I bought this book about a week ago and due to my increasingly unhinged cynicism concerning aspects of the work upon which I am engaged, as well as a laughable lack of free time, I have only just finished the introduction. Boy, I have no idea what I’m in for. (I refuse to read synopses of books I suspect I may enjoy, and thus cannot avoid ignorance concerning what I’m getting “into” as I say.)

I feel this way because the introduction centers on a modern-day exorcism which takes place in a village somewhere in rural Iran. The narrator has undertaken to study so-called mystical and esoteric phenomena taking place in this area as an academic pursuit, it seems, and I couldn’t help but become emotionally wrought up by the circumstances of this empirical pretext. The exorcism, I mean. There are all sorts of characters in this part of the story whose motives I cannot discern and whose attitudes and behavior leave not many clues as to their rational state in the context of the trajectory of the book.

“Does this guy like, believe in exorcisms or what?” Sort of thing.

See, I was raised Roman Catholic, and I’ve been party to so-called exorcisms as a result of my fanatical devotion to shaking the proverbial gift-box of superstition until the thing inside breaks. I wouldn’t say that my personal experience with exorcisms left me traumatized, so to speak, but I do believe that the already fertile ground of skepticism out of which would grow my adult feelings for Holy Mother Church, was tilled over by such events.

I am an affirmed esotericist myself; well that’s the safe word for what I believe myself to be at any rate. But there is profound misconception that surrounds the concept, it’s operative language, and the people in whom the mystical drive exists, so I can’t help but be furiously curious about this book and its ostensible ambitions to delve into such things with an academic shovel. I harbor no wish for the author to affirm my preexisting notions, but I do wonder what he/she will be doing in the following chapters.

Stay Tuned…