Introduction

The book affording to us inhabitants of the European zone of culture our earliest glimpse of the states called “possession” ¹ is the New Testament. Bible stories often give, in fact, an accurate picture of these states, which were extremely frequent in the latter days of the ancient world. To the authors of the New Testament they were evidently very familiar, and their accounts, even should they be recognized as of little or no historical value, bear in themselves the stamp of truth. They are pictures of typical states exactly reproduced. ²