ABSTRACT
Aldous Huxley considered demonic possession in a book that owed something to Freud but which also returned to the seventeenth century, finding it just as resonant with contemporary experience as Freud had, but also revelatory of the sort of religious possibilities which Freud had disallowed. The Devils of Loudon is a wonderfully unclassifiable book, with elements of the novel, history, psychobiography, spiritual and theological testimony, literary and cultural criticism, which inspired the Krzysztof Penderecki opera of the same name, as well as Ken Russell’s film and John Whiting’s play The Devils.
