SERGIEV POSAD, Russia (AFP) - The priest's voice caressed the congregation, drawing the sermon to a close. Under the monastery's high frescoed vault, where the haunting murmur of the Gregorian chants still echoed, the believers returned to their prayers. Peace. Reverence. Contemplation.
And then, in a matter of seconds, the picture began to dissolve into scenes worthy of a Hollywood producer's imagination.
High-pitched screams, animal howls and grunts cut into the austere beauty of the singing, reducing many of those present to sobs of terror while others collapsed in a dead faint, either from tension or from the heaviness of the air.
The casting out of devils is not a pretty sight, but throughout the pandemonium, German Chesnokov, the monastery's archimandrite and accredited exorcist, never batted an eyelid, not even when a young girl, screaming deafeningly, recoiled from his touch and tore away the cross hanging from her breast.
The medieval practice of exorcism may have been frowned on in Soviet times, but it now draws hundreds of faithful daily, from all over Russia and the former Soviet Union, to the Troitse-Sergiev monastery at Sergiev Posad, 60 kilometres (40 miles) north of Moscow.
In the stiflingly warm air, women and children huddled close to the altar, glancing nervously over their shoulders as the sufferers were escorted or carried in.
Of the more than 400 believers crowded under the golden domes, many were convinced that devils were to blame for afflictions, principally mental, that regular doctors had dismissed as incurable.
Exorcism "is really good for your health, there's been some significant improvement, but it depends on you how long that improvement lasts," said Marina, 32, with a glance at her adolescent son standing silently nearby.
Local parishioners advise that to obtain tangible results, visitors must attend the three-hour service for three days in succession.
Speaking in a soft drawl, German warned his listeners of "the demons who possess us when we are proud and idle, and do not want to obey God's law."
The grey-bearded priest, who has practised his unusual methods, does not believe the rites of exorcism to be in any way at odds with modern medicine.
"Doctors treat the sicknesses of the body, and the Church deals with sicknesses of the soul, such as schizophrenia, epileptic fits, depression, hallucinations, or asthma," he told AFP.
"Sometimes we send people back to official doctors, and sometimes they send people to us," he said.
True, techniques akin to exorcism have found some backing at Russia's Academy of Sciences. But many psychiatrists were inclined to scoff at what they saw as "a return to medieval times."
"This is a form of psychotherapy, and in cases of functional disorders like various neuroses or hysteria it works as well as any other. Naturally it works only on believers, acting in unison with inner conviction," Yuri Savenko of the Association of Independent Psychiatrists said.
"However with severe psychosis, such as schizophrenia or manic depression, it will not help at all and may even do harm, as believers tend to delay in getting serious medical treatment until it is too late," he warned.
Meanwhile, among the impressed and hushed crowd that made its way out of the monastery, faces dripping with holy water and sanctified oil, even the skeptics found it hard to dismiss the scenes they had witnessed.
"Before I wondered if all the scary stories were not the fruit of popular imagination, and now I understood they were not, though I'm still not convinced it wasn't a form of individual hysteria," said Olga, a 26-year-old manager who attended the service out of curiosity.
"However, if there is a logical explanation why someone would start screaming when shown a cross, I don't know any. I did have the feeling that something may be out there," she admitted.