cases where that condemnation does not occur. The best known example is Abraham who got the order fr om above to sacrifice his son Isaac, an order that was cancelled at th e last moment. Time and time again this biblical story has in�:�pircd for committing fatal crimes, e:;pcciully killing one's children, which I therefore call 'Abraham's sacrifices. '�n In the works of Idclcr one finds several of these tragic offenses de scribed. An example: In the county of Norfolk a tanner murdered his fo ur children, the eldest only being fo ur years of age. Three of them were killed by smashing their skull with a hammer, whilst the youngest, a little girl often weeks, was kept so long under water till she drowned. The tanner was con vinced that in committing this heinous crime he served the Lord and he called the killing of his offspring an ABRAHAM's sacrifzce (1851:211). What is striking in this case is that it concerns a woman who identified with a man, that is, Abraham. However, this is no unique phenom enon as we can learn, for example, from a case th ai occ u rred a few yea rs later in a Calvinist milieu in the Vc luwc, a n orthodox region in the province of Gcldcrland. Though there are no explicit reference:; to Abraham':; :;acriii.ce in this ca:;c and other traits appear that are lack ing in the Born case, here we also meet a woman who 'bonded' her gender and insisted -luckily in vai n -upon sacrificing two children.

'The Crucifixion'
The general category 'killing a human being as a sacrifice' also includes another type of reli murder, namely the 'crucifixion.' Here killing someone and committing suicide as a kind of offering are mixed up in a complex way. Howev er, in killing and suicide Jesus' death on the cross fu nctions as the 'model fo r. ' In order to avoid making matters too complicated I will not deal here with cases of pure self-crucifixion, which occurred now and then in the last two  (Hellwig 1908a:186/87).
Because it would make my essay too long I cannot deal here with a type of murder that shows a remarkable fa mily resemblance to the (sub)genres presented so far. I mean the lethal crimes evidently influenced or inspired by mod em mythological discourses such as novels and movies. Like the 'palaeo-mythologically' inspired crimes, the 'neo-mythological' ones are indeed few, but they nevertheless occur with a certain regularity. It is striking that the 'disorienting' effect or lethal implication of old myths is usu ally underexposed whilst that of the new ones is greatly exaggerated (cf. Ve rrips 1995).

Concluding Remarks
ln this contribution I have tried to present a tentative typology of reli-murdcrs in the last two centuries in Europe and the USA. The creation of order in phenomena that at first sight make a puzzling and chaotic impression is a first step on the road toward a deeper under standing. A number of types and subtypes can be distinguished. One of the main distinguish ing criteria is the biblical passages on which the killers based their thought and action, especial ly those dealing with the casting out or destruc tion of demons, devils, and Satan on the one hand and Abraham's sacrifice and Jesus' suffer ing and death at the cross on the other, often but not always in combination with eschatological sections. Elsewhere I argue (Verrips 1987) that the pathological use of biblical stories can be explained at least partly as a consequence of tremendous problems (especially in the realm of sexuality), that certain people are confronted with owing to their interpretation of other parts of the Bible or theological treatises. I will come back to this shortly. Here we encounter a shady side of Christianity that is too often neglected.
It turns out to be a double-edged sword in the sense that it propagates nonviolence, but may stimulate certain people under specific circum stances to do exactly the opposite. The perpe trators I deal with did not want to do evil but wanted instead to do good. But in this regard there exists a difference between 'exorcism murders' and 'Devil's murders.' The fo rmer are a tragic result of a derailed ritual begun to end the suffering of an individual, whilst the latter concern crimes committed on behalf of man kind, for after crushing the Devil the Kingdom of the Lord is expected to come down to earth. A similar difference can be noticed between the 'Abraham's sacrifice' (as well as the 'sacrifice to Satan') and the 'crucifixion,' for the fo rmer also is an individual affair and the latter is for the benefit of humanity.
Moreover, it is striking that 'exorcism mur ders' generally take a less gruesome turn than 'Devil's murders.' In the first case the killings are seldom fo llowed by efforts of the killers to radically destroy their victims. In order to bet ter understand this conspicuous difference it seems important to note th at 'exorcism mur ders' usually occur in Ro man Catholic and An glican circles, where rituals of deliverance are o£1icially accepted, and that 'Devil'::; murder::;' arc generally committed by u lira-orthodox Prot estants, who arc unfamil iar with these rituals.
While Roman Catholics and Anglicans arc taught that the Devil alter having manifested him::;elfin ::;omeonc can be cast out, ultra-ortho dox Protestants cannot resort to such a prac tice, fur it is oiiicially rejected. Is it possible for the former to 'd omesti cate' Satan and his hench men, though this may get out of control, where as th e latter lack this option altogether and are left with little else but prayer and, if this does not work, waging a life-and-death struggle in order to literally destroy him. It seems that the relation between the divine status claimed by ultra-orthodox Protestant perpetrators of'Dev il's murders' and their horrendous crimes owes to th eir not being raised in a theological tradi tion that accepts exorcism. However, being so cialized in such a tradition does not guarantee that excesses will not occur.
I think that the inability of Protestants to exorcise has to do with their conception of the relation between body and mind (spirit, soul) as it developed during and after the Reformation.
Whilst Catholics acknowledged that alongside the spiritual the corporal was important in the religious realm, Protestants developed the view that the spirit dominates and the body serves. Catholics somatized the spiritual, and Protes tants desomatized it (cf. Roper 1994:177).34 Ac cording to Catholic doctrines the body, being the temple of the Holy Ghost, may and must be purified of pollution. According to orthodox Prot estant doctrines it cannot be cleansed of evil (especially sexual lust). A willing spirit is often kept prisoner in bad, devilish flesh. 35 Because of the subordination of the body to the mind and the idea that the fo rmer is the source of drives and desires that are not bad in themselves but may be used in sinful ways, orthodox Protes tants in default of a ritual able to clean the body of polluting evil are left with a problem. They can only think the body pure, for example, by projecting the sinfulness of their own onto an other already killed or about to be killed and by expecting that they will be purified by the blood 40 of this victim. Most Christians do this by think ing of Jesus and his grace-bringing death on the cross, but some lost souls do not and instead perceive the Devil in someone else whom they literally try to shatter. To kill the Devil in the shape of another person, who represents a sin ful part of the self, can thus be seen as a sacrifice in order to get rid of evil radically and so to become a human being equalling God.'10 One may think that the case of Margrit Muller's 'Devil's murder' contradicts my argument, for as a Catholic she did not take resort to exorcism, but instead cleft -just like other Protestant killers of the Devil -the skull of somebody in whom she saw a kind of devil. However, if one realizes that Muller was raised a Protestant and only later converted to Roman Catholicism, her horrific crime becomes more understanda ble.a7 She did what one might expect of a Prot estant who became totally possessed by his religion.
More abstractly, one could say that what is called 'devilish' is a metaphor for everything in an individual that is 'chaotic,' 'disturbing,' 'dis orderly,' 'uncivilized,' 'wild,' in short his or her 'shady other side' that cannot be denied but has to be suppressed or even to be cast out in the interest of the continuation of the established order. As I point out, unlike Catholics orthodox Protestants subordinate the corporeal to the spiritual and ignore the possibility that devils and demons may take temporary possession of someone's body and so reject exorcism . rituals.
For that reason they do not know how to handle manifestations of this shady other side or puz zling otherness which, if not recognized as an essential part of the self, is often projected -as Lacan remarks -on someone else who then becomes an object of aggression (cf. Shapiro 1995:112). Tolerance implies the acceptance, at least to a certain degree, of what is 'disorderly,' 'different' or 'devilish' in one's own or another person's body, society and culture. And this is only possible if one is prepared to recognize and acknowledge what is 'disorderly,' 'different' or 'devilish' within one's own self. When Ter Borg states that the violence Christians may commit is a result of their prohibitions with regard to physical violence in general and violent sacri fice in particular, I cannot say this is completely irrelevant and incorrect. However, aga inst the background of the muteriul presented in this paper I think that his view i::; ::;implistic. For my argument cleurly demon::;trute::; that between these prohibitions and their dreadful 'irance gressions' an intricate complex of diverse social and psychic proces::;e::; i::; hidden th ai remains absolutely obscure if one accepts Ter Borg's Girardian viewpoint. 111 order· to understand this complex one hus to consider all sorts of biblical representations, theological doctrines, and religious rites based on th em, as well as how thi s ensemble under speciiic conditions may be pathologically interpreted and violently put into practice. Studying the extreme cases presented here in which people evidently be came possessed by their own religious belief's and lost their respect for the physical integrity of others on whom they had projected their own unbearable and confusing otherness can be useful fo r developing deeper insights in the commission of violence by believers in palaeo or neo-mythological stories. If these extreme cases deter, they probably do so not only be cause they are horrific but also because they fix our thoughts on the fr ailty of the civilized husk covering our wild core. 'We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean fo rces slumbering below' (Frazer 1922:36 8. Sec, f(n· a splendid liLcrnry evocation of'Lhi� ty pe of' murder, Konrad (1986) Tt is striking th at one did not represent the ommders as, for example, wild animals, but rather as 'wild,' 'uncivilized,' 'unchristian' hu mans. This is, I think, a consequence of the fact that when killing the baby they had indulged in a series of acts that were clearly inspired by their religious ideas. If this is not the case one often fa lls back on comparisons with animals devoid of reason and fu ll of irrational impulses. 13. Besides a series of newspaper articles and a few reports in periodicals ( imam h ad tri ed in cast him oui by fo rci ng her to drink five liters of water in a short time. In the Netherl and::; in 1991 a man and three women wore a rreRted because they had used rough m eth od� Lo deliver two children -a son and a d aughter of' one of' tho women -from devils who h ad possc�::;cd them. For weeks on end ihe blindfold ed boy was confined to a small space and 'treated' with hot irons and burning cigarettes. One of' Lhe women, a professional physician, was supposed Lo make sure that the regular use of physical violence did not result in the death ofihc victim (cf. NRC HB d.d. 8June 1991). In 1994 th e pol ice of Thbbergen took three members of a rel igious ftlundaLion (the Padre Pio Stichting) into custo dy because they were suspected of having phys ically ill-treated a psychiatric patient during an exorcism ritual by making incisions in both her cars and by beating her black and blue (cf. NR C HB d.d. 7 October 1994, 11 November 1994, and 29 November 1994 (1941) and an epic poem (1946). Van der Scheer (1917), Jelgersma (1917 and Carp (1941) refer to it. The case in Appeltern is de scribed by Ruysch (1900) and Bouman (1901Bouman ( , 1906, who both were acquainted with the cul prits. All other publications on this case are based on their work, for example, Jelgersma (1917), Kempe (1938), Carp (1941), Tolsma( 1945), Van Rooy (1949), Zaal (1972), andVan Straten (1990). See for articles in which the three cases are analyzed in relation to each other Nagel (1960), Ve rrips (1987), and Van Belzen (1988).
Recently Van Belzen (1996) used the case of Appeltern to show the completely different reac tions to it of psychiatrists and theologians. 20. Possibly the blowpipe was not coincidental since one of the means used to cast out devils is to 'blow' the eyes and mouth of the possessed (Van Dam 1973:122). 21. For instance, an important difference is that the offenders in the case occurring in Ve lp were not ultra-orthodox Calvinists but people who be li eved in a particular mixture of beliefs com ing fr om both the Hil>lc and ::;pi ritualistic literature.
Another diffe rence is that they did not believe th at the coming ofthc Ki ngdom of God was ncar and cou ld be speeded up by dest roying Satan. In fact everything started with an cfl" ort to cast out demons who were supposed to have taken pos scs::;ion of one of them. Finally there arc no ind icHtions that someone l>cliH·c or H ftcr the kil ling ofthc baby believed that he or she was the Lord or Jesus Christ. However, they claimed to have had sev eral vi sions of the latter during th eir ctliJrts to exorcise the baby. 22. Other important resemblances arc, fiJr example, the filllowing: a) the filet that the onimdcrs kept thcm::;clvcs busy fill· more th an 48 hours with singi ng, dancing, and praying without sleeping, eating, or drinking in order to cast the demons out and b) (probably as a con sequen ce) the ap pearance of all sorts of hallucinations (some of them with an undeniably sexual character). 23. A str i k i ng traitofmany rcli-murdcrs is that,just as in the case ofthc crime passionnel (cf. Philips 1938), there is a close connection between the killers and the killed. Often it concerns close relatives or, if not, people who belong to close knit groups in which th e usc of a kinship idiom is common. This is an intriguing phenomenon that begs lor further research. 24. A case which closely resembl es the one dealt with is that of father and son Alexander. They were Germans who went to the Canary Islands and in 1970 killed three members of their fa mily in a really gruesome way because they thought them to be instruments of the Devil. Father Alexander, a member of an extreme religious society fo und ed in the 19th century by a certain Jacob Lorber, called his son immediately after he was born a prophet of the Lord whom one had to obey in each and every respect. When the adolescent boy wanted to have sex with his mother and older sister this was therefore permitted.As his younger twin sisters talked about this with others the police developed an interest in the family, reason why father Alexander decided to emigrate to Santa Cruz on Tenerife, where he and his family lived in retirement. On 22 December 1970 fa ther and son Alexander decided, that Mrs Alexander and her two daughters whom they perceived as 'unclean' had to be killed for the sake of a purifi cation deemed necessary by both. And so hap pened. As Frank murdered his mother and two sisters and awfully maimed their bodies, his father was playing the organ and singing hymns.
Especially the breasts and private parts of the victims were the direct objects of his bloody attacks. After their arrest the evildoers kept saying that they had indulged in 'a purification act' at a sacred moment in time (cf. Wilson 1988:396 ff.;Nash 1992:14/15).An equally maca bre case about which I could not find much material occurred at the end of the eighties in Amsterdam. A man murdered his pregnant w i ((), took the baby out of her belly and killed it because he fancied that it was possessed by the Devil (cf. Paruul d.d. 21April 1990). Compare the case of the American Sanders, the leader of a sect, who together with a few disciples murdered a policeman in whom he had recognized the De vi I i n person (Wilson & Seaman 1989:294/95). 2!i. I th ink that the theory Bataille developed on the track ofHubcrt and Mauss with regard to trans gressive acts as sacrifices could also prov ide some clarification here. For according to him these acts can be seen as offerings that serve to lead the sacrificcrs out ofthis world ofthc ration al, the homogeneous, and the discontinuous into a completely different world where the earthly discontinuity does not exist and one enjoys abso lute sovereignty and in a sense equals God . 26. Gcr Ve rrips (1990:24) suggests that the rcl i murder in Weverwijk, which I consider to be a clear example of a 'Devil's murder,' might be inspired by the biblical story about Abraham's sacrifice. This is unacceptable, for no data sup port it. 27. If one interprets the story ofAbraham's sacrifice as one about the relation between God and be lievers independently of sex and gender, the identification becomes less striking. 28. Remarkable in the media reports is that killing one's own children and then committing suicide is often attributed to relational problems with a partner. I do not think that this is always an incorrect diagnosis, but it can easily divert atten tion fr om other possible causes, for example, the pathological elaboration of particular religious beliefs. 29. When Schubart describes and analyses religious sadism, that is, a cruel desire to devour, he does not deal with cases ofreli-murder, although this would have been to the point. He talks instead about slaughtering humans who are perceived as embodiments of God and killing God himself, a kind of sacred sex killing, which is committed mainly by 'wild' people, i.e., women! 30. See for an exceptional case of self-crucifixion Ideler (1851:202 ff. members of a peasant family who became mes merized by the assertion of a stranger that the Devil had returned to earth in the shape of their servant, and decided to crucify the poor man. This story, which is probably based on theAppel tern affair, is remarkable because it contains the ingredients of different types of reli-murders.
3!i. Illustrative exa mples of people who at a pa rticu lar moment. thought they were pmu;co;sed by Uw Devil, while they evident ly flt r-ug�lcd with sexu al problems, arc those of Ach ille, a patient of , Janet (1990), and !<' rank, a client of Tcjir-ian ( 1990). 'l'hc fi n;t sufler-cd fro m r-e morse fiw adul te ry and the second feared his ow n homosexual inclinations.
36. If this view is correct, then it means that. in murder cases characterized by :1 hi�h degree of mutilation one h:u; to think fi rst of a perpetrator with a Protestant background and not a Homan Catholic one.
37. I know that my inter-pretation of the MUller case docs not rc::;t on a finn empirical basi;;. But there is often not much material available for such cases. And, if it exists, it is rather unaccessible.
I would have liked , fen· instance, to know more about the religious background offather Alexan der before he became a member of the Lorber Society. On the basis ofthc kind of muti lati ons of the bodies of his wife and two children I would dare to state th at he probably was not raised as a Roman Catholic.