Spirit Possession: Multidisciplinary Approaches to a Worldwide Phenomenon 9789633864142

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Spirit Possession

Spirit Possession Multidisciplinary Approaches to a Worldwide Phenomenon

Edited by Éva Pócs and András Zempléni

Central European University Press Budapest ‒ Vienna ‒ New York

© 2022 by the authors Published in 2022 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN  978-963-386-413-5 (hardback) ISBN  978-963-386-414-2 (ebook)

Front cover photo: The medium (gur) of the goddess Shravani asks the bhut (ghost) to reveal the name of the witch who sent it. Kullu, 1995 Photo Daniela Berti Photo on spine: An East-Serbian Vlach fairy seer communicates with her three fairy patronesses through singing in a trance state. Kulma Toplica, 2015. April 15 (Palm Sunday) Photo Maria Vivod Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pócs, Éva, editor. | Zempléni, András, 1938- editor. Title: Spirit possession : multidisciplinary approaches to a worldwide phenomenon / edited by Éva Pócs and András Zempléni. Description: Budapest ; Vienna ; New York : Central European University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022007447 (print) | LCCN 2022007448 (ebook)| ISBN 9789633864135 (hardcover) | ISBN 9789633864142 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spirit possession. Classification: LCC BL482 .S69 2002 (print) | LCC BL482 (ebook) | DDC 204/.2--dc23/eng20220503 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007447 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007448



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

IX

Foreword XI Éva Pócs and András Zempléni 1 Discerning Spirit Possessions An Introduction András Zempléni

1

Part I Current Constellations of Spirit Possession Concepts 2 Reflecting on the Vocabulary of “Possession” in a South Indian Context 53 Gilles Tarabout 3 “Incorporation Does Not Exist” The Brazilian Rejection of the Term “Possession” and Why It Exists Nonetheless Bettina E. Schmidt

75

4 “Figures of Return” The Catholic Church, the Holy Spirit and Embandwa Spirit Possession in Western Uganda Heike Behrend

93

5 Ideas about Spirit Possession and Anti-Devil Practicesin the Religious Life of Some Eastern Hungarian Communities Éva Pócs 6 The Indigeneity of Spirit Possession A Contribution to Comparative Theory Mary L. Keller

111 193

Part II Transitions and Thresholds of Change in Possession Concepts and Practices 7 Specter, Phantom, Demon Thomas J. Csordas

215

8 From Loudun to Dakar, and Back Possession and Evil in Individualistic and Nonindividualistic Societies Pierre-Henri Castel

229

9 Devil Possession in the Liturgy around the Tenth and Twelfth Centuries 247 Bringing Together the Body Like a Microcosm Florence Chave-Mahir 10 East European Christian Prayers against Hailstorms Aquatic Demons and Divine Powers in Canonical and Apocryphal Contexts Emanuela Timotin

263

11 The Nightmare in Early Modern England Janine Rivière

279

Part III Interactive Transformations of Popular and Official Possession Idioms and Practices 12 Spirit (rwḥ) in the Dead Sea Scrolls Ida Fröhlich

299

13 Domesticating the Dead Ghosts and Spirit Possession in Late Medieval Italy Nancy Caciola

313

14 Demonic Possession in Orthodox Imperial Russia Official and Popular Religious Conceptions through the Prism of an 1839–1840 Case Study Christine D. Worobec

323

15 The Healing of the Possessed in Medieval Canonization Processes 343 Gábor Klaniczay 16 The Sabbat of the Soul Sarah Ferber 17 Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth-Century Hungarian Clerical Thought Dániel Bárth

361

373

Part IV Possession and Social Reality: Possession as Indigenous Historiography 18 Possession, Communication and Power in Himachal Pradesh (North India) 393 Daniela Berti 19 A Day-to-Day Family Chronicle with “Personages” in Madagascar 415 Michèle Fiéloux and Jacques Lombard 20 Anthropological Spirits and Colonial Consciousness in Arabic-Speaking Sudan Janice Boddy

431

21 From Illness to Trance The Socialization of Spirit Possession in Senegal András Zempléni

455

22 On Spirit Possession and Some Parallels with Reincarnation Michael Lambek

487

Contributors 505 Name Index Subject Index Geographical Index

515 524 538

List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2

Scene from a Senegalese Ndëpp. Dakar, 2011 2 Chinri trance-dance at the edge of a Mundang village. Léré (Chad), 1968 2 Figure 1.3 St Egidius exorcises a possessed woman. Hungarian Angevin Legendary, Budapest: Helikon and Corvina 1975 (Acta Sanctorum pictis imaginaribus adormenta 1320–1340) 15 Figure 1.4 St Donatus exorcises a possessed man. Hungarian Angevin Legendary, Budapest: Helikon and Corvina 1975 (Acta Sanctorum pictis imaginaribus adormenta 1320–1340) 15 Figure 1.5 A follower of the Egyptian Zār cult. 2017 27 Figure 2.1 One possible representation of a Bhut as it is ima­ gined for Kummaatti, a ritual pageant specific to the Trichur area. Trichur (Kerala), 1982 54 Figure 2.2 The dance of the “beautiful” (sundara) Yakshis in Patayani. Kadamanitta (Kerala), 1982 67 Figure 2.3 Goddess Kali as impersonated in a ritual theater (Mutiyettu, “bearing the headdress”). The power (shakti) of the goddess is said to be present in the headdress and to impose itself on the dancer. Thiruvanantapuram (Kerala), 1982 68 Figures 5.1 and 5.2  An East-Serbian Vlach fairy seer communicates with her three fairy patronesses through singing in a trance state. Kulma Toplica, 2015. April 15 (Palm Sunday) 116 Figure 5.3 Protection of a baby from the devil, the day after her christening. Gyimesközéplok/Lunca de Jos (Romania), 2005 128 Figures 5.4a and 5.4b  Death of a good man and of a sinner: details of an Orthodox icon entitled “God’s Eye”, in the house of a Roman Catholic family with Orthodox ancestors. Gyimesközéplok/Lunca de Jos (Romania), 2003148 Figure 5.5 The Devil tempting with suicide (a noose in his hand). Picture in Johannes Amos Comenius: Orbis Sensualium Pictus, Köln, 1658 150

Figure 6.1 Figure 15.1 Figure 15.2 Figure 15.3

Figure 17.1 Figure 17.2 Figure 18.1

Figure 18.2 Figure 18.3 Figure 19.1 Figure 19.2 Figure 19.3 Figure 21.1

Figure 21.2

Figure 21.3 Figure 21.4

A global map of indigenous peoples195 St Bernard of Clairvaux exorcises a possessed woman, woodcut 1506 (La Vie des Saints)344 Francis of Assisi exorcises demons. Bonaventura Berlinghieri, Altarpiece of Pescia, 1235, detail344 Nicholas of Tolentino exorcises a possessed nun. Pietro and Giuliano da Rimini, c. 1320-25, Capellone di S. Nicola, Tolentino354 Exorcism in the Flagellum daemonum …377 Signs of possession in a letter of the exorcist of Sombor, 1767386 Anita becomes “unconscious” (behos), which is interpreted as being due to the bhut’s (ghost’s) presence. Kullu 1995401 God-palanquins going to the Dashera festival 1. Kullu 2001408 God-palanquins going to the Dashera festival 2. Kullu 2001409 Clairette as Prince Ravela in the trance entry protocol. Toilara (Madagascar), 1990419 Clairette as a housewife opening her grocery shop. Toilara (Madagascar), 1990421 The moment when Clairette’s state is changing by welcoming her spirit. Toilara (Madagascar), 1990424 Moments of the “measuring” rite with millet and roots buried in the base of the rab’s domestic altar. Dakar, 1968466 The sacrificial reversal of the body in ndëpp: Stomach cap turned inside out, bloodbath, ankle bracelet and bra fashioned out of intestines. Dakar, 1965–1968471 Aïssa’s trance-dance and fall. Dakar, 1965476 Joys and frights during the public trance-dance of ndëpp. Dakar, 1965–1968479

Foreword f Éva Pócs and András Zempléni

The history of this book goes back to a challenging surprise. Contrary to what one might imagine, anthropologists working in Africa rarely engage in extensive discussions with their colleagues practicing field ethnology in Europe. This is what happened to the two editors in 2010 at the University of Pécs (Hungary) on the sidelines of a European research program. While Éva Pócs’ main works focused on religion and popular beliefs of Central and Eastern Europe, those of András Zempléni came principally from West Africa where he first encountered spirit possession in a therapeutic context. Despite these different orientations, they were similarly surprised by two things: on the one hand, by the equal richness and diversity of phenomena called, rightly or wrongly, “spirit possession” in Africa and Europe. On the other hand, by the amazing rarity of comparative works on the similarities and differences between phenomena observed in these two great culture areas. In the course of their discussions presented in an international workshop in 2012 it became clear that Western idioms of spirit possession abundantly described either by historians or contemporary ethnographers of Europe have never been compared systematically with those observed by anthropologists elsewhere in the world, despite partial attempts of trustworthy authors such as Traugott K. Oesterreich, Henri Jeanmaire or Erica Bourguignon.1 These realizations laid the foundations for this edited volume, to which about half of the participants of the above mentioned workshop have contributed. This book is intended to build the first bridges between these curiously separated areas of research in order to reformulate some basic questions recently raised in comparative anthropology of spirit possession. We were convinced that in order to reconsider these basic questions it was necessary to compare among others European Christian concepts of possession and related ritual practice with the relevant notions and rituals of other religions and also to devote heightened attention to the connections between official churches and popular/lay forms and practices. The workshop made it possible for participants to encounter colleagues from different continents who had studied possession phenomena in different 1 Oesterreich, Die Besessenheit; Jeanmaire, Dionysos; Bourguignon, “World Distribution.”

cultural and historical contexts distant from each other and brought together anthropologists and historians working on several historical periods and/or in different European, African, South American and Asian culture areas. In this respect, we considered it important to compare some anthropological works which tend to explore synchronically the social context of possession phenomena with some European studies focused on their historical analysis. Anthropologists who do fieldwork in remote areas usually need to use a foreign language in which to capture the complex terminology, metaphors, symbols and local interpretations of spirit possession. One of our aims was to place the linguistic proximity of European researchers studying their own culture in the service of anthropological understanding and interpretation in foreign terrains. Our other important goal was to render the rather fluid category of spirit possession more precise, to revise its relationships to and boundaries with related phenomena. One of the most important by-products of ongoing globalization is the emergence of new multicultural and syncretistic possession formations that encompass ethnic, national, continental and religious boundaries (e.g., global movements such as Pentecostal charismatic movements). Meanwhile the historical and anthropological literature on all phenomena labeled “possession” has grown significantly. Naturally, a volume like this cannot react to all old and new problems that have arisen; our goal has been more modest. Our basic challenge was to draw some generalizable hypotheses from case studies presented either in individual presentations or in joint discussions. We hope to have identified at least some shared problematics which span geographical and cultural areas, temporal boundaries and various forms of possession. We express our heartfelt gratitude to all the scholars and researchers who participated in the workshop in 2012, since all the presentations and cross-cultural discussions of the symposium served as inspiration, incentive and formative influence concerning the views expressed in the resulting chapters. The heartiest thanks are due, of course, to the contributors to the volume who, instead of hastening to publish their articles on other forums, patiently waited for the present volume to emerge in spite of financial difficulties. We thank our English translators Orsolya Frank and Anna Klaniczay as well as language editors Andrew Rouse and Bea Vidacs for helping to shape the text of the present volume and Andrea Zombory for giving the texts the external form they deserve. Neither the symposium nor the present volume could have ever emerged without the generous support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which enabled us to help a whole range of

noted researchers from four continents to defy geographical distances and meet their European colleagues. For financial coverage of the translation and copyediting costs we have the European Research Council as well as the National Research, Development and Innovation Office to thank – they provided funds through project no. 324214 (“‘East–West’: Vernacular Religion on the Boundary of Eastern and Western Christianity: Continuity, Changes and Interactions”) and project no. 132532 (“Folk Belief, Vernacular Religion, Mentality, 16th–21st Centuries”). We express grateful thanks to the reviewers of the book, Professors Herbert S. Lewis and Ülo Valk, for their contribution to improving the manuscript by offsetting its shortcomings with their extremely valuable advice. Last but not least, we owe thanks to CEU Press for the opportunity to publish with them and to Linda Kunos and Jaap Wagenaar for helping us in innumerable ways with the finalizing of the text.

References Bourguignon, Erica. “World Distribution and Patterns of Possession States.” In Trance and Possession States, edited by R. Prince, 3–34. Montreal: R. M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968. Jeanmaire, Henri. Dionysos, histoire du culte de Bacchus. Paris: Payot, 1951. Oesterreich, Traugott K. Die Besessenheit. Langensalza: Wendt und Klauwell, 1921.

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Discerning Spirit Possessions An Introduction f András Zempléni

It is much easier to write a monograph or a case study on a variant of “spirit possession” than to attempt an overview of the common features of the phenomena that anthropologists, theologians, and historians group together under this label. To embark on such an enterprise is to venture into one of the oldest and most complex areas of human life. For those who attempt it, great modesty and caution are required. No one has sufficiently extensive and firm knowledge in the many areas associated with this complex phenomenon that would prevent them from reaching hasty conclusions. This, however, is not a reason to shy away, provided you are allowed to make mistakes and correct them. Overviews of this topic are particularly exposed to the distorting effects of the experiences of the person attempting the synthesis. It is, therefore, perhaps useful to start by telling about mine. In the 1960s, I carried out extensive investigations into the interpretations and traditional cures of mental disorders in Senegal at the request of the Fann Psychiatric Hospital in Dakar.1 That is, my work on the possession rites of the Wolof and the Lebu had little to do with the seeming gratuitousness of ethnographic curiosity. In the eyes of my interlocutors, it was supposed to improve the care offered to their relatives who went back and forth between the healers and the hospital at that time. My work was supported by their therapeutic expectations in a fine moment of collaboration between traditional and Western medicine.2 It was in a rather intimate therapeutic spirit, focused on the patients treated by the two sets of practitioners, that I observed the rites organized by the congregations of the possessed of Cape Verde, to which I had full access. This proximity to the caretakers and “possessed” patients evaporated during my second, shorter and more conventional research among the Moundang people of Chad. The Senegalese rites presented below were addressed to ancestral spirits conceived like humans. To my surprise, the “spirits” that possessed Moundang women – the chinri – were beings 1 2

Zempléni, “L’interprétation et la thérapie.” For a critical overview of these practices, see Kilroy-Marac, An Impossible Inheritance.

2

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Figure 1.1  Scene from a Senegalese Ndëpp. Dakar, 2011

Photo Réka Albert

Figure 1.2 Chinri trance-dance at the edge of a Mundang village. Léré (Chad), 1968

Photo András Zempléni

Discerning Spirit Possessions

or phenomena as diverse as the python, the sun, the smithy, the catfish, or the rain. During secret dance sessions in the arid Chadian bush, they were put into a trance by these spiritual components of their environment. And although this cult – by now discontinued – was therapeutic, it also had very complex ties to the symbolic and sociopolitical organization of the Moundang kingdom.3 One of the basic principles of the project we launched with Éva Pócs in 2012 at the University of Pécs was to remain open to the extraordinary cultural and historical diversity of spirit possession. It seemed to us that research on this versatile and much-debated topic was constrained by a dual legacy. Except those inspired by the written traditions of Asia4 and some pioneering attempts,5 most anthropological studies on spirit possession have been – and still are – infused with Western concepts of self and personhood and Western notions of body–soul dualism, and they convey a whole set of presuppositions inherited from Christian models of “good” and “bad” possession once prevalent in Europe. What is more, aside from a few exceptions,6 the findings of the innumerable works by historians and modern ethnographers of Europe describing Western conceptions of spirit possession7 have not been compared systematically with those observed by anthropologists elsewhere in the world. They were treated independently and mostly analyzed according to dissimilar criteria. Moreover, while some of the best historians of European spirit possessions such as Michel de Certeau, Nancy Caciola or Moshe Sluhovsky have taken advantage of anthropological analyses in their works,8 their main reference was what Sluhovsky aptly calls “the deprivation–frustration–transgression–possession nexus” developed by 3 For a detailed analysis, see Zempléni, “Pouvoir dans la cure,” 141 sq. 4 For a comprehensive presentation of the notions āveśa, samāveśa, praveśa in Sanskrit India, see Smith, The Self Possessed, 173–362. 5 Let us cite the Ortigueses’ Oedipe africain, Crapanzano’s Tuhami, and Michael Lambek’s essay on possession and introjection (“Fantasy in Practice”). 6 The best known are Traugott K. Oesterreich’s outstanding compendium Die Besessenheit (1921), the “Possession” entries in Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (1908–1926) and Henri Jeanmaire’s Dionysos, histoire du culte de Bacchus, first published in 1951. The classic monographs (such as Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe; Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa; Métraux, Le vaudou Haitien; Bastide, Le candomblé de Bahia; Leiris, “La croyance aux génies ‘Zar’”) do not address this point. 7 In this book, Éva Pócs’ thorough article completed by her overviews in Between the Living and the Dead and “Possession Phenomena, Possession-systems” may give an idea of the wealth of these European works. 8 See, i.a., De Certeau, “Ce que Freud fait de l’histoire”; Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs and the Physiology of Spirit Possession,” 287–288, and Discerning Spirits, 80; Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 5–6.

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Ioan M. Lewis a half-century ago about so-called “peripheral” possession cults of African women as contrasted to “main morality cults” generally dominated by men.9 Though influential, this functionalist thesis, long predating the emergence of gender studies, considers peripheral possession as an “oblique protest” of “status-deprived” social categories – thus reducing it to an effect of sociopolitical domination – did not lead to either creative or genuinely comparative approaches that would have been open to the astounding diversity and complexity of the phenomena observed in the world.10 Moreover, we can hardly speak of a reciprocal trend. As annotated bibliographies, reviews, and comparative studies attest, the wide array of “possession” phenomena that historians and ethnographers had spotted in the West was scarcely included in the directory of the data thoroughly compared by anthropologists working elsewhere in the world.11 A meaningful exception was that of south-Italian Tarantism analyzed by Ernesto de Martino in La terra del rimorso published in 1961. In this seminal book, the Italian master of historical anthropology examined in detail the long history of Tarantism in its Muslim and Christian contexts and proposed a Mediterranean comparison on tarantella. Africanists Vincent Crapanzano and Gilbert Rouget were interested in this proposal,12 yet their comments 9 Lewis, Ecstatic Religion; Lewis et al., Women’s Medicine. According to Herbert S. Lewis (“Spirit Possession in Ethiopia”), who aligns multiple Ethiopian data that go against the thesis of his namesake, the idea of the link between female deprivation and possession goes back to the work of Simon D. Messing published in 1949 (“Group Therapy and Social Status”). 10 Although Lewis’ theory is much more nuanced than the quoted “nexus” (see Berger, “La centralisation d’un culte périphérique”), one cannot disagree with the criticisms thus summarized by Janice Boddy: “Lewis’s cross-cultural account lent sociological support to the medical tack by distinguishing central possession cults, where possession is a positive experience involving spirits who uphold the moral order (ancestors, culture heroes) and typically speak through men, from peripheral ones, where possession by amoral spirits is locally regarded as a form of illness that typically afflicts women and other individuals of marginal or subordinate status. This model and its assumptions guided a generation of scholarship in which peripheral possession signaled personal or social pathology, eclipsing investigation of its wider social, cultural, and aesthetic significance, […] and preventing possession systems from being discussed on their own terms. Instead, attention was directed to instrumental, strategic uses of consensual beliefs by socially disadvantaged (so-called status-deprived) individuals who, in claiming to be seized by spirits, indirectly brought public attention to their plight and potentially achieved some redress” (Boddy, “Spirit Possession Revisited,” 410). See also Giles, “Possession Cults on the Swahili Coast,” 234–258, and especially Behrend and Luig, Spirit Possession. 11 See, i.a., Heusch, “Possession et chamanisme”; Bourguignon, “World Distribution”; Crapanzano, “Spirit Possession”; Crapanzano and Garrison, Case Studies in Spirit Possession; Zaretsky and Shambaugh, Spirit Possession; Rouget, La musique et la transe; Boddy, “Spirit Possession Revisited”; Berti and Tarabout, “Possession”; Schmidt and Huskinson, Spirit Possession and Trance; Smith, The Self Possessed. 12 Crapanzano, “Foreword,” vii–xiv; Rouget, La musique et la transe, 299–305.

Discerning Spirit Possessions

revolve around the question whether tarantella is, as De Martino writes and Crapanzano reluctantly agrees, an exorcism or, as Rouget thinks, a disguised possession cult that “cannot declare itself as such”?13 Whatever is the case about Tarantism, such a divergence of views suffices to remind us that anthropology has barely emerged from the secular domination of the Christian idea that “possession” means above all malevolent possession by the Devil to be exorcised, or pagan Dionysian rites to be rejected. This was one of the main epistemological challenges that we had to meet. Classic writings on spirit possession are focused on the dualistic ethics and way of thinking of the religions of the Book which emphasize the opposition between good and evil, pure and impure, faithful and unfaithful, believer and pagan. Whether it is Islam, Christianity or Judaism, or even some of the great religions of Asia, religious dualism is at the origin of a whole series of oppositions that shaped how the adepts understood and judged possession: divine or demonic, pure or impure, dharma or adharma, genuine or simulated, etc. Although none of the authors of this volume analyze their data in these paratheological terms, they have all been confronted with their simplifying effects inherent to representations of possession everywhere around the world. Hence their preference for case studies, monographic studies, and the analysis of carefully delineated historical records. These are the approaches that allow us to best safeguard against the dogmatic effects and to restore the richness and complexity of the representations shared by everyday people. The so frequently posed question of the definition of possession is, of course, omnipresent in our book. “Spirit possession” is one of the most fluid anthropological categories under which many disparate phenomena are understood. As noted by Paul C. Johnson, the origin of this atavistic notion has never been clarified; unlike other anthropological categories, such as “totemism,” “cannibalism” or “fetishism,” the genesis of which has been retraced.14 It is this indeterminacy that may have allowed the term “possession” to serve “as a key pivot, and shifter, between earlier classical and then Christian discourses of demonology, on one hand, and accounts of possession among ‘savages’ on the other.”15 Obviously, the texts that follow are not immune from the fluidity of this generic term which lends itself to countless metaphorical uses.16 To be sure, spirit possession is no longer 13 14 15 16

Chajes, “Ernesto De Martino.” Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy,” 394–396. Ibid., 396. About this topic, see Lambek, “Afterword,” 261–264.

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equated with trance seen as an altered state of consciousness ascribed to the action of an invisible being pushing the individual to change his identity, behavior, language, clothing, etc. Reducing possession to trance in such a psychophysiological manner has contributed a great deal to ignorance about the diversity of phenomena labeled under this term.17 The word possession has been used to designate ideas as diverse as the penetration of an invisible being into a person’s body or a lasting influence exerted by it from the outside18; as a physical possessio or a mental obsessio; as an intracorporeal experience of a being moving inside oneself or as the feeling of being besieged or surrounded by it (circumsessio); as the Kardecist or Loudunian “obsession” that this force triggers in the person19 or the charismatic “oppression” to be lifted by prayers of deliverance20; but for most anthropologists, “possession” is above all the ceremonial embodiment of the possessing agent once named and endowed with its specific attributes such as its origin, character, clothing, favorite foods, motto, these theatrical incarnations not necessarily including a passage through a trance (“authentic” or “simulated”)21; the same word is commonly used to refer to the particular state of mediums thought to transmit messages between spirits and humans,22 the voluntary trance of Siberian shamans23 17 For Berti and Tarabout (“Possession,” 941–942), the terminological confusion between possession and trance or ecstasy – present even in the title of Ecstatic Religion by I. M. Lewis – amounts to “not distinguishing between what stems from the institution (the possession) and what belongs in the order of psychological states and behaviors (the trance); it is as if we identified marriage with sexual relations (Michael Lambek’s comparison).” This laxity is not without significance, because “the vocabulary of trance follows a medicalized meaning of the word referring to a state of psychological dissociation, characterized by the patient’s unconsciousness and absence of control of their acts and words.” Hence this further Western reduction downgrading possession to a negative psychopathological or medical fact. 18 This distinction is of particular importance for the Christian conception of demonic possession: German historian Joseph von Görres proposed in 1842 (Die christliche Mystik) to use two different words to mark it: Besessenheit for internal possession and Umsessenheit for the external “besiegement” of the person. The second would correspond to the Latin circumsessio. On the overall predominance of the second type in a rural environment of Christian Eastern Europe, see Éva Pócs’ well-documented study on Transylvania in this volume. 19 See Klaniczay’s chapter about the “obsessa” in medieval canonization investigations in this volume, as well as Castel’s chapter about the use of this word in Loudun. 20 See, for example, Csordas, “The Affliction of Martin.” 21 On this issue compare Michel Leiris’ subtle analyses in La possession et ses aspects théâtraux with Michael Lambek’s “Rheumatic Irony” to get a fairly complete picture of this way of being simultaneously another and oneself. 22 See Berti, in this volume. 23 Let us recall that it was the anthropologist Raymond Firth who first made the distinction (in Tikopia Ritual and Belief, 297) between “spirit possession,” “spirit mediumship” and “shamanism” as the various degrees of control that the host has over the spirit.

Discerning Spirit Possessions

or the wajd ecstasy of the Mevlevi dervishes practicing the dhikr. And as we shall learn, this word can also apply to the state of “inspiration” of the Indian exorcist whose tutelary goddess descends on his tongue when he delivers “the diagnosis,”24 or even to the state of “infusion” by the “tear of God” sought by the Crow ascetic.25 As for the supposed agents of all these “possessions,” their astonishing diversity has been pointed out more than once. It can be a dead family member as well as a ghost of foreign origin, the Christian Holy Spirit or an anonymous demon, a tutelary spirit of the region or an outcast djinn, a Malagasy prince or the “bad sight” of Kerala.26 And this agent can either be exorcised or “adorcised”27 and then transformed into a benevolent ally,28 honored or used as a weapon against its enemies such as the Holy Spirit during the exorcisms of the Ugandan possessed described below by Heike Behrend, etc. Indianist Gilles Tarabout goes even further.29 In his rigorous philological overview illustrated by cases he observed in Kerala, he questions whether there is a “unique and precise indigenous representation of how a supernatural being ‘possesses’ a person.” Because – he writes – this being can just as well penetrate inside my body as it can fix itself on its surface, reach me by simply looking at me, or enter my body when I am afraid, hide inside my body taking the form of a disease of which I am unaware or, on the contrary, afflict me while remaining on the outside. It can displace my ahaṃkāram (sense of self) or merge my consciousness with its divine power. The author wonders whether this great diversity and ambiguity in the agent’s modes of action, which Thomas Csordas would qualify as “moments of embodied alterity,”30 is not precisely the distinctive feature of “possession.” There is no doubt that he is right about its therapeutic representations in Kerala, which are never reduced to a “single, precise indigenous representation.” That said, we have to contextualize his remarks. We must remember that “possession” or “spirit possession” is a Western etic term used in anthropology, theology, and history, which probably does not have a strict emic equivalent in any other cultural area of the world. Once the category of trance is excluded researchers can bring together under this 24 Berti and Tarabout, “Possession,” 94. See as well Berti, in this volume. 25 See Keller, in this volume. 26 See the contributions by Tarabout and Fiéloux and Lombard in this volume. 27 Expression invented by Luc de Heusch, “Cultes de possession.” 28 My chapter in this volume about the cult of the rab in Senegal may give a good example of this. 29 See Tarabout, in this volume, and in his general overviews on possession (cf. References). 30 Csordas, “Asymptote of the Ineffable,” 170–172, and in this volume.

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label the many ways in which unseen beings can have a hold on a person. This point is well illustrated by this collection. The reader may compare, for example, the analytical panoramic views chosen by the Indianists Gilles Tarabout or Daniel Berti with the empathetic monographic immersions of Janice Boddy, Michèle Fiéloux, Jacques Lombard, or Michael Lambek into the zār and tromba cults of Africa to uncover the nature and extent of comparative challenges in this intricate anthropological field. Discreet or blatant, individual or group, rural or urban, valued or rejected, tribal or postmodern…, possession cannot be confined within spatial or temporal limits. Unlike the evolutionist cliché, which once saw it as a survival of an outdated world doomed to disappear, globalization has not led to its fading, but rather, to its proliferation and diversification both in the great cultural areas of India, South America, and Africa that were traditionally thought to be home to it31 and in the multitude of personal growth techniques promoted by postmodern individualism.32 Often, but not always linked to collective traumas such as war,33 the contagiousness or “virality” of the ideas of possession illustrated in the volume by the texts of Heike Behrend and Bettina Schmidt (attesting that this property can imply the global rejection followed by the partial return of an earlier concept) remains, in part, a mystery. Certainly, Herbert Lewis is right to underline the specific “productivity” of the idea of possession or, as he writes, its tendency to have an “adaptive radiation,”34 which would explain better the ease of diffusion of the ideas in question than its sociological functions. And the Americanist Mary Keller is not wrong to defend in The Hammer and the Flute and in her text below35 her “indigenist” thesis according to which “being spoken through” is not a belief but a 31 Especially in Sudan and in Madagascar, the current and past cults of which are widely presented in this volume by Boddy, Lambek, and Fiéloux and Lombard. Concerning Africa, Behrend and Luig devote a whole section of their edited volume (Spirit Possession) to this phenomenon. 32 See the numerous publications on current spiritualism, neo-paganism, Wicca, but also the overview of Effing (“The Origin and Development”) on the development of “self-help literature” in the United States. See in any case the thorough descriptive studies on the effects of modernity: for instance, by Aihwa Ong (Spirits of Resistance) on the transformations of the conception of possession among working women in Malaysia, or by Adeline Masquelier (Prayer Has Spoiled Everything) on the changes in Hausa bori under the influence of present-day Islam and the advent of the modern market economy. 33 See, for example, the “harmful spirit possessions” following the civil wars in Mozambique in Igreja et al., “Gamba Spirits.” 34 Lewis, “Spirit Possession in Ethiopia,” 476. 35 See below and in her book, The Hammer and the Flute.

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widespread way of being in the world. The current volume will help – if it were still needed! – broaden this kind of questioning. For instance, the comparison alone of the medieval epidemics evoked by Gábor Klaniczay or of the urban crises analyzed by Michel de Certeau in La possession de Loudun (1978) with the “mass possessions” observed recently in Malaysia, Madagascar, Niger, or Nepal,36 or earlier, among Gurage men or Sidamo women in Ethiopia,37 already raises two other questions: how is it that this “infectiousness” of spirit possession manifests itself in successive waves and seems to result in the equally rapid decline and extinction of many cults, for instance, the aforementioned chinri cult of Moundang women?38 These questions, which the longevity of other cults such as those of the various zārs or the Malagasy tromba make more complex, calls for further research. The reader will find some answers in the quoted references, in Paul Christopher Johnson’s thought-provoking article entitled “An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession’”39 as well as in the text of Heike Behrend on the violent struggles between the Ugandan Catholic Church and the charismatic movements exacerbated throughout Africa by the invasive media marketing of the Holy Spirit.40 But the issue of the spread of possessions in a contemporary world, which is continually reshaped by migration, transnationalism, and the caprices of social networks, is much larger and more complex. Many authors, who cannot all be cited here, have addressed the question. Let us only note with Thomas Csordas that, in the twenty-first century, the idea of exorcism haunts the Christian world once again41 and, with Ute Luig that “spirit possession cults are creative agents of change mediating between persons, regions, and even continents and between space and time.”42 With Janice Boddy’s fascinating article on the Sudanese zār cult, our book offers the reader an illustration of compelling historical depth. As for the mode of action of 36 In the order of the quoted countries: Ong, Spirits of Resistance ; Sharp, “Playboy Princely Spirits”; Masquelier, “A Matter of Time”; Sapkota et al., “A Village Possessed by ‘Witches.’” 37 Lewis, H.S.,“Spirit Possession in Ethiopia,” 471. 38 According to the testimonies of colleagues and travelers, the Moundang cult of chinri that Marie-José Pineau and I observed in 1968 in a dozen villages is no longer practiced. 39 Spirit possession “emerged from a confusing mélange of popular discourses on demonism, together with new ideas about persons, bodies, civil society, and the primitive, as encountered in expanding webs of commercial exchange. This may be one reason that it remains in wide circulation, while the other terms [such as totemism or fetishism] breathe only with artificial life-support, in a more or less forensic mode” (Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy,” 395). 40 Meyer, “Impossible Representations,” cited in Luig, “Spirit Possession,” 281. 41 Cf. below. 42 Luig, “Spirit Possession,” 282.

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possession rites in the face of the stress caused by rapid social change, we must touch upon the comprehensive approach of Bruce Kapferer,43 who establishes a bridge between the poles of exorcism and the rites of alliance with the spirits. For him, the demonic exorcism in Buddhist Sri Lanka is akin to a rite of passage that begins with giving an external form to the victim’s loneliness and fear by representing the demon. Then, through music, dance, masked drama, and trance, the rite brings the audience to the heart of the thus staged subjective experience of the afflicted person. Finally, this type of exorcism uses the relaxing resources of humor and irony to bring together victims and audiences into the everyday universe of shared understandings.44 If we cite this approach, adopted by other authors as well,45 it is because it allows us to break away from the monotony of protest theories. Any researcher in the field can see that the contemporary proliferation of possession also conveys the pleasure of the reinvention of local musical-choreographic aesthetics and the rejuvenation of social ironies in the face of the uniform routines of the globalized world. Since Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous (The mad masters), this creative aspect of possession cults has been delegated mainly to the cinematic genre, the function of which has fundamentally changed with the arrival of the digital camera in the daily life of anthropologists.46 But let us return once again to the difficult question of giving a general definition of possession. The above-described capharnaüm may have discouraged the best minds. As Wyatt MacGaffey47 writes, “possession has something in common with the Loch Ness monster, in that it elusively refuses to define itself to be apprehended and the more you look for it, the more it isn’t there.” Or, as Ute Luig states, “Despite many attempts to define spirit possession […], the wide varieties of beliefs, religious traditions, and new inventions make it difficult to define what possession is and what it means for different people.”48 Or as Janice Boddy concludes at the beginning of her famous overview of the issue: “because it appears dramatically and intransigently exotic, […] possession continues to hold the anthropological 43 Kapferer, A Celebration of Demons. 44 Summary inspired by Boddy, “Spirit Possession Revisited,” 413–414. 45 See, for example, Beeman, “The Zar in the Persian Gulf.” 46 On hand at all times, this tool has enabled, among other things, the perception and fine analysis of details formerly unnoticed but significant, such as the bodily signs of when the possessed Zarma enters into a trance: a small, quick and discreet step that she takes with her foot (Jean Rouch, personal communication, 1974). 47 MacGaffey, “African Spirit Possession,” 460. 48 Luig, “Spirit Possession,” 282.

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gaze despite heroic attempts to tame it, render it harmless or understood.”49 The solution proposed by the same Janice Boddy and adopted by most scholars, included Indianist F. Smith,50 is well known: “Possession […] is a broad term referring to an integration of spirit and matter, force or power and corporeal reality, in a cosmos where the boundaries between an individual and her environment are acknowledged to be permeable, flexibly drawn, or at least negotiable.”51 So be it. But we have to admit that we thus find ourselves not far from where we started: faced with a generic notion with a minimal scope and a maximal, if not unlimited, spectrum of application. Reactions to this inability to come up with a general definition of possession followed quite soon. In particular, they came from history. Since the almost simultaneous decline of culturalism and functionalism, diachronic approaches to possession have multiplied, particularly in the African diaspora in the Americas.52 The ambitious project headed by Paul Christopher Johnson under the title Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions deserves special attention.53 In his elaborate introduction to this volume, Johnson revisits the very concept of “spirit possession.” He argues that the idea of “possession” of human beings by unseen forces speaking through them is in fact a Western epistémè emerging around the end of seventeenth century “as a negative marker of free will” by which liberal philosophy defined the autonomous individual: Via the labor of the negative, “spirit possession” defined the rational, autonomous, self-possessed individual imagined as the foundation of the modem state, in canonical texts from Hobbes, Jean Bodin, Locke, Charles De Brosses, Hume, Kant, and many others, as those texts constructed the free individual and citizen against a backdrop of colonial horizons and slavery.54 Hence the second key point of the thesis: “the category of spirit possession as the ownership or occupation of the body by unseen agents emerged 49 Ibid., 407. 50 See, in particular, Smith, The Self Possessed, 35. 51 Ibid., 407. 52 See, e.g., Capone, Searching for Africa in Brazil, for a good overview; Boddy, Spirit Possession revisited, 409-412; and several essays in Johnson, Spirited Things. 53 For the general argument, see also Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy”; Santo, “Spirited Things.” 54 Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy,” 398.

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out of an analogical relation with material possessions.”55 Especially the ownership of slaves: this category “was interanimated from the outset by the question of the degree to which human beings can be seen as property – as an economic resource – and legitimately maintained in servitude.” Spirit possession and property possession were “deeply enmeshed semantic and ideological fields”56 referring to the same notion of property rights that preceded the emergence of this new epistémè. So, for Johnson, the figure of the “possessed” African American slave is, so to speak, the constituting antimodel of the autonomous individual of liberal philosophy: belonging to his owner, the slave does not dispose of himself, neither materially nor spiritually, and his dependence on all sorts of forces outside himself is proved by his incurable “fetishism” so often emphasized.57 In sum, anthropology was wrong to reify spirit possession as a primitive category, for this concept emerged at the dawn of modernity from “a confused mixture of popular discourses on demonism, as well as new ideas on persons, bodies, civil society and the primitive” as a countermodel to the Western concept of the autonomous individual freely disposing of all the resources of his Self.58 This is how spirit possession became “a proto-anthropological, universal category of experience.”59 This innovative epistemological thesis, which in its own way fits into the already long-standing tradition of “protest theories,”60 naturally raises questions. Let us begin with two commonsense remarks of Michael Lambek.61 For Johnson, all spirit possession is a hybrid construction resulting from the encounter of a local model with the above-discussed Western ideas. However, if such a hypothesis is at a pinch plausible for African American cults, such 55 Ibid., 408. 56 Ibid., 405. 57 To note that Johnson provides several compelling clues to support his theory of the historical links between slavery and spirit possession by examining the ritual language used in African American cults where references to the enslavement of followers to gods or spirits are common. Ibid., 418. 58 Michael Lambek summarizes this thesis as follows: “Johnson makes the compelling argument that possession by spirits – as Europeans found and imagined it – helped set off by contrast the emergent arguments for the self-possessed modem European individual and indeed for the whole doctrine that C. B. Macpherson so memorably called ‘possessive individualism.’ Humanity is divided in effect between the self-possessed possessors of others and those vulnerable to being possessed by spirits or by other men” (Lambek, “Afterword,” 258). 59 Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy,” 396. 60 Let us only cite Lanternari, Les mouvements religieux; Desroche, “Syncrétisme et messianisme”; Ranger, “Religious Movements”; Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories; and, of course, Lewis, Ecstatic Religion. 61 Lambek, “Afterword.”

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as Candomblé or Umbanda, or even for Spiritism or Pentecostalism, it is not for the West African forms of possession that existed already before the arrival of Europeans, or for those of the premodern Christian world, and even less for those of Greco-Latin antiquity such as Greek Maenadism.62 Furthermore, Johnson argues that the “notions of property preceded, and guided the notions of spirits’ capacity to ‘sit’ in flesh.”63 However, the beings or forces, which “possess” the person in the cults observed by anthropologists do not do so in the sense of ownership.64 Neither in Madagascar, nor in Senegal does the ancestral spirit that “follows,” “penetrates,” “climbs on” and “splits” the possessed “own” them at any time the way one owns a horse, a dress, or real estate. And equally, when they say in Sudan “inda zār,”65 “she has [a] zār” or, in Wolof, that such and such a woman “has (am) the rab” or that she is “borom rab” (the one who has rab), they are obviously not implying that these spirits belong to her, even when she uses them like my friend Khady Fall, to beg on their her behalf during a ritual.66 Either way, the excellent contributions to Spirited Things have confirmed the renewed interest in historical approaches to possession and Johnson’s thesis has shown the way to rethink the notion of spirit possession as an epistémè born in a specific historical context. The present book is part of this movement, but its purpose is more modest and its contributions more eclectic. Taking into account the disconcerting diversity of the phenomena of possession, it seemed to us preferable to draw up an inventory of a series of specific problems that the researchers meeting in Pécs identified in very different historical conditions and in cultural contexts often quite distant from one another. This is why the volume includes a wide array of case studies from a variety of cultures and religious traditions, ranging from Africa to South Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The combination of the historical and anthropological approach seemed to us a good way to support the analysis of the phenomena in question. Anthropology still tends to focus on synchronic description and analysis, 62 We regret the absence of possession cults of the Greco-Latin antiquity in our comparative work. Among the many available sources, let us quote only Jeanmaire, Dionysos; Kerényi, Dionysos; Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion. 63 Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy,” 397. 64 “Spirits don’t ‘possess’ their hosts in any literal sense. […] To ‘possess’ can also mean simply to ‘have’ rather than to ‘own.’ Thus, I can say that a host or medium possesses spirits in more or less the way I possess two eyes or two children, an unruly temper, or knowledge of anthropology, without implying that I have specific legal rights over them” (Lambek, “Afterword,” 262). 65 Boddy, in this volume. 66 See Zempléni, “From Symptom to Sacrifice,” 98, 137 n. 62, and in this volume.

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yet it is in great need of historical approaches, while the gaps in sources used by historians of religion can be usefully filled by well-documented ethnographic descriptions, both in Europe and elsewhere. Let’s add a linguistic argument in support of the association of Europeanist research with research carried out on other continents. Anthropologists who do fieldwork in remote areas usually need to use a foreign language in which to capture the complex terminology, metaphors, symbols, and local interpretations of spirit possession. As noted above, we wanted to place the linguistic proximity of European researchers studying their own culture in service of the understanding and interpretation of anthropologists working in foreign terrains. The vast corpus of Hungarian “emic” terms and expressions collected by Éva Pócs during her extensive fieldwork in Transylvania67 provides a good example of the native researchers’ special contribution to a reliable study of the diversity of phenomena clustered under the term “spirit possession.” To take but one example, she shows that Transylvanian inclination to merge, combine or partly confuse “possessions” by the dead, demons, lidérc and the Devil (ördög) can be inferred from the verbs or verbal expressions used by speakers to describe the ways these beings act. Thus, the feelings of an upsetting nocturnal or half-awake “pressure” (nyomás), that of being “besieged” (ostromolva) or “surrounded” (környékezve) by a being that “walks you” (jár, bejár) or “moves around” “encircles” you (kerülget) characterize these otherwise differentiated “possessions” whose common feature is that they never refer to the idea of an invisible being entering the body. Understood in this latter sense, possession is, according to Pócs, not an emic but “an etic category based on Christian clerical ideas that originated in the cases of exorcism of Christ.” Nobody can master the immense and ever-growing historical and anthropological literature on phenomena labeled possession. This volume does not propose a general synthesis or a global theory. Our initial challenge was to derive some generalizable hypotheses from a comparison – attempted but never done systematically before – between past possession phenomena studied by historians and those of modern times that anthropologists, folklorists, or ethnologists have directly observed. Hence also our preference for a limited number of case studies, monographic analyses, and problem-oriented micro-historical studies. This general orientation can also be interpreted more radically. The repeated failure of the discipline to arrive at a general definition of possession went hand in hand with a 67 In this volume.

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Figure 1.3 St Egidius exorcises a possessed woman. Hungarian Angevin Legendary, Budapest: Helikon and Corvina 1975 (Acta Sanctorum pictis imaginaribus adormenta 1320–1340)

Figure 1.4 St Donatus exorcises a possessed man. Hungarian Angevin Legendary, Budapest: Helikon and Corvina 1975 (Acta Sanctorum pictis imaginaribus adormenta 1320–1340)

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recurring anomaly notable among the best authors: refusing this generic term as inadequate,68 Western, “over-interpreted,”69 even rejected by its ex-users70 and yet continuing to use it – in quotation marks or as a “mere convenience”71 – to gather under this umbrella term disparate phenomena that in vernacular terminologies are not called “possession.” This is another reason why our work favors – with one exception72 – inductive methods applied to the level of case studies placed in their particular historical and cultural contexts and analyzed with particular attention to local theories and emic reflections that concern them. Éva Pócs carefully presents and thoroughly explores this orientation in her contribution on Transylvania. Such a choice carries the risk of a patchwork of cases with few links between them. This risk is mitigated here by the recurrence of a series of shared problematics, overarching geographical and cultural areas, temporal boundaries, and various forms of possession. Without claiming to be exhaustive, let us evoke some of these issues and the methodological innovations that they call for from future researchers. The first is linked to the high interconnectedness of the notion of possession, which goes hand in hand with its hybrid nature and, as we shall see, its “spectrality”. In fact, the ethnographer or the historian hardly ever deals with a pure form of possession in which the state of mind identified as such 68 For example, Smith, The Self Possessed, 10: “What I hope to show is that the category of possession as it has been commonly understood in religion studies and Indology, where it has been addressed at all, does not work well in the context of the classical Indian view of the self.” Then: “I retain the term ‘possession’ though it may not work very well in some of the circumstances that I discuss. But I preserve it because the broad semantic boundaries of the terms under study here provide no attractive alternative” (my emphasis). 69 See Olivier de Sardan, “Possession, affliction et folie” and “La violence.” 70 The phenomena of rejection and reappearance of the notions of possession have not been studied much. In this book, Heike Behrend and Bettina Schmidt approach the issue from significantly different angles. Schmidt notes, as does Éva Pócs, the absence of an emic category for intra-corporal possession in the vast South American area she studies but, for want of a better term, continues to use this word. Behrend examines the transformations of the traditional conception of spirit possession in the ancient Ugandan bacwezi cult under the influence of evangelization and later Pentecostal movements that accepted the “return” of some elements of this traditional cult. 71 As Tarabout writes in the introduction of his thorough contribution in this volume: “In practice, I shall keep on using the English word ‘possession’ as a mere convenience as it has become part of the anthropological jargon; it is used as well by English-speaking people in Kerala when they translate expressions in Malayalam. However, it is not to be taken in its literal, etymological, meaning, and for caution’s sake I will maintain the quotation marks.” 72 Keller’s chapter in this volume illustrates well the extension of the notion of possession to the invisible hold of the environment on the person. The cult in which Moundang women worship the sun and the rain, or certain animals (Zempléni, “Pouvoir dans la cure”), suggests that one does not have to be an “indigenist” to subscribe to this view.

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would be distinguishable from other kinds of relationships with the invisible, or identical from one case to the other, and attributable to the same agent or the same class of agents. The contributions to this book alone provide convincing proof of this. Those of Éva Pócs, Daniela Berti, Gilles Tarabout, and Heike Behrend, in particular, suggest furthermore that few societies have a unified discourse on possession. The range of phenomena that can be brought together under this term – namely in Christian Europe73 and ancient and modern India74 – is so wide and varied that it is impossible to overlook its potential for interconnectedness. We shall return to this question later, but here let us mention a few areas or categories ordinarily considered to be distinct, which are possibly linked by the notion of possession; in other words, between which it can serve as a mediator. “Possession” is at the same time a theological fiction, a common-sense notion conveyed by world history, and a para-scientific category (with or without quotation marks). It links the visible and the invisible, the bodily and the mental, the innenwelt and the umwelt, the past and the present, and even good and evil insofar as it relieves the possessed person – as when he/she is “sick” – of a part of his/her responsibility for what he/she does.75 This general connectivity is demonstrated in the regular copresence of two or more models of “possession” that historians and anthropologists can study concurrently: the Charismatic and the embwanda model for Heike Behrend; demons and the dead for Nancy Caciola; the canonical and the Franciscan model for Dániel Bárth; obsession and possession for Pierre-Henri Castel; the models of Umbanda, Kardecism, and Candomblé for Bettina Schmidt; possession by the rab and by the jinne in Senegal, etc. However, the monographic traditions of our respective disciplines have accustomed us more to refining the criteria for distinguishing between such competing models than to developing methods of rigorous analysis of their synchronic and diachronic articulation or hybridization in the evolving historical context where they coexist. In this perspective, at least three themes, little studied before the contemporary transformations of 73 Éva Pócs knows this subject admirably well. See her chapter in this volume. 74 See Smith, The Self Possessed; Assayag and Tarabout, La possession en Asie du Sud; Berti and Tarabout, “Possession”; Tarabout, in this volume. 75 Given the extreme diversity of “possessions,” this proposition deserves to be explained in detail. It goes without saying that a Wolof woman possessed by an ancestral spirit of her lineage is not relieved of responsibility for her actions in the same way as an eighteenth-century Christian possessed by a demon. As pointed out by De Certeau (La possession de Loudun), the waves of European possession occurred after the medieval witch hunts, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries being the period of transition from witchcraft to possession.

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possession, have come to the forefront of research: the analysis of the phenomena of the hybridization of models; that of the lasting interaction of competing models; and the identification of transition points from one model or ritual to another. The reader will find in this volume something to reflect on each of these themes and on the new methods of analysis that these texts propose. Thus, we can observe a shift in emphasis in European history from the works focused on differences, as inspired by the old theology of discerning spirits, towards the empirical study of the interactions between theological and popular conceptions about the agent of possession. Nancy Caciola’s sophisticated work on late-medieval Italy (fifteenth–sixteenth centuries) analyzes the syncretism resulting from the interaction between the official doctrine of demonic possession and the popular belief of possession by ghosts. In principle, these two models are opposed: these fallen angels, the demons, are anonymous representatives of transcendent evil that must be eradicated; while the “evil dead” are stray spirits of human origin sought to be domesticated through rites that mobilize their family and their community. In fact, the cases cited by the author prove that demons and the evil dead can possess the same person “together,” the issue being not so much their duality, but their multiplicity. And where the priest wants to see a demon, the common folk readily see a dead person they can name: Indeed, for the “common folk,” naming the possessing ghosts and recounting the evil deeds of their lives and bad deaths, was a common component of the public performance of a possession episode. This collective act of memory and narrativization is key to resolving the episode: within local communities, the possessor’s confession of his name, crimes, and details of death, ventriloquized through the possessed body, was thought to be the key veridical point that could establish the basis for exorcism.76 That said, the demon of the Church is not forgotten: the final act of expulsion, concluding these domestication rites of the dead, is the visit to the tomb of a saint; “a celebration of the clean power represented by the Holy Dead.” All this leads the author to a powerful critique of the traditional notion of survival from which any folklorist or ethnologist can benefit.77 76 Caciola, in this volume. 77 About the same topics, see also Caciola, “Le dévoyé et le damné.”

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Thomas Csordas’ chapter unexpectedly adds to and extends that of Nancy Caciola. It concerns the links not between the demon of the Church and the evil dead of the family, but those that the author discovers between the Christian demon, on the one hand, the “specter” of the philosopher Jacques Derrida,78 and the “phantom” of psychoanalysts Abraham and Török,79 on the other. His text, reminiscent of “French theory” and based on the case of an Italian woman “possessed” by seven demons identified and exorcised for several years, leads to several basic questions. Who or rather what are these seven demons, each linked to different parts of Bianca’s body, thus classifying her bodily experiences? Here, let us stick to the track opened by Csordas when he underlines the convergence between what common sense calls demon and the Derridean notion of “specter.” In Derrida’s formulation “the specter’s secret is a productive opening of meaning rather than a determinate content to be uncovered, […] not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future.”80 In short, the Derridean specter is not a clear-cut being, endowed with its own attributes, but an idea or a still indistinct force that “haunts” society or the individual. Derrida’s “hauntology” runs counter to the rationalism of ontologies, which seek to deny the intrinsically indistinct character of reality by dividing it up and isolating certain categories of it, such as the more or less personalized Christian demons. The ones on whom Bianca blames her problems have more to do with her changing and multifaceted spectral experiences than with the discrete entities of the theologians and her two exorcists. One only has to compare, for example, the proliferation of these psychosomatic experiences with those that Gilles Tarabout evokes about the afflictions of the women of Kerala81 or those mentioned by Éva Pócs, citing the possessed Hungarian peasants of Transylvania82 to realize the fruitfulness of the spectral approach in the matter of spirit possession. Possession is already “spectral,” as we have seen, as long as it resists any attempt of definition and goes beyond the limits assigned to it by essentialist interpretations of spirits. And as we will see, the well-researched embodied 78 Derrida, Spectres de Marx. 79 Abraham and Török, L’écorce et le noyau. Very schematically, a psychic “ghost” is the unconscious trace of a trauma suffered and never expressed by an ancestor of the subject who behaves as another person. It is not a repressed memory and therefore it cannot be remembered; it is rather an embedded and foreclosed “crypt.” 80 Quoted in Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms,” 377. 81 In this volume 82 In this volume.

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public possession cults of Africa or South America exhibit the ghostly nature of the imaginary experiences of their members through versatile and creative ritual behaviors. The cults of the Sudanese zār and the Malagasy tromba provide the best proofs of this.83 Finally, the so-called possession cults are par excellence social places of “revenance” in the Derridean sense: instead of exorcism’s futile cutting short of the possession process, they transform the unhappy possession into a ritual possession, the obligatory repetition of which is a sine qua non condition of the lasting well-being of the possessed person. A common sign of the interconnectedness of competing possession models, or if one wishes, their “spectrality,” is worth reflecting upon. Medieval exorcists, notes Caciola, regularly suspect the demon of disguising itself as the dead. Isn’t this suspicion the most compelling indication of a recurring connection between the demonic possession of the clergy and the spectral possession of the common folk? Be that as it may, Csordas puts us on the trail of the barely explored field of comparative research of the possessing agents’ disguise and metamorphoses. Whether it is the Christian demon disguised as a dead or living human, the Koranic shaytān as a Wolof ancestral spirit,84 the Ethiopian ganën as zār,85 the Judaic shedim as a human figure […], the disguises of the possessing agent – the “tricks of the Devil” – have always been a major concern of exorcists, priests, seers or fortune tellers, that is to say, of all specialists of discerning spirits. Without entering the thicket of the universal imagination of spirit metamorphoses, let us note that they are rarely ludic and often self-interested: the Wolof incubus takes the form of a handsome young man to possess a woman; the djinn disguises itself as an ancestral spirit so that it would not frighten the patient, etc. The anonymous demon or the devil of Christianity has, one might say, a particular interest in disguising itself: by taking on a human form, especially that of a dead person, these abstract beings may become more or less mediating social representations akin to the publicly embodied possessing agents of traditional religions. The disguises of the 83 See the contributions by Boddy, Lambek, and Fiéloux and Lombard in this volume. What Boddy calls palimpsest of possessions is a sophisticated way of ironic circumvention of social codes: “In more elaborate zār episodes, the figures of the human host, her male or eccentric female spirit, and the spirit’s faltering local role-play are juxtaposed in the body of the possessed, creating for onlookers a palimpsest that provokes quotidian understandings” (Boddy, in this volume). 84 Cf. Zempléni, in this volume. 85 Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux, 29–30. See also Young, “Why Amhara Get kureynya.”

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devil or the demon can be considered as first steps towards their shared local representation which is the condition sine qua non of the socialization of possession. Here we are in a little explored transit zone between theology and anthropology where the fieldworker also encounters reverse phenomena such as the “diabolization” of possession experiences via poltergeist phenomena.86 The portrayal of the possessing agent can sometimes be purely imaginary, sometimes publicly staged by possessed bodies in a ritual framework approved by society. Sarah Ferber gives a good example of the first case from seventeenth-century France, which does not yet differentiate between victims of possession and perpetrators of witchcraft.87 At the center of her chapter is the creation of the powerful collective imagination of the witches’ Sabbath, a fiction launched around 1430 by theologians of the Alps clearly inspired by the persistent imagery of the sensual overflows of pagan possessions of antiquity.88 Ferber shows how this common collective fiction, inseparable from witch hunts, was built little by little through forced interactions between exorcists and the possessed, who enriched it with their own dreams, visions, or extorted memories legitimized by the exorcism ritual and thereby integrated into the collective imagination of the Sabbath. This ritualistic way of constructing a social representation of possession deserves all the more attention since it has never been possible to separate the real and the imaginary in the rural traditions of the witches’ Sabbath. Sarah Ferber refines her ideas through the turbulently ecstatic story of Madeleine Demandols, a nun from Loudun. The chapter by Pierre-Henri Castel is also set in the center of seventeenth-century urban possession, but he tackles a whole different problem. We recall that, for Christopher Johnson, the origin of South American ideas of possession goes back to the time when 86 As Pócs notes in this volume, “The devil can also take possession of human homes, in keeping with the dual space-time structure which I described in connection to possession by the dead. According to data from Hidegség, the devil that assaults the family produces poltergeist phenomena: people hear noises, the throwing of stones or the rattling of dishes.” 87 For De Certeau (“Ce que Freud fait de l’histoire”), “he who says possession does not say witchcraft.” Witchcraft is rural and precedes possession, which is predominantly urban. The first produces culprits while the second gradually develops the idea of a victim. The fact remains that “the old treatises associate them, even confuse them” and that “the possession itself leads to – one could say political – trials of poisoners” (De Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 10). Let us add that the lasting fusion of the two models is another very widespread manifestation of the general interconnectedness of “possession”: thus, the officiants of the Senegalese ndëpp spend a good part of their ritual time chasing witches, and the Moundang idea of the congregation of the possessed is also intimately linked to that of witchcraft (cf. Zempléni, “Pouvoir dans la cure,” 172–178). 88 The almost obligatory presence of a sensual dance and music in the Sabbath paintings is the main sign of this persistence of the Greek Maenadism or the Roman Bacchanalia.

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the Western notion of the free and autonomous individual was born: the antithesis of the possessed.89 Castel explores a similar line of argument, but with a specific objective: to describe how the Jesuit confessor Jean-Joseph Surin transforms the ritual of exorcism into a self-examination, pushing Mother Jeanne des Anges, the mother superior of the Ursuline convent, to recognize her own “bad thoughts” and sins in her ideas of possession. This process of internalization is far from trivial and limited to the case under scrutiny. Inspired by the work of Edmond and Marie-Cécile Ortigues in Senegal,90 Castel shows that this type of confession characterized by an obsessive quest for one’s sins and faults played a crucial role in shifting from the persecutory perception of evil inherent in possession to that of the individual’s responsibility for what happens to him or her.91 By mobilizing an important philosophical apparatus, he addresses the vast question of the genesis of the Anglo-Saxon concept of the Self, which, even today, serves as a false reference to studies of possession in societies that have a quite different concept of the person in the Maussian sense of the term.92 It’s not saying much to state that not all ideas about the persecution of possessed Europeans have been converted into scruples or “bad thoughts” in the movement of interiorizing guilt that accompanied Western individualization. Studying eighteenth-century England, Janine Rivière brings a compelling illustration of this. She explores the microhistory of how the English secularized the notion of “night-mare”93 from its medieval interpretation as an oppressing sexual invasion by a demon to its medicalization as a symptom of “sleep paralysis” caused by vapors ascending to the brain. Her text brings to our attention that the European secularization of 89 “Spirit possession as a conceptual apparatus of the West descended from the nomenclature of Christian demonology, beginning with the New Testament and peaking from the fifteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century (Caciola, Discerning Spirits; Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit) with the famous mass-possessions at Loudun (1634), Louviers (1647), and elsewhere” (Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy,” 398). 90 Namely, the analysis of the case of Talla by Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues in Oedipe africain, 134–164. 91 Far from being restricted to spirit possession, this process is at the core of traditional interpretations of illness, as I have attempted to show in Anciens et nouveaux usages sociaux de la maladie 92 Cf. Mauss, “Une catégorie de l’esprit humain.” To mention only two examples, the “layered” identity of the Samo person, made up, according to F. Héritier, of a bundle of principles that are little or not at all unified, or the “transactional” identity of the Bororo Indians outlined by Ch. Crocker have nothing to do with the unifying concept of the Anglo-Saxon self, the anthropological history of which remains to be done. See Lévi-Strauss, L’identité. 93 The nighttime incubus, which will reappear in its Eastern European variant of lidérc is one of the cases analyzed in the chapters by Bárth and Pócs in this volume.

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possession ideas followed two parallel paths: one was psychology referred to by Pierre-Henri Castel, the other was medicine; the two currents meet, via Charcot and Breuer, in Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) and “The ‘Uncanny.’”94 Notwithstanding, Janine Rivière stresses that the medicalization of the nightmare did not result in the disappearance of its demonic aspect. Considered superstition by the elites, it remained alive among the popular classes of eighteenth-century English society. This is another issue explored by several authors of this volume. With the notable exception of I. M. Lewis and the followers of his aforementioned distinction between “central” and “peripheral” possession, anthropologists of the colonial era paid little attention to variants of possession within the same society, all despite the widespread occurrence of multiple and hierarchical possessions, especially in South Asia.95 However, the double distinction between the culture of the elite and the people on the one hand, and official and popular religion on the other, was a key starting point for folklore research on possession. Éva Pócs is incomparably more qualified than I am to demonstrate that the clerical and popular conceptions of possession are neither homogeneous nor independent of each other. As she develops in her contribution to this volume, these concepts have partly come into being as an effect of their confrontation during the rural or urban exorcism rites organized by priests close to the “common folk” who did not hesitate to expel the demon by sensual means condemned or ignored by canon law. This is what Dániel Bárth demonstrates in his well-documented text, in which he recounts two exorcism scandals that occurred in the eighteenth century on the borders of Eastern and Western Christianity. Here, I will touch upon only a few pertinent details relevant to the comparative aims of this book. The public and festive incarnation of spirits or deities referred to by proper names is a major characteristic of “possession cults,” which thus goes against the Christian doctrine of exorcising anonymous demons.96 94 Let us recall that this founding text of psychoanalysis (1895) was followed by two texts in which Freud set out in detail his demonological theories: “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) and especially “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” (1922), which De Certeau put into its historical context (“Ce que Freud fait de l’histoire”). 95 Georges Condominas convincingly contrasted the multiple, successive and hierarchical possessions prevalent in Asia with the African or American models centered around a single agent, in particular that of the Haitian Vodou (Condominas, “Quelques aspects du chamanisme,” 218). 96 About the anonymity of the demon of exorcisms – but not of magic – in Western Christianity, see the overview by Chave-Mahir in this volume. But see also Csordas’ chapter in this volume,

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It first needs to be noted that it is precisely the public character of the sensual rites organized by Bárth’s “populist” priests that the hierarchy condemns. As for the demon extracted by the Franciscan friar in the second case he analyzes, it is far from being an anonymous force or a simple metaphor for evil: it is a black fly, a being already embodied, escaping through the mouth of the possessed who, at the end of a “long and arduous process,” ends up naming the demon “Hassan.” We then learn that it was a water demon living in the Danube that she encountered when drinking from the river. If we add to all this the theatricality of the exorcism scene, we find that every element is there so that this water spirit – this Hassan or this black fly – can be, not expelled, but rather embodied in front of the audience; similar to, for instance, the spider of Sicilian Tarantism.97 In any case, Bárth opens up a whole field of research about the internal differentiation of ecclesiastical ideas and the determining role of the lower clergy in the construction of secular representations of possession. “Hassan”: in the medieval documents of the Catholic Church, the evil spirit, Satan, is not referred to by a proper name, but rather by pejorative epithets, such as immundus, which underline its fundamental impurity.98 To get an idea of the gap between eighteenth-century popular exorcisms described by Bárth and the rites prescribed by the Church’s official exorcism forms, one just has to take a look at Florence Chave-Mahir’s exemplarily coherent and precise philological work. It turns out that, at the turn of the first millennium, possession was considered to be a physical evil caused by Satan entering the body and by his destructive presence in the organs of the possessed body.99 The exorcism also consisted of rooting out the evil from the infected organs, body part by body part from top to bottom, by pronouncing the appropriate adjurations. The author shows that this meticulous process is also found in the liturgy of baptism, as well as in certain cures; it aims to restore the purity of the body of God’s servant by freeing it from its original or occasional blemishes. which seems to contradict her. For him, the Christian demon is a “personal being” with a proper name. The long lists of names of demons found by magical-religious texts could constitute the starting point for detailed research on the issue. 97 We saw above that the tarantella could be considered either as an exorcism or as a figurative possession rite in which the name is not pronounced. 98 It is also noteworthy that the biblical names associated with the seven deadly sins such as Asmodeus, Belphégor or Lucifer, etc., are not mentioned by Chave-Mahir, who therefore emphasizes the anonymity of the demon. 99 Hence, for example, the testimonies of exorcistic vomiting, which is in no way metaphorical.

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Reading Chave-Mahir, one realizes that the water spirit identified by Bárth’s Franciscan priest was named in the same type of bodily exorcism invented a millennium earlier: He [the Franciscan] even used those special rites of exorcism that expelled the Devil bit by bit, by listing all the possessed body parts. During the latter process, the woman felt cold and hot sensations all over her body and felt wind and fire in her limbs. She felt as if ants were crawling over her body. Due to the coercive words, the Devil admitted certain details. After a long and arduous process, he revealed his name: Hassan. Did this curious water demon reveal its Arabic or Turkish first name through the mouth of the possessed woman? It is more than likely. In any case, a meticulous bodily exorcism accompanied by “coercive words” precedes, and apparently, facilitates the naming of the spirit. One might think that this kind of punctilious rite is specific to the Christian world. However, we encounter a similar sequence even in the Senegalese ndëpp, which I discuss below. In this case, every possessed body part is “measured” (natt), again from top to bottom and one by one, to “bring down” the ancestral spirit that had penetrated the body part. Then, the thus relieved possessed person names the rab that they will subsequently portray during the public possession sessions organized by the congregation.100 This invites the same question we asked about the Christian ritual: why the meticulousness, the “body part by body part” approach to these bodily rituals, which precede the naming of the spirit? In cases of multiple possessions like the case of Bianca analyzed by Csordas, where each of the seven demons is associated from the top down with a different organ and a different bodily experience, one can understand this approach. But the others? Besides, these cases remind us that all possession is the work of a human body or, to quote Michael Lambek, a bodily poiesis, even when the agent is an anonymous demon or group of spirits. Hence the need to specify the definition of exorcism, which is still too often considered as a kind of ontological resetting of the religious body. Many authors point out that the most prominent features of demonic possession do not exist before the exorcism 100 According to the healers, “the rab [the spirit] leaves” the measured part of the possessed body.

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ritual but are its products101 and of the accompanying “coercive words,” as Daniel Bárth would say. Moreover, the story of Bianca, exorcised for more than seven years, illustrates well that “the ritual practice of exorcism may itself be the active ingredient in allowing [the possessed person] to articulate the not-yet speakable and the shamefully unspeakable.”102 Exorcism is as much a subjective process of shaping one’s psychosomatic experiences as a ritual eradication of the possessing agent assumed by the exorcist. Finally, it must be remembered that exorcism is not intended to wipe out one’s ties with the invisible world. It seeks to convert demonic possession into a state of possession or of beneficial grace, for instance, the divine purity restored by the Christian baptism mentioned by Florence Chave-Mahir, or the ritual trance of the possessed Senegalese woman. And we can go even further. In a comparative study I tried to show, with supporting facts, that in the Ethiopian zār cult,103 that of orisha or vodun of Benin,104 of rabs in Senegal, and undoubtedly Greek Maenadism, this operation consists of an inversion that is both spatial and temporal: the invisible being who continually acts on the inside during the possession-illness is exteriorized to make it return periodically from the outside during the obligatory ritual trances of the adept. A singular blood sacrifice after which the possessed wears (outside) the internal organs of the animal and sometimes its skin turned inside out105 is the originator of this inversion.106 The classical notions of exorcism and adorcism are hardly sufficient to account for this type of operation.

101 For instance, Adeline Talamonti (“La produzione rituale,” 62) regards Catholic exorcism as “a symbolic mechanism which, by acting upon a person’s state of unrest, ritually constructs the figure of the devil-possessed. This is a ritual metaprocess that unfolds at two levels, in the course of each séance taken alone and over time with the repetition of exorcisms. The stereotyped behavior of the possessed is induced and manifests itself through a relatively stable framework of actions, gestures, words, formulae, and prayers, and in the interaction between exorcist and exorcised. The symbolic efficacy of the rite is founded on the acceptance of this role: to act upon the person’s underlying state of unrest by catalyzing its diabolical representation.” See also Clark-Decès, Religion against the Self, 124; De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire. 102 Cf. Csordas, in this volume. 103 Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux; Lewis, “The Globalization of Spirit Possession.” 104 Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa. 105 In the Senegalese ndëpp (Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique du culte des rab”), the animal intestines are attached to the wrists, ankles and chest of the initiate, his emptied stomach is turned inside out and attached to his head (see pictures). In the Ethiopian cult of the zār the peritoneum is worn like a head wrap, the small intestine is wrapped around it and the skin, called the “blood garment,” is laid with the furry side – i.e., turned inside out – on his shoulders like a cape (see i.a. Mercier, “Les métaphores nuptiale et royale du Zar”,140-143 . The nebris (fawn skin) worn by the Greek maenads may have been associated with a similar action. 106 See Zempléni, “Possession et sacrifice” and “Des êtres sacrificiels.”

Discerning Spirit Possessions

Figure 1.5  A follower of the Egyptian Zār cult. 2017

Photo Ikhlas Abbis

As a continuation of this topic, we will read with pleasure the impeccably documented text of the medievalist, Gábor Klaniczay, who examines a variety of exorcisms that we will also find in a refined form in the cults of Muslim saints in Morocco: the “miraculous” healing of the possessed thanks to the charismatic powers of saints. By presenting and commenting on excerpts of the records from the canonization investigations of three late-medieval saints (1234–1323), Klaniczay explores the problems specific to this type of exorcism: the fluidity of boundaries both between demonic and divine possession, and possession and madness; the contradictory diversity of the facts from one investigation to another about the same possessed person: the demon’s appearances, the visions, the circumstances of the attacks or the encounter with the saint, glossolalia, etc. Let us note two striking features in these descriptions: the stereotypical behavior associated with possession, for the most part aggressive or demonstrative (attacking, biting, contorting themselves, rolling on the ground, drooling, speaking in tongues, etc.) and the paroxysm of medieval possession epidemics, such as the one that occurred around 1320 at the Cistercian monastery of Santa Lucia: “[T]he possessed nuns rolled their eyes, distorted their faces, bit their tongues, screamed, trembled, and walked on their hands ‘by the power of the evil spirits’ {…}. They also performed devilish marvels: they managed to stand an egg upright on the edge of a wall without its

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falling. Anthonia threw pebbles at the other nuns and started to sing obscene songs”. To place these ostentatious behaviors in a comparative perspective, two remarks are in order. Since the pioneering works of Henri Jeanmaire107 and Michel Leiris,108 we know that theatricality is one of the universal traits of possession. But that of the African or African American possession cults differ in an essential aspect from the agitated theatricality of the Christian possessions evoked by Klaniczay and made famous by the later incidents of Louviers and of Loudun. While members of the zār, tromba or rab cults mentioned below embody social characters with distinctive attributes that allow them to be identified one by one,109 Christian or Muslim “demoniacs” exhibit and dramatize a kind of a metonymic cluster of an anonymous Evil. Despite the many names and shapes of demons, they are not strictly speaking individualized. Their particular traits are less important than their common immorality. Furthermore, the European theater of demonic possession – in particular, that of the hostile period of the Counter-Reformation – mobilizes belligerent emotional energies that are either absent from the traditional cults of Africa and South America or which are reserved for specific deities like the Yoruba god of war, Ogun. Buddhist practices in Sri Lanka remind us of another path opened by the Bible, one that seems repressed in Christian Europe: in A Celebration of Demons, Bruce Kapferer110 shows that the exorcisms in this country follow the tripartite pattern of rites of passage, and that music and dance play a central role in an essential phase of the transition from demonic to divine possession. In Latin Christianity, the tomb or relic of a saint could ward off demons. In Orthodoxy, consecrated objects and contexts have a similar effect to this day. The demonic possession attack of the klikushi, the Russian “female shriekers,” is triggered by the presence of an icon, a cross, an incense or prayer, or some other source of divine energy. As dramatic and theatrical as the ones in medieval Italy, these women’s seizures and blasphemous cries occurring in the religious space could end in prolonged blackouts. In a clear and detailed case study, Christine Worobec takes us to the heart 107 Jeanmaire, Dionysos. 108 Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux, and “La croyance aux génies ‘Zar.’” 109 They have, as Leiris writes, a veritable “wardrobe of personalities” (Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux, 7). 110 Kapferer, A Celebration of Demons.

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of a possession epidemic that occurred in 1839 in a colony of the Urals that the priest Dmitrii Florovskii – the Russian counterpart of the “populist” Franciscan of Dániel Bárth – followed closely. Worobec gives a meticulous analysis of the both empathic and ambiguous attitude of the Orthodox Church towards a phenomenon considered fraudulent by the Russian elite since the reign of Peter the Great (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries) and that the people, as well as the clerical observer, continued to attribute to an act of malevolent witchcraft. The author describes the contrast between the “medical” treatments of the possessed who were stripped, hosed with ice-cold water, or even beaten to cure them of their “hysterical” trickeries and the peaceful exorcisms by prayer, icons, or fasting in Orthodox monasteries. As in the chapters by Chave-Mahir and Bárth, or in Senegal, these orthodox exorcisms also feature the idea of methodically eliminating the demon body part by body part from the body.111 The Dead Sea Scrolls from the Second Temple period re-establish the common root of all Christian possession, which makes them interesting to us here. The in-depth philological study that Ida Fröhlich devotes to the notion of “spirit” (rwḥ) in her writings provides valuable clues to situate the Western and Orthodox ideas of possession. We can already see that this notion, omnipresent in the Old Testament, is about as vague and polysemous as our current concept of “possession.” Rwḥ can also mean “wind,” “vital spirit of divine origin in humans,” “the spirit of God,” “(intermittent) prophetic spirit” and all kinds of “evil spirits” (rwḥ rʽh), sent or not sent by God, that brings discord, lies, or the plague. In Aramaic, the nocturnal agents of the disease are the male or female “penetrator” rwḥ that “enter the flesh” to transmit fever, chills, and pain in the heart. Unlike, for example, the Indian diversity emphasized by Berti and Tarabout and, more significantly, the exogenous character of Transylvanian “obsessions” pointed out by Éva Pócs,112 biblical possession seems clearly intracorporeal. The common gesture of exorcisms is the laying on of hands.113 A common practice in Palestine at the time, this therapeutic gesture takes on special meaning in 111 See, in particular, the 1892 prayer recorded in Smolensk. 112 “If we regard possessio as concrete bodily possession to be the basic category, the answer to the question whether in this region there is an emic category of possession as an independent, coherent religious/cultural formation has to be no. Possession is an etic category based on Christian clerical ideas that originate in Christ’s exorcism cases. […] There is, however, the emic category that corresponds to obsessio, that of the notion of demonic temptation and assault.” Pócs, in this volume. 113 Practiced more than once by Jesus: see the healing of Peter and Simon’s mother-in-law. In this volume, Fröhlich remarks that “[spirit-possessed people are always mentioned as mad like

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the biblical context. While purifying the possessed, it affirms the strength and the primacy of monotheism. This is what emerges from the well-known episode of the healing of the pharaoh by Abraham who puts his hand on his head while praying to God to remove the rwḥ spirit of the plague that Yahwe has sent on Egypt at his request to preserve his wife, Sarah. This is also confirmed by the story of King Nabonidus healed by a Jewish exorcist of severe inflammation caused by the king’s sins of idolatry. In short, the polysemic approach to the biblical notion of “spirit” seems to have been a condition of the Christian bipolarity between demonic and divine possession, as well as of the monotheistic ideology of Western exorcism considered as a passage from the unclean to the pure.114 *** Now, let us leave Christian demonology, which has for so long and deeply influenced anthropological approaches to the phenomena of possession, and let’s broaden our horizon. During the post-colonial period, the Christian West has not only exported its more or less anonymous demons but also its effervescent divine possessions, notably those of Pentecostalism and Charismatic Renewal, which invaded Africa in the twentieth century. In a well-documented text with field material, Heike Behrend describes the strange ecstatic crusades that the followers of the prophetess Alice Auma led in 1986–1987 against the government of Uganda to eradicate evil through the power of the Holy Spirit that possessed them. This kind of conquest possession on the fringes of the established Christian world was, and remains, even more impersonal and energetic than the late medieval “epidemics” seen in Europe that we mentioned earlier. The Holy Spirit of these postcolonial African crusaders has been intimately linked to a theology of electricity: the “possessed-batteries” are charged with it, their bodies detect Satan by shaking, their songs and prayers are “acoustic weapons,” etc. Such a cartoonishly impersonal conception interests us insofar as it is the direct opposite of a universal model repressed by the Abrahamic religions in their common fight against idolatry: that of the man from Gadara, the man exorcised in Kapharnaum and the spirit-possessed man from Gerasa.” See also Klaniczay on this subject. 114 For Edmond and Marie-Cécile Ortigues, the possession rites recommended by the religions of Custom differ from those prescribed by the religions of the Book in that the former advocate the naming of spirits while the latter are centered on the action of purification (Oedipe africain, 129).

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investment by an invisible agent endowed with the attributes of a human person, name, sex, language, way of speaking, status, tastes and other distinctive features […] with which people can identify and which they can embody. The personification of the agent – a privilege that monotheisms reserve for God – is the sine qua non of the socialization of possession observable in a wide range of societies spared or little affected by the monotheistic orthodoxy. In the following, we will consider this type of socialized possession. In ancient Uganda, it took the form of the female mediumship of the so-called bacwezi or “white” spirits, those of the first kings of Bunyoro named and associated with natural phenomena and guaranteeing the prosperity of the Nyoro kingdom as well as the fertility of its women. According to Behrend, this system was destroyed and transformed into witchcraft under the missionaries’ influence (the reverse of the European process pointed out by De Certeau). At the same time, Ugandans had to deal with the birth of “black,” foreign, and evil neo-bacwezi spirits, such as the “airplane” or the “tank.” And, last but not least, they experienced phenomena comparable to the Freudian “return of the repressed.” In 1969, John Beattie already pointed to the existence of a spirit called “I will pray to God every day.” This was already an obvious denial of the internalized faith that the missionaries were aiming for. In 2002, a woman possessed by the Holy Spirit went further: she incarnated a dove by spreading her arms like wings and cooing: this was a transgression of the Pentecostal dual prohibition of the embodiment of the Holy Spirit and animals, the latter being commonly presents in the rejected traditional worship that was thus making a return. Hence the author’s underlying question: would the compulsion to repeat socially repressed ideas – echoing the Freudian wiederholungszwang – be a more general characteristic of possession systems? In any case, interaction between at least two competing models – even if only the demonic–divine pair – is an obvious contrastive determinant of possession states. Hence perhaps the universality, both Muslim and Christian, of the otherwise incomprehensibly meticulous spirits-discernment casuistries. In Uganda, the purifying propaganda of the Charismatics empowered by the Holy Spirit has taken up the torch of the old monotheistic struggle against the idolatry embodied by the bacwezi spirit cult. In Brazil of the 2010s, the same Pentecostals are confronted with rivals and models otherwise powerful and numerous. The most fanatical propose to exorcise anyone who has ever attended an Afro-Brazilian rite, even if it means to

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trigger a real war of spirit possessions.115 But this offensive of the Holy Spirit as referred to by Bettina Schmidt was only partly successful. It meant to push into the sphere of the evil the old African American cults, such as Umbanda and Candomblé, implanted and respected in all milieus, as well as their white cousin, Kardecist spiritualism, widespread among the urban petty bourgeoisie. In a subtle text in which she alternates between analyses and in-depth interviews with followers of all Brazilian cults, Bettina Schmidt first identifies the defense mechanism common to the cults attacked by the Pentecostals: by denying that they are dealing with “possession” in the trivial sense of its agent’s embodiment they avoid the devastating assaults of the Holy Spirit.116 But apart from this denial, continues Schmidt, the cults in question have little in common as regards the definition of possession and spirits. Their followers use prominently deictic notions whose meaning and scope vary according to the context in which they are evoked. And the author argues “for an understanding of spirit possession as a deictic form of speech.” One agrees, provided that “speech” is replaced by “deictic behavior.” The reader will find notably in Janice Boddy’s contribution an elegant historical illustration of this way to “provincialize” possession that Schmidt, inspired by a Lambek article,117 calls for. Recent analyses of the highly specific contextuality of spirit possession are more than promising. In our book, this topic is best highlighted by Daniela Berti’s remarkably thick descriptions of ritual communications between villagers in the Indian Himalayas and their community goddesses, via their appointed mediums, the gur. Let us stop for a while at this point. Who are and what do spirit mediums do? “It is evident,” as Michael Lambek notes, “that spirit possession forms a system of communication. It offers shifts in voice and these voices speak to others. This is minimally triadic (spirit, host, and third party). The spirit speaks to persons who are present and who can then pass the message back to the host.”118 Be that as it may. But, what about those professionals of mediation who are in a state of possession, who are the mediums, such as Berti’s guru, that Raymond Firth placed between the possessed and the shaman according to their supposed degree of control over 115 According to Almeida, “A guerra dos possessões,” cited in this volume by B. Schmidt. 116 “Another reason why the term ‘spirit possession’ is rejected is connected to the social recognition of spirit possession which is linked to a certain degree to the ongoing attacks against Afro-Brazilian rituals. Neo-Pentecostal churches interpret the possession rituals as demonic and exorcise everyone who has ever attended a ceremony of an Afro-Brazilian religion” (Schmidt, in this volume). 117 Lambek, “Provincializing God.” 118 In this volume.

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spirits? If observation proves that every possessed person is also a medium from time to time, the institutionalized medium like the Himalayan gur has the social function of ensuring communication between the gods or spirits and men.119 This prompts him to prioritize the role of messenger at the expense of the alternative potentialities – therapeutic, relational, aesthetic, ludic – of spirit possession. And the consultants will judge him above all by his oracular potential: by his ability to tell the truth. Now, the veracity of the spirit medium’s speech – like that of the diviner – comes from his ritual action. He is not believed because he is intelligent, learned, or wise but because he is possessed, i.e., ab ovo recused as the subject of his utterances, that is, as the author of his words. Only then can it fulfill its role as a messenger of impersonal truth exempt from any human calculation.120 At least theoretically. For by reading the ritual dialogues carefully transcribed by Berti between the goddess-medium and the spirit-client or spirit-patient from Himachal Pradesh, the reader will discover several overlooked aspects of mediumistic communication. In fact, the “interrogation of the goddess” is in this case a ritual interlocution between two possessed persons, one of whom, the medium-goddess, questions, inspects, and judges the other, the possessed client, in the highly involved presence of their joint entourage. And since no one is unaware of the interlocutors’ human identity, the salt of these oracular dialogues is the disquieting strangeness (the Freudian Unheimliche) of the questions or injunctions that the medium puts to the client as if she were the demon itself or the witch suspected of having sent this demon to harm her.121 The case of Anita122 closely monitored by Berti, illustrates well this strange ambiguity of spirit mediumship. Let’s quote the author: [the seer/goddess Shravani grabs her client/demon Anita by the hair and asks]: “Who sent you? […] Tell us who sent you! I’ll reduce you to ashes! […] [the spirit?, the witch?] What did she [the witch] tell you [the demon]? […] [Anita/demon, crying loudly]: Eat her! [me Anita] and come back! […] [Goddess-medium Shravani, still pulling Anita’s hair]: Tell us more! Tell us some more!” [Then, the goddess-medium 119 Beattie and Middleton developed this point as early as 1969 in their landmark book on the subject, Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa. 120 Themes I have further developed in Zempléni, “La maladie et ses causes,” 36–41. 121 Present in other divinatory practices, this kind of oracular dialogue thus widens the communication framework evoked by Lambek to at least five terms: two invisible beings, two hosts and their entourage which is, even if mute, the main recipient of the medium’s messages insofar as the consequences of the possession diagnosis are concretized by the patient’s relatives. 122 She is the young woman in a red dress shown in the cover picture of our book. The photo dates back to 1998, and the name has been changed.

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addresses the audience]: “She [the witch] also told him [the demon] that she [Anita] shouldn’t be allowed to stay at her parents-in-laws’ house.” Without going into the sophisticated details of these oracular dialogues, let us note that their latent purpose is to elicit the reactions of the client and her family, according to which the medium-god will adjust her words so that the diagnosis is worked out jointly.123 Berti’s hosts are highly skeptical of the practices of their mediums. Is it the goddess, a demon or the medium herself who speaks? Is the goddess still there? Does the gur speak for me or for herself? These questions are common. And they are also asked about a second type of medium identified by the author: the mobile anthropomorphic effigies of the same goddesses which express themselves, like puppets, through the gestures of their bearers, bearers who, significantly, replace each other during their village rounds. Based on these arguments Berti deconstructs the classical notion of possession: as she writes, “the fact that objects may be considered as one of the possible forms of a deity’s living presence shows how possession does not necessarily involve the idea of ‘displacement of the self’ or, even less so, of a psychological transformation.” In any case,124 this in-depth fieldwork revitalizes the analysis of mediumistic communication. Now let us return to the largest reservoirs of spirit possession cults studied by anthropologists: the Middle East and Africa. Since the former is the common cradle of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, anyone working in these cultural areas is faced with a preliminary question. Is there a watertight border between the Abrahamic monotheisms and the polytheistic religions as regards the conception of possession and of the beings commonly called “spirits”? This is what Edmond Ortigues and Thomas Csordas125 suggest, 123 The elusive, “sybillian” character of certain utterances of the Himalayan medium is apparently due to the fact that he or she proceeds by successive approximations (and adjustments) of the audience’s reactions to the words of the deity who speaks through him or her. 124 For Berti, the vocal medium and the effigy refer to the “same idea: “that a god may be present in a body (human or man-made)”. But then why not include in a broad category of “embodied gods” the multiple masks about whose carriers one regularly wonders if they are “possessed” or not? Isn’t the classic distinctive feature of the “spirit medium” that it is indeed a “possessed” human being who puts his particular state at the service of other human beings who wonder about the links between the vagaries of their life and the intervention of invisible beings to which this spirit medium has access? It seems that the rath effigies of Himachal Pradesh do not fulfill this function. 125 Csordas: “The other critical feature of the discourse of evil is the epistemological boundary – and this is really a boundary and not a threshold – between the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on the one hand and all non-Abrahamic religions including all forms of shamanism and polytheism on the other hand” (in this volume). Ortigues and Ortigues, Oedipe africain, 129.

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but the least we can say is that unity of the Abrahamic religions is merely theoretical, not to mention the crossbreeding of spirit possessions under the effect of previous or recent globalizations of the world. As for the question at hand, let us leave aside the invented tradition of the Judaic dybbuk, an “impregnating” revenant that the Jewish pietists of the seventeenth century have substituted for the ancient shedim or mazzikim demons,126 and let us instead dwell on some major differences between Muslim and Christian representations of spirits, and thus of possession. In the world’s vast Muslim universes, the Arab-Koranic notion of jinn is the common matrix for countless variants of socialized possession that classical ethnology has called, rightly or wrongly, possession “cults.” Socialized possession is recognizable by the public embodiment of its agents represented by miming behaviors, dancing, singing, and wearing emblematic symbols of these spirits, in order to please them and gain their favor through a lasting pact with them. The repeated public figuration of these invisible beings in a ritual framework is both a means and a condition of their social representation, without which possession would remain a mere individual chimera. In this book, it is Janice Boddy’s beautiful text on the North Sudanese zār cult that best illustrates this type of eminently collective and creative possession. The Sudanese zār or zayrān are akin to the koranic jinn. The cult described by Boddy – as well as the vast galaxy of zār/bori/tumbura institutions stretching from East Africa to Nigeria through Iran127 – would probably not exist without a first distinguishing feature of jinn compared to Christian demons. The ontological indeterminacy of these beings, embedded in both their names and the Koran, allows them to uniquely adapt to local or regional notions of spirits. Arab scholars who have synthesized the topic, such as the Sunni Shiblī128 (fourteenth century) or the Egyptian polygrapher Suyūtī (1505),129 emphasize that for Islamic traditions jinns are neither good 126 Chajes, Between Worlds, 11-12. 127 A number of researchers have studied one or another element or global aspect of this vast complex, starting with Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux; Lewis, Ecstatic Religion; Boddy, “Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan,” Wombs and Alien Spirits, and “Spirit Possession Revisited”; Lewis, “Spirit Possession in Ethiopia” and “The Globalization of Spirit Possession”; Masquelier, Prayer Has Spoiled Everything and “A Matter of Time”; and Makris, Changing Masters; to name but a few. 128 Shiblī, Ākām al-marjān fī aḥkām al-jānn. [The Hills of Precious Pearls Concerning the Legal Ordinances of the Jinn], quoted in Lory, “Esprits terrestres.” 129 Suyūtī, Laqt al-marjān fî ahkām al-jānn[“Coral harvest regarding the status of the jinns”], quoted in Lory, “Esprits terrestres,” and “Sexual Intercourse between Humans and Demons.”

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nor bad by nature, neither entirely celestial like angels nor entirely earthly like men. They can be hostile or benevolent, frightening, or playful, and even receptive to sacrifices that pre-Koranic Arabs made to them as guardian spirits. Some jinn rebelled against the divine order and became servants of Iblis, of Satan: they are the shaytan. But, as Lory points out and as we were able to verify directly in Senegal, the jinn-shaytan confusion is constant both in religious literature and in the popular representations of Islamized societies. Unlike the basically malefic antiworld of Christian demons, that of Muslim jinn is a kind of ambiguous doublet of human society. For the LXII sura of the Koran, these beings reproduce and die like men, whether they are believers or disbelievers, Sunni or Shiite, Christians, or Jews.130 Without going further into Muslim religious thought, let’s say that, unlike the Christian demon prototype, the Koranic concept of jinn contains the seeds of a routine theatrical figuration of the spirits.131 Finally, the best proof of the ontological ambivalence of the jinns is a recurrent difference in attitude between men and women towards these spirits feared by everyone. Whereas one-time scriptural exorcism of the shaytan-jinn is the most common procedure for men,132 mollification and lasting reception of the spirit through the sensual means of a “possession cult” is the most common path taken by women. Since Bourguignon’s classical works and other multicultural research,133 we know that apart from several meaningful exceptions – such as the North African Aisha Quandisha’s worships or the Turkish Mehlevis’ dhikr or other Sufi samā’ – ritual possession is a predominantly feminine genre, especially in Muslim societies.134 Let us stress once again that this does not mean that it would be reducible to an oblique protest of women against 130 Sura LXII “The Jinn,” verses 1–17 (the Jinn’s profession of faith) commented by Lory, “Esprits terrestres.” 94. 131 As we have seen, Christian notions of demons are better adapted to grim metonymic figurations of anonymous evil. 132 As Boddy notes, “In Islamic societies where traffic with spirits is formally discouraged, men’s public religiosity may require them to handle possession via exorcism instead of mollification, or refrain from acknowledging themselves to be possessed” (Boddy, “Spirit Possession Revisited,” 415). 133 Bourguignon, Religion, 3–35. A theme that has preoccupied several researchers who have not followed the Lewisian mainstream. See, for example, those of the calcium deficiency hypothesis in women: Kehoe and Giletti, “Women’s Preponderance in Possession Cults.” 134 Mostly but not exclusively, since mixed and purely feminine cults may coexist in the same cultural area, as, for example, among the Nigerien Hausa of Maradi studied by Monfouga-Nicolas (Ambivalence et culte de possession), and those of Dogontouchi described by Adeline Masquelier (Prayer Has Spoiled Everything). For the Aisha Quandisha worships, see note below.

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their subjugation by men. Without going back to the sex-war thesis, which Janice Boddy was best qualified to discuss,135 it is worth noting here that sexualization of the link with the jinniya or the jinn is a highly recurrent motif in the literature, particularly on the well-studied North African spirit possession brotherhoods136 and Sudanese zār cults. The North Sudanese studied by Boddy distinguish between evil black jinn to be exorcised, harmless white ones and mischievous red jinn called zayrān (or zār), which are capricious, lecherous spirits “who most of the time remain ‘above’ […] their human hosts, exerting constant pressure on their heads or necks, eliciting in them certain moods, bodily sensations, and desires.” As a female ethnographer attentive to women’s experiences of spirit possession, Janice Boddy agrees that Sudanese views of the woman’s passive role in sex underlie the common idea that she must learn not to resist “zār’s attempts to enter the human realm through the vehicle of her body.” But instead of making some Lewisian conjecture about male domination from this observation, she just uses it as a starting point for an admirably sensitive, rich, and nuanced approach to the female imaginary of Sudanese zār cult followers. The leading scholar in spirit possession uses several thought-provoking formulations to characterize this cult. Thus, she is interested in “a form of non-literary fiction, an imaginative genre whose authors channel stories that emerge unbidden from within.” Let’s add, with high creative potential due to its multiple means of expression, especially the body. Regarding history, the zār is “an animate archive of villagers’ experiences with successive colonial states” and an “embodied archive of the spirit world.” It is also an “indigenous ethnography” by “cultural comparison through participant observation” (implied: during past encounters of possessed Sudanese with the embodied colonial personages or other beings figured by the cult). By

135 See infra note 8, and also Boddy, “Spirit Possession Revisited,” 415. 136 This topic is preponderant in the ideology of the Isawiyya, the Gnawa and the Hamadsha, who have been well described by anthropologists and whom we regret not having been able to include in our book. Let’s just point out that the various jinniya Aïsha or Lala are mystical wives or sisters of Muslim saints who communicate their baraka to their followers through a notoriously eroticized bond. This link that passes through the baraka of the holy man is therefore – in principle – ternary. But a jinniya, such as the very popular Aïsha Qandīsha, depicted either as a libidinous mermaid or as a chthonic being, has great autonomy and is the focus of various forms of worship, more or less independent of that of the holy men. For more details, see Lory, “Esprits terrestres”; Jamous, “Le saint et le possédé” and “De la tombe au sang”; Vincent Crapanzano’s outstanding monograph, The Hamadsha; for the Gnawa, Bertrand Hell’s Le tourbillon des génies; and for the Isawiyya, Mehdi Nabti’s recent book, Les Aïssawa.

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reading Boddy’s text,137 one will quickly see that these are not mere arguments, but inferences drawn from an impressive series of cases commented by the author with great finesse and sense of humor. She is well aware of this is not academic history or ethnography, but a whole of “traces of the past kept alive in women’s perspectives.” What makes her open-minded approach even more original. Let’s take just one example. It concerns a composite figure of zār in which several memories of colonial Sudan are condensed (my emphasis): “Several Khawaja zayrān love to hunt. In zār poetics, the avocation is a veiled warning of the dangers human and spirit Khawajas pose to female Sudanese: In Hofriyat, for instance, the spirit Dona Bey, Mudīr at-Turca (Dona Bey, Governor of the Channels), was an American doctor and big game hunter who drinks vast amounts of whiskey and beer, wears a khaki suit (sometimes a white lab coat), and totes an elephant gun. As a hunter and a physician associated with canals, Dona Bey is clearly a composite figure. He may be the zār echo of a Mr. Dunwoodie, radiographer at Khartoum Hospital during the 1930s, or a British engineer known as Dun Bey who took part in early swamp-clearing expeditions on the White Nile, or perhaps Leigh Hunt, an American who in 1906 launched an irrigation scheme at Zeidab, on the west bank of the Nile just on the west bank of the Nile just north of the village. The lab coat recalls too the work of the Wellcome Tropical Laboratories mobile unit, which was mounted in a steamer and sent to collect samples from the White Nile swamps, where crocodiles and hippos abound. Dona Bey is fierce, though his prey are scarcely fitting, for unlike most great white hunters he pursues sacid, tiny desert antelope known elsewhere in East Africa as dik-dik […]. Sacid are described as beautiful, with soft smooth fur and large dark eyes; in the past, villagers sometimes kept them as pets. Comely young women are likened to sacids. Given that Sudanese women are emblematic of and charged with maintaining the homeland (nation, village, camp, or home), Khawajas’ fondness for the hunt intimates a threat to the integrity of local society writ large. Unsurprisingly, Dona Bey has a lecherous disposition. Moreover, he destroys what he most desires by using technology excessive to his needs”. 137 Which includes several revised parts of Wombs and Alien Spirits and Civilizing Women (for Dona Bey zār, see pp. 289–291 and 78–79).

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We are far away from the metonymies of the anonymous Christian demons of Klaniczay, Fröhlich (rwḥ rʽh) or Bárth (black fly), but also from the Candomblé’s Orishas of Schmidt or Indian goddesses and bhūts of Tarabout or Berti, and even from the stereotyped personages embodied in Senegalese ndëpp or in Hausa bori.138 As portrayed by Boddy, the zār Dona Bey appears to be the product of a condensation, in the Freudian sense, of imprints left in popular female imagery by several colonial characters: “their look, habits, distinctive clothes (white coat), accessories (elephant gun), male passions (drinking or hunting) and excesses (technology) […] and their imagined lusts towards the women (sa’ids’ large dark eyes […] comely women).” Obviously, this kind of character of the zār spirits’ “non-literary fiction” is neither analyzable by usual tools of historians nor describable by those of an objectifying ethnography. Especially since Boddy does not hide that she herself participates in the construction of the “indigenous historiography” to which the zār Dona Bey belongs (“or perhaps Leigh Hunt” – adds Boddy). She characterizes this embodied historical imaginary and more generally the zārs’ world through several distinctive features. Zārs’ identity is mutable, contextually nuanced, “refreshing people’s memories of the colonial experience, keeping these meaningful in ways that make local sense.” “‘Tribalism’ is prominent in the zār, which provides an experiential ethnology to the possessed and echoes Evans-Pritchard’s remark that ethnography is a branch of history.”139 All varieties of irony are present in the zārs’ “ecstatic” representations: “a Servant zār in the body of her Sudanese host might behave as if she were a northern bride, but everyone knows she is a fake”; or “they ask for ebony walking sticks and clay pipes – caricature-like trappings of southern Sudanese,” etc.140 But irony and comic relief do not concern only the Others and are not free: “sexuality, gender, morality, even female genital cutting, all are issues raised in the zār in ways that are often comical and sobering at the same time.” As Boddy writes, zār ritual “grants adherents limited scope to see or think otherwise about the taken for granted and mundane.” This is much more than a native ethnography: “Hidden in zār traits and feats are the possesseds’ criticisms, admirations, anxieties, and self-assurance, information that rehearses outcomes of encounters with 138 Masquelier, Prayer Has Spoiled Everything. 139 As if echoing an old ethnological debate, the Saḥār spirits are cannibal sorcerers, “said to be Azande.” 140 Let’s recall here the caricatures of British colonial characters in Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous and Stoller’s Embodying Colonial Memories.

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social others, information of a historical and ethnographic kind.” Finally, the zār cult is also a tool for reflection on one’s own condition: “Like all good fiction, zār jogs participants out of complacency, adds layers of intelligibility to human lives, and may plant seeds of social and personal change.” Consolidating a descriptive methodology able to render all the implications of this type of embodied historical and social imaginary generated exclusively by spirit possession is one of the most exciting tasks for future researchers. In our book, Michèle Fiéloux, Jacques Lombard and Michael Lambek also take this path, each in their own way. The micro-anthropological approach adopted by Fiéloux and Lombard in the Madagascan city of Toliara is unprecedented. They conducted an in-depth investigation over three years within a small community of possessed women functioning as a fictional lineage under the leadership of the tromba fondy Clairette, the mistress and chief of this group.141 At first sight, Sakalava tromba have little to do with Sudanese zār. These spirits are dynastic ancestors142 who possess women from the poorest commoners’ and dependents’ lineages. So that possession implies a striking change of status for the possessed woman, “who becomes both man and lord.” But, once again, we are introduced to much more interesting things than some offshoot of the aforementioned protest theories. In Toliara, spirit possession has an amazingly concrete and almost daily presence. It is conceived as an involuntary process by which a spirit chooses a person on the model of a romantic relationship. The spirit occupies the place of first husband to which the possessed woman’s fleshly husband is subordinated. Visible in the attached photos, the woman the authors have worked with the longest is Clairette. Clairette’s spirit-spouse is Prince Raleva, who lived in the early twentieth century in a Sakalava kingdom. Her human husband is the driver Justin, the former and the latter being considered as “brothers” and both fully-fledged members of the fictive family unit. Fiéloux and Lombard highlight a rarely discussed aspect of the ritual embodiment of invisible beings: far from being reduced to a narcissistic role play, Clairette’s trances during her almost daily consultations lead the participants of these sessions to split themselves without being “possessed.” For 141 See the photos shot by the authors. Her name has been changed. Let’s add that the authors supplemented this extensive case study with an additional in-depth survey in 25 other Malagasy communities and some 130 possessed persons. 142 As the authors note, “After the dissolution of the monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century, the deceased kings and princes assumed unprecedented importance in urban possession cults.”

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example, when, in front of Justin, Clairette is alternately his wife and Prince Raleva, conversely, in front of Clairette, Justin has to behave alternately as her husband and as Prince Raleva’s obedient younger brother. Of course, the network of roles enacted during Clairette’s consultations is much more complex.143 Participants are required to react to their ancestor-prince’s injunctions, requests, and questions according to their own genealogical ties to him. And Raleva’s words often address quite concrete affairs. In Toliara, spirit possession is closely related to economic reality. The Raleva/ Clairette duo manages a real business with its own assets such as a grocery store, a cart, a pirogue, refrigerators and even some plantations. This capital is placed under the name of the spirit and no one, including Clairette, is allowed access to it without the consent of Raleva, who is embodied by Clairette. So that this variety of possession allows a remarkably wide range of economic, social, and even historical problems to be updated during the extended family sessions. At the same time, Clairette’s sessions can also address her most intimate personal problems. One day, her carnal husband Justin catches gonorrhea from an adulterous relationship in the family compound. He consults an elder brother of Prince Raleva, a specialist in the matter. But, in order to receive his remedy, he must obtain the forgiveness of the prince, his wife’s offended spiritual husband and his spiritual “elder brother” whom he owes obedience. But nothing will do. Raleva remains obstinately absent: he refuses to descend on Clairette. Then, she is possessed by the prince’s old father, whom an intermediary asks to intercede with Raleva so that he forgives Justin, so that his elder son, the specialist, may give him the remedy. In such convoluted ways, the Toliara possession formula allows both to avoid and treat interpersonal conflicts, which it dissolves into the thus reactivated history of the group. Whether it is psychophysiological amnesia or deeply ingrained cultural behavior, the disconnection of Clairette’s trance states from her ordinary self-awareness is the prerequisite for this problem-solving process built on the Raleva Prince’s fiction. Fiéloux and Lombard show, with examples, that this yet enigmatic disconnection is precisely what allows the actors – including Clairette – to express their most intimate thoughts and emotions during confidential possession sessions, 143 “Each member of the immediate and extended family has two relationships with the same person and vice versa”. Depending on the context created by possession, Clairette can become “both the daughter of her parents as well as their son-in-law, the mother of her daughter as well as her spiritual father, etc.”

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which are at the antipodes of the public performances usually associated with this notion. *** Just as the sophisticated Indian or European data mentioned above, these cases, where the religious and the economic, the past and the present, the world of men and spirits, are intimately intertwined through the notion of spirit possession, lead us to forms of reflexivity and modes of social interaction that are still little studied and understood. It is up to future researchers to discover and explore them fully. They could benefit greatly from the theoretical resources already developed, notably on figurative or embodied possessions (zār, tromba, candomblé, bori…) which, despite their partial marginalization by the Abrahamic monotheisms, are alive and well, especially in Africa and South America. Michael Lambek, whom we have already mentioned more than once, and whose remarkable work on Mayotte and Madagascar is authoritative in our field, has chosen to summarize the main teachings of his oeuvre in a series of penetrating remarks at the interface of anthropology and philosophy. Among his reflections, the reader will find the rare pearl of an argued comparison between Malagasy spirit possession and European (Swiss) notions of reincarnation. These stimulating ideas and propositions may serve as a conclusion to our book, whose main objective is to guide new generations of researchers in a rapidly changing field with a bright future.

References Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Török. L’écorce et le noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 2001 [1978]. Almeida, Ronaldo de. “A guerra dos possessões.” In Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus: Os novos conquestadores da fé, edited by A. P. Oro, A. Cordin and J.-P. Dozon, 321–342. São Paulo: Paulinas, 2003. Assayag, Jacky, and Gilles Tarabout, eds. La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire. Paris: EHESS, 1999. Bastide, Roger. Le candomblé de Bahia (rite Nagô). Paris: Mouton, 1958. Beattie, John, and John Middleton, eds. Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.

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Beeman, William O. “The Zar in the Persian Gulf: Performative Dimensions.” Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia 3/1 (2015): 1–12. Behrend, Heike, and Ute Luig, eds. Spirit Possession, Modernity and Power in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Berger, Laurent. “La centralisation d’un culte périphérique: Islam, possession et sociétés d’initiation au Bèlèdugu (Mali).” Politique africaine 118/2 (2010): 143–164. Berti, Daniela, and Gilles Tarabout. “Possession.” In Dictionnaire des faits religieux, edited by Régine Azria, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, and Dominique Iogna-Prat, 941–947. Paris: Presses universitaires de France/Humensis, 2019. Boddy, Janice. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. —. “Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality.” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 407–434. —. “Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance.” American Ethnologist 15/1 (1988): 4–27. —. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Bourguignon Erica. Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973. —. “World Distribution and Patterns of Possession States.” In Trance and Possession States, edited by R. Prince, 3–34. Montreal: R. M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968. Caciola, Nancy, Mandeville. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2003. —. “Le dévoyé et le damné: être possédé par les morts dans l’Italie médiévale.” Terrain 69 (2018): 76–95 [translation of “The Wicked and the Damned: Demons, the Dead, and Spirit Possession in Medieval Italy” Terrain 29 (2008)]. —. “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42/2 (2000): 268–306. Capone, Stefania. Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Candomblé. Durham–London: Duke University Press, 2010. Chajes, Jeffrey Howard. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Clark-Decès, Isabelle. Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Charuty, Giordana. “Ernesto De Martino, The Land of Remorse. A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism.” L’Homme 187–188 (2008): 489–491. Cohen, Emma. The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Condominas, Georges. “Quelques aspects du chamanisme et des cultes de possession en Asie du Sud-Est et dans le monde insulindien.” In L’autre et l’ailleurs. Hommages à Roger Bastide, edited by François Raveau et al., 215–232. Nice: Institut d’études et de recherches interethniques, 1976. Crapanzano, Vincent. “Foreword.” In Ernesto De Martino and Dorothy Louise Zinn, The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism. London: Free Association, 2005. —. The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. —. “Spirit Possession: An Overview.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Lindsay Jones, 8687–8694. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. —. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Crapanzano, Vincent, and Vivian Garrison, eds. Case Studies in Spirit Possession: Contemporary Religious Movements. New York: Wiley, 1977. Csordas, Thomas. “The Affliction of Martin.” In Body/Meaning/Healing, edited by Thomas J. Csordas, 100–137. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2002. —. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion.” Current Anthropology 45 (2004): 163–185. —. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms.” French Studies 59/3 (2005): 373–379. De Certeau, Michel. “Ce que Freud fait de l’histoire. A propos de ‘Une névrose démoniaque au XVIIe siècle.’” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 25/3 (1970): 654–667. —. La possession de Loudon. Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1970 [1980] [Eng: The Possession at Loudun. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1978]. —. L’écriture de l’histoire. Bibliothèque des histoires. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Desroche, Henri. “Syncrétisme et messianisme en Afrique noire.” Archives de sociologie des religions 16 (1963): 105–108. Effing, Mercè Mur. “The Origin and Development of Self-help Literature in the United States: The Concept of Success and Happiness.” Atlantis 31/2 (2009): 125–141.

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Firth, Raymond. Tikopia Ritual and Belief. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Freud Sigmund. “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, 67–106. 1961. —. “The ‘Uncanny.’” In Collected Papers, vol. 4, 368–407. 1925. Giles, Linda L. “Possession Cults on the Swahili Coast: A Re-Examination of Theories of Marginality.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 57/2 (1987): 234–258. Görres, Joseph. Die christliche Mystik. Bd. 4. Erste Abtheilung. Regensburg: Joseph Manz, 1842. Hastings, James, John A. Selbie and Louis H. Gray. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1926. Hell, Bertrand. Le tourbillon des génies: au Maroc avec les Gnawa. Paris: Flammarion, 2002. Heusch, Luc de. “Cultes de possession et religions initiatiques de salut en Afrique.” Annales du Centre d’Études des Religions 2 (1962): 226–244. —. “Possession et chamanisme.” In Pourquoi l’épouser? et autres essais, 226–244. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Igreja, Victor, Béatrice Dias-Lambranca, and Annemiek Richters. “Gamba Spirits, Gender Relations, and Healing in Post-Civil War Gorongosa, Mozambique.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14/2 (2008): 353–371. Jamous, Raymond. “De la tombe au sang: la question des substituts dans les confréries religieuses marocaines.” Archives des sciences sociales des religions 161 (2013): 189–199. —. “Le saint et le possédé.” Gradhiva 17 (1995): 62–83. Jeanmaire, Henri. Dionysos, histoire du culte de Bacchus. Paris: Payot, 1951. Johnson, Paul Christopher. “An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession.’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53/2 (2011): 393–425. —, ed. Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Junod, Henri A. The Life of a South African Tribe. New Hyde Park: University Books, 1962. Kapferer, Bruce. A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka. Providence, RI–Washington, DC: Berg and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Kehoe, A. B., and D. H. Giletti. “Women’s Preponderance in Possession Cults: The Calcium-Deficiency Hypothesis Extended.” American Anthropologist 83/3 (1981): 549–561.

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Keller, Mary. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Kerényi, Károly. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996 [1976]. Kilroy-Marac, Katie. An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Lambek, Michael. “Afterword: Recognizing and Misrecognizing Spirit Possession.” In Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions, edited by Paul Christopher Johnson, 257–276. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. —. “Fantasy in Practice: Projection and Introjection, or the Witch and the Spirit-Medium.” In Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 198–214. New York: Berghahn, 2002. —. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. New York–Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 [reissued 2009]. —. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. —. “Provincializing God? Provocations from an Anthropology of Religion.” In Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries, 120–138. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. —. “Rheumatic Irony: Questions of Agency and Self-Deception as Refracted through the Art of Living with Spirits.” In Illness and Irony, edited by M. Lambek and P. Antze, 40–59. New York: Berghahn, 2003. Lanternari, Vittorio. Les mouvements religieux des peuples opprimés, Paris: François Maspero, 1962. Leiris, Michel. “La croyance aux génies ‘Zar’ en Éthiopie du nord.” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique XXXVe année (1938): 108–125. —. La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar. Paris: Plon, 1958. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. L’identité: séminaire interdisciplinaire, 1974–1975. Paris: PUF, 2019 [1977]. Lewis, Herbert S. “The Globalization of Spirit Possession.” In Social Critique and Commitment: Essays in Honor of Henry Rosenfeld, edited by Majid Al-Haj, Michael Saltman and Zvi Sobel, 169–191. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. —. “Spirit Possession in Ethiopia: An Essay in Interpretation.” In Ethiopian Studies Dedicated to Wolf Leslau, edited by Stanislav Segert, 468–480. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983.

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Lewis, I. M. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism, rev. ed. Harmondsworth–New York: Penguin, 1978 [1971]. Lewis, I. M., Ahmed El Safi and Sayed Hamid A. Hurreiz, eds. Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 1991. Lory, Pierre. “Esprits terrestres (djinns) et relations sexuelles en islam traditionnel.” In De Socrate à Tintin, edited by Jean-Patrice Boudet, Philippe Faure, and Christian Renoux, 93–103. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011. —. “Sexual Intercourse between Humans and Demons in the Islamic Tradition.” In Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey Kripal, 49–64. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Luig, Ute. “Spirit Possession, Anthropology of.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 1491–1494. Amsterdam–New York: Elsevier, 2001. MacGaffey, Wyatt. “African Spirit Possession – Spirit Possession and Spirit Mediumship in Africa and Afro-America: An Annotated Bibliography. By Irving I. Zaretsky and Cynthia Shambaugh.” The Journal of African History 20/3 (1979): 460–461. Makris, Gerasimos P. Changing Masters: Spirit Possession and Identity Construction among Slave Descendants and Other Subordinates in the Sudan. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Masquelier, Adeline. “A Matter of Time: Spirit Possession and the Temporalities of School in Niger.” Journal of Africana Religions 8/1 (2020): 122. —. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Matory, J. L. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Mauss, Marcel. “Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne celle de ‘moi.’” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain 68 (1938): 263–281. McCloud, Sean. American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Mercier, Jacques. “Les Métaphores nuptiale et royale du Zar: Contributions à l’étude critique de la relation entre le dieu et son adepte dans les cultes de possession.” Northeast African Studies 3, no 2 (1996): 127-48. Messing, Simon D. “Group Therapy and Social Status in the Zar Cult of Ethiopia.” American Anthropologist 60 (1958): 1120–1021. Métraux, Alfred. Le vaudou Haitien. Paris: Gallimard, 1958.

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Meyer, B., “Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism, Vision and Video Technology in Ghana.” In Religion, Media and the Public Sphere, edited by B. Meyer, and A. Moors, 290–312. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Mikalson, Jon D. Ancient Greek Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Monfouga-Nicolas, Jacqueline. Ambivalence et culte de possession. Paris: Anthropos, 1972. Nabti, Mehdi. Les Aïssawa soufisme, musique et rituels de transe au Maroc. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. Oesterreich, Traugott K. Possession, Demoniacal and Other: Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times. London: Kegan Paul, 1930 [first edition in German: Die Besessenheit. Langensalza: Wendt und Klauwell, 1921]. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. “La violence faite aux données: De quelques figures de la surinterprétation en anthropologie.” Enquête 3 (1996): 31–59. —. “Possession, affliction et folie: les ruses de la thérapisation.” L’Homme (1994): 7–27. Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Ortigues, Marie-Cécile, and Edmond Ortigues. Oedipe africain. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984. Pócs, Éva. Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999. —. “Possession Phenomena, Possession-systems: Some East-Central European Examples.” In Communicating with the Spirits: Demons, Spirits, Witches 1, edited by Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs, 84–154. Budapest: CEU Press, 2005. Ranger, Terence. “Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa.” African Studies Review 29/2 (1986): 1–69. Rouch, Jean, dir. Les maîtres fous [The mad masters]. Film. 36 min., 1955. Rouget, Gilbert. La musique et la transe. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Santo, Diana Espírito. “Spirited Things: The Work of ‘Possession’ in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Ed. by Paul Christopher Johnson.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 10/1 (2015): 102–105. Sapkota, Ram P., and Dristy Gurung et al. “A Village Possessed by ‘Witches’: A Mixed-Methods Case-Control Study of Possession and Common Mental Disorders in Rural Nepal.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38/4 (2014): 642–268. Schmidt, Bettina E., and Lucy Huskinson. Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

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Sharp, Lesley A. “Playboy Princely Spirits of Madagascar: Possession as Youthful Commentary and Social Critique.” Anthropological Quarterly 68/2 (1995): 75–88. Shiblī, Muḥammad ibn ʻAbd Allāh, and Idwārd Badīn. Ākām al-marjān fī aḥkām al-jānn [The hills of precious pearls concerning the legal ordinances of the jinn]. Bayrut: Muassasat al-Kutub al-Thaqafiyah. Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Smith, Frederick M. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Stoller, Paul. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge, 1995. Suyūtī, Jalāl al-dīn. Laqt al-marjān fî ahkām al-jānn [Coral harvest regarding the status of the jinns]. Le Caire, 2088. Talamonti, Adeline. “Exorciser le Diable (Rome, années 1990).” Terrain 50 (2008): 62–81. —. “La produzione rituale della possessione e del ruolo di posseduta nell’ esorcismo cattolico.” In Medicina, Magia, Religione, edited by Vittorio Lanternari and Maria Luisa Ciminelli, 239–268. Naples: Liguori Editore, 1998. Tarabout, Gilles. “Prologue.” In La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire, edited by J. Assayag and G. Tarabout, 9–30. Paris: EHESS, 1999. Verger, Pierre. Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun à Bahia, la Baie de tous les Saints, au Brésil et à l’ancienne Côte des esclaves en Afrique. Dakar: IFAN, 1951. Vidal, Laurent. Rituels de possession dans le Sahel: exemples peul et zarma du Niger. Connaissance des hommes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990. Young, Allan. “Why Amhara Get kureynya: Sickness and Possession in an Ethiopian zar Cult.” American Ethnologist 2/3 (1975): 567–584. Zaretsky, Irving I., and Shambaugh, Cynthia. Spirit Possession and Spirit Mediumship in Africa and Afro-America: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1978. Zempléni, Andras. “Anciens et nouveaux usages sociaux de la maladie en Afrique.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 54/1 (1982): 5–19. —. “Des êtres sacrificiels.” In Sous le masque de l’animal. Essais sur le sacrifice en Afrique Noire, edited by Cartry Michel, 267–317. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. —. “Du symptôme au sacrifice: histoire de Khady Fall.” L’Homme 14 (1974): 31–77.

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—. “From Symptom to Sacrifice: The Story of Khady Fall.” In Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, 87–139. New York: John Wiley, 1977. —. “La dimension thérapeutique du culte des rab: ndöp, tuuru et samp. Rites de possession chez les Lebou et les Wolof.” Psychopathologie africaine 2/3 (1966): 295–439. —. “La maladie et ses causes.” Ethnographie 81/86–87 (1985): 13–44. —. “L’interprétation et la thérapie traditionnelle du désordre mental chez les Wolof et les Lebou du Sénégal.” PhD diss., Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1968. —. “Possession et sacrifice.” Le temps de la réflexion 5 (1984): 325–352. —. “Pouvoir dans la cure et pouvoir social.” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 8 (1973): 141–179.

2

Reflecting on the Vocabulary of “Possession” in a South Indian Context f Gilles Tarabout

Keywords: anthropology, India, Kerala, divine power, spirit possession, body, consciousness, multiple personality, illness

The aim of this chapter is to explore the semantics of “possession” in the particular context of contemporary Kerala, on the southwestern coast of India. In this region, as in other parts of the world, actions and discourses of some people in certain circumstances may be attributed as those of other beings, gods or spirits, who are thus temporarily embodied – a situation commonly characterized in the English language as one of “possession.” My main interest here is not to present and analyze its social context and dynamics: rather, it is to examine how people in Kerala express themselves about it. The corresponding vocabulary in Malayalam (the main language in Kerala)1 is richly diversified and terms covering the English notion also apply to a larger scope than what is usually taken into account under it. In this context, relationships between human beings and gods or spirits often appear fluid and indeterminate and partake of more general conceptions of the body, of society, and of the divine world. In this respect, we need to be cautious with the (Western) cultural construction linked to the standard understanding of “possession” – as an invasion and a seizure of a person – and with assumptions about consciousness and the self that it may entail. As David Scott puts it, speaking about yaktovil, a ceremony of exorcism in Sri Lanka, there is a need “to recognize that this Christian metaphor, ‘possession’ (which depends on the image of an anthropomorphic presence entering the body, occupying its interior, and gaining thereby control over the will or soul that already inhabits it), has conditioned the kinds of themes and problems produced 1 Malayalam (malayāḷam) is the language of the Kerala State in India. All transliterations (in italics) will follow the spelling in this language, even for words of other origin (Sanskrit, Tamil) – except in quotations from other authors.

54 Gilles Tar about Figure 2.1 One possible representation of a Bhut as it is imagined for Kummaatti, a ritual pageant specific to the Trichur area. Trichur (Kerala), 1982

Photo Gilles Tarabout

in analyses of yaktovil.”2 My concern in this contribution is to try to enrich this discussion by studying what people in Kerala may mean when they speak about “possession.” In practice, I shall keep on using the English word “possession” as a mere convenience as it has become part of the anthropological jargon; it is used as well by English-speaking people in Kerala when they translate expressions 2

Scott, “The Cultural Poetics,” 92; see also Tarabout, “Prologue,” 8 sq.

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in Malayalam. However, it is not to be taken in its literal, etymological, meaning, and for caution’s sake I will maintain the quotation marks. Unless specified, “possession” will cover “divine possession” as well as “spirit possession,” as they are two poles of a single continuum, the local evaluation of which is a process depending on personal and social situations.3 Moreover, I will use for convenience “supernatural being” as a shortcut for gods and goddesses as well as for various potentially aggressive beings called bhūts (bhūtam), which include various types of spirits or of lower deities (the distinction is not always clear). This is also a misleading term which should not be taken here as meaning “above” or “out of” nature. As the ancient Laws of Manu make it explicit, ghosts or demons are as much “natural” as human beings: “Domestic animals and wild game; beasts of prey and the animals with incisors in both jaws; demons (rakṣasas), ghouls (piśāchas), and humans – [these are the creatures] born from an embryonic sac.”4

Evil sight The modalities of action of such beings are diverse. For instance, in an astrological context (frequently relevant for the diagnosis of “possession” in Kerala), the main treatise used by local astrologers, the seventeenth-century Sanskrit “Path for Questions,”5 identifies two main types of “possession.” One is the “obstruction or torment by possession” (bādhā) due to the ghost of a person whose obsequies have not been properly performed, a prēta, or of a wicked person, piśācu, a ghoul.6 The second is the torment by possession (bādhā) or the attack (upadravam) caused by the sight (dṛṣṭi) of the 26 enumerated dangerous beings whom the scholarly PM7 calls “seizers” (grahaṅṅaḷ – the word also designates planets8) or “deities,” dēvata,9 and who correspond to the current popular denomination of bhūts. 3 Also Nabokov, Religion against the Self; Berti, in this volume. I do not wish to enter here the terminological debate about “spirit possession,” “spirit mediumship,” “possession,” “shamanism,” etc. (cf. Tarabout, “Prologue” and “Corps possédés et signatures”; Berti and Tarabout, “Possession”). 4 Quoted in Smith, “Classifying Animals,” 531. 5 Praśnamārggam, henceforth PM. Govindan, Praśnamārggam (with Malayalam commentary); for an English rendering, see Raman, Prasna Marga. 6 PM, XV–42. 7 PM, XV–51 sq. 8 On this point, see Thite, Medicine, 11 sq., 41. 9 PM, XV–67.

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Though it is frequently confused with the “evil eye” (karimkaṇṇu),10 an ill-defined malefic influence brought often unwillingly by some people, “evil sight,” dṛṣṭi, is different and is clearly understood as a form of “possession” bringing torment (by “possession”) (bādhā) and “desperate oppression” (pīḍa), a recurrent vocabulary in this field. A similar conception is expressed in the contemporary context of songs of Patayani (paṭayani), a series of masked dances of South Kerala with a strong dimension of exorcism.11 One of the songs tells how the great Goddess herself became “possessed” by the sight of two kinds of bhūts called pē (Tamil: pēy, sometimes translated as “demon-god”) and piśacu (ghoul): Seeing pē(y) and ghouls the Devi Was pēy- afflicted (pēppiṇi)! Alas! Cruel time! Like a tree falling on the ground Fell and rolled the goddess of the world! Running to see Lord Shiva, The frightened ghouls told Him the news: “O Lord, the Goddess saw us A severe affliction took hold of Her!”12 The song proceeds by evoking how to dispel similar afflictions by offering sacrifices, dances and songs: Hearing this song of praise, Today they should vacate from [the surface of] (mēl ninnu) the body!13 What is expressed is neither a penetration nor an occupation of a human body, but rather a debilitating effect produced by a sight which installs in some ways the beings on the body of the Goddess. An exact parallel is found in descriptions concerning the affliction of divine images, in temples, by bhūts, whose impure presence sticks at the surface of the idol, causing a decrease in the power of the godly presence.14 It clearly parallels the evil effect resulting from the sight of some entities in Buddhist Sri Lanka, which

10 Raman, Prasna Marga, 525 sq., makes this confusion. 11 Tarabout, Sacrifier et donner, chap. 5. 12 Vasudevan Pillai, Paṭēni, 214. 13 Ibid. 14 K. P. C. Anujan Bhattattirippad, personal communication.

Reflec ting on the Vocabul ary of “Possession” in a South Indian Contex t

Scott15 characterized as “a distinctive cultural poetics of eye-sight,” and finds as well other expressions elsewhere in India.16

Intrusion However, in other contexts the “possessing” entity is explicitly an invasive one. A widespread expression for “possession” derived from Sanskrit and frequently found in the Sanskrit literature, āvēśam, literally means “penetration.”17 It is an invasion of the inside of the body, which can happen as a result of deliberate rituals by the person wishing to have a divine presence inside him/her, or as an unwanted result of defects: an impurity of the body,18 or a weakening state of fright, for instance. What protect the integrity of the person are rituals (purification) and a strong mind. People are endowed with various degrees of manaśakti (“mind-power”). Those lacking in mind-power (young girls are evoked as an example) are more prone to occult attacks, whereas people with strong mind-power are nearly immune from them. According to the astrologer K. N. B. Asan, there are circumstances which will facilitate occult aggressions: Suppose a man is walking along a lonely path in the dead hours of night and suppose he is stricken with terror on hearing a strange sound at a particular place where previously a person had committed suicide. Whatever the man does thereafter may be an imitation of the dead. This is due to the mental shock he has suffered from. […] It is to be understood that till the evil spirit is expelled from the body of the person, every act he performs will be in imitation of that of the spirit. Even the tone of his voice will be like that of the person when the spirit has entered his body.19 At first sight such a statement would seem to corroborate a model of “possession” in terms of invasion and displacement of the self. As we shall see, 15 Scott, “The Cultural Poetics.” 16 Compare Herrmann-Pfandt, “The So-called Ḍākinī kalpa,” 68–69. 17 For a detailed study of aspects of “possession” in Sanskrit literature, see Smith, The Self Possessed. 18 There is a famous episode in the Indian epic Mahabharata, when a virtuous and strong-minded king, Nala, omits to purify a tiny spot on one of his heels, enabling the demon Kali to enter his body and to “possess” him. See also Smith, The Self Possessed, 251 sq. 19 K. N. B. Asan, interview, March 10, 1991.

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other expressions or statements point to more complex conceptions. For instance, another, more local expression, “to cross and become united” (kaṭannu kūṭuka), also points to the idea of a “crossing” of the body’s limits, but places the emphasis on a process of fusion (sometimes thought of in the same terms as a sexual union) rather than on a replacement of the “possessed” person’s self. For instance, in the context of ritualized possession in the northern part of Kerala, called Teyyam,20 one impersonator, speaking about his deliberate “possession” by a divine power (śakti), told anthropologist Rich Freeman: This is because, as we say, “[I am] half myself and half the deity.” After I have gotten some divine śakti, then over and above that we can add to that our own śakti. […] It is when the divine śakti and our own are combined that we reach the state of completeness.21 However, the balance between the power of the deity and the performer’s own śakti varies according to the phases of Teyyam institutional “possession.” Freeman suggests that “at the stage requiring the priest to discursively represent the speech of the deity, there must be a spontaneous anchorage in the persona of the god, with a total effacement of his normal ego and loss of conscious memory.”22 Says the performer: What is spoken during the time of illuminated possession (darśanam) are not one’s own words at all. […] If there is even a little bit of the ego (ahaṃkāram) left in the mind, then nothing will be done right.23 We may note that the term given by Freeman as “illuminated possession” is literally “vision” (darśanam) – an expression usually applied to a temple’s worship contexts, where devotees obtain the sacred vision of the divine idol in a temple, and are blessed by being seen by it.24 It is the positive equivalent of the evil dṛṣṭi, in a process in which getting the vision is directly linked to the bodily presence of a god or a spirit.25 20 The reference work about this cult, which has attracted the attention of numerous scholars, is Freeman’s PhD dissertation (Freeman, “Purity and Violence”). 21 Freeman, “Dynamics of the Person,” 157. 22 Ibid., 157. 23 Ibid., 158. 24 Eck, Darśan. 25 Compare Nabokov, “Who Are You?,” and Carrin, “The Topography of the Female.” For a discussion on ritual visualizations of the gods, see Tarabout, “Visualizing the Gods.”

Reflec ting on the Vocabul ary of “Possession” in a South Indian Contex t

Interestingly, the Teyyam impersonators refer to a combination of two “powers” (śakti): their own, and the divine one, which, when fused together, provide a “sense of completeness.” When there is such a perception, there shouldn’t be left the slightest trace of ahamkāram: this term, which Freeman translates as “ego,” is more usually translated as “sense of self”; it is one of the components of the subtle body that transmigrates from one existence to the other.26 It is also distinguished from “consciousness” (caitanyam), a term equally used by Teyyam impersonators and which Freeman characterizes as “what displaces the normal personality of living media, it is the god’s ‘mentality,’ and consultants so described it to me.”27 Thus, from what I understand of Freeman’s ethnography, the perception could be analyzed as one of displacement of the impersonator’s sense of self by the irruption of a divine power and its fusion with his own power, providing an enhanced, divine consciousness. In any case, it points to a delicate articulation between “power” and “consciousness” in the representations of “possession.” The importance of such a distinction is confirmed for instance by a recent ethnography in the adjacent region of Tulu Nad where the organization of divine “possession” is very similar to Teyyam. There, divine impersonators speak of a loss of their own consciousness for only a short time (“three seconds”), while they can feel the divine power much longer in their body.28 As one interlocutor of Miho Ishii said, “The daiva enters my body only for a while. […] However, the power of the deity remains for hours.”29 Another declares: “The moment the daiva enters my body, I can’t see other people at all. It lasts for only a few seconds though. After that I recover my consciousness, but the power of the daiva still remains in me.”30 Other ethnographies throughout India show that despite a regular claim of absence of consciousness about what happened during the episode of “possession,” such amnesia, in practice, is far from being systematic; and “possession” itself may be felt to have been intermittent.31 It is in this cultural frame that other Malayalam expressions evoking the bhūt’s action in terms of intrusion or aggression have to be understood: “travel of the bhūt” (bhūtasāncāram), “aggression by a bhūt” (bhūtakrānti), “being eaten by a bhūt” (bhūtagrasta). They point indeed to an invasion 26 27 28 29 30 31

Padoux, “Corps et cosmos,” 172. Freeman, “Dynamics of the Person,” 154. Ishii, “Playing with Perspectives,” 803 sq. Ibid., 803. Ibid., 804. Berti, in this volume.

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of the person, and to more general conceptions about the permeability of the person, a dimension elaborated for India by McKim Marriott32 and his colleagues.33 Such a model is at the basis of both Freeman’s understanding of what happens during Teyyam, and of Smith’s interpretation of “possession” in his study 34 mainly based on Sanskrit texts. I would argue, however, that even in these cases the exact impact on the medium’s or the victim’s consciousness remains unclear: there need not necessarily be a displacement or a replacement of the self, or an effacement of the consciousness. I will provide below a few illustrations that suggest a diversity of representations concerning the relationship between a person and a “possessing” spirit or God, and concerning the consciousness attributed to them.

Identities The narratives below come from psychological therapists working within the interpretative frame of “multiple personality disorder”: they put their patients into hypnosis and make the “secondary personalities” “come out” and speak. There clearly exists a discrepancy between the consultant’s representations, in terms of “spirit possession,” and those of the therapist, in terms of “multiple personalities” – for whom the question is precisely one of personalities and not of cultural categories such as spirits.35 Moreover these narratives were communicated to me or published in English. Nevertheless, despite these obvious limitations, I am convinced they may provide a glimpse into how some people in Kerala imagine what “possession” is about. My aim here is merely to look at the picture – culturally informed – that consultants may elaborate about their own perceptions; I will not be preoccupied by the events mentioned for themselves, the more so because the question of memory in the psychiatrists” (contentious) category of “multiple personality disorders” has proved rather tricky.36 32 For instance, Marriott, “Hindu Transactions.” 33 Similar conceptions of permeability may be found in other parts of the world, as well as in the not-so-distant European past – for eighteenth-century France, see Vigarello, Le propre et le sale. However, the transactional model as it has been applied to India fails to account for the observed stability of the person and of its social definition (Bouillier and Tarabout, “Introduction,” 19–22). 34 Smith, The Self Possessed. 35 Mulhern, “Embodied Alternative Identities.” 36 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul.

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A first example was told to me by a Christian priest-exorcist-psychologist, Father George Kappalumakkal. Recounting a past case, of someone he called Matthew, he recalls what the patient’s “secondary personality,” Raman, replied to his question, “Why do you possess this one?” [“Raman” speaking]: “He [Matthew] is longing much for his wife. But all the women are like that. They are cheating people and the husbands. So one day this fellow came through where I committed suicide. When this fellow came I assumed the form of a snake and jumped in front. But he did not get frightened. Immediately I assumed the form of a bat and flew away. It was soon after the snake, and that fellow was frightened. Immediately I entered him. […] I was given to drink. When I possessed him he also became very desirous of drinking. So I took him to the toddy shop, make him drink, then he had the idea that his wife is dishonest. So I asked him to kill his wife. After killing his wife I wanted to direct him to commit suicide.”37 Though it may partly be an artifact – the consequence of interpreting the situation as a case of multiple personalities – we may notice that whereas the “possessed” patient was observed by others (and depicted by the therapist) to act as somebody else, the inner representation he had himself of the process was a dialogic one. This recalls what Marine Carrin38 mentioned about the Santals, a tribal population of India, where “possession” is an occasion to manifest a form of self-awareness, enabling a discourse about the “possessed ego” from the vantage point of the “possessing other” – the deity. She joins Nabokov39 in her emphasis of questions of identity in rituals of “possession”; but while the latter considers that the Tamil rituals she studied tend to fragment the self so that the person eventually appears as “a compound of disparate identities that do not always blend well,”40 Carrin proposes for the “possession” she analyzes a less dramatic view and prefers to see a remodeling of the self. The Kerala materials could sustain both views. We find agonistic perceptions expressed, as in the above case of Matthew, supporting well a perception of a “split self,” as in the story of Gracy, reported by a psychologist, Dr. Jagathambika, who used a grid of 37 Fr. George Kappalumakkal, interview, August 22, 1992; for other cases, see Tarabout, “PsychoReligious Therapy.” 38 Carrin, “The Topography of the Female.” 39 Nabokov, Religion against the Self. 40 Ibid., 15.

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interpretation similar to that of Father George and who also had recourse to hypnosis. I am summing up: Gracy is a young Christian girl possessed by the spirit of an old Muslim woman. The “spirit” speaks: “When Gracy was frightened, I made note of her and possessed her. I am residing in Gracy’s head and that is why she is having intense head-ache, always. […] I am living in Gracy’s left side. I am afraid of going to her right side because that side is occupied by Angels of God.”41 However, by contrast, there are also instances of a nearly complete blending of “personalities,” exemplified by many institutionalized divine “possession” – not only in the case of the “completeness” reached by some Teyyam impersonators at the time of “possession,” but by many other mediums as well. Whatever be the case, the point is that the representations of “possession” that people express – be they divinely “possessed” mediums or victims of ghosts – suggest an inner world more complex than a simple displacement or replacement of their consciousness by that of a supernatural being, even when it is evoked as an invasive process.

“Hidden possession” There are in fact indications that the question of consciousness is quite distinct from the question of the self and might just not pose itself in many cases of “possession.” Kamala is a young Hindu woman “possessed” by two “spirits.” In the frame of the scenario of hypnosis, one “spirit” declares: “I am hiding and am calmly sitting [within Kamala].”42 The other one says: “I was always in her thoughts even after death. But luck and bad time only turned the thought about me into an evil spirit. I began to make 41 Jagathambika, “A Case Study,” 147 sq. 42 Ibid., 78. “Sitting” is a common expression also used for the installation of a divine power in a shrine. One expression pointing to “possession” has in other contexts the meaning “to coagulate, to be deposited on, to adhere” (uṟayuka), which has to be compared to the form uṟaykkuka, “to be installed,” used for the installation of a godly presence in an image: the person who is “possessed” also becomes a seat for the entity, like an image.

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appearance in Kamala only for the last year though I was in her from years ago. […] My part in Kamala’s illness is the violent behaviour she shows in fainting. I have never spoken or revealed myself. I am disguised as the violent behaviour.”43 We may first observe that Kamala was brought to the therapist because of her violent behavior and her fainting – corresponding to the popular observation that at these moments she was not “herself.” However, the representation that Kamala has of her own situation, as she makes it explicit under hypnosis, gives place to another silent, nonmanifested “spirit” presence which does not seem to affect her consciousness. Moreover, the representation she has of the other (violent) presence is one of late manifestation, though it was here discreetly for a much longer time – we may suppose, without outwardly affecting Kamala’s behavior. The notion of a “guise” is also one that makes more complex the understanding of behaviors attributed to “possessing” entities. Here, the “spirit” does not wish to reveal itself (i.e., it does not want to speak its name). And the violent behavior shown by Kamala, which a common analytical point of view would see as the manifestation of “possession,” is defined by her as a disguise: the very form taken by the “spirit” wishing to remain hidden. This is a perception very different from Matthew’s in the preceding case, as Matthew explained he was acting under the control of the “possessing” entity. The story of Anna, from the same source, underlines the hiatus existing between “possession” and the question of consciousness. Anna is a 35-yearold Christian woman who went to see the therapist with the complaint of being “possessed” by two lesser gods and three spirits of dead persons, all believed to have been sent by closely related persons in order to destroy the family. “These spirits were supposed to act in disguise as illness but later they appeared in their real forms.”44 When Anna was put into hypnosis and the “secondary personality” was invited to speak, “a loud scream came out of her […] along with the scream, she began to grind her teeth loudly and to shout and to beat her hands and legs on the couch violently. […] She unbound her hair and pulled that with both her hands and shouted aloud, ‘I am Chathan.’”45 Eventually, Chathan (cāttan), one of the gods “possessing” her, says: 43 Ibid., 85–86. 44 Ibid., “A Case Study,” 117. 45 Ibid., 117–118.

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As soon as I came to Anna’s home, they began to have misfortunes. I was sent by the infant’s aunt [“infant” is how Chathan calls Anna] and her brother. We were asked to sit in disguise and so we cannot expose ourselves. We came to this family even before the birth of infant. I will not tell anything. Suppose I lied? I will try my best to trick all information. […] We create all sorts of illness to the members of the family. We had shown them a sign indicating our arrival. We made a child ill and within 24 hours it died. We didn’t show any more signs. After the first indication, we were creating some illness like that. The people who sent us had a purpose. They wanted to destroy this family.46 Chathan adds: A priest tried to send us away once and he asked us to show a sign to make him convinced that we have gone, but we are clever. If we show any sign like that our presence will be proved and will be clear, so we just kept quiet. We came secretly and we would like to live secretly. We will not expose ourselves openly.”47 The actions of Anna are interpreted as those of Chathan: it certainly corresponds to an interpretation by Anna’s people in terms of displacement/ replacement of agency. However, Anna herself, using the vantage point of “Chathan,” depicts a more complex situation. Not only do Chathan and spirits “sit in disguise” (they were believed to have done so long before coming out as they did during the séance), but they send illnesses, interpreted as “signs,” to various members of the family, who are not said to be “possessed”: the “signs” are not necessarily to be read in the body of the “possessed” Anna. What is also noteworthy is the emphasis put on secrecy: the “possession” should remain unproven, unclear. Indeed, this is a domain of religious representations and practices which, by its very nature, is open to speculation and doubt in the mind of its very protagonists. As a matter of fact, the terminology and these stories suggest that there might be no single, precise indigenous representation of how a supernatural being “possesses” a person. We have seen that it can come and sit inside the body, or it may stay on the surface. It may afflict by being sighted, or it may enter through impurity or by taking advantage of a fright or some 46 Ibid., 119. 47 Ibid., 119–120.

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other excessive emotion. It may temporarily displace the person’s sense of self (ahaṃkāram), or provoke a blending of consciousnesses, or live in companionship within the person, or be hidden “in the guise” of diseases (without affecting consciousness), or afflict the consciousness while being outside of the body. Conversely, the vocabulary of “exorcism” is varied: it may correspond to a “massage” (uḻiccil) that rubs off an unwanted presence from the person afflicted, or to a “separation, cutting” (vērppāṭu), or to a “purge” (oḻikkal). Such a variety of possible discourses about what looks, from the outside, as being very similar manifestations, might result from various causes. Among others, we may think that “possession” as a set of representations prospers precisely on ambiguity and lack of clarity (as “Chathan-in-Anna” says he would like to maintain!), and that, eventually, such differences in discourses do not matter for the people concerned.

The gestures of “possession” Another dimension of the vocabulary of “possession” describes its bodily expression. These are mostly terms of movement, of agitation. The “possessed” person (i.e., under the agency of the “possessing” entity) will “stir” (iḷakkuka) or “shiver, shake” (viṟaykkuka). The association is so close that in some contexts provoking the shivering implies provoking “possession,” as in the following magician’s recipe: Medicine for the shaking: [Taking] the under garment of a woman in menses, the excreta of a pig, the excreta of a dog, the excreta of a cat, hair, a bull’s horn, the skin of a black buck, the urine of a cow, human urine, onion and garlic, ghee [clarified butter], roll all these into a wick. For a deity who does not shiver, burn the wick, inhale the smoke through the nose. Then without exception the deity will come, shiver and speak.48 Similar expressions also apply to people experiencing cold, fright, or anger – there is indeed a close semantic connection between “possession” and anger or rage. Two other widely used expressions are “jumping” (tuḷḷuka) 48 Manuscript of Kaniyan Narayanan, provided courtesy Wayne Ashley; translation by L. S. Rajagopalan.

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or “dancing” (āṭuka). Vertical jumps correspond to a standardized bodily idiom of (mostly male) institutional mediums. “Dancing” (gods or spirits) is more diversified: it may consist of a rotation of the bust and the head of “possessed” women with untied hair (untying hair is a cultural requisite for women deemed to be “possessed” – remember that Anna untied her hair when “possessed” by Chathan); or it may be a more or less elaborate dance, as in the case of the dances in Teyyam (also called tēyyāṭṭam, “dance of the God”), which have to be learned by professional mediums. Deities and spirits alike enjoy to play (kaḷikkuka) and dance (āṭuka), displaying their form through a human vehicle, as a song of Patayani dedicated to expelling Yakshis (yakṣi, an ogress, also the spirit of a woman who died before marriage) will illustrate: Antara Yakshi [“inner yakṣi”], the Illusion of Shiva, Oh beautiful enchantress! To receive the worship at your holy feet, Come to the canopy and rest, oh Devi! […] Oh one with divine feet you should put an end to the affliction [piṇi, a word for affliction by “possession”] and vacate! In the spathe of the areca tree, roasted and powdered items Are spread, and fire brands are fixed all along. I am cutting the cock 49 and giving the blood offering. Cast off hesitation, become pleased, and appear bright! [May] the affliction [bādhā] vacate; on the mask [used in Patayani] Come in a lovely manner and stay! Dance, and shake, and get exhausted, and play! You must dance [tuḷḷal] beautifully and quit and go away!50 Significantly, the very same words apply to the shaking of various ritual objects (such as the deity’s sword) that convey a deity’s power or represent it. Let me quote Freeman again: The observationally manifest rituals that precipitate possession suggest it is not wrought in the interior of the performer’s private psychology, but through the culturally scripted rites and media that give the theory of spiritual conduction behavioural expression in concrete forms. […] 49 An expression for sacrifice. 50 Vasudevan Pillai, Paṭēni, 330.

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Figure 2.2 The dance of the “beautiful” (sundara) Yakshis in Patayani. Kadamanitta (Kerala), 1982

Photo Gilles Tarabout

The weapons of the deity which normally sit beside its image are similarly taken up by the shrine priests and teyyam dancers as conductors of the divine energy that brings on possession. […] When shrine priests take up their deities’ weapons, these items are made to shake in their hands as though they had an independent agency and this power is then seen to be transferred to their bodies, which begin to shake, tremble, and jump up and down in place. […] Discursively, exactly the same verbs are used for the motions and “behaviours” of inanimate media as for the human spirit mediums; they all “stir” (iḷakuka), “tremble” (viṟaykkuka), become “indwelt” or “fixed” (uṟayuka), and “jump” or “dance” (tuḷḷuka, āṭuka). This discourse has remained constant since the medieval songs of possession which recount foundational events establishing a god’s presence in the shrines, down to contemporary reportage and description of ongoing practice. […] Images and persons are simply relatively more or less enduring sites where divine powers are deposited and made to reside.51

51 Freeman, “Dynamics of the Person,” 152–153.

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68 Gilles Tar about Figure 2.3 Goddess Kali as impersonated in a ritual theater (Mutiyettu, “bearing the headdress”). The power (shakti) of the goddess is said to be present in the headdress and to impose itself on the dancer. Thiruvanantapuram (Kerala), 1982

Photo Gilles Tarabout

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This is possible because “consciousness” (caitanyam), according to Freeman, is thought of as a “kind of conscious stuff of the deity’s personality and will,” a “substance that flows into various media and that turns possessed media into the expression of the god’s personal being,”52 confounding “our distinctions between the living and inanimate.”53

Affliction and “possession” When the “possessing” entity is a bhūt, it brings misfortune in various forms; as the story of Anna exemplifies, it is not only the “possessed” person who may be afflicted; incidents of various sorts may happen to other persons in the family, to their properties, their activity: it is the whole “domain” of the person which is concerned as an extension of his/her body.54 “Possession” is known through such effects, which can be diversified and take the form of illnesses, untoward behavior, arson, theft, economic loss, and so on. All these misfortunes may be constructed as signs pointing to “possession” of someone in the family without being necessarily accompanied – in the representations of the initial stages of “possession” – by a change in the behavior of one of its members (remember that according to Anna’s story, Chathan was even already present before her birth). When such changes do occur, like losing consciousness, shaking, acting or speaking as a supernatural being, these are thought to be extreme, or more manifest, expressions of this being. It is a difference in degree but not in nature with the initial stages. Consequently, there is no clear-cut distinction between an affliction attributed to a bhūt, and a “possession” by a bhūt – the more so because a bhūt may disguise itself as an affliction. This is in line with ancient Indian mythology, where fever was seen as the presence and manifestation of a supernatural being, the “fever-demon,” Jvarāsura. Existing magical recipes for expelling fever, by chanting mantras, by blowing on the patient, or even by transferring the “possessing” entity-fever from the patient to the outskirts of the village, suggest that this is still a widely shared conception in India.55 As a matter of fact, there is a range of common terms in Malayalam for affliction and malevolent “possession”: the most widely used word is 52 Ibid., 154. 53 Ibid. 54 Favret-Saada, Les mots, la mort, 252 sq. 55 See, for instance, David A. Thompson’s documentary film The Wages of Action.

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perhaps “obstruction, torment” (bādhā), which we have already met and which is synonymous with “possession.”56 Another common expression is “destruction by harassment” (bādhōpadravam). As a consequence the victim is “subjugated” (pūnuka), “tied by infestation” (piṇi – this was the word used for the Devi who lost consciousness after having seen bhūts, in the quote from the Patayani songs), or “desperately oppressed” (pīḍha) – all these expressions being synonyms for malevolent “possession.” Interpreting illnesses and misfortunes as “possession” is a complex personal and social process which leads to the construction of a narrative in retrospection for making sense of a series of events, past and present.57 The passage from illnesses as “signs” to a clearly perceived “possession” can be a slow process, sometimes unfinished, which brings further uncertainty about what exactly is happening. Two more stories from Dr. Jagathambika’s study will illustrate this last point: Annakkutty, a 16 year old girl, “was brought to the Research Department with complaints of severe head-ache, aggressive behaviour, talking like another person during the night and asking for water and drinking too much of it.”58 The therapist asked Annakkutty, who said she “can see a black thing coming toward her. This causes the head-ache. Later she began to see the black shape closely and this shape began to take the form of a man. She called it Appukkuttan. She said that Appukkuttan comes near her and pricks her head and that is why she is having the head-ache. Here, in this case Appukkuttan has not formed as a separate personality. But as soon as Annakkutty is put to sleep, it is Appukkuttan who is speaking. Unlike Annakkutty, Appukkuttan is very mischievous and is very witty in his conversation.”59 While Annakkutty’s family seems to have brought her with the idea she might be “possessed,” the therapist considers that the “secondary personality,” though named, is not fully formed, probably because it remains a mere

56 According to Yasuchi Uchiyamada, who worked among stigmatized castes of low status, the word may also be used for deliberate, institutional “possession” (Uchiyamada, “Soil, Self, Resistance,” 290). 57 Tarabout, “Corps possédés et signatures,” 331. 58 Jagathambika, “A Case Study,” 196. 59 Ibid., 197 sq.

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black shape devoid of any personal history. The “possession-in-the-making” appears even less advanced in the case of Susy: Susy, a 10 year old girl, “feels head-ache and giddiness and then lies down. Then, keeping the head on the ground firmly, she moves her body as though to stand on her head. She will beat on her chest and cry aloud that she is dying and that she is being dragged away into a pit. She will remain in that state for about 4 hours.” However, no “personalization” is accomplished.60 It is now well established that a regular feature of exorcisms consists of trying to put a name on a “possessing” spirit, suggesting that the most visible and spectacular characteristics of “possession,” linked to the outward manifestation of a supernatural being in a person’s body, are more often than not the very result of the process of exorcism itself.61

Final remarks The Malayalam terminology points to conceptions in which a process of vision, be it evil or divine, is a major source for “possession” by a supernatural being. The latter’s presence may be sticking at the surface of the “possessed” person or be sitting inside the body after invading it. Even in the latter case, “possession” needs not have any implication of ownership by the supernatural entity. Nor does the popular affirmation, according to which it is the supernatural being who is speaking and acting, necessarily contradict other narratives, frequently expressed, which tell us that supernatural beings coexist, dialogue, or fuse with the consciousness of the “possessed” person. As a matter of fact, the inner world perceived and expressed by institutional mediums as well as by victims of “spirit possession” reveals itself to be a complex one, and the attribution of agency to a supernatural being leaves quite open the question of the “self” – fragmented, remodeled, or completed. Moreover, some institutional mediums express their perceptions by distinguishing and articulating together two dimensions

60 Ibid., 209 sq. 61 See, for instance. De Certeau, “Le langage altéré”; Talamonti, “La produzione rituale”; Nabokov, “Who Are You?,” 124; Sorrentino, À l’épreuve de la possession.

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of the divine presence, the “power” of the deity and its “consciousness,” which have contrasted modalities of presence. As a result, the question of displacement or replacement of the “possessed” person’s consciousness, and of the memory of what happened during “possession,” is subject to diverse and contrasted affirmations. Such a view is corroborated by the fact that “possession,” in the local representations, does not always imply “personification” in the psychological and behavioral sense: an illness may be interpreted as being the supernatural itself (disguised); the diagnosis of “possession” may be elaborated following various misfortunes befalling other people than the person who will be eventually identified as “possessed”; objects may be the support of a divine power and consciousness, a process described by using the vocabulary applying to movements caused by “possession.” The Kerala material thus leaves an impression of diverse, if not heterogeneous, views. This could be linked to the relative imprecision of representations of the person as well as to the very nature of supernatural beings. As Vernant put it with regard to Greek gods (and it certainly applies to Indian ones), they “are powers, not persons.”62 They can be here and there, one and plural, localized in or on a person’s body and simultaneously acting elsewhere. Their consciousness can circulate between human bodies and objects. They can overpower the consciousness of a person, or merge with it, or take the guise of an illness, or simply “sit inside,” unobserved. When, eventually, the god or the spirit speaks out its name, this is the outcome of a process which, in reality, is fraught with a systemic uncertainty about what exactly happened.

References Berti, D., and G. Tarabout. “Possession.” In Dictionnaire des faits religieux, edited by Régine Azria, and Danièle Hervieu-Léger, 941–947. Paris: PUF, 2010. Bouillier, V., and G. Tarabout. “Introduction.” In Images du corps dans le monde hindou, in Collection “Monde indien”, edited by V. Bouillier, and G. Tarabout, 7–45. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2002. Carrin, M. “The Topography of the Female Self in Indian Therapeutic Cults.” Ethnologies 33/2 (2011): 5–28. De Certeau, M. “Le langage altéré. La parole de la possédée.” In L’écriture de l’histoire, by M. de Certeau, 249–273. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. 62 Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, 359 sq.

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Eck, D. L. Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Chambersburg: Anima Books, 1985 [1981]. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. Les mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Freeman, Rich. “Dynamics of the Person in the Worship and Sorcery of Malabar.” In La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire, edited by J. Assayag and G. Tarabout, 149–181. Paris: EHESS, 1999. —. “Purity and Violence: Sacred Power in the Teyyam Worship of Malabar.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991. Govindan, Krishnalayam M. K., ed. Praśnamārggam (pūrvvārdham) enna sārabōdhini vyākhyānattōṭukūṭi. Kottayam: National Book Stall, 1987. Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Herrmann-Pfandt, A. “The So-called Ḍākinī kalpa: Religious and Astrological Medicine According to a North-West Indian Collective Manuscript, I.” Journal of the European Ayurvedic Society 5 (1997): 53–75. Ishii, Miko. “Playing with Perspectives: Spirit Possession, Mimesis, and Permeability in the buuta Ritual in South India.” JRAI (N.S.) 19 (2013): 795–812. Jagathambika, R. “A Case Study of Multiple Personality or Possession-syndrome. Its aetiology and treatment.” PhD diss., University of Kerala, 1968. Marriott, McKim. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism.” In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behaviour, edited by B. Kapferer, 109–142. Philadelphia: ISHI, 1976. Mulhern, Sherril. “Embodied Alternative Identities: Bearing Witness to a World That Might Have Been.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 14/3 (1991): 769–786. Nabokov, I. Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. —. “‘Who Are You?’: Spirit Discourse in a Tamil World.” PhD diss., University of California, 1995. Padoux, A. “Corps et cosmos. L’image du corps du yogin tantrique.” In Images du corps dans le monde hindou, edited by V. Bouillier and G. Tarabout, 163–187. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002. Raman, Bangalore Venkata, trans. Prasna Marga, Part I. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996 [1980]. Scott, D. A. “The Cultural Poetics of Eyesight in Sri Lanka: Composure, Vulnerability, and the Sinhala Concept of Diṣṭiya.” Dialectical Anthropology 16 (1991): 85–102.

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Smith, Brian K. “Classifying Animals and Humans in Ancient India.” Man (NS) 26/3 (1991): 527–548. Smith, Frederick M. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Sorrentino, Paul. À l’épreuve de la possession. Chronique d’une innovation rituelle dans le Vietnam contemporain. Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie, 2018. Talamonti, A. “La produzione rituale della possessione e del ruolo di posseduta nell’esorcismo cattolico.” In Medicina, magia, religione, valori, edited by V. Lanternari and M.-L. Ciminelli, vol. 2, 239–268. Napoli: Liguori Editore, 1998. Tarabout, Gilles. “Corps possédés et signatures territoriales au Kérala.” In La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire, edited by J. Assayag and G. Tarabout, 313–355. Paris: EHESS, 1999. —. “Magical Violence and Non-Violence: Witchcraft in Kerala.” In Violence/ Non-violence: Some Hindu Perspectives, edited by D. Vidal, G. Tarabout, and E. Meyer, 219–254. Delhi: Manohar, 2003. —. “Prologue.” In La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire, edited by J. Assayag and G. Tarabout, 9–30. Paris: EHESS, 1999. —. “‘Psycho-Religious Therapy’ in Kerala, as a Form of Interaction between Local Traditions and (Perceived) Scientific Discourses.” In Managing Distress: Possession and Therapeutic Cults in South Asia, edited by M. Carrin, 133–154. Delhi: Manohar, 1999. —. Sacrifier et donner à voir en pays malabar. Les fêtes de temples au Kérala (Inde du Sud): étude anthropologique. Paris: EFEO, 1986. —. “Visualizing the Gods.” In Mārg, a Magazine of the Arts 63–62 (2011): 16–25 [special issue: “Visuality of Indian Rituals,” edited by Corinna Wessels-Mevissen]. Thite, G. U. Medicine: Its Magico-Religious Aspects According to the Vedic and Later Literature. Poona: Continental Prakashan, 1982. Uchiyamada, Yasuchi. “Soil, Self, Resistance: Late-Modernity and Locative Spirit Possession in Kerala.” In La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire, edited by J. Assayag and G. Tarabout, 289–311. Paris: EHESS, 1999. Vasudevan Pillai, K. Paṭēni (madhyatiruvitāmkuṟilē paṭēnikku oru ādipāṭham) [Padeni (An introduction to Padeni – An art form of central Travancore)]. Thiruvananthapuram: The State Institute of Languages, 1993. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. from the French by J. Lloyd and J. Fort. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Vigarello, Georges. Le propre et le sale. L’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Âge. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985.

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“Incorporation Does Not Exist” The Brazilian Rejection of the Term “Possession” and Why It Exists Nonetheless f Bettina E. Schmidt

Keywords: Brazil, mediumship, ethnography, spiritism, Kardecism, Candomblé, African-derived religions, experience, ontology

“Spirit possession” is a label frequently used in academic discourse for a specific form of altered state of consciousness (ASC). A common anthropological definition links spirit possession to rituals “in which one, or a few, or even several, of the participants in a public ritual behave in ways which believers interpret as signifying that ‘spirits’ haven taken ‘possession’ of them.”1 Platvoet regards the term “spirit possession” as a purely emic term which contains “a meaning which believers themselves attached to what they believe happen during a spirit possession ritual.”2 However, during my research in Brazil in 20103 I noticed that hardly anyone used the term “spirit possession” to describe their experience. Quite the opposite was the case – when I asked about their recollections of the experience or their insights into it, most interviewees vehemently rejected the term “possession” (possessão in Portuguese). Labels such as “spirit possession” carry with it, as Ann Taves states, “presuppositions and associations that may be at odds with, and thus distort, the experience of our historical subjects.”4 One medium even insisted during an interview that “incorporation” – often used in Brazil instead of “spirit possession” – does not exist. The interviewee was the founder and president of a spiritist center in Florianopolis specializing in spiritual surgeries among other therapies which he described as complementary medicine. His clinic treats around 2,000 patients weekly, most of them with spiritual therapies. But he insisted that the mediums who worked with the patients did not incorporate a spirit; he said that in his center it was even forbidden to become possessed by a spirit in front of 1 Platvoet, “Rattray’s Request,” 80. 2 Ibid., 81. 3 See Schmidt, Spirits and Trance in Brazil. 4 Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 8.

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a patient. Only in the classes for mediums would the connection between a medium and the spiritual world be strengthened and “worked with.” However, during the interview I learned that nearly every day he conveyed instructions from his spirit guide via automatic writing, which he did not regard as spirit possession. Automatic writing is relatively well-known in Brazil. Brazil’s most famous spiritist, Chico Xavier (1910–2002), whose hundredth anniversary was celebrated in Brazil in 2010 with TV documentaries, movies, newspaper articles and more,5 communicated in this way. Throughout his life, Chico published over 400 books with messages the spirits conveyed to the world through him, and he still is acknowledged as author though now his messages are transmitted from the spiritual world through mediums. Though this “communication technique” is associated with spirit possession, mediums draw firm lines between this and other practices. For instance, one medium told me that [w]hen people speak about psychic work they usually mean two things: That is, to allow the spirit to speak through them which is psicofonia [psychophonia], or elsewhere it is incorporation and psicografia [psychographic], writings. These two abilities are the most common ones, though others exist, too, and they are equally important.6 In spite of the widespread practice – and Chico’s national fame – spiritists struggle with the negative perception of spirit possession and fight for the acceptance of the practice as a technique, a means of communication. The negative perception of spirit possession has increased in the last decades due to an increase in the influence of Pentecostal churches in Brazil and their fight against the practice as demonic.7 However, this is not the only reason why Brazilians do not describe their experience as being possessed. The other reason – and the core of this chapter – is the complex discourse about this form of ASC among practitioners. Despite a certain agreement about the definition of spirit possession among scholars, people experiencing it tend to describe what happens in so many different ways that it prevents a common understanding of spirit possession, at least from the perspective of people experiencing it. Following Lambek,8 this chapter argues that spirit 5 6 7 8

Silva, “Chico Xavier.” Interview, March 30, 2010, São Paulo. Silva, “Neopentecostalismo e Religiões Afro-Brasileiras.” Lambek, “Provincializing God?”

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possession is indeed a deictic term whose meaning depends not only on the cultural context but also on the situation. The ethnographic diversity of the experience in Brazil I do not remember anything about the first time except that there was a sensation of strong heat, the sensation of heat and sleep at the same time. I felt a huge weight on my back and neck, and I began to feel my heart. The heart accelerated! And it was the sensation of two hearts beating inside me. There was a kind of force in my throat, a very strong energy in the throat, and I felt like it was about to speak. But in that moment, the first time, I was very afraid, because when it began to happen, I had doubts about whether it would be good or bad. I tried to stop it and I was left with the sensation that it would begin the communication in a trance.9 This graphic description of the first experience of an approaching spiritual entity is an excerpt from an interview I recorded in 2010. The interviewee was a woman who undertook training as a medium in a Kardecist center but afterwards never worked as a medium. Though she no longer practices Spiritism in a center, she still feels a connection to the spirits. In reply to my question about her recollection of the first encounters with the spiritual entities, she said: I felt the voice leaving my body, but unlike other people who do not have consciousness, I found that only a fraction of me was not conscious. […] I felt that the person spoke in my head. I heard and spoke. At times I was afraid of not speaking correctly, or that the person speaking was me. As it passed I thought, ah, was it only in my imagination? […] But as time passed, I had ideas that I never had before. And this was the biggest sensation. I felt an embrace. I had no more doubts.10 For her, the experience brought creativity into her life and a sense of security. As an artist she connected her spiritual experience with her artistic visions and it enabled her to make sense of the many turns her life took. But in all 9 Interview, May 27, 2010, São Paulo. 10 Interview, May 27, 2010.

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of our meetings and conversations she never described the experience as religious. Nor did she ever use the term “spirit possession” to describe her communication with the spirits. Brazil is a predominantly Christian country, with the majority of Brazilians identifying themselves with belonging to the Roman Catholic Church (64.6% in 2010, according to the national census) though the number of Protestants, in particular Pentecostal devotees, is increasing (22.2% in 2010, up from 15.44% in 2000).11 But Christian self-identification does not prevent people from practicing one of the popular religious traditions of Brazil at the same time. The Afro-Brazilian religions as well as Spiritism usually embrace the notion of the Christian God as creator and offer a link to Christianity. It is not seen as a paradox in Brazil to practice more than one religion, or to self-identify with Christianity but perform very different rituals on the weekend. Chesnut estimates that 15–20% of Brazilians (approximately 30 million people) regularly practice one of the many AfroBrazilian religions.12 He even states that half of all Brazilians have visited an Afro-Brazilian religious center at least once in their lifetime. Though a single visit is no indication of a person’s belief, it shows interest in a different form of spirituality. Machado states that 82.7% of the 306 questionnaires returned to her in São Paulo mentioned experiences with extrasensual phenomena and 55.9% of these questionnaires referred to experiences with extramotoric phenomena.13 Though her study is not representative of Brazilian society, her results indicate a high acceptance of apparently “abnormal”14 experiences in Brazil which are not restricted to religious communities. It seems to be very common among Brazilians to experience some form of interaction with spiritual entities without belonging to a particular religious group. Her 11 http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/populacao/censo2010/caracteristicas_religiao_deficiencia/default_caracteristicas_religiao_deficiencia.shtm (accessed August 24, 2010). 12 Chesnut, Competitive Spirits, 106–107. It is impossible to distinguish sharply between these religions as they not only share many features but also have developed many variations and mixtures. Without a strict hierarchical institution that decides central doctrines and rituals, each priest or priestess has the freedom to develop his or her own set of beliefs and practices. Even the pantheon of spiritual entities that is worshiped in a center or terreiro (the religious site of Afro-Brazilian religions where all major rituals are performed) can differ. This chapter refers mainly to Umbanda and Candomblé. They are not the only Afro-Brazilian religions but the most famous ones. The latter is regarded as the “most African” while the former is regarded as the “most Brazilian.” They have in common the practice of possession ritual. 13 Machado, “Experiências Anômalas na Vida Cotidiana,” 232. 14 Machado uses the term “abnormal” in line with Cardeña’s and Krippner’s definition of “abnormal” as “irregular” or “uncommon,” and not as an indicator for the pathological (Machado, “Experiências Anômalas na Vida Cotidiana,” 5).

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study also highlights that Brazilians, in particular spiritists15 and members of Evangelical churches, use religion as an instrument to cope with these abnormal experiences.16 The Jungian psychotherapist José Jorge de Morais Zacharias echoes her assessment. He told me during an interview: Suppose a teenager begins to see figures and people sometimes talk to her. If she is in a very Catholic or Protestant Church, she’s crazy, she’s in trouble, because you cannot see such things. The idea that you are seeing something is regarded as a hallucination; it’s crazy and will pose a threat to your identity. As a result her identity is threatened, she feels like she’s going crazy. This threat of disintegration of identity generates anxiety. This anxiety accentuates the feeling of disorder and brings fear, and can even cause panic. The person can develop a disorder and will be sent to hospital where he or she will be given a psychiatric drug. You can create a disruption in the brain chemistry that actually disrupts the ego. On the other hand, and I’ve seen this happen a lot, a relative or a neighbor of the individual says, “We’ll take her to the center; she must be seeing spirits.” When this information is passed to the person who is living with it, she thinks, “I see spirits.” Who are these spirits? Oh, there are spirits in the spiritual plane, and they appear to some people who have a gift. “Ah, but I’m seeing it, I’m not going crazy, even though others do not see them.” The new identity is reinforced. “I am not going crazy, I see spirits.” […] After some training in the spiritual center the individual begins to learn the meaning of the phenomenon and becomes an active member of the group because it becomes a means of communication. Then a process of indoctrination begins, where she or he will see the spirits during the sessions, and beyond. The experience becomes structured. There is no pathology, but a set of ideas. You think in a set of beliefs and values that make sense of human experience. When we do not have that, the experience is meaningless. If it does not make sense, then something is threatening. If I see a fireball in the sky, I might say, “Oh, it’s an angel, God, and Yahweh,” 15 The term “spiritist” is sometimes used in Brazil as an umbrella term for the practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions as well as Spiritism. Though Machado does not clarify her usage of the term, I assume that she refers not only to Spiritism but also to other Afro-Brazilian traditions as well. 16 Machado, “Experiências Anômalas na Vida Cotidiana,” 246.

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or nowadays, “It’s a flying saucer, or an extraterrestrial.” Now, if I do not have those references, I may collapse with fear.17 Zacharias highlights here the importance of a set of beliefs and values for the cultural assessment of an experience. However, we need to acknowledge the diversity of explanations within a culture, especially one as diverse as Brazil’s. Despite a certain common denominator of Christian ideas and values that structure Brazil (e.g., the high esteem for the Virgin Mary, National Patron of Brazil), the Afro-Brazilian deities (i.e., the orixás) play a significant role in the popular spirituality of the country, including for people who do not practice any of the Afro-Brazilian religions. Prandi describes the orixás poetically as the core of the Brazilian soul,18 and legends about the orixás as well as material artifacts such as buildings of Candomblé terreiros (= sites of Afro-Brazilian religious communities) have been officially acknowledged as national heritage.19 However, the way people define the entities can vary, as the next section shows. The discourse about the experience from the practitioners’ point of view Despite common elements, people experiencing an encounter with the orixás describe and explain the encounter in distinct ways. One reason for this diversification is the distinct ontology of the entities. While the African deities are part of all Afro-Brazilian religions, the practitioners see and refer to them differently. Candomblé devotees, for instance, usually describe them as forces of nature, ineffable, and too powerful for a human body to be possessed by them. Umbanda devotees, however, argue that the deities derived from human beings, long ago in Africa. Though it is impossible for a human to incorporate a deity, it is possible to incorporate a spirit derived from a human being that became a deity. Nonetheless, the majority of Umbanda rituals are designated for an encounter with other spiritual entities called guides (guías), e.g., the caboclos (spirits of Brazilian people from the Amazonian interior), pretos velhos (spirits of old black slaves), crianças (spirits of deceased children), exús (male trickster entities, regarded as messengers between humans and the orixás) and pomba giras (female equivalents to exús). 17 Interview, April 15, 2010, São Paulo. 18 Prandi, Segredos Guardados, 13–14. 19 Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments, 2.

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The different ontology influences the description of the encounter with the entities. In Candomblé, people usually do not remember anything of the encounter, though they often could describe the moment the spiritual entity approaches: It is different for everyone depending on who you are and who you are receiving. The sensation is the same, the sensation of having lost contact with the world. For example, every time I go into the state, it is as if I am leaning over a building of more than 20 floors, looking down. At any given time somebody might arrive and push me down. There is panic. It is always this way. I am in a high place, very high, looking down, and then I turn round and see that somebody is coming in my direction and pushing me with their hands. Up to today, though I am much older now, it still feels this way. Today I feel as if the earth is turning around and opening; just in front of me a big crater opens and somebody pushes me into the crater. It is terrifying! Afterwards I do not see or feel anything. Then I hear people say, “It’s White Feather [the caboclo] dancing,” or “Oxum was very pretty today.” I do not have any memory, I do not remember anything. And it is the same thing with the caboclo. It is the same thing.20 This interviewee is a babalorixá, a priest in the Candomblé tradition who experiences possession by an orixá as well as possession by a caboclo spirit. The next excerpt is from an Umbanda priest who also practices a so-called Yoruba tradition,21 and who hence experiences more than one type of spirit possession. I feel differences between the deities in Umbanda. When I incorporate some deities, I do not feel anything. And I have other deities that make me feel ecstatic, even though I did not enter them. The feeling is different from my normal waking state. But when I incorporate an orixá [in the Yoruba tradition], I usually I have no control over my movements. With most deities in the Yoruba tradition, I have no control over my movements. Often when I am conscious, I want to stop, but I cannot. 20 Interview, May 21, 2010, São Paulo. 21 The “Yoruba tradition” is a relatively new development in Brazil, inspired by immigrants from Nigeria who are trying to import into Brazil a “more African” way to honor the deities.

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Sometimes I feel as if my arms fall asleep, or my legs, and sometimes I even feel as if I’m having a heart attack. With each orixá I have a different feeling. Sometimes it begins with dancing, quite violent, but I’m still conscious. Nevertheless, I can control myself, or stop dancing, and I decide to stop dancing and stand still; but when I least expect it, I lose control again. In my first session, I wanted to stop dancing because my leg had been dislocated. But I could not stop and began dancing with the other leg. In the case of Umbanda it varies from entity to entity. […] In one case I have full awareness of what is happening. In other cases I have full consciousness, but I cannot control the movements. There are also others where I can master the moves, but I cannot control the voice. There are some who do not speak, but have a special way to affect me – one entity, for instance, with drinking. The taste of alcohol leaves me unconscious because of the alcohol. However, [during the incorporation] I am aware of his attitude when he is drunk, but when he leaves, I do not have the characteristics of being drunk. In this case, if I could check the percentage of alcohol in my blood, there would certainly be alcohol there. But I do not have the same feeling as when I’m drunk. This is because I did not [remember] that I drank so badly. I have no visual distortions, [but] there is a specific entity that does that! It does not allow me to know what the entity is saying. As if he [the possessing agency] realizes that I’m conscious, and makes me, one way or another, unconscious! If I do not get unconscious for good, another less pleasant way is by alcohol.22 An Umbanda priestess, who also practices Candomblé rituals, explains the differences: It’s different, the orixá [in Candomblé] has a stronger vibration than an entity [in Umbanda]. It’s a vibration; it is something that takes you, which has force. But the sense is different in Umbanda. There are various kinds of spirit, in the same way that people are also different. In my experience – have you ever had surgery? And were given an injection of a drug, an anaesthetic before the surgery? You stay well and then you do not remember anything more because the anaesthesia puts you to sleep? The state is not the same, but it is very similar. 22 Interview, April, 2010, São Paulo.

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The orixá is a living energy that is in nature. […] It gives you a new sense of wholeness. […] You are full of the energy of nature. Each [orixá] has a specific vibration with a different meaning, which makes the interpretation very different. […] For instance, the orixá Ogun represents iron, his energy is iron and the land where the iron comes from. Hence Ogun is not an individual, but a very large energy. The individual part [during incorporation] is something else that you need to study hard in order to incorporate. The ori [intelligence/consciousness] in the head of each person has an individual connection to Ogun. Thus, a person can have an individual connection to this energy. So, there could be two people [both incorporating the same orixá] and they will be two different Oguns, because even the very power of Ogun has many variations, which are the qualities.23 Spiritism, on the other side, is based on the belief in the existence of spirits and the possibility of a communication with them. Spiritists regard spirits as individual entities, often identified with names and life stories. One medium, for instance, has been working, as she puts it, with Dr. Marsec, the spirit of a medical doctor, for 20 years. He came to her for the first time when her mother became seriously ill. I can say I am fully adapted now, but at first it was very difficult because I had the feeling as if I had fainted because of the total unconsciousness. You do not know if you stood, if you fell, how and what happened, if someone does not tell you. In the beginning there was a mixture of fright with the surprise. In my first contact with Dr. Marsec I was at eighteen years old, my mother had a seizure and she was bedridden. I woke up very early to go to work and when I said goodbye to her at five in the morning she could not move in bed, she only moaned in pain. I told her, “Mom, I’ll say a prayer because I need to go to work, I’ll say a prayer for you to calm down, and then I’m going to work.” When I started doing this prayer, my sense was gone, the doctor came for the first time, and when I came back to myself she was sitting up in bed and had nothing, no pain. She was telling me and I was very scared that someone was entering my body, taking over and making me do like that. I was angry, happy to see her well, but very upset, thinking that’s not right. 23 Interview, March 16, 2010, São Paulo.

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Then with time, I understood that it was not someone coming into my body, but it is a psychic power that is now almost instinct. […] I was gradually understanding that my psychic power was not equal to the great majority, which is conscious or semiconscious. So in the beginning everything was very difficult, because sometimes when I returned I was off balance, sometimes I had the impression that I was missing my legs and I would fall. Not today, today I think that training and extensive work with these brothers has given me a physical strength and knowledge, […] but I always needed someone to hold me so I was OK but today is very quiet, […] so I say, Bettina, it was a shock, I never suffered any fainting, nor convulsing, nothing like that.24 These excerpts illustrate the differences in the ontology of the possessing agencies and the significance of these variations for the interpretation of the experience.

Reasons for the rejection of spirit possession At this point I will come back to the controversy regarding the term “spirit possession.” As already indicated, one reason for the rejection of the term “spirit possession” is the divine nature of the spiritual entities, the orixás. Because they are perceived as entities without a firm boundary, devotees argue that it is impossible to “become possessed” by them. During an interview a babalorixá of a Candomblé community explained that in the moment of the initial encounter the body [of a devotee] is not accustomed to that energy, [and] the energy is also not accustomed to the body. At these times the person exists in a state of shock and can fall or have very strong spasms. […] [The person] loses the notion of the body, the notion of everything, trembles and falls. This is symbolical for the orixá who knocks down the person to the ground in order to show that it [the orixá] has to be initiated in that person.25 During the initiation, which is a long process and contains several stages that are only fulfilled after seven years, the orixá is firmly linked to the 24 Interview, April 17, 2010. 25 Interview, April 23, 2010.

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body of the new initiate. Something of the orixá will remain in the body and during all following incidents, when the orixá wants to take control of the body, the orixá will then rise inside of the human body to the head. This explanation refers to the notion that in addition to a physical body, a human being consists of three other elements: emi (breath), which provides the body with life, ori (intelligence or consciousness), and something from Orum.26 Every person is born with elements of his or her orixás, but only the trance provides humans with a moment of harmony as it temporarily unifies all the fragments. The permanent link between the devotee and the deity explains why the babalorixá rejects the classification of the experience as spirit possession or incorporation. These terms would imply that a spirit taking control of the body comes from outside the body. The babalorixá argues that while this is the case in Umbanda, in Candomblé the experience is better described as the transformation of a human body into a divine one from within. The term “transformation” has to be considered carefully, however, as the anthropologist Goldman explains. He writes that during the encounter the worlds of gods and humans converse, orixá and adept almost overlap. But for Goldman being possessed does not mean that a person transforms into an orixá, rather that he/she becomes an “almost” divine entity.27 He insists that “becoming” is not identical with transformation because the notion of “becoming” includes the notion of an active and creative process, a movement. This confirms the explanation by the priest that the merger between human and orixá is a long learning process: As much as the person learns, the orixá learns as well. Both learn how to act, the dances, the rituals. They are taught to make everything according to the tradition of the house because each nation, each house, each place tends to keep to a specific form, each house has its tradition, each house has its way to deal with the orixá and the orixá needs to learn how to carry them out.28 Another reason why the term “spirit possession” is rejected is connected to the social recognition of spirit possession which is linked to a certain degree to the ongoing attacks against Afro-Brazilian rituals. Neo-Pentecostal 26 Explained by Berkenbrock as the divine creator though other terms are more common for the creator god: Berkenbrock, A experiência dos Orixás, 285–286. 27 Goldman, “How to Learn,” 112–114. 28 Interview, April 23, 2010.

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churches29 interpret the possession rituals as demonic and exorcise everyone who has ever attended a ceremony of an Afro-Brazilian religion. Almeida30 even describes the conflict between neo-Pentecostal churches and the AfroBrazilian traditions as a war between types of possession. The African deities as well as the other spiritual entities become perceived as devils in the worldview of the Brazilian neo-Pentecostal churches and are blamed for all the evil in the world.31 While the impact of the stigmatization of AfroBrazilian traditions and the interpretation of spirit possession as demonic can be seen on a daily basis, it is important to remember that Spiritism has a different social recognition from Afro-Brazilian religions. Most spiritists make a strong distinction between their practice and Afro-Brazilian religions, even though some practice both or a mixture of them. The reason for the different social reputation is the different social catchment. While AfroBrazilian religions were until recently regarded as being mainly practiced by members of the lower social classes, Spiritism initially recruited mainly from members of the educated middle class. Despite many changes in the last decades (e.g., Candomblé has gained many wealthy devotees), the original image still affects its reputation. Another factor that affects the perception of Spiritism as distinct from the Afro-Brazilian traditions is the underlying racism of Brazilian society. Spiritism is still considered as being practiced by white Brazilians, while Afro-Brazilian religions derive from practices of Brazilians of African descent; this despite the fact that Brazil is home to many variations and mixtures of Spiritism and Afro-Brazilian religions. One way to distinguish between Afro-Brazilian traditions and Spiritism is the practice of possession,32 as well as how practitioners refer to it. While members of Afro-Brazilian religions usually acknowledge the religious framework of their practice, spiritists prefer to use the term “mediumship” when describing their form of communication between the world of humans and the world of spirits, which is mainly conducted via automatic writing. Most spiritists insist consequently that mediumship has no religious connotation. In the end, however, it became evident during my interview with the president of the spiritual clinic who rejected the term “spirit possession” so 29 The term “neo-Pentecostal” refers to churches such as the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, IURD) that have been founded by Brazilians, to distinguish them from Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God that were introduced by missionaries. 30 Almeida, “A guerra dos possessões.” 31 See Silva, “Neopentecostalismo e Religiões Afro-Brasileiras”; Engler, “Other Religions as Social Problem.” 32 See Engler, “Ritual Theory and Attitudes.”

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firmly, that his rejection is not a denial of the practice but of its significance. He declared that to receive a spirit (hence, to become possessed by one) would be a waste of time as it would prevent a medium from developing intellectually. Nobody came to this world to receive the spirit of the third. We came here for our spirit, and what is our spirit, is our truth, our obligations, the ethics that we must learn to live together. Usually people do not want to know more, they want to come here to receive a spirit. […] They are talking about a future life, or they are talking about a past life. But no one can really say anything about it because nobody knows. […] We will just lose time. […] We do not believe in a spirit that speaks. […] Working with spirits [mediumship] is very difficult. So we have a separate group dedicated to developing guidelines for working with spirits, but not for one person. The spirits do not reveal anything about a person. They have no such right to do so because there is free will. They cannot say, “Do this or do that.” The most they can do is help the doctor make a proper diagnosis and advise the patient well, so that the patient feels compelled to take the medication, modify their diet, modify their habits, improve and be happy. None of this comes via incorporation. The merger is a primary process in psychic development. Let’s say we have a range of therapeutic possibilities to help someone. The merger is the last, the very last chance we launched there.33 He acknowledged later that he had incorporated a spirit early on but that he decided that incorporation was not the right way. Well at first, 30 years ago, I received the spirit of a doctor, Dr. Savas. […] But I had no one who could help me to understand the incorporation. I had to make my own diagnosis, perform the treatment and do the surgery. But over time the system was changed. […] Otherwise I would have been transformed into a super-doctor, a super-creature, and this is not good. […] The spirits of light, the spirits that have a certain level of evolution, do not recommend this kind of work. Incorporation happens. But not to attend an individual patient, but to give guidelines to a hospital that serves 2,000 patients per month. “Better is this, the better way to do is this, do this, prepare that, take certain hours of lectures, go to the anatomy class at the university, 33 Interview, May 5, 2010, Florianopolis.

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call a psychologist, a sociologist” and so on. […] It works by directing the system and not by incorporating in a person.34 The excerpts from my interviews in this section illustrate three different ways of speaking about spirit possession from a practitioner’s perspective in one cultural context, Brazil. One discourse highlighted the special ontology of the entities that are regarded as deities instead of spirits, too powerful for a human being to incorporate. Another interpreted the deities and spirits as demonic entities that need to be exorcised. Spirit possession is therefore regarded as means to exorcise evil from the world. And the third perspective referred to mediumship as a technique of communication that is conducted mainly for therapeutic purposes.

Is it possible to combine the practitioners’ discourse with the academic one? The discourses from the practitioners’ point of view are based on the understanding that the spiritual world exists without any doubt. Anthropologists argue that it does not matter whether we agree with this worldview because our aim is the accurate presentation of the perspectives of the practitioners in order to analyze the wider context or social meaning of the practice linked to this worldview.35 Nonetheless, as Johnson suggests, the Western focus on rationality has caused the study of possession rituals to be confined in the conceptual trap of studying something that is not “real,” a purely “religious” experience, something irrational. Discourses and legal actions naming and constraining “spirit possession” over the past four centuries helped to create the dual notions of the rational individual and the civil subject of modern states. The silhouette of the propertied citizen and free individual took form between the idea of the automaton – a machine-body without will – and the threat of the primitive or animal, bodies overwhelmed by instincts and passions (or the two merged, as in Descartes’ “nature’s automata,” animals-as-machines36). The balance between the lack of 34 Ibid. 35 Klass, Mind over Mind. 36 Ibid., 24, 29, 66.

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will and its unchecked excess has been considered through the prism of the dangers of spirits in relation to persons and objects at least since the mid-seventeenth century.37 This attitude is still influencing the way nonrational practices such as spirit possession, as well as the practitioners of these rituals, are regarded. It seems easy to disqualify the views of the practitioners because of their apparent “theological” framework. Consequently the contributions of practitioners to a wider understanding of the phenomenon are rejected. Struggling with this dilemma, Taves38 suggests a third way, “the mediating tradition,” that allows the inclusion of the understanding of people experiencing possession and trance. However, the problem with her suggestion is that she remains, with her definition of religious experience, “within the already conventionally established contours of religious studies.”39 Her starting point reflects the presumption that “involuntary acts” such as spirit possession are deemed “religious.” Consequently, incorporation is transferred to the range of beliefs – and does not exist outside the mind of the practitioner. Keller describes the problem spot on: “On the one hand, the possession is described as a real belief, but on the other hand it is not the belief of the scholar, who then presents an alternative interpretation of the real processes at hand.”40 Keller challenges these studies and argues for shifting the emphasis onto the possessing agencies, because the spirits choose “who will act as their instruments.”41 Her solution is therefore a theological approach, as she acknowledges herself. Though she would not insist on the term “theology,” she is “committed to the argument that a discursive space is needed in order to discuss the unique power struggles engaged in by religious bodies.”42 This path is relatively common among Brazilian scholars who seem to have fewer problems engaging with the discourses of the practitioners. Barros and Teixeira,43 for instance, argue against the perception of the spiritual world as purely a phenomenon of the mind. They insist that the soul is not only spiritual but has also a material aspect and that the body is not only material but has a spiritual dimension, too. For these two authors the 37 Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy,” 396. 38 Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions. 39 Fitzgerald, “Experiences Deemed Religious,” 297. 40 Keller, The Hammer and the Flute, 29. 41 Ibid., 53. 42 Ibid., 227. 43 Barros and Teixeira, “O Código do Corpo,” 110.

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Candomblé concept even shows a way to get beyond the division between body and mind. Nonetheless, their explanation only fits with one distinct type of spirit possession, not with all kinds practiced in Brazil. Looking at the diversity of explanations it is evidently impossible to construe a single category for such a broad range of intrinsically distinct practices and viewpoints. But in order to compare culturally specific concepts scholars need generic terms. Lambek’s contribution to the debate about the concept “religion” offers a solution. He argues that anthropologists need to reconsider their position and reject the binary logic of either/or, religious/secular. Only by applying an all-inclusive logic can the problem be overcome. Referring to Dipesh Chakrabarty, he writes: We cannot subscribe exclusively to European meta-narratives or analytic stances they presuppose or generate, but we cannot do without them either. What I want to provincialize is not all aspects of the Abrahamic religious traditions but rather their dedication precisely not to such a pluralistic logic of both/and but rather to a binary logic of either/or. Indeed, it is this binary logic of mutual exclusion that also poses the alternative of secularism: either belief in, and invocation of, religion – or not. In a cultural universe characterized by both/and, scepticism and rationalism are simply part of a larger repertoires of attitudes and positions, invoked according to shifting practical considerations, rather than a matter for strict adjudication.44 Lambek urges us to embrace locally specific features which he calls “provincializing God.” As anthropologists we are used to translating culturally specific terms so that our readers can understand them. However, the translation of terms that are deictic is problematic if not impossible, as Lambek demonstrates, referring to Evans-Pritchard’s book The Nuer. Though Evans-Pritchard showed throughout his work the significance of cultural translation, he overlooked that translating kwoth as “God’ overshadowed the deictic nature of the term. As with other deictic terms such as “here” and “now,” the meaning of kwoth also depends on the situation of its usage. And the same can be applied to the concept “spirit possession.” While Lambek uses his critique of the process of cultural translation as a challenge of the Western approach to religion, I argue for an understanding of spirit 44 Lambek, “Provincializing God?,” 123.

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possession as a deictic form of speech. Despite the wide-ranging academic definitions of “spirit possession,” the Brazilian practitioners – if they use the term at all – describe their practice in very different ways, depending on religious, cultural, historical and even social context. By acknowledging the diversity of the practice, or, to use Lambek’s words, by provincializing the experience, we respect the complexity of meanings and embrace the locally specific features. The spiritist idea of mediumship is different from the Candomblé idea of merging the realm of the orixás with the human realm in the moment of possession trance; the Umbanda idea of incorporation differs significantly from the Pentecostal idea of demonic possession and divine experience with the Holy Ghost. The differences between these ideas do not make any one of them less valuable than another, or incoherent; every one of these ideas makes an equal contribution to a wide range of positions, including the academic ones. Provincializing the experience on a conceptual level allows the coexistence of these and more discourses as equally relevant contributions.

References Almeida, Romaldo de. “A guerra dos possessões.” In Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus: Os novos conquestadores da fé, edited by Ari Pedro Oro, André Corten and Jean-Pierre Dozon, 321–342. São Paulo: Paulinas, 2003. Barros, José Flavio Pessoa de, and Maria Lina Leão Teixeira. “O Código do Corpo: Inscrições e Marcos dos Orixás.” In Candomblé: Religião do Corpo e da Alma: Tipos psicológicos nas religiões afro-brasileiros, edited by Carlos Eugênio Marcondes de Moura, 103–138. Rio de Janeiro: Pallos, 2004. Berkenbrock, Volney J. A experiência dos Orixás: um estudo sobrea experiência religiosa no Candomblé. Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes, 1998. Boddy, Janice. “Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality.” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 407–434. Chesnut, Andrew R. Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Engler, Steven. “Other Religions as Social Problem: The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and Afro-Brazilian Traditions.” In Religion and Social Problems, edited by Titus Hjelm, 213–224. New York: Routledge, 2011. —. “Ritual Theory and Attitudes to Agency in Brazilian Spirit Possession.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religions 21 (2009): 460–492. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940.

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Fitzgerald, Timothy. “‘Experiences Deemed Religious’: Radical Critique or Temporary Fix? Strategic Ambiguity in Ann Taves’ Religious Experience Reconsidered.” Religion 40/4 (2010): 296–299. Goldman, Marcio. “How to Learn in an Afro-Brazilian Spirit Possession Religion: Ontology and Multiplicity in Candomblé.” In Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches, edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarró, 103–119. New York–Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Johnson, Paul Christopher. “An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession.’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53/2 (2011): 393–425. Keller, Mary. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, & Spirit Possession. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Klass, Morton. Mind over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Lambek, Michael. “Provincializing God? Provocations from an Anthropology of Religion.” In Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries, 120–138. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Lewis, Ioan M. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. London: Routledge, 2003 [1971]. Machado, Fátima Regina. “Experiências Anômalas na Vida Cotidiana: Experiências extra-sensório-motoras e sua associação com crenças, attitudes e bem-estar subjetivo.” PhD thesis, University of São Paulo, 2009. Platvoet, Jan. “Rattray’s Request: Spirit Possession among the Bono of West Africa.” In Indigenous Religions: A Companion, edited by Graham Harvey, 80–96. London: Cassell, 2000. Prandi, Reginaldo. Segredos Guardados: Orixás na alma brasileira. São Paulo: Companhia dass Letras, 2005. Sansi, Roger. Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century. London: Berghahn Books, 2007. Schmidt, Bettina E. Spirits and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experience. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Silva, Raquel Marta da. “Chico Xavier: um bem simbólico nacional? Uma análise sobre a construção de imaginário espirita uberabense.” In Orixás e Espíritos: o debate interdisciplinar na pesquisa contemporânea, edited by Artur Cesar Isaia, 241–261. Uberlândia: EDUFU, 2006. Silva, Vagner Gonçalves da. “Neopentecostalismo e Religiões Afro-Brasileiras: Significados do Ataque aos Símbolos da Herança Religiosa Africana no Brasil Contemporâneo.” Mana 13/1 (2007): 207–236. Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

4

“Figures of Return” The Catholic Church, the Holy Spirit and Embandwa Spirit Possession in Western Uganda f Heike Behrend

Keywords: Africa, Uganda, spirits, spirit possession, Holy Spirit, Catholic Church, healing, Pentecostalism

In many parts of Africa (and also in other parts of the world) spirits or ghosts of people who have died an unjust, violent or untimely death return to haunt the living.1 In Northern Uganda, for instance, spirits called cen made their appearance during the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Cen were the spirits of people who had died a “bad death” and not received funeral rites. Cen were “hungry” spirits who would return to take revenge on the killer or members of their family.2 In Togo, in the context of the Tschamba cult, to give another example, the spirits of slaves who had died and whose bodies had been thrown in the bush would return after the abolishment of slavery and take possession of their former masters.3 In spirit possession rituals, former slave owners were transformed into slaves, walking in chains, carrying stools for their master and strings of cowrie shells, the currency of the slave trade.4 In both cases, the dead as spirits returned to address issues of moral concern and the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead.5 The return of spirits permitted the living to be conscious of what they had done, to reinscribe social memory and to appease and reconcile the offended spirits of the dead through gifts and sacrifices. Spirits appear to fight the act of forgetting. In a way they themselves act as triggers and figures of remembrance and activate the attention of the living to the presence of the past and sometimes, in particular, to aspects that have been excluded from social memory. As Marc Augé has suggested, 1 Morris, “Giving up Ghosts.” 2 Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits, 26ff. 3 Wendl, “Slavery, Spirit Possession and Ritual,” 111ff. 4 Ibid., 116. 5 Morris, “Giving up Ghosts,” 231.

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spirit possession is the institutionalization of return, of coming back.6 While spirit mediumship seems to stage for its audiences the simultaneous return of the dead, it also includes conflicted aspirations to play with and expose radical alterity.7 It precludes the conceptualization of a preceding time that is closed and instead favors a flexible and open past, a past that can turn into force, reach out into the present and take action on it. Against Western notions of the past as an irrecoverable loss, spirits in possession rituals cross boundaries and create new forms of continuity, simultaneity and shared space. As Rosalind Morris has suggested, spirit mediumship shares the double structure of return – a literalization of return and the display of the constant eruption of the foreign and the strange – with other phenomena that have been conceptualized as religious revivalism.8 In such a perspective, religious revivalism is constructed as a return to the more “authentic” and “true” forms and practices of religion that may have been lost in the present. In the following, I will explore a few figures of return that have emerged in the Charismatic Revival of the Catholic Church in western Uganda since the 1990s. I give the example of a lay movement, the Uganda Martyrs Guild, that celebrated, on the one hand, a return to the Holy Spirit while, on the other hand, strongly rejecting the return of “pagan” African spirits. As I attempt to show, the repudiation of what was discriminated and rejected as the “satanic” past has, however, not prevented its return in highly complex cultural bricolages. Thus, I will open up questions about different constructions of return, presence, immediacy and alterity and the formation of Catholic subjectivities.

Spirit possession in western Uganda Emin Pasha, alias Eduard Schnitzer, who traveled through western Uganda in 1888, mentioned a group of women, clothed in bark cloths, yellowish brown or dyed black. […] [T]hey also not infrequently wear skins of goats or sheep, occasionally cheetah or otter skins, and adorn or disfigure their heads with objects of every 6 Augé, Die Formen des Vergessens, 63. 7 Morris, “On the Subject of Spirit.” 8 Ibid.

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conceivable description. These ladies are certainly not beautiful, and they would hardly be eligible as vestal virgins, but they are feared, and therefore venture to take their liberties. As is always the case where professional interests are concerned, they vie with one another in eccentricities.9 These eccentric women were mediums of the bacwezi spirits that embodied the spirits of early kings related to the origin of the kingship. They were organized in associations called Embandwa. They moved through the country in small bands and claimed to have special powers to help women in childbirth and to make barren wives bear, thus insuring the health, fertility and prosperity of their supplicants. They were also present at the king’s court, where they looked after the shrines, gave oracles, told the king what sort of animal should be sacrificed, healed sicknesses and were responsible for the fertility and well-being of the kingdom.10 These spirit mediums were not recruited from the royal Babito clan, but came from the clans of peasants,11 their office not being strictly hereditary, but clustered in families. In this way, peasants were given a voice in politics.12 In the openness of their recruitment patterns Embandwa associations conformed to the model of “democratic cults” or “cults of affliction” that historians have outlined in many regions of Africa. While the king and Embandwa mediums formed some sort of dualist political and religious organization of power, they shared a common language of spiritual power, both owning, for example, regalia.13 The bacwezi were said to be white – white being the color of the dead – and were seen as quasi-historical figures. Some of them were associated like the early Greek gods with thunder (Rubanga), lightening (Kagoro) or cattle (Kalisa). They also became loosely connected to the small more or less localized agnatic descent groups. As “household” spirits,14 or, better, clan spirits, they were concerned primarily with the well-being, wealth, health and fertility of the group they were associated with.15 Their influence was 9 Emin Pasha, Emin Pasha in Central Africa, 285. 10 Roscoe, The Bakitara or Banyoro, 22ff. 11 Beattie, “Group Aspects of the Nyoro Spirit,” 15. 12 In contrast to Beattie, Roscoe claimed that the bacwezi were consulted only by the pastoral people and had nothing to do with the agricultural clans of the peasants (Roscoe, The Bakitara or Banyoro, 25). He does not mention that the spirit mediums were recruited from the peasants. 13 Berger, “Fertility as Power,” 65ff. 14 Beattie, “Spirit Mediumship in Bunyoro,” 160. 15 Ibid.

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thought to be wholly beneficial and this is why they also became linked and identified with the color white, the color of purity, life and fertility (and death).16 During colonial times and even before, another category of bacwezi emerged, the “black bacwezi” that were thought to be more inimical than beneficial.17 The black bacwezi were, above all, alien spirits and specialized in exposing radical alterity. In precolonial times, they came from Lango and Buganda and some of them were related to epidemics, such as, for example, the spirit Kapumbuli that brought the plague from Buganda. A larger number of black bacwezi arrived during colonial times, including Kifaru (the Swahili word for rhinoceros), the spirit of military tanks, Ndege, the spirit of airplanes, or Njungu, the spirit of Europeanness.18 At the same time, Christian missionaries started to establish a strict dualism characterized by a good Christian God/Trinity while local spirits such as the bacwezi or the mizimu, spirits of ancestors, were declared evil and satanic and their mediums discriminated and sometimes even persecuted. As agents of the devil or “Satan’s angels” they were driven underground. Through the redefinition of African religion as “devil worship,” the propitiation of satanic spirits as well as the persecution and the discrimination of African “pagan” ritual experts by missionaries, a radicalized structure of rejection was established. As the linguist and historian L. Rubongoya stated, “African traditions became diabolized and top-secret.” In fact, Christian missionaries strongly contributed to the transformation of spirit possession into witchcraft. By their own contradictory actions, by either negating the power of witches and spirits and likewise satanizing them, the missionaries not only produced what they were fighting against but also strongly empowered what they rejected. When the colonial state interdicted ordeals to identify witches, many local people felt even more threatened and some took these interdictions as proofs that the missionaries and the colonial state not only protected witches but more or less supported them because they themselves were witches. However, in spite of the strong repression, discrimination and persecution that Embandwa spirit mediums experienced, they did not hesitate 16 According to Ed Steinhart (Conflict and Collaboration), there were systematic differences in what the bacwezi meant to the two classes of people within the local community: for the (pastoral) elite they were considered to be dead kings; among peasants, the bacwezi were superhuman, spiritual entities that acted as moral guardians – punishers but also healers. 17 Ibid., 160–161. 18 Ibid., 161.

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to appropriate certain aspects of their Christian adversaries. Of special interest is the widespread assimilation into the cults of the very force which was dedicated to their destruction, the teaching of Christian missionaries themselves.19 John Beattie, an anthropologist who worked in western Uganda in the 1950s, mentioned a spirit in the Embandwa cults called “I shall pray to God every day.” This was the spirit of “Christian worship.”20 Following the tendency in western Uganda (and other parts of Africa) to “spiritualize” entities conceived as extraordinary, powerful and dangerous, the Christian ritual practice of praying was appropriated in spirit possession rituals and as a spirit was not only accommodated but also domesticated. And yet I must emphasize that the spiritualization of Christian prayer in the spirit “I shall pray to God every day” and its integration into a spirit possession cult was the opposite of the missionaries’ concept of conversion. Whereas the missionaries tried to convert people by convincing them of the truth inherent in the Christian belief (at least in theory) and in consequence saw conversion as a conscious decision by a self-responsible person, the spirit of Christian worship powerfully took possession of its medium, thereby effacing its consciousness more or less completely (in any case in local perspective). The spirit of Christian worship as an outside power overwhelmed the person it took possession of and forced him or her to mimetically follow the Christian practice of prayer. The spiritualization of Christian worship was, on the one hand, a powerful means of appropriating and likewise taming the foreign Christian practice, while, on the other hand, it prevented the formation of a Christian subject, a discerning subject refashioned inwardly. As a power from outside, the spirit of Christian worship could not be consciously internalized. As spirit it offered an escape from interiority and thereby also from responsibility. As Fritz Kramer has shown, in the new cults of alien spirits that emerged during colonial times, Africans were possessed by spirits that represented powerful and dangerous forces from outside their own society. Per definition they were not possessed by the spirit of things or persons that were their own. To be possessed by the spirit “I shall pray to God every day” meant NOT to get involved with Christian prayer in ordinary life and so excluded a conscious evaluation and practical confrontation with the Christian 19 Beattie and Middleton, “Introduction,” xxix. 20 Beattie, “Group Aspects of the Nyoro Spirit,” 29.

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religion.21 While evading internalization and the totalizing grip of Christian missionaries, spirit possession cults with their songs, rhythms, dances, clothes and taboos nevertheless allowed the production of an imaginary entity that in its own ways coped with the “spirit of Christianity.” The strict dualism that the early missionaries had introduced in the late nineteenth century was appropriated and even radicalized by many African Christians – Catholics as well as Protestants – in the 1990s. They also discriminated and actively fought against “pagan” healers and spirit mediums, destroying their shrines and paraphernalia and sometimes accusing them of being witches, thus repeating what the missionaries had done at the end of the nineteenth century. When I visited a “traditional” healer who himself was Christian but whose spirits were “pagan” – he had inherited them from his grandfather, a well-known healer and spirit medium – to learn more about Embandwa spirits and rituals, he gave me some medicine, a grayish powder, at the end of our conversation (free of charge). He said that I had become “impure” and would invite danger because we had talked about “satanic” traditions. For him, talking about African traditions was conceptualized as something so negative and dangerous that medicine had to be employed to counteract their “satanic” effects. The structure of rejection had become so radical and likewise so powerful that even conversations about the “pagan” past were feared as inviting the rejected and excluded to return, open up and invade bodies.

The return of an age of the Holy Spirit Since the 1980s, in many parts of Africa a sort of popular Christianity taking the form of a Christian mass culture has emerged that has become deeply embedded into everyday life. As various scholars have shown, this Christian popular culture has come forward in the context of a global Pentecostal Revival that also infiltrated the Catholic Church. In western Uganda, as part of an intense power struggle with other denominations, the Catholic Church became radically transformed by the emergence of the so-called Charismatic Movement inside the Church. In fact, some critiques saw this as a Pentecostalization of the Catholic Church. In addition, inside the Catholic Church a lay organization, the Uganda 21 Kramer, Der rote Fez, 103.

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Martyrs Guild (UMG) emerged strongly, and started to enter the public domain to “fight evil.”22 In western Uganda, the Catholic Charismatic Revival23 movement took on a new thrust in 1981 when a Holy Cross sister and brother from the USA came to Fort Portal and founded the first Charismatic prayer group. In it, believers started to experience the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, deliverance from evil spirits and inner as well as physical healing. They increasingly took recourse to practices that enabled them to feel and embody the power of God and, in particular, the Holy Spirit, and so to empower themselves and consequently level the distinctions between clerical and lay authority. Catholic Charismatics strongly reformulated Catholic identity by emphasizing the Holy Spirit, its spiritual presence in the body of believers and the direct experience of God without the interventions of priests or saints. The Holy Spirit was thus “democratized” in that it also became a source for direct accessibility to the divine for lay people. Salvation was not so much acquired through the dispensing of the sacraments but much more through the gift of various types of charisma that in principle were available to all. In a way, the Holy Spirit turned into a popular, communicative generator of charismatic gifts that allowed those who opened themselves to it to receive and transmit those gifts to others.24 Whereas the Charismatic movement in western Uganda mainly attracted well-educated people and younger male members of the clergy, the lay organizations of the UMG absorbed, above all, poor people, especially women. While the Charismatics, although also believing in the existence of satanic forces, stressed “inner healing” and the establishment of a self-responsible person, the UMG instead saw the Christian God “as an ambulance” – as a member of the Charismatic movement explained to me. They concentrated not so much on building up a personal relationship with God but gave more attention to fighting the satanic powers which they saw as their enemies, as responsible for disease, poverty and death. Whereas the Charismatics through the distinction between deliverance and exorcism attempted to reduce the scope of lay charisma and extrasacramental practice and to 22 For a detailed analysis of the history and ethnography of the Uganda Martyrs Guild, see Behrend, Resurrecting Cannibals. 23 According to Ron Kassimir, the Charismatic Renewal as a “Catholicized” form of Pentecostalism began in Uganda in 1967; yet, he also agrees that it became a mass movement only in the 1980s (Kassimir, “The Social Power of Religious Organization,” 255). 24 Cf. Abreu, “On Charism, Mediation and Broken Screens,” 240ff.

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limit the cases in which recourse to spiritual explanations to illness were legitimate,25 among the UMG, as I will show in what follows, the Holy Spirit and practices of exorcism became central; members favored a concept of the person that, invaded by satanic spirits, was only partially self-responsible. Yet, in spite of these differences, Charismatics and members of the UMG interacted in many ways and, for example, a Charismatic priest originally from Texas became a strong protagonist in the UMG. Through the common emphasis on healing and spiritual experience the boundaries between Charismatic Catholicism and Pentecostal Protestantism became of little importance (at least for many lay people). In addition, both established a radicalized structure of rejection in relation to local tradition, and in particular “traditional” or “pagan” religion. Both saw the bacwezi as agents of Satan who had turned modern and become associated with the sudden riches of businessmen. In stories, bacwezi – like Mami Wata in West Africa – provided commodities and riches for businessmen who renounced the emblems of Christianity, the rosary and the Bible. These stories formed versions of a well-known and widespread narrative about satanic riches and enchanted commodities that endangered Christian identity.26 It is important to stress that the current revival includes the return not only of the Holy Spirit but also of the “orgiastic.” In fact, the use of mediumship, techniques of trance and possession, exorcism and the invocation of spirits flourish not only among “traditional” spirit possession cults like Embandwa and new religious movements but also among the old monotheistic religions that center on the book. In the Catholic Church various forms of orgiastic spirituality have resurfaced in healing practices. Although in 1972, Pope Paul VI removed the authority to perform exorcism as one of the standard “minor orders” with which all priests were endowed at ordination, in 1999 a revised rite of exorcism was formulated, and in 2005 Pope Benedict XVI declared that every diocese should appoint an exorcist.27 The return of the orgiastic has led to a debate among philosophers, some of whom warn against the experience of the sacred as an enthusiasm or fervor for fusion, cautioning in particular against a form of demonic rapture that has as its effect the removal of responsibility.28 25 26 27 28

Kassimir, “The Social Power of Religious Organization,” 261. Meyer, “Waren und die Macht des Gebets.” See Csordas, in this volume. See Derrida, The Gift of Death.

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Spiritual practices of the UMG Since the 1990s, when the UMG entered the public domain by organizing witch hunts, its members have created a full repertoire of body techniques and forms of mediating the Holy Spirit’s power to expose the presence of satanic forces and to fight them. Particularly during crusades, the UMG became a sensuous community in motion, remaking itself through communication mediated through various materialities that oscillated between substance and force, body and spirit. The UMG’s “aesthetic formations,”29 as they unfolded during crusades, allow one to grasp the confluence of the “physical,” including bodies and things, and the “spiritual” and transcendent.30 In complex ways – by music, songs, touch, movement, dance, prayer and so forth – UMG members organized their religious experience and knowledge of the senses; they unlocked, opened or closed their bodies, entered into circuits of flows of power through which the community and bodies overlapped and processes of codependency and mutual modulation between body and space, individuals and collectivities evolved.31 The day before the “operation,” as the crusades were also called, the crusaders fasted. In the UMG fasting formed part of an alimentary regime of self-control through which the purification of the body was ensured. Food abstention was an expression of repentance, an ascetic practice that cleansed and emptied the body, thereby preparing it for God’s inspiration and enabling, in particular, the Holy Spirit to fill it entirely. Through fasting, the body was prepared to ease (spiritual) mediation. While the crusaders refused to eat food, they spent the whole night in the church singing and praying rosaries, practices that allowed the Holy Spirit “to load them with His power,” as Kasaija, the former president of the UMG, explained to me. In this they followed St. Paul’s idea of inhabitance and made their body the potential container or temple of the Holy Spirit. Yet, “to be filled with the Holy Spirit” was not a question of inward, contemplative spirituality, but of embodying divine power and thereby empowering oneself in the fight against evil. Members of the UMG conceived the Holy Spirit in terms of air, wind or electricity, a sort of force or substance that could be manipulated, condensed and intensified. Through inhaling air or pneuma effected by the presence of 29 Meyer, “Introduction.” 30 Meyer, “Aesthetics of Persuasion,”, 752. 31 Cf. Abreu, “Breath, Technology.”

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the Holy Spirit and through exhaling pious powerful words the members’ bodies were “loaded” with the Holy Spirit. Dancing and singing offered occasions for actively pursuing and achieving altered states of (un)consciousness and enthusiasm, though always submitting them to the collective discipline of a rather restricted dance style. Members were allowed different degrees of collective abandon. When carried away by the music and bodily movement, a gap opened up between intention and experience, and here we are, according to Alfred Gell, in the presence of divinity in its raw state. Kinetic forces were generated by dancing and moving the body, thereby inducing a marked subjective quality of un-willed-ness, disrupting the normal sense of self-possession and enabling an experience of enduring a force from without, the Holy Spirit.32 Yet, as in all ritual processes, moments of high intensity and even euphoria took turns with moments of less intensity and fragmentation.

The UMG’s “weapons” In the UMG, pious songs and prayers created not only a new acoustic quality of unity enveloping individuals and absorbing them to different degrees, but also served as “weapons” in the fight against evil. Guild members have created a whole repertoire of specific prayers and songs that are seen as having agency, force and power, determining the outcome of struggles against evil. Songs and prayers became acoustic “weapons” whose power undermined evil forces. To assist the exorcism of an evil spirit, for example, the song “Satan Crucified” was sung to strengthen the crusaders and weaken Satan and his agents. Not only the words of the song were taken to be effective but also the increased volume of the song intensified its power. Air, a “thin matter,” was thus thickened and condensed by powerful noisy words, loaded with the pneuma of the Holy Spirit. Likewise, consecrated objects such as rosaries and bottles filled with holy water were conceived as “weapons” to fight evil. A complex technology has evolved to concentrate and intensify the powers of the Holy Spirit by separating or combining the different “weapons,” by loading and unloading bodies, objects and words (spoken as well as sung) like electric batteries. In fact, as I will show in more detail, the Holy Spirit’s power was not only associated with pneuma, air and wind but also with electrical power. Like 32 Gell, “The Gods at Play,” 238, 226.

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air, electricity is also a medium of transcendence par excellence and the Holy Spirit has become part of a “theology of electricity”33 that associates it with an electricity generator infusing positive powers and forces to those who open up and connect with it. In the UMG in various ritual contexts, the analogy between electricity and spirituality was invoked.

Discovering witches and cannibals The UMG has invented a new hybrid technique of revelation of evil that blends Christian techniques of being loaded with the Holy Spirit with “pagan” practices of spirit possession thereby staging the controlled return of what they fought against. Some Guild members, also called “hunters,” gifted with the powers of discernment, identified the presence of evil through their bodies filled and “loaded” with the Holy Spirit. When approaching a witch or a “satanic” object such as the medicine of a witch, they started trembling, fell to the ground, scratched the earth or ran on their knees until whatever was hidden in the roof or in the bush had been found. Loaded with the power of the Holy Spirit their bodies functioned as indicators of satanic presence. If the presence of evil was strong, their reaction was dramatic and violent; if the presence of evil was weak, their reaction was milder, just a little trembling of the hands and arms. Like the pointer of a voltmeter, an instrument for measuring electrical potential, the degree of their trembling limbs indicated the degree of evil presence, as if their limbs were dispossessed, foreign objects, endowed with a life of their own. The identification of evil was thus staged not as a conscious decision of a person but as a more or less unconscious act (“it just happens to me”) in which the body filled with the Holy Spirit was transformed into a technical instrument or medium. By “switching off” individual consciousness, the act of discernment apparently was “objectified” and thereby given additional truth value. Comparable to an oracle, it was not an interested, passionate individual but instead a power from the outside that was acting. It was through the Holy Spirit as some sort of oracular power manifesting itself in the bodies of members of the UMG and not through human knowledge that the presence of a witch or satanic object was revealed. 33 Benz, Theologie der Elektrizität.

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Embodying the Holy Spirit As in the Western Christian tradition the incomparable power of the Christian God and the Holy Spirit does not allow mimesis, and the forms in which the Holy Spirit can embody and voice itself are rather reduced. While in the Embandwa spirit possession cults each spirit has its own complex personality that is characterized by a specific way of speaking, a particular language, voice, gesture, cloth, paraphernalia, food, music and scent, the Holy Spirit cannot be represented as a social person. It is, above all, its presence that has to be communicated, and this often happens through glossolalia, “speaking in tongues.” Yet some UMG mediums have transgressed the (tacit) interdiction of representation. During a crusade in Kyamiaga in 2002, a lady possessed by the Holy Spirit embodied a dove, the icon of the Holy Spirit. She spread her arms like wings and made the noises of a bird, casting an image of the dove that was immediately recognized by the people present. While, on the one hand, referring to Christian iconography, she, on the other hand, had approached dangerous, “satanic” ground, the “pagan” Embandwa practices of embodying the spirits of animals, thereby returning to what actually was fought against by UMG members. Whereas in the Western Christian tradition, glossolalia is “a speaking for the sake of speaking, […] a fiction of discourse that orchestrates the act of saying but expresses nothing”34 and is not translated, members of the UMG informed me that glossolalia for them was full of meanings. For example, the “noises” of a woman filled with the Holy Spirit that I had mistaken to be glossolalia were explained to me as a verbal fight with Satan. The woman, so I was told, was trying to say the name of Jesus to fight Satan, but Satan’s agents – satanic spirits – were blocking the flow of words and preventing her from uttering his name. She only succeeded in shouting “Jes, Jes, Jes” but could not pronounce “Jesus.” Her body was the vocal site of a severe battle between the Holy Spirit and the forces of Satan. While the Holy Spirit was associated with flow, the flow of air and pious words, Satan’s interventions were interpreted as blockage, as a disturbance of (spiritual) mediation. In fact, the “noises of otherness” were controlled here to some extent by being given meaning.35 In addition,

34 De Certeau, “Vocal Utopias,” 29. 35 Ibid., 36.

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shivers of certain limbs, perspiration and vomiting 36 were also taken as signs of blockage, of the presence and activity of an evil spirit in the victim’s body. By connecting on the one hand with the local practice of Embandwa spirit possession and, on the other hand, participating in the global Christian culture of the orgiastic as it evolved around the Holy Spirit (in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements), a highly complex and hybrid Christian body language has evolved among the Guild members that allows them to decode the theater of possession. Among UMG members, possessed bodies were readable.

Debating (the loss of) responsibility The loss of responsibility and control through religious enthusiasm formed a subject of debate among Charismatic Catholics as well as among members of the UMG. It was an intricate debate as the “surrender” to the Holy Spirit was welcomed and valued as a positive sign of a person’s nearness to God while the complete eclipse of consciousness was seen as negative and an indication of satanic presence. A delicate boundary of rejection was established that excluded the complete loss of responsibility and connected the rejected with evil spirits, Satan and paganism. The influence of satanic spirits was suspected precisely when behaviors and emotions were radically out of control.37 In this debate, it was the permeability of the body through outside forces that was at stake. The goal to be achieved was, however, not the complete closure of the body, because the Holy Spirit was celebrated as a force that should enter and empower the individual person. While possession by Embandwa spirits causes the medium to completely lose his or her own consciousness so that after possession the medium cannot remember what he/she has done or said and needs a translator who informs him or her about what happened during spirit possession, possession by the Holy Spirit is only partial and allows the possessed person to know what is happening. Whereas the presence of the “satanic” spirit is total and effaces the consciousness of the medium completely, the Holy Spirit allows a sort of coexistence of itself and its medium’s consciousness. When talking to 36 When the possessed person vomited white foam this was seen as the material sign of the departure of a satanic spirit. 37 Cf. Csordas, The Sacred Self, 19.

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some members of the UMG, they explained to me that they were only 50% possessed by the Holy Spirit and thus knew what was going on. Whereas in Embandwa spirit possession, a radical break was staged between the personality of the spirit and the one of the medium, possession by the Holy Spirit in contrast allowed some sort of partial self-assurance that supported the continuity of the Christian person. In contrast to “satanic” spirits, the Holy Spirit favored the construction of a self-reliable, self-responsible person, yet in an ambiguous way, because the so constructed person was still open to the invasion of powers from the outside. Against this background, the UMG members tried hard to continue to control their bodies when “taken” by the Holy Spirit. They feared satanic rapture that had as its effect the removal of responsibility. In fact, to be possessed by an evil spirit meant to become irresponsible. Yet, as in their practices they strongly depended upon the Holy Spirit as their “super power,” they could not eliminate but only discipline the orgiastic. Guild members thus preserved in their rituals a nucleus of irresponsibility (or unconsciousness) that, however, in its absolute form was attributed to their God’s other, Satan and its agents.

Healing session The UMG organized healing sessions in which satanic spirit possession was brought on the stage in order to display to the public the edifying spectacle of the war between God and Satan. Then, in particular, women received their share of public attention, thrown down and molested by evil spirits, giving free reign to anxiety, revenge and hatred. Yet, once in place, the theater of possession followed its own laws: it transformed the problems and passions on which it fed. It rechanneled resentment, diverting it toward great, formidable issues: God and the Devil. From the start, it posited a normative code that reduced the choices to being either in Satan’s camp or in God’s.38 The theater of satanic possession followed a dramaturgy that authorized saying (nearly) anything. Evil spirits allowed one to say what otherwise could not be said. They made their mediums suffer their language. In the healing session I observed, a spirit that possessed a lady started screaming obscenities that my friends at first refused to translate because they thought it so shameful. In addition, in the state of possession accusations could be 38 De Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, 23, 27.

“Figures of Re turn”

made that otherwise could not be made. (Nearly) everything is permitted because the person speaking and acting cannot be made responsible for what she says and does because it is the satanic spirit that acts. Although in Embandwa spirit possession unknown spirits that took possession of a person were identified and sometimes also exorcised, most often, however, spirits were accommodated in the sense that an initiation into the spirit’s cult took place. Healing presupposed the establishment of a life-long relationship between the spirit and its medium. In contrast, healing in the Guild meant exorcism. Satanic spirits were allowed to perform for a while, tell their stories so that the Guild members could understand the hidden conflicts and the etiology of the patient’s affliction. Yet, their presence was always ended by an exorcism that gave proof of the Holy Spirit’s superior power. Successful healing meant the final expulsion of evil spirits. Satan and his agents, violent at first, were slowly domesticated and the horror was transformed into a spectacle. In the Guild members’ perspective the presence of a satanic spirit in the patient’s body was seen as a temporal crisis that was suspended to reestablish the lost unity and continuity of the Christian person. In this spectacle, the healers or exorcists acted as “hunters” and tamers of bodies. Yet some of the “hunters” became so upset by the presence of evil that they had to be treated themselves. There is always the danger of contagion, the possibility that the exorcist, the hunter, becomes the hunted, the possessed. Thus a strange symmetry and complicity connected the healers and exorcists, “loaded” with the Holy Spirit and the women possessed by evil spirits. When the spirits refused to leave the body, the healers or “hunters” of the UMG took recourse to their complex repertoire of “weapons,” asking the public to sing certain songs that strengthened their fight, to sprinkle holy water, to say special prayers or to put the crucifix to the orifices of the victim’s body. They touched, massaged and pressed those body parts that, in particular, were trembling, that seemed to lead a life of their own. These trembling parts were inhabited by evil spirits that blocked the flow and by pressing and touching they were forced to leave the body of the afflicted person. In a way, the body itself confessed: sins that allowed the spirits’ entry could be recognized in the trembling, the tingling in limbs as well as in the blockings and knots that prevented the flow. All this was revealed as the body turned into an active screen on the surface of which the database of human sins appeared as part of a global project of regeneration.39 39 Cf. Abreu, “Breath, Technology,” 12.

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At the very end of the performance, after the spirits had been exorcised, the Catholic healers informed the exhausted women what had happened to them and gave them some counseling. Nobody blamed them, because the spirits were seen as responsible. Yet the women were also cautioned not to sin so that evil spirits were not given the chance to enter their bodies again. Thus, indirectly they were made responsible for the possession. And while the theater of satanic possession provided some sort of catharsis, the agony, physical pain and mental suffering that the possessed person underwent likewise may have provided her with punishment.40 In the UMG a reflective working through one’s suffering was partially prevented. It is as if, on the one hand, the practice of (satanic) possession in particular provided an escape from responsibility, the internalization of (good and) evil and questions of guilt. On the other hand, in the Catholic rituals of possession satanic spirits were allowed to return for a short time. They were presented as the Other of the Holy Spirit, as the rejected that had to return again and again to give evidence of Catholic power. Rites of exorcism followed a logic of rejection that still retained what it denied. While satanic spirits were exorcised, they – as part of the system – could never be eliminated or be disposed of for good. As I have tried to show, the UMG in its struggle against satanic agents necessarily reinstated the satanic powers they fought against. Indeed, the logic of mutual outbidding that characterized the Guild’s fight against evil made it inevitable that their members, and in particular their leaders, constantly gave proof of dangerous evil forces to show their own superior power. When the satanic forces intensified and proliferated, then also the powers of the Catholic God had to do so and vice versa. Basically, in this dualist cosmology, good could overcome evil only if it renounced being good.41 The UMG was trapped in this dynamic of the mutual constitution of good and evil, of a boundary and its transgression. Because of this dynamic, evil spread and obtained even a cosmic dimension. It was to be exposed not only in human beings but also in trees, flowers and other plants, as well as in animals, black cats, dogs, monkeys, snakes, lizards, frogs and cockroaches. The Guild’s members contributed extensively to this proliferation of evil powers and reacted to it by producing what I would call “Christian Magic,” an endless series of miracles and wonders thereby magnifying their 40 De Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, 102. 41 Baudrillard, Der Geist des Terrorismus, 19.

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practices to a greater level of power. While connecting, on the one hand, to the Christian tradition of miracles, they conversely also took recourse to the local tradition of wonder production and show effects of “pagan” spirit mediums and “witch doctors,” thereby increasingly approaching what they were rejecting and fighting against. As a former witch doctor who became a fervent member of the UMG explained to me, many people converted when they saw the power of the UMG.

References Abreu, Maria José de. “Breathing into the Heart of the Matter: Why Padre Marcelo Needs No Wings.” Postscripts 1.2/1.3 (2005): 325–349. —. “Breath, Technology and the Making of Community Cancao Nova in Brazil.” In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses, edited by Birgit Meyer, 161–182. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. —. “Goose Bumps All Over: Breath, Media and Tremor.” Social Text 25/3 (no. 96) (2008): 59–78. —. “On Charism, Mediation and Broken Screens.” Etnofoor 15/1-2 (2002): 240–259. Augé, Marc. Die Formen des Vergessens. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2013. Baudrillard, Jean. Der Geist des Terrorismus. Wien: Passagen, 2003. Beattie, John. “Group Aspects of the Nyoro Spirit Mediumship Cult.” RodesLivingston Journal 30 (1961): 11–38. —. “Spirit Mediumship in Bunyoro.” In Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa, edited by John Beattie and John Middleton, 159–170. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Beattie, John, and John Middleton. “Introduction.” In Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa, edited by John Beattie and John Middleton, xvii–xxx. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Behrend, Heike. Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda. Oxford: James Currey, 1999. —. Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-Hunts and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda. Oxford: James Currey, 2011. Benz, Ernst. Theologie der Elektrizität. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1970. Berger, Iris. “Fertility as Power: Spirit Mediums, Priestesses and the Precolonial State in Interlacustrine East Africa.” In Revealing Prophets, edited by David M. Anderson and Douglas Johnson, 65–82. London: James Currey, 1995.

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Csordas, Thomas, J. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. De Certeau, Michel. The Possession at Loudun. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [La possession de Loudun. Paris: Julliard, 1970]. —. “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias.” Representations 56 (1996): 29–47. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Emin Pasha. Emin Pasha in Central Africa. London: G. Philip & Son, 1988. Gell, Alfred. “The Gods at Play: Vertigo and Possession in Muria Religion.” Man 15/2 (1980): 219–248. Kassimir, Ronald. “The Social Power of Religious Organization: The Catholic Church in Uganda 1955–1991.” PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1996. Kramer, Fritz. Der rote Fez. Frankfurt: Athenaum Verlag, 1987 Meyer, Birgit. “Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109/4 (2010): 741–763, September 2010. —. “Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms and Styles of Binding.” In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses, edited by Birgit Meyer, 1–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. —. “Waren und die Macht des Gebets. Zur Problematik des Konsums in ghanaischen Pfingstkirchen.” Sociologus 48/1 (1998): 42–72. Morris, Rosalind. “Giving up Ghosts: Notes on Trauma and the Possibility of the Political from Southeast Asia.” Positions 16/1 (2008): 229–258. —. “On the Subject of Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media.” In Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction, edited by Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger, 25–55. New York: Fordham, 2014. Roscoe, John. The Bakitara or Banyoro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Rubongoya, L.T. Naaho Nubo.The Ways of our Ancestors. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. 2003. Steinhart, Edward I. Conflict and Collaboration: The Kingdoms of Western Uganda, 1890–1907. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Wendl, Tobias. “Slavery, Spirit Possession and Ritual Consciousness: The Tschamba Cult among the Mina of Togo.” In Spirit Possession, Modernity and Power in Africa, edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, 111–123. Oxford: James Currey, 1999.

5

Ideas about Spirit Possession and Anti-Devil Practicesin the Religious Life of Some Eastern Hungarian Communities f Éva Pócs

Keywords: possession, obsession, mediumism, lived religion, devil, witch, ghost, nightmare, fairy, illness demon, Hungarians in Transylvania

I wrote this chapter as part of a joint project with András Zempléni, one of the most important goals of which was to highlight the connections and disconnections between spirit possession phenomena known, on the one hand, from the European past, from historical sources and in the present among people living outside Europe, on the other. We wanted to better delineate the boundaries that separated and brought them together, including the nature of the phenomenon itself and the research categories that defined and classified them. In keeping with this goal, in the following I will attempt to outline the emic categories of spirit possession in the lived religion of some eastern Hungarian Roman Catholic communities, and follow up with examining whether we can speak of a coherent, local category of spirit possession or whether its local manifestations can only be regarded as a set of scattered phenomena with varied meanings; in addition, I am interested in how all this relates to the scholarly conceptualization of the anthropology of religion and theological categories of divine and diabolic possession and exorcism.1 No matter how much the study of the possession paradigm has grown in recent decades, in terms of both European Christianity and peoples outside Europe and other religions, questions around the fluid definitions and fuzzy boundaries continue to exist. The reason for this is most likely to be that spirit possession is a universal religious phenomenon across human 1 This chapter contains a few brief excerpts from my earlier summary overview of European possession phenomena (Pócs, “Possession Phenomena”).

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cultures. This fact only allows a very broad definition that sees possession as a form of communication between the human and the supernatural world in the course of which one or more spirits hold a human or humans and their property in their power and under their influence,2 or as another entity living inside or outside their body modify the personality of the possessed human(s).3 If, however, we regard the religious and social context of the phenomenon and associated ritual practices, as well as the local actors, agents of possession and the possessed, the motivations and modes, the ideology and techniques of “possession” and healing, and its effects on the individual, on body image, on the Self and identity, we find innumerable variations, often even in the same time frame, within the same community. Historical research intensifying in the second half of the last century (in historical anthropology, history of religion and mentality) inevitably remained within the framework of official Church definitions and within the Christian polarity of divine and demonic possession and of official exorcism. The most important available sources at our disposal were necessarily onesided. Despite these limitations, many important studies saw the light about “folk” conceptions and practices of possession deciphered out from historical sources, and with respect to the relationship of these to etic categories. The investigations of Nancy Caciola specifically examining the parallel and intertwining evolution of popular and elite views of possession by the dead, the work on possession phenomena as can be mined from miracle records at pilgrimage sites by Peter Brown, and of Sari Katajala-Peltomaa or Gábor Klaniczay from the vitae or the canonization processes of medieval saints, or the works of Michael Ostling on popular conceptualizations of the devil mined from Polish witch trials, or Dániel Bárth’s studies of cases of possession and exorcism in eighteenth-century Transylvania and Zombor demonstrate the multiplicity of the views of the Church and its complex network of relations with folk views.4 Peter Dinzelbacher, Moshe Sluhovsky, Nancy Caciola, Gábor Klaniczay and others have written about thirteenth- to sixteenth-century mystics, living saints, ecstatic visionaries, which bear witness to the discrepancies 2 Crapanzano, “Spirit Possession,” 12: “phenomenon of abnormal behaviour, which are interpreted by the members of the society as evidence that a spirit is controlling the person’s action and probably inhabiting his body.” 3 Bourguignon, “Introduction,” 8. 4 Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants”; Caciola, Afterlives; Caciola, in this volume; Brown, The Cult of the Saints; Dinzelbacher, “Die Realität des Teufels”; Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession; Klaniczay, “The Power of the Saints” and in this volume; Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host; Bárth, “Pater Rochus” and The Exorcist of Sombor.

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between individual interpretations based on subjective experiences and the emotions and evaluations of Church demonology that eventually led to exorcism. These works highlight once again the fluid boundaries of diabolic and divine possession both in the eyes of external witnesses and those undergoing the experience, which had as a natural consequence in these centuries the development of the principle and practice of discretio spirituum (the discerning of spirits).5 An important lesson of studies from “below” that also take into consideration the point of view of those undergoing the experiences is that individual knowledge and emotional attitude play a very important part in evaluating and categorizing possession phenomena. Richard Greenfield’s large-scale overview of Orthodox demonology on Eastern European “alternative” tenets of demonology and possession and Christine Worobec’s book and papers about nineteenth-century Russian folk conceptualizations of possession related to witchcraft as well as about conflicts between Church and medical views and practices6 are two further outstanding examples of scholarly endeavors to understand possession from the point of view of those experiencing and practicing it, about its role in “lived religion,” its various interpretations, and the mutual influence of popular ideas, the views of the local clergy and of official Church (medical, psychiatric) teachings on each other. All of this emphatically points to the fact that official and folk religion are not opposing but mutually complementary categories of lived religion that need to be considered together. Despite the many results historical studies produced, it is clear that the study of contemporary ideas and practices based on participant observation provides more opportunity for studying the emic categories of individuals or religious communities in the broader context and various registers of religious life, along with their connections to related phenomena, as demonstrated by the works of anthropologists studying peoples outside of Europe. The idea of the necessity of local intensive anthropological research 5 See Sluhovsky, “A Divine Apparition” and Believe Not Every Spirit; Caciola, Discerning Spirits; Klaniczay, “The Process of Trance,” 229–245. 6 Medical views and evaluations from a medical point of view have been present since the early Middle Ages and exerted their influence on both Church and folk interpretations of possession phenomena. Varying according to the era, possession phenomena have been attributed to madness in antiquity, to melancholy (depression) in medieval intellectual discourses, to an illness of the womb in the Middle Ages, to hysteria from the seventeenth century on, to epilepsy or the effect of magnetism after that, and to sleep paralysis in the modern era. All of this may have influenced evaluations by individuals and processes of discretio spirituum. Modern psychiatry usually identifies it as dissociative or multiple personality disorder (Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” 737–742; Worobec, Possessed; De Waardt et al., “Dämonische Besessenheit,” 37–143; Rivière, “‘Hag-riding’”; Davies, “The Nightmare Experience”).

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in Europe only occurred rather late, and despite the inspiration provided by Ernesto de Martino’s pioneering – in the context of European ethnology we could even say trailblazing – papers,7 very few such works have come into being. Among these few, the exemplary work of Charles Stewart stands out, in it the author gives an account of Christianized folk demonology and exorcism practices from the point of view of the practitioners based on fieldwork carried out on the island of Naxos, as well as the book and papers of Olga Khristoforova about nineteenth-century witchcraft and demonology. These works also give exhaustive overviews of folk conceptualizations of possession in Orthodoxy.8 It has become clear through these studies that most likely nowhere in the Christian world are there any and have never been any distinctive “folk” concepts and practices of possession that cannot be identified with the dominant European Christian paradigms of – divine and demonic – possession. Although the latter have sedimented over or merged with the former and thus many different kinds of official Church–folk, vernacular and Christian–non-Christian amalgams have come into being, besides which various forms of the coexistence of elite and popular ritual systems also exist. As for the Central and Southeastern European region best known to me, these folk systems are related to the various strategies and techniques of communication with the spirits of the dead and the varied world of local folk demons which at times are still part of living belief today (such as various local variants of lidérc, fairy, vampire, witch) as well as with the saints and deities of local religion.9 Thus, besides demonic and divine possession, concepts of possession by the dead are present everywhere – although they have to a great extent been “transformed” into diabolic possession, bringing about transitional, “mixed” categories. In addition, this is the basis of the entire possession complex, too: looking at it from 7 On southern Italian popular Catholicism, folk beliefs, and tarantism, see De Martino, Sud e magia and La terra del rimorso. 8 Stewart, Demons and the Devil; Hristoforova, Kolduny i žertvy; Khristoforova, “Spirit Possession.” The overviews of Leander Petzoldt from the territory of Western Christianity and Ludmila Vinogradova’s on Eastern and Southeastern Slavs are important – if somewhat sketchy – documentations of folk conceptualization and practices of possession (Petzoldt, “Besessenheit”; Vinogradova, Narodnaja demonologija, chap. 8.1). For the sake of consistency here and in the rest of the chapter I will provide the transliteration of Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian bibliographic items in the International Scholarly System rather than with the commonly used English transliteration system. 9 I do not have sufficient space here to cite fully the bibliography of relevant folklore studies regarding this demonic world; for some detail, see the discussion of individual demons.

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the point of view of the local participants all of these (also) appear to be particular variations of the possession by the dead. Looking at it from above, from the point of view of the overly simple Christian system of categorizations: all of these appear to be particular manifestations of diabolic or divine spirit possession. To further complicate the picture: belief in the Christian Satan figure and the related healing and prophylactic rites do not constitute a homogeneous category either, the official, and in any case over time significantly transformed, varied Christian picture of “Satan and his demons” is supplemented by many kinds of folk conceptualizations of the devil and related practices with diffuse transitional categories between the Christian and non-Christian worlds of demons. Besides communication and rites keeping demons at bay or chasing them away taking place in the private sphere, in almost all parts of the Balkans, there have been and in many places there still are communal possession cults, too (the Serbian and Bulgarian rusalje, rusalia, Bulgarian and Macedonian nestinarstvo, Romanian căluşarii), the practice of which was usually characterized by the simultaneous presence of demonic and divine possession.10 We also know of several variants of communal mediumship associated with Christian feast days involving ritually induced trance and often sacrifices offered to fairies, practiced among Serbs, Serbian Vlachs and Romanians. In some places some of these rites continue to the present, their practice is usually connected to the person of a widely known seer or fortuneteller who attracts a broad clientele.11 (See the photographs of Maria Vivod taken in 2015 about an eastern Serbian seer: the woman communicates with her fairy patrons by singing and dancing and they answer questions asked by her patients through her.) *** My chapter is limited to a much narrower area than the Central and Southeastern European region mentioned above. It concerns certain Hungarianspeaking Roman Catholic groups (five villages in Harghita and Băcau in 10 Some of the most important literature on the topic: Majzner, “Dubočke Rusalje”; KüppersSonnenberg, “Rosalienfest und Trancetänze in Duboka”; Zečević, “Neki primeri šamanske prakse”; Scharankov, Feuergehen; Kligman, Căluş; Puchner, “Beiträge zum thrakischen Feuerlauf”; Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing; Antoniević, Ritualni trans; Benga and Neagota, “Kalus és kalusárok”; Stefanova, “Mythological Thinking and Archetypes”; Petrovska-Kuzmanova, “Aspects of the Research of the Role of Rusalia Processions.” 11 Neagota, “Communication with the Dead”; Sikimić and Hristov, Kurban in the Balkans; Vivod, “The Fairy Seers” and “Az utolsó látomás.”

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116 Éva Pócs Figures 5.1 and 5.2 An East-Serbian Vlach fairy seer communicates with her three fairy patronesses through singing in a trance state. Kulma Toplica, 2015. April 15 (Palm Sunday)

Photos Maria Vivod

Romania) who live in the border zone of Eastern and Western Christianity along with Romanians with whom especially in religious life they share many traits. I spent altogether ten months in these villages in 1996–1998 and 2002–2016, but I was able to supplement my own material with data collected by others.12 I also attempted to get to know as fully as possible the materials collected among the Roman Catholic inhabitants of other villages of Szeklerland and Moldavia in the broader vicinity of these areas.13 12 In addition to my own material collected together with my students at the University of Pécs between 1996 and 1998 I found especially useful the data collected by Anita Derjanecz, Anita Györgydeák, Ágnes Hesz, Kinga Jankus and Attila Varga. Between 2002 and 2016 I spent nine months at Gyimesközéplok (Lunca de Jos), mainly in Hidegség-pataka (Valea rece), a shorter portion of which I spent at Gyimesbükk (Ghimeş-Făget). Others also collected materials in these communities as well as at Gyimesfelsőlok/Lunca de Sus, and in communities to which people from the Gyimes area migrated: Gyepece (Pajiştea), Kostelek (Coşnea), Magyarcsügés (Cădăreşti), Csinód (Cinod), Egerszék (Eghersec). I received the most assistance from the following people, who shared their published or unpublished data with me: Anikó Salamon, Zoltán Kallós, György Takács, Árpád Daczó, Zoltán Magyar, Ágnes Hesz, Szilárd Salló, Eszter Győrfy as well as such former students as Ágnes Mondok, Barnabás Csörge, Judit Schoblocher. I owe thanks to all of them for letting me peruse their data. For their published works, see Kallós, “Ráolvasás”; Salamon, “Gyimesi mondák” and Gyimesi csángó mondák; Daczó, “A gyimesi rekegő”; Salló, “Rontók, jósok és gyógyítók”; Magyar, A csángók mondavilága and Csinódi népköltészet; Takács, Kantéros, lüdérc, rekegő, “Kantéros, gurucsás,” and Az én lelkemmel elfújlak. When citing unpublished data, I indicate the identity of the collectors with their initials, the data appearing without initials were collected by myself. 13 From other areas of Szeklerland and Moldavia I found the data published in the works of István Virt, György Takács, and József Gagyi to be very useful (Virt, “Elszakasztottad”;

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The beliefs and practices of the inner core area of Csík (Ciuc) and Gyimes (Ghimeş) and their Szeklerland environment are more or less unified. There are only quantitative differences in the distribution of certain phenomena; thus this material – apart from some local variations – could be treated as a unit of analysis. I also used the materials of the broader Central and Eastern European region for a better understanding of the geographical, religious, and ethnic context of certain phenomena, to determine the distribution of local variants, their characteristics as well as characteristically missing elements and to differentiate between certain Roman Catholic and Orthodox traits and influences. The main goal of my chapter is to determine what kinds of conceptualizations of possession and in connection with them what kinds of religious practices are present in the worldview of these communities, in their mentality and everyday life, to explore the emic categories of these phenomena and to compare them with official (scientific, religious and possibly medical) categories. Because of space limitations I can only undertake a detailed presentation of local forms of demonic possession, and I can only devote a very short summary to phenomena that can be interpreted as divine possession or mediumism. The object of my study is vernacular or lived religion,14 in which popular religion is not rigidly separated from official religion, the emphasis is on their interconnections, coexistence rather than on their opposition. Because at the time of the research I was not paying systematic attention to possession phenomena, I only selected the cases that could be regarded to be possession from my vast material based on etic criteria, after the conclusion of field research. This may have been a fortunate circumstance from the point of view of establishing the proportions of the different phenomena. At the time of carrying out the research the effects of the secularization processes currently taking place were as yet hardly felt. A kind of “belatedness” connected to their geographical marginality was characteristic of these communities, which in the case of Gyimes was further enhanced by the scattered settlement pattern, and the difficulties of accessing churches

Takács, Elindula Boldogságos Szép Szűz Mária and Az én lelkemmel elfújlak; Gagyi and Dyekiss, Hiedelemszövegek Székelyföldről). 14 As Leonard Primiano put it, “vernacular religion is, by definition, religion as it is lived” (Primiano, “Vernacular Religion,” 44). Robert Orsi proposed to study lived religion in an effort to get a more comprehensive picture of people’s religious lives (Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant,” 172–173).

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and priests due to the great distances.15 During the last century the latter fact also meant the relatively lesser impact of official Church dogma, the greater role of individual devotions, and in some cases even the emergence of distinctive forms of private devotions. Just as presumably in all closed rural communities, there was a traditional set of beliefs in the communities I studied that could in a given case be considered to be axiomatic, which may have served as the point of reference for understanding and interpreting possession phenomena. The most important components of this are as follows. The spiritual essence (“soul”) lives on after death. Death is not a single event, but a process, with the way stations of the road leading to the otherworld; with humans appearing in diffuse, transitional, living–dead, human–spirit forms. There are spirits, who may relate to humans indifferently, benevolently or malevolently (specifically in the area under study – in addition to the deities, saints of religion – lidérc, szépasszony (fair lady), witches, devils and a few hazily described figures: wind demons, confinement demons, etc.). Humans can – under certain circumstances – turn into spirits, demons, animals. The manifestations and physical signs of the transformation: animal features (hair, horn, tail, wing), gnarled body, spirit characteristics (flying, levitation, out-of-body experiences). There are dual beings (half man, half spirit/demon; half man, half animal; human with a spirit/demon double; after death humans turn into spirits). There is a spiritual otherworld and an earthly spirit world; transition (either temporary or permanent) between the two is possible in both directions. Communication between the two worlds is possible (its varied forms are the following: the temporary or permanent departure of the “soul” from the body, reaching the other world bodily, disappearance from earthly existence, rising up, being carried away, being carried off by spirits, surrounding, snatching, shape-shifting: the dual beings taking on a spirit shape or through their doubles arrive to the dimension of an alternative earthly otherworld, etc.). This framework likely consists of narrative elements or actual data referring to individual beliefs, belief figures, and modes of communication.16 All of its aspects are polysemantic in character, with many kinds of interpretative possibilities that can be activated in a variety of situations. Part of this are 15 In some settlements of Bákó County, sometimes there was an actual lack of priests. Cf. Takács, Az én lelkemmel elfújlak, 11, 48–49; Győrfy, Átrajzolt határok, chap. 6. 16 I came to these conclusions from my familiarity with the belief corpus of the areas I have studied in depth and my survey of the above-mentioned Central and Eastern European beliefs.

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the symbols and metaphors derived from the local narrative tradition about the especially rich network of relations and communication maintained between this world and the otherworld. In certain cases – for example, in recounting possession experiences – this knowledge rooted in beliefs is activated and serves as explanation or validation of the experience. Even in the case of insecure knowledge, or in commenting on vaguely known or remembered phenomena, it can help in the creation of some kind of an overall category (such as, for example, when they do not associate a given phenomenon of possession with an actual demonic being, rather they merely say that someone “was possessed,” “pressed,” “ridden,” or “carried away,” etc.), and it also contributes to the dissolution of certain clear-cut categories (for example, to mixing up or blending the established characteristics of certain belief figures).17 Further important defining features of possession are certain experiences: dreams, spontaneous visions, out-of-body or near death experiences, bodily symptoms traditionally (also) explained with the presence of the supernatural, bodily–spiritual conditions, illnesses (for example, nighttime “pressing” experiences, pollution related to erotic dreams, epileptic seizures, visions experienced in states of spontaneous trance). The categories of interpretation that come into being in the course of this complex process influence individual experiences, as it were calling into being their “interpreted” version. We can sum up with Sari Katajala-Peltomaa (who drew her conclusions from studying the vitae of medieval saints) that the fluid category of the experience of the presence of malevolent demons was an accepted reality in lived religion, however, that demonic possession is not axiomatic, but a category based on collective reflections.18 In the following I present local, emic categories organized around the figure of possessing agents. Based on these I attempt to throw light upon the boundaries, the correspondences and differences as well as connections to related categories and etic systems. I have included in these categories all those cases in which the narratives indicated that the individual was under the influence of a spirit or demon, who possibly entered the body, lived in it, was “embodied” in him or her, altered the “host’s” personality, or it invaded him or her and held him or her in its power. These data can be fitted into the two main categories of research relating to concrete, bodily 17 On these questions with respect to the circumstances of and explanations for the seeing of spirits, see, in part, Honko, Geisterglaube in Ingermanland, 91–126. On the polysemantics of belief figures, see Koski, “Conceptual Analysis.” 18 Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession, chap. 8: Conclusion.

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possession (possessio) and being under the influence of a spirit or demon (obsessio, circumsessio). This type of possession is not concrete and personal. Its nature is well demonstrated by Hungarian terminology (relating to devil, or evil spirits) “surrounds,” “tempts,” “encircles,” “escorts” (körülvesz, kísért, kerülget, kísér ), or in Benz’s fortress metaphor: possession is the occupied fortress while obsession is the besieged fortress being attacked from “outside.”19 The majority of spirit possession phenomena in the area under study belong to the category of the latter, obsessio or circumcessio.20 The former (bodily possession) is what the Church, and following it research, in general considered to be diabolic possession proper, but from the early centuries of Christianity the broader conceptualization has also been in use, such as demonic influence. Sources from late antiquity and early Christianity still use exorcism in a general sense as the cleansing of objects, living beings, and human habitats from demons, from the thirteenth century on, however, it also means the established rite of expelling the devil. Exorcism manuals became permanently fixed during the fifteenth century,21 bodily possession and the behavior and physical symptoms of those possessed, became important for the Church from the sixteenth/ seventeenth centuries on. The Church has always differentiated between the phenomena of possessio and obsessio by employing “major” and “minor” exorcisms,22 however, it was inconsistent in distinguishing between them.23 The clergy used the rites of exorcism for purposes that went beyond diabolic possession (for healing, for averting storms), and everywhere, and especially in the Orthodox regions of Europe, the lower clergy resorted to folk methods 19 Benz, “Ergriffenheit und Besessenheit,” 137–141. Lauri Honko, for example, considers it to be the basic category and treats entering of the body as a narrower subcategory within this (Honko, “Genre Analysis,” 29). 20 On these categories, see Oesterreich, Die Besessenheit, chap. 12; Benz, “Ergriffenheit und Besessenheit”; Holm, “Ecstasy Research”; Siikala, “The Siberian Shaman,” 103; Crapanzano, “Spirit Possession”; Greenfield, Traditions, 141; Ferber, “Possession, Demonic”; Levack, The Devil Within, 13–17. 21 Goddou, “The Failure of Exorcism”; Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People”; Levack, The Devil Within, 20; Csordas, “Possession and Psychopathology.” 22 Minor exorcisms do not expel the devil from the body, rather they are protective, cleansing rites, prayers of deliverance and benedictions. Their performance has never required the permission of higher Church authorities, and this continues to be the case to this day. Cf.: Rodewyk, Die dämonische Besessenheit, 67; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 569–571; Bárth and Pócs, “Ördögűzés”; Bárth, Benedikció és exorcizmus; Schweighofer, “Herausschwören.” See, for example, the experience of an exorcist: in the case of diabolic presence caused by a curse, or pressing by lidérc, he only performed cleansing rites and he employed major exorcism only in cases of bodily possession (Amorth, Un esorcista racconta, 33–36). 23 Cf. Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 207–220.

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of healing, and protecting from the devil, adapting to local customs and needs.24 Modes of possession are in any case both loose categories and strongly influenced by both cultural and subjective interpretations. As Crapanzano has also remarked, cultural interpretation is influenced by one’s psychobiological state, thus Stuart Clark is right to stress the variability of interpretation in connection with possession events.25 My inquiry had several limitations. In this region there were no communal possession cults such as in several regions of the Balkans, there were no public, “major exorcisms” – at least in the recent past – held in front of crowds (only the news of such events in distant Moldavian Orthodox monasteries reached them). The “minor exorcisms” took place as private cleansing rituals, as part of individual religiosity, I could not participate in or witness such events. Thus, unlike studies examining the large, public exorcisms of early modern Catholicism, or southern Italian tarantism as “sacred theater,”26 here it is not possible to reconstruct the general reactions of local society. I could only rely on narratives of individual cases or conversations that I had for understanding local interpretations of possession and its role in religion and mentality. The relevant topics of conversations: the question of the reality or unreality of a given phenomenon (tale, imaginary, superstition); knowledge gained from the priest or from religious readings versus personal opinion; the “natural” (scientific, medical) explanation of the phenomenon versus its religious explanation. All these may refer to the possessing spiritual beings, the motivations, modes and causes of possession, the bodily–spiritual conditions of the person being possessed. In some cases these discourses seemed to be almost like miniaturized versions of attempts to interpret possession that have been ongoing since late antiquity, the juxtaposition of Church, medical, psychiatric views intertwined with popular ideologies. My data raised numerous problems of interpretation. Given the nature of the subject, I had gather the relevant data from information I elicited in a collecting situation and gleaned from the textual world of conversations. 24 Ibid., 211–218; Greenfield, Traditions, 141; Papademetriou, “Exorcism”; Balan, Vies des moines. 25 Clark, Thinking with Demons, 393–397. Cf. the definition of I. M. Lewis: “If someone is, in his own cultural milieu, generally considered to be in a state of spirit possession, then he (or she) is possessed” (Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 40). 26 Expression used to describe southern Italian tarantism and cases of public exorcism performed by the Church in the early modern and modern era (Garrett, Spirit Possession, 4–7; Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 178).

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Thus, I had to deduce information regarding experiences and symptoms of communication with the supernatural thought to be real, as well as the nature and identity of supposed demonic or divine beings from such conversations just as (with a few exceptions) the methods of prevention and protection, as well as the practice of “exorcism.” Researchers often suppose this textual world to be the impression of a “living” religion, however, we know that narrative fictions that spread through oral traditions or in writing and what folklore collectors are told in various speech situations do not always reflect local religious ideas and beliefs only, or sometimes not at all. They could just as well be carriers, narrative metaphors of concepts that have existed elsewhere or nowhere, or in the distant past, or never,27 although their telling may activate, revive beliefs that have never existed or that were thought to have died.28 Metaphors translating the “ineffable” numinous into the language of everyday reality as well as the narrative symbols of the other world29 are already present in direct, first-person narratives of dreams, visions or imaginary spiritual experiences, which can enter the narrative stock of a community from the outside through international migratory legends, known from religious chapbooks and through many other avenues. I have attempted to solve the problems presented by having to decipher the belief system from this textual world; however, I do not have sufficient space to detail my methods here.30

The dead Manifestations of possession by the dead are perhaps the oldest and, in many cases, still-living versions of possession phenomena in the region discussed here. Here, just as presumably in most of Christian Europe, 27 7 Since the pioneering works of Finnish and Hungarian folklorists (e.g., Honko, “Genre Analysis”; Dégh and Vázsonyi, “Legend and Belief”; Dégh, Legend and Belief ), the study of the relationship of the conceptual system of religion and textual world of folklore has been increasingly gaining ground in contemporary folkloristics. I only mention a few important works from this rich literature: Blécourt, “Bedding the Nightmare”; Valk, “Discursive Shift. 28 As Ülo Valk also points out (Valk, “Discursive Shift”). 29 On the concretization of the symbolism of the other world, see, for example, Benz, Die Vision, 311–410 (“Die Bilderwelt der Visionen”); Patch, The Other World; Dinzelbacher, “The Way to the Other World”; Pócs, “Feenflug und Hexenflug”; “The unbaptized, storm demons”; on the embodying of transcendent experiences through narration and on the relationship of experiences and language in general, see Csordas, “Introduction.” 30 For a detailed discussion of the problem with respect to the Gyimes community also discussed in the current chapter: Pócs, “‘We, Too, Have Seen a Great Miracle.’”

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conceptualizations of death and the fate of the dead in the otherworld and the prophylactic, protective and sacrificial rituals connected with these constituted a central part of religious life. Their practice was primarily kept alive by striving for salvation and the fear of damnation and the close community and relationship of the living and the dead was its breeding ground. Those generations of dead ancestors who were still retained in memory also belonged to the family, the living were also responsible for their fate in the otherworld; one of the guiding principles of life strategies, beyond avoiding damnation for oneself, was to watch over the otherworldly fate of their dead (by performing rituals to ensure a “good death,” or additional rites for those who had died without being buried or unbaptized and by giving alms for the dead).31 These were the needs that guided communication with the dead in the course of which dead ancestors appeared both as helpers, advisors, mediators from the otherworld; they also expressed their thanks and as spirits they could attack the living; phenomena that could be interpreted as possession also appeared in this framework. The dead as possessing agents and their victims: those, possessed by the dead appear in the narratives as overlapping variants of human–spirit combinations. These variants indicate distinctive notions regarding the relationship of body and soul and of humans and spirits, according to which, these are not sharply divided but rather in certain respects diffusely fluid categories. After death – in the context of communication with the dead – both the corpse and the spirit of the deceased are in a kind of state of transition, either as a corpse that has only partly lost its bodily condition, a “living corpse” (living dead, walking dead), or as a spirit that is unable to reach the otherworld and attain the status of the dead who thus stays in the interstitial place between this world and the other world.32 In the course of their life, humans can (temporarily) change into spirits or beings that are half human, half spirit. Communication with the dead of the family most frequently happens in meetings that take place in dreams, visions, or in the imagination. Helping dead who have good relations with the family rarely act as possessing agents, only a handful of data refer to a possessing agent entering the body. For 31 On these rituals in this region, see Hesz, Élők, holtak és adósságok and “Uncertainty and the Conceptualizations of Life after Death”; in the broader region: Virt, “Elszakasztottad”; Pócs, “Rites of Passage.” 32 On this question, see, e.g., Wiegelmann, “Der ‘lebende Leichnam’”; Lecouteux, Geschichte der Gespänster; Schmitt, Les revenants; Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants”; Caciola, Afterlives; in the context of possession by the dead: Caciola, in this volume.

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example, according to a memorate, the soul of the grandfather of somebody spoke through her and gave instructions to the family; I have also noted down a similar case in Hidegség, with reference to somebody’s father. At Csíkkarcfalva a young woman was possessed regularly by her brother-in-law in dreams, telling her “what his plans were with them.”33 Contrary to the rare cases of friendly dead there is a rich body of data representing assaults from the “outside” on individuals or the family home (the etic category of obsessio, circumsessio). These are often explicitly those dead in an intermediate state who had not attained their status in the otherworld, those for whom the ceremony of a funeral or baptism had not been performed,34 or they were sinners, condemned to damnation, whose souls had not yet reached hell. Local terms for them are: evil ones (gonoszak), bad ones (rosszak), the unclean (tisztátalanok), wandering (bolyongó), rambling (bolygó), shunned souls (kirekesztett lelkek), and (only in Gyimes and its diaspora) rekegő,35 those, as they say in Hidegség, who “cannot step in front of God.”36 It is especially from discourses about the assaulting dead that we can sense a mental model that refers to the dual space-time structure of the universe inhabited by humans which seems to be the general framework for communication between the living and the dead.37 Accordingly, the universe is partitioned into the world of the living and the dead: a section of space or a period of time belongs either to the living or the dead. In certain time periods – for example, in the deadly periods of the Christian calendar (between Christmas and Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost,38 or for 40 days 33 GyA 1996. 34 These figures are known in the whole of Europe from the Greco-Roman–Medieval dangerous dead to the unbaptized demons of the Balkans, who whoosh through the air in groups in storm clouds, bring bad weather, and steal the life-giving fluids from their own community, such as precipitation or breast milk. See Candrea, Folklorul medical român, 128; Schneeweiss, Volksglaube und Volksbrauch, 5–6; Zečević, Mitska biča, 123–125, 165–166; Georgieva, Bulgarian Mythology, 102–103; Troeva, “Magical Interaction,” 403. 35 This has special local characteristics as well (Daczó, “A gyimesi rekegő”). 36 A third category of revenants is also known, the ghosts of those suffering in Purgatory, who ask people to shorten their suffering by means of prayers, masses, or alms. As these are not assaulting dead, this category is not part of the discussion in this chapter. 37 Kaarina Koski differentiates three mental models in connection with the similar problematic of relations between the living and the dead based on the possible ways of making contact with the otherworld (Koski, “Conceptual Analysis”). 38 The period between Christmas and Epiphany is usually considered to be a “dead” period in Western Christianity, while the Easter-Pentecost period is characteristic of the religious life of Orthodox peoples (Murko, “Das Grab als Tisch”; Ranke, Indogermanische Totenverehrung; Worobec, Possessed, 64–75).

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after a death occurs, and on All Souls’ Day), in situations when people are excluded (during liminal states experienced in the course of rites of passage), the dead can take over space, the living reach a state of symbolic death as it were, and the “excluded” living are at an increased danger of being possessed. The spaces and time periods of the dead are forbidden to the living; they are surrounded by taboos, but at the same time they also provide an opportunity for communicating with the otherworld. Textual motifs of European folklore referring to dangerous periods, places and states surrounded with prohibitions which are extended to encounters with the dead, the living visiting the otherworld, the dead snatching away the living, and communication with the dead are indications of the traces of this mental model.39 This space-time structure is also one of the structuring principles of beliefs relating to possession by the dead. In the communities under study, they spoke about three kinds of possession by the assaulting dead. One of the characteristic manifestations of aggression by the dead who enter the spaces of the living is that they occupy human settlements and draw them under their negative influence. According to a narrative type that is common in Csík and Gyimes, the evil ones occupy a given human settlement and much like poltergeists cause havoc, they “spoil” the furnishings and everyday objects of people living there. There are numerous deeply believed, fearful individual accounts of this phenomenon. For example, according to data from Homoródalmás, the door slams shut, pots clank. According to the commentator, “a spirit, or dead soul or whoever” occupies the house.40 Or (about the dead who sometimes also appear in windstorms or in the whirlwind): All of a sudden loud screaming. … it was coming this way from the shack and it went through its door, it threw back the door, and then such a wind, a whirlwind came in, into the shack and it cleaned up the foot cloths, the sandals and that fireplace, that everything was totally dry, the ashes, everything was gathered together. Nothing was left inside. Then they started to pray.41 39 On dual space-time structure: Pócs, “Tér és idő a néphitben” and “Concepts of Time and Space.” 40 Gagyi, “Ica,” 348. 41 Hidegség 2006. I use the following notations in the case of quotations from interviews: the researcher’s interjections, such as questions to the informant, are in brackets [ ]; an ellipsis … indicates a break or hesitation in the informant’s speech, whereas brackets with an ellipsis […] indicate the omissions of the author.

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Another widespread type of narrative is about the dead calling out the victim, whom they try to snatch, carry with them (meghordoz) or lead to death or damnation. This belongs to the so-called Nachzehrer beliefs42 widely distributed in Europe, in many different kinds of variants which share the axiomatic idea that “the dead take the living with them into death.”43 According to the Gyimes and Szeklerland variant: if they knock or bang at the door at night, it is not advisable to go out, because the dead take those who step outside with them. For example: [S]he hears it at night that they are shouting and then surely somebody dead came for her/him. […] A pure soul will call three times, the evil soul only once or twice.44 [S]ome dead person appeared in the form of such a ghost, and sometimes it happened that they lured him outside at night, too, and they heard music, and then they went out, and they took him somewhere far in the forest, and there they put him down.45 Many spoke about being transported by the dead as a personal (dream or vision) experience which they experienced and described as a psychic disturbance: disorientation, getting lost. Narratives speak about the taking away of the mind, wits (a kind of emic category of the soul), while at the same time they are also interwoven with images of bodily snatching, bodily exhaustion, as well as the otherworldly symbol of getting lost.46 For example, if someone went out at night (when being called), “they took away his mind”47: you must not go out, “because then they take away his wits so that they take him somewhere […], he is so bewildered, that

42 Schürmann, Der Nachzehrerglauben. 43 A related phenomenon is the widespread notion in areas dominated by Roman Catholicism that in the transitional “deadly” period around Christmas and New Year teams of the dead constituted by damned souls, or souls in Purgatory, which at this time march along “their” roads that they have taken over from the living, and they snatch all living people they encounter on their way. See, for example: Waschnitius, Perht, Holda und verwandte Gestalten; Beitl, “Die Sagen vom Nachtvolk”; Ginzburg, The Night Battles, 33–68 (II The Processions of the Dead); Schmitt, Les revenants, 115–145 (V La mesnie Hellequin); Tuczay, Geister, Dämonen, Phantasme, 135–147, 160–165. 44 JK Csíkjenőfalva 1996. 45 Csíkjenőfalva 1998. 46 A rather widespread symbol in tales, legends: Cf. Mencej, “Something Came over Him.” 47 JK Csíkkarcfalva 1996.

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he comes to somewhere – in a forest or on a meadow, or somewhere.”48 Or: they “shouted” for someone at night, and he went out “and then he went away, and went, went, and went, and then he recovered himself wondering where he was […] dazed with sleep, when he gets up, he is so out of it, or his mind is taken away by that spirit, or who knows what, they call it that.”49 One of the most common manifestation of the assault of the dead is “pressing” while in bed at night (expressions used: press, goes onto him/ her, keeps going onto her/him, megnyom, reá megy, reá jár, megjárja). Conceptualizations of pressing are symptom and reality based: they can be associated with feeling unwell, experiencing distinctive sensations of pressure, difficulty breathing, connected to nightmares, erotic dreams, and sleep paralysis. It may appear on the border between sleep and wakefulness and is accompanied by other bodily experiences (trembling, tingling) and vivid auditory or visual hallucinations (visions), and at times even the sensation of flying or out-of-body experiences. As a universal neurobiological phenomenon, the anthropology of religion has documented it among almost all the peoples of Europe: during these visions “believers” usually sense a locally recognized demonic being, or an assaulting dead person.50 Many individual accounts tell us about fear of demons in this context, especially in individual crisis situations, primarily in the case of women in confinement, and the temporary “outcast” state of her newborn, which lasts from giving birth until the Church ceremony “initiating” (blessing) women following childbirth and in the case of the newborn, until baptism. Many personal accounts told of the demon beliefs and fears of mothers whose exposure to the assaulting dead was heightened (because of their special state). According to a memorate from Hidegség: [I]t pressed me too, when I was confined […] something came in through the door, and lo and behold … it steps in front of the bed […] Oh, once something was pressing me so much, I could neither breathe, nor lift my hand.51

48 Csíkkarcfalva; my emphases, PÉ. 49 JK Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 50 Hufford, The Terror; Kiessling, The Incubus in English Literature; Davies, “Hag-riding” and “The Nightmare Experience”; Rivière, “‘Hag-riding.’” 51 Hidegség 2002.

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128 Éva Pócs Figure 5.3 Protection of a baby from the devil, the day after her christening. Gyimesközéplok/Lunca de Jos (Romania), 2005

Photo Eszter Csonka-Takács

There were no beliefs in this region (nor in any other Hungarian-speaking areas) in confinement demons52 stealing, swapping or killing newborns. The narratives speak of impersonal attackers, or spirits embodied as evil dead or szépasszonyok (fair ladies), who “press,” make ill, or snatch, or swap, put a substitute in the place of an infant.53 Until baptism a newborn had to be protected, “lest the evil ones snatch him, […] “lest they press it.”54 Even recently it was common to protect an infant with sacramentals arranged

52 Their figures are known in great variety from ancient Mesopotamia, through Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Roman demon figures to the demons known in the Balkans almost to the present (Lilith, Gello, strix, etc.). Their characteristics enriched the figure of the witch and of many kinds of folk devil figures. Authors in late antiquity and the Middle Ages associated the phenomena of pressing and “swapping” newborns with the figures of Lilith and Gello, etc. For more detail on these demons, cf. Gaster, “Two Thousand Years”; Jeremias, Handbuch; Winkler, Salomo und die Karina. 53 Cf. beliefs related to changelings: Piaschewski, Der Wechselbalg; Doulet, Quand les démons enlevaient les enfants. 54 Hidegség 2006.

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around its head, devotional pictures, rosaries, because “the evil spirit will swap it”; “lest the spirit swap it.”55 Another phase of life, threatening people with a possible demonic assault lasts from a death in the family until the burial; at such times, fear of the exclusion of one’s own dead can be quite significant. The narrator of the following memorate was “pressed” by her aunt until the latter was buried, and then the series continued by other dead members of the family: I was awakened but had not yet gone back to sleep. […] I heard the door open, I heard footsteps, […] as if someone had come to the front of the bed. And then I just felt that it was so interesting just as when you have the shivers, […] such an interesting tingling went through my body. […] I could not to turn, neither could I move or speak. [I could do] nothing […]. Then I thought that, I said, one of them, either my brother or Jancsi came back. They forgot something, they came back.56 In conceptualizations of possession related to pressing, that is to say, to sleep paralysis, searching for natural explanations was intertwined with fear of death and beliefs in demons. This is most likely connected to the reality-based core of the phenomenon, the concrete bodily–psychological symptoms, and the experiences of visions thought to be real. (In the case of “changelings,” the motivation for the discourses of natural or belief-based explications may have been the empirical fact of babies born with birth defects, disabilities. It cannot be an accident that these beliefs are still alive all over Europe (including as postmodern esoteric ideas: cf. experiences of UFO abductions.57) At the same time, as universal phenomena stemming from real symptoms, since antiquity they have been the subject of philosophical, theological and medical reflections; medical and supernatural explanations have been continuous until the early modern era and this elite discourse has had an influence (according to Janine Rivière, who studied this topic in relation to early modern England) on the “disenchantment” of the medical world during the Enlightenment.58 We’ll return to these in connection 55 Hidegség 2005. 56 Hidegség 2006. 57 Which, following the research of Blackmore and Cox Alien, and the careful analysis of Owen Davies we can also consider to be phenomena brought about by sleep paralysis (Blackmore and Cox Alien, “Abductions, Sleep Paralysis”; Davies, “The Nightmare Experience”). 58 On medical theories of the natural causes (stomach ailments, circulatory problems, and Galen’s theory of humoral imbalance, etc.) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England: Rivière,

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with the related phenomena of the mara/mare/mora/lidérc demons of erotic dreams, as well as the incubus demons and devils of Church authors. Some forms of possession by the dead can also be interpreted as compensation of the liminal dead for being excluded; possession is an aggressive form of their striving for inclusion through imposing themselves on the community by force. (“Tamer” versions of this are the ghosts who do not attack but beg for alms or masses to be said for them.) The additional or repeated performance of rites of passage after death may be an important tool of protection against aggressive assaults (for example, a fictive baptism, a “second” burial,59 or the performance of prayers, or almsgiving with which the reintegrate liminal transitional beings into their family, into their lineage. I was also told about a case of “possession” when they turned to the Orthodox priests of Gyimesbükk, who “celebrated Mass, and said that there were souls who could not rest because they were great sinners. And they are not accepted, I don’t know where … these souls, restless souls or whatever they call them.”60 All this indicates that notions of possession by the dead and the practice of protecting against them may have had an important normative role in these village communities and in ensuring good relations between the living and the dead. As for the psychobiological condition of those possessed by the dead, the emphasis is on the sudden change for the worse in the physical and mental condition of the possessed person: what in a given case they will perceive as and attribute to the negative influence of an alien spirit, or what outsiders will assess as the physical and mental symptoms of the possessed person. The spirit regardless of whether it enters into somebody, or merely “surrounds” her, causes negative conditions. Similar experiences, similar physical and mental symptoms can come about when the possessed person is awake, in his dream, in his imaginings just as when he is unconscious for whatever reason, or in the case of sleep paralysis and at various stages of being in a trance state. Thus, these distinctions are not relevant from the point of view of the experience; with regard to possession by the dead, trance does not appear to be a defining, distinguishing feature of possession phenomena. In connection with notions of body and soul, too, uncertainty, diffuse, “mixed” categories seem to emerge; being “transported” bodily or spiritually in this volume. Also on this topic, primarily in relation to England: Davies, “The Nightmare Experience.” 59 See Pócs, “Rites of Passage after Death.” 60 Hidegség 2006; my emphases, PÉ.

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are not distinguished clearly. The possible subjective experiences of the individual were told in the “concretized” language of narrative discourses, from which it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the nature of body–soul concepts. As for the question of the “soul journey,” I have arrived at the same conclusion about nightmare phenomena from my own data base as did Owen Davies in his convincing argument: the snatching of bodies and souls (to the otherworld, heaven, and hell) as well as the out-of-body “journey” of the soul, just as the similarly themed near-death experiences,61 are very often caused by the extremely widespread phenomenon of sleep paralysis, which at the same time also serves as its natural explanation (along with hypnagogic hallucinations which may appear in addition or independently of it at the border of sleep and wakefulness).62 It cannot be an accident that beliefs about being “snatched” are still alive in our age all over Europe (even as postmodern, esoteric ideas: cf. the experience of being swapped by UFOs63). Davies cites David Hufford’s conclusion with which we have to agree: “[T]he pattern of the experience and its distribution appear independent of the presence of explicit cultural models.”64 In addition to being forms of possession by the dead – as we shall see below – they were also seen as possession by lidérc and fairies, each of them were also thought of as diabolic possession. The naming of the dead as evil (gonoszak, rosszak), unclean ones (tisztátalanok) may equally refer to the devil or to the diffuse, transitory categories between “evil dead” and devils.65 This was often also expressed by informants, thus: “The devil […] knocks, rumbles, scares people when they are alone […], it’s also possible that 61 See, e.g., Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, for such motifs. 62 See the convincing examples Davies brings: Davies, “The Nightmare Experience.” Cf. Blackmore and Cox Alien’s survey according to which sleep paralysis can also happen in conjunction with out-of-body experiences and flying (Blackmore and Cox Alien, “Abductions, Sleep Paralysis”). 63 Musgrave and Houran, “Flight and Abduction.” 64 Hufford, The Terror, 245. 65 Similar categories that have been born of a combination of the demon doctrines of the Church and folk conceptualizations are known all over Central and Eastern Europe: they mean souls that are in some kind of relationship with the devil and damnation; for example, a dead person who had been possessed by the devil in his lifetime, or often a vampire and/or a soul who had died an extraordinary death, who is wandering and cannot get into either heaven or purgatory, whose figure more or less merges with the devil (in Russian beliefs see, e.g., Maksimov, Nečistaja, nevedomaja, 5–27; Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 39–49; among Serbs: Zečević, Mitska biča, 128; among Romanians: Muşlea and Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului, 163–170. With respect to Hungarian data the unclean ones (tisztátalanok) of Mezőség are such beings (Keszeg, Mezőségi hiedelmek, 91–95, 313–331), and in many places they also considered the attacking dead called “evil ones” (rosszak, gonoszok) to be half devils.

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death appears.”66 Possession by either the devil or by the dead sometimes seem to be alternative explanations of the same phenomenon; both may be present concurrently in the same narrative; for example, a woman from Csíkszenttamás spoke about a series of diabolic visions, in one of which her dead father appeared in the shape of the devil, whom she – as is customary with the devil – sent away in the name of Jesus.67 The integration of the basically non-Christian notion of “revenants” into Christianity (along with the idea of communicating with the dead and possession) happened along a tortuous route dotted with many debates between religious and secular elites, and the different Christian denominations68 – and these debates have basically not been settled to this date, at most their ecclesiastic charge has become diffused; the attitude of the representatives of the Church is unsteady at the very least. Whether they believed or not in the possibility of “returning” they did help their congregations prevent it with their performance of cleansing ceremonies, the so-called minor exorcisms, thereby contributing to the classification of the assaulting dead as “devils”; their prayers and masses for restless, wandering souls helped them reach heaven, thus in effect supporting the integration of “pagan” dead into Christianity. There are numerous Western and Central European data for the very early diabolization of poltergeist phenomena known from all over the area of Latin Christianity, as well as for the exorcism of ghosts carried out by priests (after the Reformation this only occurred in Roman Catholic areas).69 There are also many data concerning the concurrent or intertwined appearance of the dead and the devil as possessing agents from the Middle Ages to the early modern era70; 66 Csíkjenőfalva 1998. 67 MÁ 2002. 68 The existence of revenants and ghosts preoccupied the early Church fathers, and for a long time the Church did not question it. Although St. Augustine (354–430) definitively distinguished between revenants and Satan’s demons, their identification with each other took place quite quickly; third- to sixth-century Church fathers debated whether the phenomenon was a bad dream, or an illusion, or a demonic attack; medieval exorcism formulae were applied to the dead in the same way as to the devil (Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, II, 549). Reformation in the predominantly Protestant areas of Europe halted this process; the question of ghosts became a weapon in the theological battle between the denominations (Paxton, Christianizing Death; Kiessling, The Incubus in English Literature; Caciola, “The Wicked and the Damned”; Hersperger, Kirche, Magie und “Aberglaube”?). 69 Schmitt, Les revenants, 156–157; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 570; Brown, The Fate of the Dead, 54; Davies, The Haunted, 73–79. 70 There are numerous examples of visions of the dead turning into those of the devil in the context of Christian visions. For example, Peter Dinzelbacher, writing about the diabolic temptation of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century saints’ reports about such cases (Dinzelbacher,

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this process took place all over Europe – albeit in locally varying ways and with varying results; the “transformation into the devil” of possessing dead appears to be a universal Christian phenomenon. These processes, in parallel with and not independently of elite discourses, have left many traces in the conceptualizations and practices of ordinary people. We cannot trace precisely the local variants of integration, but it is a fact that the current situation in both Gyimes and Szeklerland is similar to what we can see in other parts of Europe. Here, too, the assaulting dead have come into contact with the devil; to keep the attackers away they employed sacramentals, prayers, and gestures of sending away the devil, and in serious cases called for the help of priests. In addition to sacred objects and prayers protecting from or cleansing the dead, a multitude of personal accounts attest to the intervention of priests. For example, according to a story from Hidegség, ghosts were making noise, rattling sounds in an old house, and the inhabitants trembled with fear, eventually calling a priest from Gyergyó who “blessed the house, said Mass for the dead, and they have never heard anything again.”71 This process of transformation is also valid for the assaults of lidérc (nightmare) and szépasszony (fair lady) discussed below and says a lot about the “folk” components of the Christian notion of diabolic possession.

Lidérc: The Hungarian nightmare demon The lidérc (sometimes called lüdérc) is a “pressing” incubus or succubus demon which ruins individuals of the opposite sex through sexual relations. It is the only demon figure in the folk belief of Gyimes and Szeklerland that goes back to non-Christian foundations but has become a Christian belief figure. Its highly characteristic figure and traces of belief in it were present and could be found even in the early part of the twenty-first century. The lidérc is a belief figure which was known to Hungarians as far back as the “Die Realität des Teufels,” 160–161). Moshe Sluhovsky analyzes a sixteenth-century case of possession, which was at first interpreted by the possessed person’s own social circle based on personal experiences as the appearance of the suffering soul of the deceased grandfather, however, gradually the case was “transformed” into a case of diabolic possession due to local conditions and under the weight of public opinion. Nancy Caciola writes about a medieval case: the priests are exorcising a diabolically possessed person, while his family members think that a dead person known to them by name is the possessing agent (see Caciola, in this volume). 71 Hidegség 2003.

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Middle Ages.72 Stories about it were prevalent in many village communities around the turn of the millennium,73 even in the form of memorates featuring beings that the people actually believe in, particularly in the Eastern parts of the Hungarian-language area. It is an incubus or succubus demon that assaults people in the night, causing a pressing sensation, inability to move, difficulty breathing, fainting sensations, erotic dreams and visions, and that takes the shape of a sexual partner of the opposite sex as the person possessed. The lidérc is the erotic version of the dead who come to possess the living in the form of pressing demons. This conceptualization of demons originates in an experience or a symptom which, as I mentioned above, may take the shape of a local belief figure. Demons of this kind have been known in many variants throughout Europe (Alp, mor, mara, Mahr, (night)mare, cauchemar, mora, mòre, mura, zmóra, etc.),74 which contributed everywhere, but particularly among the Southern Slavic peoples, to the formation of the complex belief figure of the witch.75 All of these figures are “dual beings” (two-souled, to use a mirror translation of their Eastern Slavic name),76 they can have living and dead variants, simultaneous human and spirit forms, bodily or spirit doubles; with one or another of their traits coming to the fore at various locations. In Gyimes and Szeklerland (as in Hungarian-speaking areas in general), it is basic trait of the lidérc that it appears as the double of a living person and plays the part of the possessing agent in that quality. It has one additional trait compared to similar, sexually charged demon figures of Central and Eastern Europe: it is a demon that flies in the night sky accompanied by a bright, sparkling, fiery apparition (a rod of light, a ball of fire – indeed, lightening, meteors or satellites could be taken for lidérc). It then goes on 72 For relevant data, see Pócs, “Lidérc.” 73 For a more detailed description and other, wide-ranging ramifications, see Pócs, “‘We, Too, Have Seen a Great Miracle.’” The most important piece of literature on the broader Hungarian territory includes: Szendrey, “Hexe, Hexendruck”; Keszeg, “Történetek a lüdércről” and Mezőségi hiedelmek, 81–85, 291–306; Magyar, A csángók mondavilága; Csinódi népköltészet. 74 Alejandro Campagne calls it a “pan-European nocturnal demon” (Campagne, “Vampires and Nightmares”). For a few important overviews, see Roscher, Ephialtes; Jones, On the Nightmare; Ranke, “Alp” and “Mahr und Mahrt”; Peuckert, “Das Zweite Leib”; Tillhagen, “The Conception of the Nightmare”; Lixfeld, “Der Alp”; Strömbäck, “Ein Beitrag”; Lecouteux, “Vom Schrat zum Schrattel,” “Mara – Ephialtes – Incubus,” and Fées, sorcières et loup-garous; Raudvere, Föreställningar om maran. 75 On mora/mahr/mara–witch connections, see Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead. 76 On dual beings, see Peuckert, “Das Zweite Leib”; Lecouteux, Fées, sorcières et loup-garous; Vinogradova, Narodnaja demonologija, 289–290; Pócs, “Tündéres and the Order of St Ilona,” “Nature and Culture,” and “Fairies.”

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to descend to earth and enters a house (through the chimney) and there comes to possess a person of the opposite sex in the form of the double of a desired absent lover of the person (usually a man or at times a woman) provoked by the possessed person’s longing. In this respect, they are related to and variants of East and Southeast European fiery dragons or demon lovers named latawiec, letavec, letun, ljubak, para, (ognyonnij) zmej, zmaj, zmija, zmeu, zburator, etc.77 The majority of stories that people tell about the lidérc are accounts of personal experience (often firsthand memorates), where powerful emotions of desire born of belief and the fear of demons were evident even for the collector. The lidérc has also been perceived as a spirit framed as part of dreams, apparitions, or fantasies (with bodily traits and the capability of having sex) but most commonly it appears as the double of an absent or deceased lover or spouse, appearing in their “image” or “form.” The lidérc, they say […] came to press people […], when someone is really missing someone, for instance when a lad has gone to serve in the army, and so his lover was missing him so much that she imagined that he must be arriving, coming, and she waits for him and so he would appear to her.78 On occasion, people would also speak of a lidérc appearing in the form of a horse, goose, hen or turkey,79 “as if she was with her husband, that’s how the lüdérc appeared […], sometimes it will march into the house like a horse, or it will cackle like a hen.”80 Victims of the lidérc “have lidérc pressing,”81 they are “pressed” or “chewed up” besides which they also engage in sexual intercourse with the desirous individual and thereby render them ill, and cause them to waste away and die. “She was so pressed, so visited by the lidérc, that it finally killed her”82 and she was “finished off” by the lidérc.83 Speaking of the symptoms that the lidérc is likely to cause, people usually 77 Vinogradova, Narodnaja demonologija, 316–325; Muşlea and Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului, 189–194; Evseev, Dictionar de magie, 499; Pamfile, Mitologie românească, 244–277; Georgieva, Bulgarian Mythology, 80–86; Đorđević, “Veštica i vila,” 151–154. 78 Hidegség 2003. 79 The nightmare often takes the shape of a horse in Western, Central and Northern Europe; while various types of poultry are popular forms of the South Slavic mora, etc., demons. 80 TGy Gyimesbükk 1995. 81 Csíkjenőfalva 1996. 82 Gyimesközéplok 2003. 83 CsB Gyimesbükk 2005.

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mention a slow atrophying or wasting away, but they also speak of mental conditions such as depression usually brought up in the context of diabolic possession, too. Similarly to cases of possession by the dead, it was also evident in cases of visitations by the lidérc that a felt need for a natural and medical explanation did not preclude belief in a demonic influence, as shown by several conversations with the collector and inconsistent accounts. One of my informants at Hidegség, for instance, explained that the lidérc had “destroyed” a young woman. She became increasingly nervous and almost went crazy; it “affected her mind.” The speaker believed that this was what they call “melancholy” these days. The phenomena of pressing with a sexual content that from the point of view of the researcher’s etic categories would belong to the category of “assault from the outside” (obsessio), were not treated in these villages as such, i.e., as part of a group of concepts belonging to possession phenomena – instead, the categories of “nighttime assaulting demons” and “experiences related to pressing” can be discerned. Identifying or conflating the lidérc with the devil is also common both on the level of experiences and of narratives. Accounts often refer to diffuse lidérc-dead-devil figures denoted by names such as “evil, evil soul, evil spirit” (gonosz, gonosz lélek) or a shift between lidérc and the devil within one and the same narrative. For instance, [What is the lidérc?] Say, I love somebody a lot. I love him a great deal. And I am just waiting and waiting for him to come, and he won’t come. Even if he dies, I just go on waiting and waiting for him to come home, and he won’t, and he won’t, and he won’t, and then the devil arrives to you as if it was him, just as if he were alive. [It can also come as a woman.] You can imagine it like female folk.84 The interpretation of the experiential fact of nighttime sensation of “pressing” by the lidérc as a diabolic assault was also aided by certain concretizing motifs of international devil legends. Such motifs describe a demon figure of European folklore coming from the underworld (a fiery being entering through the chimney, one leg being that of a horse or goose which reveal it to be a lidérc, the underworldly feast familiar from legends of witches and devils where food and drink turn into dung and horse urine).85 The 84 AR and SJ Gyimesbükk 2003. 85 Cf. Frenschkowski and Draschek, “Teufel,” with further bibliographic detail.

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widespread use of prayers and sacramentals to deter the lidérc,86 the use of gestures and spells to keep the devil at bay during ordinary conversations,87 as well as the cleansing rituals offered by local priests88 furnish us with proof not only of identification with the devil but also of the role the lidérc plays in sustaining faith in the devil. Below is an account of the nighttime apparition of a lidérc which the subject came to interpret as the appearance of the devil after the admonitions of her priest. Here, right next door […] her husband had died, and the old lady kept saying, “Oh, dear God, dear God, I wish my old man would come home, I would so dearly like to set eyes on him once more.” The Pater told her, the other Pater, “Leave off, Aunty Katalin,” he said, “May the good Lord appease you, and pray for him, but you mustn’t go on like this,” he says, “because the devil will appear in his form and he will torment you so badly, it will kill you.” [The devils came and tortured her.] Then the Pater served Mass nine times over, and so they eventually left off.89 According to the testimony of the historical sources, identifying the lidérc with the devil was already underway in the thirteenth century. We have data of lidérc named as the devil going back as far as 1270, from the oldest legends of St. Margaret of the House of Árpád, the legend of St. Elisabeth, the legend of St. Hugo from the Érdy Codex (the devil possesses someone in the shape of the desired man, and this is sometimes followed by exorcism).90 Characteristics of the “lidérc lover” coincide with the views of medieval clerical authors regarding male and female incubus and succubus demons and the human individuals who have intercourse with them. These notions were also influenced by the influx into Christian demonology of traditions of Greco-Roman ephialtes (“pressing” succubus demon), nymphs, lamia, forest and house spirits and several other kinds of popular demon figures, including mora/mara/mare, etc. beings. After an age of strong skepticism 86 Several people emphasized that only a priest can help the visitations of the lidérc. 87 A story collected by György Takács at Gyimesbükk in 1995 included the following words: “So they started saying there is a lidérc visiting her and this and that. […] It was night. May God protect us! And the priests, they could help.” 88 On the priesthood as “cleansing from the devil” (in the context of the lidérc), see Czégényi, A mágikus erejű pap, 175–192. 89 Hidegség 2006. 90 See in more detail, with bibliography, Pócs, “Lidérc.” And for the legend of St. Elizabeth, see Klaniczay, in this volume.

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(incubus demons were viewed by most theologians, e.g., St. Augustine (354–430), Isidore of Seville (556–636), Guillaume d’Auvergne (1190–1249) as illusions or projections arising from erotic dreams or unwholesome fantasies).91 From the twelfth century onwards these demons began to appear more and more as variants of the possessing devil of clerical demonology, which was accompanied by a practice of warding off rituals adapted to the rites of exorcism. From the fourteenth century onwards, we can trace the notion of sexual intercourse with the devil, which also influenced the ways in which alliance with the devil was conceptualized in antiwitchcraft demonology. Naturally, it also found its way – as a witchcraft accusation – into the top-down processes of witchcraft persecution.92 The lidérc of the communities in Csík and Gyimes embodies one of the various devil notions that had fused with pressing lidérc (nightmare) type beings of different kinds. The survival of this notion and a “believed-in” demon that possesses people is due, besides the above-mentioned experiential facts, to the solid belief of locals in the devil.

The fair lady (szépasszony) The fair lady (szépasszony) is a unique Hungarian variant of fairy-type creatures known all over Europe, which share a range of traits with the fairies of the Balkans.93 According to ethnographic data collected in the twentieth century among the peoples of the Balkans, in the lived religion of rural societies fairies fulfilled several roles from a normative function through providing explanations for misfortune or regulating behavior. We found few traces of this during our collecting work among the Hungarians of Szeklerland and Gyimes (and we cannot know whether they were not borrowings from neighboring Romanians). Signs of profound fairy belief 91 On clerical sources: Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 260–261; Kiessling, The Incubus in English Literature; Metzger, “Incubus as an Illness.” 92 Stephens, Demon Lovers; Tuczay, Geister, Dämonen, Phantasme, 109–120; Davies, “The Nightmare Experience”; relating to German areas: Roper, Witch Craze, 83–103 (“Sex with the Devil” chapter); on witchcraft trials in England, see Davies, “The Nightmare Experience”; in the documentation of Polish witchcraft trials: Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, 208–226 (“Demon Lovers” chapter). 93 For more detail on the fairies of Hungarian folk beliefs: Zentai, “The Figure of the ‘Szépasszony’”; Pócs, Fairies and Witches and “Fairies.” On the world of fairies in Gyimes and Szeklerland: Salamon, “Gyimesi mondák” and Gyimesi csángó mondák; Magyar, A csángók mondavilága and Csinódi népköltészet; Pócs, “Tündéres and the Order of St Ilona”; Gagyi and Dyekiss, Hiedelemszövegek Székelyföldről.

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based on emotional attitudes cropped up only sporadically in an otherwise rich narrative tradition. In the Balkans, fairies appear in the sources as ambivalent beings combining demonic and goddess traits. On the one hand, they offer protection and bring bliss as goddess-like beings, who can act as patron spirits of village communities or individuals, patrons, calling and initiating spirits of healers and cultic societies. On the other hand, they are demons of a deadly character who appear in storm clouds, as the wind demon souls of the dead and come to punish, possess or sicken people. Fairies often appear as nature spirits living in characteristic locations of the natural environment: by water springs or by the waterside, in groves or in treetops.94 As I mentioned above, in Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian we hear of the activity of cultic societies formed to heal diseases caused by fairies, as well as of “fairy seers” who practiced healing in ritually induced trance. All of this, with the exception of possession cults and fairy seers,95 was also identifiable in the areas we studied in Szeklerland and Gyimes, but in a slightly less vibrant variant. The accounts we heard tended to foreground the entertainment function of the narratives. The majority of the narrative stock of Szeklerland are stories about unknown “others” or projected into the past. In some cases, they were quite simply international fairy legends loosely adjusted to local conditions, or the “fairy” version of witch legends.96 Although the majority of the population did not believe them or were at least skeptical, this narrative material nonetheless allowed us to discern some kind of local notion of possession and the recent practice of protection and deterrence triggered by fear of demonic assaults. A small portion of these accounts is about direct encounters with the supernatural world of the fairies; indeed, some of my informants even told me stories about their own personal encounters with beautiful women floating in the air, flying with the wind, rushing along in whirlwinds, or appearing in groups singing, 94 From the most important literature on the Balkans: Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore, 3–173; Marinov, “Narodna vjara; Ardalić, “Vile i vještice,” 301–302; Muşlea and Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului, 206–218; Đorđević, “Veštica i vila,” 5–255; Blum and Blum, The Dangerous Hour, 31–50; Stewart, “Nymphomania.” 95 Its traces in the past may be identified with regard to Hungarians in certain historical sources. See Pócs, “Tündéres and the Order of St Ilona.” 96 Shoeing, turning into a horse, digging a knife into a whirlwind, flying on a broomstick, or with a magic spell or on witch’s fat to a dance; magic spell misunderstood or misused; falling down when hearing a sacred word, etc., as the international motifs of witch legends: Gerlach, “Hexe.”

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dancing, and making music. These encounters inspired both delight and fear of the numinous: Well, there was sort of music playing, and they came along, up high, and they were throwing themselves about and dancing and just being joyful.97 They were having fun, screaming with delight, and it was like …. We got scared, we were on the wagon, driving home. We got so scared. […] We got so horrified with them. This is what I know of the szépasszony.98 Encounters with the szépasszony provide the frame for the appearance of such local notions of possession that fall within the category of obsessio (circumsessio). There are no data for the type of possession when the possessing agent enters the body (the etic category of possessio). In the background of these possession data we may discern a double universe, distributed into the world of the living and the dead (similarly to that experienced in connection with possession by the dead). This is particularly present in stories of calling, snatching, or punishing taboo breakers: the szépasszony will take them away (elviszik), snatch them (elragadják), transport them (meghordozzák) or strike them (megütik), the people who occupy “their” places, those who tread on their paths or roads during their times, or people who walk freely out in the open in the night. One conversation that the collector had with one of the locals at Gyimesközéplok revealed, for instance, that it was not permitted to sleep or lie down outside before St. George’s Day: Because then the evil one snatches his soul. He is weakened, he does not work. His strength is gone. [What is the evil one that takes away his strength?] Like fair ladies, fair ladies. They have their route. If you lie down on their path, […] there is trouble.99 A common form of being snatched by the fairies (in line with the already known wind demon nature of the szépasszony) is being picked up by a whirlwind. For instance, if a whirlwind comes people scare children by saying, “Take care or the szépasszony will snatch you – you mustn’t go out at night.”100 Most “carried away” narratives are about being “called out” at 97 Hidegség 2003. 98 Hidegség 2002. 99 CsB 2005. 100 Csíkkarcfalva 1996.

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night, which takes place in the same way as was described in the context of possession by the dead: the szépasszony will “call out” or “snatch” or “transport” people in their sleep during the night. For instance: In his sleep, they picked him out of his bed and snatched him away and then where he woke up again, I don’t know. Then finally, when he made his way home, who would’ve dared to ask, “Where have you been?”101 The wind demon character of the szépasszony also explains why being transported is always vertical in its direction and why the terms pick up (felragad), snatch up (felkap), lift up (felemel) are used. According to one memorate from Csíkkarcfalva: [S]omething just picked him up … they carried him away … [and] set him down somewhere and that’s where he came to …. And when he came to, he found himself in some sort of a big factory plant. The old lady told me often, how they looked for her father in the morning and he was nowhere to be found and then there he was staggering home.102 This is another sense in which these acts of being carried away take place in a characteristic, concretized “other world,” with metaphors of getting lost, waking up somewhere else, traveling back to this world and other concretizing elements. For instance, someone may wake up to find herself a long way from home, lying on the ground in her nightdress. According to a memorate from Csíkkarcfalva, someone heard “banging” at night, she went out and the szépasszony “snatched her and took her away,” and then, as the victim recounted, “I broke off the treetops, but when they set me down, I nearly died.”103 Being transported at night may also entail “being saddled,” where the szépasszony turns the victim she is transporting into her horse and snatches him riding astride him (this is also one of the characteristic manners of possession by a demonic witch). The locals of the region are not familiar with the fairy disease known in the Balkans, but also in southern Hungary.104 Stories related by individuals who had been transported mostly 101 JK Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 102 JK Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 103 Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 104 Fairies of the Balkans afflict those who transgress their space-time taboos with special fairy diseases, e.g., headaches, nervous problems, epileptic symptoms, muteness, blindness, paralysis, complaints in the lower limbs. This may affect anyone who goes out into the open in the night,

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speak of feeling weak or sick; except for the term “struck,”105 which refers to a stroke, there are no data to indicate that the szépasszony punish those they snatch with any particular illness. A mode of assault which the szépasszony share with the possessing dead and the lidérc is pressing at night – the szépasszony will press (nyomja), walk about (járja) or encircle (kerülgeti) their victims at night, particularly mothers during confinement who are more acutely exposed to the dangers of demonic assault. In this respect, a narrative from Hidegség related that someone was ridden and “walked about” by the szépasszony night after night – every night she was “drenched in water,” just like a horse. Riding the horses stabled for the night is also a widely known subject for narratives: many people refer to “real” experiences (horses were found exhausted in the stable in the morning, sweaty, with their manes knotted), and some people did actually believe in this possible mode of assault by the szépasszony. Beings snatched or carried away could take place, according to the accounts, awake, asleep or in an unconscious state, as a diffuse “journey” of body and soul similar to cases of possession by the dead. These parallels with possession by the dead are no accident: as they gradually die out, beliefs in the szépasszony and of ambivalent belief figures in general tend to have their deadly aspect come to the fore. This was probably kept alive partly by living faith in ghosts and the vivid presence of symptom-based notions of possession by the dead – all of this contributing to the mingling and contamination of the two belief figures. Positive, goddess-like traits of the fairies are present in the Balkans in several forms as various manifestations ranging from divine possession or (to use a different etic categorization) ecstasy or enthusiasmus, usually appearing as ritual trance or ecstasy attained through music. These appear both through the rites people practice and through narratives about individuals who were transported through music or dance.106 By contrast, in the Hungarian context we know of no possession experienced in a ritual trance, at least in the recent past, only of a narrative tradition. One particular visits their paths or dancing spots at noon or on a festive day of the dead or steps in the traces of their ring-dances (see the references in note 95). 105 A fairy disease known in multiple regions of Europe is being “fairy struck,” which is probably related to the nature of fairies as wind demons – a trait registered in Western and Central and Southeastern Europe alike (see, e.g., Briggs, The Dictionary of Fairies, 385–386; Blum and Blum, The Dangerous Hour. 106 These narratives about men transported to a fairy heaven filled with music, dance and bodily delights also reflect a male world of desires and the erotic aspect of divine possession. For more about this, see Pócs, Fairies and Witches and “Fairies.”

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memorate from Gyimesközéplok is often cited precisely on account of being unique: [T]here came a rushing wind, and three women … they were as beautiful as the rays of the sun, oh my! and they got him to dance, and dance and dance and dance without end … so the lad collapsed. He collapsed there and then. And he could not speak a word … He was just ill, so ill, he was just panting and could do nothing else. He was past his wits, if you look at it that way. His wits were all gone.107 In spite of this clear case of being transported “in spirit,” we may safely declare that the narratives collected in Gyimes and Csík do not allow us to establish a specific constellation between the body and the soul in cases of possession. Experiential accounts reveal simultaneous or alternative presence of several possible constellations of connections between body and soul. It seems to make no relevant difference whether the “journey” takes place in body or spirit, and according to the special logic of the narratives, protagonists and witnesses of such experiences can both sense the two possible conditions of the “travelers” even simultaneously. In their totality, our data on fairy possession seem to show a special local form of possession somewhat akin to possession by the dead, which in fact is an eclectic collection of several different formations, including the slight, accidentally surviving traces of divine possession. The traits that distinguish it from possession by the dead are those of possession in a state of trance induced by fairy music and dance; albeit – it has to be underlined – these are only present in the narrative tradition.

The devil Historical roots of demonic possession and the fight against demons go back in Europe to the very distant past, perhaps as far back as Babylon.108 Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries that all 107 Salamon, “Gyimesi mondák,” 109–110. 108 Christian exorcism rites against the devil go back to the same basic formula as did the antidemon exorcism of Babylon, at least as far as the “substitution attack” performed by good and the evil spirits in the body is concerned – as Alfred Jeremias writes about Assyrian cleansing rites, the evil demon relinquishes its place in the body to the good guardian spirits. Jeremias, Handbuch, 415.

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over Europe the idea that possession by the devil, combined with witchcraft, could serve as an explanation for a whole line of everyday crises, mishaps, disorders or diseases became widespread.109 Just when and how the process leading to this state of affairs took place in the lives of the communities analyzed here cannot be ascertained, but the end result can be registered. Within the overall context of fear of the devil, of sin and damnation, the devil plays a very important role in how people experience, explain and protect themselves against the crises of everyday life. According to Stuart Clark’s convincing line of reasoning, the most important ideological framework for demonic possession and exorcism in the early modern period was provided by eschatology – Satan’s threats for our sins at the end of the world: indeed, along with demonism in all its forms this too is part of eschatological history.110 In these parts of the world this was still valid in the early twentieth century; for the majority of people here Satan has been a negative power which acted as one of the most important normative regulating forces of everyday life. Even in the context of interviews a constant awareness of the presence of the devil was palpable, as shown by the frequently interspersed protective gestures, prayers and magic spells aimed to keep away evil during our conversations. “The devil has terrible power,” as an informant declared at Hidegség in 2004. No matter how much we might know about what the devil meant in the religious lives of these communities, it would be hard to offer a general and comprehensive view of the devil concept of this community. The worldview of the locals contains several, different, often mutually contradictory notions in this regard. Such a coexistence of multiple notions of the devil may date back a long time – in fact, as early as the beginnings of Christianity there were highly complex notions of the devil, of Old Testament and Assyrian–Babylonian origin. Ever since that time, the figure of the devil has been continually enriched with the traits of several non-Christian demons, as I noted in my introduction. To mention but a few examples of non-Christian demons that came to shape the figure of the devil we may refer to Assyrian–Babylonian demons causing disease and assaulting newborn babies and mothers in confinement (together with the related exorcising rites), the Jewish “angel of death”; the demons of fire, air, earth and water in late antiquity which were supposed to bring misfortune and disease; the incubus demons described by St. Augustine 109 Clark, Thinking with Demons, 388–391. 110 Ibid., 403–414.

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(354–430); the child-kidnapping demons that St. Isidor (556–636) analyzed, etc. The early Church fathers, e.g., Origen (184–254), still believed that these pagan–Christian, syncretistic demons – in keeping with God’s will – had an influence on everything.111 Even after more than a millennium they lived alongside or completely merged with the devils of Satan, as their treacherous variants, in the imagination of theologians of the Church,112 and filled the role of the devil in the worldview of witch persecuting demonologists – indeed, they also contributed to spreading witchcraft accusations and even played a role in the emergence of notions of devils’ pacts, as I mentioned earlier in the context of incubus demons.113 The devil of the Church thus integrated a motley crowd of non-Christian demons, to varying degrees depending on the peoples, the region, and the local culture. Differences between the territories of the Eastern and the Western religions mostly rest on differences in local folk conceptualization of demons.114 The above discussed belief figures: the dead, fairies and nightmare beings had different local variants in the East and the West. Vampire-like beings had a greater role in Orthodox Eastern Europe where popular vampire notions were as old as Christianity itself; and werewolf beings or dragon-like creatures were also more likely to become belief figures enriching the devil concept in Eastern Europe rather than anywhere else. Midwinter underworld demons such as the kallinkantsaroi/karakondzuli and confinement demons, dating back to antiquity, tended to be unique to 111 On the Oriental heritage and the demon world of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, see Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, I, 518–520; Jeremias, Handbuch, 411–415; Stemplinger, Antiker Aberglaube; Meier, Die assyrische Beschwörungssamlung; Böcher, Dämonenfrucht and Christus exorcista, 75–76; Flint, The Rise of Magic, 146–157; Russel, The Devil, 229–260; Fröhlich, in this volume. For a work summarizing medieval notions of the devil and their motifs rooted in popular faith, see Champneys, “The Character of the Devil.” 112 See, e.g., in Luther’s Tischreden (1531–1546): “Wohnorte des Teufels,” “Teufel macht unverwundbar”; “Teufel als Mörder”; “Teufel grunzt wie Schweine”; “Teufel holt Pfeifer,” “Teufel als Helfer im Kloster”; “Teufel schleppt Körper einer Toten”; “Teufel als Hund”; etc. (Alsheimer, “Katalog protestantischer Teufelsezählungen” 431–434). 113 See, e.g., Thomas (Religion and the Decline of Magic, 569–573) and Bever (“Popular Witch Beliefs”) regarding parallels between elite and popular notions of the devil as regards their role in witchcraft; Midelfort (“The Devil and the German People”) on the popular devil figures appearing in the documents of witchcraft trials; Ostling (Between the Devil and the Host, 228–237) on the “popular” devils of Polish and Ukrainian witchcraft trials. 114 On the folkloristic devil figure of contemporary folk beliefs in the West and in the East: Woods, The Devil in Dog Form; Röhrich, “Az ördög alakja”; Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 40–45; Pócs, “The Popular Foundations”; Novičkova, Russkoj demonologičeskij slovar’, 44–57, 165–174, 577–614; Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 137–151; Vinogradova, Narodnaja demonologija, 289–301. On the alternative demon world of the Orthodox Church: Greenfield, Traditions, 153–218; Papademetriou, “Exorcism,” 306–310 and 363–367.

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the Balkans, and so on. Belief in illness demons is testified to in the modern era only by folklore data collected in Eastern Europe, but the figures of such demons were dispersed over the whole of Europe as alternative forms of the devil through exorcism texts originating from the ancient orient, although not as “believed-in” demons, only as “textual beings.” Going back to the diffuse notions of the devil present in village communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one reason why these emerged may have been that the official doctrines regarding Satan changed over time in both the Western and the Eastern churches and remained malleable even in the modern period; indeed, the reality and mode of existence of the devil is still subject to theological debate today.115 Besides, the Orthodox Church has related differently to the devil and is more lenient toward folk demons even today. At least on the level of the lower clergy and (exorcist) monks we come across a more profound belief in the devil and his earthly representatives, in witches and in bewitchment than in the contemporary Western Church.116 All of this of course necessarily influenced the communities living in the boundary zone of Western and Eastern Christianity that I am examining in this chapter. At the same time, we can also register the effects of another process. The spreading of official clerical views took place through not only sermons and the personal advisory activity of priests, but also through reading the Bible, as well as various treatises, chap books, popular biographies of the saints, or more recently the spreading of news about famous cases of exorcism through social media, which I could observe in the communities of Csík and Gyimes. In the replies to my questions concerning temptations and assaults by the devil, people often referred to what they had learned from their religious readings or from priests and monks, often going as far as to quote them or refer to them as parables, confessions of faith or as explanations or confirmations of their own experiences of possession. For instance, after relating a parable about a faithless man, my informant summed up the story as follows: “The devil is always going about, searching, like a roaring lion, for someone to swallow. So those with a strong faith should resist.”117 In order to stress the 115 According to what might be the most recent official stance, in 1972 Pope Paul VI in the 41 Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede defined Satan as “an active being, living, spiritual reality.” 116 On Orthodoxy’s different attitude to this: Papademetriou, “Exorcism,” 302–370. On the Moldavian Orthodox monks’ popular conceptualizations of the devil and their cleansing and exorcising practices: Balan, Vies des moines. 117 Hidegség 2010.

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authenticity of their individual experiences of the devil, my informants included several variants of the legend of the fallen angels in their replies. In response to my question regarding possession, at Csíkkarcfalva in 1996 a small child, who also happened to be present, volunteered a reply saying that her friend had read that “a girl of twelve became possessed by Satan.” A man from Csíkjenőfalva claimed, “religion teaches it, the exorcism of the devil is there in the Bible.”118 Others had learned that the devil could possess a human (in the bodily sense) from an incident reported on radio concerning the famous exorcism episode at Suceava. (I am convinced that the terms “possession,” “the devil possesses him/her” “the devil gets into him/her” were also learned from these sources.) Thus, besides the surviving traditions of the popular non-Christian demon world as alternatives, therefore, as regards possession by the devil, we are witnessing the inextricable intertwining of official and popular notions, of heterogeneous syncretistic Christian notions of the devil and of possession. What I have said in the introduction regarding the set of beliefs that serve as a frame of reference for interpreting and making sense of possession phenomena, the physical or psychological, genuine or supposedly genuine experiences which influence the interpretation of these experiences and the mental model of the dual space-time structure of the universe which serves as the universal frame for communication between the living and the dead applies to them, too. All of these are also present as organizing principles concerning people’s notions of possession by the devil. Similar to the above described fundamental duality of the universe of the living and the dead, and in partial overlap with it, another idea, that of the opposition of God/the divine versus Satan/the devil, of the perpetual struggle of the sacred world and the demonic world is also present – an idea whose origin goes back to the Middle Ages and is kept alive today by chapbooks and other popular reading materials.119 Several people have told me about the widely read and much liked legend variants of the struggle between St. Michael and the devils or of the eschatological struggle against the Anti-Christ (at Csíkkarcfalva the end of the Satanic period was expected to arrive in 1998). In the course of my fieldwork my informants usually brought up notions and legends of the struggle between the angel and the devil by the bedside of a dying person in the context of this opposition between the God and Satan. This kind of conceptualization not only has 118 Csíkjenőfalva 1998. 119 Stewart, “Le Diable chez les Grecs”; Dinzelbacher, “Die Realität des Teufels,” 165.

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148 Éva Pócs Figures 5.4a and 5.4b Death of a good man and of a sinner: details of an Orthodox icon entitled “God’s Eye”, in the house of a Roman Catholic family with Orthodox ancestors. Gyimesközéplok/Lunca de Jos (Romania), 2003

Photos Ágnes Hesz

written sources, but a whole line of pictorial representations are also well known in chapbook publications, prayer books and (as an Orthodox tradition) sometimes even in pictures hung on the wall. Relating this story as a parable in the context of the death of others also serves as a memento mori in preparation for death. A further idea associated with possession by the devil developed in the late Middle Ages, whereby possession was no longer just bodily harm or the causing of physical and mental illness, but also devilish trickery and deception – in other words diabolic temptation, that is to say, obsessio.120 In Gyimes and Csík narratives of diabolic temptations, seduction, that is to say, phenomena that come under the category of obsessio within the broader range of possession phenomena (the devil assaults, surrounds someone from the outside) were conceptualized within the framework of the struggle between God and Satan. Many people’s lives were filled with constant struggle against the temptations of the devil, marked by a constant fear of damnation.121 This is proven by temptations, imagined or actually manifested in physically perceived 120 On Satan’s temptations, physical attacks, and sexual seductions in early Christianity: Russel, Satan, 186–200; Simonné Pesthy, A csábítás teológiája; in the Middle Ages and the early modern age: Greenfield, Traditions, 90–130; Dinzelbacher, “Die Realität des Teufels.” 121 György Takács writes in detail about this based on his field experiences: Takács, Kantéros, lüdérc, rekegő, 295.

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signs, as well as by notions, dreams, or visions of the devil which appear in crisis situations. I have often witnessed how the fear of the temptations of the devil caused people to fill with great emotion the retelling of fairly stereotyped legend texts. Temptation is one of the fundamental motifs of communication with the devil. The devil will surround you (körülvesz), have power over you (hatalma van rajtad), will accompany you (kísér) or tempt you (kísért). The devils will also tease you (incselkednek), they will “tempt the spirit they want to seduce and spoil so they go the bad way,”122 and so on – one could provide many more examples. The devil tempts people to drunkenness, swearing, skipping Mass, or committing suicide, so as to get hold of the soul and thus prevent its salvation. “He’s always at it, at evil, doing evil and winning souls,” as a woman from Csíkjenőfalva put it in 1998. The importance of the normative role played by the devil is indicated by stories describing the temptation experiences of the informant herself or of others. A 40-year-old woman recounted that she could never really fast because all the time during Lent it was as if the devil was calling on her to eat. At other times, the devil would tempt people to defame others and indulge in wicked gossip.123 Anyone who succumbed to the devil’s temptations would get into trouble – those who giggled in church or talked ill of others were snatched by the devil. Someone who had misbehaved in church was pestered by apparitions of the devil all the way home. This was usually the context, in both Gyimes and Csík, of the two most widely liked and retold devil narratives: the account of the fight between the angel and the devil over a dying person124 and the devil tempting people to commit suicide. The latter, oft-repeated story was given a sad topicality by the fact that in these villages, and particularly in the three Gyimes communities, the number of suicides was outstandingly high at the time of my research. This led many people to speak of the devil’s temptation based on their firsthand experience of such temptation within the family. A woman from Csíkkarcfalva had a comrade who was being bullied into suicide by the devils. They used scythes and pitchforks to “prick at her eyes and summon her to the stables to hang herself … but God always ordered someone to be there in order to stop her.” (She was finally released by the priest.125) This 122 Csíkkarcfalva 1998. 123 Hidegség 2008. 124 The international legend of the battle between the angel and the devil: Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 24–25, 122; ATU I. 449–450, 808. 125 DA Csíkkarcfalva 1998.

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150 Éva Pócs Figure 5.5 The Devil tempting with suicide (a noose in his hand). Picture in Johannes Amos Comenius: Orbis Sensualium Pictus, Köln, 1658

element is also in harmony with sixteenth-century clerical views and a type of legend which was very widespread all over Europe.126 The most important role the devil plays in people’s lives is to divert them from salvation to take their souls. Assaults by the devil classed under the 126 Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People,” 116–117. Examples of the international legend: Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 22, 251, 394. On folk conceptualizations relating to this in the West and in the East: Petzoldt, “Besessenheit,” 77; Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 48.

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category of obsessio also fit into this structure of ideas. These assaulting devils, which may be imaginary or “seen” in dreams or apparitions, have an important role in experiencing, explaining, and deflecting the crisis situations of everyday life – as is shown by a rich array of related narratives. The devil who snatches people and attacks them as a nighttime demon can hardly be distinguished in this context from the previously described demons of popular belief that supposedly assault people at night. While temptation (in thought) and leading people to sin and damnation is unique to the Christian demon, in the apparitions of the dark, nighttime world of demons, which may be seen as projections of nighttime fears, the “pagan–Christian” devil figure appears intertwined with the demons of popular belief. One major difference between the two, however, is that within this framework demonic possession is the punishment for sins as part of the normative tradition associated with the devil; his assaults may equally provoke or punish the gravest sins. The methods of assault are, however, already familiar from cases of possession by the dead. The devil will call his victim out during the night, often by knocking or banging on the door (which you must not answer), or he will carry them off (meghordozza), pick them up (felragadja), snatch them (elkapja) or carry them away (elviszi őket). Being so transported often appears as punishment of godlessness: [A]nd so, the devils took him away, for he was always mocking God, and then the devils thought they will give him a ride in their wagon. And they gave him such a ride he went mad.127 [A]nd so, if someone is really ill, so that he/she is dying, then they get together and pray. But the young people were fooling about and laughing outside at them praying, and as they were misbehaving under the window, all of a sudden something just picked them all up, into a basket or whatever it was, and they were carried off so that they flew all the way past the top of Bánd and it was at Kováspataka that they were finally thrown down.128 I have also had the occasion to hear personal accounts of being snatched, picked up, carried away. A woman from Csíkszenttamás who claimed she 127 Gyimesközéplok 2008. 128 Gyimesközéplok 2003.

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had been transported by the devil, had always been crying and suffered from headaches and, as she described, I was just struggling, always up there, they carried me up high. The evil spirit that had tempted the Lord Jesus, well just so, all the time […] I was over the top of people’s heads.129 In other words, she identified her own being carried away with the episode of the temptation of Jesus Christ from the New Testament.130 Being transported is an otherworldly experience, a quasi-death, thus it is quite natural that its idea went hand in hand with real death. At Csíkjenőfalva this is how people spoke about the death of an old man: “Something like an airplane arrived. […] They called the old man out and carried him away so that … they are still carrying him! […] The devils.”131 According to local beliefs, similar to the dead or fairies, the devils could also attack in the form of wind demons. I heard many opinions of this kind: “When there is a whirlwind, the devils are going about”; “They make the whirlwinds […] [and] they pick people up and carry them off.”132 The devils could also cause a stroke, just like the fairies – someone would doze off in the open, then all of a sudden, they would wake up to find they could not move any more, because “an ill wind had struck them.”133 My informants believed that the devil can equally well assault people who are out on their way or sleeping in their house. I have heard many accounts of night apparitions springing from fear of demons and revealing a personal experience. These may well be cases of what Lauri Honko described as spontaneous spiritual experiences (kasuale Begegnung134), when the circumstances of “seeing” (e.g., fear of death alone at night) and traditional knowledge (e.g., of punishment in hell) jointly induce the experiencing of a spiritual being. According to an account from Csíkjenőfalva, a man much given to swearing was out in the woods when the devils surrounded him, but he was carrying a consecrated penknife and he used it to “beat the devils away from himself.”135 In this context, we also saw the appearance of “folk” 129 Csíkszenttamás 1998. 130 Luke 4: 1–13. 131 JK Csíkjenőfalva 1996. 132 Csíkkarcfalva 1996; Hidegség 2003. 133 Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 134 On the ways in which “seeing spirits” may emerge, see Honko, Geisterglaube in Ingermanland, 91–126. 135 VA Csíkjenőfalva 1996.

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devils – e.g., those in animal form. Someone at Gyimesbükk was followed and kept in fear by a white dog, then a winged horse, with flashing eyes, like “the devil, a kind of transformed animal,” then she went to the priest to ask for help, and so “the Virgin Mother appeared to her, so she never had to look at those ugly things again.”136 The devil can also take possession of human homes, in keeping with the dual space-time structure which I described in connection to possession by the dead. According to data from Hidegség, the devil that assaults the family produces poltergeist phenomena: people hear noises, the throwing of stones or the rattling of dishes. The devil that appears in the house is often the apparition of a revenant. This is also the context in which we may interpret data that claim that a house where someone had committed suicide is possessed by the devil. According to data from Csíkkarcfalva, anyone who enters such a homestead exposes himself or herself to an apparition of the devil. One of my informants always avoided houses of this kind because the place would tempt her to commit suicide, and if she had to go there nevertheless, she would be murmuring the Lord’s Prayer for protection meanwhile.137 One characteristic form of assault by the devil, similar to nightmare phenomena and lidérc assaults, is nighttime pressing that can be accompanied by sexual aggression. The only difference is that the assaulting person is identified as a devil, but when it is referred to as “evil,” this actually refers to the diffuse category of the dead/devil which I already mentioned in connection with the dead, and which appears in several accounts as both a ghost and a devil at one and the same time. Several data items I collected at Hidegség show that the “pressing being” comes in through the keyhole: “It was some kind of spirit or devil, can’t be anything else”; and: the devil “will approach you, you see, […] [and] it will press on your heart just here.”138 One of my informants at Csíkjenőfalva who had been “possessed” by the devil, told me: “They pressed on me so hard every night, I was too scared to go to bed. […] They pressed me so hard, I thought they would squeeze me dead. And I couldn’t move any part of my body.”139 The majority of such pressing experiences in every community under study is connected to mothers in confinement. These are spiritual notions 136 AJ and SchJ Gyimesbükk 2003. For more on these types of apparitions of the devil, see Woods, The Devil in Dog Form; Röhrich, “Az ördög alakja”; Pócs, Hiedelemszövegek, 36–70. 137 Csíkkarcfalva 1998. 138 Hidegség 2002. 139 Csíkjenőfalva 1998.

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based on genuine bodily symptoms, this is the reason why there is such a high number of related memorates reflecting personal experiences, and this is also why it is so often an impersonal experience (when people are scared not of the appearance of one specific demon but of the dangerous situation itself): I didn’t dare to go to sleep. I was so scared to go to sleep, and so I was sprinkling the bed with holy water all the time, and while I was praying I put the prayer book right here, because I was afraid in case I should go to sleep lying in a supine position, and that gave me a dream straight away, and that horrible unpleasant feeling that pressed down on me. […] [And what do you think it was?] Evil. Yes, it was evil itself.140 Once the pressing demon assumed some sort of physical appearance, it could equally well be a dead person, a lidérc, a szépasszony or the devil, depending on local belief. Still, most often it became embodied as the devil, perhaps because aggressive onslaught from the Christian devil is seen as more likely than assault by the dead at times when the child is “unbaptized” and the mother “uninitiated.” The fact that identical procedures of religious protection applied against the devil were also applied to all kinds of pressing demons indicates that these beings have become more or less “Christianized” into a possessing devil. Experiences of pressure by the devil, accompanied by sexual aggression, are actually cases of the above described “lidérc turned devil” (often the devil and lidérc are conflated within one and the same account, and sometimes even the szépasszony were included in the same category). For example, according to a statement from Csíkkarcfalva, “the devil will approach you if you’re sad; sorrow is the devil’s cushion.” Another informant told me that an “evil soul” appeared in the form of her desired lover and was found out as such when people noted that he had a duck’s leg.141 During the decade of our collecting work the protection system against the devil was excessively rich in the practice of the people of Csík and Gyimes, ranging from sacred places through sacramentals received from the priest all the way to amulets worn on the body or cleansing rites applied by the priest. Some of their individual prayers, fasts and vows also served against crises of this kind, for protection against Satan, while official help 140 Hidegség 2006. 141 JK Csíkkarcfalva 1996.

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by the priest always served as a legitimizing factor and helped sustain belief in the devil. As regards the psycho-biological condition of people possessed by the devil, I can only repeat what I have said in the context of the dead: my data show that the emphasis was usually on the sudden worsening in the bodily and mental condition of the possessed individual (some kind of sudden illness, a general bad feeling, headache, undefined malaise and pressing sensations at night), which, as we have seen, could be associated with the assault of several locally known spiritual beings. Besides various other options (dead persons, lidérc, szépasszony), symptoms of depression, such as deep melancholy, a sense of “darkness,” longing for death and suicidal inclinations were definitely, and exclusively, understood as the work of the devil. Interpreting such symptoms as possession and associating them with the figure of the devil, just as the use of certain clerical and biblical terminology (e.g., “surround,” “approach”) may be the result of the clerical interpretation of possession by the devil, as well as the influence of Orthodox monastic healers whose services were sought (if not for exorcism, then certainly for diagnostics). (Exorcising churches have considered “melancholy” as one of the symptoms of possession ever since the Middle Ages.) In the areas where we carried out field work, the terminology of concrete bodily possession was only used in a metaphorical sense, although its cases and symptoms were enumerated by a number of my informants, applying them to a distant “other.” For instance, a possessed person “became so disheveled, she kept destroying everything. They put a rosary next to her, a prayer book, she just tore up almost everything.”142 As far as metaphorical usage is concerned, phrases such as “the devil has got into him” or “the devil is inside him” were applied to people who were believed to have made a pact with the devil, who “go about with the devil,” “there was a devil in that man.” This usage in fact applies to the witch of demonology who makes an alliance with the devil and can in a certain sense be seen as permanently possessed. Permanently possessed people existed on the level of “rural” witchcraft, particularly in the Russian and Ukrainian contexts, and I will come back to them later in connection with the belief figure of the possessed witch. Another aspect of the meaning of phrases such as “the devil has got inside him” or “the devil is in him” is that they were used to refer to people who had committed grave sins. In the data I have collected they had been thieves, arsonists, had beaten their mother, swore 142 Gyimesközéplok 2010.

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a lot or did not go to church. I believe that the use of such phrases in this context is merely metaphorical and is again related to the use of individual possession terminology. It is an almost impossible task to reconstruct possible local notions of body–soul based on the accounts given by informants in the concretized language of narrative discourses. It seems that, similar to the above discussed demons, in cases of possession by the devil it is not relevant whether the possession experience is encountered in a waking or a sleeping state, as a fantasy, a “kasuale Begegnung” or in a state of ecstasy. As regards transportation experiences of being carried away, when it comes to the question of “in body or in spirit,” most of the examples speak not of out-of-body experiences but of being snatched in the body, although, on occasion, informants also speak of the soul (“mind,” ész, elme) being snatched away. For example, when somebody answered the call of the devil at night, “his wits were taken away”143 or “they’ll take your mind away.”144 I believe that, similar to cases of possession by the dead, we can once again only discern a diffuse body/ soul category in this context. Our informants were acquainted with the concept of concrete bodily possession by the devil, but cases of the devil specifically entering the body did not occur locally. Therefore, if there was suspicion of assault by the devil in relation to a sudden bout of ill health or other mishap, they occasionally consulted an Orthodox monk, more often the local Hungarian priests for sacramentals or a cleansing ritual (through blessings, burning incense; they also performed such themselves), but they did not resort to exorcism (or at least no such case had occurred in the recent past).145 The possessing spirit was identified with the devil far more frequently, according to my data, than with any other spiritual being, which shows the “triumph” of devil belief over belief in popular demons or in the returning dead, both of which seem headed toward extinction. Most of the characteristics of the possessing devil were originally the traits of the possessing “evil” dead and of the two “popular” possessing demons here examined: the lidérc and the szépasszony which, with regard to the devil, became reinterpreted in a Christian frame of thought. Local phenomena of possession by the devil may be classified, by and large, under the category of obsessio in terms of the anthropology of religion or of the theological 143 JK Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 144 Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 145 In the Mezőség region and in Moldavia, constituting the larger context of the communities under study, the notion of bodily possession by the devil was a living belief until recently.

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category of circumsessio. Possession by the devil does not exist as a clearly circumscribed, definite and coherent idea. Rather a category of varied forms of practices of diabolic assaults and anti-devil practices appears as a category belonging to Satan and the constant struggle against him. Satan, who is the being that tempts people to sin, punishes and assaults them out of God’s will and attempts to thrust souls to damnation.

The witch – the devil’s agent Theoretical antecedents which had led up to the association of the categories of witchcraft and possession by the devil came about after the idea of demonic magic became widespread in the twelfth/thirteenth centuries in the works of Caesarius of Heisterbach (1180–1240), then St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and other highly influential thinkers.146 Accordingly, “magical effects” may be attributed not only to natural causes, but also to demons who inspire the magical actions of humans. Although representatives of “natural magic” and “demonic magic” were to continue their disputes for at least another two centuries,147 in late medieval/early modern demonology the idea triumphed whereby the witch who practices malevolent magic is the devil’s agent and this connection reached its epitome in the notion of the pact with the devil. While cases of possession in the Middle Ages did not culminate in accusations of bewitchment, by the sixteenth century the related clerical thinking distinguished these two sets of ideas based on the exact manner of diabolic possession thereby also fusing them: a person possessed by the devil is someone who passively suffers assaults by the devil, while a witch is someone who enters into alliance with him.148 In many areas of Central and Western Europe we find that matters connected to possession, clerical indictments and verdicts have practically become synonymous with the history of witchcraft and witch persecution and that all of this has yielded dramatic cases of possession (and exorcism) within the framework of witchcraft persecution.149 Hungarian sources, 146 There is no room here to include the bibliography of this extensive field of study; for a summary, see Stephen, Demon Lovers, 343–371. 147 See, e.g.: Bárth, Exorcizmus és erotika. 148 Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People,” 117. On the process of the demonization of the witch, see Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 517–534; Sluhovsky, “A Divine Apparition”; Levi, L’eredità immateriale; Bever, “Popular Witch Beliefs.” 149 Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People,” 107–108. It is enough to think of the famous cases of Louviers and Loudun, or the great trial of Salem where possession by the devil played

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including the sources on witch hunting, also contain a continuous string of data from the Middle Ages all the way into the modern period, testifying to the presence of exorcism besides cases of (not witch-related) possession.150 Several such instances also occurred in the eastern Hungarian region under investigation in this chapter.151 Despite such occurrences, it seems that this kind of fusion has taken place to a lesser degree in Transylvania and the neighboring areas and the demonological idea of the pact with the devil has had a far smaller impact.152 Neither the ideas of the heretic, God-denying witch nor that of the witches’ Sabbath as a conspiratorial gathering of heretic witches has not taken root, and they never even reached the Orthodox areas which are free of witch hunting. (However, the relevant folklore has, in the form of migratory legends spread widely all over Europe.153) Nevertheless, independently of the demonological notions of witch hunting, the relationship of the witch and the devil existed in innumerable narrative variants, particularly in the Orthodox region, and so did certain “popular” notions of the pact with the devil, which constitute remnants of an archaic layer of autochthonous folklore (cf. the Byzantine origin of legends about the pact with the devil,154 and the varied clerical demonological notions of the devil in the Orthodox Church, which were in very close, mutually enriching interaction with folk demonology 155). The folklore of the Eastern, Orthodox part of the Balkans includes many variants of beliefs and narratives about witches who are possessed by the devil or give themselves to him body and soul, become “one with the devil,” possibly also engaging in sexual relations with him. According to beliefs that are fairly widespread in the region, this type of witch can also transmit the diabolic influence that she had suffered: she can send bewitchment a central part within a system of witchcraft: De Certeau, La possession de Loudun; Mandrou, Possession et sorcellerie; Walker, Unclean Spirits; Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed; Demos, Entertaining Satan. 150 For data on instances of exorcism known from the Vitae of medieval Hungarian saints and performed at Christian shrines, followed by accounts of the activities of exorcists from the early modern period almost to the present in all strata of the clergy, see, e.g., Klaniczay, in this volume; Bárth, “Pater Rochus” and The Exorcist of Sombor. 151 Bárth, Exorcizmus és erotika. 152 With respect to Russia, see Kivelson, “Lethal Convictions.” 153 A summary of the folklore of European witches’ Sabbath: Gerlach, “Hexe.” 154 See Palmer and More, Sources of the Faust Tradition; Kretzenbacher, Teufelsbündner und Faustgestalten. 155 See the devils of the early Byzantine sources which appear, similarly to the modern folklore devil, in the form of animals or ghosts, as storm demons or water demons in the role of haunting or possessing demon: Greenfield, Traditions, 77–95; Papademetriou, “Exorcism.”

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onto others156 or even possess her fellow humans.157 Let us add that the idea of demonic assaults through human intermediaries, i.e., individuals possessed by the devil, was not unknown to clerical theoreticians either, at least as regards the territories of the Eastern religion – as is testified to by data cited by Greenfield from early Byzantine sources.158 This way, a popular version of relations with the devil has existed and continues to exist almost to this very day in the wider Central and Southeastern European region of my investigations, independently of the demonological notions of the Western Church regarding the pact with the devil. This is true not only among the ideas of the rural communities, but also of the worldview of the (Greek Catholic and Orthodox) lower clergy and monastic community. Evidence for this comes, besides the previously mentioned popular notions of the devil, from the nonstandardized exorcism practice of the Orthodox Church, which is willing to adapt to popular notions, needs and requirements and to exorcise any kind of popular demon and even to cure bewitchment. As I have already mentioned, the rather more tolerant attitude of the Orthodox Church to local traditions also supports this.159 As George Papademetriou writes, with regard to Greek Orthodoxy, the lower clergy had basically embraced local traditions, and the standard Orthodox tradition did not turn its back on its “pagan legacy” either.160 Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, witchcraft has been present as an important social mechanism in our broader Central and Eastern European region (and within that primarily in the areas of Western 156 The idea of “sending” bewitchment was also part of the folk witchcraft concepts in Western and Northern Europe; it was especially present in Scandinavian witchcraft. See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 517–558 (chapter entitled “Witchcraft in England”); Caro Baroja, Die Hexen und ihre Welt, 159–160; Davidson, “Hostile Magic”; Petzoldt, “Besessenheit.” 157 For a bibliography of the most important works on Southeast European witch beliefs, see Ðorđević, “Veštica i vila”; Muşlea and Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului, 244–277; Vukanović, “Witchcraft in the Central Balkans”; Vinogradova, Narodnaja demonologija, 230–270; Pócs, “Vampire”; Hristoforova, Kolduny i žertvy. 158 See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 569–570; Greenfield, Traditions, 77–81; Ferber, “Possession, Demonic” and “Demonic Possession.” According to the prescription of Rituale Romanum (1614) the exorcist is directed to ask the devil if he is possessing through bewitchment (Walker, Unclean Spirits, 9). 159 Greenfield, Traditions, 77–88; Papademetriou, “Exorcism, 302–370. There are traces of the tolerant outlook in the West up until the present, but in Orthodoxy it survived in a general and long-lasting manner. See the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards “folk” conceptualizations of the figure of the devil: Di Nola, Der Teufel, 345–349. On the appearance of folk devil figures (ghost-devils, nightmare-devils, etc.) in popular pamphlets in early modern England, see Millar, “Dangers of the Night.” The examples could be multiplied. 160 Papademetriou, “Exorcism,” 323.

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Christianity), and served to handle the tensions among members of small, self-sufficient, closed communities. According to its social anthropological interpretation, bewitchment was attributed to one of the members of their own community who played the role of perpetrator or scapegoat in cases of damage, harm or disaster affecting the community.161 Traces of this collective mechanism have survived into the twentieth century in some highly traditional areas, including our research area in Gyimes and Csík. During our fieldwork we encountered several forms of witchcraft,162 while, at the same time, these systems and the various “popular” notions of witchcraft were accompanied by several different kinds of phenomena of demonic possession. In Orthodox areas of Southeast Europe, such as Greece, Bulgaria or Romania, in addition to witchcraft, other communal systems of social norms and sanctions existed, such as ideologies for explaining misfortune, supernatural causes and explanations for disease (besides divine punishment this could include causes such as offending against the taboos of fairies and the dead, or the action of disease demons).163 Here, even black magic could exist outside of the practice and ideology of witchcraft, within different frames as harmful magic without the support of a witchcraft ideology. (All of this was presumably also due to the fact that antiwitchcraft demonology had a lesser influence in these parts.164) The communities of Csík and Gyimes are positioned on the Eastern European border zone where areas affected and unaffected by the persecution of witches meet; this is also the border zone between the Orthodox (and Greek Catholic) faith on the one hand and Roman Catholicism on the other. As a result, in this area we may also encounter characteristics of both regions with regard to witches and witchcraft. Hungarian terms for witches such as boszorkány, boszorka were not universally known in this region (particularly in Gyimes I met people, both old and young, who had only ever read or heard these terms as a part of fairy tales). The concept of the witch, however, existed, and several mechanisms of witchcraft were organized around its supposed activity. 161 For the witch concept introduced by Evans-Pritchard and its application to early modern communities: Evans-Pritchard, “Witchcraft”; Macfarlane, Witchcraft; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. 162 On this, see Pócs, “Curse, Maleficium, Divination”; Györgydeák, “A rontás szociálpszichológiája”; Hesz, “The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative.” 163 For more on this with regard to fairies of the Balkans, see Pócs, Fairies and Witches and “Fairies.” 164 On this, see Pócs, “Hungary and Southeastern Europe, Witchcraft.”

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Individuals who applied or were believed to apply malevolent, “black” magic were referred to with terms such as gurucsás, guruzsló, fermekás, fermekás asszony, kantéros.165 Bewitchment itself was referred to with the words megcsinálás, megcsináltatás (“doing” someone or “having them done”), less frequently rontás – (bewitchment), as well as with the words gurucsa, fermeka, which are of Romanian origin with a similar meaning. Megcsinálás meant bewitchment performed by the speaker herself or himself, while megcsináltatás referred to bewitchment performed by specialists (cunning men/women). This also reinforces my conclusion drawn from my fieldwork – that in these cases bewitchment does not merely entail suspecting someone, but often the actual perpetration of magic with intent to cause harm. In other words, certain individuals did actually “do” their fellow creatures or “had them done” (not through occult means but by manipulating them with objects). It must be noted that specialists by the names of gurucsás, fermekás, etc., also referred to as tudósok, tudományosok (cunning men, cunning women) were not necessarily judged negatively; they were also considered capable of, and employed for, positive or ambivalent magic (particularly in the field of love magic), as well as of identifying and reversing bewitchment. All of these individuals, either as ordinary members of the community or as magical specialists, could become involved in the local mechanisms of witchcraft as persons accused of doing harm or perpetrating bewitchment. Thus, in the villages of Csík and Gyimes, bewitchment was attributed to a known individual who, it was suspected, had either performed it herself or persuaded a relevant specialist to perform it. A further local characteristic in the context of witchcraft is that its belief figure was rarely connected to the belief attributes of the generally known Hungarian witch166 (and if so, mainly with regard to the devil as helping spirit). Practically independently of this “human witch,” devoid of witch beliefs, people here also know of a demonic, nighttime witch whose figure and actions are strongly fused, according to accounts, with those of the nighttime assaults of lidérc, szépasszony or, for that matter, the devil himself (narratives hardly ever connected the two figures, except, on occasion, 165 See the detailed analysis of these terms in a study by György Takács, who distinguished four basic terms with regard to the villages of Gyimes and tied in their meanings with the various “witch functions”; he also analyzed the Romanian equivalents both of these and of the word “csinálmány” (Romanian fermeca, fermacat, făcatură, azuncăturată = “doing”). We know of similar terminology from Italy (fattura, fatturato = “doing,” “being done”) (Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 212). 166 See Pócs, Hiedelemszövegek, 283–384.

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in the context of the bewitchment of cows). This witch may be of a dual nature originally, but it is also possible that this is a secondary development after the demonic traits of the returning dead, lidérc and szépasszony were transferred to it. The living and the dead forms and doubles of the same witch cannot be distinguished as clearly as they can in the belief world of the surrounding peoples167 (or as in the cases of the lidérc/mora beings, fairies, or vampires found in this region). Nonetheless, the expression “to appear in the image of somebody” implies a bodily, physical double of the nighttime witch, which was commonly used in connection with the animal shapes of the witch in the area under research. For instance, according to the data of György Takács from Gyimesfelsőlok, witches walk about in the image of snakes, frogs, dogs, “in the image of the ugliest animal.”168 The frog or lizard of the witch is often interpreted as a double, especially in the case of the legend motif of symbolic abuse: “You are not beating her/him, she/he has a spirit, you see? You are beating up on the spirit”169 It remains to be determined whether the expression to appear “in the image of,” “in the shape of,” “in the person of” somebody, can be regarded as referring to the possession of doubles as a metaphoric reference to a distinctive emic category of possession. The nighttime witch merges or mingles with the figures of night demons and the assaulting evil dead quite a bit. They usually manifest the same methods of “possessing.” (“Lüdérc, szépasszony and the Satans […] old witches – they are all the same kind of thing.”170) Apparitions of the witch in nighttime imaginings, visions or dreams, not unlike poltergeists in character, bear the traits of possession by the dead. Demonic witches frighten and torment the living in human communities and houses in which they make their dominion. Accounts of such events are found in great numbers in the minutes of witchcraft trials held in Hungary,171 but were represented by few data in the present within our geographical area 167 On Southeast European two-souled witches and magicians, see Tolstoj and Tolstaja, “Zametki”; Vinogradova, Narodnaja demonologija, 289–301. 168 TGy Gyimesfelsőlok 1998. This metaphor was especially frequently used in the course of witch trials according to the transcripts of the trials, see Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 37–44. 169 TGy Gyimesbükk 2005. 170 Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 171 Just as in the whole of Central and Western Europe, cf., e.g., Bennet’s chapter on this in the context of English witchcraft trials, where she also refers to the merging and fusing figures of the nighttime witch and the ghost of folk belief (Bennet, “Alas, Poor Ghost!”). For similar data in Hungary, see, e.g., the examples in Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 37–72.

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of research. I heard many more examples of “calling out” (kihívás), being carried away (elragadás) and being carried off (meghordozás), all of which recall possession by the dead.172 A frequently heard narrative is that of being seated in a basket and being snatched and carried off, for example, somebody was carried from mountain to mountain, he lost his eyesight and his feet froze.173 (Both the motif of freezing and going blind refer to a supernatural adventure, symbolic death.) Most narratives of being carried off refer to being ridden (meglovagolás). A distinctive metaphor associated with the witch174 is possession by snatching, whereby the witch performing the snatching turns her victim into a horse. (Presumably this motif is related to the horse figure of mora/mara, etc., possessing demons: they “press” their victims in horse shape and turn them into their horses.175) Due to the existence of multiple witch figures and the mechanisms of witchcraft, notions of diabolic possession associated with witchcraft and with witches are highly heterogeneous. It was extremely common for persons affected by the suspicion of black magic to be defined as “walking with the devil,” i.e., as maintaining constant contact with and directed in their actions by the devil. People like this “go about with an evil spirit,”176 “deal with the devil,”177 “throw themselves to the devil who dictates, […] ‘Do it this way.’”178 Sometimes the term “possession” was also used in their context – “She does not fear God and has come to be possessed by the devil.”179 This usage actually refers to the Eastern European “permanently possessed” witch, certain Russian variants of which were described most plausibly by Olga Khristoforova, based on her fieldwork carried out between 1999 and 2005.180 These witches can send bewitchment, and their own possessing demons 172 Csíkjenőfalva 1998. 173 Salamon, “Gyimesi mondák,” 99–100. 174 In other words, as I mentioned above, it can be supposed that one of the original characteristics of mare/mora beings was the riding of the possessed. 175 See, e.g., Davies, “Hag-riding”; or Scandinavian mareritt: “mare-riding” (Tillhagen, “The Conception of the Nightmare”; Raudvere, Föreställningar om maran; Grambo, “Magical Riding”). 176 GyA and MN Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 177 Csíkjenőfalva 1998. 178 Ibid. 179 Gyimesközéplok 2007. 180 On the special formation of possession called poshibka or ikota found among the Russian Old Believer communities of the Upper Kama region, see Khristoforova’s book (Hristoforova, Kolduny i žertvy, 46–170) and her article (Khristoforova, “Spirit Possession”). On the permanent possession form called klikushestvo from both a nineteenth-century and a contemporary perspective, see Worobec, in this volume. On other permanently possessed individuals in Russia, their ambivalent role and appraisal, see Vinogradova, Narodnaja demonologija, 289–327; Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 106–107; Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, 240.

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onto others.181 Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian and Croatian witches also each have a type which is possessed by the devil or, as the belief narratives relate, the “evil spirit” or “devilish soul” or the devil makes its home inside them; it is from him that they gain not only their negative, but also their positive, e.g., their prophetic, gifts.182 These possessed individuals are not necessarily witches, but may be cunning men/women or seers regarded with ambivalence. This is in harmony with the fact that their possessing agents include, besides the Christian devil, popular non-Christian demon figures, possessing dead and “wandering souls.”183 The same applies in villages of Csík and Gyimes to the ambivalent activity of gurucsáló and tudományos who “walk with the devil”: due to their possession, they can have the qualities of seers or prophets (their initiation is similar to the ambivalent cunning men/women of Hungarian belief legends, e.g., they need to swallow a wasp or a fly, which is a positive and a negative (diabolic) variant of the possessing spirit; c.f. Beelzebub as a fly).184 Several data items testify that people can not only turn ördöggös, ördöngös, ördögies (diabolic) – they can become altogether identical with the devil – they become devils, they become devil-like; “the witch appears as a devil.” 185 This witch, who had become identical with the devil, performs his/her acts not only with the help of the devil, but as the devil incarnate.186 Employing helping spirits is also something that narratives associate with individuals of this kind – in every community we examined, there were popular stories about men and women who kept a helping frog or, less commonly, a snake tied around their waist or a dog, cat, a small devil 181 There are data for this kind of Hungarian conceptualizations of witchcraft from elsewhere, too: see, for instance, bodily diabolic possession caused by bewitchment at Aranyosszék: Komáromi, Rontás és társadalom Aranyoszéken, 130. Cf. what I have written above about bewitchment being sent. 182 Cf. the bibliographic items in note 159. 183 Cf. in this context the fact that the positive, divining faculties of people under diabolic possession and their ambivalent appraisal by others, as well as the related practice of discretio spirituum, are motifs that occur continually in all the relevant Western medieval sources, as well as in the practice of exorcism (on this question, see note 5.). The desire to distinguish between spirits could perhaps based on the general European ambivalence of the beliefs of cunning men/women, holy people, and seers (see, e.g., on the ambivalence of the helping spirits of an eighteenth-century Swedish folk healer: Edsman, “A Swedish Female Folk Healer”). 184 On Hungarian legends on cunning men/women, see Pócs, Hiedelemszövegek, 455–509. 185 DA and HÁ Csíkjenőfalva 1997. 186 All of this is also characteristic of the figure of the Hungarian boszorkány (witch), particularly to the East of the River Tisza): witches are here called ördög, rosszak, gonoszok (devil, bad ones, evil ones): we see numerous examples of the same in the documents of Hungarian witchcraft trials: Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 41–44.

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(paratika), and who use these helpers to “send” bewitchment (particularly in order to procure other people’s milk yield – the “sent” frog will suck the neighbor’s cow clean and thus increase the master’s milk yield.187 Their figures are associated at the level of textual representation with a popular (nondemonological) variant of the pact with the devil: someone who walked with the devil “did not believe in God and gave himself to the devil.”188 The motif of selling the soul appears in these narratives in the sense of a medieval Byzantine devil’s pact legend: at the cost of selling the salvation of his soul, the individual who keeps a “devil servant” will become successful and rich in this life.189 Further motifs known from the folklore of Orthodox South Slavic nations, Romanians and Russians, include a diabolic helping spirit such as a snake, frog, or lizard, coming to possess its master, with whom it may even have sexual intercourse and establishes an alliance. Sexual intercourse with the devil may in itself constitute initiation into devilish knowledge – in this sense a person who has intercourse with the devil becomes a witch.190 The latter motifs are not known in Gyimes or Csík (in this sense I have no data for possession by the lidérc in this location).191 Contrary to the Russian individuals described by Olga Khristoforova and Christine Worobec who consider themselves possessed and, through their possession, cause bewitchment, in the regions under consideration here, at the time of our collection they only used the term metaphorically – the figures of these “possessed” persons were not part of any functioning mechanisms of witchcraft. The idea of the pact with the devil is also represented by orally transmitted narratives only (in folklore narratives we come across certain demonological motifs of a witches’ Sabbath such 187 For a large number of these narratives, see Takács, Kantéros, lüdérc, rekegő, 94–100. 188 CsB Hidegség 2005. 189 Paper on versions of this legend at Kostelek: Győrfy, “‘Azok ingyen nem dolgoznak!’” 190 For data from Russia and the Balkans, see Novičkova, Russkoj demonologičeskij slovar’, 289–327; Muşlea and Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului, 173; Zečević, Mitska biča, 11; Lang, “Samobor,” 2; Marinov, “Narodna vjara,” 214; Pócs, “The Popular Foundations of the Witches’ Sabbath”, 347–352. On the Great Plain of Hungary this occurs in the form of a sexual relationship with the helping spirit (chicken or snake) form of the lidérc (nightmare demon) but remains unrelated to witchcraft (Pócs, Hiedelemszövegek, 216–240). 191 This is known as a legend motif in other Hungarian areas, too (Pócs, Hiedelemszövegek, 216–240). In early modern documents of witch hunting, as well as the demonological literature on the subject, we are equally likely to come across the notion of possession by the witch’s familiars and helping animals; while the possibility of sexual relations with the possessing or helping devils became a cardinal question, as I have already indicated in the context of the nightmare and incubus demons (see Stephens, Demon Lovers, 58–85; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 626–627; Millar, “Dangers of the Night ”).

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as flying on witch’s fat, on a broomstick, on the backs of animals or in a barrel to the witches’ Sabbath, eating summer fruits in winter, etc.192). This, however, as I have already mentioned in the context of devil beliefs, does not mean that doctrines on the devil’s pact from Western demonology had any particular influence on the witchcraft phenomena of this region. Below the surface of these folklore texts, however, the belief in bewitchment and the bewitching capacity of individuals considered as devilish or witch-like persisted, keeping them alive as it were. This was also connected to ideas of demonic or diabolic possession, and served as an alternative, possession-type explanation for the assumed methods and outcomes of bewitchment. One such idea was that witches were able to pass on the devilish influence they had undergone: they could send bewitchment to others; indeed, they themselves acted, through their “devilish” nature, as possessors, and thus had a negative influence on their environment.193 Bewitchment by means of sending helping animals (in order to snatch the milk yield) seemed at the time of our fieldwork to be merely a narrative motif and did not constitute the basis of lived belief. What was, however, surrounded by living faith were the views related to the negative ambiance spread by people who walk about with the devil. One woman at Csíkkarcfalva used to “walk about with the devil,” and brought trouble to every house she entered.194 Her own homestead was a place that all people shunned: “They live there, just down the street … If I go into the courtyard, I must leave right away. It makes me so tense … I feel disgusted … I just have to get out of there. The devil somehow, you know, just got in there.”195 A similarly widespread belief surrounded the practice of placing bewitching objects (gurucsa, fermeka) in the living space of the assaulted individual (in their bed, under their doorstep, where they would regularly walk, etc.). This could be one or a combination of several different materials and objects, or things like the witch’s hair or bodily secretions left behind. This could have an explanation related to diabolic possession, but in another 192 See Gerlach, “Hexe.” 193 Daniel Walker believes that the idea of sending a possessing spirit is the invention of clerical demonology (Walker, Unclean Spirits, 7–10), others consider it an idea with its origins in folklore (see the literature of the previously mentioned Eastern European “permanently possessed,” as well as Greenfield, Traditions, 77–81; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 569–572; Ferber, “Possession, Demonic”). Based on examples of African and Indian witchcraft (Middleton, “The Concept of Bewitching”; Epstein, “A Sociological Analysis”) we may judge it to be a universal idea of bewitchment and possession. 194 GyA Csíkkarcfalva 1996. 195 Csíkkarcfalva 1996.

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interpretative frame it was seen as bewitchment. A third explanation also appeared in a similar context – a curse. (Possession caused by a curse – as a general European belief – could be secondarily connected to notions of diabolic,196 but it also appears in the possession theories of both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church.197) If a family finds that their affairs as a family and a household are constantly failing, if their family life is one of constant struggle and misfortune, that family has been cursed or bewitched, or “there are devils there, and they destroy things so you cannot finish what you’ve started.”198 Another way of speaking about bewitchment was, “they send a devilishness to the house.”199 Or: If I want to bewitch someone, then in the morning when the sun is rising I cross myself three or four times one after the other and say that God should take the animal of my comrade, or something like that. […] but they say that you have to cross yourself three times one after the other so that my curse should affect the other person.200 The rather malleable nature of the notion of possession, fusing with bewitchment, is illustrated by a narrative collected by József Gagyi at Homoródalmás, whereby the “csináltató” (bewitching) woman sent possessing spirits onto somebody. These wanted to “rule” over her, but she defended herself, and during their battle they beat her “blue and green.”201 A conversation I myself had at Csíkszenttamás in 1998 was also instructive in this regard. I talked to a woman who had formerly been possessed and who believed that the devil had possessed her, partly as a bewitching “gurucsa” which placed colored pieces of thread in her way (and she already knew which of her neighbors to accuse of this), and partly through the bright ball (ball lightening?) which had appeared in her room and in which she thought to have seen the devil taking shape. Upon this, she produced the depressive 196 See Petzoldt, “Besessenheit,” 79; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 602–610; Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People,” 103; Labouvie, “Verwünschen und Verfluchen.” 197 It even appears in a similar fashion in witchcraft outside of Europe, too, as an alternative to causing harm by occult means or with objects (Lewis, Religion in Context, 61). According to Rodewyk’s Roman Catholic handbook (Rodewyk, Die dämonische Besessenheit, 128), possession may be a consequence of parental curses – this corresponds to contemporary Orthodox views as I was told by a Romanian monk at Maroshévíz (Topliţa, jud. Harghita) in 1996 (I thank Tünde Komáromi for interpreting). 198 Gyimesközéplok 2003. 199 Ibid. 200 FZ and VA Csíkjenőfalva 1996. 201 Gagyi, “Ica,” 346–347.

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symptoms she had learned from cases of clerical exorcism (melancholy, a “dark” feeling, longing for death, suicidal thoughts) and finally, as a result of drinking a little bit of holy water every day given to her by an Orthodox monk, finally the possessing devil left her body in the shape of a snake exiting through her mouth. Here, as in other areas of Transylvania, as well as communities of the Partium and of the Hungarian communities of the Sub-Carpathian region, bewitchment and unwitching were not only associated with witches and cunning men/women but were also practiced through curses and blessings “sent” by (Orthodox) priests and monks, as part of systems of ordeals. “It was left to the Good God, it is the Good God […] who can see who had done us harm” – as one of my informants from Csíkkarcfalva explained to me in 1998.202 Cases of “being done” related by participants of ordeals by the Orthodox clergy also indicate that curses, bewitchment, and possession may be alternative methods of causing harm. There are many stories which indicate that a curse “sent” by a monk was actually the transmission or “sending on” of an assault by the devil. According to an account from Csíkszenttamás, for instance, the kaluger (Romanian “monk”) “does not act by the power of God, but lets the devil loose on a person, to torment them and make them suffer.”203 According to data from Csík, objects affected by a priest’s curse can also transmit possession to humans. A woman from Csíkjenőfalva told me that she wore a headscarf that incited by someone the priest was said “to have served Mass on” (i.e., had a curse put on it), so “the curse was sprinkled” on the scarf; as long as she wore that on her head, she “felt such a temptation, such a pressure. Some sort of a supernatural being ruling her.”204 In connection with conceptualizations of possession by the witch we cannot speak about possession experiences, much rather about narratives of legends reflecting clichéd, not necessarily local, views.205 Accounts of possession by the night-witch were greatly outnumbered by comparison to the large number of accounts of possession by the dead and lidérc/ nightmare phenomena; beliefs in the figure of the human witch as an 202 For a detailed description of this system in the villages of Csík County, see Györgydeák, “A rontás szociálpszichológiája”; Pócs, “Curse, Maleficium, Divination.” On witchcraft in Gyimes, see Hesz, “The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative”; Takács, “Kantéros, gurucsás.” 203 MÁ 1998. 204 Csíkjenőfalva (“supernatural being” was the informant’s own usage). 205 Such are, for example, the legends of saddling, turning into a horse; in relation to the entire country, see Pócs, Hiedelemszövegek, 320–337.

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agent of possession proved to be much more vivid. However, even these are merely alternatives to the much more significant explanations of misfortune related to bewitchment and curses. Nonetheless, we may discern a tendency according to which the beliefs and practices of witchcraft in the rural communities under study, despite the fact that the influence of witch hunting demonology has not reached this region, have become strongly demonized, have been saturated by the very intensive local beliefs in the devil and thus, all forms of misfortune and harm could be explained by, attributed to diabolic possession. After the detailed discussion of demonic spirit possession I do not have room for the analysis of further categories of possession, however, a short summary is necessary to round out the picture of local possession phenomena.

Illness demons In Orthodox Eastern Europe beliefs in certain illness demons were still alive in the twentieth century (Russian fever demons, Romanian, Serbian cholera demons, evil eye as a demon entering the head, etc.).206 From the point of view of the current study this is a relevant question, because, as I have discussed above, one of the (temporally) distant roots of Christian exorcisms of the devil goes back to the Babylonian (and the historically related Hebrew and Greek) practice of illness demons. Illness demons that possess humans are also considered to be the ancestors of the Christian Satan (in part Christ’s exorcisms also concerned illness demons).207 Traces of some of these can also be found in the textual motifs of some exorcisms and benedictions known from the Middle Ages.208 Fragments of texts that were verbatim passed on through clerical literacy (healing monks) also made their way into the charming practice of village healers. Elements “learned” from exorcising priests were also present in their gestures: the sign of the cross, “blowing” (insufflatio), the laying on of the hand, etc. Thus, healing charms are often closely related to Church exorcism and benediction texts, while at the same time retaining traces of ideas about 206 For example, on Russian fever demons, see Ryan, “Ancient Demons”; on the confinement demons of the Balkans: Gaster, “Two Thousand Years.” 207 See note 112 for bibliographic detail. 208 See, for example, the exorcism of the demon body part by body part: Chave-Mahir, in this volume.

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illness demons and diabolic possession. These antidemon charms were still alive in the healing practices of Gyimes in the recent past, however, this does not mean living belief in illness demons that possess the body. Presumably, it is due to Romanian influences that we could find belief legends that attest to knowledge of the cholera demon (csuma) in Csík and Gyimes as well as data about the protective practices that defend the community. However, there are no data about illness demons as possession agents or as causing illnesses.209 In charms that were still being used until recently by healers, csuma and along with it gelka (collective name for throat and neck ailments), St. Anthony’s fire (erysipelatous), evil eye and other illnesses appear as personified demons possessing the body.210 These “textual beings,” however, have no connection to local demon beliefs, thus, we cannot speak of living possession concepts in relation to them; rather, they throw light upon the multidimensional history of the Christian concept of Satan and diabolic possession.211 (This is characteristic of the Hungarian case; the situation was different in places where healing charms were also being used for expelling locally known illness demons.)212

Divine possession and mediumism The category of divine possession is debated. It is also categorized as “enthusiasm,” “ecstasy,” “rapture” (raptus), “inspiration” (prophecying), unio mystica, or is included within the category.213 In addition, there are also overlaps with mediumism which is generally discussed separately from possession. Without going into questions of classification here, summing up briefly what I have found in the regions under consideration, it can be stated that divine possession as a definitive, independent category appeared in the beliefs of healers, holy women, and seers; seen as divine calling and inspiration, or as the transmission of God’s messages, or bringing news from the otherworld: they thus appeared as borderline cases in the direction of mediumism. József Gagyi reports from Udvarhelyszék that certain holy women tell fortunes in a semi-trance state, convey their otherworldly 209 Pócs, Hiedelemszövegek, 249–256. 210 The most important publications of charms from Gyimes and Csík: Kallós, “Ráolvasás”; Takács, Elindula Boldogságos Szép Szűz Mária. 211 See Ohrt, “Über Alter und Ursprung der Begegnungssegen”; Pócs, “Church Benedictions” and “A szent és a gonosz találkozása.” 212 For example, on Russian fever demons, see Ryan, “Ancient Demons.” 213 See, e.g., Benz, “Ergriffenheit und Besessenheit”; Mühlmann, “Ergriffenheit und Besessenheit”; Dinzelbacher, Vision und Magie.

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experiences in their own words, for example, their battles with witches, or the suffering of Christ.214 Divine and demonic possession (obsessio) appear as alternatives among beliefs about those walking with God or the devil, and even in some personal accounts. Notions of being initiated by the saints, Christ or the Virgin Mary appeared in stories about cunning men/women and seers, which could be coupled with beliefs about their ambivalent nature and about gaining knowledge from the devil. Some personal accounts of experiences also speak of being carried away by the saints or the Virgin Mary, along with ideas about being snatched by the devil. According to the account of the possessed person from Csíkszenttamás mentioned above, she was carried away to above the treetops both by Satan and the Virgin Mary. In her account, one was a “dark” and the other a “light” experience. In my opinion, these dualities are in part an expression of the God–Devil battle that has such a significant place in the worldview of the people of Csík and Gyimes. It seems then that (with the exception of the data on mediumism) by comparison with the rich tradition of diabolic possession, divine possession as an independent category barely appears. It is much more likely to be present in the mentality of the communities under study as a counterpoint, an alternative. As for mediumism, accounts recalling the activities of a mondóasszony (a seer of the dead) of Csíkszentdomokos clearly refer to it, or to its ritually induced form215: the woman “hid” (she fell into trance) as she was looking into the corner, i.e., focusing on a single point216 and the “spirits entered her and prevailed upon her to tell what they had said to her,” or the dead person spoke through her.217 In this instance, we are definitely dealing with spirits entering a human being, however, the local community does not consider it to be a case of possession. (In as much as they are familiar with the expression or concept of spirit possession they associate it with assaulting malevolent beings.) It is hard to draw any conclusions from the scant data, but perhaps it can be stated that here mediumism seems to be a category independent of conceptualizations of possession. As far as etic categories are concerned: 214 Gagyi and Dyekiss, Hiedelemszövegek Székelyföldről, 505–626. This is similar to the practice of fairy magicians of the Balkans. Cf. Vivod, “The Fairy Seers” and “Az utolsó látomás.” 215 Crapanzano, “Spirit Possession,” 376. 216 Just as it has been noted about other seers as well: she looked into a corner, looked down fixed on a single point, etc. See Keszeg, Peti, and Pócs, Álmok és látomások, 352–409. 217 Csíkkarcfalva 1996.

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besides mediumism, in some cases it is possible to classify these phenomena as possession by the dead or as divine possession.

Conclusion My findings – due to the limitations discussed in the introduction – are only provisional. The great majority of my data from Gyimes and Csík indicate the presence of spirit possession in the broad sense, i.e., the phenomenon of obsessio/circumsessio, although notions of concrete bodily possession (possessio) also appear sporadically among them, as if by chance. (To some degree this is accidental: both in other areas of Transylvania farther away from Gyimes and in neighboring Romanian communities the phenomena of possessio are present with greater frequency, but by comparison with obsessio it is not of central significance there, either.) The emic categories of possession – besides cultural factors – are basically determined by individual body and soul experiences and feelings. Unfortunately, however, I had little opportunity to hear direct accounts by the “possessed” or those who were witnesses to such events, and even those were for the most part speaking about bodily experiences, spiritual states (bodily and spiritual “journeys,” raptures, shape-shifting) metaphorically, or concretely about demons attacking from the outside, however, never about spirits entering the body (with the exception of a few cases of mediumism). It also seems certain that techniques of encounters with the spirit world (imagined, in a dream, in a half-awakened state or possibly in a trance state) blend together at the narrative level, there is no meaningful difference between them, which at the same time indicates that the trance state is not a defining feature of these encounters.218 The data point to concepts that only overlap in some of their features and are more or less closely connected to each other while they can have many different interpretations both at the individual level and on the part of Church officialdom. As for conceptualizations surrounding individual possessing agents, it can be stated in general that there is no emic concept for “possessing demon.” They interpret phenomena related to this in different conceptual frameworks, and the individual experiences, emotions and interpretation inducing the concepts move on a broader scale that includes many individual 218 Trance does have such a role in possession cults and mediumism. Trance as a defining feature: Bourguignon, A Cross-Cultural Study.

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variations. All possession phenomena have an alternative “religious” and a personal interpretative framework that go beyond possession. This is most noticeable in the case of witchcraft: witchcraft as “the attribution of misfortune to occult human agency”219 is more widely spread than possession phenomena (and presumably only acquired possession-related interpretations secondarily). We can draw similar conclusions in connection with the other etic categories of possession discussed here only very briefly (divine possession, mediumism). Despite the above-mentioned connections, these can be interpreted outside the framework of demonic possession. Furthermore, the boundaries between these categories are permeable; they blend with other areas of ecstatic spirituality220 (heavenly visions, unio mystica, divine inspiration, etc.). These loosely connected phenomena are only brought together by the etic category of spirit possession, and within that only the obsessio/circumsessio version is applicable to them. The most important connecting thread on the one hand is possession by the dead, as the archaic basis and mental model of all kinds of demonic possession (in Europe?). On the other hand, we find diabolic possession which has overwritten and reinterpreted all formations of demonic possession, and also served as a basis for certain conceptualizations of divine possession, under the influence of God–Satan dualism. Besides this, it was the main cause of the unification of the earlier antidemon, preventive practices, of their transformation into “exorcism.” The categories of the devil and of possession inspired by Church demonology “taught” certain concepts that only existed in clerical literacy, for example, with regard to theological ideas that were articulated from the twelfth century on with regard to the physiological body–soul model, for the location of deities and demons within the body, and the possession of the body and soul. The cleansing rituals and prayers of deliverance of the Church (which were also used to expel the devil from the body), and the exorcism practice (which was not only used for expelling the devil from the body), spread the idea of bodily possession even where it had not been present (assaulting dead, nightmare phenomena). Similar processes may also have taken place in connection with divine possession: it is not impossible that the notion of the deity located in the body (head, heart)221 was spread by the theological notion and practice of discretio spirituum. (Scholars researching lived religion may have reached similar conclusions 219 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 519. 220 Sarah Ferber uses the term in her chapter in this volume; she also proposes its extension to include all areas of ecstatic spirituality. 221 See on this question: Caciola, Discerning Spirits.

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elsewhere, too. For example, according to Erik Midelfort, in the southern German provinces where pamphlets and wonder books less commonly spread news of famous cases of exorcism, notions of diabolic possession as bodily possession were much less common among local notions of illness.222 If we regard possessio as concrete bodily possession to be the basic category, the answer to the question whether in this region there is an emic category of possession as an independent, coherent religious/cultural formation has to be no. Possession is an etic category based on Christian clerical ideas that originate in Christ’s exorcism cases that seem to be sporadically occurring “learned” notions. There is, however, the emic category that corresponds to obsessio, that of the notion of demonic temptation and assault (and in the place of the demonological notion of the pact with the Devil) with the devil the characteristic Eastern European concepts of dual beings, such as those “walking with the devil,” transforming into the devil or those who are permanently possessed). This interpretation fits with what Lauri Honko concluded from his study of folk pathology: he regarded obsessio to be the basic category, and saw possessio as the narrower category within it.223 Finally, I refer to the research of Bettina Schmidt, who discusses the conceptual categories of possession in relation to current Brazilian Christian (Pentecostal) possession practices and the local Umbanda cult. Her findings support my views: although possession exists, it has no emic concepts, definitions; for this reason – as she argues – etic possession categories should in theory be rejected, she nonetheless uses them because they are indispensable for research.224 It is clear that we cannot make too many generalizations on the basis of a regional case study. As long as a possession-centered study of vampirism225 (that is unknown in Csík and Gyimes, but quite common in most parts of Eastern Europe) is not undertaken, or the concepts and practices of divine possession and possession cults226 in the Balkans do not become the subject of more thorough investigations we cannot draw any general conclusions 222 Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People,” 118–119. 223 Honko, Krankheitsprojektile, 29. 224 See Schmidt, in this volume. 225 The notion of the corpse possessed by the devil has an important role in the vampire beliefs of the Balkans which is a distinctive “folk” version of the notion of bodily possession. For a short summary with bibliographic references to some important overviews, see Pócs, “Vampire.” 226 The study of the possession cults of the Balkans (nestinarstvo, rusalia/rusalje, căluşarii) was on a lesser scale, it is being revitalized currently (nowadays we can mostly register their folklorization or the process of festivalization in the case of căluşarii), or their elements become part of new spiritual movements (in the case of nestinarstvo).

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about possession phenomena of this region. Still, I hope that my incomplete study may be one step towards a realistic and comprehensive picture.

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Peuckert, Will-Erich. “Das Zweite Leib.” In Verborgenes Niedersachsen. Untersuchungen zur niedersächsischen Volkssage und zum Volksbrauch, 11–35. Göttingen: O. Schwartz, 1960. Piaschewski, Gisela. Der Wechselbalg: ein Beitrag zum Aberglauben der nordeuropäischen Völker. Breslau: Maruschke & Berendt, 1935. Pócs, Éva. “A szent és a gonosz találkozása (Begegnungssegen)” [Encounters of saint and evil (Begegnungssegen)]. In Ráolvasások A. Gyűjtemény legújabb korból (1851–2012), 709–794. Budapest: Balassi, 2014. —. Between the Living and the Dead. A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999. —. “Church Benedictions and Popular Charms in Hungary.” In The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe, edited by James Kapaló, Éva Pócs, and William Ryan, 165–197. Budapest–New York: CEU Press, 2013. —. “Concepts of Time and Space in European Werewolf Mythologies.” In Space and Time in Europe: East and West, Past and Present, edited by Mirjam Mencej, 89–104. Ljubljana: Oddelek za etnologiju in kulturno antropologijo, Filosofska fakulteta, 2008. —. “Curse, Maleficium, Divination: Witchcraft on the Borderline of Religion and Magic.” In Beyond the Witch Trials 2: Popular Magic in Modern Europe, edited by Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies, 174–190. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. —. Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe. Folklore Fellows’ Communications 243. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1989. —. “Fairies: Small Gods, Small Demons. Remnants of an Archaic Fairy Cult in Central and South-Eastern Europe.” In Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: Small Gods at the Margins of Christendom, edited by Michael Ostling, 255–276. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. —. “Feenflug und Hexenflug in Mittel-Südosteuropa. Ritus und Mythos, Erlebnis und Bericht.” In Fliegen und Schweben. Annäherung an eine menschliche Sensation, edited by Dieter R. Bauer and Wolfgang Behringer, 146–167. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997. —. Hiedelemszövegek [Belief texts]. Budapest: Balassi, 2012. —. “Hungary and Southeastern Europe, Witchcraft.” In Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition II., edited by Richard M. Golden, 526–530. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006. —. “Kereszteletlenek, zivatardémonok és az ördög” [Unbaptized ones, storm demons and the devil]. In Magyar néphit Közép- és Kelet-Európa határán. Válogatott tanulmányok I, 64–77. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2002.

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—. “Lidérc” [Nightmare]. In Magyar Művelődéstörténeti Lexikon. Középkor és kora újkor, edited by Péter Kőszeghy, vol. 7, 22–23. Budapest, Balassi, 2007. —. “Nature and Culture – ‘the Raw and the Cooked’: Shape-shifting and Double Beings in Central and Eastern European Folklore.” In Tierverwandlungen. Codierungen und Diskurse, edited by Willem de Blécourt and Christa Agnes Tuczay, 99–134. Wien: Francke Verlag, 2011. —. “The Popular Foundations of the Witches’ Sabbath and the Devil’s Pact in Central and Southeastern Europe.” Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 37 (1991/1992): 305–370. —. “Possession Phenomena, Possession-systems: Some East-Central European Examples.” In Communicating with the Spirits: Demons, Spirits, Witches 1, edited by Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs, 84–154. Budapest: CEU Press, 2005. —. “Rites of Passage after Death.” In Body, Soul, Spirits and Supernatural Communication, edited by Éva Pócs, 130–160. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019. —. “Tér és idő a néphitben” [Space and time in folk belief]. In Magyar néphit Közép- és Kelet-Európa határán. Válogatott tanulmányok I, 9–39. Budapest– Pécs: L’Harmattan, and PTE Néprajz Kulturális Antropológia Tanszék, 2002. —. “Tündéres and the Order of St Ilona or, Did the Hungarians Have Fairy Magicians?” In Folk Religion and Folk Belief in Central-Eastern Europe [Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 54/2], edited by Éva Pócs, 379–396. Budapest: Akadémiai, 2008. —. “Vampire.” In Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, edited by Richard M. Golden, vol. 4, 1157–1159. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006. —. “‘We, Too, Have Seen a Great Miracle’: Conversations and Narratives on the Supernatural among Hungarian-Speaking Catholics in a Romanian Village.” In Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief, edited by Marion Bowman and Ülo Valk, 246–280. Sheffield–Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2012. —. “World View, Witch Legend, Witch Confession.” In Myth and Mentality: Studies in Folklore and Popular Thought, edited by Anna-Leeana Siikala, 107–121. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002. Primiano, Leonard Norman. “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.” Western Folklore 54 (1995): 37–56. Puchner, Walter. “Beiträge zum thrakischen Feuerlauf (Anastenaria/Nestinari) und zum thrakischen Karnevalszene (Kalogeros/Kuker/Köpek-Bey). Anmerkungen zur Forschungsgeschichte und analytische Bibliographie.” Zeitschrift für Balkanologie 17 (1981): 47–75.

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Ranke, Friedrich. “Alp.” In Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, edited by Eduard Hoffman-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, vol. 1, 281–305. Berlin–Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1927. —. “Mahr und Mahrt.” In Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, edited by Eduard Hoffman-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, vol. 5, 1508–1511. Berlin–Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1933. Ranke, Kurt. Indogermanische Totenvereherung I. Der dreißigste und vierzigste Tag im Totenkult der Indogermanen. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1951. Raudvere, Catharina. Föreställningar om maran i nordisk folktro. Lund: Religionshistoriska avdelningen, Lunds universitet, 1993. Rivière, Janine. “‘Hag-riding’: Demons of Desire or Symptoms of Disease? Medical Theories and Popular Experiences of the ‘Nightmare’ in Pre-Modern England.” In Magical and Sacred Medical World, edited by Éva Pócs, 2–36. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019. Rodewyk, P. Adolf, SJ. Die dämonische Besessenheit in der Sicht des Rituale Romanum. Aschaffenburg: Paul Pattloch Verlag, 1963. Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2006. Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich. Ephialtes, eine pathologisch-mythologische Abhandlung über die Alpträume und Alpdämonen des klassischen Altertums. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1900. Röhrich, Lutz. “Az ördög alakja a népköltészetben” [The Devil in folklore]. Ethnographia 77 (1966): 212–228. Russel, Jeffrey Burton. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 1977. —. Satan: The Early Christian Tradition. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 1981. Ryan, William F. “Ancient Demons and Russian Fevers.” In Magic and the Classical Tradition, edited by C. H. Burnett, and W. F. Ryan, 37–58. London–Turin: The Warburg Institute, 2006. —. The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia. Trupp, Stroud, and Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999. Salamon, Anikó. Gyimesi csángó mondák, ráolvasások, imák [Legends, charms, prayers of the Csángós in Gyimes]. Budapest: Helikon, 1987. —. “Gyimesi mondák” [Legends from Gyimes]. In Mai népi hiedelmek, edited by László Kákosy, 65–154. Budapest: ELTE, 1975. Salló, Szilárd. “Rontók, jósok és gyógyítók a Gyimesekben” [Bewitchers, diviners and healers in Gyimes]. In Rontók, gyógyítók, áldozatok. Történetek

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és élettörténetek, edited by Vilmos Keszeg, 179–264. Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 2012. Scharankov, Emanuil. Feuergehen. Psychologisch-physiologische und historischgeographische Untersuchung des Nestinarentums in Bulgarien. Stuttgart: Hippokrates Verlag, 1980. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Les revenants. Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994. Schneeweiss, Edmund. Volksglaube und Volksbrauch. Serbo-kroatische Volkskunde I. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1961. Schürmann, Thomas. Der Nachzehrerglauben in Mitteleuropa. Marburg: Elwert, 1990. Schweighofer, Teresa C. M. “Herausschwören – bannen – austun.” International Journal of Philosophy and Religion 15/1 (2013): 140–150. Siikala, Anna-Leena. “The Siberian Shaman’s Technique of Ecstasy.” In Religious Ecstasy: Based on Papers Read at the Symposium on Religious Ecstasy Held at Åbo, Finland, on the 26th–28th of August 1981, edited by Nils G. Holm, 103–121. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1982. Sikimić, Biljana, and Petko Hristov, eds. Kurban in the Balkans. Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute for Balkan Studies, 2008. Simonné Pesthy, Monika. A csábítás teológiája. A kísértés fogalmának története az ókorban [The theology of seduction: The history of the concept of temptation in antiquity]. Budapest: Kairosz, 2005. Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit:. Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. —. “A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France.” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1996): 1039–1055. Stefanova, Ana. “Mythological Thinking and Archetypes in the Contemporary Bulgarian Nestinarski Ritual Complex.” Folklorica: Journal of the Slavic and East European Folklore Association 18 (2013): 66–98. Stemplinger, Eduard. Antiker Aberglaube in modernen Ausstrahlungen. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1922. Stephens, Walter: Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Stewart, Charles. Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. —. “Le Diable chez les Grecs à l’époque contemporaine: cosmologie ou rhétorique?” Terrain 50 (2008): 100–113.

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6

The Indigeneity of Spirit Possession A Contribution to Comparative Theory f Mary L. Keller

Keywords: spirit possession, agency, indigenous peoples, indigeneity, materiality, energy, chthulucene, climate change

Indigenous – [indu- in, within + gen, to produce or beget]. Born or produced naturally in a region. Indigeneity – the quality of being indigenous.

Bringing the concept of indigeneity to the comparative study of spirit possession requires significant framing. What is gained by arguing that indigeneity is foundational to spirit possession is worth the challenge.1 The significant presence of Indigenous peoples in the study of spirit possession coupled with the current flourishing of scholarly attention on the critical and ecological insights of Indigenous traditions provides further impetus to theorize the indigeneity of spirit possession.2 This chapter offers a contribution to comparative theory of spirit possession arguing that the spatial and temporal aspects of the scene of spirit possession are best understood in terms of the indigeneity of spirit possession. Informed by critical Indigenous theory, this argument is meant to unsettle what David Chidester calls “imperial comparative religion,” a critique that is tightly woven in the fabric of Indigenous studies writ large.3 This chapter proceeds by defining terms related to the concept of indigeneity (the ecological meaning of indigenous, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Studies, and Indigenous orientations) and clarifying what indigeneity means for my purposes in the study of 1 The use of the capital “I” when referring to people who self-identify as Indigenous peoples reflects current usage in arenas such as the United Nations to indicate the political, cultural, and territorial claims under which disparate communities gather to voice their common concerns, as described in further detail in the chapter. Small “i” indigenous throughout the chapter indicates the ecological meaning of indigenous indicating a form of life that naturally belongs to a place. 2 For example, Grim, Encyclopedia of Religion, Beyond Primitivism. 3 Chidester, Empire of Religion.

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spirit possession at the ontological level and epistemological level. Next, I elucidate the horizontal, vertical, and temporal dynamics of the indigeneity of spirit possession, including the disregard that spirits show to modern boundaries of self and property. The temporality of spirit possession is argued to indigenize the present, restoring the central authority of the legacy of the land, thereby opposing modernity’s orientation to the future value of money. The conclusion takes on the larger conundrum of proposing the indigeneity of spirit possession at a time where earth’s climate volatility is taking on a spirit of its own that threatens the very possibility of anyone or anything being naturally at home.

Definitions: indigenous, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous studies, Indigenous orientations4 In ecological sciences, the word indigenous indicates that a plant, insect, or animal comes from an ecosystem. A cactus is indigenous to a desert having developed its niche in an arid ecosystem through eons of adaptations. The term “Indigenous Peoples” was first used by an international delegation of representatives who travelled to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in 1977, as chronicled by Chief Oren Lyons and John Mohawk in Basic Call to Consciousness.5 While the variety of international delegates were spokespersons for distinct communities, they strategically gathered under the name Indigenous Peoples to signal the strength of their global presence and their shared experiences of having been original people who underwent conquest on their homelands. They sought representation at the United Nations to counter their respective experiences of erasure and dismissal by national governments, and their 1977 efforts laid the foundation for the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), the first meeting of which happened at the United Nations in 2002. The very recent category of Indigenous Peoples refers neither to a new nor an old category of humans, but rather signals that we have entered a moment in time when humans are making meaning of their location in modernity by contrasting Indigenous cultural heritage to the heritage of those peoples who arrived with technologies and illness that created 4 The following section on Indigenous peoples and Indigenous religion is drawn from Keller, “Indigenous Religion.” 5 Mohawk, Basic Call to Consciousness.

Source: National Geographic

A global map of indigenous peoples

Figure 6.1 A global map of indigenous peoples

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asymmetries of power in the “contact zones” of European imperialism.6 The United Nations estimates 5,000 Indigenous groups composed of 390 million people are living in more than 90 countries on 5 continents, but the United Nations does not define what constitutes an Indigenous identity. Rather, on the basis of the shared experience of being clans, tribes, or nations with distinct, land-based ancestral lines that predate modernity, the UNPFII pairs self-identified Indigenous representatives with experts chosen by the United Nations to represent the region. The decade of 1995–2004 was declared by the United Nations as the “Decade of Indigenous Peoples,” and with many objectives for that decade unmet, 2005–2014 was declared the “Second Decade of Indigenous Peoples.” In 2007, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The scholarly field of Indigenous Studies includes Indigenous researchers and non-Indigenous researchers. The Indigenous Studies Group based at Georgetown University identifies 41 Indigenous studies departments worldwide. Major contributions from Indigenous studies have included theoretical and methodological arguments for community-based research methods meant to serve the needs and interests of Indigenous communities, as emphasized in the Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies.7 As epitomized in the titles Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader 8 and American Indian Thinking in a Linear World,9 the polyvalent field of Indigenous Studies is producing a critique of modernity that includes a moral call to recognize that Indigenous traditions provide a corrective to the worldview of modernity.10 Consistent with the critical angles delivered in Indigenous studies methods, I am arguing that a focus on the indigeneity of spirit possession promotes a critical corrective to the academic habits of not-thinking the human community’s relationship to ecology. 6 Pratt, Imperial Eyes. In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as a “space of colonial encounters, the space which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish on-going relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (p. 8). For a discussion of the difference between a subaltern identity and indigeneity, see Byrd and Rothberg, “Between Subalternity.” 7 Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith, Handbook of Critical. Within Indigenous studies is found a categorization among its scholars between Indigenous scholars and non-Indigenous scholars. I am a non-Indigenous scholar whose postcolonial and feminist concerns have taken root in a landscape with 12,000 years of Indigenous peoples in northwest Wyoming working to decolonize my thinking in religious studies and comparative theory aided by the critical perspectives of Indigenous cultures. 8 Barreiro, Thinking in Indian. 9 Fixico, The American Indian Mind. 10 Stamatopoulou, Indigenous Peoples’ Cultural Heritage

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Indigenous religion? Within the category of Indigenous peoples lies the fraught terrain of something that some people call Indigenous religions, though there are many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars who eschew the name religions as an imposition that represents an unwanted signification and inaccurate representation. A strategic response to this problem that allows us to describe the constitutive elements of Indigenous traditions (that often include spirit possession), is to follow the work of Charles H. Long, using a place-based and practice-oriented locative theory of religion, studying Indigenous religions as orientations. In his landmark text Significations, Long defines religion “as an orientation to the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”11 By defining religion as an orientation to the ultimate significance of one’s place, our scholarly attention shifts to the material relations of daily navigations and negotiations with natural resources by which a person develops their narration of belonging – of being recognized as significant kin in that place and time. So also, the emphasis includes navigating across symbolic landscapes with their axes of power such as caste, age, gender, and status or position within institutions of cultural authority. For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I will discuss Indigenous traditions (specific ceremonies and myths, for example) and Indigenous orientations (the apprehension of the cosmological meaning of being connected to place and interconnected in relationships of power gradients on the symbolic landscape). The methodological question shifts from asking what any community believes about spirit possession and instead hermeneutical questions frame research. How does spirit possession orient and/or disorient the community in the daily navigations and negotiations across geographical and symbolic landscapes, thereby delivering a coherent sense of the ultimate significance of one’s place in a world of agentive matter? Not only do Indigenous traditions provide overwhelming evidence that spirits are of ultimate significance to the community, but even more importantly is the consistent Indigenous orientation toward the created world as itself spirited with an energetic force that has the ambivalent power to heal and harm. That is, we have an entire shift in emphasis from focusing on the spirits of spirit possession toward seeing spirits as one element of a consistent and coherent symbolic system in which matter, including clouds, mountains, rivers, trees, prey, predators, and humans are spirited 11 Long, Significations, 7.

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with energetic power, for which a human holds ceremonial responsibility to know and balance. In Basic Call to Consciousness, John Mohawk writes: Ours is a Way of Life. We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested into matter – grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force that produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.12 This discussion of grass spirits performs the function of prioritizing spirit as an organizing force in an Indigenous orientation to the world. Spirit organizes a fundamental orientation that links the human to the spirits of grass, tree, mountain and wind and in this way an Indigenous orientation has built within it an ecological web of relations. An Indigenous orientation links personhood to ecology via the ceremonial work undertaken to navigate and negotiate with the powers of landscapes animated by spirited materiality. Grass implicates the human in a relationship of spirit to the physical world and seasonal transitions. United by this apprehension of spirit, a community navigates and adjudicates their dependency upon the ecosystems in which they live while moving through the seasons of the year and a lifetime. We turn now to the attributes of Indigenous traditions to examine further the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the comparative study of spirit possession. According to historian of religions Phillip Arnold in The Urgency of Indigenous Values and the Future of Religion, the major characteristics of Indigenous orientations include the following: – Attention to the genealogical connection of the people to the land and its spirits. – Attention to the proper food to be eaten and the ceremonial manner of gathering, preserving, and distributing the food for the common good. – The use of sacred stories that are received in dreams or other states to instruct humans on the proper responses to the sacred that will sustain the community. – An urgent need to cultivate the capacity to sense and communicate with the ancestors and other spiritual forces present but difficult to discern. – An overriding appreciation of the Earth as the sacred creation upon which all sustenance is found. 12 Mohawk, Basic Call to Consciousness, 85.

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– Ceremonial attention that tracks the elements responsible for human sustainability. – A sense that all illness is a message regarding the out-of-balance condition of the human to the cosmos. These elements are shared widely while also being articulated distinctly according to the geographical foundations of homelands, within unique languages, delivering dynamic and polyvariant knowledges and traditions. From these elements we see that a fundamental condition for Indigenous traditions and spirit possession traditions is an animated, connected, material world, in which humans participate in exchange relationships with spirited, energetic matter. The claim is this – the characteristics attributed to Indigenous orientations resonate with the requisite conditions of spirit possession traditions. When we pay attention to the animated, energetic materiality of Indigenous traditions and note the spirited matter at the foundations of Indigenous traditions, we perceive the indigeneity of spirit possession landscapes; occurring in an energetic biosphere of animated matter with persistent cultural attention to the ancestors of times past, spirits reterritorialize place and time. Spirits indigenize place and time, irrupting into the fabric of cultural landscapes from which they take their being and overtake temporarily at least, the being of their hosts. Spirits indigenize matter and they indigenize the present. From the Shinto spirits of medieval Japan to pre-modern spirits in Italy, from the spirits of commodity fetishism in Bolivia to the spirit of dollars in Brazil, our apprehension of the indigeneity of spirit possession grounds analysis in the local agencies of spirited matter.13

Ontological and epistemological considerations Paying attention to the indigeneity of spirit possession does not produce ontologies of “earthy” spirits. Rather, it raises an important distinction between ontology and epistemology. Long14 describes a doubleness inherent in the indigenous – it’s ontological and epistemological doubleness. He articulates a distinction between Indigenous peoples on the one hand, that 13 Particularly interesting is Roca, “Money and Religion” for his study of living money (dinheiro vivo) 14 Long, “Indigenous People” and “A Postcolonial Meaning of Religion.”

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is, an ontological register with empirical realities, and on the other hand lies the indigenous as an epistemological potential that is fundamental to human being. First, Indigenous refers to “those peoples, societies, and cultures who were prior to the rise of the West and have in one way or another survived […] the ‘rise of the West,’ and second, the indigenous must be understood as the basis for a new epistemological stance in the world.”15 Regarding “new epistemological stance,” Long writes: “The crisis of self and meaning in the contemporary world is at the same time a crisis of the self, and the objects upon which the self must depend, and the exchange of these objects with others. […] It is at this point that the indigenous people of the world reveal a resource and invite a contemplation for a form of globalization conducive to a viable human world.”16 Should the larger human community learn from Indigenous peoples about a ceremonial attention to matter and the exchange of matter with each other, we would be developing a new epistemological stance in relationship to our co-emergence with earth’s spirited, energetic matter. While only some people are Indigenous people, all people are earthlings and thus indigenous to earth.17 It is the global heritage of a common human ancestry and the record of human nomadic movement that attests to a universal capacity to be indigenous as earthlings. The claim regarding the indigeneity of spirit possession for comparative studies applies to a universal epistemological condition among “humans as earthlings” that has specific ontological examples across continents and centuries wherein matter such as mountains, trees, rivers, and winds are understood to be animated by spirits, that sometimes require the use of human bodies for their needs. As characterized by Vincent Crapanzano in Imaginative Horizons, research frontiers such as spirit possession “mark a change in ontological register”18; we are writers of different ontological possibilities. Different worlds. We write from the common, spatialized base of Earth and a universal capacity to think in new territories, perhaps growing to feel at home in them. This is the doubleness of indigeneity applied to the comparative study of spirit possession. Long’s argument regarding the indigenous as a resource for a new epistemological stance does not stand alone. Current scholarship on the sentient life of plants and animals,19 as well as New Materialism and New 15 Long, “Indigenous People,” 178. 16 Ibid., 179. 17 Berque, “Indigenous Beyond Exoticism.” 18 Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons, 14. 19 Kimmerer, Indigenous Wisdom; Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees; Sarafina, Beyond Words; Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant.”

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Animism in philosophy and religious studies,20 and ecology’s turn to Indigenous knowledge (such as Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management) suggest a coming together of many fields with similar conclusions regarding the critical corrective needed in modernity’s understanding of matter. Noted across these fields is acknowledgement that Indigenous cosmologies provide valuable information for these corrections in understanding, and that a universal potential exists for humans to learn from such awareness. An energetic force that animates materiality is found at home in many academic discourses, and the attention to animated matter is expanding interdisciplinary models of personhood as a coadaptive, emergent component of ecological systems. Consequent with the revaluation of matter is the revaluation of persons as well. Nobody and no things, it turns out, are best understood as self-possessed or individual. The comparative study of spirit possession can now be seen to be migrating from the peripheries of academic studies toward a common ground where questions of non-autonomous models of human agency are flourishing. Cognitive Sciences are applied not only in neurology but also psychology, philosophy, and religious studies to identify neural pathways that constitute mental experience, including belief. The spectrum of ancestors, deities, and spirits found in possession studies resonate with media studies regarding the energies of the environment, technology, and symbolic constellations of power in cultural landscapes. Literary questions of voice, language, and audience employ the motifs of spirit possession such as speaking in tongues to describe expressions of a self who is not in control of his or her personhood, and thus internally heterogenous in minoritarian, feminist and postcolonial literatures.21 Matter and personhood are widely reconfigured as nonautonomous, energetic, ecologically embedded, emergent, and coadaptive entities, which is to say moved by the spirits of the material world.22 Let me note the following caveat. I am not claiming that other scholars have missed the characteristics of indigeneity that I am arguing are constitutive of spirit possession. I could cite the contributions of every author in this edited collection and hundreds of other researches for their specific insights 20 Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited; Astor-Aguilera and Harvey, Rethinking Relations and Animism; Crockett and Robbins, Religion, Politics, and the Earth; Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, New Materialism; Houtman and Meyer, Things; Rieger and Waggoner, Religious Experience. 21 Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues.” 22 Smith, The Self Possessed.

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on the relations between land, spirits, economies and ecologies.23 Rather, by contextualizing the current academic valences of “the indigenous,” and naming the indigeneity of spirit possession, this chapter contributes a meta-argument relevant to interdisciplinary and comparative theory with regard to spirit possession. By indexing the categories of indigenous, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous studies, and indigenous orientations relative to each other, this chapter creates an analytical frame for considering the indigeneity of spirit possession.

Place and time as constitutive of the indigeneity of spirit possession The problem of place from the perspective of an Indigenous orientation is that places, with their spirited energies, have power to either secure or deny sustenance. That is, places have power that brings human beings to experience the limits of human doing and making. Places are agential landscapes in this way, and it has been the close study of Indigenous traditions where scholarship has elucidated the serious attention of communities to the animated materiality and agency of landscapes.24 For heuristic purposes, we can examine three layers of spirit participation within an agentive landscape: chthonic, terrestrial, and celestial. The chthonic power includes creation stories with chthonic origins for the people; stories that orient the community to the ultimate significance of earth as the creative origin of existence. The life-giving chthonic myths are also often ambivalent, associated with burial and the need to bury people such that their spirits of the dead will not be wandering or threatening to the living. Terrestrial powers are conceived in terms of spirits of water, plants, animals, winds, and weather of all sorts. Celestial powers such as the sun, moon and constellations act at such a distance that humans often require terrestrial spirit intermediaries to convey ceremonial communication. The location of spirits in an agentive landscape, intervening in human lives, links the human body to the animated landscape because the spirits are cohabiting the chthonic, terrestrial and atmospheric realms. When we read accounts of spirit possession, it is most often the case that the scene has attracted the attention of witnesses due to the perceived 23 Schmidt and Huskinson, Spirit Possession and Trance; Smith, “The Current State of Possession.” 24 A classic anthropological discussion of agentive landscapes is Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places.

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levels of intensified energy – sometimes described as superhuman or supernatural. It is helpful to view the movement of spirits from their chthonic, terrestrial and celestial realms into their human hosts as energy exchange. The movement of water spirits as described by Plancke in her study of water spirits among the Punu of Congo-Brazzaville occurs as an exchange of energy from waters to the human body.25 The intervention of water spirits in a community resonates with the movement of energy found in the water cycle whereby liquid water is warmed to form gases that evaporate to skies, where condensation returns it to its liquid form. The movement of spirits across earth’s layers is of a kind with the most basic cycles of life.26 The spatial characteristics of spirit possession contain vertical as well as horizontal components.27 African diaspora traditions such as Candomblé mark this vertical dimension with a sacred tree on the terreiro grounds, whose roots are understood to reconnect the community to their African homelands, while their trunk centers ceremonial practice and their branches connect the humans to the movement of Yoruba orixás, including Xangô with his thunderbolts and Olorun, father of the skies. Horizontally, there is a semi-nomadic and reterritorializing component to spirit possession. Possessing spirits are residual spirits on the landscape who are not subject to laws of property (where those laws are in play), nor are the spirits subject to the manners of privacy in communal and semi-nomadic cultures. Unfettered in their movements, spirits can transgress territorial lines and displace the self or person if and when they “take place” in a human host. This place-taking transforms a person into an instrumental agency whereby their body has become an instrument for the voice of the spirit and a place – an agency – for doing business for another.28 The temporal elements of spirit possession entail the spirit as a witness from the past inserting itself into the present with an eye toward rectifying the future social trajectory. The insertion of the past in the overcoming of the host’s present has much in common with the scene of haunting as 25 Plancke, “The Spirit’s Wish.” 26 In his study of Braudel’s ecological perspective, sociologist James R. Hudson’s argument parallels this interpolation of ecological paradigms with the interpretation of spirits. He writes: “Braudel, in seeking to move beyond what he considered to be the limits of French historiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, embraced the essential principles of ecological theory in order to transcend what he identified as the barriers to a ‘histoire globale,’ ‘histoire totale,’ grounded in the social sciences” (Hudson, “Braudel in Ecological Perspective,” 148). 27 Material in this section draws from Keller, “Spirit Possession.” 28 Keller, The Hammer and the Flute.

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described by Avery Gordon in her important work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.29 While the past erupts in the present when an ancestor, for example, possesses a human, an ethical demand generally points to a corrected or balanced future. The spirit possession rectifies ill-begotten trajectories in the community, or lapsed morality between the people and their ancestors, thereby promising a return to proper relationships between the humans and their respective cosmos.30 The possession indigenizes humanity through this transformation, by rooting the human in an ethical interrelationship with the legacy of the land. This complex temporal dynamic grounds the present, consecrating the present in the historical legacy of the land, thereby indigenizing the present in a deep history of the region.31 Whether the scene of possession transpires when a young boy in a tree possesses a young girl in her garden in a contemporary English city32 or among the Hauka spirits from the colonial past possessing the bodies of the Songhay,33 these possessing spirits are from the past and lingering on the landscape, implicating the history of the land while complicating the presence-in-time of their human hosts. The possessing spirit links humans with the land’s past, thereby making the possessed person more deeply from the place. In contrast to the future-focused orientations of modernity, the indigeneity of spirit possession infuses the temporal component of spirit possession with the glacial weight of time past while instigating an ethical demand in the present directed to rebalancing the future. Indigeneity exerts a moral obligation to remember right relations with our exchanges with others, whereas modernity is driven toward the future realization of profit made possible by money’s future value. To recap, the characteristics that I am calling the indigeneity of spirit possession entail focus on the complex space/time nexus of spirit possession that includes horizontal and vertical exchanges of energy, nomadic reterritorialization of place and time when spirits from the land’s memorial legacy consecrate and indigenize the human host who is transformed as an instrumental agency in the deep ecosystem history of the region. 29 Gordon, Ghostly Matters. 30 A poignant and pragmatic article that elucidate local forest spirits battling against ecologically and socially destructive deforestation is Beban and Work, “The Spirits are Crying.” 31 See Engler, “Modern Times,” for a discussion of Bourdieu’s use of the term “consecration” with regard to government and identity. 32 Ryan, “Spirits as Hypotheses.” 33 Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories.

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Concluding thoughts on the indigeneity of spirit possession This chapter argues for the value of indigeneity as a category of analysis toward the goal of elucidating the nomadic and reterritorializing energy of spirits who take place and produce haunted time, thereby transforming place, self, and community relations. The indigeneity of spirit possession as an analytical frame ties the social dynamics of spirit possession to the animated agencies of ecosystems, upon which all ecological, technological, and symbolic systems depend. Integrating the data of spirit possession with an ecologically grounded worldview equips us with the analytical tools for better analysis of spirit possession. Shifting now to an application of theory regarding “the crisis of self” to which Long eluded, which is unfolding in a global, ecological crisis that David Orr calls “the long emergency,”34 the comparative study of spirit possession has something important to say about human agency and the long emergency. Coincident with the rise of an international Indigenous peoples movement is awareness that earth’s ecosystems are changing so rapidly in the face of climate change that plant and animal species once indigenous to places are now moving from their homes in search of new habitat that will accommodate them. Habitat itself has become ex-static, beside itself, on the move, thus buffeting and shifting all of the interconnected species. Butterfly migrations are altering in duration while trees are moving up mountain slopes in search of temperatures that accommodate their needs; symptoms of the changes happening worldwide.35 Thus we face the impossibility of being at home in habitats appropriate to evolutionary design. Something is afoot, and it can be understood as the Spirit of Climate Change. Fossil fuel emissions have overtaken what Wes Jackson details as the “genius of the place” – the particular genius, or genie, or djinn of distinct ecosystems, such that climate change is the superdjinn of our time. This is an epic, global overtaking. As with the scene of possession wherein the crisis makes clear what was otherwise unseen because the spirit transforms its invisible energy when it uses its medium to communicate its demands, we are witness to accelerating climate crises, making clear the agencies unleashed in oceanic depths now altering their ancient courses, in terrestrial droughts and floods, and in the atmosphere where the polar vortices now wander to Taiwan bringing snow, allowing for waves of warm air to wobble to the Arctic and 34 Orr, Dangerous Years, 110. 35 Zipf et al. “Climate Effects”; Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction.

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Antarctic. The Spirit of Climate Change moves and speaks through the entire biosphere because we ginned it up – it is the first ever human-conjured global spirit. Not only do we have the effects of global warming, such as the melting of ice on the poles of the earth, but these effects generate feedback loops that intensify the volatility of ecosystem uncoupling; the melting ice creates darker pools on the ice surface that increases the melting of the ice and this albedo effect feeds energy to the Spirit of Climate Change while rapidly diminishing circumpolar habitat. The irony is that I am arguing for the indigeneity of spirit possession at the moment when the first ever global spirit is making “being naturally at home” impossible. This situation is best understood, I argue, as the forgetting our indigeneity; forgetting our relationship to energetic exchange in an animated landscape. With delight in our clever harnessing of energy accomplished by steam and combustion engines, we did not balance our actions with understanding of the energetic elimination of waste therein entailed. Our voracious energy expenditures produced an apotheosis; we became gods of consumption and elimination, using levels of energy that would have killed any naturally occurring life form. My human body cannot process 31,000 calories of energy in a half hour, yet my body flies on the paved road burning a gallon of gas in a half hour, and it contains 31,000 calories. With this monstrous consumption, corporations drive daily spewing of 110 million tons of manmade global warming pollution every twenty-four hours, a scale that requires national and corporate policies to stop. Two centuries of accelerating expenditure have returned with a vengeance to make an ethical demand we have been too slow to accept. Our time is the time of modernity’s haunting, where past consumption of fossil fuels has produced a blanket of warming gasses that we cannot shove back into a lamp. When we picture catastrophic climate change as a genie that we have unleashed with our frantic rubbing of fossil fuel combustion engines, we deliver significant intellectual purchase on what lies ahead, even though what lies ahead is novel. We can anticipate that the Spirit of Climate Change will disorient humans, who will be trying to make sense of the ultimate significance of their place in a world experiencing “the new normal,” which is constituted by record-braking abnormalities. Weather, which has always been read in religious registers, from thunder birds to divine floods, is now even more volatile, animated by tipping points we do not understand and cannot control. Superstorms are becoming our new familiars and given names from the religious symbolic such as Snowmageddon. They act like aggrieved ancestors overtaking and reshaping shorelines, islands, estuaries, and rivers.

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Irrespective of national or territorial boundaries the Spirit of Climate Change has nomadic freedom to cross boundaries, making its capricious will known. Those who have contributed least to the forces that feed the Spirit are also most vulnerable due to their enduring intimacy with ecosystems; their indigeneity is frontline in the encounter with the Spirit. In recognition of the unknowable force of climate change, philosopher of science Donna Haraway eschews the name Anthropocene and describes our geological era instead the Chthulucene, shifting the attribution of troublemaking from human activity toward the greater authority of chthonic forces erupting with deeper and more enduring power than humans.36 From Snowmageddon to Chthulucene, we see at work what Indigenous activist Winona LaDuke describes as “naming and claiming”37 – the work by which humans restore their significance through the act of identifying as sacred that which is of an otherworldly register of power. LaDuke is chronicling the efforts of Indigenous communities to restore their heritage, whereas I am saying that scholars of spirit possession have something to do as global citizens in our understanding of the ambivalent historical record of human responses to being possessed. While humans cannot know the vastness of the great derangement we are experiencing, we see patterns and systems models of the Spirit with big data and digital technology. We can represent two hundred years of warming in one minute, providing ourselves with little, animated avatars of comprehension regarding the otherwise incomprehensible power of the Spirit of Climate Change. Based on the comparative study of how communities react in the presence of spirits, we also can contribute the informed prediction that it is going to get very religious as people reel from disorientations regarding the ultimate significance of our place in the world in the Chthulucene. We see this already as researchers report increased levels of despair and religious communities read the climate crises in search of divine will.38 Where willful ignorance and disinformation abounds regarding climate change, communities that are fearful and in search of the cause of misfortune will discern in the indiscriminate agency of climate chaos the presence of spirits that need to be cast out from among their members. We can contribute from our areas of expertise to the identification of such stirrings, critical evaluations of the problem, and foresight regarding the potential reactions ahead. Thinking about the indigeneity of spirit possession provides a counterdiscourse 36 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 37 LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred. 38 Farbotko and McGregor, “Copenhagen, Climate Science”; Haluza-DeLay, “Religion and Climate Change.”

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and resource for addressing the ethical trajectories of the long emergency ahead by linking kin, plant and animals, including human animals, in an ecological worldview, thereby resisting the divisions upon which religious violence depends. Paying attention to the indigeneity of spirit possession promotes deeper understanding of spirit possession, and points toward right action in our place and time, moved as we are.

References Anderson, Chris. “Critical Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density.” Cultural Studies Review 15/2 (2009): 80–100. Arnold, Philip P. “Sacred Landscapes and Global Religion: Reflections on the Significance of Indigenous Religions for University Culture.” In Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, edited by Jennifer I. M. Reid, 39–49. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003. —. The Urgency of Indigenous Values and the Future of Religion [forthcoming]. Astor-Aguilera, Miguel, and Graham Harvey, eds. Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality. New York: Routledge, 2019. Barcham, Manuhia. “(De)Constructing the Politics of Indigeneity.” In Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous People, edited by Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, 137–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Barreiro, Jose, ed. Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010. Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Beban, Alice and Courtney Work. “The Spirits are Crying: Dispossessing Land and Possessing Bodies in Rural Cambodia.” Antipode 46, 2014. Behrend, Heike, and Ute Luig. Spirit Possession: Modernity & Power in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Berkes, Fikret. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management, 2nd ed. London–New York: Routledge, 2008. Berque, Augustine. “Indigenous beyond Exoticism.” Diogenes 50/4 (2003): 39–48. Bird-David, Nurit. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 Special Issue: Culture. A Second Chance? (Feb. 1999): S67-S91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2991332. Byrd, Jodi A., and Michael Rothberg. “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity.” Interventions 13/1 (2011): 1–12.

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Chidester, David. Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Crapanzano, Vincent. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Crockett, Clayton, and Jeffrey W. Robbins. Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Csordas, Thomas J. “Possession and Psychopathology, Faith and Reason.” In The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader, edited by Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Maya Mayblin, 293–304. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Denzin, Norman K., Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds. Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Los Angeles: Sage, 2008. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012. Engler, Steven. “Modern Times: Religion, Consecration and the State in Bourdieu.” Cultural Studies 17/3–4 (2003): 445–467. Farbotko, Carol, and Helen V. McGregor. “Copenhagen, Climate Science and the Emotional Geographies of Climate Change.” Australian Geographer 41/2 (2010): 159–166. Fixico, Donald L. The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2003. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Grim, John A. “Ecology and Religion: Ecology and Indigenous Traditions.” Encyclopedia of Religion. 2005. http://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/ encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ecology-and-religionecology-and-indigenous-traditions (accessed September 6, 2018). —. “Indigenous Traditions: Religion and Ecology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, edited by Roger S. Gottlieb, 283–310. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780195178722.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195178722-e-13 (accessed November 16, 2016). Haluza-DeLay, Randolph. “Religion and Climate Change: Varieties in Viewpoints and Practices.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 5/2 (2014): 261–279. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Harvey, Graham. Indigenous Religions. London–New York: Cassell, 2000.

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Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, 16–37. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Houtman, Dick, and Birgit Meyer. Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Hudson, James R. “Braudel in Ecological Perspective.” Sociological Forum 2/1 (1987): 146–165. Jackson, Wes. Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2010. Keller, Mary L. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. —. “Indigenous Religion: From the Origin to the Future of Religious Studies.” In Religion: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies, edited by Jeffrey J. Kripal, 233–251. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2016. —. “Spirit Possession.” In Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling, edited by Cathy Gutierrez, 66–86. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2015. —. “Spirit Possession and Gender.” In Encyclopedia of Religion 2, edited by Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed., vol. 13, 8694–8699. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2004. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt, 2014. LaDuke, Winona. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005. Long, Charles H. “Indigenous People, Materialities, and Religion: Outline for a New Orientation to Religious Meaning.” In Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, edited by Jennifer Reid, 167–180. London: Lexington Books, 2003. —. “A Postcolonial Meaning of Religion: Some Reflections from the Indigenous World.” In Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity, edited by Jacob Olupona, 89–98. London–New York: Routledge, 2004. —. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Boulder, CO: The Davies Group, 2004. Miyamoto, Yuki. “Possessed and Possessing.” Culture and Religion 7/2 (2006): 139–154. Mohawk, John. Basic Call to Consciousness: The Haudenosaunee Address to the Western Worl, edited by Awkwesasne Notes. Summertown, Tenessee: Native Voices, 1978, 1981, 2005.

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Olupona, Jacob K., ed. Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. New York–London: Routledge, 2004. Orr, David W. Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2016. Plancke, Carine. “The Spirit’s Wish: Possession Trance and Female Power among the Punu of Congo-Brazzaville.” Journal of Religion in Africa 41/4 (2011): 366–395. Pollan, Michael. “The Intelligent Plant.” New Yorker, December 23, 2013. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2008. Rieger, Joerg, and Edward Waggoner. Religious Experience and New Materialism: Movement Matters. Houndmills–New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Roca, Roger Sansi. “Money and Religion in Brazil.” Critique of Anthropology 27, no. 3 (2007): 319-339. Ryan, Alexandra E. “Spirits as Hypotheses: A Reconfiguration of Spirit Possession in a Contemporary Case Study.” MA thesis, Lancaster University, 1998. Sarafina, Carl. Beyond Words. New York: Henry Holt, 2015. Schmidt, Bettina E., and Lucy Huskinson. Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London–New York: Continuum, 2010. Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Smith, Frederick M. “The Current State of Possession Studies as a CrossDisciplinary Project.” Religious Studies Review 27/3 (2001): 203–212. —. The Self Possessed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London–New York: Zed Books, 1999. Stamatopoulou, Elsa. Indigenous Peoples’ Cultural Heritage as a Human Right. Brown University, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS08VqkNJdA (accessed June 13, 2018). Stoller, Paul. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge, 1995. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees, translated by Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver– Berkley: Greystone Books and First English Edition, 2016. Work, Courtney. “Chthonic Sovereigns? ‘Neak Ta’ in a Cambodian Village.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 20. 1 (01/01, 2019): 74-95. Zipf, L., E. H. Williams, R. B. Primack, and S. Stichter. “Climate Effects on Late-Season Flight Times of Massachusetts Butterflies.” International Journal of Biometeorology 61/9 (2017): 1667-1673. DOI 10.1007/s00484-017-1347-8.

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Specter, Phantom, Demon f Thomas J. Csordas

Keywords: hauntology, possession, exorcism, evil, healing, psychiatry, Catholicism

Roman Catholic exorcism is a liturgical prayer in which the aim is relief from affliction due to possession by evil spirits, performed by a priest under explicit auspices from a bishop. Far from being a relic of a bygone age, a contemporary resurgence of exorcism in the twenty-first century is a critical component of the global re-enchantment of the world.1 This is not the venue in which to place Catholic exorcism in the context of the many other forms of spirit possession encountered in the anthropology of religion. Suffice it to say that there are two basic modes of relation to spirits, namely adorcism,2 in which an ongoing relationship is cultivated with the being, and exorcism, in which the being is cast out or expelled. In the Roman Catholic tradition, spirits are typically demonic and must be exorcised. Rarely are any other form of spirits recognized, whether they be deities from other religions or ancestors and deceased family members of the afflicted. Demons are beings with names and personalities, literally fallen angels who rebelled against God alongside Lucifer in his transformation into Satan. They are highly motivated to separate people from a relationship with the divine, and do so by means of both ordinary and extraordinary action. The ordinary action of evil spirits is through temptation to sin, while extraordinary action includes varying degrees of affliction resulting in more or less dramatic demonic manifestations. Evil spirits can acquire different degrees of purchase on individuals short of full-scale possession. Lay healers in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal have since the 1970s addressed demonic affliction described as oppression and obsession by means of what they call deliverance prayer,3 but possession can be addressed only by an ordained priest using ecclesiastically sanctioned exorcism prayers. Demons can use a variety of means to work their way into peoples’ lives, and these means 1 Csordas, Transnational Transcendence. 2 Heusch, “Cultes de possession et religions initiatiques.” 3 Csordas, The Sacred Self.

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can vary by culture and ethnicity. They include occult activities, New Age practices, indigenous rituals, curses, witchcraft, sexual perversions or sexual trauma and abuse, family dysfunction, and any form of habitual sin. Just as there are many ethnic variants of Catholicism and Catholic culture that warrant a detailed comparative global Catholic studies,4 there is variation across the Catholic world in how exorcism is practiced, and in order to acknowledge this variation on a limited scale, my own ethnography is based on a comparison of exorcism in the United States and Italy. In this chapter I will bring to bear the interpretive concept of hauntology as a device to understand some religious, psychic, and existential features of exorcism. Two things strike me about the notion of hauntology as an existential theory of ghosts, or a ghostly take on existence. First is its blend of the ominous and the hopeful: an unknown and incipient threat and an equally unknown and incipient possibility, a constricted dungeon and an open horizon. Second is Derrida’s pun in French5 where hantologie sounds like ontologie and we are led into a reflection on the nature of being and nonbeing. In this chapter, I engage the existential and ontological ambiguity of “hauntology” by considering the three figures of specter, phantom, and demon. To be more precise, these are the literary ghost which is the subject of criticism, the psychoanalytic ancestor introject which is the subject of therapy, and the theological evil spirit which is the subject of ethnography. My point of departure is the thought-provoking article in which Colin Davis6 distinguishes the first two figures, specter and phantom, by identifying two origins of hauntology, one with Derrida7 and one with the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török.8 Derrida’s “spectre is a deconstructive figure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established certainties vacillate.”9 Abraham and Török’s “phantom is the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light.”10 Davis focuses on the element of secrecy brought to the fore in hauntology, and indeed conversing with specters “may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such.”11 In Derrida’s formulation, “the spectre’s secret is a productive opening 4 Norget, Napolitano, and Mayblin, The Anthropology of Catholicism. 5 Derrida, Spectres de Marx. 6 Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms.” 7 Ibid. 8 Abraham and Török, L’écorce et le Noyau. 9 Ibid., 376. 10 Ibid., 374. 11 Ibid., 377.

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of meaning rather that a determinate content to be uncovered […] not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future.”12 For Abraham and Török, the phantom is a liar that misleads the haunted subject, and its “secret can and should be revealed in order to achieve “une petite victoire de l’Amour sur la Morte”13 instead of remaining “unspeakable in the restricted sense of being a subject of shame and prohibition.”14 Against these figures of the specter which is not yet speakable and the phantom which is shamefully unspeakable, I want to juxtapose the figure of the demon which is deceitful but speaks aloud and with the explicit intent to cultivate a relationship of domination with the afflicted. Specifically, in this discussion I give particular attention to the hauntological role of the demon in contemporary Catholic exorcism as a figure of lies, deceit, and destruction within a ritually constructed assumptive world. Hauntology is relevant to the concrete experience of participants in exorcism as a form of ritual healing. In terms of affliction and healing, people are understood to have specific characteristics with respect to their life history, spiritual background, and mental health status that render them susceptible to demonic influence.

Haunting, healing, and the lifeworld In elaborating these three figures, I will not examine any of them in comparative perspective, but will instead describe the hauntological structure of the lifeworld of one afflicted woman I encountered during fieldwork in an urban area of northern Italy. Bianca, as I will call her, had been undergoing sessions of exorcism for more than seven years, first with a monk who visited her at home and then for five years with the priest with whom I was working ethnographically. She was in her late 50s, well educated and working in a professional field. She began her narrative in a way that clearly recognized in retrospect that her demonic troubles were rooted in her earliest childhood development, so I will start as she did with an excerpt from the beginning of her interview: [I come from] a family with a nonbelieving father and a mother and a grandmother who believed in an almost obsessive way, especially 12 Ibid., 377, 378–379. 13 Ibid., 377. 14 Ibid., 378.

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the grandmother. Let’s say that I felt more compelled, I was forced to excessively attend Church and, from an emotional point of view, I experienced a situation of great isolation, with the awareness already from a young age, of a mother who was jealous of my father and with a good reason because he married her having a mistress, of whom she was aware. I’ll start by saying that since childhood, I was aware of a father, whom I loved, but by whom I myself felt betrayed, and I did not tolerate my mother because she endured this kind of situation. I was born with a congenital malformation of the hip, so there was a certain condition for which I started to walk when I was three and a half years old. This much affected the behavior of my parents, who took a series of precautions against which I rebelled because I did not accept them very easily. They basically cared about my being a good child, then a good girl, so I studied at the classical high school [the liceo classico which focuses mainly on literature, philosophy Latin and ancient Greek], then at university, I did literature and philosophy. This is when I encountered the man who was going to become my former husband, who at the time was already an engineering assistant professor; he had just graduated. In that period a terrible thing happened, an accident to his brother who died in the mountains because a rock hit him in the head. Then there was [how it affected his] mother and father; the father died a year later. At that point I began to feel as if I was always entering in dark/black situations full of pain and suffering. So I was always feeding this core of suffering almost as if wherever I went. […] I must also tell you that my husband was the first for me and I for him because his father was a specialist in venereal diseases who had also been a brothel inspector so he had instilled the fear of sexuality in him. Bianca made it a point to say that they had sex before being married, but after they married, she did not want to have sex with him; it felt like incest, “as if he represented the positive side of my father.” Yet even though she brooded about this feeling of rejection and discomfort, they had a daughter. Her husband traveled a good deal, and while he was spending a year abroad at a foreign university an older man began “haunting” her (this is my translator’s rendering of perseguitare in Italian, closer to “to persecute” than perseguire, which is “to pursue”). Although she gave no indication that she yielded to this man’s apparently seductive attention, when she told her husband he was devastated and they eventually separated, which

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led to rejection by her family of origin. In fact, her mother said, “It would have been better if you had died,” and her father wrote a letter saying, “You are the ruin of our lives. You will be a failure as a student, as a daughter, as a mother, as a woman.” If these weren’t sufficient as curses, her mother took this occasion to inform Bianca that when she was in the womb her father’s mistress pointed at her mother’s belly and said, “I curse you and the creature that you carry in the womb. May she never find peace in her life, in love, in affections, in health.” As an adult, Bianca studied astrology and the possibility of reincarnation and contact with her own past lives or those of ancestors. She connected these studies with her identity as an educated person, and she also used them to account for voices and images she would hear and see. In this respect, she described herself by saying “I am a peculiar person with particular things, images, voices, I also had them before, and I never thought it was something, but they reminded me of situations [and] I did not know if they were the lives of my ancestors or vice versa my past lives.” She attended séances at which the host regarded her as valuable because of her ability to go into a trance and warily mentioned an instance in which “I traveled on a chair.” During one night’s ritual in which the participants had to remain within a triangle with three candles as protection against being possessed, the smell of sulfur was manifest along with a metallic voice claiming to be the master of the night, and she was so unsettled that she decided not to participate any longer. She was then subjected to veiled threats by the cult leader, and a year or so later her daughter had a cerebral hemorrhage that temporarily paralyzed her and that she implied was an enactment of these threats. Bianca herself experienced a series of events she regarded as precursors of her demonic possession, including physical troubles such as almost poking her eye out by accident while sewing, breaking an ankle, a knee, and ribs. She had a series of problems, including suffering a severe flu with a high fever, shingles, fibromyalgia that altered her gait and led to degeneration of her hip such that she was in severe pain for seven years and had to walk with a crutch, a series of retinal detachments that required surgical correction, and a constricted glottis. She talked of this series of events with reference to the Italian idiom non c’e` due senza tre, if two bad things happened to you the third will also follow. Finally, and in addition, she experienced a negative turn in the content of what her voices were saying. Bianca’s narrative of involvement with a spiritist or perhaps even explicitly Satanist cult plays into the discourse of evil that underpins exorcism

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explicitly with reference to the presence in contemporary society of occult practices and the premise that involvement in such practices renders a person vulnerable to demonic affliction. This in itself would put an exorcist on alert, and all the more since her narrative suggests an explicit susceptibility to spiritual influences, as well as some kind of spiritual powers that include capacity for trance and soul traveling. Bianca’s reticence to talk about this in our interview appeared more cautious than coy, perhaps out of a sense of lingering danger from the threats of the cult leader if she were to discuss them openly. Finally, there was a haunting sense that her physical maladies had some degree of spiritual causation, if not from earlier curses then from exposure to occult practices. Bianca had attempted to get treatment from psychology and hypnotherapy, which she claimed did not help her because the therapists determined that she was “ungovernable.” She had also sought help from a private (perhaps non-Catholic) exorcist who died shortly after he began seeing her, a fact she reported with the implication that his death may have been connected to or influenced by her affliction. She contacted the curia of her local diocese of her own accord, acknowledging that at the time she was unaware that the proper channel was through her parish priest. The monsignor who conducted the official vetting process for the diocese was sufficiently concerned to refer her to an exorcist, a Franciscan monk. He came to her house for three months to exorcise the place, then began exorcism prayers directly on her, but after a year he was given an assignment abroad. She said she remained close to him during and after this period, but she was transferred to the care of another exorcist whom she described as a “very different person.” This phrase suggests that having been treated by more than one exorcist adds yet another level of potential haunting, since for her the presence of, and possibly preference for, the monk appears to persist as an alternative to the relationship with her current exorcist. From the outset, Bianca claimed, she was never completely convinced her problem was demonic. In her words: I’ll tell you what I said to myself at the beginning, “This is not the devil; these are your personal hells that are activated in this situation and they come out maybe through this situation and all situations sacred and maybe they are the outcome of your personal hells.” I just thought they were the manifestations that came out of my head and my stomach, that I was pulling out something that I had created a conflict and so on, but I could not control it.

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Yet over the course of five years working with the new exorcist, she went through the ritual process including intense episodes in which the demons threw her into physical struggles that required restraint by others, spontaneous vocalizations and screams that she could not control, and the inability to touch the consecrated host in communion. These reprised spontaneous experiences she had previously working with the monk, when I really had this sort of manifestation of myself, I felt terrible because I could hear grunts coming out of me, cries and voices, provocations that I expressed and then over to a terrible worsening of all my pains. If I recite a rosary by myself, I could take a crucifix in my hands while praying, but if he was there and he showed [the crucifix] to me [my reaction] was something that I could not understand. The exorcist identified seven demons which in the ritual Bianca named and he cast out, and Bianca reported that their names were verified by a demonologist who the priest brought in as a consultant for this purpose. The seven demons possessing her operated in a militant cluster under the command of one named Militia Tamiel. In this excerpt, Bianca describes her bodily experience as follows: Militia Tamiel it was the devil who ruled it. And then we placed seven demons. This militia then, the militia on the heart, chest, one on the throat one on the head and neck, one on the stomach: [in a strange voice she unexpectedly interjects what sounds like “kamut”] in the genitals, and another was Beelzebub in the back, then one in the pelvis, and in the leg, okay? And this was done because they had been identified, because I named them, when he performed the exorcism I named them one by one, and I felt pain, understand? And he was able to make a map. Depending on how I responded physically and, I have to say, the physical reactions and noises depending on the demons that I named were absolutely different one from the other, things that I did not tolerate, there were cries that I just could not stand awful and then of course the physical situations in which two people had to hold me down. In the midst of all this it is clear that I was asked by [the exorcist] to start attending Church and the sacraments again. The Church meaning attending Mass and praying. I have to say that thanks to the first priest, who brought me the image of Our Lady of Medjugorje that he used during exorcisms and gave to me, I started to

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have a connection and through this image I began to talk, to narrate myself, to pray until it had become how can I say? A kind of mother on whom to rely, a mother that was not my own. In this instance the afflicted woman’s body is literally a haunted terrain, as the process constructs a map of interconnected points of influence by the cohort of possessing demons. I have referred to her experience in interviews with a number of other exorcists to inquire about whether the bodily sites to which she refers might not correspond to what in Hindu thought are identified as cakras. The clearest answer was that these are important points in one’s body regardless of whether they are called cakras, although within the logic of Catholic exorcism, it might also be relevant that her previous interest in Eastern spirituality had predisposed her to experience her own body in this way or to make these sites more vulnerable to demonic attack. The bodiliness of her experience also vividly includes classic demonic manifestations of vocalization (including perhaps the inexplicable sound “kamut” she made during the interview, which might be accounted for as clearing her throat) and physical struggle. Bodiliness is also evident in the process of recovery through engagement with the Mass, the sacraments, and prayer assisted by the physical image of the Virgin in her apparition at Medjugorje. By the time of our interviews, it was the decline in frequency and severity of such bodily experience in the form of demonic manifestations, along with Bianca’s ability to engage in Catholic ritual practices, that allowed the priest to comment that she was not yet fully liberated but that the grasp of the devil had diminished. The exorcist also demanded that Bianca “renounce” astrology and belief in reincarnation, which she resisted till it became a struggle because […] at one point, I said, “Okay, for you it is the dogma of resurrection of the body with the same soul, as far as I’m concerned you are the ones who give yourself limits,” […] and in any case, I say, I would be lying if I say, “I renounce [astrology].” Though she found some measure of peace and as time passed her sessions became less traumatic, in her words: I continued to have this conflict. I realized that to fully adhere to this thing I would have to do a partial suicide of my intelligence, of my beliefs, because the act of faith implies that and I do not know if

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I did completely. I pray a lot, I prayed a lot through the Virgin Mary, the image of the Virgin Mary, I was even able to speak to Jesus again, which was something that I hadn’t been able to do. I remember one day I said, “Lord, if you’re watching me and everything that happens to me, turn away from me Your merciful gaze.” In this most poignant reflection on her own circumstances, the act of abandonment to divine mercy for Bianca equated the leap of faith to a form of intellectual suicide that abdicated education and rationality. More precisely, the conflicts encapsulated in this statement are those between education and authority, reason and faith, autonomy and submission. The plea for God to turn away his merciful gaze indicates how healing itself can be a form of suffering. In this respect, there is a sense that she is haunted not only by demonic spirits but by the Church and the price it demands for its succor and healing, for replacing her torment with a degree of peace. Bianca’s is a narrative filled with hauntings, inhabited by multiple phantoms of shame and elaborating shadowy specters in a way that identifies densely packed and overlapping sources of psychic conflict. If this is not a practiced narrative, it is certainly one made possible by years of exorcistic “working through” by an afflicted person with cultivated psychological sensibility. Prior to and foreshadowing any involvement with evil spirits, the conflicts in her biographical narrative have to do with religious belief and nonbelief, sexuality and sexual ambivalence, loyalty and betrayal, and physical and emotional distress. By objectifying the hauntological structure of Bianca’s experience as a cohort of demons, the ritual practice of exorcism may itself be the active ingredient in allowing her to articulate the not yet speakable and the shamefully unspeakable in a way that allows our analysis to recognize these as the figures of specter and phantom. Even before the destructive consequences of a father’s infidelity based on the persistence of a relationship that existed prior to her parents’ marriage, Bianca mentions the conflict between her father’s irreligiosity and the hyperreligiosity of her mother and grandmother. Her love/hate relationship with her father taps into a series of patriarchal themes: the entitlement he felt to maintain dual relationships, the long-suffering tolerance of this by her mother, and the looming presence of the Church to which she would eventually turn for help. Both she and her former husband were haunted by sexual ambivalence, he by family tragedy as well as the shameful profession as VD inspector practiced by his father with its likely connotations of sexuality itself as diseased and polluted. This is complicated by the inherent

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sinfulness of sex before marriage, which was probably consciously rejected by the educated young couple, and the loss of sexual interest after marriage that not only still produced a daughter but that Bianca attributes in part to an assimilation of her husband to the image of her father. The psychic situation was further complicated by the ghostly presence of an older suitor who haunted her while her husband was away and an ultimately threatening leader of an occult cell. The repeated rejections and curses in conjunction with her congenital physical disability doubtless played into the discourse of vulnerability to demonic affliction that is essential to exorcistic diagnosis and practice and through which her current narrative almost certainly has been filtered. She is without doubt haunted by her vexed family of origin, by the memory of being cursed, by her own sexual relations, her physical maladies and voices, her involvement with the occult and astrology, and finally by her ongoing confrontation with what she chillingly called “intellectual suicide.”

Hauntology and the discourse of evil Beyond an understanding of the hauntological structure of Bianca’s lifeworld, my intent here has also been to contribute to a theoretical structure of hauntology by indicating some of the ways that the demon can stand in relation to the specter and phantom as a hauntological figure. In the lifeworld of Bianca, we can detect the phantom upsurge or irruption of shame in the sexually charged series of curses and rejections, the spectral threat of foreclosed possibility in the image of intellectual suicide, and the demonic foregrounding of evil in the embodiment of Militia Tamiel, all bound together in intimate interaction. These three figures evoke distinct but interrelated modes of being and nonbeing, presence and absence, ominous and hopeful, openness and constriction within subjectivity and in the frame of intersubjectivity. What they have in common is the element of secrecy, where the secret may in various instances be shamefully hidden, incipient but not yet speakable, or defiantly deceitful. In the Catholic ritual system, the demon is a personal being that lurks in the shadowy interstices of lived experience such as Bianca’s (and any apparent appearance of an actual ghost is likely to be interpreted by the seasoned exorcist as a demon in disguise). Whereas Derrida’s specter is fundamentally a figure of indeterminacy, the exorcist’s demon is a figure of foreclosure, often epitomized in the afflicted person’s inability to pray.

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Whereas Abraham and Török’s phantom is a figure of silence and shame, the demon is a figure of expressive rage and struggle, often epitomized in the afflicted person’s blasphemy and aversion to the sacred. In this context, we can begin to approach exorcism not only through an understanding of religious ritual practice and ethnopsychiatry, but also in terms of an existential analysis that treats demons and their actions as a form of human experience. Indeed, the copresence of specter, phantom, and demon that we have observed in intimate relation with one another suggests the outlines of a hauntological theory based on the experiential and rhetorical force of these figures and perhaps others yet to be defined. In elaborating such a theory we would have to recognize these as formal figures of hauntology, and alongside them acknowledge the immediacy of what we could call casual or informal figures of hauntology as moments of embodied alterity 15 in everyday life. These casual figures include something in the back of one’s mind, on the tip of one’s tongue, over one’s shoulder, beyond the horizon, under cover of darkness, almost out of earshot. Moreover, we would have to address the manner in which both informal and formal figures of hauntology intersect, express, or evoke diverse modalities of emotion, affect, mood, and feeling. There is an additional way that the notion of hauntology can help understand the contemporary phenomenon of Catholic exorcism, and reciprocally for the practice of exorcism to help elaborate the theory of hauntology. This has to do with the scale or scope of hauntology’s relevance beyond the intimate intersubjective field of the individual. A psychoanalytically inflected account of a haunted patient is one thing, but the specter that Marx invoked and that Derrida picked up was haunting not an individual patient but European civilization. In the instance we are discussing, there is a double sense of how exorcism as a sacramental practice invokes a spectral circumstance in which the past haunts not only the biographical trajectory of certain vulnerable individuals but also the Church as an institution within contemporary global civilization. To be precise, these two levels of analysis inform one another, reinforce one another, amplify one another, make one another intelligible, and haunt one another. Individual cases of exorcism provide empirical evidence that reinforces the discourse of evil at large in the world, which in turn reinforces the practice of recognizing demonic influence and deploying the necessary ritual resources. For Bianca, the entire course of ritual treatment constituted what amounts to an existential crisis of agency, both in the struggle for her own agency against powerfully 15 Csordas, “Asymptote of the Ineffable.”

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possessing demonic agents, and in the vexed compromise between her own agency and patriarchal authority that she described as an incitement to “intellectual suicide.” Problematizing agency in this way, the scenario of contemporary Catholic exorcism invites the question of whether on a larger scale the patriarchal system itself produces the specific forms of suffering it then attempts to ritually alleviate through carefully devised ritual means. The current resurgence of exorcism that has taken place largely in the twenty-first century has led to increasing numbers of exorcists appointed in dioceses. Exorcism currently may have a more prominent profile in the public sphere than at any time since the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment. Even before a specific comparison of specter, phantom, and demon, the general relevance of a hauntology is evident insofar as the resurgence of exorcism indexes an anxiety and preoccupation with evil in contemporary society. In terms of ideology, evil is understood neither as an abstract cosmological force nor solely as a characteristic of persons and their actions, but it is both personified and personalized in the form of Satan and a host of named demons. There is a distinct sense of urgency among exorcists based on a perception that demonic affliction and dangerous involvement with the occult is increasing in contemporary society. They see this as associated with a decline in faith and a relativism that leaves a spiritual lacuna and lack of moral direction. Together, these constitute an opening for demonic influence. This is exacerbated by a failure to take the danger seriously manifested in lack of awareness on the part of priests of the needs of their parishioners due to lack of training about exorcism in seminaries. Of even more concern from their standpoint, the absence of exorcists in many dioceses is attributed to the nonbelief in evil and exorcism on the part of many bishops. In the context of citing biblical passages about exorcisms performed by Jesus and papal statements about the reality of the devil one hears, with reference to the bishops themselves, the challenging statement that if one does not believe in the devil, one might as well not believe in the resurrection. On the other hand, I have heard an exorcist say that in fact the need for this ministry is no greater now than it ever has been, only that the Church is just now paying attention to it. In addition, there are two features of the discourse of evil that appear to establish the epistemological limits of exorcism practice, limits that define a zone of ambiguity ripe for the kind of haunting we are discussing and that have to do with disclosure and foreclosure, articulation and silence, healing and affliction. One is the boundary – and here threshold may be by far the better word – between psychiatry and religion. Somewhat ironically, this

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threshold is rendered problematic not because exorcists reinterpret mental illness in demonological terms. On the contrary, the threshold is haunted precisely by the Church’s complete acceptance of psychiatry.16 That is, an affliction can be either demonic or psychiatric, or ambiguously both at the same time. Moreover, since evil spirits are clever and skilled liars, they may disguise their presence by mimicking the symptoms of mental illness as a way of self-concealment. The other critical feature of the discourse of evil is the epistemological boundary – and this is really a boundary and not a threshold – between the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on the one hand and all non-Abrahamic religions including all forms of shamanism and polytheism on the other hand. While the Abrahamic religions can be understood to share a conception of evil and to worship the same God, exorcism’s discourse of evil is haunted by the rhetoric of European colonial conquest such that the spirits and deities of other traditions are invariably and irredeemably understood to be aspects of demonic evil themselves. In my view, the resurgence of exorcism and its accompanying discourse of evil at large in the world articulates a certain kind of malaise that has developed in Catholic circles since the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s and in broader society since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. The lack of certainty, stability, identity, and a clear demarcation of “good guys and bad guys” in the face of multiple forms of individual and collective violence, forced population movements, fragmented polities, intolerance, and hatred are characteristic of this malaise. There may never have been a golden age and various forms of malaise may be endemic in most societies, but there is something going on here even if we don’t know what it is, something in the form of a haunting perceived in different terms by different segments of global society. It is encapsulated by conservative Catholic exorcists in the idea of a decline of faith and a corresponding rise in the “occult.” It is encapsulated by progressive intelligentsia in the observation that right-wing political parties are increasingly “normalized” by the appearance of new parties even further to the right. A hauntingly whispered and barely audible refrain seems to hang in the air. For the exorcists, it is the repeated line of a prayer, “Deliver us from evil, for thine is the Kingdom.” For the intelligentsia, it is the repeated line of a song, “Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name.” If for Marx communism was the specter haunting nineteenth-century Europe in the face of capitalism’s 16 Csordas, “Possession and Psychopathology.”

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invisible hand, perhaps (at least in the view of exorcists themselves) exorcism is the specter haunting twenty-first-century society in the face of the devil’s invisible hand. If in fact we are in the midst of a global re-enchantment of the world,17 would it not make sense to determine whether that re-enchantment is accompanied by its own inherent form of haunting, or in other words instantiates its own hauntological structure?

Note Acknowledgment. My research on Roman Catholic Exorcism was supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council’s initiative on “New Directions in the Study of Prayer.” This article is slightly modified from its original version published in Ethos 47/4 (2019): 519–529, and reprinted here with permission.

References Abraham, Nicolas, and Mária Török. L’écorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. Csordas, Thomas J. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. —. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion.” Current Anthropology 45 (2004): 163–185. —, ed. Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. —. “Possession and Psychopathology, Faith and Reason.” In The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader, edited by Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Maya Mayblin, 293–304. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms.” French Studies 59/3 (2005): 373–379. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Heusch, Luc de. “Cultes de possession et religions initiatiques de salut en Afrique.” Annales du Centre d’Études des Religions 2 (1993): 226–244. Norget, Kristin, Valentina Napolitano, and May Mayblin, eds. The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 17 Csordas, Transnational Transcendence.

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From Loudun to Dakar, and Back Possession and Evil in Individualistic and Nonindividualistic Societies f Pierre-Henri Castel

Keywords: Norbert Elias, Edmond Ortigues, Loudun, evil, confession, possession, exorcism, scrupulosity disease

Introduction What follows is a piece of highly speculative historical anthropology, which calls for a few elements of intellectual context. In his well-known account of the genesis of the individual in Western culture, through what he termed a “civilizing process” of manners and public behaviors, Norbert Elias insisted on the progressive internalization of self-constraint.1 From the blossoming of courtier culture in Renaissance Italy to the managing of the nobility as a class by absolutist monarchies of the seventeenth century, one could witness a striking inversion of values. It slowly pervaded Western society, from the top of its hierarchy down to the bourgeoisie then in the making. What did this inversion of values consist of? Instead of forcing people to behave well by means of physical violence, new requirements of self-control in the display of emotions were internalized. Thanks to these new rules of decency, courtliness, and politeness (or civility), a new sense of interiority, which was in no way given a priori, was gradually “carved out” into people’s minds. It was to mold and frame the psychology of Western individuals. Elias traces this long-term moral and anthropological process down to modern forms of individual self-experience – such as Sartre’s existentialism with its insistence on human loneliness and its desperate sense of privacy. But a paradox lies at the core of Elias’ civilizing process. It enhances the individual’s feeling of existing alone under the surface of his or her “touchy” skin, as if he or she were trapped inside his or her own self. But at the social level, it increases his or her self-reliance, self-responsibility, and generates feeling of greater autonomy (translating little by little from 1 Elias, The Civilizing Process.

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personal ethics to political forms). In this way, it makes of each of these “isolated” individuals an even more closely connected and dependent member of the society taken as a whole. Elias gave precedence to this civilizing process over many other analogous processes which had been previously linked to the emergence of individualism in the West. For instance, he regarded Max Weber’s account of the codevelopment of capitalism and protestant religious ethos as a mere by-product of the cultural fabric of this new sense of inner responsibility – and not as its general cause. However, he privileged the behavioral expressions of this civilizing process (with an emphasis on manners) to such an extent that many readers wondered why Elias had said almost nothing about another trend towards internalization and individualization which was conspicuous from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation’s spiritual renewal, with the emergence of moral “conscience” as its cornerstone. Beyond “conscience,” the birth of a new form of mysticism, in this context, was also linked to highly exacting psychological techniques of self-awareness and self-control. But what role exactly did they play? This chapter examines what taking into account this other trend in the general picture of the emergence of individualistic thought in the West would mean from both an anthropological and a historical point of view. Like Elias, I hypothesize that what began with those first versions of individualism (individualism being here both a personal and collective process, for no one could be left behind by such a wide-ranging rewriting of our condition) extends to contemporary forms of the regulating of inner self-constraint. One last preliminary remark. The fabrication of individuals’ interiority through self-control not only entails a paradox (hyper-individualization as hyper-socialization). It also implies a contradiction in re. The more people are required to internalize restraint, to refrain from anything resembling impulsivity or even spontaneity, be it emotional or motor; the more they are encouraged to take responsibility not only for their actions, but for their intentions, and even for the quite remote intentions that might be ascribed to them, the more they face the danger of not being able to behave or even act as the disciplined autonomous agent of social practices and private actions they are expected to be. Instead, they tend to stall in many crucial interactions with their partners, and to sink into moral and mental paralysis, overwhelmed with guilt and anxiety. Too much self-restraint obviously hinders the very possibility of action. This is why the various “diseases” of excessive self-restraint reveal the dark side of our autonomy: its psychic

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cost. In all individualistic societies (i.e., any society in which the individual is the central and structuring collective value, and not the family group, the cast, nor the lineage, for example), it is inherently difficult to draw the line between normal and normative expectations of an even stricter self-restraint (as the cardinal means of socializing individuals as private and autonomous persons) on the one hand, and, on the other, a self-inflicted spiritual distress, or a psychological flaw due to over-conscientiousness, or even a mental disorder. This chapter is a tiny fragment of a longer narrative dealing with the institutionalization of interiority and autonomy as both individualistic social values and moral and psychological contents.2 Starting from the outburst of the first social epidemic of religious “scruples” at the beginning of the seventeenth century, I followed the transformations of the main forms of individualism (drawing on ethics, politics, economy) in our culture (religious, romantic, liberal, democratic individualism, etc.). I then drew a parallel with the various forms of psychic labor the civilizing process exacted on “normal to the excess” individuals, not in terms of manners and deportment, as with Elias, but, rather, in terms of the self-monitoring of thoughts, volitions, intentions and emotions. As it is easy to guess, the main chapters of this sociohistorical narrative deal with what we call today “obsessive-compulsive disorder” (OCD). For OCD is the paradigmatic illness of self-reproach, of extreme sensitivity to all the irrational thoughts and impulses popping up in the mind, and of moral anxiety in front of all the evil one could commit inadvertently against his or her will. I traced this recent nosographic etiquette, which we tend to ascribe to ahistorical neurobiological causes, back to its precedents: to Freud’s “obsessional neurosis,” to Pierre Janet’s “psychasthenia,” to the “obsessions” and “compulsions” of French and German psychiatrists of the 1880s, to the alienists’ “moral insanity” of the 1840s, and, lastly, to the ultimate forms of “religious melancholia” of the romantic age (Kierkegaard’s life and work summing up its final version). At all those periods, I hypothesized a relevant threefold relation, anthropological, moral, and clinical, between a specific condition of the individual within its historical and geographical context (France, Great Britain, the United States, post-Meiji Japan, etc.) and the mental sufferings attached to the imperative of self-constraint imposed upon individuals by the civilizing process. The “scrupulosity disease” of the classical age has indeed always been considered as a forerunner of OCD. Janet not only put the idea forward. He 2 Castel, Âmes scrupuleuses and La fin des coupables.

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even deduced from the seventeenth-century confessors’ practices against religious scruples many psychotherapic techniques in which we can recognize the core principles of our present-day cognitive therapies for OCD. But no attempt has been made to ask why and how it was precisely at this formative period of Western individuality that obsessions and compulsions, in the guise of religious scruples, exploded as a mass phenomenon in a short span of time (approximately from the 1620s to the 1640s).

A historical and anthropological hypothesis There might be a twofold explanation for this. For not only were those the years of the first framing of Western individualism as a form of interiority and self-responsibility as the ultimate values of modernity, but, in the same period, a new urban and educated class of people, belonging to the new bureaucratic apparatus of the absolutist state, or to the bourgeoisie, able to cope with the vexing spiritual issues of the times (in the context of Counter-Reformation), also faced the difficult task of finding new answers to the challenging presence of extraordinary Evil in their everyday life. For the old, premodern ways of collectively solving the riddles of Evil were doomed to fail. (Think of plagues and other public calamities of all kinds, the scandalous disorders spread by the poor and the outcast, but also, in everyday life, of the bizarre repetitions of adverse events, all hardly significant taken one by one, but looking like a “malign” series.) All beliefs rooted in tradition could no longer stand in the face of civil strife, of the obscene cruelty of religious wars, of the questioning of faith by science, or of the opportunity of individual freedom offered by the expansion of trade, to name but a few well-known factors. Hence, it was time for a radical anthropological upheaval, in which the new figure of the individual (not yet politically autonomous, but already aspiring to autonomy) could prove efficient in the handling of the great woes of the human condition. I do not speak of remedying them, of course. I only allude to the essentially symbolic task to reinscribe them within the new framework of interiority, guilt, and conscience. To that extent, my first step is to focus on a major shift in the Western sensibility to Evil which took place precisely in the first decades of the seventeenth century: the transition from a time in which the devil would manifest himself through witchcraft (typically, an illiterate peasant girl or a poor widow willingly selling her soul to him, in the guise of a bizarre rustic

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deity) to a new style of demoniac influence: the possession crisis (in which a seemingly innocent educated nun, often of a noble ascent, fights against a devil defined in sophisticated theological terms). Loudun possession is the paradigmatic case of such a shift in France. It is divided into two phases: in the first part of the possession, traditional (premodern) ways and means were put to use to cure the possessed nuns, but to no avail: whether public prayers or theatrical exorcisms, they amounted to nothing but sheer countermagic. All utterly failed. I will rather focus on the second part of the possession at Loudun, when a young Jesuit priest, Jean-Joseph Surin, was entrusted with the hard task of attending to the chief possessed nun, Mother Joan of the Angels (Jeanne des Anges). For her, he devised an entirely new technique of exorcism as confession, which was later on to be gradually accepted by the Church as a standard procedure, and which drew on what he termed “the culture of interiority.” What he did to her (and to him, as we will see) enables us to guess what the active “obsessionalization” of the Christian soul actually meant: the deliberate generation of religious scruples as a tool to compel individuals to retreat deeper into their own inwardness. Inner guilt then began to replace public shame as the key emotional organizer of interaction. To better apprehend why, let me draw a comparison between Loudun and the ethnographic data collected in Western Africa during the 1950s and 1960s by a pair of French anthropologists, the Ortigueses.3 For they took seriously the idea of an anthropology of Evil, along with its paradoxical psychopathological manifestations. It will help us to understand the difference between a relation to Evil under the sign of persecution, in which its extraordinary manifestations can always be traced to nocturnal sorcerers, or on the one hand to the envy of a malignant neighbor, while on the other, the new Western conception of Evil under the sign of guilt, in which Evil ultimately comes not from without, but from within, so that it is never too far-fetched to search for where we failed and sinned even deeper into ourselves, with great scruples and anxiety. Then I will turn to the dialogue between Surin and Joan of the Angels. For I would like to show how the odd process of obsessionalization that I mentioned above took place: certainly not as a mere change of categorization for a lived experience altered accordingly (as in a “looping effect” between experience and categorization à la Ian Hacking), but, rather, as a mutual destruction of their psychic apparatuses, both inexorably sinking into 3

Ortigues and Ortigues, Oedipe africain.

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madness, followed by two divergent and nevertheless mirroring reconstruction of their two selves. The seriousness and even the tragic character of this process sheds light, methinks, upon the first psychological fabrication of Western individuals. It reveals the psychic cost of moral conscience, of the “culture of interiority,” and of guilt and absolute personal responsibility as the somber side of what would ultimately become our much-prized autonomy. Inversely, it also helps us to realize what are or, rather, what were the radically different moral economies of evil people invented in order to cope with the unthinkable woes which were plaguing them. “Possession” is the pivotal notion here. Loudun is, so to speak, the last puncture in the thick obscuring screen of Modernity through which we can peek and guess whence we come.

“Scrupulosity disease” in seventeenth-century France As Jean Delumeau established, the “pastoral of fear” (the fear of God’s Justice) which dominated Catholic predication in the first part of the seventeenth century was two-pronged.4 To the poor, ministers preached “dolorism”: the idea that their earthly sufferings would be compensated in the afterlife according to the teachings of the Beatitudes. But in a hierarchical society with well-defined and impossible-to-trespass “order” boundaries, such as France, a growing number of people were sheltered from poverty and social distress by virtue of their status. What kind of predication could then help them to secure their salvation? “Scrupulousness” (with a tremendous anxiety of divine retribution) in the minute accomplishment of their daily religious and civic duties became the new torturing moral regimen of this privileged social class. It was mostly a women’s affair. The “scrupuleuses,” as they were known, were no longer the ascetic male monks of the past. For they lived a lay life, raising children and managing their homes (sometimes vast estates). As Robert Mandrou noticed, it was not uncommon for them to be married to the same magistrates who, were charged on the King’s behalf to eradicate the last waves of rural witchcraft in the provinces. Endless remorse for virtually nonexistent peccadilloes was the elective topic of their compulsive and fruitless consultations with their directors of conscience. Lengthy epistolary exchanges of some of these “scrupuleuses,” like Madame de Montberon’s letters to Fénelon (a prominent 4 Delumeau, Sin and Fear.

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bishop and a major theological authority of the French “Grand siècle”), still remain a landmark literary testimony of their psychological acumen. Tens of thousands of women were not only obsessed with confessing their sins, but also with the uncertainty surrounding the perfection of their repentance. They were joined by their confessors themselves, whose dread was to have too leniently granted their ego te absolvo (“I forgive you”) to a sinner not properly examined, with the dire consequence that they be damned in the afterlife. Delumeau even estimates that directors of conscience were spending a great part of their time confessing to each other to fend off that threat. An enormous amount of spiritual literature was devoted to help both confessors and penitents, both in Latin and in the vernacular language, many of the latter selling quite cheaply. Major disputes flared. They pitted directors desperately looking for means to keep their flock going to confession against a neo-Augustinian clergy, uncompromising on matters of faith and salvation, fighting like heresy any attempt to alleviate the sinners’ burden. For confession was a compulsory prerequisite of “frequent communion,” a practice then strongly encouraged by the Church. Yet it implied beforehand complete and sincere purification of the heart. Blaise Pascal’s Provinciales is not only a brilliant testimony of the intensity of these disputes. It also lays bare both the logical and psychological flimsiness of most of the “laxist” confessors of the times. And, as I have alluded to above, Pascal’s arguments still offer an excellent rationale against the credibility of the cognitive tricks used by present-day therapists of OCD. Once again, such feuds (degenerating very often into political drama) between equally faithful Catholics cannot be understood if one forgets the paradox inherent to individualization through self-responsibility and guilt: what meets the criteria for spiritual interiority (scrupulousness, conscientiousness) is also what endangers the very possibility of acting, for no action will ever be “good enough” – even at the mental level of thoughts and intentions.

From Dakar … Let us now travel both in time and space. In their ethnopsychiatric study of Lebu, Serer, and Wolof culture in Senegal during the 1950s and 1960s, Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues pointed to a striking clinical fact. In nonurban, traditional milieus, there was simply almost nothing like obsessive-compulsive symptoms at the individual level (even though “superstition” and rituals were clearly visible

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on the public scene). They never observed a single case of this paradigmatic form of melancholic delusion in which Western psychiatric patients endlessly accuse themselves of the worst deeds. On the contrary, in mental institutions, they faced a disproportionate number of patients with persecutory delusions. However, even if those last symptoms were looking similar to Western “paranoid” symptoms, they were usually transient. They easily resolved when the triggering circumstances changed, and they were always closely connected with collectively shared beliefs. None of these traits can be found in genuine “paranoid disorders” in Western psychiatry. But why this discrepancy? The one thing to consider is the following fact: the anthropological and religious background of these psychopathological conditions relates to Evil in a highly specific way. For an English-speaking reader who has never heard about the Ortigueses, their analysis compares with Edward Evans-Pritchard’s one about the Zandes.5 Of course, in premodern cultures, people are well aware that when somebody does not check where he or she walks in the woods, he or she may stumble on a root, and end up badly hurt. People do know responsibility and guilt. But, they ask, why did this happen precisely to me? And precisely then, as I was visiting my ailing uncle to solve a family feud? Once these questions are raised, what is socially valued as the standard or normative “solution” to such predicaments is not a deep self-examination. It is not, either, the ascription to fortuity or to bad luck of what one’s negligence cannot account for. Instead, a parallel world of persecutory nightly creatures, full of ill intents, readily comes to life in order to explain away the enigma. The existence of such a world is sustained by solidly entrenched cultural beliefs. Note that such an explanation fits in perfectly with the second “arm” of all animist religions, which not only allows people to fight back against witchcraft and black magic but helps them to reconnect the living and the dead as well. For, as Andras Zempléni has shown, we should not assimilate “possession” within such an anthropological context with what we see in Western cases.6 Of course, many bodily manifestations of modern and premodern possession overlap. But animist religions deal with these states through a ritual which starts from a situation of distress in which a person is invaded by an unnamed supernatural entity (a “spirit” which demands, for instance, the completion of a sacrifice), only to end in a pacified situation in which the spirit has 5 Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic. 6 Zempléni, “Des êtres sacrificiels.”

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been given a name, its demands have been satisfied, and – this being the key point – in which it has been relocated in a mythical Outside. An altar is erected, and it circumscribes its legitimate presence, whence the spirit may cyclically come back and visit the possessed, not as a painful and unwanted intrusion, but as part of a now established and socialized ritual of possession. However, at the time the Ortigueses were gathering their data, those beliefs were no longer self-evident. Interiorization was already more pronounced in children. Individualistic patterns of thinking, in link with colonial and postcolonial institutions, were already at work among ordinary people. The bonds of lineage, even though still very active throughout Senegalese culture, were more and more often exposed to the dissolving powers of competitive individualism (the French system of competitive exams playing here a major role). Let us try, now, to guess what it is like to go through such a reversal of one’s anthropological understanding of Evil by reading side by side two accounts of the way two seventeenth-century French sorcerers reacted when accused of having sold their souls to the Devil. Urbain Grandier, the Loudun witch, totally denied having signed any infernal pact. Under duress, he only confessed carnal sins. A “libertine” in terms of reason and intellectual upbringing, indeed, but still a Christian in his heart, he knew that he was but a pawn in a vast power struggle involving Cardinal Richelieu (who suspected Grandier of having authored an anonymous libel against him). But all this aside, at no point in his trial did the idea ever come to his mind that anything supernatural could have happened “in him,” and which could have escaped his conscious awareness, so that his accusers could be right about him having sold his soul to the Devil. By contrast, see this amazing excerpt from a witchcraft trial quoted by Michel de Certeau. It took place only 20 years before Grandier’s. A convicted sorcerer speaks to his judges: What vexes my soul so deeply is that I do not know whether I am guilty or not. This is why I pray you to tell me whether one can be a witch and not know it, for, if this is possible, I may very well belong to that odious class of people, even though I am not consciously aware that I do. Drawing on what I have just mentioned, it is easy to develop such a contrast, and to sum it up into a general framework of preindividualistic versus

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individualistic societies. Key moral sentiments such as guilt, or feelings of persecution, emerge against two distinct anthropological backgrounds: Evil comes from without: “someone else” wishes evil on me (envious neighbors, nocturnal witches, etc.). But I may not be aware that “I” am such an evil creature.

Any adverse event I face can lead to one form or other of persecutory feeling, for natural causes or mere bad luck cannot explain away my own specific subjective experience of it. In these traditional societies, public shame is the direst punishment.

Evil comes from within: “I” am ultimately responsible for what happens to me. This goes hand in hand with a lived experience of the transparency of one’s self-consciousness. (The Possession at Loudun started in 1634. Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, with the famous formulation of the cogito, was published in 1637.) To the “I” is attached a form of generic causal responsibility for Evil (for instance, the agent’s inner nature is corrupted by the “original sin”).

Within the new individualistic framework, guilt prevails. Remorse is the worst torment, whatever social appearances may be. Guilt isolates the individual from the group, In the case of an offense committed by which can completely sever its ties to the one of its members, the whole group is guilty person. The group expects that she under attack, for shame and stigma are will work upon herself to amend and win her somehow contagious. Reconciliation demands a collective ritual, and it makes forgiveness. This process is mostly spiritual and mental. use of bodily and/or physical symbols. Urban societies in which the ongoing process Predominantly agrarian societies, in of individualization stretches and begins to the Senegalese case structured by the disrupt all traditional bonds. solidarity of lineage “brothers.” Possession, as a sequel to witchcraft, becomes Possession cults are inherently therapeutic institutions, meant to restore a challenge for the institutions. For it points at something private which extends beyond the the damaged bonds with a common grasp of traditional collective exorcisms. ancestor. Exorcism is always, as Luc de Heusch coined it, “adorcism”: a way of linking the living and the dead. The distinction between moral or psycho- The State puts the sorcerer on trial and burns him at the stake because it is a matter of logical interiority and public behavior is public order. The Church only takes care of the either nonexistent or irrelevant in terms souls, and its attention shifts from the witch of social and political power. to the possessed.

I am well aware that comparing an old African situation with what happened in France at the turn of the seventeenth century is quite daring. Nevertheless, following De Certeau’s indications, the Loudun affair, which took place in 1634 just after a serious outbreak of plague, seems to have confronted its actors, and its tragic victims, with a global demise of their core beliefs in the possibility of confining Evil in a mythical Outside through public

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exorcisms, collective prayers, and physical techniques. Sprinkling holy water all over the nuns, forcing devils to leave their convulsing bodies, and asking for “marks” on their skin as proof of their defeat, etc.: none of these worked. The counterpart of this failure (for the nuns were still possessed after Grandier’s execution), was the urgent necessity that the Church establish new lines of containment against the powers of hell. The soul’s Inside was now the ultimate battlefield. Traditional exorcism had to be radically recast. Of course, I do not expect from the parallel I have just drawn more than a few indications concerning at the conceptual cost of objectifying our sociohistorical emergence as individuals endowed with a sense of “interiority.” I have merely used the Senegalese case as one possible contrast with Loudun. I remain open to any alternative comparison. But it is now time to examine how exactly, in “modern” possession, entirely new techniques of exorcism were invented to deal with Evil, so that it fitted with the individualistic turn of the times.

To Loudun … When Surin was summoned to Loudun by the ecclesiastical authorities, who were worrying about a crisis that appeared to find no end, he was the prototype of the new era Catholics. Trained as a Jesuit, he had no doubt about the value of the most subjective and intimate spiritual involvement in matters of faith. To him, the “culture de l’intérieur” (culture of interiority) he was to advocate to Joan of the Angels was a direct consequence of the teachings of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. But what is most striking in the way he handled the situation is that he did not actually transform mere “representations” of sin, the soul, and evil in his penitent. He did not teach her how to “recategorize” the main components of her experience, only helping her, once that “cultural” upheaval had been fully interiorized, to self-identify with the new spiritual lifestyle it entailed. The obsessionalization process I am about to describe, which appropriated the new religious scruples to turn them into a privileged tool to rephrase the old question of Evil, was infinitely more serious. For both Surin and Joan of the Angels endured what I can only define as a bewildering projective ordeal. They went through an amazing reciprocal deconstruction and reconstruction of their two psychic apparatuses, both of them encroaching more than once into madness.

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I will focus on four distinct steps in this decade-long adventure, quoting at length its two protagonists and minimizing the commentary, so much do their words speak for themselves. 1. When Surin was introduced to Joan of the Angels, she knew that her accusations against Grandier had paved the way to his death at the stake. Historians generally take it for granted that she had been in love with him, maybe seduced by him, maybe not, but in any case full of resentment against him. However, when she learned he had been arrested and accused of being the witch behind the possession, she instantly foresaw his fate. Overwhelmed by remorse, she tried to hang herself in the convent’s courtyard, only to be saved by her sisters. She tried to recant her testimony, but the court, following its own strategy against the fallen priest, attributed to Satan both her suicide attempt and her retraction. If current accounts of the possession at Loudun, since Charcot, have underscored the “hysteric” symptoms displayed by the nuns (spitting out the consecrated host in the face of the priests, jumping and yelling, contorting themselves on the floor, etc.), the best observers at the time were quite suspicious of the untold subtext of Joan’s predicament, and, like Surin in the following passage, they would have classified her mental condition as “melancholy”: [F]or this girl was in full possession of her mind, but she behaved as if she had already been put on trial and sentenced by God, lamenting and moaning so much that Surin was utterly unable to console her; the devil, acting on her by ways of the most violent impressions, was persuading her that she was in truth lost; and, as that vision was engraved into the depth of her soul, he operated strongly on her, and God continued to inflict upon her remorse of great contrition, so that she exhibited a passionate desire of Him, amid all the despair that the devils made her feel. It was an odd thing to see her, for it lasted 50 days, at the end of which her soul took strength and resolved little by little to a complete submission through the following ways. For Surin had decided to withdraw almost completely from the public scene of exorcism. A decisive gesture. Until then, the nuns were dragged against their own will almost every day to the main churches of Loudun, among a fascinated mob of believers and skeptics, to end up in the hands of poorly trained exorcists. The latter both required from and demanded of the devils the most bizarre feats, with the sole intent of demonstrating the power of the Church to chase them out (till the next day, at least). But

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on what grounds did Surin give up these public exhibitions? Because he thought that the only openings he could manage for himself into her heart were through a quasi-mystic form of compassion. Hence, he had to bypass the spectacular materiality of the official ritual in order to address the soul, as if Joan’s soul was trapped in the ceremonial into which she had to play her role as the arch-sinner, but at the expense of her own salvation: Therefore, a paternal love was born in the heart of this father, towards this afflicted woman, so that he wished he would suffer for her and instead of her (an odd idea, indeed!); and he contemplated that a great felicity for him would be to imitate Jesus Christ who, in order to rescue souls from their captivity in Satan’s hands, had suffered death after having taken their infirmities upon Him. 2. But Surin’s strategy was not only to abstain from any exhibition of Joan’s distress. Such a withdrawal was counterbalanced by the active creation of a mirroring Inside: a new private theater of “conscience.” Obsessions and scruples were the privileged instruments used by Joan’s director of conscience to literally carve out into Joan’s soul this new site of interiority. Surin instituted a constant and merciless surveillance of the slightest emotion or thought in her soul. He forced her to scruple, even to the point of keeping a tiny piece of bread in her mouth (thereby taking pleasure in it!) beyond the length of time in which it was really necessary to chew and swallow it in order to sustain her in her fasting and her prayers! Not one minute detail of her everyday life could escape his “fatherly” attention. Exorcism became a perpetual confession, a quest for complete psychological transparency. This was obsessionalization proper: a process through which the penitent is permanently reflecting on their sins so that they reach the point where the seemingly inescapable strength of external temptation by the devil only points to their inborn weakness. At that point, Joan had nothing to do but fully abandon her soul to grace. One immediately sees how pivotal obsessionalization is, on both an anthropological and a psychological standpoint: here, Evil no longer comes from without, but from within: Surin: “The mother having acknowledged all this, and moved by the Spirit of Truth who attended her, gave credence to what the father was telling her: no longer to consider the devils as the authors of the disorderly actions that she made in the course of her agitation,

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but to attribute them to herself, and to humble herself as the person responsible for them, their principle lying within her.” Joan: “It happened that I was almost always suffering from pangs of conscience, and rightly so, for, most of the time, I noticed very well that I was the first cause of my disorders and that the devil was only acting according to the openings that I had given to him.” 3. It was not long before the cost of such an operation claimed its price. For it had been brought about, let us remember, because of Surin’s “Christic” identification with Joan’s innermost resources for salvation. Projective identifications of that kind always come with a reciprocal movement of introjection, as if one could not take somebody else’s interiority in charge within oneself without fully absorbing it. And this absorption is even more threatening when the ultimate goal is not only to know the other, but to somehow “detoxify” what plagues the other person from within. To his friends’ and colleagues’ utter disbelief and great dismay, Surin himself began to feel possessed – as with communicating vessels. For Joan was recovering as fast as her director was sinking into despair. The devils, chased from Joan’s soul, were invading Surin as a matter of revenge. I could not tell you what happens in me at this time and how that [evil] spirit unites with mine without depriving me either from knowledge or from the freedom of my soul, and nevertheless it changes itself into another myself, as if I had two souls, one being dispossessed of her body and of the use of its organs, and staying aside looking at what the other one is doing within her. The two spirits are fighting in the same field which is the body, and the soul itself is as if she were split in two. On the one hand, she is the subject of demoniac impressions, and, on the other hand, she is the subject of movements of her own, or of the movements that God gives to her. This quotation shows how temptation, obsession, and possession were conceptually connected in the eyes of seventeenth-century theologians. The concept of temptation implies that Evil needs an external mediating object. For in moral theology, only (fallen) angels do evil for the sake of evil; no human being can. Hence, Satan needs an apple, and at least the semblance of good, to induce Adam and Eve to sin. Obsession begins when Satan presses further, and “besieges” (obsidere in Latin) the soul, attacking relentlessly the mental powers to resist temptation, through violent moral

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impressions, unwanted movements of the body, etc. Possession occurs only when Satan finally breaches the soul and appropriates its faculties. He takes command of speech, bodily functions, and imagination, of all but one thing: the free will of the possessed person, which cannot be superseded by Satan, unless the possessed consents to it. The splitting of the self as experienced by Surin fits perfectly into this moral and theological framework. 4. During the last phase of this process (which took approximately two years), Surin and Joan stood in completely inverted positions. Joan had learned how to endure temptation without giving from within any opening to the devil to lay further siege to her soul: “Follow the maxim that it is better to suffer temptation with humility than to fend it off with worry. Know that temptation endured in faith is more agreeable to God than the awkward moves that nature wants to make in order to avoid it.” The hard discipline of obsessions (she calls them “worry”), along with constant self-surveillance, as if she had introjected Surin to the point of self-identification, had brought about a spiritual state in which she was constantly dismissing her own internal movements and intentions. Instead, she was putting herself entirely in the hands of heavenly grace. Joan of the Angels turned into a mystic: the pure “culture of interiority” could now freely develop on more positive grounds and bring her solace and spiritual comfort. She even thought that she had become a saint, and, in fact, Mother de Chantal, whose sainthood has never been a matter for dispute, did acknowledge her sincere spiritual elevation. On the contrary, Surin had become fully melancholic, even suicidal. And he was to remain so for more than 20 years. In turn, he was convinced that he was damned and lost forever. No religious exhortation could persuade him that he had only stretched too far the boundaries of what one human being can do for the salvation of another: Such an imagination will only seem hollow to people, like a dream of the mind, because common sense, upon which our faith is built, raises such a high wall against things of the afterlife, that when a man says he is damned, people only think of it as madness. However, madness usually resides in the ideas that we conceive and, even more, that we conceive in a natural way, as with hypochondriacs. In all, it is the same: this one says he is a pitcher, the other he is a cardinal, and these ideas are legitimately regarded as folly. But what the father [Surin speaks here about himself] said was not so, and in all his conceptions there

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was nothing of the kind one can see in hypochondriacs. For believing that one is damned is something that many very wise people have believed, like Henry Suso, who is a saint of the order of St. Dominic, and St. Ignatius at Manresa was on the verge of throwing himself off a cliff, so strong was his thought that God had rejected him. I will not explain here how Surin finally emerged from his melancholy (culminating in a frightening compulsion to throw himself out of a window) to become a major mystic poet of the French “Grand siècle.” I can only emphasize the importance of Surin’s technique of confession as exorcism. It gradually became the norm, and traditional, premodern public exorcism, which was hardly more than countermagic, slowly disappeared. Possession by the end of the seventeenth century had turned into a strictly spiritual affair. It was also much rarer, as witchcraft had almost entirely vanished as a matter of law enforcement in France. The “culture de l’intérieur,” first regarded as a major deviation from the teachings of the Church (Surin was even removed from his position before being recalled as Joan’s condition was quickly deteriorating) eclipsed the former anthropological framework of Evil, in which “expelling” the devils from the possessed bodies in a collective ritual reinforcing the social bonds was standard procedure. Through Surin’s ordeal, a complete reversal had occurred. The new obsessionalization technique had prevailed, and demonstrated its ability to confine extraordinary Evil within the spiritual boundaries of the individuals’ interiority.

Concluding remarks So, what do we gain from viewing Loudun possessions in such a broad anthropological context? Two closely interrelated things. First, we inscribe these tragic events in the history of the mutations of our anxieties about Evil, a history which extends to the present times, in the form of our anxiety disorders, at the center of which stands OCD. For obsession is a theological concept, and scruples were the forerunners of the symptoms Janet and Freud described (much later, indeed) in psychodynamic terms. Second, we may now guess at what psychic cost the paradigmatic figure of our Western modernity emerged: the individual and its “conscience.” The comparison between Senegal in the 1960s and Loudun relies upon two possible answers to the question of Evil. One is

From Loudun to Dak ar, and Back

based on persecution (in a culture in which shame, lineage, and adorcism form a dense network). The other is built upon guilt (in a society which must cope with individualism as the new collective referent, and with “interiority” as the last personal space left to people, as public behaviors became increasingly strictly disciplined by the absolutist states). Such a contrast helps us not only to understand the kind of difficulties exorcists had to face in Loudun, when traditional ways and means to chase out Satan out totally failed. If I am correct in including Joan of the Angels’ cure by Surin in the course of the possession (something that only De Certeau’s approach made possible), it also demonstrates in what sense our felt evidence of interiority, and even of privacy, is a historical product. For no one owns their own interiority as an innate and pregiven dimension of one’s existence, both as a psychological and moral inner space. The process through which such interiority is being “carved out” into ourselves must be exhibited in full detail. And it so happens that when we try to address our collective anxiety of Evil it is best observed not in abstract categorizations or recategorizations of our private experience, but in highly dramatic interactions. In this way, Elias’ civilizing process would finally find a psychological counterpart. Inversely, coming to terms “at home” with the mental fabric of our individuality helps us to understand whence we observe, and maybe objectify in other anthropological contexts the relative functions and values of body and soul, moral feelings other than guilt and remorse, and, of course, the many roles and forms of “spirit possession.”

References Castel, P.-H. Âmes scrupuleuses, vies d’angoisse, tristes obsédés: Obsessions et contrainte intérieure de l’Antiquité à Freud. Paris: Ithaque, 2011. —. La fin des coupables: Obsessions et contrainte intérieure de la psychanalyse aux neurosciences, suivi de Le Cas Paramord. Paris: Ithaque, 2012. De Certeau, M. The Possession at Loudun. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [La possession de Loudun. Paris: Julliard, 1970]. Delumeau, J. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries. Translated by Eric Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Elias, N. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

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Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937]. Ortigues, E., and M.-C. Ortigues. Oedipe africain. Paris: Plon, 1966. Zempléni, A. “Des êtres sacrificiels.” In Sous le masque de l’animal: essais sur le sacrifice en Afrique noire, edited by M. Cartry, 267–317. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987.

9

Devil Possession in the Liturgy around the Tenth and Twelfth Centuries Bringing Together the Body Like a Microcosm f Florence Chave-Mahir

Keywords: the Devil, possession, exorcism, body, liturgy, demoniacs, microcosm, disease, unclean spirit

In this chapter, I would like to show how possession is described in the first liturgical exorcism formulae elaborated for the people.1 As we can find in different definitions, possession is considered to be an attack on a human being by an unclean spirit. It is quite difficult to understand how the spirit enters the body and what it does inside of it. I will try to answer these questions by reading some medieval liturgical texts, voluntarily leaving out other different sources, like hagiography and iconography, I have already studied in my book.2 These texts are found in the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, written in the tenth century, which is now considered to be the first book where exorcisms for possessed people are assembled. Before the tenth century, they were used for catechumens, candidates for baptism who, it was thought, had to be purged of their previous gods.3 The Pontifical, written between 950 and 962, was a vast project which consisted in assembling the ritual texts used by bishops. Although we have to be prudent with the Vogel and Elze edition, I will use the large section which contains ten ordines for exorcism4 but also some twelfth-century manuscripts5 and other different

1 I want to thank warmly Anna Klaniczay who helped me to translate this text. 2 Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés. 3 Ibid., 95–97. 4 Exorcistic texts for the possessed in the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum (PRG) are in Vogel and Elze, Le pontifical, II, 190–224; see Palazzo, Histoire des livres liturgiques, 210–215; Parkes, “Questioning the Authority.” 5 Five twelfth-century manuscripts: Vatican, BAV, Vat. Lat. 7701 (fol. 74–79); Paris, BnF, lat. 14833 (fol. 31v. 42v.); Munich, BSB, Clm 100 (fol. 110–116); Munich, BSB, Clm 3909 (fol. 250–253).

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texts of that time to see how possession is mentioned in them.6 Most of these texts were used in later rituals for exorcism which appeared in the fifteenth century. Nancy Caciola has studied them in their later forms in fifteenth-century manuals, but they were already present in liturgical books in the eleventh and twelfth centuries for exorcistic purposes on possessed people. They were reassembled and developed at the end of the Middle Ages when exorcism proliferated.7 With this in mind, I will first examine what words, names and metaphors were used to describe the Devil. Then I will show that the unclean spirit was considered to be inside the body and in the different body parts. The adjurations for exorcism should be compared to baptism and to texts intended for the sick. To conclude this exploration of exorcistic texts, I will ask myself whether it is possible to interpret the exorcistic process as a way of rearranging the body in the right cosmic order so that the possessed can be turned back to a servus Dei.

Evocations of the Devil The Devil is not frequently mentioned in these texts. There are only a few words to call him: diabolus, spiritus immundus. These terms, which come from the Gospels, express the essence of the Devil. He is the one who puts himself across and who imposes himself on Christian’s destinies. The unclean spirit also means his multiform action, he, or in his plurality they, try to be everywhere, which is why they are also called “legion.” The unclean spirit is one of the numerous demons who fell with Lucifer. Satan is the most frequently used denomination of the Devil in the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, occurring eleven times in the exorcistic formulae.8 For example, during a very long exorcism inside the pontifical, the Devil is called Satan at the important moment of the imposition of the hands and the exorcist exhorts that he leaves and give way to the Holy Spirit.9 By this denomination, the liturgy names the official Devil, Satan, which 6 Férotin, Le liber ordinum, 73–80. 7 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 225–273. 8 “Tu ergo, nequissime Satana, inimice fidei” (PRG II, CXV, 31, 199). For previous adjurations forms, see “Interdicimur tibi, Satanas, per evangelium Dei patris omnipotentis et Iesum Christum” (Miscellanea, ninth century, Cologne, DB, 15 in Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, 587–596). 9 “Exi ab eo, Satanas, et da locum spiritui sancto paraclyto” (PRG II, XV, 24, 199).

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is both opponent and accuser and which is mentioned in the Bible.10 This important moment of apostrophe uses a few other names, such as Asmodeus and Belial, each of which is used once. All these adjurations avoid naming the demon too much. We can already see the huge gap between exorcism and magic, which offers many names to call demons by in their conjurations. In the Munich magic manual Clm 849, Richard Kieckhefer noticed one occurrence of the word/name Satan, but several other names of demons in long lists.11 The Greek tradition of exorcism gives many names to demons, like the “Gylou” mentioned by Maria Patera.12 This liturgical tendency is maintained in magical books where the Devil’s names are numerous and texts function like invocations to the Devil. This Greek tradition totally disappeared from occidental exorcism, which endeavored to maintain a close proximity to prayer and to distinguish itself from magic.13 The use of the single and simple denomination of Satan is therefore a way of eliminating the possibility of multiple invocations and magic. Occidental exorcism talks about the Devil but rarely names it. In a way, naming the most important demon grants him power, but being allusive is another way of showing that the Devil is multiple and omnipresent. Even if the demon is called by one name, many other words and expressions are used in reference to it: transgressor, seductor,14 anathema.15 There are also long evocations of the Devil concerning his actions: Tremble, bad spirit, wicked prince and root of evil, transgressor of the road of truth, justice persecutor, fornication doctor, parricide master, peace destructor, seeds of the worst discord, prince of darkness, death inventor, Janus from hell, abyss cause of all the crimes.16 This is probably a way to deprive him of any identity other than a negative one, declined through different expressions. Since having no name means 10 Russell, Satan; Pagels, The Origins of Satan. 11 Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 154–169; Chave-Mahir and Véronèse, Rituel d’exorcisme, 170–178. 12 Patera, “Exorcismes et phylactères byzantins.” 13 Delatte, Un office byzantin d’exorcisme; Patera, “Exorcismes et phylactères byzantins”; Boudet, “Les who’s who démonologiques”and Entre science et nigromance. 14 PRG II, CXV, 33, 199. 15 PRG II, CXV, 37, 202. 16 “Contremisce, inmunde spiritus, principium sceleris malorumque omnium radix, transgressor viae et veritatis, iustitiae persecutor, doctor fornicationis, paricidii magister, dissipator pacis, semen discordiae pessimum, dux tenebrarum, mortis inventor, tartari ianua, vorago gentium omniumque criminum causa” (PRG II, CXV, 42, 205). See also PRG II, CXV, 31, 199.

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being nobody, some words describe his false identity and choose to show his numerous forms through animal metaphors. He is related to venomous animals like snakes, scorpions or dragons17 and he is quite often called the serpens antiquus. Poison metaphors are quite frequent and suggestive because they show that, like poison or venom, an unclean spirit can get inside the body and infect it to destroy or to kill it.18 The descriptions of the Devil suggest its negative past. It is like a theological “portrait” that, without describing his physical appearance, gives a precise account of what he deeply is. Through these evocations, which come from the Bible, we can imagine the terrible threat he represents. Some texts refer to the Devil by alluding to his whole identity through parts of the Old or the New Testament. An ancient exorcism adjuration which appears in the Missale Gallicanum, written in the seventh or eighth century, and that can also be found in the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, reminds us that the Devil was associated with the story of Pharaoh against the Hebrews: he is the author of the Egyptian plague, he was submerged with the Pharaoh, he was destroyed in Jericho, etc.19 All the failures of the Devil are here in memory to prepare and to assist in this new battle. And the cleric is about to join all these exorcists in their aspiration to oust the unclean spirit. The story or history of the Devil named Satan shows how old this battle is, and how it is re-enacted each time. In the texts that are not under the direct influence of the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, we can discover other evocations of the Devil more directly connected to the Greek tradition of developed exorcisms. The Liber Ordinum, written in Spain in the eleventh century, gives some long and metaphoric descriptions of this unclean spirit of multiform presence. The text recalls certain Christian beliefs about the 17 “Domine Iesu Christe, cui omnia subiecta sunt, quem omnis natura et omnis creatura pavescit recedens in semetipsam, cum te ad auxilium invocemus, cuius audito nomine serpens mansuescit et draco fugit et silet vipera et rubeta statim torpescit, scorpio extinguitur, regulus vincitur et spalangius nichil noxium operatur et omnia venenata et adhuc ferotiora repentia et animalia noxia tenebrantur et omnes adversae naturae radices evanescunt” (PRG II, CXV, 29, 198–199). 18 Chave-Mahir, “Venenum sub melle latet.” 19 “Tu vastatus Egyptiorum plagis, tu in Pharaone dimersus, in Hiericho destructus, in septem Chananeis gentibus stratus. Tu per Samson in allophilis subiugatus, per David trunctatus in Goliath, per Mardocheum in Aman expoliatus, per Danihelem in Bel deiectus, in dracone punitus, per angelum in Erode percussus, per dominum nostrum Iesum Christum humanis imperiis subiugatus, per Paulum cecatus in Mago, ustus in vipera, per Petrum disruptus in Symone, per omnes sanctos deinceps fugaris, torqueris, illuderis, aeternis ignibus et inferni tenebris deputatus” (Prg II, CXVIII, 2, 212). See also Missale Gallicanum, seventh–eighth centuries, in Eizenhöfer and Siffren, Missale Gallicanus Vetus II, no. 13.

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Devil such as his pride and his desire to be better than God. The Devil is also a master of lies, temptation and secrets.20 Relating the stories about the different interventions that the Devil has carried out in the destinies of the Christians is one way to invest him with reality and power. It also reminds us of his unique vocation of disturbing humanity in the multiple forms he has taken over the course of history. These different ways of mentioning the Devil all suggest that he is an ancient and poisonous threat related to the Old Testament. The exorcists struggled with the unclean spirit; not just one of the many demons, this was Satan, the most important among them. Evoking these stories of the Devil strengthened his being and gave some sort of explanation to why men required a great force to get rid of him. Associating him with venomous animals illustrates how toxic he could be. The exorcist takes up a battle against the Devil, but where is the evil spirit located within the possessed body?

Possession: Where the Devil hides inside the body Many texts in the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum adjure the unclean spirit by calling on it to leave the different body parts it has gained possession of. These adjurations pursue the Devil in the organs of the possessed person. According to Christian belief, the texts possess meaning, and are a sort of proof that the Devil can get inside the body. Holy Lord Father Omnipotent, Eternal God, expel the Devil from this man: from the head, from the hair and crown of the head, from the brain, from the forehead, from the eyes, from the ears, from the nostrils, from the mouth, from the tongue, from under the tongue, from the throat, from the neck, from the chest, from the heart, from the whole body, from all its members, from all its ancillary members 20 “Tu es, qui per tumorem cordis deum contemnens, non solum eius equalem te esse, sed etiam superiorem existere voluisti. Tu ab initio statim mundi hominem fefellisti et verbis mendaciis blandiens rudes animas decepisti. Tu dominum ipsum temptare conatus, quasi ut obreperes rursus et falleres latenter adgressus es. Intellectus tamen es et retrusus, et ideo prostratus, quia agnitus atque detectus. Tu lapideos et ligneos deos tecum pariter arsuros, ut colerentur instituisti. Tu miserorum mentes blandiendo facis errare, imples superbia, dissolvis libidine. Tu corda hominum cupiditate excecas, discordia exasperas, ira precipitas. Tu itinera latronibus claudis, predonibus obsides maria, et toto orbe terrarum excitas mutuo sanguine bella” (Liber ordinum cited in Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, 612–613).

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inside and outside, from the bones and nerves, from the blood, from the senses, from the thoughts, from his speech and all his actions, from his youthfulness and from all his interactions, now and in the future, so that the power of Christ the Son of the living God for all time may work within him, Amen.21 These enumerations begin from the top of the head and go to the center of the body, to the ancillary members and internal organs, veins and even thoughts. This kind of adjuration first occurs in the baptismal liturgy of the Stowe Missal in the eighth century. In this book, the adjurations of all body parts are located at the beginning of the baptismal liturgy, which means that it is the first stage of purification.22 Also many Carolingian sacramentaries include these adjurations, still in baptismal liturgy.23 Like in the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, these texts are used in exorcisms for the possessed, as in Liber Ordinum of the eleventh century, where the unclean spirit is located inside the internal organs.24 These kind of formulae are still present in later pontificals like the Rituale of Saint Florian25 and in later exorcism manuals of the fifteenth century.26 In baptismal context, these formulae are intended to “transform chaos into order,” they are a way of recreating the child even inside its body.27 So in the exorcistic context, 21 “Domine, sancte pater, omnipotens eterne Deus, expelle diabolum ab homine isto N., de capite, de capillis, de vertice, de cerebro, de fronte, de oculis, de auribus, de naribus, de ore, de lingua, de sublingua, de gutture, de collo, de pectore toto, de corde, de corpore toto, de omnibus membris, de compaginibus suorum membrorum intus et foris, de ossibus, de venis, de nervis, de sanguine, de sensu, de cogitationibus, de verbis, de omnibus operibus suis, de iuventute, de omni conversatione eius hic et in futuro, ut operetur in eo virtus Christi Iesu filii Dei vivi et altissimi, qui regnat in saecula seculorum. Amen” (PRG II, CXIV, 7, 192). See also PRG II, CXV, 29, 198; PRG II, CXV, 34, 201; PRG II, CXV, 43, 205; and Cologne Cathedral, CKC 15, ninth century, fol. 96v–98v (Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, 594). 22 “Domine, sancte pater, omnipotens sempiterne deus, expelle diabolum et gentilitatem ab homine isto, de capite, de capillis, de vertice, de cerebro, de fronte, de oculis, de auribus, de naribus, de ore, de lingua, de sublingua, de gutture, de faucibus, de collo, de pectore, de corde, de corpore toto intus de foris, de manibus, de pedibus, de omnibus membris, de compaginibus membrorum eius et de cogitationibus, de verbis, de operibus et omnibus conversationibus hic et in futuro per te Iesus Christus qui regnas” (Warner, The Stowe Missal, 24). 23 Gellone Sacramentary, end of the eighth century (Dumas and Deshusses, Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, 359). 24 “Adsit, domine, virtutis maxime gloria, adsit potens languentium medicina, que omnes his visceribus demonice temptationis morbos excludat” (Liber ordinum in Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, 615). 25 Franz, Das Rituale von Sankt Florian, 118. It is exactly the same formula as in PRG. 26 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 256–262. 27 Cramer, Baptism and Change, 149.

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giving place or name to each part of the body is a way to create and to give them a good position in the cosmic order of Creation. Exorcism, following the Devil has insertion inside the body, that is, its destruction, is intended to secure God’s return. Within these formulae, exorcism is like a systematic malediction of the different body parts possessed by the unclean spirit. From 900, we find expressions like maledicte diabole in baptismal exorcism and in excommunication texts. In these, man is cursed throughout his body.28 Formally, exorcism is close to malediction, the rejection and seclusion of the bad Christian. However, this kind of pursuit of the Devil can also be found in other parts of the liturgy. In benedictions for the sick, for example, disease is cast away from different parts of the body: the head, eyes, ears, nose, lips, neck, throat, chest, hands, feet, and the place where the pain comes from.29 The priest has to make the sign of the cross during benediction in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in order to heal the sick. As in exorcism, different parts of the body are crossed. Benediction is a sort of medication in this case. It is a way to take care not only of an organ but of the whole body. Just as the priest-doctor purifies all parts of the body, the exorcist-doctor pursues the Devil in the possessed body. Since the beginning of Christianity, oil benedictions have been an essential part in blessings for the sick. In the story of Saint Geneviève, written around 520, her prayer blesses the oil with which she heals a possessed person.30 He is not healed by an exorcism, but in this example we can observe a total confusion between disease and possession, where the oil unction functions as an exorcism. Every disease could be cured with blessed oil and so should possession 28 “Maledictus sit in totis viribus corporis. Maledictus sit intus et exterius. Maledictus sit in capillis, maledictus sit in cerebro. Maledictus sit in vertice, in temporibus, in fronte, in auriculis, in superciliis, in oculis, in genis, in maxillis, in naribus, in dentibus mordacibus, in labris, sive molibus, in labiis, in gutture, in humeris, in armis, in brachiis, in manibus, in digitis, in pectore, in corde et in omnibus interius stomacho tenus, in renibus, in inguinibus, in femore, in genitalibus, in coxis, in genibus, in cruribus, in pedibus, in articulis et in unguibus. Maledictus sit in totis compaginibus membrorum, a vertice capitis usque ad plantam pedis non sit in eo sanitas” (Little, Benedictine Maledictions, 150). 29 “Et sic perunguant singuli sacerdotes infirmum de oleo sanctificato, cruces faciendo in collo et gutture et pectore et inter scapulas seu in loco ubi dolor plus imminet, et in quinque sensibus corporis et in supercillis oculorum et in naribus intus et foris et in aurium summitate exterius sive interius et in labiis exterius et in manibus exterius, id est de foris, ut si quinque sensibus mentis et corporis aliqua macula inhesit, medicina spiritali sanetur et domini misericordia impetretur” (Ordo ad unguendum infirmum, PRG II, 260). 30 Vita Genovefae, 236. See also Dubois and Beaumont-Maillet, Sainte Geneviève de Paris.

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as well. In the Leofric Missal as used in Exeter, this oil can be applied to cure every disease and especially paralytics, the blind, the lame and also demoniacs.31 The text offers a long list of different diseases cured with this oil. The benediction gives the healing power to it. But at the end it is as if the oil was intended to expel the unclean spirit responsible for the entire malaise. After this part, the text becomes more and more like exorcism: Attack of that demon, or invasions of the unclean spirit, legions of ill-harassment, shadows and attacks and infestations, malefic arts, Chaldeans, augurs, and divine spells and indiscriminate poisons, are made by the power of the unclean spirit the worse and diabolical exercise. My Lord, by this invocation, expel it by the bottom and from all these viscers, etc.32 One manuscript testifies in favor of the proximity between medicine and exorcism. In the Lorsch Ritual, probably written before 813, exorcism formulae are inserted between ordo of benedictions for the sick and ordo for the reconciliation of penitents at their death.33 These adjurations of different parts of the body have their roots in baptism and in liturgy for the sick. The same type of text can be found in excommunication and in liturgy for the sick. What does all this tell us about possession? This way of expelling the unclean spirit from different parts of the body shows that the Devil is considered to be located inside it. That helps us to understand possession, which was, for medieval people, a sort of disease 31 “Item benedictio eiusdem olei, ad omnem languorem, quocumque tempore, et nulla in huius olei benedictione conclusio dicatur. […] Domine, Pater inmense, hoc unguentum compositionis atque permixtionis dederimus, liniendis corporibus infirmis continuo peragratis visceribus eorum omnem evomant violentiam fellis. Prosit paraliticis, cecis et claudis, simulque vexaticiis. Quartana, tertiana, et cotidiana excutiat frigora. Mutorum ora resoluat, arentia membra reficiat; dementiam mentis ad scientiam revocet; dolorem capitis, oculorum infirmitatem, manuum, pedum, brachiorum, pectorum simulque et intestinorum atque omnium membrorum, tam extrinsecus quam intrinsecus, et medullarum dolorem expellat; somnum quietis infundat et salutem conferat sanitatis” (Warren, The Leofric Missal, 257; and see Férotin, Le liber ordinum, 7–11). 32 “Impetum quoque demonum, vel incursiones inmundorum spirituum, atque legionum malignarum vexationes, umbras et inpugnationes, et infestationes, artes quoque maleficorum, chaldeorum, augurum, et divinorum incantationes, et venena promiscua, que spirituum inmundorum virtute nefanda et exercitatione diabolica conficiuntur, iubeas, Domine, per hanc invocationem tuam ab imis visceribus eorum omnia expelli etc.” (Warren, The Leofric Missal, 257). 33 Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Palat. lat. 485 (see Clercq, “Ordines unctionis infirmi”; Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 109).

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inside the body, one that could be healed by a physical adjuration coming from outside the possessed. The attack by the Devil introduces a disorder in it. Other descriptions of possession converge to this conception. Possessed people are not talking as they used to talk, some of them know new languages or secret stories. The unclean spirit is not only in their thoughts but in organs under the skin, as many stories illustrate it in exempla.34 Possession is a physical disorder and the pictures systematically show the possessed vomiting the Devil from the mouth. Most of the time He is represented as a bird, having apparently completely transformed the human being into the Devil’s puppet, with blowsy hair and clothes ripped off. Addressing the different parts of the body is a way to pursue the Devil so that one can “reorder the disordered body.”35 The medieval exorcist is less a master of disorder, as Bertrand Hell used to call him in relation to contemporary societies: he is the one who brings back order into disorder.36 In the eleventh-century texts, the body is like a microcosm, composed of different parts considered as a whole. This idea of the body as a microcosm is found to be a common conception in the middle ages.37 Addressing each part of the body is like reassembling it, it returns each part to its rightful place while expelling the unclean spirit from it. Here “unclean spirit” refers both to possession by the Devil and to a sort of disease from which the possessed have to be delivered, healed or treated. This liberation aims at establishing the original physical order. This can be achieved by uttering prayers and chants, and pursuing a special diet.

Exorcism: A way of putting the body and soul back together Exorcism, besides being a plea against an unclean spirit, is a prayer to God. The cleric asks God to establish his presence back inside the body instead of that of the Devil. The possessed is no longer called possessus but servus Dei or famulus Dei. The terms used to refer to possessed people in the liturgical texts intended to exorcise them are never possessus, demoniacus or obsessus. Men or women are here merely as vessels of God and have never totally abandoned their previous identities of famulus Dei, a term which comes from baptismal liturgy. 34 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 37–54; Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 253–258. 35 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 256. 36 Hell, Possession et chamanisme. 37 Camille, “The Image and the Self.”

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Formally, the exorcism prayer is a sort of anamnesis of Christ’s life. During Mass, after consecration, anamnesis is a call to remember Christ. Praying assists in one’s liberation from the Devil because Christ was the first to triumph over Him. I conjure you, bad angels and spirits, Christian persecutors by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, by the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, by the birth of the Lord, by his childhood, by his persecution by King Herod, by Christ’s Passion, by the wood of his cross, by his blood, by his sepulchre and his resurrection, by his ascension to heaven, by his appearance before the apostles, by his kingdom, by his arrival at Doomsday and his just Judgment over righteous and sinners, by all virtues of the sky, by the angels, archangels, prophets, apostles, martyrs, confessors, choirs of virgins and all God’s elected. You demons, I conjure you not to tempt and torment this servant of God. By the one who will come.38 The Credo is recognizable in this prayer. This was the most famous prayer, known by adults and children alike. They learned it at the time of baptism if they were adults or during their childhood. Eighth-century Carolingian capitularies ordered the Credo and the Pater to be learned and known by the people. Both had to be recited in the morning and in the evening. We can imagine how, during exorcism, when this prayer was recited by the priest, all the people present could pray or whisper along with him. Most of the time, these prayers were accompanied by music and singing. Psalms were considered to be very useful against the Devil because King Saul had been saved by David who had sung him Psalms.39 Many ordines of the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, 38 “Coniuro vos, spiritus et angeli maligni, persecutores christianorum, per patrem et filium et spiritum sanctum et adventum domini nostri Iesu Christi, per annuntiationem Gabrihelis archangeli ad Mariam virginem, per nativitatem domini, per infantiam eius, per persecutionem eius ab Herode rege, per passionem eiusdem domini nostri Iesu Christi, per patibulum crucis eius, per sanguinem, per sepulchrum eius, per resurrectionem eius, per ascensionem eius in caelos, per adventum eius super apostolos, per regnum eius, per adventum eius ad diem iudicii et iustum iudicium iudicandum inter iustos et peccatores, per omnes etiam caelorum virtutes, per choros angelorum, archangelorum, prophetarum, apostolorum, martirum, confessorum, virginum atque omnium simul electorum Dei; vos, demones, coniuro, ut non habeatis potestatem temptare vel fatigare hunc famulum Dei. Qui venturus est” (PRG II, CXVI, 3: 220–221). 39 About Psalms powers, see Morard, “La harpe des clercs.”

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such as the one called Ad succurrendum his qui a demonio vexantu,40 provide psalms, chants and litanies to accompany prayers and confessions. Litanies are liturgical prayers that contain supplications to God. They call for fecundity, peace, and the liberation of captives, unlike exorcisms that expel the Devil. The antiphon Asperges me and the penitent psalm Miserere mei are sung during the exorcism. Sometimes, songs were added to the prayer during the Mass itself. With the intervention of the priest reciting the prayers and chants, the possessed people became cured and the Devil scared away. But pontificals also recommended some quasi-medical prescriptions. In the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum a long fast is proposed, with specific instructions from the priest that the possessed should follow in order to regain their health.41 A fast lasting 40 days and 40 nights is organized for the one who is tormented by the unclean spirit. The first week, he will fast every day until the evening and will eat cold bread baked in ashes with salt and holy water and will drink holy water. For the five following weeks, he will eat the same except, on the third day, he shall eat cooked bread with bacon at night and the next three nights following that he will drink cervoise and, if he has wine, he will drink some of it but not so much as to become inebriated. Then the priest will come to the afflicted; he will give him water with blessed salt and absinth in order to make him vomit. He will wash his hands, face, feet, and all members of his body with nothing but holy water for six weeks. He will not eat the herbs of the garden, or vegetables, or anything that has been killed or that he has seen being killed. He should not approach any dead animal or dead human and should not see any cadaver for 40 days and 40 nights. After the 40 days have passed, he returns to the priest and confesses his sins, attends a Mass, receives communion and prays, because, according to the Apostle, the prayers of the faithful can save the sick. At the end, he is forbidden to eat two types of fish: the eel and the tench, and he has to avoid any animal or fowl. And if he strictly respects the fast, the prayers and the confession, we believe 40 PRG II, CXV: 193–205; and also partially in Paris, BnF lat. 14833, fol. 36–37v. 41 See Bamberg Library 53 (fol. 161v–162r); Pontifical of Gondekar II, twelfth century, Eichstätt, Diosezanachiv, Cod. B 4 (fol. 163v); Vienna National Library 701 (111v–112r); and BM Vendôme 14 (fol. 124v).

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in God’s mercy and we really think with confidence that the Lord will free him from all the attacks of the Devil.42 This diet is like a fast of penitence for the possessed. In Christianity, fasting is a kind of penitence in preparation for Easter, the purpose of which is to remind the Christians of the 40 days Christ spent in the desert. At the beginning, in around the eighth century, Lent was taken very strictly, with a diet of just a few vegetables, fish and eggs for dinner. Compared to this general Christian fasting, the possessed have to fast even more strictly. All they may eat is holy water, bread with no yeast and bread with bacon. Sometimes, the possessed have to drink a light beer – called cervoise – which was a common beverage in medieval times because it was considered better and less dangerous than water. The possessed are also authorized to drink some wine. Except for bacon, they have no access to slaughtered animals, eggs or milk products. Everything in the fast aims to purify the possessed of an unclean spirit. According to the humoral theory, only cold food is certain to help avoid passion, fire and the Devil. The priest provides them with holy water with salt and absinth to make them vomit. In iconography, a possessed person is shown vomiting the Devil through the mouth: here the priest is like a doctor giving him emetic medicine.43 The fast also has an initiatory purpose. 42 “De ieiunio daemoniacis imponendo: Hoc ieiunium providebit unusquisque, qui a daemonio vexatur quadraginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus. Primam ebdomadam ieiunet cotidie usque ad vesperam et tunc manducet subcinericium panem frigidum, cum sale et aqua benedicta factum, et bibet aquam benedictam. Et tunc preterea alias ebdomadas quinque nihil aliud manducet, nisi panem tertia die coctum, cum lardo super unam noctem cocto, et cervisam tres noctes habentem, vel, si vinum habet, tantum staupum plenum vino bibat et numquam inebrietur. Et quando primum legatur super infirmum hominem, det illi presbiter aquam benedictam cum sale sanctificato bibere et cum absinthio mixta donec evomat. Manus autem neque faciem neque pedes neque ullum corporis membrum in illis sex ebdomadis lavet, nisi cum aqua benedicta. Non manducet in horto herbulas, neque ulla holera, neque occidat quicquam, nec aliquid videat occidere. Non veniat ubi ullum morticinum videat, nec ad mortuum hominem veniat, nec ulla cadavera videat in quadraginta diebus sive noctibus. Transactis autem quadraginta diebus veniat ad sacerdotem et faciat puram confessionem de omnibus peccatis suis et audiat missam, et sacrificium accipiat et celebret orationem et, iuxta apostolum, oratio fidei salvabit infirmum. In extremo iubeatur illi, ut duo genera piscium, tincam scilicet et anguillam non gustet, nec de ullo genere bestiarum vel volatilium. Et si firmiter istud ieiunium cum oratione et pura confessione servaverit, credimus de misericordia Dei et vere confidimus, quia de omnibus incentivis diabolicis, domino largiente, liberabitur” (PRG II, CXX, 220–221). 43 See, for example, this medical book about epilepsy. Here, epileptics are called demoniacs: “Epilepsie genera sunt duo. Unum est tale in quo cadunt subito nescientes et contractionem pedum manusque cervicis tremorem patiuntur. Aliud est in quo spumant et strecunt non contrahunt membra cum ceciderint qui vulgo demoniacos dicuntur. Hi quidam ex parte sentiunt, illusio omnino sine sensus. Nascuntur he autem cause de sanguine viscido tamaro et de felle nigro viciato que cum se miscuerint cerebrum petunt in quo principaliter anima habitat, quo conturbati

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Like in Yvain ou le chevalier au lion by Chretien of Troyes, Yvain is a savage who eats raw flesh, walks around naked and sleeps on the ground. He joins human society thanks to a hermit who gives him bread, water and cooked meat. The savage fool is saved by the food of humans.44 The priest also makes some recommendations about spirituality. But the first step of the demoniac’s return to a truly pious life is to wash himself with blessed water as in a new baptism. He also has to avoid dead animals or any corpse, as the dead were believed to attract unclean spirits. Tenth-century exorcism ordines include fast medications for possessed people. These texts are influenced by the medicine of antiquity. We can then consider exorcism to be a multiple therapy which combines prayers, music, diet and seclusion from society.

Conclusion Medieval possession by an unclean spirit was regarded as a physical disease, as we can see in the earliest liturgical texts. The body was seen to have been entirely invaded by the presence of this spirit, which had one name: Satan. The different ways of naming the Devil were very much related to the description of the possession. The unclean spirit which is described in these texts was the enemy, the negative force present in the Old and the New Testaments. Consequently, the exorcist was engaged in a mighty battle against this force and the possessed person seems to have been a simple container or as, the French say, a “réceptacle.” The struggle was engaged by a direct adjuration on the possessed body. Every part of it had to be healed to force the Devil to leave it. The formulae were related both to baptism and to the healing of the sick. This means that in the Christian liturgy, texts are often reemployed in different circumstances since they have the same sense. For a Christian perception of the possession, the Devil is portrayed inside the body and the intention was to force it outside through oral adjuration, prayers, or a diet which resembled a medication. In that way exorcism enabled reconciliation between the body and the soul. cadunt. Manducent radices in oximelle infusas ieuni quamdiu omnino manducare possunt et super oximelle que resuerit mutis calda satis et (dabunt/dabant) bibere ad satietatem et post horas, digitis missis in ore vomitum provocat que si vomere missis digitis ne potuerit” (Galeno Liber Tertius, eleventh century, Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 4417, fol. 38v). 44 Le Goff and Vidal-Naquet, “Lévi-Strauss en Brocéliande.”

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References Béraudy, R. “Le sacrement des malades, Étude historique et théologique.” Nouvelle revue théologique 96 (1974), 600–634. Boudet, Jean-Patrice. Entre science et nigromance. Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XIIe-Xve siècle). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006. —. “Les who’s who démonologiques de la renaissance et leurs ancêtres médiévaux”, Médiévales 44 (2003), 117–140. Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Camille, Michael. “The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies.” In Framing Medieval Bodies, edited by S. Kay and M. Rubin, 62–99. New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Chavasse, Antoine. Étude sur l’onction des infirmes dans l’Église latine du IIIe au XIe siècle, tome I du IIIe siècle à la réforme carolingienne. Lyon: Librairie du Sacré-Cœur, 1942. Chave-Mahir, Florence. L’exorcisme des possédés dans l’Eglise d’Occident (Xe–XIVe siècles). Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. —. “Medieval Exorcism: Liturgical and Hagiographical Sources” In Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, edited by H. Gittos and S. Hamilton, 159–175. Farnham–Burlington: Ashgate, 2016. —. “Venenum sub melle latet. L’image du poison dans le discours anti-hérétique au Moyen Âge.” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales 17 (2009): 161–172. Chave-Mahir, Florence, and Julien Véronèse. Rituel d’exorcisme ou manuel de Magie? Le manuscrit Clm 10085 de la Bayerische Staatsbibliothek de Munich (début du XVe siècle). Firenze: Edizioni del Galuzzo, Micrologus’ Library, 2015. Cramer, Peter. Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages (c. 200–c. 1150). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. De Clercq, C. “Ordines unctionis infirmi des IXe–Xe siècles,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 44 (1930): 100–122. Delatte Louis. Un office byzantin d’exorcisme (ms. De la lavra du Mont Athos 20). Bruxelles: Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, 1957. Dendle, Peter, Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014. Dubois, D. J., and L. Beaumont-Maillet. Sainte Geneviève de Paris. Paris: Beauchesne, 1982.

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Dumas, A., and J. Deshusses. Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Eizenhöfer, L., and P. Siffren. Missale Gallicanus Vetus II. Rome: Heder, 1958. Férotin, Dom. Le liber ordinum en usage dans l’Eglise wisigothique et mozarabe d’Espagne du Ve au XIe siècle, edited by M. Férotin. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1904. Franz, Adolf. Das Rituale von Sankt Florian XII Jahrundert. Freiburg im Brisgau: Herder, 1904. —. Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter. Freiburg im Brisgau: Herder, 1909. Hell, Bertrand. Possession et chamanisme. Les maîtres du désordre. Paris: Flammarion, 1999. Katajala-Peltomaa Sari, Demonic possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Kieckhefer, Richard. Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Le Goff, Jacques, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. “Lévi-Strauss en Brocéliande. Esquisse pour une analyse d’un roman courtois.” In L’imaginaire médiéval. Essais, by Jacques Le Goff, 151–187. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Little, Lester K. Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Morard, Martin. “La harpe des clercs. Réceptions médiévales du Psautier entre pratiques populaires et commentaires scolaires.” PhD thesis, Université Paris IV, 2008. Pagels, Elaine. The Origins of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics. New York: Random House, 1995. Palazzo, Eric. Histoire des livres liturgiques. Le Moyen Âge, des origines au XIIIe siècle. Paris: Beauchesne, 1993. Parkes, Henry. “Questioning the Authority of Vogel and Elze’s Pontifical romano-germanique.” In Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, edited by H. Gittos and S. Hamilton, 75–101. Farnham–Burlington: Ashgate, 2016. Patera, Maria “Exorcismes et phylactères byzantins: écrire, énoncer les noms du démon.” Cahiers Mondes anciens 1 (2010). http://mondesanciens.revues. org/index139.html. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Satan: The Early Christian Tradition. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 1981. Triacca, Achille. “Gli effetti dell’unzione degli infermi. Il contributo del nuovo Ordo Unctionis Infirmorum ad un problema di theologia sacramentaria.” Salesianum 38 (1976): 3–41.

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Vogel, Cyrille, and Reinhard Elze, eds. Le pontifical romano-germanique du Xe siècle. 3 vols. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1963–1972. Vita Genovefae virginis parisiensis, MGH SRM 3. Warner, G. F. The Stowe Missal II. London: Harrison, 1915. Warren, F. E. The Leofric Missal as Used in the Cathedral of Exeter during the Episcopate of Its First Bishop (1050–1072). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883.

10 East European Christian Prayers against Hailstorms Aquatic Demons and Divine Powers in Canonical and Apocryphal Contexts* f Emanuela Timotin

Keywords: prayer, hailstorm, exorcism, euchologion, apocryphal, magical, canonical, manuscript transmission

The goal of this chapter is to convey the existence and variation of a long East European Christian tradition of prayers against hailstorms, which presents them as an evil rain influenced by the power of an often unknown supernatural force.1 1. The Eastern Orthodox Christian euchologia – collections of texts used by priests for various religious services – are one of the most important sources for studying the history of this genre of prayers.2 They comprise services which normalize the life of a community, such as the Mass for the consecration of a new church or a desecrated church and for the benediction of the water at the Epiphany. They also include the services for baptisms, marriages, funerals, confessions, and even services for occasional situations. This last category, usually labeled as “Useful Prayers,” includes purification prayers, blessings, and protective conjurations.3 The Romanian euchologia (Rom. molitvelnice) were translated from Slavonic and Greek. The first Romanian printed euchologion appears in * This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project no. PN-II-RU-TE-2012-3-0045. 1 For the Western European tradition of prayers against hailstorms, some of them influenced by Agobard of Lyon’s work De grandine et tonitruis, see, for example, Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen; Agobardi Lugdunensis, Opera omnia, 6; Blöcker, “Wetterzauber”; Sinclair, French Devotional Texts, 48, no. 547; 327–328, no. 6805; Bériou et al., Prier au Moyen Âge, 74–75; Lecouteux, “Les maîtres du temps.” 2 For a detailed description of the Greek Euchologion published by Goar in Paris in 1647 and its numerous reprints, see Leclercq, “Goar,” cols. 1368–1374; for this type of prayer book, see Kazhdan, Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 738. 3 For these occasional prayers as important sources for the study of daily life and social history; see recently Rapp et al., “Byzantine Prayer Books,” 174–175.

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the second half of the sixteenth century in Braşov, several decades after the emergence of the first Romanian texts.4 The euchologia were published in an increasing number in various centers of printing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,5 always with the local bishop’s approval, which thus sanctioned their canonical character. Prayers against bad weather fit well in these collections, precisely in the section entitled “Useful Prayers,” in the vicinity of prayers that are supposed to be read for the founding of a house, the digging of a well, the consecration and purification of desecrated springs and food (oil, salt, and wine), and for travelers, insomnia, and haunted houses. Exorcisms against bad weather, including hail, develop upon a biblical fragment which presents hail as a manifestation of divine wrath and the seventh plague of Egypt.6 The same book describes the power of this hailstorm: And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch forth thine hand toward heaven, that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt, upon man, and upon beast, and upon every herb of the field, throughout the land of Egypt. And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt. So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. And the hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field.7 The concern of people in preventing hail and for providing comfort to those whose lands were devastated by hail has been attested to since antiquity.8 The 4 Coresi, Tâlcul evangheliilor, 189–211. The first Romanian writings are a psalter written in the first decade of the sixteenth century and a document written in 1521; see, respectively, Gheţie and Teodorescu, Psaltirea Hurmuzaki; Chivu et al., Documente şi însemnări româneşti, 95. 5 Such as Iaşi (1681, 1749, 1764, 1785, 1789), Alba-Iulia (1689), Buzău (1699, 1701, 1747), Râmnic (1706, 1730, 1747, 1758, 1768, 1782, 1793), Târgovişte (1708–1712, 1713), Bucharest (1729, 1732, 1741, 1764, 1794, 1808), Blaj (1784, 1815). It is worth recalling that in the Balkan peninsula of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, publishing activity in the Greek and South-Slavonic languages was forbidden by the Ottoman authorities; that is why the printing of such texts flourished in other cultural spaces, including the Romanian linguistic space. 6 Exodus 9:18. 7 Exodus 9:22–25. I use the King James Bible throughout this chapter. 8 Fiedler, Antiker Wetterzauber.

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sixteenth sermon by Saint Gregory of Nazianz, In patrem tacentem propter plagam grandinis, proves the existence of a Christian meditation concerning this atmospheric phenomenon since the end of antiquity. Through its topic and because of its author’s authority, the sermon seems to have played an important part in shaping the Eastern Orthodox Christian beliefs concerning hail, as proven by its depiction in the manuscript Parisinus Gr. 510 (fol. 78). The miniature of the ninth-century manuscript is divided into two parts. An upper side presents a rustic landscape comprising vineyards, grasslands and fields of grain; all are covered in hail which continues to fall from the sky. The inferior part of the miniature depicts the saint delivering a sermon to his faithful.9 The Christian reflection on hail, rooted in Exodus and supported by Christian theologians, as well as the belief in Christ’s power to rule over atmospheric phenomena and based upon an episode from the Bible where Jesus is granted the power to appease a storm,10 also nourished and legitimated the presence of a prayer against bad weather, In fulminis et fulguris periculo oratio in the Greek Euchologion sive Rituale Graecorum published in 1647.11 The biblical references are abundant: the text has the form of a long glorification of God, presented as the only one who can influence the atmospheric phenomena.12 Following Exodus,13 it also states that the bad weather might be a manifestation of divine wrath, and briefly formulates the demand addressed to God, that of protecting the faithful: That is why we are beseeching You: turn Your wrath from us and never get angry with us, but revive us with Your compassion. Lord our God, You who reinforce the thunder, release the lightning and do everything for the salvation of those created by Your hands, look with Your love for mankind and deliver us from evil, wrath and the 9 The image is described and reproduced in Leclercq, “Grégoire de Nazianze,” col. 1686, fig. 5421. For the miniatures of this manuscript, see also Nersessian, “The Illustrations of the Homilies”; Brubaker, Vision and Meaning. 10 Matt. 14:24–32; Mk 4:37–40; Luke 8:22–25. 11 Goar, Euchologion sive rituale graecorum, 805. The text was translated in other Eastern Christian milieus, precisely in the Slavonic languages and in Romanian. Its Romanian version, entitled Rugăciune la îngrozirea de tunete şi de fulgere (Prayer against terrifying thunders and lightning), still appears in the contemporary Romanian euchologion; see Molitfelnic cuprinzând slujbe, rânduieli şi rugăciuni săvârşite de preot la diferite trebuinţe din viaţa creştinilor, printed with the approval of the Holy Synod, Bucharest, 1998, 402. 12 Cf. Ps. 77 [78]:47–48, 104 [105]:32–33, 143 [144]:6, 146 [147]:8; Job 38:22–30; Matt. 14:24–32; Mk. 6:48–51. 13 Exodus 9:18.

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present terror. You thundered from the sky, my Lord, and multiplied the lightning and troubled us; […] send us Your great mercy and have pity upon us, for the fire of Your wrath not to burn us, nor the wrath of Your lightning and thunders to consume us; but according to Your well-known mercy, appease Your wrath and turn the air into good air and dissolute the darkness with sunrays and turn the tempest into calmness.14 2. Apart from this prayer, sanctioned as canonical, the Eastern Orthodox clergy could employ other exorcisms, as well. Such is the case of a Slavonic prayer against hail recorded in a Slavonic codex written around the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth century, which belonged to the Antim Monastery in Bucharest. The following is from the text “Exorcism against Hail”: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Jesus Christ John and the four evangelists were sitting in a fallow place, and the four evangelists were holding Christ, who was speaking. And behold a cloud of hail cast a shadow over them and our Lord Jesus Christ began to make the sign of the cross over Himself and said: “Be calm and quiet, turn into honey and milk and provide me with water. Go to deserted mountains and into barren trees, and get into the weeds, and there release your anger and roaring, and do not harm these vineyards. I curse you with the one who spoke through the burning bush to Moses, the one who split the stone with a word. White cloud of hail, you should also split and spread and turn into honey and milk and provide me with water, and go to deserted mountains and there release your anger and roaring, and do not harm these vineyards and fields. I curse you, white cloud of hail, with Aaron’s staff, who led the people of God through the Red Sea and drowned the Pharaoh and his army. White cloud of hail, you should also go away and spread and turn into honey and milk and go to deserted mountains and into barren trees and into the weeds; and there release your anger and roaring, and do not harm these fields and vineyards. I curse you, white cloud of hail, with God who gave the people of Israel manna for 40 years. I curse you, white cloud of hail, with God who gave the grace and who was born from the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus Christ, who took 14 For the Greek text, see Goar, Euchologion sive rituale graecorum, 805.

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flesh from the Virgin. I curse you, white cloud of hail, with our Lord Jesus Christ, who stopped the wind and made the sea calm, be calm and quiet and stop and be as the dust in the field; and go to deserted mountains and into barren trees and into the weeds; there release your anger and roaring. But get out of our territory, three stadia, nine stadia away, and never harm these fields and vineyards ever, amen.” Say it three times.15 Unlike the prayer transmitted in the printed euchologia, this one is based on an apocryphal episode in Christ’s life and it presents Christ casting away the cloud of hail. The text has two parts: the former describes the context in which Christ sees the harmful cloud; the latter comprises His conjuration. The circumstances in which this apocryphal miraculous episode occurs are ambiguous in many respects. The mention of “Jesus Christ John” is obscure because it may refer to both Christ and John or conflate the two characters.16 The group of holy characters who take part in the event – Christ, the four evangelists, and St. John – is not specific to the canonical histories concerning Jesus’ miracles. The remark about the evangelists who “hold” Christ is also problematic. However, the detail of the white cloud which casts a shadow over the holy characters suggests that the description alludes to Christ’s Transfiguration, when “a bright cloud overshadowed” the apostles who joined Jesus at the Tabor mountain.17 Consequently, the plot of the Slavonic apocryphal prayer would display an apocryphal moment in Christ’s life which is analogous to a canonical episode of His life, highly esteemed by all Christians, in which apostles close to Jesus learn about His glory from God Himself, who remains hidden in a cloud. The real nature of the cloud of hail is immediately recognized by Christ, who proceeds to its conjuration. The fragment is very interesting for at least two reasons. First, before the conjuration, Christ makes the sign of the cross over Himself, a gesture by which He predicts His crucifixion. Secondly, Christ’s attitude as a conjuror differs from the one recorded in the Gospels, insofar as He does not annihilate the cloud of hail completely, but tries to turn it into a fertile rain. Thus, Jesus repeatedly orders it to be calm, to turn into milk and honey, and to provide Him with water. He 15 For the Slavonic text, see Melchisedec, “O rugăciune-vrajă,” 381–382. 16 The phenomenon of conflation of holy characters is current in the apocryphal and magical traditions. For its presence in a fourteenth-century Slavonic amulet against fever, see Năsturel, “Autour du phylactère.” 17 Matt. 17:5; cf. Mark 9:7; Luke 9:34.

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succeeds thereby to overwhelm the evil component of the cloud, to cast its anger and roaring into remote, deserted places or barren trees, to preserve unspoiled the vineyards and the fields and to supply them with good rain. During the conjuration, Christ brings forth a series of arguments which highlight His power to command the cloud of hail. Three of them relate to events recorded in the Old Testament. The first one recalls the discussion between Moses and God who appears in the burning bush,18 a discussion which preceded the Israelites’ departure from Egypt. It also mentions the rock that God cleaves in the desert in order to supply His faithful with water19: “I curse you with the one who spoke through the burning bush to Moses, the one who split the stone with a word.” The text establishes an analogy between the biblical episode and the situation to which the prayer refers. As the fragment in the Old Testament mentions a rock, so does the prayer against hail, which alludes to hailstones which can become as hard as rocks when they hit the fields. Secondly, as the rock in the desert is split according to God’s will, so will the hailstones be split at Jesus’ order, as the text says explicitly: “I curse you […] with the one who split the stone with a word. White cloud of hail, you should also split.” Finally, as water comes out of the rock in the biblical fragment, water will come out of the appeased white cloud: “White cloud of hail, you should also split and spread and turn into honey and milk and provide me with water.” The biblical text offers thus a “persuasive analogy”20 to a concrete situation; its evocation is supposed to encourage those threatened by hail that they will similarly enjoy the benefits of the water provided by God. The text also evokes “the staff of Aaron, who led the people of God through the Red Sea and drowned the Pharaoh and his army.” The reference to Aaron is inaccurate, because it is not Aaron, but Moses who is attributed these deeds.21 The narrative reveals the ambiguous nature of clouds: a pillar of cloud, the sign of divine protection, guides the people of Israel on their way through the desert and stands behind them when they walk upon dry land in the middle of the sea; at the same time, it provokes the death of the Egyptian army.22 18 Exodus 3:2; Acts 7:30. 19 Exodus 17:6, Num. 20:11; Ps 77 [78]:15–16, 104 [105]:41, Isa. 48:21, 1 Cor 10:4. 20 I am borrowing this formula from Tuerk, “An Early Byzantine,” who examined the role of the analogy in respect to charms and amulets which develop a biblical pattern. 21 Exodus 14:16. An inaccurate reference to Moses’ staff appears in a charm for treasure hunting; see Dillinger, “Charms and the Divining Rod,” 12. 22 Exod. 13:21–22, 14:19; Num. 14:14; Deut. 1:33; Neh 9:12, 9:19; Ps. 77 [78]:14, 104 [105]:39.

East European Christian Pr ayers against Hailstorms

The mention of manna among the arguments Christ uses in His conjuration (“I curse you, white cloud of hail, with God who gave the people of Israel manna for 40 years”) is far from being neutral either: the divine bread that the people of Israel receives in the morning is “as small as the hoar frost on the ground.”23 The last two arguments in Christ’s conjuration are based on episodes mentioned in the New Testament. The former evokes His nativity24 and legitimates thus once again His power to conjure the cloud; the latter explicitly recalls the biblical episode when Jesus appeased the storm.25 The end of the exorcism suggests that the text was effective in a certain territory (“of three or nine stadia” long), which belonged to a specific community (“get out of our territory”).26 The final formula of the text – “Say it three times” – slightly reveals the profile of another conjuror, who is supposed to utter the exorcism in the name of Christ. As a preliminary conclusion, both this exorcism, and the prayer transmitted in the printed euchologia attribute the power of control over bad weather, including hail, to God himself. If according to the prayer of the printed euchologia, the bad weather is a manifestation of divine wrath, which emerges because of the Christians’ sins, the manuscript exorcism no longer reveals why the “white cloud of hail” appeared. Its malignity is however beyond doubt, because Christ Himself is supposed to appease it. It is also specific to the manuscript exorcism to repeatedly state the goal of the text: that of protecting the fields and the vineyards from hail. The most striking feature of the exorcism is that although it creates an apocryphal event concerning Jesus’ life by granting Him the role of a conjuror of hail, it does not present Christ totally annihilating the harmful cloud, but asking the cloud to become a fertile rain. Moreover, Christ’s conjuration is inserted in a specific narrative and draws on certain biblical episodes, as if He needed a supplementary authority to conjure the white cloud of hail. Detailed analysis of the exorcism revealed that, apart from several inconsistencies probably due to its manuscript transmission, the text was cautiously elaborated: it emphasized that Christ, as Son as God, had the legitimacy to rule over atmospheric phenomena; it called forth that He had already exerted this power in front of the apostles, and it developed analogies 23 24 25 26

Exod 16:14. Matt. 2:1–11; Luke 2:4–20. Matt. 14:24–32; Mark 6:48–51. Hail can be a threat to travelers too; see Telelis, “Weather and Climate”, 458–459.

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between the context which required the utterance of the prayer and four canonical episodes. Two of these narratives recall that God can hide in clouds, as He did when he accompanied His people and when He announced to several apostles that Christ was His Son. Under the circumstances it is very probable, because of this constant manifestation of the divine through clouds, that the exorcism grants the authority to Christ to transform the “white cloud” into a benevolent one and that the text never mentions a total disappearance of the cloud, but only its appeasement. By this deferential attitude toward the cloud of hail, and, implicitly, toward God who governs it, the apocryphal prayer resembles other Christian apocryphal writings, according to which God uses hailstorms not only to express His wrath, but also to protect His faithful. Thus, the apocryphal Acts of Paul (§ 22) recall that when Thecla was about to be burnt, “a miraculous cloud, full of rain and hail cast its shadow” and thus stopped the saint’s martyrdom.27 In the same Acts of Paul (§ 25), a sudden hailstorm saves Paul from martyrdom in Ephesus.28 Similarly, a hurricane accompanied by a hailstorm prevents the pagans from burning the apostle Mark’s remains (Martyrdom of the Evangelist Mark, § 9).29 3. The Slavonic tradition also nourished the appearance of another type of exorcism against hail in the Romanian literature. As with the exorcism examined above, this exorcism type was also transmitted exclusively in manuscript. I identified it in eight seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts from Transylvania and Crişana,30 which are preserved in libraries from Bucharest and Cluj.31 The oldest manuscript containing this type of exorcism,32 dating from the first decades of the seventeenth century,33 includes both the Romanian text and its Slavonic source and thus provides explicit evidence that the Romanian texts derive from a Slavonic prototype.34 27 Bovon and Geoltrain, Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, 1135. 28 Ibid., 1160. 29 Geoltrain and Kaestli, Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, 585. 30 Timotin, Paroles protectrices, 206–209. 31 Four manuscripts are preserved in the Romanian Academy Library in Bucharest: Ms. 447 (fol. 76r), 4254 (fols. 155 v–156v), 5910 (first interior cover), 5911 (fols. 4 r–5 v). The other texts are preserved in Cluj, in the University Library: Ms. 2267 (fol. 54 r), 3137 (fols. 208r–209v), in the Romanian Academy Library: Ms. 10 (fols. 188–185); and in the “Sextil Puşcariu” Institute of Linguistics and Literary History: Ms. 34 (fols. 16r–20v). 32 Ms. 447. 33 The text was written between March 19, 1601, and May 21, 1618; see Chivu, Codex Sturdzanus, 51. 34 For a similar Slavonic text, see also Ms. 308 (fols. 108r–111r) in the SS Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia.

East European Christian Pr ayers against Hailstorms

The texts were transmitted mainly in a clerical milieu. They were often copied by priests,35 were part of manuscripts which belonged to clergymen,36 and were written next to writings copied by clergymen,37 or within a missal.38 Here is the text preserved in Ms. 2267: Truly pious and justly magnificent and sanctifying [is] our Lord Jesus Christ, who entrusted the archangel Gabriel with the guarding of the rivers, so that the devil cannot have power over the waters. God came with the glory and with the power of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost to cast away the devil from the sources of the waters, with the Holy Trinity, so that the devil cannot have power over the waters. I stop you, devil, with the true and living God! I stop you, devil, with all the holy angels that God created! I stop you, devil, with the four corners of the sky! I stop you, devil, with the four evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, who hold the sky and the earth! I stop you, devil, with the great city of Jerusalem and all the just who rest within! I stop you, devil, with our God and with pure Mary, the mother of His Holiness, who became engaged to Joseph! I stop you, devil, with the twelve apostles! I stop you, devil, with the sixteen prophets! I stop you, devil, with the prophet Saint John, who baptized our Lord Jesus Christ! I stop you, devil, with the 318 holy fathers from Nicaea, so that you can have no power to ruin the Christians’ work and fields of grain. I stop you, devil, with four saintly rivers which spring from Paradise and surround the world: Pishon, Geon, Tigris and Euphrates, so you can have no power over the work … and to ruin the Christians’ fields of grain! I stop you, devil, with the archangels and angels of our Lord Jesus Christ! I stop you, devil, with the Birth of Christ! I stop you, devil, with the Presentation of Christ at the Temple! I stop you, devil, with the Resurrection of Lazarus! I stop you, devil, with Palm Sunday! I stop you, devil, with the twelve Fridays! I stop you, devil, with the Crucifixion of Christ! I stop you, devil, with the Resurrection of Christ! I stop you, devil, with the holy Ascension of Christ! I stop you, devil, with the Transfiguration, the day the Lord revealed His Holiness! I stop you, devil, with the power of the honest and vivifying cross, 35 36 37 38

Ms. 447, 3137, 5911. Ms. 34, 4254, 5911. Ms. 5910, 4254. Ms. 2267.

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so you can have no power to ruin fields of grain and the Christians’ fortune! I stop you, devil, with the three holy young men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego! I stop you, devil, with the two great lights created by God, which enlighten the sky and the earth, the sun of the day and the moon of the night, so you can have no power to ruin the Christians’ fields of grain! I stop you, devil, with all the cherubim and the seraphim of Jesus Christ and with their endless song, because theirs are the power and the glory, together with the saintly, good, and vivifying Holy Spirit, now and forever, amen.39 This text is generically designated as “prayer” (Rom. rugăciune < Lat. rogatio, onis), a designation which also appears in the title of two other writings (Ms. 3137, 5911), while another one is generically called “exorcism” (Rom. molitvă < Sl. molitva).40 Their titles highlight their alleged effect over the hail: “Prayer against hail” (Rugăciune când vine grindină),41 “Prayer to divert the hail” (Rugăciunea la întoarcerea de grindină).42 Another text is entitled “Exorcism against terrifying rain” (Molitva de ploaie înfricoşată),43 a designation close to that of the prayers against bad weather printed in euchologia. Another prayer is entitled, “These prayers are to be read upon fields of grain and vineyards” (Aceastea rugăciuni să cetesc la holde sau la vii),44 and its designation resembles the denominations of various useful prayers recorded in the printed euchologia. It is specific to this exorcism category to present hail as the result of the evil action of a devil who is attributed the power to rule over the rivers. According to the apocryphal narrative placed in the beginning of the text, this aquatic devil is confronted by an archangel, Gabriel, in the above-quoted text, or Michael in other texts,45 who is charged with guarding the rivers or sometimes the River Jordan,46 so that the devil can no longer dwell there and harm people. Unlike the prayer of the printed euchologia, this specific exorcism clearly states its function: to prevent Christians from the malefic action of the aquatic devil which can stir up evil rain (ploaia rea), cold rain (ploaia cu 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

The Romanian text was edited in Timotin, Paroles protectrices, 195–197. Ms. 10. Four texts (Ms. 34, 447, 4254, 5910) have no specific title. Ms. 2267. Ms. 3137. Ms. 10. Ms. 5911. I often refer to motifs present in the other seven texts, which illustrate this exorcism category. Ms. 10.

East European Christian Pr ayers against Hailstorms

foaş), stormy wind (vânt vihorât), snowstorms (vicole), and evil hailstorms (grindine reale), which can harm the Christians themselves or their fortunes, vineyards, fields of grain, and harvests. As in the exorcism discussed above, this text has the form of a long conjuration. The identity of the conjuror is not disclosed here; it is certainly no longer a holy character, but a person who draws his power and legitimacy upon an enumeration of phrases, most of which follow a similar pattern. Thus, each part of this repetitious structure begins with a performative verb, which expresses the conjuror’s intention to stop the demon and bring about the instant cessation of the malevolent action.47 The verb is followed by the pronoun you, which refers to the malefic agent and which reveals the conjuror’s ability to address the demon directly, and by the name of the malefic agent.48 This structure, comprising the verb, the pronoun and the name of the malefic agent is followed by an ample enumeration of Christian figures, holy days, and symbols, connecting the conjuration and the mentioned events. The texts refer to various figures of Christianity, such as the Holy Trinity, God, the Virgin Mary, the four evangelists, the twelve apostles, prophets, the 40 martyrs of Sebaste, patriarchs, the 318 fathers of Nicaea, St. George, St. Theodore, the three young men in Babylon. They also mention most of the feasts related to Christ’s life (Annunciation, Birth, Presentation at the Temple, Baptism, Transfiguration, Entrance into Jerusalem, Resurrection, Ascension), but also the Resurrection of Lazarus, the Sundays related to Christ’s life, or the twelve Fridays, which represent an apocryphal motif.49 The exorcisms also recall the celestial powers, including angels, archangels, seraphim, and cherubim, and draw a sacred topography comprising the four corners of Paradise, the four corners of the sky, the heavenly Jerusalem, the four rivers of Paradise, the sun, the moon, and some stars. All these turn into protective powers which are supposed to stop or to cast away the hail produced by the aquatic demon. 47 The prayer in Ms. 2267, as well as the texts in Ms. 10, 447, 4254, use exclusively the verb opri, “to stop.” Other prayers use opri and a synonymous verb, cunteni, “to halt” (Ms. 34, 3137, 5190). Ms. 34 uses opri and blestema, “to curse.” Ms. 5911 employs the verbs jura, “to conjure,” blestema, “to curse,” and cunteni, “to halt,” in coordination. 48 The prayer in Ms. 2267, as with those in Ms. 34, 2267, 4254, uses exclusively the noun diavol, “devil;” Diavol, “Devil,” and Satana, “Satan,” appear in Ms. 447 and 5910. Ms. 5911 occasionally uses three noun synonyms: diavol, “devil,” Sătana, “Satan,” and drac, “devil.” 49 For the Romanian tradition concerning these Fridays to which Christians need to grant special honors, see Gaster, Literatura popularǎ românǎ, 256–259; Cartojan, Cărţile populare, 181–184; Vîrban, “O traducere românească.”

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Through the Christian motifs which reinforce the efficacy of the exorcism, the text resembles the above-mentioned manuscript exorcism, which also mentions several biblical episodes. In this case, however, these motifs have no longer any specific relation with the situation in which the exorcisms are to be uttered, but are called forth because of their importance in Christian life. In the mentioning of the devil that inhabits the waters, the exorcisms overlap with Romanian popular beliefs as confirmed by Prince Demeter Cantemir in the early eighteenth century, who noted in his Descriptio Moldaviae: Dracul in valle daemones appellant, quos aquas habitare credunt (“The devil of the water: that is how they call the demons which, in their opinion, inhabit the waters”).50 These beliefs seem to have survived for a very long time, because the idea that waters are inhabited by devils, punished by God for their disobedience, is well attested to Romanian popular tradition, which calls the aquatic demon “the devil of the swamp” (Dracul din tău, Cel-din-baltă, Ăl-dinbaltă).51 The Romanian tradition granted the priests with the power to ward off these devils, which are forced to leave the waters on January 6, when Eastern Christians celebrate the Baptism of Christ. On this day, priests are supposed to bless and thus to purify the running waters.52 The Romanian tradition does not preserve, as far as I know, any trace of the angelic battle which represents the main feature of this exorcism category and which juxtaposes a good archangel, sent by God, and an evil one, aquatic and a master of hail. Yet the conjunction between archangels and hail has a long history, and it is attested to since at least late antiquity, as proven by a limestone from Sicily dating from the fifth to the sixth century, which was meant to protect the vineyards from hail, and on which is engraved a demand addressed to the archangels to remove the demon of hail. This demon seems to be related to the archangel Michael, since its name is Mihalázokos, a designation composed of Michael and hálaza, the Greek name for hail.53 Another tablet against hail from Sicily begins with the invocation of God and ends with the invocation of the archangels Michael and Gabriel.54 The same conjunction of archangels and demons who provoke rain is attested to in a sixth-century lead tablet discovered close to Zagreb, on 50 See Cantemir, Descriptio, 330. 51 See mainly Pamfile, Mitologie românească, 248, and also Fecioru, Poporul român şi fenomenul religios, 113–114. 52 Pamfile, Mitologie românească, 250. 53 Olar, Împăratul înaripat, 115; Fernández Nieto, “A Visigothic Charm,” 565–566. 54 Fernández Nieto, “A Visigothic Charm,” 566.

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which there is engraved an exorcism against the devil who stirs up hail and whose actions are prevented by the archangel Gabriel: I denounce you, unclean spirit from Tartarus, that the angel Gabriel bound with chains of fire, he, who has ten thousand [such chains]; you came as a barbarian to Galilee after Resurrection; and there [the archangel] ordered you to go the mountainous forests and to no longer harm with hail.55 4. To conclude, there is a long and rich tradition of prayers against bad weather, including hail, which were used by Eastern Orthodox clergymen. This specialization is based on the reflection upon a series of biblical narratives and Christian homilies which, on the one hand, attribute the power of ruling over atmospheric phenomena to God alone and, on the other hand, consider hail as manifestation of divine anger toward the sins of the faithful. This reflection favored the appearance of official prayers against bad weather transmitted through the printed euchologia, but also nourished the emergence of various exorcisms against hail which, despite their Christian form, were never sanctioned as canonical by bishops and enjoyed an exclusively manuscript transmission. While the canonical prayer praises God and demands for forgiveness of the Christians’ faults and for divine mercy, which leads to the appeasement of the harmful weather, the unofficial prayers have the form of conjurations and explicitly require the protection of the Christians’ fortunes (vineyards, fields of grain). The unofficial prayers have at the same time important specific features, especially in respect to their beginning, which represents the core of the texts. On the basis of this initial part it was possible to establish that the motif of the mythical battle between archangels and demons, which were supposed to provoke hail, dates from at least late antiquity; its transmission required a process of strong Christianization, which explains the impressive accumulation of holy characters and symbols in the text of the exorcism, although they do not have a specific relation with hailstorms. In comparison to this exorcism, the text which presents Christ as a conjuror of a cloud of hail comprises a reduced number of Christian references, but echoes a 55 I am using the text edited in Gómez-Moreno, “Documentación goda en pizarra,” 53. For a detailed description of the history of this tradition, see Timotin, Paroles protectrices, 216–224; Fernández Nieto, “A Visigothic Charm.”

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more profound Christian reflection on hail. Inspired by the idea that any cloud, including a cloud of hail, can convey a divine wish, it displays an unparalleled apocryphal episode of Jesus’ life and elaborates “persuasive analogies” between biblical narratives and the situation in which the prayer should be uttered. The priests that use these exorcisms – canonical or not – actively contributed to the transmission of a series of beliefs about hail, some of which are heterodox. At the same time, they cast a shadow onto the figure of their rival, highly esteemed in Transylvania and Crişana, the solomonar, traditionally considered to have the power to rule over hail, owing to a secret science learned in Solomon’s school, and consolidated their position as mediators between God and the faithful.

References Agobardi Lugdunensis. Opera omnia, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medieualis, 52, edited by L. Van Acker. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Bériou, Nicole, Jacques Berlioz, and Jean Longère, eds. Prier au Moyen Âge. Pratiques et expériences (Ve–XVe siècles), Textes traduits et commentés. Turnhout: Brepols, 1991. Blöcker, Monica. “Wetterzauber. Zu einem Glaubenskomplex des frühen Mittelalters.” Francia 9 (1981): 121–126. Bovon, François, and Pierre Geoltrain, eds. Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, vol. 1., index by Sever Voicu. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Brubaker, Leslie. Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cantemir, Demetrius. Descriptio antiqui et hodierni status Moldaviæ, edited by D. Sluşanschi. Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Român, 2006. Cartojan, Nicolae. Cărţile populare în literatura românească, II. Epoca influenţei greceşti [Popular books in Romanian literature, vol. 2 The period of the Greek influence]. Bucharest: Fundatia pentru Literatură şi Artă, 1938. Chivu, Gheorghe, Codex Sturdzanus. Philological Study, Linguistic Study, Edition and Index. Bucharest: Editura Academie Române, 1993. Chivu, Gheorghe, Magdalena Georgescu, Magdelena Ioniţă, Alexandru Mareş, and Alexandra Roman-Moraru, eds. Documente şi însemnări româneşti din secolul al XVI-lea [Romanian documents and notes in the sixteenth century]. Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1979.

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Coresi. Tâlcul evangheliilor şi molitevnic românesc [Sermons and Romanian euchologion], Critical edition by V. Drimba. Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1998. Dillinger, Johannes. “Charms and the Divining Rod. Tradition and Innovation in Magic and Pseudo-Science, 15th to 21st Centuries.” Incantatio 6 (2017): 9–23. Fecioru, Theodor. Poporul român şi fenomenul religios. Studiu pe marginea producţiunilor folklorice [The Romanian people and the religious phenomenon: A Study of folk productions]. Bucharest: Editura Librăriei Teologice, 1939. Fernández Nieto, Francisco Javier. “A Visigothic Charm from Asturias and the Classical Tradition of Phylacteries against Hail.” In Magical Practice in the Latin West, edited by R. L. Gordon and F. Marco Simón, 551–600. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Fiedler, Wilhelm. Antiker Wetterzauber, Würzburger Studien zur Altertumswissenschaft 1. Stuttgart: Verlag von W. Kohlhammer, 1931. Franz, Adolph. Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter, vol. 2. Graz: Akademische Druck––U. Verlagsanstalt, 1960 [1909]. Gaster, Moses. Literatura popularǎ românǎ [Romanian Popular Literature], edition, foreword and notes by M. Anghelescu. Bucharest: Minerva, 1984 [1884]. Geoltrain, Pierre, and Jean-Daniel Kaestli, eds. Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, vol. 2, index by Jean-Michel Roessli, and Sever Voicu. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Gheţie, Ion, and Mirela Teodorescu. Psaltirea Hurmuzaki. Philologic Study, Linguistic Study and Edition. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 2005. Goar, Jacobus. Euchologion sive rituale graecorum complectens rituales et ordines divinae liturgiae, offciorum, sacramentorum, consecrationum, benedictionum, funerum, orationum & cuilibet personae, statui vel tempori congruous, juxta usum orientali ecclesiae. Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1647. Gómez-Moreno, Manuel. “Documentación goda en pizarra.” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 34 (1954): 25–58. Kazhdan, Alexander P. Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Leclercq, Henri. “Goar.” In Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, edited by Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq, vol. 6, 1, cols. 1368–1374. Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1924. — “Grégoire de Nazianze.” In Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, edited by Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq, vol. 6, 2, cols. 1667–1711. Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1925. Lecouteux, Claude. “Les maîtres du temps: tempestaires, obligateurs, défenseurs et autres.” In Le temps qu’il fait au Moyen-Âge. Phénomènes atmosphériques

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dans la littérature, la pensée scientifique et religieuse, edited by Cl. Thomasset and J. Ducos, 151–169. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 1998. Melchisedec, Bishop. “O rugăciune-vrajă” [A prayer spell]. Revista pentru istorie, arheologie şi filologie 2 (1884): 381–384. Năsturel, Petre-Şerban. “Autour du phylactère slavo-roumain de Budăneşti.” Études et documents balkaniques et méditerranéens 13/4 (1987): 52–55. Nersessian, Sirarpie der. “The Illustrations of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus: Paris Gr. 510: A Study of the Connections between Text and Image.” Dumbarton Oak Papers 16 (1962): 195–228. Olar, Ovidiu Victor. Împăratul înaripat. Cultul arhanghelului Mihail în lumea bizantină [The winged emperor: The cult of the Archangel Michael in the Byzantine world]. Bucharest: Anastasia, 2004. Pamfile, Tudor. Mitologie românească [Romanian mythology], edited by M. A. Canciovici. Bucharest: Allfa, 1997 [1916–1924]. Rapp, Claudia, Eirini Afentoulidou, Daniel Galadza, Ilias Neseris, Giulia Rossetto, Elisabeth Schiffer. “Byzantine Prayer Books as Sources for Social History and Daily Life.” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 67 (2017): 173–211. Sinclair, Keith Val. French Devotional Texts on the Middle Ages: A Bibliographic Manuscript Guide. Second Supplement. Westport–Connecticut–London: Greenwood Press, 1998. Telelis, Ioannis G. “Weather and Climate as Factors Affecting Land Transport and Communications in Byzantium.” Byzantion 77 (2007): 432–62. Timotin, Emanuela. Paroles protectrices, paroles guérisseuses: la tradition manuscrite des charmes roumains (XVIIe–XIXe siècle). Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2015. Tuerk, Jacqueline. “An Early Byzantine Inscribed Amulet and Its Narratives.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23 (1999): 25–42. Vîrban, Floarea. “O traducere românească din secolul al XVII-lea a Descoperirii celor 12 Vineri” [An eighteenth-century translation of the Discovery of the Twelve Fridays]. Limba română 42 (1993): 29–39.

11 The Nightmare in Early Modern England f Janine Rivière

Keywords: nightmare, incubus/succubus, sleep disorder history, early modern history, possession, dreams, English history, early modern medicine, supernatural

In early modern England the nightmare was understood as a specific experience in which the victim was “oppressed,” “invaded,” or laid upon by a malevolent being in sleep. While this experience today is defined by sleep researchers as a disorder known as “sleep paralysis,” premodern English ideas saw it as either a disease of the body, manifesting in terrible dreams, or as the real assaults of demonic beings, witches or spirits. In the eighteenth century, John Bond, a physician who trained in Edinburgh, explained the key symptoms associated with the phenomenon in his work, An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare (1753): The Night-mare generally seizes people sleeping on their backs, and often begins with frightful dreams, which are soon succeeded by a difficult respiration, a violent oppression on the breast, and a total privation of voluntary motion. In this agony they sigh, groan, utter indistinct sounds, and remain in the jaws of death, till, by the utmost efforts of nature, or some external assistance, they escape out of that dreadful torpid state.1 One of the nightmare’s most horrifying aspects was the victim’s encounter with a demonic being, who attacked them in a paralytic state and lay on their chests preventing them from moving or breathing. While early modern English medical authors like Bond saw this as a terrifying dream instigated by disorders in the body’s natural physiology, this encounter led many victims to conclude that they had been subject to the real assaults of demons, witches or spirits. Subsequently, there are two schools of thought concerning the 1 Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, 2.

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nightmare in early modern England. Those who saw it as a disease of the body manifesting in terrible dreams and secondly, those who saw it as the real assaults of witches, demons or spirits, which I will define as the “hag-riding” tradition. Thus, at the heart of debates about the nightmare experience was the problem of discerning between supernatural and natural causes, dreams and reality, as well as doubts concerning the reliability of the senses. In medical writings the nightmare itself was traditionally conceptualized as a disease symptomatic of humoral excess and the strange affects of the body on the mind and imaginative faculty. Although today we use the term “nightmare” to encompass all kinds of bad dreams, early modern writers understood the nightmare as an experience involving a specific set of symptoms, caused by either supernatural or natural forces. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, writings on the nightmare reveal a complex spectrum of theories that incorporate fragments of classical lore, traditional beliefs and contemporary medical understandings of the body and mind. Throughout this chapter I will use the terms “nightmare,” “Incubus” or “mare” to refer specifically to premodern understandings. Both natural and supernatural ideas of the nightmare continued and coexisted throughout the early modern period, at least until the nineteenth century. A survey of medical ideas about the causes of the nightmare over the period 1550 to 1760 shows how slowly these notions evolved and indicates that most writers drew their conclusions from longstanding medical theories. The majority of English medical texts argued that the Incubus was caused by indigestion, the supine position of the body in sleep, or humoral imbalances. Similarly, cures for the Incubus also changed little from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with physicians and medical writers continuing to counsel a strict regimen of a moderate diet, bloodletting and purging, and an avoidance of the supine position in sleep. However, this is not to suggest there were no changes in medical theories about the nightmare. Eighteenth-century writers such as John Bond sought to establish more empirical models for the nightmare by appropriating William Harvey’s theories about the circulation of the blood. Similarly, other eighteenth-century medical writers also posited that this disease was a symptom of the nervous condition of the “Spleen,” or “Hypochondria” and “Hysteria.”2 As the emphasis on the Incubus shifted from the humors to the circulatory and nervous systems in the eighteenth century, the primary site for the “Mare’s” origin also shifted from the stomach to the brain. 2 Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen; Whytt, Observations on the Nature.

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Although both lay manuals of health and learned medical treatises described the Incubus as a natural disease of the body, there is evidence that the supernatural theory of the nightmare persisted well into the nineteenth century. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical writers frequently complained about their patients’ belief of the nightmare as a supernatural assault by demonic beings. Moreover, incidents of being “hag-ridden” and “witch-ridden” continued in English records of witchcraft. Owen Davies has found evidence of men and women accusing persons of “hag-riding” or sending the “Mare” to them in the areas of Somerset and Dorset as late as 1875.3 Therefore, the development of premodern ideas about the nightmare in England reveals a degree of complexity and continuity, rather than the emergence of progressive, medical and rational models. The etymology of terms associated with the nightmare in the English language shows how its origins were firmly situated in beliefs that saw it as a supernatural assault by nocturnal demons or spirits. While the precise origins of the term “nightmare” are still something of a mystery, “mare” most likely derived from the Anglo-Saxon root word “mara” meaning “crusher.” Another alternative, as Owen Davies suggests, is that “mare” derives from the Germanic “mahr,” or the Old Norse “mara,” both referring to “a supernatural being, usually female who lay upon people’s chests at night, thereby suffocating them.”4 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “nightmare” itself, derives from the genitive of “night n.” and “mare n.,” which most likely originated from the Low German derivative of Nachtmahr or Nachmaar.5 The linguistic root words from which the English term “nightmare” originate, reveal the earlier associations of the experience with assaults by nocturnal demons. Additionally, these clues also highlight the key feature of the terrifying encounter as being centered on the experience of a malevolent being suffocating, crushing and physically oppressing the victim. As Owen Davies argued, European derivatives of the “nightmare” also reflect this important facet of “pressure”: The sense of pressure of weight is integral to the nightmare both as a concept and as an experience, and so it is not surprising that it is also prominent in the linguistics. The first element of French cauchemar derives from caucher (“to tread on”). The second element of Icelandic 3 Davies, “Hag-riding.” 4 Davies, “The Nightmare Experience,” 183. 5 “nightmare n. and adj.,” “mare, n.2,” and “Incubus, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed in 2012).

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martröd comes from troda, meaning “to squeeze, press, ride.” The idea of pressure is also present in other terms for the nightmare experience that do not share the mare element. In German we find alpdrücken (“elf-pressing”) and hexendrücken (“witch-pressing”). The term for the nightmare in medieval French appesart, Italian pesuarole, Spanish pesadilla, and Portuguese pesadela all derive from the verb peser, meaning “to press down upon.” […] Hungarian boszorkany-nyomas means “witches pressure.”6 The sense of being pressured or strangled by a supernatural being is also prominent in early modern accounts of the nightmare, as well as in modern descriptions of sleep paralysis, so that researchers today view it as a central feature of the disorder.7 One of the first known English uses of “nyghtesmare” appeared in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale in 1410 in reference to protecting a house against “every evyl wyght ffor the nyghtesmare.”8 Early modern English authors referred to the experience as the “Nyghte mare,” “Nightmare,” “Night-mare,” “Mare,” Ephialtes, Incubus, and the “Hag,” while the verbs being “hag-ridden,” “witch-ridden,” “wizard-pressed” or “hagged” were used colloquially.9 English references to the nightmare in medical writings also use the ancient Greek term, Ephialtes or the Latin, Incubus to refer to the same experience as a disease of the body. In classical Latin Incubus was used to refer to a male nocturnal demon, while Succubus referred to the female species. Incubus derives from the Latin incubare meaning “to lie upon,” and was used in medieval and early modern works of theology and demonology, alongside Succubus to refer to night demons who assaulted their victims either physically or sexually. This tradition appears to be linked to the later early modern English “hag-riding” phenomenon. Ephialtes in Greek is probably etymologically related to a verb meaning “to leap upon” and was also used in medical texts alongside Incubus to refer to the nightmare as a natural disease.10 Thus, from at least the sixteenth century onwards, medical authors appropriated the terms originally associated with supernatural beings, Incubus and Ephialtes, to refer to the nightmare as a disease or 6 Davies, “The Nightmare Experience,” 184. 7 Cheyne, “The Ominous Numinous,” 5. 8 “nightmare n. and adj.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed in 2012). 9 Ibid. 10 My thanks are due here to Professor Emeritus R. B. Todd for his views regarding the etymology of Ephialtes.

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disorder of the body. All derivatives of the original terms used to refer to the nightmare suggest a supernatural being, who comes at night when dreamers are sleeping, creeps or lies on their chests, inducing in their victims a state of heightened fear. Due to the intense feelings of acute terror and helplessness associated with the encounter, “nightmare” became later used in English around the nineteenth century to describe any terrifying dream, losing its earlier specificity as referring to a particular kind of dream experience.11 In early modern medical tracts and dictionaries, definitions of the nightmare also reveal further details of the etymology as well as the close relationship between the supernatural and natural etiologies. Philip Barrough (fl. 1560–1590), a licensed physician at Canterbury, wrote in his medical tract The Methode of Physicke (1583), “Ephialtes in Greeke, in latin Incubus and Incubo. It is a disease, where as one thinketh him selfe in the night to be oppressed with a great waight, and beleeveth that some thing commeth upon him, and the pacient thinketh him selfe strangled in this disease. It is called in English the Mare.”12 The English physician Andrew Boorde discussed at length the different views of the nightmare and explained: Ephialtes is the greke word. Ephialtes is the barbarus word. In latin it is named Incubus and Succubus. In English it is named the Mare. And some say that it is a kinde of spirite the which doth infest and trouble men when they be in their beddes sleeping, as Saint Augustine sayth. De civitate dei. Cap. rr. and Saint Thomas of Alquine [sic] sayth in his first parte of his divinitie, Incubus doth infest and trouble women and Succubus doth infest men. Some holdeth opinion that Marlin was begotten of his mother, of the spirite named Incubus, Esdras doth speake of this spirit, and I have red much of this spirite in Speculum exemplorum, and in my time at saint Albones here in England, was infested an Ancresse of such a spirite as she shewed me, and also to credible persons, but this in my op[in]ion that this Ephialtes otherwise named the Mare, the which doth come to man or woman when they be sleeping, doth come of some evil humour, considering that they the which be thus troubled sleeping, shal thinke that they doe see, heere, and feele, the thing that is not true. And in such troubles sleeping, a man skarse draweth his breath.13 11 “nightmare n. and adj.,” OED. 12 Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke, 34. 13 Boorde, The Breviarie of Health, 44. Note, in addition to Merlin, Luther was also according to legend, the offspring of an Incubus and a nun.

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From Boorde’s discussion it is evident that the nightmare was the site of two competing ideologies, one which saw it as the real supernatural assaults of demonic beings and the other which saw it as a natural disease, resulting in terrifying dreams. Later in the seventeenth century Robert Burton also discussed the nightmare as a symptom of melancholy and explained in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), “in such as are troubled with incubus, or witch-ridden (as we call it); if they lie on their backs, they suppose an old woman rides and sits so hard upon them that they are almost stifled for want of breath; when there is nothing offends but a concourse of bad humors, which trouble the phantasy.”14 These descriptions changed little into the eighteenth century, so that in Steven Blankaart’s The Physical Dictionary (1702) we find, “Ephialtes, or Incubus, the “Night-Mare,” is a depraved Imagination, whereby People asleep fancie that their Wind-pipe is oppressed by some superincumbent Body, that their Breath is stop’d.” A decade or so later, in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728) the nightmare is defined as, “Incubus, or the Night-Mare, is the Name of a Disease consisting in an Oppression of the Breast, so very violent, that the Patient cannot speak, or even Breathe.”15 As I will explore, while the descriptions of the disease are remarkably similar, medical theories saw the nightmare as caused by a mixture of physiological and psychological factors, which combined, produced the horrifying dream of a creeping being suffocating the dreamer. The majority of actual accounts of the “Mare” come from witchcraft trials and are part of the “hag-riding” tradition. In these records, witches and their demonic familiars were believed to supernaturally assault their victims while they slept by creeping onto their paralyzed bodies to suffocate and “ride” them. As shown by Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt, these incidents appear in trial records both in England and Europe.16 In an English witchcraft trial at York in 1595, Dorothy Jackson accused her neighbor of witchcraft, claiming that she was “ridden with a witch three times of one night, being thereby greatly astonished and upon her astonishment awakened her husband.” In a Northumberland trial, Nicolas Raynes accused Elizabeth Fenwick of “hag-riding” his wife, who “after being threatened, has been continually tormented by Elizabeth, a reputed witch, who rides on her, and attempts to pull her on to the floor.”17 Indicative of 14 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 253. 15 Blankaart, The Physical Dictionary, 124; Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 382. 16 Davies, “The Nightmare Experience”; Blécourt, “Bedding the Nightmare.” 17 Davies, “The Nightmare Experience,” 286.

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the persistent belief that witches sent the “Mare” into the eighteenth century, a letter to the popular newspaper The Spectator in 1711 gave the account of Old Moll White, a reputed witch, whose crimes included “giving Maids the Night-Mare.”18 Owen Davies studied the trial records of Somerset and Dorset in the late nineteenth century and found six court cases between 1852 and 1875 which involved witches being accused of “hag-riding.”19 Early modern English experiences of the nightmare could also incorporate tales of being assaulted by demonic animals and are associated with cases of possession. In the account of witchcraft written by Edward Fairfax concerning the bewitchment of his daughter, Helen Fairfax, is an incident in which she was “laid” upon by a demonic cat. On November 3, 1621, Helen complained to her parents sleeping beside her, that “a white catt hath laid longe upon mee, and drawne my breath and hath left in my mouth and Throate so filthy a smell that it doth poyson mee.”20 Similarly, in the trial records of the possession of Richard Dugdale, a Lancashire gardener who became bewitched in July 1695, one of the witnesses testifying to his possession, John Fletcher, a husbandman of Harwood, reported to the jury how he was one night “in bed with the said Dugdale, and I felt something come up towards my knee; then I felt it creep up till it came towards my heart, and it was about the bigness of a little dog or cat.”21 The descriptions of being laid upon by demonic beings, here in the form of animals, which “creep” and steal the breath of their victims, suggests another form of the nightmare. Evidence for the persistence of supernatural etiologies of the “Mare” can be found in a range of printed works outside of witchcraft records. Authors of medical works and dream treatises repeatedly complained that the “vulgar” masses still believed that the nightmare was in fact a supernatural phenomenon. Edmund Gardiner a seventeenth-century medical writer, wrote in his tract Phisicall and Approved Medicines (1611), “this dreadfull griefe which some being much deceived, thinking that it must onely proceede of witchcraft.”22 Thomas Willis (1621–1675), a well-respected English physician, wrote in his chapter on the nightmare in his work De anima brutorum (1672), “The common people superstitiously believe, that this passion is indeed caused by the Devil, and that the evil spirits lying 18 The Spectator no. 117, July 14, 1711. 19 Davies, “Hag-riding,” 36. 20 Fairfax, “A Discourse on Witchcraft,” f. 2. 21 Anon, Evidences of the Kingdom of Darkness, 225. 22 Gardiner, Phisicall and Approved Medicines, 55.

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on them, procures that weight and oppression upon their heart. Though indeed we do grant, such a thing may be, but we suppose that this symptom proceeds oftenest from mere natural causes.”23 Similarly, Thomas Tryon declared in his A Treatise of Dreams & Visions (1689), “And tho the Vulgar, when they are thus affected, conceit it some external thing comes and lies upon them, which they fancy to be some Ghost, or Hob-Goblin, yet the truth is, it proceeds from inward causes.”24 These comments indicate persistence in the belief that the nightmare was a supernatural physical or psychic assault, as well as revealing the experience as a nexus for cultural tensions surrounding ideas of natural and supernatural forces. In early modern England medical theories of the nightmare coexisted with supernatural ones, both drawing from ideas that went as far back as antiquity. Galenic lore suggested that humoral imbalances were the root cause of the disease. Most writers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English medical books asserted that the Incubus was caused by an excess of melancholy, phlegm or “vital spirits” which arose as a result of indigestion or eating “hard meats” and drinking liquors.25 Consequently, it was believed that the body’s excess humors caused “vapors” to ascend to the brain, triggering the imagination to produce horrible visions in the mind. Richard Haydock (1570–1642), an English physician famous for claiming to preach in his sleep, explained the causes of the nightmare in his manuscript on dreams the Oneirologia (1605). In the Incubus, or Night-mare, the vitall and Animall spirits are soe oppressed with the multitude of grosse vapours, that men thinke themselves overlaine by some hagge, or oppressed with some ponderous burthen. By which examples it is evident, that the actions of the minde close prisoned in the body, in time of Sleepe (it selfe never sleepinge) are distorted and missed by similitude of the cheife swayeinge humours, nowe become ixorbitant by inequality of temperature. Where a carefull difference is to bee put beetweene this first naturall kinde of Dreame, and the seconde: insoemuch as these vapours stirre the Phantasie to make and forme images answerable to theire owne nature without the helpe of preinherent formes in the Phantasie: whereas in the other the Phantasie workes only uppon the late imprinted formes and Ideas of 23 Willis, Two Discourses, 142. This work was translated into English in 1683 by Samuel Pordage. 24 Boorde, The Breviarie of Health, 44. 25 Note, this work was reprinted in 1695 and 1700. Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams & Visions, 24–25.

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the matters last thought of, or earnestly intreated of, the senses beeinge nowe kindely bounde by a temperate and milde ascendinge vapour. And this is the cause, why they are formall, rationall, and coherent: when these are only materially significative, from the Elementary part of the man, beeinge forerunners of a subsequent disease, as smoake is of fier.26 According to Haydock, the humors oppressed the animal or vital spirits, so that the imagination produced dreams of being “oppressed” by “some hagge” or “some ponderous burthen.” The mind was therefore misled by the senses into believing what was dreamt was in fact real. Thus, the difficulty here was discerning between reality and fantasy, dreaming and waking states. Similarly, Samuel Collins (bap. 1618–1710), a well-respected English anatomist and physician, wrote in his medical treatise, “Of the Nightmare” that the disease was “chiefly” made “by a gross vapour comming from thence to the braine.” These “grose vapours” obstructed the “passages of the brayne” so that the “nerves” were affected as well as the “phancy.” The result was a difficulty breathing and bad dreams of “horrible” objects.27 The mind was therefore deceived by the senses into believing what was dreamt was in fact real. *** Drawing on longstanding ideas, seventeenth-century writers also argued that the “supine” position of the body in sleep frequently gave rise to the nightmare. Samuel Collins explained, “The nightmare is […] a more dangerous malady of the braine. Because the kinder passages of the brayne are truely obstructed, from which the body being layed in a supine posture do Chiefely labour with this disease.”28 Physicians generally believed that this position encouraged the noxious vapors of hard meats to ascend to the brain. Indeed, a typical cure for the Incubus, according to most manuals of health, was to avoid the supine position, and instead, lie on one’s side during 26 Haydock, “Oneirologia”; Scarlett, “Richard Haydock.” 27 Collins, “Of the Nightmare,” ff. 95–96. N.B. This excerpt, running at 24 pages, is part of a larger collection of medical writings bound as one manuscript volume that includes eight medical treatises which discuss subjects such as “Of the Crampe,” and “Of the Plague.” The section “Of the Nightmare” (ff. 90–114) is also reproduced in the same volume in Latin as “De incubo” (ff. 127–140). According to the British Library catalog, all eight treatises were written by Samuel Collins. 28 Collins, “Of the Nightmare,” f. 95.

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sleep. Consequently, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical writers argued that the nightmare was a disease caused by imbalances in the body’s natural processes and their dangerous effects on the imaginative faculty. The terrifying dreams associated with the nightmare were therefore understood as disturbed mental images that were products of a disordered body. As with other sleep disorders, the dangers of excess were also used to explain the moral and physiological causes of the nightmare. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes dismissed belief that the nightmare was a demonic assault as mere superstition. To Hobbes, the real cause of the Incubus was that this disease sprung from “gluttony, it makes men believe they are invaded, opprest, and stifled with a great weight.”29 The dangers of excess included the sins of excessive drinking, eating, sex and even sleep. According to Samuel Collins, the chief causes of the disease were “overmuch drinking” and a “gross vaporous diet.”30 This schema is indicative of the way that diseases in this period were considered part of the moral economy of the body and conceived as divine retribution for immoderate excesses of all forms. The body itself was a potential vehicle of punishment for those who indulged too much in their appetites. Excessive indulgence also led to a dangerous overabundance of the body’s natural fluids. Thomas Tryon noted that the Incubus caused an abundance of “Phlegm” that impeded the animal spirits resulting in a temporary paralysis of the body’s natural functions.31 The dangers of excess could lead to a deadly commingling of humoral fluids in the stomach that rose to the brain, causing the terrifying dreams associated with the nightmare of being physically oppressed by a malevolent being. Samuel Collins explained, the cause is to be grose flegme or Melancholy (not lodged in the braine but about the midriffe) from which growing turgide by immoderate drinking and crudity of ill concocted ailmente the diaphrame and lunges are oppressed, and from a grosse vapours, conveyed into the fauces & braine.32 Moderation was seen to be the key to good health in premodern English physic: restraint of the body’s excessive appetites was viewed as essential 29 Hobbes, Leviathan, 184. 30 Collins, “Of the Nightmare,” f. 97. 31 Tryon, A Treatise on Dreams & Visions, 24–25. 32 Collins, “Of the Nightmare,” f. 94. Note, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “fauces” refers to “[t]he cavity at the back of the mouth, from which the larynx and pharynx open out” (“fauces,” Oxford English Dictionary Online [accessed in 2012]).

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for the overall well-being of the individual. Robert Bayfield, an English physician who wrote both medical and religious works, suggested that the best prophylactic for the Incubus was “a slender diet,” in addition to an avoidance of the supine position.33 Thomas Tryon’s A Treatise of Dreams and Visions (1689) also counseled moderation: The Cure is to be effected by a regular diet, and such as may generate good spirits; and prevent the increase of Melancholy and Phlegm; avoid full Suppers, and excess in Liquors, which oft occasion the Disease; use convenient purging, and sometimes breathing a Vein may be expedient, especially in Women, in certain Obstructions peculiar to that Sex: the Black Seeds of the Male Piony are much commended in this Distemper.34 Francis Bacon also recommended using a powder of the “peony” seed as a cure for the nightmare as did Nicholas Culpepper in his work The English Physitian (1652).35 The general consensus among physicians about prophylactic treatments for the Incubus was therefore to counsel moderation or a “slender diet,” especially for supper. They also advised patients to avoid drinking liquors, restrain excessive alcohol consumption and temper “gluttony.” Phillip Barrough explained, “This vice is caused of excesse of drinking, and continuall rawnes of the stomake, from whence do ascend vapours grosse and cold, filling the ventricles of the brain, letting the faculties of the braine to be dispersed by the senewes.”36 Through excess, physicians believed bouts of the nightmare could become chronic and lead to more serious illnesses such as “epilepsie,” “palsy” or “apoplexy.” According to Barrough, “It is good to remedie this evill at the first: for if it continewe, it induceth and sheweth before some grevous disease, as the Apoplexie, the falling sicknes, or madnesse.”37 Early-eighteenth-century medical works typically recycled the same notions of causes and remedies for the nightmare, as expounded by their seventeenth-century predecessors. 33 Bayfield, Tes iatrikes kartos, 65. 34 Tryon, A Treatise on Dreams & Visions, 25–26. 35 Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning, 259; Culpepper, The English Physitian, 193. 36 Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke, 34. 37 Ibid.

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Theories about the influence of the humors were slow to disappear from early modern medicine. However, during the mid-eighteenth century, physicians began to shift away from humoral theories. Instead, they began to assert that the nightmare was instigated by disorders of the circulatory and nervous systems; this indicated a move away from Galenic medicine. Furthermore, the primary site of the Incubus shifted from the stomach to the brain. New ideas about the circulatory system, brain and nerves were incorporated into explanations of the Incubus. John Radcliffe wrote in his Pharmacopoeia Radcliffeanna (1718), “In an Incubus, the plentiful Repast at Bed-time distends the Bowels, and the supine Posture in Sleep, causes the Victuals to press upon the descending Artery, so that nothing can circulate freely to the lower Extremities: and the whole Blood oppresses the Brain.” This obstruction of the arteries caused the “nerves” to be compressed “so that we find a Sense of some Weight upon us” during attacks of the Incubus.38 However, this does not necessarily mean that these medical models were embraced by all. Andrew Baxter (1687–1750), a significant eighteenthcentury philosopher, argued that a natural theory of the nightmare, which ascribed it as a “distemper of the brain,” was nothing less than “absurd.” In his important work, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1733), he posited that the true cause of this phenomenon was a form of demonic possession.39 In sleep, according to Baxter, the body and mind were vulnerable to the assaults of intelligent “beings” who “wait for, and catch the opportunity of the indisposition of the body, to represent at the same time something terrifying also to the mind.” In Baxter’s view it was absurd to consider that the rational soul would produce terrifying dreams and instill such disorder into the mind. He argued that the disorder of the body associated with the nightmare and “the disagreeable vision made to accompany it, are two different things.”40 In his view, dreams were products not of the individual sleeper’s body or mind, but rather of supernatural beings who “represent” or inject dreams in what was essentially a form of possession in sleep. Although Baxter’s ideas were critiqued, particularly by Thomas Branch, the fact that he was able to put forward such theories in the eighteenth century shows that not all intellectuals were exclusively committed to a natural theory of the nightmare.41 However, most later 38 Radcliffe, Pharmacopoeia Radcliffeana, 111. 39 Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature, 203. 40 Ibid. 41 Branch, Thoughts on Dreaming.

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medical writers, including John Bond, scoffed at these theories as “wild opinions” smacking of superstition and an ignorance of natural medicine.42 In the eighteenth century, John Bond’s An Essay on the Incubus or Nightmare (1753) published in London was one of the first printed English medical works to focus solely on explaining the causes, nature and cure of the nightmare. His work endorsed the growing medical view that the nightmare was the result of the stagnation of blood.43 Little is known about Bond, other than that he was a physician who submitted a Latin version of his work on the Incubus for his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh in 1751.44 Bond’s English treatise is an accessible, though learned medical treatise on the Incubus as a natural disease. The brief chapters discuss Bond’s own theory of the nightmare, including case studies, cures and prophylactics. As mentioned earlier, Bond himself was a chronic sufferer of the nightmare. In his preface he explained the reason for his interest in the Incubus: Being much afflicted with the Night-mare, self-preservation made me particularly inquisitive about it. In consulting the ancient Physicians, I found little information concerning it, except dreadful prognostics; nor could a rational account of it be expected from them, as they were unacquainted with the circulation of the blood.45 Bond was critical of most previous ideas of the nightmare. In his treatise Bond suggested that “the Night-Mare is commonly, and, I believe, justly, attributed to a stagnation of the Blood; but how this stagnation is produc’d has not been explain’d, so far as I know, in a satisfactory manner.”46 According to Bond, the real cause of the nightmare lay in the inhibition of blood, caused by the supine sleeping position.47 Bond’s emphasis on the cause of the “Mare” as lying deep within the vessels, and circulatory system, reduced the visions associated with this experience to the mere reflections of a suffocated brain. In his theory the heart was responsible for instigating a stagnation in the blood, due to its weight resting on the vertebrae in sleep. The pressure of the heart on the veins caused the blood to stop circulating through the lungs while simultaneously 42 Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, 5. 43 Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen, 16. 44 Bond, Dissertatio medica inauguralis. 45 Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, Preface. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 19–20.

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preventing the blood from returning to the Head. Yet, despite the ingenuity of Bond’s theory, as later authors such as Robert Whytt would declare, according to Bond’s logic: “If they were true, some degree of the night-mare ought to happen to every person that lies on his back, especially after eating a full meal.”48 In Bond’s view one of the “first Symptoms” of the Incubus were “frightful dreams.” Since the body and mind were united with a special “harmony and connection, the Diseases of the one always affect the other in a very sensible manner.”49 The “hideous association of ideas” that formed “frightful spectres” in the imagination during attacks of the “Mare” were products of this relationship. Bond even suggested that these dreams were perhaps “intended as a stimulus to rouse the sentient principle in us” so that the sleeper would shift their position and “by that means avoid the approaching danger.”50 The most “perfect sleep,” according to Bond, was a dreamless one, since dreams themselves were conceivably, “a Disorder of the Body” which prevented “perfect rest.”51 Bond’s idea of dreams as disorders of the body supports Lucia Dacome’s idea of the pathologization of dreams in the eighteenth century, yet as I have suggested, ideas about dreams as linked to madness and disease were indeed also present in medical writings and theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.52 The case studies of the nightmare Bond included to illustrate his theories are dramatic. While Bond himself subscribed to a purely medical theory of the nightmare, he included accounts from individuals who believed they had been assaulted by the Devil or night demons. For example, Bond included the case of a clergyman who suffered from the Incubus and believed he had been attacked by the Devil. A corpulent Clergyman, about fifty years old, who is very fond of strong beer and flesh suppers, but so subject to the Night-mare, that he is obliged to stint himself to a certain quantity every night; whenever he happens to take an over-dose, he groans so loudly that he often wakens all the People in the house. He has assur’d me, that, in these fits, he imagin’d the Devil came to his bedside, seiz’d him by the 48 Whytt, Observations on the Nature, 317–318. 49 Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, 22. 50 Ibid., 23. 51 Ibid., 23–24. 52 Dacome, “To What Purpose Does It Think,” 204.

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Throat, and endeavoured to choack him. Next day he observ’d the black impressions on his hard Fingers on his Neck.53 Although Bond considered this case an example of the dangers of excess, the clergyman himself believed that he had been a victim of the Devil. In this instance, the Devil left physical proof of his manifestation in the “black impressions” made on the clergyman’s neck. At the beginning of his work, Bond made sure to distance himself from “superstitious” beliefs and wrote, I have not introduc’d any thing in this Essay that did not appear serious or probable. I have therefore omitted an inquiry into the origin of old epithets and quaint names commonly given to this Disorder; such as Hag-riding, Wizard-pressing, Mare-riding, Witch-dancing &c. nor did I think it requisite to mention particularly the curious Charms adapted to each superstitious name.54 Bond elaborated further that the word “nightmare” itself, a “strange term,” most likely derived from “superstitious notions which the British had, and perhaps still have, of it.”55 While supernatural ideas of the causes of the Mare still circulated, Bond as a physician labored rather to present a serious medical treatise on the natural causes of the Incubus, as a naturally occurring, yet dangerous disease of the body. Ideas about the natural causes of the Incubus evolved slowly. Medical theories circulated from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries with the majority of medical works reiterating the longstanding ideas that the nightmare was a terrifying dream, that resulted from humoral imbalances and sleeping in the supine position. Some authors also adhered to notions that the Incubus was a product of the senses deceived by the “chimeras” of the imagination, a symptom of a disordered brain. Rather than a process of “medicalization,” the history of the nightmare reveals a continuation of medical theories, with subtle shifts in explanations for the primary causes of the disease. However, this is not to suggest that there were no significant developments in ideas of the nightmare. While older ideas were recycled by the majority of authors, in the eighteenth century, medical writers such as John Bond 53 Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, 55. 54 Ibid., Preface. 55 Ibid., 2.

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attempted to present more empirical theories of the nightmare based on new developments in knowledge of the body and disease. They postulated that the Incubus was ultimately a symptom of the stagnation of blood. Yet, these new models largely failed to impress both the medical professions and the wider populace, both tending to cling to more traditional views of the natural and supernatural causes of the nightmare. Showing how continuity rather than change characterizes the history of the nightmare, beliefs that it was the supernatural assaults of demons, witches and spirits also persisted among the broader populace, despite the coexistence of natural theories. While physicians may have thought their patients suffered from the Incubus as a natural disease, patients themselves often believed otherwise. This suggests that supernatural and natural theories of the nightmare were neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive in premodern culture and helps to complicate historical ideas of the rise of rational thought and the “disenchantment of the world.”

References Archival sources Collins, Samuel. “Of the Nightmare.” British Library, MS Sloane 1821. fols. 90–114. Fairfax, Edward. “A Discourse on Witchcraft.” British Library, MS Add. 32495. Haydock, Richard. “‘Oneirologia, or, a Brief Discourse of the Nature of Dreames’: Dramatic and Poetical Miscellany.” Folger Shakespeare Library, MS J.a.1., vol. 5. 1604.

Printed sources Anon. Evidences of the Kingdom of Darkness. London: Printed for T. Evans, 1770. Bacon, Francis. Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning. London: Printed by Leon: Lichfield […] for Rob Young & Ed Forrest, 1640. Barrough, Phillip. The Methode of Phisicke. London: Printed by Thomas Vautroullier, 1583. Baxter, Andrew. An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul. London: Printed for James Bettenham, 1733. Bayfield, Robert. Tes iatrikes kartos, or, A Treatise de morborum capitis essentiis & prognosticis. Adorned with Above Three Hundred Choice and Rare Observations. London: Printed by D. Maxwell, 1663.

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Blackmore, Richard. A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours. London: J. Pemberton, 1725. Blankaart, Steven. The Physical Dictionary. London: Sam. Crouch and John Sprint, 1702. Blécourt, Willem de. “Bedding the Nightmare: Somatic Experience and Narrative Meaning in Dutch and Flemish Legend Texts.” Folklore 114 (2003): 227–245. Bond, John. Dissertatio medica inauguralis, de incubo: quam […] pro gradu doctoratus […] eruditorum examini subjicit Joannes Bond. London, 1751. —. An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-Mare. London: D. Wilson and T. Durham, 1753. Boorde, Andrew. The Breviarie of Health. London: Thomas East, 1587. Branch, Thomas. Thoughts on Dreaming. London: Printed for R. Dodsley and J. Jolliffe, 1738. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Holbrook Jackson. New York: NYRB Press, 2001. Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopaedia: Or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, vol. 2. London: James and John Knapton et al., 1728. Cheyne, J. A. “The Ominous Numinous: Sensed Presence and ‘Other’ Hallucinations.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no 5 (2001): 1–18. Culpepper, Nicholas. The English Physitian. London–Edinburgh: Printed for T. Becket, and P. du Hondt, and J. Baldour, 1652. Dacome, Lucia. “‘To What Purpose Does It Think’: Dreams, Sick Bodies and Confused Minds in the Age of Reason.” History of Psychiatry 15/4 (2004): 395–416. Davies, Owen. “Hag-riding in Nineteenth-Century West Country England and Modern Newfoundland: An Examination of An Experience-Centred Witchcraft Tradition.” Folk-Life 35/1 (1997): 36–53. —. “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations.” Folklore 114 (2003): 181–203. Gardiner, Edmund. Phisicall and Approved Medicines, Aswell in Meere Simples, as Compound Observations. London: Printed by E. Allde for Methew Lownes, 1611. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Penguin, 1985. Radcliffe, John. Pharmacopoeia Radcliffeana: Or, Dr. Radcliffe’s Prescriptions, Faithfully Gather’d from His Original Recipe’s. 3rd ed. London: Charles Rivington, 1718. Scarlett, E. P. “Richard Haydock: Being the Account of a Jacobean Physician Who Is Also Known to History as ‘The Sleeping Clergyman.’” Canadian Medical Association Journal 60 (1949): 177–182.

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Tryon, Thomas. A Treatise of Dreams & Visions. London: Printed and sold by T. Sowle, 1695. Whytt, Robert. Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Those Disorders Which Have Been Commonly Called Nervous Hypochondriac, or Hysteric. Edinburgh–London: Printed for T. Becket and P. du Hondt, and J. Baldour, 1765. Willis, Thomas. Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, translated by Samuel Pordage. London: Thomas Dring, Ch. Harper and John Leigh, 1683.

12 Spirit (rwḥ) in the Dead Sea Scrolls f Ida Fröhlich

Keywords: demonology, evil spirits, Dead Sea Scrolls, Bible, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, postbiblical Judaism, inspired exegesis, charismatic leadership, prophecy, emotions

The Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran represent the spiritual tradition of a community that occupied the site named Hirbet Qumran today from the middle of the second century BCE until 68 CE. It is the largest collection of writings from the Second Temple period (sixth century BCE–first century CE). Manuscripts found in Qumran represent biblical books (among them deuterocanonical books like Tobit and Ben Sira), and nonbiblical writings (among them texts categorized today as Apocrypha like the books of 1Enoch and Jubilees). Most of the texts are from the second century BCE–first century CE. Copies of some manuscripts come from the fourth/ third centuries BCE.1 The literary tradition preserved in nonbiblical texts shows mixed origins. Some of the texts – especially Aramaic ones – reflect a good knowledge of Mesopotamian lore. The tradition retained in these texts may have originated from an exilic Jewish milieu.2 Hebrew texts originating from a later time were probably composed on the Qumran site. The Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns depict the Righteous Teacher, the spiritual leader of the community, as a person endowed with spirit received from God that enables him to understand mysteries and to interpret the sacred texts in a mystical and authoritative way. The result of this spiritual interpretation of prophetic tradition can be read in the pešarim, mystical commentaries written to various prophetic books. Inward phenomena representing sins and virtues were exemplified in a several Qumran texts as originating from an inner spirit (rwḥ) of humans. Other texts report on spirit possession. For a better understanding of the role of spirits and spirit possession in Qumran written tradition, one has to refer to the idea of spirit (rwḥ) in biblical tradition. 1 For a comprehensive view on the Qumran community and their written and spiritual tradition, see García Martínez and Trebolle Barrera, The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2 For Qumran Aramaic texts and their problems, see Berthelot and Stökl Ben Ezra, Aramaica Qumranica.

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Rwḥ (rūaḥ) is a very frequent expression (represented by 405 items) in the Old Testament. It is an elusive notion having several synonymous meanings.3 Rwḥ can mean wind, as well as a vital spirit of divine origin in humans (rwḥ ḥyym, rwḥ ’lhym), often related to sentiments and emotions. Rwḥ can also designate an outward spirit that appears in humans intermittently. The latter idea includes such categories as the prophetic spirit and the spirit of judges. An outward spirit may have various other functions, positive or negative. Thus, spirit is of divine origin and is a kind of mediator between the divine world and humans. The priestly creation story in Gen 1 (composed in the sixth–fifth centuries BCE) highlights in particular the role of the divine spirit as God’s creator principle: “and the spirit of God (rwḥ ’lhym) hovered over the surface of the water.” It is not our task to discuss here the meaning and function of rwḥ as wind. As to the second meaning of the word, rwḥ ḥyym, the living/vitalizing spirit, it appears in various passages as the force that maintains humans during their lifetime. Human lifetime is predetermined by God in Gen 6:4 as follows: “My spirit (rwḥy) will not remain in a human being for ever; because he is mortal flesh, he will live only for a 120 years.”4 Sources representing postexilic anthropology present humans as composed of body and vital spirit.5 Vital spirit is mentioned in a Qumran text as follows: “The rule concerning the scale disease on the head and under the beard [is the following:] […] the priest shall examine it, and if he sees that the spirit (rwḥ) entered into the head or into the beard, girdling the veins.”6 The rwḥ here may be identical with the vital force represented by the pulse of the veins. 3 Relatively few studies have been written on the theme of rwḥ in the past hundred years. They include Lys, Rûach; Albertz and Westermann, “rwḥ.” The various meanings of the word were treated in Baumgärtel, “Spirit in the Old Testament”; and the Spirit of God was discussed in Neve, The Spirit of God. See also Montague, Holy Spirit; Hildebrandt, An Old Testament Theology. For a bibliography, see Robson, Word and Spirit in Ezekiel, 15–16. 4 It is to be noted that the biblical narrative on the creation of Adam mentions nšmt ḥyym, “living/vitalizing breath” (and not rwḥ) as the vital force given to humans by God. Choosing even this expression was probably motivated by some theological concern. The expression nšmh as “human vital force” is repeated in Gen 7:15. “They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life [nšmt ḥyym].” Also, Gen 7:22, rwḥ nšmt ḥyym b’pw, “Everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.” 5 Mal 2:15 “Did not one God make her? Both flesh and spirit are his. And what does the one God desire? Godly offspring. So look to yourselves, and do not let anyone be faithless to the wife of his youth.” Ezekiel uses the metaphor of God’s animating spirit for expressing the renewal of the people when a spirit (rwḥ) will be given to the people resurrected: “And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, […] I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil” (Ez 37:13–14). 6 4Q266 6 i.5–7.

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The rwḥ that inhabits humans is not only the maintainer of life, but also a guiding force. Human emotions like anger, eagerness and patience result from the workings of the rwḥ that resides in the humans. Human spirit (rwḥ) – especially that of kings and rulers – is sometimes incited by God for historical deeds.7 Outward spirit that appears in humans intermittently is represented by the spirit that directs the judges and the prophets (rwḥ nbyym). Its working is temporary, and it is effective for the period of the special functioning of a person (as in the charismatic functioning of the judges and the prophetic function of the prophets).8 Isolated rwḥ can also be negative like the spirit that tormented Saul. The account emphasizes that in the beginning of his career, Saul had been directed by “the spirit of God.” It was by the effect of a sin committed by Saul that the spirit of God left him, and “an evil spirit (rwḥ rʽh)” began to torment him.9 The spirit caused madness in Saul, and it was intended to be eliminated with the help of David’s harp music.10 Other kinds of evil spirits that can temporarily conduct men are the “spirit of lie,”11 “spirit of falsehood,”12 “spirit of lethargy,”13 “spirit of fornication,”14 etc. An interesting example is “the evil spirit” (rwḥ r‛h) sent by YHWH “between Abimelech and the lords of Schechem”15 – a spirit that caused 7 This is partly because the vitality spirit shares divine characteristics: “Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. Let your good spirit lead me on a level path” (Ps 143:10). God also directs politics and the leaders of peoples through the spirit (rwḥ). It is God “who cuts off the spirit of princes, who inspires fear in the kings of the earth” (Ps 76:13). “The Lord aroused against Jehoram the anger [rwḥ)] of the Philistines and of the Arabs who are near the Ethiopians” (2Chr 21:16). That is the way kings and princes become the means of God’s punishment. 8 E.g., “the spirit of YHWH came upon Othniel and he judged Israel” (Judg 3:10). 9 1Sam 16:14. The spirit is mentioned at several points of the narrative (1Sam 16:15–16). It is cured by David’s playing on the lyre – actually by incantation accompanied by musical performance: “And whenever the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, and the evil spirit would depart from him” (1Sam 16:23). The evil spirit seems to cause mental illness and sudden transports of rage: “The next day an evil spirit from God rushed upon Saul, and he raved within his house, while David was playing the lyre, as he did day by day. Saul had his spear in his hand” (1Sam 18:10; see also 19:9). 10 1Kgs 22:21. The spirit was probably imagined as a spirit residing in the body (head). Spirits were usually thought capable of entering the body through the ears and other apertures of the body. 11 1Kgs 22:22–23. 12 Is 19:14. 13 Is 29:10. 14 Hos 4:12, 5:4. 15 Judg 9:23.

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discord between the members of the human group. Biblical reports highlight that the spirit is not an autonomous entity, but a power subordinated to God, part of a relative dualistic system. On the other hand, there is mentioned a “spirit of benevolence,”16 and a “spirit of righteousness,”17 also originating from God.

Qumran and Second Temple period Nonbiblical Qumran texts reveal several examples of spirit possession.18 Genesis Apocryphon, an Aramaic paraphrase of narratives on the patriarchs, mentions an afflicting spirit (rwḥ mktyš) that causes impotence. The paraphrase of the biblical narrative on Abraham and Sarah’s stay in Egypt19 says that following Sarah’s abduction by Pharaoh’s men, a pestilential spirit (rwḥ mktyš) was sent by God to Pharaoh’s court on Abram’s prayer.20 The spirit is called also an evil spirit (rwḥ b’yš’).21 It was sent in order “to afflict” (lmktšh) Pharaoh, and to every person of his household, so that he was not able to approach her (lmqrb), nor did he have sexual relations with her (w’p l’ yd‛h’).”22 The plague smote Pharaoh’s court for two years.23 Finally, “he sent a message to all the wise m[en] of Egypt (hkymy mṣryn), and to all the magicians (‘špy’), in addition to all the physicians of Egypt (‘sy mṣryn), thinking that perhaps they could cure him and his household of this pestilence.”24 However, the healers were unable to cure him; on the contrary, the spirit afflicted them, too. For that reason, Pharaoh sent his man Herqanosh to Abram, asking Abram to pray over him and to lay his hand upon him, “so that he would live (wyhh),”25 for Pharaoh had seen Abram in a dream.26 Thus, Pharaoh learned that “the afflictions and hardships” (kwl mktšy’ wngdy’) were 16 Zech 12:10. 17 Is 28:6. 18 Alexander, “The Demonology of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” esp. 331. According to Karel van der Toorn, “The Theology of Demons,” the recrudescence of the demonology in the postexilic age aims to purify the image of God from the inherent demonic features. If God has an adversary in heaven with an army of demons and spirits of the air, He is himself free from evil. 19 Cf. Gen 12:10–20. 20 1Q20 20.16. 21 1Q20 20.16–17. 22 1Q20 21.16–17. 23 1Q20 2.18. 24 1Q20 20.18–20. 25 1Q20 20.22. 26 1Q20 20.21–22.

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due to Sarai, Abram’s wife.27 (The point was that Pharaoh took to himself a married woman, and with this deed, he committed the sin of adultery.28) The condition of dismissing the spirit is to return Sarai to her husband, which Pharaoh is willing to do,29 and he asks Abram to pray over him and his household “that this evil spirit may be driven away from us.”30 Abram does so. He prays over Pharaoh and lays his hand upon his head. Thus, the affliction is removed, and the evil spirit is driven away from him. Recovered from his illness, the king gives rich presents to Abram.31 He takes an oath (wym’ […] bmwmh) that he had no relation with Sarai (dy l’ yd‛h’) and did not make her impure (w[l’ ṭ]myh’). Finally, he returns her to Abram.32 The harmful being is called rwḥ; its harmful character is referred to by its attribute “afflicting” (mktyš). The activity of the demon is prolonged and extended. It lasts for two years and seems to be epidemic. It smites every male in the royal palace, causing general barrenness leading to starvation.33 There is no ancient Jewish parallel to the motif of the spirit causing impotence.34 The nearest examples are attested from Mesopotamian written tradition, where incantation texts attribute the illness directly to a demonic harm called “hand of ghost” (ŠU.GIDIM.MA).35 The cause of the illness which calls forth the functioning of the “hand (kātu) of god” is usually some sin committed by the patient in the past, an offence against a certain god. The concept of the causality of sin and illness was similar in Israel.36 Abram refers 27 1Q20 20.24–26. 28 Adultery, sexual intercourse between a married or betrothed woman and any man other than her husband (also called in ancient Near Eastern sources “the great sin”), was generally considered a capital crime. See Adler Goodfriend, “Adultery.” 29 1Q20 20.26–27. 30 1Q20 20.28. 31 1Q20 20.28–29. 32 1Q20 20.30–31. 33 Dupont-Sommer read the demon’s attribute as šḥlny (1Q20 1.26), which he related to the root šḥl, “couler, suppurer.” He translated the demon’s name as “l’esprit des pustules” and supposed it to be a cause of contagious illness. See Dupont-Sommer, “Exorcismes et guérisons,” esp. 250. 34 A special group of Mesopotamian medical texts (the series called ŠÀ.ZI.GA) are potency incantations. They prescribe magical practices to regain lost potency, hardly ever mentioning demons as causes of the problems. On incantations healing impotence, see Biggs, ŠÀ.ZI.GA. 35 Cf. Scurlock and Andersen, Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine, 110–113. Mesopotamian medical literature attributes a wide scope of symptoms to ghostly affliction: noises, apparitions, physical problems, headaches or neck aches, ghosts in the ears, ghostly pains, ghosts in the intestines, numbness, dizziness, shortness of breath, ghost fever, neurological disorders, mental disturbance, odd behavior and living skeleton. See Scurlock, Magico-Medical Means. Illnesses caused by the working of a spirit that reside in the patient’s body are usually related to the head (mental illnesses). 36 E.g., the case of Job when his friends argue that the plagues smiting Job must have their origin in some remote sin, cf. Job 4:7–8, 5:6–7 and passim. On the ancient Near Eastern idea of

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in his prayer to the ethical impurity which would be invoked if Pharaoh took Sarah into his harem. Accordingly, the pharaoh would offend God. Abram refers in his prayer to God’s mighty hand (yd rbt’).37 The apparition of the evil spirit is not spontaneous in Genesis Apocryphon; it was sent by God, following Abram’s request addressed to him in a prayer that God not should not allow his wife Sarah to be made impure for him (i.e., Abram).38 Paradoxically enough, the impotence caused by a demonic force is not the consequence of a sin, but the prevention of it. It makes it impossible to commit an offence against God. The author of the narrative on Abram in Genesis Apocryphon evinces a good knowledge of terms and methods concerning magical healing. The text uses three terms for specialists in magical healing: the wise men of Egypt (hkymy mṣryn), the magicians (‘špy’), and the physicians (‘sy mṣryn). Their methods are not revealed in the text. The first term (hkm) is a general one used for wise men, scholars and specialists of a particular science.39 The two other terms are names of Mesopotamian (and not Egyptian) magical healers (āšipu) and physical practitioners (asû). The exorcism (and healing) takes place only after Sarai is returned to her husband and the pharaoh has taken an oath that he has not touched Sarai. Consequently, Abram performs magical healing. His prayer over Pharaoh means the invocation of the ritual power that sent the demon.40 Exorcising the demon is described as performed through the healer’s laying on of hands over the patient.41 The method of the laying on of hands is documented the causal relation between sin and illness, see Van der Toorn, Sin and Sanction; cf. also Scurlock, Magico-Medical Means, 73–74. 37 1Q20 20.14. 38 The legal background behind Abram’s argument is Deut 24:1–4, according to which the wife divorced and married again becomes impure for her first husband; thus, he is forbidden to remarry her. 39 Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, 294–304; Sasson, Civilizations; Scurlock, “Physician, Exorcist, Conjurer, Magician.” 40 Contrary to this, Jesus never invokes the divine name and does not cite prayers in his exorcisms; they are performed by his own divine power. See Kirschläger, “Exorzismus in Qumran?,” esp. 143. 41 The verb smk, “lean, lay, rest, support,” expresses taking possession (usually of the animal to be sacrificed). Laying on of hands on humans may serve the purpose of healing, blessing or praying, which stems from the ancient belief that the head is the central seat of a man’s life. Hence, the ordination smykh of spiritual leaders in Israel requires the placement of hands upon the ordained. Cf. Moses transmitting the leadership to Joshua (Num 27:23; Deut 34:9) and the blessings of the leaders to the people (Lev 9:22). See also “Handauflegung.” The laying on of hands in the New Testament is associated in a similar manner with healing, blessing, reception of baptism and the Holy Spirit, as well as ordination. See Daube, “The Laying on of Hands”;

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in the Bible in the story of the Syrian army commander Naaman, who is cured from his leprosy by the prophet Elisha.42 The prophet waves his hand over the spot.43 The account leads us to presuppose the belief that the illness (or, the demon that was the cause of the illness) was dwelling in the patient’s body and was the main source of the client’s ill-health.44 This idea is clearly delineated in Genesis Apocryphon, where it is told that, on the effect of the laying on of hands, the demon leaves the body of Pharaoh and his environment. Several pericopae on exorcisms in the New Testament refer to the demon leaving the human body following the laying on of hands. The concept of the demon residing in the body and its exorcism by the ritual of the laying on of hands were general belief in the Palestinian milieu of the first century AD.

Demons of inflammation and fever The “Prayer of Nabonidus,”45 a monologue spoken by King Nabonidus, mentions a severe inflammation (šḥn’ byš’) with which the king has been afflicted for seven years.46 He was healed by an exorcist (gzr), an exiled Jew who cured him by absolving his sins and laying his hand on him.47 Surviving elements of the fragmentary text do not refer to a demon (rwḥ’ or its synonym). However, the description of the healing method, the laying on of hands (known also from the Genesis Apocryphon and New Testament parallels), leads one to suppose that the illness of the king was caused by a factor – probably a demon Fitzmyer, The Genesis Apocryphon, 207; Brayer, “Psychosomatics, Hermetic Medicine”; Trunk, Der Messianische Heiler, 278–279. 42 2Kgs 5:1–14. 43 2Kgs 5:11. 44 On demons residing in the patient’s body, see Stol, “Review of JoAnn Scurlock.” Some accounts of Jesus’ healing an illness caused by a demon residing in the patient’s body, cf. Lk 4:40–41. A later example is the spirit called “the spirit of the bones,” described as one who “walks within the tendons and the bones of Quzma son of Salminu.” See Naveh and Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls, 41, A 1:21–22. 45 4Q242. The text that contains a legend about Nabonidus (to be identified with the historical Neo-Babylonian king Nabu-naid, 555–539 BCE) that has been published in several editions. A recent standard edition is Collins, “4Q242. Prayer of Nabonidus ar.” 46 4Q242 frgs. 1–3, 2–3. From the Aramaic root šḥn, “be warm, heat” (Hebrew šḥn “be hot, inflamed”). The Exodus narrative mentions šḥyn “boils” on humans and animals as a plague smiting the Egyptians, Ex 9:9–11. A composite form of the name (šḥyn rʽ “grievous boils, loathsome sores”) is contained in Dt 28:35, Jb 2:7. 47 The cause of illness is usually some sin committed by the patient in the past. On this idea, see note 35.

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(rwḥ’) – residing in his body. Similarly, no mention of the cause of the plague has survived in the text. The part mentioning that the king had been praying in vain to various idols made of gold, silver and other materials before his successful healing can be interpreted as an element referring to a sin (idolatry) committed by the king. Healing here means a purification from earlier sins (idolatry). The healing ritual power is from Yahweh, the god of the Jewish exorcist (gzr), who is the mediator of the healing power. The fragmentary Aramaic text labeled as 4Q560 mentions demons of fever and other illnesses.48 The text is, in all probability, an exorcistic healing text that speaks of illnesses caused by spirits and gives a recipe for healing or getting rid of the spirits, called rwḥ49 and the “evil visitor” (pqd b’yš), which “enters the flesh” (‛ll bbśr’).50 The text speaks of male and female agents of the disease: “the male penetrator” (ḥlhy’ dkr’) and “the female penetrator” (ḥlhlyt nqb’).51 They transmit fever (‘š’), chill (‛ry’) and pain in the heart (‘št lbb).52 They are active during the night.53 A further pair of male and female objects or symptoms (prk dkr wprk nqbt’54) are mentioned again.55 The next column contains an address by the exorcist to the demon: “I adjure you, spirit […] I compel you, spirit” (w’nh rwḥ mwmh […] ’wmytk rwḥ’56). Thus, the demon is made ineffective by an “oath” (mwmh), probably an incantation, the reciting of a fixed text (i.e., the text which followed the 48 The standard edition of the text is Puech, “4Q560,” with several new readings. Earlier editions and remarks are Penney and Wise, “By the Power of Beelzebub”; Naveh, “Fragments of an Aramaic Magic Book”; García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 2: 1116–1117. 49 4Q560 1 ii.5. 50 4Q560 1 i.2–3. 51 4Q560 1 i.3. According to Puech: “est entré dans la chair le poison mâle, et le poison femelle,” cf. Puech, “4Q560,” 296. 52 4Q560 1 i.4. Puech’s translation runs “fièvre et frisson, et feu/fièvre de coeur.” He intends for the words referring to sins (‛w’n wpš‛) to occur in the same line as part of the same enumeration: “qui génére(ra) inquiété et péché, fièvre et frisson, et feu/fièvre de coeur” (4Q560 1, 4). However, in the ancient Near Eastern worldview, sins are rather causes than consequences of the demonic offenses that result in illnesses. See Van der Toorn, Sin and Sanction. 53 4Q560 1 i.5. The word bḥlwm or “asleep” in the same line may refer to this. Night demons are primarily members of the lilû family. They are well documented from Mesopotamian incantation texts. They are male (lilû) and female (wardat lilî) types of incubus and succubus, attacking the opposite sex and causing erotic dreams and infirmity. On the other hand, night is the time par excellence for any demonic attack. The demons mentioned in our text are not of a sexual nature (incubi or succubi), but demons residing in the patient’s body. The text describes a group of physical symptoms. 54 4Q560 1 i.5. 55 The interpretation as symptoms is based on the meaning of the words prk és prkyt in amulet texts: “crumble” or “crush” (referring problems related with teeth). See Naveh and Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls, Amulet 11, 90–94. Puech translates the two expressions as broyeur/ une idole mâle and la broyeuse/l’idole femelle. 56 4Q560 1 ii.5–6.

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above summons).57 Unfortunately, no further lines are readable. The text is most probably a healing text, written for practical use, for exorcism of demons causing illnesses.58 Fever was considered as a serious danger in ancient world, and it is a frequent theme in late antique Jewish amulets. Terms for fever in these amulets are Hebrew ’š,59 Aram ’šh,60 and ’šth.61 They are often mentioned together with synonyms like “fever and shiver.”62 A special term is ’yšt’ rqyqt’ or “hectic fever.”63 Fever is often described as an attack of fire, from which the patient is to be saved with the help of the amulet.64 Healing means exorcising these illnesses from the body. Causes of fever are usually demons mentioned most often in male and female categories, thus providing “a macrocosm of demons,”65 terms expressing the universal nature of the causes. The idea of male and female agents of illnesses and those of healing is well documented from Mesopotamian magical healing texts, where illnesses caused by male and female demons were cured with the help of male and female figurines used in magical healing rites.66 According to the tradition of the New Testament Gospels, Jesus heals various afflicted patients like epileptics, the lame and those possessed by 57 The grammar of the incantations has been well established in research. See Knox, “Jewish Liturgical Exorcism”; Campbell, “The Technique of Exorcism”; Klutz “The Grammar of Exorcism.” 58 Alexander, “The Demonology of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” 345–346. He believes that 4Q560 has conserved the “remnants of a recipe book containing the texts of amulets, which a professional magician would have copied out and personalized for the client’s use.” 59 E.g., Naveh and Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls, Amulet 3 (‘š). 60 Naveh and Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae, Amulets 24:11, 26:2 (‘šh). 61 E.g., ibid., Amulet 19 (‘šth rbth). 62 Naveh and Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls, Amulet 4:29 (wh’š wh‛ryh), Amulet 9:1 (‛yrywt’); Schiffman and Schwartz, TS K.127, in Schiffman and Schwartz, Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts, Genizah 5:1–2. 63 Naveh and Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls, Geniza 5:1. 64 E.g., ibid., Amulet 2:1; Amulet 4:29; Amulet 9:1; and Amulet 14:3. 65 Naveh and Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae: “all kinds of demons, male and female” (Amulet 1:8), “male and female liliths” (Amulet 1:10), a series of male and female spirits (Amulet 2:4), and “shadow-spirit, whether male or female” (Amulet 24:12); “male and female” (Amulet 26:2); pebble-spirits and liliths, both mentioned as male and female (Bowl l16:3); šyd’ male and female (Bowl 20:3); brqt’ (cataract) male and female (Bowl 25); male and female demons (Geniza 10, Geniza 12:17); shadow spirit (hṣlnyt) and the male and female spirit (rwḥ zkr unqbh). Naveh and Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: “the demon (šydh) whether male or female” (‘n dkr w’nnqbh) (Amulet 4:15); the shadow-spirit, whether male or female (Amulet 7:6–7); “evil liliths, male and female” (Amulet 7b:3, Bowl 8); Schiffman and Schwartz, Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts, “all kinds of demons and demonesses, lilis and liliths, evil diseases, harmful male spirits and harmful female spirits, and evil spirits, male and female,” TS K1.18, 30:8–10. 66 Wiggermann, Mesopotamian Protective Spirits. On the continuity of Mesopotamian tradition and late antique Jewish amulets, see Segol and Hunter, Catalogue of the Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls; Geller, “Four Aramaic Incantation Bowls.”

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spirits.67 Spirit-possessed people are always mentioned as mad like the man from Gadara,68 the man exorcised in Kapharnaum69 and the spirit-possessed man from Gerasa (the spirit being mentioned with the name “Legio”).70 The Gospels mention cases of fever twice, the first time concerning Peter’s motherin-law71 and the second example being Simon’s mother-in-law,72 who were cured from fever. (The two reports are probably variants of the same case.) In both cases, Jesus heals the woman by touching her hand, a method akin to the laying on of the hands, used for eliminating demon-induced illness.

General remarks Qumran and the New Testament are backgrounded, broadly speaking, by the same world of beliefs. Illnesses caused by spirit possession were well known in both traditions. Madness is the most prominent type of illness caused by spirit possession in the New Testament, while it cannot be documented from Qumran. On the other hand, impotence and fever as demon-induced illnesses are documented in Qumran. The laying on of hands, a par excellence method for healing illnesses caused by spirit possession, is documented both in the New Testament and Qumran. (The New Testament mentions the healing of fever by the healer’s touching the patient’s hand. This may refer to a general conception that fever was caused by a demonic agent.) The laying on of hands may have served to eliminate the demonic spirit from the body (or from its milieu) by the healer’s restoring the purity of the body.73

Abbreviations ABD HTR

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman, 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Harvard Theological Review. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School.

Mt 4:24. Mt 8, Mk 5. Lk 4. Lk 8:30. Mt 8:14–17. Mk 1:30–31. Cf. restoration of ethical purity by forgiving the sins of the patient in 4Q242.

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IEJ JBL JQR RGG TDNT

TLOT

Israel Exploration Journal. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Journal of Biblical Literature. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature. The Jewish Quarterly Review. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Hans Dieter Betz, 4th ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2007. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976. Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, edited by Erns Jenni, with assistance from Claus Westermann, translated by Mark E. Biddle, 3 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997.

References Primary sources Biggs, Robert D. ŠÀ.ZI.GA: Ancient Mesopotamian Potency Incantations: Texts from Cuneiform Sources 2. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1967. Collins, John J. “4Q242 Prayer of Nabonidus ar.” In Discoveries in the Judean Desert: XXII. Qumran Cave 4. XVII. Parabiblical Texts, Part 3, DJD XXII, edited by J. Brooke et al., 83–93. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. García Martínez, Florentino, and Eibert J. Tigchelaar. The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition 1–2. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Naveh, Joseph, and Shaul Shaked. Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity. Jerusalem–Leiden: Magnes Press–Brill, 1985. —. Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993. Puech, Émile. “4Q560 – an Aramaic Incantation from Qumran.” In Qumrân Grotte 4: Textes araméens, deuxième partie: 4Q550–4Q575a, 4Q580–4Q587 et Appendices. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXVII, by idem, 291–302. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009. Schiffman, Lawrence, and Michael D. Schwartz. Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah: Selected Texts from Taylor-Schechter Boksz K1. Semitic Texts and Studies 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992.

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Secondary sources Adler Goodfriend, Elaine. “Adultery.” In Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman, 6 vols., vol. 1, 82–86. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Albertz, Rainer, and Claus Westermann. “rwḥ, Rûaḥ Spirit.” In Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, edited by Erns Jenni, with assistance from Claus Westermann, translated by Mark E. Biddle, 3 vols., vol. 3, 1202. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997. Alexander, Philip S. “The Demonology of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, edited by P. W. Flint and J. C. VanderKam, 331–353. Leiden–Boston–Köln: Brill, 1998–1999. Baumgärtel, Friedrich. “Spirit in the Old Testament.” In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols., vol. 6, 367. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968. Berthelot, Katell, and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, eds. Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June–2 July 2008. Leiden–Boston, MA: Brill, 2010. Brayer, Menachem. “Psychosomatics, Hermetic Medicine, and Dream Interpretation in the Qumran Literature.” Jewish Quarterly Review 60 (1970): 112–127, 213–230, 228–229. Campbell, Bonner. “The Technique of Exorcism.” Harvard Theological Review 36 (1943): 39–49. Daube, David. “The Laying on of Hands.” In New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, edited by David Daube and Calum M. Carmichael, 224–246. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 [reprint of the 1956 edition]. Dupont-Sommer, André. “Exorcismes et guérisons dans les récits de Qoumrân.” In Congress Volume – Oxford 1959. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 7, edited by George W. Anderson, 246–261. Leiden: Brill, 1960. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1 (1Q20). A Commentary, 3rd ed. Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2004 [1966]. García Martínez, Florentino, and Julio César Trebolle Barrera. The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Geller, Markham J. “Four Aramaic Incantation Bowls.” In The Bible World: Essays in Honour of Cyrus H. Gordon, edited by G. Rendsburg et al., 47–60. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1980. “Handauflegung,” In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Hans Dieter Betz, 3rd ed., vol. 3: 1407–1410. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000.

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Hildebrandt, Wolf. An Old Testament Theology of the Spirit of God. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995. Kirchschläger, Walter. “Exorzismus in Qumran?” Kairos: Zeitschrift für Judaistik und Religionswissenschaft 18 (1976): 135–153. Klutz, Todd E. “The Grammar of Exorcism in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Some Cosmological, Semantic, and Pragmatic Reflections on How Exorcistic Prowess Contributed to the Worship of Jesus.” In The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, edited by Newman C. Carey, 156–165. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Knox, Wilfred L. “Jewish Liturgical Exorcism.” Harvard Theological Review 31 (1938): 191–203. Lys, Daniel. Rûach: Le souffle dans l’Ancien Testament. Études d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. Montague, George T. Holy Spirit: Growth of a Biblical Tradition. New York: Paulist Press, 1976. Naveh, Joseph. “Fragments of an Aramaic Magic Book from Qumran.” Israel Exploration Journal 48 (1998): 252–261. Neve, Lloyd. The Spirit of God in the Old Testament. Tokyo: Seibunsha, 1972. Oppenheim, Leo A. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, 2nd. rev. ed. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 1977 [1964]. Penney, Douglas L., and Michael O. Wise. “By the Power of Beelzebub: An Aramaic Incantation Formula from Qumran (4Q560).” Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994): 627–650. Robson, James E. Word and Spirit in Ezekiel. New York: Clark, 2006. Sasson, Jack M., ed. Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995. Scurlock, JoAnn. Magico-Medical Means of Treating Ghost-Induced Illnesses in Ancient Mesopotamia. Leiden–Boston: Styx–Brill, 2006. —. “Physician, Exorcist, Conjurer, Magician: A Tale of Two Healing Professions.” In Mesopotamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretative Perspectives, edited by I. Tzvi Abusch and K. van der Toorn, 69–79. Groningen: Styx, 1999. Scurlock, JoAnn, and Burton Andersen. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Segol, J. B., and E. C. D. Hunter. Catalogue of the Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum. London: British Museum, 2000. Stol, Marten. “Review of JoAnn Scurlock, Magico-Medical Means of Treating Ghost-Induced Illnesses in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81 (2007): 652–653.

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Trunk, Dieter. Der Messianische Heiler: Eine redaktions- und religionsgeschichtliche Studie zu den Exorzismen im Matthäusevangelium. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 1994. Van der Toorn, Karel. Sin and Sanction in Israel and Mesopotamia: A Comparative Study. Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 1985. —. “The Theology of Demons in Mesopotamia and Israel: Popular Belief and Scholarly Speculation.” In Die Dämonen. Demons, edited by A. Lange, H. Lichtenberger, and K. F. Diethard Römheld, 61–83. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Wiggermann, Frans A. M. Mesopotamian Protective Spirits: The Ritual Texts. Cuneiform Monographs 1. Groningen: Styx Publications, 1992.

13 Domesticating the Dead Ghosts and Spirit Possession in Late Medieval Italy f Nancy Caciola

Keywords: possession, spirits, ghosts, demon, Italy, medieval, Middle Ages, Catholicism, exorcism

I’d like to begin by sharing three brief quotes, all from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. The first, by an anonymous Dominican writing in 1420, concerns some saints’ relics that had a particular exorcistic power over, “the very worst demons – the ones that the common folk ignorantly consider to be souls separated from their bodies.”1 Quote number two comes from a fifteenth-century hagiography; it adds a little more information about this belief. “Demons,” the author writes, “sometimes invade the bodies of living men and women, but then they lie and say they are the ghosts of the dead. They often even give names, in order to defame the souls of those dead people.”2 Finally, the third quotation is from a Franciscan exorcists’ manual published in Venice in 1567; it specifies that the demons that enter human bodies, “almost always appear to the person beforehand in the shape of a man who died an evil death, or sometimes as one of the person’s relatives.”3 These three comments assume spirit possession to be the work of demons who masquerade as ghosts: unclean spirits impersonate the shades of the dead in order to lead astray the ignorant common folk. The authors of these quotations believe they know better: they aggressively dispute this self-identification on the part of the possessing spirits, discerning the true demonic nature of the invading entities. Of course, despite the contestation of spiritual identity embedded in these quotations, the authors’ arguments against spirit possession by ghosts is itself a way of preserving the contours of popular belief. Thus these fragments of text present evidence for the coexistence of two separate epistemological systems concerning spirit possession and the nature of the invasive spirits in late medieval and into 1 Anonymous, “Vita Viridianae Virgine,” 265. 2 Anonymous, “Vita Francescae Romanae,” 175. 3 Farinerio, Exorcismo Mirabile, 360v.

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early modern Italy. (We could, of course, multiply this even further by considering forms of divine possession as well, but I shall leave that aside in the present context.) On the one hand, we have the standard interpretation of possession advanced by Christian theologians: demons – that is, fallen angels – invade human bodies in order to wreak havoc in God’s ordered universe, and in order to tempt and torment the faithful. Thus the perpetrators of possession are eternal, cosmic beings of essential evil, ontologically distinct from humankind. Yet, we also readily discern in these quotations a distinctly different understanding of spirit possession that is the purview of the “common folk,” i.e., the popular culture of the region. The latter implicates a far more immanent spiritual universe, one populated chiefly by spirits of human, rather than of cosmic origin. The supernatural, here, is populated by natural spirits; human spirits that linger upon the earth and wander, invisibly, among the living. Possessing spirits are not demonic principles of transcendent evil; they are simply the shades of those who “died an evil death.” That is, they are the ghosts of persons torn too soon from this world, often by sudden violence, and who are not yet reconciled to their new status among the dead. These ghosts remain upon this plane of existence, refusing to transit into the Otherworldly eternity envisioned by Christian theology; they may seek to re-experience embodiment again by seizing the bodies of living persons and molding that corporeal shell to their own purposes and identities. Indeed, when interviewed, they will freely name themselves and speak about their situations. Possession is regarded primarily as the work of human spirits who are out of place, combined with the wrong bodies; rather than being seen as the wrenching invasion of a supernatural, spiritual intelligence of unfathomable power and transcendent evil. It is, then, located within the preternatural, rather than the supernatural, realm. Now, let us consider the following statement: Some say that those who are cut down by an early death wander about hither and yon until they complete the number of years they would lived, had they not died untimely […] But in reality, it is demons that operate under the pretense of being these dead souls […] for an evil spirit sometimes disguises itself as the ghost of a dead person.4 This quote fits well with the material with which I began. However, it was composed over 1,200 years earlier: it was authored by the Latin Church father 4 Tertullian, Liber de anima 56–57, 746a–748b.

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Tertullian in the early second century, in his treatise On the Soul. Nor was Tertullian the only early theologian to take up this matter: the Christian Church quite early on began a reinterpretation project in regard to spirit possession. In brief: ancient Mediterranean paganisms had usually (though not exclusively) blamed the shades of the dead for spirit possessions of the living. We see echoes of this even in the synoptic gospels, in the story of the Gadarene demoniac, the man with the legion who slept and lived among the tombs, cities of the dead. More broadly, possessing spirits fell under the diverse category of spirits that in Greek were called daimones: landscape spirits, prophetic oracles, imps, familiars, and unquiet ghosts. This daimonic pantheon was reconceived and reduced by Christian thinkers to a single kind of entity: fallen angels, primordial forces of pride and chaos. Thus the multiform category of daimones was assimilated to a uniform model of cosmic evil, demons. And of course, a parallel process has occurred throughout the modern era, as Christian missions have encountered, and recategorized, the spiritual entities of many different ethnic and cultural groups: all these gods, ancestors and spirits around the world are, in Christian terms, the same thing: demons struggling against the True God. Yet to a striking degree, Tertullian’s second-century apologetic is identical to the rhetoric employed 1,200 years later or more by medieval clerics and exorcists. The dominant religious model of the world had been completely transformed in that time; yet still, “the common folk” preserved a set of beliefs about possession that Christian polemicists had been inveighing against for twelve centuries. This continuity is both intriguing and difficult to problematize with due attention to temporality. As João de Pina-Cabral has argued, in a critique of the concept of pagan survivals, the modern social sciences tend to “devalue evidences of relative invariance [that] […] loom in the shadows,”5 with the result that we do yet not possess a set of analytic tools that is fully adequate to the evolving meaningfulness of stable beliefs or customs through time. The language of survivalism, while apposite, can also tend to suggest a narrative of nonselective imitation, leading to slow cultural denaturation, increasing irrelevance, or ossification. Pina-Cabral challenges us, instead, to foreground the perpetual renewal, relevance, and specificity of those cultural formations that persist fixedly over many centuries, their continued vitality over what historians call the longue durée. Aspects of culture that persist are chosen, not simply received. In this chapter, I want to try to rise to Pina-Cabral’s challenge to take seriously such continuities across 5

Pina-Cabral, “The Gods of the Pagans,” 49.

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time, regarding them as conscious expressions of continuously relevant local knowledge. To assess this issue fully would be, of course, a vast undertaking that I cannot accomplish here; I can only begin to suggest some points of entry, using this chapter as a sort of “think piece.” How can we grasp the cultural logic at work here, in the inheritance of an ancient pagan idea, persisting with great vitality into a late medieval Christian context? How can we historicize, with full and careful attention to the specificities of temporality, a construct that remains unchanged in important ways? Can we write a history that foregrounds stability, rather than change? If we were to take the notion of “pagan survivalism” in a facile way, we might readily fall into romantic notions of a pagan peasantry wholly untouched by the Christian teachings of the elite; yet it is clear that a far more dynamic cultural exchange was occurring. Take, for example, this description of a possessed woman, from oral testimony preserved in a 1325 canonization inquiry for St. Nicholas of Tolentino6: She used to proclaim loudly that she was all the demons of Hell, but especially Belial. Other times she announced that she was the dead men Lord Johannes, Lord Vivibene de Esculo, and Lord Raynaldo de Brunforte; plus various other dead folk who committed many crimes while alive.7 All the demons of Hell reside inside this possessed body, along with a gang of dead local criminals. Thus, the identification of possessing spirits is of two types: the dead and demons dwell within her together; and the issue of identity is not simply one of replacement, nor even of duality, but of multiplicity. This body, this voice, expresses the identity of a still-present, living “owner”; yet this body is Belial, it is various other demons; it is Johannes, Vivibene, Raynaldo, and others. These identities presumably take turns at dominance within the possessed physical shell, rendering the possessed woman into a cacophonous multiplicity of converging selves. She is simultaneously human and demonic; masculine and feminine; living and dead; evil and an innocent victim. Similarly, a woman named Salimbena, who likewise was healed by the same saint, was said to be invaded by, devils and by ghosts of the damned, including Scambio Raynaldo, Vecte Salvo de Podio Vallis, Nicoleta de Paterno, and two others 6 Occhioni, Il processo. The relevant testimony occurs on pp. 135–137 and 320–330. 7 Ibid., 328.

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[…] [who] because of their actions, evildoing, and crimes, had been burned to death.8 The category of demons is treated, in these testimonies, as largely self-evident: one name – Belial – is offered, but no further explanation is required. By contrast, the dead who seize living bodies to possess appear to require further elaboration. Their identities are explained and described: their full names and titles, the nature of their lives, the details of their deaths. Those who die badly – and one can hardly imagine a more classic instance than execution by fire, which recurs in several cases – are particularly likely to be identified as perpetrators of possession: clearly their fate was impressed upon local memories. Indeed, another victim of a different set of burned criminals states that she “had those burned men always before her eyes”; and several witnesses were able to recall the same names and details about them. The specificity of the memories is key: the ghosts who possess the living always are named, always are known, and often are remembered with a mixture of horror and fear. No wonder they were considered appropriate companions to demons, with whom they possess the living conjointly in these testimonies. Indeed, conceptual links between the evil dead and demons exists within learned Christian theology as well: the damned and demons are alike condemned to Hell, sharing an infernal home and its torments. In these oral testimonies, however, the suffering bodies of the possessed are symbolically coterminous with Hell: the possessed body is the infernal territory in which shades of the evil dead and unclean spirits dwell together. Thus, the understanding of possession expressed by these witnesses is not impervious to change, not a mere survival without evolution; to the contrary, this set of ideas about possession is accumulative, absorptive of Christian influences. Demons are given their due, and incorporated in the system alongside the more elaborately described local ghosts. The system at work here has absorbed the translocal Christian epistemology of demons as possessors, right alongside a still-flourishing tradition of ghostly possession that is contingent upon local memories and knowledge systems. The two are not seen as contradictions, but as mutually sustaining, syncretic constructs that literally share space. If the Nicholas of Tolentino dossier unveils the porous and accumulative qualities of this popular culture, in other texts we encounter the limits of this flexibility. In the Miracles of John Gualbert, a fifteenth-century 8

Ibid., 452.

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compilation of saintly healings, there are some dramatic accounts of public disputes about possessing spirits. Belief in ghostly possession was, at times, directly challenged by Church authorities. Interestingly, however, these disputes were to no avail: clerical arguments about the impossibility of ghosts returning to possess the living achieved little traction against local beliefs and local memories. The author, Jerome de Raggiolo, himself suggests that possession by ghosts is a structural impossibility, given the hylomorphic union of body and soul: That [a dead spirit] should go back into a human body again we consider […] to be blasphemy. […] [S]uch a thing has never been seen: two souls of the same type and nature, occupying a single body.9 Raggiolo here argues against the logic of the preternatural: one human body cannot play host to two human spirits; the supernatural interventions of demonic intelligences make much more rational sense, according to his worldview. Yet Raggiolo’s convictions were a tough sell to what he called “the average common people.” We know from his other anecdotes that the arguments clerics proposed against ghostly possession were spectacularly unsuccessful with local audiences. In a typical case, a priest enters into a spontaneous public debate with the crowd, aggressively contesting the identity of a possessing spirit that confessed itself to be one of the evil dead. However, his arguments were met with stony refusal: The possessing demon claimed to be the ghost of one Mazzanto, who had been murdered with a dagger […] over a dice game. The whole crowd that was watching [the exorcism] pressed forward in order to confirm that it all was true. But the priest argued with them explaining [that] […] when the souls of men leave their bodies they go to the place they have merited [for punishment or reward;] […] they do not find another body to enter. Those others are evil spirits. […] [But] he could not at all convince them that this was true.10 Ghostly possession also was a way through which the living were able to learn about the details of dying and the realms of the afterlife from a firsthand source. We know from medieval tales of spirit mediums – those 9 Miraculi S. Joannis Gualberti Abbatis, Acta Sanctorum, 416. 10 Ibid., 417.

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in touch with the dead, and even voicing their words, but in a voluntary, rather than involuntary possession – that medieval people often were curious about death and anxious to converse with the dead if possible. Some such cases developed into small-scale spiritist cults, with meetings or séances attended by groups of regular devotees. The medium would simultaneously slake the crowd’s thirst for knowledge about the unknowable, unutterable experience of death, and act as a psychopomp guiding the dead spirits to their proper place beyond this realm. A similar dynamic likely also was in effect in cases of involuntary possession: the crowd desired to learn from the unquiet dead, and then to help them find rest – a set of priorities that could not, of course, apply to demons. The belief that possessing spirits were the ghosts of those who died bad deaths was too deeply rooted in the community to be challenged, even by an authority figure such as a priest. As always, the crowd was particularly impressed by the specificity of the spirit’s own local knowledge: the offering of a name, followed by an account of the precise circumstances of Mazzanto’s bad death – when, where, why, and how – provoked a stirring response among the bystanders. Clearly they remembered this incident of a nasty quarrel, ending in a bloody murder, over a set of gambling dice: they pressed forward excitedly to confirm the story. Their attitude seems to be that only Mazzanto’s ghost would provide such details, not a demon. In such a case, community memory and the collectively affirmed narrative of Mazzanto’s ill-fated dice game had priority over the priest’s abstract theological presentations about the afterlife, and about the different capacities of disembodied human spirits and of demons. Moreover, the local witnesses that comprise this crowd are shown as actively choosing among different interpretations, and defending their preferred interpretive framework. They are not mere passive recipients of trickle-down culture – whether from higher social strata such as clerics, or from replication of past tradition. They actively create meaning for themselves, selecting from among various fragments of available data and defending the epistemic integrity of the whole against challenges. At the same time, of course, these same events are subject to a quite different process of meaning-making on the part of the clerical intelligentsia. Priests and exorcists were more likely to perceive possession, which was in their view a demonic intervention, as enabled by some form of sin on the part of the victim. Thus demoniacs are, to some degree, morally complicit in their possession, even though the affliction itself is involuntary and unwanted. The possessed often were described as having “opened” the

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surfaces of their bodies via some collusive act of sin; demons were then better able to gain access to the interior spaces of their bodies, and to seize control over the person from within. Medieval physiological thought provided explanations for the precise interior pathways available to demons, and the means through which they might open up, enter into, and control the human body by taking up residence in the open spaces and corporeal gaps inside the human person. Thus, the demonic model for possession rationalizes the question of physical vulnerability to spiritual depredation, conceiving it as a literal transgression into the interior anatomy; it simultaneously associates sin with the victim of possession in a way that the system of ghostly possession does not. Indeed, for the “common folk,” naming the possessing ghosts and recounting the evil deeds of their lives and bad deaths, was a common component of the public performance of a possession episode. This collective act of memory and narrativization is key to resolving the episode: within local communities, the possessor’s confession of his name, crimes, and details of death, ventriloquized through the possessed body, was thought to be the key veridical point that could establish the basis for exorcism. Indeed, despite the repulsion elicited by some of these criminal ghosts and the memories of their deaths, the high level of public interest in these events also testifies to a broad social interest in temporary communion with the dead themselves. The exorcism of a ghost – a human being who was, until recently, a member of the community – must of necessity be a different sort of emotional operation than exorcism of a demonic fallen angel. The preternatural model of ghostly possession opens up the possibility of compassion for both the victim and the perpetrator of possession. Moreover, the fact that possessing ghosts always were identified as the shades of those who were torn from life too soon, and by violence, has implications not only for the individual ghost, but for the broader social group as well. The exorcism of a ghost is an inherently social operation, in a way that the exorcism of a demonic entity, a fallen angel, is not – for demons never were part of the social fabric. A ghost, however, was until recently a local community member: someone’s son, someone’s husband or lover, someone’s father, probably also someone’s enemy – but a person occupying a particular social identity defined by a unique set of social relationships. The untimely death of such a person not only snapped his own life thread, it ruptured a web of social bonds that surrounded him and attached him to others. Such a person’s re-emergence among the living, through possession, accomplished the temporary mending of a torn social

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fabric; it likewise provided an opportunity for reconciliation and acceptance of a violent death on the part of the broader community. Thus, exorcising the dead could be a means of domesticating their memories. The level of interest that bystanders expressed in hearing these possessing ghosts recount their identities and stories suggests both a capacity to empathize with their postmortem confusion and sufferings, as well as intense curiosity about the world beyond the grave. Indeed, in some cases a possessing ghost requests masses for the dead to be endowed in its name, thus using the stratagem of possession as a means to communicate its postmortem needs and hope of eventual salvation. The ultimate act of expulsion, of course, most often occurred at the tomb of a saint, an opposition of the exemplary “good dead” against the “bad.” After all the details of the possessing ghost’s past were known and shared among the crowd, the cathartic end of the episode would be a celebration of the clean power represented by the Holy Dead. A saintly dead body could exorcise the evil dead from a living body, in a triangulation of life, death, and corporeity that benefitted both the victim of possession and its perpetrator. In closing, I want to circle back to the question of cultural survivals. While the medieval popular belief in ghostly possession clearly was an inheritance from ancient paganism, this is only a starting point for analysis: we must actually unpack the continued, evolving relevance of the idea. For, cultural continuities only are reproduced through time if they can continue to act as forms of intensely local knowledge: once they lose the capacity to structure vivid, lived experience in a convincing fashion, they will be abandoned. And for us, as scholars: the moment we encode a particular cultural formation as atavistic (that is, as a mere “survival”) we begin to derogate from its continuing relevance. Thus, what would it mean to take this set of ideas seriously as continuously fresh and meaningful, rather than as a survival handed down through some vague respect for tradition? Though we see the same kind of epistemology in ancient pagan sources, clearly the application of these ideas to possession in later medieval sources is posed within a wholly Christian framework for understanding the cosmos: the possessed are seized by demons as well as ghosts; the dead speak of Christian concerns such as acquiring masses for salvation; the possessed go to saints’ shrines for relief. Yet at the same time, the very presence of ghostly possession as a cultural idiom, and its deviation from the theological dogma of demonic possession that dominates our textual evidence, testifies to the multivocal qualities of medieval culture. There are many historians who prefer to visualize medieval Europe as an age of faith: more complex for the

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schoolmen, simpler for the laity, but in any case unified in its devotional outlook and always at least “implicitly Christian” in its adherence. I would contend that this formulation obscures the intensely regional, and inherently pluralistic, aspects of medieval cultures – plural. Furthermore, it reduces to a singular and unitary perspective what was actually a far more complicated set of interactions. In fact, in so doing we accept the ancient strategy of the Church fathers themselves, to reduce a pantheon of spiritual ideas to a simple unitary one. The translocal culture of Church doctrine interacted with many local subcultures, which evolved in dialogue with one another. Long after the era of Christianization passed, medieval culture continued to be extremely regional; characterized by plurivocal perspectives on experience and reality; and intensely dialogic in the relationships between these varying epistemic stances. Furthermore, there are significant differences of scale, in terms of how these epistemologies were framed and applied: preternatural and immanent scales of interest competed against, and sometimes combined with, supernatural and transcendent modes of thought. Fragments of past culture survived, but they also evolved and reconceived themselves in these new circumstances. In the case of ghostly possession, we see an idea that continued to have relevance and power within popular culture in Italy, chiefly because it continued to make sense, in the literal meaning of producing understanding, within a changing cosmological framework.

References Anonymous. “Vita Francescae Romanae.” Acta Sanctorum 8 (March 9). —. “Vita Viridianae Virgine.” Acta Sanctorum [ed. Société des Bollandistes, 3rd. ed. (Paris, 1863–1887)] 4 (February 1). Farinerio, Buonaventura. Exorcismo Mirabile da Disfare Ogni Sorte de Malefici et da Cacciare i Demoni. Venice, 1567. Miraculi S. Joannis Gualberti Abbatis, Acta Sanctorum 29 (12 July). Occhioni, Nicola, ed. Il processo per la canonizzazione di S. Nicola da Tolentino. Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome, 1983. Pina-Cabral, João. “The Gods of the Pagans Are Demons: The Problem of Pagan Survivals in European Culture.” In Other Histories, edited by Kirsten Hastrup. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

14 Demonic Possession in Orthodox Imperial Russia Official and Popular Religious Conceptions through the Prism of an 1839–1840 Case Study f Christine D. Worobec

Keywords: demons, holy, klikushestvo, klikushi, medical, prayers, sorcerer, witchcraft, witches

Returning to the history of demonic possession in Russia after researching and writing about it in the 1990s and early 2000s, I am struck by profound changes within contemporary Russia.1 In conversations that I had with scholars and archivists in the newly formed Russian Federation of the 1990s, it was clear that only specialists of lived Orthodoxy, or Orthodoxy as practiced, had some understanding of what was meant by the term “klikushestvo.” This was a phenomenon whereby shriekers or klikushi, in the presence of sacred objects such as icons, crosses, and reliquaries, or in the midst of the singing of the Cherubikon hymn during the sacred liturgy, began to speak in animal voices, pull at their hair and clothing, fall to the floor in convulsions, and often lose consciousness for a considerable length of time.2 The shriekers understood themselves to be possessed by demons who were unable to withstand Christian sources of power and energy contained in crosses honoring the crucifixion, holy water, incense, and holy words offered in prayers and religious services. The possession resulted either directly from the demons’ own power, God’s ire, or the malevolent intentions of a witch or sorcerer. Occasionally, the term “klikushestvo” appeared in the fledgling popular Russian press of the early 1990s, particularly in publications devoted to demonology. There individuals 1 Worobec, “An Epidemic of Possession” and Possessed. 2 The Cherubikon hymn is sung in preparation for the mysteries of the Eucharist. The unbaptized or catechumens have already been dismissed from the church, but the priest must be sure that the congregation is full of only worthy Christians. The Cherubikon is thus accompanied by the priest’s inaudible exhortation against the unworthiness of “those who are bound by carnal desires and pleasures” (Maughan, The Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, 53).

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recalled witnessing or hearing about shriekers in the post-Stalinist era. Finally, sometime in 1993 it was apparent that klikushi had resurfaced and were being treated at one of the major monastic institutions, the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Monastery in Sergiev Posad, located just 70 kilometers northeast of Moscow. In the summer of 1993, I and a colleague, who had previously witnessed the demoniacs there, took a trip to the monastery with the intention of interviewing the possessed. Except for the regular services, the monastery was unfortunately eerily silent that day. My friend’s subsequent discrete inquiries revealed that Patriarch Alexei II had banned the shriekers from the monastery’s main church and other public spaces, including the shrine and reliquary of St. Sergius, because of their disruptive behavior. All of that has changed, as monastic institutions all over the Russian Federation, including the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Monastery, regularly minister to those who believe they are possessed by demons and even advertise their services on the internet. YouTube has broadcast some of the contemporary exorcist rites. By and large, Russian Orthodox monastics today refer to the possessed literally as demonically possessed (besnovatye) rather than as female shriekers (klikushi). They have reverted to a nomenclature that was popular before the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725) when the plural word besnovatye was gender neutral and could be applied to both men and women (although the endings of the singular word besnovatyi or besnovataia do indicate the sex of the individual). The word klikushestvo had become prevalent in the course of the eighteenth century to describe the phenomenon of demonic possession, which starting in Peter’s reign was legally defined as a potentially fraudulent and therefore criminal act. Such a definition, which was not accepted by clerics and laity at large, suggested that klikushi had ulterior motives if and when they denounced individuals as sorcerers or witches and that their behavior had nothing to do with evil spirits. Petrine laws also attacked witchcraft and sorcery as fraudulent crafts, but stepped up their prosecution. Ironically, a lingering fear of witchcraft, which caused more illnesses than simply possession, persisted even among court circles until the accession of Catherine the Great in 1764. While Russian witchcraft or sorcery was terrifying to society at large, we must keep in mind that it involved the manipulation of everyday, kitchen objects and common herbs rather than black Sabbaths, sexual encounters with the Devil, incubi, and inverted masses. Russia lacked a discourse of learned demonology or “a satanic

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paradigm.” Even pacts with the Devil were rare in Russian witchcraft.3 The Petrine laws may nonetheless have had the unintended consequence of fostering in the public mind the notion that witchcraft was the primary explanation for demonic possession. While a connection between witchcraft and possession had certainly existed in the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials, witchcraft at that time was considered only one of several causes of demonic possession. The Petrine laws against demoniacs also promoted the idea that any loss of control over the body could be interpreted as a feminine trait. By demoting the importance of klikushestvo and casting doubt on its reality, Peter I and his rationalist religious adviser Feofan Prokopovich ensured that the experience of demonic possession would be confined almost exclusively to women. A man who believed himself and was believed by others to be infected with klikushestvo accordingly became feminized. While reverting to an older, broader concept of demonic possession and decoupling possession from witchcraft, contemporary monks who perform special prayer services for demoniacs and, in extreme cases, exorcisms, are far more ready than their nineteenth-century counterparts to blame the possessed for their sins. In a postcommunist world struggling with materialism, corruption, drug addiction, alcoholism, and reinventing Russian Orthodoxy, monastic clergy continually preach against the evils of modernity. They are also suspicious of the growing industry of healers, witches, clairvoyants, and lay practitioners of alternative medicines, some of whom claim that they are following rather than reinventing Russian Orthodox traditions. Although Russian Orthodox discourse at the turn of the twentieth century, especially after the 1905 Revolution, railed against the evils of the day, particularly in this case the growth of atheism and sectarianism, monks and other clerics in the nineteenth century tended to treat klikushi humanely and gently. As they had been doing for centuries, clerics regularly gave klikushi holy communion. In doing so they publicly proclaimed the fact that the victims of possession were not responsible for their situation.4 3 Levin, “Healers and Witches,” 107; Kivelson, “Lethal Convictions,” 45–51; Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 53–54, 59–60. 4 Russian Orthodoxy’s positive notion of demonic possession did have its counterpart in early modern Roman Catholic France. However, in France’s case, according to Sarah Ferber, such an understanding occurred when “outright witchcraft came to be the most common cause of possession leading to exorcism.” She quotes Henri Boguet (1550–1619), jurist and author of an influential demonology tract, as noting that “[s]ometimes […] God allows Innocents to be

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A mid-nineteenth-century primer for parish priests accordingly included a sermon by the Church father John Chrysostom. In distinguishing the possessed who were worthy of communion from those individuals whose actions made them unworthy of the host, Chrysostom advised, Let no one inhuman, no one rough and unmerciful, least of all any one unclean approach here. This I say not only to you, who seek to receive the Communion, but also to you, whose ministry it is to give it. […] They that be possest in that they are tormented of the devil are blameless, and will never be punished with torment for that: but they who approach unworthily the holy Mysteries shall be given over to everlasting torments.5 At the turn of the twentieth century the popular and charismatic preacher Father Ioann of Kronstadt (1829–1908), who reputedly had the divine gift of healing and regularly expelled demons from the possessed, rejected witchcraft as a cause of possession. He talked about devils lurking in all human beings and tempting them with “various voices: greed for food and drink, lust, pride, and arrogant free thought concerning the Church and her teachings; malice, envy avarice, covetousness and so on…” However, he singled out the possessed as battling these demons with Christian actions and qualities. “As soon as we begin truly to serve the Lord,” wrote Father Ioann, “and thus provoke and strike the demons nesting in us, then they attack us with infernal manifold, burning attachments to earthly things, until we drive them out of us by fervent prayer, or by partaking of the Holy Sacrament.”6 With their benevolent attitude toward demoniacs, nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox clerics accordingly prescribed a regimen of fasting and prayer to demoniacs, administered blessed oil, holy water, communion, and herbs to them. In lieu of applying extreme exorcist rituals, they also intoned a series of prayers, psalms, readings from the Gospels, and specific exorcism prayers from saints Basil and Chrystosom over them.7 In administering possessed and afflicted, not for any sin, but that His justice and His works may thereby shine the more gloriously…” (Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism, 116–117). 5 Blackmore, The Doctrine of the Russian Church, 223–224. Emphasis added. 6 Grisbrooke, Spiritual Counsels, 155. 7 Almazov, Chin nad besnovatym, 35–40. The eighteenth-century monk Paisii Velichkovskii thought that the Jesus prayer was the best weapon against demons (Velichkovskii, “O tom, chtoby terpet’” and “O tom, chego osobenno”).

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the rite of the Annointing of the Sick,8 the priest marked the sufferer’s forehead, chin, cheeks, hands, nostrils, and breast with holy oil and intoned a modified prayer from the Euchologian of Serapion: O Holy Father, physician of souls and bodies, who sent your only begotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, who heals every infirmity and delivers from death: heal also your servant (name) from the infirmities of body and soul which afflict her, and enliven her with the grace of your Christ; through the prayers of our most-Holy Lady, the Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary […] and of all saints.9 Although historians can obtain a sense of Russian Orthodox clerics’ actions towards the possessed from nineteenth-century miracle tales, descriptions of klikushi who came to holy sites to venerate miracle-working icons and saints’ relics, and reports of psychiatrists interested in the phenomenon of klikushestvo, it is rare to come across a clerical description of and reaction to demonic possession. With its emphasis on ritual rather than the word, Russian Orthodoxy had not developed a theology of demonology. Furthermore, academic theological writing was still relatively new. The account of the clerical superintendent, Dmitrii Florovskii, which describes an epidemic of demonic possession in the spring and summer of 1839 in the Urals’ obligated foundry settlement (sloboda) of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia,10 thus presents us with an unusual insight into clerical thinking as well as popular understandings of klikushestvo. As had been true for the previous century and a third, clergy and laity associated demonic possession with witchcraft. Sharing a belief in the real possibility of demonic possession, Father Florovskii and the settlement’s inhabitants participated in a possession drama where they understood all the cues and reacted to them similarly. This thinking contrasted sharply to that of the secular authorities and medical doctors who subscribed to the criminal definition of klikushestvo as fraudulent behavior and sought to unmask it.11 8 The Orthodox rite for the Anointing of the Sick is one of the seven sacraments. It is administered to a sick conscious person either on the deathbed or in a less serious condition. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church which uses the rite in terminal cases, the Eastern Church has never used the phrase “extreme unction” to describe it, preferring instead to focus on repentance, the forgiveness of sins, and the healing of both mind and body (Worobec, “The Miraculous Revival and Death,” 32). 9 Meyendorff, The Annointing of the Sick, 164. 10 The foundry and settlement belonged to the Iakovlevs, a noble family that originally stemmed from the merchant estate. The obligated laborers were not completely free, but unlike serfs they earned a salary, received free bread, and did not have to pay taxes. 11 Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika”; Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair.

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The epidemic in Nizhnaia Utkinskaia unfolded near the end of April 1839, when six individuals manifested the signs of klikushestvo. It escalated through the summer as the total number of possessed individuals reached 44. As was common in such disturbances of the peace, the authorities dispatched doctors to the settlement to investigate the situation and bring it under control. For its part, the Ekaterinburg diocesan authorities sent one of their own, Superintendent Florovskii, to make his assessment and “to gather testimonials from their [the klikushi’s] neighbors and local residents in general.”12 The superintendent proceeded to conduct his investigation with the help of the parish priest, Evgenii Ogloblin. In talking to local residents, Florovskii’s opening question demonstrated his empathy with the community’s sufferings and his own belief that demonic possession could be the result of the machinations of malevolent individuals. He asked people to identify the individuals they thought were initially responsible for causing the ailments and which of them were magicians and healers, in other words, witches.13 The residents obliged by naming three women. Among them was Evdokiia Selianina, who they suspected had been using herbs, grasses, and minerals to cause hernias in animals and people for at least the last twelve years. Here the inhabitants of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia subscribed to the popular notion that harmless plants such as these could be turned into dangerous substances through the application of incantations and magic. They also pointed their fingers at the state peasant Evdokiia Viracheva, whose mother had been exiled to Siberia for witchcraft, and by implication of heredity was therefore a witch. Finally, members of the community targeted Mar’ia Pavlovna Liamtina, who had come from another foundry settlement to marry and reside in Nizhnaia Utkinskaia. They suspected her of having ties to unclean spirits and witchcraft, because she taught magic to some of the inhabitants. As it turned out, all three suspected witches had not fulfilled their Christian obligations, including taking yearly communion, which was mandated by law.14 Nonfulfillment of Christian responsibilities was not necessarily a sign that these individuals were witches as witches were known to attend church services. Nonetheless this behavior would have raised the eyebrows of clerics on the lookout for noncompliant Orthodox believers who might have fallen 12 Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika,” 103. 13 A fine line separated black from white magic as all magic could potentially have dire consequences. 14 Transcribed in Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika,” 104–105.

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into the hands of schismatic Old Believers.15 In his general report Florovskii did identify the suspected witches as being Orthodox. A secret section of the report, which his bishop sent on to the Holy Synod (the church’s governing body) on June 15, 1840, however, noted that the settlement of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia had experienced the Old Believer schismatic movement in the distant past and that Florovskii had overheard some of the possession victims saying schismatic prayers. The superintendent’s comments complicated his general assessment of the epidemic of demonic possession as he wondered if the Old Belief was not lurking somewhere in the residents’ ailments, “engendering in the sufferers an initial aversion to the clergy and the saints of the true church…”16 Nevertheless, Florovskii’s concern about schismatic activity did not dampen his belief that witches were responsible for implanting demons in people and causing the epidemic. He noted that after the secular authorities had arrested the three suspected witches, two other women, the widow Khioniia Ivanovna Aristova, a serf belonging to the nobleman Demidov, and the married woman Marfa Dimitrieva, had used their magical arts to make two additional inhabitants of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia ill.17 In weighing the theories that residents of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia gave for how the witches operated, Florovskii sided with popular perceptions. After he had witnessed the victims’ suffering, their demonic fits, and their fear of holy communion and holy objects, as well as their ability to kiss the cross and partake of holy communion when their seizures were over, he concluded, “I am compelled to side with popular opinion that the sorceresses have ties with unclean spirits which they plant in people.”18 According to some of the testimony, witches not only tainted food and drink with their potions and incantations, but they could also transmit their evil intentions against individuals through the air. In other words, a witch or sorcerer only had to wish a person ill to make them so. The obligated woman Elena Iakovlevna Vesnina blamed her sister-in-law Mar’ia Pavlovna Liamtina for implanting her with demons. Elena Iakovlevna told Father Florovskii that she had never taken any food and drink from the woman and generally 15 In the middle of the seventeenth century the Russian Orthodox Church experienced a schism as a result of a number of reforms and corrections that bishops introduced into the liturgy and ritual. Those who rejected the reforms and were persecuted by the state as schismatics well into the early nineteenth century were called Old Believers. 16 Transcribed in Atapin and Lupanova, “Russkie klikushi,” 194. 17 Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika,” 105. 18 Ibid., 107, 108.

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stayed away from her. On one occasion, however, Elena Iakovlevna explained that when she greeted her brothers who had just returned from the fields, her sister-in-law demanded that she pay back the 30 kopecks that she had borrowed. Elena Iakovlevna started to feel poorly right after an angry Mar’ia Pavlovna threatened her with “You’ll remember those 30 kopecks well!” It was as if Mar’ia Pavlovna’s threat in and of itself released demons into the air, who headed straight for Elena Iakovlevna’s unprotected body.19 She immediately began to feel poorly and experience periodic fits of demonic possession. In between seizures, whenever Elena Iakovlevna felt her sisterin-law approach, “she [Elena Iakovlevna] calms herself down by kissing the Gospels [and] the Life-Giving Cross and drinking Holy Epiphany water.” Some of the other witnesses believed that the suspected witches had simply tainted their victims’ food or drink.20 None of the victims in Nizhnaia Utkinskaia attributed their bewitchment to a sorceress’s cutting out an imprint of their feet in the dirt and casting a spell over it, which was another popular belief. Only in one instance was Florovskii ready to depart from popular thinking and side with medical opinion by pointing out in the report to his bishop that one of the possessed women was shamming her illness. He attributed such fraudulent behavior in general to discord among spouses and the fact that gullible individuals believed that unclean spirits did not tolerate arguments of any kind. In this particular case, Florovskii noted that the woman had fits of possession every time she had a tiff with her husband.21 But even here, the superintendent did not accuse the woman of consciously being a deceiver. In siding with the villagers, Florovskii saved his anger for the “violent and illegal measures” of the bailiff of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia and four doctors. He accused them of “having forgotten their love of mankind” in punishing all those who had exhibit characteristics of klikushestvo for pretending to be demonically possessed. He described the public humiliation and torture to which these men subjected the women and girls. Having taken the possessed to the public square and in the midst of a crowd, the officials stripped the women naked in violation of the law, let their hair down loose as if they were prostitutes, then hosed them with ice-cold water from a fire truck, aiming the nozzle at the location in their bodies where the demons supposedly 19 According to popular and clerical beliefs, had Elena made a sign of the cross at that moment, she would have protected herself against the demons. 20 Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika,” 106. 21 Ibid., 108.

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resided.22 According to Florovskii’s account, the men sarcastically asked the women if the ice-cold water had chased out the unclean spirits. It would appear that the Russian doctors were following European practice in treating certain types of mental illness. Cold and sometimes ice-cold water were shock therapy treatments that doctors across Europe prescribed in the seventeenth century and later for mania and melancholia and in the nineteenth century for hysteria.23 According to an 1866 lecture by Frederic Carpenter Skey of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, “a few quarts of cold water suddenly thrown on the person of a chief delinquent [i.e., hysteric] instantly brought the ward to a state of reason and subordination. The disease succumbed to the indignity of the treatment.”24 Some of the possessed women of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia fainted from the water torture. Although all of them subsequently declared themselves to be healed out of fear of further punishment and mortification, that cure turned out to be only temporary. Upon their return home, the women once again experienced fits of possession, and new cases of possession occurred.25 Contrary to the medical science of the day, “the disease” had not “succumbed to the indignity of the treatment.” The punishment of individuals who believed themselves to be demon possessed was not restricted to Nizhnaia Utkinskaia. A September 21, 1846, report of the governor of Kaluga, N. M. Smirnov, to Minister of Internal Affairs A. A. Perovskii complained that the number of possessed women was growing in some areas of his province. On the serf estate of Gil’ in Kaluga district alone, their number had increased from 30 to 180. Viewing klikushestvo as either an act of deception or an instance of hysteria, the governor had ordered his investigating official in this instance to punish the women a doctor identified as being healthy and therefore deceivers with the birch rod. Some were healed immediately by the application of physical violence; others were dispatched to Kaluga for further corporal punishment. 22 Married Russian Orthodox and schismatic women always covered their hair, while maidens braided theirs. 23 Kromm, The Art of Frenzy, 145; Moricheau Beaupré, A Treatise on the Effects, 191–192; Shorter and Fink, Endocrine Psychiatry, ix. Cold water, it turns out, had been used in some Catholic exorcist rituals whereby the possessed individual was forced to stand “in a bath of cold water,” but there are no such references to cold or ice water in Russian Orthodox exorcist rituals. Here Brian Levack is quoting the Swiss theologian Heinrich Bullinger’s writing of 1740 (Levack, The Devil Within, 106). I would like to thank Professors Stephen Frank, Marianna Muravyeva, and Christine Ruane for their help in identifying cold water treatments in Russian legal proceedings and medicine. 24 Skey, Hysteria, 63. 25 Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika,” 108–109.

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Only four women declared by the medical expert to be suffering from nerves were given medical attention. Smirnov concluded that women in his province of Kaluga and elsewhere were shamming possession in order to avoid work and to receive sympathy. In consulting with the central medical council, Minister of Internal Affairs Perovskii sent a secret memorandum to Governor Smirnov on December 10 ordering him to desist from further action against klikushi, until the medical council had determined whether their behavior was in fact fraudulent, noting that the fear of punishment could actually increase the sufferings of individuals with nervous conditions.26 Clearly, no such limitations had been in place in Nizhnaia Utkinskaia. At the same time, neither the central medical authorities nor the minister of internal affairs were ready to abandon the general legal notion that klikushi were only pretending to be possessed by demons. Contrary to official views, Superintendent Florovskii, in tandem with other Russian Orthodox clergy, believed that most shriekers were genuine and only the Church’s thaumaturgical arsenal of holy objects, prayers, oils, and fasting could adequately treat them. He accordingly described in his report his ministrations to the possessed. In one case he had the woman come to his living quarters, where he tried to administer holy water to her. Three times the crying woman attempted to drink the water. In the end, she vomited the demon and aptly named him Plaksivoi (Cry Baby).27 The name suggests that this victim of possession might have been treated with the weeper herb (plakun-trava), a root picked on St. John’s Eve specifically to make demons and witches cry.28 Unfortunately, Florovskii does not describe the nature of the vomited demon. In the much earlier cases of Mar’ia Semenova in 1732 and Irina Ivanova in 1737, the demon was a requisite black object akin to a reptile, moustache, or wet crow.29 In the late nineteenth century Father Shalabanov of the Siberian village Pokrovskoe, in Kainskii district (Tobol’sk province), read exorcist prayers over the bewitched Varvara Stepanovna Kostina of the village Turumovo. When he forced Varvara Stepanovna to drink anointed oil for the sick, she vomited decomposed fish, mice, and six frogs.30 Another woman, to whom Superintendent Florovskii administered, called her demon Khokhotun (The Joker), i.e., the deceiver who was prone to demonic laughter. A third woman 26 Transcribed in Atapin and Lupanova, “Russkie klikushi,” 195–197. 27 Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika,” 110. 28 Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, 190. 29 Worobec, “How One Runaway,” 15. 30 Ostrovskaia, “Mirovozzrencheskie aspekty,” 136–137.

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gave her demon the name Sedun (Rider).31 She may have viewed her unclean spirit as a sexual predator. Florovskii also noted that earlier some of the possessed had sought help from a sly sorcerer in the village Talitsa named Ivan Filippov Ropanikov. This sorcerer, who reportedly had three unclear spirits under his authority, had somehow healed two of the demoniacs. Rejecting the validity of both scientific medical and superstitious treatments, Florovskii concluded that only the mysteries of the Orthodox Church and the removal of the main witches from the community in accordance with the wishes of the residents of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia would stop the epidemic.32 In 1866, the priest A. Petrov noted similarly that “the veritable truth of the holy mysteries of our Orthodox universal church is solemnly confirmed by that phenomenon [of klikushestvo].”33 Father Florovskii’s disdain for sorcerers and witches is not surprising, but this disdain would also have extended to healers of any type precisely because he would have suspected them of using magic, even though their incantations were full of Christian references. In July 1839, in the midst of the epidemic of demonic possession in Nizhnaia Utkinskaia, one of Princess Shcherbatova’s serfs and his mother from the village Nikonovskoe in Bronnitskii district, Moscow province, turned to 92-year-old Evstafii Antonov, who belonged to another serf owner, for help against sorcerers’ spells. In this case, the victim of bewitchment did not claim that he was a demoniac. Instead, he explained that he had been bewitched by three local sorcerers who had made young married husbands, including himself, impotent. The remedy that the healer applied, however, would also have been used for someone demonically possessed. Whispering over a glass of water mixed with grain liquor, Evstafii addressed his prayer (which he later told the authorities that he had learned from his father) to Solomoniia (also called Solomonida), the apocryphal midwife present at the birth of the Christ child.34 The prayer also contains a description of the Slavic otherworld. It reads as follows: In the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. On the sea, on the ocean, on the island of Buian,35 the Holy Birthgiver of Christ gave 31 Golikova, “Klikushestvo glazami sviashchennika,” 110. 32 Atapin and Lupanova, “Russkie klikushi,” 195. The expulsion of the suspected witches would have involved exile to Siberia. 33 Quoted in Panchenko, “Klikushestvo.” 34 Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, 252. 35 According to W. R. Ryan, “Buian has been variously identified either as a derivative of the adjective buinyi (wild, strong, etc.),” or the noun buian (a high point in an open place), or as a

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birth, the midwife Solomoniia delivered Christ [and] received him in her hands. Ask, pray to the midwife Solomonida in heavenly Christ, in the Mother of God, to [free] the slave So-and-So from the male sorcerer, the female sorcerer, the male heretic, the female heretic,36 the evil female specialist in roots, devilish matters and the devil’s snares. God’s angels [and] archangels went off to fight devilish matters with fiery instruments; save, heal, and forgive this slave So-and-So on this day, at this time, through my incantation.37 The Muscovite Russian Orthodox service book identified the archangels by name as “Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Sichael, and Uriel” in a prayer that was intended to protect a person from the invasion of demons.38 Imitating exorcist prayers, other popular incantations attempted to expunge demons from all parts of the body, as in this 1892 example from Smolensk province: Lord God! Jesus Christ, the Lord’s Son, came away from the Jordan River with crosses and blessed water. He came to a halt and became still. The convulsions of (some sort of) blessed animal with (some type of) wool in the belly, stomach, bones, skeleton, turbulent head, bright eyes, dark eyebrows, [and] veins made him come to a halt and become still. And the Blessed Mother came with the twelve apostles, and she came to a halt and became still. The convulsions (naming the wool of the animal) made her come to a halt and become still. Our most holy Protector, have mercy on us in our youth, our old age, for the rising moon, and for eternity. Amen.39 The incantation’s references to animals and animal wool or fur stemmed from the popular belief, discussed above, that demons took the shape of small animals when they inhabited an individual’s body. Although healers intoned incantations that borrowed heavily from Orthodox prayers, Russian ecclesiastics began to frown upon their use by the laity as early as the late seventeenth century. The authorities were trying corruption of the name of the island of Rugen, a holy place of the ancient Baltic Slavs (Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, 204, n. 41). 36 Individuals who confessed to being witches under duress often referred to themselves as heretics and even fornicatresses (Mordovtsev, “Russkie charodei i charodeiki,” 6–7). Eretik (heretic) was a Russian colloquial word for wizard or sorcerer (Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, 33). 37 Obshchestvo liubitelei, Sbornik izdannyi Obshchestvom, 275–276. 38 Quoted in Levin, “Supplicatory Prayers,” 104. 39 Provintsial, “Derevenskie znakhari,” 3.

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to gain clerical control over the saying of thaumaturgical prayers, which they accompanied with censing and the sprinkling of holy water. They consequently accused healers of playing with magic.40 As we move into the nineteenth century, clerics such as Superintendent Florovskii were even more insistent upon their having sole authority over demoniacs, whether as pastors or shrine guardians. The 1830s may appear late for an epidemic of demonic possession that involved witches, especially since Catherine the Great had begun the process of decriminalizing witchcraft in 1775. Witchcraft persecution by the state on behalf of the Church had peaked in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century, but did not come entirely to an end with Catherine’s 1775 decree that repeated previous assertions that witchcraft was a fraudulent behavior. Noting that witchcraft prayed upon the minds of gullible and superstitious individuals, Catherine turned cases involving witchcraft or sorcery over to new provincial Courts of Equity. Inspired by English legal institutions, these courts were mandated to rule more humanely than the written laws specified. It is far too complicated a story to get into here, but suffice it to say that the verdicts in cases that came before these courts involving witchcraft and often demonic possession were inconsistent. Secular judges and police authorities out in the provinces sometimes continued to punish alleged witches and sorcerers with beatings and exile to monastic institutions for lengthy penances (the exact nature of which ecclesiastics generally determined) or even to Siberia, as had been the case with one of the alleged witches’ mothers in the Nizhnaia Utkinskaia case. Beliefs in witchcraft were widespread among all classes, including the clergy, into the first half of the nineteenth century. The tide began to turn among educated society as more and more often medical investigations within witchcraft cases determined the herbs and potions seized as evidence of alleged witchcraft to be harmless and the deaths of individuals supposedly murdered by witches to be the result of natural causes.41 Given the lack of a paper trail and evidence from comparable cases, we can only assume in the case of the Nizhnaia Utkinskaia epidemic of demonic possession that the women arrested and suspected of witchcraft were eventually exonerated and reinstated in their communities. Florovskii’s understandings and beliefs reflect a point at which Russian Orthodox beliefs in witchcraft among the clergy had not yet disappeared. 40 Levin, “Supplicatory Prayers.” 41 Worobec, “The 1850s Prosecution,” 397, and “Decriminalizing Witchcraft,” 291–293, 296–300, 304–306.

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For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russian Orthodox practices made a connection between sorcery and demonic possession. Using the 1720 Trebnik (service book), priests asked communicants in the confessional if they had used the services of magicians and sorcerers to bewitch individuals and make them ill.42 In 1803 Archbishop Veniamin (1739–1811) in his manual on Orthodoxy, which was to undergo sixteen reprintings, pointed out, “Some people repudiate that the power and evil of demons bring illness upon people; but pious people do not doubt this truth” (Luke 13). On another page he noted that prayer services for the possessed were necessary because of sorcerers’ evil actions.43 Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the connection between witchcraft and possession weaken dramatically among Russian Orthodox ecclesiastics and clerics as the emphasis shifted to focus upon God’s agency in imbuing individuals with demons and the ubiquitous presence of demon. Yet, for the most part they did not completely dismiss klikushi’s beliefs that they had been bewitched or hexed through the air, in food or drink, or in the copying of their footsteps, for to have done so would have ended the possession drama and more importantly, denied the place that demons occupied in the Christian Orthodox cosmology and the role that the Church had to play in combating demons. While acknowledging the power of witches, superintendent Florovskii did not believe that a witch or sorcerer could heal the possessed of demons that had been placed in a woman’s body by the said witch or sorcerer; that task, he firmly believed, was for the Church. In this regard Florovskii departed from popular understandings that a bewitcher’s powers to undo a spell or hex could be the most beneficial. The possession drama did not fall apart on the basis of this disavowal of that popular belief, as believers did appeal to a variety of sources for help, including the Church. When healers, other sorcerers’ treatments, and medical treatments proved unsuccessful or often in tandem with seeking such treatments, believers called upon the sacred world for assistance. They tended to turn more to monastic institutions than parish priests, even though all parish priests ministered in Christ’s name in aiding the sick. At monasteries, demoniacs as well as other ill believers appealed to the numerous saints’ relics and icons they believed to be miracle working for help. As one priest explained, peasants favored prayer services before saints’ relics and icons over regular prayer services addressed only 42 Smilianskaia, “Sledstvennye dela ‘o sueveriiakh’,” 8. 43 Veniamin, Novaia skrizhal’, 2: 449–450, 457.

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to Christ the Savior.44 Clearly, worshippers found the intercessory powers of saints and the Mother of God to be more efficacious.45 The possessed also turned to monks who had gained reputations as being able to heal the possessed through the Church’s humane thaumaturgical arsenal. In closing, let me point out that Florovskii’s castigation of the inhumane treatment of the demonically possessed at the hands of medical doctors who had clearly abused their authority sits uneasily with his belief that witches had to be expelled from a settlement in order for peace to be restored to its community. At the same time, the medical hystericization of women’s bodies in the course of the nineteenth century and late twentieth century led to psychological remedies involving the incarceration of hysterics, bromides, unnecessary surgeries, and the application of hypnosis and other regimens which proved to be ineffective. The late-nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox emphasis on helping klikushi expel their demons and recover their health while at the same time deemphasizing beliefs in witchcraft proved to be more effective than the medical science of the time. Klikushestvo was clearly a social and cultural illness as opposed to medical disease. In the case of demonic possession, “the aim of healing […] is to demonstrate that evil does indeed exist, that it can be objectified in the external world, understood, and at times controlled by magical means.”46 The physical and spiritual anguish of the possessed is no less genuine within this cultural context. The fire and brimstone approach of contemporary Russian Orthodox exorcists does have the potential of prolonging a victims’ suffering if they believe their own actions to be responsible for demons taking over their bodies.

References Almazov, A. I. Chin nad besnovatym. Pamiatnik grecheskoi pis’mennosti XVII v. [The rite of exorcism: Greek literary texts of the seventeenth century]. Vol. 1. Odessa: Ekonomicheskaia tipografiia, 1901. Atapin, S. S., and V. M. Lupanova. “Russkie klikushi: Tri vzgliada sovremennikov” [Russian shriekers: Three observations of contemporaries]. In Rossiiskii arkhiv: Istoriia otechestva v svidetel’stvakh i dokumentakh XVIII–XX vv. [Russian archive: Our country’s history in testimonies and documents 44 Eremich, “O predmete i metode,” 342. 45 Worobec, “Miraculous Healings”; Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, chap. 6. 46 Levy, “Some Comments,” 226.

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Meyendorff, Paul. The Annointing of the Sick. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. Mordovtsev, D. L. “Russkie charodei i charodeiki” [Russian sorcerers and sorceresses]. In Sobranie sochinenii D. L. Mordovtseva [The collected works of D. L. Mordovtsev], edited by Daniil Lukich, vol. 20, 1–28. St. Petersburg: N. F. Mertts, 1901. Moricheau Beaupré, Pierre Jean. A Treatise on the Effects and Properties of Cold, with a Sketch, Historical and Medical, on the Russian Campaign, translated by A. Clendinning. Edinburgh: MacLachlan & Stewart, 1826. Obeyesekere, Gananath. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Obshchestvo liubitelei dukhovnago prosveshcheniia [The Society of Lovers of Religious Enlightenment]. Sbornik izdannyi Obshchestvom liubitelei dukhovnago prosveshcheniia, po sluchaiu prazdnovaniia stoletniago iubileia so dnia rozhdeniia (1782–1882) Filareta, Mitropolita Moskovskago [A collection of essays published by the Society of Lovers of Religious Enlightenment in honor of the centenary of the birth of Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow (1782–1882)]. Moscow: Tip. L. F. Snegireva, 1883. Olenev, M. B. “Narodnye pover’ia i obychai v nekotorykh selakh Riazanskoi gubernii (po dannym ‘Riazanskikh eparkhial’nykh vedomostei’)” [Popular beliefs and customs in several villages of Riazan Province (Based on information in the Riazan Diocesan Gazette)]. https://www.62info.ru/history/ node/2519 (accessed April 8, 2020). Ostrovskaia, L. V. “Mirovozzrencheskie aspekty narodnoi meditsiny russkogo krest’ianskogo naseleniia Sibiri vtoroi poloviny XIX veka” [The beliefs of popular medicine among the Russian peasant population of Siberia in the second half of the nineteenth century]. In Iz istorii sem’i i byta sibirskogo krest’ianstva v XVII – nachale XX veka: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov [The history of the family and everyday life of the Siberian peasantry from the seventeenth to beginning of the twentieth century: A collection of academic works], edited by M. M. Gromyko and N. A. Minenko, 131–142. Novosibirsk: Novosibirskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1975. Panchenko, A. A. “Klikushestvo: Chuzhoi golos: Klikota i prorochestvo” [Demonic possession: A strange voice: Shrieking and prophecy]. In Khristovshchina i skopchestvo: Fol’klor i traditsionnaia kul’tura russkikh misticheskikh sekt [The Christ faith and castrators: Folklore and the traditional culture of Russian mystical sects], by idem, 324–341. Moscow: OGI, 2002. http:// ec-dejavu.ru/c/Clicusha.html (accessed April 8, 2020).

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Provintsial [Provincial (a pseudonym)]. “Derevenskie znakhari v Smolenskoi gubernii” [Village healers in Smolensk province]. Smolenskii vestnik [Smolensk herald] 114 (1892): 3. Ryan, W. F. The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Shevzov, Vera. Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Shorter, Edward, and Max Fink. Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of Melancholia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Skey, Frederic Carpenter. Hysteria: Remote Causes of Disease in General. Treatment of Disease by Tonic Agency. Local or Surgical Forms of Hysteria, etc. Six Lectures, Delivered to the Students of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 1866. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867. Smilianskaia, E. B. “Sledstvennye dela ‘o sueveriiakh’ v Rossii pervoi poloviny XVIII v. v svete problem istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia” [Investigative cases concerning “superstitions” in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century through the prism of the history of social consciousness]. Rossica 1/1 (1996): 3–20. Velichkovskii, Paisii. “O tom, chego osobenno boiatsia besy” [What demons fear in particular]. In Zhitiia i tvoreniia russkikh sviatykh: Zhizneopisaniia i dukhovnye nastavleniia velikikh podvizhnikov Khristianskogo blagochestiia, prosiiavshikh v zemle Russkoi. Narodnye pochitaniia i prazdniki Pravoslavnoi tserkvi [The vita and works of Russian saints: Biographies and spiritual instructions of the great ascetics of Christian piety who illuminated the Russian land. National devotions and holidays of the Orthodox Church], edited by Sergei Tomchenko, 281. Moscow: Sovremennik, Donskoi monastyr’, 1993. —. “O tom, chtoby terpet’ napraslinu i vsiakoe ukorenie i dosazhdenie” [How to deal with slander and all types of accusations and provocations]. In Zhitiia i tvoreniia russkikh sviatykh: Zhizneopisaniia i dukhovnye nastavleniia velikikh podvizhnikov Khristianskogo blagochestiia, prosiiavshikh v zemle Russkoi. Narodnye pochitaniia i prazdniki Pravoslavnoi tserkvi [The vita and works of Russian saints: Biographies and spiritual instructions of the great ascetics of Christian piety who illuminated the Russian land. National devotions and holidays of the Orthodox Church], edited by Sergei Tomchenko, 273. Moscow: Sovremennik, Donskoi monastyr’, 1993. Veniamin, Archbishop. Novaia skrizhal’ ili ob’iasnenie o tserkvi, o liturgii i o vsekh sluzhbakh i utvariakh tserkovnykh [A new tablet or explanations about the Church, liturgy, and all Church services and vessels]. 2 vols. 16th ed. Moscow: Russkii dukhovnyi tsentr, 1992 [1899].

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Worobec, Christine D. “An Epidemic of Possession in a Moscow Rural Parish in 1909.” In The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, edited by William B. Husband, 31–44. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000. —. “Decriminalizing Witchcraft in Pre-Emancipation Russia.” In Späte Hexenprozesse: Der Umgang der Aufklärung mit dem Irrationalen, edited by Wolfgang Behringer, Sönke Lorenz, and Dieter R. Bauer, 281–308. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2016. —. “How One Runaway Serf Challenged the Authority of the Russian State: The Case Against Mar’ia Semenova.” In The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia, edited by Eadem, 13–23. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. —. “Miraculous Healings.” In Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, edited by Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, 22–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. —. “The Miraculous Revival and Death of Princess Anna Fedorovna Golitsyna, 22 May 1834.” In Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Source Book on Lived Religion, edited by Heather Coleman, 31–42. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. —. Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. —. “The 1850s Prosecution of Gerasim Fedotov for Witchcraft.” Russian History 40/3–4 (2013): 381–397.

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15 The Healing of the Possessed in Medieval Canonization Processes f Gábor Klaniczay

Keywords: miracles of saints, medieval exorcism, canonization processes, curses, collective possession cases, female convents, Elizabeth of Hungary, Margaret of Hungary, Nicholas of Tolentino

Healing the possessed has been, since the cases recorded for Christ in the Gospels, among the most spectacular manifestations of the charismatic power of people who wanted to follow and emulate him, such as the “holy men” of late antiquity and the “living saints” of the later Middle Ages. Famous cases were recorded for Anthony the Great, Martin of Tours and, later, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, and Francis of Assisi. A widely disseminated paradigm for the fight of good and evil, these detailed accounts in the legends described diabolic possession and its exorcism by a saint. These cases also paved the way for elaborating a more and more complex liturgy for this spectacular event; “professional” Church dignitaries and exorcists developed a routine way to handle cases of alleged diabolic possession and related phenomena.1 The rich documentation of late medieval canonization processes constitutes a special territory for inquiry. From the thirteenth century on, this procedure came to subordinate saints’ cults, hitherto locally generated, to a centralized, bureaucratized, legally framed procedure ultimately controlled by the papacy.2 It was intended to prove the sainthood of the candidates by meticulously recorded testimonies on their miracles. A handful of cases of healing the diabolically possessed appears in most such miracle collections from canonization investigations (about 70 of these were preserved from the later Middle Ages). The descriptions of the witness hearings at the proceedings provide a multivocal and varied description of the possessed with more realistic detail than the biblically inspired and rhetorically elaborate stories in legends shaped by the rules of the hagiographic genre. Another aspect is 1 Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés; Levack, The Devil Within. 2 Klaniczay, “The Power of the Saints and the Authority of the Popes.”

344 Gábor Kl aniczay Figure 15.1 St Bernard of Clairvaux exorcises a possessed woman, woodcut 1506 (La Vie des Saints)

Figure 15.2 Francis of Assisi exorcises demons. Bonaventura Berlinghieri, Altarpiece of Pescia, 1235, detail

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that the miracles recorded in the framework of the official investigation of a prospective saint’s relics occur in a specific institutional/ritual setting. This should be considered part of a mechanism which triggered and predefined the psychological conditions for healing in such cases differently from spontaneous or ritualized exorcisms. From these points of view, the cases recorded in the acts of the canonization processes (which number about a hundred before the end of the fifteenth century) require special treatment. Furthermore, the presence or absence of possession cases in the collection may have resulted from the selection criteria of the investigators. In general, most types of illnesses are presented to show the universality of the saint’s power, but some commissions might have deliberately discarded this domain because of an ambivalent attitude toward diabolic possession. To contribute to the considerable work already done in this domain,3 I propose to make some observations here on three late medieval possession cases: from 1234, 1271 and 1318 to 1323. *** Let me start with the second, a healing miracle at the grave of Margaret of Hungary (d. 1270), daughter of King Béla IV of Hungary (1235–1270), who spent her life as a Dominican nun and died in the “odor of sanctity” on January 18, 1270, in the royal nunnery founded for her on the Island of Hares near Buda, subsequently named after her.4 The fama of the miracles at her grave started to spread in January of 1271. This soon triggered a spectacular public event, the healing of a possessed woman (obsessa) named Elizabeth, in the presence of King Stephen V (1270–1272), the barons of the country and virtually the entire royal court, Elizabeth, the betrothed of Thomas of the diocese of Veszprém, tormented by love for her long-absent fiancé, wandered about through dark places at night like a vagrant. Avoiding the company of her family, she became possessed by a demon who appeared to her in her in the shape of her fiancé; she began at once to rage savagely, attacking her father, her mother, her brother and anyone she could get her hands on, 3 Some of these studies will be cited later. Since the formulation of the original version of this chapter (2014), a substantial monograph has been published by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa with an ample treatment of possession cases in canonization processes; I have added references to its findings to my notes. Cf. Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion. 4 Cf. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses, 205–207.

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striking them in the face with her fist, savaging them with her teeth, or cruelly hitting them with rocks or a stick. Finally, she was caught, thanks to the efforts and piety of her parents, and she was restrained in iron chains. Although originally she had only known Hungarian, throughout the five months of her being possessed she started to speak in German, Bavarian, Slavic, and various other languages. On the third day of her possession, therefore, after they had heard of the miracles and cures which God was performing at the tomb of the holy virgin Margaret through her merits, the afflicted woman was led bound and chained to the tomb and kept there for quite a while. King Stephen, the barons of the kingdom and almost all of the king’s court were present, and they were amazed by the variety of her languages. The parents of the suffering woman and all who were there had pity on her. With ardent desire and devout intention, they begged for the assistance of the same aforesaid virgin Margaret. Lo! The divine mercy invoked through the merits of the virgin Margaret manifested itself. On the anniversary of Margaret’s burial, that is to say, the feast of St. Prisca, the Enemy was expelled and put to flight; the woman regained perfect health, and returned to her usual mild manner. In all her acts and perceptions, she regained the full use of her reason and forgot all the languages except Hungarian, which she had spoken originally.5 This spectacular manifestation of Margaret’s healing power helped her brother, Stephen V, obtain Pope Gregory X’s permission to start an investigation of her sanctity; this was the first such inquisitio in partibus to be carried out in medieval Hungary. The enquiry recorded seven miracles in life, four miraculous visions concerning Margaret’s death and 29 postmortem miracles, the accounts of which were incorporated in the oldest legend of Saint Margaret, probably written by her confessor Marcellus, prior provincial of the Hungarian Dominicans. This life account and the first record of the miracles (the source of the quote above) were sent to the Curia, with the result that in 1276, Pope Innocent delegated a new commission consisting of two Italian clerics who made a very meticulous new examination of the miracles between July 23 and October 21 of that year, recording the testimonies of more than 110 witnesses.6 Of interest for us here is the pres5 Csepregi, Klaniczay and Péterfy, Legenda Vetus, 109–113. 6 Ibid., 133–721. From the witnesses of the first investigation only those of five miracles in life and nine miracles post mortem were available at the second hearing. They were able to find, however, new testimonies on sixteen further miracles she had performed in vita: three cases

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ence of two new testimonies of the same case; this time, Elizabeth, the once-possessed woman herself provides an account as witness (LXXIII) before the second papal commission and her mother, Fera, also gave an testimony before the commissioners (LXXIV). This time we hear a completely different story. In Elizabeth’s account there is no longer a complaint of her beloved bridegroom leaving her, haunting her in her memory, and subsequently causing her a diabolic possession; neither is there a mentioning of the phenomenal “speaking in tongues.” In her account to the investigators, she complained about a mighty black dog and the frightening apparition of three beautiful men: Elizabeth sister of Thomasius, resident in the suburbs of the Castle of Buda, took the oath, as above. […] When asked if she wanted to say anything about miracles, she replied, “In the month of Saint Michael, during the vintage, I went to a certain vineyard where my father was, and I stayed there until vespers, and when I came home I fed a dog that was tethered in my house, and then a big black dog, really awful to look at, passed close by me, and I was so terrified that I left that house and went into another, and I saw through the windows that in it were three men so beauteous and bright that I couldn’t look upon them, and I got even more afraid than before, not knowing what was happening to me, and I lost my mind. I grabbed a shovel and ran over to my mother and father, but I didn’t know who they were nor where I was; but I do know that they tied my hands behind my back and put a horse shackle round my legs, as tight as they could, and those shackles had an opening so that I could walk, while the shackle stayed on. […] I stayed in this condition until the feast of Saint Anthony, and on that feast day I was led to this tomb of Saint Margaret, and was cured and got my wits back right away.7 The fragmentary manuscript does not include the end of this testimony and the beginning of the next one, by her mother, Fera, and possibly the depositions of others related to the case. The mother does not add much new information, but it is significant that the central motif of the first account, the original reason for her daughter to become raging mad – being when miraculous signs attested her sanctity and 57 post mortem miracles. This raised the total number of her miracles to 116. 7 Ibid., 585.

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abandoned by her bridegroom – is also missing here. The mother relates briefly: “My daughter, Elizabeth, whom you have seen, lost her mind, and we were restraining her with iron shackles and other bonds, and she was taken tied up like this by boat to the tomb of this Saint Margaret and when she was there, she was cured.”8 She does mention, however, what the daughter omitted from her own testimony: her speaking in tongues: “We did not know what to do, because she was speaking in Slavic, German, and our own language.”9 The contradictions in the different accounts are worthy of attention; they attest to the ongoing work of reinterpretation in such cases, where the symptoms change constantly and the ultimate cause remains unclear. The story of the departed bridegroom reappearing to the disappointed abandoned bride as a possessive demon may actually be a rather transparent explanation of this clear emotional trauma. (And, incidentally, it recalls the pattern of some famous early modern possession cases, like the Loudun scandal of Urbain Grandier and Jeanne des Anges.10) The “big black dog, […] awful to look at,” in the second account, replacing the “demon in her fiancé’s shape” is equally a being with potential diabolic associations. And finally: the disappearance of the first interpretation could equally be considered meaningful. (Has the betrothal problem been resolved? Or, on the contrary, is the memory of it five years after the crisis repressed in total oblivion? We will never know.) A contemporary canonization process in France in 1266, that of Bishop Philip of Bourges (d. 1261), analyzed by Michael Goodich, recorded the somewhat similar miraculous healing of a certain Dulcia of St. Chartier, a cheated on and abandoned young wife, who went insane.11 Dulcia’s insanity was not interpreted as possession, but rather as a result of poisoning or witchcraft by an “old hag” (vetula) hired by the adulterous husband and his “whore” (garcia). The fluidity of the demarcation between the state of being possessed (obsessa, demoniata) and mad (sine mente) – in other cases also furiosa, insana, epylemptica is noteworthy.12 The similarity of the symptoms in the descriptions also speaks for this continuity: senselessly wandering around, 8 Ibid., 587. 9 Ibid., 589. 10 De Certeau, The Possession at Loudun. 11 Goodich, “The Multiple Miseries.” 12 This has been pointed out by Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 40–47; Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion, 48–50.

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attacking close relatives with unexpected force, biting others like a raging dog, having a foam of saliva at the mouth, unpredictable bodily contortions, loss of communicative abilities, and saying surprising things as if another person was residing in them. While possession could indeed be for a long time a convincing explanation of madness (just like any illness attributed to demonic influence and somewhat later to witchcraft), these two explanations were potentially rivals, and in the later Middle Ages an explanation by madness (with its more and more elaborate medical parameters)13 was indeed beginning to replace the diagnosis of diabolic possession. (Speaking about madness one should not fail to notice the potential spectacle of this family “ship of fools” which was floating down the Danube with the possessed young woman in shackles to get her healed by Margaret.) Finally, the third noteworthy element of this possession case is the motif of speaking in tongues (German, Bavarian and Slavic – a variety that amazed the king and his court), a feature of the possessed which has many parallels in both in canonization processes and the broader hagiography. *** The second case is taken from the canonization process of the aunt of Saint Margaret: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231), daughter of King Andrew II and wife of Ludwig, the Thuringian landgrave.14 Her canonization investigations, recording 129 miracles in two rounds between 1232 and 1235, were among those which set the model for future processes.15 These accounts were exemplary as regards their new judicial style, aiming to make dry records of observable facts, avoiding the usual hagiographic stereotypes. Among Elizabeth’s miracles were ten cures of epileptics16 and six raging mad individuals (furiosa)17 – all of them showing spectacular symptoms such as tearing their clothes and running around naked (I/16), running with the dogs (I/18), biting their own hands (I/27), falling into a trance and grinding their teeth with foaming saliva at their mouth (I/ 32, 41, 43), having fits of convulsions, rolling on the ground (I/35, 80, 81), biting their tongues (I/81). Nevertheless, only one (II/13) among these miracle recipients qualified as possessed (obsessa) – a case from the second investigation, i.e., 13 Fritz, Le discours du fou; Huot, Madness in Medieval French Literature. 14 Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses, 195–291; Gecser, The Feast and the Pulpit. 15 Huyskens, Quellenstudien; Wolf, The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth. 16 Miracles I/23, 24, 32, 35, 36, 41, 43, 53, 77. 17 Miracles I/16, 18, 27, 80, 102, II/13.

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one in front of different investigators than the first. The account is given by a man about his ten-year-old stepdaughter named Benigna: [Benigna] once asked for a drink. A handmaid gave her one in anger, saying: “Take this and drink the excommunicated devil!” The girl drank it and within an hour it seemed as if a burning firebrand had gone down her throat. As a result, she cried out: “O, my neck!” All at once her abdomen swelled up like a barrel. In addition to this growth, something was seen coursing violently through her limbs. She remained in this state for two years, with everyone thinking she was possessed, because she also emitted voices. “I am called Portenere and Wisman,” was often heard coming from her, accompanied by horrible gestures, which she often made.18 She was described by another witness “as if a demon were controlling her neck, twisting her arms and legs, moving around inside her body.” A third, skeptical witness, however, challenged this interpretation; he said that “once he had seen her sick, rushing about from place to place on her hands and feet. He said he did not know if this was the result of a demon or not.” The girl was only cured at her third pilgrimage to Elizabeth’s grave in Marburg. Significantly, it happened when she drank holy water – an appropriate remedy for possession caused by drinking cursed water. This miracle account is one of a remarkable series of cases where possession occurred after swallowing the devil with some kind of food or drink. The model reaches back to the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, which included the exemplum of a nun eating a leaf of lettuce in the monastic garden without first blessing it with the sign of the cross and thus biting and inadvertently swallowing a devil sitting on the leaf, who immediately possessed her.19 Gregory’s story was popular in the early thirteenth century, retold by Jacques de Vitry.20 The other prolific exemplum collector of the age, the Cistercian Caesarius von Heisterbach, described a slightly similar story in his Dialogus miraculorum, “the girl, in whom the devil entered when she was five years old.” This exemplum resembles quite closely the miracle described in the canonization documents of Saint Elizabeth: “On a day when she was drinking milk, her irritated father said: ‘You will have 18 Huyskens, Quellenstudien, 251–252; Wolf, The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth, 177–178. 19 Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues (I, 4, 7), 42–45; cf. Boesch Gajano, “Demoni e miracoli.” 20 Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 59; Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion, 35–37.

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a devil in your belly.’ And immediately the girl felt a demon enter her body and she was tormented by him until her mature age.”21 The impact of this story was attested in the fifteenth-century Formicarius of Johannes Nider, which founded the new genre of demonological treatises. Nider wrote about a thirteen-year-old Dominican novice in St. Hertogenbosch who also swallowed a devil with a leaf of lettuce in the convent garden, fell into trance, started to speak Latin and French fluently, and quote passages from the Bible by heart. He started preaching to “credulous and light-hearted women who believed that God’s spirit appeared there where, in fact, the Devil found a dwelling.” Finally, he was diagnosed as diabolically possessed and exorcism with the Sacred Host restored him to normality.22 The possession miracle from the canonization process of Saint Elizabeth includes a detailed description of how the witnesses observed the devil move around inside the body of the possessed girl. This provided additional data for Nancy Caciola’s insightful analysis on how it was believed in the age, and pointed out by Caesarius of Heisterbach, that the possessing devil inhabits the “lower parts,” the guts of the possessed: “the bowels where the shit is contained.”23 Another remarkable aspect of this case is that the possession occurred as a result of a malediction.24 In another fascinating case of this mechanism from medieval canonization process documents, Michael Goodich, Alain Boureau, and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa25 have dwelt on the possession miracle in the canonization hearings of a Breton secular priest, Yves Tréguier (d. 1303), held in 1330. Nineteen-year-old Yvees Andree stated before the investigators that his mother accused her with the following exclamation: “Was it you who have defamed me, and should you have said what you said before?” She then withdrew her breasts from beneath her blouse, kneeled down and shouted: “I give you my curse and the curse of my breasts which sucked you, and the curse of my loins which bore you.

21 “De puella, quam diabolus intravit cum esset quinquennis. […] Die quadam cum lac manducaret pater eius iratus dixit: diabolum comedas in ventrem tuum. Mox puellula sensit eius ingressum et usque at maturam aetatem ab illo vexata.” Caesarii Heisterbacensis, Dialogus miraculorum (V, 26), 309. 22 “nonnulle femine qui cito credunt et leves sunt corde satis putabant adesse Dei spiritum, ubi dyabolus locum habebat,” Nider, Formicarius (III, 7), 290–292; cf. Klaniczay, “The Process of Trance,” 208. 23 “in visceribus ubi stercora continentur.” Caesarii Heisterbacensis, Dialogus miraculorum (V, 15), 293–294; Caciola, “Breath, Heart, Guts” and Discerning Spirits, 176–223. 24 On medieval maledictions, see Little, Benedictine Maledictions. 25 Goodich, Violence and Miracle, 78–79; Boureau, “Saint et démons,” 201–202; Boureau, Satan hérétique, 159–161; Katajala-Peltomaa, “Socialization Gone Astray?”

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Whatever I may possess of you legally and can have, I utterly relinquish and give to the Devil.”26 The curse had immediate effect; the boy fell to the ground, had strong seizures, and the following night two goat-shaped demons appeared and tried to carry him away, saying: “You belong to us. You belong to us because your mother has given you to us.” The saint, who also appeared, however, rescued him by pointing out that his mother had no more right to him, than “the sack has on the grain which it carried to the mill.” This explanation drove away the devils, but this logic does not seem to have worked in other cases where such a curse could induce possession. Turning back to the case of the possessed girl healed by Saint Elizabeth, one final aspect remains to be noted: the names by which the demon introduced himself to the outside world. A double name, “Portenere and Wisman,” is used for a single demon, German names which sound rather unusual in the biblically based tradition of demon denominations.27 Nevertheless, there are other contemporary examples of such invented names for demons. At the shrine of Cunegond, another saintly niece of Elizabeth, an elder sister of Margaret (who became princess of Lesser Poland) and retired at the end of her life as a Clarisse sister near Cracow,28 a possessed girl named the demons in her as “Oksza, Naton and Rozen” – three invented names in Polish.29 *** The third example I will discuss here is not from Central Europe but from Central Italy, from the canonization process of an Augustinian friar, Nicholas of Tolentino (1305), arranged in 1325. This process has been the object of an excellent micro-historical analysis by Didier Lett, who revealed the institutional, political, and social mechanisms in the background of these investigations.30 Among other aspects, this process included a remarkable set of possession and exorcism cases (thirteen altogether) and this popularity was not independent of the fact that during the papacy of John XXII there 26 De la Borderie et al., Monuments originaux, 257–262; I quote the translation by Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle, 78. 27 On demon denominations, see Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion, 109–113. 28 Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses, 207. 29 Kętrzyński, “Vita et Miracula sanctae Kyngae,” 737. 30 Lett, Un procès de canonisation, 107–122; Occhioni, Il processo.

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was a considerable upsurge in demonology, promoted by the pope himself, as Alain Boureau has recently demonstrated.31 Besides a number of “habitual” individual possession cases, this is the first time that a canonization investigation includes a case of collective epidemic possession drama. In the Cistercian monastery of Santa Lucia in Pian de Peca, three nuns showed signs of an attack by Belial, who possessed them for a long time. The most spectacular case, according to the testimonies, was Sister Philippucia (witness 20), who was possessed for five years (from 1318 to 1322). After she was healed at the relics of Nicholas of Tolentino, Sister Anthonia, former treasurer of the convent, was possessed and stayed in that state for a year and a half. A third nun, Sister Estephanucia, was only mentioned in one testimony; Alain Boureau has suggested that she was the first in this series.32 During the canonization examinations the whole commission moved to the monastery and arranged prolonged hearings on this complex case and the testimonies of ten nuns from the convent were recorded. These descriptions are among the most detailed from the Middle Ages, giving an account of how the possessed nuns rolled their eyes, distorted their faces, bit their tongues, screamed, trembled, and walked on their hands “by the power of the evil spirits” (per potentiam malorum spiritorum).33 They also performed devilish marvels: they managed to stand an egg upright on the edge of a wall without its falling. Anthonia threw pebbles at the other nuns and started to sing obscene songs (cantilenae turpissime)34; Philippucia said “such blasphemer words to the nuns, that even a whore [meretrix] would not tell.”35 The testifying nuns also provided clear diagnoses of what had happened to their sisters: “Belial or another demon is in the body [in corpore] of Philippucia” said Sister Francesca (witness 123),36 she is “invaded and possessed by demons and Evil Souls,” said Solamea (witness 22).37 Servedea (witness 124) told of the possession and liberation of Anthonia and Philippucia, emphasizing that the latter was in a much worse way, more strongly invaded and tempted by the devil.38 31 Boureau, Satan hérétique, 17–60, and Le pape et les sorciers. 32 Boureau, “Saints et démons,” 217–218. 33 Occhioni, Il processo, 324, 327–330. 34 Ibid., 136, 323–326. 35 Ibid., 324. 36 Ibid., 323. 37 Ibid., 141. 38 Ibid., 326–327.

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354 Gábor Kl aniczay Figure 15.3 Nicholas of Tolentino exorcises a possessed nun. Pietro and Giuliano da Rimini, c. 1320-25, Capellone di S. Nicola, Tolentino

An interesting aspect of these possession narratives is that the possessed nuns also give an account of the diabolic visions that tormented them – Philippucia felt attacked by hosts of mice or other repulsive figures and animals and also attacked by the ghosts of two deceased local noblemen, who Sister Johanuccia characterized as tyrants “who have committed during their lives many attacks, homicides, burglaries and other evil deeds.”39 As Sister Franciscucia narrated, Philippucia asked for help against this attack from one of the principal devils of the Bible: “Oh Belial, come, bring along with yourself a thousand knights, because Raynaldo de Brunforte and Johannes de Esculo are coming against me with an entire host of knights!”40 In Sister Philippucia’s turning to the devil for help Alain Boureau sees an early manifestation of the concept of the “pact with the devil.”41 I would 39 Ibid., 328. 40 Ibid., 138–141. 41 Boureau, Satan hérétique, 180–187.

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rather stress here a strange combination of two different types of possession, that by the devil, conjured up for supernatural help, and the immediately more frightening attack by ghosts of the dead, an aspect of the Tolentino testimonies that Nancy Caciola discusses in detail.42 Other laywomen from Tolentino, like Salimbena de Visso and Zola, wife of Massius, also came to the tomb of Saint Nicholas to be delivered from possession and they also claimed to be possessed by the ghosts of deceased local robbers.43 Seemingly this type of belief was current in that region. The analyses of Didier Lett and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa have unveiled how these ghost-driven possession cases in Tolentino reveal significant social and political tensions in the local urban context.44 These findings can be juxtaposed to an observation by Michael Goodich, who argued that it was rather in “rural Europe” where the “theater of exorcism” could maintain its popularity throughout the later Middle Ages.45 In fact, the urban public proved to be just as sensitive to such things, especially if it affected an entire convent. The series of possession scandals in female monasteries, starting with the nuns of Santa Lucia, had a remarkable future. As Moshe Sluhovski put it,46 the “Devil in the Convent” produced several such scandals in the later Middle Ages, such as a rebellion in the Dominican female convent of St. Catherine in Nuremberg, where the nuns opposed the imposition of strict new rules by raising clamorous complaints of being haunted by the devil, a collective possession that finally had to be disciplined by Johannes Nider, a leading promoter of Dominican observance.47 All this prepared the way for a spectacular early modern continuation of convent possession epidemics in Loudun, Louviers, and elsewhere.48 The contagious, epidemic possession among the Cistercian nuns of Santa Lucia is also related to the spurious manifestations of late medieval female religious devotion. Beguines, Dominican nuns, Dominican and Franciscan tertiaries expressed mystical claims in places where the repeated collective ecstatic experience produced many variants of what Nancy Caciola has 42 Caciola, Afterlives, 315–321; see also her essay in this volume. 43 Occhioni, Il processo, 445–446, 452–455; 302–304. 44 Lett, Un procès de canonisation, 112–122; Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion, 134–138. 45 Goodich, “Battling the Devil.” 46 Sluhovski, “The Devil in the Convent.” 47 Nider, Formicarius, V, 2; Klaniczay, “The Process of Trance,” 242. 48 De Certeau, The Possession at Loudun; Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism; Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit.

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labeled “divine possession,”49 (a phenomenon amply researched since the pathbreaking studies by Caroline Walker Bynum,50 Barbara Newman,51 Dyan Elliott,52 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski,53 and others). With a growing suspicion as regards ecstatic manifestations and a reinforced attention to the discernment of spirits, the borderlines of holy and diabolic possession became increasingly blurred, which paved the way for the advent of the spectacular early modern possession scandals. *** The three examples presented above provide only glimpses into phenomena of possession and exorcism in the later Middle Ages, the period of medieval canonization processes. Some data are provided on the social position (family, monastic community) of the possessed, the personal crises that induced possession (being an abandoned bride or a victim of bewitchment, animosities among nuns or tensions between members of their community and the surrounding citizens), and the symptoms (raging, performing marvelous or repulsive physical acts, becoming obscene, speaking in tongues), and rather few indications of the process of exorcism. In contrast to the detailed and ritualized theater of verbal, liturgical, and ceremonial acts to be read at medieval exorcism rituals54 and given in many hagiographic writings,55 exorcism and healing in the frequently laconic miracle accounts of witnesses in the canonization processes is mostly brief: liberata fuit, with only occasional accounts on some kind of inquisitorial interrogation of and the verbal duel with the devil to be chased.56 The multiplicity of data that carry the record of juridically identified witnesses in these investigations, however, allows for a more contextual understanding of the phenomena of possession, and how others evaluated the behavior of the possessed. These 49 Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs” and Discerning Spirits. 50 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Fragmentation and Redemption. 51 Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist and “Possessed by the Spirit.” 52 Elliott, Fallen Bodies, Proving Woman and The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. 53 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims. 54 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 225–273; Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 93–131, 177–221. 55 The most interesting accounts can be found in the legends of the three most prominent living saints of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen and Francis of Assisi, well analyzed in Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 136, 157–162, 177–221, 260–262. 56 Such a verbal combat is described in a possession healing in the canonization process of Clare of Montefalco (1321), Menestò, Il processo, 500; cf. Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion, 6–7.

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data complete and add more color to the recently much enriched general picture of the late medieval historical evolution of the phenomenon of diabolical possession.57

References Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman between Demons and Saints. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Boesch Gajano, Sofia. “Demoni e miracoli nei Dialoghi di Gregori Magno.” In Hagiographie, culture et sociétés, VIe–XIIe siècles, Colloque de Nanterre, 1979, 263–281. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1981. Boureau, Alain. Le pape et les sorciers. Une consultation de Jean XXII sur la magie en 1320 (Manuscrit B. A. V. Borghese 348). Roma: École française de Rome, 2004. —. Satan hérétique. Histoire de la démonologie (1280–1330). Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004. —. “Saints et démons dans les procès de canonisation du début du XIVe siècle.” In Procès de canonisation au Moyen Âge. Aspects juridiques et religieux/ Medieval Canonization Processes: Legal and Religious Aspects, edited by Gábor Klaniczay, 199–221. Roma: École française de Rome, 2004. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. —. Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Caciola, Nancy. “Breath, Heart, Guts: The Body and Spirits in the Middle Ages.” In Communicating with the Spirits: Demons, Spirits, Witches 1, edited by Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs, 21–40. Budapest: CEU Press, 2005. —. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2003. —. “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42/2 (2000): 268–306. Caciola, Nancy Mandeville. Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2016. Caesarii Heisterbacensis. Dialogus miraculorum, edited by Josephus Strange. Coloniae, Bonnae et Bruxellis: J. M. Heberle, 1851. 57 Boureau, “Saints et démons”; Chave-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés; Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion.

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Chave-Mahir, Florence. L’exorcisme des possédés dans l’Église d’Occident (Xe–XIVe siècle). Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Csepregi, Ildikó, Gábor Klaniczay, and Bence Péterfi, eds. Legenda Vetus, Acta Processus Canonizationis et Miracula Sanctae Margaritae de Hungaria/ The Oldest Legend, Acts of the Canonization Process and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Hungary. Budapest: CEU Press, 2018. De Certeau, Michel The Possession at Loudun, translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. De la Borderie, A. J. D., R. F. Perquis, and D. Temper, eds. Monuments originaux de l’histoire de Saint Yves. Saint Brieuc: L. Prud’homme, 1887. Elliott, Dyan. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. —. Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. —. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Ferber, Sarah. Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern Frances. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Fritz, Jean-Marie. Le discours du fou au Moyen Âge XIIe-XIIIe siècles. Paris: PUF, 1992. Gecser, Ottó. The Feast and the Pulpit. Preachers, Sermons and the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 1235–ca. 1500. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2012. Goodich, Michael. “Battling the Devil in Rural Europe: Late Medieval Miracle Collections.” In La christianisation des campagnes. Actes du colloque de C.I.H.E.C. (25–27 août 1994), tom I, edited by J.-P. Massaut and M.-E. Henneau, 139–152. Bruxelles: Institut historique belge de Rome bibliothèque, 1996. —. “The Multiple Miseries of Dulcia of St. Chartier (1266) and Christina of Wellington (1294).” In Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, edited by Michael Goodich, 99–126. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006. —. Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Grégoire le Grand. Dialogues, edited by Adalbert de Vogüé. Sources Chrétiennes, vol. 260. Paris: Cerf, 1979. Huot, Sylvia. Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Huyskens, Albert, ed. Quellenstudien zur Geschichte der hl. Elisabeth. Marburg: Elwert, 1908. Jacques de Vitry. Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares, edited by Thomas Frederick Crane. London: Folk-lore Society, David Nutt, 1890. Katajala-Peltomaa, Sari. Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. —. “Socialization Gone Astray? Children and Demonic Possession in the Later Middle Ages.” In The Dark Side of Childhood in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by Katariina Mustakallio and Christian Laes, 95–112. Oxford: Oxbow, 2011. Kętrzyński, Wojciech, ed. “Vita et Miracula sanctae Kyngae ducissae Cracoviensis.” Monumenta Poloniae Historica 4 (1884): 662–744 [Lwów: Gubrynowicz and Schmidt]. Klaniczay, Gábor. Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, translated by Éva Pálmai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. —. “The Power of the Saints and the Authority of the Popes: The History of Sainthood and Late Medieval Canonization Processes.” In Church and Belief in the Middle Ages: Popes, Saints and Crusaders, edited by Kirsi Salonen and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, 117–140. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. —. “The Process of Trance: Heavenly and Diabolic Apparitions in Johannes Nider’s Formicarius.” In Procession, Performance, Liturgy, and Ritual, edited by Nancy van Deusen, 203–258. Ottawa, Canada: The Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2007. Lett, Didier. Un procès de canonisation au Moyen Âge. Essai d’histoire sociale. Paris: PUF, 2008. Levack, Brian P. The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Little, Lester K. Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Menestò, Enrico, ed. Il processo di canonizzazione di Chiara da Montefalco. Spoleto: CISAM, 1991. Newman, Barbara. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. —. “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century.” Speculum 73/3 (1998): 733–770. Nider, Johannes. Formicarius – De visionibus ac revelationibus. Helmstedt, 1692.

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Occhioni, Nicola. Il processo per la canonizzazione di s. Nicola da Tolentino. Roma: Padri Agostiniani di Tolentino, École française de Rome, 1984. Sluhovski, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. —. “The Devil in the Convent.” The American Historical Review 107/5 (2002): 1378–1411. Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

16 The Sabbat of the Soul* f Sarah Ferber

Keywords: demonic possession, exorcism, witches’ Sabbat, Antonin Artaud, performance, authenticity, unconscious, modernity

The history of demonic possession and exorcism across the world can both invite and reward cross-cultural comparison, but it can also provide an avenue for reflection on change over time, within a national culture. This chapter will consider possession and exorcism specifically in the context of the history of Catholicism in France, between the early modern era and the twentieth century. By locating possession and exorcism in the context of histories of the witches’ Sabbat, of the theater, of discernment and of subjectivity, it will be argued that the phenomena of Catholic possession and exorcism, while substantially marginalized between the seventeenth century and the twentieth century, were not expunged from cultural memory. In this period the credibility of demonic possession and of the rite of exorcism shifted dramatically, but not necessarily in predictable ways. These significant phenomena from the early modern period continued as a form cultural currency, to play a role in the constitution and self-representation of French secular modernity in the work of the French dramatist, Antonin Artaud. This chapter will begin with an outline of the use of the ritual of exorcism as one of several means through which knowledge of the witches’ Sabbat was apprehended in early modern French possession/witchcraft cases. It then moves to analysis of one scene of exorcism in particular, which took place in early-seventeenth-century France. Going forward in time to the 1930s, it reflects on the survival of the idea of exorcism as a metaphor for emotional authenticity in the theories of Artaud. The chapter seeks to build on the insights of Stephen Greenblatt, who juxtaposes the cultural profiles of early modern exorcism and theater, and Moshe Sluhovsky, who has argued that the requirement for discernment of spirits in cases of claimed * Note: I explored the themes of the present chapter in an essay published in 1993 (Ferber,“Le Sabbath et son double”). Thanks are due to the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions for its support of this research.

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possession and ecstatic spirituality contributed to a distinctly modern type of introspectiveness.1 The witches’ Sabbat was a crucial location for the politics of the imagination in early modern Europe. In possession/witchcraft cases, access to knowledge of the Sabbat through the torture of demons under exorcism lent value to the rite of exorcism itself and legitimacy to ideas about the Sabbat. Witchcraft accusations in turn made for “value-added exorcisms”, as stories of accused witches at the Sabbat could contribute acceptable evidence for a legal case, and exorcism added value to witchcraft accusations, because the rite is a sacred act.2 Rituals facilitated access to the knowledge of the Sabbat and the status and credibility of the ritual itself in turn vouched for the authenticity of the account of the Sabbat as presented. At the same time, every journey into the “world beyond” of the witches’ Sabbat was a journey into the inner world of the person who bears witness to the reality of the Sabbat itself. The soul of the possessed was in a sense contained within the witches’ Sabbat or at least locked there in jeopardy, until freed by exorcism, while the Sabbat itself was to be found only within the possessed, to whose body, memory and will exorcism created access. Thus the histories of exorcism and of the witches’ Sabbat in early modern France were for a time interlocked, situated at a juncture where the soul of the possessed was both a battleground between exorcists and witches as well as being the “home” of the witches’ Sabbat. These observations provide the framework for interpreting an event which took place during one of most high-profile possession/witchcraft cases of the seventeenth century in France, the case of the parish priest Father Louis Gaufridy, who was executed in 1611 for witchcraft involving the Ursuline nuns at Aix-en-Provence. In an extensive 1613 work devoted to the case (The Admirable Historie of the Possession and Conuersion of a Penitent Woman Seduced by a Magician That Made Her to Become a Witch, and the Princes of Sorcerers), the Dominican prior of Sainte-Baume, Sébastien Michaelis, recorded many of his exorcisms of Sister Madeleine Demandols de la Palud. Demandols was one of two accusers of Gaufridy, who was herself charged with having let him lure her into being a witch.3 She was able to plea bargain to avoid the same fate as Gaufridy. Michaelis was the principal exorcist 1 Greenblatt, “Loudun and London”; Sluhovsky, “Discernment of Difference”. 2 On this theme for torture in witch trials and exorcism as a medium of hidden truths, and other themes addressed here, see: Voltmer, Goodare and Willumsen, eds, Demonology and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe. 3 Walker and Dickerman, “A Notorious Woman.”

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and witch hunter in this lamentable story of persecution and excess. His describes an exorcism in which Demandols reported on the presence in her chamber of invisible visitors from the witches’ Sabbat. The scene depicts a struggle between the exorcists, aided by armed secular allies, and the invisible so-called “members of the Sabbath” who the exorcists held to be literally present in the room. The scene is of interest for a few reasons. First, this witchcraft case was one of proportionately few in which knowledge of events of the witches’ Sabbat was derived through the performance of exorcism, rather than through the more common route of legal torture or inquisitorial questioning. Exorcists in this case pressed out the boundaries of exorcism as a medium of access to knowledge about the witches’ Sabbat by engaging directly and physically with the people attending the witches’ Sabbat. This case was a dramatic instance that built on the high level of credibility that exorcists claimed for their rite, through its associations with other powerful contemporary discourses, of possession caused by malefic witchcraft, and as a tool of discernment of diabolical fraud in cases of claimed religious ecstasy. The story can also make a potential contribution to history of emotions. The history of demonic possession has gone through several phases of historiography (including anthropological readings, psycho-history, history of the body, history of the senses, history of the imagination) and recent interest in the history of emotions seems to be a promising avenue of investigation.4 In particular the history of emotions has quite specific value in this case as, like demonic possession and exorcism, it poses questions about authenticity. Emotions have two faces, for example: they can be the essence of authenticity, because spontaneous and inescapable, yet they are also inherently suspect because they can be performed, just as in theater. For exorcists, discerning the authenticity of the emotions and the state of the possessed was one of the ways they gained power for their rite, by guaranteeing institutionally that which could not for theological reasons be guaranteed by individual demoniacs. The work of exorcists in turn was challenged along similar lines: how could they prove the presence of the devil when both the possessed and the exorcists themselves might be frauds? As historians of early modern Europe have documented extensively, many exorcists gorged themselves on the license they found in the performance of their rite, as the destructive logic of their demonology spiraled out of control. When the devils of the possessed were able to run amok, because 4

Haggis and Allen, “Imperial Emotions.”

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of the belief that the exorcists were working on behalf of God. If reality itself could be undermined by reference to the deceptions of the devil, it fell to exorcists to define reality in the process of seemingly verifying it. Claiming that exorcism had the capacity to detect and expel demons, exorcists relied heavily on the word of “demons themselves” speaking through the possessed as proof of the success of their rites. Exorcism seems at times literally to have created madness because of this ritual malleability, a capacity to break down borders between illusion and reality. Such a compression of real and unreal derived from exorcists’ claim to police the borders between divine and demonic, which they helped to dissolve in chaotic scenes resulting from their often equally informal rituals. Such manipulation of a medium which could facilitate lethal prosecutions was a kind of pure power. Indeed, as Stephen Greenblatt’s classic essay “Loudun and London” states: “[S]ince exorcism involves an unusually self-conscious conjunction of ritual and theater, it is a particularly straightforward instance of the negotiation of cultural power.”5 Exorcism, however, was only one of the media for reaching the “inner world”. The transports of accused witches, ecstatics, and the possessed took place through a range of “portals”, such as in sleep, in prayer, in trance, in “recollections” accessed via legal torture in witch trials, in shared myths of visits to the world of the dead, in acts of divination, and even in the transports resulting from the act of reading inspirational works. Knowledge about the “worlds behind the world”6 provided a vast mindscape of resources for legal and religious authority and for shaping the experience and governance of emotion in diverse early modern communities. “Altered states” were moreover not just the province of individual behavior: they could be depicted as the means to enter shared places of remove, whether sacred or damned. How communities in the real world cohered or became divided was in part governed by how its officials mediated journeys into the realm of the unconscious, variously depicted in this period as the witches’ Sabbat, the world of the dead, or simply a vision of another place in the real world in the same time.7 Policing the borders of the unconscious as well as seeking and encouraging access to it as a part of that process, were among the chief tasks of the clergy and the judiciary. Politics and ritual were engaged in accessing but also evaluating those (at once) psychic, cosmic, moral and emotional spaces. Interpersonal and 5 6 7

Greenblatt, “Loudun and London,” 343–344; cf. Butterworth, “The Work of the Devil?” Zika, “The Devil’s Hoodwink,” 153. Ibid.; Ginzburg, I Benandanti.

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institutional power circulated through the value accorded to the diverse media of access to equally diverse nether worlds. The value attached to knowledge about what went on in these places was linked in turn to the value attached to the type of people who told the stories. Often the storytellers were women whose tales were mediated by authorities such as confessors, exorcists, trial judges, and inquisitors. As Sluhovsky has argued, gender and specifically the female or at least feminized element common to many of these discourses was an important source of both value and valuelessness: “Given the constantly growing number of female claimants for sanctity, the early modern period was a time of growing need to develop an ‘objective’ method of discernment.”8 In this light, he argues for the importance of the history of discernment in early modern Western Europe as one of the cultural forms which might make it possible to challenge standard narratives of modernity as masculine and Protestant, when introspection and objectivity were bound up in the spiritual lives of many early modern Catholic women. In the course of the events to be described here, a friendship is revealed to exist between the possessed nun and one of the women from the Sabbat. In the case of Madeleine Demandols de la Palud, the witches’ Sabbat appears to have represented a countercommunity to the convent in which she lived, and possibly a more convivial environment. We can speculate in this example that a young possessed woman who was also a confessed witch sought to seize in her account of the Sabbat some kind of emotional integrity through the creation of an imagined affective community.

“The Acts of the 18 of January Being Tuesday” In Michaelis’ book, a chapter entitled “The Acts of the 18 of January Being Tuesday” opens with a dispute between Madeleine Demandols, possessed by the demon, Beelzebub, and a second nun, Louise Capeau, speaking through her devil, Verrine, at the priory altar at Sainte-Baume. Such a scene of conflict between the two young women was repeated countless times in Michaelis’ account of the story of the possessions at Aix, as Capeau harangued Demandols to confess to her witchcraft and to give evidence of the crimes of the secular priest, Louis Gaufridy. In this case, Capeau

8

Sluhovsky, “Discernment of Difference,” 181.

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accused Demandols of wearing a charmed ring, which led to the assembled exorcists to cut the ring from her hand and throw it into a fire. The account continues by introducing somewhat languidly a curious kind of après dinner exorcism. It did not take place in the chapel of the priory of Sainte-Baume but in the bedroom of Demandols under the watchful eye of two of the older Ursulines. “After dinner, as it was thought fit, to take advantage of the time, and to purge the soule of Magdalene.” The exorcists “exhorted her to name all the witches which she had formerly seene in their synagogue.”9 But their efforts were, they believed, blocked by Father Louis Gaufridy, who, they said, sent unto her many Sorcerors and Witches, which were sensible unto her and not unto us, who came to cast their charmes upon her, that shee might loose her memory or wits: they came in at the chimney as Magdalene reported; and when the charme seized her, she remained a long time, as if she had been in a trance, or were halfe dead. On waking, Demandols yielded through her mouth the charm which “appeared to be a glutinous kinde of matter, as it were a mingle of hony and pitch.” This direct physical evidence of the proximity of witches was proof enough for the exorcists to take up arms. I will quote the remainder of this important passage at length: When all the fathers that were there present had seene this, and knew for a certainty that these were realities and not shewes, they determined to furnish the house with swords and halbards to defend themselves against these wicked assailants. And the same accident happening againe not long after, a valiant gentle-man called Monsieur Gombert kept close to the chimney with a sword in his hand, ever beating and thrusting into it, and others betooke them to their halberds, striking and laying about them over all the chamber. But upon the sudden Magdalene cryed out, Alacke, poore Mary, what makest thou here? and made an out-cry like unto a woman that seeth one man murthering another, beating her thighs with her hands, and plucking her selfe by the haire. When this was passed over, she was asked the reason of her out-cry, who made answere, that a companion of hers whom shee loved the best of al the Synagogue (for she was of very gentle and 9 Michaelis, The Admirable Historie, 330.

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courteous disposition) called Mary of Paris came into her chamber with a servant of hers named Cecile, to bring her a love letter from the Magician, which she refused to receive. And they being fearfull to return through the chimney, were carried up and down the chamber by the Divels, skipping and flinging about for fear of being wounded. Mary (said shee) was striken over the breast with a halbard, and also hurt on the left side, and Cecile was wounded in the back, and I feare me, Mary is dead. […] Upon sunne set, wee heard through the window a lamentable voice of a woman that seemed to be ready to give up the ghost; and as we thought, it came from an adioyning mountaine just over against S. Baume, these lamentations continued for a long season, so that we called Magdalene to understand of her what the matter was: who when shee came to the window, shee said, looke, looke, doe not you see Lewis the Magician that holdeth Mary upon his knee to comfort her? For shee is ready to dye, and her father and mother with much other company are very busie about her. About nine of the clock at night, the fathers with certain women there present did see in the aire great store of torches and candles burning very bright, and carried in manner of Procession towards Marseille.10 This scene is notable for both the arresting battle between the exorcists with their allies against the supposed group of invisible witches and for the expression of friendship by Demandols. The case brought the usually secondhand drama of the witches’ Sabbat front and center into the forum of exorcism. Exorcism “crossed live” to the witches’ gathering, which took place in the same room as the exorcism. It was a parallel universe which existed in the present moment, with the world of the spirit, the physical world, the sacred, and the diabolical all concertinaed together. This was possibly one of the starkest instances of the raw power of the rite of exorcism, as a kind of unbridled anti-ritual, to have taken place during this period in France. The account holds a place, too, in the history of discernment. As other materials pertaining to this confronting and controversial case show, there were divisions between those who opposed any pursuit of Louis Gaufridy and the priests who sought his execution. This kind of division is the social and political side of the problem of discernment: in many cases, people in positions of authority simply did not agree on what whether possession or ecstasy was the result of divine action. From what Michaelis describes, 10 Ibid., 331–333.

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at least some members of the group of priests and laymen present wanted to know if what Demandols and Michaelis said was happening really was happening. The exorcists themselves realized they needed physical evidence. The “glutinous kinde of matter” for them established “that these were realities and not shewes.”11 Some of those present who were or had become doubtful of the reality of the presence of members of the Sabbat asked why to escape the armed men “they had not broken through the leaves of the window which were made of paper.” They seemed to accede to the specialist knowledge of Demandols’ devil, who replied that without the permission of the master of the house, the devil could not break out, but that if there were a passage through which they could pass it had to be the “capacity and bigness that a reasonable great cat may get in and out of.”12 For the exorcists the crucial feature of these performances was their claim that Father Louis Gaufridy was literally the animating spirit behind the Sabbat. Demandols is reported as saying that the visitors from the Sabbat were there because Gaufridy had sent them to try to induce her to accept a love letter from him.13 The Sabbat is depicted as a kind of troupe who collectively derived from and were driven by the damned soul of a witch, a group which has in effect no reality outside of being an expression of his diabolical lust and malice. They were invisible in the room, only indirectly visible to all as torches seen at a distance, and Demandols alone could see the attendees. And what is to be made of the peculiar expression of friendship and indeed of grief on the part of Demandols? Recent historians have rightly resisted the temptation to second guess the “true” mental state of the possessed, but given such an expression of sentiment is a very unusual occurrence, there is perhaps a temptation to speculate. Is it possible to see in these words a reclamation of psychic and emotional integrity on Demandols’ part, through the expression of grief for an imaginary friend? Harassed by Louise Capeau and exorcists, Demandols expresses a fragment of subjectivity through sentiments of loss and concern for someone who did not exist, before a room full of people who had stuck their swords into an invisible victim. *** 11 Ibid., 330. 12 Ibid., 331. 13 Ibid., 329.

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By the late nineteenth century, a process of differentiation had begun which saw the relationship of theater, exorcism and the witches’ Sabbat disperse and regroup.14 The credibility of exorcism in circles of power and particularly in relation to witch trials in France had declined by the eighteenth century and the political urgency to defuse the power of exorcism by reference to its theatrical nature in turn dissipated. Even as early as the seventeenth century, both possession and exorcism had taken on a life as metaphors. Here perhaps were some of the seeds of how exorcism and possession came to be perceived in a more secular age. Certainly in the late nineteenth century, Jean-Martin Charcot was able to figure an entire reading of secular modernity around the innovation of the hysteria diagnosis as a replacement both for a judgment of witch status or a diagnosis of possession. As is well documented, Charcot “re-diagnosed” cases of early modern possession as hysteria, as a means par excellence to assert the superiority of nineteenth-century medical science. Freud, at one point a student of Charcot, also engaged with historic demonic possession as a way of understanding mental illness. Yet by a circuitous route, one of the great modernist theater practitioners of the early twentieth century, Antonin Artaud, reclaimed exorcism as he searched for the idea of a “pure” theater. He believed he found it in Balinese dance performances.15 He wrote: There is in them something of the ceremonial quality of a religious rite, in the sense that they extirpate from the mind of the onlooker all idea of pretense, of cheap imitations of reality. This intricately detailed gesticulation has one goal, an immediate goal which it approaches by efficacious means, whose efficacity we are even meant to experience immediately. The thoughts it aims to create, the mystic solutions it proposes are aroused and attained without delay or circumlocution. All of which seems to be an exorcism to make our demons FLOW.16 Artaud advocated the ideal of an antiperformance as an uncompromising performance of the “real world” of the unconscious. While early modern critics of exorcism derided it as acts theater performed on complicit 14 In the mid-twentieth century an Austrian playwright Carl Zuckmayer poignantly recalled the Anschluss by reference to a happy day spent with a troupe in intensive rehearsal. They emerged at close of day to hear the news of the arrival of the Nazis which he said unleashed “a Witches’ Sabbath of the rabble: a burial of all the dignity of Man” (Yates, Theatre in Vienna, 223). 15 Savarese, “Antonin Artaud”; Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship; Francovich, “Genet’s Theatre.” 16 Artaud, “On the Balinese Theater,” 60. Emphasis in the original.

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demoniacs, Artaud saw theater as a performance of reality carried out on the audience. Artaud, as an educated Frenchman influenced by the work of Freud, is very likely to have knowledge of the history of possession and exorcism in early modern France. Moreover, in 1920, Joan of Arc was canonized and in 1928, a youthful Artaud appeared as a monk in Theodore Dreyer’s modernist film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Artaud also created a translation of a violent and scurrilous anticlerical book The Monk, which had Sadean elements.17 He is also known to have read the work of influential late medieval Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck, a figure of importance for many French mystics of the seventeenth century.18 We might in this light reasonably surmise that Artaud’s point of reference for exorcism was to be found in early modern France. Demonic possession and exorcism provided a culturally familiar and resonant “toolkit” for representing powerful performances which Artaud saw as the model for his idea of a “theater of cruelty.”19 The historical dispersal and perhaps unexpected reassembly of these elements suggest that they could together represent what today might be referred to as a specifically French cultural “meme.” Ironically, in his plea for a modernist theater imbued with authenticity, Artaud reclaims a legitimacy for the idea of exorcism that in many social circles it lost during and after the seventeenth century. While early modern critics of exorcism derided it as theater performed on a compliant demoniac to fool onlookers, Artaud saw theater as a performance of the real carried out on the audience, so as to better know themselves. Exorcists were regularly accused of “pretense, of cheap imitations” and by the nineteenth century of an even more fundamental false consciousness. Yet Artaud reclaims exorcism for the history of authenticity. And while the rhetoric of modernity often relies on the promotion of secularism, it is interesting to see the modernist Artaud reclaim religious ritual, as it were by the back door, and with unselfconscious Orientalism, through a celebration of the works of the “other” in Balinese theater. He saw the theater of Bali as a celebration of the idea of life being at its most authentic when in a state of something like a permanent nervous breakdown, a condition to which Artaud himself sadly succumbed. *** 17 Phillips, “Circles of Influence.” 18 Deák, “Antonin Artaud and Charles Dullin,” 351. 19 Artaud also uses the metaphor of exorcism in his more famous essay “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto),” 89 and 91, and in “The Theater and the Plague,” 27.

The Sabbat of the Soul

In 1992 Jean-Michel Sallmann drew an almost offhand link between early European explanatory categories (God-Devil-Human) and the modern psychoanalytical notions of Super Ego-Id-Ego.20 A trans-historical question might be, how much of both artistic modernism and psycho-sociopolitical modernity can be if not attributed then at least reasonably linked to the history of Western European demonic possession? The narratives of seventeenth-century exorcism and the witches’ Sabbat were possibly less the antithesis of what came later as a key element in the generation of these new cultural narratives. Around these vibrant cultural nodes of possession, exorcism, theater and witchcraft swirled the questions of authenticity, moving from authenticity in a religious and political sense to the emotional authenticity to be derived from the experience of a kind of exorcism through theater. And perhaps Madeleine Demandols found her own “early modern” form of therapy, by creating a protective emotional space for the expression of loss amid the overlapping veils of uncertainty that her exorcists created.

References Artaud, Antonin. “On the Balinese Theater.” In The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, 53–67. New York: Grove Books, 1958. —. “The Theater and the Plague.” In The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, 15–32. New York: Grove Books, 1958. —. “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto).” In The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, 89–100. New York: Grove Books, 1958. Butterworth, Emily. “The Work of the Devil? Theatre, the Supernatural, and Montaigne’s Public Stage.” Renaissance Studies 22/5 (2008): 705–722. Deák, František. “Antonin Artaud and Charles Dullin: Artaud’s Apprenticeship in Theatre.” Educational Theatre Journal 29/3 (1977): 345–353. Ferber, Sarah. “Le Sabbath et son double.” In Le Sabbat des Sorciers en Europe, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, edited by Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Préaud, 101–109. Grenoble: Jerôme Millon, 1993. Francovich, Allan. “Genet’s Theatre of Possession.” The Drama Review 14/1 (1969): 25–45. Ginzburg, Carlo. I benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra cinquecento e seicento. Torino: Einaudi, 1966. 20 Sallman, “Théories et pratiques,” 95.

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Goodall, Jane. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Loudun and London.” Critical Inquiry 12/2 (1986): 326–346. Haggis, Jane, and Margaret Allen. “Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women’s Missionary Publications c1880–1920.” Journal of Social History 41/3 (2008): 691–716. Michaelis, Sébastien. The Admirable Historie of the Possession and Conuersion of a Penitent Woman Seduced by a Magician That Made Her to Become a Witch, and the Princes of Sorcerers. London: Imprinted [by Felix Kingston] for William Aspley, 1613. Phillips, John. “Circles of Influence: Lewis, Sade, Artaud.” Comparative Critical Studies 9/1 (2012): 61–82. Sallmann, Jean-Michel. “Théories et pratiques du discernement des esprits.” In Visions indiennes, visions baroques: les métissages de l’inconscient, 91–116. Paris: PUF, 1992. Savarese, Nicola. “Antonin Artaud Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Colonial Exposition,” translated by Richard Fowler. The Drama Review 45/3 (2001): 51–77 [1931]. Sluhovsky, Moshe. “Discernment of Difference, the Introspective Subject, and the Birth of Modernity.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36/1 (2006): 169–199. Stoller, Paul. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Voltmer, Rita, Julian Goodare and Liv Helene Willumsen, editors. Demonology and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Walker, Anita M., and Edmund H. Dickerman. “A Notorious Woman: Possession, Witchcraft and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century Provence.” Historical Reflections 27/1 (2001): 1–26. Yates, W. E. Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Zika, Charles. “The Devil’s Hoodwink: Seeing and Believing in the World of Sixteenth-Century Witchcraft.” In No Gods Except Me: Orthodoxy and Religious Practice in Europe, 1200–1600, edited by Charles Zika, 152–198. Melbourne: Melbourne University History Monographs, 1991.

17 Ideas of Possession in EighteenthCentury Hungarian Clerical Thought* f Dániel Bárth

Keywords: signs of possession, exorcism and sexuality, eighteenthcentury Catholic Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, white magic, lower clergy, Franciscans

This chapter will discuss the different layers of eighteenth-century ecclesiastical thought through the question of demonic possession and exorcism. Study of the source materials from the era warns us that the generalizing dichotomy of “elite” and “popular” culture and “clerical” and “laic” religion are not satisfactory when it comes to describing certain issues.1 My preconception is that ecclesiastical demonology, a sort of “negative theology” which arose in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period after a long, gradual process, did not enter the “Century of Reason” as an exclusive system of interpretation, but rather as an inconsistent collection of knowledge, which proved hard to manage and which was sometimes even cause for alarm among eighteenth-century empiricists. This was especially true in the Eastern European region of the Catholic Church, where the witch scare reached new heights in the first half of the eighteenth century, based as it was on charges both of common malevolent sorcery (maleficium) and of a deal with the Devil.2 One of the important tasks of the history of mentalities of this period is to uncover the differences between

* The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 324214. The author is the principal investigator of the MTA-ELTE Lendület Research Group for Historical Folkloristics studying the theme of “The Lower Clergy in Local Communities in the 18th-20th Centuries”. 1 Cf. Burke, Popular Culture; Kaplan, Understanding Popular Culture; Klaniczay and Pócs, Christian Demonology. 2 Klaniczay and Pócs, Witch Beliefs and Witch-Hunting; Pócs, Demonológia és boszorkányság Európában; Klaniczay and Pócs, Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions.

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the attitudes of clergymen from various segments of the Church hierarchy towards demonic possessions.3 Of course, such research requires appropriate sources. Only a handful of ecclesiastical handbooks dedicated to demonology and rites of exorcism are known from Hungary, while the official liturgical books contain a revised and unified text of the Rituale Romanum (1614).4 The non- (or “semi-”) official handbooks follow the European trends in the modern age and contain benedictions rather than exorcisms meant to cure possessions. These liturgical texts tell us a great deal about what people of the age thought about circumsessio, as most of the prayers take into account demonic interference in air and water and in all the different facets of life on earth. The benedictions were meant to ensure that divine grace could fill the areas (the house, the garden, the fields, objects, animals, materials, etc.) cleansed by the “small” exorcisms. As I have already discussed modern age benedictions in Hungary on many occasions, including in a separate book,5 our attention on this occasion will turn to what may be termed as “large” exorcisms. Another, more successful approach to achieving our research goals is by browsing through ecclesiastical archives for eighteenth-century collections of documentations of individual exorcism scandals.6 By this time, large-scale formal exorcisms generally led to large scandals. The investigation reports, witness statements and correspondence about such cases bring us closer to a deep understanding of clerical and lay thought on the matter.7 In recent years I have researched two such cases: one of them from the eastern, and the other from the southern border of historical Hungary. The geographic locations were probably not coincidental, as the Roman Catholic population of these areas lived side by side with Eastern Orthodoxy, and especially with its Romanian and Serbian variants. Thus, this state of affairs may lead to important conclusions regarding the meeting points of religious spheres of influence during and after the eighteenth century (even today!). *** 3 Sluhovsky, “Discerning Spirits.” 4 Bárth, Benedikció és exorcizmus, 429–438. 5 Bárth, Benedikció és exorcizmus and “Benediction and Exorcism.” 6 See parallel cases: Ernst, Teufelaustreibungen; Midelfort, “Catholic and Lutheran Reactions” and Exorcism and Enlightenment; Almond, Demonic Possession; Johnson, “Besessenheit, Heiligkeit”; Ferber, Demonic Possession. 7 See in larger context: Levack, The Devil within; Young, A History of exorcism.

Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth- Century Hungarian Clerical Thought

The scene of the first case8 was a small Hungarian village in Transylvania,9 in the year 1726. The parish priest diagnosed a local woman who occasionally suffered from seizures that were accompanied by violent convulsions as an energumen. The sources do not specify how the priest came to this conclusion, but it is certain that he was trying very hard to prove it to those fellow clergymen and villagers who remained skeptical. Witnesses attested that during his sermons, he would threaten those who did not believe that the woman was indeed possessed by the Devil with damnation. In one of his letters, the priest writes that one time, he gave her the Eucharist and made her swear that she was possessed by demons. According to the priest, it wasn’t the woman talking, but the evil spirit that dwelt within her. To convince his fellow clergymen, he asked the otherwise uneducated woman theological questions in Latin. During the public hearing that took place in the Church, such questions were asked as “Was the Virgin Mary conceived without original sin?” to which the woman replied in Hungarian “Absolutely, she’s a virgin, exactly like Christ.” The next question was about whether the unio hypostatica (hypostatic union) is realized in Christ. The answer was, once again, positive: “Completely.” “Who teaches the latter?” came the follow-up question. “The Jesuits,” answered the woman correctly. The theological questioning touched on subjects such as angels, Purgatory, devils and predestination. The crafty answers given to these questions convinced the vicars of the neighboring parishes. They thought that such perfect answers could only have come from the Devil. Furthermore, the prophecies and visions received by the women were the most convincing to her neighbors. Even the exorcist made notes about the doings of the local dead in the afterlife. The woman, in a trance due to her possession, revealed how the souls languishing in Purgatory could earn their place in Heaven. She even ordered a set number of prayers to be said for this purpose. When it came to the living, she generally resorted to revealing concealed sins. Unfortunately, we don’t have many descriptions of her physical symptoms. The witnesses mention her seizures, during which the woman was in great pain, as if the demons were tearing into her from the inside. During her fits she also displayed an unusual physical strength. Because of this, she was constantly guarded by local men. According to the priest, the Devil himself spoke from the woman, referring to himself as a damned soul 8 See in greater detail: Bárth, “Exorcism and Sexuality”. The archive material is located in the Roman Catholic Archiepiscopal Archive in Alba Iulia (Romania). 9 Ciucsângeorgiu (today in Romania).

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and requesting two priests to be at his (her) side at all times. The other priests were tasked with saying prayers of exorcism to deliver the woman’s soul from evil. The priest claimed that she was originally possessed by 17 million demons, a number which was reduced to 60 in the course of weeks of exorcism. In the struggle, which altogether took two months, the priest used the official rites, but after they proved to be of no use, he resorted to the alternative, early modern tools of exorcism. It is almost certain that he used the popular handbooks of Girolamo Menghi (Flagellum daemonum and Fustis daemonum),10 or their abridged versions for these rites. Naturally he also used holy water and sanctified oils. The parsonage was sprinkled with the former and the latter was applied to the woman’s brow, eyes, chest, navel, soles and, according to some testimonies, genitals while pursuing the Devil, who manifested in lumps. Not only incense, but also sulfur and several strongly scented plants (rue, lavender, rose) were burned in the censer. The woman was made to draw pictures of the demons, and these were also placed on the embers so that as the fire consumed the drawing, so would the power of the Devil diminish. Twigs were blessed, so that they would sweep evil out of the house, the window, the hearth and every other room. The priest also blessed a crooked stick, which was used to beat the head and back of the woman. She was a very picky eater, but her food and drinks were also blessed. Alongside the gastronomic pleasures, her body was also pampered: A bath was prepared for her using different blessed plants and herbs, which the handbooks claimed had powers of exorcism. Many witnesses claimed that she was also bathed in wine. These scenes hint at the significant issues the Church authorities had with the priest’s conduct. The exorcism violated numerous regulations of the Rituale Romanum.11 First of all, it wasn’t announced and secondly, it was conducted in public. The priest gave credence to the words and prophecies uttered by the possessed woman and the demon talking from within her even though this was strictly forbidden by the regulations. He misused the vestments and the Eucharist. A small part of the latter was sewn into a small piece of cloth and hung from the woman’s neck. He touched the body, even the “most indecent” part of the woman, with the monstrance. The exorcism slowly descended into eroticism. It started with murmurings between the priest and the woman, followed by small displays of affection (stroking, hugs, kissing), which led to sexual intercourse during the night. Such acts, 10 Cf. Petrocchi, Esorcismi e magia; Probst, Besessenheit, Zauberei. 11 ROM 1614, 198–219.

Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth- Century Hungarian Clerical Thought

Figure 17.1 Exorcism in the Flagellum daemonum …

(Girolamo Menghi: Flagellum daemonum, exorcismos terribiles, potentissimos et efficaces, remediaque probatissima, ac doctrinam singularem in malignos spiritus expellendos, facturasque et maleficia fuganda de obsessis corporibus complectens, cum suis benedictionibus, et omnibus requisitis ad eorum expulsionem) Venetiis: apud Paulum Balleonium, 1697.

deemed obviously erotic by the community, were accompanied by some strange acts performed by the priest. For example, he bathed in her bath water and followed her into the restroom. The priest’s excuse for the latter was that he only wanted to witness the demons leaving her body with the

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excrement. Occasionally they kissed during meals so that they could tear the common mouthful of food into two. Of course, not only the priest, but the guard, mostly comprising unmarried men, also participated in these acts. The identity of the person who got her pregnant was never revealed. The Church authorities interpreted the events as a clear-cut case of sexual abuse and asserted that the possession was faked. Despite this, the documents reveal interesting details about what local religious attitudes were towards demonic possession. At first, not only the priest, but his colleagues and the majority of the locals also believed the woman to have been possessed, but they had different opinions on what had actually possessed her. The Devil, an army of demons and even the returning dead (damned/unclean souls) were implicated. One witness’s testimony described the appearance of a rooster-shaped lidérc, a variety of the incubus demon (aggressive sexual partner). This testimony also records the priest’s outcry at this proposition, which can be explained with the fact that at the time, a lidérc was thought to be a witch’s spirit assistant and many testimonies referred to the woman as a witch, but this belief was restricted to the inhabitants of the village. If taken seriously by the authorities, such accusations could easily prove very dangerous to a woman in 1726. Instead, the Church declared her a “liar and a lousy fake” and punished the priest instead. He was stripped of his title and probably of his liberty and he may even have been executed. It is important that the sin committed by this pre-Enlightenment member of the lower clergy was not the performing of the exorcism, but that he did it in an inappropriate fashion.12 The next case13 takes place half a century later, in an age when the spirit of the Catholic Enlightenment (Katholische Aufklärung)14 had already concluded its battle with the “enthusiastic healing movements” – though to the accompaniment of great scandals.15 The location was Sombor (in Hungarian: Zombor), a multinational city located in contemporary Serbia. The protagonist was a friar in the local Franciscan convent named Rókus Szmendrovich (1726–1782). Even though Pater Rochus spent only three years in the city, the period between 1766 and 1769 proved very memorable for many locals. This conflict transcends the person of the monk, symbolizing a 12 Bárth, “Exorcism and Sexuality”; and Benedikció és exorcizmus, 77–90. 13 See in greater detail: Bárth, “Pater Rochus” and The Exorcist of Sombor. 14 Cf. Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’‘Aufklärung’”; Kovács, Katholische Aufklärung; Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment; Bárth, “Demonology and Catholic Enlightenment”. 15 Midelfort, Exorcism and Enlightenment.

Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth- Century Hungarian Clerical Thought

struggle between the changed outlook of the clerical “elite” and the medieval, “folk-friendly” religious attitudes of the Franciscans. The case began in December 1766. A local woman named Anna had long been suffering from a peculiar illness, which was interpreted by her relatives as a demonic possession. They claimed that, alongside her fits of convulsions, some strange force had been preventing her from receiving holy communion. In their desperation, the family asked Father Rochus, the newest member of the convent, for help. Apparently, news of the exorcisms performed by the friar in the past had already reached the city. At first, Szmendrovich wanted to ascertain the true condition of the woman. The opening words of the exorcism were already effective: the possessed woman started laughing and when the priest arrived at the hardest-hitting text, she started weeping and hurled herself at the floor with such force that they could not hold her back. She seemed to understand the Latin words and to calm down when hearing the softer parts, but the more serious bits threw her into convulsions. When the priest leaned close to her pale, swollen face and inward turned eyes, she shouted at him in Latin, saying that she was a demon and a devil, and then she added ironically that he should “talk quickly” (cito loquaris). As the ritual progressed, more and more signs appeared. Unnatural convulsions twisted her body, she ground her teeth very loudly, her chest swelled, she sweated heavily and emitted an unusually foul odor. Sometimes she would seem to be soothed, exhibiting a near-death calm only to break out into an animalistic scream and proceed to tear away her clothes. Such obvious signs of demonic possession convinced the friar. The ritual, which dragged on for two weeks, became a public spectacle, the screams of the possessed drawing many onlookers. At first, the exorcism was performed in the sacristy, but it was later moved to the church. The Hungarian and Croatian nobles of the city and many ordinary townsfolk were present. There were Lutherans among the soldiers and an increasing number of Eastern Orthodox Serbians seeped into the Catholic Church. At first, Rochus Szmendrovich used the official (Roman) rites, but later he had to resort to his alternative collection of serious, medieval exorcisms, including the two handbooks of Menghi mentioned earlier. Alongside the holy water, he used a wax medallion (Agnus Dei) blessed by the Pope himself, the Gospel of Saint John and various other holy texts, prayers to the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis and Saint Anthony, blessed bread, etc. He burned blessed flowers and plants to exorcise the demons. He mixed holy water with sacred oils and made the woman drink this concoction. He even used those special rites of exorcism that expelled the Devil bit by bit, by

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listing all the possessed body parts. During the latter process, the woman felt hot and cold sensations all over her body and felt wind and fire in her limbs. She felt as if ants were crawling over her body. Due to the coercive words, the Devil admitted certain details. After a long and arduous process, he revealed his name: Hassan. He was probably a water demon because he said that he lived in the Danube. Many years earlier, Anna had left her husband and fled to her mother. On the way, while cursing profusely, she drank from the waters of the river and this is when the Devil had possessed her, in consequence of her sins. The struggle ended with the victory of the Franciscan friar and the demon left the woman in the body of a black fly that flew out of her mouth. Some heard the church windows smashing, but no one could find any glass shards. The woman’s mouth remained open for hours and it took quite some time for life to return to her body. Afterwards, she could not remember anything about the exorcism. People said that she had found peace. Signs of possession in the Sombor case Anna Matich (Sombor)

Lucia Markojevich (Subotica)

bodily torment/ seizures

illness/feebleness, thin, with aching bowels several people it takes several men to hold her can hardly hold her down down loathes all things r­ efuses related to God to take communion

it takes several men to hold her down has not taken communion for four years

Anna (Sombor)

wanders off

often wishes to die

seeks solitude

understands Latin

understands Latin, obeys Latin instructions, jumps up suddenly when hearing a command in Latin

understands Latin, jumps up suddenly to obey a Latin command

Anna Buday alias Balatinac (Sombor) illness

wanders off all over the place understands Latin, obeys commands

Stephanus Mandich (Sombor)

cannot cross himself, something will not let him

understands Latin, obeys commands, but with difficulty

Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth- Century Hungarian Clerical Thought

Anna Matich (Sombor)

Lucia Markojevich (Subotica)

laughs abruptly

laughs at length, until sweaty picks up beads bursts into tears abruptly and for no of the torn rosary in tears reason throws herself on falls on the the ground ground as if having a seizure tears at clothing tears at clothing speaks in a mixture crosses herself of Latin and Illyrian accompanied by Latin, Hungarian and German words grinds teeth grinds and powerfully clenches teeth intensely loses appears to be consciousness dead (without breathing or use of senses) goes deathly pale is very pale turns flaming red turns from pale to red is paralysed

trembling shows sudden strength

limbs/bones are barely attached/ crippled trembling in entire body shows sudden strength (pushes away six people…)

Anna (Sombor)

Anna Buday alias Balatinac (Sombor)

Stephanus Mandich (Sombor)

laughs out loud weeps

collapses as if dead

often drops to the ground tears at clothing speaks a little speaks in accurate Latin Latin on numerous occasions

falls into a trance as if she was not breathing

grinds teeth in an alarming manner falls into unconsciousness

suddenly turns from pale to red

turns from deathly pale to red

eyes turn inward in an unnatural manner

eyes shut tight with eyebrows squeezed together screams when hearing harsh words

turns feeble

trembling

swears shuts eyes shuts her eyes tight shuts the eyes tightly, squeezes tight eyebrows together harsh words cause reacts to harsh her torment words

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382 Dániel Bárth Anna Matich (Sombor)

Lucia Markojevich (Subotica)

waves of hot alternately feels hot and cold in her and cold flush through body body like the wind or like ants senses the movefeels movement inside her body (as ment of some kind of animal if cold ants [were inside her body moving inside her]…)

throat is constricted choking, has choking difficulty breathing snorting gagging, vomiting limbs trembling (as trembling in the if mice…) entire body movement her body is full through her of winds (also body in keeping with commands) bloating of the bloating, chest particularly in the chest finds incense to have a foul smell making her cough the demon will move to her tongue and fingertips on command divulges secrets

divulges secrets

Anna (Sombor)

Anna Buday alias Balatinac (Sombor)

Stephanus Mandich (Sombor)

feels movement inside her body (like hot and cold wind, or like fish jumping or like ants marching) throat is constricted choking snorting loud

snorting trembling fingers

feels bloated, her body is as if she were bloated ready to explode

demon will move into her left little finger, under her fingernail, on command divulges knows secrets senses secrets secret things (distinguishing between sacred and profane things)

Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth- Century Hungarian Clerical Thought

Anna Matich (Sombor)

Lucia Markojevich (Subotica)

Anna (Sombor)

her mouth is agape

screaming

screaming continually along the way; wailing quarrels with relatives

Anna Buday alias Balatinac (Sombor) her mouth is agape sticks her tongue out (until it turns black)

Stephanus Mandich (Sombor)

sticks her tongue out

screaming

hostility to friends and relatives

became belligerent loathes and cannot bear to avoids priests look at people, and friars particularly priests looks at the ground with twisted eyes whilst approaching the priest foregoes eating for days and still feels sated

becomes furious avoids mass inside the church

stabbing pain in the heart area (as if by a blade …) sweating even sweats when though it is cold seeing holy things making noises as if fighting somebody

irritable with husband

fears priests

lacks appetite, hardly eats, yet remains fat loathes church, turns her head away from the altar constant tight feeling about the heart

murmuring

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384 Dániel Bárth Anna Matich (Sombor)

Lucia Markojevich (Subotica)

Anna (Sombor)

tearing rosary apart, smashing cross limbs stretched out beyond measure ripping off her headscarf tears at her hair

trampling on the cross with her feet stretching out limbs

Anna Buday alias Balatinac (Sombor)

Stephanus Mandich (Sombor)

tears at her hair

clenching fist eyes turned up, pupil not visible

eyes turned up, pupils hardly visible

chattering banging on her own chest (until black) pushing at the pews with her head stamping on the ground with feet demon screams abuses at her (calling her a whore) threatening the priest face wrinkled up

eyes turned up, pupils hardly visible

beats her head until bleeding

twitching face feeling pain in some part of her body which suddenly goes away at the sign of the holy cross then (like an arrow) affects her again on command from the exorcist

Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth- Century Hungarian Clerical Thought

Anna Matich (Sombor)

Lucia Markojevich (Subotica)

Anna (Sombor)

Anna Buday alias Balatinac (Sombor) wants to hang herself at wells

coils rope around her neck to choke herself sees distinct and improper visions around the images of the saints seeking dark and foul places is sad during great festivities tormented by tormented scares, fears, by fears and monsters imaginings appearing ceremony caused weight loss, then she gained weight again body covered by burning little red blisters hot flushes and motions cramps in limbs mouth foaming with blood spinning like a top

Stephanus Mandich (Sombor)

cramps in the body

twisting the hands feels something hitting and pricking him during prayer, as well as extreme pain

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386 Dániel Bárth Figure 17.2  Signs of possession in a letter of the exorcist of Sombor, 1767

Ideas of Possession in Eighteenth- Century Hungarian Clerical Thought

This exorcism was the beginning of the story that centered around the exorcisms, healings, catechisms, and preachings performed and confessions received by the Franciscan monk. News of the friar, who treated both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox possessed, had by the following spring reached the superior Church authority (the diocese of Kalocsa). The episcopal see (consistorium) started its investigation into the dealings of the exorcist in March 1767, after it had received the first accusations. The church authorities were mostly interested in the role played by the Orthodox schismatics. The friar endeavored to defend his actions in a series of letters. He wrote that of the dozens of Serbian women who sought his help, he diagnosed some with natural illnesses. In the end, he performed exorcisms on nineteen Orthodox women, mostly with great success. The demons (he lists over 30 names) left their bodies as black birds, flies, crows or sparrows. The priest had broken the rules by performing the rituals publicly. He made the possessed and their helpers stand around a stagelike pulpit, holding candles in their hands, and he even made them say vulgar prayers in unison, for greater effect. One reliable witness claimed that he heard the crowd chant, “Begone, Satan, begone, you unclean soul, may the sufferings of Christ destroy you, may the blood of Christ shatter you!” The claim that the healings also converted many of the possessed (and onlookers) helped the case of the Franciscan and the Church authorities sanctioned the continuation of the rituals under controlled circumstances. Due to these regulations, the documents contain accurate lists of the signs (signa) of possession. These dozens of signs (understanding and speaking Latin, unnatural convulsions, ecstasy, eyes rolled inwards, lengthy bouts of laughter or crying, sudden flushes or paleness, seeing hidden things, revulsion of holy objects, shouting, fits of rage, the tearing of clothes and hair, etc.) were all meant to convince the authorities that the exorcism was necessary. In May 1769, the archbishop ordered the two alleged victims of possession (a man and a woman) to be brought to the seat of the diocese to undergo the exorcism. The members of the consistorium initiated the ritual, which was concluded by Rochus himself. Neither the signs witnessed before, nor those seen during the rites (convulsions, gnashing of teeth, shouting and trembling) convinced the skeptical Church leaders. When the women around her claimed that the victim would throw herself on the ground, convulse and start frothing at the mouth, the local doctor (physicus) diagnosed her with a natural illness, epilepsy. The same doctor diagnosed the man as a maniac. His deceit became obvious to the Church tribunal when his main claim, that he understood Latin, was debunked. He claimed that whenever he heard prayers, he would have a fit of convulsions.

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The investigators started praying in Latin, but soon switched to profane utterances, but the man just kept on convulsing. Father Rochus tried to argue that the Devil could not be unmasked with the official rituals, only stronger, more powerful texts. His “suspicious” and “superstitious” attitude led to his removal from the town and his banishment from the diocese. The popularity of the Franciscan, alongside his exorcisms and healings, made him unpopular with the Church leaders, who were already influenced by the Enlightenment. The conflict between the passionate letters of Father Rochus, written in “kitchen Latin,” and the cold rationalism of the Church authorities can also be felt in the case of the famous German exorcist, Johann Joseph Gassner, whose struggles have been published in an excellent monograph by Eric Midelfort.16 Both Gassner and the Sombor Franciscan relied on a simple, naturalistic cause and effect stance instead of a personalistic approach that would explain the disease with multiple causes.17 They attributed physical illness to demonic possession. In a lastditch effort to fight back rationality and empiricism, they claimed that the Devil could disguise possession as a natural disease. Both of them made good use of the complete Church arsenal of “white magic,” including texts (benedictions, exorcisms) and objects (sacramentals). It seems that they were the last, ethereal warriors of the “counter-Enlightenment” in an age when the former validity of “thinking with demons”18 was quickly fading away. Their mentality, in many shapes and forms, still lives on.

References Almond, Philip C. Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and Their Cultural Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Bárth, Dániel. —. “Benediction and Exorcism in Early Modern Hungary.” In The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe, edited by James Kapaló, Éva Pócs, and William Ryan, 199–209. Budapest–New York: CEU Press, 2013. —. Benedikció és exorcizmus a kora újkori Magyarországon [Benediction and exorcism in early modern Hungary]. Budapest–Pécs: L’Harmattan, 2010. 16 Ibid. 17 Levi, Egy falusi ördögűző, 64–67. 18 Clark, Thinking with Demons.

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—. “Demonology and Catholic Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Hungary.” In Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania, edited by Gábor Klaniczay, and Éva Pócs, 319–347. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. —. “Exorcism and Sexuality: The ’Thick Description’ of an 18th-century Transylvanian Catholic Priest’s Transgression.” Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 63 (2018): 107–128. —. “Pater Rochus, der ungarische Gassner. Exorzismus, Volksfrömmigkeit und Katholische Aufklärung in Südungarn im Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Jahrbuch für Europäische Ethnologie. Dritte Folge 8 (2013): 85–100. —. The Exorcist of Sombor. The Mentality of an Eighteenth-Century Franciscan Friar. New York–London: Routledge, 2020. Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd., 1978. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ernst, Cécile. Teufelaustreibungen. Die Praxis der katholischen Kirche im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Bern: Hans Huber Verlag, 1972. Ferber, Sarah. Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France. London–New York: Routledge, 2004. Johnson, Trevor. “Besessenheit, Heiligkeit und Jesuitenspiritualität.” In Dämonische Besessenheit. Zur Interpretation eines kulturhistorischen Phänomens, edited by Hans de Waardt et al., 233–247. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2005. Kaplan, Steven L., ed. Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. Berlin–New York–Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984. Klaniczay, Gábor, and Éva Pócs, eds. Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology: Demons, Spirits, Witches 2. Budapest: CEU Press, 2006. —. Communicating with the Spirits: Demons, Spirits, Witches 1. Budapest: CEU Press, 2005. —. Witch Beliefs and Witch-Hunting in Central and Eastern Europe (Conference in Budapest, Sept. 6–9, 1988). Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 37. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1991/1992. —. Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions: Demons, Spirits, Witches 3. Budapest: CEU Press, 2008. Kovács, Elisabeth, ed. Katholische Aufklärung und Josephinismus. Wien: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1979. Levi, Giovanni. Egy falusi ördögűző és a hatalom. Budapest: Osiris, 2001 [L’eredità immateriale. Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del seicento. Torino: Einaudi, 1985].

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Levack, Brian P. The Devil Within. Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2013. Lehner, Ulrich L. The Catholic Enlightenment. The Forgotten History of a Global Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Midelfort, H. C. Erik. “Catholic and Lutheran Reactions to Demon Possession in the Late Seventeenth Century: Two Case Histories.” In Possession and Exorcism, edited by Brian P. Levack, 135–160. New York–London: Garland, 1992. —. Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Petrocchi, Massimo. Esorcismi e magia nell’Italia del cinquecento e del seicento. Napoli: Libreria scientifica editrice, 1957. Plongeron, Bernard. “Recherches sur l’‘Aufklärung’ catholique en Europe occidentale (1770–1830).” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 16 (1969): 555–605. Pócs, Éva, ed. Demonológia és boszorkányság Európában. Studia Ethnologica Hungarica 1 [Demonology and witchcraft in Europe]. Budapest: L’Harmattan–PTE Néprajz Tanszék, 2001. Probst, Manfred. Besessenheit, Zauberei und ihre Heilmittel. Dokumentation und Untersuchung von Exorzismushandbüchern des Girolamo Menghi (1523–1609) und des Maximilan von Eynatten (1574/75–1631). Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 97. Münster: Aschendorff, 2008. ROM 1614: Rituale Romanum, Pauli V. Pont. Max. jussu editum. Romae, 1614. Sluhovsky, Moshe. “Discerning Spirits in Early Modern Europe.” In Communicating with the Spirits: Demons, Spirits, Witches 1, edited by Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs, 53–70. Budapest: CEU Press, 2005. Young, Francis. A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

18 Possession, Communication and Power in Himachal Pradesh (North India) f Daniela Berti

Keywords: oracular possession, communication, narratives, divination, doubt, ritual interactions, exorcisms, ritual conflicts, India, Himalaya

The conventional term “possession” has been widely used by anthropologists working in India to give the idea that a being (a god, a spirit, a ghost) is supposed to act in or through a person. The form that this “presence” can take may vary largely according to the regional, social and ritual context. The vernacular terms or expressions may point to the idea of an arrival of a being in the body of a person, or to that of an influence, of being “seen” or “caught,” of making this being “play” or “dance.” In some cases, the being is thought to make the person say something, or behave in a certain way, or it is supposed to simply make something happen to them or to their family – an event, a disease, an accident, a dispute. However widespread the idea of possession is in India, it is not conceived in the same way by everyone, not even by those living in the same village or within the same family. Ethnographic descriptions often tend to neglect that even in places where possession rituals are very institutionalized and celebrated at village level, not everybody necessarily feels committed to them. Some people may, in principle, accept the idea of “possession,” but they may be critical of a particular form in which possession is supposed to occur. In the region of Himachal Pradesh where I worked, criticism towards possession was often linked to ideas regarding power, competence and efficacy. For instance, Brahman practitioners, who are experts in the recitation of mantras and in performing oblations in the fire, may sometimes denigrate temple mediums and say that the latter’s way of trembling and speaking as a god “is just a drama.” This does not mean that they themselves do not sometimes explain the problem of a client who consults them as being due to the “presence” of a being (of a ghost or of a planet). However, they may think that the only way of getting rid of this presence is by calling upon the knowledge of Sanskrit verbal formulas and of Brahmanic expertise.

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Similarly, the Tantric “specialist,” who also recites (often vernacular) mantras, may look down on temple mediums, yet at the same time also refer to a “possession logic” when he claims, as happens in some regions, that a god is sitting on his tongue1 or on his back.2 But the veracity of the “other’s presence” may also be challenged by people who are completely committed to possession rituals. As I will show in greater detail later in this article, in the region where I did fieldwork, people who carry the village god’s palanquin during local festivals are sometimes accused of directing the movements of the palanquin – which are supposed to be made by the god’s own will – to present their own decisions as coming from the god. This kind of allegation is not new. A settlement officer from the nineteenth century referred to an order enacted in the presence of an assembly of village elders that banished a local god’s palanquin and attendants from an entire district in order to prevent the god’s attendants from extorting monetary offerings from people in the name of the god and from threatening them with the god’s displeasure if they refused to give in to their demands.3 In modern secular institutions, such as in courts of law, the idea of forcing someone to do something in the name of a “god’s displeasure” is considered to be a penal offence and courts do sometimes have to deal with such cases.4 These critical attitudes towards possession need to be emphasized in order to avoid the risk of reifying and homogenizing people’s discourses about possession into one “indigenous” point of view which would highlight a local “ontological perspective.” Although the concepts related to the idea of possession are dependent on the specific notion of body, of consciousness and on other cultural representations,5 they correspond to just one of people’s many contrasting points of view. Possession may also take multiple forms. In some cases, it appears to be a more or less codified form of expression involving a very intimate and personal experience, linked to individual suffering, solitude, inhibition, whereas in other contexts it may merely be ceremonial; or, on the contrary, it may imply a more public dimension and be used by people as a way of exercising social or political power. 1 Thompson, The Wages of Action. 2 Gaborieau, “Note préliminaire sur le dieu Masta.” 3 Emerson, “Manuscript,” 14. 4 Hari Chand Khimta vs Karam Chand and Anr., Himachal Pradesh High Court, April, 14, 1983. 5 Tarabout, in this volume.

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In this chapter I base my observations on ethnographic material that was collected in different villages in Himachal Pradesh between the years 1995 and 2000. Although I followed up different kind of ritual activities involving possession during my fieldwork,6 I have limited myself to the one linked to the cult of village deities which, due to their institutional nature, helps to show how possession in this region involves the “conjoining aspects of publicity and intimacy.”7 In the first part of this chapter I focus on temple consultations that deal with village or domestic issues, particularly in cases where the person who consults the deity through the medium is supposed to be under the influence of a “bhūt” (ghost) who is considered to have a negative effect on the person’s life. The interactions that take place during these ritual consultations are essentially aimed at verbalizing the scenario in which the bhūt makes its attack. I will analyze the major role played by the medium in this verbalization process. In the second part of the chapter I deal with consultations that concern collective issues; where a deity is supposed to enter into not only men but also objects. This type of deity’s presence may appear both as a counterpower to the medium’s voice and as a way for villagers to take part alongside their gods in local or state politics.

Interacting with the “other” Possession has often been interpreted in anthropological works as being associated with the way the people studied perceive the “other” and with how they cope with and relate to this alterity.8 The “Other” which is enacted during possession may either be culturally familiar, such as saints or the Devil in a Catholic context,9 or it may be the result of an external, more or less violent, cultural encounter.10 In India, although in multiconfessional contexts “trans-religious possession” may occur – a Hindu may be possessed by a Muslim jinn or by a Christian figure,11 in most cases the “Other” that is embodied during the consultation comes from the same religious milieu as the person possessed. 6 Berti, La parole des dieux. 7 Lambek, in this volume. 8 Nabokov, “Expel the Lover, Recover the Wife”; Crapanzano and Garrison, Case Studies in Spirit Possession. 9 Talamonti, “La produzione rituale.” 10 Masquelier, Prayer Has Spoiled Everything; Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories. 11 Tarabout, “Corps possédés et signatures.”

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However, even within the same ritual event, possession may produce different reactions, from being accepted as a normal event to provoking surprise or despair. From the point of view of those who take part in possession rituals, what makes the difference between these contrasting reactions depends on the identity of the being who is supposed to manifest itself – whether it is considered to be a devtā (god) or devī (goddess) or a bhūt (ghost). However, apart from the often relative value of this opposition in India (in the sense that what some people define as a bhūt may be considered by others to be a devtā), the question we may ask ourselves is how those who take part in the same ritual event end up relating to the “other” they are supposedly dealing with as if it were a devtā or a bhūt. I will give three short examples here of the different types of behavior that this relationship may produce, even though many other intermediate and ambiguous situations may also arise. The institutional and ritually controlled context in which people are directly confronted with possession occurs during what are called deopūchnā (questioning the god), which are ritual consultations held at the temple of the village deity. Deopūchnā may be organized either at the request of one person or of family members who wish to submit a personal problem, or by those in charge of village affairs to discuss a subject of public concern. At the beginning of deopūchnā, the medium of a particular village deity, after donning special clothing, sits near the temple entrance and, using specific ritual techniques, invites the deity to enter into him. At the time of deopūchnā, both the deity’s entry into the medium and its exit are a well-delimited moment ritually defined by a beginning and an end through specific “signs” that may vary slightly from one medium to another: a sudden trembling of the medium’s shoulder, some incomprehensible words, the playing of a bell, to quote just a few examples. An additional mark of this codified behavior, which is shared by various mediums in the region, is the slow fall of the cap, releasing the medium’s long locks of hair. Once the cap falls from his head and until the end of the séance (marked by other codified techniques), the “I” pronounced by the medium no longer designates himself but the deity – the devtā (god) or devī (goddess). Similarly, those who have come for the consultation start to address the deity in turn. They may use, for a god, the terms Mahārāja (King), or Mālik (Owner) or, for a goddess, Mātā (Mother) or Bhagvatī (Goddess), all of which refer to the multiple roles a village deity plays among the people living in its area. Interactions take place in the local dialect. Even though the medium may sometimes mark the shift from the “I medium” to the “I god/goddess”

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by slightly changing his tone of voice or by using some ritual formulas, those who address the deity use a very colloquial language. They treat the deity as a member of their family, sometimes contesting what the deity says about their problem and sometimes even harshly reproaching it for not helping them. Here is a short extract from a ritual interaction which occurred in 1994 between some men from the village of Banara and the goddess Hadimba from the village of Dungri. The goddess had been brought to Banara with her palanquin along with some men from her temple, including the medium, a rather rustic-looking man who belonged to an allegedly low-status caste. Concerned about a long period of drought, the villagers wanted to consult the goddess to ask her to give them rain. The goddess told them that there would be no rain until they resolved a long-standing conflict between a neighboring village and themselves. Due to this conflict, the two villages no longer celebrated their common festival during which the deities of the two villages met. In order to settle this conflict, each time the deities were asked to give rain or sunshine, the villagers were told that they could not obtain what they wanted without first making a compromise: Men: Mātā, tell us what you want us to do. Goddess Hadimba: I want to come to your place with my incense and incense holder. In the month of August, I want to perform a yāg [oblation of offerings in the fire] there. Woman: Oh Mahārāj! We did what you asked us! Why are you angry with us? Goddess Hadimba: You did wrong! You did wrong! Men: We didn’t do anything wrong! Give them [the others] the punishment! Goddess Hadimba: You have separated two brother gods. We [the gods] will send them our vāhan (here assistant gods). I can arrange a compromise (phaislā) [between the two villages]! I can arrange a compromise but you must feel sorry. Men: We tried to invite them to the festival. Goddess Hadimba, loudly, to the people from Banara: You have to come to my place on my birthday and feel contrition (in a feminine voice). I have come with all my power. I have given the kingdom to the king. Men: They said that they would bring him [the god] but they didn’t. They are very proud. Goddess Hadimba: What you did is bad! Before I leave this place something will happen to them.

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As this short passage shows, the interactions between those engaged in deopūchnā and the goddess enacted by the medium are nothing strange and people behave very normally. In fact, the deopūchnā held at the village temple is a highly institutionalized ritual context and it is common to almost all village temples in the region. Village deities are considered to have control over natural resources within a delimited territory. Their cult is regularly carried out by different temple employees: the priest, the medium, the administrator and the temple musicians. Some deities are also owners of land rights which were granted by the king and which have been officially recognized, first of all by the British administration and then by the postcolonial state. Given the institutional and official setting, the temple medium is “duty bound” to act out the deity. In fact, once a person has been publicly recognized as the medium of a particular deity he has to enact the deity each time he is requested to do so.12 Similarly, consulting the deity through the temple medium is part of socially expected behavior which is in some cases even independent of how close the person is to the particular deity he is addressing.13 In fact, the person attending the deopūchnā may come from somewhere else and may know nothing about the identity of the deity he is addressing. What makes him assume that the medium is embodying a devtā is both the institutional setting within which deopūchnā is organized (at the temple, in the presence of the temple priest or of other village members) and the familiar style and techniques used by the medium. In other words, in deopūchnā, the relationship between the participant and the devtā is based less on a personal evaluation of the identity of the “being” with whom he is interacting than on what Houseman14 has called, referring to another context, the “well-defined pragmatic conditions” of the ritual performance. As Houseman noted, this is not to say that participants perform ritual actions “in an unthinking fashion.”15 In fact, while participants in deopūchnā may take it “for granted” that the “other” who is speaking through the medium is in fact the temple devtā (and not, for example, a bhūt), they may be constantly wondering whether it is really the devtā who is speaking through the medium or the medium speaking on his own behalf. In fact, the idea that the medium, at 12 For example, in addition to deopūchnā, another moment when this enactment takes place is during the village festival when the medium has to perform deukhel, the play/dance of the deity. 13 This does not mean to say that everybody in the village consults the medium as some people have nothing to do with these cults. 14 Houseman, “Relationality.” 15 Ibid., 421.

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the time of a consultation, receives a prabhāv (influence/presence) of the deity is always presented by people as being an intermittent process, where the deity’s presence may come and go in the space of few seconds. That the deity’s presence is not marked by continuity but comes and goes conveys the manifestation of possession with an attitude of uncertainty and doubt on the part of participants. Is it the deity speaking, or is the medium speaking on his own? Indeed, during a deopūchnā, the possibility that people doubt what the medium/deity 16 tells them is fully acknowledged and the ritual proceedings include specific techniques to express and dispel the doubt in the persons’ minds.17 Within the same institutionalized context of a technically controlled manifestation of the temple devtā, other beings may occasionally “show themselves.” During deopūchnā it sometimes happens that someone in the audience suddenly begins to tremble for a few seconds – which is understood in this context as the presence in him of another being. He may just tremble or even say some words. If this only lasts for a few moments people may become a little puzzled without worrying too much. The pujārī (temple priest) or some other person may reassure them that “this is the assistant deity” or, if the person who trembles comes from another place, he may say that “this is his own deity.” These episodic forms of possession are not produced by ritual techniques and they appear to be less controlled compared to the case of the temple’s medium. Although people may remain uncertain about the identity of the “being,” this kind of episode does not appear to particularly disrupt the course of the consultation. By contrast, the manifestation of another presence during deopūchnā is sometimes perceived as coming from a bhūt and provokes a very surprised and scared reaction among participants. The “sign” of this presence may already have appeared outside any ritual context and be the very reason that brought the person or his family members to consult the temple deity. Those who have brought the person to the temple may indeed suspect that the sign in question is produced by the presence of a bhūt and therefore they ask the deity to reveal the bhūt’s identity. Some of these bhūt are 16 Here we enter an area of linguistic fluidity for the anthropological description. If we use the term “medium” we adopt an analytical point of view; if we use the word “deity” we take the point of view of those who consult, though we omit the fact that the people themselves may think that it is the medium who is speaking, not the deity. Here I will use the word “deity” or “medium” depending on the point of view I wish to stress. The same fluidity characterizes the use of the term bhūt as compared to the person who is supposed to be possessed by it. 17 Berti, La parole des dieux.

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considered to be at the service of a ṭāṇagī (tantric specialist) or of witches (dāhinī) and to have been “sent” to a person to cause them trouble. Other kinds of bhūt-like beings are said to live in the locality, somewhere on the landscape, and to act on their own. During the ritual consultation the devtā, supposedly acting through the medium, has to force the bhūt to reveal himself and to leave. In the next section I will show how the bhūt’s presence is verbalized during the ritual.

Narrative constructions Contrary to the possession of the temple’s medium, where the identity of the deity and the way it manifests itself are already known by those who regularly attend the consultation, the identity of the bhūt and the scenario of the bhūt attack are usually revealed during the consultation itself. In the region concerned here, the bhūt’s identity remains however rather anonymous throughout the ritual and it is never personified with biographical details. Although the medium addresses the bhūt by asking it to reveal its identity, the only biographical information that emerges is a general name provided by the medium (such as a “one-faced bhūt” or “five-faced bhūt”). By contrast, the main question the bhūt is asked to reply concerns not so much itself but the person who has sent it and the reasons why it has been sent. In fact, the bhūt itself is not considered to be an “agent’ in the full sense of the term, since it is supposed to be under someone else’s control – a dāhinī or a ṭāṇagī. Let us take, for example, the case of a woman I will call Anita, who at the time of my fieldwork in 1994, had recently married and who was having problems with her husband and in-laws. She was brought to the temple of the Goddess Shravani by her relatives, who suspected her of having a bhūt. During deopūchnā, the goddess revealed that a witch from her native village had sent her a bhūt, “hiding it’ in some gifts that had been given to her at the time of her wedding. It also emerged through ritual interactions that the alleged witch was a woman associated with the family and who wanted to harm Anita’s family in order to inherit their land. At the consultation, the goddess said that she (her medium) had to go to the in-laws’ house, take out the objects and offer a sacrifice to the bhūt. At the time of the final consultation, Anita, who had not said anything during the previous consultations, started crying, swaying and then fell down, totally still, without pronouncing a single word.

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Figure 18.1 Anita becomes “unconscious” (behos), which is interpreted as being due to the bhut’s (ghost’s) presence. Kullu 1995

Photo Daniela Berti

This kind of behavior is called “behoṣ” and is codified, especially in cases concerning young married women. The use of the term “trance” would not be appropriate, however. The local idea of behoṣ, in fact, does not at all refer to an internal transformation process, which is the meaning the term carries in Western languages: instead, it is linked to the idea of the presence of an entity in the person’s body. According to this logic, the state of behoṣ is considered to be the result of this presence, not as a psychological process per se.18 As soon as the deopūchnā began, the medium got up, took the young woman by the hair and pulled her up. He first began to openly question the bhūt: Goddess Shravani: Who sent you? Why have you come here? Tell us who sent you! I’ll reduce you to ashes! I have all forms! [rūp]! Tell me your name! What did she [the witch] tell you? Anita/bhūt, crying very loudly: Eat her [Anita] and come back! Goddess Shravani: And then what? What did she say to you? 18 Berti and Tarabout, “Possession.”

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Anita/bhūt, still in tears: That everyone there [in the in-laws’ family] must take sides against her [Anita]. Goddess Shravani, still pulling Anita’s hair: Tell us more! Tell us some more! So she told you that as well? That you shouldn’t be happy? (He addresses the audience) She [the witch] also told him [the bhūt] that she [Anita] shouldn’t be allowed to stay at her parents-in-laws’ house. Then questions were put to the bhūt, where the replies were suggested in the questions: (To the bhūt) Did she [the witch] say that you should ensure that the family gets no peace and quiet? She also told you that, didn’t she? And didn’t she also tell you that she [Anita] should be accused of that? And that she should be pressurized into a divorce?19 So, do you want to leave or not? Tell us! Didn’t she also tell you that you should do wrong here? In Anita’s case, the theory of a bhūt as well as the particular way in which it revealed its presence during the consultation, though made explicit by the deity, was accepted by the girl who, on showing signs of behoṣ, followed the scenario for such occasions. In other cases, however, the idea of a bhūt attack is imposed even when the victim does not show signs of possession. During my stay in the village of Jagatsukh in 1994, for example, a very young woman, also recently married and encountering problems with her husband, was brought to the temple. The goddess said that an act of witchcraft had been performed, but the woman remained calm, not showing any particular sign. Her silence was interpreted as a strategy of the bhūt to hide itself. The medium then, supposedly acting as the goddess, passed the chains round her neck and stared into her eyes while he waited for her to do something. They stayed like that for about five minutes, neither of them saying or doing anything. The audience, which was silent at first, started commenting on the bhūt’s stubbornness and provoking it. In the end, the medium decided to make the girl scream and cry by pulling her hair violently and shaking her about, while asking the bhūt who allegedly possessed her to reveal its identity. The bhūt again remained quiet. However, the fact that the girl cried and shouted was interpreted as a sign that the bhūt was starting to show itself, 19 Here the “goddess” means that because of Anita’s behavior her parents-in-law would have ended up persuading their son to get divorced.

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and therefore that could be defeated. The possession “crises” that occur during these séances are thus stimulated and provoked by the medium even when the person gives no sign of being possessed.20 Although the medium plays a major role in the construction of scenario of the bhūt attack, the interactions that take place during the consultation may sometimes produce contrasting narratives, some of which publicly emerge during consultations, while others remain more private or at an implicit level. The production of multiple narratives for the bhūt attack are often the direct outcome of the specific kind of language used by the medium during the consultation, which is often allusive, inexplicit and sometimes even likely to be misunderstood by the audience.21 This is what happened in another case I followed during my fieldwork in 1994. It is about a man called Lalchand, who was from a Brahman caste and who lived in his in-laws’ village with his wife. This was somewhat exceptional since, in India, it is usually the wife who lives with her in-laws. In fact, he was from another rather poor district so they preferred to live in the wife’s village as she had some land. One day, Lalchand’s wife, Sushma, went running to the medium’s house, asking him to come to the temple for an urgent consultation. Her husband, who was a rather calm and pleasant person, had started yelling savagely, showing his teeth. At the temple, Lalchand looked normal and waited for the consultation to begin. As soon as the medium started to ring the temple bell to invoke the deity, the man, kneeling, his arms outstretched and clenching his fingers like claws, bared his teeth and started growling at the medium in an aggressive manner. People reacted to these signs very differently. While relatives showed their despair, those outside the family circle and even the temple’s priest were first surprised, then tried not to laugh. The scene was in fact almost grotesque. Those attending the ritual did not understand what was happening to the man, and whether to be astonished by his behavior or whether to laugh at his outburst. They said, “What a strange thing is happening to our village!” or “What is that?” The way the bhūt manifested itself seemed bizarre as nobody had ever experienced a similar situation before. 20 As for Catholic exorcism, Talamonti remarks that possession by the devil is not only ritualized but also produced by exorcism itself: “Exorcism thus appears to be like the symbolic device for inducing the ritual possession crisis and its effectiveness depends on the success of learning the role that the subject is supposed to represent” (Talamonti, “La produzione rituale,” 260). 21 The elusiveness of the medium’s language allows the medium to interpret people’s problems by a process of approximations and adjustments based on the audience’s reaction to the deity’s words.

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The medium started jumping up and down very quickly, thrashing about with the chains. These gestures are defined by the people as khel karna, or “playing.” Here the expression “to play” means that the deity is manifesting its power in order to make the bhūt do the same and to reveal its identity. But the bhūt only yelled and made short aggressive gestures. Those taking part in the ritual then started to provoke the bhūt and asked it to give the name of the person who had sent it. The bhūt did not want to talk. Here are some passages from the consultation: (Lalchand/bhūt, yelling) His brother-in-law: Look how the bhūt has come! With a mouth like a cave! Goddess, to the bhūt: Speak! Say your name! (Lalchand/bhūt, yelling) Goddess, to the audience: What shall I do? Shall I reveal it [the name of the one who sent it], or shall I remove it discreetly? Lalchand yelled repeatedly, while people started to discuss how to reply to the question asked by the goddess. Some were of the opinion that the name of the person responsible for sending the bhūt should not be revealed, while others thought that if that was the case, they should not have come to consult the deity. Goddess: I will remove it discreetly! Lalchand’s wife: Yes! Do that! We don’t want to have any other problems. (Lalchand/bhūt yells desperately) Goddess: He (the bhūt) has said “I don’t want to reveal myself!” Brother-in-law: Let him leave then! [to the bhūt] Go away then! We won’t say who sent you! Lalchand’s wife: Yes, anyway we know who [the witch] is. (To the deity) Attack her and send it [the bhūt] back to the place where it comes from. The goddess asked the pujārī to lock the man inside the temple and the man was ordered to remain there for some days. Consultations for this case went on for several days during which the goddess, using a special way of speaking, revealed that a “five-mouthed bhūt (paṃchmukh)” had been sent by a witch and that the witch was in fact the man’s wife. This was recounted in such an allusive way that the relatives continued to believe that the deity

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was talking about someone else: as we have seen in the consultation they kept saying “anyway we know who sent you.” Once the deopūchnā was over, the medium explained the situation to me more explicitly: he told me that the man’s wife used to have extramarital relationships and that she was responsible for the man’s trouble with the bhūt. He also told me that though the goddess had alluded many times during the consultation to the fact that she was the witch, the woman and her relatives did not seem to understand what the deity said and they continued to have their own idea about who had sent the bhūt. During the consultation, this kind of misunderstanding was not completely settle to avoid a public scandal. In fact, if the wife had been explicitly accused, the situation would have been embarrassing for the man and it would have been shameful for him to continue to live with his wife in her family home. In the course of a conversation Lalchand described to me how he had experienced his possession. He did not make any reference to his wife’s behavior and he seemed to be completely convinced that he had a bhūt. He said, “The power did not attack me every time but only from time to time and for a few seconds. Then I felt as if an electric current had passed through my stomach, and I felt the need to do something. Then I had these yelling fits and made strange sounds. But I didn’t know why I yelled.” (Author’s field notes, 1994). He told me that during his stay at the temple, two men from another village came and asked him where the mad man was that they had been hearing about from other villagers and, he told me, “I said, ‘It’s me!’ Then they told me: ‘But you’re not mad! You look like a good guy!’ And I said, ‘No, the bhūt can make me mad, it is very powerful, it has five mouths and it suddenly enters my body.’” He also told me that since the beginning of these outbursts people had given him a lot of attention but that “as soon as I started yelling they hit me with chains or shoes, because they wanted to hit the bhūt; I didn’t feel anything as long as the bhūt’s power was within me; but once the bhūt had gone away and they carried on hitting me I couldn’t say anything anyway. [I couldn’t protest] because otherwise they would have left me alone.” So for him, the bhūt was the cause of his suffering but also what made him receive so much attention. He was aware of this fact and that was why he had ended up accepting this physical aggression even when the bhūt was no longer there. What we find here and in many other cases I have observed is that in the version produced during the consultation, through interactions between the goddess and the audience, reference is occasionally made to another possible version (and interpretation) which is not explicitly revealed in

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public or which is revealed in an indirect way. This may be compared with what Nuckolls describes about divination practices among the Jalari, a caste of fishermen in South India. In his analysis of the way in which the explanatory process of a case is built, Nuckolls shows the existence of what he calls a sub-text which underlies ritual interactions and which sometimes “can be transparent in divinatory discourse.”22 In Nuckolls’ example, reference to such a sub-text is made by means of an allusive language which avoids a full explanation. And the effect the consultation seeks to produce is only achieved when a version of the events that has been constructed and negotiated during the ritual emerges, after being voluntarily created by the participants themselves in order to be superimposed on the sub-text. Obviously not all consultations involve such diversity in their versions. While, in certain cases, ritual dialogues are very emotive and the understanding of them proves complex, in other cases they do not even get off to a proper start – the person involved in the consultation remains silent: they do not react, they feel embarrassed. In such cases, regular attendees of these consultations say that the person “lacks experience.” This expression fully conveys the fact that consulting a village deity is not simply a matter of asking questions: the person consulting or his/her family must know how to react, how to formulate questions, how to insist in order to obtain a reply. They must enter into a different register of communication and, sometimes, they must reply to what the deity says in a ritualized (or codified) way.

Gods’ public roles In cases dealing with collective issues, especially those involving several villages where different mediums are consulted, contrasted versions of the problem submitted for consultation may emerge. On large-scale consultations, the source of the deity’s authority is more fragmented than in cases of individual consultations since deities are supposed to express their will not only through their human mediums but also through their mobile images, which are called rath – wooden palanquins decorated with metal faces and other items. The palanquin’s structure is somehow anthropomorphized – the rath has “hair,” and wears jewelry and clothes. The parts making up the rath are usually assembled when the deity (whose image is also permanently housed in the temple) has to receive a guest or be taken somewhere – to a 22 Nuckolls, “Deciding How to Decide,” 73.

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festival or as part of a procession – otherwise they are kept “inanimate” in a basket. Once the structure has been assembled, the rath “comes alive”: it is supposed to move and “behave” according to the deity’s will. Raths are said to be endowed with intentionality and with the capacity to interact among themselves and with people. These “god-palanquins” are treated like living beings that people have to take care of and play with. When the rath is carried to the sound of music, the god may also dance, run a race with another rath; it may encounter his/her loved one, his father or mother; a brother may encounter his sister or his friend. There is a coded set of movements which is interpreted by people according to a given context and which may indicate how a god-rath feels at a specific moment: is he angry, or happy, does he want to say something? A god-rath may also be asked to give his opinion on something or to give a reply. The god’s intention may be clarified through the god’s official medium, though it may happen that the god expresses something different through the medium and through the palanquin. The rath’s eloquent movements not only function in a way similar to a medium’s words as a way of communication; they also provide the deity with “social visibility” and with the opportunity to assert or to increase the deity’s “prestige.” This especially occurs on the occasion of major public festivals that are celebrated at the district capital where a number of deities, together with the palanquins, mediums and villagers gather together with ritual and political representatives. During these festivals, privileges are distributed among these palanquins, and villagers vie for an honorific place for their god. For villagers, the honorific positions and roles held by these palanquins during a festival are crucial since they visualize and make public their gods’ importance in the local pantheon and in the regional history, thereby showing the close relationship the deities maintained in the past with former kings and at present with local political leaders.23 Some honors are the unquestionable prerogative of specific deities; others are the object of virulent competition and protests. Clashes between different groups of villagers over issues regarding honorific positions were reported in local stories and are still extremely common in the region today. These clashes are expressed and provoked through the rath, whose movements may become very violent: they may rush into the crowd, making it difficult for the police to stop them. Clashes are often meant to provoke a public scandal, as many 23 These honors are related to royalty and mark the importance of the deity in the past. This comes with many honors and privileges: of entering the throne hall, of exchanging gifts with the king and his family, of accompanying the king during his daily procession, and so on.

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Photo Daniela Berti

leading authorities attend the festivals (elected representatives, ministers, governors, judges) and the event is closely covered by the press. In one case, for example, a clash made the following newspaper headline: “With Deities at War, Can Devotees Be Far Behind at Rath Yatra [Chariot Procession]?”24 Not only may a rath upset the social order but also, and even consequently, participants may get into trouble with the police authorities. In one of these clashes two deities were even banned and put under “house arrest,”25 which resulted in a newspaper headline: “Uninvited deities placed under ‘house arrest’ at Dussehra.”26 In newspaper articles, as in village discussions, the gods are regarded as the reason for these clashes. However, it regularly happens that those 24 Indian Express (Chandigarh), October 29, 2001. 25 Here the term “house arrest” means that the deities – that is their rath – are in fact “banned” from the procession by the local administration. The practice of banning a village god was also attested to during the colonial period (Emerson, “Manuscript,” 11–14). Today this procedure is carried out in accordance with article 144 of “Law and Order” or the Indian Penal Code. 26 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Uninvited-deities-placed-under-house-arrestat-Dussehra/articleshow/24173365.cms (24th February 2022).

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Figure 18.3  God-palanquins going to the Dashera festival 2. Kullu 2001

Photo Daniela Berti

who carry the god-rath on their shoulders are accused of intentionally directing the rath’s movement and of forcing the god to act according to their will. The idea that is the bearers, not the deity, who move the rath brings to mind what happens in the case of medium consultations, even though these accusations here have more resonance due to the collective nature of the issue as well as to the media coverage. The media in fact seems ready to play along with the ambiguity over who is really upsetting public order – whether it be the gods or their human followers. On the occasion of public festivals, not only may village tensions or competitions be expressed. Gods may also play a role in publicly expressing a disagreement with the political authorities on matters related to politics and governance. The role that village deities played in the past as the interlocutors of the royal family27 persists in modern times. One example, still pending at the High Court, mainly opposes the promoters of a hydroelectric project (the Water Mill Company) and the devotees of a goddess living just next to the site selected by the company, which is near a huge waterfall considered to be inhabited by the goddess Maha Jogni. When the 27 Berti, “Kings, Gods, and Political Leaders.”

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project was announced, people started to consult the goddess via her medium, and other neighboring gods, and all the gods expressed their disapproval of the project. The protests continued and a consultation of all the gods (jagtī pūch, lit. universal consultation) was organized, which at once made the headlines: “Appeal against Hydel Power Project to Be Taken to Deities Parliament.”28 Another example is a very well-known case concerning the construction of a ski resort funded by the Ford America Company in Parvati Valley and which prompted a protest by all the deities of the valley. In 2006 a number of meetings took place with all the gods’ mediums from the district and they unanimously criticized the project. A descendent of the royal family, who is a politician but who still plays a ritual role as a king, also organized a collective consultation of all the deities (a jagtī pūch)29 A writ petition against Ford was eventually filed in the High Court and after battling for many years the project was finally abandoned. The case made the headlines: “Hindu Ford Battle against Kullu Gods”30 and “Hindu Gods Turn Down Plan for a Himalayan Ski Resort.”31 In some of these cases the god’s contestation against the government policy can even be brought before a court of law. In fact, due to their role as “legal persons,”32 these deities can even become the main petitioner in a court case.33 Although in their rulings, judges with a more secular attitude may sometimes clarify that the notion of a god having a juristic personality is a “mere creation of law,”34 the fact that the deity is officially presented in the file as being the main petitioner maintains the ambiguity, as in the newspaper articles quoted above, about whom the real agent of this contestation is – the god or its supporters.

Concluding remarks From the point of view of local people, medium consultations and god-raths are part of the same idea: that a god may be present in a body (human or 28 Times of India, August 31, 2011. 29 The Tribune, 2006. 30 Economic Times, January 26, 2006. 31 The Telegraph, February 21, 2006. 32 Anoussamy, “La personnalité juridique”; Sontheimer and Dietz, “Religious Endowments in India.” 33 Devtā Shring Rishi ji (and others) vs State of Himachal Pradesh (and others), Himachal Pradesh High Court, 2011. On this topic, see Sontheimer and Dietz, “Religious Endowments in India”; Davis, “Temples, Deities, and the Law.” 34 M. L. Hanumantha Rao vs Sri Sai Babaon, Madras High Court, 1972.

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man-made) and express through it its feelings and will. Paradoxically, through rath, more so than through mediums, a deity appears as person like, provided with individuality, subjectivity, feelings and emotions. The fact that objects may be considered as one of the possible forms of a deity’s living presence shows how possession does not necessarily involve the idea of “displacement of the self”35 or, even less so, of a psychological transformation. Even where a displacement of identity is supposed to have taken place, as in the case of the temple medium, we have seen how the shift from the medium to the god, which is always presented as an intermittent process, is completely controlled throughout ritual procedures. Similarly, in the case of a bhūt attack, although the shift of identity from the person to a bhūt appears as less controlled by the subject, it frequently follows a ritual script which is also, at the time of consultation, eventually mastered by the medium. The different possession contexts presented here are thus arenas where various processes of communication are at work. They are contexts for the verbalization and explanation of tensions and conflicts, even though in some cases, these explanations are codified in conventional scenarios which make them socially and culturally acceptable. They are also symbolic settings within which it is possible to manifest, by nonverbal behavior, personal feelings/emotions (suffering, rage, fear or emotional discomfort). At the time of a consultation, the interpretations given by the medium provide elements for a preliminary explanation of certain events from which people start to build a certain version of the facts. By a gradual process of adjustment between alternative narratives and the decisions taken by the medium, the ritual leads to redefining relationships, to attributing responsibilities, to reinterpreting the past and to accomplishing reparatory acts. Finally, we have seen how a possession framework is also a context for public action within which power relationships between groups of villagers may be played out and where state decisions may occasionally be challenged.

References Annoussamy, David. “La personnalité juridique de l’idole hindoue.” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 57/4 (1979): 611–621. Berti, Daniela. “Kings, Gods, and Political Leaders in Kullu.” In Bards and Mediums: History, Culture, and Politics in the Central Himalayan Kingdoms, 35 Cohen, “What Is Spirit Possession?,” 113.

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edited by Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, 107–136. Almora: Almora Book Depot, 2009. —. La parole des dieux. Rituels de possession dans l’Himalaya indien, Collection Monde Indien. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2001. —. “The Memory of Gods: From a Secret Autobiography to a Nationalistic Project.” Indian Folklife 24 (2006): 15–18. —. “The Technicalities of Doubting: Temple Consultations and District Courts in India.” In Of Doubt and Proof: Ritual and Legal Practices of Judgment, edited by Daniela Berti, Anthony Good, and Gilles Tarabout, 19–38. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Berti, Daniela, and Gilles Tarabout. “Possession.” In Dictionnaire des faits religieux, edited by R. Azria and D. Hervieu-Léger, 941–947. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010. Cohen, Emma. “What Is Spirit Possession? Defining, Comparing, and Explaining Two Possession Forms.” Ethnos 73/1 (2008): 101–126. Cohen, Emma, and Justin L. Barrett. “Conceptualizing Spirit Possession: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence.” Ethos 36/2 (2009): 246–267. Crapanzano, Vincent, and Vivian Garrison. Case Studies in Spirit Possession. London: Wiley, 1977. Davis, Richard, H. “Temples, Deities, and the Law.” In Hinduism and Law: An introduction, edited by Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr., and Jayant K. Krishnan, 195–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Emerson, W. H. “Manuscript.” London: Indian Office Library (MSS.EUR.E. 321), n.d. Gaborieau, Marc. “Note préliminaire sur le dieu Masta.” Objets et Mondes 9/1 (1969): 19–50. Houseman, Michael. “Relationality.” In Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, edited by Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg, 413–428. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2006. Lambeck, Michael. “Spirit Possession/Spirit Succession: Aspects of Social Continuity Mayotte.” American Ethnologist 15/4 (1988): 710–731. Leiris, Michel. Miroir de l’Afrique. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Masquelier, Adeline. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Nabokov, Isabelle. “Expel the Lover, Recover the Wife: Symbolic Analysis of a South Indian Exorcism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3/2 (1997): 297–316. Nuckolls, Charles W. “Deciding How to Decide: Possession-Mediumship in Jalari Divination.” Medical Anthropology 13 (1991): 57–82.

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Obeyesekere, Gananath. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Sontheimer, Gunter, and G. D. Dietz. “Religious Endowments in India: The Juristic Personality of Hindu Deities.” Zeitschrift fur Verglichende Rechts Wissenschaft 67 (1964): 45–100. Stoller, Paul. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa. New York–London: Routledge, 1995. Talamonti, Adeline. “La produzione rituale della possessione e del ruolo di posseduta nell’ esorcismo cattolico.” In Medicina, Magia, Religione, Valori, II Dall’ antropologia all’etnopsichiatria, edited by Vittorio Lanternari and Maria Luisa Ciminelli, 239–268. Naples: Liguori Editore, 1998. Tarabout, Gilles. “Corps possédés et signatures territoriales au Kérala.” In La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire, edited by Jackie Assayag and Gilles Tarabout, 313–353. Paris, EHESS, 1999. Thompson, David M. The Wages of Action: Religion in a Hindu Village. The Open University. BBC-TV, 1979.

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19 A Day-to-Day Family Chronicle with “Personages” in Madagascar f Michèle Fiéloux and Jacques Lombard

Keywords: spirit possession, trance, woman, tromba, Sakalava, spiritual husband, ancestor, economy, self

Today, Madagascar is facing a serious economic and social crisis, leading to a permanent collapse of old balances and a disruption of kinship organizations connected with a weakening of ancient religious solidarities and practices. In this unsettled context, the development of new kinds of possession cults represents a more or less successful attempt to create concrete forums for dialogue and develop other modes of sociability. The resulting proliferation of communities of possessed people (or tromba) has been accompanied by rapid and often disordered urban expansion. This phenomenon, which can be broadly observed throughout the island, corresponds to genuine attempts to address problems of every kind, often new ones specifically faced by the poorer classes, from economic instability to the evolution of sexual practices. From the most ancient historical periods to modern times, possession cults have represented an essential component of religious practices. More or less permanent relationships with various authorities of the invisible, particular to a single collective imagination, have enabled (and continue to enable) the most important problems of day-to-day social life to be conceived and managed, by reproducing an ancient political model established in the time of the royals. The king and his relations are of a different nature than other human beings, being linked to the invisible world through their own genealogy. They are masina, sacred, and their visible presence is truth and therefore power. After the dissolution of the monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century, the deceased kings and princes assumed unprecedented importance in urban possession cults. Through this channel, deceased sovereigns transmit their words, the most senior of them having unmatched influence, which now spreads beyond traditional units of reference (ancient kingdoms, lineages, various regional units), expanding as it were to the scale of the national territory.

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It is no longer the quintessential royal political tool, which the possessed royals used during annual celebrations to sensationally reestablish the sovereign’s unique link to the divine during each of these festivals, back when the sovereign drew his legitimacy from the far reaches of the cosmos. It was a tool that, in its time, budding dynasties had borrowed and adapted from the lineage groups and political organizations that had preceded the era of the royals. The profound reality of possession, tromba, was thus fashioned into a powerful institution of control, interpretation and communication that had the ability not only to confirm the legitimacy of social practices, but also to transform them. In the name of the Fombadrazana, the “Tradition of the Ancestors,” the possessed-by-a-royal-spirit or sazoka could introduce innovations that, far from appearing as such, were conceived as the very expression of what had always been done. The role of the ancestor, of the invisible, is that of the unspoken, of invention, of change. The ancestors are true moderns since they legitimize all new ways of doing things in the name of Tradition, because when all is said and done, they alone are its guarantors.1 This research was conducted in the western Madagascan city of Toliara, a regional capital with a population of approximately 150,000, where the social fabric is interwoven with networks of small communities of possessed people, which tend to have less than ten members acting as true fictional lineages (in the sense that they reproduce a kinship model to promote transformation) under the leadership of a tromba fondy, or possessed mistress, who acts as the head of the lineage. It should be noted that this fondy initiates the members of her community, making it part of the urban social game. In this way, she is fulfilling the primary duty of an experienced possessed person. We should specify that the term “tromba” designates three realities in Malagasy: the person who has duly acquired the “possessed” status, the possessing spirit, and the ritual as a whole. We have chosen to use this term only to designate the possessed person, whether in a state of trance or not. The term “spirit” is used to designate the external agent, and “possession” designates the phenomenon as a whole. The first letter will be capitalized when a spirit is designated by a personal pronoun. The stock of available spirits – always personalized by their age, gender, character, etc., and predominantly male – is constantly being reorganized, 1 Lombard, Le royaume sakalava.

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thus revealing the dynamics of modernity in operation as well as the profound logic of this ancient political institution, which, as we have seen, has accompanied and produced the movement of history, from one period to another, in this way constituting a form of reflexivity particular to the Madagascan societies under consideration. Some spirits disappear from the repertory while new ones appear. The frequency with which a given spirit is solicited is a sociological indicator of the profound movements that drive a city that we have investigated systematically. In 1998 in Toliara, out of around one hundred spirits, three or four of them (including Prince Raleva, who “possesses” C.) were more strongly represented than the others. However, there is a hierarchy between the spirits (and therefore also between the possessed) which operates on several levels, depending on whether or not they are a royal, and according to order of birth, specializations, their position in relation to certain periods of Madagascar history, etc. These possessions mostly concern females (85% in Toliara according to our statistics), poorly educated women belonging to the most disadvantaged social strata. Posture then conveys the spectacular change of status enjoyed by the possessed woman, who thus becomes a man and lord at the same time, keeping in mind that by nature, dynastic lineages cannot have possessed people in their ranks, and that only the lineages of commoners and dependents may supply possessed people for spirits belonging to the dynastic lineages. It follows from what has been developed above that living members of dynastic families and the lineages connected with them are of the same nature as royal spirits. The fact of their prestigious ascendency, which has a divine, “sacred” character, means they already have one foot in the invisible, making it inconceivable that they could embody royal spirits. In every case, possession is conceived as the process of a spirit choosing a person, generally on the model of an amorous relationship, and it is never the product of personal initiative, and certainly not a voluntary one.2 On the other hand, divine healers take a different path, that of knowledge, wrested as it were from the invisible step by step, and in this sense they have less authority. Subjected to exclusive attention, the chosen one, the future possessed person, eventually enters into a very ritualized marriage at the end of an itinerary spanning several years, punctuated by misfortune and afflictions that indicate “divine” intent. The spirit will always occupy the place of primary husband and is therefore master of the house in which he takes his place as spouse. We are examining the traditional form, in which 2

Fiéloux and Lombard, “Du premier frisson.”

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the possessed person is a woman. It is nevertheless important to note that over the past 20 or 30 years, we have seen the appearance of possession through the channel of men. In general, these men have had some school education and are much more quickly legitimized in their role as possessed people than women. In many cases, it is part of a personal political or economic strategy. Having set up this indispensable framework to support what follows, our aim is to present a particularly significant aspect of the subtlest registers of exchange and reflexivity revealed by the practice of possession. Instead of dissociating everyday events from those stemming from possession as if they were two exclusive spheres, we have chosen to link all the facts together, placing them back in their particular context, in order to understand the particular dynamic that results from the intervention of the possessed person, who establishes herself as the group’s “memory,” recording a set of acts, dreams, feelings, hopes and quiet conflicts, a role that gives her remarkable power of action and genuine social mobilization abilities. The empirical material we have gathered through the cumulative observation of numerous possession sessions represents a more or less continuous scale between affects and social matters, between the simple expression of aguish at one end, and dynamic integration into the social or political game at the other. In line with the dual perspective we have outlined, our approach consisted in conducting a thorough three-year investigation in fondy C.’s family and community, in connection with an extensive supplemental investigation in fifteen other communities of possessed people (including the one presented in the film Pourquoi tu pleures? [Why are you crying?]), encompassing 128 possessed people, making it possible to conduct a genuine sociological analysis of the network formed by a set of communities in the city of Toliara, though we will not be developing that particular analysis here. C., 45 years old, is a member of a lineage (tarike) of fishermen (vezo) that includes several renowned tromba, or possessed people, some of whose spirits were inherited from an agnatic line. She has been responsible for her community for about 20 years, and is therefore recognized as an experienced possessed person (fondy). She is possessed by twelve spirits belonging to four large, high-status families, specifically princes and a king, half of whom belong to the same lineage as her main spirit and spouse, Prince Raleva, who lived in the early twentieth century in the Sakalava kingdom of Boeny in northwest Madagascar. Unlike his older siblings, this Personage is reputed to be receptive to contemporary problems, which he is said to be capable of

A Day-to -Day Family Chronicle with “Personages” in Madagascar

Figure 19.1 Clairette as Prince Ravela in the trance entry protocol. Toilara (Madagascar), 1990

Photo Jacques Lombard

resolving in original ways. For the past fifteen years, C. has also been married to Justin, a driver working for an electric company. In this triangular relationship, C.’s two husbands are united as “brothers” in a fictional kinship link that carries real weight, since they are both fully-fledged members of the family unit. Since we have broadly addressed this element elsewhere from a comparative perspective, here we will not go any more deeply into an analysis of this specific form of human/spirit bigamy, which is based on status and position asymmetry (the Lord and his commoner brother), the principle of unilateral debt, the opposition between supernatural love and day-to-day life, etc. We have retained several examples that show a few systems that C. uses to bring the possession game to life, in the sense that this ritual is the foundation of the tromba’s recognized authority in all areas of the social game. The examples are borrowed from the corpus we assembled by systematically recording (without any kind of preselection) public consultations over an eighteen-month period (1990–1991), at an average rate of 20 sessions per month. This made it possible to bring out the importance of possession in the extended family context. In

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fact, in more than half of cases, the consultations concerned members of the actual family unit (circle 1) and their allies as a group (circle 2). Circle 3 encompasses family members and their allies in the community of possessed people in which C. is the fondy – possessed people being recruited on the basis of kinship between spirits. Circle 4 groups together all nonkinship or unallied persons who have an economic relationship with the Raleva/C. duo (employees, farm workers, sharecroppers, wood sellers). As an experienced fondy, Prince Raleva is also consulted (circle 5) by strangers to the region or personalities, first-time visitors and visitors with no links to C. whatsoever. For our present purposes, we have decided only to explore the field of multiple interactions between humans and spirits in the context of circle 1, with an extension to circle 2, that is, where all of the possible permutations of roles and statuses play out, since each member of the immediate and extended family has two relationships with the same person and vice versa. For example, C., as a person who is “two-faced” (but in a necessarily alternating way), concurrently plays not only the role of spouse to her human husband, but also that of his brother as Prince Raleva. Similarly, she is both the daughter of her parents as well as their son-in-law, the mother of her daughter as well as her spiritual father, etc. This allows her to involve herself – always in a specific way – in the lives of the members of her family, with whom she can shift from being herself (as C. and wife) to being several Personages, which she can embody on demand during the same day according to need. In the sacred ritual space inside the home where her transformation takes place, she dresses in the clothing of this or that spirit. Her relatives then act as if they no longer recognized the relative or spouse in her, but now saw an entirely different being that is incomparable, sacred, masina, like a king.3 The exchanges are based on a mirroring of the two lineages, tariky, that of Prince Raleva and that of C. in the everyday life of her family. This allows the most complete circulation of information possible, the most diverse revelations, the expression of numerous rivalries, conflicts, desires, ambitions, strategies, etc, thus prefiguring the transformation of this family’s world both in terms of its organization and its conceptions: relationships between couples, gender, relationship to money, the social division of work, etc.

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Fiéloux and Lombard, “Le maître du jeu” and “Regards en gamme.”

A Day-to -Day Family Chronicle with “Personages” in Madagascar

Figure 19.2 Clairette as a housewife opening her grocery shop. Toilara (Madagascar), 1990

Photo Jacques Lombard

The reason why Raleva’s intervention can be this subtle and circumstantial is that his status is relative to a generational order. C. is possessed by seven members of Raleva’s tarike, or lineage branch, including two of his older siblings and four other brothers who have a specific effect not just on relationships between humans, but also between the two lineages. Prince Raleva is all-powerful in C’s lineage, but he cannot be so in his own lineage since he occupies the place of a younger brother and thus risks appearing to have faults. This situation activates a subtle system of nonlinear changes with alternating phases of resistance and legitimization (applied, for example, to gender relationships, sexuality and reproduction, or marriage), and all of this in the name of the most classical principles of “tradition.” The fiction of Raleva’s dual position (powerful among humans and dependent within a still-active lineage) brings a kind of necessary adjustment to the dynamics of possession and to the excesses that might result from the absolute power of a possessed person like C. Understandably, the more she is assumed to be responding to the prince’s injunctions, the more she benefits from the impunity of his acts, and the more feely she herself can speak and act. Moreover – and this is one of the forms of this “regulation” – C., in the prince’s place, is supposed to suffer the punishments directed at him by his older brothers when they accuse him of being pig-headed, of being transgressive, of acting like he has no family. Analysis of consultations shows that the farther removed one is from circle 1, and therefore from a kinship relationship, the more the interpretation of problems or events is based on the classic theory of persecution by an

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external agent (witchcraft, lineage ancestors, etc), as opposed being based on the interpretive logic applied to everyday events within circle 1, that which accompanies and engenders social and urban development. Thanks to Raleva’s authority, within the family unit there is, strictly speaking, no longer any interpretation in terms of witchcraft or malevolence on the part of lineage ancestors, especially in the case of C., who now recognizes nothing but relationships of dependence on spirits, particularly on Prince Raleva. Members of circle 1, including the human husband – the negative image of Raleva – are therefore subject to new intra-family rules of conduct “verbally” decreed by Raleva (or by the Raleva/C. duo), who makes them known to the relevant person according to certain mechanisms. This procedure obviously encourages the emergence of individual responsibility linked to that of a more marked individuality in a truly romantic form, and it therefore also fosters the development of a feeling of personal culpability in face of threats of punishment, expressed not only in terms of sickness but also in terms of the risk of impoverishment, and this in a family community that is always on the verge of a precarious situation, something that is a constant source of worry in the most disadvantaged areas. This procedure shows the lineage group operating like a real business integrated into the urban economy and managed by the Raleva/C. duo. Not only has the prince, through his multiple activities – particularly the consultation office – made a certain accumulation possible (house, electrical appliances, cart, pirogue, grocery store, saline, manioc and maize plantations), but some family members, including C.’s husband and brother, have jobs as a result of Raleva’s intercession and are therefore indebted to Him for a situation that is never permanently secured; the power of the intercession can always weaken, and it needs to be revived. Moreover, this method enables an accumulation of capital that will be made as profitable as possible, since it is considered to be under the spirit’s name and would not be mixed with that of any other member of the family. No one, including C., is allowed to access it without the consent of Prince Raleva, embodied by C. The prince also contributes to the management of the business as a control authority that regulates the sale of grocery store products and other merchandise on credit to all relatives, an attitude that is considered very transgressive on C.’s part, since it does not conform to principles of family solidarity. It is obvious that C.’s remarkable authority within her familial world is accompanied by a significant weakening of lineage cults in this same world. In this way, the shifting of authority

A Day-to -Day Family Chronicle with “Personages” in Madagascar

is evidence of an irreversible evolution of social relations in the urban environment. This type of situation often generates conflict between human couples, and it also has the consequence of noticeably changing the composition of domestic units based on matrilineal kinship. For example, C. might decide, via the prince and therefore as the head of a family, who will be taken care of and integrated into the family. She adopts her sisters’ children while at the same time using this very effective tool to evade the constraints associated with the rules of marriage in her personal situation, knowing that problems stemming from the contradiction between marriage principles and those of filiation are the subject of many consultations in every part of the community. Although the Personage, in this case Prince Raleva, makes it possible to set the rules of the game, he never exists until he has been embodied before a given audience. Embodiment is the intelligence of the social game in all its complexity, but in our view it is therefore one of the most subtle and creative encounters between a person, approached in the movement of her singularity, and her social space, conceived both as the site of her expression and the substance of her being.

A few elements of the system: Intermediary, business manager, negotiator, intercessor, or the thousand facets of the social game As in any system of this kind, C. has a duty to pass through an intermediary, not just to find out what was said during the possession, but also to speak with her spirit if necessary. The required intermediary can appear in two different configurations: Raleva, the person seeking consultation and a third party or the servant in this ritual in its traditional form, specifically responsible for telling C. the story of what was said and done during the trance. A second configuration, as is generally the case when the person seeking consultation is a close relative of C. (such as her father, mother, or especially her husband), establishes a one-on-one relationship without any witness or translator, so that in some circumstances, one might wonder if the consultation really took place. The lack of any transmission of the event solicited by the trance activates a particularly complex register based on pretense, made of hypotheses and assumptions about what could have

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424 Michèle Fiéloux and Jacques Lombard Figure 19.3 The moment when Clairette’s state is changing by welcoming her spirit. Toilara (Madagascar), 1990

Photo Jacques Lombard

been said, introducing various nuances into everyone’s interpretations and positions. This is a key element of the narrative processes that allow C. to openly express her boldest or most personal thoughts, by introducing Raleva for this purpose, using him as an absent, virtual third party. C. implicitly refers to elements of a drama she is supposed to be undergoing with Justin, and in this way she engages only her own personality and not the spirit, whose “words” are inconsequential in this case. For example, on November 27, 1990, C. explains to a confidant that “Justin wouldn’t have said anything to him, probably because the prince would have complained that he was going behind his back, selling certain household appliances, refrigerators and fans that belong to him.”

A Day-to -Day Family Chronicle with “Personages” in Madagascar

According to a process similar to that outlined in Pourquoi tu pleures?, one story reveals another, leading to the heart of the conflict between C. and Justin, concerning the financial constraints imposed by the rules of marriage through the performance of rituals, the construction of houses, etc., especially as on this occasion, C. is expressing her tense relationship with her in-laws, who attribute the most negative qualities to her, belonging as she does to a low-status group, tromba and therefore “under influence,” infertile, and – an unspoken serious fault – responsible, through the Spirit, for the redistribution of goods in her own house, but also indirectly in her husband’s family. All of these issues are very difficult to address directly, and no less so through the mediation of possession.

Shell games In 1991, C.’s husband, Justin, caught gonorrhea as a result of an adulterous relationship, something that was not unusual for him. The act was supposed to have taken place within the family compound, which is strictly unforgivable. To get treatment, Justin consulted Letianarivo, Prince Raleva’s older brother, a specialist in these problems. But Justin had to obtain forgiveness from Prince Raleva before he could receive treatment. Raleva remained stubbornly absent and refused to descend upon not only C., but all of the other tromba spouses solicited within the network of communities. C. then found herself possessed by Prince Raleva’s father, a very old man who spoke in a faint, nearly inaudible voice, suffering from pain in his joints. An intermediary in the family asked this elder to speak to his son and ask him to forgive Justin so that his other son, Letianarivo, could prepare the medicine that was urgently needed. The resolution of a trivial problem of adultery reveals the meaning of this kind of scenario, with many characters, forcefully dealing with sudden developments, feelings and dramatic effects that are part of a reality that is not just C.’s, but is rooted in her, weaving the plot of a whole social and emotional life in the city of Toliara. As we have seen, C., via the prince, does not have the uncontested authority of an eldest sibling, nor the experience of Letianarivo, who died of syphilis, so that his arrival on the scene can seem a little worrying, since he has such a transgressive character, doing what none of C.’s other spirits is in a position to do, such as make direct, raw allusions to the sexual practices of one or another family member, or provoke sudden possession crises simply

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though the touch of his finger! He embodies libido, while also revealing it, and is the “spirit-husband” of many partners in Toliara. Finally, he also represents sexuality unconnected to reproduction, a central marriage issue and therefore a reflection of rapidly changing gender relations.

A daughter’s metamorphosis and the reversal of roles (mother/daughter; father/daughter, etc.) C’s possession offers close relatives an unusual chance to directly and subjectively express acts, intentions and emotions that cannot be known by any other member of the family, including C., who is thus exempt from any responsibility for resolving the expounded problems. “C. must not know that.” This is the standard preliminary when C.’s father or mother has a one-on-one interview with the prince, which takes the tone of a confidential conversation, the prince assuming the very strategic role of a “good advisor,” who conciliates and displays a kind of benevolent neutrality while listening to detailed descriptions of everyday micro-events. The image of C. (the oldest of eight siblings) as it is conveyed by her parents, presents her as a very reserved, rather taciturn child forced into the role of domestic helper, exploited at will. One imagines her as the little girl in “Prince Charming” who goes to fetch water and cries out under the weight of the bucket: marary, it hurts! To say how heavy it is for a little girl. A kind of role inversion occurs as a result of the acquisition of tromba status. C. gains autonomy from her mother, triggering an original positiondisplacement process within the kinship system. First, she became the identifier of the Spirit that “hovered over her mother,” which was none other than Raleva’s older brother Letianarivo, the figure of sexuality. Through their spirits, mother and daughter found themselves in the role of “sisters-in-law,” whose rank depended on the primogenital order of their respective spiritual husbands, who were brothers. C. held the status of younger sister-in-law and Prince Raleva was forced to assume the role of a younger brother in possession sessions in which both mother and daughter were present through their spirits. When in a state of possession, C.’s mother essentially continued to embody parental authority. Later, the fondy C. ritually “dismissed” the spirit of a mother she considered too old, depriving her of authorized speech. Through her six spirits, members of the Raleva lineage, C. consequently acquired power, speech and right of interference in family affairs, in a sense occupying the place

A Day-to -Day Family Chronicle with “Personages” in Madagascar

of her parents. Her siblings became “her children,” especially given that, as we have said, she adopted her sisters’ children. In consultations, Prince Raleva, on the strength of his gradually acquired roles as the whole family’s advisor, doctor and conscience, only uses “words that carry weight,” and does not use the language of talismans or divination that He/she tends to use during consultations with people from circles 4 or 5. In this new configuration, C.’s mother, who regularly consults the prince, has inadvertently become a special informer since she confides to her daughter only a fraction of the story shared with the prince, especially when it concerns her highly conflictual relationships with her granddaughters, who are attributed every flaw in this context. She accuses them of plunder, laziness, of only knowing how to “lift the cover of the rice pot,” etc. Her most serious reproach is that they do not show her enough respect. Sometimes an unexpected thought brings more play back into the exchange: “People in the family criticize me for giving preference to the one possessed by Raleva, but I swear it isn’t true.” And the prince replies: “But what makes the children think such a thing!” It is certainly worth pointing out that we personally believe that C., by definition, controls most of the game introduced by Prince Raleva, but only up to a certain point, and it is this that interests us, the threshold beyond which something else happens. Possession helps open a forum for “free speech” between the two interlocutors. First, in C./Raleva’s case, she makes concrete adjustments to the family’s day-to-day life through her way of listening and answering, as we have just seen. Most of the time, these adjustments concern situations that may be trivial, but they foreshadow elements of social reorganization at work in the city: alcoholism, drugs, juvenile insolence, frivolous behavior by boys and girls, unbridled sexuality, thefts, jealousies, greed. All things that Raleva confronts as the head of the family, who must ensure its cohesion and its social and economic survival. This is precisely where the threshold appears: by playing Raleva, C. is led to run behind her concretely active Personage, who gets C. herself involved in the family setting. The prince’s words are not simply a diagnosis, an external judgment. They constitute an act that carries weight in a situation where, for better for worse, everyone is playing the game. All of this implies an acceleration of the process, which naturally leads C. to make mistakes that can only be corrected by the arrival of a spirit that has authority over Raleva, as we have seen. Moreover, Raleva’s role is much more gratifying

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in many cases than her position as C., but it is only possible for her to play this role if she respects the alternation. The more effective she is in the role of Raleva, the more she finds herself forced to play the role of C. Then the central question that arises is the following: when C.’s father consults Prince Raleva, does he no longer recognize his daughter (like Maltina’s father in Pourquoi tu pleures?), but only see the prince? And how could that be possible? Of course, we have no straightforward answer to this question, but a thorough consideration of two essential points is necessary if we are going to give ourselves any chance of finding a possible way forward. The first concerns the fascination that this question of possession arouses in anthropologists and historians, not to mention philosophers, writers, filmmakers. These phenomena are often generally perceived as a direct relationship, a “primitive” contact with something that haunts more or less everyone: questions about origins and their mysteries. And the search for origins is just as much a search for the self. In fact – and this is worth noting – the implicit axioms that underlie discourse on possession, whatever its nature, even the most positivistic texts, preserve the “divine’s” share, thus enabling the operation of the religious, which is always hiding somewhere. This naturally leads us to the second point: both in terms of sensibility training and the acquisition of know-how, the learning processes necessary in a given culture and society enable everyone to immediately take their place in a world of exchange that is no less real than that of merchandise: the world of the imagination. This is where the religious nests, but the arts certainly nest there as well, and we believe that it is by exploring this avenue that we can try to find answers to this beautiful question.

References Fiéloux, Michèle and Jacques Lombard. “Du royaume à la ville: le territoire des possédés (Madagascar)”, in La construction religieuse du territoire, edited by Jeanne Françoise Vincent, Daniel Dory, and Raymond Verdier, 323–336. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. —. “Du premier frisson à la libre parole.” L’autre. Cliniques, cultures et sociétés 3 (2000): 455–473. —. “Le maître du jeu. L’amour merveilleux et l’amour quotidien.” L’Autre. Cliniques, cultures et sociétés 7/2 (2006): 253–266. —. “Regards en gamme. Chronique familiale ordinaire avec Personnages. Madagascar, juillet-septembre 1991.” Ethnographies.org 16 (2008).

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—. “Chronique familiale avec Personnages. Le sujet et l’imaginaire social à Madagascar.” Etudes Océan Indien. Autour des entités sacrées. Approche pluridisciplinaire et nouveaux terrains à Madagascar 51–52 (2014): 207–25. Lambek, Michael. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lombard, Jacques. Le royaume sakalava du Menabe. Essai d’analyse d’un système politique à Madagascar, 17e–20e. Travaux et documents 214. Paris: ORSTOM, 1988. —. “Le tromba ou la possession à Madagascar. Théorie politique et conviction religieuse”, in L’étranger intime. Mélanges offerts à Paul Ottino, 329–345. Paris: l’Harmattan, 1995. Zempléni, Andras. “Des êtres sacrificiels.” In Sous le masque de l’animal. Essais sur le sacrifice en Afrique Noire, edited by M. Cartry, 267–315. Paris: PUF, 1987. —. “Du symptome au sacrifice. Histoire de Khady Fall.” L’Homme 14 (1974): 31–77.

Filmography Fiéloux, Michèle, and Jacques Lombard. Le Prince charmant, 43 min. Paris: ORSTOM, 1991. https://vimeo.com/112941343. —. Pourquoi tu pleures? 26 min. IRD/CNRS audiovisual, 2007. https://vimeo. com/63952563.

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20 Anthropological Spirits and Colonial Consciousness in ArabicSpeaking Sudan* f Janice Boddy

Keywords: spirit possession, women, zār, jinn, Sudan, colonial history, indigenous historiography, critical anthropology

British officials in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898–1956) occasionally saw local Islamic rites that left them bemused if not concerned. Among them were zikrs, ceremonies in which members of a Sufi order, mainly men, form up facing each other and sway or step back and forth while chanting the names of Allah to the beat of a hand-held drum. The group moves slowly at first, then gradually quickens pace. As the volume and tempo intensify some participants enter trance, break off and begin to whirl or dance wildly, flourishing swords or canes.1 Zikr means “remembrance” – of Allah’s magnificence and will, but also of the saintly forebear whose path (ṭarīqa) disciples follow in an effort to link to the Prophet and through him to God. Such ecstatic religiosity worried colonial administrators, who feared a resurgence of the Islamist revolt they and their Egyptian colleagues had invaded Sudan to quell. Another rite, zār bori, involved mainly women and, though once held alongside zikrs on public occasions, was less feared by officials than spurned as “superstition.” Here is a description of one such event in 1907 on the eve * I am grateful to the following for their support of my research: the Canada Council (1972–1977), the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (1984–1986, 1990–1991, 1996–2000, 2006–2012), the Connaught Fund, University of Toronto (1994), H. F. Guggenheim Foundation (1998–1999), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Program (2003), the University of British Columbia, and archivists in Sudan and throughout the UK but especially Jane Hogan of the Sudan Archive, Durham University. I remain most deeply indebted to women from “Bajrawiya North” in Sudan for our continuing conversations. 1 A colorful contemporary example can be seen in Omdurman where members of the Qadriyya order perform a zikr at sundown every Friday before the tomb of their Sudanese leader, Shaykh Hamid an-Nil. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz-x8Z0lGt0 (accessed January 19, 2022). In the video women dance on the sidelines in the manner of darawīsh zayrān, discussed below.

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of the Prophet’s birthday in Port Sudan, from a British officer’s letter to his parents in the UK: The oddest thing I saw was a ring in which the music was supplied by two tom-toms and the performers were women: they were crouched on the ground and were entirely covered by large blankets spread all over them. All that could be seen was the convulsions of the blankets. My guide was very careful to explain that the women were not free agents at all, but that their contortions – they knelt down and waived [sic] their heads up and down violently – were entirely the work of a particular devil or spirit which always had the same effect. Rich men pay considerable sums for their wives to “work off” this devil with appropriate paraphernalia in the way of music and so on.2 Zikrs and zārs are both concerned with memory, though in different ways, as I elaborate below. And while they were once deemed part of the same religious complex, their emphases are distinct. A zikr is focused on transcending the self to achieve oneness with Allah, providing participants with a foretaste of the afterlife (al-akhira). Zār bori ceremonies, conversely, are firmly of the earthly world (ad-dunyā). They are staged to celebrate and appease ethereal beings that populate that world who can overwhelm humans and take possession of their bodies, producing illness or intensifying humans’ physical ailments as they do. The purpose of a zār bori rite is to placate such entities and coax them to restore their victims’ well-being. In the northern Sudanese village of Hofriyat (a pseudonym) where I conducted research on zār between the 1970s and 1990s, the targets of zār spirits (s. zār, pl. zayrān) were mainly but not exclusively women. This, I was told, was because zayrān are attracted to human blood and prone to disturb its orderly flow: they can interrupt a woman’s menses, seize a “seed” being nourished in her womb, induce hemorrhage after birth, or settle on a child (a product of her blood) in utero who will then be possessed once born. Zayrān thus jeopardize, seek to control, or are otherwise concerned to influence human sociality. In Hofriyat this was largely expressed in the idiom of female fertility.3 2 F. C. C. Balfour, letter to his mother, SAD 303/6/56–57. 3 In Sennar, central Sudan (Kenyon, Spirits and Slaves), fertility is a less prominent concern of zār than it is in Hofriyat. Moreover, among descendants of former slaves in both Sennar and greater Khartoum, a closely related form of zār, zār tumbura (Makris, Changing Masters),

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While zār ceremonies appear to have been modeled on zikrs,4 the two have grown apart and were firmly distinguished in twenty-first-century Sudan. Those who consider themselves pious Muslims condemn the zār as un-Islamic; those who follow conservative forms of Islam are dubious of zikrs, too. Zār’s reduced status in Sudanese Islam owes much to the promotion of religious conservatism under British colonial rule. According to Pamela Constantinides, zār likely arrived in Sudan around the time of the Ottoman conquest (1820–1821), and by the time of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1898) had grown so popular that it was seen as a threat to orthodox, legalistic Islam.5 It was denounced by Al-Azhar-trained religious scholars (ulama) whom the British appointed to official posts in a bid to promote mosquebased Islam and stem the tides of charismatic zeal.6 British officers and Egyptian ulama viewed zār as an irrational practice that marked Sudanese women, its main adherents, as even more “backward” than Sudanese men who followed Sufi paths. This chapter provides some background on the northern Sudanese zār bori, then discusses its implications as a form of historical reason and ethnographic practice. Zayrān bori evoke external human forces that have impinged on northern lives in the past. By filling an intellectual space that surrounds local women (and men) but leaves their own ethnographic setting unmarked – save in its breach – zayrān both encompass and encourage reflection on everyday life. My discussion focuses on zār in rural northern Sudan: villages and towns of Ja’ali Arabic speakers whose forebears were freeborn, not enslaved.7 Much here recapitulates earlier work8 but goes further in two directions: in mapping parallels between zayrān and generic and occasionally specific colonial figures whose names and proclivities are recorded in texts, and in developing the thought that zār furnishes an addresses issues to do with subaltern social status to an extent not seen in the rural north. There is, however, considerable overlap between bori and tumbura forms. 4 Constantinides, “Sickness and the Spirits”; Makris, Changing Masters. 5 Constantinides, “Sickness and the Spirits.” 6 North Sudan was a colony of Ottoman Egypt from 1821 to 1882–1884, when a charismatic Muslim leader Mohammad Ahmad, who claimed to be the Islamic Mahdi (awaited one), gradually succeeded in overthrowing Egyptian rule. The Mahdist state was (re)conquered by British and Egyptian troops between 1896 and 1898. British officials considered Mahdism a political threat and sought to stamp it out; officials remained wary of enthusiastic religious expression (Islamic or Christian) throughout the colonial period (1898–1955). 7 On zār among descendants of former slaves, see Kenyon, Spirits and Slaves; Makris, Changing Masters. 8 Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits and Civilizing Women.

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animate archive of villagers’ experiences with successive colonial regimes. Zār is many things, and for women of my acquaintance is now in steep decline; here I focus on its former creative potential as an expressive historical genre that for many is now part of history itself.

Zār bori9 For followers of zār bori the term “zār” refers at once to a type of “spirit,” for lack of a better English word, as well as the illness such spirits induce by taking possession of humans, and the rites by which the spirits may be appeased.10 Although ulama regard the zār with disfavor, they subscribe, as all Muslims do, to the foundations on which it rests, for zayrān are said to belong to the jinn, a class of ethereal beings whose existence the Quran affirms.11 Jinn inhabit a world similar in structure to that of humans: they belong to “nations,” ethnic groups, religions, classes, and are distinguished by sex and age. Their reality is contiguous with and overlies our own but is invisible to humans most of the time. Like humans, jinn are sentient beings created by God. But where humans are composed of mud, i.e., water plus earth, jinn are made of complementary elements, air or wind and fire. According to Hofriyati, jinn live longer than humans but are nonetheless bound by nature and social contract; they are born, have childhoods, grow up, marry, reproduce, live in families, and ultimately die. Yet they have some exceptional abilities. They can move unimpeded through walls and doors, transform themselves into animals, take human form. They can possess human bodies at will, signaling their presence by triggering illness, 9 The material in this section is abridged from “Wombs and Alien Spirits” (Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits) and has appeared in other of my publications describing zār. 10 Zār takes two forms in northern Sudan: zār bori and zār ṭumbura (Zenkovsky, “Zar and Tambura”; Kenyon, “The Story of a Tin Box,” “Zar as Modernization,” Five Women of Sennar, and Spirits and Slaves; Makris, Changing Masters). The former, linked to bori practices in northern Nigeria and Niger (Masquelier, Prayer Has Spoiled Everything), is practiced mainly by northern riverain Arabs and commonly known there as zār. Tumbura, however, is regarded as at least partly indigenous, associated with descendants of former slaves and subaltern groups. Makris (Changing Masters, passim) writes of a flexible “zār cult complex,” in that some spirits and ritual forms may be present in both. Variants of zār can be found in Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia, Arabia, and Iran (Constantinides, “Sickness and the Spirits” and “The History of the Zar.” See also Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits). There is some evidence that zār is also practiced in the Maghreb (Cloudsley, Women of Omdurman, 75), and offshore islands in Iran (Moghaddam, “Zâr Beliefs”). 11 See Suras 6, 17, 18, 34, 37, 46, 55, 72, and 114.

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disturbing visions, or dreams. Some jinn are “black” or malevolent and cause grave disease and mental distress; these must be exorcised according to Islamic conventions. Other jinn are “white” or benign and their presence may hardly be noticed. Then there are zayrān, or red jinn. These are capricious pleasure seekers, amoral and mischievous, who most of the time remain “above” (fowq) their human hosts, exerting constant pressure on their heads or necks, eliciting in them certain moods, bodily sensations, and desires whose import can be deciphered with the aid of zār specialists, the shaykhat.12 Especially during ceremonies, however, zayrān enter the bodies of their hosts, displacing their persons, acting in their stead, and mingling with other spirits and people who are not being actively possessed. Someone overcome by a zār is said to be ghabiyāna – absent, in trance, a term also used for Sufis in the throes of religious bliss. The zār possessed seldom become ghabiyān spontaneously; rather, one must learn to achieve this state in order to negotiate an appropriate relationship with her intrusive zār or zayrān. As adepts put it, one must learn how not to resist a zār’s attempts to enter the human realm through the vehicle of her body. Local notions about women’s passively receptive role in sexual intercourse are tacit here; moreover, a woman should be married before she publicly acknowledges she is possessed. When I researched zār in rural northern Sudan, men told me that the proper way to deal with a bothersome jinn was to dislodge it by exorcism and force. Women, however, claimed that red jinn cannot be got rid of at all, insisting that if one’s illness is caused by a zār no amount of Islamic or Western medicine will effect a cure.13 Attempts to exorcise a zār merely intensify one’s condition. The best to be hoped for is a remission of symptoms, and this, only if the afflicted agrees to propitiate the as-yet-unidentified zār by holding a “party” (ḥafla) in its honor. Having agreed, she may start to recover, but she is nonetheless forever possessed: “inda zār,” they say, “she has [a] zār.” During the ceremony, which may take place long after the initial illness has resolved, the patient or “bride of the zār” (arūs az-zār) enters a contractual relationship with the spirit responsible for her troubled health. 12 Feminine plural of shaykh. There are male zār specialists, too, but they are less common than female and more typical of zār ṭumbura than zār bori. 13 Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits. Interestingly, this is similar to the situations of men and women in a marriage: while men may divorce an unwanted wife at will, women usually must accommodate themselves to the marriage, however unhappy it may be.

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But first the identity of the intruder must be revealed. This is achieved by observing the patient’s response to drummed refrains specific to each zār and nation of zayrān. Every spirit has a personal chant, known as its “thread” (khayṭ). During a ceremony these threads are “pulled” (drummed and sung) one after another according to a schedule of spirit nations that begins with Islamic holy men – the dervishes or darawīsh.14 When a spirit is named in a thread, it “descends” (nazal), should it wish, into its hosts where it can interact for a time with humans and earlier summoned zayrān. The quick bobbing motion described by the British officer is called nizūl or “descent,” a term also connoting submission and revelation. Nizūl is performed from a kneeling or sitting position and is the first indication that a spirit has arrived. The atmosphere is lively, each woman’s movements becoming quicker as she enters trance and a spirit takes control. If she has already sponsored a ceremony she may rise to her feet, manifesting her zār with uncovered head and face. Several participants may be possessed by a given spirit and exhibit it simultaneously. If well-behaved the spirit relinquishes their bodies when its “thread” concludes and the beat shifts to that of another zār. But a novice’s spirit is rarely so tame. At some point during nizūl, she will suddenly throw aside her cover and fall to the ground. The spirit has arrived. Now its name – usually, but not always that of the thread being sung at the time – can be announced and its demands ascertained. Likewise, if an established spirit is tenacious and reluctant to quit, the curer encourages it to speak. In either case, the zār is asked to state its desires, and the shaykha bargains with it if these seem extravagant. Ideally, in return for meeting some of its demands the invader agrees to relent and refrain from doing further harm. Human host and possessive zār are thence joined in enduring but uneven partnership. To some extent a woman can rely on the spirit’s compliance in restoring and maintaining her health, but only as long as she provides its requests for food, drink, and clothing particular to its identity. She must also resist flinging dust over her head in mourning (the zār resides above her and abhors dirt), associate with clean and sweet-smelling things (zayrān love perfumes and fine soaps and detest unsanitary conditions), and refrain from strong emotion (zayrān require their hosts to comport themselves with dignity in the everyday, despite making them act in unseemly ways during 14 Where I worked there were said to be seven zār nations, though in practice more than these are recognized.

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descent). Dignity is the antithesis of exposure. It is expressed through bodily restraint, a covered head, downcast eyes, and closed mouth in the presence of strangers, especially men. Its apotheosis is the infibulated, covered and protected female body, enclosed by courtyard walls and marriage to close kin. Breaching these conditions entails openness or exposure and renders a woman vulnerable to spirit attack. There is a certain irony here, for as discussed below, zayrān themselves are multiply “other” than local women. Yet they refuse to tolerate behavior in their hosts that is inconsistent with those women’s idealized selves. Here, as will be seen, they echo British colonial masters of the past. When the identity of her problematic zār is known, a woman must agree to attend the zār rituals of others whenever she can so that her spirit has regular access to the human world. Spirits regard such invitations as their due and are apt to become petulant and dangerous if neglected or put off. Zayrān are hedonists with an insatiable taste for human finery, a disgust of dirt and bad smells, and no taste for local fare. Once granted their desires, zayrān should confine their appearance to ceremonies where they can frolic and be entertained. But a violation of any negotiated provision exposes a woman to relapse. Alleviating possession illness is a matter of cultivating reciprocity between spirit and human host; their relationship, like that between spouses, should be one of complementarity, exchange, and mutual adaptation. Indeed, possession enables a woman to negotiate indirectly with her husband, before whom she (but not her zār) is expected to be shy and reserved, for it is her husband who is responsible for funding her spirits’ requests. Over the course of their lives, women typically accumulate several zayrān who may belong to different zār nations. In this way possession thickens domestic relations, adding to them a layer of invisible foreign “kin” intimately attached to human persons, weaving new dimensions of relatedness into the already dense network of social ties that the preference for lineage and spatial endogamy entails. I noted, however, that the social and cultural traits of zayrān differ considerably from those of their hosts. While local humans prefer endogamy, zayrān practice exogamy, even interfaith, interethnic, and inter-racial marriage. Their genealogies are “transnational” avant la lettre. Hedonistic, impulsive, capricious and amoral, and altogether socially other, they obliquely reveal to northern Sudanese what they are not or ought not to be. Yet in doing so, zayrān provide their hosts perspectives on the world that they historically and ethnographically share.

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Distorted reflections: Time, being, and space The identities of spirits, their distinctive antics and demands, reveal the richness and complexity of the zār as a resource for life and thought, its capacity – worked out through the bodies of women it claims – to comment on both contemporary situations and the wider historical challenges that northern Sudanese have faced. The pantheon of zayrān is a chronicle of powers that have impinged on peoples of the Upper Nile, especially under the Turko-Egyptian, Mahdist, and Anglo-Egyptian regimes, but also since. Although the roster of spirits varies from place to place in Sudan, the majority of zayrān are analogues of powerful strangers, usually but not exclusively male, who have affected Arabic-speaking Sudanese in memorable ways. Since the zār world asymmetrically twins the human, an individual, living or dead, may have a zār facsimile whose name and traits partly align with his own. I stress that these are not ghosts, spirits who were once attached to humans who have died, but are complementary creatures from the start. Zayrān belong to “foreign” groups that invisibly parallel divisions of the human world, such that differences among spirit “nations” (dowlā), “races” (jinis), or “types” (noca) correspond roughly to those among human societies. Both nations and the individual spirits within them are identified by style and color of dress, ceremonial demands, typical gestures and demeanor during nizūl (descent), and sometimes the illnesses they are most likely to exacerbate or provoke. For instance, an Islamic holy man zār asks for prayer beads and a spotless white gown that its host is expected to don when it descends; another darwish will favor green; both are expected to behave with the decorous restraint of (human) religious functionaries. An Abyssinian prince demands red silk robes, an ebony cane, and a coffee service every Sunday; apropos the doubled association of their nation with red (they are the red society of red winds), Ethiopian zayrān are closely linked to fertility concerns. An Egyptian ḥakīm (doctor) of the Ottoman era requires a fez and a black topcoat over a cream-colored gown. A contemporary American zār demands Nike running shoes. The ever-shifting list of spirits rehearses and fine-tunes human experience of the present and past, and serves it up in embodied spirit display. When summoned to a ritual, zayrān appear in order as their “threads” are “pulled” – drummed and chanted by assembled devotees. The sequence is ranked from first to last, from noble religious figures such as zār cAbd al-Gadir al-Jaylani whose chant is drummed near the start, through a succession of powerful yet decreasingly prestigious figures, much like humans

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in a British era parade who were marshaled by race (Europeans in the lead) and rank of government pay.15 In zār, however, Islamic figures outrank British ones. Yet even lowly “slave” spirits whose threads are drummed toward the end of the rite are impressive and alarming. Collectively zayrān comprise all that is exotic, alien to northern Sudanese of a given time and place. Zār, and by extension women’s impressions of human others in their milieu, thus provides a historical foil by which participants’ own identity – their difference in an elastic field of human and spirit actors – is exposed. Yet this is not unchanging: the pantheon of spirits and their traits is a moving backdrop, a composite social memory always sensitive to present concerns. Among the liveliest and most revealing spirits when I conducted research were the Khawajāt (Misters, Europeans, Westerners) or Naṣarīn (Christians, Nazarenes), and Bashawāt (Pashas or high officials, including Europeans, Turks, and Egyptians). Colonial zayrān include Al-Wardi Karoma (Lord Cromer), a zār overly fond of rum and cigarettes whose generosity is implored. There is also Nimr al-Khala, Leopard of the Desert, who, like Lord Kitchener or Governor General Wingate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rides a fine steed and travels by steamboat on the Nile. Even the martyred General Gordon is represented, in the form of Gordel, a zār who requires a khaki uniform, high leather boots, and a Turkish fez.16 Nimr al-Khala was much in evidence at the zārs I attended in the mid 1970s and 1980s, but Gordel and Karoma did not show up; women claimed the two were still “above” them but they had “retired” from active service in the zār. Zayrān described below appeared also during my visit in 1994 after the Islamist regime that seized power in 1989 had begun to suppress the zār, a move that intensified thereafter but may be waning since the revolution of 2019. Islamist officials objected that zār is bidca, religious innovation. Perhaps more importantly, its rites attract animated crowds that defied police curfews and assembly laws According to Susan Kenyon, the Bashawāt category came to include Islamist government ministers,17 a telling addition given that spirits are characteristically “other” than those they possess, a reflection, perhaps, of the growing social and political gap between nonelites still able to practice zār and administrators who would make them stop. 15 See Boddy, Civilizing Women, chap. 2. 16 Cf. Constantinides, “Sickness and the Spirits.” See also Zenkovsly (“Zar and Tambura,” 70), who refers to “Gowri or Kowri Pasha.” 17 Sue Kenyon, personal communication.

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Among continuing (i.e., nonretired) Bashawāt in the mid-1990s were several zār analogues of the Sudan Political Service, British colonial officers who were accompanied only rarely by their wives. Khawaja Bashawāt typically asked their hosts to wear socks and Oxford shoes, trousers, shirts, ties, military or civilian jackets, pith helmets, and Sam Browne belts. Among them was Abu Rīsh, Ya-Amir aj-Jaysh – Father of Feathers, O Commander of the Army – who demanded a white plumed helmet and gold epaulets on his uniform, echoing the governor general’s formal dress, an ornate version of the livery worn by British rank-and-file for town rides, levees, and official parades: “white helmet with gilt spike and chinstrap, replaced in the evening by the tarbush, gold-laced overalls, a double-breasted white jacket with gilt loops and epaulets, with gilt rank indications on the sleeves.”18 Intriguingly, the name Abu Rīsh appears in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historical accounts. According to one source, he was a member of a Hamaj lineage, Awlad Abu Likaylik, who were regents to the pre-Ottoman Funj royal house in Sennar.19 Another source places Abu Rīsh as a son of Shayhk Ahmad bin al-Radi of the Rufa’a tribe and member of the family known as “Abu Jinn” who lived in the Ethiopian borderlands during the early nineteenth century.20 The use of the name for a prototypical British governor general may owe as much to the latter’s feathered helmet as to knowledge of a human Abu Rīsh. Still, ancestors of people in Shendi region where I learned about this zār had fled to the Ethiopian frontier after their leader, Mek Nimr (another Nimr Al-Khala?) arranged for the murders of Ibrahim, son of the Ottoman Khedive Mohammed cAli, and his entourage in 1822. Such collapsing of names, times, and power figures is common in the zār, part of the creative bricolage that keeps local history relevant and alive. Another high British official zār, Basha-t-cAdil, “the Just Pasha,” was the Sikritayr al-Madani, the “civil secretary” who managed a large group of personnel. The human civil secretary was second only to the governor general in rank and led the political service in Sudan. The job of Basha-tcAdil was likewise absorbing and busy, with many concerns, one of them building railways. Basha-t-cAdil frequently traveled by train and was often conflated with the railroad engineer, a lesser ranked Khawaja zār. By the 1980s in Hofriyat, Basha-t-cAdil had acquired a hybrid costume: European 18 Frost, “Memories of the Sudan,” 74–75. For an analogous example from northern Ghana, see Jean Rouch’s film Les maîtres fous. See also Stoller, Fusion of the Worlds. 19 “Survivals of the Fung,” SAD 478/4/66, Henderson files. 20 Spaulding, The Heroic Age, 389.

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business suit, peaked cap, and large whistle worn on a string around the neck. British zayrān announce their arrival by marching, walking with a pronounced swagger and imperious mien, twirling their moustaches, and pointing with batons, horsehair fly swats, or hooked canes. An exception to this was Basha Bashīr (Good News Pasha or Evangelist Pasha), a corpulent colonial zār who loathed the hot sun, found desert travel a torment, and moved with ponderous fatigue. Bashīr constantly used a handkerchief to mop his sweaty brow; his human host wore a towel over her shoulder, ready for a cooling dip in the Nile. Basha Bashīr may be the counterpart of a well-known Church Missionary Society cleric, Bishop Gwynne, who arrived in Khartoum in 1900 as part of the Gordon Memorial Mission dedicated to converting Muslim Sudanese. Foiled by the government’s ban on proselytizing in the north, Gwynne founded a Christian school for girls (now Unity High School in Khartoum), optimistic that Muslim daughters would attend; by capturing the souls of Sudan’s future mothers he hoped to win their sons for Christ.21 Several Khawaja zayrān love to hunt. In zār poetics, the avocation is a veiled warning of the dangers human and spirit Khawajas pose to female Sudanese: In Hofriyat, for instance, the spirit Dona Bey, Mudīr at-Turca (Dona Bey, Governor of the Channels), was an American doctor and big game hunter who drinks vast amounts of whiskey and beer, wears a khaki suit (sometimes a white lab coat), and totes an elephant gun.22 As a hunter and a physician associated with canals, Dona Bey is clearly a composite figure. He may be the zār echo of a Mr. Dunwoodie, radiographer at Khartoum Hospital during the 1930s,23 or a British engineer known as Dun Bey who took part in early swamp-clearing expeditions on the White Nile, or perhaps Leigh Hunt, an American who in 1906 launched an irrigation scheme at Zeidab, on the west bank of the Nile just north of the village. The lab coat recalls too the work of the Wellcome Tropical Laboratories mobile unit, which was mounted in a steamer and sent to collect samples from the White Nile swamps, where crocodiles and hippos abound.24 Dona Bey is fierce, though his prey are scarcely fitting, for unlike most great white hunters he pursues sacid, tiny desert antelope known elsewhere in East Africa as dik-dik (genus Madoqua or Rhynchotragus). Sacid are 21 Boddy, Civilizing Women, part 1. 22 Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits, 289. 23 Squires, The Sudan Medical Service, 87 24 Boddy, Civilizing Women.

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described as beautiful, with soft smooth fur and large dark eyes; in the past, villagers sometimes kept them as pets. Comely young women are likened to sacids. Given that Sudanese women are emblematic of and charged with maintaining the homeland (nation, village, camp, or home), Khawajas’ fondness for the hunt intimates a threat to the integrity of local society writ large. Unsurprisingly, Dona Bey has a lecherous disposition. Moreover, he destroys what he most desires by using technology excessive to his needs. In a related vein, one shaykha I knew regularly dreamt of the female Ethiopian zār “Ḥamāma-t-al-Bahr” (Pigeon of the River) being shot at by Khawaja zayrān on the banks of the Nile. Colonial officials often enthused over weekend shooting parties on the Nile where they “bagged” huge numbers of water birds, far more than they could ever use for food. The enormity of their destruction would not have failed to impress Sudanese. One district commissioner (DC) wrote of a day in the early 1950s when, together with a French baron who was traveling in the governor general’s “yacht,” he shot one hundred sand grouse before breakfast, and rounded out the day with six Nile geese and four ducks after lunch.25 Like the sacid, ḥamāma (pigeon) is a common metaphor for an infibulated Sudanese woman: pharaonic circumcision is said to make a woman’s genitals “as smooth as a pigeon’s back” (nacim zay aḍ-ḍuhr al-ḥamāma).26 Circumcised women are ṭahir (pure) and naḍīf (clean), words also used to describe domestic doves. During my fieldwork villagers preferred ḥamām over chicken as food, referring to the latter as laḥma waskhāna (dirty meat), a term they also used to describe the genital flesh removed from girls at circumcision. Infibulated young women were not only pure, but as such, marriageable. And when attending a village wedding unmarried girls would speak of themselves as “pigeons going to market,” on display for prospective suitors who could see them perform the sensuous “pigeon dance.” But while the associations between pigeons and nubile Sudanese women are dense and clear, Ḥamāma-t-al-Bahr confounds them all, for she is an Abyssinian prostitute zār. As such she can only feign the delicate dance of a moral, sexually reserved, circumcised Sudanese woman. Ḥamāma-t-al-Bahr in possession of one who is indeed a nubile Sudanese woman who performs 25 Arthur letters, SAD 726/6/12. 26 Thanks to Rogaia Abusharaf (personal communication) for this additional information, and confirmation that the “pigeon” metaphor is widespread in Arab Sudan. My earlier discussions had been based on research conducted in a three-village area of the north, and did not attempt to generalize. See Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits.

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the local “pigeon dance,” can only produce exaggerated steps that invariably give the zār away.27 Deportment and attire are crucial to creating and maintaining identity for northern Arab Sudanese, as they were for British officials who ruled them for more than 50 years. In colonial times, demeanor and dress declared one’s basic ethnicity and were subject to discipline if they did not. For instance, Yusuf Bedri, son of the distinguished educationalist Babikir Bedri, “vividly recalled” when, on his way to school one day at the age of twelve, he was confronted by the DC and rebuked for “wearing European shoes, not marcoub, the locally produced shoes.” He said, “Why are you wearing these?” […] I said, “These were given to me by my brother who bought them from a shop.” He sent me back in a furious temper to change my shoes and put on my marcoub, the native shoes. By the time I got back to school, I found the whole school paraded. […] Every boy wearing European shoes was sent home to change into Sudanese shoes.28 Where the British imposed intelligibility, Sudanese aspired to modernity; who one is depends in part on practice: one assumes an identity by enacting it, indeed by wearing it. The zār repeatedly shows this, too, but indirectly and with notable lability. In zār identity is inconstant, shifting, and people may not always be who they seem. Unlike human British who forced their subjects into ethnic and racial categories they defined in primordial terms, identity in the zār is mutable, contextually nuanced. Moreover, zār rites are commemorative. Decades after the last colonial officer left Sudan, the figures of British zayrān periodically materialize in domestic space, refreshing people’s memories of the colonial experience, keeping these meaningful in ways that make local sense. The powers of Inglizi civil secretaries and governors general are recalled, tapped, and enlisted to ends that officials themselves deplored: being other than one’s authentic self. Not all Khawājas and Bashas are government officials. Birulu, Lord of the Chains, is a nineteenth-century European slave concessionaire portrayed as 27 She is similar in these respects to Luliya Habishiya (Luliya the Abyssinian), an extremely popular spirit who wears a multicolored rahat (maiden’s skirt) and attempts to perform the exacting northern Sudanese bridal dance, but fails to pass muster by opening her eyes and peering at the audience, something a bashful young bride would never do. See Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits, 282–283. “Luliya” is a diminutive of Lu’ul, meaning Pearl, a name typically given to slaves (many of whom were their masters’ concubines). 28 Deng and Daly, Bonds of Silk, 102.

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driving a long line of sorry shackled wares to markets in the north. There are also Greek, Jewish, and Armenian traders whose human counterparts brought European goods to Sudan well in advance of Anglo-Egyptian troops. More: there are bespectacled archeologists, British and Syrian doctors, Italian soldiers (analogues of prisoners taken on the border with Ethiopia in World War II), Catholic nuns and priests, a Coptic monk who flies in an airplane and an English zār who pilots it, even a spirit called Kahrabā (Electricity). There is a British zār who demands a good mattress, another who chain-smokes Benson & Hedges while riding around in a taxi. There is also Hashīra, a well-laced English gentlewoman who gazes disdainfully through the window of her railway carriage as it crosses the Blue Nile Bridge to Khartoum while Sudanese farmers labor in the blistering sun on the banks below. Note the prevalent themes of colonial encounter: the role of the railway in conquering Sudan, the elevated position of the colonial wife, the marvels and humiliations of Western technology, British privilege, indulgence, and apparent indifference to Sudanese. In his book, The River War (1899), Winston Churchill described how, when building the desert railway through northern Sudan in order to facilitate the area’s conquest, troops encamped at the railhead were replenished: Every morning in the remote nothingness there appeared a black speck growing larger and clearer, until with a whistle and a welcome clatter, amid the aching silence of ages, the “material” train arrived, carrying its own water and 2,500 yards of rails, sleepers, and accessories. At noon came another speck, developing in a similar manner into a supply train, also carrying its own water, food and water for the half-battalion of the escort and the 2,000 artificers and platelayers, and the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whiskey, soda-water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort.29 If the woman holding a zār is well off, a sequence called mayz (mess) may be staged for assembled Khawajāt. A table is set up, covered with a cloth, laid with forks and knives, and surrounded by wooden or metal chairs. The offerings are “typical” European fare: Churchill’s sausages, biscuits, hard cheeses, olives, sardines, jam, white baguettes, exotic fruits such as apples and cherries, bottles of Pepsi and Fanta, and before the sharica prohibitions of 1983, beer, sherry, and – most essential – whiskey. Khawāja spirits would 29 Churchill, The River War, 175.

Anthropological Spirits and Colonial Consciousness in Ar abic-Speaking Sudan

be invited to eat and drink and smoke cigarettes. They would sit on the chairs or circle the table, chatting in “English” or “Italian” or “Greek,” tasting the food and sipping the tipple, enacting, as Pamela Constantinides writes, a Sudanese “image of Europeans.”30 Khawāja spirits require the trappings of European modernity to “be” themselves: imported soap, whiskey and soda, socks and shoes, jars of jam, helmets. They are partial to electric fans, air conditioning, swimming pools, trains, cars, airplanes, other Europeans, churches, and bars. Khawajāt are wealthy, arrogant, and very often drunk. Here zār furnished an inverted and perhaps unwitting parody of Sudan Political Service conceits: its principles of self-sacrifice, martyrdom, the compulsory asceticism of its recruits. In the zār hedonism, selfishness, and irreverence reign supreme. To colonial British, of course, the zār exemplified northern women’s heterodoxy and excess; but for the women colonized it supplied an implicit critique of British self-importance, intemperance, and zeal. Equally, however, zār enabled a subtle if equivocal embrace of “modernity,” a trying-on of other selves31 that in the process invariably affirmed the value, indeed the essence, of one’s own. In the context of the zār, gender and colonial subjectivities, hierarchy and difference intersect: a Sudanese woman might be a prosperous Khawāja one minute, a Muslim cleric or lowly slave the next. But ideally she returned to herself when the thread was “let go” and the rhythm changed to that of another zār. She’d come back refreshed, participants said, with renewed awareness of herself and the outside world. In this sense, zār served as more than a continually revised narrative of foreign contact; in facilitating cultural comparison through participant observation it was also an indigenous ethnography.

Tribes and “unconscious anthropologists” During the 1920s, British policy in Sudan shifted firmly to “indirect rule” or governing through native leaders, in the belief that “tribes” might be reconstituted if no longer politically viable, or prevented from disintegrating if they were on the point of collapse. A memorandum circulated by the civil secretary’s office in 1924 spoke of the DC’s task “as that of ‘regenerating the 30 Constantinides, “Sickness and the Spirits,” 202. 31 Lambek, “The Continuous and Discontinuous Person.”

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tribal soul.’”32 Officials were convinced that authoritarian tribal structures had characterized even acephalous groups in the past and, with proper nurturing, their remnants might “develop and perhaps in time […] give birth to genuine ‘chiefs.’” Thus, “it became one of the major duties of DCs to discover by research this ‘ancient governing organisation,’ and if possible to revive it.”33 In the 1950s as the Condominium drew to a close the civil secretary’s office declared, “The effect of these reforms was not only to restore but also to increase the prestige of tribalism.”34 Tribes that had “lost” their “coherence” were considered casualties of the Mahdiya, the slave trade, or both. Granted, such events had disrupted social alignments; yet the idea that there had ever existed a stable set of discrete social entities is difficult to defend.35 More problematic still is the notion that “tribes” so defined (rather than, say, family, village, or herding group) had ever provided Sudanese with their vital affiliations, leadership, and self-worth.36 Nonetheless, most challenges to colonial governance, from crime, to snags in the implementation of indirect rule, to the glimmerings of Sudanese nationalism, were put down to the calamity of “detribalization.” Tribal institutions were held to provide a “stable foundation” for rule; “detribalization” was a synonym for trouble and unrest.37 The desire for precision in classifying subjects remained strong to the end of the Condominium. In preparation for its only census undertaken in 1955–1956 just as independence was declared, a circular entitled “Tribes of the Sudan” codified peoples in descending order of race, groups of tribes, sub-group, tribe, sub-tribe. While conceding that such divisions “are bound to cease having their original importance sooner or later,” the document states it is the government’s aim to enumerate the population by “race” and “tribe.” Yet the list includes several queries. Should the contemporary Fung (Funj) be classed as “Race I, Arab” or “Race III, Negroid”? Should the Gaafra be included in “Arab, Miscellaneous Central,” and if not, where?38 Such doubts and a desire for (ever elusive) clarity suggest why ethnographic research was encouraged by colonial authorities, whose needs 32 Sanderson and Sanderson, Education, Religion and Politics, 124. 33 Ibid., 124. 34 “Feature no. 253, The Position of Tribal Leaders in the Life of the Sudan.” Civil Secretary’s Office, July 16, 1953. SAD 519/5/20 (Robertson). 35 See, for instance, Asad, Introduction to Anthropology; James, “The Funj Mystique.” 36 Robertson SAD 519/5/20–20b. 37 See Collins, Shadows in the Grass, chap. 8. 38 “Tribes of the Sudan,” n.d., SAD 403/10/29–41 (MacMichael), emphasis mine.

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stimulated and helped shape “the infant industry of anthropology,” in Robert Collins’ phrase.39 Ethnographic inquiries were most required in the south where the British confronted a confusing array of “primitive” peoples who, ruthlessly exploited by prior regimes, were disposed to defend themselves against this latest invasion of “Turks.” Good administration, it was believed, “was largely a matter of applied social anthropology.”40 All DCs should attend to the “ethnological side of their work” because, wrote the governor of Bahr al-Ghazal in 1923, “one of the surest means of gaining the confidence and respect of savage people is to learn as much as possible of their sociology, their life histories, social organization, folklore, songs, etc.” He drew his staff’s “attention to Notes and Queries on Anthropology which will be found valuable as a guide and assistance,” and offered to obtain copies for those who lacked them “as soon as the new consignment has arrived.”41 The “ethnological side” also warranted expert help. In January 1929, the civil secretary (Harold MacMichael) wrote to the financial secretary, defending his plan to hire a permanent government anthropologist. Government, he noted, had already granted funds “to enable Mr. Evans-Pritchard to carry out his researches” and “assist Professor Seligman […] [with his] anthropological survey of this country.” And Evans-Pritchard was required as “a condition of the grant” to furnish government with “a report of his studies […] suitable for the use of administrative officials.” Anthropology, MacMichael was convinced, “is a science of vital importance to the European administrator of primitive peoples.”42 [Anthropology] is concerned with the study of the social structure, customs, beliefs and ways of thought of the races of mankind. Some understanding of these will be conceded to be an essential equipment of the administrator responsible for the tutelage of primitive races whose mental processes are not as ours. Between the mind of the educated European with its heritage of some centuries of occidental civilization and that of the primitive savage a great gulf is fixed which the former can bridge hardly and with patient study only. But unless that gulf is bridged with at least a slender span, there is little hope of really constructive administration of the primitive by the European. 39 Collins, Shadows in the Grass, 165. 40 Sanderson and Sanderson, Education, Religion and Politics, 179. 41 Wheatley to D. C. Wau, November 22, 1923. SAD 403/9/1 (MacPhail). 42 MacMichael to Financial Secretary, January 10, 1929. SOAS (Arkell Papers) MS 210522/2/1/1.

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So much is this an axiom, that the well-intentioned administrator has at all times been compelled by force of circumstances to become an amateur though possibly unconscious anthropologist.43 “Tribalism” is also, of course, salient to the zār, which provides an experiential ethnology to the possessed and affirms Evans-Pritchard’s remark that ethnography is a branch of history.44 The nations of zayrān include not only Europeans, Egyptians, and Turks, but groups from what is now South Sudan – Azande (Nyam Nyam), Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk – plus French-speaking spirits from Equatorial Africa (CAR), and Nuba from Kordofan. These nations are referred to as cAbīd (Slaves), Khuddām (Servants), or Zurūg (Blacks): nonbelievers whom Muslims (and Europeans) once captured and enslaved. The most virulent and powerful of such spirits belong to a separate nation called Saḥār, cannibal sorcerers, said to be Azande. The “Soudanese” troops (freed southern slaves) in the army that Kitchener led to Omdurman were described by British soldiers as “reformed cannibals”45; Azande have long been feared for their witchcraft and dietary preferences by women in the north. Zurūg and Saḥār symbolize primitiveness and brutishness in the zār, as do their requests: scant black loincloths, animal hides, and for the Nuer leopard-skin priest zâr, a spotted cape. Some demand their hosts go naked, and observers are often required to prevent the possessed from removing their clothes during trance. Male Zurūg zayrān require long spears on which to lean with one leg crooked, as in photographs in Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940).46 Or they ask for ebony walking sticks and clay pipes – caricaturistic trappings of southern Sudanese. Female Zurūg zayrān demand mortar stones on which to grind grain, an arduous task and one that was abandoned with alacrity by nineteenth-century women of the Muslim bourgeoisie when slave-owning became widespread in the north.47 Most female Zurūg are also prostitute zayrān, not unlike the Ethiopian Ḥamāma-t-al-Bahr. In the human world, British colonial officials believed that female slaves would invariably become prostitutes if freed, which justified refusal to liberate them: on the colonial evolutionary scale, southerners ranked as savages, and inherently immoral and corrupt. Yet 43 Ibid. 44 Evans-Pritchard, Essays in Social Anthropology. 45 Alford and Sword, The Egyptian Soudan, [1] 116. 46 Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer. 47 Spaulding, The Heroic Age, 193.

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fugitive bondswomen had few means other than prostitution to survive. Khuddām (servants), as female slave zayrān are generally known – echoing British euphemisms – request rahaṭs, short leather thong skirts described as “boot-lace fringe”48 once worn by northern Sudanese girls before marriage. Spirits’ rahaṭs, however, are garishly multicolored, not monochromatic magenta like those of human wearers. And in contrast to modest Sudanese girls, the spirits simper and act flirtatiously when summoned during rites. Their dress presumes the spirits’ clientele to be Arab Sudanese by invoking the “cutting the rahaṭ” rite in which the groom publicly announces the bride’s sexual maturity by pulling several strips from her skirt. But if sexual connotation informs the spirits’ play, it invariably misfires. A Servant zār in the body of her Sudanese host might behave as if she were a northern bride, but everyone knows she is a fake. Unlike their human counterparts,49 Khuddām zayrān are invariably pagan and uncircumcised. Again a wanton spirit tries to pass as a moral, circumcised northern woman, but fails, exposing the link between female genital cutting and legitimate sexuality for northern Sudanese. Other spirit nations include the Ḥabish (Ethiopians, Abyssinians) to whom Ḥamāma-t-al-Bahr and several other zār harlots belong, as well as Ethiopian princes, Oromo warriors, and a well-bred Christian noblewoman who requires her Muslim hosts to wear a Coptic cross and perform a coffee service every Sunday beneath a shady tree. Here too is the zār Silassilay Habishi, counterpart of Haile Selassie, who spent time in Sudan during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia during WWII, and Dadaross, counterpart of King Tewodros II of Abyssinia, whose human counterpart lived from 1818 to 1868 and whose zār chant goes “ya hanna, alcab al-dowir” (Oh tender one, play the role), alluding to some long-elided episode in the spirit’s life. There are also Muslim spirits from the African west. The zār nation Fallata (for “Fula” or “Fulani”) includes spirits from the African sahel and Darfur whose human counterparts migrated to central Sudan in the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. Fallata zayrān may be Hausa refugees from early-nineteenth-century Fulani jiḥads, religious scholars from Takrur in Senegal (known as Takari or Takarin), plus Fulani, Kanuri, and Hausa who decamped when the British conquered Sokoto in northern Nigeria in 1903: as members of the Sokoto elite led their followers 48 Described thus by British troops in 1884, SAD 304/2/20 (Farley). 49 Hargey (“The Suppression of Slavery,” 70) notes that during the Mahdiya practically all female slaves were circumcised in one way or another; there is no reason to suppose the situation had changed by the reconquest.

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toward the Hijaz, they were joined by others in the emirates through which they passed. In 1906, Mai Wurno, son of the Sokoto leader Muhammad Attahiru, settled with his band of followers in a village on the Blue Nile near Sennar that came to bear his name (Maiurno). By 1912 Maiurno’s population was estimated to be 4,000; other villages were founded nearby and “Fallata” quarters soon began to appear in major towns.50 In the Gezira region, south of the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, settlements of Fallata became “labor villages,” reserves of seasonal workers paid to weed fields and pick cotton on government-managed plantations. A number of Fallata were and are pilgrims working their way to Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz. Settled or transient, they were generally welcomed by the British because they willingly undertook hard, low-paying agricultural work that Arab Sudanese abjured. Some, however, were more controversial, having come to Sudan seeking the Mahdi’s son, Sayyid cAbd al-Rahman, whom they revered. Not only were Fallata among the most devout of the postconquest Mahdists, they were also widely alleged to be slavers. Both distinctions won them British surveillance and control.51 Among the Fallata zayrān are Sarkin Bornu, the king of Bornu, who wears a stripped gown and a turban of the type worn by West African Mucallims, Muslim sages. Female Fallata are the zār analogues of women who sell perfume, peanuts, and tasali (roasted melon seeds) in rural markets and whose hygiene and morals northerners distrust. Their distinctive gold nose rings and colorful cotton wraps are Fallatiyāt zār requests. Like their human counterparts, Fallata zayrān are feared for their ability to perform c amal (“work,” that is, black magic) and sell it to the highest bidder. They are wily and mercenary but ardent Muslims and, like human Fallata, do not shrink from physical toil. Fallata pilgrim spirits are wretchedly poor and imploring, demanding that their hosts don ragged clothes and dine on plain boiled sorghum (balīla); when manifest during rituals they beg from those present in a pathetic wheedling style, “For Allah, O my sisters!” Their lack of dignity, reputation for conjuring, and apparent affinity for menial work merited human and zār Fallata disdain from northern Sudanese, while their religiosity and willingness to endure humiliation in the cause of completing the ḥajj were envied and grudgingly admired. Ironically, several women I spoke to claimed that were it not for their spirits’ costly 50 Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, 66–67; Daly Empire on the Nile, 238; O’Brien, “The Formation.” 51 “Report on the Pilgrimage and the Slave Trade,” C. A. Willis, SAD 212/3. See also Sudan government, “Memorandum on the Immigration and Distribution of West Africans in the Sudan,” Khartoum, n.d. (c. 1938).

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demands, they themselves might have massed sufficient funds to perform the ḥajj. For the settled peoples of the Nile, there are also Beja zayrān, and Hadendowa, peoples of the east, even the Kordofani Ta’ishi Baggara of the Mahdi’s army whose human counterparts became dreaded foes of main Nile villagers soon after that leader’s death. Most such zayrān belong to the “Arab” nation depicted as nomads: one is a truck driver crossing the desert, another an unwed homosexual herder who tries without success to wear his jallabiya like the modesty wrap (towb) of a woman from a northern village or town. And there is a lost Arab “boy” who runs about weeping, calling for his stolen camel (jamal), a euphemism for “clitoris,” which the spirit’s host indeed has “lost.” Sexuality, gender, morality, even female genital cutting, all are issues raised in the zār in ways that are often comical and sobering at the same time. Zayrān materialize in the bodies of infibulated northern women who are ideally dignified, virtuous, and sexually self-restrained. The powers of alien groups, whether political, religious, sexual, or all of these at once, are thus aired and contrasted with those of northern Sudanese. The ritual grants adherents limited scope to see or think otherwise about the taken for granted and mundane. In more elaborate zār episodes, the figures of the human host, her male or eccentric female spirit, and the spirit’s faltering local role-play are juxtaposed in the body of the possessed, creating for onlookers a palimpsest that provokes quotidian understandings. Yet such scenes also revivify local sympathies, as zayrān invariably fail to “pass.” Moreover, the spirits parody not men but local women, the heart of northern society. Still, zayrān who try this ploy are Ethiopian slaves, displaced Fallata, Southerners – powerful in their own right but conquered all the same. They are not the determined colonial administrators who, like Dona Bey, threaten to annihilate local girls; nor are they the zār counterparts of British gentlewomen who view Sudanese with scorn.

Critical anthropology Little did the officer know that the women he observed at the fete in Port Sudan may not have “been” women at all, but, perhaps, zār simulacra of British army officers and administrators like himself. Hidden in zār traits and feats are the possesseds’ criticisms, admirations, anxieties, and self-assurance, information that rehearses outcomes of encounters with

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social others, information of a historical and ethnographic kind. But it is also, controversially, performative fiction, an imaginative genre whose authors channel stories that emerge unbidden from within.52 In exhibiting alienness while showing its imperfections, zayrān invoke and endorse the normative world of Arab women, the household, the everyday. Yet zayrān compel their hosts to concede the deficiencies of their world. Like all good fiction zār jogs participants out of complacency, adds layers of intelligibility to human lives, and may plant seeds of social and personal change. Northern Sudanese women’s possession rites filter, interpret, and obliquely put to use evidence of the world beyond courtyard walls – passed on to women by men when the former are unable to observe for themselves.53 They suggest how to handle spirit or human foreigners materializing in villagers’ midst: be cautious, but willing to bargain when dealing with those ostensibly more powerful in some ways than oneself. They advise too that there are more ways to be human than those which villagers espouse. Zār makes such inferences available by mobilizing history: traces of the past kept alive in women’s perspectival, embodied archive of the spirit world.

References Archives SAD: Sudan Archive, Durham University. SOAS: School of Oriental and African Studies Archives, London.

Bibliography Alford, Henry S. L., and W. Denniston Sword. The Egyptian Soudan, Its Loss and Recovery. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1898]. Asad, Talal, ed. Introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press, 1973. Boddy, Janice. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. —. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 52 Much as Stephen King (On Writing) describes the process of writing novels. 53 Thanks to Wendy James for suggesting this clarification.

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Churchill, Winston. The River War: The Sudan, 1898. Sevenoaks: Sceptre, 1987 [1899]. Cloudsley, Ann. Women of Omdurman: Life, Love, and the Cult of Virginity. London: Ethnographica, 1983. Collins, Robert O. Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918–1956. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Constantinides, Pamela. “The History of the Zar in Sudan.” In Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond, edited by I. M. Lewis, Ahmed al-Safi, and Sayyid Hurreiz, 83–99. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 1991. —. “Sickness and the Spirits: A Study of the ‘Zar’ Spirit Possession Cult in the Northern Sudan.” PhD diss., University of London, 1972. Daly, M. W. Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1898–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Deng, Francis M., and M. W. Daly, eds. Bonds of Silk: The Human Factor in the British Administration of the Sudan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Essays in Social Anthropology. London: Faber & Faber, 1962. —. The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940. Frost, John W. “Memories of the Sudan Civil Service.” In The British in the Sudan, 1898–1956: The Sweetness and the Sorrow, edited by Robert O. Collins and Francis M. Deng, 65–103. London: Macmillan, 1984. Hargey, Taj M. “The Suppression of Slavery in the Sudan, 1898–1939.” DPhil diss., St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, 1981. James, Wendy. “The Funj Mystique: Approaches to a Problem of Sudan History.” In Text and Context: The Social Anthropology of Tradition, edited by Ravindra K. Jain, 95–133. Philadelphia: ISHI, 1977. Kenyon, Susan M. Five Women of Sennar: Culture and Change in Central Sudan. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2004 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991]. —. Spirits and Slaves in Central Sudan: The Red Wind of Sennar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. —. “The Story of a Tin Box.” In Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond, edited by I. M. Lewis, A. al-Safi, and S. Hurreiz, 100–117. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 1991. —. “Zar as Modernization in Contemporary Sudan.” Anthropological Quarterly 68/2 (1995): 107–120. King, Stephen. On Writing. New York: Scribner, 1997.

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Lambek, Michael. “The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19 (2013): 837–858. Makris, G. P. Changing Masters: Spirit Possession and Identity Construction among Slave Descendants and Other Subordinates in the Sudan. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Masquelier, Adeline. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Moghaddam, Maria S. “Zâr Beliefs and Practices in Bandar Abbâs and Qeshm Island in Iran.” Anthropology of the Middle East 7/2 (2012): 19–38. O’Brien, Jay. “The Formation of the Agricultural Labour Force in Sudan.” Review of African Political Economy 26/1 (1983): 15–34. Sanderson, L. Passmore, and G. M. Sanderson. Education, Religion and Politics in the Southern Sudan 1899–1964. London: Ithaca, 1981. Sikainga, Ahmad A. Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Spaulding, Jay. The Heroic Age in Sinnar. East Lansing: African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1985. Squires, H. C. The Sudan Medical Service: An Experiment in Social Medicine. London: William Heinemann, 1958. Stoller, Paul. Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Zenkovsky, Sophie. “Zar and Tambura as Practised by the Women of Omdurman.” Sudan Notes and Records 31/1 (1950): 65–81.

21 From Illness to Trance The Socialization of Spirit Possession in Senegal f András Zempléni

Keywords: Wolof, rab, ndëpp, spirit possession, illness, trance, adorcism, incubus, nomination, feminization, history, self

Christian and Muslim models of demonic possession to be eradicated through exorcism have long blinded observers of the multifarious phenomena called “spirit possession.” That is why it may be useful to present in this book an entirely different approach found in many African and South American possession rites. Instead of expelling the possessing agent, these rituals initiate a cyclical and beneficial exchange with it. Far from unknown, this type of process had been first described in the second half of the twentieth century mainly by French by ethnologists such as Pierre Verger (1951), Michel Leiris (1958), Alfred Métraux (1958), Luc de Heusch (1971) and other authors following them, including myself.1 Here, I will illustrate this approach through the Senegalese rituals called samp and ndëpp, which convert pathological possession by ancestral spirits into ritual possession by the latter called rab. In doing so, I will also highlight some Wolof data that confirm, qualify or – why not – contradict some arguments I put forward in my general introduction to this book. Thus, we encounter from the beginning the universal problem of discernment. If you have a confidential conversation with a Senegalese man or woman about his or her life, you will sooner or later hear the words rab, jinne, or seytaane. Also found in neighboring countries,2 these terms are practically interchangeable and can even be substituted by the French words génie or diable in urban clinical settings.3 However, the syncretism and profusion of quasi-synonyms referring to these invisible beings – which intervene in daily life and not only in the awkward moments of misfortune, diseases, 1 Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa; Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux; Métraux, Le vaudou Haitien; Luc de Heusch, “Possession et chamanisme”; and other authors following them, including Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique” and “Pouvoir dans la cure.” 2 See, e.g., Olivier de Sardan, “Possession, affliction et folie,” 7–27. 3 Ortigues and Ortigues, Oedipe africain, 119–121.

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or sexual problems – is misleading. People know that jinne and seytaane are Islamic beings who fall within the scriptural competence of marabouts, while rab are ancestral spirits linked to their maternal or paternal family and traditionally treated by priestesses called ndëppkat. Another quasi-universal problem of differentiation is about the very nature of these “ancestral spirits” who “possess” Senegalese women and men. The primary meaning of the word rab is “animal.” Even today some elders can be found in Lebu or Wolof families to tell the origin of the alliance between the founding ancestor of the lineage and an animal spirit. The latter is a snake or a lizard that owns the land and water, and who promises the ancestor fertility and health in return for regular offerings of water, milk, and millet on its original altar, a tree or a rock.4 In 1877, a missionary described vividly this local cult.5 These guardian spirits of Wolof or Lebu lineages are called tuur. They are established in and linked to their territory and celebrated annually by the priestess of the family. Usually, their name is preceded by the epithet maam, which means grandparent, elder of the family, ancestor. A third conceptual intermingling: there is no clear distinction between tuur and rab. The two words are interchangeable even if one generally calls tuur an already named rab which had long ago been fixed (samp) in/on its altar. According to some local exegetes, the pact made by the founding ancestor means that all his descendants are paired with those of the allied tuur. Every birth would be twofold: each member of the family would have an invisible “companion” (wéttal), an anonymous rab born at the same time on the other side.6 A rab named during the ndëpp 4 See the first ethnological outline of the Lebus’ “traditional religion” in Balandier and Mercier, Les pêcheurs Lebou, 111–118. 5 Excerpts from Les missions catholiques (304–307): “The generic name under which the fetishists who speak Wolof designate them all is that of râb, i.e., the beast. There is the râb of the village, the râb of the house, the field, the forest, and so on. They are the guardian genies of these places. […] One saw whole villages upset because a missionary had crossed their fields: the râb could be offended. […] The form for which they show a marked preference is that of the snake. One frequently finds a small hut or round hut, woven from branches, covered with a conical thatched roof, and isolated in the middle of the garden and the millet fields. The master of the field makes libations there and deposits from time to time a calabash filled with milk. It is with the greatest satisfaction that he sees the râb approach and swallow the pious offering. Each village and sometimes each family has its own hèrèm, a place dedicated to the genies. Offerings, i.e., horns, ox feet and other off-putting animal remains, are placed there. Here and there one sees shreds of cloth; debris of vases covering the ground. It is also in these places that the fetishists make libations. The Wolofs call this tour [tuur], that is to say, to pour, to spread.” 6 Some informants speak of a “counterpart of the same age, sex, and name.” However, the sex of the twin being is controversial. According to David Ames (“The Selection of Mates,” 159), men have female spirits and women male spirits. Before marriage, he claims, the seer was consulted

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and then regularly honored by their human hosts becomes a tuur passed on within the family of the possessed person. In short, the rab who appear either in episodes of illness or in public trance sessions of ndëpp are not strictly speaking ancestors, i.e., dead family members. They are not spirits of ancestors, but let us say ancestral spirits once associated with a member of the family, dead or alive. This kind of conceptual ambiguity – which does not disturb Senegalese but only the Western observer – is found in many other possession cults. It is a means of moving between different levels of interpretation. In another respect, the combination of the clinical and ethnographic approach allowed us to distinguish two types of psychosomatic realities called rab. On the one hand, this term applies to various idiosyncratic experiences (visions, voices, cenesthetic sensations, phantasmal figures) that a patient, or a healthy person, attributes to an anonymous rab which he or she supposes to be “following” (topp) him or her and which asks for something. At the other pole, we find a limited set of characters embodied and staged during the public trance sessions of ndëpp: as the mahoran spirits presented by Michael Lambek in this volume, these embodied rab or tuur are Maussian “personages,” i.e., more or less stable social characters reproduced from generation to generation.7 Among them, we find warriors, farmers, Fulani herdsmen, weavers, bards, Muslim marabouts and even white boat captains. Domestic sanctuaries of high priestesses can include up to fifteen altars corresponding to as many spirits who entered their lives through illnesses, misfortunes, dream, or even by whim.8 The world of the spirits staged in Senegalese trance sessions reproduces human society. Similar to zār or Malagasy tromba spirits, Wolof rabs have a name, sex, ethnic origin, religion, caste status, profession, personality, their distinctive food habits, peculiar moods, and even fancies. Like the Ethiopian or Sudanese zārs’ universes,9 the colorful world of rabs is made up of characters who condense stereotypical to determine whether the betrotheds’ “personal spirits” (rab i nit) were well matched or, on the contrary, antagonistic. As we will soon see, the stories of succubus and incubus also argue in favor of gender reversal: therapy consists in “marrying” the “fiancé(e) rab” (faru rab or coro rab) with a spirit of the opposite sex. During this ritual, the below-presented nomination of rab is twofold: first the “man” or the “woman” is identified, then the name of its “spouse” is asked. 7 Mauss, “Une catégorie.” 8 See, for example, the repertory of twelve rabs of my friend, the priestess Wolof Khady Fall, which I described in detail by following her life story (Zempléni, “From Symptom to Sacrifice”). Her collection is quite comparable to the rich zār repertory of Malkam-Ayyahou, carefully analyzed by his friend Michel Leiris (La possession et ses aspects théâtraux). 9 Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux; Boddy, in this volume.

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images of the past and present, these personages being exhibited in rather spectacular trance sessions, providing a sort of community role-playing encompassing the multiethnic colonial history of Senegal. However, as we will soon see, public practice and spectacularization of trance and the spirits’ ritual mimes seem to have been late urban developments of this cult. About half of the publicly embodied rab are male spirits ranging from peaceful Muslim holy men to violent pagan spirits ceddo named after the dreaded mercenaries of past Senegalese kingdoms.10 However, the present-day rab cult is performed mainly by women. It is female dominated to such a symbolic extent that its male priests wear female ceremonial clothing. It does not follow that the rab cult is to be counted automatically among the so-called “peripheral” or “deprivation cults” that I. M. Lewis contrasted to “main morality cults.”11 First, several in-depth studies have shown that among urban women of Cap-Vert, many of the protagonists of ndëpp are much more autonomous and wealthy than their husbands whom they sometimes hire as employees.12 Second, one may wonder whether, in Senegal, Ioan Lewis would consider as “main morality cult” a rather syncretic Islam which officially rejects the “infidel” rab cult which perpetuates traditional respect for the family’s ancestors. Here as elsewhere, what is “central” and “peripheral” depends on who is involved and in which context. However, as a general rule, Senegalese Muslims tolerate this old family cult by admitting, as one of Khady Fall’s rabs said in a dream, that “no one can escape his ancestors.”13 As we shall see, references to ancestors are omnipresent in the rab cult: whatever the context, possessed men or women feel strongly encouraged to submit to the “elders” of their family, dead and alive. Clinical case studies evidence this meaning.14

Possession as illness Possession by ancestral spirits is only one of four etiological models that Wolof associate with physical and psychic suffering. The other three models 10 The ceddo – the “strong” or “rich” – were independent warriors of the ancient Senegalese kingdoms who simultaneously opposed colonization, Islamization and Christianization and were renowned for their courage and cruelty. Very attached to traditions, they even revolted against the damel of Kayor Lat Dior when he converted to Islam. The difference between rab serin (Muslims) and ceddo is often staged during public sessions of ndëpp. 11 Lewis, Ecstatic Religion. 12 E.g., Le Cour Grandmaison, Femmes dakaroises; Moya, De l’argent aux valeurs. 13 Zempléni, “Du symptôme au sacrifice,” 55–56. 14 Ortigues and Ortigues, Oedipe africain, 119–130.

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are witchcraft (ndëmm), instrumental magic (liggey) and unexpected attack of a jinne. Each of these agents is associated with a different set of symptoms. Here are some conclusions of my long-term fieldwork on traditional interpretations and therapies of mental disorders in Senegal.15 Whereas attack of witchcraft is known to cause sudden and acute psychosomatic disorders, instrumental sorcery – called “work” (liggey) – is associated with progressive and lasting disorders that affect the body’s surface or the locomotion organs.16 Just as witchcraft attack, unexpected encounters with a jinne cause sudden and acute afflictions triggered by the frightening spectacle and the roar of the monstrous spirit. The most severe psychotic states and disabilities are assigned to jinnes. Once again differentiation problems need to be resolved, Wolof healers have a set of criteria to distinguish illnesses caused by a rab or a jinne. For example, some ndëppkat are willing to treat homolateral paralysis, but not the cases of cross paralysis that they send to Muslim marabouts or hospitals. However, at the same time, the boundary between these two kinds of spirits is far from being precise, as we will see later.17 Possession by rab, on the one hand, is therefore similar to the magical “work” of sorcery, in that it is associated mostly with lasting, progressive or recurrent disorders. On the other hand, it is similar to witchcraft in that these disorders are mainly experienced inside the body. The prototype of possession-illness is characterized by a severe impairment of the patient’s ability to relate to others and interact with them: most common signs of possession are mutism and isolation, anorexia and weight loss, apathy and impaired mobility, as well as deep and painful cenesthetic sensations, often related to fertility disorders. Violent crises may from time to time reverse the signs of this stagnant state: immobility then gives way to anxious agitation, apathy to emotional outbursts, silence to logorrhoea triggered by visions or voices hallucinated by the patient. These episodes are regarded as crises of wild possession, which should be converted into a ritual trance. 15 Zempléni, “L’interprétation et la thérapie.” 16 The Azande of Evans-Pritchard admit a similar opposition between witchcraft and sorcery, but in the opposite direction: “slow and wasting diseases” are attributed to witchcraft (see EvansPritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, 38). 17 In addition, the Senegalese view of the links between the person and the jinne is to be placed in the vast African and Middle Eastern repertoire of possession cults derived from the Quranic notion of jinn, such as the zār tumbura or bori systems, or, closer to us, the Aissawa or Hamadsha brotherhoods of Morocco, which have built up various formulas of embodiment of this type of ontologically ambiguous spirit. See the fine monograph by Crapanzano, The Hamadsha.

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Ritual speech allows us to grasp partly how the Wolof conceive the rab’s action. The spirit begins to “follow” (topp) the person. Then, it “enters” or “penetrates” (dugg) the body to “inhabit” (dëkk) it. It weighs (diis) on the chest of the patient, sucks their blood and thus “desiccates” (ngiss) their body. Sometimes the spirit “rises” (yéeg) in their head – hence the wild crises – and, as we shall see, it is “brought down” (wàcce) by the healing rite, first inside and then outside their body. Like other peoples, Wolof associate witchcraft and spirit possession. There is an intimate link between the rab’s vertical movement in the body and its reversal in the case of a witchcraft attack. The Wolof witch, dëmm, is supposed to remove and eat the fit, the vital principle of the victim located in his liver. The prey typically feels as if he were suddenly emptied, especially his stomach. Often associated with anxiety about impending death, this feeling of being hollowed out is seen as a distinctive sign of this type of attack, as opposed to possession characterized by the heaviness of the chest and experience of something moving inside the upper body. Wolof healers agree on this point: the more the witch has “lowered” the fit from the victim’s liver towards his toes, the worse his condition gets. Emergency care begins with a massage rhythmed by an incantation addressed to the witch. The healer reintroduces the patient’s fit through the little toe of his left leg and slides it up by singing and massaging the leg and abdomen until the fit reaches the liver. As we will see in a moment, this ritual is a puzzling reversal of the one applied to the rab who “inhabits” the patient’s body: in this case, the spirit is moved downwards from the patient’s head towards his or her feet and then transferred to its future altar. Let us say that the idea of a bi-partitioned body with an upper part and a lower part dedicated respectively to the rab and the witch is not foreign to the Wolof. Moreover, there is no ndëpp without a lot of protective rites – especially léem u dëmm, warning songs against dëmm – aimed to keep away witches from new patients: the as yet unknown being who “dries them up” could well also be a witch. The proximity between these two agents, nicely illustrated by Gorer’s description of a ndëpp session from 1935,18 is evidenced as well by psychiatric practice: when an acute episode occurs during a slow and lasting illness attributed to rab or sorcery, its interpretation may change overnight into a witchcraft attack. Otherwise, spirit possession and witchcraft are autonomous etiological categories. 18 Gorer, Africa Dances, 44–45.

From Illness to Tr ance

So Senegalese spirit possession has little to do with such notions as “influence,” “obsession,” or “spiritual fusion.” From the beginning, possessionillness is conceived as a close relationship between the individual and an invisible being which is not merged with him. The rab who has “penetrated” and “inhabits” this person, “ascends” and “descends” in, inside or on his body,19 is conceived as a distinct being. In possession-illness it is generally represented as incorporated by its host, but not in the same manner as in a ritual trance. While the anonymous spirit causing illness acts continuously from within the body, the named rab incarnated in ritual trance periodically returns from outside into or onto the body of its “horse.” I will come back to this meaningful spatiotemporal inversion. Anyhow, the healing rite does not remove the link between the patient and the spirit but transforms it into a lasting alliance between them. We will soon see how the liturgy of ndëpp reproduces in a reverse order one of the primary sequences of the wedding ceremony formerly organized by the Wolof. Thus, the purpose of this rite is not to exorcise the rab, but on the contrary to found its worship: to irreversibly bind it with its human host, like in a marriage.

The “lover rab”: Sex and exorcism It is well known that similar sexual or matrimonial metaphors are found as well in shamanism as in several ancient traditions and other spirit possession cults such as Haitian Vodou or its Ewe or Fon African ancestors.20 What is comparatively rarer – and more relevant for this book focused on comparison with European possessions – is the exceptional importance taken in the lives of many Senegalese women and men by a so-called “lover rab” (faru rab) or “mistress rab” (coro rab), i.e., by an incubus or succubus which disrupts their sexuality.21 A large amount of popular literature and today many healers’ websites are devoted to this widespread yet intimate problem whose frequency seems to be related to the agonistic character of 19 In Wolof, the preposition ci used to indicate the location of the activity of the rab after the verbs “enter,” “inhabit,” “rise,” and “descend” can be translated as well by in, inside as by on or towards. Besides, this preposition serves to express multiple other relationships such as for, to, vis-à-vis, etc. (Diouf, Dictionnaire wolof-français, 37). 20 See, e.g., Herskovits, Dahomey. 21 According to Rachel Mueller’s recent survey (“The Spirits Are My Neighbors,” 62–67), women’s faru rab infinitely outnumber men’s coro rab.

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Senegalese couples’ sexuality.22 The summary of a recent article by Ismael Moya provides a good overview of what it is all about: In Dakar, the ordinary sexuality of married couples is described as a combat. It implies extensive preparations and long preliminaries. Women have the task of arousing their husband’s desire by mobilizing a veritable arsenal: kinky fabrics, arousing incense, hip pearls that tinkle alluringly, erotic underwear. […] Husbands must be able to respond unfalteringly to the provocations of their wife (or wives), and sometimes have recourse to a well-stocked pharmacopeia. The pleasure of the women, who have control over this process, is secondary and the husband’s pleasure translates into his offering his wife a gift. Orgasm is fundamental, without however being the ultimate horizon of the sexual relation.23 It appears from Moya’s informants’ comments that Muslim ideology about the woman’s duty not only to hide her body in public but also to arouse her husband’s desire in their intimacy is not unrelated to the existence of this titillating sexual staging. It is not surprising that in these conditions – further complicated by the egalitarian carnal duties of polygamy – intercourse may fail. If repeated, a man’s failures can be attributed to a coro rab with whom he has a secret liaison.24 The range of problems attributed to these immoral spirits is quite extensive. In the 1960s, male impotence was a common complaint of patients hospitalized in psychiatry. It was attributed either to a rival’s magic or to jealousy of the patient’s mistress rab or that of his wife’s fiancé rab. Just like Christian incubus and succubus from the European Middle Ages, faru rab and coro rab are supposed to have hidden intercourse with their human partner and thus cause both male impotence and female frigidity 22 See, i.a., the conference organized by Ibrahîm A. Sow and Dominique H. Zidouemba in 2006 (Sow and Zidouemba, “Faru rab” et “coro rab”). 23 Moya, “Perles de hanches.” 24 In the case of Islam, let us note that neither healers nor their clients use the terms coro jinne (mistress jinn) or coro seytaane (lover seytaane) and rarely do they use the expression faru jinne (fiancé djinn). Interchangeability of the words rab and jinne seems to stop as soon as the idea of a lasting sensual connection with a spirit is in the offing. Not even marabouts highly educated in scriptural magic can maintain a lasting bond with a jinne or seytaane which are to be exorcised or kept away using the Quran. Thus, carnal love between humans and spirits tends to be reserved for wicked ancestral spirits, a tendency that can be viewed as both further evidence of the Islamic disqualification of the “pagan” rab worship as well as a way of relegating to this domestic cult the treatment of embarrassing sexual disorders involving lover spirits.

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and infertility. If a woman’s misfortunes such as miscarriages, postpartum psychosis, metrorrhagia, serial death of children do not stop after the healing rituals I will describe, they can be attributed to the malevolence of a hidden faru rab who continues to harm her. Moreover, since the ills caused by the evil spirit do not end, they can lead to other problems such as forced celibacy or serial divorces. Whether in conversations, in hospitals or on the web, there are many more women than men complaining about such invisible partners: as in both past and probably present-day Europe, the concern for the harm caused by spiritual lovers is mainly feminine.25 According to the written and oral complaints I was able to collect, these ills go well beyond sexual or gynecological disorders. They lastingly affect the woman’s relationship with men. Under the hold of her jealous incubus, the possessed becomes irritable, nervous, unpleasant, as soon as she is with male partners: who abandon her or whom she quickly gets rid of. The spirit most often appears to her as a brother, friend or another man who is close to her. He invites her to have sex. At first, she may feel pleasure, but the spirit returns more and more often and he “tires” her: she wakes up wet, exhausted. If she is single, her fiancé rab will chase away her suitors. If she is married, the spirit can interfere in her intercourse with her husband. At the moment of ejaculation, he too may emit a liquid that will prevent her from getting pregnant or force her to abort, and so on. The distinctive feature of faru rab and coro rab is not only to sexually possess her/his host but also to refuse to part with her or him. Unlike the average rab who can be “moved down” from the possessed person and with whom one then initiates a sacrificial exchange, this kind of wicked spirit must be exorcised. I will not detail here the Islamic eviction techniques that are most frequently applied. They use the purifying resources of the Quran and magic scriptures in a similar way to healing victims of an accidental encounter with a jinne, or seytaane.26 As in Christian Europe, scriptural exorcism is, therefore, the most common procedure. Unlike in ndëpp, the lover rab does is not given an individual name, and the marabout only separates him from his human partner. However, syncretic rites testify to 25 See the abundant medieval literature on St. Augustine’s spirit spouses, Melusine and other “diabolic fiancées” (Gagnebet, Le carnaval, 87–103), testimonies on erotic trances of Loudun’s possessed women, as well as Eastern European popular representations of the incubus called ludvérc or lidérc (see Pócs, in this volume). 26 For a detailed descriptions and analyses of these procedures, see Zempléni, “L’interprétation et la thérapie,” 262–283.

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the existence of alternative ways of dealing with the faru rab and coro rab. Some healers use a special ritual to get rid of the lover rab by “marrying them off” with a spirit of the opposite sex living far away from the possessed man or woman, for example, in Ivory Coast, as in a fiancé rab rite collected by the Ortigueses.27 In these rather comical expatriation rites, the compromise between Islam and traditional religion is obvious: they do not openly exorcise the hidden lover but merely banish him to another country.28 According to some healers, if the cured person goes there, he or she will have sex with the spirit again, but going home, will be healthy and well. The lover rabs’ banishment rites reproduce a central sequence of the ndëpp called natt which consists of “measuring” the possessed body and person using tree roots to be embedded in the foundations of the domestic altar to be built during the ceremony. Now the explicit purpose of the spirit’s deportation rites is to “remarry” the libidinous spirit in its proper world: to substitute another spirit, male or female, for the human being it is frequenting. This detail brings us back to the Wolof-Lebu conception of the ancestral spirits’ universe. As already noted, the rabs’ world is a replica of human society. The spirits have their spouses and children, and their sex life must be kept apart from that of the people they possess. The ndëpp seeks to enforce this rule: usually, by asking the possessed to give the name of his/her rab and that of an opposite sex spirit.

“Lowering” the rab without expelling it “Caressing” The ndëpp begins on Sunday evening at the patient’s home in the presence of the entire ndëppkat congregation composed of former patients all of whom are required to embody their own spirits in subsequent trance sessions organized by their healers. To take a term promoted by Luc de Heusch, the opening rite is a typical adorcism.29 All known Senegalese tuurs and rabs are lured, called by their individual songs (bakk) and drummed refrains. Once there – their presence being attested by the early signs of trance – the 27 Ortigues and Ortigues, Oedipe africain, 306–307. 28 And not just anyone: in the 1960s, Côte d’Ivoire was Senegal’s most envied economic rival. 29 Heusch, “Possession et chamanisme.”

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priestesses spit large quantities of milk on the patient’s naked chest and begin to massage, caressing downwards to the rhythm of the drums, her bust flooded with milk. Milk is the favorite food of the ancestral spirits. This inaugural rite is called ray, “caressing,” and it is explicitly associated with mothering.30 Its purpose is to attract and to activate the incorporated rab by the milky caresses and the presence of all the gathered fellow spirits. Let us note that this caressing ritual is deeply rooted in Senegalese mothering traditions characterized by a long symbiotic relationship between mother and child.31 As psychiatrists have shown, it probably generates a regressive state, which is quicker and easier to reach than in the West.32

“Measuring” the possessed and “lowering” the spirit Around Sunday midnight everyone goes to bed. At dawn, the ndëppkat gather their ritual objects, including a lot of medicinal roots that will be planted in the foundations of the domestic altar of the spirit to be identified. As concerns of distinguishing entities are constantly present in the minds of these officiants, they readily explain that some of these roots attract the rabs while others repel witches. The patient – person and body – is “measured” (natt)33 as follows. A bundle of roots taken from a wicker tray is pressed against each part of the body to be “measured” (head, forehead, neck, chest, joints, legs, feet), then a handful of millet is thrown on this package, all falling back onto the tray. The millet and roots, thus dedicated to the rab in/on the body here and now, will later be used to transfer the spirit from the body to its altar consecrated with a dough made from sweet millet flour, another favorite food of the rabs. The healers’ commentary on this “measuring” ritual is generally simple: it is at this moment that “the rab leaves the measured part of the body.”34 The head of the patient is then covered by a white and a black loincloth, hence the term “ndëpp” derived of the verb dëpp meaning “cover the head.” 30 See Alice Bullard’s excellent analysis: “Neither Melancholic nor Abject” 31 In rural areas weaning used to occur around the age of two. See Rabain, L’enfant du lignage; Rabain-Jamin and Wornham, “Transformations des conduites.” 32 In a seminal article, Dr. Henri Collomb highlighted the astonishing speed and reversibility of regressions during acute psychotic episodes, some of which are healed by ndëpp (Collomb, “Les bouffées délirantes”). 33 This verb is routinely used to talk about the size of a field or that of shoes. 34 In my introduction to this book, I noted the similarity of these measuring rites with the Christian exorcisms studied by Chave-Mahir and Bárth, which also consist of going scrupulously from the top to the bottom of the possessed body without forgetting any part.

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Figure 21.1 Moments of the “measuring” rite with millet and roots buried in the base of the rab’s domestic altar. Dakar, 1968

Images Michel Meignant

The “descent” rite, called wacce, is performed on the thus veiled patient. Attempts to move the spirit downward in and from the possessed body is an ever-recurrent act in Wolof possession rites. The initiate has been already “caressed” and “measured” top to bottom. Now, the priestesses gather millet, roots, and ritual objects in a heavy cloth bag. With this bag, they sweep the entire body of the patient sitting on a mat, several times and again from top to bottom. Each time, they hit this bag against the ground or a large pot that will become the main pot of the future altar. Later, the same operation is repeated with a broken pestle and two big pots of the future shrine. Prayers clearly indicate the meaning of these rituals: moving down, “descending” (wacce) the spirit in this way amounts to “unloading” it (yenni) from the initiate’s body.35

35 See the long and very explicit prayer recited by Seynabou in the 1960s: Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique,” 377–378 (Wolof text in a note).

From Illness to Tr ance

Who is it? Up to this point, the rite looks like a somewhat soft exorcism. However, the ndëpp is far from over. The two loincloths are put back on the bust of the initiate but in reverse order, black on white. The identification of the spirit is the most dramatic episode of this ritual. Deafened by intense and prolonged drumming, the ringing of bells and high-pitched sound of rattles, her head violently shaken by a cloth headdress, deliberately exhausted, the patient reaches the doorstep of trance when drums stop abruptly, and the chiefpriest(ess) puts the question: “What’s its name?” or “Who is it?” The name of the rab and that of its mate of the opposite sex is, so to speak, extracted in a polemical atmosphere in sharp contrast with the adorcizing “caresses” of the previous mothering rite. As Senegalese people travel quite often, the patient may have to indicate as well the named spirit’s former place of residence. Let us make a few comments. The violence of this rite of naming36 recalls that of some ancient exorcisms observed in Africa.37 Even if it is not always so intense and may even be skipped – especially in Muslim families who may prefer the discretion of a samp performed without music and behind closed shutters – it should be stressed that it is not the priest-healer but the initiate who chooses and utters the name of the spirit. The difference is critical. First, the possessing spirit’s identification is not achieved by matching the patient’s symptoms with the distinctive pathological signs of a divinity belonging to an established pantheon as in other African religions such as Fon or Yoruba Orisha cult.38 Second, according to my recordings, the question that the ndëppkat asks in Wolof may be just as well be “What’s your name?” (naka nga tudd?) as “What’s its name?” (naka la tudde?). The nature of the supposed intimate link between the healer, patient, and spirit is obviously quite different in these two situations. Moreover, in most cases, the spirit named by the patient is a neglected rab or tuur, who had already possessed an elder in her/his paternal or maternal lineage, but whose cult was discontinued for some reason. According to current narratives, it may also be an as yet unknown or wandering spirit who is expressing through the initiate’s illness its desire to be recognized, housed and nourished. In both cases, the personal experiences of the possessed – dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, emotions – deeply infuse the 36 At least, of the ones I’ve tried to reproduce as faithfully as possible in 1965 (Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique,” 358–360). 37 See, e.g., Junod, Moeurs et coutumes des Bantous, II, 432–460. 38 Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa; Maupoil, La géomancie à l’ancienne.

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spirit’s image. As I have attempted to show in detailed biographical case studies,39 these intimate experiences are partly reminisced and externalized in subsequent trance sessions when the former patient personifies the distinctive traits of the spirit. However, the range of characters embodied in Senegalese trance sessions is no more a collection of individual creations than a timeless pantheon. It can be tentatively stated that many personages embodied in possession sessions are shaped through a process of socialization of past illness experiences. Anyway, illness is the gateway by which current experiences and thus history, enter into the rab cult. This therapeutic infiltration of the living present into an ancestral spirits’ worship is a still unexplored dimension of “indigenous historiography” produced by spirit possession. Let us add this socio-therapeutic dimension to Janice Boddy’s and Michael Lambek’s seminal contributions to this volume.

The alliance Another intriguing stage of ndëpp follows the rab’s naming. It is called “putting together” (boole). The initiate has to lie down in the middle of the courtyard next to the ox or sheep that will be sacrificed. She then has to press her whole body against the animal whose horns she grabs. The ndëppkat cover this hidden couple with seven loincloths, turn around dancing and singing the songs of the most famous tuur and rab. Again, they “caress” the invisible bodies, this time with one or two cackling chickens. Their comment is simple: during this hidden intertwining, the spirit “goes down” from the patient’s body and “mounts” into that of the animal. The prayer that the initiate pronounces directly into the animal’s mouth confirms this meaning.40 When the seventh song is sung, the pile of loincloths begins to tremble, and the initiate emerges, begins to dance and sometimes falls into a trance. This is not just a rite of passage marking the death and rebirth of the initiate as I once wrote. As I later showed using David Ames’ detailed description, the departure of the Wolof bride for her husband’s village was formerly marked by the same ritual but performed in reverse order.41 39 See inter alia my autobiographical study of the priestess Khady Fall who during a year period described to me when and how her twelve spirits burst into her life, and how she embodied them during ndëpp. The great influence of her past subjective and physical experiences on her ritual behavior were apparent (Zempléni, “From Symptom to Sacrifice”). 40 Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique,” 377–378. 41 Ames, “The Selection of Mates.” See in Zempléni (“Sur l’alliance”): two loincloths, black on white, cover the bride; she lies down next to a sister in the courtyard of her house; still veiled she

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Without going into detail, the comparison of these matrimonial rites with those just described highlights the objective of the ndëpp: establishing a lasting alliance with the spirit “moved down” from the initiate’s body. The reversal of the sequential order of rituals would mark the difference between this ancestral spirit – which belongs, let us recall, to a world twinned with that of humans – and the human husband and sexual partner. The ritual alliance with the rab amounts to a symbolic homecoming, the opposite of a lover rab’s expatriation.

The sacrificial reversal of the body Subsequently the ox or the sheep is sacrificed in a particular way. The initiate sits down on the animal tied up and lying on its left side. She grabs its horns or snout and asks the spirits to “unload” her, to “descend” from her and to “ascend” onto this animal. She spits out this wish into the half-opened mouth of the animal. Moreover, she must remain seated on the ox or sheep throughout its quivering agony. Put to death, the animal is torn to pieces. Then follows the roog (adornment). Once emptied of their contents, the animal’s bowels are cut out, and fastened piece by piece on the initiate’s body: on her left wrist and right ankle (or the reverse); on her hips as a belt; on her chest and back like a bra crossed and tied under her breasts. Finally, part of the animal’s belly, emptied of the chyme and turned inside out, is fixed in her hair like a small cap. Covered in curdled blood, she will keep these viscera ornaments until the ritual bath she will take the next day in the lustral water of her new altar. Part of the remaining bowels will be wrapped around the tree roots used for the “measurements.” They will be buried into the altar’s foundation. How to understand this peculiar sacrifice? Here is a phenomenon that fits with the comparatist ambitions of this book. Similar ritual acts such as blood bathing, fixing the internal organs of a sacrificed animal on the body of the possessed, wearing its peritonea like a shawl or its intestines like a turban (or even the animal’s entire skin turned inside out like the “blood garment” of Ethiopian zār novices) have been observed in a series of possession cults including Greek Menadism, Orisha cults among Fon and Yoruba or Brazilian Candomblé.42 is accompanied to her husband’s village; she is welcomed like a newborn by a calabash of milk; her hands are “measured” as in ndëpp. 42 To cite only three examples, after the blood-drinking rite performed by the Tsonga (Mozambique), the initiate’s body is “covered with strips cut out of the skin of the animal whose

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In a comparative study, I proposed a common denominator between these ritual actions that I called “sacrificial inversion of the body.”43 I will not reproduce here the large array of ethnographic data that led me to this seemingly odd interpretation: after naming the spirit, the possessed body is symbolically turned inside out like a glove. This interpretation – compatible with Leiris’ aesthetic approach to the initiate’s sacrificial “adornments”44 – enables us to grasp how Senegalese people conceive the shift from possession-illness to ritual, i.e., to socialized spirit possession. As we’ve seen, while the anonymous rab of illness acts continuously inside the person whom it “penetrates,” “inhabits,” “desiccates,” the named rab of ritual trance returns to the body periodically and violently from outside. Wolof verbs describing the ritual trance are particularly illuminating in this respect: once “came” (dikk), my rab “attacks” (song) me, “seizes” (jàpp) and “holds” (téye) me, it “shakes” (yëngu) me and makes me “tremble” (say), then it “splits” (xar) me and, finally, it “makes me fall” (daanu) by a kind of death blow. Thus, the Senegalese ritual converts an internal and continuous link between the individual and the possessor spirit into external and periodical contact with it. The sacrificial reversal of the body symbolically turned inside out, is a marker of this conversion and opening of the possessed body. gallbladder is fixed in his/her hair” (Junod, Moeurs et coutumes des Bantous, II, 444). In 1938 Michel Leiris described the adornments of the Ethiopian zār initiate as follows: “Adorned with the victim’s remains (its plumage, called sallaba or ‘trophy’ in the case of a chicken; his mora or peritoneum as well as his skin ‘dam labsu,’ ‘blood garment’ in the case of an ovine (sheep) or caprine (goat), the peritoneum and the stomach in the case of a bovine (ox), it (the zar) triumphs like a hunter who has just killed a large game animal. At least during this time, it leaves his ‘horse’ (the possessed) in peace, since it has received the blood and it is satisfied” (Leiris, “La croyance aux génies ‘Zar,’” 121–122). As for Yoruba or Fon adepts of the Orisha cult in Nigeria and Benin as well as those of Brazilian Candomblé, Verger notes that “blood baptism” (afèjèwè) is the central act of initiation. Like the “horse” of the Ethiopian zār or that of Haitian loa, first, the initiate drinks the blood of the decapitated poultry presented to him. His head, chest, shoulders, hands, and feet are coated with blood. Then follows the culminating point: the sacrifice of a ram. Its blood is spilled on the novice’s head and body. The plumes of the sacrificed birds are glued to his head, face, and other parts of his body. The animal’s head is separated from its body above the collapsed novice. The elégún grabs the bloody head of the ram with both hands, squeezes one of the carotid arteries between his teeth, then engages in a “hallucinating” dance to the sound of applauding hands and the singing of the assistants (Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa, 38–39). 43 Zempléni, “Des êtres sacrificiels.” 44 As Leiris writes, “it is worth noting the spectacle aspect of the so-called dam lebsu (literally “blood cloak”) ritual, consisting in throwing the skin of the sacrificed sheep or goat – hair turned inside – on the novice’s shoulders such as a cloak. If the sacrificial animal is an ox, the priests put its stomach washed and prepared like a large hood, over the mora (the peritoneum) with which the novice is capped” (Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux, 43).

From Illness to Tr ance

Figure 21.2 The sacrificial reversal of the body in ndëpp: Stomach cap turned inside out, bloodbath, ankle bracelet and bra fashioned out of intestines. Dakar, 1965–1968

Photo Paul Martino and Michel Meignant

Founding the spirit’s worship You may go through the described rites without ever falling into a trance or even participating in public possession sessions organized by the congregation that initiated you. Pious Muslim families who accept the idea of possession by their ancestral spirits but prefer the discretion of a closed-door ceremony may ask the ndëppkat to perform only the last obligatory rite called samp. Samp or sampal means to plant, to erect. The construction of the domestic altar of the just named spirit is the core founding rite of the rab’s worship. The shrine is built with the utmost care. Two holes are dug in a hidden place behind the initiate’s house (even in urban Dakar). The bowels of the sacrificed animal are wound around the tree roots that were previously used to “measure” the patient’s body. These roots are planted at the bottom of the holes, i.e., the foundations of the altar: they are supposed to “keep” the initiate’s rab in his future “house.” Then, these foundations

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are generously drenched with the blood of the killed animal, so that the sacrificial materials are shared between the altar and the patient’s body. Finally, a broken pestle is implanted next to the holes and the two big pots of the altar are placed on these holes – one is filled with lustral (consecrated) water, and the other is placed upside down with a tiny eye at the center. To complete the rite, this altar is flooded with milk and sweetened millet porridge. The identity and specific demands of the so installed spirit are not forgotten. They are indicated by various objects: dates for a Mauritanian rab, a small drinking trough for a Fulani rab, lemon soda or cologne for a Muslim, small ax for a woodcarver spirit, orange or even cheese for a white rab and so on.

Gift exchanges with the ancestral spirit From this point on, the owner of the altar will be making regular offerings to her rab who is supposed to turn into a beneficial spirit protecting its host and bringing her good luck, health, and fertility: i.e., the opposite of the harms caused by the lover rab. These weekly gifts are also means of self-medication, especially in case of ndikan, a peculiar state of nervousness and restlessness felt by the possessed, notably on Monday or Thursday, days dedicated to the rab cult. If a former patient is not feeling well, experiencing dizziness, nightmares, visions, voices or other signs of the spirit’s discontent, she can bathe in its altar water and offer milk or sweetened millet porridge to her rab. If her condition worsens, she can sacrifice a chicken. However, soaking in or just refreshing the face in the medicinal water from a rab’s altar has little to do with the Christian or Muslim self-administered lustration with holy water. The aim of the Wolof woman is not to purify herself, but to secure favors from her allied spirit by washing herself in a consecrated water, exclusively reserved for her. This lustral water from her altar will not affect anyone else, even if she or he is being possessed. Now, let us underline again that the ndëpp is not only a healing rite intended to alleviate the suffering of individuals. One of the priestess’s prayers addressed to the patient may give an idea about the underlying social meaning of the ceremony. It prompts the patient to “unload” her rab not only from her person but also from her whole family. By giving them to eat and drink, the individual has to nourish the tuurs of her ancestors, too: “May they snuggle up against each other here (at the shrine)! May they huddle together here! Let them hug you! Let them hug each other in their

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family! May you hug your family!”45 These images speak for themselves: the expected effect of the ritual is to strengthen the bonds between the patient’s family and all the spirits that have entered into it. As noted earlier, any new alliance with a rab is supposed to renew a previous pact made by the elders of the lineage, whether deceased or alive. To grasp the sense of these prayers, let us recall that Wolof lineages gradually disintegrated from the beginning of colonization and Senegalese people have always been a migratory people. Thus, at least half of the identified rabs are considered to be neglected and forgotten spirits who had once settled in the family, but whose worship has been abandoned. Until today possession by rab is primarily a family affair. The new borom rab,46 the host of a recently fixed rab, is a potential priest in her family who is an elected intermediary between her living relatives and dead forebears. She has to take care of her family members as well.

Projective communication and possession Let us evoke now another way to approach the close links between an individual’s possession and the emotional state of her or his family group. Assuredly, the Senegalese borom rab does not play as important a role in the social life of her relatives as the Malagasy, and Himalayan mediums brilliantly depicted in this book.47 Nevertheless, she participates in an intersubjective process by which her “possession” reinforces the rule of submission to the elders and ancestors of the group. Indeed, serious illness therapy triggers a process of projective communication between the patient’s relatives since they associate her or his illness with other misfortunes and conflicts within the family, such as accidents, agricultural disasters, miscarriages, inheritance conflicts, marital disputes, child deaths, and so on. Without going into the details of this complex issue,48 let us emphasize just one point. The projective-persecutory communication process, in which each family member may indirectly express his or her problems, 45 For a detailed analysis, see Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique,” 377–378. The quoted passage in Wolof: “Sa tuur i maam yi nañu uuf fi seen bop, uufê la sa bop, nañu uuf fi seen njaboot, uuf la ak sa njaboot.” 46 The most common expression for a possessed person. Borom means “holder” or “bearer”. 47 See the chapters by Lambek, Berti, Fiéloux and Lombard in this volume. 48 Which had already been widely addressed in the 1960s by British anthropologists succeeding Evans-Pritchard, such as Horton (“African Traditional Thought”), Marwick (Sorcery in Its Social Setting), and especially Turner (The Drums of Affliction), and that I approached elsewhere with regard to Senegal (Zempléni, “Anciens et nouveaux usages”).

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desires, and strategies when interpreting a relative’s illness does change the relational structure of the family and sometimes even that of the local group.49 When the concatenated afflictions are ascribed to a recurring attack of a witch hidden in the family, the process may result in the very splitting of the group. Conversely, when the same process ends with the attribution of a relative’s recurrent problems to possession by an ancestral spirit, the healing ritual leads to the strengthening of subordination links between juniors and elders in the whole family, and thus to a realignment of lineage solidarity. I am not claiming that possessed Senegalese serve as scapegoats for their families, nor that the rites of possession invariably end with the restoration of their family group cohesion. I only want to stress that the diagnosis of spirit possession is closely related to the projective interpretation of other ills in the family through concurrent etiological models such as witchcraft or magic. In other words, in the described rites, efficiency cannot be dissociated from their social implications and effects. Given the significant changes that occurred since the 1960s and the massive individualizing impacts of current globalization, this issue should be revisited in depth.

The spirits’ display in public trance sessions Rab worship is indeed a “main morality cult” to use the rather outdated category by Ioan Lewis50 even if the latter would probably have considered it to be one of the “peripheral cults” he found in several Islamic societies of East Africa. In any case, this ancestral spirits’ cult owes its reputation to the four- or seven-day-long spectacular public trance sessions which follow the rites that I have just described. Men normally avoid the sensual excesses of these public meetings that transgress both traditional and Muslim norms of male restraint and dignity. The few, who participate in 49 The principle of projective communication is simple. When an illness event mobilizes the group members emotionally, the patient, his social partners and therapists enter into an interlocutory process concerning the supposed agent of the disease: “It’s a rab who possesses her,” “No, it’s the magic of her mother’s cowife,” “No, it’s a witch of her maternal family,” etc. The manifest goal of these projective dialogues is to heal the patient’s ailments. Its latent goal is to work out and bring out into the open the otherwise censored wishes of the group members. The effect of the persecutory communication is as much the modification of the patient’s state as the modification of the relational texture of the group affected by her illness. Most of Africa’s traditional healing arts operate according to the axiom that treatment of individuals’ body states requires the appropriate treatment of the social bodies to which they belong (see in Zempléni, “Anciens et nouveaux usages,” 12). 50 Lewis, Ecstatic Religion.

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these sessions are commonly suspected of being gor-jigen, “men-women,” i.e., gay.51 Moreover, as we have seen, most pious Muslim families prefer to erect the spirit’s altar behind closed doors. In this case, the construction of the shrine (samp) is the core rite and it is not followed by musical trance sessions. This is one of the several reasons why equating possession with public trance is meaningless. Let us come to these trance sessions during which their hosts personify the identified spirits. Rather frequent nowadays in over-urbanized Cape Verde, these lively sessions take place in crowded public spaces, such as a square, or a street where the novice’s parents join the priestesses and their former patients, children, and the entire female population of the neighborhood, with men taking a look in passing. The chief priestess draws a large circle in the sand with her “worked horn,” a circle one can only enter barefoot, like a mosque. This area, surrounded by a thick ring of spectators and participants, is reserved for dancing and trance. A half-dozen drummers close the circle on one side. Thus, the spirits are incarnated in a strictly delineated public scene. Falling into a trance is not a private matter but a public performance mediatized by a ritual. As most former “possessed” patients have to participate in the trance sessions organized by their congregation, the most peculiar features of the spirits they saw, heard, or felt during their illness, may appear on this ritual scene. Unlike ndëppkats’ familiar spirits, the newly fixed rab does not readily come forth when it is called by its song (bakk) and drummed refrain. Trance is induced and consolidated by a fast-rhythmed swaying of the bust and head from front to back and from left to right, the dancer’s gestures being synchronized with a very intense drumming near her ears. As terminology detailed earlier suggests, entering into trance is a violent and dramatic process that ends with the “split” (xar) and “fall” (daanu) of the possessed. What we call trance is made up of two distinct phases. Most of the time, the first signs of identity change – i.e., the character of a given rab – only appear when the host recovers from her visible daanu, the “fall,” what is not surprising given the over-stimulation of the previous phase. 51 The highly specific situation of Senegalese homosexual men has recently been the subject of extensive research by Broqua (“Góor-jigéen”) and by Mbaye (Les discours sur l’homosexualité). Not all ndëppkat who dress as women like the late Daouda Seck, with whom I worked for a long time, are gay. On the other hand, one of the members of our mbotay certainly was. As for the ambiguous position of the gor-jigen in contemporary Senegalese society, it is worth reading Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s fascinating recent book De purs hommes (2018).

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Figure 21.3 Aïssa’s trance-dance and fall. Dakar, 1965

Photo Paul Martino

Moreover, trances observed during the public sessions of ndëpp are somewhat ephemeral and do not continue for long beyond the ritual circle drawn in the sand. Incidentally, the trance can be interrupted by the priestesses who, fearing an excess, may tap the neck of the possessed woman to stop it.52 In Senegal, the state of trance seems closely linked to the embodiment ritual. This type of induced ritual trance is quite different from the lasting and maybe more comfortable identity transformations by which embodied spirits intervene in the daily lives of their hosts in other societies, especially in Malagasy and India. In Lambek’s term, Senegalese culture is not a genuine “trance culture.”53 Finally, it should be remembered that public trance is only a variant of the ritual links that the Senegalese host has with her rab. She makes regular offerings of milk and millet porridge to the spirit on her domestic altar. As soon as she is worried or tired, she sprinkles herself with 52 Jean Rouch has also observed this gesture in the Songhay cult of holley (personal communication). 53 Lambek, Human Spirits, 6–7; Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters, 80.

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the lustral water from her rab’s xamb located behind her bedroom. She may also address her rab by prayers and bloody sacrifices. Moreover, as we have seen, these gestures, words, and gifts are not intended to bring the spirit back into her body – as in public trance – but rather to prevent its return. Compared with other well-known “possession cults” of Africa contemporary Senegalese trance sessions may seem somewhat frivolous.54 They are not – or no longer – intended to communicate with deities or spirits transmitting cosmological truths or predictions about the community, as in Songhay-Zarma trance sessions where such beings as Dongo, the god of lightning, is embodied and states its penalties.55 Nor do Wolof-Lebu trance sessions trigger lasting interactions between community members resulting from those staged by the experienced possessed who embody historical, ancestral, or other characters, as in the case of the Mahorian or Malagasy Tromba.56 The main distinguishing feature of Wolof trance sessions seems to be social irony expressed through emblematic behaviors. When a given rab or tuur manifests its presence through the gestures of its host in a trance, the priestesses bring its symbolic accessories: walking stick and a rope for a Fulani shepherd rab, textile belt for a wrestler spirit, prayer hat for a Muslim rab, white chasuble to an uncircumcised aat spirit, hat for the white rab. The spirit signals its identity and habits mainly by gestures and typical behaviors. For example, Ardo, the main Fulani rab, leads its flock, treats the cows, pulls the rope from the well, speaks in Pulaar. Sidi Ahmed Aidara, a fervent Mauritanian Muslim spirit who drinks tea and eats dates, recites the Quran and rosaries, prays, and moves slowly with ceremonial dignity. In contrast, Maam Ngesu, the pagan warrior tuur of the royal lineage of the kingdom of Cayor, appears on the scene with a lot of energy and noise. He runs back and forth on the stage and threatens participants and the audience with old-fashioned fighting gestures. The presence of most spirits is manifested by similar emblematic behaviors highlighting their ethnic origin, caste status, profession, activity, skills, physical condition, and moral qualities. The weaver rab weaves on the stage, the sea fisherman “swims” and “paddles” in the sand. The host of the leper rab kneels, makes a fist to hide his fingers, and simulates removing its nose. 54 Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa; Maupoil, La géomancie à l’ancienne; Rouch, La religion; Leiris, La possession et ses aspects théâtraux; Mercier, Asrès le magicien éthiopien; Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits. A glance at most of the recent videos published on the Web is enough to grasp what I mean. 55 Rouch, “Le calendrier mythique.” 56 Ottino, “Le tromba”; Lambek, Human Spirits; Lombard and Fiéloux, in this volume.

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The bard rab goes further: its host recites praise songs of her/his neighbors who cannot refuse the spirit’s requests for money. Irony is never absent in the behavior of spirits. The ditty by which the white rab is called is itself a parody: “Bonsur missié, bonsur missié, savélévay, savélévay, savélévay!” (“Bonjour Monsieur, ça va, ça va!”). Its host walks disdainfully on stage, wearing a colonial helmet. He or she asks for a cigarette and blows clouds of smoke all around in an arrogant way. She or he puts her right hand on her hip, spreads her legs, leans back, and looks at the audience contemptuously in this dominant position. These figures mix the social imagery of the former colonizers with contemporary clichés of the white man. Thus, the spirit world staged in the ndëpp trance sessions resembles a bric-a-brac of social stereotypes from yesterday and today. With a few exceptions, the embodied characters are neither named ancestors nor – strictly speaking – historical personalities as are so many Central African zār or Malagasy tromba spirits.57 Thus, the commedia dell’arte of the public meetings of the ndëpp is something else than a “cult of ancestral spirits.” Although some characters staged in ndëpp sessions – such as the pagan warrior Maam Ngesu or the Fulani Muslim chief Ardo embodied by my friend priestess Khady Fall58 – may be stereotypical figures from the past more or less tailored to the intimate experiences of the possessed who embody them, it would certainly be an exaggeration to qualify these trance sessions as lessons or fragments of an “indigenous historiography.”59 In this respect, the Wolof-Lebu rab’s cult seems quite different from that of the Sudanese zār or Malagasy tromba.60 It would be closer, for example, to the Nigerian bori, another major West African system.61 These cults reproduce in another way the history of the groups that practice them. In fact, as I already noted in 1965, the public embodiment of rab is a relatively recent phenomenon and occurs almost exclusively in urban or semi-urban settings of Cape Verde. While Abbé Boilat had described cases of female possession as early as 1848,62 the first reliable albeit 57 See, for instance, the chapters by Boddy and Lombard and Fiéloux in this volume. 58 Zempléni, “Du symptôme au sacrifice,” 42–45. English: “From symptom to sacrifice.” 59 I borrow this expression from Lambek and Boddy (in this volume). 60 See the chapters by Boddy, Lambek and Lombard and Fiéloux in this volume. 61 See Broustra-Monfouga, “Approche ethnopsychiatrique”; Échard, “Petites lectures”; Masquelier, “Lightning, Death,” 10–45, and Prayer Has Spoiled Everything; Berliner, “Spirit Possession.” 62 Here is an excerpt from his text (my translation): “We found a young girl of 20 to 22 years lying on a mat and a pillow under her head on a bed; the hut was full of people. This person’s head had been shaking like a pendulum with incalculable speed and movement. She sang, in a

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Figure 21.4 Joys and frights during the public trance-dance of ndëpp. Dakar, 1965–1968

Photo Paul Martino and Michel Meignant

partial observations of public trance sessions organized by women’s congregations only date from 1935.63 Moreover, it is obvious that the tone that you can feel more than you can express, prophecies of all kinds. All the Blacks, beyond themselves, were very ill at ease, unable to help her. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked them. It is, they answered me, a spirit that has seized her body. You who have education, you may find a way to drive it out. I asked her name, and I was told that her name was Sophie. I started questioning her. I will quote my requests and her answers: ‘Sophie, Sophie !,’ I said to her, several times. No answer. Her songs and agitations were redoubling. ‘I command you to answer me in the name of Jesus Christ, Sophie!’ ‘I am not Sophie. I am not a girl to call myself like that. I am Samba-Diob [Diop], the great demon worshipped by the Serères of the village of *** in Baol. I am a spirit. I transport myself wherever I want on the wing of the winds.’ She continued her singing. A moment later, she took on another song in a language I couldn’t understand” (Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises, 449–454). 63 By British anthropologist G. Gorer in Africa Dances, 44–45. Gorer does not evoke any identificatory behavior and tends to present the trance as a method for finding witches. This function still exists, but not to this extent. Here are some excerpts from his work: “The people, nearly always women, who have the faculty of going into a clairvoyance trance are known as m’Deup. […] Men are occasionally m’Deup, but they are looked down on as debauchees and effeminate. […] When a m’Deup is going into trance, she goes through a curious pantomime, acting as if she had just awakened from sleep, stretching her arms and staring about. She will

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rab cult is not reducible to these public sessions of dance and trance, if only because the families of good Muslims do not practice the ndëpp, but only the samp, the ritual of “fixation” of the spirit without dance or music at their home. Furthermore, one need only glance at the case studies conducted at Fann Hospital or elsewhere to see that the spirits tormenting the Senegalese are incomparably more complex and subtle psychosomatic realities than the publicly embodied rab. Yet there is a relationship between the two, indeed. To come back to the patient of ndëpp, she has to learn to fall in a trance gradually and to incarnate the spirit that she has named herself. The role of public trance and identity change in the healing process is easy to understand. As already noted, the Senegalese model of pathological possession is characterized by an overall narrowing of relational functions, i.e., a disturbing desocialization of the possessed person. Fixing the spirit named by the patient in her domestic altar does not magically resocialize her. All the less so since this newly named spirit remains at this stage an idiosyncratic being, shaped by her intimate experiences, including recurrent bodily sensations, dreams and visions. The spirit’s embodiment in public trance sessions allows the possessed to adjust – and readjust – its idiosyncratic traits to the more or less codified characteristics of the above described social characters. In a way, public trance allows the spirit itself to be legitimized and socialized by selecting and displaying approved emblematic behaviors, such as Muslim prayer or Fulani speech. In this way, the former patient is integrated into her congregation, that is, she is resocializing in a deviant group specialized in the ritual embodiment of spirits. However, Senegalese families do not support these rituals to rehabilitate some of their members in a female club. Ndëpp and samp rites are primarily aimed to restore cohesion in the family whose failing solidarity is evidenced by the perturbing desocialization of its possessed members. As shown, this goal is achieved at a symbolic level by recovering the sacrificial exchange with ancestral spirits tied to the family through regular offerings and bloody sacrifices to the newly domesticated rabs of possessed family members. open her eyes with her forefingers, and touch her ears, nose and mouth. Then, with her eyes no longer focused on anything, she will start to dance. If she is not removed by force […] she will go on dancing for an indefinite period […] without rest or food, until the crisis comes and she falls to the ground with only the whites of her eyes showing. In this state she will prophesy and name sorcerers. If by any chance there is a sorcerer in the near neighborhood she will get up from the ground, her eyes still reversed, and fall on the guilty man clawing and wounding him until she is dragged off.”

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Thus, in Senegal, the collective dramatization of identity change in supra-familial congregations, as well as the cosmopolitan staging of ethnic, religious, or other social characters that I described earlier, are relatively modern phenomena. In addition, contemporary ndëpp sessions tend to become somewhat narcissistic manifestations of women’s social imagination. As Ismael Moya has recently shown, the ceremonial life of Wolof and Lebu women is amazingly complex and autonomous. The ndëpp is but one of its festive events that allows the patient to take care of herself and her companions to show themselves in their brightest clothes. Now each ndëpp congregation, mbotay, has its cameraman who records the entire session, and when the chief priestess orders a stop, the film is shown in the living room for the participants to watch and comment on their trances and thus their identity changes. This is not to say that public possession is, or has become, a party or a banal role-playing game. Participants cannot embody a rab that has not been previously fixed in its domestic altar. Nevertheless, it is enough to look at one of the innumerable videos of ndëpp published on the Web to note that this spectacular ritual, sometimes animated today by spirited young men64, is turning into a kind of national rite detached from the domestic cult from which it comes, and which continues to fulfill the essential functions of socialized possession. Without going back to the various factors behind the increased visibility of the rab cult both in the public square and in the hospitals of Dakar, let us stress that it is clearly linked to the process of disintegration of Senegalese lineages ongoing since the beginning of colonization. It is neither by chance nor for mere financial reasons that the most spectacular collective trance sessions are organized in the urban areas of Cape Verde. This is where the most fragmented and ethnically mixed families reside: families who have either left or are leaving their villages or birthplaces, and who continue to migrate across Senegal’s urban spaces or abroad. Like the Romans who moved with their penates, Senegalese family fragments move with their ancestral spirits, which they reinstall in urban altars when illness occurs. It is therefore hardly surprising that the rabs are not only honored in the homes but also embodied on public stages of these communities haunted by the wandering spirits of their ancestors. 64 Some of whitch seem to be góor-jigéen. In the 1960s, one saw men wearing women’s clothes, but not these carefully dressed young men with sophisticated gestures shown in some of these recent videos shot by Senegalese.

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—. “Perles de hanches et fumées d’encens. L’économie domestique du plaisir à Dakar.” Terrain 67 (2017): 186–207. Mueller, Rachel. “The Spirits Are My Neighbors: Women and the Rab Cult in Dakar, Senegal.” Anthropology Honors Projects 18, Macalester College (2013). https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/anth_honors/18/. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. “Possession, affliction et folie: les ruses de la thérapisation.” L’Homme 34/3 (1994): 7–27. Ortigues, Marie-Cécile, and Edmond Ortigues. Oedipe Africain. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984 [Paris: Plon, 1966]. Ottino, Paul. “Le tromba (Madagascar).” L’Homme 5/1 (1965): 84–93. Rabain, Jacqueline. “L’enfant du lignage”: du sevrage à la classe d’âge chez les Wolof du Sénégal. Paris: Payot, 1979. Rabain-Jamin, Jacqueline, and Wendy L. Wornham. “Transformations des conduites de maternage et des pratiques de soin chez les femmes migrantes originaires d’Afrique de l’Ouest.” La psychiatrie de l’enfant 33/1 (1990): 287–319. Rouch, Jean. La religion et la magie Songhay. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960. —. “Le calendrier mythique chez les Songhay-Zarma (Niger).” Systèmes de pensée en Afrique noire 1 (1975): 52–62. Rouget, Gilbert. La musique et la transe. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Sow, Alfâ Ibrâhîm, and Dominique Hado Zidouemba. “Faru rab” et “coro rab”: mythe ou réalité? Jeudi 15 décembre 2005, amphithéâtre de l’EBAD, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAD). Dakar: Observatoire de l’Imaginaire, 2006. Turner, Victor, W. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Verger, Pierre. Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun à Bahia, la Baie de tous les Saints, au Brésil et à l’ancienne Côte des esclaves en Afrique. Dakar: IFAN, 1951. Verger, Pierre Fatumbi. Orisha. Les Dieux Yorouba en Afrique et au Nouveau Monde. Paris: Éditions A. M. Métailié, 1982. Zempléni, Andras. “Anciens et nouveaux usages sociaux de la maladie en Afrique.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 54/1 (1982): 5–19. —. “Des êtres sacrificiels.” In Sous le masque de l’animal. Essais sur le sacrifice en Afrique Noire, edited by Cartry Michel, 267–317. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. —. “Du symptôme au sacrifice: histoire de Khady Fall.” L’Homme 14 (1974): 31–77. 

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—. “From Symptom to Sacrifice: The Story of Khady Fall.” In Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, 87–139. New York: John Wiley, 1977. —. “La dimension thérapeutique du culte des rab: ndöp, tuuru et samp. Rites de possession chez les Lebou et les Wolof.” Psychopathologie Africaine 2/3 (1966): 295–439. —. “L’interprétation et la thérapie traditionnelle du désordre mental chez les Wolof et les Lebou du Sénégal” [Traditional interpretation and therapy of mental disorder among the Wolof and the Lebou of Senegal], PhD diss., Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1968. —. “Pouvoir dans la cure et pouvoir social.” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 8 (1973): 141–179. —. “Sur l’alliance entre la personne et le rab dans le n’döp.” Psychopathologie africaine 3/3 (1967): 441–450.

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22 On Spirit Possession and Some Parallels with Reincarnation f Michael Lambek

Keywords: spirit possession, reincarnation, historicity, person, imagination, self, irony, Madagascar, Mayotte, Switzerland

I think maybe […] why people write fiction, and why people read it, is because you don’t know who you are unless you can imagine being otherwise. – Marilynne Robinson (2012)1

This chapter summarizes some of the key things I have learned from and about spirit possession among Malagasy speakers in Mayotte and northwest Madagascar (western Indian Ocean). The points raised may be of use for comparison with European instances of possession. Moreover, they suggest similarities with an ostensibly different European cultural phenomenon, namely accounts of reincarnation. Here I draw from my understanding of Malagasy possession to show the significance of the recounting of past lives in Switzerland. Both spirit possession, as found in the western Indian Ocean, and reincarnation, as found among some Europeans, are premised on a distinction between spirits and bodies such that the spirits of non-contemporaneous persons can move between bodies. As a result, living persons are connected in specific ways with past persons, enabling distinctive forms of historicity in which voices from distinct historical periods are brought together to speak in or to the present. Possession and reincarnation thereby generate “imagined continuities,” understood as the temporal dimension of what Benedict Anderson2 called “imagined communities.” Spirit possession and reincarnation can each likewise form vehicles for historical succession and for Maussian “personnages,” social characters reproduced from generation 1 Marilynne Robinson, interviewed by Joe Fassler in The Atlantic, May 16, 2012. https://www. theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/marilynne-robinson-on-democracy-readingand-religion-in-america/257211/. 2 Anderson, Imagined Communities.

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to generation.3 However, whereas in the Malagasy case the deceased come forward, alongside the living and retain their public identities, in the Swiss case the living look back to past lives and the deceased do not return to become distinct, embodied, public social actors in the present. In reincarnation, past lives are replaced by subsequent ones, leaving only traces or hints, rather than moving explicitly forward alongside the living. One could say that the spirit (or soul), in the European sense, is more abstract or abstractable from the substance of individuated personhood and yet more completely reproducible in new bodies than the spirit in the Malagasy sense.

Malagasy spirit possession Spirit possession has proved highly compelling to me ever since I first encountered it in 1975, unexpectedly on the island of Mayotte in the Comoro Archipelago of the western Indian Ocean where I had gone to conduct doctoral fieldwork.4 It has been compelling not in the sense that I have desired to perform as a spirit myself or felt myself pulled into trance, but for three other main reasons. First, it provides an extraordinarily rich avenue for exploring the social relations as well as the personal lives and psyches of many of the people I have come to know in Mayotte and Madagascar, conjoining aspects of publicity and intimacy. In Madagascar this extends to the political and historical domains, where mediums possessed by famous monarchs often become public figures. Yet here too their possession expresses unconscious motivation and shapes their personal and private lives. In sum, possession provides a means to get to know people really well. Second, and more abstractly, spirit possession provides a vehicle for reflecting on many philosophical and intellectual puzzles: the mind/ body problem,5 the ethical dimensions of personhood,6 the mimetic and performative dimensions of sociality and selfhood, the social construction 3 Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind.” 4 Ethnographic fieldwork has been carried out over many years in the western Indian Ocean and for briefer periods in Switzerland. The original research was funded by the Canada Council and an NSF grant (Conrad Kottak and Henry Wright, principal investigators) and subsequently by the National Geographic Foundation. Ethnographic fieldwork in all locations since has been supported by successive grants from the Social Science Research Council of Canada and the writing by the award of a Canada Research Chair. 5 Lambek, “Body and Mind in Mind.” 6 Lambek, “How to Make Up One’s Mind.”

On Spirit Possession and Some Par allels with Reincarnation

of reality, the role of the imagination, the nature of historicity (living in time), and so forth. Third, a system of active possession such as is found in northwest Madagascar exemplifies and embodies a mode of being. Possession mediates between the abstractions anthropologists call myth and ritual, bringing the characters down to earth, or back from the dead, and into the space of performance. As such, it also mediates past and present, in some instances conceivable as “tradition” and “modernity,” or in the case of Madagascar, between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial epochs, enabling the past to speak on and in the present and thus inscribing the present into an ongoing and fluid tradition. As noted, it also mediates between the public symbolic world and private and personal subjectivity, that is, between embodied experience, mental representations, and objectified cultural forms. Possession is a means to internalize the past, but it also enables alternate channels of communication between a host or medium and his or her family members, clients, fellow practitioners, friends or enemies, and ultimately between the mediums and themselves, in the latter instance, somewhat as a diary or psychoanalysis might. Possession as practiced by Malagasy speakers has continued to surprise and enlighten me (in something like the way reading good literature does) and it has led me simultaneously to deeper realms of local intimacy and subjectivity, to the singularity and complexity of local ontology, to the articulation of social relations, and to more abstract philosophical questions. Its creativity has meant that I am rarely at a loss as to what to write about and its depth has meant that I have continued to come up with both new ways to think about it and new things to think about it with. Indeed, spirit possession forms an interesting context and metaphor for thinking about the nature of social experience in general and, as pioneered in the work of Janice Boddy,7 about the art of fieldwork and the practice of the ethnographer. For reasons of efficiency and limited space I rapidly summarize some of the arguments I have made over the years since I began following spirit possession in Mayotte from 1975 (then part of the Comoros and since 2011 a département of France) and from the beginning of the 1990s also in northwest Madagascar, especially in the city of Majunga. The practices in the two places closely overlap, with much movement of people and ideas between them, but there are differences of emphasis and understanding. Some of what I say about possession applies only to these places and sometimes 7 Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits; cf. Lambek, “Pinching the Crocodile’s Tongue.”

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more to one than the other; other points I make are more general, and a few may be intrinsic to spirit possession wherever it is found, insofar as one can abstract or isolate such a thing. An important point is that in both places the traditions of spirit possession are live, active, and public, total social facts in the sense of Mauss,8 that is, of social, political, economic, therapeutic, ethical, and aesthetic import. Possession is at once highly entertaining and deeply serious, “religious,” if you like the word (albeit in a context of Islam in Mayotte and of both Islam and Christianity in Majunga). The practices have histories and certainly change over time but they are currently flourishing. A recent thesis by Sophie Bouffart9 confirms much of what I saw in Mayotte in the 1970s; likewise, on my most recent visit to Majunga (in August 2015), I saw a lot of possession, including some very young mediums.10 The arguments are presented more or less, but not entirely, in chronological order and without trying to be complete or consistent. At the end I will briefly compare their relevance for understanding reincarnation in contemporary Switzerland. 1. Trance or dissociation and its neurophysiology are affordances, but secondary to the cultural frameworks that give spirit possession substance and meaning.11 Trance or dissociation does not simply happen first, followed by its rationalization as possession; it manifests as possession. Spirit possession is in the first instance a cultural phenomenon not a purely biological one. It is neither the expression of an illness, nor fakery. As a cultural phenomenon it is symbolically constituted and its manifestations and significance are, of course, socially diverse. 2. Spirit possession can be used to many ends but its presence or existence cannot be explained through any specific social function or any single intention on the part of a given spirit medium. It is a vehicle of cultural expression that needs to be understood first in its own terms. Reductive explanations for both the presence of spirit possession in general and for the practice of any given spirit medium are to be avoided. This includes reductive explanations on religious grounds – as a source of spiritual experience, etc. 3. Spirits are understood (in this region) as distinct, individuated social persons, with named identities, homes, and kin. Their active presence in a given medium is discontinuous but their persons are continuous. That is to say, they are held to their words and acts from one appearance to the next 8 Mauss, The Gift. 9 Bouffart, “La possession comme lieu.” 10 Lambek, “On Being Present to History.” 11 Lambek, “From Disease to Discourse.”

On Spirit Possession and Some Par allels with Reincarnation

and likewise, mediums are held to the relationships they have established with particular spirits. 4. It is evident that spirit possession forms a system of communication. It offers shifts in voice and these voices speak to others. This is minimally triadic (spirit, host, and third party). The spirit speaks to persons who are present and who can then pass the message back to the host. For example, in Mayotte it is not uncommon for spouses to have distinct relationships with the spirits who possess one another. Spouses can report back what was said when the host was replaced by the spirit. Moreover, spouses and spirits can say things to each other that might not be said so easily face to face. The plurality of voices and channels also enables curing rituals to be characterized by a high level of redundancy of the message, repeated each time someone enters or leaves a trance or appears as a different spirit.12 5. Hence, while the modality of cure certainly entails material elements and bodily practices like bathing or the ingestion of plant medicines, and while it certainly includes direct experiential dimensions, it is primarily communicational, or can be understood at a communicational, interpersonal or intersubjective level, but also at an intra-personal level, as a means of coming to a better understanding of oneself or of resolving internal dilemmas. Despite the evident embodiment, it is in large part a form of “talk-therapy.” 6. Possession therapy, like psychoanalysis, offers a privileged mode of communication, or a framed site for communication, in which the message is decoupled from the meta-message; thus, what I say to you need not have the implications for my relationship to you that speech ordinarily does. Put another way, it is not just the content of what is said but the pragmatic and illocutionary effects of speaking that are distinct from those of ordinary speech. As Janice Boddy13 has argued, possession also offers a unique means or site for reflexivity and for partial freedom or distancing from certain forms of subjectification, of putting oneself in perspective. 7. The possession ritual in Mayotte is defined as one of healing but is also a kind of initiation and confirmation of a specific relationship.14 The key point is for the spirit to announce his or her name and for that identification to be recognized and accepted (unchallenged) by those present. The people who need to acknowledge the new relationship are primarily other spirits whose identification and presence in other hosts have been previously authorized. 12 Lambek, Human Spirits. 13 Boddy, “Spirits and Selves.” 14 Lambek, Human Spirits.

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8. The key moment in a very long process, that also entails reciprocity among the spirits and among the hosts, is the announcement of the name. While this is understood to be a locutionary utterance in which the spirit merely identifies himself or herself, I have understood it as a performative utterance, in which, in effect, the spirit gives itself a name, thereby creating its social existence, demonstrating its presence, instantiating or confirming the relationship with the given host, and reproducing the identity and being of the spirit.15 Following Rappaport,16 I call this an instance of mystified performativeness. The illocutionary effects are mystified to participants or their force is downplayed. However, it could be that I am making assumptions about the local semiotic ideology and that people understand the effects of performativity perfectly well or that, to anticipate my subsequent argument, the distinction between the locutionary and illocutionary is undecidable, hence the speech act is understood ironically, as both at once. 9. People say they do not choose to be possessed, nor to be possessed by one spirit as opposed to another, yet it is clear that unconscious motivation is at play. By becoming possessed, and possessed by a specific, given spirit, a person in Mayotte articulates her relationships to others in her milieu who have the same, related, or entirely different spirits, whether identifying with and succeeding or possibly displacing one parent or grandparent, or moving off in a different direction.17 In northwest Madagascar the identity of the possessing spirit also has complex implications with respect to its social status, its place in the genealogy, its historical cohort, its relationship to the segmentation of the Sakalava kingdom into multiple smaller polities and to one or another royal faction, and its link with a particular cemetery and set of residentially as well as genealogically adjacent ancestors.18 The identity of the spirit also has implications for relationships with other spirit mediums and family members. Additionally, hosts in both Mayotte and Madagascar are never possessed by just one spirit; some hosts have two or three spirits, other hosts have many more. Each of these spirits has specific social implications and the different spirits in a given host may pull them in more than one direction or draw upon and expand more than one strand of their identity. Sometimes the incentive for possession by a particular spirit is ambivalent, complex, or concealed; at other times it appears fairly obvious. In 2012 15 Lambek, “What’s in a Name?” 16 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion. 17 Lambek, “Spirit Possession/Spirit Succession” and “Kinship as Gift and Theft.” 18 Lambek, The Weight of the Past.

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Sarah Gould and I encountered a medium who was said to be possessed by ancestral spirits who were twins, something neither of us had heard of before. As we were standing in the courtyard, the medium’s wife pointed out a pair of young women who looked alike – the medium himself had identical twin sisters. 10. Once one stops asking the question why some people or categories of people become possessed and not others, and asks instead why a particular host is possessed by a particular spirit or spirits, the relevant social and psychological processes and meanings become more evident and the question of naturalized pathology recedes. In discussing their personal histories of possession with some mediums and in having the privilege of observing certain individuals at intervals over the course of many years, it is clear that many factors, at various levels of psychological depth, can enter an individual case history. In this respect the question would not be so different from trying to discover why a group of intellectuals choose their particular academic disciplines or are attracted to particular theorists rather than others. One of the processes characteristic of spirit possession can be described as introjection – and it can be specifically contrasted with projection or seen in dialectical relationship to it.19 Thus, one woman I knew well, troubled by unwelcome suitors, later understood her illness as caused by sorcery perpetrated by a specific young man. Being healed from the sorcery, she acknowledged her own possession by a young male spirit who announced he was looking after her interests and fighting off aggressors. She thus came to identify with a young male figure and transform him from attacker to protector. Likewise, the possessing spirit to whom she was most closely attached was a strong elder male who was the younger brother of the spirit who possessed her own much older brother, a man who stood for her in the place of her absent father. In introjecting him, she became, in effect and in part (in an unconscious sense), her own father, that is to say, she acquired what she understood to be his care for her and his strength and authority. 11. The public performances of spirit possession in Mayotte and Madagascar are lively and compelling and attract fairly large audiences. My first book, Human Spirits, was organized around the Geertzian metaphor of the text20; however, unlike critics of Geertz, I never took the metaphor literally nor assumed it meant that texts were permanently fixed. Among other things, the 19 Lambek, “Fantasy in Practice.” 20 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.

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text metaphor captures the kind of dialectical movement between objectification and subjectification proposed by Berger and Luckmann.21 I applied a Ricoeurian textual hermeneutics22 and concluded that, irrespective of the many immediate and direct messages passed on through the system of communication, taken more broadly as a cultural text, possession addresses general issues of power, morality, and integrity. There are elements both of comedy and of tragedy. Possession qua entextualized public performance can be seen as a particular creative and imaginative genre that is intellectually compelling and emotionally evocative for its audience, much as any great art form. 12. Following the lives of spirit mediums, it is evident that the significance of having a spirit is found not only during intermittent periods of active possession when one is performing directly as the spirit but also across daily practice. The relationship one has with a spirit, if taken seriously, affects what one cannot eat, on what days one cannot work, and ones’ relationships with others who have the same or closely related spirits.23 In northwest Madagascar it adds a whole other layer of kinship relations with living members of the royal clan and with other spirit mediums and it sets up various prohibitions on marriage and child-rearing that can be profoundly consequential. Thus, whereas active performance is premised on a strict separation between the person of the host and that of the spirit – it is either one or the other who is present and speaking – in the practice of daily life there is much more interpenetration or influence. Possession can be deeply significant to spirit mediums (though not to all). It can influence such things as who one can live with, whether one can attend Muslim or Christian funerals, and even the color of the cats one chooses to keep. 13. In Mayotte spirit possession has long been found alongside Islam and a tradition of astrology and today alongside extensive French schooling and medicine. These traditions are incommensurable to one another rather than in outright contradiction or mutually exclusive.24 No one can fully disregard possession; while many people state forcefully that they are not interested and will never become possessed themselves, and while some would say it is prohibited by Islam, very few would say that it is unreal or untrue or merely a social construction, and everyone is eventually forced to acknowledge or greet a spirit or go to one for advice or assistance. Everyone has ways to articulate the various traditions. 21 Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. 22 Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text.” 23 Lambek, The Weight of the Past. 24 Lambek, Knowledge and Practice.

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Such articulation occurs in praxis, in creativity, and in reflection (Aristotle’s three modes of activity) and it shifts depending on whether at a given moment the practitioner is operating as an expert in one of these traditions, as a well-informed citizen, or as a simple “man on the street” (to draw from Schutz’s categories of relations to knowledge or modes of attention).25 In northwest Madagascar where some living people and some ancestors are Christian, some Muslim, and some neither, all permutations are possible in possession, including Christian spirit mediums possessed by Muslim spirits and Muslim mediums possessed by Christian spirits. Moreover, there is a playful element to all this, a recognition, for instance, that not all people who identify as Muslim adhere strictly to the tenets of Islam. One of the spirits currently most popular in Majunga is a Muslim man (Ndrankeindraza) sporting a red fez, who likes nothing so much as a stiff drink, albeit attempting to conceal his drinking in front of his grandfather (Ndramañavakarivo), portrayed as a much stricter Muslim. Spirit possession expresses and enhances the open, pluralist, and cosmopolitan nature of society here. At a more abstract level, the pervasiveness of incommensurability challenges structuralist assumptions of holism and neat binary oppositions. Incommensurability characterizes not only the problem of translation evident between cultures, but is also internal to every lively cultural tradition. It is one of the things that the rationalizing processes or discourses as described by Weber or Foucault try to eradicate. Spirit possession, of course, stands as a strong counter to rationalization in this sense. However, this by no means renders it irrational. 14. A capable spirit medium must be able to perform well in character, thus as a spirit. She must also master her entries and exits into the role, hence to perform well in her practice as a spirit medium. Finally, she must be able to articulate her spirits with the rest of her life.26 One might call the first kind of performance creative, the second ethical, and the third perfectionist.27 Far from being hysterical, a strong medium is competent in her craft, if not a stellar artist, psychologically mature, and has what Freud and Fingarette28 refer to as insight. Certain strong mediums might be described as ethical virtuosi. 15. Hosts who do not simply enjoy themselves or suffer with possession but who work as active mediums on behalf of others must have organizational 25 Schutz, “The Well-Informed Citizen”; cf. Lambek, Knowledge and Practice. 26 Lambek, “Graceful Exits.” 27 In Cavell’s sense: Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. 28 Fingarette, The Self in Transformation.

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skills, an ability to adjust behavior to context and to shape the context, capacities for empathy and intimacy,29 sound judgment and creative imagination.30 16. In being both oneself and an other,31 or others, possession is intrinsically ironic.32 Irony is not the same as sarcasm or cynicism. Here it is not directed to or against others33 but acknowledges the essentially unknowable qualities of human intention and agency.34 A spirit presenting himself in and through my body is simultaneously me and not me. As a spirit medium I am committed to and certain of the fact that I am displaced by another, lend the other my body, and yet I also know, somehow, that I have a hand in my performance. Others recognize and defer to my spirit while also seeing a version of me. The affirmation of spirit possession always contains a residue of skepticism or wonder. As people in Madagascar sometimes say, in French, “Incroyable. mais vrai!” Spirits speak knowingly, often with a wink or a comic gesture, framing one kind of statement with another and juxtaposing their statements with those of the respective mediums. Hence, at the core of spirit possession is irony rather than certainty. “Belief” in the Christian sense is not the correct analytic concept; felicity of performance35 and deference36 are better. Becoming a medium entails, in effect, learning to know that one means what one does.37 17. An ironic appreciation of human existence, and especially of illness and its treatment, is characteristic of many modern works of fiction, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain providing – if you will tolerate the pun – a monumental example. Here, as in Freud, questions of cause, intention, and agency are problematized. Are patients complicit in their illnesses? Is the source of certain forms of distress ultimately undecidable? Spirit possession raises similar questions, not least for the possessed themselves.38 18. In northwest Madagascar the various spirits are manifestations of predecessors – ancestors or prior inhabitants of the land. I have focused on those belonging to the dominant royal clans (Zafinimena, Zafinifotsy).39 29 Lambek, Knowledge and Practice, chap. 11. 30 Lambek, The Weight of the Past and “Nuriaty, the Saint, and the Sultan.” 31 Cf. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. 32 Lambek, “Rheumatic Irony.” 33 Lear, Therapeutic Action and A Case for Irony. 34 Nehamas, The Art of Living. 35 Austin, How to Do Things. 36 Bloch, “Ritual and Deference.” 37 Lambek, “On Catching up with Oneself.” 38 Lambek, “Rheumatic Irony.” 39 Lambek, The Weight of the Past.

On Spirit Possession and Some Par allels with Reincarnation

These spirits are manifestations of specific members of the clan; their persons can be found on the royal genealogy. In principle, every member of this extensive genealogy, male and female, and whether or not they ruled when alive, emerges as a spirit (tromba), so long as the correct forms of burial were practiced or dispensation provided. Tromba are located between life and death; when they manifest in human hosts some of them are depicted as emerging from burial shrouds and they show the symptoms associated with their mode of dying. When present, spirits dress and conduct themselves appropriate to the era in which they were alive and, in effect, speak from the perspective of people from that era. In performance they interact most closely with those of immediate adjacent generations, offering brief tableaux of mother/son relations and the like. The most powerful spirits and those from earliest generations manifest in more forceful and tiring, hence shorter, states of dissociation than the younger and more junior ones, some of whom can carouse the night away. The senior spirits evoke violent and tragic events of their own lives, stories which in their intensity and themes resonate with the Greek myths, indeed bringing together the drama and conflict of political succession with that of psychological intergenerational succession (identification, separation) characteristic of the Oedipus cycle. I call spirit possession a form of mythopraxis insofar as it is a visceral enactment of relations that in other societies are strung into the narrative structures we call myth (or dramas we call tragedy).40 19. The juxtaposition of the voices of royal ancestors, each anchored precisely in a genealogical grid that establishes their relative chronology, enables a kind of historically informed and informing polyphonic chorus or debate that, if it is not exactly “history” in the European sense of the term, certainly manifests a kind of historical consciousness or generates a particular historicity. When spirits from different periods or with different subject positions come together there is irony not only in the sense intrinsic to possession described above, but also in the sense of dramatic irony, as elucidated by Kenneth Burke41 or Bakhtin,42 that is, where each character necessarily offers a perspective on the standpoints of each of the others and hence in which no single voice can be understood as strictly true or false, but rather contributory to the whole. The conjunction of multiple voices is what I call a poiesis of history,43 producing a particular historicity in which 40 Lambek, “How Do Women Give Birth?” 41 Burke, “Four Master Tropes.” 42 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 43 Lambek, “The Sakalava Poiesis of History” and The Weight of the Past.

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the past is neither homogenous, nor empty, nor ever fully displaced by the present. This is a historicity in which multiple times speak to each other; in effect, the precolonial and colonial voices contextualize the present and ironize it and each other. This is simultaneously playful and serious and it can be extremely compelling. Eventually I came to see that this is true as well for the distinction between the voice and person of any individual medium and his or her manifestations of possession – that it is not merely the content of what is said that is ironic but the very means of saying it. Certain literary critical definitions of irony look very much like descriptions of the double voicing characteristic of possession.44 20. When living people wish to make changes or accommodations to the ceremonial system, for example, to renovate ancestral shrines in new materials or address the question of filming the ceremonies, they must ask permission of the most senior ancestors. To achieve their approval they have to explain themselves; hence possession affords a space in which change is clarified, rationalized, and reflected upon, not entered lightly or unthinkingly, but only when balanced against other considerations and justified. One can say that when the spirits acquiesce, the past sanctifies the present. Put another way, historical change is here understood as an ethical process in which each generation must acknowledge both its debt to and its departure from previous generations.45 Through spirit possession, change is characterized by a process of “working through” roughly analogous to that of psychoanalysis. 21. All of this suggests that life with spirits may be better and more broadly conceptualized as one of cohabitation rather than as possession, an argument I will develop in subsequent publications.

Swiss reincarnation Like possession, reincarnation is to be understood as a cultural practice whose invocation is not to be explained reductively. Swiss people who are reincarnated are not possessed by spirits; in a way, they are the spirits themselves, reborn and transformed from generation to generation. Because there is no objectification of the other voice or person, much more weight falls on the individual consciousness. Past lives are acknowledged personally rather than 44 Lambek, “Rheumatic Irony.” 45 Lambek, The Weight of the Past.

On Spirit Possession and Some Par allels with Reincarnation

displayed publicly. Reincarnation stories are less objectified as cultural texts and their narrators are subject to fewer criteria and standards of performance. Moreover, reincarnation is less common in Switzerland than is possession in Madagascar. Yet despite these differences, there is a poiesis of history and an ethical responsivity vis-à-vis the past that reminds me of Madagascar. The two most powerful accounts of reincarnation I heard in Switzerland came from practitioners of what they might call complementary medicine.46 The two women did not know each other and were in many respects quite different from each other, but each was born between 1955 and 1960 and each told me about a previous life lived during World War II. In one account,47 a woman I call Alice Alder recalled her immediately preceding life as a political dissident in Nazi Germany. In another, much earlier life she lived in a monastery in what is present day Bhutan and fought over access to medical knowledge and power with the abbot, who was also later reincarnated as her grandfather. Indeed, she and her grandfather had met and fought in various lives and epochs as they have in the present one. The other woman, whom I’ll call Beata Baumann, is a highly articulate and savvy practitioner of a kind of feminist homeopathy making use of distillations of the latest cancer drugs. Beata said she first dreamt about her reincarnation. She had been a writer in her previous life and later she read the writer’s published autobiography and realized she had been to all the same places. She said, in her idiomatic English, that while the initial realization was “kind of scary” she was bored reading the autobiography, “maybe because I wrote it.” I asked whether the writer was Swiss and she said no, adding that he committed suicide exactly fourteen years before she was born. “I saw the cemetery in Brazil. It was scary. I went there, entirely by chance; it was a tiny place and I just happened to be there. In a coffee house I had a serious déjà vu. I thought, I’ve been here before.” Ten years later she had the dream. “And it made sense. But it was not something I was searching for.” “You know,” she added in a seeming non sequitur, “since the age of eighteen I have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. I was told in the dream 46 Research in Switzerland was conducted sporadically between 2003 and 2010 and supported by the SSHRC. I have not collected many accounts, but the ones I received came unsolicited from citizens of long Swiss ancestry (not from recent immigrants). I do not know how widespread the idea of reincarnation is in Switzerland; many people claim it is irrelevant and yet it is a tenet of anthroposophy, which does have a significant presence. The two women I describe were not practitioners of anthroposophy. 47 Lambek, “The Cares of Alice Alder.”

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not to remember what I had learned. But when I woke up, I remembered saying to myself in the dream “Oh, I was that guy!’” But Beata didn’t remember who “that guy” was. She went from A to Z in the encyclopedia, trying to find the name that matched up with the life. She said, “I should have started at the back since his name began with Z.” I took a guess and asked, “Were you Stefan Zweig?” “Yes! He told me he had pain because he couldn’t live with the guilt of being Jewish. He felt guilty for surviving and for living well in Brazil. He was blamed by German-speaking Jews for leaving and for not returning. He lived in a good situation in Brazil and was blamed for this, blamed for surviving.” “He suffered survivor guilt and so committed suicide together with his wife. She suffered from permanent rheumatic pain. He died because he couldn’t live with the attacks against him, the attacks by his fellow Jews.” At the time Beata had the dream she had not yet read much Zweig. She remembered only having read his Schachnovelle (Chess novella)48 in school. This “had a big impact.” The famous novella is about a prisoner of war who passes the time in solitary confinement playing chess with himself. She had never imagined someone who could do this. “It’s hard enough to play with two.” There are all kinds of intriguing materials embedded in this narrative that I cannot develop here. Beata is not Jewish and indeed her German mother spent the war in a TB sanatorium in Davos that was effectively an internment camp. Years’ later the mother committed suicide. Schachnovelle, Beata agreed, is essentially the depiction of a person divided against himself. Zweig’s wife is portrayed as suffering an ailment similar to Beata’s own and to the kinds of autoimmune conditions she diagnoses and treats in her patients. Taken together, Alice and Beata’s stories illustrate the working through of Switzerland’s relationship to Nazi Germany during World War II, an issue at once personal and public. Both women live today in Appenzell Ausserrhoden with its view to Germany over the Bodensee (Lake Constance). Had they been alive at the time, they could quite literally have watched the war from their balconies, as many Ausserrhoders did. But, of course, this is a working through of history in the imagination, alongside but incommensurable with academic or even national history. I doubt that survivor guilt or public criticism was the main factor in Zweig’s suicide in 48 Also translated in English as The Royal Game; written in the period 1938–1941, the German edition was first published posthumously in 1942.

On Spirit Possession and Some Par allels with Reincarnation

February 1942 at the age of 61; it was more likely despair at the collapse of the world he had known and the thought, at the height of their power, that the Nazis would be ever more victorious.49 As in spirit possession, reincarnation draws on a kind of playful LéviStraussian bricolage or Freudian dreamwork. If the vehicle or means of such imagining of history is here not minimally triadic in its communicational structure, not collective and public like the Malagasy spirits, nor manifestly fully embodied like possession, it is still a kind of poiesis of history and one whose central narrative or dramatic function, of the many functions that Aristotle identified, is character. History is constituted through distinct persons or personnages. Moreover, similar to Malagasy spirit possession, these stories of reincarnation entail a kind of moral imperative to live with and work through the past. In complex ways I have not been able to address here, Malagasy spirit mediums bear the past, becoming both the consciousness and the conscience of history.50 Like the Malagasy spirit mediums, the reincarnated Swiss bring voices from the past into the present. They carry them forward by identifying with them and doubling or multiplying their own persons. In bringing these characters and voices to bear they construct an intrinsically ironic poiesis of self and history as well as their own ethical relation to it.

References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991 [1983]. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965 [1955]. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination, edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Bloch, Maurice. “Ritual and Deference.” In Essays on Cultural Transmission, by Maurice Bloch, 123–138. Oxford–New York: Berg, 2005. 49 Beata’s points about why Zweig committed suicide could be said to evince something of a lack of ethical discernment, or at the least a knowledge of history; nevertheless, the effort to understand and to acknowledge is present. 50 Lambek, “The Past Imperfect,” The Weight of the Past, “Nuriaty, the Saint, and the Sultan,” “Memory in a Maussian Universe,” and “On Being Present to History.”

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Boddy, Janice. “Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance.” American Ethnologist 15/1 (1988): 4–27. —. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Bouffart, Sophie. “La possession comme lieu et mode d’expression de la complexité sociale: le cas de Mayotte.” PhD thesis, Paris-Ouest Nanterre, 2009. Burke, Kenneth. “Four Master Tropes.” In A Grammar of Motives, by Kenneth Burke, 503–517. New York: Prentice Hall, 1945. Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Fingarette, Herbert. The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, & the Life of the Spirit. Boston: Basic Books, 1963. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Lambek, Michael. “Body and Mind in Mind, Body and Mind in Body: Some Anthropological Interventions in a Long Conversation.” In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, edited by M. Lambek and Andrew Strathern, 103–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. —. “The Cares of Alice Alder: Recuperating Kinship and History in Switzerland.” In Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, edited by Janet Carsten, 218–240. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. —. “Fantasy in Practice: Projection and Introjection, Or the Witch and the Spirit-Medium.” In Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 198–214. New York: Berghahn, 2002 [copublished in Social Analysis 46/3 (2002): 198–214]. —. “From Disease to Discourse: Remarks on the Conceptualization of Trance and Spirit Possession.” In Altered States of Consciousness and Mental Health: A Cross-cultural Perspective, edited by Colleen Ward, 36–61. Newbury Park, CA–London: Sage Press, 1989. —. “Graceful Exits: Spirit Possession as Personal Performance in Mayotte.” Culture 8/1 (1988): 59–69. —. “How Do Women Give Birth?” In Questions of Anthropology, edited by Rita Astuti, Jonathan Parry, and Charles Stafford, 197–225. Oxford: Berg, 2007. —. “How to Make up One’s Mind: Reason, Passion, and Ethics in Spirit Possession.” University of Toronto Quarterly 79/2 (2010): 720–741 [special issue on Models of Mind, edited by Marlene Goldman and Jill Matus]. —. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. New York–Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 [reissued 2009]. —. “Kinship as Gift and Theft: Acts of Succession in Mayotte and Israel.” American Ethnologist 38/1 (2011): 1–15.

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—. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. —. “Memory in a Maussian Universe.” In Regimes of Memory, edited by Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, 202–216. London: Routledge, 2003. —. “Nuriaty, the Saint, and the Sultan: Virtuous Subject and Subjective Virtuoso of the Post-modern Colony.” In Post-colonial Subjectivities, edited by Richard Werbner, 25–43. London: Zed Books, 2002. —. “On Being Present to History: Historicity and Brigand Spirits in Madagascar.” Hau 6/1 (2016): 317–341 [in a special section of Hau entitled “Beyond History,” edited by Stephan Palmié and Charles Stewart]. —. “On Catching up with Oneself: Learning to Know That One Means What One Does.” In Learning Religion, edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarró, 65–81. Oxford: Berghahn, 2007. —. “The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice.” In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze and M. Lambek, 235–254. New York: Routledge, 1996. —. “Pinching the Crocodile’s Tongue: Affinity and the Anxieties of Influence in Fieldwork.” Anthropology and Humanism 22/1 (1997): 31–53 [special issue on fieldwork]. —. “Rheumatic Irony: Questions of Agency and Self-Deception as Refracted through the Art of Living with Spirits.” In Illness and Irony, edited by M. Lambek and P. Antze, 40–59. New York: Berghahn, 2003. —. “The Sakalava Poiesis of History: Realizing the Past through Spirit Possession in Madagascar.” American Ethnologist 25/2 (1998): 106–127. —. “Spirit Possession/Spirit Succession: Aspects of Social Continuity in Mayotte.” American Ethnologist 15/4 (1988): 710–731. —. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. —. “What’s in a Name? Name Bestowal and the Identity of Spirits in Mayotte and Northwest Madagascar.” In The Anthropology of Names and Naming, edited by Gabriele vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn, 116–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Lear, Jonathan. A Case for Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. —. Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony. New York: Other Press, 2003. Mauss, Marcel. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self.” In The Concept of the Person, edited by Michael Carrithers et al., 1–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [1938]. —. The Gift, translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Nehamas, Alexander. The Art of Living. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Rappaport, Roy. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Model of the Text.” Social Research 38 (1971): 529–562. —. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Schutz, Alfred. “The Well-Informed Citizen.” In Alfred Schutz: Collected Papers, edited by Arvid Brodersen, vol. 2, 120–134. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964.

Contributors Dániel Bárth is an ethnologist and historian who teaches as an associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest and leads the Department of Folklore there. His research and teaching interests include microhistory, historical anthropology, archival-historical folkloristics, popular culture and everyday life in early modern Hungary, lower clergy and local society. His main fields are the historical aspects of vernacular religion and the historical sources of early modern Christianity. Among his books are Esküvő, keresztelő, avatás. Egyház és népi kultúra a kora újkori Magyarországon (Marriage, baptism and the churching of women: The Church and popular culture in early modern Hungary) (2005); Benedikció és exorcizmus a kora újkori Magyarországon (Benediction and exorcism in early modern Hungary) (2010), and The Exorcist of Sombor: The Mentality of an Eighteenth-Century Franciscan Friar (2020). Heike Behrend (PhD, Free University of Berlin, and PhHabil, University of Bayreuth), since 2012 retired Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of African Studies, University of Cologne, Germany, has conducted intensive ethnographic and historical research in Kenya and Uganda in the field of media anthropology (in particular, photographic practices in Eastern Africa) and anthropology of violence, war and religion. She has published Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda (1999) and Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-Hunts and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda (2011). Her latest publications are Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices along the East African Coast (2013) and Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction (ed. with Anja Dreschke and Martin Zillinger) (2015). Daniela Berti is a social anthropologist at CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and a member of the Centre for Himalayan Studies. After working for several years on ritual settings in North India (on oracular and astrological consultations, Brahmanical and tantric rituals), her current research focuses on the ethnography of court cases and, over the last few years, in particular, on cases dealing with animal rights and the conservation of animal species. She is coordinating the comparative project “Ruling on Nature: Animals and the Environment before the Court” (ANR, 2020–2024). Her books include La parole des dieux. Rituels de possession en Himalaya

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indien (2001); Regimes of Legality: Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia (with Devika Bordia) (2015); and Filing Religion: State, Hinduism, and Courts of Law (with Gilles Tarabout and Raphaël Voix) (2016). Janice Boddy (PhD, University of British Columbia) is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Muslim Sudan and Northeast Africa. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor and past Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include religion and ritual, gender, anthropology of the body, kinship and sociality, and colonial history. Her books include Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan (1989); Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl (1993); and Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (2007). She has also published numerous journal articles and book chapters and is coeditor with Michael Lambek of A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion (2013). Nancy Caciola is a cultural historian who teaches in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her general research and teaching interests include religion, gender, popular culture, and processes of conversion; she specializes in beliefs about bodies and spirits in later medieval Europe. She has published two monographs: Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (2003) and Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (2016); and a wide variety of journal articles, in venues such as Past and Present, Speculum, and Comparative Studies in Society and History, among others. Her current research project centers on the Guglielmites, a heretical group in thirteenth-century Milan that preached a doctrine of universal salvation and that venerated a woman as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Pierre-Henri Castel is senior research fellow at CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), Paris, École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He has a PhHabil (Paris Panthéon Sorbonne), a PhD in philosophy (EHESS), and a PhD in psychology (Paris Villetanneuse). He is a historian and philosopher of psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis. His main academic interests are in the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy (especially madness and evil). He has written extensively on the historical context of hysteria, transsexualism, depression, sexual perversions, and schizophrenia, their many conceptualizations, and their treatment (with an emphasis on psychotherapy). His last major investigation, in the wake

Contributors

of Norbert Elias, is a cultural history of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in two volumes: Âmes scrupuleuses, vies d’angoisse, tristes obsédés: obsessions et contrainte intérieure de l’Antiquité à Freud (2011), and La fin des coupables: obsessions et contrainte intérieure de la psychanalyse aux neurosciences (2012). In his last book, “But why psychoanalyze children?” (2021), he reconsiders child psychoanalysis as a therapeutic ritual in contemporary individualistic societies. Florence Chave-Mahir is researcher associated with University Lumière Lyon II (CIHAM-UMR 5648). Her field of interest is the relationship between exorcism and magic in the Middle Ages. Her books are: L’exorcisme des possédés dans l’Eglise d’Occident (Xe–XIVe siècles) (2011); Rituel d’exorcisme ou manuel de magie? Le manuscrit Clm 10085 de la Bayerische Staatsbilbiothek de Munich (début du XVe siècle) (with Julien Véronèse) (2015). Among her articles are: “Medieval Exorcism: Liturgical and Hagiographical Sources,” in Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, edited by Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton (2016). Thomas J. Csordas is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Dr. James Y. Chan Presidential Chair in Global Health, and he serves as Founding Director of the Global Health Program and Director of the UCSD Global Health Institute. His research interests include medical and psychological anthropology, global mental health, anthropological theory, comparative religion, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture. He has conducted ethnographic research among Charismatic Catholics, Navajo Indians, adolescent psychiatric patients in New Mexico, and Catholic exorcists in the United States and Italy. Among his books are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994); Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (1994); Body/Meaning/ Healing (2002); and Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009). Sarah Ferber is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the author of Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (2004). She contributed several entries to the Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, edited by R. M. Golden (2006), and “Demonic Possession, Exorcism and Witchcraft,” to The Oxford

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Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by B. P. Levack (2013). Her research on contemporary exorcism practices is found, inter alia, in “Psychotic Reactions? Witchcraft, the Devil and Mental Illness” in Emotions in the History of Witchcraft, edited by L. Kounine and M. Ostling (2016) and, with Adrian Howe, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Devil: Exorcism, Expertise and Secularisation in a Late Twentieth-Century Australian Criminal Court” in Dämonische Besessenheit: Zur Interpretation eines kulturhistorischen Phänomens, edited by H. de Waardt, J. Schmidt, and D. Bauer (2005). Michèle Fiéloux is an ethnologist at CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), a member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale (LAS), and a film director. Using a comparative approach applied to the Lobi society of Burkina Faso and the Masikoro-Sakalava society of Madagascar, she has studied different modes of expression of the individual in his or her social space through biographies, lineage and possession cults, gender relations and funeral rituals. She has co-directed several documentaries on Lobi society and possession cults in Madagascar. Her main books are Les sentiers de la nuit (1980), Biwanté, biographical account of a young Lobi from Burkina Faso (1993), Femmes du Tiers Monde (with J. Bisilliat) (1993), Les mémoires de Binduté Da (1998) and Images d’Afrique et sciences sociales (with J. Lombard) (2019). Her articles on the Sakalavas include: “Regards en gamme. Chronique familiale ordinaire avec Personnages” (2008) and “Corps féminin, corps du lignage: le rituel du bilo” (with Jacques Lombard, 2019). Ida Fröhlich is Professor of Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern History at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest. Her research field is Judaism in the Second Temple period, with a focus on the Qumran community, its tradition and religion. Her books include: Bibliai legendák Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarumában (Biblical legends in Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum) (1973); Time and Times and Half a Time: Historical Consciousness in the Jewish Literature of the Persian and Hellenistic Eras (1996); A qumráni szövegek magyarul (The texts of Qumran in Hungarian translation), with introduction and notes, 2nd enlarged edition (2000), a comprehensive Hungarian translation of the Qumran texts. She has widely published on the Qumran pesharim; historical memory in the Qumran texts; the Aramaic Enochic collection from Qumran; and the book of Tobit (also represented in the Qumran library). The present chapter is part of a book program on Qumran magical texts.

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Mary L. Keller (PhD) is a historian of religions at the University of Wyoming. Her first book on spirit possession, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession (2002), brings feminist and postcolonial theorists to the comparative study of women possessed by spirits in order to consider the agency of the body that is spoken-through at work, war and play. Her recent publications include “Indigenous Studies and ‘the Sacred’” American Indian Quarterly 38 (2014); “Spirit Possession,” in the Brill Handbook on Contemporary Religion (2015); and “Indigenous Religion: From the Origin to the Future of Religious Studies,” in Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religion (2016). Her current research engages Indigenous studies theory to consider the “scene of possession” where matter’s energy is translated as “spirit” and the spirits of the land are moving human and nonhumans as ecological relationships change with the warming planet. Gábor Klaniczay is University Professor at CEU, Budapest/Vienna. His principal field is the historical anthropology of Christianity (sainthood, miracle beliefs, stigmata, visions, healing, magic, witchcraft). His books include The Uses of Supernatural Power (1990); Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses (2002); Procès de canonisation au Moyen Âge. Aspects juridiques et religieux/Medieval Canonization Processes: Legal and Religious Aspects (ed.) (2004); Communicating with the Spirits: Demons, Spirits, Witches 1 (ed. with Éva Pócs) (2005); Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology: Demons, Spirits, Witches 2 (ed. with Éva Pócs) (2006); Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions: Demons, Spirits, Witches 3 (ed. with Éva Pócs) (2008); The “Vision Thing”: Studying Divine Intervention (ed. with William A. Christian Jr.) (2009); Multiple Antiquities – Multiple Modernities: Ancient Histories in Nineteenth Century European Cultures (ed. with Michael Werner and Ottó Gecser) (2011); Manufacturing the Middle Ages (ed. with Patrick Geary) (2013); Discorsi sulle stimmate dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea/ Discours sur les stigmates du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine (ed.) (2013); Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania (ed. with Éva Pócs) (2017); Santità, miracoli, osservanze. L’Ungheria nel contesto europeo (2019). Michael Lambek is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Toronto. Previously he spent some years cross-appointed at the London School of Economics. He holds a Canada Research Chair and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His main fieldwork was conducted in northwest Madagascar and the neighboring island of Mayotte. His books include

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Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte (1981, reissued 2009); Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession (1993); The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (2002); The Ethical Condition (2015); and Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte (2018). He is coauthor of Four Lectures on Ethics (2015) and editor of eight other books, including Tense Past (with Paul Antze) (1996); Ordinary Ethics (2010); Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (2002; 2nd ed., 2008); and A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion (with Janice Boddy) (2013). Jacques Lombard is an anthropologist (Institut de recherche pour le développement) and filmmaker, specializing in the study of Madagascar (the Sakalava society). He has directed over 30 ethnographic documentaries, and he is the author of many articles and about a dozen of works, including Images d’Afrique et sciences sociales (with Michèle Fiéloux) (2019); Andolo, l’art funéraire sakalava à Madagascar (with Sophie Goedefroit) (2007); Les mémoires de Binduté Da (with Michèle Fiéloux) (1998); Le royaume sakalava du Menabe: essai d’analyse d’un système politique à Madagascar (1998). His most recent works focus on the place of images in social science research (construction of facts and anthropological writing), in particular through the comparative study of religious phenomena (possession cults) and on the approach to notions of shared imagination and “social subject.” Éva Pócs is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pécs, Hungary. She has been PI on the European Research Council project “Vernacular Religion on the Boundary of Eastern and Western Christianity.” Her main research areas are the comprehensive analysis and comparative research of Central Eastern European folk religion and folk belief; complex anthropological research of lay religiosity and popular magic; research into early modern religion, witchcraft and demonology; as well as research into text-folklore related to belief narratives, verbal charms and other genres of religious folklore. Her books include: Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of SouthEastern and Central Europe (1989) and Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age (1998). Among her edited and coedited books are: The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe (with James Kapaló and William Ryan) (2012); Charms and Charming: Studies on Magic in Everyday Life (2019); Present and Past in the Study of Religion and Magic (with Ágnes Hesz) (2019); Body, Soul, Spirits and Supernatural Communication (2019); The Magical and

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Sacred Medical World (2019). Her most recent articles in English are: “The Hungarian Táltos and the Shamanism of Pagan Hungarians: Questions and Hyphotheses,” Acta Etnhographica Hungarica 63 (2018), and “Stoikheion, Stuha, Zduhač: Guardian Spirits, Weather Magicians, and Talismanic Magic in the Balkans,” Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 16 (2021). Janine Rivière is a cultural historian who has been teaching academic literacy and history courses at universities in Canada and Australia for over ten years. She is a teacher at New College. She has published widely on the cultural history of dreams and nightmares in the early modern period. Among her articles are: “‘Visions of the Night’: The Reform of Popular Dream Beliefs in Early Modern England,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 20 (2003); “Death, Dreams and the Disorderly Dead: Liminality and the Discernment of Spirits in Early Modern England,” in The “Vision Thing”: Studying Divine Intervention, edited by William A. Christian Jr. and Gábor Klaniczay (2009); “Demons of Desire, or Symptoms of Disease? Medical Theories and Popular Experiences of the Nightmare in Premodern England,” in Dreams, Dreamers and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle (2013). Her book Dreams in Early Modern England was published by Routledge in 2017; and her essay “‘Whispers of the Almighty’: The Reformation of Dreams” appears in Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies and Cultures, edited by Nicholas Terpstra (2020). Bettina E. Schmidt, DPhil (habil.), PhD, MA, is Professor of the study of religions and anthropology of religion at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK, and the director of the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, UK. She served as the president of the British Association for the Study of Religions. Her main areas of research interest are Latin American and Caribbean religions, identity, and well-being. Her academic interests include religious experience, the anthropology of religion, diaspora, and medical anthropology. She is the author of Spirit and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experiences (2016); Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City (2008), and other books, as well as coeditor of the Handbook of Contemporary Brazilian Religions (2016) and Spirituality and Wellbeing: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Religious Experience and Health (2020); and other edited volumes.

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Gilles Tarabout is a social anthropologist (PhD, School of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences – EHESS, Paris) and Emeritus Senior Fellow at CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). His research focuses on society and religion in Kerala, from various vantage points. He is the author of Sacrifier et donner à voir en pays malabar. Les fêtes de temple au Kérala (Inde du Sud): étude anthropologique (1986), and he has coedited numerous collections on South Asia, including La possession en Asie du Sud. Parole, corps, territoire (with Jackie Assayag) (1999); Images du corps dans le monde hindou (with Véronique Bouillier) (2002); Violence/ Non-Violence: Some Hindu Perspectives (with Denis Vidal and Eric Meyer) (2003); Territory, Soil, and Society in South Asia (with Daniela Berti) (2009); Filing Religion. State, Hinduism, and Courts of Law (with Daniela Berti and Raphaël Voix) (2016). Emanuela Timotin is a senior researcher in the Institute of Linguistics “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” in the Department of the Romanian Philology at the Romanian Academy, Bucharest. Her main research areas are Romanian philology, charms, and apocrypha. Her recent publications related to charms and apocryphal texts include Paroles protectrices, paroles guérisseuses. La tradition manuscrite des charmes roumains (XVIIe–XIXe siècle) (2015); “Divine Healers in Romanian Manuscript Charms (17th–19th Centuries),” in The Magical and Sacred Medical World, edited by Éva Pócs (2019); “Versifier la Passion. Les versions roumaines versifiées du Rêve de la Vierge dans leur contexte littéraire (XVIIe–XIXe siècles),” Neophilologus 102 (2018); “La tradition roumaine manuscrite de La lamentation d’Adam à l’expulsion du paradis,” in Philologie, herméneutique et histoire des textes entre Orient et Occident. Mélanges en hommage à Sever J. Voicu, edited by Francesca Barone, Caroline Macé, and Pablo Ubierna (2017); “La tradition roumaine de la Vie d’Adam et d’Ève,” in La vie d’Adam et Ève et les traditions adamiques, edited by Frédéric Amsler et al. (2017). Christine D. Worobec is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at Northern Illinois University. She has published widely on peasants, women, gender issues, and lived religion in modern Russia and Ukraine. She is the author of Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (1991), coeditor of Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (1991); and editor of The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia (2009). Her works on witchcraft and possession include Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (2001); “Decriminalizing Witchcraft

Contributors

in Pre-Emancipation Russia,” in Späte Hexenprozesse: Der Umgang der Aufklärung mit dem Irrationalen, edited by Wolfgang Behringer, Sönke Lorenz, and Dieter R. Bauer (2016); and Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900: A Sourcebook (edited with Valerie A. Kivelson) (2020). András Zempléni is anthropologist and honorary research director at CNRS (LESC, University of Paris X–Nanterre). His fieldwork in Africa successively focused on Wolof and Lebu concepts and therapies of mental disorders, Mundang medicine and divination and Senoufo matrilinearity, “visiting husband” system, male initiation and secret society of Poro. His major works on possession include his extended monographs L’enfant nit ku bon (with Jacqueline Rabain) (1965) and La dimension thérapeutique du culte des rab. Ndöp, tuuru et samp: Rites of Possession among the Lebou and Wolof (1966); his thesis L’interprétation et la thérapie traditionnelle des troubles mentaux chez les Wolof et les Lébou (1968); Le bâton de l’aveugle: divination, maladie et pouvoir chez les Moundang du Tchad (with A. Adler) (1972); “Pouvoir dans la cure et pouvoir social,” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse (1973); “From Symptom to Sacrifice: The Story of Khady Fall,” in Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison (1977); “La maladie et ses causes,” Ethnographie (1985) ; “Les êtres sacrificiels,” in Sous le masque de l’animal: Essais sur le sacrifice en Afrique Noire, edited by Michel Cartry (1987); “Savoir taire: du secret et de l’intrusion ethnologique dans la vie des autres,” Gradhiva (1996); and “La politique et le politique: les assemblées secrètes du Poro sénoufo,” in Qui veut prendre la parole?, edited by Marcel Détienne (2003).

513



Name Index

Abimelech (Old Testament)  301 Abraham/Abram (Old Testament)  30, 34–35, 302–304 Abraham, Nicolas  19, 42, 216–217, 225, 228 Abreu, Maria José de  99, 101, 107, 109 Adler Goodfriend, Elaine  303, 310 Afentoulidou, Eirini  278 Agobardi Lugdunensis  263, 276 Albert, Réka  2 Albertz, Rainer  300, 310 Alexander, Philip S.  302, 307, 310 Alexei II, Patriarch  324 Alford, Henry S. L.  448, 452 Allen, Margaret  363, 372 Almazov, A. I.  326, 337 Almeida, Romaldo de  32, 42, 86, 91 Almond, Philip C.  374, 388 Alsheimer, Rainer  145, 175 Ames, David W.  456, 468, 482 Amorth, don Gabriele  120, 175 Andersen, Burton  303, 311 Anderson, Benedict  487, 501 Anderson, Chris  208 Annoussamy, David  411 Anthony the Great  343 Antoniević, Dragoslav  115, 175 Ardalić, Vladimir  139, 175 Aristotle/Aristoteles  495, 501 Arnold, Philip P.  198, 208 Artaud, Antonin  361, 369–371 Asad, Talal  446, 452 Assayag, Jacky  18, 42, 49, 512 Astor-Aguilera, Miguel  201, 208 Atapin, S. S.  329, 332–333, 337 Augé, Marc 93–94, 109 Augustinus of Hippo/Augustine, Saint  132, 138, 144, 283, 464 Austin, J. L.  496, 501 Bacon, Francis  289, 294 Badīn, Idwārd  49 Bakhtin, Mikhail  497, 501 Balandier, Georges  456, 482 Barcham, Manuhia  208 Barna, Gábor  175 Barreiro, Jose  196, 208 Barrett, Justin L.  412 Barros, José Flavio Pessoa de  89, 91 Barrough, Philip  283, 289, 294 Bárth, Dániel  17, 22–26, 29, 39, 112, 120, 157–158, 175, 373–390, 466, 505 Basil the Great/Basilius, Saint  326 Basso, Keith H.  202, 208

Bastide, Roger  3, 42, 44 Baudrillard, Jean  108–109 Baumgärtel, Friedrich  300, 310 Baxter, Andrew  290, 294 Bayfield, Robert  289, 294 Beattie, John  31, 33, 42, 95, 97, 109 Beaumont-Maillet, L.  253, 260 Beban, Alice  204, 208 Beeman, William O.  10, 43 Behrend, Heike  5, 7–9, 16–17, 30–31, 43, 93–109, 208, 505 Beitl, Klaus  126, 176 Benga, Ileana  115, 176 Bennett, Gillian  175 Benz, Ernst  105, 109, 120, 122, 170, 176 Béraudy, R.  260 Berger, Iris  95, 109 Berger, Laurent  4, 43 Berger, Peter  494, 501 Bériou, Nicole  263, 276 Berkenbrock, Volney J.  85, 91 Berkes, Fikret  201, 208 Berliner, David  478, 482 Berlinghieri, Bonaventura  344 Berlioz, Jacques  276 Bernard of Clairvaux  343, 344, 357 Berque, Augustine  200, 208 Berthelot, Katell  299, 310 Berti, Daniela  4, 6–8, 16–17, 29, 32–34, 39, 43, 55, 59–60, 72, 393–413, 474, 505, 512 Bever, Edmond  146, 157, 176 Biggs, Robert D.  303, 309 Bird-David, Nurit  201, 208 Bîrlea, Ovidiu  131, 135, 139, 159, 165, 184 Blackmore, Richard W.  280, 292, 295, 327, 338 Blackmore, Susan  129, 131, 176 Blankaart, Steven  284, 295 Blécourt, Willem de  122, 176, 284, 295 Bloch, Maurice  496, 501 Blöcker, Monica  263, 277 Blum, Richard, and Eva  139, 142, 176 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate  356–357 Böcher, Otto  145, 176 Boddy, Janice  4, 8–11, 13, 20, 32, 35–39, 43, 91, 431–454, 457, 468, 477, 478, 482, 489, 491, 502, 506, 510 Boesch, Gajano  350, 357 Boilat, David P.  478–479, 482 Bond, John  279–280, 291–295 Boorde, Andrew  283–284, 286, 295 Boudet, Jean-Patrice  47, 249, 260 Bouffart, Sophie  490, 502 Bouillier, V.  72

516  Boureau, Alain  351, 353–354, 357 Bourguignon, Erica  XI, XIII, 4, 36, 43, 112, 172, 176 Bovon, Francois  270, 276 Boyer, Paul  158, 176 Branch, Thomas  290, 295 Brayer, Menachem  305, 310 Braudel, Fernand  203, 210 Briggs, Katharine Mary  142, 177, 178 Broqua, Christophe  475, 482 Broustra-Monfouga, Jacqueline  478, 482 Brown, Peter  112, 177 Brown, Theo  132, 177 Brubaker, Leslie  265, 276 Bullard, Alice  465, 482 Burke, Kenneth  497, 502 Burke, Peter  120, 161, 177, 373, 389 Burton, Robert  284, 295 Butterworth, Emily  364, 371 Bynum, Caroline Walker  356, 357 Byrd, Jodi A.  196, 208 Caciola, Mandeville Nancy/Caciola, Nancy  3, 17–20, 22, 48, 112–113, 123, 132–133, 173, 177, 248, 252, 255, 260, 313–322, 351, 355–357, 506 Caesarius of Heisterbach/Caesarius von Heisterbach  157, 350, 351 Camille, Michael  255, 260 Campagne, Fabián Alejandro  134, 177 Campbell, Bonner  307, 310 Candrea, I. A.  124, 177 Cantemir, Dimitrie/Demeter/Demetrius (prince, Moldavia)  274, 276 Capone, Stefania  11, 43 Caro Baroja, Julio  159, 177 Carrin, M.  58, 61, 72 Cartojan, Nicolae  273, 276 Castel, Pierre-Henri  6, 17, 21, 22, 23, 229–246, 506 Cavell, Stanley  495, 502 Certeau, Michel de  3, 9, 17, 21, 23, 26, 31, 44, 71, 72, 104, 106, 108, 158, 178, 237, 238, 245, 348, 355, 358 Chayes, Jeffrey Howard  35, 43 Chambers, Ephraim  284, 295 Champneys, A. C.  145, 177 Charcot, Jean-Martin  23, 240, 369 Charuty, Giordana  5, 44 Chavasse, Antoine  260 Chave-Mahir, Florence  23–26, 29, 121, 169, 177, 247–262, 343, 348, 356–358, 465, 507 Chesnut, Andrew R.  78, 91 Cheyne, J. A.  282, 295 Chidester, David  193, 209 Chivu, Gheorghe  264, 270, 276 Chretien of Troyes/Chretien du Troyes  259 Chrysostom, John, Saint  326

Spirit Possession

Christ, Jesus Christ, Christ the Savior  14, 29, 145, 152, 169, 171, 174, 176, 241, 250, 252, 256, 258, 265–274, 275, 327, 333–334, 336–337, 339, 343, 356, 358, 375, 387, 441, 479 Churchill, Winston  444, 453 Clark, Stuart  121, 144, 177, 388–389 Clark-Decès, Isabelle  26, 43 Cloudsley, Ann  434, 453 Cohen, Emma  44, 411–412 Cohn, Norman  138, 157, 177 Collins, John J.  305, 309 Collins, Robert O.  446–447, 453 Collins, Samuel  287–288, 294 Collomb, Henri  465, 482 Condominas, Georges  23, 44 Constantinides, Pamela  433–434, 439, 445, 453 Cox Alien, Marcus  129, 131, 176 Cramer, Peter  252, 260 Crapanzano, Vincent  3–5, 37, 44, 112, 120–121, 171, 177, 200, 209, 395, 412, 459, 482, 485, 513 Crockett, Clayton  201, 209 Csepregi, Ildikó  346, 358 Csordas, Thomas J.  6–7, 9, 19–20, 23, 25–26, 34, 44, 100, 105, 107, 110, 120, 122, 177–209, 215–228, 507 Csörge, Barnabás  116 Culpepper, Nicholas  289, 295 Cunegond (princess, Poland)  352 Czégényi, Dóra  137, 178 Dacome, Lucia  292, 295 Daczó, Árpád  116, 124, 178 Daly, M. W.  443, 450, 453 Danforth, Loring M.  115, 178 Daube, David  304, 310 Davidson, Hilda R. Ellis  159, 178 Davies, Owen  113, 127, 129–132, 138, 163, 178, 281–282, 284–285, 295 Davis, Colin  19, 44, 216, 228 Davis, Richard, H.  410, 412 De Certeau, Michel  3, 9, 17, 21, 23, 26, 31, 44, 71–72, 104, 106–108,  110, 158, 178, 237–238, 245, 348, 355, 358 De Clercq, C.  254, 260 De la Borderie, A. J. D.  352, 358 de Martino, Ernesto  4–5, 44, 114 ,178 de Raggiolo, Jerome  318 de Vitry, Jacques  350, 359 De Waardt, Hans  113, 178, 508 Deák, František  370–371 Dégh, Linda  122, 178 Delatte, Louis  249, 260 Delumeau, Jean  234–235, 245 Demos, John Putnam  158, 178 Dendle, Peter  260 Deng, Francis M.  443, 453

517

Name Index

Denzin, Norman K.  196, 209 Derrida, Jacques  19, 44, 100, 107, 110, 216, 224–225, 228 Descartes, René  8, 238 Deshusses, J.  252, 261 Desroche, Henri  12, 44 Di Nola, Alfonso  159, 179 Dias-Lambranca, Béatrice  45 Dickerman, Edmund H.  362, 372 Dietz, G. D.  410, 413 Dinzelbacher, Peter  112, 122, 132, 147–148, 170, 179 Diouf, Jean Léopold  461, 482 Dolphijn, Rick  201, 209 Dona Bey  38–39, 441–442, 451 Donatus, Saint  15 Ðorđević, Tihomir  159, 179 Doulet, Jean-Michel  128, 179 Draschek, Daniel  136, 180 Dreyer, Theodore  370 Dubois, D. J.  253, 260 Dugdale, Richard  285 Dumas, A.  252, 261 Dupont-Sommer, André  303, 310 Dyekiss, Virág  117, 138, 171, 180 Échard, Nicole  478, 482 Eck, D. L.  58, 73 Edsman, Carl-Martin  164, 179 Effing, Mercè Mur  8, 44 Egidius, Saint  15 Eizenhöfer, L.  250, 261 El Safi, Ahmed  47 Elias, Norbert  229, 230, 231, 245, 507 Elisabeth, Saint, Elisabeth/Elizabeth of Hungary  137, 347, 348, 359 Elisha (prophet, Old Testament)  305 Elliott, Dyan  356, 358 Emerson, W. H.  394, 408, 412 Emin Pasha, alias Eduard Schnitzer  94–95, 107, 110 Engler, Steven  86, 91, 204, 209 Epstein, Scarlett  166, 179 Eremich, I.  337–338 Ernst, Cécile  374, 389 Evans-Pritchard, Edward E.  39, 90–91, 160, 179, 236, 246, 447–448, 453, 459, 473, 482 Evseev, Ivan  135, 179 exorcist/s, healers, healing priests/monks  1, 17, 24–25, 29, 61, 96, 98, 107–108, 130, 133, 137, 139, 155, 149, 153–154, 156, 164, 169–170, 215, 220, 253–259, 263, 276, 300, 302, 304, 308, 313, 325–328, 332–336, 351, 355, 362, 365, 367–368, 373, 375, 376–380, 387–388, 417, 459–462, 464–465, 467, 470, 472, 475–478, 481 monastic ~  155 exorcist

Antonov, Evstafii (Russia)  333 Auma, Alice (prophetess, Uganda)  30 Balan, Père Ioanikïe (monk, Romania)  121, 146, 175 Fall, Khady (ndëppkat, Senegal)  13, 49–50, 429, 458, 468, 478, 484–485, 513 Gassner, Johann Joseph (German)  388, 390 Kappalumakkal, Father George (India)  61, 62 Malkam Ayyahou (Ethiopia)  457 Michaelis, Sébastien (Dominican prior, France)  362, 365–368, 372 Ogloblin, Evgenii (priest, Russia)  328 Ropanikov, Ivan Filippov (Russia)  333 Seck, Daouda (ndëppkat, Senegal)  475 Selianina, Evdokiia (Russia)  328 Shalabanov (monk, Russia)  32 Surin, Jean-Joseph, (priest, France)  22, 233, 239–245 Szmendrovich, Rókus (Franciscan friar, 18th century Hungary)  24, 175, 378, 379, 380, 389, 505 Tréguier, Yves (priest, France)  351 Fairfax, Edward  285, 294 Fairfax, Helen  285, 294 Farbotko, Carol  207, 209 Farinerio, Buonaventura  313, 322 Favret-Saada, Jeanne  69, 73 Fecioru, Theodor  274, 277 Fénelon, François  234 Ferber, Sarah  21, 120, 159, 166, 173, 179, 325–326, 338, 355, 358, 361–372, 374, 389, 507 Fernández Nieto, Francisco Javier  274, 275, 277 Férotin, Dom  248, 254, 261 Fiedler, Wilhelm  264, 277 Fiéloux, Michèle  7–8, 20, 40–41, 415–429, 473, 477–478, 508, 510 Fingarette, Herbert  495, 502 Fink, Max  331, 340 Firth, Raymond  6, 32, 45 Fitzgerald, Timothy  89, 92 Fitzmyer, Joseph A.  305, 310 Fixico, Donald L.  196, 209 Flint, Valery I. J.  145, 179 Florovskii,Dimitrii (superintendent, Russia)  29, 327–333, 335–337 Francis of Assisi/Francesco d’Assisi, Saint  343–344, 356 Francovich, Allan  369, 371 Franz, Adolf  132, 145, 179, 248, 251–252, 261–263, 277 Freeman, Rich  58–60, 66–67, 69, 73 Frenschkowski, Marco  85, 180

518  Freud, Sigmund  3, 21, 23, 44–45, 231, 244–245, 369–370, 495–496, 507 Fritz, Jean-Marie  349, 358 Frost, John W.  440, 453 Gaborieau, Marc  394, 412 Gagnebet, Claude  463, 482 Gagyi, József  116–117, 125, 138, 167, 170–171, 180 Galadza, Daniel  278 Gamble, David P.  482 García Martínez, Florentino  299, 306, 309–310 Gardiner, Edmund  285, 295 Garrett, Clarke  121, 180 Garrison, Vivian  4, 44, 395, 412 Gaster, Moses  128, 169, 180, 273, 277 Gecser, Ottó  349, 358 Geertz, Clifford  493, 502 Gell, Alfred  102, 107, 110 Geller, Markham J.  307, 310 Genovefa/Genoveva/Geneviève, Saint  253, 260, 262 Geoltrain, Pierre  270, 276–277 Georgescu, Magdalena  276 Georgieva, Ivanichka  124, 135, 180 Gerlach, Hildegard  139, 158, 166, 180 Gheţie, Ion  264, 277 Giles, Linda L.  4, 45 Giletti, D. H.  36, 45 Ginzburg, Carlo  126, 180, 364, 371 Goar, Jacobus  263, 265, 266, 277 Goddou, andré  120, 180 Goldman, Marcio  85, 92 Golikova, S. V.  327–333, 338 Gómez-Moreno, Manuel  275, 277 Goodall, Jane  372 Goodich, Michael  348, 351–352, 355, 358 Gordon, Avery  204, 209 Gorer, Geoffrey  460, 479, 482 Görres, Joseph  6, 45 Govindan, Krishnalayam M. K.  55, 73 Grambo, Ronald  163, 180 Gray, Louis H.  45 Greenblatt, Stephen  361–362, 364, 372 Greenfield, Richard P. H.  113, 120–121, 145, 148, 158–159, 166, 180 Gregory of Nazianz, Saint  265, 276, 278 Gregory the Great, Saint/Gregorius Magnus 350 Grim, John A.  193, 209 Grisbrooke, W. Jardine  326, 338 Gualbert, John/Gualbertus, S. Joannes (abbot)  317–318, 322 Guillaume d’Auvergne  138 Gurung, Dristy  48 Gwynne, Llewellyn  441 Győrfy, Eszter  116, 118, 165, 180 Györgydeák, Anita  116, 160, 168, 181

Spirit Possession

Hacking, Ian  60, 73, 233 Hado Zidouemba, Dominique  484 Haggis, Jane  363, 372 Haile Selassie  449 Haluza-DeLay, Randolph  207, 209 Haraway, Donna Jeanne  207, 209 Hargey, Taj M.  449, 453 Harvey, Graham  201, 208, 209 Harvey, William  280 Hastings, James  3, 45 Haydock, Richard  286, 287, 294, 295 healers  see exorcists Hell, Bertrand  37, 45, 255, 261 Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn  201, 210, 440 Herrmann-Pfandt, A.  57, 73 Herskovits, Melville J.  461, 482 Hersperger, Patrick  132, 181 Hesz, Ágnes  116, 123, 148, 160, 168, 181, 510 Heusch, Luc de  4, 7, 45, 215, 228, 238, 455, 464, 483 Hildebrandt, Wolf  300, 311 Hildegard of Bingen/Hildegard von Bingen  343, 356 Hobbes, Thomas  11, 288, 295 Holm, Nils G.  120, 181 Honko, Lauri  119–120, 122, 152, 174, 181 Horton, Robin  473, 483 Houran, James  131, 184 Houseman, Michael  398, 412 Houtman, Dick  201, 210 Hristoforova, Olga  see Khristoforova, Olga Hristov, Petko  115, 189 Hudson, James R.  203, 210 Hufford, David J.  127, 131, 181 Hugo, Saint  137 Hunter, E. C. D.  307, 311 Huot, Sylvia  349, 359 Hurreiz, Sayed Hamid A.  47 Huskinson, Lucy  4, 48, 202, 211 Huyskens, Albert  349–350, 359 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint  239, 244 Igreja, Victor  8, 45 Ioann of Kronstadt (monk)  326, 338 Ishii, Miho  59, 73 Isidore of Seville/Isidorus Hispalensis, Saint 138 Ivanits, Linda  131, 145, 150, 163, 181 Jackson, Wes  205, 210 Jacques de Vitry  350, 359 Jagathambika, R.  61–62, 70, 73 James, Wendy  446, 452–453 Jamous, Raymond  37, 45 Janet, Pierre  231, 244 Jeanmaire, Henri XI, XIII  3, 13, 28, 45 Jeremias, Alfred  128, 143, 145, 181 Jerome de Raggiolo  318

519

Name Index

Jesus, see also Christ  104, 132, 152, 223, 226, 241, 256, 265–269, 271–272, 276, 304–305, 307–308, 311, 326–327, 334, 479 Joan of the Angels/Jeanne des Anges, Saint  22, 233, 239–240, 243, 245, 348 Johnson, Paul Christopher  5, 9, 11–13, 21–22, 45, 88–89, 92 Johnson, Trevor  374, 389 Jones, Ernest  134, 182 Junod, Henri Alexandre  3, 45, 467, 470, 483 Kaestli, Jean-Daniel  270, 277 Kallós, Zoltán  116, 170, 182 Kapchan, Deborah  476, 483 Kapferer, Bruce  10, 28, 45 Kaplan, Steven L.  373, 389 Kassimir, Ronald  99, 100, 110 Katajala-Peltomaa, Sari  112, 119, 182, 261, 345, 348, 350–352, 355–357, 359 Kazhdan, Alexander P.  263, 277 Kehoe, A. B.  36, 45 Keller, Mary  7, 8, 16, 46, 89, 92, 193–211, 509 Kenyon, Susan M.  432–434, 439, 453 Kerényi, Karl/Károly  13, 46 Keszeg, Vilmos  131, 134, 171, 182 Kętrzyński, Wojciech  352, 359 Khristoforova/Hristoforova, Olga  114, 159, 163, 165, 181–182 Kieckhefer, Richard  249, 261 Kiessling, Nicolas  127, 132, 138, 182 Kilroy-Marac, Katie  1, 46 Kimmerer, Robin Wall  200, 210 king/s Andrew II (Hungary)  349 Béla IV (Hungary)  345 Catherine the Great (tsar, Russia)  324, 335 David (Old Testament)  256, 301 Nabonidus (Qumran)  30, 305, 309 Peter the Great (tsar, Russia) Saul (Bible)  256, 301 Stephen V (Hungary)  345–346 Nabonidus (Babylonia)  30, 305, 309 King, Stephen  452–453 Kirchschläger, Walter  304, 311 Kierkegaard, Sören  231 Kivelson, Valerie A.  158, 182, 325, 338 Klaniczay, Gábor  6, 9, 27–28, 30, 39, 112–113, 137, 158, 182, 343–360, 373, 389, 509 Klass, Morton  88, 92 Kligman, Gail  115, 182 Klutz, Todd E.  307, 311 Knox, Wilfred L.  307, 311 Kolbert, Elizabeth  205, 210 Komáromi, Tünde  164, 167, 182 Koski, Kaarina  119, 124, 182 Kovács, Elisabeth  378, 389 Kramer, Fritz  97, 98, 110

Kretzenbacher, Leopold  158, 183 Kromm, Jane  331, 338 Küppers-Sonnenberg, G. A.  115, 183 Labouvie, Eva  167, 183 LaDuke, Winona  207, 210 Lambek, Michael  3, 5–6, 8, 12–13, 20, 25, 32–33, 40, 42, 46, 76, 90–92, 395, 429, 445, 454, 457, 468, 473, 476–478, 483, 487–504, 506, 509 Lang, Milan  165, 183 Lanternari, Vittorio  12, 46 Lawson, John Cuthbert  139, 183 Le Cour Grandmaison, Colette  458, 483 Le Goff, Jacques  259, 261 Leão Teixeira, Maria Lina  91 Lear, Jonathan  496, 503 Leclercq, Henri  263, 265, 277 Lecouteux, Claude  123, 134, 183, 263, 277 Lehner, Ulrich L.  378, 390 Leiris, Michel  3, 6, 20, 26, 28, 35, 46, 412, 455, 457, 470, 477, 483 Lett, Didier  352, 355, 359 Levack, Brian P.  120, 176, 183, 331, 338, 343, 359, 374, 390 Levi, Giovanni  157, 183, 388, 389 Levin, Eve  325, 334–335, 338 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  22, 46, 259, 261, 501 Levy, Jerrold E. 337, 338 Lewis, Herbert S. XIII  4, 8–9, 26, 35, 46, 483 Lewis, Ioan M.  4, 6, 12, 23, 35, 47, 92, 121, 167, 458, 474, 483 Lincoln, Yvonna S.  196, 209 Little, Lester K.  253, 261, 351, 359 Lixfeld, Gisela  134, 183 Lombard, Jacques  7, 8, 20, 40–41, 415–429, 473, 477–478, 508, 510 Long, Charles H.  197, 199–200, 205, 208, 210 Longère, Jean  276 Lory, Pierre  35–37, 47 Luckmann, Thomas  494, 501 Ludwig (landgrave, Thuringia)  349 Luig, Ute  4, 8–10, 43, 47, 208 Lupanova, V. M.  329, 332–333, 337 Lyons, Oren R.  194 Lys, Daniel  300, 311 Macfarlane, Alan  160, 183 MacGaffey, Wyatt  10, 47 MacMichael, Harold  446–447 Machado, Fátima Regina  78–79, 92 Madame de Montberon  234 Magyar, Zoltán  116, 134, 138, 183 Majzner, M.  115, 184 Makris, Gerasimos P.  35, 47, 432–434, 454 Maksimov, S. V.  131, 184 Mandrou, Robert  158, 184, 234 Marcellus (Dominican prior, Hungary)  346

520  Margaret of Hungary/Margaret, Saint  137, 343, 345–349, 352, 358 Marinov, Dimitar  139, 165, 184 Martin of Tours, Saint  343 Martino, Paul  476 Marwick, Max. G.  473 483 Marx, Karl  19, 44, 216, 225, 227–228 Mary  see Virgin Mary Masquelier, Adeline  8–9, 35–36, 39, 47, 395, 412, 434, 454, 478, 483 Matory, J. L.  47 Maughan, H. Hamilton  323, 338 Maupoil, Bernard  467, 477, 483 Mauss, Marcel  22, 47, 457, 483, 488, 490, 503 Mayblin, May  216, 228 Mbaye, Aminata Cécile  475, 483 McCloud, Sean  47 McGregor, Helen V.  207, 209 McKim, Marriott  60, 73 Meier, Gerhard  145, 184 Meignant, Michael  479 Melchisedec (bishop, Romania)  267, 278 Mencej, Mirjam  126, 184 Menestò, Enrico  356, 359 Menghi, Girolamo  376–377, 379, 390 Mercier, Jacques  26, 47, 477, 483 Mercier, Paul  456, 482 Messing, Simon  4, 47 Métraux, Alfred  3, 47, 455, 483 Metzger, Nadine  138, 184 Meyendorff, Paul  327, 329 Meyer, Birgit  9, 48, 100–101, 110, 201, 210 Michaelis, Sébastien  362, 365–368, 372 Middleton, John  33, 42, 97, 166, 179, 184 Midelfort, H. C. Erik  120, 145, 150, 157, 167, 174, 184, 374, 378, 388, 390 Mikalson, Jon D.  13, 48 Millar, Charlotte-Rose  159, 165, 184 Miyamoto, Yuki  210 Moghaddam, Maria S.  434, 454 Mohawk, John  194, 196, 198, 208, 210 Monfouga-Nicolas, Jacqueline  36, 48 Mondok, Ágnes  116 Montague, George T.  300, 311 Morard, Martin  256, 261 Mordovtsev, D. L.  334, 339 More, Robert P.  158, 185 Moricheau-Beaupré, Pierre Jean  331, 339 Morris, Rosalind  93–94, 110 Moses (Old Testament)  264, 266, 268, 304 Mother de Chantal, Saint  243 Mother of God,  see Mary Moya, Ismaël  458, 462, 481, 483 Mueller, Rachel  461, 484 Mühlmann, W. E. von  170, 184 Mulhern, Sherril  60, 73 Murko, Matthias  124, 184

Spirit Possession

Musgrave, John Brent  131, 184 Muşlea, Ion  131, 135, 139, 159, 165, 184 Naaman (warlord, Old Testament)  305 Nabokov, Isabelle  55, 58, 61, 71, 73, 395, 412 Nabti, Mehdi  37, 48 Napolitano, Valentina  216, 228 Năsturel, Petre-Şerban  267, 278 Naveh, Joseph  305–307, 309, 311 Neagota, Bogdan  115, 176, 185 Nehamas, Alexander  496, 504 Nersessian, Sirarpie der  265, 278 Neseris (Ilias)  278 Neve, Lloyd  300, 311 Newman, Barbara  113, 185, 356, 359 Nicholas of Tolentino/Nicola da Tolentino, Saint  316–317, 322, 343, 352–354, 360 Nider, Johannes  182, 351, 355, 359–360 Norget, Kristin  216, 228 Novičkova, T. A.  145, 165, 185 Nuckolls, Charles W.  406, 412 O’Brien, Jay  450, 454 Obeyesekere, Gananath  327, 339, 413 Occhioni, Nicola  316, 322, 352–353, 355, 360 Oesterreich, Traugott Konstantin  XI, XIII, 3, 48, 120, 185 Ohrt, ferdinand  170, 185 Olar, Ovidiu Victor  274, 278 Olenev, M. B.  339 Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre  16, 48, 455, 484 Olupona, Jacob K.  211 Ong, Aihwa  8–9, 48 Oppenheim, Leo A.  304, 311 Origen/Origenes 145 Orr, David W.  205, 211 Orsi, Robert A.  117, 185 Ortigues, Edmond  3, 22, 30, 34, 48, 229, 233, 235–237, 246, 455, 458, 464, 484 Ortigues, Marie-Cécile  3, 22, 30, 34, 48, 233, 235–237, 246, 455, 458, 464, 484 Ostling, Michael  112, 138, 145, 185 Ostrovskaia, L. V.  332, 339 Ottino, Paul  477, 484 Padoux, A.  59, 73 Pagels, Elaine  249, 261 Palazzo, Eric  247, 261 Palmer Philip M.  158, 185 Pamfile, Tudor  135, 185, 274, 278 Panchenko, A. A.  333, 339 Papademetriou, G. C.  121, 145–146, 158–159, 185 Parkes, Henry  247, 261 Pascal, Blaise  235 Patch, Howard Rollin  122, 185 Patera, Maria  249, 261

521

Name Index

Paxton, Frederick S.  132, 185 Paul, Saint  101, 270 Penney, Douglas L.  306, 311 Perquis, R.F.  358 Péterfi, Bence  358 Peti, Lehel  171, 182 Petrocchi, Massimo  376, 390 Petzoldt, Leander  114, 150, 159, 167, 180, 185 Peuckert, Will-Erich  134, 186 Philip of Bourges (bishop, France)  348 Phillips, John  370, 372 Piaschewski, Gisela  128, 286 Pina-Cabral, João  315, 322 Plancke, Carine  203, 211 Platvoet, Jan  75, 92 Plongeron, Bernard  378, 390 Pócs, Éva  XI–XIII, 3, 6, 14, 16–17, 19, 21–23, 29, 48, 111–192, 373, 389–390, 463, 509, 510 Pollan, Michael  200, 211 Pope/s  182, 343, 359 Benedict XVI  100 Gregory X  346 Innocent 346 John XXII  352, 353 Paul VI  100, 146 Prandi, Reginaldo  80, 92 Pratt, Mary Louise  196, 211 Primack, R. B.  211 Primiano, Leonard Norman  117, 187 Prince Raleva  40–41, 417–418, 420–428 Probst, Manfred  376, 390 Provintsial (Pseudonym)  334, 340 Puchner, Walter  115, 187 Puech, Émile  306, 309 Rabain/Rabain-Jamin, Jacqueline  465, 484, 513 Radcliffe, John  290, 295 Raman, Bangalore Venkata  55–56, 61, 73 Ranger, Terence  12, 48 Ranke, Friedrich  134, 188 Ranke, Kurt  124, 188 Rapp, Claudia  263, 278 Rappaport, Roy  492, 504 Raudvere, Catharina  134, 163, 188 Reinhard, Elze  262 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis de  237 Richters, Annemiek  45 Ricoeur, Paul  494, 496, 504 Rieger, Joerg  201, 211 Rivière, Janine  22–23, 113, 127, 129, 188, 279–296, 511 Robbins, Jeffrey W.  201, 209 Robson, James E.  300, 311 Roca, Roger Sansi  199, 211 Rodewyk, P. Adolf S. J.  120, 167, 188 Rogaia, Abusharaf  442 Röhrich, Lutz  145, 153, 188

Roper, Lyndal  138, 188 Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich  134, 188 Roscoe, John  95, 110 Rossetto, Giulia  278 Rothberg, Michael  196, 208 Rouch, Jean  10, 39, 48, 440, 476–477, 484 Rouget, Gilbert  4, 5, 48, 484 Rubongoya, L.T.  96, 110 Russel, Jeffrey Burton  145, 148, 188, 249, 261 Ruysbroeck, Jan van  370 Ryan, Alexandra E.  204, 211 Ryan, William F.  163, 169–170, 188, 332–334, 340, 510 Salamon, Anikó  116, 138, 143, 163, 188 Sallmann, Jean-Michel  371, 372 Salló, Szilárd  116, 188 Sanderson, G. M.  446–447, 454 Sanderson, L. Passmore  446–447, 454 Sansi, Roger  80, 92, 211 Santo, Diana Espírito  11, 48 Sapkota, Ram P.  9, 48 Sara/I, Sarah (Old Testament)  30, 302–304 Sarafina, Carl  200, 211 Sartre, Jean-Paul  229 Sasson, Jack M.  304, 311 Savarese, Nicola  369, 372 Scarlett, E.P.  287, 295 Scharankov, Emanuil  115, 189 Schiffer, Elisabeth  278 Schiffman, Lawrence  307, 309 Schmidt, Bettina E.  4, 8, 16–17, 32, 39, 48, 75–92, 174, 202, 211, 511 Schmitt, Jean-Claude  123, 126, 132, 189 Schneeweiss, Edmund  124, 189 Schnitzer, Eduard  94 Schoblocher, Judit  116 Schürmann, Thomas  126, 189 Schutz, Alfred  495, 504 Schwartz, Michael D.  307, 309 Schweighofer, Teresa C. M.  120, 189 Scott, David A.  53–54, 57, 73 Scurlock, JoAnn  303–305, 311 Segol, J. B.  307, 311 Selbie, John A.  45 Seligman, Charles Gabriel  447 Shaked, Saul  305–307, 309 Shambaugh, Cynthia  4, 47, 49 Sharp, Lesley A.  9, 49 Shevzov, Vera  337, 340 Shiblī, Mu ḥammad ibn ʻAbd Allāh  35, 49 Shorter, Edward  331, 340 Siffren, P.  250, 261 Siikala, Anna-Leena  120, 189 Sikainga, Ahmad A.  450, 454 Sikimić, Biljana  115, 189 Silva, Raquel Marta da  76, 92 Silva, Vagner Gonçalves da  76, 86, 92

522  Simonné Pesthy, Monika  148, 189 Sinclair, Keith Val  263, 278 Skey, Frederic Carpenter  331, 340 Sluhovski, Moshe  355, 360 Smilianskaia, E. B.  336, 340 Smith, Brian K.  55, 74 Smith, Frederick M.  3–4, 11, 16–17, 49, 27, 60, 74, 201–202, 211 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai  196, 209, 211 Sontheimer, Gunter  410, 413 Sorrentino, Paul  71, 74 Sow, Alfâ Ibrâhîm  462, 484 Spaulding, Jay  440, 448, 454 Squires, H. C.  441, 454 Stamatopoulou, Elsa  196, 211 Stefanova, Ana  115, 189 Steinhart, Edward I.  96, 110 Stemplinger, Eduard  145, 189 Stephens, Walter  138, 165, 189 Stewart, Charles  114, 139, 145, 147, 189 Stichter, S.  211 Stökl Ben Ezra, Daniel  299, 310 Stol, Marten  305, 311 Stoller, Paul  12, 39, 49, 204, 211, 369, 372, 395, 413, 440, 454 Strömbäck, Dag  134, 190 Suso, Henry, Saint (Donican priest)  244 Suyūtī, Jalāl al-dīn  35, 49 Sword, W. Denniston  448, 452 Szendrey, Ákos  134, 190 Takács, György  116–118, 137, 148, 161–162, 165, 168, 170, 190 Talamonti, Adeline  26, 49, 71, 74, 395, 403, 413 Tarabout, Gilles  4, 6–8, 16–17, 19, 29, 39, 42–43, 49, 53–74, 394–395, 401, 412–413, 506, 512 Taves, Ann  75, 89, 92 Telelis, Ioannis G.  269, 278 Temper, D.  358 Teodorescu, Mirela  264, 277 Tertullian/Tertullianus  314, 315 Thite, G. U.  55, 74 Thomas of Aquino/Thomas Aquinas, Saint 157 Thomas, Keith  120, 132, 145, 157, 159–160, 165–167, 173, 190 Thompson, David M.  69, 394, 413 Tigchelaar, Eibert J.  306, 309 Tillhagen, Carl-Herman  134, 163, 190 Timotin, Emanuela  263–278, 512 Tolstaja, Svetlana M.  162, 190 Tolstoj, Nikita I.  162, 190 Török, Maria  19, 42, 216–217, 228 Trebolle Barrera  229, 310 Triacca, Achille  261

Spirit Possession

Troeva, Evgenia  124, 190 Trunk, Dieter  305, 312 Tryon, Thomas  286, 288–289, 296 Tubach, Frederic C.  149–150, 190 Tuczay, Christa Agnes  126, 138, 190 Tuerk, Jacqueline  268, 278 Turner, Victor, W.  473, 484 Uchiyamada, Yasuchi  70, 74 Urbain Grandier (priest, France)  237, 348 Uther, Hans-Jörg  175 Valk, Ülo  XIII, 122, 190 van der Toorn, Karel  302, 304, 306, 311–312 van der Tuin, Iris  201, 209 Vasudevan Pillai, K.  56, 66, 74 Vázsonyi, Andrew  122, 178 Velichkovskii, Paisii  326, 340 Veniamin (archbishop, Russia)  336, 340 Verger, Pierre  3, 26, 49, 455, 467, 470, 477, 484 Vernant, Jean-Pierre  72, 74 Véronèse, Julien  249, 260, 507 Vidal, Laurent  49 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre  259, 261 Vigarello, Georges  60, 74 Vinogradova, L. N.  114, 134–135, 145, 159, 162–163, 191 Vîrban, Floarea  273, 278 Virgin Mary, Mother of God  80, 171, 223, 256, 271, 273, 327, 334, 375, 379 Virt, István  116, 123, 191 Vivod, Maria  115–116, 171, 191 Vogel, Cyrille  247, 262 Vukanović, Tatomir P.  159, 191 Waggoner, Edward  201, 211 Walker, Anita M.  362, 372 Walker, D. P.  158–159, 166 Warner, Elizabeth  191 Warner, G. F.  252, 262 Warren, F. E.  254, 262 Waschnitius, V.  126, 191 Weber, Max  230, 495 Wendl, Tobias  93, 110 Westermann, Claus  300, 309, 310 Whytt, Robert  280, 292, 296 Wiegelmann, Günter  123, 191 Wiggermann, Frans A. M.  307, 312 Williams, E. H.  211 Willis, Thomas  285–286, 296 Winkler, H. A.  128, 191 Wise, Michael O.  306, 311 Wohlleben, Peter  200, 211 Wolf, Kenneth Baxter  349–350, 360 Woods, Barbara  145, 153, 191

523

Name Index

Work, Courtney  204, 208, 211 Wornham, Wendy L.  465, 484 Worobec, Christine D.  28–29, 113, 124, 163, 165, 191, 323–341, 512 Xavier, Chico (spiritist, Brazil)  76, 92 Yates, W. E.  369, 372 Young, Allan  20, 49 Young, Francis  374, 390

Zaleski, Carol  131, 191 Zaretsky, Irving I.  4, 47, 49 Zečević, Slobodan  115, 124, 131, 165, 191 Zempleni, Andras/Zempléni, András  XI– XIII  1–50, 111, 236, 246, 429, 455–485, 513 Zenkovsky, Sophie  434, 454 Zentai, Tünde  138, 192 Zika, Charles  364, 372 Zipf, L.  205, 211 Zweig, Stefan  500, 501



Subject Index

abrahamic (religions, monotheisms)  30, 34–35, 42, 90, 227 Adharma  (the evil, India)  5 adjuration  24, 248–252, 254–255, 259 adorcism, adorcised  7, 26, 215, 238, 245, 455, 464, see also mollification Afèjèwè (“blood baptism”, Candomblé, Nigeria, Brazil)  470 affliction  19, 56, 302, 417, 459, 474 Afro-Brazilian religions  78–80, 86 agency (displacement, replacement of ~)  64–65, 67, 71, 82, 102, 173, 193, 201–205, 207, 225–226, 36, 496 alienness, exhibiting ~ (zayrān, Sudan) 452 alliance with a spirit/the Devil  10, 138, 155, 157, 456, 461, 469, 473, see also pact with the Devil arūs az-zār (“bride of the zār”) 435 allusive (language, gesture)  249, 403–404, 406 Alp  see nighmare demons altar  237, 365, 383, 456–457, 460, 464–466, 469, 471–472, 475–476, 480–481 altered state of consciousness (ASC)  6, 75, 102 alterity  7, 94, 96, 225, 395 amnesia  41, 59 amulet  154, 267, 268, 306, 307 anamnesis 256 ancestor, ancestral spirit  1, 4, 13, 17, 19–20, 25, 40–41, 96, 123, 148, 169, 198–199, 201, 204, 206, 215–216, 219, 238, 315, 415–416, 422, 440, 455–458, 461–462, 464–465, 468–469, 471–474, 478, 480–481, 492–493, 495–498 angel  36, 62, 79, 96, 147, 149, 233, 239–240, 243, 245, 256, 271–275, 334, 375, see also archangel/s angel of death  144 fallen angel/s  18, 147, 215, 242, 314–315, 320 anointing (of the sick)  327 anonymous, anonymity, anonymous demon  7, 18, 20, 23–25, 28, 30, 36, 39, 237, 400, 456–457, 461, 470 anorexia 459 Anti-Christ 147 Antiquity  13, 21, 113, 120–121, 128–129, 144–145, 259, 264–265, 274–275, 286, 343 Apocrypha/Apocryphon/Apocryphal book/s  263, 267, 269–270, 272–273, 276, 299, 333 1Enoch 299 Genesis Apocryphon  302, 304, 305 Jubilees 299

apparition  see vision Archangel/s  256, 271, 273–275, 334 Gabriel  256, 271, 272, 274–275, 334 Michael  147, 272, 274, 334, 347 Raphael, Sichael, Uriel  334 autonom/y/ous  11–12, 22, 37, 201, 223, 229–232, 234, 302, 426, 458, 460, 481 āveśa, āvēśam (“penetration”)  3, 57 bacchanalia 21 baptism  26, 124, 127–128, 130, 247, 248, 252–253, 256, 259, 263, 273–274, 304, 470 baptismal liturgy  252, 255 baraka 37 bath/e, bathing  331, 376–377, 469, 472, 491 behos (condition due to the presence of a possessing agent in the body, India) 401–402 benedictio  120, 169, 253–254, 263, 374, 388 besnovatye see possessed Bible, biblical  24, 28–30, 100, 146–147, 155, 226, 249–250, 264–265, 268–269, 274–276, 299–300, 302, 305, 343, 351–352, 354 blowing (insufflation)  69, 169 blasphemy  225, 318 blood, ~ bath  26, 66, 82, 252, 256, 280, 290–292, 294, 319, 385, 387, 432, 460, 469–472, 477, 480 see also afèjèwè (“blood baptism”), dam labsu (“blood cloak”) body bodiliness, bodily experience/presence  19, 25, 58, 127, 172, 222 female ~  437 possessed ~  18, 24–25, 251, 253, 259, 316–317, 320, 380, 464–466, 470 body-soul dualism  3 bricolage  94, 440, 501 burial  129–130, 202, 346, 369, 497 cannibal/cannibalism  5, 39, 103, 448 canon/canonical  11, 17, 23, 263–264, 266–267, 270, 275–276 canonization  6, 27, 112, 316, 343, 345, 348–353, 356, 370 Caressing, ray (ritual, Senegal)  464–465 Catholic/Roman Catholic, Catholicism  9, 24, 26, 78–79, 93–94, 98–100, 105, 108, 111, 114–117, 121, 126, 132, 148, 159–160, 167, 215–217, 222, 224–228, 234–235, 239, 313, 325, 327, 331, 361, 365, 373–374, 379, 387, 395, 403, 444 Catholic Enlightenment  373, 378 cauchemar  see nightmare demons

525

Subjec t Index

celestial powers (Sun, Moon, stars)  202, 273 cenesthetic  457, 459 changeling 128–129 charismatic (movement, leadership)  XII, 6, 9, 17, 27, 30, 94, 98–100, 105, 215, 299, 326, 343, 433, see also renewal, revival, revivalism charm, verbal ~, incantation  169–170, 268, 293, 301, 303, 306–307, 328–329, 333–334, 366, 426, 460 healing charm  169–170 potency incantation  303 child kidnapping demon/s  145 childhood  217, 218, 256, 434 Christ, Christian, Christianization  XI, XIII, 3–9, 13–14, 17, 19–20, 22–26, 28–31, 34–36, 39, 53, 61–63, 78, 80, 96–100, 103–109, 111–112, 114–116, 120, 122, 124, 132–133, 137, 143–148, 151–152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 164, 169–171, 174, 227, 233, 237, 241–242, 248, 250–253, 256, 258–259, 263, 265–276, 314–317, 321–323, 326–328, 333–334, 336–337, 343, 375, 387, 395, 433, 439, 441, 449, 455, 458, 462–463, 465, 472, 479, 490, 494–496 Christmas  124, 126 chthonic  37, 202–203, 207 church/clerical demonology  113, 138, 166, 173 church father(s)  132, 145, 314, 322, 326 clairvoyant  see seer clan spirit  95 cleansing ritual  121, 137, 156, 173 clergy  20, 99, 113, 120, 158, 168, 235, 266, 271, 275, 325, 327, 329, 332, 335, 364, 373–375 lower~  24, 120, 146, 159, 373, 378 colonial officers, ~ figures, ~ personages, ~ time  23, 30, 37, 39, 96, 97, 237, 408, 431, 433–434, 437, 440, 442–446, 448, 451, 498 colonial history, ~ experience, ~ consciousness  39, 431, 443, 458 colonizers 478 commemorative (rites)  443 communication, ritual ­communication  32– 34, 76–77, 79, 83, 86, 88, 101, 112, 118, 253, 393, 406–407, 411, 416, 473–474, 491, 494, 501 ~ with fairies  116 ~ with spirits  33, 78, 86, 114–115, 118–119, 122, 149, 202, 489 ~ with the dead  114–115, 123–125, 147 communion  221, 235, 257, 320, 325–326, 328, 329, 379–380 condensation/condense  38–39, 101–102, 203, 457 confession, confessor  18, 22, 146, 229, 232–233, 235, 241, 244, 256–258, 263, 320, 346, 365, 387

confinement demon/s  118, 128, 145, 169 consciousness (loss of)  69, 70, 77, 103, 105, 323, 381 see also caitanyam, sense of self convent  351, 353, 355, 378–379 female ~  22, 240, 343, 353, 355, 365 conversion  97, 470 convulsion  323, 334, 349, 375, 379, 387, 432 corpse  123, 174, 259 cosmology, cosmos  11, 108, 197, 199, 201, 204, 226, 321–322, 336, 416, 477 Counter-Enlightenment  373, 388 creativ/ity  4, 9–10, 20, 35, 37, 77, 85, 202, 423, 434, 440, 489, 494–496 cross, sign of the cross, crucifix  28, 58, 94, 99, 107, 167, 169, 221, 253, 256, 266, 267, 271, 323, 329, 330, 350, 380, 381, 384, 449 crypt 19 curse  120, 167–169, 216, 219–220, 224, 253, 266–269, 273, 343, 350–352 dam lebsu (“blood cloak”, Ethiopia)  470 dance, dancer, dancing  3, 10, 21, 28, 56, 66–68, 85, 98, 101–102, 115, 139, 142–143, 369, 393, 398, 407, 431, 442–443, 468, 470, 475–476, 479–480 Dead Sea Scrolls  29, 299 dead assaulting ~, bad ~, evil ~  124, 125, 127, 132, 133, 136, 144, 162, 173 bolygó/bolyongó (“wandering” dead, Hungarian) 124 kirekesztett lelkek/rekegő (“shunned souls”, Hungarian)  124 living ~, living corpse  118, 123 Nachzehrer 126 revenants/visszajárók (“revenants”, Hungarian) 132 tisztátalanok (“unclean ~/souls”, Hungarian)  124, 131 walking ~  123 wandering soul, spirit  124, 131, 132, 164, 202, 348, 467, 481 death  18, 62, 93, 96, 99, 118–119, 123, 125–126, 129–132, 144, 148, 152, 155, 163, 168, 216, 220, 240–241, 249, 254, 268, 279, 313–314, 317, 319–321, 327, 335, 346, 451, 460, 463, 468–470, 473, 497 deictic, deictic behavior  32, 77, 90, 91 deities  see possessing agents demon/s  see possessing agents demon lover  see sexuality; nightmare demons; possessing angents demoniac/s  28, 233, 242, 247, 254–255, 259, 315, 319, 324–326, 333, 335–336, 363, 370 ördögös/ördöngös/ördögies (“diabolic person”, Hungarian)  164 demonic possession  see possession

526  demonology, demonologist  5, 30, 113–114, 137–138, 145, 155, 157–160, 165–166, 169, 173–174, 221, 227, 282, 299, 323–324, 327, 351, 353, 363, 373, 388 deopūchnā (ritually questioning the god, Himalaya)  396, 398–401, 405 deprivation  3, 458 dervish/darawīsh  7, 436 descent (of the spirit into or from its host) nizūl (Sudan) 436, 438, wacce (Senegal) 460, 466 Deuterocanonical book/s (of the Bible) Ben Sira 299 Tobit 299, 508 Devil  see possessing agents: spirits, deities, demons Devil servant  165 dhikr/zikr (“remembrance” of God, sufi trance-dancing ritual)  7, 36, 431–433 diabolic seduction, ~ temptation  148 diabolic possession  see posession diabolization  21, 132 diagnosis (of possession)  7, 34, 55, 72, 87, 224, 349, 369, 427, 474 Dialogus miraculorum 350 discerning of spirits/discretio spirituum 113, 173 disease  see illness disguise (of the Devil)  20, 63–64, 69, 72, 224, 227, 314, 388 displacement (of the self, of identity)  34, 57, 59–60, 62, 64, 72, 411 dissociation, dissociative personality (disorder)  53, 60, 490, 497 see also multiple personality (disorder) divination, oracle, oracular  33–34, 95, 103, 315, 364, 393, 406, 427, 513 divine (being)  5, 7, 26–31, 36, 53, 55–59, 62, 66–67, 71–72, 84–85, 91, 99, 101, 111–115, 117, 122, 142–143, 147, 160, 170–174, 206–207, 215, 223, 234, 254, 263–265, 268–270, 275–276, 288, 300, 314, 326, 346, 356, 364, 367, 374, 416, 417, 428 divine possession  see possession diviner/fortune teller  33, 115 tudós, tudományos (“wise man/woman”, Hungarian) 161 djinn/ jinn/ jinne  7, 17, 20, 35, 36, 37, 205, 395, 431, 434–435, 440, 455–456, 459, 463 doctor (physicus)  83, 87, 109, 249, 253, 258, 331, 387, 427, 438 double  23, 94, 118, 134, 135, 140, 162, 225, 352, 498 physical ~  118, 134, 135, 162 double voicing  498 doubt  7, 64, 77, 88, 224, 239, 269, 280, 325, 336, 368, 393, 399, 446, 500 dragon  145, 250, see also fiery dragons/ snakes

Spirit Possession

dream  21, 119, 122–124, 126–127, 130, 134–135, 138, 149, 151, 154, 162, 172, 198, 243, 279–280, 283–290, 292–293, 302, 418, 435, 442, 457–458, 467, 480, 499, 500 drum, drumming  431, 436, 438–439, 464–465, 467, 475 dual being  118, 134, 174 dynastic, dynasty  40, 416, 417 early modern medicine  279, 290 Eastern Christianity  146 Eastern Orthodox Church/es, Eastern Church  29, 145–146, 158–159, 167, 169, 266, 275, 329, 333, 374, 379, 387 ecological, ecology, ecosystem  193–194, 196, 198, 201–202, 205, 208 ecstasy  6, 142, 156, 170, 363, 367, 387 see also rapture/raptus, enthusiasm/ enthusiasmus, trance, wajd ecstasy ecstatic (religiosity, spirituality)  21, 30, 39, 80, 111, 173, 354, 356, 362, 431 ~ crusade 3 Ego  58–59, 61, 79, 216, 235, 371 electricity (and transcendence, Uganda), theology of electricity, electricity and spirituality  30, 101, 103, 444 embodying (experience), embodied (spirits), archive of the spirit world  6–7, 19–20, 24, 28, 31–32, 35, 37, 39–42, 53, 95, 99, 101, 104, 119, 128, 138, 154, 224, 225, 314, 395, 398, 417, 420, 422–423, 426, 438, 452, 457–458, 464, 468, 476, 477, 478, 480, 481, 488–489, 491, 501 see also alterity embodiment (ceremonial, ritual)  6, 31–32, 35, 40, 224, 314, 423, 476, 478, 480, 491 emic  7, 14, 16, 75, 111, 113, 117, 119, 126, 162, 172, 174 empathy  328, 496 enthusiasm/enthusiasmus  100, 102, 105, 142, 170 ephialtes  see nightmare demons epilepsy 387 Epiphany  124, 263, 330 epistémè, epistemological  5, 11–13, 194, 199–200, 226–227, 313 eradication 26 eschatology 144 eschatological struggle  147 ethnograph/y/ic (description, research)  1, 14, 37–40, 59, 75, 77, 99, 138, 216–217, 233, 393, 395, 433, 437, 445–448, 452, 457, 470, 488 ethnopsychiatry 225 etic  7, 14, 112, 117, 119, 124, 136, 140, 142, 171, 173, 174 Eucharist  375, 376 euchologion, euchologia  263, 264–265, 267, 269, 272, 275 Euchologian of Serapion 327

527

Subjec t Index

Evangelical Church/es  79 Evangelization 16 evil eye  56, 169, 170 exchange (with the spirit)  199, 203, 420, 455, 463, 472, 480 exegesis 299 exorcism, exorcising  5, 7, 9–10, 14–15, 18–32, 36–37, 53, 56, 65, 71, 86, 88, 99–100, 102, 107–108, 111–114, 120–122, 132–133, 137–138, 143–144, 146–147, 155–159, 164, 168–169, 173–174, 215–217, 219–229, 233, 238–241, 244, 247–257, 259, 263–264, 266, 269–270, 272–276, 304–307, 313, 318, 320–321, 325–326, 343, 345, 351–352, 355–356, 361–364, 366–367, 369–371, 373–374, 376–380, 387–388, 393, 403, 435, 455, 461, 463, 465, 467 large/major ~  374 scriptural ~  463 small/minor ~  374, 120–121, 132 adjuration 24, 248–252, 254–255, 259 yaktovil (Sri Lanka) 53–54 exorcised (person)  5, 7, 19, 26, 37, 88, 107–108, 215, 308, 435, 463, see also possessed (person) expatriation, spirit expatriation rite  464, 469 expell/ing, expulsion  18, 23, 107, 173, 251, 254, 257, 321, 337, 364 faint/ing  63, 83–84, 134, 331, 425 fair/y/ies  111, 114–116, 131, 138–143, 145, 152, 160, 162, 171 szépasszony (“fair lady”, Hungarian) 118, 128, 133, 140–142, 154–156, 161–162 fall, daanu (Senegal)  470, 475 faru rab (“fiancé rab”, incubus Senegal)  457, 461, 462, 463, 464 fast/ing  29, 101, 149, 154, 241–242, 257–259, 326, 332, 469 fast of penitence  258 female ~ fertility  31, 95–96, 432, 438, 456, 459, 463, 472 ~ frigidity 462 ~ genital cutting 39, 449, 451 feminization 455 fetish, fetishism  5, 9, 12, 199, 456 fictional lineage/kinship  40, 416, 419 fiery dragons/snakes (as demon lovers)  135, see also lidérc/lüdérc (nightmare demons) latawiec, letavec, letun, ljubak, para (East Europe) 135 zmej, zmaj, zmija, zmeu, zburator (Central-East Europe)  135 figuration, public figuration (of invisible beings)  35, 36 figurative/embodied (possession)  see possession

fly, flying  24, 39, 80, 118, 127, 131, 139, 164, 166, 380, 441 folk/popular belief/faith, popular demonology  XI, XIII, 18, 114, 133, 138, 145, 151, 162, 274, 313, 321, 330, 334, 336 fondy, tromba fondy (mistress of Sakalava possessed women)  40, 416, 418, 420, 426 food (spirits’ food)  6, 101, 104, 136, 198, 258, 259, 264, 326, 329–330, 336, 350, 376, 378, 436, 442, 444–445, 457, 465, 480 free will  11, 87, 243 friar, see: monk fusion/fused (representations)  21, 58–59, 100, 138, 158, 161, 461 gay 475 gor-jigen  475 homosexual (herder, zayrān)  451, 475 genealogi/cal  41, 198, 437, 492, 497 ghabiyāna (“absent”, in trance, elated, Sudan) 435 ghost  7, 18–19, 55, 62, 91, 93, 111, 124, 126, 130, 132–133, 142, 153, 158–159, 162, 216, 224, 266, 271, 286, 303, 313–321, 354–355, 367, 393, 395–396, 438 ~ fever  303 ghostly pains  303 ghostly presence  224 see also dead, specter/spectre ghouls (piśāchas, India) 55–56 globalization  XII, 8, 35, 200, 474 glossolalia  27, 104 Gospel/s  248, 267, 307–308, 315, 326, 330, 343 Gospel of Saint John 379 god/s, godess/es  see possessing agents Greek gods, myths  72, 95, 497 guilt, guilt culture  22, 108, 230, 232–238, 245, 480, 500 guise (India)  63, 65, 72, 232 gur/guru (India)  32–33, 34 hagiography  247, 313, 349 hailstorm  263, 264, 270, 273, 275 hallucination  79, 127, 131, 467 haunt, haunting, hauntology  9, 19, 93, 158, 203–206, 215–218, 220, 222–228, 264, 347, 355, 428, 481 healing, ~ session  27, 29–30, 93, 99–100, 106–107, 112, 115, 120–121, 139, 169–170, 215, 217, 223, 226, 254, 259, 303–308, 318, 326–327, 337, 343, 345–346, 348, 356, 378, 387–388, 460–461, 463, 472, 474, 480, 491 heaven  131–132, 142, 173, 256, 264, 266, 302, 375 hell  124, 131, 152, 220, 239, 249, 316, 317 helping animal  165, 166 helping spirit  11, 164–165 heretic  158, 334 historicity (forms of)  487, 489, 497–498

528  historical/diachronic ~ genre  10, 36–37, 263, 343, 351, 434, 452, 494 ~ personalities  28, 60–62, 215, 420, 478 ~ and social imaginary  39–40 Holy Dead  18, 321 Holy Ghost  91, 266, 271 holy man  37, 438 Holy Sacrament  326 Holy Spirit, God’s spirit  7, 9, 30–32, 93–94, 98–108, 248, 253, 256, 272, 304, 333, 351 Holy Synod (Russia)  265, 329 horse (of the gods, spirits)  461, 470 host (of a spirit)  6, 13, 20, 32–33, 37, 39, 119, 199, 203–204, 219, 226, 318, 354, 435–438, 440–441, 448–452, 457, 461, 463, 472–473, 475–478, 489, 491–495, 497 house spirit  137 humoral (theory)  129, 258, 280, 283, 286, 288, 290, 293 hunt, hunter  38–39, 101, 103, 107, 268, 441–442, 470 hybridization  17, 18 hypnosis  60, 62–63, 337 hypnotherapy 220 hypochondria  243–244, 280 hysteria/histerical  23, 29, 113, 240, 280, 331, 337, 369, 495 icon  28–29, 104, 148, 323, 327, 336 identity/ies  60–61, 255, 314, 316–317, 321, 438, 488, 490 ~ change  475, 480, 481 shift of ~  411 idolatry  30, 31, 306 illness/disease/sickness  4, 7, 22, 26, 29, 53, 63–65, 69–70, 72, 99–100, 111, 113, 119, 139, 141–142, 144, 146, 148, 155, 160, 169–170, 174, 194, 199, 218, 223, 227, 229–231, 234, 247, 253–255, 259, 279–284, 286–294, 300–301, 303–308, 324, 330–331, 336–337, 345, 349, 369, 379–380, 387–388, 393, 432, 434–435, 437–438, 455, 457–461, 467–468, 470, 473–475, 481–490, 493, 496 illocutionary  491, 492 imaginary (collective ~ world)  20–21, 37, 39–40, 98, 121–122, 151, 368 imagination (collective, social)  20–21, 77, 123, 145, 204, 243, 284, 286–287, 292–293, 362–363, 415, 428, 481, 487, 489, 496, 500 impersonator, impersonator’s sense of self  58–59, 62 impur/ity  5, 24, 56–57, 64, 98, 303, 304 incantation  see charm incarnation/bodily presence (of spirits)  6, 23, 58, 75–76, 80–83, 85, 87–89, 91, 280, 285, 290, 317, 346, 461, 465

Spirit Possession

incubus  20, 22, 130, 133–134, 137–138, 144–145, 165, 279–284, 286–294, 306, 378, 455, 457, 461–463, see also ephialtes; faru rab; nightmare demons indigenous (peoples)  193–202, 205, 207, 216, 434 indigenous studies/ethnography/historiography, indigenist  7–8, 16, 37, 39, 64, 193–194, 196, 197– 198, 201–202, 391, 394, 431, 445, 468, 478 individualism/individualization  8, 12, 22, 28, 229–232, 235, 237–239, 245, 411, 422, 474 infectiousness/virality/contagiousness (of spirit possession)  8, 9 infertility 463 influence (of spirits), (demonic) influence  105, 119–120, 136, 173, 217, 225–226, 233, 349, 393, 395, 399 inhabit/ed (by a spirit)  53, 101, 107, 112, 124, 223, 274, 301, 334, 351, 409, 434, 460–461, 470 initiating, initiation  26, 84, 85, 107, 127, 139, 154, 164–165, 171, 387, 416, 455, 463, 466–471, 491 inside (the body)  6–7, 57, 64, 71–72, 77, 112, 155, 164, 229, 239, 247–255, 259, 316, 320, 350–351, 375, 382, 459–461, 470 inspiration  XII, 7, 101, 114, 170, 173, 364 insufflation 169 interconnectedness (potential for)  16–17, 20–21 interiority, culture of  233–234, 239, 243 internalization of self-constraint  229–230 intestin, intestine cap  26, 303, 469, 471 intracorporeal/~ experience  6, 29 introjection  3, 242, 493 intrusion/invasion (by spirits), invader  22, 53, 57, 59, 106, 237, 254, 314, 334, 436, 447 see also possessing agents inversion (sacrificial inversion of the body) 470 see also reversal invocation of spirits  100 ironic/ironize, Rheumatic Irony  6, 20, 226, 324, 370, 379, 450, 492, 501 Islam  5, 8, 34–35, 227, 433, 458, 462, 464, 490, 494–495 Islamic traditions, rites  35–36, 431, 435, 456 jagtī pūch (consulting all the gods Himachal Pradesh) 410 Jesuit  22, 233, 239, 375 jinn/jinne/djinn/jinniya, red ~, black ~  17, 35–37, 49, 395, 431, 434–435, 455–456, 459, 462–463 Judaism  5, 34, 227, 299 journey (spiritual), soul journey  131, 142–143, 172, 362, 364

529

Subjec t Index

kasuale Begegnung (Honko)  152, 156 khayṭ (“thread”, sudanian zār’s chant)  436 khel karna (Himalayan god’s bodily “playing”) 404 klikushi, Klikushestvo (Russia)  see shriekers Koran  see Quran layered identity  22 laying on of hands  29, 304–305, 308 legend, migratory legend  80, 122, 126, 136–137, 139, 147, 149–150, 158, 162, 164–165, 168, 170, 283, 305, 343, 346, 356 Lent  149, 258 levitation 118 Liber Ordinum  250, 252 lidérc/lüdérc see nightmare demons liturgy, liturgical  24, 215, 247–249, 252–255, 257, 259, 323, 329, 343, 356, 374, 461 lustration 472 measure/measuring, natt (rite, Senegal)  25, 464, 465, 466, 469, 471 mad, madness, sine mente  10, 27, 29, 113, 151, 234, 239, 243, 289, 292, 301, 308, 347, 348–349, 364, 405 magic  108, 139, 144, 157, 160–161, 163, 236, 249, 328, 333, 335, 450, 459, 462–474 demonic ~  157 natural ~  157 white ~  328, 373, 388 male impotence  462 Mahr, mare, mora see nightmare demons mantra  69, 393–394 marriage  6, 66, 223–224, 263, 417, 421, 423, 425–426, 435, 437, 442, 449, 456, 461, 494 Maussian personnage  22, 457, 487, 501 medicalization, medical theories  22–23, 129, 280, 284, 286, 293 see also early modern medicine medium  6, 13, 32, 33, 34, 60, 62, 66–67, 71, 75–77, 83, 87, 95–98, 103–107, 109, 205, 318–319, 362–364, 393–407, 409–411, 473, 488–496, 498, 501 mediumism/mediumship, mediumistic  6, 31, 33–34, 55, 75, 86–88, 91, 94, 100, 111, 115, 117, 170–173 melancholy  113, 136, 155, 168, 240, 244, 284, 286, 288–289 memory  18, 19, 58, 60, 72, 81, 93, 123–224, 250, 319, 320, 347–348, 361–362, 366, 418, 432, 439 memorate  124, 127, 129, 134–135, 141, 143, 154 menses  65, 432 mental disturbance/disorder  1, 231, 303, 459 metamorphose, spirit metamorphoses  20 meticulous  24–25, 29, 31, 343, 346 metonymy, metonymic  28, 36, 39 microhistory 22

miracle  108, 109, 112, 267, 327, 336, 343, 345–347, 349–351, 356 Devilish marvel/s  27, 353 miscarriage  463, 473 Miserere mei (penitent psalm)  257 Missale Gallicanum 250 missionary/ies  31, 86, 96–98 mollification (of spirits)  36 see also adorcism monk/friar  24, 146, 156, 167–169, 217, 220–221, 234, 325–337, 352, 370, 378–380, 383, 387, 444 kaluger (călugăr, “monk”, Romanian) 168 see also healer monotheism, monotheistic  30–31, 34, 42, 100 multiple personality (disorder)  53, 60, 113 music  10, 21, 28, 101–102, 104, 126, 140, 142–143, 256, 259, 301, 398, 407, 432, 467, 475, 480 mutism 459 mystics  112, 370 name, nomination, naming rite  18, 24–25, 28, 30–31, 63, 72, 83, 104, 131–132, 135–137, 161, 170, 194, 206–207, 215, 221–227, 237, 248–249, 253, 259, 283–284, 293, 303–304, 313, 320–321, 327–328, 332, 334, 336, 345, 352, 404, 438, 443, 455, 457–458, 463–464, 467–468, 470, 480, 490–492, 500 narrative (tradition), ~ construction  60, 70–71, 90, 100, 118–119, 121–123, 125–126, 128, 131–132, 136, 139–143, 148–149, 151, 158, 161, 163–168, 172, 217, 219–220, 223–224, 231, 268–270, 272, 275–276, 300–305, 315, 319, 354, 365, 371, 393, 400, 403, 411, 424, 445, 467, 497, 500–501 national rite  481 native researcher  14 Ndëpp, ndëppkat (Senegal)  2, 21, 25–26, 39, 455–461, 463–465, 467–469, 471–472, 475–476, 478–481 Nebris (Greece)  26 Neo-Pentecostal Churches  see Brazil Church neurological disorders, neurophysiology  303, 490 New Testament  22, 152, 250, 259, 269, 304–305, 307–308 nightmare demon/s  133, 165 Alp 134 cauchemar, mar, Mahr, mara, mare, mora, mòre, mura, zmóra  130, 134, 137, 163, 279, 280–286, 291–293 ephialtes (incubus, Greco-Roman)  137, 282–284

530  Hag  280–282, 284–285, 293, 348 lidérc/lüdérc (fiery ~, Hungarian)  14, 22, 114, 118, 120, 130–133, 135–138, 142, 153–156, 161–162, 165, 168, 378, 463 non-literary fiction (zār cult, Sudan)  37, 39 nun, possessed nun  21, 27–28, 233, 239–240, 283, 345, 350, 353–356, 362, 365, 444 nymph/s 137 oath  303–304, 306, 347 obscenities 106 obsessionalization, obsessional neurosis ​ 231, 233, 239, 241, 244 obsessive/obsessive-compulsive disorder, symptoms (OCD), scrupulosity disease  22, 119–120, 122, 129–130, 135, 141, 154–155, 168, 205, 217, 227, 229, 231–232, 234–236, 240, 244, 279–280, 292, 303, 306, 348–349, 356, 375, 435, 459, 467, 497 Oedipus 497 Old Belief/Believers  163, 329 Old Testament  29, 144, 251, 268, 300 ontology, ontological, ontological perspective  19, 25, 35–36, 75, 80–81, 84, 88, 194, 199–200, 216, 314, 394, 459, 489 oracle, oracular  see divination ordeal  96, 168, 239, 244 ordo, ordines  247, 254, 256, 259 orgasm 46 orgia/stic  100, 105, 106 Orthodox/y  28–29, 31, 114, 117, 120, 124, 130, 146, 148, 158–160, 165, 167–169, 263, 265, 323, 325–329, 332, 334–337, 374, 379, 387, 433 ~ Christianity  263, 265 ~ demonology  113 ~ monastery/ies  29, 121, 146, 324–325 otherworld/ly  118–119, 123–126, 131, 152, 170, 207, 314, 333 out-of-body experience (OBE)  118–119, 127, 131, 156 ownership 13 ~ and possession  11, 71 ~ of slaves  12 pact (with the Devil)  145, 155, 157, 158, 59, 165, 166, 174, 237, 325, 354 pagan  5, 21, 94, 96, 98, 100, 103–104, 109, 132, 145, 151, 159, 270, 315–316, 321, 449, 458, 462, 477, 478 palanquin (god’s palanquin, Himalaya) ​ 394, 407–409 palimpsest (zār perfomances)  20, 451 Palm Sunday  116 pantheon of spirits, ~ of zayrān  78, 322, 438, 439 parody  445, 451, 478 Penates 481 Pentecost 124

Spirit Possession

Pentecostal/Neo-Pentecostal Church/es Assemblies of God (Brazil)  32, 76, 86, 174 Brazil Church  32, 85–86 performance 18, 42, 108, 120, 130, 132, 301, 320, 361, 363, 368–370, 398, 425, 475, 489, 493–497, 499 performativ/e/ity/eness, performative utterance  273, 452, 488, 492 peritoneum  26, 470 permeability (of the body, of the person)  60, 105 persecution/persecute, persecutory (delusion, perception)  22, 96, 138, 157, 160, 218, 233, 236, 238, 245, 249, 256, 329, 335, 363, 421, 473, 474 personhood  3, 198, 201, 488 personalization, personification  31, 71–72 personage  see Maussian personnage pešarim (commentaries in Qumran)  299 Petrine Laws (Russia)  324, 325 phantom  19, 215–217, 223–226 pharaoh  30, 250, 266, 268, 302–305 philosophy  11, 12, 42, 201, 218 pilgrimage  112, 350 poiesis, bodily ~, ~ of history, ~ of self  25, 497, 499, 501 polysem/ic/y  29, 30 polytheism, polytheistic  34, 227 poltergeist  21, 125, 132, 153, 162 Pontificale Romano-Germanicum  247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 256, 257 popular belief/faith  see folk/popular belief/ faith popular culture  98, 314, 317, 322, 373 popular religion  see religion possessed (person), possessus demoniacus, obsessa, demoniata,  1, 6, 7, 11–13, 15, 17–22, 24–27, 29, 30–34, 36, 37, 39–41, 56, 58, 61–66, 69–72, 75–76, 80, 84–85, 87, 97, 103–108, 112, 119–121, 123–125, 130–131, 133–135, 147, 153, 155, 157–159, 163–166, 171–172, 174, 201, 204, 207, 217–225, 233, 237–239, 242–244, 247–248, 251–253, 255, 257–259, 307–308, 316–321, 323–328, 330–331, 337, 343–356, 362–365, 368, 375–376, 378–385, 387, 395, 399–403, 415–428, 432, 435–436, 448, 451, 457–458, 463–467, 469, 470, 472–478, 480, 488, 492–496, 498–499 besnovatye (demonically possessed, Russia) 324, inda zār (forever possessed, Sudan)  13, 155, 163, 166, 174, 435 see also shriekers possessing agents (demons, deities, spirits)  1, 4, 6, 10, 12–13, 18–20, 23, 25, 27–28, 30–37, 39–40, 42, 53, 55, 58,

531

Subjec t Index

60, 62–64, 66, 67, 72, 75–81, 83, 85–89, 93–100, 104–108, 112–114, 118–120, 123, 128, 137, 139, 143, 152, 164, 167, 171–173, 194, 197–207, 215, 223, 227, 242, 247, 256, 259, 279–281, 285–289, 294, 299, 301–302, 306–308, 313–319, 324, 328–331, 333, 353, 356, 361, 395, 397–398, 406–410, 416–418, 420, 422, 425–426, 431–432, 434–435, 437, 438–439, 448–451, 455–460, 462, 464–465, 468–469, 471, 473–478, 480–481, 487, 490–498, 501 see also fairy, nightmare demons, fiery dragons/snakes aat (uncircumcised rab ~, Senegal)  477 alien spirit/s  96–97, 130 ancestral spirit/s  1, 13, 17, 20, 25, 455–458, 462, 464–465, 468–469, 471–472, 474, 478, 480–481, 493 animal spirit  288 bhūt,bhūtam, bhūt-like beings (India)  39, 54–56, 59, 69–70, 395–396, 398–405, 411 British zayrān (Sudan)  441, 443 caboclo/s (metis spirit, Afro-Brazilian) 81 ceddo (Senegal) 458 cen (evil dead, Uganda)  93 chinri (Chad)  1–2, 9 cohort of demons  222–223 community goddesses (Himachal Pradesh) 32 Coptic monk (zār, Sudan) 444 coro rab (mistress-rab, succubus, Senegal)  457, 461–464 crianças (spirits of deceased children, Afro-Brazilian) 80 csuma (“cholera” demon, Hungarian) 170 daiva/daeva (divine power or demon, Tulu Nad, India, Iran)  59 darawīsh zayrān (Sudan) 431 demon lover  135, see also fiery dragons/ snakes; nightmare demons demon of inflammation  305 devil, diabolus, evil  1, 4, 6, 10, 12–13, 18–20, 23, 25, 27–28, 30–37, 39–40, 42, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62–64, 66, 67, 72, 75–81, 83, 85–89, 93–100, 104–108, 112–114, 118–120, 123, 128, 137, 139, 143, 152, 164, 167, 171–173, 194, 197–207, 215, 223, 227, 242, 247, 256, 259, 279–281, 285–289, 294, 299, 301–302, 306–308, 313–319, 324, 328–331, 333, 353, 356, 361, 395, 397–398, 406–410, 416–418, 420, 422, 425, 426, 431–432, 434–435, 437, 438–439, 448–451, 455–460, 462, 464–465, 468–469, 471, 473–478, 480–481, 487, 490–498, 501

devtā, devī (god, goddess, India)  396, 398, 399, 400, 410 disease/illness demon  146, 160, 169–170 dybbuk (wandering spirit, Jewish)  35 elégún (Orisha cult, Candomblé, Nigeria, Brazil) 470 English zār (Sudan) 444 Exús, pomba giras (male resp. female tricksters, Yoruba, Afro-Brazilian) 80 Fallata zayrān (zār nation, Fulani, Peul, Hausa, Sokoto, Sudan), fallata pilgrim spirits) 449–451 familiar spirits  475 fever demon (Jvarāsura) India)  69 forest spirits  204 ganën (demon, Ethiopia)  20 gonosz/ak, rossz/ak (“evil ones”, Hungarian)  124, 131, 136, 164 grass spirits  198 guías(“guides”)/caboclos (Brazilian peoples from the Amazonian interior) 80 Ḥabish (Ethiopian, Abyssinian zayrān) 449 hauka (Niger, Ghana)  204 hedonist (spirit, Sudan)  437 holey (Zarma-Songhay ancestral spirit, Niger)  10, 477 ikota (demon, Russia)  163 khawayāt (Misters, Europeans, Westerners, zayrān, Sudan)  139, 444–445 mazzikim (invisible demons , Hebrew) 35 mizimu (spirit of ancestors, Western Uganda) 96 nations of zayrān [spirit of slaves (Azande, Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk, Abīd), spirit of servants (Khuddām)]  448 Njungu (spirit of Europeanness, Western Uganda) 96 orixás (Afro-Brazilian)  80, 84, 85, 91, 203 ördög (“devil”, Hungarian)  14 paratika (familiar, Hungarian)  165 Portenere, Wisman (Hungarian)  350, 352 poshibka (demon, Russia)  163 rab (“animal”, ancestral spirit, Senegal)  7, 13, 17, 25, 26, 28, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 480, 481 rak ṣasas (anthropophagic demons, India)  55 residual spirit  13, 17, 26, 28, 455–481 rwḥ/rūaḥ/rʽ h (wind, vital demons, outward demon, Bible)  29, 39, 299–303, 305–307

532  sa ḥār (azande zayrān, cannibal sorcerers)  39, 448 Satan  24, 30, 36, 96, 100, 102, 104–107, 115, 132, 144–148, 153, 157-158, 162, 169–171, 173, 215, 226, 240–243, 245, 248–2451, 259 sazoka (royal spirit, Madagascar)  416 serpens antiquus  250 shaytān, seytaane (Islamic world, Senegal) 20 shedim (“the  worst demons”, Hebrew)  20, 35 Shinto (medieval Japan)  199 spirits of benevolence, falsehood, fornication, lethargy, lie, righteousness; outward spirits (Old Testament) 301–302 spiritus immundus 248 storm demon  122, 158 unclean spirit/s (New Testament), tisztátalanok (“unclean ones”, Hungarian)  124, 247–248, 250, 255, 257–259, 275, 314, 317, 328–333, 431 tuur (“pour, spread” guardian spirit, Wolof, Lebu)  456–457, 464, 467–468, 472, 477 zurūg (black zayrā)  448 possessing agents: spirits, deities, demons; named Abd al-Gadir al-Jaylani (zār, Sudan)  438 Abu Rīsh, Ya-Amir aj-Jaysh (Father of Feathers, Commander of the Army, zār) 440 Abyssinian prince (zār, Soudan)  438 Aïsha/Aïsha Qandīsha (Jinniya, North Africa, Morocco)/Lala 37 Al-Wardi Karoma (Lord Cromer’s zār, Sudan) 439 Appukkuttan (Kerala)  70 Ardo (Fula chief, Senegal)  477, 478 Asmodeus 249 Basha Bashīr (Evangelist Pasha zār, Sudan) 441 Basha-t-cAdil, (“the Just Pasha” zār, Sudan) 440 Bashawāt (Pashas or high officials zārs including Europeans, Turks and Egyptians, Sudan)  439, 440 Beelzebub  121, 164, 365 Beja zayrān (Sudan) 451 Belial  249, 316, 317, 353, 354 Birulu, Lord of the Chains (slavery zār, Sudan) 443 Chathan (India, Kerala)  63, 64, 65, 66, 69 Coptic monk (zār, Sudan)  444 Dadaross (counterpart of King Tewodros II of Abyssinia, zayrān)  449

Spirit Possession

Dona Bey (“Governor of the Channels”, zār, Sudan)  38, 39, 441, 442, 451 Dongo (zarma Thunder God, Niger) 477 Gylou, Gello (Balkans)  249 Hadimba (goddess, Himachal Pradesh) 397 Hakīm (Egyptian doctor’s spirit, Sudan) 438 Ḥamāma-t-al-Bahr (“Pigeon of the River”, prostitute zār, Sudan)  442, 448, 449 Hashīra (English gentlewoman zār,) 444 Hassan (Hungarian)  24, 25, 380 Iblis (Koran)  36 Kagoro (lightening god, Uganda)  95 Kahrabā (“Electricity”, zār,Sudan)  444 Kali (India)  68 Kalisa (cattle god, Uganda)  95 Kapumbuli (plague demon, Buganda) 96 Khokhotun (“The Joker”, demon, Russia) 332 Kifaru (“rhinoceros”, ~ of military tanks, Uganda) 96 Lamia (female demon, Balkans)  137 Lilith (female confinement demon, Hebrew)  128, 307 Lucifer  215, 248 Luliya Habishiya (“Luliya the Abyssian”, Sudan) 443 Maam Ngesu (warrior rab, Senegal)  477, 478 Mami Wata (West African water ~)  100 Militia Tamiel (demon, Italy)  221, 224 Naton, Oksza, Rozen (demon, Polish) 352 Ndege (spirit of airplanes, Western Uganda) 96 Nimr al-Khala (“Leopard of the Desert”, zār, Sudan)  439, 440 Ogun (Yoruba) 28, 83 Olorun (father of the skies, Brazil)  203 Plaksivoi (“Cry Baby”, demon, Russia) 332 Portenere, Wisman (demon, Hungarian) ​ 350, 352 Prince Raleva (Toliara, ­Madagascar)  40– 41, 417–418, 420–428 Rubanga (thunder god, Uganda)  95 Sarkin Bornu (“king of Bornu”, Fallata zayrān,Sudan) 450 Sedun (“Rider”, demon, Russia)  333 Ta’ishi Baggara (zayrān of Kordofan, Mahdi’s army, Sudan)  451 Xangô/Shangô, Jakuta (god of lightning, thunder, justice, Yoruba, South America) 203

533

Subjec t Index

possessing agents’ influence and effects on the possessed arrival (in the body)  393, 425, 427, 441 attack  27–28, 55, 57, 82, 120, 123, 128, 131–132, 143, 148, 151–152, 172, 222, 242, 247, 254–255, 258, 279, 290, 292, 306, 326, 353–355, 395, 400, 402–404, 411, 437, 459, 460, 470, 474, 500 assault, assaulting  21, 29, 32, 124–125, 127, 129–130, 132–134, 136, 139, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150–157, 159, 161–162, 166, 168, 171, 173–174, 279–282, 284–286, 288–290, 292, 294 “seeing”,“catching” the possessed  393 speaking through the possessed  8 besieging/obsidere the possessed  242 carrying away/off the possessed  85, 93, 126, 151–152, 219, 352, 394, 501 desiccating the possessed  460, 470 entering the body of the possessed  7, 14, 24, 29, 37, 53, 57, 59, 83, 105, 108, 119–120, 123, 130, 140, 156, 169, 171–172, 247, 300–301, 306, 313, 318, 320, 350–351, 395–396, 405, 435, 460, 473 following the possessed  13, 77, 457, 460 gnarling the body of the possessed  118 going onto, in the possessed  127 inhabiting the body of the possessed  53, 107, 112, 223, 274, 301, 334, 351, 409, 434, 460–461, 470 penetrating the body of the possessed  6–7, 13, 25, 29, 56, 57, 306, 460, 461, 470 picking up, snatching up, lifting up, taking away, transporting the possessed  31, 67, 106, 118, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130–131, 140–143, 149, 151–152, 156, 163, 166, 171, 301, 364, 479 pressing  14, 37, 107, 119, 120, 127–129, 133–138, 142, 153–155, 163, 168, 242, 281–282, 293, 435 riding the possessed (by Hag, mare, witch)  119, 141–142, 163, 280–282, 284–285, 293, 444 rising inside the body of the possessed  85, 460, 461 saddling the possessed  141 seizing the possessed  4, 55, 279, 317, 320, 321, 366, 432, 470, 479 shaking the possessed  65–67, 467, 470 making the possessed shiver, shake (viṟaykkuka, South India)  65–67, 307 splitting the personality of the possessed  13, 40, 61, 242–243, 266, 268, 470, 475 striking the possessed (by spirits, fairies)  140, 142, 152, 367

surrounding the possessed  6, 14, 118, 120, 125, 130, 148–149, 152, 155, 162, 166, 172, 235, 271, 320, 356, 433 tormenting the possessed (bādhā, Kerala) 55–56, 66, 70, 137, 162, 168, 223, 256, 257, 284, 301, 314, 317, 326, 345, 351, 354, 380–381, 385, 441, 480 weighing on the possessed  77, 171–172, 247, 300–301, 306, 313, 318, 320, 350–351, 395–396, 405, 435, 460, 473 possession/possessio  XI, XII, 1–37, 40–42, 53–78, 81, 84–98, 100–125, 129–133, 136, 139–144, 146–148, 151, 153, 155–158, 162–175, 193–194, 196–208, 215, 229, 233–234, 236–245, 247–248, 251, 253–255, 259, 279, 285, 290, 299, 302, 304, 308, 313–315, 317–320, 323–327, 329–332, 336, 343, 345–346, 348–356, 361–363, 365, 367, 369–375, 378, 380, 386–388, 393–396, 399–403, 405, 411, 415–419, 421, 423, 425–428, 431–432, 434, 437, 442, 452, 455, 457–461, 466, 468–471, 473–475, 477–478, 480–481, 487–499, 501 ~ among working women  8 Besessenheit (internal ~)  6 bodily ~  29, 120, 155, 156, 172, 173, 174 circumsessio  6, 120, 124, 140, 157, 172, 173, 374 criticism of ~ definitions  4, 39, 216,393, 451 definition of ~  11 demonic/diabolic ~/affliction  6, 18, 20, 25–26, 28, 91, 111–112, 114, 117, 119–120, 131, 133, 136, 143–144, 151, 157, 160, 163–164, 166, 169–174, 219, 255, 290, 321, 323–325, 327–328, 330, 333, 335–337, 343, 345, 347, 349, 356, 361, 363, 369–374, 378–379, 388, 455 divine ~  27–28, 30, 55, 113–115, 117, 142–143, 170–174, 314, 356 epidemic ~  27, 29, 327, 329, 333, 335, 353, 355 figurative/embodied ~  19–20, 24, 42, 53, 468, 501 ghostly ~,  ~ by the dead  21, 112, 114–115, 122–123, 125, 130–131, 136, 140, 141–143, 151, 153, 156, 162–163, 168, 172–173, 317–318, 320–322 illuminated ~ (darśanam, India) 58 mass ~  9, 22 obsession/obsessio  6, 17, 29, 111, 120, 124, 136, 140, 148, 151, 156, 171–174, 215, 231, 232, 233, 241–244, 255, 345, 348, 349, 461 oppression, “desperate oppression” (pīḍa, Kerala)  6, 56, 215, 279, 284, 286 permanent ~  see inda zār (possessed); shriekers ~-illness  26, 459, 461, 470

534  ritual ~  20, 36, 403, 455 trans-religious ~  395 Umsessenheit, besiegement (external ~) 6 urban ~  21, 40, 415 variants of ~  23 wild ~  459 possession cults  4, 9–10, 13, 20, 23, 28, 34, 40, 98, 100, 104, 115, 121, 139, 172, 174, 238, 415, 457, 459, 461, 469, 477 central ~ (I. M. Lewis)  4 main morality cults (I. M. Lewis)  4, 458 peripheral ~ (I. M. Lewis)  474 Aissawa/Issaoua/Issawa/Isawiyya (Morocco)  37, 459 Bacwezi (Bunyoro, Uganda)  16, 31, 95–96, 100 Bori (Hausa, Niger, Nigeria)  8, 35, 39, 42, 478 Căluşarii (Romania)  115, 174 Candomblé (Brazil, Uruguay, Argentine, Venezueala)  13, 17, 32, 39, 42, 75, 78, 80–82, 84–86, 90–91, 203, 469, 470 Chinri (Chad, Moundang))  1, 2, 9 Dionysos (Greece) 5 Embandwa (Uganda, Bunyoro)  93, 95–98, 100, 104–107 Gnawa, Gnaoua (Morocco) 37 Hamadsha (Morocco)  37, 459 Hauka (Niger, Ghana)  204 Kardecism (international, mainly Brazil)  17, 75 Maenadism (Greece)  13, 21, 26 Mevlevi, Mevleviyya (Sufi order, Turkey)  7 Nestinarstvo (Bulgaria, Macedonia)  115, 174 Ndëpp (Senegal)  2, 21, 25–26, 39, 455–461, 463–465, 467–469, 471–472, 475–476, 478– 481 Orisha, Orisa (Yoruba, Nigeria, Benin)  26, 39, 467, 469, 470 Orixás (Brazil, see Candomblé) 80, 84–85, 91, 203 Rab (Wolof, Lebu, Senegal)  7, 13, 17, 25–26, 28, 455–481, see also Ndëpp Rusalje, Rusalia (Serbia, Bulgaria)  115, 174 Tarantism, tarantella 4, 5, 24, 121 Tromba (Madagascar, Mayotte)  8–9, 20, 28, 40, 42, 415–416, 418–419, 425–426, 457, 477–478, 497 Tschamba (Mina, Togo)  93 Umbanda (Brazil)  13, 17, 32, 78, 80–82, 85, 91, 174 Vodun, Vodu (Fon, Gun, Ewe, Benin, Nigeria) 26 Zar, Zār, Zayrān cult (Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia)  8–9, 20, 26–28, 35, 37–40, 42, 431–452, 457, 469, 470, 478

Spirit Possession

Zār identity  13, 39, 443 Zār nations, dowlā (spirit nations)  436, 437, 438, 449 Zār hedonism 445 Zār poetics  38, 441 Zār bori (Sudan)  35, 431–435 Zār tambura (Sudan)  432, 434, 435, 459 possessive individualism  12 postbiblical Judaism  299 postpartum (psychosis)  463 prabhāv (influence/presence of the god, Himachal Pradesh) 399 praveśa (“entering in”, Sanscrit, India)  3 prayer  6, 26, 28–30, 83, 97, 99, 101–102, 107, 120, 124, 130, 132–133, 137, 144, 148, 153–155, 173, 215, 220, 222, 227, 233, 239, 241, 249, 253, 255–257, 259, 263–270, 272–273, 275–276, 302, 304, 323, 325–327, 332–336, 364, 374–376, 379, 385, 387, 438, 466, 468, 472–473, 477, 480 Prayer of Nabonidus 305 schismatic prayer  329 precolonial/postcolonial time  30, 96, 196, 201, 237, 398, 489, 498 predestination 375 preternatural  314, 318, 320, 322 priest, priestess  18, 20, 23–25, 29, 58, 61, 64, 67, 78, 81–82, 85, 99–100, 118, 121, 130, 132–133, 137, 146, 149, 153–156, 168–169, 215, 217, 220–222, 226, 233, 240, 253, 256–259, 263, 271, 274, 276, 300, 318–319, 323, 326–328, 333, 336, 351, 362, 365, 367–368, 375–379, 383–384, 387, 398–399, 403, 444, 448, 456–458, 465–468, 470, 472–473, 475–478, 481 babalorixá (Afro-Brazilian)  81, 84–85 ndëppkat (Senegal)  456, 459, 464–465, 467–468, 471, 475 pujārī (Himachal Pradesh)  399, 404 see also clergy prophet, prophecy  164, 170, 256, 271, 273, 299, 301, 305, 375–376, 431–432, 479–480 projection, projective communication  138, 151, 473–474, 493 proliferation, proliferation of possession  8, 10, 19, 108, 415 property (and spirit possession)  8, 12–13, 112, 194, 203 Protestant/s/ism, Protestant religious ethos  78–79, 98, 100, 132, 365 prostitute/zayrān (Sudan)  330, 442, 448 protest theories  10, 12, 40 pseudepigrapha 299 psychiatry, psychiatrist  60, 113, 215, 225–227, 231, 235–236, 327, 462, 465 psychoanalyst/psychoanalytic  6, 19, 23, 34, 60–61, 66, 72, 79, 88, 129–130, 147, 201, 216, 223, 225, 229, 230–232, 234–235, 238, 241, 245, 284, 337, 345, 371, 401, 411, 459, 465, 489, 491, 493, 495, 497, 498

535

Subjec t Index

psychosomatic, ~ disorder  19, 26, 457, 459, 480 publicity  395, 488 punishment  108, 151–152, 160, 238, 288, 301, 318, 331–332, 397, 421–422 pur/ity/ification  24, 26, 30, 57, 96, 101, 235, 252, 263–264, 306, 308 pure, tahir (circumcised woman, Sudan) 442 Qadriyya 431 Qumran  299–300, 302, 308 Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns 299 Quran/Koran  20, 35–36, 434, 459, 462–463, 477 rath god-rath (wooden palanquin, Himalaya)  406–407, 409, 410–411 reflexivity  42, 417–418, 491 Reformation  28, 132, 230, 232 reincarnation (Switzerland)  42, 219, 222, 487–488, 490, 498–501 rejection  8, 16, 75, 84, 87, 96, 98, 100, 105, 108, 218–219, 224, 253 relics (of saints)  313, 327, 336, 345, 353 religion folk ~  113 lived ~  111, 113, 117, 119, 138, 173 popular ~  23, 117 vernacular ~  XIII, 117 return, institutionalization of ~, figures of ~, ~ of the repressed  8, 16, 31, 84, 93–94, 98, 100, 103, 108, 132, 156, 162, 203–204, 206, 253, 255, 257, 259, 303–304, 318, 331, 346, 367, 378, 380, 445, 456, 461, 463, 470, 477, 488 revenant/revenance  20, 35, 124, 132, 153 renewal, revival, revivalism  30, 94, 98–100, 215, 230, 300, 315 rites of alliance  10 rites of passage  28, 125, 130 ritual interaction, ~ conflict  393, 397, 400, 406 Rituale Graecorum  265 Rituale of Saint Florian 252 Rituale Romanum (ROM)  159, 374, 376 Roman Catholic, see: Catholic role-play  458, 481 local~  20, 451 roog (viscera, „adornment”, Senegal)  469 rosary  100, 155, 221, 381, 384 Sabbat/h  see Witches’ Sabbath sacid, dik-dik (desert antelope, young woman)  38, 441, 442 sacramental/s  128, 133, 137, 154, 156, 225, 388 sacrament/s  99, 221, 222, 326, 327 sacramentaries 252

sacrifice  26, 36, 56, 66, 93, 95, 115, 236, 304, 400, 445, 468–472, 477, 480 sacrificial reversal of the body  460, 469, 470, 471 sorcerer  39, 233, 237–238, 323, 324, 329, 333–336, 362, 448, 480 saints  18, 27–28, 37, 99, 112, 114, 118–119, 132, 146, 158, 171, 243–244, 252, 253, 265, 270–271, 283, 314, 316, 321, 326–327, 329, 336–337, 343, 345–352, 355, 356, 379, 385, 395 śakti (divine power, Kerala)  58, 59 salvation (of soul)  99, 123, 149–150, 165, 234–235, 241–243, 265, 321 samā’ (“listening”, Sufi mystical practice to induce trance)  36 samāveśa (absorption, immersion, penetration, Sanscrit, India)  3 Samp (“planting, fixing”, Wolof rite)  455, 456, 467, 471, 475, 480 Satan  see possessing agents Satanic presence  see signs (signa) of possession scruples, scrupulosity, religious scruples  22, 229, 231–235, 239, 241, 244, 465 secondary personality  61, 63, 70 secrecy/secret  3, 19, 64, 96, 216–217, 224, 251, 255, 276, 329, 332, 382, 462, 513 secular/ize/ization  5, 22, 24, 90, 117, 132, 327, 329, 335, 351, 361, 363, 365, 369–370, 394, 410, 508 seer  20, 33, 115, 164, 170–171, 456 ~ of the dead 171 fairy ~ 116, 139 mondóasszony (“wise woman”, Hungarian) 171 see also visionary seizure  28, 53, 83, 119, 329–330, 352, 375, 380–381 self, selves  3, 7, 12, 16, 22, 34, 53, 57–62, 65, 71, 112, 194, 200–203, 205, 229, 243, 411, 415, 428, 432, 443, 455, 487, 501 ~-awareness, ~ -constraint, ~ -control, ~ -examination, ~ -responsible,~ -reproach, ~responsibility, ~ -surveillance  3, 12, 16, 22, 34, 41, 53, 57–62, 65, 71, 97, 99, 100–101, 106, 112, 194, 200–201, 203,  205, 229, 230–232, 235–236, 243, 415, 428, 432, 443, 455, 487, 501 selfhood 488 self-help literature  8 sense of interiority, ~ of privacy  229 sexual/ity  6, 22, 39, 133, 134, 136, 148, 153–154, 158, 218, 223–224, 302–303, 306, 324, 333, 374, 376, 415, 425–427, 442, 449, 451, 456, 461–462, 469 ~ union  58 ~ly charged  134, 224

536  ~ perversions, ~ abuse  216, 378, 462, 463, 506 fear of ~ity  218 sex war  37 sexual intercourse (with demons, with the Devil) see incubus, succubus, spirit lover, faru rab, coro rab (possessors), nightmare demons, fiery dragons/snakes, spiritual husband shaman, shamanism  6, 32, 34, 55, 227, 461 shame  217, 223–225, 233, 238, 245 shape-shifting  see transformation Shaykh/shaykhat (zār specialists, Sudan)  431, 435–436, 442 ship of fools  349 shriekers/klikushi (Russia)  28, 323–325, 327–329, 332, 336–337 signs (signa) of possession  373, 380, 386–387, 402, 459 fits of convulsions  323, 334, 349, 375, 379, 387 numbness 303 perspiration 105 screaming  27, 63, 106, 125, 140, 221, 353, 379, 381, 383–384, 402 shaking  27, 30, 69, 84, 353, 399, 402, 467, 468, 470, 478 shivering 105 trembling  27, 67, 84, 103, 107, 127, 133, 249, 353, 381–382, 387, 393, 396, 399, 468, 470 vomiting  24, 105, 255, 257–258, 332, 382 sleep paralysis  22, 113, 127, 129–131, 279, 282 snake  61, 108, 135, 162, 164, 165, 168, 250, 456, see also fiery dragons/snakes socialize, resocializ/ing/ation  21, 24, 31, 35, 230–231, 237, 351, 455, 468, 470, 480–481 sorcerer  39, 233, 237–238, 323, 324, 329, 333–336, 480 soul  3, 53, 80, 89, 118, 123–126, 130–134, 139–140, 142–143, 149–150, 156–158, 162, 164–165, 172–173, 220, 222, 232–233, 237–245, 255, 259, 290, 313–314, 318, 327, 361–362, 366, 368, 375–376, 378, 387, 441, 446, 488, see also body-soul dualism evil soul  126, 136, 154, 353 Nšmh (“human vital force”, Bible)  300 specter/spectre  19, 215–217, 223–228, 292 spell  see charm spirit  see possessors spirit medium  6, 32, 33–34, 55, 67, 87, 94–96, 98, 109, 318, 490, 492, 494–496, 501 spirit metamorphoses  20 spirit possession  see possession spiritism, spiritist  13, 75–79, 83, 86, 91, 219, 319 spiritual husband  41, 415, 426 split self  61

Spirit Possession

St. Anthony’s fire/Erysipelatous  170 St. George’s Day  140 storm (averting)  120 succubus (demon)  133–134, 137, 282–283, 306, 457, 461–462 see also Coro rab suicide  57, 61, 149–150, 153, 222–224, 226, 240, 499–500 Super Ego-Id-Ego  371 supernatural  7, 55, 62, 64, 69, 71–72, 112, 119, 122, 129, 139, 160, 163, 168, 203, 236–237, 264, 279–286, 290, 294, 314, 318, 322, 355, 419 survivalism 315–316 symptom, set of symptoms  22, 119–120, 122, 127, 129–130, 134–135, 141–142, 154–155, 168, 205, 227, 235–236, 240, 244, 279–280, 284, 286, 292–294, 303, 306, 348, 350, 356, 375, 435, 459, 467, 497 system of communication  32, 491, 494 systemic uncertainty  72 szépasszony see fairy talisman 427 talk-therapy 491 tantric  394, 400 Tartarus 275 temple, temple mediums  393–400, 402–406, 411 temptations (of the Devil)  29, 132, 146, 148–149, 151–152, 168, 174, 216, 241–243, 251 terreiros (sites of Afro-Brazilian religious communities) 80 theather, theatrical, theatricality  6, 24, 28, 36, 68, 105–106, 108, 121, 223, 241, 355–356, 361, 363–364, 369–371 sacred theater  121 theologian, theology  2, 7, 17–19, 21, 30, 89, 103, 111, 132, 138, 145–146, 242, 265, 282, 314–315, 317, 327, 331, 363, 373 therapy, therapeutic  2, 3, 7, 29, 33, 87–88, 216, 238, 259, 331, 371, 457, 468, 473, 490–491, 507 total social fact  490 totemism  5, 9 trance, ~ culture, ~ session, ~ state  2–3, 6–7, 10, 40–41, 77, 85, 89, 91, 100, 115–116, 119, 130, 139, 143, 170–172, 219, 220, 349, 351, 364, 366, 375, 381, 401, 415–416, 419, 423, 432, 435–436, 448, 456–458, 463–464, 467–468, 471, 475–481, 488, 490–491 ritual/public ~  26, 142, 457, 459, 461, 470, 474, 475, 476, 477, 479, 480 voluntary ~  6 transactional identity  22 transcendency, transcendent evil  18, 314 transformation, shape-shifting  85, 118, 133, 204, 401, 411, 420, 476

537

Subjec t Index

transport  126, 130, 140–143, 151–152, 301, 364, 479 trauma  8, 19, 216, 348 Trebnik (service book, Russia)  336 tribalism  39, 446, 448 UFO abductions, swapped by UFOs  129, 131 Uganda Martyrs Guild (UMG)  94, 99, 100–109 ulama (islamic scholar, Sudan)  433–434 unbaptized child, ~ demon  123–124, 154 unspeakable  26, 217, 223 unction  253, 327 uninitiated (mother)  154 unio hypostatica (hypostatic union)  375 unio mystica  170, 173 Ursulines (France)  366 vampire  114, 131, 145, 162, 174 ventriloquized, ventriloquism  18, 320 veracity (of the other’s presence)  394 vernacular (terms, expressions)  16, 235, 393, 394 victim  10, 21, 60, 62, 70–71, 105, 107, 123, 126, 135, 141–142, 151, 163, 238, 279, 281–285, 293, 316–317, 319–321, 325, 329–330, 332–333, 337, 356, 368, 387, 402, 432, 460, 463, 470 village deities  395, 396, 398, 406, 409 violent, violent behavior  9, 63, 82, 93, 103, 107, 240, 242, 280, 284, 321, 330, 350, 370, 375, 395, 402, 407, 432, 458–459, 467, 470, 475, 497 virality 8 visibility  407, 481 vision  21, 27, 58, 71, 77, 90, 119, 122–123, 126–127, 129, 132, 134, 149, 162, 240, 286, 290–291, 346, 354, 364, 375, 385, 435, 457, 459, 472, 480 apparition  134–135, 137, 149, 151–153, 162, 222, 303–304, 347 heavenly ~  173 visionary 112 vocalization 221–222 Vitae (sanctorum)  112, 119, 158 voices  19, 32, 217, 219, 221, 224, 324, 326, 350, 457, 459, 472, 487, 491, 497–498, 501

wacce (“lowering”, Wolof)  460, 466 wajd, ~ ecstasy 7 water spirit  24, 25, 203 wedding  400, 442, 461 werewolf 145 Western individualism, modernity  232, 244 Western technology  444 witch  21, 33–34, 96, 98, 103, 111, 114, 118, 128, 134, 136, 139, 141, 145–146, 155, 157–169, 171, 237–238, 240, 279–280, 284–285, 294, 323, 324–325, 328–330, 332–337, 361–371, 373, 378, 400–402, 404–405, 460, 465, 474, 479 boszorkány, boszorka (“witch”, Hungarian) ​ 160, 164, 282 dëmm (“witch”, Wolof) 460 dāhinī (Himashal Pradesh)  400 fermekás, gurucsás, guruzsló, kantéros (“witch”, Hungarian)  161, 164 nighttime ~  161, 162 ~ legend  139 ~es’ fat  139, 166 ~es’ Sabbath  21, 158, 165–166, 324, 361–365, 367–369, 371 witchcraft  17, 21, 29, 31, 96, 112, 114, 138, 144, 145, 155, 157–169, 173, 216, 232, 234, 236–238, 244, 281, 284–285, 323–328, 332–333, 335–337, 348–349, 361–363, 365, 371, 402, 422, 448, 459–460, 474 bewitch/bewitchment /bewitching  146, 157–169, 285, 330, 332–333, 336, 356 gurucsa/fermeka/csinálmány (“bewitching”, Hungarian)  161, 166–167 witchcraft accusation  138, 145, 362 witchcraft attack  459, 460 witch doctor  109 witch hunt  17, 21, 101, 158, 165, 169, 363 witch trial  112, 162, 362, 364, 369 Yahweh  79, 306 yāg (oblation in fire, Himachal Pradesh) 397 yakśi (ogress) 66 Zar, Zār, Zayrān  see Possession; Possession cults



Geographical Index

Abyssinia/n, Kingdom of Abyssinia (Ethiopia)  438, 442–443, 449 Africa  XI, XII, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10–13, 20, 22–23, 28, 30, 33–34, 42–43, 47–50, 75, 78, 80, 86, 92–98, 166, 203, 208, 211, 233, 238, 246, 449, 453, 455, 458, 460–461, 464, 467, 473–474, 477, 479, 482–484, 502, 513 Central Africa  95, 448, 478 East Africa  35, 38, 441, 474, 505 North Africa  36–37, 506 South Africa  3, 45, 483 West Africa  XI, 13, 46, 49, 92, 100, 211, 233, 413, 449–450, 459, 478, 482 Aix (France)  310, 362, 365 Alba Iulia (Romania)  264, 375 Amazon region (Brazil)  80 America  11–12, 23, 28, 32, 38, 47, 49, 176, 178–179, 196, 209, 410, 438, 441, 487, 508 South America  XII, 8, 16, 20, 21, 28, 42, 455 Antarctic 206 Antim monastery (Bucharest, Romania) 266 Arabia 434 Aranyosszék/Arieş Seat (Romania)  164, 182 Arctic 205 Asia  XII, 3, 5, 23 South Asia  13, 23, 49, 74, 506, 512 Assyria/n  143, 144, 303, 311 Azande Kingdom (Congo)  448 Babylon/Babylonia/n  143–144, 169, 144, 169, 303, 305, 311 Băcau County (Romania)  115 Bahia (Brazil)  3, 42, 49, 484 Bahr al-Ghazal region (Sudan, Chad)  447 Bajrawiya North (Sudan)  431 Bali Island (Indonesia)  370, 371, 372 Balkans/Balkan Peninsula 115, 121, 124, 128, 138–139, 141–142, 146, 158, 160, 165, 169, 171, 174, 189, 191, 264, 511 Central Balkans  159 Banara (Himachal Pradesh)  397 Baol Kingdom (Senegal)  479 Benin  26, 470 Bocage (France)  73 Bodensee/Lake Constance (Austria, Germany, Switzerland)  500 Boeny region (Madagascar)  418 Bolivia 199 Bornu (Sudan, Chad)  450 Braşov (Romania)  264 Brazil/ian  11, 31–32, 43–44, 47, 75–81, 85–92, 174, 199, 211, 469–470, 499–500, 511 Brazzaville (Congo)  203, 211

Bucharest/București (Romania)  264–266, 270, 512 Buda (Hungary)  345, 347 Budapest (Hungary)  15, 505–509 Buganda Kingdom (Uganda)  96 Bulgaria  114–115, 124, 135, 139, 160, 164, 189 Bunyoro Kingdom (Uganda)  31, 95 Byzantium, Byzantine  158, 159, 165, 180, 263, 268, 278 Canada  431, 488, 506, 509, 511 Cape Verde/Cap Vert  1, 458, 475, 478, 481 Cayor Kingdom (Senegal)  477 Chad  1–3, 513 Cluj (Romania)  270 Comoro Islands/Comoro Archipelago 488–489 Congo/Congo-Brazzaville  203, 211 Côte des Esclaves  49, 483, 484 Cracow/Kraków (Poland)  352 Crişana region (Romania)  270, 276 Croatia  164, 379 Csík/Ciuc County (Romania)  117, 125, 138, 143, 146, 148–149, 154, 160–161, 164–165, 168, 170, 172, 174, 181–190 Csíkjenőfalva/Ineu (Romania)  126, 132, 135, 147, 149, 152–153, 163–164, 167–168 Csíkkarcfalva/Cârța (Romania)  124, 126, 140–141, 147, 149, 152–154, 156, 162–163, 166, 168, 171 Csíkszentdomokos/Sândominic (Romania) 171 Csíkszentgyörgy/Ciucsângeorgiu (Romania) 375 Csíkszenttamás/Tomești (Romania)  132, 151–152, 167–168, 171 Csinód/Cinod (Romania)  116, 183 Dahomey (Benin)  461, 482 Dakar (Senegal)  1, 2, 229, 235, 458, 462, 466, 471, 476, 479, 481, 483, 484 Danube River  24, 349, 380 Davos (Switzerland)  500 Dead Sea (Israel, Jordan)  29, 299, 302, 306, 307, 309, 310 Dogontouchi (Niger)  36 Duboka (Serbia)  115, 183, 184 Dungri (India)  397 Durham (United Kingdom)  431, 452 Edinburgh (United Kingdom)  279, 291 Egerszék/Eghersec (Romania)  116 Egypt/ian  27, 30, 35, 250, 264, 268, 302, 304–305, 431, 433–434, 438–439, 444, 448, 452, 453

539

Geogr aphical Index

Ekaterinburg (Russia)  328 England  22, 129–130, 138, 159, 178, 183–184, 188, 190–191, 260, 279–281, 283–284, 286, 295, 331, 388, 511 Equatorial Africa  448 Ethiopia/n  4, 8–9, 20, 26, 35, 46–47, 49, 301, 434, 438, 440, 442, 444, 449, 451, 457, 469, 470, 483 Ethnic groups, peoples, languages African American  12 Amhara (Ethiopia)  20, 49 Aramaic  29, 299, 302, 305–307, 309–311, 508 Balinese (Bali Island)  369–372 Bavarian (Germany)  346, 349 Bororo (Brazil)  22 Crow (North America)  7 Dinka (Sudan)  448 Ewe (Ghana, Togo)  461 Fon (Benin)  461, 467, 469, 470 Fula/Fulani/Fulbe/Fallata (West-, Central- and East-Africa)  449–451, 457, 472, 477–478, 480 German/s  6, 120, 145, 150, 157, 167, 174, 183–184, 231, 281–282, 346, 348–349, 352, 381, 388, 500 Hadendowa/Beja (Sudan)  451 Hausa (Niger)  8, 36, 39, 449 Hebrew/s  128, 169, 250, 299, 305, 307 Jalari (caste of fishermen, South India)  406, 412 Jewish  30, 35, 144, 299, 303, 306–307, 311, 444, 500, 508 Lango (Uganda)  96 Lebu/Lebou (Senegal)  1, 50, 235, 456, 464, 477–478, 481–482, 485, 513 Malagasy (Madagascar)  7, 9, 20, 40, 42, 416, 457, 473, 476–478, 487–489, 501 Malayalam (India)  16, 53, 55, 59, 69, 71 Moundang (Chad)  1–2, 9, 16, 21 Nuba (Sudan)  448 Nuer (Sudan)  90–91, 448, 453 Ottoman  264, 433, 438, 440 Punu (Congo-Brazzaville)  203, 211 Sakalava (Madagascar)  40, 415 Samo (Burkina Faso)  22 Santal (India)  61 Serer (Senegal)  235, 479, 482 Shill United Kingdom (Sudan)  448 Slavs, Slav/ic  134, 175, 333, 346, 348–349 Songhay (Niger)  204, 454, 476, 477, 484 Southern Slavs, Southern Slavic  134–135, 165 Swahili (East Africa)  96 Tchango/Csángó (Romania)  116, 134, 138, 182–183, 188–191 Tsonga (South Africa)  469 Vlach/s (Serbia)  115–116

Wolof (Senegal)  1, 13, 17, 20, 50, 235, 455–464, 466–468, 470, 472–473, 477–478, 481–482, 484, 485, 513 Yoruba (Nigeria, Benin)  28, 81, 203, 467, 469–470 Zande (Sudan, R.D. of Congo)  39, 236, 246, 448, 459, 482 Zarma (Songhay dialect, Niger)  10, 477, 484 Europe/an  XI–XIII, 3, 12–14, 17–18, 22, 28, 30–31, 42–43, 60, 90, 96, 111, 113–114, 120, 122, 124, 127, 129, 131–134, 136, 138, 142–144, 146, 150, 157–158, 164, 167, 173, 176–177, 179, 182, 184, 186, 196, 225, 227, 261, 281, 284, 321–322, 331, 338, 355, 357–359, 362–363, 371–372, 374, 388, 390, 439–440, 443–445, 447–448, 461–463, 487–488, 497, 506, 508–510 Central Europe/an  XI, 117–118, 131–132, 134–135, 142, 157, 159, 162, 186–187, 190, 352, 359, 389, 510 East/ern Europe/an  XI, 6, 22, 113, 117–118, 131, 134–135, 145–146, 159–160, 163, 166, 169, 174, 182, 187, 189–190, 263, 373, 389, 463, 510 North/ern Europe/an  135, 159 South-East/ern Europe  114–115, 135, 142, 159–160, 162, 185–187 West/ern Europe/an  132, 142, 157, 159, 162, 263, 365, 371 Exeter (United Kingdom)  254, 262 Florianopolis (Brazil)  75, 87 France  21, 43, 60, 189, 191, 231, 233–234, 238, 244, 261, 325, 338, 348, 358–359, 361–362, 367, 369–370, 389, 489, 507 Gadara (New Testament)  30, 308 Gamba (Gabon)  8, 45 Geneva (Switzerland)  194 Gerasa (New Testament)  30, 308 Germany  138, 184, 188, 390, 499–500, 505 Southern German provinces (Germany) 174 Gezira region (Sudan)  450 Ghana 48 Northern Ghana  440 Gondar (Ethiopia)  46, 483 Great Britain/United Kingdom  231, 431–432, 511 Greece, Greek/s  13, 21, 26, 48, 72, 74, 95, 128, 139, 160, 169, 176, 178, 183, 189–190, 218, 249–250, 263–266, 274, 276, 282–283, 315, 337, 444–445, 469, 497 Gyepece/Pajiştea (Romania)  116 Gyergyó/Giurgeului region (Romania)  133 Gyimes/Ghimeş region (Romania)  116–117, 122, 124–126, 133–134, 138–139, 143, 146,

540 

Spirit Possession

148–149, 154, 160–161, 163–165, 168, 170–172, 174, 178, 182–183, 188 Gyimesbükk/Ghimeş-Făget (Romania)  116, 130, 135–137, 153, 162 Gyimesfelsőlok/Lunca de Sus (Romania)  116, 162 Gyimesközéplok/Lunca de Jos (Romania)  116, 128, 135, 140, 143, 148, 151, 155, 163, 167

Kerala (India)  7, 16, 19, 53–56, 58, 60–61, 67–68, 72, 74, 413, 512 South Kerala (India)  56 Khartoum (Sudan)  38, 432, 441, 444, 450 Kordofan region (Sudan)  448, 451 Kostelek/Coşnea (Romania)  116, 165, 180 Kullu (India)  401, 408–411 Kulma Toplica (Serbia)  116 Kyamiaga (Uganda)  104

Haiti/en/an  3, 23, 47, 455, 461, 470, 483 Hargita/Harghita County (Romania)  115, 167 Hidegség/Hidegség-pataka/Valea rece (Lunca de Jos, Romania)  21, 116, 124, 125, 127–130, 133, 135–137, 140, 142, 144, 146, 149, 152–154, 165 Hijaz/Hejaz region (Saudi Arabia)  450 Himachal Pradesh (India)  33–34, 393–395, 410 Hofriyat (Pseudonym, Sudan)  38, 432, 434, 440–441 Holy Trinity St. Sergius Monastery  (Sergiev Posad, Russia)  324 Homoródalmás/Merești (Romania)  125, 167, 180 Hungary  XI, 160, 162, 165, 175, 186, 343, 345–346, 349, 358, 360, 374, 388–389, 505, 509–510 South/ern Hungary  141 Hungarians of Transylvania  111

Lancashire region (United Kingdom)  285 Lango (Uganda)  96 Latin America  13, 91, 511 Latin Christianity  28, 132, 177 Léré (Chad)  2 Loch Ness Lake (United Kingdom)  10 London (United Kingdom)  291, 362, 364, 372, 452, 509 Loudun (France)  6, 9, 17, 21–22, 28, 44, 106, 108, 157–158, 178, 229, 233–234, 237–240, 244–245, 348, 355, 358, 362, 364, 372, 463 Louviers (France)  22, 28, 157, 355

India/n  3, 7–8, 16–17, 22, 29, 39, 42, 53, 57, 59, 60–61, 69, 72–74, 166, 196, 208–209, 393, 395–396, 403, 410, 412–413, 476, 488 North India  393, 505 South India  53, 406, 412 Indian Himalayas  32 Indian Ocean  487–488 Ingermanland/Ingria (Russia)  119, 152, 181 Iran  35, 434, 454 Island of Hares/Nyulak szigete (Buda, medieval Hungary)  345 Italy  18, 28, 43, 161, 177, 199, 216, 229, 313–314, 322, 507 Central Italy  352 North/ern Italy  217 Jagatsukh (India)  402 Japan  199, 231 Jericho (Bible)  250 Jerusalem (New Testament)  271, 273, 309 Jordan River (Israel, Jordan)  272, 334 Kalocsa (Hungary)  387 Kaluga district (Russia)  331–332 Kapharnaum/Kafernaum (New Testament)  30, 308

Macedonia/n 114–115 Madagascar  8–9, 13, 42, 49, 415, 417–419, 421, 424, 428–429, 484, 487–489, 492–493, 496, 499, 503, 508, 510 Northwest Madagascar  487, 489, 492, 494–496, 503, 509 Madras (India)  410 Magyarcsügés/Cădăreşti (Romania)  116, 190 Mahdist State (Sudan)  433, 438, 450 Maghreb 434 Maiurno (Sudan)  450 Majunga/Mahajanga (Madagascar)  489– 490, 495, 503, 510 Malabar Coast (India)  73–74 Malaysia  8–9, 48 Maradi (Niger)  36 Marburg (Germany)  350 Maroshévíz/Topliţa (Romania)  167 Marseille (France)  367 Mayotte Island (France)  42, 46, 412, 429, 483, 487–494, 502–503, 509–510 Mecca (Saudi Arabia)  450 Medina (Saudi Arabia)  450 Mediterran region  4, 278, 311, 315 Medjugorje/Međugorje (Bosnia and Hercegovina) 221–222 Mesopotamia/n  128, 299, 303–304, 306–307, 309, 311–312 Mezőség/Câmpia Transilaviei region (Romania)  131, 134, 156, 182 Middle East  34, 43, 454, 459 Moldavia/n (Romania)  116, 121, 146, 156, 175, 180, 182, 191, 274, 276 Morocco  27, 459

541

Geogr aphical Index

Moscow (Russia), Muscovite  324, 333–334, 338–339, 341 Moundang Kingdom (Chad)  1–3, 9, 16, 21, 513 Mozambique  8, 45, 469 Munich/München (Germany)  247, 249, 260, 507 Naxos Island (Greece)  114 Nepal  9, 48 Niger  9, 47, 49, 434, 454, 482, 484 Nigeria  35–36, 81, 434, 449, 470, 478 Nikonovskoe (Russia)  333 Nile River (Africa)  38, 439, 441–442, 450–451, 453 Blue Nile  444, 450 Upper Nile  438 White Nile  38, 441 Nizhnaia Utkinskaia (Russia)  327–333, 335 Northumberland region (United Kingdom) 284 Nuremberg/Nürnberg (Germany)  355 Omdurman (Sudan)  431, 434, 448, 453–454 Palestine 29 Partium region (Romania)  168 Parvati Valley (India)  410 Pécs (Hungary)  XI, 3, 13, 116, 510 Pokrovskoe (Russia)  332 Poland  185, 352 Port Sudan (Sudan)  432, 451 Red Sea  266, 268 Romania/n  115–116, 128, 131, 138–139, 148, 160–161, 164–165, 167–170, 172, 176–177, 179, 182, 185, 187, 263, 264–265, 270, 272–273, 274, 276–277, 374–375, 512 Russia/n, Russian Federation  28–29, 113–114, 131, 145, 150, 155, 158, 163, 165, 169–170, 181–182, 185, 188, 191, 323–327, 329, 334–335, 337–341, 512, 513 Sakalava Kingdom (Madagascar)  40, 416, 418, 429 Santa Lucia Monastery (Pian de Peca, Italy)  27, 353, 355 São Paulo (Brazil)  76–78, 80–83 Scandinavia/Scandinavian Peninsula  159, 163 Senegal/ese  1–2, 7, 13, 17, 21–22, 25–26, 29, 36, 39, 50, 235, 237, 238–239, 244, 249, 455–459, 461 462, 464–465, 467–468, 470, 473, 476, 481–485 Senegambia 482 Sennar (Sudan)  432, 434, 440, 450, 453 Serbia/n, Serbs  114–116, 131, 139, 164, 169, 190–192, 374, 378–379, 387 Sergiev Posad (Russia)  324 Shendi region (Sudan)  440

Siberia/n (Russia)  6, 120, 189, 328, 332–333, 335, 338–339 Sicily (Italy)  274 Syria/n 444 Smolensk (Russia)  29, 334, 340 Sokoto (Nigeria)  449, 450 Somalia 434 Sombor/Zombor (18th century Hungary)  112, 158, 175, 378, 380–386, 388–389, 505 Spain  177, 250 Sri Lanka  10, 28, 45, 53, 56, 73 Sub-Carpathian region (Romania)  168 Suceava County (Romania)  147 Sudan/ese, Soudan  8–9, 13, 20, 35, 37–40, 43, 47, 431, 433, 437–446, 448–454, 457, 478, 506 Central Sudan  432, 449, 453 North/ern Sudan  35, 37, 43, 432–435, 437–439, 443, 444, 449, 451–453, 482, 502, 506 South/ern Sudan  39, 448, 453, 454 Swahili Coast (Africa)  4, 45 Sweden 190 Switzerland, Swiss  42, 194, 331, 487–488, 498–502 Syrian  305, 444 Szeklerland/Székelyföld (Romania)  116–117, 126, 133–134, 138–139, 175, 180 Taiwan 205 Talitsa (Russia)  333 Takrur region (Senegal)  449 Tambura/Tumbura  434, 439, 454 Tikopia Island (Pacific Ocean)  6, 45 Tisza River (Hungary)  164 Tobol’sk province (Russia)  332 Togo 93 Tolentino (Italy)  316–317, 332, 343, 352–355, 360 Toliara (Madagascar)  40–41, 416–418, 425–426 Toronto (Canada)  431, 506–509 Transylvania (Romania)  6, 14, 16, 19, 29, 111–112, 158, 168, 172, 175, 181, 270, 276, 375, 389, 509 Travancore (India)  74 Tulu Nad (India)  59 Turkey, Turk/s, Turkish  25, 36, 439, 447–448 Turumovo (Russia)  332 Udvarhelyszék/Odorheiu Seat (Romania) 170 Uganda  7, 9, 16, 30–31, 93–94, 98–99, 505 Northern Uganda/n  93, 505 Western Uganda/n  93–94, 97–99, 505 United States of America  8, 44, 47, 216, 231, 507

542 

Spirit Possession

Upper Nile State (Sudan)  438 Ural Mountains (Russia)  29, 327

Wyoming State (United States of America)  196, 509

Vatican  227, 247, 254, 259 Venice (Italy)  313 Veszprém (Hungary)  345

York (United Kingdom)  284 Zagreb (Croatia)  274 Zeidab (Sudan)  38, 441