Written By: Fabrizio Beverina
I once spoke with a forensic psychiatrist who had interviewed some of the most infamous serial killers in modern history. One day, after meeting a murderer whose name everyone knows, she told me something that shook my scientific certainty.
“When I looked into his eyes,” she said, “they weren’t human. He was a devil.”
She was not a woman prone to superstition. Her job was to classify pathologies, prescribe medications, keep everything within the walls of science. But after decades in the darkest corners of the human psyche, she confessed a doubt: perhaps what medicine calls illness sometimes wears another mask.
“We give them drugs to quiet them down,” she told me, “but maybe what they really need is an exorcism. Science has no tools for this, because it ignores the spiritual part of reality.”
That conversation never left me. It made me wonder if the oldest human fear, possession, the invasion of the soul, might still demand the oldest response.
And when, years later, I picked up M. Scott Peck’s Glimpses of the Devil, I felt as though I were reading the continuation of her confession. Peck, himself a psychiatrist, came to the same unsettling conclusion after decades of practice: sometimes what looks like illness is something else. He wrote of patients whose voices changed, whose knowledge exceeded their own, whose bodies convulsed under an alien will. For him, too, the word “devil” was not a metaphor. It was the only name he could find for the foreign presence that had entered his patients.
What struck me most was how close his language was to that of the shamans I had met in the Amazon. Different traditions, different rituals, yet describing the same phenomenon.
A Universal Practice
Exorcism is not the invention of a single culture. It is one of humanity’s universal responses to the inexplicable.
The Gospels describe Jesus casting out demons. Catholic priests still perform the rite today, sometimes against all rational dismissal. In Africa, spirit possession is treated with drumming, trance, and sacrifice.
Taoist medicine, rooted in China’s oldest cosmologies, speaks of 三魂七魄—three souls and seven spirits within each person. If grief or trauma weakens a person’s vital defenses, one of these souls can be displaced and replaced by an alien presence. The signs are hauntingly familiar: voices that do not belong to the sufferer, compulsions toward self-destruction, sudden changes of personality that defy ordinary explanation.
Even beyond these traditions, echoes abound. Among the Inuit, shamans speak of tupilak, vengeful spirits sent by sorcery. In India, possession is linked to wandering bhutas, spirits of the restless dead. Ancient Greece knew of daimones, forces that could inspire or corrupt. Everywhere, in every age, humans have recognized the same truth: that we are not sealed containers. We are porous. And sometimes, what leaks in is not benevolent.
The Amazonian Battlefield
In the Amazon, exorcism is not superstition, it is the heart of healing. Illness is rarely seen as something that comes only from within. More often, it is intrusion: a wandering spirit, a parasite of energy, or a sorcerer’s dart lodged invisibly in the body. Shamans confront these forces not with theories but with weapons made of sound, smoke, and breath.
Thick spirals of mapacho rise like protective serpents. The chacapa rattles, its leaves cracking like thunder, scattering shadows into the night. Agua florida flashes sharp and sweet through the air, breaking the heaviness like lightning. And always, the icaros—healing songs—move like nets of light, cast into the invisible, weaving a new order around the patient.
To the outsider, what unfolds looks like a battle. The guest trembles, moans, vomits black rivers as though expelling the spirit itself. The shaman leans close, chanting into the ear, sucking sickness into their own body, then spitting it out with a tearing heave.
Sometimes it ends quickly, the spirit gone, the patient freed. Other times, the fight is harder. I have heard cats scream and dogs howl in the night at the very moment a presence was expelled, as though the fleeing entity leapt into the nearest living body. Once, after Maestra Alicia sang a particularly powerful icaro, several of us doubled over with cramps and dry heaves. Later she explained: “When a spirit is driven out, it looks for the nearest host. You were rejecting it.”
Stories from the Maloka
There is an old Amazonian saying: “A beautiful woman is like honey to the bees: sweetness attracts both nectar drinkers and stingers.” I remember a young woman who could not see visions, no matter how much she drank. Maestra Alicia looked into her and saw the reason: the spirit of a fetus lodged in her womb, placed there by a brujo. It was feeding on her light. “If this stays,” Alicia said, “it can grow into sickness, even a tumor.”
She treated her daily with plants and tobacco. At first Alicia herself vomited violently, drawing the intruder into her body and purging it. Each day the purging lessened, until at last nothing more came. That night, for the first time, the woman’s visions opened again.
Another case and another woman: a Canadian lady, once radiant from kambo and bufo, now gray and joyless, with a cyst in her womb. Ayahuasca revealed her attacker: a man she had never met, who envied her brightness during a ritual. Maestra Alicia called on the spirit of the anaconda. In visions, the serpent coiled around her, devouring entities one by one. She screamed, vomited, and finally burst into laughter like water released from a dam. “Finally, I am free again,” she cried. That night, we all rejoiced with her.
And the succubus: a woman tormented nightly by a presence that pressed on her, made love to her, and left her drained by dawn. An ancient story returned in the jungle, the succubus, painted by Fuseli in The Nightmare. During the ceremony, Maestra Alicia saw it clearly, and with smoke, song, and the sharp snap of the chacapa, cut it away.
Then the Indian man: haunted for six months after a retreat abroad, unable to sleep without lights. In our maloka, shadows swarmed him when he sang his hymns. By the second night, the air was thick with battle. Maestra Alicia sucked and spat, vomiting out black forms, sweeping with her chacapa like a broom. Again and again they returned, until a cat’s scream tore the night. At dawn, the man slept peacefully for the first time in half a year.
The Ecology of Spirits
What are these forces? One way to understand them is to see them as parasites like viruses or worms. A biologist once told me: worms on the skin eat the rotten flesh, preventing infection of the healthy tissue. Spirits, too, often arrive where there is something putrid to consume: anger, envy, greed, despair. They feed on what is festering, transforming it into something else, as worms transform waste into soil.
It is not so different from our physical immune system. You can walk into a hospital filled with viruses and bacteria, yet if your immunity is strong, nothing touches you. The same is true in the spiritual world. We are always surrounded by presences—some nourishing, some predatory—but whether they harm us depends on our inner defenses. If your “spiritual immunity” is weak, if your life is permeated by resentment, jealousy, or despair, you become a host. If it is strong, the spirits pass you by, unable to find an opening.
Indigenous cosmologies in the Amazon describe this in a different but complementary way. For them, the universe is not linear but circular. Time is not an arrow; it is a wheel. Everything that exists is bound in cycles of feeding and being fed upon, of life turning into death and death into life. The jaguar eats the peccary, the worms eat the jaguar, the soil eats the worms, and from that soil grows the plant that will one day feed another peccary.
Spiritual life is seen the same way. Entities are not aberrations, but part of this great wheel. They feed on what leaks from us—our unprocessed emotions, our heavy energies—just as carrion birds feed on corpses. In turn, they are also consumed, transformed, recycled into new forms of energy. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is final. In this circle of total balance, everything exists in relation to everything else, across both time and space.
This vision goes far beyond the Christian idea of good versus evil, of God’s angels on one side and the devil’s demons on the other. In the jungle, there is no eternal war between light and dark. There is only balance and imbalance, health and decay. Spirits are not to be hated or glorified—they are part of the ecosystem. There is nothing to fight in absolute terms, only to clean, to strengthen, to keep in harmony.
Just as one washes the body or brushes the teeth daily to prevent rot, one must also wash the spirit. Tobacco smoke, mucura, baths with plants, and the constant work of tending to one’s energy are ways of maintaining that inner hygiene.
In this sense, healing is less about defeating an enemy and more about keeping one’s spiritual house in order—swept, aired, luminous. When we do this, the parasites have no place to settle, and the circle of life continues unbroken.
Protection and Immunity
In the jungle, protection is not an accessory—it is survival. Tobacco smoke spirals like serpents, sealing cracks in the spiritual body. Mucura, sharp and pungent, creates a shield of armor. Songs call upon thorny palms, owls, jaguars, and hawks—the allies who slice through sorcery. Shamans speak of building invisible fortresses around their malokas, “a thousand feet high and a thousand below the earth,” as Don Roberto once told. Without such walls, everything is exposed.
But protection is not only for shamans. Every human being has a spiritual immune system. Just as a healthy person can walk through a hospital without catching every germ, so a strong, balanced spirit can move through dense environments without being invaded. When that system is weakened—through trauma, exhaustion, or neglect—it opens holes where intruders can slip in.
A man once told me that, as a child, he played in abandoned houses where satanic rituals had been performed. Soon after, nightmares consumed him, draining his energy. The rituals had left residues, charged spaces that preyed on his young fragility.
Such cases aren’t rare. Entities linger where energies are disturbed: séances without protection, improvised ceremonies, homes steeped in grief or violence, even circles of envy and malice. Like mold in damp corners, they thrive where the spirit is unguarded.
So protection begins with daily hygiene. Just as you brush your teeth or wash your hands, you can tend your luminous body. Meditation, prayer, and dietas keep energy clean and circulating. Visualization, as for example imagining golden light or armor wrapping the body, strengthens the field. And perhaps most important: choose your environments carefully. If a place feels heavy, chaotic, or parasitic, trust that sensation.
As the elders say: “Where shadows gather, they are already feeding.”
Back to Science
And yet, after all these nights in the maloca, I return to the words of that forensic psychiatrist. Her training told her “these are metaphors.” My training as a biomedical engineer tells me the same. Parasites, projections, psychodrama. The rational mind insists on categories.
But when you are in the ceremony, the categories dissolve. You see black forms leaving a body; you hear the cat scream at the exact moment the spirit departs; you watch someone tormented for months finally sleep in peace. These are not metaphors when you witness them. They are events.
Perhaps science, too, will one day describe them—not as angels and demons, not as hallucinations, but as part of a wider ecology of mind and matter. Just as microbes were once invisible, ridiculed until the microscope revealed them, maybe these “spiritual parasites” await the right instrument, the right theory, to be measured.
Until then, the maloca remains the laboratory. Shamans are the practitioners. And the data are the healed lives, the scars erased, the light returning to faces once dim. Science may not yet have language for it, but reality does not wait for our theories. What happens here is not superstition, not symbol, but something fierce, purgative, and real. Something that heals.