CLARA GERMANA CELE

Opening

In 1906, at St. Michael's Mission in Natal, in what is now South Africa, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl named Clara Germana Cele began, according to the missionaries, to act as if possessed. The nuns who looked after her wrote that she spoke languages she had never learned, knew the secrets of people she had never met, threw grown women across rooms, and floated up to five feet in the air.

Two Catholic priests performed an exorcism over two days and declared her freed. Her case is now one of the most retold possession stories in the world, especially online. Almost all of it comes from the mission itself, and the record behind it is thin.

Timeline

About 1890Clara is born. She is orphaned young, baptised as an infant and raised at the mission.

1906At sixteen, according to the mission's account, she confesses to her confessor, Father Erasmus, that she has made a pact with Satan. Her behaviour changes sharply.

1906, the following weeksThe nuns record the phenomena: languages, clairvoyance, intolerance of blessed objects, great strength and levitation, which in some accounts ends when she is sprinkled with holy water.

1906, the exorcismFather Mansueti, the mission director, and Father Erasmus perform the rite over two days. She is said to knock the Bible from the priest's hands and try to choke him with his stole. At the end she is declared healed.

1906 to 1912According to the account, she has no further episodes, is ashamed of what happened, asks forgiveness and takes on humble work at the mission.

1912She dies of heart failure, aged about 22.

Key figures

Clara Germana Cele was an orphaned African girl in a European mission school, and she never gave an account of her own that survives. The two priests and the sisters of the mission are the only witnesses whose words reached print.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: accounts attributed to the nuns and priests of the mission, repeated in later Catholic books and digests. I could not find the original letters or reports in a form that can be checked, and even sympathetic reference works mark the sources as unreliable. No medical examination, no outside witness and no contemporary newspaper report is cited. The quotation most often repeated, that she understood "Polish, German, French, Norwegian and all other languages", comes from a nun's account known only through these later retellings.

Competing explanations

Possession, as the mission described it. The priests and sisters believed it, and the story is told within the Church as an example of real possession and successful exorcism.

Illness or distress, read through the mission's beliefs. A teenage orphan in a strict religious institution, in a colony, showing extreme behaviour that her carers had one framework to explain. Some of what is described, such as violent fits and great strength, is consistent with seizure or psychiatric illness.

A story that grew. The most spectacular details, such as levitation and universal languages, are the least sourced, and the account has passed through several hands before reaching modern readers.

Later life of the case

The case is a fixture of internet lists of real possessions, usually with the details at their most extreme and with no sources. For a possession case with a far stronger paper trail, see the St. Louis exorcism.

Finding

A girl at a mission in Natal was exorcised in 1906, and the people who did it believed she was possessed. Beyond that, the account can't be tested: it comes from those who performed the rite, through later retellings, with no outside record.

What still will not resolve: what Clara herself experienced, since only the mission's version of her survives. She was about 22 when she died. Rest in peace, Clara. 🕯️