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lb_leeBecause kinda_lost asked for them, and I realized that putting them in comment form would've been prohibitively long. I have PDFs of most of these, so let me know if you want any of those files! This post will probably be added to and updated over time, and other people have added their own citations; use "track comments" to keep track of new additions.
Disclaimer: A lot of these sources are devoted to unrelated subjects, and only briefly mention the many-selved/pluralish stuff. Some of these sources I name may not qualify as plural by your definition, and the groups of people involved often have their own cultural framework and philosophy surrounding these phenomena, so very well may not consider themselves plural, but nevertheless, I think that people who DO see themselves as plural should read up about such experiences and learn. I'm also including works that were marketed as fiction but later the author publicly announced it was based off real events from their life. Finally, some of these sources are about very bad forms of possession (like witiko).
Africa
Baule (Cote D'Ivoire): Monni Adam's Designs for Living (1982) is mostly about African art, but mentions spirit lovers in passing: "Each person is thought to have a partner of the opposite sex in the spirit world. If one is having difficulties, the diviner may blame one's spirit mate who feels neglected or find that an irascible, mischievous bush spirit has entered the person's life. In either case, if the client is able to afford it, he will commission a carving and placate the spirit by offerings to it. The spirit mate is given personal care by cleaning and rubbing with oil, food offerings are placed in tiny dishes before the figure. In contrast, offerings to a bush spirit are poured into the statuette. [...] The bush spirit figure is given the hairstyle and scarification markings that characterize the civilized person, in order to help modify its wild nature." (100, cited as Vogel, S. "People of Wood: Baule Figure Sculpture" College Art Journal 33, 1:23-25, 1973). I plaintexted some of it, but the full thing has been scanned and put on archive.org. (Thanks, Janusz!)
Dagara (Burkina Faso): in Spirit Marriage, (2022) Megan Rose interviews a cross-cultural (Columbian-American) practitioner of spirit marriage who mentions her husband in the tradition acts as a kontomble voice diviner, a type of divination which "is done through the merging of the practitioner with the kontomble, the playful 'little people' of the Dagara cosmology, and the delivering of messages in the kontomble's voice" (142).
Ibibio (Nigeria): Monni Adam's Designs for Living mentions in passing, "The actions of idiok are wayward, violent, and irresponsible. The masker [the one possessed by idiok] shakes its body, runs through the village, climbing houses and trees, destroys property, and shoots arrows at women." Contrasts the idiok ekpo with the mfon ekpo, who also possess, but are good, graceful, and beautiful apparently.
Igbo (Nigeria): Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018) and Dear Senthuran (2021) are autobiographical depictions of being ogbanje, many-selved, nonhuman gods trapped in human embodiment. Freshwater was originally marketed as fiction, but Emezi has publicly stated that this was because they didn't think they could get it published any other way. They also have essays and short stories on their website that might also prove relevant! Emezi is selling well in the States, so finding ebooks should be no trouble. Written by insider.
Uganda: Van Dijl et al's "The validity of DSM-IV dissociative disorders categories in south-west Uganda" (2005). I haven't read this in a really long time, but it exists, and the abstract says the DSM-IV DID category didn't really fit for trance possession. (This was before the DSM 5.)
Yoruba (Nigeria): Monni Adams's Designs for Living (1982) mentions in passing, "One widely known cult focuses on worship of Shango, the thunder god. When possessed by the god, in violent frenzied states, devotees dance with this kind of wand [photographed on the following page], enriched by a female figure with child" (101). Due to the slave trade, Shango made it over to our side of the pond, and he's also a figure in Santeria, Vodou, and Candomble.
Asia
Chinese (in Penang Malaysia and other countries): Both books are academic, paper-only, and expensive, but Zen Cho name-drops both Cheu Hock Tong's The Nine Emperor Gods: A Study of Chinese Spirit Medium Cults and Jean DeBernardi's The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia as valuable sources she used for her own (fictional) work about ethnic Chinese spirit possession in Malaysia, Black Water Sister.
India (specifically, western India, around Karnakata): Aneka's Jogappa: Gender Identity and the Politics of Exclusion discusses jogappas, male-assigned people who are possessed by the goddess Yellamy and compelled (or choose) to become women and perform ritual for her. The goddess will claim Muslim children as well, much to their families' bemusement. "Many form a deep, personal relationship with the goddess: 'When I was alone I stayed with the goddess.' While the goddess is at times seen as the reason for their existing problems, she is also seen as a companion, and a source of support and strength." (53) Female-assigned people marry Yellama and do service for her as well, known as devadasis, and the two groups together are called jogatis. You can learn more about them in Lucinda Ramberg's Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion.
Nepal (Shakta Tantra): in Spirit Marriage, Megan Rose interviews a white cross-cultural practitioner who while doing religious research in Nepal got grabbed by Kali and just had to live with it. She states that Kali lives inside her, but doesn't exactly possess her: "her experience is much more like indwelling. Kali is simultaneously next to her and around her--not separate from her and yet separate" (99). The practitioner frantically tried to get exorcised by a local exorcist who basically went, "So let me get this straight. Whatever is in your body says that it's Kali, and she won't leave? If Kali's not coming out, I'm not going in after her" (105).
Australia and Pacific Islands
Bali (Indonesia): Suryani and Jensen's Trance and Possession in Bali: A Window on Western Multiple Personality, Possession Disorder, and Suicide. (1993) I haven't read it, and it looks to be really expensive, paper only, and hard to find, but it exists. The review I found on ResearchGate complains about an ethnocentric bias, despite Suryani being a Balinese hyponotherapist. I loathe citing Astraea for anything, but they did transcribe some of it here.
Tigabinanga (Indonesia): Ginting and Effendy's "Post-Dissociative Trance Disorder: Traditional Culture of Nini Pagar from Tigabinanga" is a case study involving a teenage girl possessed after a Nini Pagar rain-bringing ritual. (Thanks, kinda_lost!)
North America (and Caribbean)
Algonquian (Canada): Nathan Carlson's "Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of 'Cannibal Monsters' in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910" (2009). Written by insider. Mentions the Witiko as a possessing entity: "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. [...] 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." (365)
Haitian Vodou: Vodou has possession out the wazoo, so it's the one I have the most sources for. I organized them chronologically.
Iroquois (USA): I haven't read Mann's Iroquoian women: the gantowisas, but someone of Native descent did give me this passage about the state of being many-souled. Written by insider.
Mexican Santa Muertista Catholicism: Howe et al's "Devotional Crossings: Sex Workers, Santisima Muerte, and Spiritual Solidarity in Guadalajara and San Francisco," from the book Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana. This article only has one relevant paragraph (it's overwhelmingly about general religious practices of some trans women sex workers who cross the California/Mexico border) and here it is: "Santisima Muerte is even, for some, a marrigeable partner. Vicky, a sex worker who had recently returned from San Francisco, explained that she had 'married' the Holy Death because the Holy Death had performed so many miracles for her. And, she further explained, she was not happy with men anymore. Vicky's marriage to the Holy Death appears to have altered the Church's usual domain by transforming the traditional marriage between a nun and Jesus to one of different, though related, intentions. Moreover, Vicky's marriage to the Holy Death is, from one perspective, a first 'lesbian' marriage between a human and a deity." (pg. 31)
Native American: Sam Medlock's War Zone (2021) is a short fiction comic about suicidality, but Medlock writes, "I wrote this while looking back on when I was suicidal. I felt like my thoughts weren't my own and it was really scary. I legit thought I was possessed by demons or something, but now I think it was more an influence of bad spirits. But whatever you wanna call it, it felt very supernatural to me. Anyway I got some help and am better now. I hope you got something out of this story~" Written by insider.
USA (New Orleans Voodoo): in Spirit Marriage, Megan Rose interviews a mambo who describes marrying Baron Samedi (who possesses others, not her herself) and who describes met tets (patron loa)as "spirits 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. With the marriage I was chosen by somebody to share and to be part of them" (201).
Misc: I have no goddamn idea how to categorize the cultural perspective of the Mary Nardini Gang's zine Be Gay Do Crime and whether it's plural or not, but it's definitely spiritual, animist, and all about talking and living in the world with their beloved dead (other members of the Gang who died by suicide, warehouse fire, or police). It has lines like "Ten years ago, we were seized by a frenzied spirit and, in a trancelike state, received a set of ten weapons for a war we were only just finding the words to describe" (5). "We needed skillsets to engage our friends among the dead, and they in turn gestured toward an animist worldview, toward the enspirited world. We live in a world haunted by all the ghosts of a genocidal leviathan, where the land is full of bones screaming out for vengeance and the very architecture of these cities filled by all the dead who built it" (10). They mention "possession by egregores" (13) and I don't think they're talking metaphorically about all this.
Do you have a source I don't? Tell me about it!
kinda_lost asked for them, and I realized that putting them in comment form would've been prohibitively long. I have PDFs of most of these, so let me know if you want any of those files! This post will probably be added to and updated over time, and other people have added their own citations; use "track comments" to keep track of new additions.Disclaimer: A lot of these sources are devoted to unrelated subjects, and only briefly mention the many-selved/pluralish stuff. Some of these sources I name may not qualify as plural by your definition, and the groups of people involved often have their own cultural framework and philosophy surrounding these phenomena, so very well may not consider themselves plural, but nevertheless, I think that people who DO see themselves as plural should read up about such experiences and learn. I'm also including works that were marketed as fiction but later the author publicly announced it was based off real events from their life. Finally, some of these sources are about very bad forms of possession (like witiko).
Africa
Baule (Cote D'Ivoire): Monni Adam's Designs for Living (1982) is mostly about African art, but mentions spirit lovers in passing: "Each person is thought to have a partner of the opposite sex in the spirit world. If one is having difficulties, the diviner may blame one's spirit mate who feels neglected or find that an irascible, mischievous bush spirit has entered the person's life. In either case, if the client is able to afford it, he will commission a carving and placate the spirit by offerings to it. The spirit mate is given personal care by cleaning and rubbing with oil, food offerings are placed in tiny dishes before the figure. In contrast, offerings to a bush spirit are poured into the statuette. [...] The bush spirit figure is given the hairstyle and scarification markings that characterize the civilized person, in order to help modify its wild nature." (100, cited as Vogel, S. "People of Wood: Baule Figure Sculpture" College Art Journal 33, 1:23-25, 1973). I plaintexted some of it, but the full thing has been scanned and put on archive.org. (Thanks, Janusz!)
Dagara (Burkina Faso): in Spirit Marriage, (2022) Megan Rose interviews a cross-cultural (Columbian-American) practitioner of spirit marriage who mentions her husband in the tradition acts as a kontomble voice diviner, a type of divination which "is done through the merging of the practitioner with the kontomble, the playful 'little people' of the Dagara cosmology, and the delivering of messages in the kontomble's voice" (142).
Ibibio (Nigeria): Monni Adam's Designs for Living mentions in passing, "The actions of idiok are wayward, violent, and irresponsible. The masker [the one possessed by idiok] shakes its body, runs through the village, climbing houses and trees, destroys property, and shoots arrows at women." Contrasts the idiok ekpo with the mfon ekpo, who also possess, but are good, graceful, and beautiful apparently.
Igbo (Nigeria): Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018) and Dear Senthuran (2021) are autobiographical depictions of being ogbanje, many-selved, nonhuman gods trapped in human embodiment. Freshwater was originally marketed as fiction, but Emezi has publicly stated that this was because they didn't think they could get it published any other way. They also have essays and short stories on their website that might also prove relevant! Emezi is selling well in the States, so finding ebooks should be no trouble. Written by insider.
Uganda: Van Dijl et al's "The validity of DSM-IV dissociative disorders categories in south-west Uganda" (2005). I haven't read this in a really long time, but it exists, and the abstract says the DSM-IV DID category didn't really fit for trance possession. (This was before the DSM 5.)
Yoruba (Nigeria): Monni Adams's Designs for Living (1982) mentions in passing, "One widely known cult focuses on worship of Shango, the thunder god. When possessed by the god, in violent frenzied states, devotees dance with this kind of wand [photographed on the following page], enriched by a female figure with child" (101). Due to the slave trade, Shango made it over to our side of the pond, and he's also a figure in Santeria, Vodou, and Candomble.
Asia
Chinese (in Penang Malaysia and other countries): Both books are academic, paper-only, and expensive, but Zen Cho name-drops both Cheu Hock Tong's The Nine Emperor Gods: A Study of Chinese Spirit Medium Cults and Jean DeBernardi's The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia as valuable sources she used for her own (fictional) work about ethnic Chinese spirit possession in Malaysia, Black Water Sister.
India (specifically, western India, around Karnakata): Aneka's Jogappa: Gender Identity and the Politics of Exclusion discusses jogappas, male-assigned people who are possessed by the goddess Yellamy and compelled (or choose) to become women and perform ritual for her. The goddess will claim Muslim children as well, much to their families' bemusement. "Many form a deep, personal relationship with the goddess: 'When I was alone I stayed with the goddess.' While the goddess is at times seen as the reason for their existing problems, she is also seen as a companion, and a source of support and strength." (53) Female-assigned people marry Yellama and do service for her as well, known as devadasis, and the two groups together are called jogatis. You can learn more about them in Lucinda Ramberg's Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion.
Nepal (Shakta Tantra): in Spirit Marriage, Megan Rose interviews a white cross-cultural practitioner who while doing religious research in Nepal got grabbed by Kali and just had to live with it. She states that Kali lives inside her, but doesn't exactly possess her: "her experience is much more like indwelling. Kali is simultaneously next to her and around her--not separate from her and yet separate" (99). The practitioner frantically tried to get exorcised by a local exorcist who basically went, "So let me get this straight. Whatever is in your body says that it's Kali, and she won't leave? If Kali's not coming out, I'm not going in after her" (105).
Australia and Pacific Islands
Bali (Indonesia): Suryani and Jensen's Trance and Possession in Bali: A Window on Western Multiple Personality, Possession Disorder, and Suicide. (1993) I haven't read it, and it looks to be really expensive, paper only, and hard to find, but it exists. The review I found on ResearchGate complains about an ethnocentric bias, despite Suryani being a Balinese hyponotherapist. I loathe citing Astraea for anything, but they did transcribe some of it here.
Tigabinanga (Indonesia): Ginting and Effendy's "Post-Dissociative Trance Disorder: Traditional Culture of Nini Pagar from Tigabinanga" is a case study involving a teenage girl possessed after a Nini Pagar rain-bringing ritual. (Thanks, kinda_lost!)
North America (and Caribbean)
Algonquian (Canada): Nathan Carlson's "Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of 'Cannibal Monsters' in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910" (2009). Written by insider. Mentions the Witiko as a possessing entity: "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. [...] 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." (365)
Haitian Vodou: Vodou has possession out the wazoo, so it's the one I have the most sources for. I organized them chronologically.
- Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (1953) discusses the religion in general, including her own experiences being possessed by Erzulie despite not being a Vodouissant herself. She also filmed some of the dances and rituals with participants' consent, which were completed after her death and released as an avante-garde mini-documentary also with the name Divine Horsemen.
- Rene and Houlberg's "My Double Mystic Marriages to Two Goddesses of Love" (1993) interviews a man married to the two Erzulies, who appear to him in dreams and communicate with him. The book it's from (Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, also 1993) has at least one article about an ordinary everyday religious dinner and how the mambo is possessed during it, but this book is out of print, hard to find, and super-expensive. If you're aching for more, I can try lugging my ass back to the library and book-scanning the relevant chapters for you, because that's the only reason I have the Rene and Houlberg part.
- Leslie Desmangles's The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (1994) mentions how possession was a part of the very formation of both Haiti as an independent nation and Vodou as a religion, in the 1700s. Written by a Haitian.
- Megan Rose interviews multiple Vodouissants (both Haitian and New Orleans) for Spirit Marriage (2022).
Iroquois (USA): I haven't read Mann's Iroquoian women: the gantowisas, but someone of Native descent did give me this passage about the state of being many-souled. Written by insider.
Mexican Santa Muertista Catholicism: Howe et al's "Devotional Crossings: Sex Workers, Santisima Muerte, and Spiritual Solidarity in Guadalajara and San Francisco," from the book Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana. This article only has one relevant paragraph (it's overwhelmingly about general religious practices of some trans women sex workers who cross the California/Mexico border) and here it is: "Santisima Muerte is even, for some, a marrigeable partner. Vicky, a sex worker who had recently returned from San Francisco, explained that she had 'married' the Holy Death because the Holy Death had performed so many miracles for her. And, she further explained, she was not happy with men anymore. Vicky's marriage to the Holy Death appears to have altered the Church's usual domain by transforming the traditional marriage between a nun and Jesus to one of different, though related, intentions. Moreover, Vicky's marriage to the Holy Death is, from one perspective, a first 'lesbian' marriage between a human and a deity." (pg. 31)
Native American: Sam Medlock's War Zone (2021) is a short fiction comic about suicidality, but Medlock writes, "I wrote this while looking back on when I was suicidal. I felt like my thoughts weren't my own and it was really scary. I legit thought I was possessed by demons or something, but now I think it was more an influence of bad spirits. But whatever you wanna call it, it felt very supernatural to me. Anyway I got some help and am better now. I hope you got something out of this story~" Written by insider.
USA (New Orleans Voodoo): in Spirit Marriage, Megan Rose interviews a mambo who describes marrying Baron Samedi (who possesses others, not her herself) and who describes met tets (patron loa)as "spirits 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. With the marriage I was chosen by somebody to share and to be part of them" (201).
Misc: I have no goddamn idea how to categorize the cultural perspective of the Mary Nardini Gang's zine Be Gay Do Crime and whether it's plural or not, but it's definitely spiritual, animist, and all about talking and living in the world with their beloved dead (other members of the Gang who died by suicide, warehouse fire, or police). It has lines like "Ten years ago, we were seized by a frenzied spirit and, in a trancelike state, received a set of ten weapons for a war we were only just finding the words to describe" (5). "We needed skillsets to engage our friends among the dead, and they in turn gestured toward an animist worldview, toward the enspirited world. We live in a world haunted by all the ghosts of a genocidal leviathan, where the land is full of bones screaming out for vengeance and the very architecture of these cities filled by all the dead who built it" (10). They mention "possession by egregores" (13) and I don't think they're talking metaphorically about all this.
Do you have a source I don't? Tell me about it!
Same!
Date: 2023-02-17 02:25 am (UTC)Definitely relate!