Have you ever thought about having done something and said, I don’t know what possessed me? All over the world people report being possessed by demons, spirits and deities. But what is going on here? Is it the same as being in a trance? And what does it mean for our sense of self – the way we experience who we are? Are we permanent, singular, self-aware individuals or are our connections to the world.

Summary

Possession and trance phenomena have inspired numerous anthropological, medical, psychological, historical, sociological, and neuroscientific studies. The ‘‘otherness’’ of possession is captivating, mysterious, and enigmatic.

Many anthropologists have commented on ‘‘its uncanny inexplicability”, incompatibility with Western notions of personhood, ostensible disdain for self-control as well as radical otherness (Cohen & Barrett, 2008, pp.250–251).

Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, Paganism and all things occult.

Today’s video is brought to you by a friend of the Symposium, Angry Abacus! Thank you so much for commissioning this video, which I hope you’re going to find helpful along your path!

So, what exactly is a spirit possession?

According to Vincent Crapanzano and the definition he provides in the Encyclopaedia of Religion (2005) “Spirit possession may be broadly defined as any altered or unusual state of consciousness and allied behaviour that is indigenously understood in terms of the influence of an alien spirit, demon, or deity.” (2005, p. 8687)

This may categorise demon possession as being part of the wider category of spirit possession, begging the question: what constitutes a demon and what is a spirit?

WHAT CLASSIFIES AS A DEMON?

There are two main ways of answering the question of what may classify as a demon: a religious and more contextual way and a trans-cultural one.

As I argued in my video on Demons in Paganism the concept of demon has historically been used on several occasions to “other” the deities of a religion that is not your own and hence need to be perceived as evil or forbidden within a dichotomous framework of us versus them. Thus, the Gods and spirits of neighbouring countries or those of an old religion that has been taken over by a new one would become demons.

In this contextual religious sense, therefore, it will really depend on the specific religion what entities classify as demons and even whether the concept of demon is employed, to begin with. Indeed, using this lens, Lilith could classify as a demoness in a Christian religious context while being deemed as a Goddess in a contemporary Pagan one.

A second way to classify demons is more trans-cultural and less influenced by a given religion. Here a demon is simply an entity that brings about either harm or chaos to people or situations. You may have noticed that I purposefully avoided the term ‘evil’ as I would argue that to be an ethical concept heavily dependent on one religious belief or another.

For the sake of understanding, we will endorse the second – more trans-cultural – definition of demons in this episode, which allows us to navigate the main topic of spirit and demonic possession across different religious traditions.

TYPES OF SPIRIT POSSESSION

Spirit possession usually refers to the hold exerted over a human being by external forces or entities more powerful than the individual. These forces may be ancestors or divinities, ghosts of foreign origin, or entities both ontologically and ethnically alien. As Janice Boddy highlights, ‘Some societies evince multiple spirit forms. Depending on cultural and etiological context such spirits may be exorcised, or lodged in a continuous relationship with their host – as it happens for mediums – who only see occasionally their bodies completely taken over (Boddy, 1994, p.407).

A paper authored by Emma Cohen ‘argues that possession concepts demonstrate cross-culturally recurrent features that are the product of the mechanisms and processes of regular cognitive architecture, and that these cognitive processes constrain and partially explain the form and spread of these features’.

She then proceeds on distinguishing between the two types of spirit possession: executive and pathogenic, both of which entail the direct actions of spirit entities in or on a person’s body.

1 – Pathogenic possession notions result in benign or harmful contamination of one’s cognitive representation. Here, the presence of the spirit entity is commonly – albeit not necessarily – manifested in the form of illness.

2 – Executive possession concepts affect one’s intentional agency. Here, the spirit entity is usually represented as taking over the host’s executive leadership and/or replacing the host’s ‘mind’ and their intentional agency, assuming full control of bodily behaviours (Cohen, 2008, p.103).

TRANCE VS POSSESSION

Now, is possession different from trance states and altered states of consciousness?

In the early studies on Shamanism – most notoriously in the works by Mircea Eliade – the very figure of the shaman is defined in relation to such states. The Shaman was indeed the one who mastered the techniques of ecstatic states to communicate with the spirit world and gain power, healing and knowledge out of it.

So, in this sense, trance states and other such altered states of consciousness don’t see the practitioner being taken over by a spirit or a demon but rather retain their full agency throughout the process. They may ‘leave their bodies’ through various degrees but still have their own intentions guiding the process and the entire magical operation.

However, a few Anthropologists and Ethnographers, especially those who study Afro-Brazilian traditions have pointed out that on the field this stark demarcation between trance and possession is much more blurred than one may conceive in theory and that practitioners may engage in and be subject to both forms of trance and possession during their rituals. Consequently, in more recent and anthropological scholarship it’s been argued that contextual and local-specific definitions of both trance and possessions should be favoured (Schmidt, 2016, pp.5–14).

PERSONHOOD & POSSESSION IN RELATIONAL TERMS

That said, when addressed in cross-cultural studies, possession is still employed with a reasonably agreed-upon understanding of what the concept means.

Possession is indeed a broad term that refers, as previously suggested, to the integration of spirit and matter, force or power and corporeal reality.

Now, the very possibility that something like a possession may occur is rooted in a specific worldview. More specifically in a cosmos where the boundaries between an individual and their environment are conceived as permeable, flexibly drawn and somewhat negotiable (Boddy, 1994, p.407).

A worldview that enables the notion of possession to arise as an interpretative tool to understand human experiences such as the ones so far described entails the tacit ‘presumption that bodily behaviours may be attributed to a single agent in any given instance. If so, acquiring and embracing a displacement model of possession (in which a mind or agency fully displaces the other) may be more common than endorsing a fusion model in which two agencies are combined in a single body (Cohen & Barrett, 2008, p.253).

Indeed, a certain understanding of personhood as a single and separate entity with its own agency, interacting with a world populated by other people and various kinds of entities, appears to be a presupposed condition for the notion of spirit possession.

Interesting to notice that it’s also been argued that possession could very well occur and be interpreted in non-religious terms, as in the cases of people marrying or developing relationships with spirits, ghosts or demons. Such occurrences challenge the ethnopsychological understanding of self and other as the boundedness of the two (Boddy, 1994, p.412). Depending on one’s worldview, a relationship with a spirit could be seen as a way of reifying and othering one’s feelings and thoughts or as an interaction of the self – rather than a projection – with an ‘other-than-human person’. In this sense, the actor is “possessed” in terms of belonging to a spirit based on their own feelings.

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REFERENCES

Boddy, J. (1994) Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 23 (1), pp.407–434.

Cohen, E. (2008) What is Spirit Possession? Defining, Comparing, and Explaining Two Possession Forms. Ethnos, 73 (1), pp.101–126.

Cohen, E. & Barrett, J.L. (2008) Conceptualizing Spirit Possession: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence. Ethos, 36 (2), pp.246–267.

Crapanzano, V. (2005), ‘Spirit possession: an overview’, in L. Jones (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion (2nd ed). Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, pp. 8687–94.

Schmidt, B.E. (2016) Spirits and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experience. Bloomsbury Publishing.

First uploaded 21 Oct 2021