I just finished re-reading William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist. The story by now is familiar to nearly everyone interested in horror fiction. Young Regan McNeil is possessed by the spirit of demon and her fiercely atheist mother Chris McNeil after exhausting everything the worlds of science and medicine have to offer calls upon a Jesuit priest suffering a crisis of faith Father Karras and an aged but experienced exorcist Father Merrin to save her daughter.

Published in 1971 The Exorcist displays some interesting hallmarks of that period in its construction. Now, I am not referring to disco music or leisure suits but rather the way extra-sensory perceptions and abilities had been absorbed into the public consciousness.

What started in science-fiction print media and had grown throughout the 50s and 60s, telepathy, prescience, and telekinesis became accepted wisdom, along with pyramid power and ancient astronauts.

What does this have to do with a novel about the demon Pazuzu possessing the body of 12-year old Regan McNeil?

Before Karras can appeal to his Bishop for permission to perform the ritual of exorcism he must first eliminate the possibility that the phenomena associated with Regan are natural and explainable by the science at the time. This includes the shaking of her bed, objects flying about her room, and Regan possessing knowledge of events and languages unknown to her.

As Karras grapples with the enormity of the possibility of an actual possession his faith, already shaken, is undermined by the explanation that all the strange events may be caused by telepathy and telekinesis. This is not a by-product of Karras being a person who is weak in his scientific knowledge or understanding, he is a trained and respected psychiatrist. The novel, though published in the early 70s, is so infused with the popular wisdom at the time, that this priest of science considers telekinesis are rational and scientific justification for observed events.

I was a teenager in the late 70s and re-reading the novel for the first time in many decades it is a strange deja vu sensation to be brought back to that unique period in American Culture.