Two quotations on possession
Oct. 21st, 2022 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeStill plugging away at Megan Rose's Spirit Marriage, which is leading me to learn more about spirit possession and its overlap with plural/more-than-one stuff. This part is from an interview with Voodoo Queen Bloody Mary in New Orleans:
"She explained to me that Voodoo possession is not necessarily just about a spirit entering into someone; it is perhaps more accurate to think of it as the spirit coming out of someone. Possession might be understood as an aspect of who someone already is, expressing through the personality of a Loa. That is, while one is possessed, the Loa comes out more fully to be seen and recognized as who one already is or could be, perhaps indicating certain aspects that the individual needs to express more fully in life. Ideally, the practitioner is bringing forth an archetypal quality that has perhaps lain dormant or subdued within until the person is ready to open more fully to its expression. [...]
"Mary's conceptualization of spirit possession is a different concept from the more conventional idea that spirit possession is a matter of giving over control of oneself to an outside entity. However, Mary was quick to point out that both practices are present in Voodoo ritual and in dream possession. [...]
"To me it seems that there is a similarity between the relationship one has with the met tet [patron being] and the relationship one might have in a spirit marriage. Both involve a sort of hosting in one's body, as well as an extrasensory sharing of consciousness. [...]
"When I brought this up with Suzetta [a New Orleans Voodoo mambo in a spirit marriage with Baron Samedi], she elaborated:
"[The met tets are] the psirits that live in your head, the ones that claim you as their child. You are part of them, too. [...] My met tets, I feel they're aspects of my personality. [...] When you're initiated, it's to open your head, and that's how the met tet gets in." (pg. 199-201)
This other one's from "Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of “Cannibal Monsters” in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910" by Nathan D. Carlson, in Ethnohistory 56:3 (Summer 2009):
"In addition [to other ways described earlier in the paper], an individual could acquire witiko through the influence of a spirit guardian (referred to in the Cree language as a pawâkan), a type of visionary spirit entity that formed a personal subjective relationship with a human host as an integral part of the religious experience of many Athabasca Cree and Métis. The pawâkan was typically sought after and encountered during a vision fast enacted at the onset of puberty, but could also be contacted in dreams and visions throughout life. The pawâkan required the performance of specific ceremonials in return for the bestowal of certain powers or abilities such as visions and knowledge, prowess or luck in hunting and trapping, etcetera. If a human host acquired a malevolent pawâkan, especially the pawâkan of ice, the North Wind (Kewâtin), or the Witiko itself, the pawâkan was believed to have the power to augment the human host’s personality so that it would operate in congruence with the spirit entity’s malevolent intentions.In effect, the personal identity of the individual would merge with, or be lost to, the personality of the spirit agent if the vision seeker accepted the pawâkan, allowing the entity to subsequently take over the body and faculties of the human host."
The citations given for that passage are:
Robert Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships (Regina, SK, 2002), pg. 76–102, 153–56.
R. H. Cockburn, ed., “Like Words of Fire: The Lore of the Woodland Cree from the Journals of P. G. Downes,” The Beaver 315 (1984): 41
Cockburn is the specific source for the "augmented personality" bit, so I'd have to dig in further.
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that my own religious ignorance has hindered learning my own history, and that there's no way I can learn about multi/plural/more-than-one/WHATEVER history and ways of being without going and learning about spirit possession, religion, and other ways of life. I feel like a fool for not realizing this sooner, but at least now I've got some leads and an idea what search terms to use. (It's horrible to be so pig-ignorant you don't even know the WORDS to use to SHIFT said ignorance.)
"She explained to me that Voodoo possession is not necessarily just about a spirit entering into someone; it is perhaps more accurate to think of it as the spirit coming out of someone. Possession might be understood as an aspect of who someone already is, expressing through the personality of a Loa. That is, while one is possessed, the Loa comes out more fully to be seen and recognized as who one already is or could be, perhaps indicating certain aspects that the individual needs to express more fully in life. Ideally, the practitioner is bringing forth an archetypal quality that has perhaps lain dormant or subdued within until the person is ready to open more fully to its expression. [...]
"Mary's conceptualization of spirit possession is a different concept from the more conventional idea that spirit possession is a matter of giving over control of oneself to an outside entity. However, Mary was quick to point out that both practices are present in Voodoo ritual and in dream possession. [...]
"To me it seems that there is a similarity between the relationship one has with the met tet [patron being] and the relationship one might have in a spirit marriage. Both involve a sort of hosting in one's body, as well as an extrasensory sharing of consciousness. [...]
"When I brought this up with Suzetta [a New Orleans Voodoo mambo in a spirit marriage with Baron Samedi], she elaborated:
"[The met tets are] the psirits that live in your head, the ones that claim you as their child. You are part of them, too. [...] My met tets, I feel they're aspects of my personality. [...] When you're initiated, it's to open your head, and that's how the met tet gets in." (pg. 199-201)
This other one's from "Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of “Cannibal Monsters” in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910" by Nathan D. Carlson, in Ethnohistory 56:3 (Summer 2009):
"In addition [to other ways described earlier in the paper], an individual could acquire witiko through the influence of a spirit guardian (referred to in the Cree language as a pawâkan), a type of visionary spirit entity that formed a personal subjective relationship with a human host as an integral part of the religious experience of many Athabasca Cree and Métis. The pawâkan was typically sought after and encountered during a vision fast enacted at the onset of puberty, but could also be contacted in dreams and visions throughout life. The pawâkan required the performance of specific ceremonials in return for the bestowal of certain powers or abilities such as visions and knowledge, prowess or luck in hunting and trapping, etcetera. If a human host acquired a malevolent pawâkan, especially the pawâkan of ice, the North Wind (Kewâtin), or the Witiko itself, the pawâkan was believed to have the power to augment the human host’s personality so that it would operate in congruence with the spirit entity’s malevolent intentions.In effect, the personal identity of the individual would merge with, or be lost to, the personality of the spirit agent if the vision seeker accepted the pawâkan, allowing the entity to subsequently take over the body and faculties of the human host."
The citations given for that passage are:
Robert Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships (Regina, SK, 2002), pg. 76–102, 153–56.
R. H. Cockburn, ed., “Like Words of Fire: The Lore of the Woodland Cree from the Journals of P. G. Downes,” The Beaver 315 (1984): 41
Cockburn is the specific source for the "augmented personality" bit, so I'd have to dig in further.
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that my own religious ignorance has hindered learning my own history, and that there's no way I can learn about multi/plural/more-than-one/WHATEVER history and ways of being without going and learning about spirit possession, religion, and other ways of life. I feel like a fool for not realizing this sooner, but at least now I've got some leads and an idea what search terms to use. (It's horrible to be so pig-ignorant you don't even know the WORDS to use to SHIFT said ignorance.)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 11:12 pm (UTC)The other on the met tets is reminding me of some more personal stuff from my background. Seed Host, and all. It sounds like the met tets are outside of a person, instead of already linked through them?
>> (It's horrible to be so pig-ignorant you don't even know the WORDS to use to SHIFT said ignorance.) <<
You have that opening up to you, though.
>> that my own religious ignorance has hindered learning my own history, and that there's no way I can learn about multi/plural/more-than-one/WHATEVER history and ways of being without going and learning about spirit possession, religion, and other ways of life. <<
Not wholly related and coming from a different background - as people were understanding more of Archetypes and Oceanic physics, and how beings connected to those work, they started having a different perspective on old world religions. It's really, really easy to see how something that acts in certain ways would be explained in stories and such, and gradually be deified.
It's kind of an "Oh, duh" moment when realizing that pantheons have personifications of natural forces and ways of explaining the world - but through a different lens. Like, not just characters but a symbolic system of describing these dynamics that are hard to quantify and don't get along well with (local) mathematics.
Like, it's really easy to say they're representations of abstract concepts and phenomena, and still entirely miss what that means.
- Amber (he/him)
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Date: 2022-10-28 06:34 pm (UTC)They also conveniently overlap most with my own desire to learn more about plural history, because if trauma and plurality are linked, then we have a HUGE, well-known population of traumatized people in US history: slaves! And yet, multiplicity is considered a white person's ailment, and there's a yawning void of information about anyone else. So either we're wrong about the link between trauma and plurality, or there's a HUGE section of people experiencing something similar to me, but who are categorized as something else, and if that's the case, then I refuse to believe that there's NO documentation of them WHATSOEVER. It might be in oral tradition or texts I don't know about, but it is SOMEWHERE.
Voodoo and Vodou are slave religions, and they look to have a huge tradition of possession, so they may be a missing link to this greater history. I feel like I can learn more about the experience of >1ness from them, and break down some of my preconceived notions of what that means, and boy howdy am I motivated! I couldn't understand American rape culture and incest without understanding slavery and its aftereffects, and this might be more of the same.
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Date: 2022-10-31 12:34 pm (UTC)--Janusz
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Date: 2022-10-31 03:10 pm (UTC)Mori
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Date: 2022-10-31 04:22 pm (UTC)Fun fact about Haitian folk religion: During the Haitian revolution, Napoleon sent Polish legionnaires to Haiti to fight for the French. But when the Poles actually got there and learned what the Haitians were actually fighting for, they switched sides and fought alongside the Haitians. As a result, they earned a place of honor in Haiti and that is why there is a Polish-Haitian community there now. The famous Black Madonna of Częstochowa entered Haitian voudou as the Ioa Ezilí Dantor.
--Janusz
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Date: 2022-11-07 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 02:49 am (UTC)-- Janusz
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Date: 2022-10-22 02:31 pm (UTC)We also jokingly say we're possessed because recently it's sort of been more relatable than a lot of multiple/plural stuff, but I think that's just because of the emphasis on psychological origins and experiences we don't really vibe with as much.
-Artemis (they/them)