The unholy demon Pazuzu is trying to kill my substack
You know him from 'The Exorcist.' My connection with the demon is much deeper.
Welcome, new readers!
Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.
Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.
Précis
The ancient Mesopotamian demonic deity Pazuzu1, known to many for its starring role in the 1973 movie The Exorcist, having since taken the form of a disease caused by a pathogenic parasitic protozoan, has tormented me and my family for 42 years. But we, like the Jesuit Fathers Lankester Merrin and and Damien Karras of Exorcist fame, have not cowered when confronted by this evil thing and we have never accepted its dominion.
Nothing pisses off an ancient Mesopotamian demon, of course, more than people refusing to accept its dominion. Moreover Pazuzu has recently grown even more powerful and scary than it already was, having found powerful allies in the sick MAGA cult that now rules the United States of America.
Newly emboldened, Pazuzu continues to torment me —going so far as to attempt to sabotage this very Sundman figures it out! substack, which it takes as an affront.
This post recapitulates some of this history and recounts the most recent skirmish in the Sundman vs Pazuzu war.
Background
In my essay Toxoplasmosis, my Pazuzu, part one, I wrote about how my then 40 year old son Jakob’s adverse sequelae — which is to say, bad things that show up at unpredictable intervals years later — of his condition of congenital toxoplasmosis, are, to me, as the demon Pazuzu in the exorcist movies is to Father Merrin.
Wikipedia:
Sequela2
A sequela is a pathological condition resulting from a disease, injury, therapy, or other trauma. Derived from the Latin word meaning "sequel", it is used in the medical field to mean a complication or condition following a prior illness or disease. A typical sequela is a chronic complication of an acute condition—in other words, a long-term effect of a temporary disease or injury—which follows immediately from the condition.
Like Pazuzu, these adverse sequelae of congenital toxoplasmosis appear at random places and times to pitilessly torment innocent souls, including my son. But also, by proxy, me.
The occasion of Toxoplasmosis, my Pauzu, part one was Jakob’s being intubated and then taken by helicopter from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital to Brigham & Women’s hospital in Boston, to which I followed in my car, by 45 minute ferry ride and two hour drive, arriving around 1 AM, and, after conferring with the medical team at The Brigham, spending the few remaining hours of that night sleeping in my car in a hospital carpark.
Nota bene: permission
I again apologize to Jake for appearing, in these posts, to reduce his person to his disabilities and medical challenges. He is just as complete a person as you are, dear reader. So I wish to state again for the record that Jakob is cool with my writing about this stuff. He does not mind me writing about what we might call Jakob’s Big Toxo Adventure because he’s in favor of increasing awareness of the challenges faced by people with disabilities, and their families; and of toxoplasmosis in particular: the disease itself; ways to reduce chances of getting it; and efforts to eradicate it.
I continued the tale of Jakob & our family’s experiences with toxo — from before his birth until the present — in my post Toxoplasmosis, my Pazuzu. Part two:
I include links to Toxoplasmosis my Pazuzu, parts one and two, for completeness’s sake, but you can follow this post without reading those earlier essays.
A toxo lifecycle refresher
To understand why Pazuzu has become obsessed with this substack, it will be helpful to be at least somewhat familiar with the toxoplasmosis lifecycle. Particularly notice the role of cats in this disease’s transmission, and the many forms taken by the microorganism in it hideous life.
Why the demon hates Sundman figures it out!
Like all diseases, toxoplasmosis hates science. Like all infectious diseases, toxo harbors a particular loathing for the concept of vaccination and lives in terror of a toxoplasmosis vaccine. That is why this disease, congenital toxoplasmosis — along with fellow pestilences numbering in the hundreds and including Covid, influenza, measles, cholera, smallpox and plague — is so in love with MAGA and Trump. These diseases rejoice in this administration’s war on science, truth, and free inquiry; they celebrate the antivax, anti-science zealot Robert Kennedy, our new Lysenko.
Lately I’ve been writing essays here that are explicitly pro science, pro vaccine, and anti MAGA/Trump/Kennedy; my position is anti ignorance, anti cultish thinking, and anti stupidity in general. Pazuzu hates me for this.
Now, you might be skeptical that an abstract entity such as the abiding spirit of a congenital disease would take note of some poor schlub’s substack with its very modest following; that it would bother to try to kill it. But if you’ll read this essay to its conclusion and consider the evidence that I lay out I think you may change your mind.
On the challenges of developing a vaccine for toxoplasmosis
Since the gut of the cat is toxo’s essential host, the only place where the toxoplasma gondii parasite sexually reproduces, and since cats only acquire the infection when they’re out of doors, it follows that if there were no cats who ventured out of doors, then once the current generation of infected cats died out there would be no more toxoplasmosis. That is to say, to rid the world of the scourge of toxoplasmosis, all we have to do it get rid of all the cats.
Not even all the cats. Just the ones that go outside.
But as Jonathan Franzen explained in his long essay in the December 25, 2023 issue of The New Yorker magazine, How the ‘no kill’ movement betrays its name, even if all people who have pet cats kept them inside, always, toxo would still be rampant, because feral cats pose a problem that has no solution. Therefore the the only route to eradication of toxoplasmosis is through a vaccine, whether it be one for cats or one for humans.
Consider again the complex lifecycle of this parasite:
With this in mind, you can appreciate the issues discussed in the October, 2022 survey article in npj | vaccines, entitled Toxoplasmosis vaccines: what we have and where to go?, the abstract of which I share here:
Despite recent major advances in developing effective vaccines against toxoplasmosis, finding new protective vaccination strategies remains a challenging and elusive goal as it is critical to prevent the disease. Over the past few years, various experimental approaches have shown that developing an effective vaccine against T. gondii is achievable. However, more remains unknown due to its complicated life cycle, difficulties in clinical translation, and lack of a standardized platform. This minireview summarizes the recent advances in the development of T. gondii vaccines and the main obstacles to developing a safe, effective and durable T. gondii vaccine. The successes and failures in developing and testing vaccine candidates for the T. gondii vaccine are also discussed, which may facilitate the future development of T. gondii vaccines.
In Sundman figures it out! I write a lot about the importance of science, and of vaccinology in particular. In fact my most recent essay, Oligarchs triumphant and biopunks rave as Lysenko returns from the grave, begins with a celebration of the work of Dr. Gregory Poland, Chair of the World Vaccine Congress.
Recall that in the original Exorcist movie (“The Exorcist”), the demon Pazuzu cruelly takes possession of the body of thirteen year old Regan MacNeil, an innocent, merely as a way to settle a score with Fr. Merrin and to torment Fr. Karras with guilt about his mother’s last days and questions about his own belief in Catholic doctrine. Which, to me, seems extremely petty on the part of that demon.
So I ask you: If you were an ancient Mesopotamian demonic deity who had taken the form of adverse sequelae of a parasitic disease for which an effective vaccine was theoretically possible but very difficult, in practice, to produce, would it really be beneath you to try to prevent the publication of pro-vaccine substack essays by a schlub like me?
I think not.
Schizophrenia, toxoplasmosis, and the reality of demonic possession
When E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist and medical researcher, first proposed — in the early 1970’s, around the time that The Exorcist was being made — that infection by toxoplasma gondii might be a cause of schizophrenia, he was widely dismissed as a crank.
Some people still consider him a crank, but these days his toxo-schizo hypothesis is taken a lot more seriously. See, for example, Relationship between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia: A review, in the September, 2017 edition of Advances in Clinical and Experimental Medicine, whose abstract I condense here:
A growing body of evidence suggests a correlation between schizophrenia and exposure to infectious agents. The majority of studied cases concerns the infection caused by T. gondii, an intracellular parasite that infects about 1/3 of the entire human population, according to the available data. [. . .] [C]hronic toxoplasmosis, might be responsible, in light of current scientific evidence, for a vast array of neuropsychiatric symptoms. Numerous epidemiological case-control studies show a higher prevalence of T. gondii infestation in individuals with various psychiatric and behavior disorders, including schizophrenia. [. . .] Toxoplasmosis is one of the putative infectious agents that derange correct brain growth and differentiation[. . .] All of them may lead eventually to schizophrenia. A better knowledge of infection mechanisms and its influence on neurobiochemical and neuropathological pathways may enable more efficient therapy and the prevention of this devastating disease.
I don’t know whether congenital toxoplasmosis causes schizophrenia, although I have a strong hunch that it does. All I know for sure is that sometime in 1996, when my son Jake was just about the age that Regan MacNeil was when she became possessed by Pazuzu, he presented every single symptom of early-onset schizophrenia, viz: positive symptoms that can include hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized speech; and negative symptoms, such as blunted affect and avolition and apathy; and a number of cognitive impairments.
During this truly awful, scary, horrible period in Jake’s life and in the lives of his parents and sisters (which lasted a few years, after which, by a miracle of God and modern medicine, virtually all of the symptoms gradually dissipated), Jakob was convinced that he was possessed by a demon.
That demon’s name, (which was not Pazuzu), I have, thank Christ, since forgotten. And I have destroyed the diary that Jakob kept in those years, in which he recorded the demon’s instructions. Because to me that document was more terrifying than Regan MacNeil’s spinning head. Reading it was like looking right at Satan, and having him look right through me. I don’t even believe in Satan, but I’ve seen him.
Now, you may say that Jakob’s demon was not ‘real,’ that it was a delusion or hallucination or whatever the fuck you want to call it, it was ‘just his imagination,’ but I assure you that to Jakob, at that time, it was 100% real, as real as you are right now, reading these words, and furthermore I, John, know how it feels to be a helpless father staring down at his son who is writhing on the floor wrestling a demon that only the son can see. It is the worst feeling I have ever felt.
So now perhaps you understand that when I talk about toxoplasmosis as ‘my Pazuzu’ I am joking but I am not joking.
La lutte continue — the struggle goes on
Here’s what I published last week, May 23, in the form of a series of short posts on the blue sky microblogging site, which I’ve lightly edited:
I put more work into my most recent essay on synthetic biology and the fate of the world than might be apparent. Then yesterday evening, as I was about to take a hatchet to my draft to get it below Substack's 'too long for email' limit, the demon Pazuzzu once again made himself known.
My son Jake called me from the hospital, sounding lucid, saying he'd been taken by ambulance after a neighbor heard the commotion when he seized up. I changed out of the PJs I'd been working in all day and headed to the hospital. A truly magnificent storm was still raging. Five corners was flooded two feet deep.
As far as I could tell Jake had been med-compliant, and when he’s med-compliant his seizures are rare, so the seizure was a bit disturbing. But it resolved, they gave him meds in the ER & near midnight I drove him to his apartment. So much for editing my substack essay that night.
So I got up early this morning intending to finish editing that essay — which I really hope you're read; it’s about synthetic biology & the fate of humanity — when I got a call from Jake's long-distance girlfriend. "Jake always answers my calls but he's not answering. Can you go check on him please?" Jake’s apartment is 1/4 mile from the falling down house where Betty and I live.
I got in my car, still wearing PJs, without my phone, and drove to Jake's place. I found him sitting on his bedroom floor, naked, bloody, bruised all over.
I said, “Jakob, can I ask you why you're sitting naked on the floor? “
“I'm not," he said groggily.
“Where are you?”
"In my bed."
“What are you wearing?”
“My clothes.”
I found his phone & dialed 911
Obviously he had recently had a bad seizure & was still in a post-ictal state, confused and agitated. Jake very rarely seizes when he's med-compliant; now he'd had 2 seizures in 12 hours. Not good. The ambulance came & I helped 3 EMTs wrestle my naked, half-conscious grizzly-bear of a son onto the gurney.
I gave the ambulance crew info about Jake's 2 seizures — all the long-time Tisbury ambulance people know Jakob (and me too, since I was a Tisbury firefighter for 10 years) but this crew had a few new people. I said, "Hospital has my cell #, please tell them I'll be there in 20 minutes."
I went home, changed out of my PJs, told Betty what was up with Jake, ran upstairs & made a few hasty edits to my substack post about synthetic biology and the fate of mankind & posted it.
So it went, all day. Jake's overnighting for observation at MV Hospital & I couldn't be happier about that.
Jake ended up spending 4 days, including his 42nd birthday, at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. He’s back at his apartment now. I’ll be heading over later to day to check on his meds and clean his fridge.
Coda
From my third-ever SFIO! essay, the criminally under-appreciated Easy Was: Apologia pro substack sua:
I drove onto the boat for the 45 minute ride to the Vineyard, put the seat back, pulled the brim of my cap down over my face & closed my eyes, composing a Sundman figures it out! post in my head. It had been an exhausting and worry-filled few days and I was looking forward to getting back home, being in my own house, sleeping in my own bed instead of on my friend Gary’s couch. I had just dozed off when my cell buzzed. Seems that my 40 year old son Jake had just had a very nasty seizure and was being taken to Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.
So here we have irrefutable evidence: as early as my third Sundman figures it out! essay, Pazuzu was already trying to kill my substack. The facts could hardly be more clear.
What was I doing that caused him to materialize as I put back my car seat for the ferry ride to Martha’s Vineyard? Composing a Sundman figures it out! post in my head, that’s what.
And what was I doing when the most recent installment of Jakob’s Big Toxo Adventure began playing? Working on an essay: Oligarchs triumphant and biopunks rave as Lysenko returns from the grave. What’s that essay about?
Synthetic biology, oligarchicly-funded vs publicly funded science, George Church & the dire wolf brouhaha, the unsung hero of the Human Genome Project, biopunks, cowardice at Synbiobeta 2025, and the fate of humanity.
In the words of vaccinologist Greg Poland, history will judge all of us by whether we did or did not stand up for science when the fate of the world was in play. At "The World's Largest Gathering of Synthetic Biologists," many prominent scientists failed this test. We can and must do better.
Do you really think Pazuzu would let me write and post an essay like that without throwing at least a little sand in my gears? I don’t believe that for a second. It’s trying to kill this substack. And how will it do that? First, by making it hard for me to write and post any pro-vax, pro-science, pro-freedom of thought, pro-education essays. But also, crucially, by subtly causing you, dear reader, not not ‘like’ this post, to not comment on it, to not share it. In this way you do that Mesopotamian fiend’s work for him. Do not do that!
So do me (and maybe yourself) a favor. Show that demon you’re not afraid of it. Go read, share, comment on my essay. Especially the ‘Oligarchs’ one. I promise it won’t make your head spin.
Easy Was
I begin writing this entry at 10:47 on a Saturday morning. Just about exactly one week ago to the minute I got a phone call from my friend Susan. She and my wife Betty had taken Susan’s dog Dundee and our dog Spot for a walk. Spot and Dundee tend to cavort with great enthusiasm on such excursions, and so it came to pass, Susan told me, that Spot, in he…
Passing the collection plate
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Wikipedia: In ancient Mesopotamian religion, Pazuzu is a demonic deity who was well known to the Babylonians and Assyrians throughout the first millennium BCE. He is shown with a rather canine face with abnormally bulging eyes, a scaly body, a snake-headed penis, the talons of a bird and usually wings.
In Latin, the plural of sequela is sequelae.
The Pazuzus of this world no pasaran!
My daughter had bipolar disorder with psychosis when she was in a manic episode. She didn't think she was possessed but she had other delusions. She didn't make it through her illness. Thank you for sharing about Jakob.