lb_lee | Entries tagged with plural:possession

This is a very brief selection from a much larger 1988 book I found in a free box, Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories. It is a life story from a woman involved with Brazilian spiritualism (more specifically, umbanda). The book is still miraculously in print, and there is a screen-readable version for the print-disabled on archive.org.

Citation: Patai, Daphne. “ÂNGELA: ‘In Spiritualism There’s Real Equality.’” In Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories, 109-110, 120-125, 364-365. New Brunswick: Rutgers,1988.

( Book selection about the orix�s possessing and incorporating into people involved in the umbanda religion. �ngela herself hasn't been possessed, but it's nevertheless and everyday part of her religious life. )

Rogan: After making my silly Bechdel in Bookshelf post, I found myself thinking about other variations. I also found myself thinking about how community is shown in fiction.

( Multis, books, and the Bechdel Test )

Current Mood: drained

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Summary: “By placing it into the hands of physicians, spirit sex is relegated to the status of a disease that must be cured. […] by regarding sex with spirits as a psychological disorder of the mind, it can be dismissed as a mere fantasy or illusion, probably induced by some childhood trauma, that has no value to or significance in the so-called real world. The view is that once a person who is under the ‘illusion’ that he or she is having sex with a spirit has been successfully counseled, the aberrant notion will simply fade away like a forgotten dream.” (Tyson, 25)
Series: Essay (sorta)
Word Count: 3000ish
Notes: Rough transcription and expansion of a talk I gave for the Pleasure Pie Sex Salon in November 2023; it was the blow-out winner of the writing poll! Mentions of psychiatric abuse, exorcism, rape, violence, harassment, negative side effects of tantric training, and suicide. Despite all that, this is a happy essay.

Hello! We are Rogan and Mac of LB Lee. We are multi (multiple personalities by popular parlance), we’ve been together since 2007, and we’ve been making comics about it since 2008!

Pretty quickly in, we realized that people had no idea how we have sex, and there was no way for them to learn, asides from asking us rude, intrusive questions. There were no books, no pamphlets, no guides—even the Internet barely mentioned such things, except as “this happens” and “what a freak show!” So we started making works like Alter Boys In Love (2010-2017) and Multi, Orgasmic (2022). But this is a live talk, not a comic, so let’s get into the nuts and bolts: what, exactly, do you do with a noncorporeal partner?

( This is a text-only medium so you just have to imagine us waggling our eyebrows. )

Reading The Altar of My Soul: the Living Traditions of Santería, by Marta Moreno Vega, found this bit on spirit mediumship. Vega first found herself exploring Santería after the spirit of her deceased mother took hold of a medium during a ceremony and spoke to her. This comes afterward:

( Read more... )

Had an excellent first day of sales and will be there again Sunday! Come check us out!

We also blew shameless money there, because there was so much irresistably cool stuff. The haul:

( booooooks )

Man, I have missed doing anarchist events. Watered my heartflowers good!

Current Mood: sleepy

Rogan: I have been working on an essay about being a cyborg, and it's led me to a lot of interesting readings! So since I am sick and don't have a lot to do, nonfiction cyborg linkdump! (With bad citations because I am dumb with plague right now.)

( There are a lot more of these than I thought. Including one plural citation, We Other Fairies by Xavia Publius at the bottom. )

During the pandemic, we discovered the Chuangqi Trilogy by Lydia Kwa: Oracle Bone, the Walking Boy (which we read first), and (just now we discovered) the third book is in preorder, A Dream Wants Waking. (We have just now ordered it. QUEER ROBOT GHOST FUTURE YESPLZ.)

Oracle Bone and the Walking Boy both take place in Tang Dynasty, China--specifically, the capital city of Chang'an. Kwa (who's both a poet and a psychologist by trade) has a gift for delineating the complexity of human relationships, both good and bad, in this beautiful quiet way. She makes this ancient time in a faraway land feel so real and alive; we totally recommend these books if you're interested in queer, character-relationship-focused magical realism of the Chinese variety.

This post is NOT about any of that though. Instead, it's about the OTHER book we found THANKS to her books.

( Learning about a transgender group in India who marry and are possessed by a goddess. )

EDIT: more quotes:

( Read more... )

Mori: finished the Magic Daughter. It was good! Recommended for anyone interested in a MPD integration memoir.

In the same book sweep, I got D. Scott Rogo's "The Infinite Boundary: a psychic look at Spirit Possession, Madness, and Multiple Personality," which I do not recommend. It's too credulous for me, and the whole prologue is about a trans woman being made cis and straight through exorcism. Ech!

But go figure, it has the first medical multi citation of headmate sex I know of! And of course, it comes from Ralph fuckin' Allison.

Allison was considered one of THE multi shrinks, back in the day. He coined the term "Inner Self-Helper," cured Henry Dana Hawksworth, but by 1980 he was already drinking his own Koolaid and turned into a crank convinced that multiples had psychic powers and called to demonic entities to possess them. Dude started exorcising his patients and wrote about it in his 1980 book, Minds In Many Pieces, which is where Rogo pulls the following story: while treating a female multi, "an unfamiliar entity, who called himself 'Dennis,' suddenly popped forth. He stated that he was possessing Elise because of his sexual attraction toward 'Shannon,' an important secondary personality of the patient's! (...) The inexplicable appearance of Dennis confused Dr. Allison, who had never heard of one secondary personality falling in love with another. (...) The therapist asked 'Dennis' just how he expected to consummate his love for Shannon. 'Dennis's' response was (...) That he could possess anyone Elise dated. 'Shannon' was called forth (...) And she corroborated 'Dennis's' story." (261-262)

Of course, Elise's ISH says that Dennis "had taken control of Elise because of her experiments with witchcraft, which had opened her to ge evil," (262) and they end up exorcising him very dramatically.

Ugh. I can't believe the earliest citation I have for this now is THAT book, which I reeeeeaaally don't want to read! Even the selections of Rogo I pounded through were a drag!

Current Mood: grumpy

Still on Dreamwidth break, but read something too cool not to share. This is from Xavia Publius's "Anima Ex Machina: Meatsuit Realness and Transformative Reenchantment," which is only publicly available in the (perversely paper-only) Digital Performance in Canada. (I ended up emailing Publius for a digital copy. She was very gracious about it.) Accordingly, this academic essay is mostly about technology, performance, and the immersion, enchantment, and rapture thereof, but there's a bit on pages 102-103 about "electric theology" and trance possession and kenosis (the divine emptying of self) in technology:

( Publius is dense and tough for me, so I will probably be digesting and rereading this. )

Because

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) )

( Dagara (Burkina Faso) )

( Ibibio )

( Igbo )

( Uganda )

( Yoruba (Nigeria) )

Asia

( Ethnic Chinese overseas in Malaysia and elsewhere )

( western India (around Karnakata) (jogatis) )

( Nepal (Shakta Tantra) )

Australia and Pacific Islands

( Bali, Indonesia )

( Tigabinamga (Indonesia) )

North America (and Caribbean)

( Algonquian )

( Haitian Vodou )

( Iroquois )

( Mexican Santa Muertistas )

( Native American )

( USA (New Orleans Voodoo) )

( Miscellaneous )

Do you have a source I don't? Tell me about it!

I'm going to post some notes I took from Monni Adams's Designs for Living from 1982 (made in Cambridge MA at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in cooperation with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology).

I grabbed this from a free box and liberated it soon after (so sorry, if you're wanting more context for these quotes, I don't have it). Ostensibly, it is about the design of various art objects (masks, sculpture, textiles) from various peoples scattered around Africa, but it has some interesting stuff about art, religion, spirit possession, and spirit marriage that I thought folks might also want to read! (Especially since this book looks exactly like the kind that is hard to find and expensive to buy.) It bugs me how all these different peoples are kinda lumped together but whatever, it's still information I didn't have before. The peoples mentioned here include the Yoruba, the Ibibio (both mostly in Nigeria) and the Baule (Cote D'Ivoire).

( Very singlet academics from the 1980s pondering this peculiar possession thing and the spirits involved. That's your warning! )

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Entries tagged with plural:possession

ÂNGELA: "In Spiritualism There’s Real Equality"

Multi Bechdel

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

The Altar of My Soul, by Marta Moreno Vega

Boston Anarchist Book Fair CONTINUES!

Cyborg Readings

Jogappa: Gender Identity and the Politics of Exclusion, by Aneka

Ralph Allison and In-System Romance

Xavia Publis's "Anima Ex Machina: Meatsuit Realness and Transformative Reenchantment"

Big Sourcedump of Nonwhite Spirit Marriage, Possession, and Many-Selvedness (1878-2022)

Adams's "Designs for Living" Notes: Spirit Marriage & Possession

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