Possession and self-possession

Recent scholarship on Tantra often treats it as a path to enlightenment, separate from ritual healing, mediumship, and spirit possession. Frederick Smith’s book The Self Possessed argues the opposite: that healing, sorcery, and spiritual liberation all share common assumptions and a common idiom. Smith presents the idea of entry, pervasion, or possession (avesa) as a fundamental trope in Indic thought, encompassing conception, Tantric ritual, occupying another body, and malevolent spirit attack. This article questions whether we are applying the wrong categories to understand Indic and other religious traditions, and sketches an alternative way to view the field of possession, exploring its implications.

Study at a glance

Abstract

While much recent scholarship on Tantra has tended to distance it from the world of pragmatic ritual healing, mediumship and spirit-possession, and treat it primarily as an elevated mode of pursuit of enlightened consciousness, Frederick Smith’s recent book The Self Possessed is the most comprehensive presentation so far of the reverse position, that all of these modes of interaction with the divine, whether to do with healing, sorcery or spiritual liberation, share common assumptions and a common idiom. Here, and in other recent writing, Smith presents the idea of entry, pervasion or possession (avesa) as a fundamental trope in Indic thought, encompassing everything from conception (seen as the individual jiva taking over possession of the embryo) to Tantric ritual, the temporary occupation of another body and malevolent spirit-attack. If this is true, however, does this suggest that we are applying the wrong set of categories to understand Indic and perhaps also other religious traditions? This article sketches an alternative mode of looking at the field of “possession,” broadly defined, and explores some of its implications.