The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel [Hardcover]

Felicitas D. Goodman (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 255 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385157894
• ISBN-13: 978-0385157896
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,625,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Felicitas D. Goodman, Ph. D.
Academic background
Felicitas Maria Johanna Daniels was born of ethnic German parents in Budapest, Hungary, on January 30, 1914. She was the elder of two children. In her youth, she was educated by the Roman Catholic order of Ursuline nuns, though her family was Lutheran. As a young woman, she attended the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and in 1936 earned her degree as an interpreter. It was here that she met her future husband, Glenn H. Goodman, an American from Ohio.

In 1947, Felicitas, Glenn, and their first three children immigrated to Columbus, Ohio, where Glenn became a professor of German at Ohio State University. Her fourth child was born a few years later. During this period, Felicitas taught German and English and worked as a translator of scientific articles.

In 1965, when she was 51 and her children were grown, she returned to graduate school completing a master's degree at The Ohio State University in linguistics in 1968 and a doctorate in cultural anthropology in 1971. From 1968 until her forced retirement in 1979, at age 65, she taught linguistics, cultural anthropology and comparative religions at Denison University, Granville, Ohio.

Contributions to anthropology
Felicitas Goodman made two major contributions to the field of anthropology: one concerned "glossolalia" or "speaking in tongues;" the other concerned religious ecstatic trance.

As she plunged into her graduate anthropological studies, Felicitas noted frequent discussion of an odd kind of speech people spoke while they were "possessed." As a linguist, this intrigued her. Ethnographers called it "unintelligible speech" or "unintelligible gibberish." This speech reminded her of Bible stories about the "unknown tongues" spoken by the Apostles at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-13). For a seminar in anthropological linguistics conducted by Erika Bourguignon at Ohio State, Felicitas chose "glossolalia" as the topic of her paper. Dr. Bourguignon supplied her with sound tapes of such speech from Pentecostal denominations in Ohio, Texas, and the Caribbean. On the basis of this research she developed a working hypothesis that the striking accent and intonation patterns of such speech, as well as certain phonetic features were NOT a different kind of natural language, which was the "received view" on her field. These features expressed bodily changes that a person underwent during trance, accompanying or possibly even facilitating the religious experience. (1969. "Phonetic Analysis of Glossolalia in Four Cultural Settings." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 8: 227-239.)

To test her hypothesis further and explore its possible cross-cultural significance, she conducted fieldwork with Spanish-speaking Pentecostals in Mexico City in 1968. This experience validated her hypothesis: the syllables uttered during speaking in tongues were different, but the accent and intonation pattern, as well as certain phonetic features, were the same. They seemed biologically fixed.

But would these insights hold for non Indo-European languages? She conducted further field-work among Maya (Pentecostal) speakers in Yucatan which confirmed her hypothesis. Her study remains the definitive word on this phenomenon to this day. (1972. Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-cultural Study of Glossolalia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2001. Maya Apocalypse: Seventeen Years with the Women of a Yucatan Village. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Glossolalia is simply patterned vocalization without content which can even be imitated upon a single hearing.

Religious ecstatic trance: Dr. Goodman's research, publications, and on-going experience in this field are her major contribution to anthropology. In her book, Where the Spirits Ride the Wind, (1990, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), she notes how trance experience was a normal part of her life until the age of puberty when she was advised to leave behind the experiences of childhood. Happily, Felicitas did not do that. The interest remained with her throughout her life. Felicitas recognized two dimensions to reality: consensual and alternate. Consensual reality is the arena of common, ordinary, human experience. Alternate reality is parallel to consensual reality. It is the abode of the spirits, the ancestors. This, of course, is how Felicitas understood and interpreted reality in the contemporary western world. It was very different in antiquity. Until the time of Origen (circa 253 AD), the notion of "supernatural" simply didn't exist. Reality was one: spirits, gods, ancestors, and humans lived in one world. This is why biblical and other ancient reports speak of humans communing with spirits, deities, or ancestors on a regular basis. This is a concept and understanding to which westerners can return, if they choose. Felicitas was unaware of this concept. Despite her excellent qualifications as a scientist, she sometimes lapsed into ethnocentrism and anachronism, ever threatening pitfalls for anthropologists.

Felicitas' views of Christianity and antiquity were shaped by the Ursuline nuns, her primary grade teachers in Budapest. She was ever grateful to them for offering young girls the opportunity for quality education. Nevertheless, these "Catholic Christian" views are and for a long time have been antiquated and discredited. Felicitas' comments on "hell" as a notion that derived from agricultural religions such as Christianity are not based on good evidence. There is no word in Hebrew or Greek that can be translated "hell." The word never appears in the Bible nor should it in an honest translation. The notion derives from a much later period.

Nevertheless, Felicitas believed that the spirit world (the abode of the deity and the deity's entourage) could be accessed by humans, and this chiefly in an alternate state of consciousness (ASC). With her students at Denison University, she developed a ritual to enter the ASC and make contact with the spirit world. Ritual is essential to this contact.

The Cuyamugue Institute in Santa Fe, NM
It was first in 1960 that Felicitas went with friends from Ohio State University to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She fell in love with it and the ambient Native American culture almost immediately. Began to search for small property in the area, and in 1963 her realtor found 300 acres for her (more than she wanted) in the area known as Cuyamungue, the name of an ancient pueblo in the area. In 1965, accompanied by friends and relatives, she discovered a place to erect a building on her property, and thus the Institute had its beginning.

Because she continued to live in Columbus, OH, she divided her time between there and Cuyamungue. In 1978, Dr. Goodman founded the Institute which today is known as Cuyamungue: The Felicitas D. Goodman Institute which continues her research into altered states of consciousness and holds workshops about the postures which she admits are but one door to alternate reality.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars interesting but could have been better, July 3, 2006

By 

Ryan Ahlgrim (Indianapolis) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel (Paperback)

The recent movie, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," made me curious about the original case, so I purchased this book. The author, a religious anthropologist with some psychiatric background, would appear to have good credentials for analyzing this case of possession/exorcism, but the author's bio at the end of the book makes one wonder if she may not be on the flakey side. For instance, the bio mentions that she grew up and attended school in Transylvania and immigrated to the U.S., after which "she was made aware of the infestation by vampires of her home province." Is this meant to be serious or a bit of dry humor? The background provided on Anneliese Michel contains surprising ommissions. For instance, we're told that she had an older sister who died, but we're not told how old Anneliese was when this happened. Surely this is an important part of her psychological history. The book's description of Anneliese's seven-year history of convulsions, medications, depression, odd behaior, etc. is sometimes maddeningly unclear. Paragraphs often contain quotes and conversations from multiple people, making it hard to determine who is saying what. And because the author does not footnote her sources, one cannot determine where some of the information and perspectives are coming from. The section detailing the several-month attempted exorcism is interesting and tedious at the same time. The subsequent report of the trial for negligent homicide rarely quotes from trial transcripts but instead relies primarily on psychiatric reports provided to the court and the memory of one of the accused. Finally, at the very end of the book, the author presents her own counter-perspective as to what was actually going on with Anneliese and why the exorcism failed and the young woman ultimately died. This is the most intriquing and rewarding part of the book, and it changed my own opinion, but even here the author fails to give us as much anthropological analysis and scientific research as the reader would want. For instance, if Anneliese was experiencing a relatively common "religious altered state of consciousness," why aren't there many more cases such as hers in the Western world? The author's claim that an anti-convulsant drug was responsible for Anneliese's failed exorcism and death, while an interesting hypothesis, lacks sufficient research. The epilogue, uncharacteristic of the rest of the book, raises a frightening but overly vague prospect. A final complaint: $28 (the Amazon price) is unreasonably high for a 250 page paperback.

73 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very similar to the movie, November 13, 2005

By 

Victoria Shephard "Newbirth" (San Francisco Bay Area, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel (Hardcover)

Ms. Goodman uses court records and eyewitness interviews to put together the facts surrounding this case. She takes the view that possession is real, and common to many cultures.

But in the last couple of chapters where she looks at things from a clinical perspective, we find that she does not believe in possession as literally true, but as an altered state of conciousness, and that Anneliese, as a hypersensitive person, needed help to switch from the altered state back to "normal" reality. Rituals are the means of accomplishing this, and in her culture, exorcism was the means chosen.

Ms. Goodman also speculates that since Anneliese was not epileptic (in her opinion), the medication given to her to control her seizures only made her condition worse, increasing her frightening visions.

The book fleshes out many of the things the movie left obscure. It's a good read and I highly recommend reading it. I see it's been republished and is available again on Amazon. Buy it!

And rent the video if you haven't seen the movie. It's great.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting and thought provoking., April 20, 2007

By 

Daniel A. Biddlecom (Savannah, GA. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel (Paperback)

I initially started searching for this book after seeing the movie THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (which got it's inspiration from this book and real life event). This book is amazing and just like the movie it does present both sides of the story (religious and scientific) with a little more emphasis on the religious side.

I just finished reading the book tonight and I wanted to write a review to let other readers know that if they are interested in finding out more about Anneliese Michel and her amazing experience you have to read this book. It give you a more indepth look at her life and the specific events that happened to her before, during and after the exorcism. I must say that before I even cracked the cover of the book I was convinced that Anneliese was possessed by demons. And the first half of the book reinforced my beliefs. But in the middle I found one occurance of the author (Felicitas D. Goodman) contradicting herself in a very crucial way that made me think... maybe Anneliese wasn't possessed? And from that point on I was getting a little skeptical.

The book provides VERY strong evidence that she was possessed by demons, but also strong evidence that she was (for the lack of better words) crazy. This is one book that you will have to pick up for yourself and read if you are even remotely interested in the life of this girl. And for those of you who have seen the movie you will see the similarities between the book and the movie and where the movie draws directly from the actual events in the book.

This book is a little hard to follow in the beginning because it jumps back and forth in the timeline of her life but don't let that discourage you... it IS an excellent read and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in demonic possession or a fan of the movie.