A Phenomenology of Posession

Here is an essay i wrote about spirit possession and some of the misunderstandings that have often surrounded its meaning and interpretation in the West.

Healing at its most human is not an escape into irreality and mystification, but an intensification of the encounter between suffering and hope at the moment in which it finds a voice, where the anguished clash bare life and raw existence emerges from muteness into articulation.
—Thomas Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing

Human interaction with God is typically mediated through the Goddess. Experience, both physical and psychical allows the divine to manifest, play and consolidate her relationship with the immanent dimension of reality that humans inhabit. The focus of this essay is possession; but more specifically it is the individual and social roles that possession plays in healing. The methodology I will use to analyze the dynamics of possession is derived from a performative perspective, grounded in phenomenology. This approach accepts the ‘objectivity’ of religious experience within the context and accordingly builds on the perceived reality to elucidate the sociological facets of possession. First I will describe some broad details about how possession has been interpreted in the past. To conclude I will describe several cases of possession and how they might relate to healing. Possession is not seen as a “convenient epiphenomenon”[1] in this essay, but as a fully integrated and active part of the world, giving devotees the resources to maintain social and cosmic stability, while often mitigating the suffering implicated in human existence.

Individual’s acts can rarely be seen as isolated. Rather they are almost always a part of some greater collective action. Possession does not transcend this assumption. People who become possessed, whether by a pure and benevolent deity or a fierce and malicious ghost, do so, according to the communities understanding(s) of the cosmos. The cosmos is not separate and disconnected from people but is intimately woven into everyday life. Thus, knowledge can be seen to arise, not from abstract thought, but through daily practices, ritual participation and joint understanding(s) of what constitutes knowledge. This process is not frozen in time, but is rather fluid, constantly being (re)negotiated by people. Meanings are perpetually contested and challenged, as is the validity of possession.[2] In the Indian context some possessions are falsified while others are verified as authentic. That considered a majority of possessions are believed to be the real appearance of a spirit of some sort or the emanation of sacred power.[3] Very few question the existence of foreign unseen powers that act mysteriously in the world. If this is so then a Western interpretive strategy that does not take seriously the existence of these entities or forces will be insufficient.

As many studies of possession have shown the Western model of empirical analysis is too reductive to account for the actual lived experiences of people who have been possessed.[4] The search for a scientific cause ignores the perspective of the possessed and tends to classify such events as pathological. This contradicts the indigenous interpretations of possession. While early missionaries called the possessed “devil dancers” (as Christians automatically assumed that the ‘other’ was of Satan), anthropologists saw the possessed behavior as ‘irrational’ and ‘inexplicable’ in relation to Western standards of ‘rationality’ and religiosity.[5] At first sight, as you can imagine, the Western mind set to work, decoding, classifying and explaining the phenomena they encountered. But more often than not they tended to explain it away. Because of individualistic models that assume the private and personal nature of religion, they tendentiously psychologized possession as neurotic—as can famously be seen in the work of Freud.[6] To Freud spirits and demons were nothing more than primitive projections of emotion. As a result psychological methods always prove futile as they miss the bigger picture. That is, the networks of symbolism that possession relays to the wider community.

Sociological accounts have tried to explain what some of the social causes of possession are in terms of its patterned reflection of broader socio-economic inequalities in India.[7] Opler, Obeyesekere and Harper claim that there is a correlation between the hierarchy of the caste system and that of the cosmos. In other words the higher auspicious gods are connected to the Brahmans while the lower spirits, ghosts and demons prey on the poor and vulnerable, namely women. Women therefore are seen to be the most susceptible to the imposition of a negative spirits in Hindu society because they are disproportionately disadvantaged and downtrodden. Possession in this respect is viewed as a way of circumventing some of the power and attention allotted to men, by redirecting it to disempowered women—which is then used as a form of protest. Caroline and Filippo Osella also argue that possession is part of what Bourdieu called habitus, which symbolically and devotionally stratifies the high from the low castes.[8] Brahmans are austere, aloof, and controlled in their communion with God while the outcasts are ecstatic, flamboyant and overcome in worship. By reinforcing the spiritual power and transcendental prowess of the Brahmans, lower casts are portrayed as corporeal, animalistic and desire ridden. This discursive hierarchy is also said to correspond to the division between the sexes as well. While men are seen as more pure and resistant to spirit possession, women are depicted as highly vulnerable to pollution and hysteria.

I will not pursue this analysis as I think it makes far too many broad generalizations that, although they may reflect reality, are not so useful in understanding possession as performative and phenomenological. Performance does not just mean the Shakespearian type that can be found in the līlās, but also involves symbolic and embodied activities that repetitively communicate systems of meaning, as to create a comprehensive network of rituals, rites and practices that make social life coherent and tenable to a community. Bell argues that a theory of performativity encompasses “the production of ritualized agents, persons who have an instinctive knowledge of the schemes embedded in their bodies, in their understandings of reality, and in their understanding of how to act in ways that both maintain and qualify the complex microrelations of power.”[9] While a phenomenology that doesn’t have the essentialist underpinnings of Husserl’s transcendent paradigm, a more relational and culturally sensitive understanding of perception, would help propagate an understanding of human consciousness according to the context in which one exists and actively participates in.[10] Thus if possession is understood, not ‘objectively’ or exogenously but through both embodied and culturally mediated experiences, then dualities such as subject and object, religious and non-religious, mind and matter will be undermined. Instead of using dyads to talk about possession we might talk about it as intersubjective, trans-religious and as a culturally specific experience. A theory that leaves out emotion, perception, theatricality, imagination, and embodiment as well as the tacitly shared understandings of reality misses the collective and subjective significance of possession.

In this light possession can be seen as a form of communication. The way in which people react to cases of possession says more about the society than it does about the actual possession itself. In India it is for the most part normalized whereas in Western culture it has been thoroughly stigmatized and demonized. Maybe this has something to do with the ‘inexplicable’ nature of possession, which eludes scientific explanation and also expresses the unwillingness of scientists to accept that their knowledge is also limited and partial. The idea of personhood centering on the individual self in the ‘West’ presupposes that possession is psychological.[11] Whilst in Hinduism the concept of self is relational, referential and free-floating. This dynamism tolerates the fluidity and multi-dimensionality of the self, and juxtaposes it vis-à-vis the social self. The ‘other’ (the possessed) in Western society is denigrated, subjugated and ostracized, while their knowledge is excluded from participation. On the contrary possession in India is often seen to express a deep truth beyond social convention and religious dogma.

Thus we might see possession as a “creative response to otherness.” In other words, “It takes up the self-Other question but tosses it about, turns it around and transforms it.”[12] The opposite has taken place in Western civilization. Otherness has tended to been censured, expelled and tormented in the West; while if we take god to be a representation of ‘otherness’ than we can see that divinity has been severed and differentiated from humanity. As a result, saints such as Ramaprasad, Caitanya and Ramakrishna would most likely be ‘institutionalized’ in the West. To the contrary in India their seemingly erratic, mad and nonchalant attitude towards normative behavior has been sacralized and imbued with divinity. Their extremely expressive and emotive form of devotion and possession twists and reorganizes the Self-Other relationship, making it malleable.[13] By emulating the divine play (līlā) of the goddess, these saints become an embodied force of divinity in the world, disrupting the separation of ‘otherness’. Thus the goddess is seen as an “agent herself, rather than as simply a disembodied symbol or projection.”[14] Her madness becomes the devotee’s madness, and together they dance and sing, merrily flaunting convention. They are said to be intoxicated by her spirit and possessed by her power (sakti).[15] This cultural understanding of reality breaks down simplistic dichotomies that seek to explain the function and cause of possession.

As such, possession should always be seen as part of a broader context in which it plays a significant role. Performance theory gives us an insight into the theatrical side of possession without making presumptuous judgments about the entities that are possessing or the people who are possessed. It also argues that possession is not as spontaneous as it might first seem. Rather it is often ritualized over time and scripted out for local people to gather and partake in the divine. Unwanted possession (as opposed to organized or performative possession) may initially be seen as the random consequence of illness, deprivation or individual idiosyncrasies, but often becomes explained in religious terms and routinized over time. Thus, once uncontrolled, unpleasant, uninvited and chaotic fits of possession are gradually brought under the person’s guidance whereby they may become a medium who is able to willingly contact and communicate with the spirits.[16] In other words, “What first looked like illness, protest or oblique strategy turned out to be a potential for ecstatic religious experience that could be developed into divine possession.” [17] This often empowers women, liberating them from having to follow the prototypical path of marriage and may also put a positive spin on ‘mental illness’. Thus “possession is not seen as an “illness” which has to be cured, but rather that the appropriate preconditions have to be provided in order to make it a positive event.”[18]

Here I would like to elaborate on possession as a life affirming episode that, although can torment and horrify, tends to be normalized within Hindu society on a continuum that displays creative and holistic approaches to healing. In Murphy Halliburton’s work he came across a case of possession in India. Below he describes the way in which the healing process works of this particular individual:
Sasi is a 27-year-old Hindu man who is possessed and has been living at Beemapalli mosque with his mother for years after spending a good portion of his life trying other treatments. Eight and a half years before our interview, when his problem started, Sasi’s family went to see a mantrav¯adan, a specialist in magic, to counter the sorcery that they thought might have been the cause of his affliction. Sasi then spent a year seeking treatment from a private allopathic psychiatric hospital in Trivandrum and two years in the state allopathic psychiatric hospital in Trivandrum. For the last five years, he has been at Beemapalli mosque, and his mother says that it is only at Beemapalli that he gets relief. During a follow-up interview seven months after our original interview, Sasi’s mother told us that Sasi’s condition has been “up and down.” She said she believes one gets relief by going through ups and downs, and affirmed that she and her son “have complete faith in Beemapalli.”[19]

First we might observe that the relationship between Sasi and his affliction is only alleviated through his religious devotion. Possession is not seen as a psychopathology in the Hindu context but as a unique cultural experience. Because this hermeneutic strategy is used to interpret experience, possession is viewed as an acceptable part of life. The ‘treatment’ is characteristic of India and moves away from seeing possession as an ‘illness’ which needs to be ‘cured’ to that of a process of religious healing which is transformative, rather than transitive. As Schutz would argue the specific way that people attend to their experiences constitutes the meaning of those experiences.[20] This significantly alters the Western interpretation of sickness, which sees it as a reified abnormality that must be mechanically ‘fixed’.

If possession is seen as a dynamic mechanism of support and protest, as well as a mode of communication in which people express their anguish and existential anxieties to one another, then it can be seen as a healing process whereby people collectively act and creatively negotiate the countless difficulties encountered in life. The “ups and downs” of life are themselves a form of healing as the ‘ups’ cannot exist without the ‘downs’. The story of Sushila is a testament to this.[21] Sushila is a shaman who specializes in the bhopi ritual. She is a healer, doctor and exorcist all in one. Coming from the Rawat caste she is fairly poor and relies on part-time work as well as her husband’s inconsistent income. She described her possessed states as primarily a consequence of, and protest against, her husband’s violent and abusive behavior, resulting also from the social exclusion she experienced as an Islamic/untouchable women. But as her mediumship progressed and she started routinely visiting and worshiping at the local shrine Pīr Bābā it has become her vocation and subsequently has transformed her familial relationships as well as the whole family’s spirituality. Her husband has now stopped drinking and helps out with her therapeutic practice. This shows how possession can be used as an emancipatory narrative where healing is experienced by all those associated with it.

Mayaram Stanley also tells a similar story.[22] In popular religion in the Maharashtra region there are two main types of possession. One is by a ghost (bhūt bādha) and the other is by a deity (angāt yene). Although they may appear, to the outsider, to have many similarities (hence they are often confused) they are purported to be experientially quite different. When one is spontaneously possessed by a ghost they often turn to a healing center (which is located in a temple) and operated by doctor type person called a bābā or holy person. The possession is interpreted as an opportunity to experience the sacred and renounce the chaos of the defiled spirit. As one treated patient describes his experience of possession, “I don’t know how to say it. Then everything was wrong—not only with me but with my sister, and all the family was sick. It was all wrong. Now I am fine and my sister is happy and everything is all right.”[23] The process of sickness, is much like a secular establishment, however it is not imputed as mechanical and spiritually devoid. Rather it is laden with spiritual overtones of devotion which is offered to the bābā as an exchange for the healing. Patients put their faith in bābā and take darshan for years after the treatment. In contrast angāt yene is rapturous possession by a god or saint. These possessions are ritualized and performed with recitations, singing or prayers. The body must also be purified before the deity enters. Possession consists of a trance like state, dancing and heavy breathing. These actions are thought to result from the ‘play’ of the Goddess in their bodies and minds.[24] Both types of experience follow a cyclical pattern of restoring of order that was felt to be lost or intensified when possessed. Although the former is not interpreted as a religious experience originally, it frequently becomes continuous with the experience of healing that comes after possession. While the latter (uncontrollable and unexpected) probably arose out of the former, it was piecemeal and transformed through ritual into the former.


To conclude, we can say that the localized and indigenous ways in which people make sense of human existence is seen in Indian cases of possession. Just as Western models have tried to explain (away) the complex phenomena that people experience when possessed, Indian cosmology has used possession as a way of letting divinity express itself in the domestic world of human affairs. Possession incarnates the divine and lets humans interacts with it. Phenomenologically, possession is real because it is experienced as such by the person. To use Western scientific categories that explain possession as an epiphenomenon in the context of India is to impose foreign taxonomies on a different world view. By seeing possession as a collective event rather than a personal one we can see it as a public performance which communicates important values and ideas about the social and spiritual world to the community. These ideas include a conception of healing that is spiritual, transformative and organic rather than secular, disjunctive and mechanistic. Possession can be seen as a form of healing because even in negative cases, it usually leads to a more profound understanding of one’s religion and self. Possession touches the very depths of human emotion and consciousness and expresses the obscurity and ambiguity of human experience. To understand such ethereal experiences, scholars must be highly self-reflexive and critical of how their own perspective fashions the way in which the world is interpreted. They must also be conscious of their own limitations as situated observers. Empathy and openness will always lead to a more dynamic and multifaceted analysis of such complex phenomena.






















Bibliography


Bruckner Heidrun, Latze Lothar and Malik Aditya, Flags of Flame: Studies in South Asian Folk Culture, (Eds) New Delhi: Ajay Kumar Jain Manhar Publishers, 1993.

Bouez Serge, Staying on the Goddess’s Eyelid: Devotion and the Reversal of Values in Hindu Bengal, in Hinduism Reconsidered (Eds) Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke, Heidelberg: Manohar, 1997.

Csordas Thomas, Body/Meaning/Healing, Boston: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002, pp.58-87

Clause Peter J., ‘Spirit possession and spirit mediumship from the perspective of Tulu oral Traditions’ in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 3(1), 1979 pp.29-56.

Erndl Kathleen M., Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Mayes Elizabeth, ‘The Fantasy of Internalization in the Theoretical Imaginary’ in Representations, No. 62 (Spring, 1998), pp. 100-110

Halliburton Murphy, ‘The Importance of a Pleasant Process of Treatment: Lessons in Healing from South India’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol.26, pp.161-286, 2003.

Hollywood Amy, ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, in History of Religions, University of Chicago Press, Nov 2002, Vol. 42, No. 2.

Klass Morton, Mind over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Kehoe A.B. and Geletti D.H. ‘Women’s Preponderance in Possession Cults: The Calcium-deficiency Hypothesis Extended’, In American Anthropologist, 83, pp.549-61

Kinsley David, The Divine Player: A Study of Krisna Lila, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.

Lewis I. M. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism, England: Penguin Books, 1971.

McDaniel June, Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

McLean Melcom, Devoted to the Goddess: The Life and Work of Ramprasad (Ed) Wendy Doniger, Albany: State New York Press,1989.

Shail Mayaram, ‘Spirit Possession: Refraiming discourses of Self and Other, Possession In South Asia: Speech, Body and Territory (Eds) J. Assayag and G. Tarabout, Paris: Collection Purusartha, 1999.

Stanley John M., ‘Gods, Ghosts, and Possession’, in The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra (Eds) Elenor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988.

Schutz Alfred The Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston: Northwestern University,1967.
[1] Kathleen M. Erndl, Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.105
[2] John M. Stanley, ‘Gods, Ghosts, and Possession’, in The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra (Eds) Elenor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 26-57
[3] Although this distinction is commonly made (i.e. sacred and profane, pure and impure, spiritual and physical, mind and body) it often obscures the complexity that exists in the interplay. A better way to imagine this relationship is by creating a third category which can be seen as a bridge between the two, this is the middle ground where they meet and are inextricably interconnected in the form of the Goddess. See Serge Bouez, Staying on the Goddess’s Eyelid: Devotion and the Reversal of Values in Hindu Bengal, in Hinduism Reconsidered (Eds) Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (Heidelberg: Manohar, 1997).
[4] Peter J. Clause, ‘Spirit possession and spirit mediumship from the perspective of Tulu oral Traditions’ in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 3(1), 1979 pp.29-56. For a more up to date critique see Morton Klass, Mind Over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
[5] Elizabeth Schoembucher, ‘Gods, Ghosts and Demons: Possession in South Asia’, Flags of Flame: Studies in South Asian Folk Culture, (Eds) Heidrun Bruckner, Lothar Latze and Aditya Malik (New Delhi: Ajay Kumar Jain Manhar Publishers, 1993), pp.241-262
[6] Elizabeth Mayes, ‘The Fantasy of Internalization in the Theoretical Imaginary’ in Representations, No. 62 (Spring, 1998), pp. 100-110
[7] Cited in I. M. Lewis Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (England: Penguin Books, 1971), pp.84-85. Also see Kehoe A.B. and Geletti D.H. ‘Women’s Preponderance in Possession Cults: The Calcium-deficiency Hypothesis Extended’, In American Anthropologist, 83, pp.549-61
[8] In Possession In South Asia: Speech, Body and Territory (Eds) J. Assayag and G. Tarabout (Paris: Collection Purusartha, 1999), pp. 183-20.
[9] Cited in Amy Hollywood, ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, in History of Religions (University of Chicago Press, Nov 2002) Vol. 42, No. 2, p.111
[10] Thomas Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing (Boston: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002), pp.58-87
[11] Shail Mayaram, ‘Spirit Possession: Refraiming discourses of Self and Other, Possession In South Asia: Speech, Body and Territory (Eds) J. Assayag and G. Tarabout (Paris: Collection Purusartha, 1999), p.101
[12] Ibid., p.103
[13] See David Kinsley, The Divine Player: A Study of Krisna Lila (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979). See also June McDaniel, Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[14] Kathleen M. Erndl, Victory to the Mother, p.105
[15] Melcom McLean, Devoted to the Goddess: The Life and Work of Ramprasad (Ed) Wendy Doniger (Albany: State New York Press,1989), p.39
[16] Shail Mayaram, 1999, pp. 105-109
[17] Elizabeth Schoembucher, 1993, p.252
[18] Ibid., look at her notes on p.253
[19] Murphy Halliburton, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol.26, pp.161-286, 2003), p.179
[20] Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1967), p. 63-63, 215
[21] Shail Mayaram, 1999, p.105-6
[22] John M. Stanley, 1988, pp. 26-57
[23] Ibid., p.56
[24] Idid., p.42