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lb_leeCross-Ethnic Headmates I: A Brief, Woefully Incomplete Historical Overview
Summary: Spirits, lwa, headmates, controllers, personalities, and alters from all sorts of ethnic groups their vessels aren’t. Briefly touches on 1791-present, vessels from the USA, Haiti, India, Chile, the Holy Roman Empire (now Germany), Brazil, and England.
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3659
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month—and surprise, turns out it’s a multi-parter! (You’d think we’d have learned from the plural history essays…) Many thanks to N. Fadeke Castor, whose use of we/I in articles helped solve our long-running (and deeply annoying) pronouns problem in essays. Content warning for racism, exoticism, Orientalism, and magical Indian spirit guides.
Cross-ethnic spirits, foci, controls, alters, communicators, personalities, loa/lwa, soulbonds, walk-ins, and headmates have been around for centuries and appear all across the globe, through all sorts of cultures and people. They appear in works of medicine, religion, art, and random groups of friends. Let’s talk about them!
Summary: Spirits, lwa, headmates, controllers, personalities, and alters from all sorts of ethnic groups their vessels aren’t. Briefly touches on 1791-present, vessels from the USA, Haiti, India, Chile, the Holy Roman Empire (now Germany), Brazil, and England.
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3659
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month—and surprise, turns out it’s a multi-parter! (You’d think we’d have learned from the plural history essays…) Many thanks to N. Fadeke Castor, whose use of we/I in articles helped solve our long-running (and deeply annoying) pronouns problem in essays. Content warning for racism, exoticism, Orientalism, and magical Indian spirit guides.
Cross-ethnic spirits, foci, controls, alters, communicators, personalities, loa/lwa, soulbonds, walk-ins, and headmates have been around for centuries and appear all across the globe, through all sorts of cultures and people. They appear in works of medicine, religion, art, and random groups of friends. Let’s talk about them!
Terms of Engagement
The very idea of a cross-ethnic headmate can be so emotionally loaded that we/I feel the need to be far more strict in our definitions than we normally are, just to avoid getting bogged down in endless hair-splitting along the lines of, “but does that really count?” turf battles over terminology, or derailments about white guilt, white purity, and just plain whiteness. We’ll discuss that (oh, will we discuss that) in the next installment. For now, let’s focus on proving that cross-ethnic headmates are a wide-ranging phenomenon.
First of all, to count as “cross-ethnic,” for this essay, the folks involved must differ in at least one of four main criteria:
Finally, for this essay if nowhere else, we will restrict ourself to human (or humanoid) beings with human ethnicities that exist in this vessel reality. As an example, our headmate Grey, an Ashkenazi Jew, counts as cross-ethnic, while Mori (whose ethnicity is extremely local to us) does not.
These restrictions are not culturally neutral. They’re basically the DSM-III-R requirements for someone to count as an alter for the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder, a product of American medical culture of the 1980s! It sucks, and we really hope that once we/I prove our point, we can chuck this nonsense. Our restrictions cut a huge number of people—not just most nonhumans, but plenty of humans who simply come from lands and cultures that have no analogs here, like our own Rogan and Mori. It also cuts people who don’t want to front, haven’t gotten around to it yet, or just plain don’t do it clearly enough in the source we reference for us to avoid the hair-splitting arguments. If you didn’t know us extremely well, Falcon and Grey would also be cut by these restrictions—40% of our human-passing roster in total.
All of this is to say, we are layering understatement on top of cultural bias on top of ignorance on top of erasure. The way we frame the question limits the answer, and our “does this really count?” pedantry have real effects on how we view real people. Keep that in mind.
A Brief Historical Overview of Cross-Ethnic Headmates
The very first medical multi case we/I have, the Caroline H. case from Gmelin 1791, involves a German (well, Stuttgart) woman whose “changed personality” was French. While to a race-brained American, it may be temping to say, “whatever, they’re both white,” that’s an absurd conflation of two different nations with very different languages, cultures, and governments—at this time, Stuttgart was a German-speaking part of the Holy Roman Empire, a monarchy, while France had just had a famous revolution! Indeed, Gmelin credits this to Caroline’s “fits”: “this highly sensitive person put herself often and continuously into the miserable position of the refugee French people” and “the sad imaginations of the refugee French people created a focus [personality] that approached and finally surpassed the original one” (76-77, translation paperfliegerfalter’s). In her “paroxysms,” Caroline showed an “uncommon aptitude” for the French language (84) and “[spoke] German in the manner of a Frenchman,” (83) “butchering the German words in the way the French do” (7). “She believes that she had gone into a monastery in Paris in her second year of life, been raised there, but had escaped in the recent unrest that broke out there” and “come to Stuttgart” (3). So the very start of “Western” concept of medical multiplicity involves cross-ethnic personalities!
There’s a tragic hundred-year gap between Caroline H. and our next record (for now, anyway), but that’s a problem of our ignorance, not history, because by 1890, William James is making snarky remarks about the “Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage[s]” who appeared with the Spiritualists of his day (394). “Calling the ladies ‘squaws,’ the men ‘braves,’ the house a ‘wigwam,’ etc., etc., are excessively common,” he reports (ibid, 395). A year prior, in an 1889 article on automatic writing, he mentions “trance-mediumship, with its Indian or other outlandish ‘control,’ giving more or less optimistic messages from the ‘summer-land’” (555, emphasis his). Clearly this was common enough for William James to roll his eyes about it, expecting his reader to know exactly what he was talking about.
By 1895, Ida Craddock is on the scene. Though most of her focus is on her spirit husband, Soph, and her deceased relatives, she also has “her spirit guide (and brother-in-law) Iases, a Brahmin from India, [who] was training her ‘in conformity with the yogic life lived by the Oriental yogis’” (Schmidt, 120). Iases was not a member of Ida’s family in this world; the sister he married, “Nana, […] had ‘passed over’ as a baby before Ida was born. Now all grown up to ‘womanhood’ on the other side,” Iases had married her there (Schmidt, 107). Unlike many of the mediums before and after her, Craddock only seems to have spoken about Iases in her private journal and in a private communication to her friend and financier on January 3rd 1895 about work: “Iases seems to have been choosing to use what psychic strength I had to issue instructions regarding the work on ‘Heavenly Bridegrooms’ ....a work which I think I can truly say, is much, much more due to his directing intellect than I should have ever dreamed possible for me as a psychic. […] the great wonder of it all, to me, is that an outside intelligence seems to be running the machine, so to speak, and I am little more than amanuesis for him, —or it, whatever one may call that intelligence. Of course, I am, I trust, a fairly intelligent amanuensis, so that I have no hesitation about making corrections promptly of the matter given to me, when such corrections seem to be needed. But oftener it is the other way round, and Iases corrects my work.” Craddock publicly acknowledged Soph (much to her downfall), but if she ever did so with Iases, I/we don’t know about it.
In 1900, we have the famous Helene Smith case in France, as written up in Fluornoy’s From India to the Planet Mars. Though most of her case involves past lives as Marie Antoinette, an Arab princess, and a Hindu princess, she also is accompanied by a spirit going by the name Leopold—though “the name of Leopold is only a pseudonym under which is concealed the illustrious Cagliostro, who, it appears, was madly infatuated with Queen Marie Antoinette, and who now, discarnate and floating in space, has constituted himself the guardian angel in some respects of Mlle. Smith” (12). Cagliostro was Italian and speaks with an Italian accent (and this identity was apparently known by 1893), but Flournoy is dismissive: “he has nothing in common with the famous thaumaturgist of the last century, save a certain superficial resemblance” (77). He does incontrovertibly take control of Smith’s body and speak through it, though.
Then we have Gladys Osborne Leonard, the famous British trance medium. In her 1931 book, My Life in Two Worlds, describes her first Spiritualist meeting in Great Britain “in my early teens,” so around the 1890s: “a slim, delicate-looking middle-aged woman, with a mild expression […] lurched violently several times. Then to my delight, she gave a tremendous howl—quite a blood-curdling howl—and after violently swinging her arms in a wild circle round her, narrowly missing the chairman and other officials on the platform, a strong, deep, man’s voice broke through her lips, speaking at first in some unknown language, then relapsing into broken English. From the books dealing with adventures in the Wild West—Buffalo Bill and others—I gathered that the woman was acting (most perfectly, I thought) the part of a North American Indian” (15). She also describes a “young man […] rather fat, yet anemic-looking. I didn’t like him at all, but I watched, fascinated, while he stood quietly on the platform. He closed his eyes, passed his hand over his forehead two or three times, and then, to my amazement, a child’s shrill treble voice came from his lips. His whole demeanor changed. The fat ponderous young man became a vivacious, pert little girl of apparently seven or eight years old, with a strong foreign accent” (14).
By 1919, Leonard herself works with a “control” named “Feda” (Radclyffe-Hall and Troubridge, 340), “an ancestress of mine,” “an Indian girl” who “had married my great-great-grandfather,” though likely under dubious circumstances (Leonard, 23). “After marrying this native girl, my great-great grandfather, William Hamilton, was not popular in India, and he made arrangements to bring Feda home to England. On the eve of starting home she gave birth to a son, and died. She was then only thirteen” (Leonard, 23).
Also in 1919 is the Alice case, by Cory. Though Alice herself was not Spanish, Bonita was, claiming to be “the long-departed spirit of a Spanish woman” (Baldwin, 79). “Her Spanish, rapid and mellifluous, doubtless sounded quite genuine to someone not acquainted with the language. Actually, however, it was an untranslatable mish-mash of Spanish, and Spanish-sounding, words and phrases” (79-80).
In 1938, Zora Neale Hurston reports in her anthropologic work, Tell My Horse, that the Haitian lwa Erzulie “is a mulatto and so when she is impersonated by the blacks, they powder their faces with talcum” (122). She is also happy to possess Haitians of all genders: “He [the new adept] is ‘mounted’ by the spirit of Erzulie, who sometimes talks at great length, giving advice and making recommendations” (125). She also devotes a short chapter to Dr. Reser, a “white man who is a houngan,” an “American,” and “an officer in charge of the state insane asylum as Point Beudet” (245-246). “I have seen him in the grip of the African loa (spirits) known as possession: that is, the spirits have entered his head and driven his own consciousness out. I have seen him reeling as if he were drunk under the spirit possession like any Haitian peasant” (252). We include lwa in this essay because ethnicity, race, and racism are such big parts of them… though not necessarily in the same way every time.
In 1953, Erzulie (along with Loco and Azacca) also possessed Maya Deren, a Jewish, Kiev-born American immigrant (Deren, Chapter VII). Decades after her death, Deren herself will become spirit-married to a Baton Rouge Vodou houngan asogwe named Henri, who sees her as a beloved ancestor (Rose, Spirit Marriage, 210-212).
Come the 1970s, our/my records get a lot more numerous, like Billy Milligan, an American with an English alter named Arthur and a Slavic one named Ragen (Keyes, xv) and Sybil’s famous French alter, Vicky whose “mother and father, […] brothers and sisters […] all live in Paris” (Schreiber). Predating them both in the literature, however, is the far less famous Jonah, an African-American man with Usoffa Abdulla, a warrior “born in Africa” (Brandsma and Ludwig, 226). Usoffa Abdulla credits his creation to an act of racist violence: “when Jonah was 9 or 10 years old, a gang of white boys decided one day to beat him up after school just ‘for sport.’ They proceeded to pummel Jonah with their fists, and he became absolutely terrified that he was going to die. At that point, Jonah lost consciousness and Usoffa Abdulla emerged. Usoffa fought so viciously and vehemently that he purportedly almost killed a couple of the boys” (Ludwig et al., 300). Judging by Jonah’s age, this assault would’ve taken place around 1955. Remember Jonah and Usoffa Abdulla; we’ll come back to them in the next installment!
In the 1980s, we have Mean Joe, a black member of the Troops for Truddi Chase in When Rabbit Howls—apparently somewhat inspired by a corporeal person who was kind to them in childhood. We/I also have citations from this decade involving both American and Brazilian Spiritualism, thanks to Goodman’s regrettably titled How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World. Goodman remarks in her (non-Brazilian) Spiritualism chapter that “Indian spirits are frequently mentioned,” surely causing William James to roll his eyes from beyond the grave (35). But, lest anyone think this is a tendency only to be found in Euro-Americans, Goodman discusses similar in Brazilian Umbanda, where such Indian spirits are apparently called “caboclos” (45). Meanwhile, “prêtos velhos are spirits of dead Afro-Brazilian slaves, very gentle and easy to approach, grandfatherly in manner” (ibid). Goodman also quotes liberally from an earlier 1974 experience of an American anthropologist, Pressel, studying Umbanda in Brazil. In the course of her research, Pressel’s informant, Cecilia, is possessed by an Indian spirit who, after being introduced to Pressel, “gave his personal blessing to my work and told the others in the room that they should aid my research in any way they could” (Goodman, 45). The 1980s is also when our/my medical multi community records start, and in the very first surviving one—the Speaking for Ourselves newsletter from 1986—Eliza, Betty, Beth Ann, et al. mention “this person called the Indian Princess: a Potawatamee Indian at that,” among their roster (14).
In the 1990s, our/my records really kick off and there become too many examples to list, so here’s just a smattering:
In the June 1992 issue of Many Voices (the “exotic alters” issue), there are many alters who differ from their vessels in gender, disability, species, and indeed, racialization. My favorite is a digital drawing made by Starflower, shared by Julie etc., which shows the large figure of a polar bear encompassing and protecting the other alters, the humans of which are represented as tiny faces with black and white skin or hair and different hair textures (ibid). Meanwhile, Kristen, for Kathy & Co. writes, “We are a cross-section of society. We are a family. Boys, girls, old, young, black, white—we all fit” (12).
In the private August 1992 BBS records I got from Astraea, someone with the handle “Hey Jood” says, “I even have one [personality] who is an old Cherokee Indian Chief!” Iris of Astraea says, “I’m the only African-American (that I know of) in my household. […] Our Switchboard Operator looks Alaskan Indian or Chinese.” Having met Astraea in person, and knowing folks who’ve known them, their vessel is not racialized as black; they’re of Native descent.
In 1993, Rene Georges, a self-identified black Haitian Vodouisant, describes his marriages to Ezili (Erzulie) Freda (who is described as “white” and speaks Creole, 298) and Ezili Dantó, who is described as “black” “from l’Afrique Ginen” (288) and speaking in “some African dialect” (291). Dantó mounts a Haitian mambo, while Georges’s aunt is mounted by Ogou (295), who Georges describes as “white. Mulatto, it’s the color you dream him. You never dream Ogou as black” (294).
In 1995, Francisca Kolipi, a Mapuche thunder machi (shaman) is possessed by previous (and deceased) machi, Rosa Kurin, as has reportedly been the case since 1960: “Rosa’s spirit took over her body and speech” (Bacigalupo, 113). Rosa Kurin “was of mixed ethnicity, which placed her in a condition of otherness. People of mixed gringo and Mapuche descent are thought to possess special powers because they see the world as both insiders and outsider, and Rosa was one of only a few blonde or red-haired, blue-eyed German-Mapuche machi in Aracucanía” (51). Kolipi herself is also of mixed-ethnicity, though of non-Mapuche mestizo and Mapuche descent; “unlike Rosa, Francisca did not have the socioeconomic status that comes with blue eyes, red hair, and noble Mapuche and German origins” (80, 81). Nonetheless, after her death, “community members merged [Kolipi’s] personhood with that of Rosa, referring to the combined spirit as ‘the thunder machi’ (tralkan machi) rather than as ‘Rosa’ or ‘Francisca’” (214). (Going into Mapuche conceptions of self and personhood would be a massive digression, so suffice to say: it is radically different than Euro-American conceptions and pisses on the singlet/plural binary. Bacigalupo’s book is dense and challenging, but highly recommended.)
It is also in the nineties that Kama Devi, an American, is inadvertently (and uneasily) taken over by Kali at a Dakshinkali temple in Nepal (Rose, Chapter 6). Kama was so “perturbed” that she sought out an exorcist. “When Kama told the exorcist what had happened, the exorcist said, ‘so let me get this straight. Whatever is in your body says that it’s Kali, and she won’t leave?’
“Kama said, ‘right.’
“To which the exorcist replied, ‘if Kali’s not coming out, I’m not going in after her.’” (Rose, 105).
Kama Devi isn’t the only ‘90s woman getting possessed by Kalli. Lalitha, a woman from Tamil Nadu in India, switches languages and “speaks in Hindi” “when possessed by Kali” (Halliburton, 122). This is only one instance in a greater paper on spirit possession in Kerala, including cross-religious experiences like “Anna, a 35-year-old Christian woman, [who] was possessed by Chattan and Kutty Chattan (mischievous spirits from Hindu cosmology), Namboodiri (a 22-year-old Brahmin boy), a woman named Threesia, and a low caste version of Anna herself” (120). There is also the reverse, “Bose, a 16-year-old Hindu boy who said he was possessed by Jesus Christ” (ibid). One can argue whether Chattan, Kutty Chattan, or Jesus Christ have ethnicity in a human sense, but their hosts clearly come for a different religious and sometimes linguistic background, so we/I think a case can be made for it!
Once we reach the 2000s, we/I arrive on the scene and cross-ethnic headmates, alters, soulbonds, and walk-ins are, if not normal, rarely worthy of comment. This remains true regardless of the vessel’s ethnic group, and this aspect of our/my social life never changes, not once in the nineteen years we/I’ve been here. The bigger the roster, the higher the likelihood of it happening. Most folks don’t disclose their vessel’s race or ethnicity for obvious safety reasons, but even for the ones we/I don’t know the ethnicity of, the sheer diversity of the crews makes it borderline-impossible for them to all match their vessel. Since we/I can’t name most of them out of privacy concerns, here are a couple public records of folks:
Downtide, a British plural system (n.d.) mention “our first fictive, appearing in 1999/2000” named Maggie, a “brash, outspoken Scot from an alternate future in which she’s a Mech pilot” (2022). Maggie is mentioned to rarely front, but that still means that she has at least once!
Eclective, a soulbonder/midcont system who will later identify multiple as well, describe having a Japanese bond, Daidouji Tomoyo (2002), but they themselves are “heading off to university in a few months’ time to study Japanese” (2004), a strong implication that they themselves are not Japanese even if I didn’t know people who knew them and could tell me so.
Meanwhile, back in the world of traditionally published nonfiction, we have the 2019 case of “K,” a Malayalam debt collector in India in his sixties who developed Tamil and Marwari personality states, with accompanying language switching, after a left parietal hematoma, a brain injury (Sreenivasa and Mayur, 2019). Back in the USA, Ronnie Gladden releases White Girl Within in 2023, a memoir written in the form of a series of letters between Ronnie (who is racialized as black and gendered as male) and White Girl, with much talk of what race means.
All of this is to say: white people did not invent this. They dominate our/my records, but that’s because they dominate my/our local culture and literature. People might dislike or challenge the cases we/I describe, but they still exist. There is so much racism and confirmation bias in the claim that cross-ethnic headmates are the sole invention and province of whites. The only way to believe it is to bleach all the non-white people for political convenience, which is not only cruel but factually untrue. Even medical multiplicity, that “white woman’s illness,” has that reputation from years of entrenched medical racism and confirmation bias, plus colorstuck Americans who can’t see past their own hang-ups.
My/our research into the other cultural forms of spirited/many-selvedness is barely embryonic! The whole 1800s might as well just be a sign reading Here There Be Spiritualists! Someone who properly knows the history of Haitian Vodou, or Spiritualism and Spiritism, or Umbanda or Candomblé or any one of the countless other religions and cultures out there, would have so much more to say about this, and so much more intelligently! Our/my sources are hopelessly Anglophone and American, because that’s what we/I can most easily get. There is so much more out there that we/I know nothing about (yet)!
Why do these headmates exist, though? Aren’t they bad, racist things to have? Well, for that, you’ll have to wait for the next installment!
Citations:
Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.
Baldwin, Louis. Oneselves: Multiple Personalities, 1811-1871. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1984.
Brandsma, Jeffrey M. and Arnold M. Ludwig. “A Case of Multiple Personality Diagnosis and Therapy.” In The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Vol. XXII, No. 3, 216-233, 1974.
Clell, Madison. Cuckoo. Portland, OR: Green Door Press, 2002.
Craddock, Ida. “Heavenly Bridegrooms: An Epilogue.” Retrieved from http://idacraddock.com/epilogue.html
Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson, 1953.
Dewar, H. “Report on a Communication from Dr Dyce of Aberdeen, to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, ‘On Uterine Irritation, and its Effects on the Female Constitution.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. XI. Edinburgh: Williams & Charles Tait, 1822, 365-379
Downtide. “Profile.” Not dated, retrieved from https://downtide.dreamwidth.org/profile
Downtide. “State of the System.” January 22, 2022. Retrieved from https://downtide.dreamwidth.org/104499.html
Eclective, Riesz Fenrir and Daidouji Tomoyo of. “An Intro to Midcontinuum Multiplicity.” July 8, 2002. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20020918063730/http://childofmana.tripod.com/multiplemidcont-intro.htm
Eclective, Riesz Fenrir. “Soulbonding and Multiplicity: What’s the Deal?” May 15, 2004. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20040515070049/http://soulbonding.tripod.com/ouressays_multiple.htm
Eliza, Betty, Beth Ann, et al. “Would you believe that my therapist has actually given me homework to write to you?” Speaking for Ourselves, Vol. 1, No. 4, 14, June 1986.
Flournoy, Theodore. From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia. New York and London Harper & Brothers, 1900. Accessed May 8, 2020, from sacred-texts.com
Georges, Rene and Houlberg, Marilyn. “My Double Mystic Marriages to Two Goddesses of Love: an Interview.” In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 1993. Retrieved from http://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Misc/Rene-MyDoubleMysticMarriagestoTwoGoddessesofLove.pdf
Gilkey, Laura. “Who I Am.” Accessed October 2, 2024 from the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20030117075620/http://shininghalf.com:80/liteside/who.html Original link http://shininghalf.com:80/liteside/who.html 2003 January 17
Gladden, Ronnie. White Girl Within: Letters of Self-Discovery Between a Transgender and Transracial Black Man and His Inner Female. October Publishing, 2023.
Gmelin, Eberhardt. Materialen fur die anthropologie. Translated by papierfliegerfalter. Tubingen, Germany: Cotta. Retrieved from http://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Info/1791MaterialienfurdieAnthropologietranslation.pdf
Goodman, Felicitas D. How About Demons? Possessions and Exorcism in the Modern World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1988.
Halliburton, Murphy. “‘Just Some Spirits’: The Erosion of Spirit Possession and the Rise of ‘Tension’ in South India.” Medical Anthroplogy, Vol. 24, 111-144, 2005.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1938, reprint 2009.
James, William. “Notes On Automatic Writing.” Proceedings of the American Society of Psychical Research, vol. 1, Part 1-4, 1995-1889.
James, William. “The Mutations of the Self.” In the Principles of Psychology. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57628/57628-h/57628-h.htm#Page_373
Keyes, Daniel. The Minds of Billy Milligan. New York: Random House, 1981.
Leonard, Gladys Osborne. My Life in Two Worlds. 1931. Retrieved from https://www.rune.ws/rune/lydboker/may2016upload/gladysOsborneLeonard_my-LifeIn2worlds/My%20Live%20in%20Two%20Worlds%20by%20Gladys%20Leonard.pdf
Ludwig, Arnold M., Jeffrey M. Brandsma, Cornelia B. Wilbur, Fernando Bendfeldt, and Douglas H. Jameson. “The Objective Study of a Multiples Personality: Or, Are Four Heads Better Than One?” In Archive of General Psychiatry, Vol. 26, 298-310, April 1972.
Radclyffe-Hall and Troubridge. “A Series of Sittings with Mrs. Osborne Leonard.” Proceedings for the Society for Psychical Research, vol. XXX, Part LXXVIII. London: Francis Edwards, December 1919.
Rose, Megan. Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldly Beings. Rochester, VT: Bear & Co, 2022.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Heaven’s Bride: the Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Maryr, and Madwoman. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Schreiber, Flora Rheta. Sybil. New York: Warner Books, 1973.
Sreenivasa, Vyjayanthi, and Prashanth Mayur. “Dissociation of identity following left parietal haematoma – a single case report.” Australasian Psychiatry, 1-3, 2019.
the Troops for Truddi Chase. When Rabbit Howls. New York: Berkley Books.
The very idea of a cross-ethnic headmate can be so emotionally loaded that we/I feel the need to be far more strict in our definitions than we normally are, just to avoid getting bogged down in endless hair-splitting along the lines of, “but does that really count?” turf battles over terminology, or derailments about white guilt, white purity, and just plain whiteness. We’ll discuss that (oh, will we discuss that) in the next installment. For now, let’s focus on proving that cross-ethnic headmates are a wide-ranging phenomenon.
First of all, to count as “cross-ethnic,” for this essay, the folks involved must differ in at least one of four main criteria:
- Nationality (a Canadian is not the same as an American)
- Language (a Hindi speaker is not the same as a Malayalam speaker)
- Culturally significant religion (a Northern Irish Protestant differs from a Northern Irish Catholic)
- Locally-significant racialization (a mulatto Haitian differs from a black Haitian, though they both might read as “black” in the USA)
- You may notice that we are focusing on ethnicity instead of race. Why? Because applying USA conceptions of race to people in Haiti or Chile or India is wrong. Our definition of ethnicity is also culturally biased and lacking, but at least it’s based on something besides douchebaggery and enslavement.
Finally, for this essay if nowhere else, we will restrict ourself to human (or humanoid) beings with human ethnicities that exist in this vessel reality. As an example, our headmate Grey, an Ashkenazi Jew, counts as cross-ethnic, while Mori (whose ethnicity is extremely local to us) does not.
These restrictions are not culturally neutral. They’re basically the DSM-III-R requirements for someone to count as an alter for the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder, a product of American medical culture of the 1980s! It sucks, and we really hope that once we/I prove our point, we can chuck this nonsense. Our restrictions cut a huge number of people—not just most nonhumans, but plenty of humans who simply come from lands and cultures that have no analogs here, like our own Rogan and Mori. It also cuts people who don’t want to front, haven’t gotten around to it yet, or just plain don’t do it clearly enough in the source we reference for us to avoid the hair-splitting arguments. If you didn’t know us extremely well, Falcon and Grey would also be cut by these restrictions—40% of our human-passing roster in total.
All of this is to say, we are layering understatement on top of cultural bias on top of ignorance on top of erasure. The way we frame the question limits the answer, and our “does this really count?” pedantry have real effects on how we view real people. Keep that in mind.
A Brief Historical Overview of Cross-Ethnic Headmates
The very first medical multi case we/I have, the Caroline H. case from Gmelin 1791, involves a German (well, Stuttgart) woman whose “changed personality” was French. While to a race-brained American, it may be temping to say, “whatever, they’re both white,” that’s an absurd conflation of two different nations with very different languages, cultures, and governments—at this time, Stuttgart was a German-speaking part of the Holy Roman Empire, a monarchy, while France had just had a famous revolution! Indeed, Gmelin credits this to Caroline’s “fits”: “this highly sensitive person put herself often and continuously into the miserable position of the refugee French people” and “the sad imaginations of the refugee French people created a focus [personality] that approached and finally surpassed the original one” (76-77, translation paperfliegerfalter’s). In her “paroxysms,” Caroline showed an “uncommon aptitude” for the French language (84) and “[spoke] German in the manner of a Frenchman,” (83) “butchering the German words in the way the French do” (7). “She believes that she had gone into a monastery in Paris in her second year of life, been raised there, but had escaped in the recent unrest that broke out there” and “come to Stuttgart” (3). So the very start of “Western” concept of medical multiplicity involves cross-ethnic personalities!
There’s a tragic hundred-year gap between Caroline H. and our next record (for now, anyway), but that’s a problem of our ignorance, not history, because by 1890, William James is making snarky remarks about the “Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage[s]” who appeared with the Spiritualists of his day (394). “Calling the ladies ‘squaws,’ the men ‘braves,’ the house a ‘wigwam,’ etc., etc., are excessively common,” he reports (ibid, 395). A year prior, in an 1889 article on automatic writing, he mentions “trance-mediumship, with its Indian or other outlandish ‘control,’ giving more or less optimistic messages from the ‘summer-land’” (555, emphasis his). Clearly this was common enough for William James to roll his eyes about it, expecting his reader to know exactly what he was talking about.
By 1895, Ida Craddock is on the scene. Though most of her focus is on her spirit husband, Soph, and her deceased relatives, she also has “her spirit guide (and brother-in-law) Iases, a Brahmin from India, [who] was training her ‘in conformity with the yogic life lived by the Oriental yogis’” (Schmidt, 120). Iases was not a member of Ida’s family in this world; the sister he married, “Nana, […] had ‘passed over’ as a baby before Ida was born. Now all grown up to ‘womanhood’ on the other side,” Iases had married her there (Schmidt, 107). Unlike many of the mediums before and after her, Craddock only seems to have spoken about Iases in her private journal and in a private communication to her friend and financier on January 3rd 1895 about work: “Iases seems to have been choosing to use what psychic strength I had to issue instructions regarding the work on ‘Heavenly Bridegrooms’ ....a work which I think I can truly say, is much, much more due to his directing intellect than I should have ever dreamed possible for me as a psychic. […] the great wonder of it all, to me, is that an outside intelligence seems to be running the machine, so to speak, and I am little more than amanuesis for him, —or it, whatever one may call that intelligence. Of course, I am, I trust, a fairly intelligent amanuensis, so that I have no hesitation about making corrections promptly of the matter given to me, when such corrections seem to be needed. But oftener it is the other way round, and Iases corrects my work.” Craddock publicly acknowledged Soph (much to her downfall), but if she ever did so with Iases, I/we don’t know about it.
In 1900, we have the famous Helene Smith case in France, as written up in Fluornoy’s From India to the Planet Mars. Though most of her case involves past lives as Marie Antoinette, an Arab princess, and a Hindu princess, she also is accompanied by a spirit going by the name Leopold—though “the name of Leopold is only a pseudonym under which is concealed the illustrious Cagliostro, who, it appears, was madly infatuated with Queen Marie Antoinette, and who now, discarnate and floating in space, has constituted himself the guardian angel in some respects of Mlle. Smith” (12). Cagliostro was Italian and speaks with an Italian accent (and this identity was apparently known by 1893), but Flournoy is dismissive: “he has nothing in common with the famous thaumaturgist of the last century, save a certain superficial resemblance” (77). He does incontrovertibly take control of Smith’s body and speak through it, though.
Then we have Gladys Osborne Leonard, the famous British trance medium. In her 1931 book, My Life in Two Worlds, describes her first Spiritualist meeting in Great Britain “in my early teens,” so around the 1890s: “a slim, delicate-looking middle-aged woman, with a mild expression […] lurched violently several times. Then to my delight, she gave a tremendous howl—quite a blood-curdling howl—and after violently swinging her arms in a wild circle round her, narrowly missing the chairman and other officials on the platform, a strong, deep, man’s voice broke through her lips, speaking at first in some unknown language, then relapsing into broken English. From the books dealing with adventures in the Wild West—Buffalo Bill and others—I gathered that the woman was acting (most perfectly, I thought) the part of a North American Indian” (15). She also describes a “young man […] rather fat, yet anemic-looking. I didn’t like him at all, but I watched, fascinated, while he stood quietly on the platform. He closed his eyes, passed his hand over his forehead two or three times, and then, to my amazement, a child’s shrill treble voice came from his lips. His whole demeanor changed. The fat ponderous young man became a vivacious, pert little girl of apparently seven or eight years old, with a strong foreign accent” (14).
By 1919, Leonard herself works with a “control” named “Feda” (Radclyffe-Hall and Troubridge, 340), “an ancestress of mine,” “an Indian girl” who “had married my great-great-grandfather,” though likely under dubious circumstances (Leonard, 23). “After marrying this native girl, my great-great grandfather, William Hamilton, was not popular in India, and he made arrangements to bring Feda home to England. On the eve of starting home she gave birth to a son, and died. She was then only thirteen” (Leonard, 23).
Also in 1919 is the Alice case, by Cory. Though Alice herself was not Spanish, Bonita was, claiming to be “the long-departed spirit of a Spanish woman” (Baldwin, 79). “Her Spanish, rapid and mellifluous, doubtless sounded quite genuine to someone not acquainted with the language. Actually, however, it was an untranslatable mish-mash of Spanish, and Spanish-sounding, words and phrases” (79-80).
In 1938, Zora Neale Hurston reports in her anthropologic work, Tell My Horse, that the Haitian lwa Erzulie “is a mulatto and so when she is impersonated by the blacks, they powder their faces with talcum” (122). She is also happy to possess Haitians of all genders: “He [the new adept] is ‘mounted’ by the spirit of Erzulie, who sometimes talks at great length, giving advice and making recommendations” (125). She also devotes a short chapter to Dr. Reser, a “white man who is a houngan,” an “American,” and “an officer in charge of the state insane asylum as Point Beudet” (245-246). “I have seen him in the grip of the African loa (spirits) known as possession: that is, the spirits have entered his head and driven his own consciousness out. I have seen him reeling as if he were drunk under the spirit possession like any Haitian peasant” (252). We include lwa in this essay because ethnicity, race, and racism are such big parts of them… though not necessarily in the same way every time.
In 1953, Erzulie (along with Loco and Azacca) also possessed Maya Deren, a Jewish, Kiev-born American immigrant (Deren, Chapter VII). Decades after her death, Deren herself will become spirit-married to a Baton Rouge Vodou houngan asogwe named Henri, who sees her as a beloved ancestor (Rose, Spirit Marriage, 210-212).
Come the 1970s, our/my records get a lot more numerous, like Billy Milligan, an American with an English alter named Arthur and a Slavic one named Ragen (Keyes, xv) and Sybil’s famous French alter, Vicky whose “mother and father, […] brothers and sisters […] all live in Paris” (Schreiber). Predating them both in the literature, however, is the far less famous Jonah, an African-American man with Usoffa Abdulla, a warrior “born in Africa” (Brandsma and Ludwig, 226). Usoffa Abdulla credits his creation to an act of racist violence: “when Jonah was 9 or 10 years old, a gang of white boys decided one day to beat him up after school just ‘for sport.’ They proceeded to pummel Jonah with their fists, and he became absolutely terrified that he was going to die. At that point, Jonah lost consciousness and Usoffa Abdulla emerged. Usoffa fought so viciously and vehemently that he purportedly almost killed a couple of the boys” (Ludwig et al., 300). Judging by Jonah’s age, this assault would’ve taken place around 1955. Remember Jonah and Usoffa Abdulla; we’ll come back to them in the next installment!
In the 1980s, we have Mean Joe, a black member of the Troops for Truddi Chase in When Rabbit Howls—apparently somewhat inspired by a corporeal person who was kind to them in childhood. We/I also have citations from this decade involving both American and Brazilian Spiritualism, thanks to Goodman’s regrettably titled How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World. Goodman remarks in her (non-Brazilian) Spiritualism chapter that “Indian spirits are frequently mentioned,” surely causing William James to roll his eyes from beyond the grave (35). But, lest anyone think this is a tendency only to be found in Euro-Americans, Goodman discusses similar in Brazilian Umbanda, where such Indian spirits are apparently called “caboclos” (45). Meanwhile, “prêtos velhos are spirits of dead Afro-Brazilian slaves, very gentle and easy to approach, grandfatherly in manner” (ibid). Goodman also quotes liberally from an earlier 1974 experience of an American anthropologist, Pressel, studying Umbanda in Brazil. In the course of her research, Pressel’s informant, Cecilia, is possessed by an Indian spirit who, after being introduced to Pressel, “gave his personal blessing to my work and told the others in the room that they should aid my research in any way they could” (Goodman, 45). The 1980s is also when our/my medical multi community records start, and in the very first surviving one—the Speaking for Ourselves newsletter from 1986—Eliza, Betty, Beth Ann, et al. mention “this person called the Indian Princess: a Potawatamee Indian at that,” among their roster (14).
In the 1990s, our/my records really kick off and there become too many examples to list, so here’s just a smattering:
In the June 1992 issue of Many Voices (the “exotic alters” issue), there are many alters who differ from their vessels in gender, disability, species, and indeed, racialization. My favorite is a digital drawing made by Starflower, shared by Julie etc., which shows the large figure of a polar bear encompassing and protecting the other alters, the humans of which are represented as tiny faces with black and white skin or hair and different hair textures (ibid). Meanwhile, Kristen, for Kathy & Co. writes, “We are a cross-section of society. We are a family. Boys, girls, old, young, black, white—we all fit” (12).
In the private August 1992 BBS records I got from Astraea, someone with the handle “Hey Jood” says, “I even have one [personality] who is an old Cherokee Indian Chief!” Iris of Astraea says, “I’m the only African-American (that I know of) in my household. […] Our Switchboard Operator looks Alaskan Indian or Chinese.” Having met Astraea in person, and knowing folks who’ve known them, their vessel is not racialized as black; they’re of Native descent.
In 1993, Rene Georges, a self-identified black Haitian Vodouisant, describes his marriages to Ezili (Erzulie) Freda (who is described as “white” and speaks Creole, 298) and Ezili Dantó, who is described as “black” “from l’Afrique Ginen” (288) and speaking in “some African dialect” (291). Dantó mounts a Haitian mambo, while Georges’s aunt is mounted by Ogou (295), who Georges describes as “white. Mulatto, it’s the color you dream him. You never dream Ogou as black” (294).
In 1995, Francisca Kolipi, a Mapuche thunder machi (shaman) is possessed by previous (and deceased) machi, Rosa Kurin, as has reportedly been the case since 1960: “Rosa’s spirit took over her body and speech” (Bacigalupo, 113). Rosa Kurin “was of mixed ethnicity, which placed her in a condition of otherness. People of mixed gringo and Mapuche descent are thought to possess special powers because they see the world as both insiders and outsider, and Rosa was one of only a few blonde or red-haired, blue-eyed German-Mapuche machi in Aracucanía” (51). Kolipi herself is also of mixed-ethnicity, though of non-Mapuche mestizo and Mapuche descent; “unlike Rosa, Francisca did not have the socioeconomic status that comes with blue eyes, red hair, and noble Mapuche and German origins” (80, 81). Nonetheless, after her death, “community members merged [Kolipi’s] personhood with that of Rosa, referring to the combined spirit as ‘the thunder machi’ (tralkan machi) rather than as ‘Rosa’ or ‘Francisca’” (214). (Going into Mapuche conceptions of self and personhood would be a massive digression, so suffice to say: it is radically different than Euro-American conceptions and pisses on the singlet/plural binary. Bacigalupo’s book is dense and challenging, but highly recommended.)
It is also in the nineties that Kama Devi, an American, is inadvertently (and uneasily) taken over by Kali at a Dakshinkali temple in Nepal (Rose, Chapter 6). Kama was so “perturbed” that she sought out an exorcist. “When Kama told the exorcist what had happened, the exorcist said, ‘so let me get this straight. Whatever is in your body says that it’s Kali, and she won’t leave?’
“Kama said, ‘right.’
“To which the exorcist replied, ‘if Kali’s not coming out, I’m not going in after her.’” (Rose, 105).
Kama Devi isn’t the only ‘90s woman getting possessed by Kalli. Lalitha, a woman from Tamil Nadu in India, switches languages and “speaks in Hindi” “when possessed by Kali” (Halliburton, 122). This is only one instance in a greater paper on spirit possession in Kerala, including cross-religious experiences like “Anna, a 35-year-old Christian woman, [who] was possessed by Chattan and Kutty Chattan (mischievous spirits from Hindu cosmology), Namboodiri (a 22-year-old Brahmin boy), a woman named Threesia, and a low caste version of Anna herself” (120). There is also the reverse, “Bose, a 16-year-old Hindu boy who said he was possessed by Jesus Christ” (ibid). One can argue whether Chattan, Kutty Chattan, or Jesus Christ have ethnicity in a human sense, but their hosts clearly come for a different religious and sometimes linguistic background, so we/I think a case can be made for it!
Once we reach the 2000s, we/I arrive on the scene and cross-ethnic headmates, alters, soulbonds, and walk-ins are, if not normal, rarely worthy of comment. This remains true regardless of the vessel’s ethnic group, and this aspect of our/my social life never changes, not once in the nineteen years we/I’ve been here. The bigger the roster, the higher the likelihood of it happening. Most folks don’t disclose their vessel’s race or ethnicity for obvious safety reasons, but even for the ones we/I don’t know the ethnicity of, the sheer diversity of the crews makes it borderline-impossible for them to all match their vessel. Since we/I can’t name most of them out of privacy concerns, here are a couple public records of folks:
Downtide, a British plural system (n.d.) mention “our first fictive, appearing in 1999/2000” named Maggie, a “brash, outspoken Scot from an alternate future in which she’s a Mech pilot” (2022). Maggie is mentioned to rarely front, but that still means that she has at least once!
Eclective, a soulbonder/midcont system who will later identify multiple as well, describe having a Japanese bond, Daidouji Tomoyo (2002), but they themselves are “heading off to university in a few months’ time to study Japanese” (2004), a strong implication that they themselves are not Japanese even if I didn’t know people who knew them and could tell me so.
Meanwhile, back in the world of traditionally published nonfiction, we have the 2019 case of “K,” a Malayalam debt collector in India in his sixties who developed Tamil and Marwari personality states, with accompanying language switching, after a left parietal hematoma, a brain injury (Sreenivasa and Mayur, 2019). Back in the USA, Ronnie Gladden releases White Girl Within in 2023, a memoir written in the form of a series of letters between Ronnie (who is racialized as black and gendered as male) and White Girl, with much talk of what race means.
All of this is to say: white people did not invent this. They dominate our/my records, but that’s because they dominate my/our local culture and literature. People might dislike or challenge the cases we/I describe, but they still exist. There is so much racism and confirmation bias in the claim that cross-ethnic headmates are the sole invention and province of whites. The only way to believe it is to bleach all the non-white people for political convenience, which is not only cruel but factually untrue. Even medical multiplicity, that “white woman’s illness,” has that reputation from years of entrenched medical racism and confirmation bias, plus colorstuck Americans who can’t see past their own hang-ups.
My/our research into the other cultural forms of spirited/many-selvedness is barely embryonic! The whole 1800s might as well just be a sign reading Here There Be Spiritualists! Someone who properly knows the history of Haitian Vodou, or Spiritualism and Spiritism, or Umbanda or Candomblé or any one of the countless other religions and cultures out there, would have so much more to say about this, and so much more intelligently! Our/my sources are hopelessly Anglophone and American, because that’s what we/I can most easily get. There is so much more out there that we/I know nothing about (yet)!
Why do these headmates exist, though? Aren’t they bad, racist things to have? Well, for that, you’ll have to wait for the next installment!
Citations:
Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.
Baldwin, Louis. Oneselves: Multiple Personalities, 1811-1871. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1984.
Brandsma, Jeffrey M. and Arnold M. Ludwig. “A Case of Multiple Personality Diagnosis and Therapy.” In The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Vol. XXII, No. 3, 216-233, 1974.
Clell, Madison. Cuckoo. Portland, OR: Green Door Press, 2002.
Craddock, Ida. “Heavenly Bridegrooms: An Epilogue.” Retrieved from http://idacraddock.com/epilogue.html
Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson, 1953.
Dewar, H. “Report on a Communication from Dr Dyce of Aberdeen, to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, ‘On Uterine Irritation, and its Effects on the Female Constitution.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. XI. Edinburgh: Williams & Charles Tait, 1822, 365-379
Downtide. “Profile.” Not dated, retrieved from https://downtide.dreamwidth.org/profile
Downtide. “State of the System.” January 22, 2022. Retrieved from https://downtide.dreamwidth.org/104499.html
Eclective, Riesz Fenrir and Daidouji Tomoyo of. “An Intro to Midcontinuum Multiplicity.” July 8, 2002. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20020918063730/http://childofmana.tripod.com/multiplemidcont-intro.htm
Eclective, Riesz Fenrir. “Soulbonding and Multiplicity: What’s the Deal?” May 15, 2004. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20040515070049/http://soulbonding.tripod.com/ouressays_multiple.htm
Eliza, Betty, Beth Ann, et al. “Would you believe that my therapist has actually given me homework to write to you?” Speaking for Ourselves, Vol. 1, No. 4, 14, June 1986.
Flournoy, Theodore. From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia. New York and London Harper & Brothers, 1900. Accessed May 8, 2020, from sacred-texts.com
Georges, Rene and Houlberg, Marilyn. “My Double Mystic Marriages to Two Goddesses of Love: an Interview.” In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 1993. Retrieved from http://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Misc/Rene-MyDoubleMysticMarriagestoTwoGoddessesofLove.pdf
Gilkey, Laura. “Who I Am.” Accessed October 2, 2024 from the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20030117075620/http://shininghalf.com:80/liteside/who.html Original link http://shininghalf.com:80/liteside/who.html 2003 January 17
Gladden, Ronnie. White Girl Within: Letters of Self-Discovery Between a Transgender and Transracial Black Man and His Inner Female. October Publishing, 2023.
Gmelin, Eberhardt. Materialen fur die anthropologie. Translated by papierfliegerfalter. Tubingen, Germany: Cotta. Retrieved from http://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Info/1791MaterialienfurdieAnthropologietranslation.pdf
Goodman, Felicitas D. How About Demons? Possessions and Exorcism in the Modern World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1988.
Halliburton, Murphy. “‘Just Some Spirits’: The Erosion of Spirit Possession and the Rise of ‘Tension’ in South India.” Medical Anthroplogy, Vol. 24, 111-144, 2005.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1938, reprint 2009.
James, William. “Notes On Automatic Writing.” Proceedings of the American Society of Psychical Research, vol. 1, Part 1-4, 1995-1889.
James, William. “The Mutations of the Self.” In the Principles of Psychology. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57628/57628-h/57628-h.htm#Page_373
Keyes, Daniel. The Minds of Billy Milligan. New York: Random House, 1981.
Leonard, Gladys Osborne. My Life in Two Worlds. 1931. Retrieved from https://www.rune.ws/rune/lydboker/may2016upload/gladysOsborneLeonard_my-LifeIn2worlds/My%20Live%20in%20Two%20Worlds%20by%20Gladys%20Leonard.pdf
Ludwig, Arnold M., Jeffrey M. Brandsma, Cornelia B. Wilbur, Fernando Bendfeldt, and Douglas H. Jameson. “The Objective Study of a Multiples Personality: Or, Are Four Heads Better Than One?” In Archive of General Psychiatry, Vol. 26, 298-310, April 1972.
Radclyffe-Hall and Troubridge. “A Series of Sittings with Mrs. Osborne Leonard.” Proceedings for the Society for Psychical Research, vol. XXX, Part LXXVIII. London: Francis Edwards, December 1919.
Rose, Megan. Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldly Beings. Rochester, VT: Bear & Co, 2022.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Heaven’s Bride: the Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Maryr, and Madwoman. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Schreiber, Flora Rheta. Sybil. New York: Warner Books, 1973.
Sreenivasa, Vyjayanthi, and Prashanth Mayur. “Dissociation of identity following left parietal haematoma – a single case report.” Australasian Psychiatry, 1-3, 2019.
the Troops for Truddi Chase. When Rabbit Howls. New York: Berkley Books.
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Date: 2026-07-31 02:22 am (UTC)I don't get the impression people choose who their headmates are, but even if it happens, I don't understand how the inside of a person can be bad - well, other than purely physical badness like your insides aren't working right.
But then, I don't understand most people's hangups about other people's business.
no subject
Date: 2026-07-31 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-02 05:01 am (UTC)Oh hey! We coined cross-ethnic! Nice to see it getting use! :)
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Date: 2026-08-02 03:30 pm (UTC)EDIT: my mistake, Em of Plures were also using it by 2014! https://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/intersections/the-race-issue-3-0/