The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization

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Author: Frederick M. Smith

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the self possessed

Image has been suppressed

the self possessed Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization Image has been suppressed

Frederick M. Smith

columbia university press

new york

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Frederick M. The self possessed : deity and spirit possession in South Asian literature and civilization / Frederick M. Smith. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-231-13748-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-231-51065-9 (electronic) 1. Spirit possession—South Asia. 2. Spirit possession in literature. 3. Sanskrit literature—History and criticism. 4. Tantrism—South Asia. 5. Spirit possession— Hinduism. I. Title. bl1055.s63

2006

133.4´260954—dc22

2005056030

8

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

This book was printed on paper with recycled content.

Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


As a reflection is to a mirror or other similar surface, as cold and heat are to living beings, as a sun’s ray is to one’s gemstone, and as the one sustaining the body is to the body, in the same way “seizers” enter an embodied one but are not seen. ´ susruta samhitā 6.60.19 .

This work is dedicated to the memory of the late Pratap Bhagwandas Mody of Bombay, who demonstrated artfully and convincingly that we are never quite alone.



list of illustr ations xi preface xiii acknowledgments xix introduction xxi

Part I. Orthodoxies, Madness, and Method 1 1.

Academic and Brahmanical Orthodoxies 3 Sanskritic Culture and the Culture of Possession 3 The Sanskritic Vocabulary of Possession 13 Problematics of Interpretation 15

Part II. Ethnography, Modernity, and the Languages of Possession 31 2.

New and Inherited Paradigms: Methodologies for the Study of Possession 33 Classical Study and Ethnography 33 Definitions and Typologies 35

viii

Contents

The Devil’s Work 39 Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Interpretations 43 Possession as a Form of Social Control 56 Possession and Shamanism 60 Possession as Ontological Reality 66 Uakti, the Localization of Divinity, and the Possessed 68 Performative and Biographical Context 75 Conclusions 78

3.

Possession, Trance Channeling, and Modernity 95

4. Notes on Regional Languages and Models of Possession 110 Lexicography, Languages, and Themes 110 Exorcists, Oracles, and Healers 142 Reflections on “Folk” and “Classical” in South Asia 146

Part III. Classical Literature 173 5.

The Vedas and Upaniùads 175 Embodiment and Disembodiment Among the ñùis 175 Possession in the Early Vedic Literature 177 Shape-Shifting and Possession 195 In the Beginning, God Possessed Heaven and Earth 202 Transfer of Essence 211 The Gandharva, the Apsaras, and the Vedic Body 224

6. Friendly Acquisitions, Hostile Takeovers: The Panorama of Possession in the Sanskrit Epics 245 The Mahābhārata, Where Everything Can Be Found 246 Notes on Possession in the Rāmāyaâa 275

7. Enlightenment and the Classical Culture of Possession 284 Possession as Yoga Practice 286 Possession and the Subtle Body in the Yogavāsiù•ha 290 Śaãkara’s Possession of a Dead King 294 Possession and the Body in the Brahmasūtras 297 Possession in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism 302 Conclusions 308

Contents ix

8. Vampires, Prostitutes, and Poets: Narrativity and the Aesthetics of Possession 317 Culture, Fiction, and Possession 317 Possession in Sanskrit Fiction 320 Can There Be an Aesthetic of Possession? 330

9. Devotion as Possession 345 Devotional Possession in the Gītā and Ānandavardhana 345 Vallabhācārya’s Concept of Āveśa 347 Śrī Caitanya and the Gaubīya Concepts of Āveśa, Avatāra, and Multiple Bodies 350 Āveśa and Bhāva 353 Āveśa, Bhāva, and Alternative Vedāntas 356

Part IV. Worldly and Otherworldly Ruptures: Possession as a Healing Modality 363 10.

Possession in Tantra: Constructed Bodies and Empowerment 367 Samāveśa as Tantric Realization 367 Discipline and Enlightenment 368 Divinizing the Body 374 Possession in Buddhist Tantras 390 Tantric Possession and Images of a Multiple Self 398

11.

Tantra and the Diaspora of Childhood Possession 416 The Śaiva and Buddhist Tantras and the South Indian Texts 418 Svasthāveśa and the Prasenā 421 Epigraphical Evidence for the Practice of Svasthāveśa 427 The Ritual of Svasthāveśa 429 Possession Across the Himalayas 432 Aweishe: The Indic Character of Chinese Possession 435 Svasthāveśa in South India 440 The Mantramahodadhhi 441 The Tantrarāja 443 Indian Āveśa and Chinese Aweishe: A Comparison 444 Conclusions 448

x

12.

Contents

The Medicalization of Possession in Āyurveda and Tantra 471 Disease-Producing Spirit Possession 471 Bhūtavidyā: Vedic and Āyurvedic Demonologies 474 Other Indic Demonologies 508 Piśācas and the Piśācmocan Temple 525 Childsnatchers and Therapy to Counter Demonic Possession (Piśācagóhītabhaiùajyam) 530 Healing and the Circulation of Knowledge 536 Possession and Exorcism in Contemporary Āyurveda 544 Diagnosing Possession 551 Conclusions: Notes on the Textuality of Āyurveda 555

13.

Conclusions: Identity Among the Possessed and Dispossessed 579 Variation and Vocabulary 579 Possession and Embodiment 581 Sudden and Gradual 591 Questions and (a Few) Answers 593 Bringing It All Back Home: The Mahābhārata and Traditions of Possession 598

bibliogr aph y 607 index 665


list of il


Plate 1. Boopsie welcomes the 25,000-year-old-warrior Hunk-Ra into her body. 97 Plate 2. Vajrávesa (rDo-rje dbab-pa), a gate guardian (dvárapála). 393 Plate 3. Lunar asterisms (nak{atras) located within a man. 400 Plate 4. Yajñavaráha. Wadhwan, Surendranagar, Gujarat (thirteenth century). 401 Plate 5. Kámadhenu, the “wish-fulfilling cow.” 402 Plate 6. Kámadhenu. 403 Plate 7. Composite elephant. 404 Plate 8. Vi{çu and Lak{mô on Garufa. 405 Plate 9. Ama Ta Bap–Bylekuppe, Karnataka. 452 Plate 10. Alexander erects an enchanted mirror that allows him to monitor activity on the high seas. 453 Plate 11. An astrologer’s shop, Bombay 1947. 472 Plate 12. Pisác Bábá, Pisácmocan Temple, Varanasi. 529



he writing of this volume took me by surprise. I never envisaged it as part of my “research program” until it began to form a life of its own. Eventually, it grew from childhood to adolescence and, typical of adolescence, began to exact unreasonable demands on my resources, including time, place, and modes of thought. Having now achieved maturity, it demands to be set free. On the whole, I would have preferred to be in India translating Sanskrit and examining manuscripts, rather than working on a project like this that imposed on me a new and very different set of intellectual, psychic, and even physical demands. As it turned out, I was forced to examine worlds of thought and theory that I had always suspected lay in wait, less quietly than I appreciated, to ensnare me, while the project unceasingly transgressed boundaries I kept setting on it. Its conception and infancy—I thoughtlessly intended to abandon it in childhood—took the form of papers delivered at annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 1992, the American Oriental Society in 1993, and the Indic Seminar at Columbia University in 1994. My intention in these papers was to examine a few of the semantic issues surrounding some of the key terms for possession that I saw repeated in Sanskrit texts of many different periods and genres. I foolishly believed that I could accomplish this in

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ten, twenty, or thirty pages. Soon enough, however, I discovered the vast ethnographic literature of possession in India and became almost hopelessly entangled—and gridlocked—in the theoretical issues surrounding it. This is discussed in due course, but I must confess here that my reading of possession in modernity had a much greater impact on my reading of possession in antiquity than I had expected or desired. Instead of a paper on possession in antiquity—the initial scope of the project—this has become a work more generally on possession in South Asian culture over a long span of time. After several years, at first intermittently, of data gathering and absorbing stories of possession, then reading and reflecting on theories of possession, and finally engaging it actively, I have arrived, with this book, at a meditation, a perilously intimate one, on personhood, which is sometimes, though not always, contiguous with selfhood. As the title of the book suggests, I find myself attempting to reconcile in this project the self, possessed, with a presentable veneer of self-possession. In this way, the final product has also become a meditation on embodiment and incarnation, gain and loss, transformation and transition, and tradition and imagination, which, my friend Robert Beer reminds me, “must become the same thing” (1988:9). However it began—and the raison d’être of scholarship is often contested, perhaps especially within the mind and body of the scholar him or herself—it was, upon reflection, inspired by the constant, elusive, and very personal conundrum of embodiment, by a sense of the irreducible strangeness of life, by the shock of an eternally mutating present and presence when we seek only past and future permanence, which is to say by the trauma and bewilderment of continuity when we seek resolution and termination. This was aided by a vision of the simultaneity of multiple selves clamoring for dominance, propriety, order, and voice as they succumb to the inexorable force of entropy, by dreams pushed aside incomplete and irretrievable by the disappointment of awakening, and by awakening to (and within) the disappointedness of dream. In short, the process of creating this book has been a long and complicated exorcism. If my selection of material appears planned but extravagant, the reason is that the planning came to life as a learning process, like perfecting a rāga: I found a few unique scales and constantly improvised on them. Thus, the extravagance could never be exhaustive. The material turned out to be much more extensive than I initially expected. In many key places, in dealing with the Mahābhārata, Tantra, and bhakti texts, for example, I was forced to be illustrative and selective. As a friend, a veteran of many books, told me (para-

Preface xv

phrasing W. H. Auden, as I recall) when I was about three-quarters done, this is the kind of book that cannot be completed but, instead, should be abandoned. The lesson for me was that both data and knowledge can be infinite, especially as they are swept up in an ever-expanding vision with everincreasing dimensions and vocalities. The evidence of the multidimensionality and multivocality of possession that I have brought to bear on the topic is more than I had ever hoped to find or thought was even possible. Many readers will still say that I left out this or that, especially from ethnographies or modern autobiographies, or could have interpreted something differently, that I should have attended more to feminist perspectives or psychoanalytic theory. I must also mention that our knowledge of Tantra from the mid-first millennium through the first few centuries of the second millennium c.e. is rapidly expanding, in great measure because of the efforts of Alexis Sanderson and his students at Oxford University. Doubtless, there will soon be much more to say about possession in tantric literature that will add considerably to what I have written in Chapter 10, and may force new paradigms on the notion of possession itself as it was configured historically in India. Nevertheless, for me, this exercise—whatever I have adduced on the topic— has turned religion, particularly as observed in South Asia, on its head, as the material ultimately argues against much of what is stated in standard textbooks. If even a tiny amount of that is transmitted to the reader, this project will have been worth the effort. I should say a few words here about the study of possession. In India and elsewhere, the field has been dominated by compartmentalized ethnographies and, less often, by histories of possession in specific lineages or local cultures. No syncretic history or synoptic account of possession in India has been attempted.1 While my intention here is to locate and capture such a history, I have tried to keep in mind the problems associated with “master narratives” and endeavored to avoid them. Even if I were dedicated to a single theoretical model (and it will soon become obvious that I am not), two things would still parry any attempt to create such a master narrative: the sheer variety of the textual and ethnographic source material, and the delicacy with which the layers of their connections must be handled. I have been constantly aware of the pitfalls of both subjectivity and objectification that confront both scholars and participants who think about and live with possession. This inspires in me a certain trepidation, because it sharpens rather than occludes the necessity to define and delimit, to construct and deconstruct, to know when to intervene and when to leave alone, to know

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how strongly to invoke situated histories, to know when to allow tradition and imagination to merge, and to feel comfortable if all my data and conclusions are not scrubbed clean of contradiction. Nevertheless, I take full responsibility for lapses in clarity, errors in judgment, and oversights in the use of material. After this volume went into production, two films dealing with spirit possession were released that deserve comment here because they illustrate the point of the title of this book. One was an American film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose; the other was an Indian film, Paheli (The Riddle).2 What is striking about these films is their representation of the self possessed. Emily Rose was founded on the assumption of a naturalized, identifiable, and unitary self that was breached by demonic possession. This replicates the standard view within Western culture, even if it is belied by the very fact of, for example, acting (as in a movie) or role playing, which presupposes a fluidity, multiplicity, or even nonexistence of a fundamental identity on which personalities, or even persons, are constructed or superimposed. Another standard Western view, also casually supported by this film, is that possession can only be sinister, demonic, and evil. All of these assumptions are called into question in the present study. In the Hindi film Paheli, a wife is seduced by a bhūt (spirit) who falls in love with her and takes the form of her husband after he is sent by his father, a successful businessman, to a distant city for an extended period. Soon, the bhūt is drawn into his own self-construction, and at the end of the film he appears to merge with the character that he has replicated, making the possession complete and, we believe, satisfying and permanent. Thus, the bhūt possesses, first, his own shape-shifted construction and, eventually, its more substantial prototype. Almost as casually as Emily Rose replicates Western assumptions of selfhood and fixed identity, Paheli illustrates the Indian (and other Asian) recognition of selfhood as mutable, multidimensional, nonlinear, and (at least in Buddhism) fabricated, a moving part among other moving parts. The bhūt maintains his self-possession, his own identity as a bhūt (the wife also knows this—it is their great secret), aware that he has instigated his own construction. In certain important respects, this is similar to some of the cases I discuss here; indeed, it emerges from the same religious and cultural tradition. These include, for example, the Upaniùadic case of Brahmā possessing the inert world that he has created and the eighth-century philosopher Śaãkara possessing the body of a dead king. We also see in Paheli a striking sympathy for the character of the bhūt, a portrayal of possession that would not be possible in Western cinema, except perhaps as comedy.

Preface xvii

As startling as the film Emily Rose may be, equally startling to this viewer is the cinematic figure of Dr. Adani, an anthropologist. Dr. Adani is perhaps not entirely unlike this book’s author or some of its readers. About this character, and the film in general, A. O. Scott writes, in his review of Emily Rose in the New York Times, that the anthropologist “studies demonic possession and is studiously noncommittal as to whether it really exists. The movie pretends to take the same tolerant, anything’s-possible position. . . . Its point of view suggests an improbable alliance of postmodern relativism and absolute religious faith against the supposed tyranny of scientific empiricism, which is depicted as narrow and dogmatic” (Scott 2005). This volume addresses the issues brought up by Scott, all of which are implicit in Emily Rose and Paheli, and tries to present them from a variety of perspectives. Finally, I have established a Web site that will include some of the material in this book, including the plates, which will be in color, and the bibliography. In due course I will also put on the site audio and video clips of possession phenomena as well as photographs and accompanying explanations. I invite interested readers to contact me about adding entries to the bibliography and placing other possession material on the site, or links to theirs. I envision this as a clearinghouse for the topic of possession in South Asia. The URL is www.possession-southasia.org, and I can be contacted at [email protected].

Notes 1. The nearest attempt so far has been in the collection of articles edited by Assayag and Tarabout (1999). As good as this collection is, it lacks a general historical context and the syncretism that only a single-authored study can provide. The same is true for possession studies elsewhere in the world. For Africa, see Behrend and Luig 1999; for Indonesia and Oceania see Mageo and Howard 1996. 2. Both films were released in 2005. Emily Rose was directed by Scott Derrickson, Paheli by Amol Palekar. See Philip Lutgendorf ’s discussion of Paheli at www .uiowa.edu/~incinema/Paheli.htm.


ackno


ecause of the multidimensional nature of this study, I have sought and received help in the form of information, discussion, and, eventually, critical reading of different parts of the book from many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. This particularly long gestation period of a decade and a half has, therefore, placed me in their debt, a debt that I am delighted to acknowledge. First, I extend special thanks to Frank Korom, William (Bo) Sax, and Lindsey Harlan for reading early drafts of the chapters on theory and ethnography. Thankfully, Frank, Bo, and Lindsey think very differently about both anthropology and religion and offered correspondingly different critiques, all of which helped me immensely. I am also heavily indebted to Chris Minkowski for comments on the Mahábhárata chapter, to George Thompson and Steven Lindquist for comments and moral support on the chapter on possession in the Vedas, to Alexis Sanderson for time-consuming and selfless assistance on the second of the two Tantra chapters, and to Claudia Welch for insight and extensive comments on the Ayurveda chapter. I am grateful for the University of Iowa International Programs office for grants that allowed me to travel to Kerala for fieldwork on Ayurvedic mental health care in 2002 and 2004. I can confidently say that I could not have accomplished any of my work in Kerala

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were it not for the ready kindness of N. V. Ramachandran of Palakkad, to whom I remain heavily indebted. His ethnographic skills as well as knowledge of local medical traditions and, conveniently, all the back roads of Kerala were decisive in that work. I deeply thank my colleagues at the University of Iowa: Philip Lutgendorf, Susan Lutgendorf, and Janine Sawada, for their many insights and comments on various incarnations of this work. Any work touched by Philip Lutgendorf emerges better for his contact. Indeed, one of the great boons of my life has been his presence in the next office, not to speak of his enormous generosity in countless areas of life, for a substantial number of years. Susan Lutgendorf, professor of psychology at Iowa, guided me in readings on psychology and constantly challenged me in thinking about the inner dimensions of possession. Her engagement with the topic has vastly advanced this work, especially Chapter 2. Wendi Adamek has been an indefatigable supporter of this project throughout. Like Philip Lutgendorf, she is a brilliant and exacting reader and a luminous thinker, whose advice on matters of theory, consistency, and style is always to be heeded. Many other friends and colleagues have offered productive comments and substantive help along the way, including, most formidably, Rich Freeman, Robert Svoboda, Antti Pakaslahti, Laurie Patton, Jeffrey Kripal, John Dunne, David Gray, Kathleen Taylor, Stephanie Jamison, David White, David Knipe, Anne Feldhaus, and E. Muralidhara Rao. I also express my appreciation to the exceptional staff of Columbia University Press—Wendy Lochner, Christine Mortlock, Leslie Kriesel, and Debra Soled. Their kindness and enthusiasm helped enormously to validate the years of time and effort I put into this project. All errors are, of course, my own responsibility, and in a work of this size and omniformity I am sure there will be more than a few, for which I beg the reader’s indulgence.


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he evaluation of the evidence for deity and spirit possession in South Asia, in both classical texts and modern practice, is framed by prevailing characterizations of such gravity that only with great effort is it possible to escape from beneath their weight— and in doing so it is still impossible to escape their shadow. These characterizations are literary, marked by vocabulary, images, and themes distinguished from an array of related phenomena. They are recognized because of a rich history of scholarship on the general subject of possession. Most such studies, whether Indological or anthropological—or even brahmanical, if we consider the long history of Sanskritic and other indigenous Indic scholarship— have commenced with the necessary chore of phenomenological categorizing and entertaining a potpourri of theoretical approaches. Just as brahmanical and Indological scholarship have set certain limits and challenges on the subject, thereby creating orthodoxies, so have the shifting grounds of anthropological studies, thereby creating mini-orthodoxies of their own. Although the word “orthodoxy” may sound harsh and unjust to some, scattered in this study is an accounting of methodological approaches to and models of possession employed by Indic authors and scholars throughout the millennia, by anthropologists and other ethnographers, as well as psy-

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chologists, in the latter cases reflecting Western academic deployment and establishing for them new dimensions. The approaches, addressed in Chapter 2, range from outright condemnation (by apologists for religious orthodoxies) to sophisticated psychoanalytic interpretations, sociopolitical views, notions of possession as a facet of shamanism, and last (and probably least) an increased acceptance, with certain qualifications, by ethnographers, of emic viewpoints regarding the existential reality of spirit and deity possession. Both separable and inseparable from these approaches are other general issues, including those of gender and illness. Why, in popular culture, are women subject to possession more regularly than men? Do we find the same gender configuration in possession described in Indic literature? To what extent or under what circumstances does possession signal disease, particularly mental illness? These questions are addressed in due course, and answers to them must consider the purport and environment of the Sanskrit texts as well as their contents. In order to more clearly envision the Sanskritic and classical contexts, it will also be necessary to view the subject from the top down, that is, to discuss the vocabulary and linguistic characterizations of possession in postclassical and modern South Asia. To this end, I explore the semantics of possession and their significations in several South Asian languages (Chapter 4). This discussion begs a consideration of the relationship between “folk possession” and “classical possession,” a topic that is frequently revisited in this study. After explorations of the ethnography and linguistics of possession in (mostly) postclassical South Asia, we turn to the Sanskrit texts. First, we consider the extensive evidence for possession and models of thought based on possession in the vedic literature (Chapter 5). References to possession begin in the ñgveda itself, where we first encounter the word āveśa (and other forms derived from the root ā√viś ) in the ninth maâbala, the book that includes most of the soma hymns. It is significant that āveśa is the most commonly attested word for “possession” in the ñgveda through Classical Sanskrit and Middle-Indic languages down to modern times, where it has found its way into most Modern Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. I argue that the vedic soma drinkers experienced (at least in part) a type of divine possession. The word āveśa occurs in nearly all vedic texts, with a preponderance in texts of the early and middle vedic periods. By the late vedic period, derivatives from another Sanskrit verbal root, √góh (to seize), especially the substantive grahaâa, begin to appear, indicating a rather less divine form of

Introduction xxiii

possession. In attempting to address the vedic evidence, I highlight four features in particular: first, the production of soma and the sages’ experience of its consumption; second, āveśa as a paradigm for cosmic creation and personal and divine incarnation; third, a phenomenon called “transfer of essence” (medhas), found in many vedic texts beginning with the Brāhmaâas; and, fourth, the relationship between women (mostly) and gandharvas, celestial musicians with a predilection for possession. It is this latter notion that has perhaps the greatest impact on later classical literature and “folk possession.” In fact, it is in the vedic texts that the Indian notion of the “self ” is first expressed as permeable and multivalent. Some readers may find this notion overly complex because it runs counter to the received Vedāntic idea of the self as an autonomous ātman identified with a universal brahman. However, the evidence here demonstrates that the Vedāntic notion of the self is primarily a normative, albeit a popular and attractive, idea that, because of the force and elegance of much of the Sanskrit philosophical literature, has overshadowed more complex and, I believe, more fundamental notions of self and personhood in classical India. Possession comes into its own as a literary motif with accompanying procedural specificity in the Mahābhārata, a subject addressed in Chapter 6. Among the possession stories in this great epic are the well-known tale of Nala’s possession by Kali; another in which Vipula Bhārgava protected Ruci, the wife of his guru, Devaśarman, against the sexual advances of the notorious womanizer Indra by entering (anupraviśya) the body of Ruci through his yoga-power; the account in the Sauptikaparvan of Aśvatthāman’s destructive possession by Rudra/Śiva; and the account near the end of the epic in which Vidura, an incarnation of Dharma, employs his yogic abilities to leave his own body, permanently, and enter that of Yudhiù•hira. Although the Mahābhārata contains many stories in which possession is central, the other Sanskrit epic, the Rāmāyaâa, frequently refers to possession as a dimension of intense emotion but has few stories in which it is central. Thus the nexus of possession and emotion appears fully developed in the epics, a feature that characterizes Indic possession from that point on. Countless narrative passages in the epics and later literature describe extreme anger, love, anxiety, concern, or faith in terms of possession. Taking rhetorical leads from the epics, many of the Purāâas frame possession in the same way; indeed, possession in the same key appears in the Purāâas with remarkable regularity. It is no exaggeration to say that the Mahābhārata is the most influential text in Indian history, and the tone and timbre of possession, in

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Introduction

both its positive and negative manifestations, is established in the Sanskrit epics. Because of certain important conceptual links between the epics and the Purāâas, specifically the way devotion frames possession, it is essential to have a brief look at possession in the Purāâas as well. Among the most visible manifestations of early Indian thought are Vedānta, classical Yoga, Buddhism, and Jainism, all of which are nuanced reactions to the perceived excesses of vedic ritualism. Chapter 7 discusses possession in these important branches of knowledge. Although possession is not a primary concern of the literature of these schools, which, on the whole, avoids discussion of personal experience except in the vaguest, most normative, and most fragmentary ways, it is nevertheless mentioned and occasionally discussed at some length in their foundational philosophical texts. It occupies a small place in the Yogasūtras of Patañjali and a rather larger one in the Jain Yogaśāstra of Hemacandra. Possession is also discussed in the Brahmasūtras of Bādarāyaâa and in the commentaries by Śaâkara, Rāmānuja, and Vallabhācārya. The Buddhist Pali canon, where demonologies appear for the first time (in the Petthavatthu), mentions it, as do the Jātaka stories and the more scholastic Buddhist Sanskrit literature. This is an appropriate place to begin to examine possession in Buddhist practice, where it is, in the best-known instance, a highly visible performative phenomenon by the oracle who has assisted the Dalai Lamas in matters ranging from statecraft to personal practice. In all the relevant texts, as in observable practice, possession is not condemned, but considered accessible for individuals who have achieved particular stages of mental and physical discipline. In addition, it is considered useful for gaining certain kinds of knowledge. An example of translating yogic theorizing about possession into practice appears in the hagiographies of the philosopher Śaãkara, who, it is said, took possession of the body of a dead king named Amaruka in order to gain carnal knowledge without sullying his pure brahmanical and ascetically trained body. This incident must be discussed at some length. Chapter 8 explores possession in Sanskrit and other classical Indic fiction, drama, and aesthetic theory. In the same way that the 1973 film The Exorcist and Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw influenced (and were influenced by) the Western—particularly the Anglophone—imaginaire in its views and experience of possession as a nasty and terrifying phenomenon (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3), stories of possession in India influenced its experience and occupied a major place in the Indian imaginaire. The evidence from Chapters 4 and 12, discussing the language of possession and

Introduction xxv

extensive demonologies, testifies to this. But the influence and experience was not all of a “negative” sort, as tales of possession—especially from the Mahābhārata, the text with the greatest influence of all—did not simply create a psychic locale for dumping one’s worst fears and (one hopes) imprisoning one’s most terrifying ghosts. In addition, these tales opened the psychic doors to possibilities of oracular, divine possession, which is subsequently taken up by different genres of Sanskrit, Middle Indic and modern Indian literature; the tales are a major reason why possession is the most common and, at the grass roots, most valued form of spiritual expression in India. Possession as a motif in Sanskrit fiction was initially addressed by the American Sanskritist Maurice Bloomfield in 1917. However, he covered only a few of the important texts and examined possession more as a curiosity than as a cultural phenomenon or the reflection of a widespread experience. The most important texts in this category are the well-known vampire (vetāla) stories and the massive Kathāsaritsāgara. Possession is also referred to in Sanskrit and other classical dramas, including the Bhagavadajjukāprahasana, a comedy by the seventh-century Pallava king Mahendravarman in which it is the primary theme; indeed, that possession is presented as social satire is itself telling. Perhaps more than elsewhere, in fiction and drama possession is revealed as a well-known (though not particularly well-respected) feature of popular religion (at least among the literati). It is also appropriate in Chapter 8 to attempt to derive a formal aesthetics of possession by examining theories of mood and emotional construction, as well as audience response, in the works of Bharata (Nā•yaśāstra) and Abhinavagupta (Dhvanyālokalocana), then to locate resonances of this in modern popular culture. Chapter 9 places possession in the context of devotional practice. This is perhaps the most important aspect of possession, as the intensity of personal engagement is revealed in both text and practice to be the signal determining feature in personality identification. And in India bhakti it is nearly always linked to an intensity driven by a single-minded love for the deity. Thus, in the context of devotional practice, personal identification with a deity is often interpreted as possession. The primary textual locale for this is late first-millennium Sanskrit and Tamil bhakti literature, eventually extending to Hindi, Marathi, and other regional literatures. Although this narrow, interiorized, single-minded (ekāgratā) focus is ostensibly resolute and impenetrable, it is, in South Asia, indicative of the porousness of the self and the fluidity of personhood.

xxvi

Introduction

Chapters 10–13 address possession in Tantra and Āyurveda, discourses that must be examined together to some extent because they increasingly share the same intellectual context. It is here, for the most part, that the notion of possession as “grasping” or “seizing” ( grahaâa) is highlighted, “negative” possession brought on by a malevolent spirit (the influence of the Mahābhārata is also felt here). But this is only a part of the story, as it shares conceptual territory with the “positive” possession most often associated with deities, as well as with interpersonal possession found in texts ranging from the ñgveda to the Upaniùads, the Mahābhārata (again), the Purāâas, the texts of classical Yoga, and most other texts encountered in the earlier chapters. It is important that the Tantras feature oracular possession as an active practice. This is dealt with in Chapters 10 and 11, which cover the ground of normative brahmanical possession and possession found in Buddhist Tantras. Chapter 11 addresses a single topic, the practice of using children as agents of oracular possession and the dissemination of this practice from North India to Tibet, China, and South India. The usual way in which the Sanskrit texts dealt with negative possession was to identify and classify invasive spirits in demonologies, then to medicalize their possession. The most important and influential texts undertaking this are the foundational works of Āyurveda, as well as a number of Tantras. I offer new translations of the relevant sections of the three primary Āyurvedic texts—the Caraka, Suśruta, and Aù•āãgahódaya SaÅhitās—which provide specific demonologies in the context of discussions of insanity (unmāda). I also provide extracts from some of the relevant tantric texts, the most important of which is the Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati, and a hybrid text of Āyurveda, ritual, and dharmaśāstra called Madanamahārâava. Because of the importance of astrology in Indian culture for at least two millennia, and because of the perception of planets as graspers or possessors (indeed, the Sanskrit word for “planet” is graha), I must also discuss passages from astrological texts, notably the Praśnamārga, dealing with possession. In summarizing the ritual and pharmacological aspects of exorcism recommended by various āyurvedic, tantric, and astrological texts, I bring into the discussion my own fieldwork on possession among these traditions as they are constituted in present-day Kerala. The final chapter offers a few conclusions based on my years of living with this topic. The first identifies typologies of possession that are correlated with language use in order to elucidate the semantics, constituted within the sociolinguistics, of possession. Then follows a discussion of the influence of posses-

Introduction xxvii

sion on notions of corporality and personal identity. Essentially, I conclude that possession was both a cause and a result of the generally accepted South Asian notion of a permeable embodiment. This notion, derived from a study of practice, is somewhat at odds with notions of selfhood developed in philosophical texts that have been adopted as canonical from the time of the Upaniùads to postcolonial India. Perhaps not incidentally it is exhibited more consistently among women or at least applied more generally to women, in accordance with anthropological findings. However, our evidence demonstrates that such permeability is equally applicable to men, though in rather different configurations. Finally, I return to the Mahābhārata for an examination of the diachronic aspects of possession. We see in this paramount epic prototypes and patterns of possession that recur throughout Indian history, not just in performance and philosophical construction but in basic problems of self-definition that lie at the root of human multivocality. Finally, I should say something about Sanskrit text passages in the book, which may appear to be irregular. Because of the length of the book I had to be selective in my choices of transliterated Sanskrit text passages. I include text of the ñgveda in Chapter 5 and of passages that are of particular lexical or philological importance scattered elsewhere throughout this work. I have usually omitted the text of passages I have translated of Sanskrit works that are generally available—such as the Upaniùads, the Mahābhārata, and the published āyurvedic texts—and those that have been translated by others. I hope these decisions do not prove to inconvenience the reader excessively. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

the self possessed



I

Orthodoxies, Madness, and Method


1

Academic and Brahmanic

s

I am large, I contain multitudes. —WA LT W H I T M A N , Song of Myself, v. 51


Sanskritic Culture and the Culture of Possession Ethnographic work at the beginning of the twentieth century, which has been supplemented and revitalized during the past forty years, shows that spirit or deity possession is a widespread epstimi—a historically situated discourse, phenomenon, and practice—in Indian thought, culture, religion, and medicine.1 However, if our knowledge of the subject were limited to the accounts of classical Indologists and others who have privileged the “high” intellectual and religious traditions while eschewing the history of actual religious practice, we would scarcely know of the existence of this phenomenon, much less its pervasiveness. One might say that it is the “ism” of Hinduism, the Hinduism essentialized by its most literate propagators and translators that has nullified and delegitimized its breathtakingly broad spectrum of popular practice, including possession.2 More specifically, non- or scant recognition of possession in premodern India has been due to a longstanding aversion among educated Judeo-Christians as well as educated Hindus, for whom possession has fallen outside the realm of both reason and social accountability.3 Perhaps the most common perception—and consequent stigmatization—of possession among both academic and indigenous ortho-

4

Part I. Orthodoxies, Madness, and Method

doxies is that it is a nettlesome aberration, a blemish on the face of epistemological order, a phenomenon subject to benign neglect, or, at most, sanitized into nonrecognition. To whatever degree this perception is borne out by taxonomies in both Sanskrit and regional languages that distinguish various loci and states of possession (a topic dealt with extensively below), the more important point is that possession and, indeed, emotion itself, the kinder, gentler ancestor of possession, have been considered to bear the stigma of primitivism:4 they are associated with people of lower social rank, including low castes, tribals, and women,5 or more generally with those lacking literacy, the great (and, before modern times, extremely rare) tool generally believed capable of bestowing introspection, self-knowledge, and control.6 Therefore, discussion of it has been avoided or denounced by the self-conceived (and, by no accident, highly literate) orthodox among both scholars and indigenous practitioners. And among scholars, even when this stigma has not been inflicted, possession as the exclusive property of lower-ranking individuals has been assumed so casually as to preclude a search for it among other groups and individuals. Even the eminent sociologist Louis Dumont declares possession a “mystic ecstasy . . . which so far we have not encountered at a learned level.”7 The present study aims to rectify these shortcomings. In this study, I press two overriding contentions, both of which not only are paramount for the present study but have implications for the methodology of future scholarship. The first is that the force of the ethnographic accounts should elicit a re-examination of classical texts for evidence of possession. The second is that possession as described by anthropologists and other ethnographers, and as understood by native and scholastic orthodoxies, does not represent the full spectrum of possession as revealed in Sanskrit texts. No doubt, such possession is described in or assumed by certain Sanskrit texts, and the bulk of the present project is dedicated to the exploration of Sanskritic possession. However, as shown below, the category of possession as understood in Sanskrit literature must be expanded beyond the parameters assigned to it by previous scholarship, which is largely drawn from prevailing Western notions. As an indigenous category in ancient and classical India, possession is not a single, simple, reducible category that describes a single, simple, reducible experience or practice, but is distinguished by extreme multivocality, involving fundamental issues of emotion, aesthetics, language, and personal identity. Both of these contentions contribute to my principal project here, which is to retrieve, as far as possible from texts, an understudied aspect of ancient

Academic and Brahmanical Orthodoxies

5

and classical Indian cultural practice, religious experience,8 and disease production. I become suspicious of the apparent nonexistence of possession in antiquity when we read present accounts, such as that of David Knipe, who states, based on fieldwork in East Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh, “it appears that the number of householders subject to possession states is astonishingly high, and the phenomenon occurs within families of all communities as a central component of religious life.”9 This suspicion is verified, at least for non-Sanskritic classical culture, when we read David Shulman’s reports on “Tamil Hinduism.” Beginning in the Pallava-Pāâ•iya period in the sixth century c.e., writes Shulman, “The focus is entirely on the interaction between the devotee and the god who has entered him, mastered or ‘possessed’ him without destroying his empirical, sensually motivated, autarchic being.”10 Despite vivid descriptions of possession in Tamil texts of the first millennium c.e., which on the whole bear out the contemporary ethnographies, as lucidly discussed by Glenn Yocum,11 most Sanskrit texts, conspicuously “canonical” religious texts, entirely neglect—or, perhaps, avoid—discussing what people actually do or experience. The reason for this is well known: The major commentaries on the philosophical darśanas and primary texts of aesthetic theory set the epistemological agendas for the remainder of religious discourse in Sanskrit. The principal epistemological feature of these primary texts and commentaries is a quest for programmatic perfection, with unwritten rules that discourage discussion of personal experience except as a mythical, fictional, or paradigmatic figure might have a paradigmatic experience. These texts clearly are mindful of the requirements of canon, which, as mentioned, privilege theory over experience.12 Thus Sanskrit texts are almost always oriented uncompromisingly toward concepts, prescriptions, and mythology—what their authors understood to be “true”— but rarely toward “human” concern (except insofar as theorizing is a human concern)—what we (and probably they) deemed to be “real.”13 However, with persistent searching—a task doomed to incompleteness—perhaps we can begin to retrieve descriptions of this “deemed reality” from texts that both approximate those found in ethnographic literature and shed light on the parallel issues of emotional construction and personal identity in India. The problem of retrieval, however, is not just one of oppositional texts; equally problematic is scholarly re-engineering of possession states, a problem that continues to the present day, albeit rather reduced from that of previous decades or centuries. It is well known by now that the academic

6


agendas of respectable Indological scholarship were set in the middle of the nineteenth century by Europeans who cast a long shadow of doubt on the “authenticity,” hence validity, of a number of subjects.14 The important subjects, which quickly became canonical, which is to say orthodox, in Indology, following to some extent a sanitized brahmanical presentation, were the Vedas, Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraâa), the “six systems” of Indian philosophy (ùabdarśana), Buddhism and Jainism, law (dharmaśāstra), epic poetry (kāvya), and, to a lesser extent, poetic theory (alaÅkāraśāstra). Among the subjects neglected by respectable scholars were Tantra, bhakti, and astrology (jyotiùa), the texts of which, interestingly, are included in disproportionately high numbers in manuscript collections throughout India, but were cast into disfavor by the orientalism of the day.15 Factors weighing against these latter texts were their relative modernity, their popularity, and their intellectual movement away from the more classical texts, which, following the orientalist prerogative (consonant with their nostalgia for classical Greece and the Renaissance), expressed in general the ascendancy of reason. Thus certain topics and texts were destined for neglect because they participated in and typified a perceived intellectual and cultural malaise that rendered the defeated, superstitious, caste-ridden, economically straitened, and technologically underdeveloped India the natural subjects of the European Enlightenment. In other words, not only were most of these texts composed after the close of the first millennium c.e., which is to say on the wrong side of the tracks, temporally, to count as true or ideal representatives of ancient India, but their very subject matter was beneath the intellectual and cultural prestige or dignity of contemporary European scholarship.16 If the brahmanical orthodoxies engineered popular and experiential content out of their texts, if they cavalierly shredded context and imposed an artificial and hegemonic discursive order, as standard Indology suspects— and this is a big “if ”—it becomes immediately necessary to pose a question that will inevitably bear on everything dealt with here: Are Sanskrit (and other classical Indic) texts appropriate sources for our inquiry? More precisely, is Sanskrit literature or Sanskritic culture capable of representing the interests of a clientele more broadly based than a brahmanical elite that is usually characterized (and caricatured) as unregenerate and epistemologically prejudiced? At this point, which is to say until we have recounted and taken stock of the evidence—or its absence—we must be content with the unsatisfying observation that this question is fraught with ideological considerations and is thus unanswerable.


7

Nevertheless, a preliminary inquiry into this question is possible through a consideration of two opposing viewpoints on the capabilities of Sanskrit literature. In one corner is the eminent historian and Sanskritist D. D. Kosambi, who does not mince his words in the introduction to his critical edition of a collection of Sanskrit court poetry and miscellanea, the Subhāùitaratnakoùa, compiled in the eleventh or twelfth century c.e. in Bengal by one Vidyāpati. Kosambi observes that the life depicted in such poetry “was not shared by most Indians of the poet’s or of any other time; in essence, not even by the poet himself.”17 According to Kosambi, Sanskrit poetry, as well as classical Sanskritic culture, was the shared property—as well as the shared fantasy (Kosambi would likely regard it as a shared conceit)—of a brahman/ ruler class collusion.18 The end product was “the empty bombast of a Rājaśekhara,” thoroughly detached from the lives and livelihoods of the majority.19 In the other corner is the Sanskritist Richard Lariviere, who parries “criticisms of Sanskrit philology” in a wonderfully contentious article entitled “Protestants, Orientalists, and Brāhmaâas: Reconstructing Indian Social History.”20 It is Lariviere’s view that “if we return to the philological techniques and values that have been exhibited with such consistency in the study of Greek and Latin classics, and that were once an important part of Sanskrit philology, but seem, in recent years, to have fallen out of favor, . . . [the result will be] to give the fullest possible voice to the views of classical Indians—of all social classes.” To achieve this, he states, “we must carefully and thoroughly edit their texts.” In Lariviere’s view, “[t]he better the data we have the better our answers will be, and philology provides the data.” Although Lariviere sanctimoniously calls for more and better critical editions of Sanskrit texts as the central requirement in the noble mission of expanding our knowledge of the historical South Asian underclasses, it must be remembered that in the Subhāùitaratnakoùa Kosambi has also taken on the task of constructing a critical edition, always with a view toward understanding Indian social history—and has arrived at radically different conclusions. Regardless of how this debate eventually plays out—and I am not particularly optimistic that Lariviere’s hypothesis will be upheld in any great measure21—the present work is, I hope, an example of data-gathering from a large number of Sanskrit texts and of how such data gathering can help us to retrieve and identify some of the religious views and practices of a broad spectrum of ancient and classical Indian society.22 In the process I hope to demonstrate implicitly some of the areas in which both Kosambi and Lariviere might be right.

8


Several scholars have declared that possession is conspicuously absent in Sanskrit texts, at least possession as classically understood from ethnographies. In addition to Dumont, cited above, Richard Gombrich states, “Later brahmanism . . . denied all value to possession states and they were screened out of brahmanical religion. To be possessed is to lose one’s self-awareness and self-control. Brahmanism inculcated control.”23 Gombrich’s remarks were to some extent responsible for alerting me to the possibility of possession in Sanskrit texts. While it is true that brahmanism inculcates control, to what extent, I wondered, did brahmans strictly observe brahmanism, and to what extent was this aspect of brahmanism an instigating force in a broad sampling of Sanskrit texts? I wondered, in other words, was the relationship between brahmans, brahmanism, and brahmanical texts very different a thousand or two thousand or three thousand years ago from what it is today? It is important for our purposes to note that brahmans, perhaps as much as others, participate in rituals of possession (and enter into states of possession), as is evident in the bhūta cults of South Kanara District,24 the pilgrimage to Nandadevi documented by William Sax,25 bhakti derived possession by smārta women in Madras by Mary Hancock,26 and rites of exorcism in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Varanasi, and doubtless elsewhere.27 This is analogous to the participation of Buddhists, unswervingly loyal to their textual traditions and text-based practices, in an array of possession rituals in Tibet, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, if not elsewhere.28 As is the case with Buddhists and Buddhism, participation by brahmans in ritual must be distinguished from “brahmanism” as Gombrich employs the term. Indeed, many if not most brahmans demur in practice, at least part of the time, from the “ism” of brahmanism, and probably always have. We examine in Chapter 5 a passage from the Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad that confirms this in part.29 The tidy conflation of brahmans and brahmanical practice with the “ism” is all too hastily associated with both and leads to conclusions such as Dumont’s, which are little more than weary stereotyping. To be more generous, however, what Dumont and Gombrich are doubtless referring to are the official brahmanical doctrines espoused by the literary elite for the past two or three millennia, as they appear in the normative dharmaśāstra texts and philosophical darśanas. In this sense, Gombrich is correct in noting the importance of “brahmanism” in delimiting the parameters of control, self-awareness, and the self as a single discrete independent entity. Indeed, these are some of the issues I must address in unpacking the category “possession.” Restated in the form of fundamental questions, these issues may be ex-


9

pressed as follows: Is the “self ” or “person” revealed and explicated in possession states genuine? Is there a true self (assuming for the moment that this is a viable concept and can be located) contaminated or camouflaged by possession states, spirits, or deities? Is the self a singular stable undiluted entity? Or is it a referential, explanatory convenience, an individualized composite construction, and thus unrealizable beneath its layerings—in agreement with the Buddhists? If the former, is deity or spirit possession a superimposition on a pure and realizable self? If so, then possession should be distinguished from that insular self, which is to say that the self and the personality are distinct. If the latter, is such possession a random or occasional component in a mutating multiform self, and if so can we really call this a “self ” rather than a “person”? Or—another possibility—is possession merely a trope, a significator for an essentially plural or composite self? These are all questions intended to explore the experiential and soteriological trajectories of possession as well as its historical and sociopolitical contexts. With respect to Buddhists, to whom control and mindfulness were paramount, Gombrich observes that they “set themselves against such vulgar lack of self-control in favour of what they considered more ‘civilized’ standards.”30 Thus, possession skirted the various crossroads of native scholasticism, “civilized standards,” and control, self or otherwise. The assumed— and unaddressed—questions were: Is the deity or the true self revealed more accurately when one is in control or out of control? Is the self revealed out of control different from or, as some would have it, inferior to the one revealed while under control? Or, is there not much difference; which is to ask, does being out of control lead to states of knowledge, surrender, and spontaneity that are similar or identical to those manifest while under control? Or, is spontaneity in religious expression possible only under controlled (which is to say ritualized) circumstances?31 With respect to the integrity of the self, which cannot be easily separated from the body, the early and middle Vedic texts are clear. For example, the Śatapatha Brāhmaâa (9.5.1.11) insists on a self that is constitutive of an intimate interplay between human, divine, and sacrificial bodies, while the Atharvaveda (11.3.1–2,7–8) holds that “of this porridge Bóhaspati is the head, Bráhman is the mouth, heaven and earth the ears, sun and moon the eyes, the seven seers the in- and out-breaths . . . dark metal its flesh, red metal its blood, tin its ash, gold its complexion.”32 Whether porridge or human being (and often there is little difference), this theme of a composite body and self recurs in Vedic and Purāâic literature (the figure of Yajñavarāha, the

10 Part I. Orthodoxies, Madness, and Method

“sacrificial boar,” and the kāmadhenu or wish-fulfilling cow is employed in Chapter 10 to help explicate this) and, to a great extent, sets the tone for widespread textual and extratextual acceptance of possession as a natural phenomenon and of power sharing across apparent individual boundaries. As suggested, one of the primary goals of this study is to examine the notion, generally recognized by anthropologists, though not by religious orthodoxies, that possession is not just one thing and apply this insight to the evidence from Sanskrit and other classical Indian texts. What I hope to show is that the category of possession as it has been commonly understood in religious studies and Indology, where it has been addressed at all, does not work well in the context of the classical Indian view of the self. As I demonstrate, it is a self with permeable layerings and boundaries, both of which constantly shift and mutate, and this can be known in part through a study of possession, as suggested by recent anthropological studies. Janice Boddy, an anthropologist who has studied possession in Sudan, writes that possession, within a wide spectrum of anthropological situations, is “a broad term referring to an integration of spirit and matter, force, or power and corporeal reality, in a cosmos where the boundaries between an individual and her environment are acknowledged to be permeable, flexibly drawn, or at least negotiable.”33 Furthermore, I hope to show that the questions asked above can be answered, at least in part, through a better understanding of the experience and construction of possession in premodern India. I retain the term “possession,” though it may not work very well in some of the circumstances that I discuss.34 But I preserve it because the broad semantic boundaries of the terms under study here provide no attractive alternative. Consistent with this, I also suggest, in agreement with Gombrich, that the disregard or oversight of possession is a product of its construction (or lack thereof ) by orthodoxies. In spite of concerted efforts at ideological exorcism, possession is frequently found in Sanskrit texts, but locating it, thinking about it, and understanding it cannot be undertaken by applying our usual category of possession, even if Gombrich is quite correct given his assumptions of what possession actually is. Close scrutiny leads me to conclude that forms of religious experience and expression since the time of the ñgveda disclose much more possession than hitherto believed. After reviewing notions of possession derived from ethnographic literature, important because these notions define the commonly understood terms of our investigation, I discuss examples from a broad range of Sanskrit texts, including the ñgveda and Upaniùads, the two


11

great epics, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaâa, the primary classical medical texts, classical poetry and fiction, classical yoga and Vedānta texts, tantric texts in both their philosophical and ritual incarnations, sectarian devotional texts, and of utmost importance for “negative” possession an array of āyurvedic texts. Throughout I attempt to summon a few conclusions about possession that might augment our appreciation of the phenomenon. In spite of the generally accessible chronology of the selected texts and genres (and presumably of the development of the concepts contained therein), I must emphasize that, in view of the thematic organization of the subject matter presented here, I cannot rigorously adhere to the chronological order of text composition in assembling my account of possession in Sanskrit texts. Although text chronology does not necessarily correspond to the logical order of my presentation, neither is my assemblage of evidence, often lexical in nature, merely associative. Not unexpectedly, many of the text passages are ritual in nature, though a notable feature is that the objects and intentions of the rituals as expressed in the early texts are often not the same as in later texts. In the ñgveda, for example, possession was associated with ritual consumption of soma, while in the later Tantras and other explicitly ritual and devotional texts it was associated with initiation, ritual lapses, hostile takeovers by spirits, immersion in the regulated (hence ritualized) “life” of a deity, and the very equivalent of enlightenment. This shift is significant because the relevant passages from most of the later texts as well as occurrences of possession found in modern religious practice, including religious drama, appear to be predicated more explicitly on an ethos of possession that in time became more characteristic, recognizable, and predictable. It is not that the early texts suggest spontaneous states of possession that were later suppressed or domesticated through ritual confinement, but that the earliest accounts may be skewed by frustratingly incomplete descriptions of both ritual and states of possession.35 Regardless of the extent to which early texts may be incomplete or later texts and ethnographic accounts complete, an unchanging fact was that spiritual and social forms of control were to a great extent mediated through intricate ritualizing, in which the domestication of possession was undoubtedly a factor. But this probably came about not because of more possession, or ritualization of possession, but because of increasing recognition of it through a more developed vocabulary of possession. After possession was recognized and named—and this appears to have already occurred by the time of the ñgveda—the category or categories denoting this activity be-


came multivocal; they expanded to include varieties or shadings of itself. As is often the case with an action or phenomenon that is inherently uncertain or difficult to identify, possession as experienced and thought about in India suffered the discomfort of certainty and confidence arising from linguistic identification. In other words, one of the methods of controlling possession was to identify it, however vague or variant it might be, as something that was already known. Thus the forms of experience reflected in this vocabulary appeared to require control, given the social and ritual fabric of control in ancient India and the increased tendency to codify such control through the careful use of language and the composition of texts. Perhaps as important as any other feature inhibiting orthodox recognition of possession was the very fact of literacy itself, which presupposes the composition of Sanskrit texts (not to speak of scholarly exegesis). One might say that in general textuality itself was, or at least epitomized, the antithesis of possession. Walter Ong notes, “By separating the knower from the known, writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.”36 In other words, literacy—or, more simply, text—potentially releases the knower from the necessity of intense bodily engagement, from interaction with other beings, human or nonhuman, real or imagined, and, at the same time, establishes self-sufficiency beyond the pale of relational intrusion, a realm in which possession naturally abides. Indeed, to the culture of the situated word, possession dictated a relational intrusion beyond the realm of self-sufficiency; it was, rather, a technology or mode of representation, an improbable and intractable self-effacement and a wholesale replacement of one set of memories for another.37 The response of most of the orthodox among Sanskrit paâbitas to the problem of possession, or more generally of human experience itself, was a civilizing and, not incidentally, a benignly controlling neglect, a response not far from that of their more modern Indological counterparts. Regardless of whether writing was a universal fact of life among the educated (and in India education did not always require the written word), the brahmanical culture was one in which certain behavioral norms were propagated and largely observed. The very propagation and observance of these norms, regardless of how closely tied they were to written texts (and eventually their link was very close), constituted at least a cultural or brahmanical literacy that became extratextual, though emphatically not universal, as the


13

discipline of anthropology constantly confirms. Indeed, I try to demonstrate, inspired to some extent by Ong, that the ideological literacy of “Sanskritic culture” was not universal, that it was, at various points, strongly under the sway of nonliterate and “vernacular” modes of thought.38 While it is probably true that literacy, wittingly or unwittingly, inculcates control, what we find in India is that certain cultures, highly refined (saÅskóta) yet, at the same time, comfortably “vernacularized,” share certain features that allow considerable spontaneity and emotion, positioning them more or less against the grain of a “Sanskritic culture” commonly understood (or, more accurately, misunderstood) as uniform or monolithic. At the risk of oversimplification, I posit for the moment that the most prominent among these are the early vedic culture and the culture of post–first millennium c.e. bhakti, with the more normative, control-oriented, darśana-based cultures situated between them.

The Sanskritic Vocabulary of Possession It is difficult to recommend a single definition of possession, or indeed a single word for it, in the Indian context, primarily because this context— even as described in Sanskrit texts—is more accurately a shifting series of contexts that betray a broad life experience. Kathleen Erndl states, “The word possession can . . . provide only a rough and partial semantic equivalent for what is a fluid, multifaceted set of concepts.”39 The fact that I am able to locate only one attempt to define possession in Sanskrit literature, by the great tenth-century Kashmiri paâbita Abhinavagupta (discussed below), and that this definition does not easily suit most of the Sanskritic contexts of possession, demonstrates that possession as apprehended from these literary contexts constitutes a category in need of clarification. Determining the extent to which such a clarification can be expedited by comparison with the interpretations of possession states proffered by ethnographers is a necessary part of this study. This matter is dealt with below, but here I need simply to mention that comparisons with shamanic ecstasy, yogic samādhi, and hypnotic states must be undertaken cautiously. Mircea Eliade, who many years ago proposed these distinctions in his book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, has not given adequate attention to possession states in spite of contributing the valuable observation that yogins and fakirs may practice the exercises of particular schools of yoga while separately (or even simultaneously, which is


to say eclectically) engaging in “ecstatic practice,”40 which has too often been regarded as synonymous with possession.41 So, without overburdening the reader with taxonomies, at least in the beginning, of what has been regarded in India as spirit or deity possession, I shall try to convey what the ancient and classical texts have said about both the process and the accompanying states of deity and spirit possession. I began thinking about this topic with the idea that I could do justice to the subject by searching the texts for examples of āveśa (entrance into), the word used perhaps most widely for possession. This derives from the lexeme ā√viś (to enter in) and is attested in the sense of possession in many of its verbal forms and nominal derivatives (including, notably, samāveśa). Forms of ā√viś are nearly always distinguished from its close colleague pra√viś (to enter toward), which provides relevant nominal derivatives such as praveśa and praveśana. In the former case, ā√viś, friendly, benign, or self-motivated possession is indicated, while pra√viś more often indicates possession generated from outside.42 In fact, C. J. Fuller, undoubtedly reflecting on contemporary ethnographic data, comments, “In all Indian languages, a distinction can be made between involuntary, ‘bad’ possession by a malevolent being and voluntary, ‘good’ possession by a deity.”43 Although not all possession induced from outside, which is to say involuntary, can be regarded as “bad” (cf. below the Mahābhārata story of the possession of Ruci by Vipula Bhārgava), it is significant that this differentiation appears as early as the ñgveda. Other words for possession occur as well, most frequently derivatives from the root √góh (to grasp, seize), e.g., graha, grahaâa, parigraha, though other derivatives are attested from adhi√sthā (to inhabit) and abhi√móś, upa√spóś, sam√spóś (to touch, contact). Usually these convey a comparatively malefic sense, an inimical entrance or hostile takeover, in which the possession occurs independent of or even contrary to the intention of the one possessed. However, other more extended ideas or descriptions of emotional states may occur in place of a single word. Most important here is the word bhāva (mood, attitude, experiential state), which is often closely associated semantically with āveśa. Therefore, an examination of this word must be incorporated into a study of āveśa, especially in Purāâas and other devotional texts, as well as in ethnographies of possession. Indeed, one of the primary aims of this study is to elucidate the vocabulary of possession, to understand the complex semantic parameters of the lexical field relating to


15

possession, recognizing that the Sanskrit (and other Indic) terms, as well as the English term “possession,” are polysemous and multivocal, thus presenting an array of unenviable problems in cross-cultural understanding.44

Problematics of Interpretation Until the 1970s it was acceptable literary practice to employ terms such as “person,” “self,” and “experience” unquestioningly in academic discourse. Since then, however, these and other related terms have come under close critical scrutiny. The word “consciousness,” for example, is used in contemporary Anglophone culture in ways never imagined, for instance, in classical India; indeed, I have identified more than thirty different words and terms in one Sanskrit text alone, the Bhāgavata Purāâa, that have been variously translated with this juggernaut significator of contemporary culture.45 These words and terms have distinct meanings with distinct, if partially overlapping, semantic fields. This confers specificity to each word and term that is not conveyed through the blanket translation “consciousness.” Thus, because of the abuse, confusion, and ambiguity of this word revealed in contemporary discursive practice, I have avoided it whenever possible.46 This is not always practical, however, because possession inevitably touches on issues raised by the concept of consciousness as variously formulated.47 With this example in mind, we should discuss a few problematic English terms that are prominent in the present discussions of possession and that, like “consciousness,” call for greater precision and sensitivity to context. I need not dwell here on the central term of this study, namely “possession,” as I must, obviously, deal with it throughout. But a few others should be highlighted at the outset because of their general relevance. In addition to “consciousness,” we consider here “experience,” “person,” and “self.” These three terms do not come close to exhausting the problematics that could be raised with respect to the terminology employed in this volume; but to discuss them more deeply here would deflect the focus of this work and impose greater restrictions on my own freedom of discourse than is necessary or comfortable. Some of these other terms, such as “rationality,” “incarnation,” “intentionality,” “belief,” and “mediumship,” could also have been mentioned at the outset. But these and several others are better addressed in


situ. Several of these terms received dedicated space in Mark C. Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies,48 which I occasionally cite here. However, I limit my remarks specifically to the subject at hand.49

The Concept of Experience When I speak of an experience of soma (Chapter 5), a cultural or religious experience, a personal experience, a dissociative experience, and especially an experience of possession, I am employing with apparent ease terminology that hovers on a precipitous edge of ancient and classical Indian discourse maps. No one can doubt that people as well as cultures and civilizations experience in some sense, and that they experience all the time. Several scholars, however, including Wilhelm Halbfass, Wayne Proudfoot, and Robert Sharf, have noted, or even reinforced, certain relatively recent doubts cast on the “notion” of experience, particularly religious experience, positing that its validity can be situated only within highly specified cultural contexts. Halbfass sorts out the concept in Indian thought, particularly in its encounter with Western models of experience,50 while Sharf, following Proudfoot and others, traces the conceptualization of experience to the German philosopher Arthur Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century and shows that personal religious experience was not an issue of doctrinal concern in the textuality of Asian religions until the early twentieth century.51 Thus, when I speak of experience in the ways mentioned above, am I injecting into the personal and cultural networks of possession in South Asia an epistemology that threatens to bury the subject beneath fragile and dissembling layers of modern discourse? Am I reading possession in South Asia as a servant of the overwrought contemporary, peculiarly Western, discourse of experience? With such dangers in mind, Sharf resolves to employ the term “experience” guardedly. I do not eschew the notion of religious experience to the extent Sharf does, thus I do not feel it is necessary to justify its use by attempting to establish an empirical epistemology of it. Sharf pointedly writes: I have suggested that it is ill conceived to construe the object of the study of religion to be the inner experience of religious practitioners. Scholars of religion are not presented with experiences that stand in need of interpretation but rather with texts, narratives, performances, and so forth. While these representations may at times assume the rhetorical stance of


17

phenomenological description, we are not obliged to accept them as such.52

I do not contest Sharf ’s basic point, that we are dealing with texts, narratives, performances, and so forth. In this volume, we are not encountering possession directly, but approaching it through the side door of academics, which is to say through linguistic examination, textual description and prescription, ethnographic reportage, and text-critical, anthropological, psychological, literary, and historical interpretations. Similarly, I agree with Sharf that we are not obliged to accept at face value the phenomenological descriptions of these texts and narratives; but neither can we reject or neglect them out of hand as a methodological stance, replacing them with secure propositions of our own making. The hermeneutic of suspicion on which rests much of value in our fields must not become a hermeneutic of mandatory, routine rejection. At this point, no scholar will disagree that texts, as well as performances or orally produced descriptions, are representations that at best asymptotically approach facticity or are themselves the only realities that they construct. As for the rhetorical stance that informs my own material, most classical Indian philosophers and theoreticians agree that smëti (memory), on which representation is constructed, is inadmissible as pramáça (means of proof ).53 Perhaps for this reason they, like Sharf, shied away from discussions of personal experience, in the present case of possession by spirits, deities, yogins, or other adepts. But perhaps this is also why they questioned the consensus view of their world, and why they do not appear to have denied the ontological possibility of spirits, deities, and possession. While they rejected the final validity of memory and memory-based representation, they readily admitted observation (pratyakía) as a valid means of proof. Thus the stance that classical textuality takes with regard to possession approximates that of performance and oral narrative: What you see is what you get, but you might also get what you do not see. In virtually all the approaches I consider here—textual, anthropological, psychological, and historical—assertions of the inner and individual nature of the experience of possession are stripped away and “the phenomenon” in question is presented as discursively realizable only through reconstruction of context, whether performative or textual. It is with reference to this interpretive tradition that I feel compelled to contribute my own remarks to the discussion on the nature of the experience of possession. In spite of Sharf ’s and Halbfass’s observations that personal inner experience is a notion im-


ported to interpretations of Asian religious phenomena by Western and Western-informed scholars and practitioners,54 I contend that the removal of the role of individual inner experience, or subordinating it to a normative context, is another kind of ill-conceived construction of the object of study.

The Person and the Self The notion of a “person” distinguished from a “self ” was initially, if vaguely, proposed by Marcel Mauss in his final but seminal essay, “Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de ‘moi,’” written in 1938.55 Since then, philosophers and anthropologists have inquired further into these categories. This distinction is important in problematizing possession, especially in India, where the oppositions person/self share conceptual territory with the indigenous categories puruùa/puruùottama and ātman/ brahman, and in early Buddhism with the terms attabhāva (Pali < Skt. ātmabhāva; individuality) and puggala (Pali < Skt. pudgala; person). Consideration of these terms, especially of the paired opposites puruùa/puruùottama and ātman/brahman is advisable for establishing the ground on which possession may be understood in Sanskritic discourse. Only through such consideration will it be possible to comprehend the discursive context, for both scholarly and Indic categories, of the question “What or who is possessed?” Leaving aside Mauss’s evident evolutionism,56 a summary of his concept will prove useful here. Observes Mauss, given “that there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical,”57 a “person” (personne) or sense of situated “I” (moi) is as close to a natural human phenomenon as is reasonably possible. After sketchily reviewing the evidence from two North American native cultures (Zuñi and Kwakiutl), Australian aboriginal culture, classical India (in two brief paragraphs),58 China, and Rome, then early Christianity, he proffers several features of personhood: absorption within one’s clan, name and title, hierarchical rank, rights and obligations, roles and functions, and property. In addition to these local accretions and constructions, a person is also a legal category. Thus it is no surprise to learn that the word “person” (Latin persona) indicates a mask—tragic, ritual, or ancestral. The Latin and Greek persons were also moral ones, with “a sense of being conscious, independent, autonomous, free and responsible.”59 If Mauss is correct and this was the case in Europe, it was less so in India,


19

which had more sharply wrought notions of fate, circumscribing this autonomy and freedom. It was Christianity, asserts Mauss, that conferred personhood on the shell or mask or conditional person and provided the person (personne) with a metaphysical foundation, a rational substantiality, indivisible and individual. Although this view was much more nuanced, and not uncontested, in the history of Christian theology, the general trend was to regard the self as an inner, unchanging, stable, and ultimately detachable core known as the soul, and this is what lay at the center of an integrated if not always balanced wholeness constitutive of personhood. It is here that the situation differs so markedly from that of South Asia, where, as seen below, fluidity, divisibility, and penetrability were features of personhood, where dissociation and fragmentation (sometimes called possession) produced an alienness that at least temporarily overshadowed the familiarity of the person and rendered the self Other, and where a metaphysically conceived “self ” was often, though far from always, conceptually sedimented within that person.60 Thus a person is made, not born. This construction is not merely conceptual; it possesses a rarefied corporality or concreteness, the building blocks of which are what McKim Marriott calls “coded substances,” the subtle residue of acculturation.61 These accrete through the materialization and legitimation of any of Mauss’s qualities of personhood, by the performance of a particular action or series of actions, or by any other intentional or interactional process. A brahman, for example, becomes a brahman “person” by virtue of an initiation (upanayana), a rite of passage that complicates his identity and individuality by rendering him twice-born (dvija). Similarly, a śūdra becomes a śūdra person not just through the passive act of birth into a particular family, but through his or her occupation, expectations, low ritual rank, and relation with non-śūdras. Personhood, then, according to various modern Western-derived schools of cultural critique, consists of a collocation of contextual substantialities with a locus on a physically demarcated individual. Selfhood, by contrast, is more internally realized, a personal objectification of one’s own subjectivity. A recursivity may be seen in the relation of person and self: While personhood is an objectification and representation of selfhood, it nevertheless illumines and engages this selfhood, the definitions and boundaries of which the “person” has set. This, then, sets in motion a reciprocal process of the self producing, engaging, and placing limits on the


person. But the person, closer to the world and its vicissitudes than the self, is more easily subjected than the self to shifts and modalities of objectification; indeed, in its engagement with the person, it would be pointless and contradictory to assert that the self objectifies the person, even as it engages it. Thomas Csordas, citing Merleau-Ponty, states the critical view succinctly, a view that is at odds with traditional Indic views: “The person already objectified is a culturally constituted representation of the self. The preobjective self, however, is a culturally constituted mode of being in the world.”62 It is the status of this “preobjective self ” that most Indic schools of thought would dispute. Stated in these terms, we might say that the culturally constituted Indic notion of selfhood is of a self that is not culturally constructed; it is of a preobjective self that is free of cultural constructions of the world. In sum, it is helpful in the present study to be aware of how contemporary Western-derived models of cultural critique contend that person and self are culturally constructed and constitute each other, whereas non-Buddhist Indic systems tend to preserve a one-way process of self as prior to person. In his article “Person,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Charles E. Winquist traces the changes in the concept of the person in Western philosophy as it progressed from philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language. “The subject experienced in the transcendental unity of apperception, which is itself an effect of differential series of active formal processes, can then be asserted as the basic meaning of the person in an epistemological construct.”63 In other words, depending on the immediate and ever-shifting coloring of perception conferred by local context, a person is the sum total and unified representation of all autonomic and conceptual systems operating within an individual. This, it appears, is a philosophical iteration of Marriott’s sociological notion of substance-codes: The individual is systemic, with a collocation and hierarchy of autonomic, ethical, perceptual, and conceptual systems. When taken together in a dynamic and shifting unity, they constantly produce usable knowledge. When these factors combine in a uniquely situated and usually culturally validated manner to produce an epistemic shift of sufficient quality, a self may be represented. From the emic perspective, this self is produced within, and is sometimes distinct from, the person. This self, at least as it is expressed in Indic thought in the concept of ātman, is a metaphysical residue of the person that operates in an inherently reflexive manner.64 Through ascribing to it reflexivity, freedom, and autonomy, it is thus constituted as Other, while its counterpart, the person, contains within itself antinomies that, if sepa-


21

rated from the whole, constitute a differently conceived otherness, an otherness that does not contribute to selfhood but expresses fragmentation of personhood. Similarly, Marriott’s notion of substance-code expresses these antinomies, as well as juxtapositions, overlaps, and possible fragmentations of the parts of the person. The distinction I am attempting to forge between person and self in terms of the two sets of Sanskritic categorical oppositions puruùa/puruùottama and ātman/brahman can at best be partial and tentative. Given the widely divergent intellectual histories of these English and Sanskrit lexemes, it is foolish to assert exact equivalences. Puruùa literally means “man” or “person,” while puruùottama is translated as “highest person” and usually refers to Kóùâa. Puruùottama is, in fact, one of the most prominent names for Kóùâa in both the Mahābhārata and the Bhāgavata Purāâa. Puruùa as “person” is rarely used in the sense of “a free and autonomous self devoid of definable qualities and behavioral environment.” The only place this meaning is preserved is in SāÅkhya and Yoga philosophy, where the singularity or multiplicity of puruùa, which Gerald Larson renders in its philosophical sense with the dangerous terms “consciousness” and “contentless consciousness,” has been much debated.65 In most narrative contexts in Sanskrit, puruùa is assumed to possess forms and qualities. This is exemplified in the person of Kóùâa, the highest person, who contains within himself all forms (rūpa) and attributes ( guâa), the entire spectrum of materiality (prakóti) as well as universal selfhood, brahman or akùarabrahman. Personhood in the Indian sense, then, is a manifestation of form, attribute, substance, and materiality. The opposition puruùa/puruùottama may be contrasted with ātman/ brahman in that ātman refers to a certain residue of the person, a “thumbsized person” (aãguù•hamātrapuruùan) residing in the heart, according to the Upaniùads,66 which, though dependent on a body or person, is separate from substance and substantiality. It is free and autonomous, an inseparable microcosmic component of the absolute macrocosmic brahman. More precisely, in its generalized vedic sense, where it underwent considerable semantic development, ātman signified “the center of a personality determining its individuality” or “the substratum underlying the phenomena and functions of life,” in the words of Jan Gonda.67 Conversely, brahman’s microcosm is ātman, the self or identifiable center of personality. It is not puruùa, a person with many parts and systems but no definitive or consensus ontological center. Furthermore, according to the devotional schools of Indian thought that gained prominence early in the second millennium c.e. and


figure significantly in our discussions of possession (cf. Chapter 9 on bhakti), although all puruùa are engulfed within the Puruùottama, they can never become that Puruùottama. Nor can they ever fully identify themselves as that Puruùottama, as ātman can with brahman. Buddhist texts, as Steven Collins clarifies in his providentially titled book Selfless Persons, distinguish between “individuality” (attabhāva) and “person” or character type (puggala). While other Indic texts, particularly within the vast medical literature, engage in protracted discussion of personality or character types subsumed within the rhetoric of demonology (see Chapter 12), early Buddhist texts, which preceded the extant medical literature, speak of an attabhāva, a uniquely composed and constantly mutating edifice of khandas (Pali < Skt. skandha) or constituents of personality, and puggala, character types defined by temperament, ethical disposition, spiritual aptitude, and so on. Both attabhāva and puggala are driven by kamma (Pali < Skt. karman), the sum-total of sense-desires, feelings, and perceptions. It is these that produce individuality, the internal sense of self, and character type, the person observed from without. Collins states: “Where attabhāva was more oriented towards expressing, in a suitably impersonal way, the structure of individuals and rebirth as particular forms of existence, puggala is more oriented toward description of those individuals and reborn ‘persons’ as character-types.”68 Both of these are, according to Buddhist doctrine, void of reality; attabhāva, the status, condition, or experience of selfhood is no proof or guarantee of an ontological self. And it is this empty set that serves as the basis for puggalas or observed character types, rendering the latter equally baseless and empty. Given this status, the Buddhist individual becomes inconstant and permeable, capable of penetration, displacement, or permeation by forces, moods, entities, or beings of different but equally empty constitution.69 Because of possession’s complexity—āveśa, praveśa, or any other variety of it—we might say that it directly engages and affects the person, the puruùa (though no Sanskrit text speaks of it in quite this way) or attabhāva. Possession may in certain cases, for example in initiatory possession described in tantric texts, help illumine a self, but it occurs within and is mediated by complex systemic units that we might call persons or puruùa. Thus I am careful to keep discussion of possession within the domain of personhood, with the cultural and behavioral environments that these perforce require and refer to emergent selfhood when the context dictates. This is not only


23

because it makes good English sense, but because it makes good Sanskrit and Indic sense.

Notes 1. See references in Stanley 1988:7, Jones 1968, and Schoembucher 1993. A small gem of a book (with hardly a single reference to India), which anyone interested in the subject must seriously examine, is Bourguignon 1976; see also Boddy 1994, a global review of secondary literature on possession. 2. “Hinduism” takes on a life of its own when it becomes a concept wielded by a self-interested elite. As Foucault writes about Christianity in his essay “Technologies of the Self,” it “has always been more interested in the history of its beliefs than in the history of its real practices” (Foucault 1988:17). The academicians’ (especially anthropologists’) quest for an “essential culture” is lucidly criticized in Turner and Turner 1998, their controversial book asserting strong, even incontrovertible, evidence for cannibalism among the Anasazi of the American Southwest at the end of the first millennium c.e. It is important to note that though anthropologists were once as guilty as others, e.g., Indologists, of reifying and essentializing culture, anthropologists in particular are now at the forefront of questioning this sort of reification. 3. Humphrey and Laidlaw note, “avowedly atheist academics [still] routinely display deep Protestant prejudices” (1994:57n1). This occurs notably in translations. I understand from William Sax (personal communication, November 1999) that among those who now cast a cold eye on possession are scientists and Hindu nationalists—not surprising in either case, as both trumpet the ultimacy of their respective theologies. I might mention here that one of the problems in dealing with possession in South Asia is that, in spite of the fear and derision cast on it by certain early evangelical Christians (see Chapter 2), it was never the target of colonialist discourse; it was factored out, mostly ignored by nineteenth- and twentieth-century occidentalizing narratives of Hinduism. Thus it was not manipulated, constructed, or reconstructed as part of a colonizing project or a nationalizing discourse. The sub rosa quality of possession, sub rosa perhaps because of the fluidity of the South Asian person, to which the South Asian and the occidental were blind for very different reasons, rendered it unaccountable for either colonizing or nationalizing. 4. Carstairs (1957) observed a pronounced repugnance toward devotional religion and the singing of religious hymns among high-status brahmans, Rajputs, and Jains of Rajasthan. Among academics, however, especially anthropologists, the study of emotion has gained legitimacy in the past three decades; cf. Lynch 1990 and Marks and Ames 1995. 5. This is beginning to change in certain quarters. For example, the town of Mehndipur in eastern Rajasthan hosts a temple to Hanumān, called Bālājī, as well as several other facilities well known for exorcisms and other treatments for psychological disorders; cf. Kakar 1982:53–88; and the recent work of Dwyer, esp. 2003;


see also Chapter 4, n. 16. Most of the clientele at Bālājī are from first-generation literate families, thus with strong memories of the lifeways of oral cultures, many of whom come from great distances (relevant here is the work of Luria, cited in Ong 1982). For information above and beyond that presented by Kakar and Dwyer on the possession and temples at Mehndipur, I am indebted to Antti Pakaslahti, who has been conducting fieldwork for many years on the processes of psychological healing that occur there. 6. Ong 1982 develops this as a major theme. 7. Dumont 1970:57. Although Dumont often criticizes his great predecessor, Max Weber, here they agree. In 1917 Weber remarked of brahmans “that orgiastic and emotional-ecstatic elements of the ancient magic rites were not taken over and for long periods either completely atrophied and were tolerated [only] as unofficial folk magic” (1970:345). Cf. Weber 1917 [1970] and 1958:137, cited in Gellner 2001:34. Weber continued: “The status pride of cultured men resisted undignified demands of ecstatic therapeutic practices and the exhibition of neuropathic states . . . [but] could take quite a different stand toward the forms of apathetic ecstasy . . . and all ascetic practices capable of rationalization” (1958:149, cited in Gellner 2001:35). 8. I do not feel it is necessary here to problematize the term “religion” or “religious” by replacing it wholesale with “way of life” or any similar phrase, as Ronald Inden and some of his students have done. “Religion” remains an adequate term around which supplementary concepts such as belief, creed, practice, ritual, liturgy, and institution may be organized. See Inden, Walters, and Ali 2000, esp. pp. 23ff. 9. Knipe 1997. 10. Shulman 1991:51. 11. Yocum 1982:187–194. 12. Cf. Halbfass 1988:388–402. 13. This tendency was noted as early as the Atharvaveda; cf. Heesterman 1962. The major exception to this is in bhakti, which, as noted in Chapter 9, does not easily fit the paradigm. The conflict between precept and practice is a major concern of Bell 1992. 14. For my comments on the notion of authenticity in Indian ritual (and in general), see F. Smith 2001b:449–450. 15. Trautmann (1997:23ff.) reminds us that not all orientalist scholars of the earlier periods should be branded as “orientalist” in its current pejorative sense. 16. Considerable attention has been paid in recent years to the “construction” of the ancient and classical “East” by the West. Among the more noteworthy studies are Inden 1990, Trautmann 1997, Bishop 1989. 17. Kosambi and Gokhale 1957:xlvi. 18. That this is true can hardly be doubted, though it is equally true that Kosambi oversimplifies matters. Many of Kosambi’s ideas and historical conclusions are dated. 19. Ibid.:1. Rājaśekhara is, in fact, proud of his literary skills, twice referring to himself as an expert in all languages: sarvabhāùāvicakùaâa in Bālarāmāyaâa 1.10,


25

and savvabhāùācadara in Karpūramañjarī 1.8; cf. Karpūramañjarī, ed. Konow and Lanman, p. 199. 20. Lariviere 1995. He proposes three categories of scholarly Other: “orientalist critics,” with Edward Said as its exemplar; “essentialist critics,” typified by Ronald Inden; and “distortionist critics,” including Sheldon Pollock and other postcolonial and postmodern theorists. Lariviere’s terms should, of course, be understood as “critics of orientalism,” “critics of essentialism,” and “critics of distortionism.” Said attained his status as exemplar through his well-known (and often-criticized) work Orientalism (1978); Inden through his thought-provoking (but increasingly criticized) work Imagining India (1990); and Pollock through his brilliant (and controversial) article “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj” (1993a). Lariviere might peg Kosambi as a prescient postcolonialist, though it is likely that Kosambi would have enjoyed the label. 21. Indeed, the evidence he provides in his article, preliminary though it admittedly is, has less to do with reconstructing the history of India’s underclasses through the construction of critical editions than with a careful reading of well-known Sanskrit texts. For other acknowledgments and discussions of the dissonance between text and the practice of daily life, see Bailey 1995; Salomon 1989. 22. The most ambitious critical editions undertaken thus far (and it is difficult to imagine more ambitious projects) are the Poona Mahābhārata (MBh) and the Baroda Rāmāyaâa. It is difficult to say that the editions of these texts in their critical incarnations contribute more to our knowledge of the underclasses than does any single manuscript or regional rescension of these texts. One test of Lariviere’s theory would be for a brave, preferably retired, Indologist with an enormous amount of time to spare to examine the entire critical edition of the MBh with all the text-critical notes and appendices of excised passages, thus determining which manuscripts or rescensions contribute most in this area. Perhaps it would be better to sensitively examine texts on śūdradharma. An excellent beginning to this has been made by Vajpeyi 2004, a foray into the “philology of oppression” (I am grateful to her for this felicitous phrase). 23. Gombrich 1988:36–37; see the quotations from Weber in n. 7. Gombrich extends this view to the more general field of emotion: “my guess is that the apparent dearth of emotion in early Indian religion is due to its being censored out by the intelligentsia, both brahman and heterodox, just as they censored out the widespread practice of possession” (p. 170). I am in essential agreement with Gombrich, though I see more evidence of emotion in early Indian religion than Gombrich does; see Smith 1998b. It must be noted, however, that control is a major issue in all possession, brahmanical and non-brahmanical. See Wadley 1976 for an account of dank, a ritual of snake possession on the fifth day of the bright half of the month of Śravaâ (nāg pañcamī ), Wadley states, “Control is necessary at all times . . . there is control for causing possession, cessation of possession, and control during the rite itself. At no point is there lack of control” (p. 247). Gellner essentially supports Gombrich and states, “Lack of control is evident in spirit possession. Thus one can see how both


women and low castes are associated with spirit possession, and why high-caste males should shun it, except in closely defined esoteric contexts. This secret possession by the tantric gods of Buddhism and Hinduism is part of tantric initiation in both religions” (2001:42). 24. On the bhūta cults of South Kanara District, see Prabhu 1977. For a more theoretical treatment, see Brückner 1987, 1995. I am also grateful to Edwin Gerow, who informed me of his own observations in Karnataka. For another important study of possession among brahman women, see Harper 1963. 25. Sax 1991. 26. Cf. Hancock 1995. 27. I have observed brahmans undergoing exorcism and expiation for spirit possession in Pune (various temples and exorcists), Varanasi (Piśācmocan temple), central Kerala, and Bālājī. 28. For Tibet and Nepal, see, for example, Mumford 1989. For Thailand see Morris 2000. Both Mumford and Morris observe a conflict of interests. On the one hand, both lay Buddhists and priests condemn shamanistic practice, including varieties of possession, perhaps a relic of clashes long past. On the other hand, they furtively— though sometimes openly—attend these same ceremonies. Thus it comes as no surprise that Morris observes: “For many Buddhist men, mediumship still has the rank odor of the feminine and emanates the aura of a not-yet-recuperated primitiveness” (p. 85), recapitulating a stereotype that has persisted for millennia. Nevertheless, in later—though by no means recent—forms of Buddhism there was a reaction against this. See, for example, Faure 1998:100–104. He refers to eccentrics in Chan Buddhism who “seem to represent the nostalgia of a lost spontaneity” (p. 102). These eccentrics were initially regarded as subversive and dangerous, but after they became culturally fashionable they lost their subversive edge. This transgressiveness revealed a deep-seated ambivalence, which served “to legitimize the norm that it transgresse[d], like an exception confirming the rule” (p. 104). This masculine construction of the weakness of women was expressed as penetrability, no doubt sexual in origin, which Morris sees in “the ethnography of Buddhist gender ideology . . . as softness or pliability. Thus women are deemed within dominant ideology to be soft-souled or malleable as well as volatile. . . . For this reason, they are said to be particularly unsuited to the ascetic traditions of Buddhist meditation and particularly likely vehicles for spirits” (pp. 124–25). 29. See Chapter 5 on Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad (BĀU ) 3.3.1, 3.7.1. 30. Gombrich 1988:64; also: “both brahmanism and Buddhism oppose possession and commend self-control” (p. 145). 31. States of possession often are ritually controlled, as in the Siri cult in South Kanara district of Karnataka (Claus 1979). 32. Trans. by White 1996:12. 33. Boddy 1994:407. 34. This problem has arisen for other scholars as well. See, for example, Shulman 2002, who rightly labels the term possession “problematic” (p. 145) and admits to using it “with some trepidation” (p. 133).


27

35. See Csordas 1994:222ff., 252ff., for discussions on the criteria for spontaneity and control in American Charismatic Catholic trance healing. Spontaneity lies outside the accepted boundaries of intentionality. 36. Ong 1982:105. The literature on orality has advanced considerably in recent years; cf. Falk 1990 and Lopez 1995a, both of which are concerned more with the dynamics of orality and scripture than with the dynamics of culture. 37. See the incisive comments of Morris (2000) on remembering, forgetting, and literacy, 38. See Hufford 1977, indicating an incomplete hypostatization of oral exegesis into the ideologies of literacy; Davidson 2002, on the influence of nonliterate people on Mahāyāna Buddhism; and Campany 1996, esp. ch. 1. Campany writes: “As scholars including Walter Ong, Jack Goody, Michel de Certeau, and Jacques Derrida have shown, writing lends itself to ‘fixing’ objects of discourse by creating a uniform field of textual space and time in which they assume a definite place” (p. 16). Countering this, however, is a “nostalgia for the oral [which] is often part of a larger protest against the sort of locative cosmography for which writing had served as a medium” (ibid.). Although this nostalgia is largely unconscious, it helps explain why possession could not be effectively suppressed among the literate in classical India. 39. Erndl 1996:178. See Daniel 1984:227 on the impossibility of studying a culture in its own terms, but for its own terms. We must keep Daniel’s caveat in mind throughout this study. 40. Eliade 1969:339, also 320; cf. Eliade 1964:411ff. 41. Eliade 1969:339; Lewis 1989. 42. In a different context, Benz (1972) distinguishes between emotion (Ergriffenheit) and frenzy or spirit possession (Besessenheit). Ergriffenheit indicates blessing, healing, renewal, while Besessenheit indicates malevolent and destructive possession); cited by Schoembucher 1993:241–42. 43. Fuller 1992:231. 44. I explore the vocabulary and senses of possession in both their “microstructures” and “macrostructures,” as elucidated by Gonda 1962: “There are ‘microstructures’: ‘meanings’ which are complex, consisting of semantic aspects, grouped round a ‘kernel’; there are also ‘macrostructures’ or ‘fields’ composed of groups of words which are in some way or other—morphologically, notionally, etc.—more closely associated” (p. 245); also Gonda 1970a:177–178. 45. I cannot treat this fully this here, so it must be reserved for a future article. But see, e.g., BhP 4.7.26, cinmātram; 5.12.11, jñānaÅ viśuddham; 5.19.4, viśuddhānubhavamātram; 8.18.12, avyaktacit; 10.51.57, jñaptimātram. 46. Were I to struggle for a definition of consciousness in the present context, I would begin by revisiting the discussion of over a century ago by William James in Varieties of Religious Experience (1958:140–156), in which he considers it an openended, responsive, and adaptive mental activity. 47. The philosophical analysis of consciousness is problematized differently in the fields of neurophysiology and cognitive science. The questions raised by neurobiologists ultimately involve behavioral and cognitive function. But, asks David Chalmers,


a cognitive scientist, why is it necessary for these functions to be accompanied by conscious experience? This question remains unanswered, but the issues it raises are now being addressed by physicists, neuropsychologists, geneticists, information theorists, and an array of metaphysicians. Chalmers (1997) sees an explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness, which, he posits, may be negated (if not closed) by considering consciousness as an independent, irreducible, fundamental property in a final “theory of everything.” As such, awareness would be defined as physical and objective, while its psychophysical counterpart, consciousness, would not. See also Black, Flanagan, and Güzeldere 1996. I should acknowledge that “states of consciousness” have different constructions in the contexts of South Asian philosophical and religious textuality: deep sleep, dream, waking, or, in the Upaniùads and elsewhere, turīya, a fourth transcendent state. It has also been construed as a momentary finite unit connected by time or innate tendency. Elsewhere it has been regarded as identical with thought, with the thinking I; as the central product of embodiment; as an event connected with embodiment but not necessarily limited to it, and so on. Much modern anthropological and philosophical reflection on the term draws on Merleau-Ponty’s now rather quaint view (1962) that consciousness derives from embodiment. As noted in the previous paragraph, the questions asked today are nuanced differently. 48. Taylor 1998a. 49. Winquist states, in partial introduction to his article in that volume on the concept of person: “It is a commonplace in scholarship to recognize that words, ideas, or concepts are embedded in historical and cultural settings and cannot be isolated or abstracted without being misplaced, or translated without accounting for the transformation of or the difference in the cultural milieu into which the word is rendered or onto which it is inscribed” (1998:225). 50. Halbfass 1988:388–402. 51. Proudfoot 1985; Sharf 1995, 1998. 52. Sharf 1998:111. 53. Cf., e.g., Yogasūtras 1.11, 4.4, and Vyāsa’s commentary. Opposed to this is, e.g., Chāndogya Upaniùad 7.26.2. For a good description of memory in brahmanical thought, see Caraka SaÅhitā, Śārīrasthāna 1.148–151. 54. Sharf writes elsewhere: “The notion that the term ‘experience’ is self-evident betrays a set of specifically Cartesian assumptions, according to which experience is held to be immediately present to consciousness. It would appear that the phenomenological transparency of consciousness—what Richard Rorty has called the ‘glassy essence’ or ‘mirror of nature’ picture of mind (Rorty 1979)—is reproduced in the conceptual transparency of the category ‘experience,’ obviating the need for definitional precision or critical analysis” (1995:229). 55. Mauss 1938 [1966]. The volume in which the English translation appears, in The Category of the Person, ed. Carrithers et al., is dedicated to unpacking the legacy of Mauss’s essay and includes one article dedicated to the “person” in South Asia (Sanderson 1985:190–216). Less Indological, but more anthropologically informed, is Carrithers (1985:234–256).


29

56. Critiqued by Allen, in Carrithers et al. 1985:26–45. See also Lynch: “it suffers from its evolutionary framework, which can be read as putting the Western idea of the fully individualized self as the height of progress, rather than as a different idea of the self ” (2003:474). 57. Translation of Mauss 1938 by W. D. Hall in Carrithers et al. 1985. This deceptively simple statement may be used to counter in part the tired (and tiresome) idea, caricatured from Dumont, that Indians have little or no independent self-identity, only a corporate or systemic reflexivity. 58. Sanderson comments on Mauss: “What is striking in his cursory treatment is not so much his evolutionism as the inadequacy of his evidence and his lack of sociological and historical perspective” (1985:190). 59. Mauss 1938:18. 60. See Shulman 1994:26f. I address Shulman’s views more fully in dealing with the Mahābhārata in Chapter 6. 61. This is explored more extensively below; cf. Marriott 1976. 62. Csordas 1994:14. 63. Winquist 1998:229. 64. On ātman (self ), its relation with nara (person), and its use dialogically by Abhinavagupta, see Dupuche 2001. 65. See Larson and Bhattacharya 1987:73f. 66. Cf. Ka•ha Upaniùad, 4.12,13, 6.17; Śvetāśvatara Up. 5.8; etc. 67. Gonda 1965:266. 68. Collins 1982:160, 172, for mention of an ‘inner soul” (abbhantare jīva), used conventionally, in the Milinda Pañha. 69. The texts Collins exploited were the Visuddhimagga, Dīgha Nikāya, Nettipakaraâa, Anguttara Nikāya, SaÅyutta Nikāya, Paramattha-jo•ikā, and the Katthāvatthu. The latter is discussed in Cousins 1994, which relates Vasubandhu’s representation of the Vātsīputrīyas, a remnant sect of early Buddhism that maintained a certain pudgalavāda view based on the coalescence of the aggregates or skandhas. See also the references cited in ibid.:28n6. In Jainism, poggala is an ontological category that denotes particles of matter or basic constituents of nature. These can be aggregated, recombined, and transformed to yield substances (davya < Skt. dravya) that may serve as a locus for a jīva. But they do not in themselves bear the weight of a person or personality. Cf. Deleu 1970:145, 183f., passim.



II Ethnography, Modernity, and the Languages of Possession


2

New and Inherit

s

Methodologies for the Study of Possession There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden. — B OB DY L A N


Classical Study and Ethnography Although possession as a religious and sociocultural phenomenon in ancient and classical India has been understudied, in fact rarely mentioned in the secondary literature (to a great extent because it has been regarded as absent in the primary literature),1 the opposite is the case for modern India, for which studies of possession abound. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that possession is one of the most studied topics in anthropology and is beginning to find its way into the academic study of religion.2 Its attractiveness as a subject of study is often due to its exotic character (which is to say its spiritual distance from academe), its evident irrational Otherness, and its frequent presence in ritual. Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, who have studied possession and exorcism among largely educated middle-class people at the Padampura Jain temple near Jaipur, assert, “Ethnographers have displayed an almost puzzle-solving pleasure in ‘decoding’ rituals: the more bizarre and serpentine the better. Behind this lies the idea that rituals contain hidden messages about the societies in which they are performed.”3 This, they believe, is the consuming passion of anthropologists; yet they see the scholar’s analysis of ritual (especially that in which possession is contex-

34 Part II. Ethnography, Modernity, and the Languages of Possession

tualized) as usually neglecting the participant’s view. This emic viewpoint is something I attempt to engage in this volume, as a parallel discourse to the etic viewpoints that constitute and regulate contemporary academics (though one may argue that the practice of an etic discourse in thinking about the Other is simultaneously the practice of an emic discourse within the tribe of scholars).4 Conferring at least limited credibility to emic viewpoints is, in my experience of contemporary scholarship (in opposition to Humphrey and Laidlaw’s observation), finding an increasingly prominent place in more recent studies of possession. Furthermore, in defense of those of us who study possession (including Humphrey and Laidlaw), it must be said that public performance of possession is nearly always thrilling and exotic for those who are enculturated. Thus anthropologists and other observers and researchers must not be faulted too severely for yielding to that same odd attractiveness, for succumbing to the spell of possession.5 In order to comprehend possession as presented in Sanskrit texts, it is important to understand the use of the English word and its background in Western thought, especially in anthropological analysis. However, it is neither possible nor desirable to provide a full accounting of the history of experiential states identified as “possession.” Nevertheless, a summary, particularly of possession reports in the Indian ethnographic literature, will prove helpful.6 Nevertheless, I do not intend to write an account of possession in Sanskrit texts according to any particular anthropological paradigm. I am not scrutinizing a broad range of Sanskrit and other classical Indian texts in order to historically validate any single anthropological model or with the specific intention of applying any of them exclusively or strictly to the evidence for possession derived from these texts. But the insights on possession gained by anthropologists and other ethnographers will be useful in evaluating the evidence adduced here—and I shall not hesitate to call on these insights when necessary or convenient. In this section (Chapters 2–4) I first look at definitions of possession found in anthropological literature, especially in the work of scholars of South Asia. Then I examine a number of intellectual perspectives in which anthropologists and others situate possession. After considering these, I attempt a broad characterization of possession in South Asia according to the anthropological literature (Chapter 2). With this in mind, I consider, as an interlude, the distinction between deity or spirit possession in South Asia and trance channeling in contemporary America (Chapter 3). Then, I enter

New and Inherited Paradigms

35

into a lengthy discussion of the vocabulary and general diction of possession and allied forms of spirit-mediumship in several South Asian languages and linguistic and cultural areas that have been the subject of studies of possession (Chapter 4). I conclude the chapter with a reflection on the relationship between “folk possession” and “classical possession.”

Definitions and Typologies The definition of possession cited earlier by Boddy in her review article on the literature of possession has the advantage of both conceptual precision and elasticity. This definition bears repeating. Possession, Boddy says, is a broad term referring to an integration of spirit and matter, force, or power and corporeal reality, in a cosmos where the boundaries between an individual and her environment are acknowledged to be permeable, flexibly drawn, or at least negotiable.7

Erika Bourguignon notes a curious statistic: Out of 488 societies examined, 360 of them (74 percent) showed evidence of possession belief and 251 (52 percent) evinced possession trance.8 She defines possession accordingly. After stating that possession “is an idea, a concept, a belief which serves to interpret behavior,” she says: We shall state that a belief in possession exists, when the people in question hold that a given person is changed in some way through the presence in or on him of a spirit entity or power, other than his own personality, soul, self, or the like. We shall say that possession trance exists in a given society when we find that there is such a belief in possession and that it is used to account for alterations or discontinuity in consciousness, awareness, personality, or other aspects of psychological functioning.9

In addition, we may cite Rex L. Jones, who studied spirit possession in Nepal: Spirit possession can be defined as an altered state of consciousness on the part of an individual as a result of what is perceived or believed to be the


incorporation of an alien form with vital and spiritual attributes, e.g. the spirit of a superhuman form such as a witch, sorcerer, god, goddess, or other religious divinity.10

Carl Becker provides broad leeway in defining possession as: the phenomenon in which persons suddenly and inexplicably lose their normal set of memories, mental dispositions and skills, and exhibit entirely new and different sets of memories, dispositions, and skills.11

By simply defining possession as a type of behavior, he avoids (perhaps too cautiously) the knotty problem of an individual being taken over by another (presumably discarnate) being or conscious entity. This broad definition should become useful in dealing with the broad category of possession in South Asia. Bearing in mind that these definitions are offered by anthropologists rather than classicists or historians of religion and that they have different emphases—possession as an integrated but fluid psychophysiological state, as an interpretative idea, and as an altered state of consciousness induced by an external agent—they are good starting points.12 Historically, the study of possession has been a Eurocentric concern, mostly by white men studying an experience of mostly nonwhite men and women. Certain fallacies incumbent in this enterprise in early studies of possession, which are apparent to the turn-of-the-millennium eye (but which continue to the present in many cases), were summarized by W. G. Jilek in 1971 in his analysis of the “sick medicine-man” thesis. The fallacies of this thesis, which can be applied to the “possession thesis,” are that the very notion of the “sick medicine-man” is: (1) Eurocentric, insofar as it tries to explain descriptive data collected in nonWestern cultures by Western scientific theories, ignoring the non-Western folk systems of explanation and overlooking Western folk systems analogous to shamanic institutions; (2) Positivistic insofar as it considers behaviour which does not fit into the framework of logico-experimental explanatory theories . . . as departure from rational norms due to “ignorance and error,” under which is subsumed the “poor reality testing” of psychopathology.13

Although the early British ethnographers who mapped out the “cultures, artifacts, and peoples” of the British Raj were unabashedly Eurocentric and


37

positivistic, these tendencies have been in decline with recent methodological advances in anthropological research. An increasing number of anthropological studies of possession, for example, those by Peter Claus, Edith Turner, Smriti Srinivas, and Daniel Halperin, all discussed below, question the anthropologist’s presumed superior understanding of possession— superior, that is, to the understanding of the people under study.14 A substantial number of anthropologists and folklorists, such as Humphrey and Laidlaw, Claus, Erndl, Caldwell, and Sax, understand the issues at stake here and address them cogently; and, among them, Claus directly addresses the central problematic. Echoing a theme I note often in this study, Claus contends that the results of anthropological studies of possession have been guided by preselected models, which in most cases means that the method determines the madness at the expense of fair and adequate representation of the cultural context. Although very different from the early British ethnographies, the methodological assumptions and approaches are now much more varied and abstract. An example, discussed more fully below, of the overdetermined nature of many modern studies is revealed in Richard Castillo’s indictment of Gananath Obeyesekere and others whom Castillo believes forced their evidence to fit their theories. In the case of Obeyesekere in particular, Castillo tries to show that his assertion of repressed oedipal desire as the primary causal factor in possession is completely mistaken—that Obeyesekere’s data cannot possibly support this claim. Claus’s point bears on the problematic of the one-way discourse of many studies such as Obeyesekere’s (which, nonetheless, may still be valuable and illuminating). He states, “I doubt that any serious anthropological study gives credence to the native claim that they are possessed by spirits, although we do sometimes acknowledge that we can proceed with the study ‘as if there were spirits.’”15 Fortunately, this attitude of grudging acknowledgment is an increasing trend, which opens the discussion considerably and allows for more nuanced interpretations. Halperin states, along the same lines: While externally formulated, or “etic,” approaches normally consider possession from the perspective of the human individual or society, the practitioner’s own worldview is nearly always an actively spirit-centered one. Ritualists typically perceive the essence of possession rites not as entering a trance but as being entered by spirit(s), by a force clearly outside themselves.16


As shown below, many recent studies are not exclusively concerned with constructing their own theories of possession or justifying fully formed theories that they have adopted, but also consider the implications of the emic viewpoint for the people under study. This is not to criticize any particular theories or the enterprise of theorizing, but to say that theorizing can be much more fruitful when granting those under study the facticity of their viewpoints. Studies of possession commonly (and correctly) ask one or more of three questions: What is possession? How does it work? What does it mean? In spite of several cogent definitions, such as those noted above, there is little agreement on what possession actually is. How it works is also not well understood or generally agreed upon. The greatest disagreement, however, is over the last question, which most researchers, curiously, feel qualified to address even as they readily acknowledge ignorance in relation to the first two questions. This is reminiscent of physics, in which the existence and role of black holes can be postulated and surmised, yet “from within which,” declares the science writer Timothy Ferris, “one may rest assured, no reporter will ever file dispatches.”17 Since the earliest serious field studies of possession about a century ago, a considerable amount of work on the subject has been carried out, most of which views possession as “a symbolic expression of other experiences.”18 This characteristic of anthropological interpretations strives to unearth psychological, medical, or social causes of possession. This investigative tendency, Elizabeth Schoembucher maintains, is due to the Western social scientists’ insistence on rationality and “search for a deeper meaning.”19 This has resulted in a series of different interpretations, in which the fact that possession is seen as an ecstatic religious experience by the people themselves is intellectually indefensible, an academic inheritance from the Protestant-dominated cultures of anthropology and the study of religion, which subtly yet pervasively establish hierarchies subordinating sorcery, witchcraft, and “natural” religion to higher “revealed religion.”20 This disregard for indigenous voices and interpretations is noted by Humphrey and Laidlaw, who, not surprisingly, reject the interpretive strategies of most of their contemporaries. They contend that most ethnographers read ritual, a category in which possession most often falls, as “an escape for the ethnographer from the bewildering and dispiriting prospect of thinking about multifarious individuals.”21 One of the features of the present study, I hope, is to permit the texts, our current voices under examination, to speak for themselves, to admit at least some of their own light by allowing their own interpretations to arise more or less unhindered, given the limita-


39

tions I fully recognize in the oft-stated caveat that every act of reading or translating is an act of interpretation. Another objective is to avoid reifying or “orientalizing” possession—a possibility against which Arjun Appadurai warns in no uncertain terms when he speaks of “the unruly body of the colonial subject (fasting, feasting, hook swinging, abluting, burning, and bleeding)” as a creation of the “exoticizing gaze” of orientalism.22 Possession has usually been examined from the perspective of one of five interpretative frameworks: (1) as demonic, opposed to God and good; (2) as a medically defined psychological state; (3) as a psychological condition engineered for the purpose of gaining social or even political control; (4) as an aspect of shamanism; and (5) as an existential reality. I deal with each of these in turn.

The Devil’s Work Because possession is deeply embedded in the complexities of local culture and ritual, it is important to exercise caution in formulating general theories about it.23 Although it is not my intention to present a general theory, it is nevertheless necessary to present different viewpoints regarding possession, particularly because most available theories have been applied to possession in India. To begin, the interpretation of possession as the work of demonic, ungodly beings is characteristically the property of certain Western Christian, usually Protestant, denominations, though, as shown below, South Asians themselves often enough accuse tantrikas in the temporary employ of local enemies of setting malevolent spirits on family members afflicted with mental illness. Commenting on studies of possession, though not singling out Christian perspectives, Nicholas Dirks comments: “Most of the literature on possession deals with the nasty kind, when it is the devil rather than the lord who has taken up residence within our mortal coil.”24 This may be stretching it a bit, especially given the explosion of possession studies among anthropologists since the 1960s. But it does constitute a well-represented viewpoint commonly invoked until the mid-twentieth century, one that has not been completely abandoned. It is more accurate to agree with Isabelle Nabokov, who observes that despite Christian missionary accounts of possession as “replete with prejudicial interpretations and factual errors, they still disclose a vibrant, well-established tradition of boundary transgressions between this world and the hereafter.”25


One (1991) proponent of this missionary viewpoint shows, if nothing else, that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “orientalist” attitudes die slowly, stating that “possession by the evil one means losing control of the self.”26 This is not far from the language used almost three hundred years ago by Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719), the first Danish Protestant missionary in India, whose pre-enlightenment views were a precursor to imperialist Christianity. Ziegenbalg spoke of “devil dancers” in his “Genealogy of the Malabar Gods” (1713),27 a phrase that has cropped up for centuries. It was not, therefore, a complete surprise when, in 2000, the New York Times quoted the Reverend Bob Larson, a full-time, Vatican-sanctioned Roman Catholic exorcist operating out of Denver, Colorado, on the physical effects of exorcism. According to Larson, these may include violence, vomiting, and cursing on the part of the possessed: “Dealing with the Devil is ugly work. The Devil is ugly. Evil is ugly. When you get to what I call pure extreme evil, it’s not going to be pretty.” The Times article notes that in January 1999, “the Vatican issued a revised Catholic rite of exorcism for the first time since 1614, essentially reaffirming that Satan exists.”28 An article of a much higher caliber of statement than that on Reverend Larson, written by a Protestant missionary in Pakistan, appeared in a1990 issue of the journal Missiology. This article is of interest because it displays an anthropology parallel to that conducted by mainstream scholars—parallel but distinctly detached from it. It is recognizable to conventional scholarship because the data gathering is methodologically rigorous and linguistically sound. Yet, because of its source, it is not referred to in any secondary source that I have examined. The author of the article, Wayne McClintock, was employed by Interserve, formerly the Bible Medical Missionary Fellowship International, and reveals practically no familiarity with current scholarship on possession phenomena in South Asia. In the academic mainstream, this would be regarded as an unacceptable oversight for an article on folk demonology in Pakistani Panjab. However, McClintock’s motivations are different from those of the academic mainstream. After recording a good deal of phenomenological and linguistic data of some importance, McClintock’s conclusion is, at least for this reader, unexpected: It is incumbent on persons bent on contextualizing the gospel among the rural peasantry of South Asia to grapple seriously with a worldview that perceives the misfortunes of life as attributable to some supernatural agency. Unless serious attempts are made by outsiders to understand this cos-


41

mos of demons and ghosts and its relevance to the everyday life of the rural villager, then efforts to incarnate the gospel message in a South Asian context will fail, and new believers will continue to be entangled in the web of syncretism.29

McClintock’s legitimate, if dated, anthropology, not to speak of his conclusions, locates him within a certain tradition which from our present perspective must be regarded as emic, and not peculiarly so, as it deals with faithbased assertions that assume a superior reason (and reasonableness) to what it clearly sees as other local contesting faith-based traditions. It seeks a victory for reason—Christian reason—over what it sees as an irrational, thus faulty, emotion-laden and superstitious belief system.30 This victory of reason over emotion in religious doctrine (if not always in religious practice) is well documented and is rooted as much in institutional prerogatives as in theological ones (though, of course, often there is little difference between them)—reason is regarded as stable, stabilizing, measurable, and the result of conformity with theological writ, all of which is to say that reason is institutionally safe as well as godly. In contrast, emotion is unstable, destabilizing, unpredictable, and attributable to the invasion of evil spirits, which is to say that it is socially unsafe as well as ungodly. Reason, stability, and control are due to possession by God; emotion, instability, and spontaneity threaten theological order and may well be the product of the devil or symptomatic of possession by spirits. It is not difficult here to connect the ascendancy of reason, hence control, expressed in McClintock’s Christian writing to Gombrich’s observation, noted earlier, that “Brahmanism inculcated control.” In both cases, the issue of control serves as a diaphanous cover for a strong undercurrent of behavior that transgresses institutionally imposed limits or, at least, bears the threat of such transgression. However, acts of faith, which are central to the perpetuation of institutionalized religion, regardless of whether the religion is devotional, monastic, a state-sponsored cult, or a hereditary formalism, often take extreme forms that are permitted by the institution so long as they can be brought under theological, hence institutional, control. In other words, extreme behavior may not be regarded as unreasonably transgressive if it is accorded a peaceable and compliant place at the outer limits of theological or institutional normativity. Thus certain types of extreme behavior can be, and often are, theologically domesticated in order to neutralize any potential threat to institutional control. For example, glossalalia and āveśa are permitted,


and sometimes encouraged, by dominant theological elites because they can be assigned an agreeable location in the theology and power structure of the religion. This structural positioning may seem at first glance forced or unnatural—after all, glossalalia and āveśa are uncomfortably close to the more transgressive and threatening specter of “devil worship” or physical violence such as self-impalement. Practitioners are empowered by the personal and social epiphanies that are components of glossalalia and āveśa, while priesthoods and theologians may be equally empowered so long as they are ceded final interpretative power and at least the illusion of overarching social control. In fact, the process is dialogical because it negotiates in both directions. Less privileged nonelite nonprofessionals poach on the discourse of privileged elite professionals by adopting their symbols and images, thus demarcating a realm of social and political safety for their experience, while the elites, the priesthoods, extend their domain by creating discourse mechanisms through which they domesticate popular practice. Indeed, as shown in culture after culture, elite participation in popular practice contributes to this negotiation between professionals and nonprofessionals.31 European Christianity, however, is unlike indigenous Indian religions in that it established more or less clear boundaries with respect to ecstatic experience, then strived to maintain them, at least in the periods immediately before and after the rise of Western colonialism. In order to understand the Protestant Christian, hence orientalist, attitudes toward possession in India (as well as other colonized territories), it is necessary to briefly summarize the Church’s position on possession on its home turf.32 Fortunately, we have Keith Thomas’s compendious Religion and the Decline of Magic to turn to for this.33 The devil was believed to be immanent, lying in wait to spread disease, crime, and havoc. “The belief in the reality of Satan not only stimulated allegations about diabolical compacts; it also made possible the idea of demoniacal possession.”34 Unusual or antisocial behavior, fits or convulsions, unconscious or unwitting blasphemy of the Church, and many other physical and moral ills were attributed to evil spirits sent by witches in league with the devil. “In seventeenth-century England, the epithets ‘possessed’ and ‘bewitched’ came very near to being synonymous.”35 The English Protestants viewed the practice of exorcism with considerable hostility, employing repressive actions to counter possession or bewitchment, including imprisonment or, in extreme cases in which a scapegoat was required, death.36 The Holy Spirit occupied an ambiguous place in the mainstream Church: To be possessed by the Holy Spirit was often intended met-


43

aphorically and was often at the outer limits of Protestant discourse.37 Beyond this, all other epiphanies were cordoned off, quite unlike the earlier Church, in which the limits were extremely elastic, at least in practice. Thus the dialogue between theological powerbrokers and representatives of popular movements broke down considerably earlier than was the case in India, and it was the deputies of the official power structure, in the form of missionaries, who came to India and attempted to impose their values on a phenomenological universe, which to them resembled the work of the devil. In view of this precedent for “othering,” it is not surprising that Western advocates of unorthodox intellectual and methodological positions, all to some degree rooted in the Reformation, should look so skeptically at emic assertions of possession that they too end up engaged in one or another type of othering. This othering is also assisted by the relative absence of a Christian framework for experiencing spirits, which “collapses them into a Christian demonic realm, which is much vaguer than spirits’ traditional classification.”38 In this case, as elsewhere in the colonial system, unfamiliarity bred contempt.39 To say that brahmanism or Christianity inculcate control is to say that the human desire and capacity for exotic empowering experience is kept within manageable, recognizable limits. In fact, however, is it actually the case that the elites whose discourse controls the “isms” also control the experience? This begs the complementary question: To what extent does more or less unsanctioned or barely sanctioned experience of the nonelite reshape the discourse of the “isms”? Both the anthropological and the Indological evidence suggest that when institutionally imposed limits are stretched, but not irreparably ruptured, these limits are usually modified, broadened by incumbent priesthoods and other elites in something of a tacit recognition that their control is comparatively thin, and often in name only. This interpretative strategy, which is not the property of anthropologists but of missionaries, is to be distinguished from the following perspectives in that it views possession as a religious problem, rather than as a medical, social, psychological, or existential problem.40

Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Interpretations As others have noted before me, spirit (or deity) possession must be viewed from within the cultural systems of which it is a part. In such systems, as


Loring Danforth points out, “people who are seriously disturbed are generally not able to express or resolve their idiosyncratic problems through the cultural symbols provided by the idiom of spirit possession.” Spirit possession is, therefore, “an adaptive response through which they are able to resolve social and psychological problems in a widely accepted, and sometimes well-respected, cultural idiom.”41 Thus the question of labeling spirit or deity possession a form of deviant behavior or psychologically definable pathology must be answered within the context of the local culture. This is no less true in South Asia than anywhere else. In spite of (or perhaps because of ) a suspected (or suspect) normalcy, and because of the extensive time frame of the topic as I approach it here, it is necessary to engage in a fairly thorough review of the psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of possession as I see them and their relevance to the topic at hand. The defining feature of possession to both the possessed individual and the observer is marked psychological change that engenders recognizable modifications in speech and behavior. This is accompanied by an observable shift from one internal focal context to another and from one presumed identity to another. The operative assumption of nearly all scholars who favor psychoanalytic interpretations of possession is that the modifications are generated intrapersonally, strictly from within, the result of the psyche responding to stimuli that may be either internally or externally produced. If the latter, then the stimulus is regarded as secondary; in psychoanalysis the primary concern is to locate and analyze internal reactions and personality complexes that confer on the individual’s experience a unique and idiosyncratic flavor. Regardless, then, of whether an alleged experience of possession is said to result from interpersonal or any other extrapersonal contact (and nearly all of them are), the psychoanalytic project is to address internal psychic and psychological processes, usually released by external stimuli, that induce observable personality modifications. Possession or external invasion has not been a productive psychoanalytic diagnosis, at least not until recently, because it opposes the assumption of the normalcy of an inviolable and unitary self, on which the Western biomedical system is founded. As much, however, as this philosophical reason for the denial of extrapersonal contact as the etiology of reported experiences of possession is that psychoanalysis (and, we should add, other social and “human” sciences), in the words of J. Moussaieff Masson, is “always skeptical of anagogic or ‘spiritual’ explanations, or of explanations in terms of what we cannot understand.”42 Part of the problem is that these sciences have estab-


45

lished the parameters of what is understandable, and this creates an often unbridgeable rift between the science and the object of study. What eventually occurs, then, is that one explanatory model is replaced with another, which hardly solves the problem of communication between models.43 Nonetheless, psychologists and anthropologists who study possession are able to observe and even measure certain of its manifestations, such as altered speech and behavior, following which these investigators construct credible psychological and psychosocial narratives said to be responsible for these modifications.44 What observers, including ethnographers and (we choose to believe) indigenous participants, are unable to perceive are the alien spirits and deities reported to be taking possession of the individual and instigating these psychological and socially interactional changes. Thus most psychoanalytic interpretations either deny the possibility of possession (e.g., Lambek, see below) or leave the question unaddressed. The nature of these interpretations has become more sophisticated and nuanced over the years, though, as always, psychoanalytic interpretations continue to carry more than their fair share of cultural and intellectual biases.45 The three competing theoretical perspectives concerning spirit (and, we might add, deity) possession are Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which regards possession as a form of hysteria, dissociation theory based on the work of Pierre Janet in the late nineteenth century, and the notion that possession is a culturally mediated altered state of consciousness. We deal with the third of these later; for the moment, it is important to understand that dissociation theory has always opposed Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. In the late nineteenth century most possession experience was regarded as dissociation. After rise of Freud in the early twentieth century, dissociation theory was eclipsed by psychoanalytic theory. A perusal of the different editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (in four editions so far: 1952, 1968, 1980, and 1994), illustrates the changes in categorizing psychiatric disorders during the second half of the twentieth century. Initially psychoanalytic theory was ascendant. In the past few decades, however, there has been a shift toward viewing psychopathology “as a set of discrete heterogeneous disorders with distinct biological causations.”46 Along with this, dissociation theory has experienced a revival (for our purposes, note especially the work of Castillo and Littlewood, discussed shortly). At the same time, certain psychoanalytic categories have been completely expunged from the DSM, most recently neurosis and hysteria.47


Until the latter decades of the twentieth century, possession was usually explained by advocates of psychoanalytic theory as little more than a psychological state indicative of “repressed infantile complexes or a reconfirmation of primitive beliefs once surmounted,”48 as repressed oedipal desires in the unconscious, or even (in the case of spontaneous, nonritualized, possession) as compulsion, obsession, epilepsy, or hysteria.49 Although this may be an oversimplification, even a caricature, of most current psychoanalytic interpretations of possession, investigators throughout the twentieth century resorted to explanations that attributed reported possession experiences at least in part to abnormal psychological conditions or, if not abnormal, as culturally sanctioned psychological reactions to social or political oppression—in other words, as compensatory behavior. In either case, the reported “possession” was lightly regarded; rather, the experience was considered a psychic dimension of learned and conditioned behavior, founded on an ultimately fictive belief in possession.50 Stanley Tambiah attempts to interpret Indian notions of spirit possession from a standard psychoanalytic paradigm. it is to be expected that the Indian view of mental illness would be incompatible with the Western approaches. In the Indian shamanistic or spirit possession beliefs, mental illness may be admitted to be related to undue or unfulfilled desires, but the results of such unfulfilled desires are not internally split-off portions of the self but are externalized entities given phenomenal existence as demons and spirits.51

Later we examine in detail the subject of bhūtavidyā (demonology) in classical Indian medical literature and how a diverse array of invasive spirits are believed to induce disease, especially in children. Of more immediate concern, however, is to better understand the incompatibility of Indian and Western approaches of which Tambiah speaks. In short, the Western biomedical approach to physical and mental illness excludes the possibility of nonsensory forces influencing the individual’s consciousness. This consciousness, in the Western biomedical model, is a function of the mind, which is equated with and bounded by the brain. The proximate construction in Indian thought to this model of internal functioning is the “inner organ” (Skt. antankaraâa), analyzed as the heart (as the locus of emotional experience), mind, intellect, and ego combined.52 This “inner organ,” however, is not immune to nonsensory influence, from


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infiltration by external signals. With respect to possession, unarguably an assertion of such nonsensory, external influence, Sudhir Kakar, for example, contends that what Indians regard as spirit possession is, in fact, nothing more than an interpretation. Kakar, perhaps the most literate apostle of Freud in the Indian psychoanalytic community, interprets possession as a self-induced mechanism for psychic release, consistent with the generalization stated above. Kakar observed reported possession in Mehndipur in eastern Rajasthan, which contains a temple to Hanumān, called Bālājī, as well as several other facilities well known for exorcisms and other treatments for psychological disorders. The classic visible symptoms of possession, very much on display at Bālājī, suggested to Kakar that the evident somatic unburdening was caused by a culturally identifiable and sanctioned mode of psychic release, akin to classically defined hysteria but identified locally as a kind of possession. To Kakar, spirit possession is an act of situated imagination, the classic mechanism of projection.53 Another clinician, Dr. Antti Pakaslahti, has been conducting fieldwork for many years on the processes of psychological healing that occur at Bālājī. He agrees: “Here psychological distress is expressed and treated in terms of spirit affliction, culturally congenial to large segments of the Indian population.”54 However, Pakaslahti avoids the increasingly vague term “hysteria,” consistent with its banishment from the 1994 edition of the DSM, and sees the possession and exorcisms at Bālājī as effective family therapy, regardless of any claims to the facticity of possession.55 The reason for the effectiveness of the therapy, says Pakaslahti, is that at least one member of the family of the afflicted party accompanies him or her to the healing center, and, in the presence of the family, the healer is careful to expunge the afflicted person of guilt by convincingly shifting the blame for the individual’s dysfunctionality from the individual to the afflicting spirit. The anthropologist Michael Lambek, who has studied possession in Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique channel between Madagascar and Tanzania, puts it this way: “To argue that spirits are imagined is not to hypostatize them but to locate the work of imagination in its social context, in history.”56 Lambek states flatly, perhaps more decisively than Kakar or Pakaslahti would find comfortable: “Spirits are products of imagination, partial world constructions that are fictional but not simply fictitious.”57 In other words, whatever condition it may be, it is not possession, even if those experiencing it are not lying or misguided by their cultural preceptors.58 Among such conditions often associated with possession are “dissociation, fugue states,


multiple personalities, fainting, functional epileptic seizures and other behavior of an apparently hysterical type,” writes Bourguignon.59 Many of these conditions have been favored diagnoses for possession, particularly dissociation, which falls within the general category of “double consciousness—in which two different human personalities apparently coexist in association with a single physical body.”60 From the point of view of the Western commonsense assumption of a unitary self lurking behind multiple personalities, double or multiple consciousness is an aberration. As Roland Littlewood suggests, however, distancing himself from Lambek’s psychoanalytic rationalism, “this might not be altogether legitimate.”61 Clifford Geertz provides a tidy summary of the Western conception of the person, a description that should be kept in mind throughout this study. This person is a “bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background.” It is no less important that Geertz notes, as an addendum to this definition, that this is “a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”62 Littlewood, a practicing psychiatrist, suggests that this notion of a “single bounded and volitional self which shares a body which gives rise to it” hangs together as a result of the potential accessibility to awareness of various facets of the personality such as habits, abilities, memories, and idiosyncratic responses to stimuli. However, he adds, “this hanging together becomes unstuck in dreams, or in the usual process of forgetting and inattention, such that chunks of past experience cannot necessarily be recalled simultaneously.” These chunks, says Littlewood, citing Jung, are “split off ‘complexes’” or fragments (of which Tambiah speaks) that “might be so extensive as to actually constitute a parallel secondary self.”63 The concept of double consciousness, of dissociation, popular in the nineteenth century, fell out of favor for much of the twentieth century and has experienced a well-publicized revival since the 1980s under the designation Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Most recently, the latter has been rechristened Dissociative Identity Disorder.64 Furthermore, the DSM-IV has dropped the category of hysteria, which served as the bedrock of Freud’s view of possession, and suggested a new category for further research called “dissociative trance disorder.” Among the features of “dissociative trance disorder” are the following:


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A. possession trance, a single or episodic alteration in the state of consciousness characterized by the replacement of customary sense of personal identity by a new identity. This is attributed to the influence of a spirit, power, deity, or other person, as evidenced by one (or more) of the following: (a) stereotyped and culturally determined behaviors or movements that are experienced as being controlled by the possessing agent (b) full or partial amnesia of the event B. The trance or possession trance state is not accepted as a normal part of a collective cultural or religious practice. C. The trance or possession trance state causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. D. The trance or possession trance state does not occur exclusively during the course of a Psychotic Disorder . . . or Dissociative Identity Disorder and is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance or a general medical condition.65

It is important to understand that the DSM-IV is not suggesting that the etiology of such a state is in fact spirit possession, but that this is the symptomatology of a mental state associated with reported possession episodes. Littlewood does not regard double or multiple consciousness as necessarily an aberration or in general as a kind of pathology. “Humans have the ability to dissociate their mental processes and do so the whole time—through changing moods, selective attention and putting unpleasant issues out of mind, through fantasy and dreaming—for the potential contents of our awareness are hardly accessible simultaneously.”66 Dissociation, he says, is: the necessary flip side of consciousness: it allows detachment of awareness from the immediate passage of events, part of the evolutionary development of “self-consciousness” as an internal system of representation and self-monitoring where the individual’s awareness can then objectivize their own cognitions (“my senses deceive me,” “I was overcome by emotion”), allowing self-recognition, anticipation, introspection, creative imagination, recognition of another’s motivations and possible identification with them, disbelief, and acting: all requirements for our complex programmes of intersubjective action.67


Such dissociation, he says, can be engendered through hypnosis, sensory deprivation or overload, hyperventilation (or, I might add, other forms of regulated breathing), the ingestion of psychoactive substances, as well as through witchcraft or spirit possession. All of these conditions may influence the individual to bring about concentrated attention, meditative states, a shared sense of community, out-of-body experiences, and so on.68 The fact that beginning in the nineteenth century the Western psychiatric model established these phenomena as intrapersonal in origin rather than as deity or spirit intrusion may be little more than an artifact of a culturally weighted scientific paradigm. There is no reason why the “dissolution of everyday agency”69 and its temporary reassignment cannot occur through a comportment of causation and volition that is differently constituted from that presented by the intrapersonally defined Western psychiatric model. This is not to defend the “reality” of spirit possession, however, but to point out the limitations of the psychoanalytic model in providing a “final” assessment of possession. To state succinctly the distinction between paradigms, I offer the following formulation: Possession as an intrapersonal phenomenon requires (at least) two minds in one body, but as an interpersonal phenomenon requires two minds in one body and one mind in two bodies.70 An immediate objection to this formulation is that the possessor might be a disembodied spirit. However, as we discuss below (Chapter 8), the classical Indian doctrine of embodiment is multilayered and only with certain qualifications allows for true disembodiment. Robert I. Levy et al. state: “Two conditions are necessary for full possession to flourish: people who are psychologically disposed to dissociation, and a cultural environment that makes conventional use of possession episodes.”71 Few would disagree with the latter, but some would view possession as integration rather than dissociation (leaving aside Littlewood, who would regard dissociation as an alternative mode of integration). In a relatively early article on possession in India, Stephen Fuchs comments on the barwa, male exorcists of central India, and distinguishes their dissociation from more pathological dissociation: We might be tempted to diagnose the case of the barwa as that of a “dissociated personality.” Whenever he is “possessed,” the barwa assumes a different personality—that of his familiar, who speaks and acts through him with the authority and behavior of a superhuman force. In psychopathic cases, however, this change of personality takes place automatically


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and cannot be controlled by the individual patient; the barwa, on the other hand, is able deliberately to produce this psychic state.72

In an influential 1963 article, “Spirit Possession and Social Structure,” Edward B. Harper states that the spirit possession he observed among Havik brahman women of coastal Karnataka could be “labeled dissociation, characterized by compartmentalisation of the personality in which one aspect acts more or less independently of another.”73 This dissociation, Harper argues, is comparatively benign and functions as a stress reduction mechanism as well as an outlet for the expression of power by women disadvantaged by the incumbent social structure. As with Lambek, however, it is not spirit possession: under certain prescribed conditions and in certain prescribed manners, it is relatively commonplace in most parts of the world for some individuals to identify themselves so completely with another as to believe they are the other, and to be considered neither mad nor impostors by their fellow citizens. The particular type of complete-identification role playing I am talking about involves temporarily taking the identity of—not another human being but—a personified supernatural being.74

What Lambek and Harper do is draw a fixed line between psychological disturbances as understood in the Cartesian Western sense, influenced, it appears, by the Protestant perspective outlined above and spiritual disturbances in the Mayotte or Indian sense. I am not arguing that Lambek and Harper are wrong or morally in error by denying or minimizing the emic viewpoint; nor am I attempting to argue that scholars who “admit” the possibility of possessing agents are right. Scholarship, notably in the social and philological sciences, must depart from emic discourses and follow, as their designations suggest, the positivist moorings of science, at least to the extent of searching for mechanisms for distant, difficult, or vague ideas, such as possession. Nevertheless, I contend that both etic and emic categories of interpretation are limited if they are not used to complement, or at least accompany, each other. A case in point is dissociation, a disputed concept that does not necessarily encompass the concept of possession. The Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko, who has produced a major study of an oral epic named after its heroine, Siri, in the same area in which Harper worked, quizzed his informants on the relationship between domestic prob-


lems and possession in the performance of the epic. “Our psychologising questions concerning the identification of possession cult members with their mythical (epic) models began to irritate Gopala Naika [a possession priest, Honko’s principal informant], as they seemed to imply manipulation of the epic plot in relation to prevalent moods and problems in the audience.”75 In other words, Honko’s informants had no use for Westerners psychoanalyzing their possession rituals.76 There is little doubt that South Asians in possession would unanimously reject such psychoanalytic interpretations. This, however, is not to suggest that Honko’s questioning was wrongheaded and culturally insensitive. Indeed, Honko’s thorough work appears, to some extent at least, to bear out Harper’s observations. These observations, in turn, are useful in discussions of bhakti-induced āveśa. As is so often the case in psychology, these and other psychoanalytical interpretations of possession originate with Sigmund Freud, the revived importance of Janet’s work on dissociation aside. In 1919, while attempting to understand the concept of the “uncanny” (Unheimlich), Freud cited F. W. Schelling (1775–1854), who stated that “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light.”77 Based on this and other definitions, “Freud developed the idea that the uncanny arouses anxiety because the familiar and the unfamiliar appear in inextricable conjunction.”78 The bewilderment other people’s possession induced in Western fieldworkers has often reminded them of Freud’s Unheimlich and his association of it with repeated “doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self ” (Ich-Verdoppelung, Ich-Teilung, Ich-Vertauschung).79 Furthermore, many (if not most) ethnographers tacitly accept Freud’s distinction between the externalizing primitive and the internalizing civilized. Freud bases this distinction on his belief that the premodern subject labored under the delusion that external forces were responsible for neuroses that were, in fact, internally induced. This amounted to a declaration of the superiority of the uncanny by rationality. We revisit this possibility in later discussions of possession in Indian literature (see Chapters 8 and 12). He wrote to W. Fliess, “The medieval theory of possession, held by the ecclesiastical courts, was identical with our theory of a foreign body and a splitting of consciousness.”80 Possession, he concluded, was a mistaken diagnosis for hysteria.81 He was not, it seems, concerned with dissociation and did not address that problematic. Although hysteria fell out of favor with the American Psychiatric Association, many researchers have chosen to retain and reinterpret it. Clarke


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Garrett, a historian who has worked on possession among the Shakers of North America, describes hysteria as a legitimate “act of communication, intended for an audience whose shared values and expectations enable it to interpret the behavior in culturally normative terms.”82 In this sense, it shares common ground with possession. Indeed, Garrett asserts, “spirit possession and hysteria become two names for the same thing—a kind of spectacular body language for expressing convictions or emotions too profound, too painful, or too dangerous to be expressed verbally.”83 In this interpretation, the possession is again reduced to an interpretation, rendering it a phenomenon induced solely by internal psychic processes. Thus it ends up asserting the same old truth claim of the psychoanalytic viewpoint and the falsehood of the subject’s assertion. Dissociation theory, however, allows the indigenous or emic voice a role in etic theorizing, as seen above in the construction of “dissociative trance disorder.” Littlewood’s consideration of possession as a nonpathological and even psychologically advantageous state of dissociation— whose causes are both variegated and little understood—not only is thus in keeping with recent advances in psychiatric taxonomy, but is a more prudent route to take in a study of a culture with a long, diverse, and abundant history of reported possession phenomena. As should be clear by now, possession states, like other states of mind, are psychological states. Interpretations of these states, perhaps most of which are grounded in cultural and religious beliefs, assumptions, and practices, must consider the psychological content of these states within the framework of these cultural and religious contexts. If interpretations of phenomena that are regarded by the experiencer as religious, spiritual, or in some way extraordinary depend too strictly on psychoanalytic (or, for that matter, any other) models, which is to say at the expense of examining what people actually do, then these interpretations risk becoming overdetermined or, more simply, too normative for their own good as they slip into discontinuity with their subject matter. An example of this is Masson’s Freudian analysis of Indian asceticism, mentioned above, which poses many excellent questions but entirely neglects actual ascetic practice and, in the end, disintegrates into puerile oversimplification.84 This is one reason why I am attempting in the present study to temper my textual examination with a survey of the ethnography of possession. Fortunately, most recent studies are a good deal more culturally sensitive and accommodating than their predecessors and are considerably more advanced theoretically because of it.85 Perhaps the best-known studies of possession in South Asia that rely on


psychoanalytic interpretative strategies are Stanley and Ruth Freed’s seminal 1964 study of possession in a North Indian village,86 Obeyesekere’s many studies of possession in Sri Lanka,87 and Jeffrey Kripal’s Kālī’s Child.88 I address only the latter because Castillo has effectively deconstructed the work of the Freeds and Obeyesekere, demonstrating that their psychoanalytic interpretations are based on assumptions of “unfulfilled oedipal desires” of those experiencing possession (cf. Tambiah above), assumptions for which, Castillo shows, there is not a shred of evidence.89 In his far-reaching examination of the life of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the well-known nineteenth-century Bengali saint, Kripal intrepidly defends his use of psychoanalytic categories in analyzing Ramakrishna’s ecstatic experiences and possession states. In spite of occasional lapses into Freudian overspeculation, Kripal does not wander into the trap into which Masson precipitously plunged of abandoning his primary subject (in this case, Ramakrishna), entranced by Freud’s seductive gaze. Kripal’s often attractive and compelling work is well known for the wrong reason, namely, the criticism it (and he) has sustained at the hands of the Ramakrishna Mission and its allies, who believe that their patron saint has been desecrated by this Freudian upstart.90 Kripal eventually concludes that Ramakrishna’s ecstatic experiences, possession states, and homoerotic visions (to say nothing of his asceticism and misogyny) were to a considerable extent compensatory behavior for the early death of his father as well as for conflicted experiences of sexual seduction.91 Sarah Caldwell, however, presents more solid evidence that in India possession states may be linked to transvestism, sexual conflict, and sexual abuse.92 Among women, the experience of bādhā āveśam (demonic possession) resembles other varieties of dissociative trance that occur as a result of anxiety, depression, withdrawal, low self-esteem, victimization, hallucinations, hearing voices, and so on. These states, she suggests, following Castillo, are not due so much to sexual dysfunction as to sexual abuse at a young age.93 It has proved difficult to ferret out of the earlier Sanskrit literature evidence for such abuse and consequent possession. At their worst, psychological interpretations of other people’s possession reduce it to sexual dysfunction, illness, or incoherence and erroneous perception arising from dissociation; at their best they consider the indigenous context and explore whether and to what extent that forces modification in their own theories.94 One sociologist who, like Kripal, worked in Bengal was Deborah Bhattacharyya (whose important study Kripal never cites, though it was published more than two decades earlier). She notes that, in Bengal,


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possession represents “a kind of pseudo-pāgalāmi [insanity], wherein the person only appears to be pāgala.”95 This is distinguished from insanity as a medically defined pathological condition, in Bengali called māthāra golamāla (the disease of head malfunctioning).96 Such recognition of indigenous categories is all too rarely found in psychoanalytic analyses of possession.97 Caldwell, working in Kerala, states: “As in other areas of India, mental imbalance is traditionally believed to be a sign of possession by an evil spirit, either male or female—but, significantly, not by Kā{i or any other deva (divine being).”98 A psychiatrist in Kerala known to Caldwell pointed out to her that the symptoms of “hysteria and sexual dysfunction” among women were similar to the “feelings of inner heat, trembling, and rage that typify the inner experience of possession reported by actors”99 performing the possession dramas that Caldwell observed. Why this should be so is not clear. It is possible that possession, regardless of the locus of its expression, exhibits external manifestations of feelings of trembling, rage, and so on simply because these are culturally recognized symptoms of possession and because possession is a form of practiced behavior, as Rich Freeman and others point out. In fact, Freeman’s definition of possession is sensitive to this issue: “To be possessed means to perform the possession rituals correctly and manifest possession behaviors.”100 At any rate, a topic not sufficiently discussed by Obeyesekere and others is the relationship between possession drama and compensatory possession brought on by physical, sexual, or mental abuse. Another advocate of psychoanalytic interpretations of possession is Charles Nuckolls. He supports psychoanalysis as an analytic construct to be used in conjunction with others, however. Notably, he considers the rationality—the inferences and decision-making processes—that contributes to the possessionmediumship that characterizes the ritual healing among the Jalaris of coastal Andhra Pradesh. He notes that despite the “abundance of literature on South Asian possession . . . answers to the question ‘How does it work?’ are limited, for the most part, to ‘psychological’ and ‘sociological’ perspectives that have been around for years.”101 Jalari possession falls within the realm of what Sax calls “oracular possession”: It is concerned largely with healing and other sorts of problem solving. In this way, it is rather unlike most possession that occurs in festivals or in Sanskrit literature, where oracular possession is unusual.102 In any event, studying possession-mediumship as an inferential process helps to contextualize and modify the usual psychocultural interpretations. Nuckolls recognizes that emotion and thought both contribute to decision-making, and he notes how this contributes to Jalari pos-


session. He cites strong evidence that possession-mediumship among Jalari and non-Jalari informants arose as a resolution to generational crises: ambivalent mother-son relationships that led to the son’s “identification with the mother-goddess as a central aspect of the self ” or, in the case of women, “transformation into possession-mediums as a process of recovering deceased sons to whom they felt ambivalently attached.”103 After he establishes the generational and gendered basis of Jalari possession, he then analyzes the ritualized possession process in terms of contextual linguistic strategies and decision-making processes. Thus Nuckolls’s approach represents an advance over the usual psychoanalytic theorizing. Nevertheless, because of the nature of the ancient and classical Indian material, the synthetic approaches of Nuckolls, Kripal, and Caldwell are of limited use to us here.104

Possession as a Form of Social Control Possession is often interpreted as an expression of social control, or at least its attempt, a category that includes political power. Within this broad category of interpretation are almost innumerable variations that have been much pursued by anthropologists in the past several decades. Although control is exercised both actively and passively through political enforcement and cultural ideology, these interpretations have emphasized the active or performative aspects of possession and their roles within implicit psychological, social, and political contexts. This political influence in South Asia, however, is hardly felt because, despite the widespread practice of possession, it has not gained sufficiently broad formal recognition to influence religious or political bodies, as it has, for example, in certain places in Africa where possession argues much more visibly a politics of identity based on a sense of colonialist victimization,105 or in Tibet where the Nechung oracle has had a history of influencing the politics of the Dalai Lamas.106 Interpretations of possession as a product of or reaction to various modes of social control or oppression are usually aspects of broader interpretations that strive to locate more specifically and define more broadly the psychological and sociological dimensions of possession.107 At worst, these broad interpretations reduce possession to rituals of compensation or scripted cultural performance; at best, practice or performance theory, structuralism, and other innovative interpretative frameworks are invoked in conjunction with a sensitive hearing of other people’s ontologies and a solid understand-


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ing of the literary or folk-cultural backgrounds of the subjects under study.108 Claus’s comment—“The phenomenon of spirit possession—or rather a tradition of spirit possession—can provide a symbolic medium through which the individual (or group) re-adjusts himself to an appropriate [moral] order”109—provides a thicker accounting than many interpretations. This is because it views possession as a more or less normative and legitimated activity that helps sustain a balance between the possessed (who may or may not be the dispossessed) and the unpossessed. Viewed from this perspective, possession is an integral part of a self-regulating system of social control. It is not merely a one-sided or desperate compensatory response to oppression, nor is it a veiled or exclusive mode of cultural communication, the role of which is to socially or politically strengthen or empower the individual or group. One of the more impressive and sophisticated studies of South Asian possession is Hancock’s explication of the social dimensions of oracular and ecstatic possession among middle-class Smārta brahman women in Madras. She claims, with Claus, that possession is an aspect of the socially self-regulating, yet ambiguous, mechanism of bhakti within a domestic setting, in which compliance with patriarchal norms is assured through retaining their “patriarchally derived identities as wives and mothers” while also manifesting a resistance to these norms “through their radical appropriation of authority through the avenues of possession and mediumship.”110 In a statement that can as well be true of possession in general, Hancock argues that bhakti “cannot be treated merely as a compensatory safety valve or an interstitial or liminal interlude in an otherwise normatively ordered social existence. Bhakti, especially as pursued by cumaãkalis [Tamil, Skt. sumaãgali (fortunate woman)], may be an agency for change in domestic life, whether the bhakta is perceived as succeeding or failing in her efforts.”111 It is this sort of observation that should be valued as a safety valve on the exclusivity of certain psychoanalytic or sociological conclusions about possession. Although most cases of possession as āveśa or samāveśa attested in Sanskrit and other classical literature are manifestly empowering in a religious sense, I hesitate to overlap this empowerment with externally induced attempts at social control or engineering. While Sax’s observations (predominantly in men) of possession in present-day Garhwal—as a medium for the contestation of prestige through which social control is gained—constitute strong evidence for this interpretation (and this is replicated often enough in the ethnographic literature),112 I am not persuaded that possession as at-


tested in Sanskrit texts is guided by this sort of quest, at least not in all cases. Primarily this is because much of the possession found in these texts is nonritual or at least may be epiphenomenal rather than primary (as in certain tantric texts examined below). Regardless of whether the texts accurately reflect possession outside the texts, in the present project we must evaluate the evidence at hand, which means textual, and only then attempt to infer sociological realities behind the texts. Unfortunately, very few studies have focused on nonceremonial possession (indeed, many scholars would hold that this very notion is mistaken)—and this requires us to go beyond the familiar theories in assessing “Sanskritic” possession. In other words, the evidence from classical texts does not ordain that I base my study on ethnographies from the past hundred years or that I necessarily regard these accounts as normative, as filling the lacunae that are a natural aspect of texts that do not aim at thick description. Rather, it seems, the vast number of texts that speak of possession directly or refer to its social context fragmentarily or obliquely provide evidence for other interpretations or for locating a home for this and other more or less singular and isolated interpretations of possession within other cultural and theoretical explanations, not all of them necessarily contemporary Western models. Part of the reason I feel uncertain about this or any other singular interpretation is the lack of evidence: Quite simply, Indology cannot easily, if at all, locate the political background to first millennium b.c.e. or c.e. events with the precision and depth of events that Caldwell, Claus, Erndl, Hancock, Sax, and others present through the disciplined practice of ethnography. That said, it is necessary to emphasize that possession is, in virtually all cases including those described in ancient and classical literature, an act of social subversion as well as an act of social confirmation, at least within a small but informed circle, regardless of the visible or conditioned structures of oppression surrounding it. Possession subverts consensual views of consciousness, the nature of the individual, and the orderliness of social and political order. Possession, even when it is nonritual (as in the case of diseaseproducing possession), behaves like ritual in that it is itself a structure of resistance, a rift in the psychological, social, and political fabric of society. However, in most cases (even in disease-producing possession) it is a contained rift: It is not ultimately counter-hegemonic, as Claus has noted. Thus possession becomes a satisfying, sometimes even a necessary, dissociative experience that ends up presenting very little threat to prevailing orders. It becomes a form of “controlled chaos,” to invoke Heesterman’s depiction of


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vedic ritual. And, like the latter, what is controlled is (usually) the danger, the violence, the utter alienness, of possession.113 Just as vedic sacrifice cannot be performed outside a sanctified ritual arena, thus limiting its extension into the social and political arenas, possession cannot be manifested outside its own orbit; it is self-contained, limited by the boundaries of the body. Although this observation may seem obvious and tautological, what I mean here is that as a dissociative experience it is segregated from consensual, normatively configured, states of consciousness and communication. As a site of resistance, possession has a limited domain, and when performed it tends to “lapse back into the social order,” as Dirks notes of public ritual.114 Just as both the individual and the social order are reckoned to be permeable and fluid as a result of possession, possession is ultimately circumscribed, penetrated, and permeated by the social and political orders. That this is much more evident in anthropological studies than in the classical South Asian literary record introduces a question that we can attempt to answer only at the end of our study: To what extent can we equate possession as discourse with possession as event? Or, more precisely, to what extent does possession as a discursive event represent possession as a psychophysical enactment? Because of the prevalence of interpretations that seek to locate (and limit) possession as a product of social and psychological forces, I offer, early in my account, some tentative, if synthetic, conclusions on these issues. Many studies have shown that the splitting of the personality into discrete personae—public and private, outer and inner, authorized and unauthorized, lawful and illicit—is a characteristic of authoritarian societies. This fragmentation, and the consequent struggle to unify the self, or at least to publicly depict a unified self, may be extended to more restricted domains of tyranny: within the family, particularly women under patriarchal oppression; within the school or other educational systems characterized by consensual dominance and inferiority; within prisons or other more modified precincts of legal systems; and within hospitals and other health-care environments in which an afflicted individual becomes psychologically exposed, uncertain, and disadvantaged. In other words, the personality fragments—and becomes habituated to such fragmentation—in encounters of conditioned inequality. Among the time-honored methods of contending with this loss is full or partial dissociation. As we have seen, among the defining features of dissociation is increased intensity of mood, which complements increased objectival focus. This arises as extraneous or impractical aspects of the personality


drop away as part of a coping mechanism. Dissociation thus becomes a response to particular varieties of stimuli. However, while these stimuli may not fit into cultural categories sanctioned hierarchically, they may not be destructive and may not necessarily be oppressive in the classical sense. They may simply fall outside the system. But, good, bad, or neutral in any cultural system, they may be said to oppress the openness of the personality by shutting down certain areas of it, areas that are, at least temporarily, deemed inconvenient, unnecessary, and distracting. The difference, then, between dissociation and any ordinary shift in mood or focus is one of intensity and cultural recognition and accountability. Examples might be dissociation derived from the inspiration of religious or spiritual experience, from an encounter with novelty or from anything that might suddenly push the mind into new and captivating realms of thought. Thus a poor woman suffering patriarchal oppression in an Indian or Nepali village might develop the ability to sequester her mind from the drab familiarity of her world by entering into an intimate and coveted relationship with a deity (or the idea of a deity), then become so engrossed in it that she acts out, manifests, and finally “becomes” the deity. This is possession, regardless of the “reality” of the deity. Similarly, a man, prosperous and seemingly in control, might covet a deep relationship with a deity or other ethereal being (or with the constructed idea of the deity or being) and psychophysically act out the theorized behavior of that being: This may well be surprising and unexpected to the man. Again, this is possession, regardless of the “reality” of the deity or ethereal being. What is cultivated is a heightened awareness and spontaneity that is exciting and attractive to both performer and audience. This increased focus and spontaneity is highly valued as an enhanced level of awareness. What turns this into āveśa in popular culture from the ñgveda to the present—or, according to certain Tantras, samāveśa—is that it is a willed and invited, rather than an involuntary, state. Of course, there may be involuntary possession, and this is dealt with in due course.

Possession and Shamanism Possession is often identified or compared to shamanism.115 The most important theorist of this relationship is I. M. Lewis, whose book Ecstatic Religion remains mandatory reading in the field. Lewis asserts that “possession


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is a culturally normative experience”116 in many places, a statement with which I concur with respect to South Asia. Like most anthropologists, he seeks to determine the social etiology and meaning of possession as well as its culturally determined psychological dimensions. He examines trance, ecstasy, hypnosis, and shamanism, ultimately concluding that the latter shares an important process with possession—a reciprocity between gods and humans. He posits a homogeneity between shamanism and spirit possession, arguing, contra Eliade, that “the Tungus evidence makes nonsense of the assumption that shamanism and spirit possession are totally different phenomena, belonging necessarily to different cosmological systems and to separate historical stages of development.”117 In drawing this equivalence, Lewis, whose model strikes me as excessively deterministic despite many virtues,118 delineates a wholly presumed and uncompromising functionalist sociology of possession states.119 In this he develops two contrasting psychosocial loci of possession, which he labels “central” and “peripheral.” Central possession, generally highly valued, supports prevailing political, moral, and religious beliefs and views spirits as sympathetic to these. Peripheral possession, an invasion of evil, amoral spirits, is undesirable and dangerous. Central possession, understandably, is a preserve of those of high status and power, while peripheral possession is generally associated with those who lack power and status. Although peripheral possession appears to be historically the preserve of women and those of lower social rank, it is definitively less so in recent times, as democratization, modernity, and the disappearance of Christian-dominated colonialism have freed educated middle- and even upper-class individuals and families to embrace the peripheries, bringing them closer to the center. In this way, economics, rather than ideology, caste, or other markers of purity or impurity, defines and situates power and status, at least in this orbit, by collapsing the boundaries between the periphery and the center.120 Gombrich critiques Lewis a decade and a half after Lewis’s first edition. Possession is sometimes confused with shamanism; but in shamanism one’s spirit travels while one’s body remains unconscious, whereas in possession one’s body is temporarily inhabited by another spirit, while what happens to one’s own spirit at the time is left undetermined. This temporary loss of the sense of self is just like hysteria as clinically defined by Freud and Breuer. In India possession is mainly valued when it is practiced (perhaps one should rather say “undergone”) by specialists; they become


possessed by non-human spirits, interact with an audience, and solve problems for clients.121

In order to bring some clarity to the much-abused term “shamanism,” especially as it is used by South Asianists with reference to possession, it is constructive to critique both Lewis and Gombrich. As to Gombrich: while we admit that he offers an adequate (though limited) critique of Lewis, he nevertheless misses the point that in India shamanism cannot be restricted to spirit travel while the body lies inert. In this, Gombrich adheres to the notion of possession offered by Eliade, that soul-journeys, rather than possession, are the definitive markers of the trance states characteristic of shamanism.122 This is also stated succinctly by Bourguignon, who distinguishes between shamanic trance and possession trance: “The [shamanic] trancer sees, hears, feels, perceives, and interacts with another; the possession trancer becomes another.”123 South Asianists, however, do not limit the use of shamanism to “soul-journeys”; indeed, in South Asia there is little evidence for this sort of shamanism.124 Obeyesekere largely agrees with Gombrich’s critique, though, in his study of the Pattini cult of Sri Lanka, he discusses a variety of possession states, not all of which can be described as sharing with shamanism the essential feature of reciprocity.125 These are cases of involuntary possession, usually symptomatic of disease or psychomental instability. Another criticism of Lewis, at least from the South Asian standpoint, is that the terms “ecstasy” and “ecstatic,” as well as “central possession” and “peripheral possession,” are unproductive and misleading.126 Although Lewis is largely free from cultural biases, his characteristic terms “ecstasy” and “ecstatic” are drawn from Western theological discourse and cannot be applied unhesitatingly to South Asian possession accounts. At the beginning he defines ecstasy as “those transports of mystical exaltation in which man’s whole being seems to fuse in a glorious communion with the divinity.”127 He then equates this with the premodern Christian sense of “enthusiasm.” While this is surely one of the many senses that come under the category of possession states in South Asia, as we see below in reviewing possession in the Mahābhārata, bhakti, Tantra, and medical literature, it is by no means the only one. Through expanded attention to the lexical and linguistic presentation of possession states in South Asia, the present study hopes to set aright the misrepresentation of possession to which even a sensitive researcher, like Lewis, falls victim. As for “central” and “peripheral” possession, I have no disagreement


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with Lewis’s distinction between possession states, and even spirits, that support prevailing political, moral, and religious beliefs, as well as other states (and spirits) that are undesirable and dangerous. The problem with his categories is that the terms “central” and “peripheral,” while valid, are of limited application in the South Asian context. Indeed, in South Asia, undesirable and dangerous states and spirits often support prevailing beliefs and moral orders as strongly as do benevolent ones. For example, folk possession in Nepal, Tamilnadu, and elsewhere is often violent, even dangerous, but in many ways it serves as the touchstone of certain deity cults, mediating between the individual and the prevailing social and religious orders.128 Truly malevolent possession is usually associated with physical and mental illness. But this, too, might not fit neatly into the category of peripheral, as it can also support prevailing morality and social systems, garnering participation across the social spectrum. I am not arguing that all possession in South Asia is central, rather that these terms should be used carefully. Perhaps the most critiqued aspect of Lewis’s work is his association of possession with marginalized people, his “assumption that possession provides the powerless with a means to symbolically express social, economic, or political oppression.”129 Although many of the contexts of possession worldwide confirm this, the preponderance of the evidence in India bears this out only superficially. While no one can deny that power relations are an important factor in South Asian possession, the evidence from both classical and contemporary possession demonstrates that it is by no means the exclusive province of the powerless. Shamanism broadly indicates manipulation of spirits, the usual process being the intentional, though ritually induced, introduction of a spirit into the shaman, which he or she then employs in a deliberate manner, generally for the benefit of others, often for curative purposes.130 In this seemingly physical entry, little if any distinction of category or function is made between spirit and deity; the shamanistic process is the same in either case. The shaman as spirit medium could as easily be the shaman as deity medium. One can say here that “the medium is the message,” that the shaman’s very presence, the empowering perception of his or her extraordinary gifts, is the most essential component of the shamanistic process. It is this that sets in motion the performative processes and their eventual fructification. Sergei Shirokogoroff lists five essential characteristics of a shaman (at least among the Tungus of Siberia): (1) a shaman is a master of spirits, who has (2) mastered a group of spirits; (3) a shaman commands a recognized array of tech-


niques and paraphernalia that have been transmitted from elders; (4) s/he possesses a theoretical justification for the shamanistic process; (5) the shaman occupies a special social position.131 Whether spirit or deity, these five are repeatedly borne out in studies of South Asian spirit mediumship, which most often assumes the form of oracular possession. In other words, shamanism in South Asia takes the form of spirit mediumship and oracular possession. This is not to argue that all possession in South Asia is shamanistic (disease-producing possession is not, nor is destructive possession analogous to that of Nala by Kali in the Mahābhārata, and other forms of possession emanating from curses that one finds at exorcism sites such as Bālājī), or that the possession states that I describe from Sanskrit literature are shamanistic; it is simply to say that there are points of contact among such phenomena that must be distinguished.132 This technicality is important because shamanism has sometimes been limited to a specific mode of contact, in which the shaman ascends to the province of the gods or to chthonic realms in order to access special knowledge, which is subsequently transmitted to an enculturated and ritually constituted group. The innovation in South Asia, arising in no small measure from a widely distributed and more or less uniform devotional ethos, is that in oracular possession, gods descend into humans as an act of grace.133 Although the shaman may have invited the deity, the prevailing view is that in the final analysis it is often believed to be the deity that instigates the possession. While the shamanistic components of personal empowerment and acquisition of social status are neither lost nor ignored by either ethnographers or their informants, the latter invariably report that the primary value of possession and spirit mediumship is religious, that they are reciprocations of bhakti. The late G.-D. Sontheimer, the well-known scholar of Maharashtrian folk culture, also understood possession as shamanic in a broad sense, when it was mediumistic, usually involving exorcism or healing.134 In his many essays on Khaâbobā, he consistently translated the Marathi word dev óùi (variants: devóùi / devruùi; Skt. devarùi) as “shaman,” though he quickly adds that a “devóùi is not a shaman in the strict sense. There is no land of the dead into which the devóùi accompanies the dead, and no magical shamanic flight. The god ‘comes’ in order to take possession of the medium’s body and to speak to the Dhangars,”135 a shepherd caste whose members are possessed in this manner. Even if it is in a festival context where others may be in ecstatic possession brought on by devotion, the devóùi’s experience is qualitatively different. Although his possession (devóùis are all male) is brought on by devo-


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tional intensity, like that of others in ecstatic possession, it is also oracular or mediumistic and seemingly open to the same rational processes described by Nuckolls. “By entering into the body of the devóùī, he [the god Śidobā] makes him into a ‘temple’ and enables him to diagnose others’ diseases, adversities, and so on, in the form of bhūta, and to recommend methods for remedying them.”136 Finally, Smriti Srinivas, who studied oracular possession among the Buddhists of Ladakh, recognizes its distant affinities with classical Siberian shamanism. Nevertheless, what she studied was also oracular possession, not journeys of the soul. Srinivas recognizes the terminological problem, the fuzzy understanding and application of different categories: “There is no unity of terminology—they may be called mediums, oracles, or shamans.”137 It is clear that most possession is not shamanic, strictu sensu, even when the term is used.138 In a statement summarizing studies of possession in Chinese religion—apposite for the state of affairs in South Asian studies—Jordan Paper writes: “The general tendency to refer to all ecstatic religious functionaries as shamans blurs functional differences”139 Thus it is more prudent to employ the distinction between spirit possession and spirit mediumship proposed by Peter Claus. Spirit mediumship—the legitimate expected possession of a specialist by a spirit or a deity, usually for the purpose of the aid of the supernatural for human problems—is perhaps more common in certain parts of South India than in others. Spirit possession—which we may tentatively distinguish from the above as an unexpected, unwarranted intrusion of the supernatural into the lives of humans—is far more common than mediumship and far more widely distributed.140

This distinction is valuable for the current study, though, as seen below, there are many situations in which spirit possession is expected and warranted, but is not mediumistic or oracular. As for the current study, much of what Lewis refers to is difficult to apply to the material found in Sanskrit texts. It is not possible to align either shamanic trance or ecstasy or social oppression with possession based on the evidence adduced here. Indeed, Lewis’s determinism is unproductive for the present purposes; he overtheorizes or makes his argument too extensive. The problem is the overdetermined nature of the discursive resources at his disposal: His theories all too easily circumscribe his evidence. It may be that


the texts are hopelessly inadequate, but I believe that the evidence accumulated below demonstrates that only with great caution is it advisable to link possession (or ecstasy) with oppression and shamanism in premodern India. There is some evidence of mass possession cults in eastern India (i.e., greater Bengal) due to Mughal imperialism before British domination. This is alluded to in some of the Bengali maãgalkābyas,141 but as far as I can see there is virtually no evidence for this before the Muslim period. It is possible, however, that the evidence I have presented here can reveal a sociology of possession that I have failed to retrieve.142

Possession as Ontological Reality Possession is understood as ontological or veridical reality by those who undergo the experience, which is to say as imposition or investiture on an individual personality of an independent and unseen external agent. This, of course, is the emic view, the narrative of indigenous tradition, the interpretation given to possession by the groups or individuals studied. This stands opposed to nearly all academic theorizing—to the emic narrative of scholarship. Nevertheless, it is an interpretation not wholly discarded by many ethnographers and others engaged in the issue. For most scholars who recognize, if grudgingly, the possibility of possession, this recognition is tactical, as a contribution to other theoretical agendas. The underlying assumptions of the social constructivist approaches that characterize most academic theorizing about possession—that issues and ambiguities concerning power and authority lie at the basis of much spirit belief and nearly all claims of unmediated possession experience—are being increasingly softened by scholars willing to find a way for their approaches to reconcile with indigenous notions that they find are all too often summarily dismissed. These scholars, most of whom occupy university positions in religion, psychology, and anthropology, are themselves, perhaps, rebelling against the possession–or, to put it more mildly, the enchantment–of their disciplines by modernity (or postmodernity). To transpose Geertz’s observation of cultures as possessing a “curious mixture of borrowed fragments of modernity and exhausted relics of tradition,” we might speak of contemporary academics sorting out for itself exhausted relics of modernity and borrowed fragments of tradition.143 Perhaps the most sympathetic and best-reasoned considerations of this mixed viewpoint are by Felicitas Goodman, whose work has been (perhaps


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not unsurprisingly) largely overlooked in the past decade or so,144 Edith Turner,145 and Michael Cuneo.146 In 1970, the Indian psychoanalytic literature added the category of “possession disorder” to its list of diagnostic categories, in recognition of the dissimilarities of alternative identity adoption in the possession experience from other types of dissociative disorders.147 This is part of a growing trend (at least in South Asia) to consider possession a viable category in anthropological and psychological theorizing, in which interpretative frameworks supplement one another or overlap. Boddy notes, “Possession intersects with numerous cultural domains including medicine and religion, but is itself reducible to none.”148 For example, psychological or social factors may be causal in ritually circumscribed, though socially or politically empowering, experiences of possession, experiences that may be characterized by temporary loss of personal control— which under “ordinary” circumstances would be strikingly disempowering. That is, one may take seriously the givenness of spirits in order to understand possession as an idiom of communication, moral discourse, gender, identity formation, and conflictual or power relations.149 A good example of this is Manuel Moreno’s study of possession in Tamilnadu, in which he questions analyses of Hindu gods as “‘disembodied symbols’ of social realities and human relationships.”150 Rather, he argues, gods and humans “are related by complementary, mutually rewarding bodily exchanges,” which, as shown below, is not far from the notion of transfer of essence that characterizes possession in India as early as the Upaniùads. Notwithstanding a few attempts at multivalent theorizing such as Moreno’s, academic approaches to possession have usually foregrounded the social or psychosocial contexts of possession, or the moral or communicative value of its performance, approaches that generally, it seems, have drained possession of the assumption of existential reality. More to the point, to most academics the existential possibility of possession is epiphenomenal to constructed psychosocial or moral realities, while in the present study the opposite is the case: Because of the relative absence of thick description of possession in the classical literature of India, environmental factors are often forced into the position of epiphenomena. This is why Halperin advises treading a fine line between the usual scholastic etic approaches and an unqualified “emic friendly” approach. Given the veritable minefield of official discourses, underlying assumptions, deeply held feelings, and occasionally conflicting behaviors of participants, the ethnographer is perhaps best advised to do research equipped


with a flexible analytical armamentarium. Preferably, this approach includes a more than superficial appreciation of other emic worldview(s), without being limited to such an orientation.151

The present work should, it is hoped, permit a flexible armamentarium to enter, to possess, its analysis.

Śakti, the Localization of Divinity, and the Possessed We must now discuss some specifications of possession in South Asia, including, first, the possibility of possession as a gendered phenomenon. In South Asia, as elsewhere, more women than men appear to experience possession. Important to understanding why this is the case, and perhaps always has been, is an evaluation of the constitution of personhood and sacred space in South Asia, for these are intimately linked in the physical and metaphysical complex of South Asian women’s possession. It is also necessary to discuss possession as performance, as this is also linked with the constitution of the person and relational space. Schoembucher notes that the earliest European notice of possession was in 1713 by Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, the Danish missionary who lived on the Malabar coast, while the first serious anthropological study was by C. G. Seligmann and Brenda Seligmann, who wrote an account of spirit mediumship among the Veddas of Ceylon in 1911. These and most subsequent studies have remarked on the preponderance of women in possession.152 One reason often attributed is psychosocial: Possession is a refuge and an empowerment for the oppressed and marginalized woman in a patriarchal society. In this sense, possession is a ritually protected means of enabling a woman to interact from a position of authority and status. Many studies of South Asian possession bear this out, though not all are in agreement about how this occurs.153 In fact, the classical feminist model explicates the dynamics of oppression and empowerment and, in possession studies, investigates notions of agency. The most recent general study of this is by Mary Keller, who investigates the interrelationships between women’s bodies, power, and possession. Her principal observations led her to theorize an “instrumental agency,” in which “possessed bodies share the same paradoxical agency in that the body is not speaking, it is spoken through; the body is not hammering, it is being used


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to hammer; the body is not mounting, it is being mounted.”154 This will come as no surprise to those who study possession in South Asia; the evidence presented in Chapter 4 reveals that language after language in South Asia has terms for riding, mounting, and so on that are characteristic of possession, preponderantly women’s possession. Does this then occlude or nullify any power in the form of cultural rebalancing that women might gain from possession, by shifting the power to a possessing spirit or deity and away from the woman herself as an autonomous agent? My sense is that it does not. Primarily, I believe, this is because the question does not quite work in the context of South Asia. First, much of this power is ritualized,155 which tends to reinforce cultural conservatism, as both the textual and ethnographic evidence reveals. Most women’s possession practice tends to maintain, rather than threaten, the power distribution between men and women by functioning within orbits of culturally sanctioned ritual control. The release of the energies of women’s oppression into possession states does little in the end to rectify the power imbalance between the sexes in the “traditional” cultures of South Asia. However, the reasons for this have less to do with the shifting of power to a spirit or deity or, more broadly, to possession as an ineffective mode for asserting women’s power than with a millennia-old acceptance of possession as, to a great extent, a women’s cultural or religious practice. Notions of agency, including Keller’s of an instrumental agent that functions outside or in opposition to the realm of “selfhood,” simply have not arisen in South Asia, where an autonomous self was rarely regarded as normative, or even particularly sought after, beyond the thin veneer of certain forms of vedāntic theory and practice. The normative self was understood as permeable, hence the distinction was rarely drawn between an instrumental agent and an autonomous self. In this sense, the power women derived from possession was real, and constantly corrective, because they functioned autonomously and powerfully as instrumental agents. A reason closely embedded in the woman’s marginalization in South Asian culture that is sometimes given for the preponderance of women’s possession is their relatively lower level of education, especially in rural towns and villages, which, some say, contributes to their greater ability to experience “irrational” states.156 Although it is true that positivistic education contributes to the growth of “reason” and a concomitant devaluation of states that run counter to that, the evidence presented in Chapter 3 and verified elsewhere in the world demonstrates that possession states can occur, even


abundantly, in literate and educated societies.157 To give this as a reason for possession is to harbor biases, which should have been put to rest by now, against the mental and psychic capacities of the “Other” and to misunderstand the possibilities of our own positivistic education and the challenges it confronts in an ever-changing culture. The notion that possession is a long-established aspect of “women’s religion,” as opposed to the supposedly more intellectualized and ritually formalized “religion” of men, receives a boost from Margaret Trawick, who contributes to this understanding in her observation that women in South India who are possessed by the goddess Māriyammaç are the feminine counterparts to the masculine practitioners of the siddha tradition of Śaiva Siddhānta.158 To whatever extent this may be the case, what appears certain is that women are consistently depicted locally as embodying an inherent power, a pure but malleable active energy that is both dangerous and spiritually potent, called śakti or, in Tamil, aâaãku.159 It is this, I might speculate, that is the conductor of women’s permeability or penetrability or, more strongly, that it is a uniquely gendered substance that cultivates women’s power and (among other things) contributes to the capacity for possession. This characterization, especially the assertion of inherence, is largely a male cultural construct, in which śakti (Ta. cakti) or, perhaps less, aâaãku, because of its greater ambiguity or multivalence, is believed to derive from the woman’s awesome and incomprehensible menstrual and child-bearing capacities, from her mysterious ability to manifest blood and babies.160 In spite of the culturally conceived purity of the energy that lies behind the phenomenon of manifestation or transformation, whether it is of babies, deities, or spirits, the obverse is equally regarded: a latent impurity that is an aspect of a more delicate female constitution. At any time this can burst forth into dangerous, “negative,” possession, into illness and madness—a topic examined in detail in Chapter 12. The characterization of śakti as an inherent female power, inherent because it is identified as the essence and energy of the goddess, is noted in many anthropological reports. This śakti may be intensified in any individual through possession, typically goddess possession, which is itself typically an intensified form of bhakti. However, manifestation of śakti, even regularly, neither elevates a woman from poverty nor confers on her equal status in a patriarchal universe, in spite of its temporary empowerment; wealth and status operate independently of śakti or possession. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite: Although exceptionally a person who gains a reputation for oracular possession may benefit financially through developing a consul-


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tative practice,161 usually possession and other manifestations of śakti confirm the socioeconomic order as they provide a separate identity comprehensible from within the woman’s world. Hancock notes, based on fieldwork with middle-class Smārta brahman women from Madras who experienced possession of the goddess Karumāriyammaç, “Women’s devotionalism, including spirit possession, often involved efforts to renegotiate domestic relations of authority while still retaining their patriarchally derived identities as wives and mothers.”162 Somewhat at odds with Hancock’s sociological observation, Margaret Egnor (Trawick) reports on a life history of a woman regularly possessed by the goddess Māriyammaç in Tamilnadu: “Mediums for the goddess are expected to be poor, low caste individuals. . . . The poverty and low status that Sarasvati endures are considered necessary conditions for possession by the goddess.”163 Nevertheless, Egnor, in agreement with Hancock, adds, “if women have more śakti than men, this is (at least in part) because women stand in the position of servants with respect to men.”164 Thus neither possession nor the śakti on which it both rides and creates upsets the social order. Indeed, śakti legitimates the suffering implicit in woman’s subordination, and it is this, Egnor concludes, that creates “an essential unbreakable unity among females themselves.”165 The manifestation of śakti is therefore self-empowering and at least temporarily subverting in that it confirms and liberates the woman’s suffering and status so that it may be used to her advantage. Yet that universe of empowered suffering is (in general) ritually circumscribed, hence does not confer on her the social or political power to threaten the patriarchal order, at least not in the long term. The male Śiva, the archetypal śaktimān, controls his consort Pārvatī, the śakti. Woman, characterized as śakti, is, in possession, in fact revealed as śaktimatī, śakti as controller, in her incarnation as Durgā, in which she controls the male god. This is her act of subversion. Durgā is Mahiùāsuramardinī, the “slayer of the buffalo demon,” as she mounts a tiger and destroys ignorance incarnated as a man deformed. It is śakti as śaktimatī that is subversive and is therefore feared and overpowered by men. But in possession, especially oracular, the woman—here the goddess (most possessing deities are female)—manifests power that confronts men directly. Erndl has shown that village women in Panjab become Śerāãvālī, “she who rides the lion,” by becoming possessed, by being “ridden” by the goddess.166 It is this powerful woman who tames the oppressive man. The reversal is empowering to the woman and her community, even if it cannot extend to other sociocultural areas. In other words, women in possession opt out of


the dominant culture and create their own path, reversing the socially inscribed hierarchy provisionally and briefly, demonstrating to themselves, at least, its vulnerability and shallowness.167 This function of possession is not unlike that of certain genres of women’s songs, which Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold show empower women while they critique the structure of the dominant male culture, without, however, materially altering it.168 Both women’s possession and women’s songs follow the inherited cultural and religious paradigm in India in which women’s participation and empowerment rarely lead to social dominance. For example, in the Vedic New and Full Moon sacrifice (darśapūrâamāsa), the wife of the sacrificer undergoes a regular ritual initiation, as both Stephanie Jamison and I have pointed out.169 According to the Vedic Brāhmaâa texts, this empowers the woman to influence the ritual, hence the workings of the cosmos, in uniquely gendered ways, while not substantially affecting the patriarchal social order. The nature of śakti as a factor in possession must be contrasted with the classical Tamil concept of aâaãku, a term that does not appear in ethnographies, but is nonetheless related to śakti and its modern deployment. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the concept of aâaãku, at least certain aspects of it, influenced the discourses of śakti and possession in Sanskrit. The term aâaãku was brought to general Indological notice by George Hart in his 1975 book, The Poems of Ancient Tamil. Hart gives this term the broad meaning of “sacred power.” However, upon review of the usages of aâaãku in early Tamil texts Kamil Zvelebil amends it to a “fear-provoking divine or demoniac force . . . [a] hieratic, sacred power, which could be dangerous but not always malevolent.”170 Zvelebil continues: The functioning of aâaãku in human recipients represents often the true power of possession which caused particularly in women a kind of “sickness” (nōy) which had to be dealt with, controlled, removed. However, apart from this possession by aâaãku which must have been regarded as dangerous and unwanted, the same sacred force emanating from Murugan caused obviously a sacred possession, a hieratic trance which was welcomed and very probably self-induced.171

Thus aâaãku is the substantial and immanent means through which divinity, or any other power, is localized, whether it occurs in objects, places, or persons.172


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The phenomenon of “localization” was explicated by David Shulman, who demonstrated that each Tamil shrine “sees itself as the only center of the universe, the one spot that is directly linked to heaven and the nether world.”173 This extensiveness and localization of divinity, though not a concept actively enunciated in the early Tamil texts, was an assumed part of south Indian religion and much more of a force in central and north India than Shulman recognized.174 Shulman’s statement is, after all, a strikingly succinct summary of shamanistic idealism, which has been shown to be distributed throughout the world. Although it is possible that the recognition in Tamil sthalapurāâas of the multilocality of divinity influenced the acceptance of this notion elsewhere in the subcontinent, it is also possible that the notion was at least partially derived from vedic sources, which are also often quite specific about the localization of divinity. Nevertheless, the acceptance of the multilocality of divinity must surely have contributed to the notion that the divine, or any other less benign force, could penetrate and divinize any receptive individual. In this way, the individual—the person in the form of the body—became a sacred site, confirming the Toda conception of sacred space noted by Murray Emeneau in 1938: “the ‘sacred place’ and the ‘god’ are the same thing.”175 It is remarkable that this notion of the coextensiveness of divinity and place is preserved among the Toda, a nonliterate tribal group that speaks a Dravidian dialect, almost two millennia after the composition of the early Tamil literature. The assumption of localization, immanence, and transportability of divinity, possibly a dispersed relic of early Tamil religious thought, thus became a background metaphysic for the widespread phenomenon of possession in South Asia.176 It is also entirely possible that this phenomenon of localization of divinity was more applicable to women’s lives than to men’s. Most of the religiosity that survives in early Sanskrit literature is men’s religion. Men were the priests, the official mediators between the gods and the rest of the human species; they were largely responsible for the construction of temples, as inscriptions of all ages testify; they constituted the vast majority of renunciates; they were the majority of teachers and yogins. However, it is unreasonable to assume that, in such a culture, women did not also assert the sacredness of their domain, nor is it reasonable to assume that they would cede full control of that sacredness. If I may be permitted to project backward from the modern ethnographies, I would speculate that, for a millennium or two at least, possession has had a presence in women’s religion. Indeed, evidence from the Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad, discussed in Chapter 5, permits this. It


was an ideal strategy for localizing divinity and the social and religious power incumbent in that divinity, both of which were otherwise in the dominion of more socially and economically privileged men. This fluidity of role evident in the woman’s assumption of śakti (or aâaãku) in possession brings up one of the major issues involved in thinking about possession, one to which Boddy refers in her definition: that possession exposes the fluid and permeable nature of personal identity. I say more about this below, but here I might pose a few of the questions that require attention later on: Is the individual still an individual when possessed? Is possession a state in which both the individual and the ethereal possession agent (deity or spirit) are fully attributed? If so, is the fabric of the individual then destroyed? Is it a mistake to assume an autonomous individuality in the first place? It is useful here to review Marriott’s notion of “substance-code.” This term indicates a diversity abiding within, and even constituting, a unity or inseparability, a common locus of “codes,” for example, puruùa, norm, mind, and spirit, and their “substance” counterparts, prakóti, behavior, body, and matter, respectively. Particles of substance codes mutate and recombine with particles from others, thus manifesting new ones. Not only is this thesis closely related to anthropological theories of the self as a system of symbols and social meanings that is best articulated semiotically,177 but it can be viewed as a restatement of the brahmanical bandhutā (linkage) that will be discussed below. How is it that Viùâu is the sacrifice or dawn the head of the horse? “Such ancient and widely held Indian assumptions,” says Marriott, “if abstractly stated, seem compatible with the theories of modern natural scientists, although they conflict with common Western popular beliefs in standard, stable entities and in the normally impermeable, autonomous person.”178 Marriott recognizes that: persons—single actors—are not thought in South Asia to be “individual,” that is, indivisible, bounded units, as they are in much of Western social and psychological theory as well as in common sense. Instead, it appears that persons are generally thought by South Asians to be “dividual” or divisible. To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They also must give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances—essences, residues, or other active influences—that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated. Persons engage in transfer of bodily substance-codes


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through parentage, through marriage, and through other kinds of interpersonal contacts.179

Although Marriott has applied this concept to caste transactions, the question “How does possession work?” can be answered in part through application of this concept. Dividual persons, entities, or even concepts transfer parts or essences of themselves, in whole or in part, willfully or by force, to other dividual persons, entities, or concepts. A case of transfer of substancecode in the anthropological record occurs in Obeyesekere’s study of the Pattini cult, in which transfer of the goddess’s essence (Simhala diù•i; Skt. dóù•i; glance) is a state called ākarùaâa, translated by Obeyesekere as “magnetism,”180 distinguished locally from possession, āveśa or ārubha (mounted).181 The use of Sanskrit terms here is significant, because this distinction is not found in Sanskrit texts, where ākarùaâa (attraction) is one of the “six acts” (ùa• karmāâi) of left-handed Tantra.182 At any rate, the point is that ākarùaâa, in Obeyesekere’s sense, becomes, in Marriott’s, a physiological substance that is transacted during ritual action. The goal of this transaction is to integrate the dividual individual’s activated substance-code with a similar, though more powerful, substance of the divinity. In so doing, rather as a byproduct, incompatible or negatively charged substances are surmounted or removed. Nabokov critiques Marriott’s view by stating that, in her experience, Tamil ritual does not serve an integrative or reintegrative function, but fragments the participants “to the point of splitting them apart.”183 This is a serious criticism, in spite of Nabokov’s (correct) contention that her “research seems to rather corroborate Marriott and Inden’s ‘dividual’ model of the Hindu person.”184 Her view is that the ritual she observed, which had a major component of possession by deceased relatives, left the individual, in the end, in a state in which she (usually) was forced to dis-integrate psychologically in order to reproduce her received roles and patterns within the dominant culture of oppression. Without the benefit of the thick description that modern ethnography offers, it will become clear that possession in classical Indian literature supports Marriott’s views more readily than Nabokov’s.

Performative and Biographical Context A major feature of possession known from ethnographic literature is its frequent occurrence in either religious drama or religious ritual (or both to-


gether). One need look no further than the recent work of Alf Hiltebeitel and Richard Frasca on South Indian street theater,185 Kathleen Erndl’s work on goddess worship in Panjab,186 and William Sax’s work on the Pāâbav Līlā in Garhwal to recognize the prominence of possession in contemporary religious drama.187 In the Pāâbav Līlā, for example, the actors or dancers are regarded as possessed by the characters whom they represent, such as Arjuna, Kóùâa, or Draupadī. Indeed, as in the Kóùâa and Rām līlās in Vrindaban, Varanasi, and elsewhere, the deities are themselves believed to be physically present, temporarily but fully manifested in the performers. This display of power and presence of the sacred permits the deities to be worshipped directly. Also documented is possession judged as higher and lower, positive and negative, not at all unlike the general distinction noted above between ā√viś and pra√viś in “Sanskritic possession.” Schoembucher recognizes similar categorical pairs in the anthropological record: “controlled and uncontrolled possession, induced and spontaneous possession, . . . desired and undesired, divine and demonic possession.”188 As an example of this, Hiltebeitel writes, “In Draupadī cult contexts, drunkenness and narcotics are thought of as inducing a kind of impure, or ‘polluted’ possession, one which is essentially demonic and stands in opposition to higher forms of possession which become vehicles for bhakti.”189 A feature of possession common to many of the ethnographies is play. The tendency toward the ludic in South Asian religion is strong,190 and Erndl shows in her book that the goddess “plays” with her devotees in the form of pavan (wind), while Wadley and Sax show that the possessing spirits or deities enjoy “dancing” in the bodies of their temporary hosts. On possession and play, Tom Driver writes, Possession, in my view, has also to be regarded as a kind of serious game. . . . [T]he seriousness and the truthfulness of spirit possession does not mean that it involves no role-playing, as is made obvious by the fact that costumes and props are made ready ahead of time, prepared for a panoply of spirits that is just as recognizable as the dramatis personae of any familiar script. . . . In spirit possession, “playing for keeps” is escalated to a very high level.191

Another feature, noted by Sax, is “oracular possession,” a phenomenon discussed below. Sax writes:


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(1) that such possession often, but not always, runs in families, usually from male to male; (2) that according to popular stereotypes, the oracle has no choice in the matter, and also cannot remember any details of his (or very rarely, her) trances; and (3) that discussions I have had with friends who are regularly possessed lead me to suspect that in many cases the oracle experiences an intrusion from outside of another consciousness or being but also adds his own elements of manipulation and self-conscious stagecraft in order to achieve a convincing performance.192

Susan Wadley writes succinctly in a slightly different vein, in order to distinguish between an oracle and an exorcist: “Basically, an oracle is possessed by a spirit and speaks while possessed; the exorcist himself is not possessed and therefore is not an oracle.”193 About the latter there can be no disagreement; but the label “oracle” for anyone who speaks while possessed is much too broad and certainly inexact for the material we consider. A. W. Macdonald also contributes to conceptually locating oracular possession. In describing why he so delicately translates the Nepali word jh7kri (var. jhāÅkri), a magicoreligious specialist often regarded more broadly as a shaman, as “interpreter of the world,” Macdonald provides an excellent description of spirit mediumship in South Asia. “Interpreter of the world,” says Macdonald, avoids the pejorative connotation “conjurer” or “wizard.” These latter terms are generally associated with irregular activities that either stray slightly from the societal norms or that are blatantly anti-social. The jh7kri, however, appears to be the very vehicle of a certain Nepali traditionalism. He is a person who falls into a trance, during which time voices speak through his person, thereby enabling him to diagnose illnesses and sometimes cure them, give advice for the future and clarify present events in terms of their relationship to the past. He is therefore both a privileged intermediary between spirits (who cause and cure illness) and men; between the past, present and future; between life and death, and most importantly between the individual and a certain social mythology.194

Another form of ethnography is the religious or spiritual biography in which possession is explained for the edification of an audience or student as a reproduceable benchmark experience.195 In a contemporary report of a Tantric practitioner known as the Aghori Vimalananda, written by Robert Svo-


boda, the Aghori disregards the word “possession” as well as the common Indic terminology discussed here, and speaks instead of avishkara (Skt. āviùkāra; manifestation, sudden appearance), which he equates with the Hindi baithak (bai•hak; seat) and the Urdu hazri (hājiri; presence).196 He employs these terms to denote a state in which a deity is invited into the body of the tantric practitioner, to his or her benefit.197 Vimalananda tells Svoboda, “By long worship your subtle body will actually take the form of the deity you are worshipping.”198 In addition to this practice, in which a full manifestation of a deity is produced through spiritual practice, “[t]he deity can enter into someone’s body, and you can worship Him or Her in that way.”199

Conclusions After reviewing various definitions of possession, methodological approaches including those that study possession (1) as a negatively inspired religious phenomenon, (2) as a psychological event, (3) as a social or sociopolitical event that trades in power relations, (4) as a type of shamanism, and (5) as a “real” incursion of spirits or deities to be taken at face value and addressed with a full cosmological arsenal, and after examining possession as a gendered, situated, and performative experience, we are in a position to move forward in our study. As should be clear from the above remarks, I am not bound to any single methodological approach; indeed, I find all of them problematic, especially for a study that emerges for the most part from the literary record. Most of this record does not satisfy the requirements of thick description, as this was never the intention of the authors. Furthermore, possession as mentioned and described in India is exceptionally diverse in its perspectives and dates. Therefore, we cannot expect a unity of vision to emerge, nor a single methodological approach to work for all the material. As a classicist and Sanskritist, it is my “natural” mode to resort to textcritical method. This is not, as some readers might suspect, a regressive or default tactic. The methods of Indology, following Lariviere, prove productive for this enterprise. However, I supplement this “natural” inclination with insights from other fields and do not hesitate to employ observations from comparative religion, ritual studies, and a variety of anthropological approaches if they help elucidate the material at hand. This is evident in the next two chapters, which, like the current chapter, deal with modern and contemporary phenomena.


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Notes 1. A recent exception is Padoux 1999. 2. Boddy 1994 cites 221 anthropological and ethnographic studies of possession, and this is far from complete as she cites only English-language sources. 3. Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994:261. The authors add, with respect to the notion that the purpose of ritual is cultural communication: “Our theory suggests that this is a mistake” (ibid.). 4. I am grateful to Scott Schnell, an anthropologist, for this observation. 5. I return to this theme periodically. See also Kapferer 1997:83, on the attraction to the anthropologist of sorcery in general. For a very different reaction, see Nabokov (2000), who admits to being so intrigued by possession and a séance that she witnessed one night at the beginning of her fieldwork in Tamilnadu that she spent the remainder of her research year attempting to understand what she had seen (pp. 3–4). By the end of the year, however, she claims to have “acquired none of the fascination that anthropologists working on possession sometimes develop for states of trance” (pp. 179–80). Her illuminating book provides the reasons for this; indeed, the reasons are embedded in the title, Religion Against the Self. 6. See the work of Biardeau, including her 1989a primer on Hinduism; also Knipe 1991 and Fuller 1992 for introducing anthropological material into introductory books on Hinduism. Fuller presents an especially good summary of deity and spirit possession in popular religion (1992:231–236). 7. Boddy 1994:407. 8. Bourguignon 1976:31. 9. Ibid.:7–8. Bourguignon is strongly critiqued in Levy et al. 1996:17ff. 10. Bourguignon 1976:1. 11. Becker 1993:11. 12. Rouget’s definition of possession as a “trance of identification” is too broad and too vague to serve as a starting point, though, as seen in discussions of bhakti, in South Asia identification with a deity is often regarded as a variety of possession; cf. Rouget 1985:25–28, 325. 13. Jilek 1971:214. 14. E. Turner 1992a, 1992b, 1993; and Halperin’s (1996) important critique of Turner. I would include Humphrey and Laidlaw in this group except that possession is not their primary object of study. 15. Claus 1984:61. 16. Halperin 1996:31. 17. Ferris 1999:35. This might be juxtaposed with a quotation from Aldous Huxley: No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and selfconscious personality. It would be interesting to take a group of the most eminent philosophers from the best universities, shut them up in a hot room with


Moroccan dervishes or Haitian Voodooists, and measure, with a stop-watch, the strength of their psychological resistance to the effects of rhythmic sound. Would the Logical Positivists be able to hold out longer than the Subjective Idealists? Would the Marxists prove tougher than the Thomists or the Vedantins? What a fascinating, what a fruitful field for experiment! Meanwhile, all we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and singing, every one of our philosophers would end up by capering and howling with the savages. (1952:369)

This is no doubt an extreme statement that might be contrasted with Nabokov’s opposing personal view cited in note 5. For an excellent anthropological self-disclosure, see Stoller and Olkes 1987. 18. Schoembucher 1993:242. 19. See Stoller 1998, for a discussion of several approaches: universalist (Horton, Sperber, Lévi-Strauss, Ernest Gellner), relativist (Tambiah, Geertz), and phenomenological (Husserl, Schutz). “Relativists complain that universalists are insensitive, eurocentric, or even racist. Universalists chide the relativists for their scientific naïveté and epistemological imprecisions” (p. 248), while phenomenologists tend to be too ahistorical. Stoller concludes that “the phenomenological approach might lead us to more embodied rationalities that are intellectually and personally transformative” (p. 240). 20. For an excellent account of the “hegemonic” Protestant interpretative ethos in studies of classical India, see Schopen 1991. For a reminder of just how thoroughly these ideas still dominate our thinking, see Tambiah 1990. 21. Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994:261. Elsewhere they write: “anthropologists engaged in symbolic analysis often singularly fail to provide realistic information about what people actually say about such symbols, no doubt because the actors so frequently reply something along the lines, ‘I know this means something, but I don’t know what it is.’ Anthropological interpretations have commonly covered up such unhelpful replies in order to produce a reading from their own deductions” (p. 180). And “we would claim that an across-the-board analysis, with no attention to the cognition of real participants, produces an occluded and ontologically unclear level of analysis” (p. 181). 22. Appadurai 1993:333–334. 23. Bell 1992, esp. ch. 4–6, reminds us of the dangers of positing general theories of ritual: all theorizing, she insists, must be deeply contextualized. 24. Dirks 1992:233. 25. Nabokov 2000:16. 26. Will 1991:9. Wade strongly discourages hypnosis: “Don’t even watch it” (p. 31). He refers to spiritualism as an “ancient monster” (p. 72) and states that, “possession results from submission to the suggestions of an evil spirit” (p. 41). It is not necessary for me to recount here the history of Orientalism or the extensive scholarship on it in the past thirty years. 27. Originally: Genealogie der malabarishen Götter. Aus eigenen schriften und


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briefen der heiden zusammengetragen und verfasst (Madras, 1867). English translation: Genealogy of the South-Indian Gods; a Manual of the Mythology and Religion of the People of Southern India, Including a Description of Popular Hinduism (Madras, 1869; New Delhi, 1984). A more exact translation of the title would be: Genealogy of the Malabar Gods, Compiled from My Own Writings and Letters of the Heathens. See Sweetman 2003:104-126, for an account of Ziegenbalg’s life and a number of translations from his work, some of which appear shockingly heavy-handed to today’s reader. See also Jeyeraj 2004 for a complete translation of Ziegenbalg’s original manuscript along with a thoughtful analysis. 28. Fountain 2000. See also Cuneo 2001, for an account of the rise in exorcism in the United States in the past several decades, which, he says, is due to the influence of popular culture, e.g., the film The Exorcist, increasing Protestant fundamentalism, and the acceptance of exorcism as an alternative to conventional psychotherapy for those who are wounded, addicted, or sexually abused. This fits with some of the observations of Lewis discussed below, as well as with my own observations in contemporary India (Chapter 12). 29. McClintock 1990:46. 30. I am not claiming here that there was an unbroken continuity between Ziegenbalg and McClintock or that the latter was typically “orientalist.” Nor do I intend here to equate Protestantism with orientalism. Indeed, most orientalists (in both senses of the word) were not Protestant missionaries. 31. Cf. Certeau 1984; Ginzburg 1989. The latter is an excellent historical example of this process of negotiating. 32. Catholic and Protestant churches had slightly different formal stances on the issue of possession. Nevertheless, they were alike enough with respect to what they encountered in South Asia to conflate them here without fear of undue essentializing. 33. Thomas 1977:569–588. 34. Ibid.:569. Thomas also explains that the spread of enlightenment rationalism in English Protestantism helped bring witchcraft persecutions to an end, notably with the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1736 (p. 535). 35. Ibid.:570. 36. Cf. Norton 2002. 37. Nevertheless, many Protestant denominations, including mainstream Methodists, speak of “being filled with the spirit.” Furthermore, Pentacostalists “speak in tongues,” while certain Catholic saints experienced stigmata, all resonant with different manifestations of āveśa. 38. Levy et al. 1996:15. With respect to the Pacific islands, they note that Christianity “radically altered the cultural framework for numinals, selectively overthrowing or demoting the gods, replacing a rich diversity of conceptualizations with an undifferentiated residual and negative category of ‘devils’ or ‘demons’” (pp. 24– 25). Missionary attempts to impose this in India met with decidedly less success. For comments on the opposite effects of colonial Christianity and modernity on possession cults, see the articles on possession in Southeast Asia in Mageo and Howard 1996.


39. See Ram 1991:85–105, passim, for comments on possession and healing in a Christian community of Kanyakumari District in southern Kerala. The discourse, language, and actions are little different from those of Hindu possession, reflecting (at least in this case) little political involvement in religion by the ancient (Syrian) Christian Church in Kerala. 40. Cf. Claus 1984:60f; Lewis 1989:18ff. 41. Danforth 1989:60. 42. Masson 1976:615 (1999:238). 43. For example, Masson’s statement “I cannot help viewing asceticism . . . as a defense, not a freely chosen position” (196:620; 1999:243). Masson fails to recognize that the reasons for asceticism in India can be, and always have been, myriad and that freely chosen positions are probably never free of conditioning factors. Procrustean characterizations like this close off the possibility of truly engaging the Other. 44. Ervin et al. (1988) and Simons et al. (1988) take steps toward establishing formal research criteria: Simons et al. show that, in Thaipusam, a possession ritual performed in Southeast Asia, based on South Indian precedents, a training regimen is in general a prelude to the experience of possession; in other words, it is a learned behavior. While seeking to understand the mechanisms of trance physiology, the second study confirms the findings of the first one: that the physiological responses to possession are sharpened through repetition, which is to say through practice, a conclusion discussed further in Chapter 4. The conclusions of Ervin et al. are that muscle tone is increased, that except for the slow pulse the state resembles hypoglycemic shock and that the recovery period of a few minutes is characterized by headache, photophobia, and confusion. “Early in training,” they state, “trances are characterized by poorly organized motor hyperactivity and occasionally the display of intense emotion. With experience, the motor patterns become more coherently organized with few affective displays. In both cases, trances are accompanied by amnesia. This state is suggestive of other situations in which the limbic system dominates the behavioural program” (Ervin et al. 1988:277). 45. An excellent and sympathetic introduction to cross-cultural psychoanalysis, which outlines the theoretical assumptions behind psychotherapy, is Frank and Frank 1991, esp. ch. 5. They state, with respect to their method: “Practitioners of biomedicine generally refuse to take seriously the evidence that healing can occur through procedures involving the paranormal or supernatural. In seeking to maintain objectivity, we shall try to navigate between the Scylla of scornful scepticism and the Charybdis of gullibility” (p. 88). 46. Castillo 1994a:2. Much of my discussion here is summarized from this excellent article. 47. See Lewis-Fernández 1998, for a critique of what was added to or deleted from the latest edition of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 1994). LewisFernández was a member of the subcommittee of the American Psychiatric Association that recommended these changes. He notes: “Very prevalent phenomenologies such as ‘possession trance syndromes,’ amok, ‘falling out’ and ataques de nervios, among several others, still did not have an appropriate nosological niche in the man-


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ual” (p. 388). He also notes, as do many others, “the inherent normalcy of most dissociative states” (ibid.), adding that specific diagnostic criteria that would enable the clinician to distinguish between normal and pathological dissociation was also lacking. 48. Crapanzano 1977:4. 49. Jonas (1965), a practicing psychoanalyst, links demonic possession with epileptoid phenomena: “In the past, many afflicted individuals thought they had been possessed by the devil or the holy ghost, and it is quite probable that many of the visions and voices described by mystics and prophets were not triggered by hysterical disassociations but epileptic equivalents” (p. 48, cited by Weiss 1977:160). Weiss’s Ph.D. dissertation, now being revised for publication, has analyzed Indian categories of unmāda, “insanity,” and exogenous disease-causing spirits in terms of Freudian categories of psychological pathology (pp. 112–186). Whatever might be said of Weiss’s work (and more is said at length in Chapter 12), it stands on firmer ground than some of the early “pseudo-psychiatric” studies he cites (as bad examples of the psychoanalytic trade), which grandly (and grandiosely) diagnose Indian culture at large, such as Berkeley-Hill 1921 (cf. Weiss 1977:135n5). For more grand theories, see Oesterreich 1930. 50. Significantly, the New York Times reported in 1999 that, “the Vatican again urged bishops and priests not to confuse psychological suffering and possession, and to seek medical help while at the same time offering spiritual consolation” (Tagliabue 1999:4). 51. Tambiah 1990:134–135. 52. Cf. Vallabhācārya, Antankaraâaprabodha and commentaries. 53. Cf. Kakar 1982:53–88. Most of the clientele at the temples and facilities in Mehndipur are from first-generation literate families with strong memories of the lifeways of oral cultures (cf. the work of Luria, cited in Ong 1982). 54. Pakaslahti 1998:130. 55. Pakaslahti writes (personal communication, October 2001) that he disagrees with Kakar’s view that “possession phenomena in Balaji are manifestations of hysteria or hysteric personality. Such a view—not rare among Indian doctors—is a ‘pathologization’ of the native therapeutic processes and phenomena. It overlooks the cultural construction of possession in Balaji which provides a specific language, the forms and the method of spirit-possession-as-therapy.” 56. Lambek 1996:239. 57. Ibid.:238. Like most other researchers on possession, I find Lambek’s positions extreme. Morris states the case with greater subtlety: “For only in the wake of a submission to the fictions that mediums themselves inhabit can one ask what work forgetting performs and, thus, how mediumship works” (2000:125). 58. See Stephens’s 2003 book on the Christian clerical misogynistic preoccupation with stories of sex with demons in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their consequent crises regarding the reality of not just demons, but God as well. This account strengthens my own sense of the emic nature of Western scholarship in the work of Lambek and other anthropological witch hunters. They have, it seems, un-


wittingly taken up the mantle of their clerical forebears, assigning it a place under the rubric “hermeneutic of suspicion,” then superimposed it onto their anthropological subjects. This hermeneutic has no doubt advanced their (and our) scholarship, but sometimes the results are little different from what they were hundreds of years ago: a totalization of their own ontological worldview and a privileging of it over that of their subjects. This has emerged as part of the dominant and still very Christian scientific paradigm, something that most in the modern Western academy have failed to problematize. 59. Bourguignon 1976:10. Note her inclusion of dissociation as a subset of hysteria. 60. Littlewood 1996:4. 61. Ibid.:7. 62. Geertz 1983:59. 63. Littlewood 1996:7. 64. Cf. DSM-IV:487, #300.14. Dissociative Identity Disorder is defined as follows: A. The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self ). B. At least two of these identities or personality states recurrently take control of the person’s behavior. C. Inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. D. The disturbance is not due to the direct psychological effects of substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during Alcohol Intoxication) or a general medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures. Note: In children, the symptoms are not attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play. 65. DSM-IV:729; 490f., 727ff; also Lewis-Fernández 1998:389f. on formally establishing the category “possession trance disorder.” 66. Littlewood 1996:14. 67. Ibid.:14–15. 68. Cf. ibid.:12ff. 69. Ibid.:34. 70. Some of the Sanskrit stories discussed in the following chapters deny the latter. It is not uncommon to find references to a body vacated by its conscious controlling agent after this conscious agent has entered the body of another being. This can lead to ludicrous consequences, cf. the discussion on the Bhagavadajjukāprahasana in Chapter 8. 71. Levy et al. 1996:19. 72. Fuchs 1964:131.


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73. Harper 1963:166. An important article on the value of Western psychoanalytic categories and psychiatric labeling in cultures in which the norms of mental health (and illness) may be different from those in the Western cultures that produce these categories and labels is Murphy 1976. Murphy’s views are accepted uncritically by Weiss (1977:5). This is problematic and is dealt with in Chapter 12. 74. Harper 1963:166. 75. Honko 1998:137. 76. Honko himself admits that the epic, its oral tradition, and the social forces and functions surrounding them are both too complex and too localized to offer such unilateral interpretations (1998:147). Antti Pakaslahti described to me a similar scenario in north India: I have taped a long conversation between an Indian patient and Indian psychiatrist. More precisely it was not really a dialogue but a composition of two intermittent monologues, quite surrealistic, at times like an Ionesco play. The patient talked about spirits, devotion, and rituals, the psychiatrist about hysteria, depression and therapy. Neither understood what the other was saying. The doctor considered the patient to be an uneducated believer in black magic and supernatural beings. The patient was wondering what on earth the psychiatrist was trying to say with all his complicated, strange words which made no sense to him. (personal communication, October 2001)

77. Freud 1955[1919]:224; 1972:235. 78. Bargen 1997:21. This is one of the few studies of possession in classical Asian literature that I have been able to find. Consistent with the findings of many anthropologists, Bargen states that, in the Tale of Genji, “spirit possession is an individual woman’s response to pervasive discontent rather than the inherited affliction of a single person, family, or clan” (p. 246). 79. Freud 1955[1919]:234; 1972:246. 80. Freud 1962:242; see also Mayes 1998:101. 81. Cf. Freud 1959[1923]:446: “Cases of demoniacal possession correspond to the neuroses of the present day.” 82. Garrett 1987:4. 83. Ibid. 84. See note 41. Masson’s final assessment of asceticism is that it is “unconsciously active sadism that expresses itself in extreme piety or even gets turned back against oneself ” (1976:625; 1999:247). That this speaks more about Masson than about asceticism as a vigorous Indian socioreligious phenomenon was revealed almost two decades later in his stinging critique of his father’s relationship with Paul Brunton (1993). Cf. also Kripal 1995:303, 358n71. 85. A recent far-reaching model proposed by Mayes shows promise. Capitalizing on Freud’s notion of the externalizing primitive and internalizing civilized, discussed above, she discusses possession as a “primal fantasy of being moved or contained


from without [which] may have either a negative or positive interpretation: at one pole is a desired state of rapturous surrender to external interpenetrating management, while at the other is a feared state of enforced submission to an invasive alien power” (1998:103). 86. Freed and Freed 1964:152–171. 87. See esp. Obeyesekere 1970:97–111; 1977; 1981. 88. Kripal 1995:39, 271, 335, 340n63, 357n46. See also Vaidyanathan and Kripal 1999, which is helpful because many of its essays actively engage the critical question of the validity of Freud’s psychoanalytic enterprise to Indian and Hindu cultures. The most important chapters dealing with this issue in this collection are by Parsons, Ramanujan, Kurtz, and Kakar. All of these essays can be called comparativist in the true sense of looking at cultures that are constituted differently, and they all suggest ways in which Freud must be emended in order for his theories to apply to India. 89. Castillo 1994b:142–152. 90. Although the review of the book by Svāmī Ātmajñānānanda (1997) is meritorious on many counts, there can be little doubt that the Svāmī’s engagement in the Ramakrishna Mission colored the review. Svāmī Ātmajñānānanda’s suggestions have been taken to heart by Kripal in the second edition of his book (1998). Certain other reviews have been more favorable; see, for example, the reviews by Patton (1996b); Haberman (1997): McLean (1997); and Padoux (1999). The most important and illuminating of the positive reviews, however, is in a review article by Parsons (1997), which illustrates the benefits of Kripal’s comparativist approach, especially when compared to two other seriously flawed psychoanalytically based biographies of Ramakrishna, by Sil (1991) and Kakar (1991). Among the less-positive reviews of this book, the better are by Urban (1998) and Walker (1998). See also the exchange between Larson and Kripal: Larson’s challenge in JAAR (1997), and Kripal’s response (1998). Kripal defends himself against the charge that the book’s final conclusions are monocausally reductive. But Larson was not the only reviewer to level this charge; Walker and Urban would agree with Larson. 91. Echoing what has been stated in certain reviews of the book (cf. Urban 1998), I might also criticize the book, though mildly, for its lack of attention to historical context. Kripal never asks why, in nineteenth-century Bengal, its prosperity punctuated regularly by oppression, floods, epidemics (notably a malaria epidemic in the late 1860s), famine (a major pan-Indian famine in the 1870s, which sent birth rates plummeting), not to speak of the usual “fever” and cholera, most other males (Bengali or otherwise) did not become homosexual or resort to ecstatic behavior. In fact, the average life span in India—Bengal was no exception—was thirty-six years according to the census of 1881, a statistic that was computed after eliminating infant and early childhood mortality. When adjusted for these factors, the average lifespan dropped to twenty-three years. Thus it is a safe guess that most men lost their fathers at a young age. Although this is a minor point given the overall scope of Kripal’s book, it is important to point out, if for no other reason than as an argument for more broadly based and interdisciplinary studies of issues in the history of religions. Cf. Report on the Census of British India (1883) pp. 142ff., 170ff. On Bengal as a


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historical center of prosperity, contrary to popular impressions, see Greenough 1982, ch. 1. 92. Caldwell 1999, esp. ch. 5. 93. Ibid.:228f.; cf. Castillo 1994b. 94. For perceptive comments on this problem, see Claus 1979. 95. Bhattacharyya 1986:71; see also 59–75. 96. Ibid.:72. 97. Yet occasionally one finds cases that beg for psychoanalytic interpretations. Vijaya Ramaswamy (1997) had one fall into her lap, but failed to engage psychoanalysis. Ramaswamy writes of a contemporary saint in Tamilnadu, Andavan Pichchi (“Mad”) Amma, who at age fifty was dying when she was possessed by the spirit of Pinnavasal Swamigal, a disciple of the nineteenth-century mystic Sadasiva Brahmendra. This male possession of a female body, says Ramaswamy, “has led to biological problems for her. However it has also given her an in-depth knowledge of Vedanta and the Upanishads which Amma as an illiterate wife had no acquaintance with” (p. 6). I am ill equipped to venture a psychoanalytic interpretation, but any such interpretation would have to balance Amma’s biological problems with the fact that she was also healed of her mortal affliction. 98. Caldwell 1996:222n22. 99. Ibid. 100. Freeman 1993:134. Humphrey and Laidlaw observe that even “unconsciously,” possession bears ritual patterning: “The phenomenon of spirit possession trance also demonstrates this: people coming out of these trances commonly say they do not know what they were doing and their family does not hold them responsible for their words and actions. Yet during the possession trance people act in specific, patterned ways (the circling of the head and shoulders) and not in the other numberless ways possible. This indicates that even ritualized possession is in some sense ‘directed’ and not totally formless, incoherent activity” (1994:235). 101. Nuckolls 1991a:58. See also Nuckolls 1991b; and for a deeper view of some of the cultural phenomena behind Jalari spirit possession, see Nuckolls 1997. 102. Sax (1991a) reports instances of oracular possession in festivals in Garhwal, where people randomly rush up to a possessed individual to ask for help in solving their problems. This sort of description is absent from Sanskrit literature. 103. Nuckolls 1991b:76. 104. Nuckolls replicates the structure that Bell (1992) attributes to anthropologists generally: that the ritual resolves a contradiction. 105. For example, see Sharp 1993, which examines possession as a mode of political consciousness embedded in religious experience. Among the varieties of possession she examines, one is of mass possession in the public schools, largely of adolescent migrant girls (222ff.). In one instance of this, a powerful healer was consulted. He reported that the local ancestors were angry because the French paid no regard to the sacredness of the ancestral ground on which the school was built, moving and destroying tombs. The healer recommended the performance, on the school grounds, of a ceremony honoring the deceased ancestors, including the sacrifice of an ox. After


this performance, the possession diminished considerably. It is difficult to imagine a school system in India that would accede to such a request. 106. See Diemberger 2005 for the role of female mediums in Tibetan politics. She writes: “Indeed, from historical sources we know that in ancient Tibet spirit possession had a central position in the political system and that women had an important role in embodying this institution” (p. 144). Diemberger’s excellent study appeared too late for me to take full advantage of it. 107. Claus writes, with respect to the compelling nature of these interpretations to academics, “Spirit possession is almost invariably viewed by anthropologists in psychological or sociological frameworks” (1979:30). 108. In my view, the works of Caldwell, Erndl, Freeman, Hiltebeitel, and Knipe excel here. See, e.g., Knipe 1989; also Sontheimer 1989b. 109. Claus 1984:63. 110. Hancock 1995:62. See Dernbach 2005, for a detailed argument that female possession on the island of Chuuk in Micronesia is both a discourse and a mode of cultural continuity and change. 111. Ibid.:63. 112. Sax 1991a:41, 184, 194. 113. Heesterman’s grandest statement on this issue in Vedic ritual is his 1993 book, The Broken World of Sacrifice. Heesterman may have overhistoricized what the Vedic poets intended poetically or metaphorically, but his efforts are nevertheless noteworthy. See my review of this book (F. Smith 1995). 114. Dirks 1992:216. 115. See Atkinson 1992 for a thoroughly documented account of the decline in the 1960s and subsequent revival of the concept of shamanism in ethnographic discourse. That the word shaman is possibly a derivation from Sanskrit śamaâa (< śramaâa), as Altaicists generally believe (though Tocharian is an option), does not help in determining the nature of shamanism as it is thought of today, even in India. See the discussion by Menges (1989), who supports the derivation, citing a letter from Sir Harold Bailey to Carmen Blacker (Bailey, cited in Blacker 1975:321–22n4) that traces the term through Prakrit, Saka, Tokharian, Sogdian “and other forms in Uigur Turkish, Asokan Greek and New Persian until it reached China as sha-men. Thence it made its way to Japan as shamon” (ibid.:23). In addition to the references cited here, see those cited in the articles on South Asian, Himalayan, and Tibetan shamanism in Walter and Fridman 2004:741–798. 116. Lewis 1989[1971]:57. 117. Ibid.:55–56. 118. A critique against which he explicitly defends himself in the “Preface to the Second Edition” (Lewis 1989:10). 119. However, for a strong defense of Lewis, at least on this point, see Gellner 1994:27–48. 120. This is being increasingly recognized by scholars; cf. Gellner 1994; Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Pakaslahti 1998.


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121. Gombrich 1988:36–37. 122. Cf. Eliade: “To be sure, shamans are sometimes found to be ‘possessed,’ but these are exceptional cases for which there is a particular explanation” (1964:6). 123. Bourguignon 1979:261. 124. Ripinsky-Naxon (1993), who has written a wide-ranging and dense distillation of the phenomenology of shamanism, argues for restricting the domain of shamanism to the realm of soul-journeying, while presenting almost unlimited variations on this theme. However, he does state, rightly: “It is easy to confuse folk beliefs and spirit possession with shamanism” (p. 67). Nevertheless, most modern scholars would admit possession into the realm of shamanism, which they regard as a rather open category. 125. Obeyesekere 1984:13–14. See also the excellent (and underutilized) study by Wirz (1954). This study recognizes in twentieth-century Ceylon some of the possessing “seizers” ( graha) that occur in the classical literature, especially the rakùas, yakùa, and preta. 126. Pettigrew and Tamu (1994:416–422) demonstrate that ecstasy and possession are uneasy partners in Gurung shamanism in Nepal. Related is Rouget’s criticism of the confusion of “ecstasy” and “trance” (1985:312). Trance, he says, is accompanied by convulsions, music, noise, amnesia, and an audience, while ecstasy is characterized by silence, immobility, and solitude. In the South Asian experience, the characteristics of both may be found alternating in the possessed (see the discussion of Knipe’s work on raudra and śānta in Chapter 8). See also Diemberger’s helpful critique of Lewis, in which she demonstrates that though Lewis’s gendered distinction between central and peripheral possession may be applicable in Tibet (male as central, female as peripheral—a distinction that is largely inapplicable in India), Lewis’s distinction between “lower” and “higher” does not work, largely because such hierarchical positionings shift rapidly in different, even neighboring, communities (2005:145-146). 127. Lewis 1989:15. 128. Examples abound. See, e.g., Biardeau 1989a and 1989b; Hiltebeitel 1991; for Nepal see, e.g., Macdonald (1975), who translates the threatening ranting of a gāine (professional beggar/minstrel who is possessed by Bhat Bhateni), “a divinity whose altar is to be found not far from the Snow View Hotel in Kathmandu, a divinity famous for its murders of new-born children” (p. 116). 129. Sharp 1993:15; see also her excellent summary of anthropological perspectives on possession, pp. 14ff. 130. Cf. Shirokogoroff 1935:269. 131. Ibid.:274, cited by Maskarinec 1998:viii. See also Siikala 1982. Also relevant to the discussion is During Caspers (1992), who argues that certain inscriptions, masks, and other items of material culture from the Indus civilization reveal the presence of shamanism in that culture, probably as a survival from earlier, more characteristically shamanistic hunter-gatherer cultures farther north. Although it may be part of During Caspers’s project to argue for an Indus civilization shaman-


ism based on likely regional antecedents, it is not part of my project to argue that possession as an aspect of shamanism is based on models from that earlier civilization. The evidence is simply too fragmentary and random to say any more than that it is possible. 132. Inglis (1985) argues that most of the possession in Tamilnadu that may be considered oracular is not shamanic, strictly speaking. 133. Other instances of gods descending into humans in a manner departing from the shamanistic norm may be cited, most famously the oracle at Delphi. 134. Sontheimer 1997:80, 106, 174, passim; 1989a:142–146. Stablein (1976), who studied Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal, also sees possession as shamanistic. In fact, he sees possession as the main connection between shamanism and Vajrayāna Buddhism, a theme taken up by Samuel (1993), but contested by Gombrich (1997). 135. Sontheimer 1989b:142. 136. Ibid.:145. 137. Srinivas 1998:178. Kakar also recognizes different categories of shaman, which to him, too, is a rather large category of spirit healers (1982:89ff., passim). Also important for shamanism in tribal cultures is Jones 1968. Jones’s primary influence was Eliade; he wrote before Lewis and his critics and was unaware of the article by Rubin discussed in note 138. 138. For an early enthusiastic article on shamanism in India, see Ruben (1940), who regards almost everything dramatic from the ñgveda and Avesta through early Buddhism to early twentieth-century ethnographies as manifestations of shamanism and argues for its presence in India. He writes of magical flight, magical dreams, animal sacrifice and totemism as suggestive of shamanism, drawing on a bewildering array of cross-cultural comparisons that would be forbidden in more recent scholarship. His work is a reminder of how difficult it was sixty-five years ago, and still is today, to say exactly what shamanism is. 139. Paper 1995:85. In this cautiously recommended general study of religion “on the ground” in China, Paper has devoted two chapters to “ecstatic functionaries in Chinese religion” (pp. 51–124). For a more thorough critique of this book, see F. Smith 2001a. 140. Claus 1979:29. Nabokov (2000:187n2) comments lucidly on the use of the terms shaman, oracle, trance-therapist, and possession-medium by various scholars. 141. These texts remain untranslated from Bengali. I am indebted to Frank Korom for this information. The only notable account of the maãgalkābyas is by Zbavitel 1976:156–169. See also W. Smith 1980. 142. For an interesting critique of Lewis, see Kjaerholm 1982: 185ff. Kjaerholm’s article is seriously flawed from an Indologist’s perspective, though he rightly (and vigorously) calls for an understanding of cultural representations of personhood as a prerequisite for understanding possession. More appropriate for the South Asian context is Jones 1976, which suggests four, rather than two, categories of possession: peripheral, tutelary, reincarnate, and oracular. 143. Geertz 1983:59. I agree with Flood’s methodological suggestions regarding a dialogue between scholarly and indigenous narrativization (1999:139ff.).


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144. Goodman 1988. Curiously, this work is not mentioned in Boddy’s review article (1994). 145. See references in note 14. 146. See Cuneo’s discussion (2001:273ff.) on the existence of spirits based on his observation of more than fifty exorcisms in late twentieth-century America. 147. See Castillo 1994a:145, 156, and references therein. 148. Boddy 1994:413. 149. See Claus 1979, 1984; Halperin 1996; also Nourse 1996. 150. Moreno 1985. 151. Halperin 1996:36. 152. This is true elsewhere, cf. Lewis 1989[1971], for extended discussions of this; also, e.g., Kendall 1985, 1988. 153. Cf., e.g., Erndl (1993), Harper (1963); and Nabokov (2000), all of whom nuance their studies differently while illustrating the utility of this perspective. 154. Keller 2002:82. 155. Most important here are Bell’s elaborations of Foucault’s notion of “ritualized agency” (1992:197ff.). 156. It need hardly be re-emphasized that “If there can be said to be such a thing as prelogical mentality, it can surely be found in our own midst and not just in Others” (Jensen and Geertz 1991:17). 157. See F. Smith 2001a and the books reviewed therein. 158. Trawick 1992:153–154. 159. As for the danger, see Harper 1969, for an account of the perceived danger of widows and more general fear of women among certain brahmans of coastal Karnataka. 160. See Caldwell 1999:217, for a summary of scholarly views on the relationship between women’s possession and sexual and aggressive emotions. Now see Diemberger 2005, who argues that female oracular possession in Tibet is an aspect of a peculiar “female competence” (p. 141). Women, in part because they are often outside the system of social ranking, in part because they have been largely responsible for child-rearing and in part because they “have a deep knowledge of the kinship-network as patrilocally married wives” (p. 143), are experts at mediating small-scale conflicts and threats to the coherence of the community. As such, it is part of their hereditary religious role to serve as oracles, a role also attested in India (and elsewhere). 161. Cf. Gellner 1994; Hancock 1995. 162. Hancock 1995:62. Although smārtas are followers of the advaitin Śaãkarācāryas (especially of Kanchi and Sringeri) and are (in theory, at least) guided by the Smóti texts, they engage in popular goddess worship. As Hancock (along with many others) notes, “The Śaãkarācāryas (all of whom are men) are said to have merged with the goddess” (p. 71). This is an old notion, as the attribution to Śaãkara of dozens of hymns to the goddess testifies. 163. Egnor 1980:12–13. This excellent essay discusses, among other things, the relationship between devotion (bhakti), power (śakti) and feeling (Ta. uâarcci). 164. Ibid.:15.


165. Ibid.:27. 166. Erndl 1996; see also Wadley 1976. The equestrian theme is a common and potent metaphor in possession cults throughout the world: a medium is mounted by a spirit who takes the reins of control. Halperin (1996:33) notes that in Afro-Brazilian trance dancing a medium is called a “horse,” upon which a spirit rides. See also Deren 1991; Matory 1993; and Chapter 4, n. 189. 167. The theme of gender role-reversal is well known from Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969). This is also proximate to Foucault’s reflections on the agency and power of subjectivity and on resistant “technologies of the self.” By shaping their own subjectivity, Indian women in possession can potentially thwart, challenge, or question the ways that they have been shaped by men. See Ransom (1997:152) for an explanation of the political impact of this aspect of Foucault’s project. 168. Gold and Raheja 1994. 169. Jamison 1996:42ff. In demonstrating that tying a cord around the waist of the sacrificer’s wife is ititiatory, Jamison has argued against a position that I took in my 1991 essay, that the act of binding the wife was also an act of suppression. While I agree with Jamison’s conclusions on the initiatory aspects of the rite, which I also stated in my article (though not as forcefully as she), I also believe that her conclusions do not necessarily contradict mine. 170. Zvelebil 1981:15–16. Zvelebil examined roughly four dozen occurrences of this word in old Tamil texts. 171. Ibid.:20. 172. Through examination of a broad sweep of Tamil texts, Rajam 1986 demonstrates that the term aâaãku has a much greater semantic range than Hart supposed. Rajam finds instances of the word in the senses of sexuality, undefeatable quality, a celestial woman, a male ascetic, a source of distress, the supernatural capacity of an ocean, and so on. Furthermore, she discovers that, when used for a woman’s force, it is not necessarily inherent or sacred. For a thorough discussion of the word, see also Dubianski 2000:6–19. Burrow, in his 1979 review of Hart 1976 defines aâaãku as “the possessing spirit” and “the state of possession” and cites the expression aâaãk ā•u (= teyvam ā•u; to dance under possession of a spirit). 173. Shulman 1981:55, esp. ch. 2, “The Phenomenon of Localization” (pp. 40–89). 174. See, for example, Chapter 4, pp. 140–142, on possession during the Debaddhani festival in Assam. 175. Emeneau 1938, cited by Zvelebil 1981:13. 176. This supports Daniel’s observations (1984) on the coextensiveness and “substantial” or “fluid” relationship, or even identity, between place and individual in south India. 177. See Daniel 1984; Singer 1984, esp. chs. 3 and 6. 178. Marriott 1976:110. See now the perspicacious remarks of Sax 2002:9–15. 179. Marriott 1976:111. 180. The word ākarùaâa is used in Bengali to denote the power of place due to


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its habitation by a deity; a “magnetic pull.” I thank Frank Korom for this. The “magnetic pull” of a temple or deity is a familiar experience in India; thus it is possible that the Simhala usage reported by Obeyesekere encompasses this. 181. Obeyesekere 1984:14. 182. Cf. Bühnemann 2000; Goudriaan 1978:294ff.; cp. Türstig 1985:101ff. The lists of ùa• karmāâi in Türstig’s texts do not mention ākarùaâa. I am unable to locate ārubha in the sense of possession in any Sanskrit text. 183. Nabokov 2000:15. Her entire discussion on this issue is worth examining. 184. Ibid. :14. See Marriott and Inden 1977. 185. Blackburn 1988; Frasca 1990; Hiltebeitel 1988, 1991; Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya 1984. 186. Erndl 1993. 187. Sax 1991b, 1995. Other studies worth mentioning are, on Kerala, the work of Richmond and others in Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli 1990; on Garhwal pilgrimage, Sax 1991a; on Rajasthan, Gold 1987. Also of interest is Ramanujan’s discussion of the relationship between possession and performance (1986a). 188. Schoembucher 1993:242. 189. Hiltebeitel 1989b:365. 190. Cf. Korom 1999; Norbeck 1974, 1976. 191. Driver 1991:177–78. In tones familiar to some of the issues we are grappling with, Driver notes that in Christianity there is a wide gulf between liturgists/ theologians and advocates of possession: To “get the spirit”—that is, to become filled with the immediate presence of the deity—is the essence of the sacramental act, although this truth has been obscured, not to say suppressed, in those churches that have come to put high value on their social respectability and thus to shy away from experiences that are strongly antistructural, preferring the shelter of this world’s customs even in ritual. In these circumstances, the experience of possession (being filled with something) during a sacrament has been more or less banished, its place taken by an emphasis on symbolism. (pp. 208–209)

192. Sax 1991a:41n6. 193. Wadley 1976:235; see also Dumont and Pocock (1959:55f.), who note that an exorcist or priest mediates from man to deity, but an oracle mediates from deity to man. 194. Macdonald 1976:310. The reader must compensate for the masculine pronouns here because, as Merz and many others have shown, most of the jh7kri are dyah-mā, women. Perhaps the most complete account of exorcism in Tibetan Buddhism is Mumford 1989:140–162. 195. These personal experience narratives have not received the scholarly attention they deserve; cf. Korom 1997, esp. 570ff; 1999. 196. See Bellamy 2004 for an account of different kinds of hāzri at a healing site


called Husain Tekdi in Rajasthan. She records the Hindi term van hājri bhar rahā haiÅ (he is filling that presence). 197. Cf. Nasir 1987. Like much else reported in this chapter, bai•hak in Peshawar was the province of women. It is also very formal, includes songs, and is used for healing purposes. Vimalananda’s use of the term is nonspecific and does not reflect this context. 198. Svoboda 1986:212. 199. Ibid.


3

Possession, Trance Channeling, a

y

There is a pleasure sure In being mad, which none but madmen know. —DR Y DE N , The Spanish Fryar, II.i


L

est anyone idly think that possession is a phenomenon limited to antiquity and contemporary non-Western societies, and that possession studies are strictly the property of scholars, mostly anthropologists, who conduct research on exotic people in far-flung places, Michael F. Brown has written The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age, a book that addresses an increasingly wellknown Western phenomenon known as trance channeling, an unambiguous, if culturally reconfigured, cognate of spirit and deity possession.1 Like spirit possession elsewhere in the world, the primary observed characteristics of trance channeling in America are sharp changes in expressive behavior accompanied by identity shifts. Trance channeling can be viewed in much the same terms as possession reported elsewhere, for example, by Srinivas in Ladakh, Sax in Garhwal, Gellner and Macdonald in Nepal, and so on: as a relatively controlled multiple personality experience framed by ritual and performance, conferring on it a safety net of cultural legitimacy, thus (largely) removing it from culturally construed realms of danger and pathology. New Age trance channeling is almost entirely oracular, which is to say “positive.” It does not resemble the mass celebratory possession found at the festival at the Khaâbobā temple in Jejuri in Maharashtra when the new moon


falls on a Monday (somavatī amāvāsyā),2 the possession at the Draupadī festival in Tamilnadu documented by Hiltebeitel, or the ritual vow-taking involving possession during the new year’s festival called Thaipusam in Malaysia or Singapore.3 Although the possession in these locations is also “positive” and immensely empowering to participants, it may also be dangerous or violent, with self-flagellation (at Jejuri), animal sacrifice (in the Draupadī cult), and impalement (during Thaipusam). Just as New Age channeling is not celebratory or “sacrificial,” neither is it disease-producing, a “negative” infestation of evil or unwanted spirits. Two of the regular (though not invariant) features of New Age channeling are the elision of memory and the presence of elements of stagecraft, the second and third of Sax’s criteria for oracular possession. Although not identical to South Asian ritual possession, nearly all trance channeling occurs in ritual situations, for example, during a scheduled meditation or before a client or audience. In the latter cases, like mediumship elsewhere, it is benign, with an eye toward attracting a following.4 And like all rituals, these are planned, staged, and culturally sanctioned events. An element New Age channeling shares with certain other varieties of possession is nostalgia. An analogous, but not far-fetched, example of the manifestation of nostalgia surfaced in The New York Times Magazine of February 25, 2001. This article, titled “Theme Park on a Hill,” discussed a new “Holy Land Experience,” a fifteen-acre Holy Land theme park associated with Disney World in Orlando, Florida. This tourist attraction features a “peaceable Zion rising above Florida’s marshes” and offers “a ray of hope for its embattled counterpart in the Middle East.”5 All of this for a mere $17. Much possession is of historical or mythically imagined or reimagined personalities.6 As in the Holy Land Experience, these personalities are vividly brought to life—alterity is introduced—through theatricalization, in this case mediumistic skill, of memory traces, fantasy, and nostalgia. However contrived, they take on a life of their own in the present, as documented in Uganda, where mediums supposedly possessed by warriors of real and imagined armies of the past generated a brutal revolution in the 1980s,7 or in Thailand, where rituals of possession mediumship are openly nostalgic of earlier eras and cultural forms.8 In South Asia, the mass possession in Tamilnadu of Draupadī’s armies affects the dynamics of the entire community, even out of the festival season. Similarly, the Yelm, Washington, alternative community led by J. Z. Knight, who, the community claims, channels an ancient warrior named Ramtha, is structured to replicate the social roles of its archetypal community. This nostalgia of a glorious past is transferred to the present

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plate 1. Boopsie welcomes the 25,000-year-old-warrior Hunk-Ra into her body DOONESBURY © 1987 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.

through an elaborate network of lessons with multilayered abstract meanings, rather than as the thing itself, rekindling the archetypal narrative for the sake of its very manifestation, as is the case, for example, in South Asia. The messages transmitted in channeling sessions largely concern physical and psychological healing, personal transformation, and inner growth. Channeling thus becomes a vehicle for or a practice of growth, healing, or “spiritual evolution.” Within the subculture of New Age channeling, healing is regarded as the transformation of a complex network of social, psychological, and spiritual conditions, which acts as the primary cause of physical illness or psychological imbalance. Neither pathogens nor spirit possession are considered essential factors in disease production, or at least they are not dealt with in any active therapeutic sense in New Age channeling. This is also asymmetrical with South Asian possession in that spirit mediums in South Asia are not dealt with in any active therapeutic sense in New Age channeling. This is somewhat asymmetrical with South Asian possession in that spirit mediums in South Asia are often approached to combat possession by malignant deities and spirits that are believed to cause disease or erratic behavior. These spirits are dealt with directly by exorcists, as entities bearing a palpable, if usually undefinable, existential reality, rather than as materializations of social, psychological, and spiritual conditions. Thus traditional trance healers are also exorcists or spirit doctors. They employ spirits or deities to exorcise other, more malignant, spirits; in other words, a strategy of possession—more aptly counterpossession—is deployed to combat possession.9 Perhaps more to the point, though, is that healing through possession in South Asia is viewed as a medical alternative to serious health and life crises, rectified by the transformative power of a deity. As Tara Devi, a lower


middle-class housewife in rural Himachal Pradesh, educated up to the fifth grade, states: “the Mother’s grace came upon me, and the world became good.” She dispensed mantras and sacred ash to the afflicted who came to her in possession, and “[t]hrough that they become all right. The world has become good.” Tara Devi’s emphasis is, ostensibly at least, not on her personal psychosocial empowerment, but on the transformative goodness of the goddess.10 As a medium and a healer, Tara Devi is, like most Western trance channelers, an ethical and religious traditionalist, part of an effort (probably unconscious) to move from the periphery to the center, to utilize Lewis’s terms. For Western trance channelers, ignoring or downgrading the concept of a predominantly pathogenic cause of disease is part of the New Age presentation of its “new paradigm” of choice and a simultaneous rejection of the old and weary mechanistic paradigm of Descartes, Newton, and Darwin. However, as the pathogenic contribution to disease production is becoming increasingly understood and accepted in South Asia, mediumistic healers have adjusted their theories and practices to accommodate this notion. It is not unusual for a healer or medium to give a diseased client an empowered or ensorcelled substance such as water, ash from a sacred fire (vibhūti), or sweets previously offered to a household or temple deity (prasād) as a healing agent for an identifiable disease such as amoebiasis or malaria. One of the interesting features of oracular possession in South Asia, Africa, the islands of the South Pacific, and elsewhere is that it has been on the increase in recent decades.11 Under the hegemony of Western colonialism and Christianity (at least when the latter served as an agent of the former), possession was, in general, on the decrease, as was the case in the Pacific islands. However, in its encounter with modernity—or, in Western eyes, with postmodernity—possession has been embraced as an indigenous cultural practice.12 As such it has undergone a renewal, at least in places where Christianity has not been dominant or became detached decades ago from colonial interests. An example of the accessibility of possession today is Taiwan, which now has a “Republic of China Mediums’ Association.” This association opened its own school for mediums in 1992 and, according to a 1989 disclosure, listed 62 organizational members and 1,940 individual members, numbers (though probably not percentages) that appear to approach the prevalence of spirit-mediumship in China during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.13 Similarly, spirit mediumship has increased in Thailand since the decline of missionary Christianity in recent decades. In northern Thailand a


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highly developed “Praise Ceremony” is increasingly performed to initiate, and therefore acculturate and legitimize, mediums across boundaries of local spirit lineages. This ceremony, steeped in both local spirit culture and transnational Buddhism,14 has professionalized and institutionalized local spirit mediums. Rosalind Morris remarks that such mediumship is only gradually acquired; professional standards can be achieved only after the possession becomes regularized and controlled. Mediumship “is only recognized by other mediums after the identity of the spirit has been clearly articulated and the medium has come to accept the professional obligations that attend possession through the acquisition of a khan [spirit offering] dish.”15 In other words, the democratic ideologies of secular modernity have not suppressed possession, as did the religious and sectarian ideologies of Christianity, especially when the latter was represented through colonialism as the bearer of progress. In the modern West as well, secular modernity has proved to be more hospitable than the dominant religions in its support of the ideologies and practices of the New Age, including channeling. In Africa, South Asia, and Oceania, as in the modern West, the personal empowerment that is a major component of possession (or channeling) abides in religious or spiritual realms and discourse modes, areas in which the dominant sociopolitical cultures are most open to alternative expression. Possession and channeling, then, have been legitimated by an amicable relationship of discourse with sociopolitical cultures. In this way, the dominant cultures have, by necessity, created recognizable and tacitly accepted outlets for alternative experience and expression. In the West, such legitimization by the dominant secular society has lent a vigor and creativity to the New Age movement. Perhaps this has been felt nowhere more strongly than by the advocates and practitioners of trance channeling, as witnessed by the explosion of books, videotapes, and media coverage of the phenomenon.16 As noted, oracular possession has been on the increase in South Asia. Gellner attributes this increase in Nepal since about 1950 to democratization (prajātantra), which has emboldened a large number of people, especially women, to establish themselves as regular mediums. This has become a new and viable wage-earning opportunity for women in certain oppressively patriarchal rural areas of Nepal—not a trivial factor in the general empowerment offered by possession.17 Thus, as with New Age channeling, the proliferation of possession in Nepal and elsewhere in South Asia is a populist artifact of democratization. In this way, democracy has done well its


job of leveling inequalities: It has been a mechanism for shrinking the gap between laity and deity in the West and between the laity and the priestly elite in South Asia.18 Nevertheless, in spite of similar dynamics of cultural legitimization and forces of modernity at work in the West and in other lessprivileged regions of the world, the personal empowerment experienced by New Age trance channelers displays a considerably different texture from that experienced by women and others of lower social rank in developing societies whose possession is a temporary expression of social or political dominance in a general climate of oppression. Further comparison can be made between New Age trance channeling and spirit mediumship in developing countries. In America and elsewhere in the West, workshops on contacting spirit guides and guardian angels are commonly held, all in search of “the primal experience of transformation.”19 Although contacting spirit guides is by no means synonymous with possession, such New Age workshops may not be unfairly compared to spirit initiations and apprenticeships in Oceania and South Asia.20 A strong difference, however, is that the latter arise from the imperatives of need, the synchronicities of oppression, or long-term religious or spiritual commitment, while the former, New Age channeling workshops and even correspondence courses, are a “product” arising from media-based culture (the ready availability of books and videotapes by trance channelers) and widespread prosperity. Whereas the experiences of transformation and empowerment are common to New Age trance channeling and Third World possession, the clientele in the West are generally upwardly mobile, not (in general) restricted in their movement by centuries of social conditioning and oppression. As we have seen, though, the latter situation is changing, as democratization in Taiwan, Oceania, and probably South Asia as well has led to attendance at oracular and festival possession events as much a matter of choice than of local tradition. Although it is probable that a preponderance of New Age trance channelers are women, it is not an established or overwhelming majority. In South Asia and other more “traditional” societies, this is also the case, as many studies have shown. On balance, Lewis’s insight that possession and its incumbent empowerment are the rather “natural” property of the oppressed and underprivileged has been disproved by developments in the past forty years. The content of channeling and possession serves as another point of comparison. New Age channeling usually assumes the form of general or abstract advice that, if followed, reinforces the notion of a new scientific


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paradigm that becomes the basis for spiritual enlightenment. Therefore, more often than not, the channeled message is presented in glowing salvific terms, not least because it enshrouds itself in scientific (or at least scientistic) certainty.21 The ontological basis for this salvific message, as well as for the new scientific paradigm, is that the self is fluid or permeable, that it is not a psychophysical entity limited by and equated with the boundaries and irrevocable entropy of the physical form. This is not simply a rejection of both the Western scientific assumption of an impermeable unitary self and the psychological notions that have arisen out of the biomedical model constructed on this assumption. It is equally a declaration of a new model in which the self does not terminate with the body but is a biomagnetic field that can be influenced by other biomagnetic fields. This opens the floodgates to the notion of receiving information from various extrapersonal sources, while simultaneously embracing the normalcy, indeed the exalted potential, of dissociation. As we have seen above, this is not far from Littlewood’s insights into the mechanics and deployment of dissociation or of Castillo’s assessment of its adaptive nature. Although this is prominent in some possession noted by ethnographers, it is absent from the classical literature of India. More often in the classical accounts, detailed information about the past—less often the future—is transmitted through possession, but usually the purpose of possession (at least positive possession) is either possession itself, the mere fact of expressing the personality of the deity or spirit or a more “educational” goal, such as Śaãkara’s possession of the body of the dead king Amaruka (parakāyapraveśa) in order to gain carnal knowledge without compromising his own vow of celibacy (about which I say more below).22 Moreover, the emotional trajectory is usually different. In South Asian possession, the emotional constitution of the deity or spirit is often vividly reflected; indeed, this is often the point of the possession. South Asian possession is often accompanied by acts of violence, for example, in the possession by a blood-drinking goddess or an ancestor who demands an animal sacrifice. However, in New Age trance channeling, the message is, on the whole, more important than the medium. The emphasis is almost exclusively on the exalted and the inspirational; there is little place for the idiosyncratic past of the channeler, for the childhood traumas and repressed demons that feed the jumbled personal and social histories that constitute the persona of the channeler and bind it into its own time and place. This is why channeled material translates effectively into the written word, while South Asian possession, when transcribed,


loses much of its meaning, which is often bound up in its immediacy or presence or conversely holds most of its meaning in local context. For this reason, the primary experience of an audience attending a channeling session is usually one of hearing words of well-established wisdom, with the significance of an attendant emotional state subsumed to the primacy of the message. This confers a prevailing mood of warm and fuzzy friendliness that serves the expectations of the targeted clientele as well as the proprietary interests of the channeler. This presentation of channeling as a safe spiritual, emotional, and psychic zone may be contrasted with the intense and unpredictable emotional engagement that is usually a distinguishing feature of possession in South Asia and elsewhere. In part this is because emotions are accorded greater substantiality and validity in South Asia, where bhāva (emotionally integrative experience—much more is said about this below) is culturally and religiously sanctioned, rather than realized solely through transgressive and extrainstitutional means.23 The New Age presentation of channeling as a zone of safety, rather than risk, danger, or violence, reflects the need of New Agers to be more secure in their spiritual vision and less out of place in a postmodern, dislocated world. Channeling, with its smooth and mildly ecstatic purposiveness, provides a rootedness, a continuity, which confers a structure for authentication of humanness and a vision of goodness, both of which empower through (at least nominal) rejection of a cultural system characterized as discontinuous and violent. History is constructed and personally appropriated, rather than continually erased. Higher-risk practices, such as those found in South Asia—including mass role playing, fire walking, impalement, and public sacrifice—rearrange the power-sharing in a rather opposite manner, by erasing both history and the present moment while consciously engaging nonlinearity, even if this nonlinearity has been established through engagement with varieties of Purāâic and other similar narrative. The embodiment of a dangerous spirit or hungry goddess is empowering because it nullifies the gap between the rural and urban poor and middle classes (regardless of caste or sex) and the political elite. This gap is not nullified through assertion of a more accurately constructed or envisioned universe, as in New Age channeling, but through a singular act of deconstruction. The cessation of the gap, its nonrecognition, constitutes the negotiation that confers social empowerment within South Asian oracular and other “positive” possession. In more than one way, then, the dispossessed become the possessed, at least temporarily. That said, I must add that if channeling


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were regarded as entirely safe, it would lose its valence; conversely, if possession were regarded as entirely risky, it would also lose its valence. In other words, exceptions to this rather offhand depiction of the emotional construction of New Age channeling and South Asian possession must surely be numerous—which urges me to agree with others in recognizing the difficulties incumbent in cross-cultural comparisons of emotion.24 Although the rather consistent emotional construction of trance channeling might suggest otherwise, a prominent feature of channeling is that it adumbrates a moral and epistemological relativism while displaying a remarkably (or perhaps unremarkably) consistent potpourri of earth-centered spirituality, cosmic orderliness, human divinity, and exhortations of personal responsibility.25 Yet South Asian and other possession reveals practically the opposite: moral consistency, though not absolutism, and a chaotic, indeed often frightening, variety of possession states, including all the elements mentioned above—impalement, body-piercing, and blood sacrifice. The reasons for this appear to lie in the relatively greater importance of the message in New Age channeling—and the messages can be very different—while in South Asian possession, as mentioned, the process, the action, and the “facticity” of manifesting the divine is paramount.26 Another point of comparison is that of spirit ownership. In South Asia, possession is democratic in the sense that almost never does one have exclusive rights to a deity.27 However, the situation is rather more complicated with spirits. Although deities are capable of having multiple hosts, this is not necessarily the case with spirits, which are regarded as more easily subject to individual control. This is strikingly highlighted in an article by N. K. Wagle describing a number of court cases in early seventeenth- to early nineteenthcentury Maharashtra, in which spirits (bhūts), only occasionally specified, were the accused, directed by experts (bhutāle, bhutālī) to cause disease, wreak havoc on personal property, steal documents, and even commit murder. Although it was impossible to punish the offending spirit, the ritual expert or, more generally, the one who hired him or her was punished.28 Comparing this to possession elsewhere in the world and with New Age channeling reveals that possession is not always democratic. In a few instances, single individuals have secured exclusive rights to possession of a particular spirit, such as in Uganda.29 In the West, where channeling is big business, serious issues of intellectual property rights have arisen. On more than one occasion, channelers have resorted to copyright law in order to ensure their ownership of a certain spirit, formally, of course, the spirit’s


name, for example Ramtha—thus, according to their logic, the spirit him or herself.30 The copyright issue is wrought with conflict for channelers, as it opposes the peculiar American populism that serves their spiritual and economic interests. The obvious problem here, and admittedly an awkward one, is that spirits cannot be brought under legal contract, at least not in America.31 Thus the solution—the copyright and subsequent commodification of a name, very much in the Western (particularly American) spirit (so to speak)—has led Brown to conclude that channeling will eventually enter the cultural mainstream.32 Although trance channelers depict themselves as an exclusive breed apart from society, their teachings contain a reformist message that places them squarely within the accepted range of Western social, religious, and economic processes. Thus just as modernity and secular culture have bestowed legitimation and protection to the New Age and trance channeling, channelers have reciprocated by legitimizing modernity. It is therefore understandable that the New Age movement has vigorously embraced the political rights and freedoms that modernity has effected; indeed, these rights and freedoms serve and protect the New Age. And understandably, if ironically, it rejects the science that has accompanied modernity and given rise to it in the first place. All of this is on display in the hundreds of thousands of Internet sites dedicated to channeling, as well as in the numerous “How to” books and videotapes on channeling that fit into mainstream cultural categories.33 Brown contends that “channeling has a democratic undercurrent that subverts centralized power,”36 but this undercurrent has an ameliorating, rather than an alienating, edge to its subversion. As is the case with possession examined in ancient and modern India, known through classical literature and anthropological investigation, it is a subversion that does not seriously threaten the dominant order. Rather, it provides new rationale for the old established moral and social order. The alternative linear histories that are both revealed and employed in channeling are, at least nominally, reformist, as mentioned; but, in the end, channelers’ support for the mainstream means of distribution of channeled knowledge establishes both a mainstream niche and a mainstream necessity for channeling. Indeed, the commodification of spirits and channeling is closely akin to the commodification of knowledge in any literate society, including ancient India, in which esoteric and ritualistic strategies of gaining knowledge and power required


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an established literate priesthood that traded on its exclusive access to the world of the gods and required exorbitant dakùiâā for its services. The demographics of channeling support this. Consistent with possession reported elsewhere, channeling is a phenomenon that occurs increasingly among the middle class and upwardly mobile working class, classes that are scarcely rebellious. A demographic profile, hinted at above, reveals the preponderance of channelers who share a fairly similar socioeconomic profile and set of intellectual interests. On the whole, they are white, well educated, economically secure Baby Boomers. As with possession reported in South Asia and almost everywhere else,35 most channelers are women, who, says Brown, “are free to assert religious authority and to experience a liberating androgyny.”36 Like its historical antecedents, and akin to its crosscultural cognates, channeling depicts contemporary anxieties about central themes and tensions in Western culture. And like possession elsewhere, New Age trance channeling serves the ends of physical, emotional, and social healing in innovative but not revolutionary ways. We examine below how this squares with the evidence from Indic texts; it must suffice for the moment to note that, in the Vedas and Upaniùads, the Mahābhārata, Buddhist texts, Tantra and elsewhere, the demographic profile is much broader, as are the modes, varieties, and goals of possession. Whatever possession was in South Asia, it was never thought of in terms of personal growth or “spiritual evolution.” At best, South Asian deity or spirit possession and Western trance channeling are vehicles for self-empowerment within the context of the relevant subcultures. Most interesting is that effacement of the individual personality, rather than its normative manifestation, should be empowering. Loss of active control, loss of recognizable personality, and submersion of personal ego and identity are symptoms of pathology in both āyurvedic and Western medical analyses. However, within the context of possession they are empowering and thus attractive— even compelling—forms of expression. As such they are regarded as the very antithesis of pathology; indeed, they are regarded as symptoms of sound psychic and spiritual health. In fact, this is consistent—one might say radically consistent—with dominant religious belief: complete submersion of the individual into the identity of a perceived higher (or sometimes lower) power. In many mainstream religions—and all religions appear to be mainstream in the marketplace of the New Age—this is consistent with notions that dispassion and ego dissolution are the keys to heaven or enlightenment. Effacement of individual personality within a religious or spiritual context is


in keeping with fundamental notions of individual and social power in democratic secular culture. Despite this resonance, possession in South Asia, as known from both ethnographies and classical literature, exhibits a breadth of possibilities, as one might expect from a culturally normative experience, while Western trance channeling remains relatively narrow in intellectual and performative expression, as one might expect from an experience with comparatively limited normativity.37

Notes 1. Brown 1997. 2. Nor does it resemble the trance states experienced by contemporary charismatic or Pentacostal groups. These states have vague resonances with the possession found at Jejuri and other mass possession sites. However, I cannot consider them here. 3. For an account of this festival as it occurs in Penang, see Collins 1997, whose theoretical perspective is quite different from that of others, and well worth noting. See my discussion of this in Smith 2001a. For a discussion of the experience of possession during the Thaipusam festival, along with a complementary study of its physiological correlates, see Simons et al., 1988. 4. Cf. Gellner 1994:211f. 5. Goodheart 2001:13. 6. Cf. Morris 2000 for the possession of royalty long dead in Thailand. This is also common in Africa; see the relevant articles in Behrend and Luig 1999. 7. Cf. Behrend 1999. 8. This is a major theme in Morris’s study of possession and modernity in northern Thailand; see Morris 2000:332. See also the remarks of Faure, in Chapter 1, n. 28. 9. Macdonald (1975) reminds us of just how remote most of Nepal remained, at least in the 1960s, and likely remains today. In the mid-twentieth century, 75 percent of Nepalese had never visited a doctor, thus depended for their health care on local healers and shamans. 10. Erndl 1997:23. 11. For Africa, see Behrend and Luig 1999 and Sharp 1993. For the islands of the Pacific basin, see Mageo and Howard 1996 (also my review of these books, Smith 2001a). For Cambodia, see Bertrand 2004. For Sri Lanka, see Lawrence 2003 and Chapter 4 herein. Nabokov sees the same phenomenon in South India: “Over this century South India has undergone a revival of devotional fervor (bhakti) first popularized by the Tamil poets and saints between the seventh and the ninth centuries. Increased participation in practices such as firewalking, flesh piercing, and pilgrimage have moved devotee to experience deities directly, intimately, and intensely” (2000:16). The possession described in the New York Times in November 2000 (see above, p. 40) is not considered oracular, at least not by the Catholic Church, which is


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attempting to eradicate it through exorcism. Nevertheless, the Church does recognize its recent increase. 12. See Mark Taylor on Huntington’s remarks on the connection between Westernization and modernization and the eventual backlash against the former in nonWestern societies (1998:5f. on Huntington 1996:75f.). 13. Cf. Paper 1995:117ff. For more recent information on the Mediums’ Association in Taiwan and its practices, see Tsai 2003, 2004. See Davis 2001 on the number of spirit-mediums per capita in Song-dynasty China. “These numbers are not small,” he states. In Hongzhou [Nanchang, Jiangxi], for example, nineteen hundred spirit mediums were rounded up in the early eleventh century, which produces a ratio of one spirit-medium for every 135 families; in Chuzhou [Zhejiang], there were thirty-seven hundred spirit-medium households in the prefecture of the late eleventh century, and therefore one medium household for every 24 families; and in Fujian . . . [there were] four or five spirit-medium households for every village! (p. 62)

It is impossible to adduce data that can provide any figures for classical (or contemporary) South Asia. 14. For example, a possessed medium mounts a throne in order to become a cakkavartin (world-turning monarch); cf. Morris 2000:115. 15. Morris 2000:89; for an extended description of and commentary on the Praise Ceremony, see pp. 107ff. 16. One channeled book, Conversations with God: Book 1, by Neale Donald Walsch, was on the New York Times bestsellers’ list for more than three years in the late 1990s. Walsch alleges to have channeled God himself, not a spirit, angel, or minor deity. It is apparently of great comfort to millions that God gives good, commonsensical, and very general advice. The degree to which trance channeling has entered the American consciousness (and the general level of seriousness with which it is taken) can also be seen by the following headline “yankees le ad series, 3-2. Wells Channels Babe Rut h to Keep Curse A live” in the New York Times, on the first page of the sports section, October 15, 2003. This is not altogether distant from the parody in Chapter 8 in our discussion of the Bhagavadajjukāprahasana, a drama written in the seventh century. 17. Sontheimer notes that in Maharashtra it is not the most respectable mode of earning a livelihood: “The rather unclassical folk-religious forms of bhakti are hierarchised: e.g., hook-swinging is rākùasī bhakti, the possession by the god and making a living on it is styled piśācī bhakti, and feeding a Brahman, who has to be imagined to be a form of Mārtaâba Bhairava, is called sāttvikī bhakti and is the highest form of bhakti ” (1995:136). 18. See Gellner 1994; also Höfer 1974:163–164. 19. Melton et al. 1990:xiii.


20. See Desjarlais 1992, ch. 1, for the author’s interesting and reflective account of his shamanic initiation in Nepal in 1988. 21. See Hanegraaf 1998:23ff. He states further that channeling “is an emic term used in the New Age context to refer to the general etic category of ‘articulated revelations.’ It is no more and no less than that. The attempt to present channeling as an etic term must be dismissed as an apologetic strategy for convincing the public of the validity of New Age trance channeling” (p. 27). For “articulated revelations,” see pp. 24ff. 22. The commentator on the love poem Amaruśataka informs us that Śaãkara wrote this while stationed in Amaruka’s body. It is virtually certain, however, that Śaãkara did not write the Amaruśataka. 23. A few scholars, notably Elizabeth-Chalier Visuvalingam (1989) and Sunthar Visuvalingam (1989), have overplayed the idea of the transgressive in Indian religious and spiritual practices. A transgressive practice is not necessarily extrainstitutional, especially in Indian popular religion, where “institutional” boundaries are shadowy at best. 24. See Solomon (1995), who rightly notes: “there is no reason—certainly no a priori reason—to suppose that emotions are the same the world over” (p. 255). For more on this topic see Chapter 8. 25. Brown 1997:38ff. 26. In my own classes in “Comparative Religious Ritual” at the University of Iowa, I have shown Alf Hiltebeitel’s documentary film “Lady of Gingee,” produced while conducting research for his Draupadī volumes. During one scene a participant in possession bites off the head of a rooster and drinks its blood. Despite many noteworthy features of this film, this scene is often the only one that students remember. Although the scene is surely striking, it is disorienting and memorable for most American students because to them religiosity is not supposed to be expressed like this. For a photo of a “yakka-dancer” biting through the throat of a sacrificed cock, see Wirz 1954:56, plate VIII; see also Nabokov 2000:160, where the head of a chicken is bitten off, followed by the severing of the head of a goat with a single stroke of a sword and the impalement of a pig with a long spear piercing the throat. Hiltebeitel (1991) often addresses the theme of impalement as a feature of possession. The theme also occurs in Bengal; see Korom 1992:252ff. 27. See Sontheimer 1965 on the legal personality of Hindu deities. 28. Wagle (1995) describes the legal procedure for verification, called pabthal, in which various gods were consulted to pronounce judgment on spirits. Sometimes this was done through a medium, sometimes through other forms of divination. “The bhūt problem,” writes Wagle, “must have reached crisis proportions in the districts of southern Koãkaâ in the mid-1770s” (p. 191). A special constabulary was established with a designated officer and six assistants from the central government of the Peshwe’s who traveled through the area investigating and controlling bhūt cases, then levying fines of between 25 and 50 rupees. 29. For example, the Ugandan Alice Auma of the spirit Lakwena; cf. Behrend 1999.


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30. I am grateful to Michael Wright, a resident of the community headed by J. Z. Knight (Ramtha), in Yelm, Washington, for this clarification. 31. But see Sontheimer 1965 on the degrees to which deities are said to be alive in Indian legal theory, their ability to accept gifts, the deity as a juristic entity, and the historical role of MīmāÅsā in mediating such cases. 32. Brown 1997:156ff., 187ff. 33. See ibid.:194–195; a particularly good Web site is www.trancechanneling .com. 34. Ibid.:130. 35. See, e.g., Sharp 1993. 36. Brown 1997:182. 37. Another related comparative study was conducted by Jakobsen (1999), who discovered that urban neoshamanistic course participants more often than not practice shamanic behavior without actually mastering the spirits, which Shirokogoroff discovered is one of the important aspects of traditional shamanism (see above, pp. 63–64).


Notes on Regional Languages and Mod


Lexicography, Languages, and Themes This chapter takes account of the tendency of Sanskritists and other scholars of Indian antiquity to disregard religious form not tied directly to texts. Similarly, it takes account of the tendency of anthropologists and other ethnographers who distrust texts and are therefore not willing to look beyond their own ethnographies for the possibility of important antecedents in classical textuality. I aim to close these gaps, at least to some degree, with respect to possession by integrating material from Sanskrit sources into a primary discussion of both the language of possession in modern India and models of possession that are intertwined with these languages. First I must state emphatically that it is impossible to provide a complete record of the language of possession in all South Asian languages or, for that matter, in all eighteen recognized “national languages” of India or even in more than a few of them with any degree of authority or thoroughness. Comparative studies of the vocabulary and linguistic idiom of any single religious phenomenon as it is represented in all the major regional languages is, to my knowledge, uncharted territory, not to speak of similar comparative studies of nonliterary or “tribal” languages, as well as dialects and subdialects

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of a single major language such as Hindi or Tamil. The difficulties involved in amassing the necessary raw lexical data for such a project are, quite simply, overwhelming. Perhaps this will be possible after another quarter of a century, when optical character recognition equipment for South Asian scripts are perfected and databases with literary, lexicographic, and ethnographic material are more complete and integrated. Under current conditions, therefore, I can strive only to produce a few examples of vocabulary and idioms for possession in a few South Asian languages for which such studies have been undertaken. Unfortunately, even the best ethnographers, linguists, and lexicographers have sometimes neglected to provide the specialized vocabulary of possession in their work. It is often assumed that the phenomenon itself is all that is important, not how the group or individuals under study represent it linguistically or what the cultural or mythic comportment underlying this linguistic usage might be. This neglect has contributed to the mistaken notion that possession is just one thing and renders it easy fodder for established Western categories. While lamentable, this tendency is also correctable. The Indian languages best served by sensitive ethnographers of possession are Hindi, Marathi, certain languages and dialects of the Himalayas (including Ladakhi and Nepali), Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, and (interestingly) Tulu. The most intensively researched languages are Tamil, Malayalam, and the Himalayan languages, as these opposite ends of the subcontinent have become preferred territory for possession research.1 The primary sources necessary for a proper determination of possession in regional languages are, in addition to the ethnographies, the early regional literature, dictionaries of vernacular languages modeled after European lexicographies, and traditional lexicographic works (kośas).2 The primary benefit of the early vernacular literature is that it provides insight into the history of both the language used and the experiences denoted by that language. The disadvantage is that this literature was not written to present complete linguistic records, but is intrinsically fragmentary. The dictionaries benefit from their completeness, but are far too often riddled with problems. First, they are often skewed toward Sanskritic interpretations. Second, they too often passively accept Western categories. This is especially prominent when translating from one language to another, for example, from English to Tamil or Hindi to English. It must be said, however, that the problem of translating concepts and categories—when the assignment is to translate words with the briefest precision—is, in most cases, an exercise in futility. Third, a lexicographic format almost always struggles to meet the demands of context,


which is to say that most dictionaries provide practically no historical accounts of word usage.3 This renders it impossible to know which words are most important and widely used and which are rare and perhaps idiosyncratic. As for the ethnographies, their great advantage is a vivid portraiture, while, as mentioned, their disadvantage is an often complete absence of deep historical and linguistic contextualization. The following account attempts to consider images and models of possession and exorcism, for example, possession as “riding” (Hindi, Nepali, Simhala, Malayalam), as “dancing” (Tamil, Malayalam), as an “attack” (Hindi, Nepali), as a force “coming into the body” (e.g., Hindi, Marathi, Tulu, Irula), as “play” of the deity (Hindi, Marathi, Nepali), as a kind of “ecstasy” (Bengali, Marathi, Nepali), as a “weight” (Bengali), as a marker for intense emotional engagement (Sanskrit, Malayalam, Bengali, and many others), as an idiom for impersonation (Tamil), as an emblem of political oppression (Ladakhi), as a sign of debilitated life force (Ladakhi, Sanskrit), as part of a multicultural dialogic interaction (Ladakhi, Nepali), or as a symptom of a multilayered world visible “as if in a mirror” (Tibetan, Sanskrit). Similarly, exorcism has a varied set of images, for example, it can occur in an imagined legal court (Urdu) or serve as communication with a spirit for the sake of rectifying its own history of wrongdoing (Urdu, Simhala). In addition, the rich vocabulary found for exorcists and other possession mediators reflects healing and other culturally integrative roles taken on by these ritual functionaries, including conjurer, scholar, priest, herbalist and medicine man, storyteller, protector of the evil eye, and performer. The semantics of possession in regional South Asian languages reveals the important role that it has assumed in South Asian culture and therefore sets the stage for the ensuing discussions of possession in the ancient and classical literature, literature that cannot reflect such a diverse number of languages or local cultures. This should contribute to ongoing discussions of the continuities and disjunctions within South Asian cultural history, to the development of the language of emotion in South Asia, and to reflections on the relationship between the folk and the classical in South Asia, a discussion that closes this chapter.

Hindi Variants of the Sanskrit āveśa and grahaâa appear widely distributed in regional Indian languages. The unexpectedly late semantic conflation of √góh with ā√viś in Sanskrit is seen in several Middle Indo-Aryan languages con-


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temporaneous with such usages in Sanskrit texts from the last few centuries of the first millennium c.e., which in turn set the stage for the all but interchangeable use of these verbs in New Indo-Aryan. In Hindi, āveś in the early Sanskritic senses of pervasion, absorption, and entry has been completely superseded. In addition to spirit possession, which is also a common meaning for the Hindi verbs cabhnā (“to climb or mount,” hence its sexual connotations; “to become possessed”) and khelnā (to play) (cf. below, Marathi khe{,4 Panjabi khebnā,5 and Bengali khelā6), āveś discloses the senses of “charge, agitation, intense emotion, frenzy, wrath.”7 Erndl reports the use of the Hindi verb khelnā as illustrating the sense of possession as play, more specifically, the play of the deity with the person possessed. “When a woman is possessed, the goddess is said to take on a ‘wind form’ [pavan rūp], enter her, and ‘play’ within her.”8 Some of the terms for possession noted by K. P. Shukla, who conducted a sociological study of traditional healers in rural areas near Varanasi in 1969–71, are havā lagnā (to feel a breeze), pher (turn, curvature), kisī ne kucch kar (or de) dīyā hai (giving someone something, doing something to someone; probably indicating black magic).9 Ann Gold notes the term bhāv ānā (a feeling is coming) used in Rajasthan,10 while Beatrix Pfleiderer and Lothar Lutze note jāgar (waking [the deity]).11 Ruth and Stanley Freed note bhūt kī bīmārī (spirit illness), bhūt grasth (ghost possessed), and bhūt lagnā (attacked by a ghost).12 While not noting the vocabulary for “possession,” Ariel Glucklich, who worked on magic in Varanasi, does record the well-known colloquial term for a capricious spirit or ghost (bhūt-pret), which is attested throughout northern and central India.13 Bhūt (Skt. bhūta) is a general word for any kind of ghost, while pret (Skt. preta) more specifically designates a wandering spirit of the dead, often a deceased ancestor whose funerary rites remain incomplete or were performed improperly, if at all. Both bhūta and preta are past participles in Sanskrit; thus they may be said to represent the past, entities that have existed and gone away. We may suggest, then, that any model of spirit healing or exorcism admits the possibility that the obstruction and uncertainty that intercedes between the past, bhūta and preta, and the future can be ruptured and extinguished. In this sense, negative possession, which is to say possession by a bhūt-pret, locks an individual into a past that can be abrogated and (re)connected to the future only when the possessed personality is effaced. We explore this notion more fully in discussions on possession in the Mahābhārata below, especially in unpacking the story of the possession of Aśvatthāman by Śiva, the most powerful of bhūt-prets.


Urdu: Hanumān’s Court at Bālājī One of the most striking models of possession and exorcism, in which bhūtprets play a significant role, occurs in the environs of the Bālājī temple in Mehndipur, Rajasthan, as well as at several other spirit healing centers in India.14 Most of the clients at Bālājī are Hindu, from Hindi-speaking areas of India.15 Yet in a slight acknowledgment to the once-dominant Indo-Islamic culture, the clinical model is replete with Urdu terms. These terms are drawn from the British colonial legal system, which adopted the Persian-Urdu language of the Islamic legal system of the Mughals. This is described in the work of Antti Pakaslahti and Graham Dwyer,16 but a summary is apposite here. The possession/exorcism rituals at Bālājī are not standardized; instead, they bear the distinct imprimatur of different healers and exorcists, almost all of whom work outside the main temple.17 Nevertheless, all the healers situate their exorcisms (bhūt-pret utarâā)18 in an adālat or Islamic court, drawing their inspiration from the concept utilized at the main temple. This, it is important to note, is not an actual court; rather, it is an envisioned court and background metaphor, employed for instituting their processes of possession, exorcism, and healing.19 The primary deity, Hanumān as Bālājī, is the supreme magistrate. He is assisted by two subordinates, Bhairavjī (the local manifestation of the protector divinity Bhairava) and Pretrāj (King of the Spirits of the Dead), who are Bālājī’s messengers (dūt)—as Hanumān is Rāma’s messenger (dūta). Before visiting the office—usually a small shrine room— of one of the many clinicians in the town, Bālājī is first petitioned (darkhvāst) at the main temple. Whether pilgrim or afflicted petitioner, Bālājī is proffered sweets (laddū), parts of which are offered into a sacred fire (havan) in his name, while the remainder is returned to the client as prasād. After this offering, a larger petition (arzi) of sweets is served to Bhairavjī and Pretrāj in side annexes of the temple, where their shrines are located. Through their consumption of the prasād, the power of the deities is said to be infused into the clients. One or two days later, trance commences, usually during scheduled offerings (ārati) or devotional singing (kīrtan), which may occur in either the main temple or the “office” of the exorcist. This kīrtan (at least at the locale in Bālājī that I observed) consists of deafeningly amplified recordings of devotional singing to the melodies of Hindi film songs.20 This engages the largely Hindu audience21 of spirit afflicted (bhūt-pret kī bīmārī) individuals and their families, who chant along with the music, “Jai Mā, Jai Mā” and so on, and clap rhythmically—some of the standard accoutrements


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of shamanic “trance” music. The music that most often sends afflicted members of the audience (or concerned relatives) into trance, at least in the adālat that I witnessed, is instrumental “snake-charmer” music from a Hindi film of the late 1980s, Naagin, which, appropriately, inspires some of the possessed to writhe like serpents. The word used for this trance is the Urdu peśī, literally a “hearing” or “appearance in court,” in which the classic symptoms of possession occur. Initially these include rhythmic swaying (jhumnā), literally “to move as if one were intoxicated, as a drunkard,”22 but eventually violent whirling of the head and upper body, hectic chaotic movements such as somersaults, writhing, sobbing, and so on. Women’s hair is always unbraided and left loose during the proceedings.23 During the peśī, at least in my observation of it, the client or the clinician’s assistant, performing as a surrogate on behalf of the client by temporarily taking the bhūt from the client, becomes possessed by Bhairavjī or Pretrāj.24 This double possession of the invasive bhūt along with Bhairavjī or Pretrāj is understood as a battle between bhūt and dūt, negative and positive entities and polarities of personality.25 It is often cast as a battle; the dūt may be assisted by an army of positive spirits, with its own hierarchy, called phauj (Urdu for “army”; or dūt saphāī [sepoy]),26 constituted of former bhūts that have been transformed into this lower grade of protective dūt by the exorcistic and analytical procedures of the clinicianritualist(s).27 If the clinician or his or her assistant has taken on the bhūt, the battle transpires within his or her body, which has also become possessed by the dūt.28 S/he then acts out the violence of battle in chaotic movements, with eyes turned back, hair flying, mouth foaming, and other familiar effects of possession. If the client has retained the bhūt (and often if not), one of the regular actions of the assistant is forceful beating on the back (usually the lower part of the spine) of the victim with the fists, followed by wrenching upward movements of the fists, said to drive the bhūt (s) up the spine and out the top of the head. This, according to the model of the adālat, is the punishment (sazā, daâb) meted out to bhūt by dūt. It forces wildly uncontrollable shaking of the head and rocking of the upper body. Often the clinician (or the assistant) and the victim are both in possession, writhing and wrestling, both sets of eyes locked or rolled back. But the clinician or assistant, with much more experience and comfort in the adālat and a seasoned eye for the dynamics of psychosocial issues, particularly the manner in which mental distress bears on social dysfunction, has marginally more control of the situation. There-


fore he or she is in a much better position to control the agendas and paths of rectification and healing. This process of administering psychological justice in the peśī usually must occur many times before the healing is fully effected, which is to say before the bhūt is completely extricated. This is because, according to Pakaslahti’s informants, “the possessing spirits are held to be deceitful (cālak) and full of tricks (dhokhebāz).”29 In this way the client becomes empowered or resocialized to the point of return to the normal flow of family life. The penultimate step in this legal proceeding is the bayan, a confession or statement by the bhūts, who identify themselves, announce their departure, their next destination, and perhaps other significant information, such as why they have taken up residence there. Communication with a spirit, or more often interrogation, even harshly worded, occurs frequently in South Asian possession. This is considered beneficial for both the victim and the spirit.30 In this case, the confessions of the bhūts are spoken out after the battle has been suspended because of exhaustion of either the client or the clinician or his or her ritual assistant who has borne the bhūts. In this way the battle lines are drawn between bhūt and dūt: counterpossession of positive entities is required to combat possession by negative ones. Usually, the bhūt reveals the required information upon the relentless interrogation of the clinician or healer.31 This part of the adālat resembles a talking cure, a local variant of psychoanalysis that deals directly with the bhūt-pret, in which the clinician attempts to address the problems of the entity and elevate it into the ranks of the phauj, thus freeing the afflicted individual of his or her madness or dysfunctional condition. This is the local variant of the widespread phenomenon in both Hinduism and Buddhism of the conversion to good causes of “criminal gods and demon devotees.”32 As it turns out, most of the afflicted, as Dwyer has discovered, believe that the afflicting bhūt-pret is a Muslim spirit (jinn/jind), a dissatisfied ancestral spirit (pitó devatā), or a wild sexy female spirit (chūdāl, cuóail) sent by a tāntrika in the employ of an enemy.33 Pakaslahti notes that the Hindi terms bhūt, pret, jinn, saãkat, upari havā, and so forth “practically never occur with such adjectival attributes as ‘evil or malevolent’ (burā, niùidh, pāpī, duù•, etc.). The only preceding adjective used was, in fact, ‘unhappy,’ dukhi, connected to their descriptions as souls stuck in the past, hovering unfulfilled in the air, unable to proceed forward.”34 The implication here is that the conception of these as “evil spirits,” with the weight of the word “evil” emphasized, is a Western construction imposed on the Indic material. In


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fact, the Sanskrit material agrees with Pakaslahti’s findings; I have not come across any reference to a spirit that was “evil,” per se. This reconfirms that the exorcisms are designed to alleviate misery rather than evil, an important distinction when considering the healing process. The final procedure in the adālat is parhez, home instructions, which often includes dietary advice—usually the elimination of heavy or inertiaproducing (tāmasik) foods such as alcohol, meat, and garlic (because bhūts are attracted to these) and the addition of foods categorized as “cold” in āyurvedic medicine, such as barley—and the prescription of gifts of uneaten food offerings to cows and dogs. Despite this density of Islamic terminology, the terms for possession itself, in this case spirit-induced illness, are the more standard Hindi upari havā (breeze from above), bhūt kī bīmārī (spirit sickness), and jābu •onā or caukī (sorcery),35 while the chief clinician/priest/ exorcist/psychologist is termed bhagat, in conformity with other north Indian terminology.36 Although this model of possession, exorcism, and healing is exceptional in South Asia, it is not conceptually dissimilar to important models of death, possession, and corporeality found in China. I am not arguing for its transmission from China to India (or vice versa); the evidence is much too fragmentary and temporally disparate to suggest any kind of mechanism for transmission. I mention this only to point out that the idea of a court as a venue for an ontological life and death struggle of this kind is not entirely idiosyncratic. While addressing the oxymoronic topic of “postmortem immortality” in Daoism and early Chinese Buddhism, the Sinologist Anna Seidel notes that Han dynasty (206 b.c.e.–220 c.e.) funerary texts do not assign the dead to various realms based on ethical issues of karma, retribution, and expiation, as in later Buddhism, but present a “bureaucratized netherworld,” with its “hierarchy, its tax offices, tribunals, and prisons.”37 Like the bureaucratized parallel universes of classical China, the adālat features a hierarchy of celestial officials who judge and assist the condition of the individual. But the adālat is also the locus for attending to ethical issues centered on individuals who are dysfunctional and resistant within the structure of “family values.” In both cases, the rationale appears to be to present to the afflicted (and their families) closed structures within which mastery and control over spirits may be demonstrated and, in some cases, transmitted. In later periods in China, the task of constructing a legal model for possession and exorcism was accommodated by the convergence of government official and priest, functions rarely shared in classical India. According to


Edward Davis, who has written an extensive study of possession ritual in Tang (618–907) and (especially) Song dynasty (960–1278) China, Daoist ritual masters were almost always portrayed as government officials. The Tang court, Davis writes, “continued to employ at least fifteen master spiritmediums (shiwu 師巫) in the Imperial Divination Office (Taibu shu 太卜署) of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices (Taichang Si 太常寺) plus a number of related exorcists known as ‘Spellbinding Erudites’ (Zhoujin boshi 咒禁博士, Zhoujin shi 咒禁師, or Zhoujin gong 咒禁工).”38 During the Song dynasty, a “Rite of Summoning for Investigation” (kaozhao fa 考召法) developed, an elaborate ceremony that included, among other elements, “the visualization of the spirit-generals and soldiers, the summoning of the demon, and the interrogation of his identity.”39 The spirit-soldiers ( jiangli 將吏), rather like those operating in the adālat, were marshaled to locate and identify an afflicting spirit, then at the command of the ritual master, “to seize, bind, flog, pummel, yoke, burn, freeze, or crush the demon.”40 This is reminiscent of the adālat, where the rhetoric of violence is commonly employed to exorcise bhūt-prets. In both cultures, disembodied ancestral spirits seek a return to the terrestrial world. And in both the adālat and the “Rite of Summoning for Investigation” (as well as other related Chinese models of exorcism), the burden of guilt is shifted from the individual to the invading spirit. “[I]t is the demon who confesses, not the patient,” writes Davis, in words that could be applied to the adālat, “and the demon confesses because it is only the demon who has something to confess. By disrupting the link between illness and morality in the patient, the . . . codes, regulations, and protocols of the fashi [法師]41 locate guilt solely on the side of demons.”42 In South Asia, this practice of shifting the burden of guilt to a spirit, thus freeing the individual supposedly harboring the spirit from the social opprobrium of dysfunctionality, is not simply a psychotherapeutic folk strategy employed by exorcists and village healers; we see it in the Mahābhārata, composed perhaps two thousand years ago. In the story of Nala (nalopākhyāna), which we deal with extensively (Chapter 6), Nala’s conscience is clear in his rapprochement with his wife Damayantī, whom he has recklessly betrayed, because he has understood that he was not responsible for his actions while possessed by Kali, the spirit of darkness, a spirit that is in the end bound and burned.43 Davis adds—once again with words strikingly resonant of the adālat and, indeed, classical Indian mythic and medical literature—that “if the patient has become demonized, the demon ultimately becomes humanized.”44 The spirit seeks a return, a renewed strategy for expression and communication. Fi-


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nally, Seidel points out that the Chinese word for “demon, ghost, wraith 鬼” is a homophone of the word for “return” (kuei [ gui] 歸).45 And, as we have seen, the primary Sanskrit words for invasive spirit, bhūta and preta, are past participles for common verbs of becoming and forward motion. I have presented a somewhat detailed description of this not just because I have observed it, but because it contains many of the features of possession found in classical texts. First, these texts, being classical, have as their target audience an educated elite. Pakaslahti, citing data collected by Dwyer, states that “seeking help from Balaji is not correlated with illiteracy, lack of education, low social status, poverty or a rural background as the patients are predominantly relatively well-educated, from higher castes, middle social class, and of urban domicile.”46 Thus this contravention of norms expected from a reading of Lewis’s and other well-known studies applies not just to classical, but to contemporary possession as well. Second, many of the phenomenological features of possession at Bālājī resonate with those in antiquity. These include positive oracular possession (āveśa) and negative diseaseproducing possession ( grahaâa), physical symptoms that approximate textual descriptions, the development of a meaningful and meticulously described imagery on which to fix the setting of polyphonous or multitiered personalities, a devotional impetus to the process, and the engagement of possession by Hanumān and Bhairava, the two divinities directly mentioned in the only Sanskrit manuscripts that I was able to locate that deal exclusively with possession as a prescribed practice. In addition, Hanumān as lord of bhūt-prets is reminiscent of other deities who command armies or troops, notably Gaâeśa, “Lord of Hosts,” usually of undefined character or, more appositely, of Khabgarāvaâa, a minor deity often associated with possession, who is specifically called bhūtarāja (King of Spirits)47 and bhūteśaÅ (Lord of Spirits).48

Bengali In Bengali, √bharā (to fill) is attested in the sense of possession, in addition to its expected etymological usage.49 The nominal form bhar means “weight,” hence the two meanings conflate: being filled with or bearing the weight of a spirit or deity. The extended sense of possession as intense emotional engagement is also found in Bengali: for example, karuâā-bharala (filled with [i.e., immersed in] compassion).50 Deborah Bhattacharyya, based in Bengal, examines possession and other behavior that “specifically refers to the collapse of the boundaries between


the inside and outside of the individual”51 and are treatable through folk psychiatry. She describes three paradigms of “madness” (pāgalāmi): (1) bhūt bharā (ghost possession); (2) tuk or tuktāka (black magic or sorcery); and (3) māthār golmāl (malfunctioning of the head). The most common terms she found for possession are, in addition to bhūt bharā, bhūte pāo±ā (the getting or receiving of a ghost) and the Sanskritism apadóù•i (inauspicious glance, evil eye),52 which compares to the attested Sanskrit term dóù•ipātam.53 Although the term apadóù•i is found in Bengali literature (for example, by Tagore),54 I am unable to find it used with this particular meaning in any Sanskrit text. More common in spoken Bengali for “evil eye” is bad naμar, borrowed from Urdu.55 I suspect that apadóù•i and other Sanskrit words used more frequently in modern Indo-Aryan than in Sanskrit, such as ārūbha for possession in Sri Lanka (but unlike āveśa, which is used commonly in both Sanskrit and modern vernacular languages), are the products of local traditions of applied Sanskrit that grew up alongside the literature but are not fully reflected within it; in other words, they were clever attempts to Sanskritize the vernaculars.56 While it is reasonable that ārūbha should denote spirit or deity possession, it is not so reasonable in the case of apadóù•i. Indeed, Bhattacharyya was surprised to find it used in this sense. Before she heard it used unmistakably in this sense, she writes, “I thought that māthāra golamā{a was a general term for madness and apadóù•i one of several causal agents of madness.”57 June McDaniel notes three general terms in Bengali to indicate religious ecstasy: bhāva, mahābhāva, and bhāvāveśa.58 All of these are Sanskrit borrowings, about which I say more below. She further isolates three types of goddess possession: (1) bhar nāmā (nāmā; to descend or alight; also bhar karā, bhar hāo±ā), oracular possession, often experienced in a state of apparent pain, in which the “person often writhes on the ground, gasping and screaming”;59 (2) āveśa, which, based strictly on McDaniel’s informants in Bengal, is defined as “an emotional state arising out of love for the deity,” a “spontaneous, nonritual possession by a deity, often accompanied by visions of lights or paradises”;60 and (3) mahā-ullās (the ritual group possession of the Śākta cakra).61 The latter is voluntary and transgressive, occurring after the participants “ingest ritual substances.”62

Marathi In Marathi āveś carries the same semantic range as it does in Hindi. J. T. Molesworth notes many compounds borrowed from or modeled on San-


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skrit, probably limited to Marathi literature (they are less likely in speech, even among upper castes): kāmāveś (absorption or immersion in love), krodhāveś (anger), lobhāveś (greed), śauryāveś (heroism), piśācāveś (evil or evil spirits), harùāveś (laughter), śokāveś (grief ), īrùyāveś (envy), kópāveś (a state of grace), and mohāveś (delusion).63 Unfortunately, Molesworth does not provide sources, but these appear to have been drawn from (highly Sanskritized) translations or perhaps from independent texts in Marathi on poetic theory.64 These terms bespeak the increasing use of āveś with words for emotions and states of mind that are attested by the end of the first millennium c.e. in Sanskrit as well as in Mahārāù•rī Prakrit. Rājaśekhara, writing in the Western Deccan around 900 c.e., has the following line in his ornate Prakrit drama Karpūramañjarī: tā vasantavaââaâeâa sibhilaāmi se taggadam āvesam (“Well, I must sing the praises of spring-time to him and so slacken his passion [āvesam] for her”).65 The dictionary of Old Marathi by S. G. Tulpule and Anne Feldhaus, covering texts through the mid-fourteenth century, lists three meanings under āveś/āves: (1) force, power (jor); (2) fullness of heart (bhāvanotkatatā); and (3) wrath, anger (krodh, rāg).66 These meanings are well placed within the extended horizons of āveśa in Sanskrit literature. In spite of this Sanskritic influence in Marathi literature, the vernacular angāt yeâe (lit. “coming to the body”) is the usual Marathi term for possession by a deity or saint.67 This is similar to the Hindi idiom for a deity “coming over” an individual: ūpar āna or ūpar honā: for example, us ke ūpar sāÅp hameśa hai (there is always a snake over him).68 John Stanley reports that the distinction between divine or desired possession (equivalent to āveśa) and forced or demonic entry (equivalent to grahaâa or the general semantic tendency of praveśa) is maintained in contemporary Maharashtra (in other languages, such as Bengali, the distinction does not appear to be so marked). “Maharashtrian culture makes a sharp distinction between the two phenomena. Moreover, when the phenomena are analyzed as religious experience, they can clearly be seen as polar opposites.”69 Bhūt bādhā (obstruction by an evil sprit), conceptually similar to praveśa or grahaâa, is experienced as “wrongness, chaos, disorder.”70 Conversely, “[f]or most people angāt yeâe is immediately subjectively self-authenticating.”71 Stanley discovered that devotees of Khaâbobā drew a further distinction between spirit possession and infusion of power: Only the latter was regarded as a gift from the deity, and readiness for such an experience was rooted in bhakti. Indeed, bhakti-based ecstatic experience proved


to be one of the symptoms of angāt yeâe. Here we do see evidence of a nexus of ecstatic experience and possession, as Lewis presupposes; but the possession is not oracular and cannot be regarded as shamanic. Feldhaus reports in detail on a kind of negative possession in Maharashtra of pregnant women by a group of minor divinities known as Sātī Āsarā (Skt. Sapta Apsaras) or Mālavayā (female beings who resemble ghosts [bhūts] or goblins [piśācas] more closely than they do full-fledged gods).72 In fact, they more closely resemble the skandagrahas (childsnatchers) discussed in the Mahābhārata and āyurvedic literature (see Chapters 6 and 12). In one ethnography, a woman from Pune who had experienced a number of pregnancies in which the infants died almost immediately after birth because she was “got” by these Āsarā was diagnosed by another woman from Pune in a state of oracular possession. The woman possessed by the Āsarā reported that the other woman guaranteed the birth of a son if she followed certain procedures: “Then she gave her word, in her possessed state [vāryāmadhye]. The god was possessing her [te dev vārā khe{at hotā], you see. In that state she gave her word.”73 This is similar to the situation at Bālājī in that a possession was recognized and confirmed by another person in possession. The “cure” in this case was strictly ritual: The woman possessed by the Āsarā had to make certain offerings to them.

Possession and Its Discourse in the Himalayas Oracular possession in the Himalayas is very common. Daniela Berti reports that in Himachal Pradesh nearly all the village temples in Kulu district have mediums who are possessed by the main temple deity.74 The situation appears to be little different elsewhere across the Himalayas, from Ladakh to eastern Nepal. This is equally the case in Tibet, as Per-Arne Berglie notes: “Even more than the local lama . . . the dpa’ bo [spirit medium, lit. “hero”] acted in the centre of the religious life of the village.”75 Smriti Srinivas demonstrates that possession among the Buddhists of Ladakh is an integrated activity in that its social, linguistic, psychological, and ritual components operate together. Because personhood is a reflection of these variables—it is an interdependence of social relationships, language use, culturally conditioned psychological states, inherited religious ideology and practice, and the vagaries of individual physical and emotional constitution— personal behavior is theoretically unstable, thus constantly in need of cultural sanction and legitimation. Within the Ladakhi cultural system, which


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includes social, economic, and political arrangements between Buddhists and Muslims, possession is a culturally sanctioned and recognized form of unusual, manifestly unstable, behavior that ironically serves to reverse, albeit temporarily, areas of perceived weakness or imbalance such as social or political oppression, psychological distress, or even physical debility.76 Although possession is understood in Ladakh to originate in weakness, it nevertheless occupies an important mediatory function. It does not fit neatly into either of Lewis’s categories of “central” or “peripheral” possession; rather, it combines elements of both. For example, it resembles peripheral possession in that the majority of mediums are females who are denied access to positions of power through the primary sociopolitical processes. It is central in that it is so much a part of public culture that it upholds the traditional power structures, in spite of its covert manipulation of certain mundane events. It is also central because it involves possession by Tibetan Buddhist deities with strong shamanic elements. Thus, although Lewis’s categories may be helpful in thinking about Ladakhi and other Himalayan possession, they are too categorical to be productive here. Srinivas’s primary focus in her discussion of possession is a Buddhist monk called Gelong, who also served as a priest in one of the villages in Nubra, the region of Ladakh in which Srinivas conducted her fieldwork. Gelong was possessed by a local lha called Chamshing, a protector deity (dharmapāla) who, through many rebirths, during which he conquered his anger, rose to an exalted state from that of an enemy spirit. Possession occupies a high profile in Ladakh, not least, according to Gelong, because, after the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the subsequent destruction of the temple images in which the deities were embodied, the Tibetan Buddhist deities themselves “fled to Ladakh to seek their residence in people’s bodies.” According to Gelong’s divination, “seventy-five lhas would come to reside in Nubra (at the moment there are twenty-one), exiled from their former homes.”77 Ladakh is unquestionably a remote area, yet a large number of languages are spoken, including colloquial Tibetan, the Ladakhi dialect of Tibetan, Hindi, Urdu, Kashmiri, and local languages, such as Dogri. Although the language of popular religion in this area requires further elucidation, especially in the highly nuanced area of code-switching, the terminology for spirit possession appears to be derived from Tibetan and Indo-Aryan. The general term for a spirit or deity is lha, which may be benevolent or malevolent in nature. The possessed individual is known as a luyar, or vessel for a lha.78 Malevolent possession is caused by lha known as dre or temo, the latter


being an evil female spirit. Srinivas identifies four types of ritual practitioners who treat this type of spirit possession: the lama, who “ensures peace and can help a man’s spirit reach heaven”; the onbo, who “removes evil and assists in securing earthly and other benefits”; the lhaba, who “sees the spirit of a man and its imaginings as if in a mirror”; and the larje, who “takes care of the body.”79 Possession is caused by debilitated life-force (la), which sustains the body (lus). In “negative” possession, vitiation or loss of la is conducive to lassitude, physical weariness, emotional distress, and illness.80 These, in turn, lead to a more immediate cause of possession, called mikha in Ladakhi (lit. “mouth” < Skt. mukha). Mikha refers to that which emanates from the mouth, specifically gossip, derogatory or slanderous speech, and idle or useless chatter, which, consistent with Buddhist doctrine, are considered counterproductive to religious or spiritual aims.81 Oracular or “positive” possession, however, is due to weakened la, which leads to a kind of madness characterized by loss of self-control and spiritual crisis. An individual subject to this type of possession undergoes an initiatory life-crisis ritual called lhapchok, in which the newfound status of oracle becomes formally recognized. The oracle, who can inherit its lha from lineages of practicing oracles, including parents and grandparents, now undergoes a period of training including exorcism and sucking out poison, all this while leading an otherwise ordinary life as a farmer or government worker.82 Among the many studies of Nepali possession and shamanism, perhaps the most comprehensive, particularly from the point of view of rescuing the terminology, is András Höfer’s transcription, translation, and lengthy discussions of oral texts of the Tamang shamans of central Nepal, which are sung in both Tamang and Nepali.83 Tamang is a Sino-Tibetan language, and, though it is related to Tibetan, its speakers are resistant to Tibetanization. The shamans (bombo < Tib. bon-po) represent what Höfer calls “accommodated heterodoxy,” a term that reflects the bombo’s rejection of the stigma of heresy, ascribed to them by the lamas of Tibetan Buddhism, who, Höfer believes, assigned to them the designation bombo because of their apparent similarity to the priesthood of the Bön.84 Höfer presents several terms for kinds of ecstatic experiences, many of them symptomatic of possession. A bombo quivers inside the body (síãsiã-khòlkhol), “something like the sensation you have when urinating,” reports one informant. The bombo experiences a shamanic trembling or quaking (chyèkpa) that indicates he has been “seized by the god” (lajye cuãba). When this occurs, the deity, usually a goddess (mài, Nepali māi, māiju) or virgin (Nepali kanyā, kumārī), descends


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onto one’s back or into one’s body (Tamang: gori yùba; Nepali: sir/kum caóhnu [mounting one’s head/shoulders]; āãgmā caóhnu [to mount the back]). Höfer cautions that having a “superhuman agent on one’s back or in one’s body” does not fully correspond to possession. The latter occurs when the bombo becomes a mouthpiece for the deity (vide Srinivas). In this state the deity plays (khelnu [to play]; khelāunu [to make play]) in the body of the bombo. In the state of gori yùba, the bombo attains partial identity with the deity, “an interpenetration, rather than a fusion, of identities. Informants likened this relationship between the bombo and the superhuman to that between husband and wife.”85 An excellent study of the interaction between Tibetan Buddhism and local shamanistic religion in Nepal, in which possession looms large, is Stan Royal Mumford’s Himalayan Dialogue. This volume draws its theoretical inspiration from Mikhail Bakhtin’s model of dialogic interaction, in which the temporal processes of cultural production are located in a relational “betweenness” characterized by elements of earlier layers of discourse becoming sedimented in later ones, even (or especially) in discourses that rivaled and eventually achieved hegemony over these earlier ones.86 This intersubjective model shares conceptual territory with Marriott’s notion of substance-code in that they both highlight a self that is decentered—or perhaps better is multicentered or polyphonous—and is at odds with notions of autonomous selfhood or identity, whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Judeo-Christian. This is helpful to the present study and would be even more so if the Sanskrit texts were more straightforwardly descriptive or if survivals from earlier vernaculars were more numerous. An example of Mumford’s ethnographic application of Bakhtin’s largely literary use of dialogic interaction87 can be seen in Mumford’s analysis of competing attempts to exorcize suspected evil spirits from a dying twentythree-year-old girl, possessed, according to the villagers, by an old woman identified as a witch, who transferred the spirits to the girl through a glass of milk.88 The local Tibetan lama was called in first, to perform an exorcism called “the evil spirit ransom” (’dre glud), in which a chant “calls down weapons like hailstones which will reduce the black sorcerer to dust.” After this failed, the government health assistant was summoned and proceeded to pronounce the girl beyond recovery. The last resort was the local paju shaman, a specialist in exorcisms, whose mantras and heavy-handed actions, including beating the victim about the head with a burning broom and a belated attempt at “red offering” or animal sacrifice, also failed. In-


deed, so little confidence did the lama have in the paju’s ritual that he broke into it, whispering sections of the Tibetan Book of the Dead into the dying girl’s ear.89 Mumford comments that both lama and paju agree that “when established human rules are violated, the breach of social harmony brings demonic attack” (a view with strong resonances throughout South Asia).90 In spite of this agreement, the paju takes a dim view of the lama’s attempts to distance himself from personal responsibility in the violence of exorcism by calling in intermediate spirits for this work, as well as his feeble attempt to liberate the spirit. “I only try to kill the demons, there is no thought of liberating them,” says the paju.91 Mumford fruitfully employs Bakhtin’s notions of dialogic interaction to unpack the dialectics and historicity of ethical comportment, ritual (especially exorcistic) practice, and models of hierarchy, retribution, death, and transmutation. No reportage of such immediacy appears in Sanskrit literature, but the lesson is apposite: We must listen for traces of one community’s speech, discourse, and doctrine embedded in those of another. In this way, it may be possible to expose cracks in the surface and break through the canonizing agendas of much of Sanskritic thought. Berglie has observed possession among Tibetan spirit mediums (dpa’-bo) in Nepal.92 His informants all explained their possession in characteristic Tibetan Buddhist idioms. First the “consciousness” (rnam shes) was sent away, meaning that the mind was emptied. It is important that the medium’s body be completely empty of his or her rnam shes; to be “half god, half man” was an untrustworthy state. This rnam shes was then placed under the care of Padmasambhava (Tib. Padma ’byung gnas) or a protective deity called mkha’ ’gro Ye shes mtsho rgyal,93 while any one of a number of other deities protected and controlled the proceedings. The possessing deities then enter the body of the dpa’-bo through one of the main channels (Tib. rtsa, Skt. nābī) of the subtle body, though the informants differed as to whether the deities themselves entered their body or merely the deity’s rnam shes. During the ritual, mirrors are placed on a nearby altar, because it is in these that the deities are thought to reside during the séance (recall Srinivas’s observation that the ritual specialist called lhaba sees a person’s spirit “as if in a mirror”).94 Two experiences of Berglie’s informants are as follows. When all the gods summoned have arrived, possession took place by the god most suited to carry out the task of the evening. dBang phyug [one of the informants] said that he then saw all the colours of the rainbow in the


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mirrors and that all became very bright when the gods arrived. When the god was to take possession of him, his body felt enlarged and as if filled with air. Sri gcod [another informant] said that when his rnam shes was going to leave his body, he saw a glowing fire of many colours. This fire grew bigger and bigger and finally entered his body, as it were. After that, everything became black and he remembered nothing further. At the end of the possession all this happened in the reversed order.95

Berglie records very little of the terminology of possession, though he does record ’bab pa (coming down), which he says is a Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit āveśa.96 This apparent paucity of terminology is not reflective of the actual situation in either literary or colloquial Tibetan. As discussed below, the process of possession found there is remarkably resonant with what is found in texts on classical yoga. Another noteworthy study, albeit somewhat undisciplined from the perspective of contemporary anthropological discourse, is Angela Dietrich’s Tantric Healing in the Kathmandu Valley.97 This valuable resource extensively records the contemporary vocabulary of healing and spirit beings (unfortunately without diacritics), as well as attitudes about these spirit beings by both healers and clients alike. Dietrich vividly portrays possession as one of the primary modes of both disease production and healing and notes the ubiquity of oracular possession. Indeed, as reported by others, the spirit world is portrayed as alive and well in the Kathmandu Valley.98

Tamil and Simhala In Tamil and Simhala,99 āvēcam (< Skt. āveśam) is perhaps the most common word for spirit or deity possession. Like other South Asian languages, Simhala betrays a linguistic nexus between possession and emotion: the substantive ävitu (possessed [by an evil spirit], mad) is related to the verb ävissenavā (to be angry).100 Obeyesekere, however, recognizes a much greater frequency in colloquial Simhala of ārūbe (< Skt. ārūbha [mounted]), divine possession, “in which the magnetism of the god infuses and suffuses the body.”101 This is distinguished from the equally common preta dosa (misfortune caused by an evil ancestral spirit or preta).102 The definitions of āvēcam in J. P. Fabricius’s Tamil-English dictionary are: “1. spectre, ghost; 2. the entrance of a demon into a person for the purposes of uttering oracles; 3. the fury or madness of a possessed person; 4. the grimaces of a person in ecstasy,


religious frenzy.”103 The Tamil verb pukutal (to enter) is used in Tamil poetry where ā√viś is found in Sanskrit or Sanskritized Tamil. For example, Tiruvāymo~i 9.6.3 reads, “With gentle grace he conquers, and enters my heart” (nīrmaiyāl nencam vancittu pukuntu), and 9.6.5 reads, “As if he were going to show his grace, / He entered into me” (tiru aru~ ceypavan pōla ennu{ pukuntu).104 On the word aru~ in the Tamil Śaiva texts, Handelman and Shulman note: an unfortunate tendency to translate this critical term, in nearly every instance, as “grace,” with its heavy Christian connotations. Aru{ can, it is true, correspond in Śaiva texts to Sanskrit anugraha, the god’s compassionate giving to his servants. More often, however, it approximates a notion of coming into being or freely becoming, present, close, alive. In village ritual contexts, aru{ may mean simply “possession”—a presence intensified beyond bearing—or the experience of the deity’s true (nija, aghora) form.105

We examine this notion of possession as “coming into being” when discussing possession as a mode of devotion (Chapter 9). Hiltebeitel records the Tamil substantive maru{u (delusion, bewilderment), used for Aśvatthāman’s murderous possession of the young Pañcapāâbavas in the folk Draupadī ritual.106 The use of this word for negatively charged possession distinguishes it from āvēcam. Hiltebeitel raises, without much discussion, the intriguing question of a connection between death, sleep, trance, and possession,107 a subject on which the Sanskrit texts are equally silent. Hancock notes a distinction (that I have not found in any other study) between āvēcam and other modes of deity or oracular possession. According to one of her informants, āvēcam refers to a general state of possession, while a “specific, temporary transformation” would be referred to with the observation “the ammaç has come” (ammaç vantatu).108 Another scholar with incisive thoughts on possession, and who has produced one of the most language-sensitive studies so far, is Eveline Meyer, who observed possession in the cult of the goddess Aãkālaparamēcuvari in Tamilnadu.109 Meyer finds an ambiguity between possession and impersonation: Sometimes a man representing the goddess is possessed; at other times he does not achieve possession but completes the ritual by acting the part of the goddess. The latter is impersonation, asserts Meyer, because it is not considered to be genuine possession even by the participants. The posses-


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sion about which she writes occurs within a non-brahman community, and it is important to note that both the culture and language in Tamilnadu are sharply divided between brahman and non-brahman.110 Like Hiltebeitel, she notes the word maru{, “used to describe the power and frenzy which takes hold of the pūcāri [Ta. pūjāri].”111 To be possessed is to “run frenzied” (maru{ ō•a).112 Nabokov, too, records the phrase maru~ o•utal (running in a state of confusion or frenzy), which she defines more strictly than Meyer as ceremonial flight after decapitation of a chicken that is intended to send a pēy (spirit) fleeing. Another form of possession is “dancing the god,” because of certain patterned or even choreographed dancing during deity possession.113 The Tamil term is teyyā••am (god-dancing), while the Malayalam cognate is tirayā••am (festival dancing) or teyyam tu{{al (divine ballad/frenzy; Ta. tey, Ma. teyyam < Skt. daivam).114 Nabokov records the Tamil phrase kōriccu varutal (the request to come), corresponding to the establishment (Skt. pratiù•hā) of a deity in a shrine, examined below. This Tamil term refers to an “investiture ceremony” in which the spirits of dead relatives are installed “in the domestic sanctuary of the household as tutelary deities.”115 Possession of the deity Meyer studied was reported in the Indian press a few years ago. It is of interest that the Sunday Pioneer, a New Delhi newspaper, featured a front-page article headlined “They dig gr aves, chew hum an bones & dance t he night” (March 4, 2001), which described “a frenzied procession to the graveyard where three chosen ‘incarnations’ of Goddess Angala Amman fished out the bones of the dead and chewed them up at midnight” on the night of Mahāśivarātrī (February 21, 2001). Leaving aside the obvious sensationalizing and orientalizing of this English-language report of a ritual among the relatively well-off Manai Telugu Chettiar community, who constitute 80 percent of the five thousand residents of Sundakkamuttur Village near Coimbatore, where the story was situated, the article reveals that there is a renascence of this sort of possession, at least in that village: “The annual event is a hit with the younger population. Surprisingly, the elders here have, of late, been trying to do away with the primitive ritual, but it’s the growing generation that has taken it up almost as a mission.” According to the reporter, R. Revathi, “A visit to the houses of a few bone chewers shows that they are literate and come from affluent families who have modern gadgets like television, refrigerators, washing machines, etc.” One of the bone chewers, eschewing the suspicion that they are tribals or cannibals, says: “We have Ministers and MLAs [Members of the Legislative Assembly] from our community.”


According to S. M. Chandrakumar, an advocate who has previously acted the role of one of the incarnations, “It’s our custom. In ancient times, an asura did tapasya to propitiate Lord Shiva. Gods, like Indra and Varuna, went to Shiva and asked him not to grant him a boon. But Shiva, touched by the asura’s devotion, granted him a boon of immortality. The asura then went on a rampage and killed many in Devaloka and threatened the munis. The sadhus complained to Parvati. But Shiva could not take back his boon. So he gave Parvati powers to eliminate the asura. Parvati came to Earth as Angala Parameswari Amman. She chased the asura who took refuge in a graveyard. To escape her fury, the asura entered a corpse. In order to kill him, Angala Parameswari Amman dug up every corpse in the graveyard. She ate up the flesh and chewed the bones and tied some around her waist and danced the ananda tandav. ‘We are the children of Amman and we’ve been doing this puja from time immemorial.’” A comparative study of goddess worship in Tamilnadu and Orissa was conducted in the 1990s by Lynn Foulston.116 She cites the Tamil verb iôaãku (to descend), following Diehl, indicating the descent of a deity on a cāmyā•i (see sami ati and cāmiyā•i below) (god dancer).117 This, in its festival context, is a kind of positive oracular possession. Foulston notes several important facets of possession in the communities under study, including the honor and status accorded to those who enter into possession (mostly women, but also, on occasion, male temple officiants) and the imperative for the deity to possess the devotee. In Khurdapur, near Bhubaneswar in Orissa, “there is a strong indication that the goddess [Santoùī Mā] must respond to the pūjāri if he approaches her correctly.” However, in Cholavandan, near Madurai in Tamilnadu, “possession was entirely dependent on the will of the goddess.”118 Among the purposes of possession, she notes, are problem solving, healing, and for the goddess to exercise her power, to demonstrate to her devotees that she “is a stable, constant force in an ever-changing and unpredictable world.”119 Elizabeth Fuller Collins, an anthropologist who studied possession at an important Hindu Tamil festival for Murugaç in Penang, Malaysia, called Thaipusam, also recognizes indigenous terminology. Collins observes that the Hindu Tamils of Penang recognize three categories of trance: sami ati (the possession of a pūjārī by a goddess or warrior deity); pey pirichu (lit. “having a ghost”; possession by ghosts or demonic spirits); and aru~ (the trance of divine grace experienced by those who fulfill vows during religious festivals).120 Nabokov provides specificity to certain possessing spirits. The


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pēy “is the spirit of a man who took his life because he was prevented to wed, or because his marriage did not work out, and who henceforth ‘catches’ other men’s wives.” Nabokov understands this to symbolize the “obstruction and desecration” of marriage. “The pēy,” she explains, “represents a generic timeless entity, a ‘departed’ who cannot grow.”121 Although these representations may be valid in the community in which Nabokov worked in South Arcot district, it is likely that among the Tamils of Malaysia pēy is a general term for spirit, reflecting its Sanskritic origin, the word preta. Nabokov writes extensively of the pūvā•aikkāri (woman who wears flowers).122 These are good spirits, who may be male or female, or even an indistinct collocation of deceased members of one’s lineage, despite the literal sense of the term. In a general sense the pūvā•aikkāri is a deceased human spirit who returns as a god. He or she is invited to enter certain mediums during pūvā•aikkāri pūjās, held to bless weddings, harvests, plantings, and other auspicious occasions. Karin Kapadia has also studied possession of Murugaç in Tamil festivals.123 She focused her study on body piercing and the apparatus of ritual. Kapadia’s findings are very much in keeping with what is seen elsewhere, some of which we expand on later, when dealing with bhakti more formally. The word that Kapadia found used for possession among the largely middleranking non-brahman Tamil castes she studied was pubiccikirabu. She arrived at two general conclusions: first, that devotees who experience possession are mostly female and that men in possession “become” female for the duration of the ritual, and, second, “that the lower castes do not share uppercaste assumptions regarding ritual purity,”124 an argument against the wellknown assertion of Dumont and others.125 Most striking, though, is Kapadia’s observation that the social order is preserved in these rituals because they reinforce the notion that “only men can be ‘complete.’”126 By this, Kapadia means that men can become Ardhanarīśvara, Śiva who is half-man and half-woman, while women cannot assume this state. This “ritual androgyny of men”127 in possession empowers them to manifest female power (śakti), whereas women cannot manifest male power, which resides in stillness and inactivity, which Kapadia sees as the expressions of wisdom and knowledge inherited from brahmanical (viz., Sanskritic) discourse. Kapadia wisely does not attempt to generalize this observation to all of India. The point, however, as Hancock noted earlier (Kapadia seems to be unaware of her work),128 is that possession, transgressive and liberative though it surely is, reinforces key elements of the patriarchal social order.


It is striking that the psychological experience of possession of Murugaç, if not its ritual form, is similar to that expressed in the Akanāçūôu, a collection of Tamil poems dating from the first to third century c.e. George Hart notes that even at that time Murugaç was a deity popularly invoked for possession. Hart cites an early Tamil poem describing the dance of a shaman called in to treat a girl possessed by Murugaç: “It is the presence of Murugaç, hard to bear.”129 One final ethnographic study of Tamil possession deserves mention. This is a deeply moving study by Patricia Lawrence of the role of Tamil-speaking oracles in the recent Sri Lankan civil war.130 Lawrence’s study took place in the eastern part of the island, largely in Batticaloa district, perhaps the leastreported district of the war. “In eastern Sri Lanka,” she writes, “institutionalized possession is incorporated into the structure of pūjā ritual at temples for all local goddesses.”131 The civil war has brought increased public involvement in goddess cults, particularly rituals for Kā{i that feature possession, blood sacrifice of goats or chickens (or ash pumpkins, their substitute), body piercing (especially of the cheeks with silver needles or triśūlas, the trident of Śiva, or the back with multiple fishhooks). At the time of Kā{i’s annual festival in June, thousands of men, women, and children walk across burning coals, led by a charismatic “uttering oracle” (vākku solluôatu), a possessed woman speaking with Kā{i’s voice. All of this is performed with the ritual intention of healing the country’s ethnic wounds. Lawrence makes an important contribution to our understanding of oracular possession, at least in the context of the torture, genocide, and horror that has been widely reported in this civil war. This is the element of pain. In addition to the bliss and heightened awareness of oracle and audience, there is an accompanying presence of pain. “Oracles describe śakti possession as a painful sacrifice of the body, reporting feelings of unbearable heat and a trembling like the ‘shivering when one suffers from fever.’ They may also, particularly if embodying the agency of Kā{i, describe an overwhelming feeling of āvēsam,” which Lawrence renders as “uncontrollable emotion, fury, wrath.”132 The oracles, who have experienced the same torture, abductions, and genocide as practically all other Tamils in the region, employ possession as a therapeutic tool: as a special bonding strategy that embodies and renders sacrosanct their collective memory, translating their unspeakable suffering into a discourse of communal healing that undermines the discourse, and therefore the power, of the forces that have striven to strip them of their very humanity.133


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Turning for a moment to classical Tamil, Māâikkavācakar, in the ninth century, used the verb ā•ko{ (to rule for oneself; lit. “to take to oneself in order to rule over [a person]”).134 This verb is usually translated “to enslave,” “accept as one’s slave,” “take possession of,” or “possess,” as noted by Yocum. Forms of this verb are not cited in the ethnographic studies, thus it must be assumed that at some point it fell out of favor in this context. Mention of possession and ecstatic dancing is found even earlier in Tamil, in the Caãkam poetry of the early centuries of the common era.135 Perhaps the most richly detailed depiction of possession in early Tamil texts is in the wellknown fifth-century epic drama Cilappatikāram. At the end of the drama the oracular possession of a brahman woman named Tēvantikai by the god Pācaâ•aç is described. She was not alone, however, as the early Tamil texts frequently mention the possession of women. Indeed, for the realization of his own spiritual and religious instincts, it was not a problem for the male Mānikkavācakar to think of himself as a female devotee, subservient to Śiva.136 It is this sort of phenomenon that has led many scholars, such as Yocum and Friedhelm Hardy, to posit a movement of possession and ecstatic devotional madness from south to north India.137

The Yakädura of Sri Lanka Paul Wirz, Bruce Kapferer, David Scott, and Beatrice Vogt,138 in chronological order, provide deep, vivid, and often startlingly different accounts of Sri Lankan exorcists. These are called ädurā (Wirz: edura) or ka••ābiya (Wirz, also Obeyesekere: kattadiya), though the more proper rendering is yakädurā.139 Scott defines ädurā as a “practitioner of the arts of controlling the malign figures called yakku”(Skt. yakùa),140 avoiding what he rightly regards as colonialist terminology (e.g., the more literal “demon master”). Another ritual specialist called bandhanaya (Wirz) addresses afflictions caused by planetary influences ( grahacāraya) and black magic (bandhena). The bandhanaya confines and disarms demons and other evil forces responsible for these afflictions based largely on astrological remedies.141 The baliädura (Vogt) “eliminates disturbances caused by gods (deva) by means of an offering (bali) and other acts performed together with the patient.”142 Vogt classifies healing systems in Sri Lanka into five groups: (1) Western or allopathic doctors; (2) vedarala or āyurvedic doctors; (3) yakädura, who are versed in bhūtavidyā (see Chapter 12) and employ tovil or yaktovil, a wide range of healing rituals that are captivating and artistically integrated, and


that may include masked dances, drumming, pūjā, didactic songs, and theatrical scenes, some of which are comical and contain ritually regulated dialogue; (4) śāstrakāraya, a group that includes astrologers and fortune tellers; and (5) bhikkus or Buddhist monks.143 I limit my comments here to Vogt’s study, for five reasons: first, because it is the least known of them; second, because she is a trained psychologist whose eye is different from the others’; third, because it lacks both authorial inclination and disciplinary pressure to anchor her study in postcolonial, poststructural, or Freudian positionings, a freedom, it seems to me, that is a refreshing characteristic of continental European scholarship; fourth, because her findings are in substantial agreement with Kapferer’s sophisticated views of the ritual, healing, and socializing processes involved in yaktovil;144 and, fifth, because she grapples seriously with the relationship between indigenous healing practice and Buddhist doctrine and belief. Indeed the latter is the crux of her study and is thus central to the project of investigating links between modern practices and premodern epistemological patterns and between folk and classical discourse. Vogt describes her project as “ethnopsychological research (1985–1988) on a healing ritual that is traditionally performed in the Kandy highlands as a treatment for mental illness.”145 She apprenticed with a yakädura called Upasena Gurunnanse, but conducted interviews with a substantial number of healers and patients in order to understand the healing process in afflicted individuals. Through correlating specific material in canonical and semicanonical Buddhist texts with the statements of interviewees, Vogt strives to show that the basis of the nonmedically trained healing practitioners of Sri Lanka is canonical and historically situated Buddhism. This may not seem remarkable given that Sri Lanka is largely a Buddhist country. However, it is surprising given the attempts of anthropologists to assign the background of the healing process to other factors. The latter is in step with the model of many Indic scholars who separate healing ritual from canonical Hinduism, assigning it, instead, to other indigenous forces. On the whole, as Vogt is aware, and as is also argued in the present volume, most ethnographers are untrained, largely because of confining disciplinary boundaries, in classical and ancient Indic texts, and as a result are uninformed of the possibility and dynamics of deep cultural and structural continuities.146 Eschewing attempts to dichotomize Sri Lankan culture between high and low or Buddhist and non-Buddhist, in which the latter is disparaged as “folk religion” or pre-Buddhist animistic cult practice, distinctions that Vogt sees


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as the relic of Christian scholarship with its own history of forging these distinctions in Euro-American culture in order to rescue a “true” Christianity, Vogt instead sees the healing process as practiced by folk healers in Sri Lanka as an integral part of the local construction of Buddhism. I argue below that the distinctions Vogt questions are as untrustworthy in India as Vogt cogently argues they are in Sri Lanka. Although I might take issue with some of Vogt’s psychological theorizing, because the Jungian and other non-Freudian notions of “psychodrama” on which she bases her study are as underdeveloped as Freudian theory is overapplied (on the latter, see Chapters 2 and 12), on the whole I agree with her conclusions.147 Vogt states: “The analysis of terms used in the psychology of tovil underline my fundamental recognition that tovil healing rituals are a form of Buddhist psychology.”148As a psychologist looking meticulously at Buddhist psychological categories, Vogt argues that such ritual is as firmly grounded in Buddhism as Western psychotherapy is grounded in Christianity. To this end, she marshals considerable evidence from Buddhist precepts as well as from abhidharma, the Buddhist analysis of personality and mental processes. She notes, for example, that Upasena Gurunnanse describes his method as, among other things, “bringing the demons under the control of Dhamma,”149 then dealing with five components of the personhood (pañcaskandha) of the demon (yaka [yakùa], bhūta) as well as with the kamma (karma) of both patient and invasive being. She also shows convincingly that the mythic and cosmological beliefs of the Buddhist patients who came to the yakädura with whom she studied in the Kandy highlands were consistent with those of the MahāvaÅsa (mid-fifth century) and other “histories” that have been transmitted in both literary and oral form for nearly two thousand years.150 Vogt also carefully avoids characterizing tovil as exorcism. The yakädura are not “spirit conjurers,” a term that she associates with exorcists, but that has been applied misleadingly to yakädura based on precedents from the Catholic Church. Although it appears that she unnecessarily limits the realm of exorcists and exorcism in her laudable goal of recognizing and setting aside the relics of a Christian mindset in relevant scholarship, especially in the field of comparative religion, she nevertheless offers a perspicacious analysis of the skill (upakkrama; Skt. upakrama) of the Sri Lankan healer.151 In this analysis, the healer is characterized by: 1) concretizing psychic problems as “demons”; 2) re-educating these demons and relegating them to their place within the psychocosmos of the patient; 3) establishing an interpersonal consen-


sus with regard to these demons or the psychic problems personified by them; and 4) therapeutic-pedagogic guidance of the patient by means of communicating to him patterns of knowledge and action that will make possible a happier way of life.152

With respect to the second of these points, which has been briefly addressed above, Scott emphasizes that “the first thing the ädurās have to establish is whether the virtuous commands (aâaguna) of the Buddha are accepted as valid by the yakku (and the other malign beings—prētayo, bhūtayo, and bahīravayo).”153 That this process resembles the process employed at Bālājī in Rajasthan is simultaneously striking and unsurprising.

Malayalam Scholarship on possession in Kerala is now emerging, thanks in large part to the work of Sarah Caldwell, Rich Freeman, and Gilles Tarabout. Caldwell explores oracular possession among worshippers of Kā{i. She writes about the performance of mudiyettu (divine offering),154 in which the goddess Kā{i battles the demon Dārika. Caldwell notes that Kā{i “will enter the actor’s body and consciousness as a great inner heat”155 and reports an informant saying, “We fix the picture of Bhagavati in our mind, and her supernatural power (caitanyam) enters our body.” Freeman asserts that the tradition of spirit-possessed dancers and priests in Kerala dates back two millennia, before Malayalam had separated from the linguistic and political domain of Tamil Caãkam culture.156 Observing the teyyam complex in Kerala,157 Freeman demonstrates that ritual structure allows for spontaneity and improvisation, even one that contains stock phrases and memorized text.158 He insists that ritually circumscribed possession experience exhibits learned, context sensitive encoded gestures and behaviors that are not invariant, but permit a degree of improvisation. This alludes to the issue of “faking” possession, which has been the subject of considerable indigenous discussion and which Meyer generously labels impersonation. Tarabout has written a comprehensive study of sacrifice and gift in Malabar festival life, a study that includes major sections on oracular possession.159 Freeman also reports the Malayalam vocabulary of possession: Whatever the type of being and circumstances may be, the onset of possession (āvēśam) is described as a “coming to” (varuka), “joining” (kū•uka),


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or “mounting” (kēruka) of the body (meyyal). In this state the host is said to be “illumined” (ve{iccappe•uka), “fixed” or “in-dwelt” (uôayuka), to be “internally moved” (i{akuka), and possessed of “spiritual vision” (darśanam).160

Freeman adds that the state of mind during the performance of teyyam “entails no loss of consciousness, or ‘dissociation’ in psychological terms, but rather a heightened sense of consciousness” in which “one’s consciousness has not traveled somewhere else, shaman-like, but that instead, one’s own body and mind are taken over and animated by a higher and more powerful (and I would add more concentrated) form of consciousness.”161 Caldwell explains that in Malayalam tu{{al “is a jumping, hopping dance undertaken in a fit of possession, fever, or madness.”162 It is difficult to ignore the confusion, ambiguity, or conflation of possession, fever, and madness in the eyes of Caldwell’s informants, a situation that haunts many ethnographers and surely skulks in the shadows in the present study. Nevertheless, her informants deploy Sanskrit terms when drawing broad categorical distinctions: divine possession of men is labeled dēva āveśam (which Caldwell renders “divine inspiration”), while spirit possession is called bādhā āveśam (demonic inspiration).163 Stuart Blackburn, too, is sensitive to the distinctions in possession that are revealed in the language. He reports that the general term in Malayalam for spirit possession is kōmaram; unwanted possession is rendered pēy pi•ikkatu (caught by a malevolent spirit); and in a festival context a beneficent visitation is called cāmi mēl varavattu (the god descends). “False possession,” he says, is poy ā••am, while a “fierce dance” is payaãkara (< Skt. bhayaãkara) ā••am.164 Thus, Malayalam appears to have an extensive and highly developed vocabulary for possession. Phillip Zarrilli, in his study of ka{arippayattu, the indigenous martial art of Kerala, concurs with this observation of performed possession and extends it to the performance of martial arts. According to martial arts practitioners in Kerala, the essential elements for raising the kuâbalinī śakti are “self-confidence, doubtless heroism and internal fury.” This kuâbalinī śakti is “a state of intense concentration of energy (aveshakaram), ‘the power generated from concentration.’”165 Two points are significant here: first, possession can be a deliberately induced performative state; second, it commences with the identification of a specific emotive energy with which the practitioner is familiar, in this case, fury. Through repeated practice, the martial artist gains the ability to immerse the mind fully in this emotion. One of the qualities of this


immersion is a condensation or compression of energy, rather than its dissipation in a multiplicity of thoughts or other forms of outward-directed activity. The maintenance of this immersion and subsequent compression during activity results in an attentive state of potentiality, power, excitement, and readiness that are observed features of the martial artist, the teyyam performer and, indeed, of anyone in a state of positive or oracular possession. It is thus appropriate that the Malayalam discourse of kālarippāyattu should employ the term āveśakāram to signify this. These observations serve us well in the ensuing discussions of possession in “Sanskritic culture.”

Tulu and Irula The recent major studies by Honko and Brückner of possession cults and epic performance in Tulunad in South Kanara District of Karnataka represent culminations in a long scholarly interest extending back to the Abbé Dubois in the early nineteenth century.166 The spirits invoked in the performance of the Siri epic are benevolent, which Claus points out “may be hard to believe” given “the incredible discomfort and agony evident in the bodily contortions and facial grimaces of the possessed young women.”167 Because these possession festivals (būta nemā/kolā) are similar to Teyyam in both Kerala and Coorg District of southern Karnataka,168 it is not surprising that in some cases the Tulu vocabulary was influenced by Malayalam. For example, Claus reports the phrase “darùana169 had happened to so and so” (arugu darùana ātuâbu). This is one of dozens of words in Tulu for spirit possession, which is not surprising given the Tulu recognition of the pervasiveness of spirits—evident from the studies of Honko, Brückner, and Claus. Claus reports the common expressions are bhūta pattuâbu (the spirit caught) and may •u battuâbu (came into the body),170 and Brückner reports nubika••u (oracular speech).171 Thus Tulu, barely a literary language, shares in the same locutions for possession found throughout South Asia. Typically shamanic oracular possession is also found among men of the minimally Hinduized Irula of the Nilgiris in southern Karnataka. Zvelebil notes, “Jāya [induced possession] is performed when the Irulas need divine guidance and help to solve a personal or public problem—whenever they want to obtain any assistance from the deity. The process is termed joga ugādu (inviting god [to descend and possess]) or jāya. According to Zvelebil’s informants, the deity “then enters the heart [īruvatte] of the possessed person [termed jāyakāra], which trembles gïdigïdigïdigïdi in an increased


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heartbeat rate, and it changes [māôi] his mind [ge âa] so that it can speak through the possessed person.” The languages uttered are not always intelligible, but are thought to be either Kannada or an archaic variety of Irula. The possession trance is induced by drumming, swaying, and singing a “deityinviting song” (dua uga pā••u) in which the deity is addressed as “one who comes riding a black bee or dragonfly (dumbiyānē).”172 As in Tulu, what is noteworthy is the striking similarity of rationale, ritual strategy, and verbal imagery to possession noted throughout the subcontinent.

Assam and Possession at Kamakhya In view of its proximity to Bengal, Nepal, Tibet, and the rest of northeastern India, the presence of a large (and largely unexplored) indigenous Tantric literature, and a predominance of worshippers of exotic goddesses, Assam might be expected to evince a substantial amount of possession. I have no doubt that this is the case. However, this has been almost entirely unresearched. What little is documented, however, is intriguing and requires a brief explanation that contextualizes this absence in terms of the political and religious exigencies of colonial (or colonized) Assam. Above I cited Ziegenbalg’s early eighteenth-century attitude toward the “heathens” of Malabar and the festival participants in possession there whom he labeled “devil dancers.” Furthermore, we saw the continuity (or reappearance) of Ziegenbalg’s attitudes nearly three centuries later in a few instances of postcolonial Protestant Orientalism. In the present instance we are able to see conflicting attitudes among the British toward festival possession in Assam. Two studies of Naga “tribes” were carried out from 1912 to 1920 by J. H. Hutton, a young Oxford-educated ethnographer and civil servant. He wrote two volumes on the Nagas that are by now in serious need of revision.173 In the foreword to one of them, Henry Balfour, at the time the director of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, wrote: It is of the utmost importance not only to the Science of Man, but also to responsible officialdom, since a just and enlightened administration of native affairs cannot be established and pursued without an intimate knowledge of and sympathetic interest in the natives themselves, their customs and their point of view. Lack of ethnographic knowledge has been responsible for many of the misunderstandings and fatal errors which have tarnished our well-meant endeavours to control wisely and equitably the af-


fairs of those whose culture has evolved under environments which differ widely from those of civilised peoples.174

This attitude was widespread among British administrators. Although Balfour was no doubt right that “knowledge of and sympathetic interest in the natives themselves” strengthened the colonialist enterprise of subjugation, it is also true that we would have much less information than is available to us today on topics like the prevalence of deity and spirit possession in India had it not been for the dedicated work of the British administrators who oversaw the production of local and district gazetteers, volumes from which I and many others continue to draw valuable material. Hutton, one of these eager and highly educated administrators, reported a number of “supernaturals,” including the Sema aghau, equivalent to the Angami ropfu, “a personal familiar . . . perhaps it may be said that all persons are potentially possessed of aghau, though the existence of the aghau is not always important.”175 These may also be “house spirits,” thus testifying to their capacity to enter individual spaces. Study of spirits and possession was by no means Hutton’s forte, and he includes no vocabulary of possession. He was, however, a step ahead of most of his predecessors in remarking: The missionaries in their blindness teach the Angani convert to regard all terhoma [deities] as evil, and mission-taught Nagas are in the habit of translating the generic terhoma into English or Assamese as “satas” [viz. Satans]. All of these “satrans,” as they call them, are, however, very far from having those qualities which we traditionally associate with the Devil, and the qualities of some of them are definitely benevolent.176

In spite of the efforts of the British colonial government, indigenous beliefs and religious festivals continue unabated in the twenty-first century. Because of Assam’s proximity to Bangladesh and the unstable political situation in India’s far northeast, it was almost entirely off-limits to Western scholars until recently, and local scholars did not appear to take much interest in the dramatics of oracular possession there. However, one local chapbook, which describes festival possession at Kamakhya, the great temple complex near Gauhati, was produced in February 2004, with sections in Hindi, English, Assamese, and Bengali.177 This chapbook describes in detail a festival or “ritualistic dance” called Debaddhani or Deodhani, a local term derived from the Sanskrit devadhvani (sound or


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echo of the deity).178 This yearly festival is held late in the rainy season, beginning on the last day of the month of Śrāvaâa and continuing for three days, up to the second day of the month of Bhādrapada, coinciding with the annual worship of the Goddess Manasā, a popular snake deity of Kamakhya. The chapbook states that the term debaddhani “conveys the idea of the conceptual dances of the human vehicles chosen and possessed by the divinities to reveal their own intricate selves.” From nine to fifteen people, called deodhā, experience this possession.179 They are generally the same people every year and appear invariably to be men. Like many other sites of divinity in India—and we must view these possessed individuals as sites of divinity—the starting point is explained through a miracle. Once, it is said, a mahārāja with no offspring promised to offer his own head in sacrifice to the goddess if she would grant him a son. Pleased with his prayers, the goddess did so. But the mahārāja, in his joy, forgot about his promise. The goddess became enraged and in a vision reminded the king of his promise. The mahārāja promptly prepared a golden knife and chopped off his own head and offered it to Bhairavī. The king thus attained divinity and possessed a local male devotee, thus beginning the debaddhani tradition. As sites of divinity, the possessed individuals are viewed as loci of purification and, in an initiation ceremony conducted by the principal priest (daloī) of the Manasā temple, accept ritual paraphernalia, vow to eat a simple vegetarian diet (though they may smoke and drink tea), and are paid only in offerings of sacrificed goats, pigeons, and ducks, as well as gifts of ornaments, sweets, and fruit. Much of this is reminiscent of the Vedic initiation performed at the beginning of a soma sacrifice, though it is extremely doubtful that the influence was direct. After several rounds of dancing in the early afternoon, the performers are made up and dressed with garlands, bouquets, ritual insignia, cloth, swords, and other items reminiscent of the possessing deity. The chapbook does not list the names of all the possessing deities, but among them are the deified mahārāja; Mahādeva (Śiva), the ceremonial leader of the group; Kuvera, “the traditional store-keeper” of Mahādeva; and the goddesses Kālī, Kāmākhyā, and Calantā. The possessing deities bestow bīja and other meditation (dhyāna) mantras on the possessed, as well as visionary and oracular abilities. According to the chapbook, the signs of possession are “peculiar” or “abnormal” behavior, including fasting and unusually clean living. [B]ut he demands raw flesh of black pigeons or of a he-goat and he takes these uncooked; he drinks the fresh blood of animals. His eyes turn blood-


red, he yawns frequently and roams about aimlessly solely at the mercy and direction of the deity of possession.180 . . . The dance of the Deodhas consists of very vigorous movements interspersed with shrill shrieks. They run like mad men, as if they are unconscious of the physical environment and the thick crowd of spectators. They hold swords, batons, and animal offerings on their hands and shoulders.

The most dramatic moment occurs when the most deeply possessed among the deodhās, usually those possessed by Kālī and Calantā, dance with bare feet on the blade of a long razor sharp blade held by other deodhās. “It is indeed miraculous that none of the Deodhas have ever been hurt.” After the dancing is concluded, the deodhās sit, surrounding the vehicle of Mahādeva, and consume fresh blood and raw meat, in addition to juice of fresh coconuts and other refreshments. The description ends by noting that the deodhās form neither “a caste [n]or a privileged class; nor are they associated with the temple of Kamakhya according to the traditional categories of the temple’s functionaries.” They are, rather, self-selected as a result of inspiration from the particular deity. The deodhās then, as sites of divinity, represent the Assamese version of what Shulman identifies as localized divinity: The deodhās manifest the immanence and transportability of divinity. This multilocality of divinity, from Śiva to Kālī to Calantā, is, as in Tamilnadu, a localization and transportation of the deity’s śakti, analogous to the Tamil aâaãku. In the Assamese case, however, the śakti is not so easily generalized. It is, rather, embodiment itself with the specifications of the individual divinity, including dress, ornamentation, diet, speech, spatial requirements, its position within the matrix of deities who have a special relationship with Mahādeva, the divinity of the center, and the peculiar way that it manifests power and danger.

Exorcists, Oracles, and Healers In spite of the efforts of Meyer, Erndl, Bhattacharyya, Stanley, McDaniel, Srinivas, Freeman, Claus, Brückner, Macdonald, Pakaslahti, Gellner, Vogt, Wadley, Caldwell, Inglis, Wirz, and a few others to highlight the importance of local terminology, many ethnographers fail to provide not only the vocabulary for possession but also the specialized words or terms for the person possessed. Let us now briefly look at some of the vocabulary in Hindi,


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Urdu, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali, Tulu, Tamil, Malayalam, Simhala, and the language of the Maldive islands. Wadley states: “In North India, the native terms for oracle are baki and bhagat. The native terms for exorcist include jhābâewālā, ojhā, mantravidh [sic: should be mantravid], and mativah.”181 Wadley does not provide translations. They are: baki (babbler); bhagat (devotee); jhābnevālā (spiritualist); ojhā (exorcist, folk healer); mantravid (well-versed in mantras); and mativah (desire-bearer; opinion-bearer).182 Henry and Lambert distinguish between Tantric healers called sidh or sayana and mediums, bhopā or ojhā.183 Fuchs records that in central India the barwa cures by exorcism, while a janka does so by divinization.184 McClintock, in Pakistani Panjab, cites the Urdu āmil, more properly “agent” or “operator,” as “exorcist,” distinguishing it from the jādugar (magician) and pīr (saint).185 In Gujarati, according to the Broach District gazetteer, the term bhagat is mentioned as someone who is able to diagnose the provenance of a spirit, while a bhuva, who may be from any caste or religious community, is an exorcist.186 This is also a common term in Marathi, along with jhāb (medium).187 Bhattacharyya provides three words for folk healer in Bengali, all (seemingly) synonymous: ōjhā (Skt. upādhyāya), rojā, and guâina.188 As noted above, Sontheimer records the Marathi devóùī, locally denoting a shaman, healer, and possession oracle. Sax notes the terms daãgārīya (little horsie) and paśvā (animal), for a person who is regularly possessed by a local deity.189 With respect to the latter, a relatively modern Tantric text, the Āgamarahasyam, also employs this image. In its description of śavasādhana, the practice (sādhana) of meditating while sitting on a corpse (śava) and in a cremation ground (śmaśāna), this text states that one should sit on the corpse as if riding a horse (aśvārohaâam).190 Although this is not possession per se, the image is applied to a situation in which possession of the corpse by the deity is implicit. As mentioned, the primary terms in Nepali for a religious healer are jh7Åkri and paju, who can be either spirit mediums or practitioners of other shamanic arts,191 and the related jāki in Assamese.192 A primary Tibetan term for Vajrayāna yogis and ritualists who practice exorcism, sometimes applying wrathful means, is sngags-pa (nag-pa) (mantraist).193 They closely observe the vows of the Vajrayāna, which include observance of the bodhisattva vows, and require particular qualifications to be met for a practitioner applying “wrathful means.” The term, if not the qualifications, is similar to the Sanskrit māntrika, denoting an exorcist in relatively recent texts,194 as well as to the mantravādin, a category of ritual specialist noted in south India


who employs therapeutic mantras and is distinguished locally from a vaid or vaidya, a doctor of āyurveda,195 and a pātrī (Skt. for “vessel”), a healer who diagnoses and cures through possession.196 Thus Brückner and Honko report that in Tulu pātri is used for a possessed person.197 Macdonald states that a jh7Åkri is one who “after having first of all suffered possession by a spirit foreign to his everyday world, manages to control it and regulate it.”198 The jh7Åkri appears to be a figure who moves from peripheral to central possession, in keeping with Lewis’s observations. The foreign spirit resides at the periphery of the social and mythic worlds of the jh7Åkri, but is then domesticated and employed to present a possession that is central, if marginally intrusive, in the local cultus. Höfer prefers a more straightforward description of the jh7Åkri than Macdonald’s “interpreter of the world.” Höfer states: “Roughly defined, the jh7Åkri is a ‘shaman,’ i.e., a socially recognized ritual specialist whose main task is curing the sick; he is claimed to be capable of controlling and/or producing paranormal experience—visions, possession, etc.—allowing for a privileged, direct contact with occult forces and beings.”199 Gellner distinguishes the jh7Åkri from the mediums recognized by the Newari as dyah-mā (godmother)200 or the more inclusive category dyān waipĩ. About the latter, Gellner notes that they diagnose illness and other social problems and more often than not are low-caste women who suggest treatment in the form of the worship of certain deities.201 The nearly identical terms dyan waimha in Newari and devatā āune in Nepali indicate “one to whom the gods come.”202 Also used for possession are the Newari verbs waye (to come) and dubiye (to enter into).203 Gellner also places the healers and mediums at the nexus of classical and folk Tantra and Vajrayāna Buddhism, in which the recitation of certain sūtra texts are used for apotropaic and protective purposes and in which Buddhist mantras are merged and jumbled by possessed healers with jhārphuk, exorcistic practices of “brushing and blowing.”204 As noted, the term for the healer subject to possession in Höfer’s study of Tamang shamanism in Nepal is bombo, one who treats individuals but has no role in communal rituals. The Tamang themselves regard this as a synonym of jh7Åkri.205 Gaborieau records the Indo-Aryan word dhāmī and the non-IA bāÅgre in central Nepal.206 Berglie provides a detailed description of the training of a spirit-medium: the recruiting, apprenticeship, testing, acquisition of ritual paraphernalia, and an account of the trance experiences of the Tibetan dpan-bo.207 Dietrich provides interesting vignettes of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim healers, Newari


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and Nepali, urban and rural in Nepal.208 Her study is consistent with earlier ones, though hers is more squarely situated in the indigenous healing traditions. Both Hindu and Buddhist spirit healers occasionally attribute possession among their clients to negative astrological influences, something I suspect is more widespread through the Indian subcontinent than ethnographers have recorded. Anwarul Karim, a folklorist who studied shamanism in his native Bangladesh, is careful to clarify his terms. He explains that the Muslim ojhā belongs to the larger faqīr community of Sufis and are exorcists as well as healers of snakebite, female hysteria, childhood ailments, and cattle diseases. They are contrasted with the Hindu ojhā, who belongs to low-caste and peasant communities and are often ojhā by hereditary occupation.209 Karim distinguishes these practitioners from the kabirāj, a practitioner of normative Hindu medicine (he does not use the word Āyurveda, but this is probably intended).210 The faqīr invokes spirits or jinns to cure diseases, while the ojhā, either Muslim or Hindu, arrange and sing religious songs known as bhasan, padmapurāâ or behulā laksmindar, which invoke the serpent deity Mānashā (as in the debaddhani festival in Assam) as well as other deities, both male and female, for healing.211 Shukla noted the words sokhā (one who absorbs or dries up) and guâī (adept), in addition to ojhā and bhagat. He also noted that Muslim exorcists are called maulvī (a scholar of Islamic law), fakīr (a Muslim mendicant or saint), and namājī (a devout Muslim).212 Caldwell and Freeman inform us that, in Malayalam, the words for oracle are ve{icchapā•u or kōmaram. Most are male priests associated with temples. However, some are females who reside in the hilly tribal areas near Palghat. Caldwell suspects that the male ve{icchapā•u “in fact modeled their behavior on these female shamans, whose role was superseded in the Aryanized lowlands.”213 Freeman remarks that, regardless of their origins, “[t]hese priests are selected by a combination of a specific lineage eligibility, divine selection through spontaneous acts of possession, and subsequent ratification by astrological or other kinds of oracular readings.”214 Inglis notes the distinction in Tamilnadu between the cāmiyā•i (god dancer) as the name for both the institution of nonshamanic oracular possession and its performers in the Madurai area, nērttikam (< Skt. nótya [dance]; nārttikam [dancer]) (individuals who become possessed in the course of carrying out personal vow fulfillment) and kō•aãki (“possession specialists . . . who ply the trade of soothsaying in a market or other public place for a fee”).215 In Sri Lankan


Tamil, Lawrence cites the word ka••ātikal for “oracle” and teyvam ā•ukākkal for deity-dancer, as well as vākku solluôatu for “uttering oracle” (discussed above).216 Finally, Clarence Maloney discusses fanbita in the Maldive islands, which is “magic or religious ‘science’ of any sort, white or black, curative or preventative, fertility ritual or divination.”217 The word fanbita, from Sanskrit paâbita, probably entered Divehi, the local language, through an earlier Tamil-Malayalam substrate population. In spite of an extensive catalogue of spirits, spirit possession is comparatively rare in the Maldives. This relative absence may be an influence of Islam on a local tradition that is still extensively practiced. Nevertheless, in Divehi a conjurer, exorcist, herbalist, astrologer, and protector of the evil eye (esfinna < Sinhala a svaha) is called a “fanbita man.”218 As mentioned above, this review, lengthy though it may be, is not intended to be complete or definitive. I have made little effort to obtain data on possession for Telugu,219 Oriya, Assamese, and other northeastern languages and dialects and have not exerted much more effort for Gujarati.220 Scouring the district gazetteers, as I did in part for Gujarat, Kerala, and Maharashtra, will supply greater breadth, but I am not certain that our depiction of possession in South Asia will assume much greater depth for the effort. Nor are the data available in early highly positivistic studies of tribal areas likely to deepen our knowledge of possession on the subcontinent. I cannot make it my project here to take on the vast early (pre-1960) ethnographic literature, which, in any case, is hardly anthropological in the contemporary sense.221 However, I hope that what I have accumulated helps illustrate some of the conceptual, lexical, and semantic patterns of the language of possession as they emerge from a background in Sanskritic and other classical Indian possession as well as ways in which it may be independent of that background. These include the expression of possession as salvific, purificatory, exorcistic, therapeutic, celebratory, oracular, aesthetically potent, and socially binding—in part because it cuts across caste, class, and gender boundaries practically everywhere in South Asia.

Reflections on “Folk” and “Classical” in South Asia From the foregoing discussion of lexemes and terms in many South Asian languages, one conclusion is unavoidable: that with a few notable exceptions


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the expansion of the lexicon for possession—and, we might cautiously presume, many of the ideologies behind this expansion—was to a great extent derived from Sanskrit and Sanskritic culture, after which it became diversified and adapted into regional languages. Despite this conclusion, the ethnographies highlight the non-brahmanical, non-Sanskritic dimensions of possession and the rejection of clerical authority in favor of a nonmediated transcendence or, at most, a transcendence that is sanctioned—and, therefore, in a sense mediated—by the dynamics of the local culture. Locally construed possession is, furthermore, an irruption of assigned hierarchical place that bears with it a consequent identification with nonhierarchical sacred place—indeed, of the individual as sacred place. Hence, it is an assertion that possession is largely the experiential property (and path) of people of lower social rank, women as well as men. It is regarded, in a critical mass of instances, as a socioreligious innovation of subalterns. Although this may be an overstatement, it is not without basis. After all, the social structure in South Asia hardened into a self-sustaining oppressive force long ago, giving rise to equally self-sustaining forces of reaction that drew form and idiom in part from these forces of oppression. In other words, though the preponderance of the evidence suggests that most possession is an indigenous phenomenon related to brahmanic oppression or “official” brahmanical religion only peripherally,222 in fact, a number of ethnographers (e.g., Sax, Knipe, Claus) have shown that brahmans participate in possession as much as anyone. Thus the “upward” accession of form and idiom is matched by a “downward” accession. As seen below, this is not a recent phenomenon: The evidence adduced from the Sanskrit texts testifies that possession has long been a part of unofficial (and preofficial) brahmanical religion; it was no less a part of Sanskritic culture than was officially engineered brahmanical religion. Arguments that possession was “originally” a folk phenomenon distinguished from Sanskritic culture are, of course, correct, as far as they go. But these arguments cannot go very far, because folk culture by definition preceded Sanskritic culture and continued to flourish alongside it without operating in opposition to it. However, Sanskritic culture was never very far behind or far removed from folk culture. Indeed, one can argue that early Sanskritic, which is to say vedic, culture is nothing more than a poetic or literary redaction of folk culture. Folk culture was a part of Sanskritic culture from the outset. As seen in Chapter 5, possession (āveśa) was one of the defining experiences of the ñgvedic ritualists under the influence of soma, at least in


the early, compositional periods of Vedic ritualism. One can conclude from this an identity of folk and classical during that period, the mid-second millennium b.c.e. At best this undermines the categories “folk” and “Sanskritic,” at least for these early periods of recorded Indian history. As for the later periods, however, as the gap widened between the literary presentation and the practice of Indian religions, we must conclude that the “origins” of possession in South Asia, whether brahmanical or non-brahmanical, Sanskritic, Dravidian, or “tribal,” are not particularly important. Although the ñgveda suggests that its ritualists were familiar with possession, this does not mean that it was not also a widespread experience in nonvedic realms of early Indic folk culture. While noting the prominence of possession in folk ritual and theater, A. K. Ramanujan suggests that we do not find it in vedic or other exclusively Sanskritic ritual and theatrical forms. He writes that with respect to the “assumptions and characteristics” of folk ritual and theater, “notions of possession are never far from the audience’s mind.”223 We can probably assume that neither audience (and śrauta ritual was rarely as public as often assumed, based on its public patronage today) nor participants in vedic ritual, at least of “classical” or post–folk vedic ritual, looked for or expected possession. The emphasis on ritual exactitude far superseded expectations of immediate emotional uplift. Role playing was not expected to evolve into manifestation of the deities or sages whose mantras emerged from the mouths of the ritualists. Nevertheless, the evidence presented below suggests that Sanskritic, even vedic, possession cannot be ignored in discussions of more recent, even contemporary, cultural, religious, and linguistic parameters of possession.224 For example, the possession Hiltebeitel observed in the Draupadī cult in Tamilnadu occurred in a non-brahman population. This sort of folk possession, however, occurred as a result of long intertextual negotiations between an evolving local oral Mahābhārata and the Sanskrit epic,225 between Sanskrit renderings by professionals and folk retellings by local nonelite nonprofessionals (or even professionals), between classical dramatic performance that strived to maintain the Sanskrit plot lines and local performance that embraced non-Sanskritic folk elements. It is unlikely that the Draupadī cult’s Mahābhārata was a reaction against the classical text or against brahmans and brahmanical culture and religion. Instead, it is likely more accurate that it was a folk development in Tamilnadu that included some reconfigured and renegotiated elements of Sanskritic culture, among which possession was almost certainly one, given the substantial presence of it in the Sanskrit


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text (see Chapter 6). One fragment of evidence supporting this is the similarity of possession in the Tamil Draupadī cult and that which Sax finds more than a thousand miles away among brahmans as well as non-brahmans in another contemporary (but unrelated) Mahābhārata based sect in Garhwal. The linking element is clearly the classical Sanskrit epic in both its textual and performative incarnations. Regardless of whether possession is viewed as brahmanical, it is, as we have often noted, prominently observed among brahmans. Not only does Sax find brahman possession in the Garhwal Himalayas, but it is widespread in the bhūta cult of South Kanara district of Karnataka, in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, and elsewhere in the subcontinent. Typologically, brahman possession is little different from non-brahman possession: Much of it is oracular and performative, not unlike non-brahman possession.226 Although possession states are trumpeted (sometimes correctly) as being “of the people” rather than “of the elite” (sometimes conflating brahmans with “the elite” when it is unjustified), at the same time their experience is often framed in the language of that much-ballyhooed elite. As mentioned, a cautionary note should be voiced to the effect that the dictionaries of the regional languages and the training of most of the lexicographers and many of the ethnographers are perhaps skewed toward a more classical (hence elite) expression, yet the evidence currently available nevertheless suggests a healthy diffusion of the terminology of possession from Sanskrit into regional languages, supplementing the terms independent of classical or Sanskritic sources. Indeed, even the countervailing evidence, notably from classical Tamil, cannot safely be marshaled to argue against Sanskritic influence.227 It must be admitted, however, that linguistic borrowing and influence cannot safely be equated with cultural borrowing and influence; words and terms can be borrowed from one language into another to express notions or denote objects that are already present in the intellectual or material culture of the people into whose culture the borrowing takes place. Such linguistic borrowing can occur for reasons of prestige or as part of a general pattern of cultural and linguistic borrowing in which extensive sets of borrowed cultural and linguistic information might contain a smaller number of items already present in the culture into which the borrowing occurs. In the present case, deity or spirit possession might have been a part of tribal or vernacular culture in South Asia before the terminological borrowings for it from Sanskrit and other derivative Indo-Aryan languages occurred. Rem-


nants of tribal shamanism in South Asia suggest that this might be the case, as Rex Jones demonstrates a continuum of ideas and ideologies between tribal shamanism and “ecstatic possession” of Buddhists and caste Hindus.228 Jones’s observations are augmented by Berglie, who discovered spirit meduimship in Nepal among reciters of the Tibetan national epic, the tale of Gesar of Ling.229 What is striking about this for our purposes is that in this epic, Buddhism, which condemns loss of control, eventually emerges victorious over folk religious practice through a narrative acculturation in which peaceful Indian Buddhist mahāsiddhas are given Tibetan origins and identities as heroes and warriors. This merging of Buddhism, folk religion, and shamanistic practice eventually manifested in the practices of epic recitation, in which Buddhist narrators sung the glory of local practices, often while possessed by Gesar himself. “Now,” writes Berglie, “it is more or less an integrated part of Buddhist practice [that] the activities of the spirit-medium are placed in a Buddhist scale of virtues.”230 It is often the case in South Asia that we see these three levels of discourse palimpsested, from the early performers of the vedic śrauta sacrifices to Kóùâa līlā performers to kathāvācaks of Varanasi. Thus the Nepali example helps shed light on the history of possession in South Asia. Both Buddhism and “Brahmanism” were conservative movements, favoring literate text-based priesthoods, deities, and practices over spirit mediums, healers, and local gods, in short, the codified and predictable over the (ostensibly) uncodified and unstructured. The difference, however, between Buddhist and early Sanskritic and Indo-Aryan cultures is that the latter had ancient folk and shamanistic practice embedded within it, even if it lost much of its fluidity and dynamism over time. So the latter were in a good position to provide cultural and linguistic borrowings of phenomena and terminology of possession into vernacular, folk, and even tribal cultures over a very long period of time. The situation that Berglie reconstructs for Nepal and Tibet seems analogous to what occurred in other parts of South Asia thousands of years ago. Although it is possible, we must not assume that tribal and folk cultures preserve intellectual notions and a phenomenology of greater antiquity than those of the literate and dominant or hegemonic cultures. It is relevant here to inquire into the identity of the possessing gods. It is clear from the ethnographies that most of these gods are “folk” rather than “classical,” that they appear to be the property of “little traditions” rather than the “great tradition.” If this dichotomy is projected backward by more


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than a few centuries, which is possible given the evidence of early first-millennium c.e. Tamil literature, then can one not argue that possession was a folk phenomenon Sanskritized in order to confer upon it credibility, rather than assuming that it was vernacularized and localized from Sanskritic culture? Although this question may be merely “academic,” the linguistic evidence suggests that possession pervaded both Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic traditions equally, as just suggested. In any case, proving a direction of flow may be impossible to accomplish definitively, because it would require historical reconstruction beyond what the literary and inscriptional evidence allows. As for Sanskritic and folk deities,231 Antonio Rigopoulos, subscribing to the doctrine of a clear dichotomy between folk and classical, states: “Not all Maharashtrian gods possess their devotees. For instance, Khandoba, Kal Bhairav, Dattatreya do possess but not Ganesha, Rama, Shiva, Krishna, Vithoba, Hanuman, or Vishnu. The list of Hindu gods who do possess, corresponds closely to those ancient non-Aryan local gods who were gradually assimilated into the brāhmaâic tradition.”232 But this is not strictly accurate, as I have heard in Maharashtra (where Rigopoulos worked) first-hand claims of possession by Hanumān, Gaâeśa, and Śiva, and, outside Maharashtra, of Kóùâa (in Nepal),233 the Buddha (also in Nepal),234 Viùâu (in Sri Lanka and Nepal),235 and, as we have seen above, possession by Śiva (as Mahādeva) in Assam (and as shown in Chapter 11, in Andhra Pradesh and in China) as well as in classical Tamil literature.236 It is therefore possible to conclude that in folk contexts classical deities (and other figures) become folk, just as it may be shown that in classical contexts folk deities become classical.237 A good example of the former is in the Draupadī cult, where possession of the Mahābhārata figures occurred under a decidedly folk aesthetic, while Kóùâa as the supreme deity was replaced by a more culturally appropriate flesheating goddess.238 In contemporary India, most deity possession, even of brahmans, is by folk deities.239 Thus the question arises as to whether this helps decide the matter of the direction of flow, from classical to folk or folk to classical, that was left undecided by resorting to linguistic evidence alone. In my view it does not; as I stated above it fuels an argument for dissolving, or at least rethinking, the distinction between folk and classical. As argued above, what we now regard as the folk experience of possession may well have been at one time characteristically classical, as evidence from the ñgveda, the Mahābhārata, the tantric literature, and elsewhere demonstrates. So, from a very


early date a South Asian culture of possession must have existed that enveloped Aryan and non-Aryan, brahman and non-brahman. Catherine Bell deploys the verb “traditionalize” to indicate the act of constructing tradition and the substantive “traditionalization” to indicate the process of such a construction.240 These terms are useful in thinking about the history of possession in South Asia. Based on the juxtaposition of textual and ethnographic data, it appears that possession became traditionalized as it assumed recognizable forms that were deemed religiously empowering and medically safe, while operating within generous margins of social acceptability. This assumes sanctioned and appropriate contexts for possession, which must have been abundant given the range of possession manifestations in South Asia. Furthermore, this traditionalization must have occurred gradually and, to a great extent, beyond the active intellectual reach of the literary traditions. Examples of models of possession that have syncretized and traditionalized “popular” (viz., the products of less-formally educated strata of society) with “learned” (whether Sanskritic or otherwise) elements include the following: the adālat, where little-educated non-brahmans preside over an imagined court and administer ontological justice to members of all social and religious communities; the “accommodated heterodoxy” of Tibetanized Nepali bombo shamans; the Sanskritized ka{arippayattu of Kerala; the performance of the Siri epic of Tulunad officiated by brahmans; and, elsewhere, the marginally successful efforts of New Age trance channelers to mainstream and market their possession “products.” One of the powerful objectives of this traditionalization is to disseminate normative and paradigmatic discourse, in keeping with hegemonic or Great Tradition strategies of legitimation, which privileges theory over experience. In these cases, traditionalization and institutionalization operate synchronically. This may be distinguished from the processes operating in classical India, where, with rare exception in the Sanskrit literature (the exceptions being āyurvedic texts, a few Tantras, and dharmaśāstra texts on karmic ripening [karmavipāka] examined in Chapter 12), possession was never accorded a place in any descriptive or epistemological order. In the latter case, it appears that possession was traditionalized without being institutionalized. In general, it escaped the discursive formalization that has always been an outcome of śāstraic institutionalization, while it nevertheless remained enculturated within the broad boundaries of Sanskritic culture. And its disappearance from this sort of epistemological institutionalization is what has rendered it largely invisible to scholars.


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The ethnographies show that practices of possession can be classified into a small number of categories, regardless of region, from Assam to Sindh, from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka. This accords well with the general distribution of the terms āveśa and grahaâa. The phenomenon of linguistic borrowing, in this case of loanwords, has long been studied, with the general consensus that borrowings of terms with abstract or “cultural” import proceed from a politically and technologically dominant culture into the languages of those under political control or less advanced technologically, while the opposite movement is true for terms for flora, fauna, rivers, and other “natural” phenomena.241 The provisional conclusion, then, unless and until further lexical and other linguistic data become available from regional languages and dialects, is that regardless of the unique manifestation of the possession experience in the non- and semiliterate local cultures, its expression was to a great extent framed by the language and conceptualizations of the elite, dominant cultures, whether Sanskritic or Tamil. This speaks not only of the extent of cultural relations between dominant and local cultures but of the prominence possession must have once enjoyed in the dominant culture before it became locally prominent among nonclassical, non-Sanskritic cultures. This is not to argue, however, for a trickle-down theory, a gesunken Kulturgut, of possession phenomena from dominant Sanskritic cultures to subordinate vernacular ones; in general, such theories have long been discredited. The sociocultural and psychological affinities of bai•hak as performed in Peshawar with, for example, the possession rituals among the Jalari of Andhra Pradesh and the bhūta festivals among the Tulu speakers in Karnataka testify to a broadly distributed cultural form with regional variations that was (and remains) inclusive of Sanskritic culture and, in many places, eventually came to adopt its primary expressions. It is important to note, too, that specific “religions” do not sequester particular domains of possession. Shail Mayaram, who studied possession in Ajmer, Rajasthan, records that a Hindu woman regularly reports possession of Imam Husayn, the grandson of Muhammad, known locally under the eclectic name Pīr Bābā. Conversely, Mayaram notes that a Muslim woman healer reported regular possession of a local mother goddess called Bayasaab Mātā.242 Let us now attempt a composite depiction of possession based on the ethnographies alone. Possession more often than not involves the feminine— either women are possessed or men are possessed by a form of the goddess. In fact, Caldwell suggests that men’s possession might have been inspired by women’s, at least in Kerala. Possession also tends to be ritualized, often in


highly developed calendrically based rituals, religious festivals, or pilgrimages. It is often a part of religious practice (sādhana)—also a feature of Sanskritic possession—and often involves an imitatio dei, as we investigate further in the discussion of āveśa in the realm of bhakti. Possession frequently begets violence, usually sacrificial though occasionally self-inflicted, such as the body-piercing Meyer observed in Tamilnadu and Lawrence in Sri Lanka. Often the individual possessed bears a visage of pain, writhing or screaming, though there is usually no memory of this. It is as if the pain were caused by trying to fit something big, frightening, wild, powerful, awesome, unfamiliar and beautiful into a small, limited, culturally conditioned enclosure. Sometimes, the awesome dominates, resulting in ecstatic wailing, but often the frightening dominates, as the deity (herself, usually) becomes wild and frenzied. Meyer has noted that the frightful possessing goddess is compared to a ghost or flesh-eating spirit (Ta. pēy, picācu < Skt. preta, piśāca). A summation of the ethnographic reports thus permits the observation that the cries of the possessed are, on the one hand, the cries of psychic pain and sheer fright at the power of the possessing agent, while, on the other hand, they are the joyful shrieks arising from the unleashing of repressed sexuality, aggressive emotions, and ecstasy paradoxically generated by the frightening deity (or spirit). The result is an empowerment centered on a wave of devotion to the possessing agent, like power generated from a great dam, whose bound waters nourish and drown. Possession is also healing; demarcated by a secret semantics of liminality, it assuages the wounds of individual and community. A final question we must consider here is eligibility (Skt. adhikāra). Who is eligible for possession? Who is possessed? The issue of eligibility in India is as old as the middle vedic literature, when criteria were fixed for eligibility to perform vedic śrauta sacrifices. Discussions of eligibility were formalized in the PūrvamīmāÅsāsūtras of Jaimini around the third century b.c.e. and have been argued, refined, and modified constantly since then.243 Without doubt, the issue of adhikāra has been a brahmanical, elitist issue that has served socially polarizing ideologies within Indian society as well as the brahamanical historiographical enterprise, as Pollock has shown.244 However, possession is a populist, egalitarian phenomenon that has persisted almost entirely beyond the reach of śāstra or formal brahmanical discourse. Why, then, should this question arise? First, possession has taken on many disguises in South Asian history in the past three or more millennia, and at least a few of them were determined or assisted by the acquisition of particular


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training or levels of initiation. This is evident in the classical period in certain Tantras and bhakti texts and, more recently, in possession festivals in Kerala, Tamilnadu, Garhwal, and elsewhere. Second, the question is of importance because of the likelihood of the influence of Sanskritic culture on popular possession. Although the ritualization of possession as noted in ethnographies does not resemble classical Vedic ritual, the concept of divinization of the body is a theme that runs through Indian religion from the middle vedic literature to contemporary possession performance. We have already examined the phenomenon of the “localization” of divinity in southern India, the narrative act of establishing and circumscribing sacred space in a person, place, or thing. What is relevant here is that this act helps to establish eligibility, conferring a zone of safety, rather than danger, on possession. Possession is not risk-free; it may be dangerous or harmful unless the individual acquires eligibility through initiation, formal training, frequent exposure to others’ possession (which may also be a kind of training), or heredity. Thus eligibility is of great concern to the communities practicing possession. Certain individuals are authorized by the community and occupy a correspondingly higher place in the social structure, as would a formally educated priesthood. For example, Dirks notes that the cāmiyā•i (possessed “deity dancers”) in the Aiyanar festivals in Pudukkottai District of Tamilnadu were “initially chosen for possessing special spiritual powers,” but that the position eventually became hereditary.245 Also prominent is an endemic sense of what is genuine possession and what is pure theater, especially in narrative or festival performance. Zvelebil distinguishes between “genuine possession” and “pseudo-possession,” the former characterized by hieratic trance and the latter either feigned outright or the product of passion. Genuine possession, he says, is a form of “regulated contact with the sacred,” while pseudo-possession is expressed in “poetic conventions dealing with the erotic.”246 This is a distinction that may apply “on the ground,” but, as shown in the following discussions, these are more generally regarded as different modes and discourses of possession than distinct states of genuine and pseudo-possession. This complicates the field of eligibility, in which Zvelebil’s category of “genuine possession” would bear the greatest weight of the criteria for eligibility. It will be of interest to see how Zvelebil’s categories withstand the evidence of classical literature. In living cultures in which possession is recognized, much of it is oracu-


lar, used for divination, healing, and mediumship. It is in these forms that standards of eligibility are most important. But some possession, including (occasionally) oracular, is exhibited in a manner suspiciously akin to madness or intoxication. Although this worries family members, in most cases it is interpreted as the inspired presence of the deity. Thus a post facto form of eligibility is invoked. This exhibition of divine presence as frenzy (a culturally sanctioned dissociative state) is a respected and recognizable part of the tradition of imitatio dei. Already in the ninth century the Tamil poet Mānikkavācakar was calling Śiva a madman (pittaç).247 To what extent madness, as well as contextual notions of eligibility and the localization of sacred space, are shared with possession as reckoned from the classical sources will come into sharper focus in the following discussions. But at the very least we can posit that possession appears to have undergone development with changing social and cultural environments, that it may not be what it once was, at least not completely—in spite of millennia of alleged obfuscation by various orthodoxies who made it their business to try to manage the unmanageable.

Notes 1. This is borne out in a study of the bibliographies in an issue of Puruùārtha devoted to possession; cf. Assayag and Tarabout 1999. The issue contains thirteen articles (excluding the prologue and epilogue), of which five are on Kerala, two each on Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka (one of these on Tulunad), and one each on Rajasthan, Tamilnadu, Nepal, and Kashmir. The brief article on Kashmir is by André Padoux and is the only one in the collection devoted to possession in the premodern period (cf. Chapter 10). 2. These are based on either synonyms or homonyms; see Vogel 1979. 3. Good examples are Sanskrit dictionaries. For example, Monier-Williams’s English-Sanskrit Dictionary (1851) is of no value because it simply has an English word followed by a large number of Sanskrit words, with no effort to contextualize any of them. By contrast, his Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899) is much better in that he often (but, by no means, always) cites texts from which he draws a word’s meanings. Better still is the seven-volume Sanskrit-Wörterbuch by Böhtlingk and Roth (1855–75). Best is the Deccan College dictionary (Ghatage et al. 1976– ), which, after more than half a century of work, including more than three decades of publishing (as of this writing twenty-six fascicles have been published), is about a third of the way through the first letter of the alphabet. Although the completion schedule has become something of a long-running joke, few scholars doubt the validity of the project or, for the most part, its results. Similarly, the Critical Pali Dictionary (Trenckner et al. 1948–90) begun in the nineteenth century is nowhere near


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completion. Most dictionaries of regional languages are utterly nonhistorical. To be generous, however, historically sensitive lexicography is definitely on the increase. See, for example, Tulpule and Feldhaus 1999, for Marathi, which tries to recognize chronological changes in meaning. 4. Sontheimer 1989b:142ff. 5. Erndl 1996:178. 6. Cf. Korom 1992:275ff. 7. Caturvedi and Tiwari 1975; cf. bhūtabādhā. 8. Erndl 1996:178; also Erndl 1993:108. Wadley writes that khelnā “identifies an active and extreme possession which is manifested by the physical activity of the possessed; khelnā is also used to indicate goddess possession in Karimpur” (1976:237n6). 9. Shukla 1980:167. 10. Gold 1988:38. 11. Pfleiderer and Lutze 1979:111. 12. Freed and Freed 1993:17. 13. Glucklich 1997:49. 14. Many of these are found in rural areas, including Bālājī. This contravenes Dumont and Pocock (1959:56–57), who estimated that healers, as distinguished from oracles, are found only in urban settings in India. See Chapter 12 and F. Smith 2004 for notes on the spirit healing center at Chottanikkara in Kerala. 15. The healing centers at Muslim dargāhs (such as at Badayun, in U.P., south of Bareilly) and other Sufi-oriented Muslim healing places (such as Matka Pir in Delhi) have clientele that are at least half Hindu. 16. Dwyer’s ethnographic work (1998, 1999, 2003) was primarily on possession and healing in the main temple of Bālājī, while Pakaslahti has been documenting the work of a healer (bhagat) who conducts his sessions at one of the shrines near the temple. Bālājī has experienced exponential growth in the past twenty-five years, since Kakar was there. Pakaslahti estimates that the better known of the many healers there have hundreds of patients, who are often treated simultaneously. Most of these healers come to Bālājī for regular brief visits from other cities in north India (personal communication); also see Pakaslahti 2005. 17. Much of the following description is based on my own observations at the shrine that Pakaslahti has studied, augmented by Pakaslahti’s explanations; cf. Pakaslahti 1998:146ff. The tactics of exorcism at Bālājī vary so greatly that it is certain that some of what I observed does not occur at all of its exorcism and healing clinics. Conversely, some of the tactics employed at these other centers are not employed in the adālat that I observed. For a vivid depiction of one healing, see a video for which Pakaslahti was the primary research and scientific advisor: Kusum, by Jouko Aaltonen (Illume Co., 69 minutes; Helsinki, 2000). 18. Dwyer 1998:7. 19. The emerging work of Bellamy (2004) at Husain Tekri shows that this image has a broad and varied distribution in northern and western India. 20. This is a common genre of popular music in contemporary India.


21. A Sikh family was also present when I was there and responded similarly. 22. Dwyer 1999:113. 23. Cf. Obeyesekere 1981; Hiltebeitel 1988, 1991. Dwyer notes: “I was told that the possessed frequently experience a choking sensation ( galā bhar ānā), a contraction of the muscles in the throat, and/or a sense of being bound up (bandha); and informants commented that these are the reasons why tight-fitting garments are loosened before, and sometimes during, the ritual, and why a woman’s hair must be untied” (1999:113). 24. See Davis 2001:99ff., and the discussion in Chapter 11, for surrogate possession in eighth- to twelfth-century China. Davis’s important study seeks to free possession (pingfu [to lean on and adhere to]) from its “shamanic substrate” and bring it to the center of Chinese religious practice, as the present effort aims to do for India. Davis, to the detriment of his otherwise tight and groundbreaking study, rarely refers to anthropological theory or other situated studies, at least in English. For example, his acceptance of Rouget’s definition of possession as merely “a trance of identification” (ibid.:1, 84) is often inadequate, even for his material. Nevertheless, he does refer to many studies in French and Japanese, lest anyone assume (as Janice Boddy has, apparently) that English is the sole authoritative language for the study of possession. Also important for Chinese religion is Teiser 1988. He makes a case for placing spirit possession within the “shamanic substrate” (to which Davis reacts). He writes that “the shaman is one who has special mastery over shen—spirits from afar, his own spirit, and spirituality in general. The shaman’s special access to shen, then, implies that his mediumship works both ways: he can be possessed by spirits, and he is an adept at soul journeys” (p. 145). In fact, Chinese elites—Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist—placed these wu (shamanic practitioners) in a substrate. But these are disputes that I am hardly qualified to enter. 25. For a somewhat similar situation, see Werbner and Basu 1998:15, where a dargāh is thought of as a Mughal court presided over by a dead saint, potent with charisma, but whose primary minister is a sajjāda. Again, here we have examples of a debate between healer and jinn, where the person’s body is the battleground between the sajjāda and the client. 26. One of the Sanskrit manuscripts on possession on which I base my discussion in Chapter 11 below employs the compound kapisainyaprakāra, indicating that one is invoking not only Hanumān but also the army of monkeys (kapisainya) that assisted him in his invasion of Laãkā. The phauj here is thus evocative not only of the Rāmāyaâa but of other possession complexes in India. 27. For another example of this, in what must be regarded as an extended South Asian religious complex, see Bertrand 2004 on the conversion of “errant” Khmer spirits in Cambodia known as brāy to Buddhist pāramī, spirits who exhibit the Buddhist perfections (Skt. paramā). See also Vogt 1999, discussed below. 28. “She” because the assistant in this “clinic” was a sensitive woman named Meena who was herself a former patient who came to this work after a series of traumatic events befell her life leading to a nearly total psychological collapse. See also


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Trawick 1992:153, for a roughly similar instance, a woman who had experienced possession of Māriamman when she was young who then became a spirit healer only after a near fatal bout of tuberculosis. 29. Pakaslahti 1998:143. Parry states that in Varanasi, at least, a healer and assistant who work together are recognized by certain specific terms: “The ojhā lures and entraps the ghosts, while the sokhā supervises his efforts and is the real expert in identification” (p. 236, diacritics added). The situation was not quite the same at Bālājī. 30. For a similar process of questioning the spirit in more Islamic-centered possession, see Nasir 1987:165f. For a Buddhist context, see Vogt’s findings in Sri Lanka (below). 31. I am here reminded of a description of an exorcism found in Philostratus’s life of Apollonius of Tyana (Philostratus 1970). Philostratus probably finished writing this text in 220 c.e., while Apollonius, one of the earliest travelers from Greece to India, probably lived in the mid- to late first century c.e. There is no possibility of linking through any recoverable tradition the practice that Apollonius describes with practices in contemporary India. Nevertheless, the passage is of such interest that it is worth quoting in full: In the middle of this conversation, the Wise Men were interrupted by the messenger bringing some Indians who needed cures. For instance, he brought forward a woman praying to them on her son’s behalf. He was sixteen years old, she said, but had been possessed for two years by a spirit with a shy, deceitful character. One of the wise men asked what her evidence was, and she said, “This boy of mine is rather handsome in appearance, and the spirit is in love with him. He will not allow him to be rational, or go to school or to archery-training, or to stay at home either, but carries him off to deserted places. My boy no longer has his natural voice but speaks in deep, ringing tones like a man; his eyes, too, are someone else’s than his own. All this makes me weep and tear my hair, and I scold my son as you would expect, but he does not recognize me. But when I decided on this journey, which I did a year ago, the spirit confessed who he was, using my son as a medium. He said he was the ghost of a man who formerly died in war, still very much in love with his wife; but the woman broke their marriage bond three days after his death by marrying another man, and from that time, he said, he had loathed the love of women and had transferred his affection to my son. And he promised that if I did not accuse him before you he would give many wonderful presents to the boy; and this rather made me change my mind. But he has been keeping me waiting for a long time now, acting as sole master of my house, with his wicked, deceitful ways.” The Wise Man then asked her if the boy was with her, but she said, “No: I did everything to make him come, but that spirit threatened me with mention of ‘cliffs’ and ‘abysses,’ saying he would kill my son if I accused him here.” “Don’t worry,” said the Wise Man; “he will not kill him when he has read


this,” and he brought a letter out of his pocket and gave it to the woman; it was addressed to the spirit, and contained threats and warnings. (pp. 83–84)

This story has many of the elements of what may be found today, including a setting of family therapy, decided dysfunctionality and marked changes in behavior by the individual possessed, identification of the offending spirit, and threats and warnings by the exorcist. 32. Cf. Hiltebeitel 1989a and Mayer’s study of the phenomenon in the Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism (1996:109–132). In the latter case, Śiva as Bhairava and Rudra/Maheśvara is tamed and converted to Buddhism. 33. For more on the cuóail, see Chapter 12. 34. Pakaslahti, personal communication October 2001. 35. See Pakaslahti 1998:139. Dwyer (1998:11ff.) statistically analyzed the results of interviews with 734 patients or their caregivers. He discovered that 35 percent of women and 26 percent of men believed their afflictions were caused by bhūt-prets and that half of both female and male respondents believed that they were harmed by occult practitioners. The biggest differential was between married and single persons: “68 per cent of married persons as opposed to 28 per cent of single persons, in fact, accused their enemies of directly harming them by means of sorcery” (p. 12). Dwyer has much to say about this. 36. Information from Pakaslahti, confirmed by my own observations. I am indebted to him for taking me to Bālājī in April 2001. Casual visitors to Bālājī may examine the immediate surroundings of the main temple, including the pitósthān behind it. On a wide dirt track immediately behind the temple, the visitor may see on any day a fairly large number of people with large heavy stones either balanced on their heads or placed on several parts of their supine bodies. These are meant to press on the bhūtprets in order to help expel them from the victims’ bodies. These stones are clearly much heavier than an ordinary person could bear. The victims might remain motionless in those positions for a few minutes or a few hours before family members struggle to remove the stones. The pitósthān rises on a hill behind the temple and resembles a graveyard of stone tumuli. These are, in fact, commemorative stones to deceased ancestors whose possessed and exorcised descendants have placed them there. This is also a site for ordeals. The “clinics” (a very inadequate word) such as I describe here are quite small, consisting of a room or two in houses outside the main temple. 37. Seidel 1987:228. The bureaucratization of celestial regions and netherworlds in China has long been a source of discussion; see Nickerson 1996. 38. Davis 2001:61. 39. Ibid.:95. Davis comments (101ff.) on the striking similarity of exorcism rituals with Song dynasty criminal proceedings. 40. Ibid.:2001:106, also 46. The notion of an army of spirits is not unique to India and China. In Uganda this notion has been elevated to real armies, battles for national political control, and mass murder; see Behrend 1999. 41. Davis 2001:45ff. for accounts of the exorcistic services of fashi, a somewhat amorphous class of ritual specialists who could be Daoist priests, laymen, or spirit-


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mediums. See also Schipper 1993:49ff. on the category of “barefoot master.” The fashi is the lowest-ranking priest in the Daoist hierarchy. He commands spirit militias filled with petty demons, hungry ghosts, and wandering spirits, and his troops “save the people, fight evil, and heal the sick” (ibid.:50). 42. Davis 2001:106. 43. Cf. Shulman 1994:7f. 44. Davis 2001:109. 45. Seidel 1987:229. See also Eder 1973:194ff., passim, on the division of the Chinese universe into yin (darkness) and yang (light): “A shen, a good spirit or god, comes from the beneficent half of the universe; a kuei, a demon or spectre from the opposite half. Every good in the world comes from a shen, every evil is inflicted by a kuei” (p. 195). Furthermore, “[a]fter death the soul is helplessly exposed to hordes of spirits” (p. 194). Only through the grace of bodhisattvas can these beings be saved. Note the vague resonance of this with the rationale behind the increasingly popular mass exorcisms of the living in contemporary American Christianity documented by Cuneo 2001. For complex demonologies in the Hindukush, with Indic, Chinese, and Central Asian influence, see Jettmar 1975:219ff. 46. Pakaslahti 1998:132. 47. Goudriaan 1977:145; this is in a collection of Balinese hymns written in very corrupt Sanskrit. 48. Cf. Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati 43.68. For more on Khabgarāvaâa, see Chapters 10 and 12. 49. Cf. Sen 1971:701–702. Sen gives the etymological meanings of bhar(a) as “weight, load, cargo; full” and of bhara as “to fill up, to thrust in.” These meanings are a short step to possession. Nevertheless, I am unable to find uses of the Sanskrit √bhó in the sense of possession; usually it has little meaning beyond the literal “excess, bearing; burden, weight, mass, bulk, fullness.” Hints, such as ñV 1.60.5, vājaÅbhara, hardly serve as evidence. Östör 1980 notes the Bengali ānanda korā (to make joy), a joy that serves as the “the basis of devotion to and possession by Bhairab, Śiva’s deputy in the gājan” (p. 138). Their merrymaking, their ānanda, is a result of consumption of large quantities of country wine. See also Bellamy’s observation noted in Chapter 2, n. 196. 50. Sen 1971:701. 51. Bhattacharyya 1986:172. 52. Ibid.:59–75, 180–181. Alternative terms for māthār golmāl are māthākhārāp (bad-head), māthā-garam (hot-head), and the Sanskrit borrowing unmāda (insanity) (p. 65). Maloney (1976:132) adds the Bengali mukh-lāge (evil face). See also Gonda 1969 for a detailed study of early Indian (and Indo-Iranian) notions of the nature and consequences of eye contact. On the evil eye, ághoracakùun (ñgveda 10.85.44), ághoreâa cákùusā (Atharvaveda 14.2.12), etc., see pp. 33ff. 53. E.g., Netratantra 19.2. As we see in Chapter 12, the curse of the evil eye is quite predominant in this text of the end of the first millennium c.e. 54. I am grateful to Amitava Bhattacharji for this information. 55. On the manifestations of naμar and its relationship to desire and caste, see


Pocock 1992. See also Kapadia 2000:182, for remarks on the evil eye (tirusti < Skt. dóù•i) in Tamil. 56. Without citing sources, Maloney gives two additional Sanskrit words: kudóù•i (weak sight, evil or sinister eye, heterodox opinion or doctrine) and pāpadóù•i (sinsight). These are, however, common enough in Sanskrit. Cf. Maloney 1976:128. 57. Bhattacharyya 1986:181. Note Bhattacharya’s alternation between the nonretroflex and retroflex “l.” 58. McDaniel 1990:21 and passim; see also McDaniel 1988:87–99. 59. McDaniel 1988; idem 1990:91; also Caldwell 1996:207. I have corrected the transliteration and diacritics of both Bhattacharyya and McDaniel. 60. McDaniel 1988:87, 96. 61. Ibid.:87. 62. Ibid. 63. Molesworth 1857:76. 64. Molesworth states in his introduction that his sources consisted of paâbits in the Konkan area of coastal Maharashtra. 65. Karpūramañjarī, 37–38, 243. 66. Tulpule and Feldhaus 1999:72. 67. Cf. Stanley 1988:40ff.; also Sontheimer 1989b:78. Compare this with bhūt bādhā (harmful possession by a ghost); Stanley 1988:26ff. Sontheimer notes that one who is possessed by any of these the gods Birobā, Mhaskobā, and Khaâbobā is called devācī jhāb (god’s tree) (p. 193). 68. Wadley 1976:238. Wagle records bhūte āãgī vābhu lāglī (became possessed by bhūts), āãgāt vābhlā (possessed), and bhutācā asvār āâūn (the bhūt was induced to possess) in court documents dated 1812 (1995:197, 211). 69. Stanley 1988:27. 70. Ibid.:57. 71. Ibid.:48. The district gazetteers published throughout India beginning in the 1870s and revised periodically for at least a century are also useful sources for possession. In spite of the normatively brahmanical presentation of religion in some of the volumes (e.g., the Satara District gazetteer), others try to present a more balanced view. For example, the Poona District gazetteer discusses the demigod Vetā{a, the local demonology, and the ubiquity of belief in spirits and possession in Maharashtra; cf. Gazetteer of Bombay State: Poona District (1954:126–128). 72. Feldhaus 1995:48, cf. also pp. 11–13; and 126ff. for ethnographies. 73. Ibid.:134. 74. Berti 1999:61–97. 75. Berglie 1976:86. Berglie worked with Tibetan refugee communities in Nepal and India in the early 1970s. He does not state that spirit-mediumship among the Tibetan refugees in Nepal is constituted differently from that in Tibet. It is unlikely to have accumulated significant influences from the indigenous Nepali population by that date. 76. Another study of possession and spirit belief among Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhist tribals in central Nepal is by Gaborieau (1975a), who has recorded statements allegedly uttered by members of a class of spirits of the dead, those who suf-


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fered accidental death, called bāyu. See also the excellent studies by Crook (1997, 1998) on oracular possession among Ladakhi Buddhists, as well as the shamanic narratives and Buddhist metanarratives that guide the process. 77. Srinivas 1998:134. 78. In western Nepal, Gaborieau (1975b:158ff ) has noted that the word avatār is normally employed for the possession of a deity by a medium. This possession is instigated by a tantric master who calls the deities into the body of the medium. Clearly, there is a greater infusion of Indo-Aryan (IA) terminology in Nepali (an IA language) than there is in Ladakhi. 79. Srinivas 1998:132. See Nagano 2000:587f., for distinctions made between kinds of possessed festival mediums among the Tibetans of northern Tibet and southern Qinghai province, China: “Tibetan people generally judge the greatness of a lha pa on the basis of whether or not he can verbalize the gods’ words. In addition to that, they distinguish a lha pa from a lha pa tshab on the basis of whether he has actually been possessed. They also distinguish between lha (rang) ’bab rgyab ‘the deity itself descends from heavens’ and lha phab/’bebs ‘to make a deity descend.’” See Paper 1995:54ff., 115, for a description of four shamanic specialists in ancient China. It is possible that there is a common ancestry for these groups. 80. Srinivas 1998:126. 81. See Mumford, who renders mi-kha as “envious talk” (1989:140). 82. Considerable information on possession in Nepal is in Hitchcock and Jones 1976; also Samuel 1993:194–196. 83. Höfer 1994. This exemplary work is first and foremost a linguistic study, though this inevitably leads to a “thick description” of Tamang shamanic ritual. The book also includes glossaries of Tamang, Tibetan, and Nepali words. Admirably, Höfer devotes considerable space to explaining his terms. 84. Ibid.:20. See also Gutschow 2004 for this and related shamans and oracles in Ladakh. 85. Ibid.:26–27, 72–74. 86. Bakhtin 1981; cf. Mumford 1989:13ff. 87. Mumford makes extensive use of Bakhtin’s observations (1968, 1984) on Rabelais and Dostoevsky. 88. Spirits are often said to be fond of milk; see the translations of the āyurvedic texts in Chapter 12. Note also in the same chapter the discussion of the Malayalam word kaiviùa, a kind of poisoning in which spirit possession is involved. 89. Mumford 1989:196ff. 90. Ibid.:144. See also the discussion of the Madanamahārâava in Chapter 12. 91. Ibid.:148. Mumford adds, “The shaman regards his own exorcisms as more effective for that reason, justifying his own violent rites as the only effective way to expel demons from the community.” 92. Berglie 1982a, also see Berglie 1976, 2000. For more on the dpa’-bo, see p. 304f. For a wealth of material on shamanic healing and possession in northern Tibet, much of which is clearly imprinted on Nepali Buddhist shamanic possession, see Bellezza 2005. Unfortunately, this volume came to me too late to make full use of it.


93. She was a bākinī and one of the main consorts of Padmasambhava. 94. It is not without interest that the dpa’-bo call the mirror gling (“world”); cf. Berglie 1976:94. This appears to be consistent with the tenor of Buddhist philosophy. See my extended discussion of this in Chapter 11. See Bellezza 2005:23–28 for an interesting description of a number of Tibetan words for this magical mirror. 95. Berglie 1982b:164. 96. Berglie 2000:30. See also Pettigrew and Tamu (1994), who briefly describe possession among the Gurang of central Nepal. The term for possession in that dialect of Nepali is khhelye khhaba (god has caught, captured, covered) (p. 421n4). 97. Dietrich 1998, esp. pp. 39ff. for demonologies, pp. 160ff. for healing practices. Regrettably, the book does not include an index. 98. An important study of psychiatric treatment from the textual point of view, with a few ethnographic examples, is Clifford 1984. This is discussed extensively in Chapter 12. See also Merz 1996, which describes the goddess Hāratī in the Kathmandu Valley, whose cult has arisen since the mid-twentieth century. Hāratī confers on her devotees oracular possession as well as disease, but also heals. This is consistent with evidence found elsewhere for other deities. See also Diemberger 2005 on various terms for oracles and oracular possession in southern and central Tibet. 99. Cf. Hiltebeitel 1988, 1991, passim, esp. note 1988:275. 100. Cf. R. L. Turner 1969:65, #1437, also #1446, āvēsika. See also Obeyesekere 1970:98 and Hiltebeitel 1988:275. Although Simhala is an Indo-Aryan language, āvesa in Sri Lanka shares semantic features with its counterpart in Tamil. 101. Obeyesekere 1981:34, passim. 102. Ibid.:24, 84, 100f., passim. 103. Fabricius 1897 [1972]:61–62. 104. Cf. Carman and Narayanan 1989:168. I thank Vasudha Narayanan for the Tamil text. 105. Handelman and Shulman 2004: 40; see also Shulman 2002:134. On the Sanskrit anugraha, see Chapter 12. 106. Hiltebeitel 1991:344. 107. Ibid.:343f; see also Reiniche 1979. 108. Hancock 1995:89n19. This observation requires further corroboration. That I have not seen this distinction elsewhere raises the question of whether Hancock’s informant was sharing no more than her personal syntactic sensibility. 109. Meyer 1986. 110. Cf. Ramaswamy 1997. 111. Meyer 1986:110n2. 112. Ibid.:110. 113. Ibid.:258ff. More important is Klimkeit 1976. 114. Klimkeit’s use of term teufelstänz is thus not an accurate translation, but reflects the usage of previous scholarship extending back to the early eighteenth century and Ziegenbalg. Clearly “devil’s dance” is pejorative and must be understood in the context of Protestant missionary activity on the Malabar coast; e.g., Burnell 1894, 1896. See also Brückner 1987 and, much more extensively, 1995.


tions and sources (e.g., from the traditions based on the Bhāgavata Purāâa) ultimately derives from Tamil texts and religiosity. Tieken proposes to reverse this. If this were true (and I do not see a definitive solution), then the history of devotional, oracular possession would have to be revised, placing the time of its popularization a half a millennium later and its locus more squarely in Sanskritic rather than Tamil religiosity. 136. Hardy comments on the female presence in Tamil possession and ecstatic dancing: “Therefore it may not be accidental that in later bhakti religion, where these forms of worship appear again, the psychology of religious awareness is ‘female’” (1983:140). 137. The south Indian origin of what he rather flatly calls “emotional bhakti” is one of the main themes of Hardy’s Viraha-Bhakti. 138. Vogt 1999:xi. 139. Wirz 1954:14ff.; also Scott 1994:16, passim. 140. Scott 1994:279. 141. Wirz 1954:14ff. 142. Vogt 1999:13. 143. Ibid.:11, table 2. 144. Ibid.:109ff. 145. Ibid.:xi. 146. Exceptions to this perhaps harsh assertion may nevertheless be cited, e.g., Hiltebeitel, Sax, Korom, and certainly others. 147. Vogt’s psychological interpretations (ibid.:74ff.) are indebted to the work of J. L. Moreno, the founder of “sociometry” and “psychodrama.” Her interpretations are intriguing and often convincing. However, she does not support her otherwise good arguments for application of Moreno’s ideas with reasons why Moreno’s psychodrama is more compelling than Freudian or other allied psychoanalytic theories. Moreno, for better or worse, stands beyond the pale of Freudian and other more medicalized systems that dominate psychological perspectives of scholars in the humanities and that have, partly for this reason, achieved greater subtlety and nuancing than Moreno’s views. 148. Ibid.:130. 149. Ibid.:48, yakunte dharmayan ana-kirima (Simhala); see also pp. 84–100. 150. See Walters 2000 for a powerful critique of the uses and misuses of the Pāli vaÅsas by the authors themselves, nationalist Sri Lankans of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and European scholars of the same period. Despite many valuable insights, Walters is much too (fashionably) zealous in stigmatizing the textualists upon whom his own work depends. 151. Scott’s postcolonial positionings are much more sophisticated than Vogt’s. The latter was clearly unfamiliar with Scott’s work. My comments above on the freedom of continental European scholarship to work outside the present trends of postcolonialism, etc., should be tempered by such admissions. 152. Vogt 1999:131. 153. Scott 1994:228. In spite of this, it must be noted, Scott appears to be un-


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aware of what these virtuous commands actually are. Although he adds that aâaguna “conveys in fact the very force of the Buddha’s moral authority” (p. 25), he appears not to have studied the Buddhism that he admits rests at the basis of this healing process. 154. Caldwell 1996:201. 155. Ibid.:202. 156. Freeman 2001:187, 384n1. 157. Cf. Freeman 1993:134, 1998:73–98; also see Nambiar 1993. 158. Cf. Albert Lord’s notion of the “formula” (1960:30ff ). 159. Tarabout 1986. 160. Freeman 1993:113n7. 161. Ibid.:131. 162. Caldwell 1996:207; for this word see the earlier discussion of Meyer’s account of possession of Aâkālaparamēcuvari. 163. Caldwell 1999:213. 164. Blackburn 1988:229–230nn22–27. 165. Zarrilli 1998:212. 166. Brückner 1995; Honko 1998. Among the earlier studies are Abbé Dubois 1818:728–730, Prabhu 1977, and the works of Burnell cited in note 113. See also Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya 1984; and Claus 1973, 1979. For references to these and other studies, see Honko 1998:247nn95–97. 167. Claus 1979:38. 168. Brückner 1987:20;1995:66ff. 169. Tulu replaces the velar “ś” with the retroflex “ù.” 170. Claus 1984:62ff. 171. Brückner 1987:26. 172. Cf. Zvelebil 1988:145–146, 2000:185, where the word is transliterated ja:ya. Zvelebil does not comment on why ja:ya is exclusively a male enterprise. He adds: “Foretelling the future, divination, and possession are obviously part of an archaic layer of Irula tribal religion” (ibid.). See also Zvelebil’s brief notes on pe:y/pe:, 2000:188. 173. Hutton 1921a, esp. 178ff; 1921b, esp. 192ff. 174. Ibid.1921b:xv. 175. Ibid.:193. 176. Ibid.1921a:180. 177. See Viswa Shanti Devi Yajña Committee, Viswa Shanti Devi Yajña (2004). A “world peace sacrifice to the goddess” (viśva-śānti-devī-yajña) was performed at that time. All quotations are from pp. 11–15 of the book. I am grateful to Loriliai Biernacki for lending this to me. 178. The Web site www.hindubooks.org/temples/assam/kamakhya/page23. htm states cogently that the festival is “so called because of the tremendous sound produced by the instruments such as drum, dhole, etc.” This argues for a more shamanistic identity of debaddhani. 179. The chapbook says nine are possessed, but Loriliai Biernacki reports that,


according to her informants, the number is not fixed, and as many as fifteen have been possessed in previous years. 180. Cf. the descriptions of possession found in the principal āyurvedic texts; see Chapter 12. 181. Wadley 1976:235. Her main sources for these words are Berreman 1963 and Planalp 1956. 182. I am in no position to comment authoritatively on the distribution of these words. 183. Henry 1981:303; Lambert 1988:356. 184. Fuchs 1964. 185. McClintock 1990:37, 47. 186. See the Gujarat State Gazetteers: Broach District 1961: 121, 124; also p. 124 for a vivid description of the rite of exorcism. 187. Wagle 1995:194, 198. 188. McClintock 1986:42–47. Bhattacharyya’s discussion is recommended for its linguistic sensitivity. 189. On Vodoun possession by loa, the local spirits, see Hurston 1938: “The person mounted does nothing of his own accord. He is the horse of the loa until the spirit departs. Under the whip and guidance of the spirit-rider, the ‘horse’ does and says many things he or she would never have uttered un-ridden” (p. 221). 190. phab ity anena mantreâa tatrāśvārohaâa viśet | Āgamarahasyam 3899ab, 2:330. 191. Macdonald 1975:327n5, for regional variants of this word. Dietrich 1998:259 and passim, records the word dhami as a rural variant. 192. Viswa Shanti Devi Yajña Committee (2004):15. 193. Cf. Mumford 1989:148n12; also Aziz 1978:52ff. Mumford labels sngags pas as “magicians” who practice “violent” means of exorcism. In this sense, he may be misrepresenting the teachings and practices of sngags pas themselves, but correctly representing the views of local Tibetan villagers in remote parts of Nepal who, over centuries of direct contact and folklore, have come to see them as such. 194. See, for example, the Sanskrit manuscripts on possession discussed in Chapter 11. 195. Although this is correct in its Sanskritic reference, Gellner notes that in Newari the word vaidya refers to “any type of healer who is not directly possessed” (2001:97). 196. See Carstairs and Kapur 1976. 197. Brückner 1995:89ff.; Honko 1998:341. Claus is more specific, stating that this is used for a spirit medium (1979:29). 198. Macdonald 1975:118. 199. Höfer 1994:18. Macdonald’s designation is also too restrictive for Gellner, who, like Höfer, regards a jh7Åkri as a shaman in a more general sense; cf. Gellner 1994:31. 200. Ibid.; also Merz 1996:347. Hāratī, the “goddess who steals,” is a Hindu-


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Buddhist crossover deity. She is worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists, her temple ritual is performed by Newar Buddhist Vajrācāryas, and she is related to other deities of possession, including her husband Unmatta (“Drunken”) Bhairava and several of their children. 201. Cf. Gellner 1988. 202. Gellner 1994:31 (= 2001:202). 203. Gellner 1994:32 (2001:203). 204. Gellner 1992:326ff. 205. Höfer 1994:17–19. 206. Gaborieau 1975a:73, 76ff. 207. Berglie 1976. 208. Dietrich 1998:119–159. 209. Karim 1988:277–309. 210. The kabirāj is also discussed by Risley 1891:362–366. 211. Karim 1988:295. The word bhasan, writes Karim, “suggests one who is floated” (p. 307n15). 212. Shukla 1980:167. 213. Caldwell 1996:223n23. It is of little value to discuss words found in dictionaries without comment or contextualization. Thus it suffices to merely mention that the old standard English and Tamil Dictionary, by Winslow, Spaulding, and Pillai (1888 [1842]), lists the following: under “possession by an evil spirit”–tēvarālan, veôiyā••u, āvēsam (p. 1019); under “oracle”–āvēsakkāram, tēvarālan, pa•imatton. 214. Freeman 2001:190. 215. Inglis 1985:90–91; for a similar list see Diehl 1956:221ff. Inglis studied the similarities between possession dancers and the local manufacture of clay images, both serving as vessels for the divine. We have seen this image of the possessed as a vessel in Tibetan and in Tulu, via Sanskrit. Doubtless it occurs elsewhere in South Asia as well and is a common image elsewhere in the world. For example, Spanish attests vasos preferidos (chosen vessels) and cajitas (little boxes), for those who accept certain spirits for oracular and curative purposes; cf. Kay F. Turner 1992:126. 216. Lawrence 2003. 217. Maloney 1980:242. 218. Ibid.:242ff.; for more on the evil eye in the Maldives, see pp. 258ff. This is not unlike a brujo in Mexico. On the evil eye in Sri Lanka, see Wirz 1954:178f. 219. On Telugu, see Knipe 2001. He observes that the Telugu word for “possession speech” is vakku (cf. the observation by Lawrence in Sri Lanka) and that “possession ritualists who have one or more neighborhood goddesses ‘come to’ or ‘come on’ them, to employ common Telugu parlance for possession [is] an event also known substantively by the word pūnakam” (p. 344). In a more recent article (2004), Knipe states, importantly, that “Godavari Brahmans are reluctant to mention āveśa, samāveśa, or related experiences, whereas pūnakam, the moment when Ammavāru or a deceased person descends on the occupant of a gaddi [a ‘seat’ for a possession ritualist, shared with the goddess], is eagerly discussed by all ritualists who


claim routine divine visitation, as well as by their clients and assembled audiences who share each detail with the village and town folk at large” (p. 440). See also Nuckolls (1991a), who mentions that in Telugu a person on or in whose body a deity comes is called bhaktudù (m) or bhakturàlu (f ) (< Skt. bhakta; a devotee). I suspect that these words have broader semantic fields. 220. However, see the 1961 edition of the Broach (present-day Bharuch) district gazetteer (123ff.). Spirits are referred to as bhūts, as is the case all over northern India, while the word for possession is va{gan. Spirits are divided into family or household spirits (bharâābhūt) and outside spirits (baharâābhūt). If a man remarries after the death of his first wife, it is believed that the spirit of the first wife might possess the second. However, if post-mortem rites are properly performed, the spirit will be pacified. An array of spirits and goddesses of lower-caste Hindus are believed to be responsible for the possession. More fieldwork must be done on possession in Gujarat to fill out this very thin picture. 221. See, for example, Troisi 1976, which lists more than five hundred studies of this “tribe,” as it is still classified, of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, most of them in English, in many of which, doubtless, one can find references to spirit possession. 222. Nevertheless, I am reminded by William Sax that though “everyone gets possessed, high caste and low, upper caste people tend to deny it of themselves [at least in Garhwal], and attribute it to the subalterns” (personal communication, November 1999). This he attributes to brahmanical image-conjuring rather than suppression, though he does see an effort of Hindu nationalists to suppress possession and other kinds of popular Hinduism. This prurience is little different from that of their detested Victorian predecessors. Pakaslahti has hard evidence to back up Sax’s observations: “Seeking help from Balaji is not related to illiteracy, low caste status or rural domicile, as the majority of the clientele has average or better than average education, belong to the higher castes and are of urban domicile” (1998:164). 223. Ramanujan 1986a:69. 224. Knipe notes that vaidika brahmans in the community he has studied in coastal Andhra Pradesh do “not enter into a heightened state of consciousness after drinking soma.” Yet they are “well aware of the emotional rhetoric of transformation, most dramatically in the large-scale sharing of soma in a śrauta sacrifice such as the vājapeya, pauâbarīka, sarvatomukha or the currently rare agniù•oma for a newly initiated member of the soma society” (2004:438). 225. For example, the presence in the Draupadī cult’s Mahābhārata of a Muslim devotee, Muttāl Rāvuttaç, who serves Draupadī by accepting blood sacrifices for her and receiving impure offerings, including gāñjā, opium, cigars, and arrack. At one temple, red and green chili peppers are offered to his dog. Cf. Hiltebeitel 1988:101– 127. It is difficult to imagine a more non-brahmanical Mahābhārata. 226. Cf. Prabhu 1977; Honko 1998:389–421; also Knipe 1989. It is important not to commit the error of assuming that because the vocabulary of possession in northern India is in a large number of instances derived from Sanskrit, while in southern India it is less the case, possession in the north is more inclusive of upper


171

classes. North Indian languages are Indo-Aryan while south Indian languages are not, so the idiom of possession in the north would “naturally” be more Sanskritic. Similarly, the presence of a Dravidian vocabulary for possession in the south cannot be used as evidence that the possession is somehow non-brahmanical. Correlation of language with culture is an idea that is dying all too slowly; one would have thought that this would have ceased sixty-five years ago with the publication of Frans Boas’s Race, Language and Culture (1940). 227. Note the superannuation of the term aâaãku in present-day Tamil (or Malayalam) by the concept (and term) śakti. 228. Cf. Jones 1968. See now Davidson 2002 for a wealth of evidence that tribal practices influenced the development of Mahāyāna Buddhism in the first millennium c.e. 229. Berglie 1996. This epic is still transmitted largely orally, through bards of virtually every stratum of Tibetan society. No standard edition of the text exists, nor is one likely to be produced anytime soon. Geoffrey Samuel has also done important work on the traditions and shamanic dimensions of the Gesar epic; see Samuel 1991, 1994, 2005. 230. Ibid.:17. 231. I agree with Gellner (2001), following Dumont and Pocock, that “it is probably better to talk only of Great Traditions, which certainly exist, and to contrast them with ‘popular religion.’ To call the latter a Little Tradition either appears to imply that it is organized in the same way as the Great Traditions (which it is not) or that it constitutes a pool of survivals of pre-Hindu or pre-textual practices (which is doubtful)” (p. 100). Here I equate “folk” with Gellner’s “popular religion.” 232. Cf. Rigopoulos 1993:54n18. Rigopoulos reports that a devotee of Sai Baba, possessed by Khaâbobā, supplied information on Sai Baba’s personal history (47f., 53f.) (which, unfortunately, Rigopoulos accepts as pramāâa). Sontheimer (1989a, 1989b, and elsewhere) also supports the folk vs. classical Hinduism dichotomy. But the dichotomy Sontheimer writes about is based only on recent historical and contemporary arrangements. 233. Cf. Gellner 2001:203. For certain spiritual practices (upāsana) that involve possession of Hanumān, see Śrīmālī n.d. 234. Gellner writes: “a Maharjan (Farmer) man from a village south of Lalitpur who appeared one day in Kwā Bāhān (an important Buddhist sacred complex) and claimed to be possessed by Kwābāju, i.e. Śākyamuni Buddha, was met with polite but definite scepticism” (2001:211). For a description of a spirit medium who “dances” Śākyamuni Buddha in contemporary Singapore, see DeBernardi 1995:158. 235. See Holt 2004a, 2004b for Viùâu possession in Sri Lanka; and Gellner 1988 [2001:102] on the possession of the king of Nepal: “He was considered to be like Vishnu and to be possessed by him in ritual contexts.” 236. See also Dietrich 1998:236, for an account of a Nepali healer who claims possession by Brahmā, Viùâu, and Śiva, among others. 237. Not only is the latter apparent from much of the evidence presented in this volume, but one of the primary areas of Indological study in the twentieth century


was the determination of Aryan and non-Aryan in early Sanskrit literature. See, for example, Deshpande 1995. 238. Cf. Hiltebeitel 1991. 239. Erndl states: In reading about South Asia, one often gets the impression that possession, along with related ecstatic behavior, belongs to the “little tradition” and is thus largely confined to the lower castes and the poor and uneducated in rural areas. However, in my experience, the phenomenon of possession in the cult of Śerāãvālī is widespread throughout the population. I have witnessed Goddess possession in both village and urban settings, among low and high castes (including Brahmins), the poor and the rich, the uneducated and the educated, Sikhs as well as Hindus. (1996:179)

240. Bell argues that ritualization is not a “standardized process” of traditionalization, but that: [r]itual can be a strategic way to “traditionalize,” that is, to construct a type of tradition, but in so doing it can also challenge and renegotiate the very basis of tradition to the point of upending much of what has been seen as fixed previously or by other groups. Examples abound, ranging from the ascetic internalization of the Vedic sacrifice and the iconoclasm of early Ch’an Buddhism to the Reformation’s challenge to papal authority through a recreation of the free outpouring of the spirit to the early church. (1992:124)

241. For an accessible general discussion of this, see Bryant 2001, ch. 5. As I write this in Iowa, I am surrounded by the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, South Dakota and Nebraska, while the best-known place names in the region are those of the Mississippi River and the city of Chicago. All of these are Native American names, the total number of which by now surely exceeds the number of Native Americans in these areas who have any knowledge of their ancestral languages. Although an extreme example, it is nevertheless not wholly dissimilar to the results found elsewhere of linguistic and cultural contact. 242. Mayaram 2000. 243. See F. Smith 1987:59–63, 121–223. 244. See Pollock 1990. 245. Dirks 1992:231. Possession within epic or other narrativized ritual performance in south India yields rather similar results; cf. Hiltebeitel, Brückner, Biardeau, Caldwell, Freeman, and others. 246. Zvelebil 1981:82. See also Stewart 1995:574ff. for a modern story of a faked devotional possession during the life of Haridāsa, a devotee of Śrī Caitanya in the early sixteenth century. 247. Yocum 1982:144. There is earlier testimony for this in the Mahābhārata tale of Aśvatthāman, discussed in Chapter 6.


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115. Nabokov 2000:120. 116. Foulston 2002:140ff. 117. Cf. Diehl 1956:177; also Biardeau 1989b:149f., 153f. Foulston’s study is thin on linguistic data and records none from Oriya. 118. Foulston 2002:143. 119. Ibid.:149. 120. Collins 1997:111. 121. Nabokov 2000:126–127. 122. Ibid.:126–137, 159. 123. Cf. Kapadia 2000. 124. Ibid.:183. 125. Cf. Feldhaus (1995), whose findings support Dumont. 126. Ibid.:198. 127. Ibid. 128. Hancock 1995 and Chapter 2. 129. Hart 1975:28. Another example is found in the Shilappadikaram; cf. Adigal 1965:150–151. 130. Lawrence 2003. 131. Ibid.:101. 132. Ibid.: 115. Hiltebeitel shows the same resolution of āvēsam in the Draupadī cult in northern Tamilnadu. 133. It is relevant here to cite Bertrand’s 2004 study of spirit possession and Buddhism in Cambodia, because what he finds resembles in part the situation in Sri Lanka. In one important way, however, it is dissimilar. In Cambodia many monks, in addition to laity, undergo possession in which they attempt to convert wayward spirits to Buddhism. This, observes Bertrand, “is a complete infraction of the Vinaya, the code of conduct that regulates the life of monks. . . . Trance is unacceptable for a monk, as it is proof of the absence of serenity and a lack of behavioural control” (p. 163). Thus many of these monks “chose to [temporarily] defrock rather than break the monastic rules” (ibid.). The situation in Cambodia is unique, however. The large number of new mediums there, both lay and monastic, is often interpreted “as the wish of the Buddha to aid mankind and also to pacify and educate all the souls of the dead killed under Pol Pot” (p. 166). The proximity of Buddhist monks to deity or spirit possession is discussed elsewhere as well; cf. DeCaroli 2004:25ff., 128ff. 134. Yocum 1982:189. It is also important to see the evidence from various firstmillennium Tamil sources gathered by Hardy (1983:136–138, passim). 135. Yocum 1982:188ff. Anyone who has read this far would profit by referring to Yocum’s section on possession (pp. 187–194). On the matter of dating, see Tieken’s revisionist view attributing the Caãkam poetry to the second half of the first millennium c.e. (2001) and Hart’s strong criticism of this view (2004). Both authors argue their cases well. I am not qualified to say which of the two is right. However, I must offer two observations: (1) the consensus remains that the Caãkam poetry is of the first half of the first millennium c.e. (2) This is important because it is assumed that much of Indian devotional possession deriving from Sanskrit tradi-



III Classical Literature

L

eaving aside the technical argument that literature requires knowledge of the written word, Indian literature may be said to begin with the Vedas. Among the topics given priority in the Vedas is, by no accident, beginnings, and, as we explore below, possession was the means by which the gap between spirit and matter was, in the beginning, closed. From the earliest explorations of the nature of essence, substance, volition, movement, and their interactions, to more concretized and localized concerns that were not just contiguous and stratified but integrated and sedimented as well, the Vedas recognized the fact of linkages or interpenetrations. These were often conceived poetically, through the operation of word, speech, Vāc, the motile force of the gods replicated in the sacred song of the sages. This was the richness of their world. It was an assemblage and interpenetration of all of these forces—essences, substances, volitions, movements—which lay at the basis of multiplicity and, as more commonly envisioned, possession. These were also, again by no accident, the earliest forays into the nature of person, personality, and selfhood, the mechanics of entanglement and disentanglement. Thus the Vedas explore possession as an ontological necessity, as an experience of the sages in the consumption of their sacred soma, ritually produced and imbibed. It is also

174 Part III. Classical Literature

deployed in a more general sense of entrance, pervasion, and occupation, and finally as the possession of one whole integrated being by another, such as a woman by a gandharva, granting an oracular experience, or anyone by a gr6hī, which could produce death, disease, or fainting. From here we move to the Sanskrit epics, particularly the Mahābhārata (MBh), which undoubtedly reflect prevailing attitudes toward and practices of possession, many of which are only dimly visible in the Vedas and which decisively set the agendas for possession in South Asia for the next two millennia. This is a strong statement, but the MBh has been the most fundamental and influential text in Indian history, a remark that hardly requires defense in the present context. The MBh explores several kinds of possession and brings an array of emotional and energetic forces to bear on the topic. We move from the epics to Sanskrit philosophy, classical literature, and devotional movements, which comprise vast segments of the Indic literary record. The discourses on possession in these texts is as varied as the texts themselves, ranging from yoga, Jainism, and Vedānta, to didactic tales, such as those found in the Kathāsaritsāgara, pure but socially observant entertainment, such as the Bhagavadajjukāprahasana, hagiographic texts such as the many biographies of Śaãkarācārya, and the texts written by some of the founders of the bhakti schools of north India, including Jīva Gosvāmī and Vallabhācārya, as well as many of the saints of South India, some of them written in classical Tamil.


5

The Vedas a

s


Embodiment and Disembodiment Among the ñùis The vedic literature from the ñgveda (ñV) to the classical Upaniùads is the earliest source of information on possession in India. It is also among the most unambiguous. Because one of the principal arguments of this book is that there is a recognizable “tradition” of possession in India, it is necessary to say a few words about the early relationship between the folk and the classical as this bears greatly on any allegation of a tradition widely regarded as an experiential phenomenon with a popular discourse that largely bypasses ancient and classical literature. I say this in spite of all the evidence adduced in the following chapters, because most of these texts, or at least the passages cited in them, exist on the periphery of mainstream classical literature, by which I here mean śāstra. If an argument can be made for a convergence, or indeed an identity, of the folk and the classical in India, the Vedas are a fine place to begin. What transformed folk into classical was not appropriation of folk material by a brahman literati, but the dynamics of preservation between the cognitive and narrative aspects of literary production. Three examples of these dynamics may be cited. The first occurs in the ñgveda, which became classical


through oral preservation and whose primary focal points—uniquely configured mythology and ritual—were blurred and transfigured in later thinking and literature in spite of a perfectly preserved textuality. Imagine if the text of the ñV were lost three millennia ago and our only knowledge of Indra was as a defeated, degraded, and depraved warrior with a disfiguring exoskeleton of thousands of vaginas and our only knowledge of the soma pressing ritual were as a primeval and highly unlikely foil for the practices of Krishna devotion! Indra the warrior, valorous king of the vedic divinities, who slaughtered Vótra the serpent demon with his mace and liberated the cosmic waters, was a heroic and epic figure, while the disfigured Indra of later centuries was, at best, an antihero. In both cases, however, Indra found an outlet in the creative flux of brahmanical literary mythologizing. The same can be said for classical vedic ritual, which was, on the one hand, preserved through brahmanical textualizing and highly guarded ritual practice and, on the other, was fragmented and spread about in later, more accessible, forms of Indic ritual. The second example is the narrative line of the Mahābhārata, preserved with sufficient clarity and uniformity by the written Sanskrit text in its many recensions to render a critical edition conceivable.1 This may be compared to folk Mahābhāratas, which diverge markedly from the Sanskrit original, the best known of which, thanks to the work of Alf Hiltebeitel, is that of the Draupadī cult in Tamilnadu. Imagine, for example, that our received MBh depicted a cowardly Arjuna living in a tree and a fierce blood-drinking Draupadī leading the possessed Pāâbava army in a victorious romp across burning embers!2 Third, consider ascetic practices recorded in the early Upaniùads and Buddhist texts that enable one to speak of “classical” Indian meditative or ascetic experiences and practices.3 Although most of these grew out of ideas and practices mentioned in the Brāhmaâa literature or were the heritage of the Jainas and others in reaction to the religious culture of the Vedas, they bore an energy and relevance at the time that can never abide in the classical alone. Similarly, possession that today is identified as folk may be recognized, at least approximately, in the Vedas, even if the texts of the Vedas are not recognized in possession. According to received tradition, the first to be possessed were none other than the óùis themselves, who saw the Veda. Not only does the word óùi itself seem to hark back to an ecstatic sage,4 similarly vipra, which etymologically

The Vedas and Upaniùads

177

means “quiverer,”5 but the Hindu tradition, following the sūtras and commentaries of the PūrvamīmāÅsā, has it that they saw or cognized the eternal mantras, rather than composed them. Francis X. Clooney notes appositely that the óùis were “merely ‘enlisted’ to pronounce the vedic words and hand them down, to make sure the text is known and able to be regularly translated into action. The words are not expressions of human wisdom and are not to be interpreted as statements of human values and goals.”6 The óùis were thus innocent (if enlightened) bystanders, through whom knowledge incidentally flowed. Another important and well-known term is apauruùeya, used in the PūrvamīmāÅsā “simply to dismiss the possibility that the óùis might have a creative or authorial function in regard to the text.”7 The gods are also denied an authorial role in the PūrvamīmāÅsā, thus distinguishing the notion of vedic textual reception or cognition from more normative ideas of possession, which require the mediation of another being.8 Although the apauruùeyatva of the PūrvamīmāÅsā was a concept designed to demonstrate the primacy of sound and word, shifting responsibility away from the individual human center,9 it nevertheless illustrates the tendency toward disembodied manifestation. Thus one might say that as the concept of vedic cognition was itself emblematic of a culture ripe for possession, that it is a correlate, and, in this case, a prerequisite, to the notion of possession.

Possession in the Early Vedic Literature The verbal root √viś, to enter, occurs 103 times in the ñgveda in various forms. Of these, 69 are used with the prefix 6. It is not necessary to examine each of these occurrences to conclude that in the ñV forms of ā√viś are not used in the simple sense of entry, as a person through a door, but in a more abstract sense, beyond the normal physical contexts of entering a separate enclosed or semienclosed space.10 The root ā√viś in its many derivative forms occurs almost entirely in the sense of entities of different densities or substantialities penetrating and pervading one another. ñV 10.130.5:

vir6â mitr6váruâayor abhiśrHr índrasya triù•úb ihá bhāgó áhnan | víśvān dev6ñ jágaty 6 viveśa téna cāk{pra öùayo manuù6n ||11


Virāj spread to Mitra and Varuâa. Here, every day, Triù•ubh was Indra’s portion. Jagatī penetrated all the gods. By this process, men become constituted as óùis.

Poetic meters, with different numbers of syllables per verse line and different arrangements of light and heavy syllables, are accorded substantiality, even physicality, in virtually all vedic texts. In this creation hymn (sūkta), they are said to conjoin with and enter into different deities. This occurs through the resonance of sound: The names (and identities) of meters resemble the names (and identities) of deities. The meters possess a substantiality different from that of the gods; as the initial materializations of mantric cognition (manīù6, see ñV 9.95.3 below), their boundaries are amorphous, if not all-pervasive, while those of the gods are seemingly more defined. The meters enter into, pervade, or interpenetrate the psychophysical bodies of the gods. By entering into a dynamic relationship with the conjoined deity (devátā) and meter (chándas), a human becomes a sage (öùi). The Yajurveda texts use this idea in ritual performance. For example, the Taittirīya SaÅhitā (TS 4.4.12.2) prescribes that a Sāmavedic chant (sāman) called Vairūpa should be invited to enter (6veśayāman) the sacrifice through the medium of the jagatī meter. In another passage in the TS (7.3.13), the petitioner “invites” the sacrificial chants of the ñgveda and Sāmaveda (stotra and śastra), the soma sacrifices called Agniù•oma and Ukthya, as well as the divine waters to enter into him (6viśatām). It is very revealing of the power of poetry that the meters are accorded the ability to cross the threshold into the individual. Riding on the back, as it were, of the meters, significant but differently constituted substances—such as sāmans and sacrifices—are invoked to enter a sage or sacrificer. An example of meters’ being invoked in order to obtain dominion over one’s “natural” domain occurs in the PañcaviÅśa Brāhmaâa (19.17.6). In this verse, part of a brief section that eulogizes a ritual chant (stoma) to Indra and Agni, the primary deities associated with king and priest (rājanya and brāhmaâa), the brāhmaâa is said to “descend into” (avarundhe) brilliant brahmanical luster by reciting the gāyatrī meter, while the king “enters” (praviśati) the mercantile classes with the jagatī meter.12 The process referred to in ñV 10.130.5 may not, however, be merely the act of recitation, but may also include an intimation of the mechanics of the generation of vedic verse and meter, its pervasion of the gods, and their rebounding and transforming effect on humans; in other words, knowledge as process. In this way, the


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circuit of pervasion, of āveśa, between entities of different essentiality and density of substance becomes complete. This interdimensional adherence is most evident in the soma ritual, as the majority of occurrences of ā√viś in the ñV appear in the context of descriptions of relations between the processed and liquid soma, the deity Soma, various other deities, and the sages themselves. It is used for soma entering, permeating, psychologically or somatically influencing, and, perhaps, possessing a person or even a deity (particularly Indra). Soma, whatever its psychotropic properties, is believed to be potentiated through mantra chanted and sung to the deity Soma, who stands as the power behind the liquid soma. The sacred word is said to enter, to possess, Soma, who, identified with soma, is made pleased and transfers that empowerment to his liquid substantial other. The substantial soma is, thus, more than the physical center of a complicated priestly ritual. To be sure, it is subject to many priestly manipulations (saÅskāra), including being pounded with stones in order to extract the liquid and being passed through a woolen filter or sieve as one of several cleansings and purifications. Eventually, most of it is offered into the eastern or āhavanīya fire and the remainder consumed by officiants. In addition, however, it adopts an abstract or ethereal counterpart as the ritual arena expands to empyrean proportions, in which case the soma is said to penetrate or even permeate the sieve from its place in heaven: ñV 9.38.5:

eùá syá mádyo rásó ’va caù•e diván śiśun | yá índur v6ram 6viśat ||

This exhilarating juice, child of heaven, looks downward—this Indu who has passed through [6viśat] the filter.13

The óùi Praskaâva sings of the unpurified soma’s being pressed through a woolen strainer, after which it ascends to the realm of light (dív) as the god Soma, the soma drop incarnate (Indu), fresh and innocent as a child. From there, he (for Soma is a he) looks down upon the human realm, the realm of sacrifice. The journey of the drops is, thus, not a simple journey of entering and passing through a filter in order to remove impurities, as part of an elaborate priestly ritual of producing a relatively palatable (and sacred) intoxicant. It is also a journey of transfiguration to the substantiality of the deity Soma. As it passes through the filter, the drops enter, pervade, and reconstitute the body of Soma.14


It is the recitation of well-conceived and well-uttered (sūkta) verse, with a life of its own (perhaps a prelude to the notion of apauruùeya), with its own structure of desire (it desires Soma), that is attractive to Soma, who longs for it. ñV 9.95.3:

ap6m ivéd ūrmáyas tárturāâan prá manīù6 īrate sómam áccha | namasyántīr úpa ca yánti sáÅ c6 ca viśanty uśatHr uśántam ||

Spreading outward like the waves of waters, our cognitions are pressing forth to Soma. Together they approach him humbly, and, yearning, enter him who yearns for them.

Here, too, is a sense of a circuit, a conjoining or mutual pervasion, as Soma encloses or envelopes the sage’s widespreading cognitions (manīù6), which are, of course, none other than the ñgvedic verses. The entrance here, then, is a mutuality, an infusion and saturation of different kinds or modes of substantiality. Several additional examples may be cited to illustrate nuances on this theme of entrance, pervasion, and occasionally mutual transfiguration. ñV 1.91.11:

sóma gīrbhíù •vā vayáÅ vardháyāmo vacovídan | sumõ{īkó na 6 viśa ||

O Soma, we, learnéd of speech, strengthen you with words. Gracious one, enter into us. ñV 8.48.12ab:

yó na índun pitaro hótsú pītó ’martyo mártyā á āvivéśa |

That immortal drop, O Fathers, which, when drunk in our hearts, enters us mortals.15

The Atharvaveda (AV) also provides supporting statements. For example: AV 6.2.2:

6 yáÅ viśant Hndavó váyo ná vókùám ándhasan | vírápśin ví m ödho jahi rakùavínīn ||


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May the drops of the soma [ándhas] enter [Indra] as [a flock of] birds a tree. Drive away the powerful enemy, the troop of demons.

Although in this instance 6 viśānti cannot be translated as “possesses”—it is clearly “entrance” and no more—it shares, and points to, a semantics in which the same words take on the sense of possession. Indra acts with the strength and anger of a god possessed after he has drunk soma. A flock of birds entering or landing in a tree gives that tree a wholly different character from that of the tree without birds, or birds in flight, untethered to a tree. The cacaphony of birds in a tree, like Indra suffused with soma, poised to destroy a horde of demons, suggests more than mere entrance; it suggests the kind of pervasion that is identified as possession in South Asian textuality. ñV 8.48.15ab:

tváÅ nan soma viśváto vayodh6s tvaÅ svarvíd 6 viśā nócákùān | tváÅ na inda ūtíbhin sajóùān pāhí paśc6tād utá vā purástāt ||

You are the giver of strength to us on all sides, O Soma. You are the finder of the heavenly light: enter us as man’s observer! You, O Indu, with your helpmates, protect us behind as also in front!16 ñV 9.8.7 is another invitation: maghóna 6 pavasva no jahí víśvā ápa dvíùān | indo sákhāyam 6 viśa || Flow toward us for generosity, strike all our enemies away. O Indu, enter into your friend.

Soma also enters and pervades its very source, for example, ñV 2.13.1b: makùX u jātá 6 viśad y6su várdhate (the soma quickly pervaded the waters from which it came).17 From the power generated at its source it also becomes capable of entering the gods: ñV 9.25.2:

pávamāna dhiy6 hitó ’bhí yóniÅ kánikradat | dhármaâā vāyúÅ 6 viśa ||


O Purifying One, placed with awareness, roaring toward your source, enter Vāyu according to your nature.

ñV 8.102.8 does not employ the usual verb forms, but it continues the same theme: ayáÅ yáthā na ābhúvat tváù•ā rūpéva tákùyā | asyá krátvā yáśasvatan || [ I summon Agni ] [. . . agním 6 huve,] that through this famous one’s capacity he may abide in us as Tvaù•ar comes to a form that is to be fashioned.

It will be instructive to turn briefly to a couple of ritual applications of soma mantras. The Āpastamba Śrautasūtra (ĀpŚS), a ritual prescriptive text of perhaps the fourth century b.c.e., instructs that certain mantras from Taittirīya Brāhmaâa (TB 1.2.1.1) should be recited while the chief officiant (adhvaryu) is collecting sand, one of seven special ingredients (sambhāra-) mixed in with the mortar while the fireplaces are constructed during the initial setting up of the three ritual fires (agnyādhāna). ĀpŚS 5.1.7

vaiśvānarásya rūpáÅ póthivy6Å parisrásā | syonám 6 viśantu na iti sikatān |

As for the sand, [one should recite], “May Vaiśvānara’s form, the rubble, enter gently upon this earth for us.”

The text does not specify why rubble (or “refuse” or “rubbish” [parisrásā]), here a form of Vaiśvānara, the fire common to all men, is required to enter or permeate the ritualists.18 Perhaps, however, the answer is found in the vājapeya, where the brahman sacrificer, whose sovereignty has been ritually achieved, stands at the pinnacle of his power, atop a platform of seventeen steps. From this vantage point, he extends his blessings to the audience and is pierced, that is, lightly stabbed from all four major directions by officiants brandishing salt- (uùapu•a) tipped arrows. It is likely that the salt in the vājapeya and the sand in the agnyādhāna are emblematic of the life-giving sustenance of the earth in its most resistant and unrevealing manifestations. Certainly, the seven special ingredients constitute a tremendous range of earthly paradigms, including clay from the bottom of a river


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that never dries out (wetness) and this, sand (dryness). Thus the intention of the texts appears to have been to infuse the ritualist with the broadest range of environmental essences, to invest or possess (6viśantu) the ritualist with the manifold possibilities and powers of the physical world. 19 Elsewhere in the ĀpŚS, the effects of soma and surā are compared. Soma, of course, is the exhilarating drink of the gods, while surā is an exotic concoction prepared by fermenting cooked rice or barley, then mixing it with vegetable juice, milk, and the hair of a lion, a tiger, and a wolf. It is then purified by being poured through a sieve and, finally, stirred with the tail of a cow and a horse.20 Here also, it seems, a range of ingredients with symbolic significance are required: you are what you eat, in extremis. Surā is prescribed for ritual consumption in the sautrāmaâī, an accessory to the vājapeya and agnicayana. Among the mantras to be recited over the prepared surā, ApŚS 19.3.4, prescribes the following (cf. TB 1.4.2.2): “You are the turbulent surā, this one here is soma. Do not injure me (O soma), resolve back into your own original state” (súrā tvám asi śuùmíâī sóma eùá m6 māá hiásīn sv6Å yónim āviśán).21 Although the commentators state that the latter part of the mantra is addressed to the soma, in fact it could be addressed to the surā or to both the surā and soma. A point in the commentators’ favor (though one they never considered) is the use of ā√viś, often used with soma. Here the soma (or possibly the surā) is requested to enter (permeate, possess) a locus originalis; in the case of soma in order to generalize its influence, in the case of surā in order to vitiate its effects.22 Similarly, the ĀpŚS (5.2.4) prescribes that one should gather a palāśa leaf as one of the materials to be mixed in with the mortar used in constructing the fireplaces at the time of the initial setting up of the sacrificial fires (agnyādhāna). While gathering this leaf, the adhvaryu should recite the following two verses. TB 1.2.1.5–7:

gāyatriy6 hriyámānasya yát te parâám apatat tótH yasyai divó ’dhi | sò ’yam parâán somaparâ6d dhí jātás táto harāmi somapīthásy6varuddhyai || dev6nāÅ brahmavādáÅ vádatāÅ yád up6śóâon suśrávā vái śrutò ’si | táto m6m 6viśatu brahmavarcasáÅ tát saÅbháraás tád ávarundhīya sākù6t ||


That leaf of yours, a leaf that is born from the soma-leaf, being brought by Gayatrī, fell down from the third heaven. For the attainment of the soma drink, I take it from that. Since you have heard of gods uttering divine speech, you are known as Suśravas. Thus, while collecting it may the splendor of brahman enter me, so that I may attain it directly.

This act serves the interest of soma, thus the text requests the bráhmansplendor, which in the view of the ritualist is a natural element in this leaf, to enter and permeate the vedic priest. Thus, the essence of the leaf is transferred to the priest. The use of the verb āviśatu in this passage parallels contexts in the ñV in which ā√viś is used for the soma drinking experience. Through this textual association, the author of the TB likely intended that the transmission of brahmavarcasá was part of this experience. Most of these passages employ the verb 6√viś, and several express it in the imperative. Soma, the deity of the consumed soma, is commanded, gently, to respond to the sonorous speech ( gīr) of the seers by entering into them, refashioning them as his nature dictates. He pervades them as he enters their hearts. He is separate from man; he is man’s observer (nócákùān). Entering man, Soma gives strength while leading the singer to the heavenly light (svar). Further, Soma enters into his friend, bestowing prosperity and striking down demons and rivals. Finally, Soma, installed in the sacrificial arena with intelligence and awareness (dhī), is asked to enter Vāyu, the god of wind, perhaps a reference to the seer’s own breath or bodily life force, with his (Soma’s) own positive qualities.23 Soma is an agent of multifaceted transformation in these verses: socially by bestowing prosperity and striking down rivals, physically by entering the breath and the heart, and spiritually by guiding the seer to the heavenly light. Unlike other deities (except Bóhaspati, noted shortly) Soma is invasive; he takes hold of the supplicant like none other. The verb 6√viś also expresses the sense of a deity entering or occupying a house (10.85.43) or of supplicants appealing to the Lord of the House (Vāstoùpati) for easy access (7.54.1), of Bóhaspati’s ease of access, which is to say his beneficence when possessed (7.97.7), an expression of personal intimacy (10.10.3, 10.85.29), of rivers entering the ocean (3.46.4, 6.36.3), of sickness entering a dwelling (6.74.2), of Agni entering the heaven and earth (3.3.4), or entering mortals (5.25.4). Speech, established by the gods, also enters into and pervades individual homes, as well as heaven and earth (10.125.3, 6). Two verses employ ā√viś explicitly in the sense of entering another body (2.35.13, 1.164.21). The latter of these two is a decidedly


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cryptic passage, in which the protector of the universe enters into the speaker. Let us examine these passages in more detail. ñV 10.85.43cd:

ádurmaãgalīn patilokám 6 viśa śáÅ no bhava dvipáde śáÅ cátuùpade ||

Free from ill omens, [O deity,] occupy your husband’s realm. Bring peace to the bipeds and quadrupeds.

This is addressed to Sūryā, at the time of her marriage to Soma, after invoking Prajāpati for offspring and Aryamān for a lifetime of beauty. The entrance and presence of Sūryā, and by extension of any bride, into a house is expressed as a form of occupation, pervasion, and possession in the sense of physical and psychological ownership. ñV 7.54.1:

v6stoùpate práti jānīhy asm6n svāveśó anamīvó bhavā nan |

Respond to us, O Lord of the House; may you be easy of entry [sv-āveśan]. Do not bring us disease.

Ease of occupation, a livable dwelling, is a request that the house may be “well-possessed.” The following verse identifies Vāstoùpati, the lord and guardian of one’s dwelling, with Soma: ñV 7.54.2ab:

v6stoùpate pratáraâo na edhi gayasph6no góbhir áśvebhir indo |

O Lord of the House, be our promoter, expand our property with cattle and horses, O Indu.

Soma’s qualities or roles linked with his status as personally, physically, empowering—bestower of strength, health, and prosperity, destroyer of enemies—are easily transferred to Vāstoùpati. Two of these qualities are found here: Vāstoùpati as he promotes wealth (pratáraâan) and as he expands property ( gayasph 6nan), which are also used for Soma.24 In a passage from the Taittirīya SaÅhitā (TS) relevant in this context, the ritualist confers substantiality on the act of eating (bhakùā) and implores it to


enter and permeate him in order that he might have all the good things of life. TS 3.2.5.1:

bhak ùe hi m6 viśa dīrghāyutv6ya śantanutv6ya rāyás pó ùāya várcase suprajāstv6ya |

O ingestion, pervade me for the sake of long life, a healthy body, increase of wealth, splendor, and fine offspring.

Bóhaspati shares the same ease of access (svāveśán) as Vāstoùpati, though here this ease of access is not physical, as in occupation of a house, but mental, in the sense of being possessed by the power of speech or mantra, the domain of Bóhaspati: ñV 7.97.7:

sá hí śúci n śatápatra n sá śundhyúr híraâyavāśīr iùirá n svarù6 n | b öhaspáti n sá svāveśá óùvá n purú sákhibhya āsutí Å káriù•ha n ||

He is pure, hundred-winged, radiant, with golden axe, unrestrained, victor of the sun; this Bóhaspati is sublime, auspicious in possession, most generous to his friends on many occasions.25

The spatial dimension of occupation is physically and psychologically comfortable, safe, intimate, expansive, and pervasive within its bounded domain. It is also the domain of speech, and Brahmaâaspati, the lord of sacred speech (bráhman) and helpmate of Indra, who “pervaded the mountain laden with wealth” (6 c 6viśad vásumantaÅ vi párvatam, 2.24.2d).26 The first of the following two verses expresses the power of minds and bodies to unite, to interpenetrate. The second compares well-directed generosity to an ambulatory female spirit, uniting, merging, interpenetrating with the brahmán officiants who are the recipients of the generosity. This “distribution of wealth” is personified as a wife entering, merging with, her husband. The image of wives and husbands entering each other, merging bodies, is a potent image of possession, in which individual identity is merged or altered. ñV 10.10.3:

uśánti ghā té amõtāsa etád ékasya cit tyajásam mártyasya |


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ní te máno mánasi dhāyy asmé jányu n pátis tanvàm 6 viviśyā n || The immortals desire this, that offspring should be left by the one mortal. Let your mind unite with my mind; as a husband, penetrate the body of your wife.27 ñV 10.85.29:

pára dehi śāmulyàm brahmábhyo ví bhajā vásu | ` jāy6 viśate pátim || k ótyaí ùā padvátī bhūtvy ā

Give away the woolen gown to another, and distribute wealth to the brahmán officiants. This [gift] becomes a female spirit with feet; like the wife it merges with the husband.

The next two verses reveal that āveśa is a state of pervasion, such that one entity cannot be distinguished and separated once the merging of essences occurs: ñV 3.46.4cd:

índra Å sómāsan pradívi sutásan samudráÅ ná sraváta 6 viśanti ||

The pressed soma from former times enters Indra like streams an ocean. ñV 6.36.3cd

samudráÅ ná síndhava uktháśuùmā uruvyácasaÅ gíra 6 viśanti ||

As rivers reach the sea, our words, resonant with verse, are absorbed in [Indra,] the far-reaching one.

The image of separate waters, one bounded, the other unbounded, is stronger and more decisive than that of the commingling of husband and wife. Like streams and rivers (sravátan, síndhavan) bounded by riverbanks, husband and wife are circumscribed by discrete identities. But the ocean (samudrám) and Indra are unbounded, both far-reaching (uruvyácasam). The essence of the pressed soma becomes indistinguishable from that of Indra, just as the power of vedic mantra becomes fully absorbed in and utterly inseparable from Indra. The “substance-codes” of soma and Indra or mantra and Indra discover—or, perhaps better, generate—a common locus. This, then,


assumes a separate, if not autonomous, identity, one that partakes of the modified substance and nature of each. As seen in the verses above, Soma enters and pervades Indra. A couple of additional examples may be mentioned: “The exhilarating drops enter Indra” (éndraÅ viśanti madir 6sa índavan, ñV 9.85.7d); “O Indu, enter Indra with your strength” (índram indó vöś 6 viśa, ñV 1.176.1b, 9.2.1c). Several times in the ñV Soma is requested to enter into Indra’s heart, for example, “May Soma enter Indra’s heart, the reservoir of soma” (índrasya h 6rdi somadh 6nam 6 viśa, ñV 9.70.9b, 9.108.16a), or throat (índrasya já•hare viśa, 9.66.15c).28 The entrance, occupation, and absorption of a limited entity into one less limited or unlimited may not always be altogether sanguine, as revealed by the image of a disease’s pervading a house: ñV 6.74.2ab:

sómārudrā ví vóhataÅ víùucīm ámīvā y6 no gáyam 6 viveśa |

Soma and Rudra, drive away in all directions the illness that has possessed our dwelling.

This is principally an image of absorption, however, and must be distinguished from the imagery and language of negative, disease-producing, possession (that is dealt with in Chapter 12). The present image may perhaps be a precursor of the latter in that disease and other classifications of physical dysfunction, in particular conditions brought on by invasive spirits, are regarded in Indian medical thinking as systemic: All aspects of an organism are affected by the pervasion and occupation of a psychophysical individual by a spirit. The image of Agni’s entering and pervading is strong in all vedic literary genres. The two following passages illustrate this well: ñV 3.3.4:

pit6 yajñ6nām ásuro vipaścítāÅ vim6nam agnír vayúnaÅ ca vāghátām | 6 viveśa ródasī bhXrivarpasā purupriyó bhandate dh6mabhin kavín ||

The father of sacrifice, the Lord [ásura] of wise men, Agni, the guiding principle of the priesthood, has entered the multiform heaven and earth; the sage, beloved of many, honors him with his favorite objects.


ñV 5.25.4ab:

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agnír devé ùu rājaty agnír márte ùv āviśán |

Agni shines among the gods. Agni has entered into mortals. Śatapatha Brāhmaâa (ŚB) 2.3.3.2:

na vā aham idaÅ titik ùe

hanta tvā praviśāni taÅ mā janayitvā bibh óhi. I cannot endure this, let me enter into you. Having generated me, support me.

In the ŚB passage, Agni entered mankind (puruùa) in order to protect himself from being crushed (saÅpeù•um dadhrire, 2.3.3.1) by mankind after Prajāpati created both Agni and living beings. The bargain that Agni struck with mankind was that he would not burn everything (sarvam) if man would generate him regularly in the daily agnihotra, the morning and evening fire offerings. This merging resulted in a reciprocation of essences that preserved and maintained a precariously generated balance of nature. Thus, Agni enters the multiform heaven and earth, as well as mortals, in the unmistakable sense of entrance as pervasion. Agni the multiform fire manifests on earth as Agni, in the mid-region as Vāyu, in the celestial world as Sūrya. Agni cannot be easily contained: He moves upward to the gods, bearing oblations; as the wind, the principle and force of movement, he traverses the mid-region in all directions; as the sun, his brightness illuminates the three realms. As the priest of the gods and the god of the priests he penetrates and pervades all beings and all functions. This pervasion enables Agni to protect those who invoke him: “May you, [O Agni,] wealthy in heat, let no demon enter into us” (m6 no rákùa 6 veśīd āghóâīvaso, 8.60.20a). Similarly, Agni, the Son of Waters, enters into and nourishes young plants (ap6Å gárbhan prasvà 6 viveśa, 7.9.3d). He prospers and brings prosperity by entering into the waters (6d in mātör 6 viśad y6sv 6 śúcir, 1.141.5a). A passage from the Taittirīya Upaniùad (TU), an early Upaniùad that postdates the final redaction of the ñV by perhaps five hundred to seven hundred years, expresses the same idea as ñV 5.25.4, though it employs pra√viś rather than ā√viś.29 TU 1.4.3:

yaśo jane ’sāni svāhā | śreyān vasyaso ’sāni svāhā | taÅ tvā bhaga praviśāni svāhā | taÅ tvā bhaga praviśa svāhā |


sa mā bhaga praviśa svāhā | tasmin sahasraśākhe ni bhagāhaÅ tvayi m óje svāhā | May I be famous among men! Svāhā! More affluent than the very rich! Svāhā! May I, O Bhaga, enter you! Svāhā! May you, O Bhaga, enter me! Svāhā! In you, O Bhaga, branched a thousandfold, In you I shall be cleansed! Svāhā!30

In this passage the vedic teacher and ritualist unambiguously invites the deity Bhaga, an Āditya or solar deity, a giver of good fortune, to merge with him. Whether this was meant literally or metaphorically is unclear, but the history of possession in the Vedas, the patchwork nature of this Upaniùad, and the use of the offertory exclamation svāhā suggest that this may have been drawn from a ritual in which possession as a spiritually cleansing state was the primary goal. Two verses from the well-known hymn to V6c or Speech (ñV 10.125) testify to her power to enter and pervade, which is not surprising given the power of invocation ( gír) to strengthen and enliven Soma. ñV 10.125.3:

aháÅ r6ù•rī saÅgamanī v6sūnāÅ cikitúùī pratham6 yajñíyānām | t6Å mā dev6 vy àdadhu n purutr6 bhXnisthātrām bhXry āveśáyantīm ||

I myself am queen, a treasury of riches; [I am] insightful, first among the gods worthy of sacrifice. As such, the gods have divided me up in many places, me of many positions, me entering many forms.31 ñV 10.125.6:

aháÅ rudr6ya dhánur 6 tanomi brahmadvíùe śárave hántav6 u | aháÅ jánāya samádaÅ kóâomy aháÅ dy6vāpóthivH 6 viveśa ||

I myself stretch the bow for Rudra so that his arrow kills the enemy of magical speech. I myself make battlejoy for the clan. I have pervaded both Heaven and Earth.32


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An excellent example of the ritual application of the invasive and possessive power of speech occurs in the soma sacrifice, when a specially made and marked daâba or staff, representing kingly attributes, is passed from the soma sacrificer (dīk ùita) to an officiant called the maitrāvaruâa, who utters divine speech under the influence of the vedic sovereigns Mitra and Varuâa, and who thus mediates between ritual functions.33 This daâba is passed physically, of course, but the vedic texts (e.g., TS) say it is passed as well through the medium of speech.34 TS 1.2.2.3–1.2.3.3: v6g vái devébhyó ’pākrāmad yájñāy6tiù•hamānā | s6 vánaspátīn pr6viśat | saíù6 v6g vánaspátiùu vadati y6 dundubháu y6 tHâave y6 vHâāyām | yád dīkùitadaâbáÅ rayácchati v6cam ev6varunddhe| Speech went away from the gods, not [wishing to] serve the sacrifice. She entered the trees. What is heard in the drum, in the flute, in the vī âā is speech speaking in the trees. In that he gives the daâba of the dīkùita, he gains speech.35

A similar passage occurs in the TB section describing the vājapeya sacrifice: TB 1.3.6.2

vājínāá s6ma gāyate | ánnaÅ vái v6jan | ánnam ev6varundhe | vācó várùma devébhyò ’pākrāmat | tád vánaspátīn prāviśat | sáiù6 v6g vánaspátiùu vadati | y6 dundubháu | tásmād dundubhín sárvāv6cò ’tivadati | dundubhHn sam6ghnanti | param6 v6 eù6 v6k ||

He [the brahman priest] sings the sāman of the vājins.36 Vāja, indeed, is food [ánnam]. Thus he obtains food. The uppermost level of Vāc ran away from the gods. It entered the trees of the forest [vánaspátīn]. It is this Vāc who speaks in the trees. It is she who is in the drum. Therefore all sounds [v6can] are overcome [ativadati] by the drums. Together they beat the drums. This, verily, is the highest Vāc.

An important example of the invocation of Vāc occurs in TS 1.6.2.2, where the yajamāna is enjoined to recite mentally the following dhyāna or meditation statement (cf. ĀpŚS 2.12.6) at the time of consuming the tiny por-


tion of the offered riceflour cakes (purobāśa): máno ’si prajāpatyám mánasā mā bhūténāviśa (You are mind, derived from Prajāpati, enter me with the mind that participates in manifest existence).37 Thus, the essence of the purobāśa has been ritually transformed into the essence of Vāc. In this way, speech enters, pervades, and reconstitutes the personalities of the trees, the drum, the flute, the vīâā, the sacrificer, and the maitrāvaruâa priest. This notion of transfer of essence, a subcategory of possession, is dealt with more fully below. Several passages recognizably presage later uses of the word āveśa. ñV 3.7.4:

máhi tvāù•rám ūrjáyantīr ajuryáÅ stabhūyámānaÅ vaháto vahanti | vy áãgebhir didyutānán sadhástha ékām iva ródasī6 viveśa ||

Nourishing streams greatly bear the ever-young Tvaù•ó, standing firm. Shining forth in his home with all his limbs, he has entered the heaven and earth as if they were one.38

This notion of a deity entering a primeval but inert world in order to create—Tvaù•ó is the “fashioner” or carpenter among the gods—appears again, fully theorized, in the Upaniùads, as shown below. ñV 2.35.13cd:

só ap6Å nápād ánabhimlātavarâo ’nyásyevehá tanv6 viveśa ||39

ApāÅ Napāt, Agni as the Son of the Waters, of unfading color, entered this world, as if [entering] another’s body. ñV 1.164.21:

yátrā suparâ6 amötasya bhāgám ánimeùaÅ vidath6bhisváranti | inó víśvasya bhúvanasya gop6n sá mā dhHran p6kam átr6 viveśa ||

Here, where the well-winged ones [priests] in their assemblies flawlessly raise song to their share in immortality, the mighty herdsman of the whole world [Agni], the wise one, has entered into me, the humble.40


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The first passage speaks of ApāÅ Napāt, Agni in the form of lightning, born from the clouds, holding the celestial waters. He takes on another body in order to enter in this world, a body produced through the heat resulting from the use of the fire-churning equipment. The latter passage is from the wellknown asya vāmasya hymn of the sage Dīrghatamas. Leaving aside the problem of the identity of the “wise protector,” this verse states directly that the deity possesses the sage. There is little difference between this and what is found in the Tantras and the ethnographies. The following passage is cited by Patañjali (c. 150 b.c.e.) near the beginning of his Mahābhāùya (Great Commentary) on Pāâini’s sūtras describing the Sanskrit language. ñV 4.58.3:

catv6ri śöâgā tráyo asya p6dā dvé śīrùé sápta hástāso asya | trídhā baddhó vóùabhó roravīti mahó devó m6rtyāá 6 viveśa ||

This bull, who has four horns, three legs, two heads, seven hands, and is bound in three ways, roars loudly. This great god has entered into mortals.

Patañjali interprets the numbers of horns, legs, and so on as kinds of words and parts of grammar; the places in which the bull is bound as the sources of the articulation of sound—the chest, throat, and head; the bull as the desire of the speaker to produce sound; and the great god as the action or energy of sound itself, which has entered (6 viveśa) mortals. The great fourteenthcentury commentator on the ñV Sāyaâa interprets this passage differently: as sacrificial rituals, parts of the Veda, and cosmic regions; the bull as either the sun or the text of the Vedas that enters mankind. It is noteworthy, though not particularly unexpected, that Sāyaâa does not pause to consider the weight of ā√viś.41 A passage from the Atharvaveda (AVŚ) continues this theme of the entrance or pervasion of abstract qualities, this time by the night: AVŚ 7.79.3:

6gan r6trī saãgámanī vásūnām XrjaÅ puù•áÅ vásv 6veśayantī | amāvāsyáyai havíùā vídhemórjaÅ dúh6 nā páyasā na 6gan ||


The night has come, collector of treasures, causing the pervasion of sustenance [XrjaÅ], prosperity, and goodness. Let us offer an oblation to the new moon, yielding sustenance; with a flow of milk may she come to us.

The word Xrjam denotes fluid life-force, sustenance, the “principle of strength.”42 Night personified (r6trī), spreading, permeating space, takes control of this sustenance and the material goods surrounding it. An oblation of flowing, white milk is offered into the fire, into the light, as an invitation to that darkness to possess its prey warily and peaceably. A similar passage from the Taittirīya SaÅhitā reads as follows. TS 3.5.1.1

nivéśanī saÅgámanī vásūnāÅ víśvā rūp6âi vásūny 6veśayantī | sahasrapoùáÅ subhágā rárāâā s6 na 6gan várcasā sáÅvidān6 ||

The fortunate one, gathering together and dwelling in riches, causing the pervasion of all rich forms, rejoicing in a thousandfold prosperity, has come to us with harmonious radiance.

An example from the ŚB is relevant here because it reveals the continuity into later vedic texts of the idea of hostile possession by an entity not so abstract to them as it might be to us. Note in this case that a hostile or incidental possession is indicated by the verbal root √góh.43 This occurs in a discussion of the consecration of an odd menagerie of socially important figures called Ratnins in the Rājasūya or Royal Consecration. ŚB 5.3.1.13:

y6 v6 apútra pátnī s6 nír ótigóhītā tád yád ev6syā átra nairótáá rūpaÅ tád evaítác chamayati tátho hainaá sūyámānaÅ nírótir ná góhâāti |

A wife without a son has been seized [ góhītā] by “Disorder” [níróti] . . . [but] Disorder does not seize him while he is being consecrated.44

One of the likeliest candidates for possession in the ñV, as well as for shamanism in the strict sense, is the keśin, the long-haired ecstatic (muni) of sweet disposition, celebrated in ñV 10.136, who treads the aerial path of the gandharvas (celestial musicians) and the apsarases (celestial dancers). This suspi


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Upani ùads, cion is strengthened by the role of gandharvas in possession in the Upaniùads and the Mahābhārata (see below). Only once, however, in this hymn of seven verses, is possession suggested.

ñV 10.136.2:

múnayo v6taraśanā n dóùé keśHdraÅ jyótir ucyate | v6taùy6nu dhr6jiÅ yanti yád dev6so ávikùata ||

The munis, reined by the wind [vātaraśanā], wear soiled yellow garments. They glide with the wind when the gods have possessed [them].45

Entrance here (ávikùata) appears to bear the sense of intentionally induced possession, brought on by the muni with clear knowledge of and control over the results. It does not serve as a comprehensive transformational agent, as it does in the other cases of more general pervasiveness. It is quite likely no accident, then, that the word for “entrance” in this verse is from √viś rather than ā√viś. The former, along with pra√viś, is used consistently throughout the later literature for more intentional disembodied entrance. These few examples from the vedic texts, most of them from the ñgveda, betray a multivalent notion of the verbal root ā√viś. André Padoux, who is one of the few scholars to focus on the notion of possession in Sanskrit literature, has stated bluntly that possession was the original sense of āveśa, and he, too, has noted its continuity in later Indic languages.46 However, our examination suggests that the significations of ā√viś as “possession” are constituted rather differently here than in the later texts. In the Vedas, ā√viś has the sense of “pervasion,” “immersion,” and “participation,” conceptual neighbors to “possession” that often, but perhaps not always, qualify as “possession.”

Shape-Shifting and Possession Sāyaâa understands the last quarter-verse of ñV 10.136.2 differently, avoiding any suggestion of possession. He says: “[the munis] entered the deity’s own physical form” (devatāsvarūpaÅ prāviśan). This is slightly ambiguous, but he probably means here that the munis assumed or constructed a form of the deity rather than merged with a pre-existing divine body.47 The former is more likely because Sāyaâa consistently avoids speaking of possession,


while he readily acknowledges shape-shifting—which is in any case much in evidence in the vedic and post-vedic literature. This example demonstrates that shape-shifting was proximate to possession and perhaps indistinguishable from it in certain contexts, especially in the early history of Sanskrit literature when the vocabulary for the two was not fully differentiated. Although it is unwise to get too far ahead of ourselves, it may be useful to note here an example of this lexical differentiation. The much later Jain Pārśvanātha Caritra distinguishes between shape-shifting (rūpāntarakóti) and entering another’s body (parakāyapraveśa).48 Another reason for arguing in favor of possession rather than shape-shifting in the case of the muni is that he is, unmistakably, an ascetic, and merging with or becoming possessed by a deity was more likely for such a figure than was shape-shifting, which signifies greater stakes in worldly pursuits than those that the muni appears to have. Shape-shifting is most often a strategy for subterfuge, adopted to present a persona to the world or to a particular individual different from one’s own given or recognized form. Occasionally it is employed for other strategic purposes, such as assuming a shape that is more suitable for a specific physical medium or situation, for example, changing into the form of a bird in order to fly through the air. However, it does not encompass internal shifts of identity or transformations of mental and psychological states that are characteristic of possession, even if it enhances the individual’s power—and it is clear in the present instance that the muni is not concerned with his physical appearance; rather, he enters the form of the god in order to enhance his ecstatic state. In addition, shape-shifting is limited almost entirely to celestial beings, who already command considerable power and charisma, while possession always requires at least one human. To the best of my knowledge, there is no literary or oral record of a deity or spirit’s possessing another deity or spirit. In the ñV, Indra is the god who most often resorts to shape-shifting, a strategy that he has developed for enhancing his own power: ñV 3.53.8ab:

rūpáÅrūpaÅ maghávā bobhavīti māy6n kóâvānás tanvàÅ pari sv6m |

Maghavān constantly changes form, rendering his own body completely magical.


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In another rather elliptical passage, the sage announces that his hymn is in praise of Indra, who manifests various forms within his daughter’s womb (vakùáâāsu [interior spaces]): ñV 5.42.13:

prá sú mahé suśaraâ6ya medh6Å gíram bhare návyasīÅ j6yamānām | yá āhan6 duhitúr vakùáâāsu rūp6 minānó ákóâod idáÅ nan ||

My latest cognition, my hymn, that is now arising within me, I bestow upon the great one who offers safe refuge [Indra], the striker, who has created all this, whose forms are knit within the womb of his daughter.

Indra’s reputation for incest, even at this early date, surely inspired this trope. It is likely that the daughter is the earth, and her wantonness the earth’s fertility. Indra’s virility and his prowess at shape-shifting are reconfigured as his power to produce varied forms within and on the earth.49 The purpose of shape-shifting is usually to accomplish a specific deed wherein a prior intentional or psychological state is aided by a more appropriate and powerful physical form. Several stories from the Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaâa, and elsewhere, some dependent on vedic exemplars, bear this out. In one story (MBh 3.197) Indra assumes the shape of a hawk and Agni the shape of a pigeon in order to test Śibi. In another (MBh 14.55, 58), Indra tests Uttaãka by adopting the form of a Cāâbāla and offering him nectar (amóta) in the form of urine. In the Rāmāyaâa Hanumān often expands or contracts his body in encounters with inimical beings. For example, he defeats but nevertheless gains the blessing of Surasā, the “mother of snakes,” through expanding and contracting in order to enter and exit her mouth, and he kills the rākùasī SiÅhikā by entering her with his tiny form and piercing her vital organs (Rām 5.1.130–178).50 He is called kāmarūpin (Rām 5.5.1), one who has the ability to change his form at will. In one passage, he morphs into a mendicant from a mountain called ñùyamūka in order to help Sugrīva, and there refers to himself as kāmarūpin (Rām 4.3.21).51 In the Bhāgavata Purāâa (BhP) retelling of a very old story that has its roots in the ñV and middle vedic literature, the sage Cyavana, old and wrinkled, was married to the “beautiful maiden” Sukanyā, the daughter of King Śaryāti. Not thinking himself fit for such a wife, he offered soma libations to


the celestial physicians, the Aśvinīkumāras, though he knew that they were technically ineligible. In exchange, the Aśvinīkumāras promised to return him to his youth. And thus it happened. But Indra objected and tried to kill Cyavana with his vajra. Not only did he fail in this mission, but Cyavana paralyzed Indra’s arm, forcing his vajra to drop helplessly to the ground. Ever after, all the gods have agreed to grant a libation of soma to the Aśvins (BhP 9.3.1–26).52 Two related cases of shape-shifting, or at least of ethereal transformation, that serve positively charged ritual and brahmaâical goals, are recounted in the Jaiminīya Brāhmaâa (JB, 2.53–54)53 and the Jaiminīya Upaniùad Brāhmaâa (JUB, 3.6.1–3).54 They both involve Keśin Dārbhya, a king of the Kuru-Pāñcāla clan, who, in the JB story, unsuccessfully attempts to initiate himself into the vedic sacrificial ritual and, in the story from the JUB, encounters the ghost of his beloved uncle, the late king of the Kurus, Ucchainśravas Kaupapeya, in the forest while on a hunting expedition. In the JB Keśin is taught the proper mantras of consecration by the ghost of his late uncle, who appears to him, having assumed the form of a golden bird. In the JUB, Keśin is overjoyed to see the figure of his uncle roaming the forest. Keśin attempts to embrace him but fails, because Uccainśravas does not have a tangible body. In order to embrace his uncle and join him in the world of the gods, Keśin, by now an advanced vedic ritualist, needs a brahman officiant to “shake off my bodies with a disembodying Sāmavedic chant” (sa me ’śarīreâa sāmnā śarīrāây adhūnot; JUB 3.6.1.2). These tales of Keśin Dārbhya argue for the legitimacy of disembodied sources of knowledge; at the very least, they display a sense of discarnate spirits, conceived as epistemological units detached from the physical body and capable of ousting the consciousness of any human being, and therefore capable of possessing it. Because of the fluidity of form and identity, disembodiment here partakes of aspects of both shape-shifting and possession. The shape-shifting is clear, especially when the spirit of Uccainśravas adopts the shape of a golden bird, a clearly wrought symbol of the achievement of a divine afterlife. The territory of possession is the assumption of a multiplicity of bodies. J. C. Heesterman often points out that the unitary world envisioned in the Vedas consists of a seamless flow of multiple and often contradictory parts. Both the world and the individual depicted in the early and middle vedic texts are constructed of incompatible principles that express ambivalence and conflict. The irony, cohesiveness, and flow of this complex whole was, according to Heesterman, subverted first by the “classical” vedic ritual


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and then by the Upaniùads, with their procrustean application of an “unforgiving transcendent order.”55 This transcendent order adopted as ideology became brahmanism, which, as Gombrich supposed, inculcated control. This it did, says Gombrich, in part by denying all value to possession states. We might ask here, however, how true this really was. No doubt, brahmanism was an increasingly conservative intellectual and cultural movement that denied many of the less-Sanskritic elements of Indian social, intellectual, and spiritual culture. It also exploited its custody of literature and literacy in order to tilt Indian culture to the social and material advantage of brahmans. And, in no small measure, this required the denial of public forms of selfexpression and empowerment, including possession. However, before the philosophy and theology of the Vedas and Upaniùads devolved into brahmanism, possession was recognized, even embraced by brahmans. This was before the folk had parted company with the Sanskritic. We have already seen that the ñV and other early and middle vedic texts recognize and even celebrate possession. An example of an endorsement of it in the systematic philosophy of the Upaniùads occurs in the Muâbaka Upaniùad (3.2.5), which states: “The wise, their selves controlled, when they attain him [puruùa] altogether, he who is present in All, they enter into [āviśanti] that very All.”56 This is to say, the wise, though controlled, become possessed by that wholeness (sarvam), which is both personified and universalized as the cosmic man (puruùa). Their very being becomes indistinguishable from that wholeness, and they become its instrument. Although brahmanism here undeniably inculcates control, it also recognizes possession and the possibility of a general transformation of personality. This is a philosophical presupposition of Keśin Dārbhya in the JUB passage cited above. In the JUB, possession was an assumed prefiguration to shape-shifting. As a ritualist familiar with the consumption of soma and the deeds of Indra, Keśin believed that minds and bodies could be taken over by powerful forces and dissolved by disembodiment chants. In most states of possession, the mask, either actual (as often occurs in ritualized possession)57 or psychological, is not a masquerade. It is not an act of deception, as in the case of shape-shifting, but denotes a real, if temporary, shift in identity and perspective. In shape-shifting, the personality, which remains intact to the experiencer, is revealed to the observer only after the mask has fallen away. In one of the instances of shape-shifting from the MBh noted above, in which Indra assumes the shape of a hawk and Agni the shape of a pigeon in order to test King Śibi, Indra and Agni—who are gods


and therefore blessed with nonchanging forms (occasional injuries, curses, and afflictions aside)—must maintain their masks, lest their identities be revealed. In contrast, drawing from another example cited above, the sage Cyavana’s shape is changed (his youth is restored), seemingly permanently (until he grows old again), as a gift in return for granting the Aśvinīkumāras the gift of soma. Yet the form of the muni, who, possessed by the deity, rides the wind, does not undergo any change as a result of his experience, nor does that of the ritualist who has drunk soma, nor do those possessed in any of the examples noted below. Both shape-shifting and possession confer an uneasy power, but only in the latter case is core identity at stake. This hints at a precarious—and curious—relationship between physical and personal identity: Personal identity is transformed through possession, but not through shape-shifting, while shape-shifting is always a ruse and does not appear to induce any transformation of personal identity. Doubtless, personal identity can shift more easily in mythic than in human contexts, because myth encourages a more flexible material framework on which to fix identity. But the mythic and the human are blurred in ritual, where the identity of human actors can appear to shift like autumn winds (or like myth), through a system of specific coordinates that lies behind the shifts, as one should expect in India, waiting to be deciphered. Both the textuality and practice of vedic ritual, and the textuality and practice of the MBh, Rām, and Purāâas in their wake,58 are replete with examples of possession and (at least prescribed) shape-shifting. Apparently, the attention paid to ritual detail and etiquette does not interfere with the emotional urgency required for possession in any of these instances,59 though to be sure this urgency has been drained from vedic ritual practice as part of the supersession of rule and control that became an oppressive feature of brahmanism. One of the most frequent mantras prescribed in the Yajurvedic ritual literature lies at the cusp of possession and shape-shifting. The Taittirīya SaÅhitā prescribes the following for recitation during a number of ritual acts preliminary to the offerings themselves, such as while lifting a pot of ghee or a riceflour ball (purobāśa): “On the impulse of the God Savitó, with the arms of the Aśvins, with the hands of Pūùan, I take thee” (devasya tvā savitun prasave ’śvinor bāhubhyāÅ pūùâo hastābhyām ā dade; TS 1.3.1.1, 7.1.11.1).60 Thus it is not the officiant alone who takes up the ghee, but the officiant as composite deity who performs the actions through the body of the officiant. This mantra, more than any other, served as the paradigm for the process of divinization of the body called nyāsa (setting down, imposi-


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tion), which was to become one of the trademarks of Hindu daily ritual and Tantric practice.61 I deal with nyāsa extensively later, in discussions of possession in Tantra; it is sufficient to mention here that it is a uniquely brahmanical subcategory of possession, one in which transformation of form is thought, even prescribed, to accompany possession. The composite nature of personal identity expressed in this mantra, various deities together with a human actor who is not thoroughly occluded, but remains capable of making decisions and following learned ritual patterns, is quite in keeping with much of the possession performance in the ethnographies. For the extraordinary degree to which personal identity is reassigned in this composite manner in vedic ritual, one need search no farther than any Śrautasūtra on the New and Full Moon Sacrifices (darśapūrâamāsau),62 in which this mantra is often employed. Because this mantra is presented in a prescriptive rather than a descriptive context, terms such as āveśa are notably absent.63 One example of the extension of this mantra and corresponding notion of multiform identity into a later mythic setting will suffice. In a myth with a venerable vedic and Purāâic pedigree, Śiva was excluded from Dakùa’s sacrifice.64 As a result, he wreaked havoc on the sacrifice and, among other things, chopped off the arms and hands of some of the officiants, as well as the head of Dakùa himself. In order to have the sacrifice completed after he was finally, and grudgingly, admitted into it, Śiva decreed: BhP 4.7.5:

bāhubhyām aśvinon pūùâo hastābhyāÅ kó•avāhavan | bhavantv adhvaryavaś cānye bastaśmaśrur bh ógur bhavet ||65

The adhvaryus and other ritual officiants should carry on their duties with the arms of the Aśvins and with the hands of Pūùan, and let Bhógu have the beard of a billy-goat.

Eventually the decapitated head of the sacrificial goat was joined with the body of the beheaded Dakùa (Bhógu). The relevant point of this story is that the feared and ferocious Śiva wields the power to curse and destroy, but he leaves the marks of divinity in the wake of his curse and destruction, even if these marks are also embarrassing stigmata of pain and humiliation. Another example of such divine and human collusion, also intended for the New and Full Moon Sacrifices (and elsewhere as well), is given in the Taittirīya Brāhmaâa where the sacrificer addresses deity-ancestors and ancestor-deities:


TB 3.7.5.4–5:

yò ’hám asmi sá sán yaje | yasy6smi ná tám antár emi | sváÅ ma iù•áá sváÅ dattáá sváÅ pūrtáá sváÅ śrāntáá sváÅ hutám | tásya me ’gnír upadraù•6 vāyúr upaśrot6 ādityò ’nukhyāt6 | dyáun pit6 póthivH māt6 prajápatir bándhun | yá ev6smi sá sán yaje |

Being the one I am, I sacrifice. I do not go beyond the one to whom I belong. I have offered what is mine, I have given what is mine, I have conferred as largesse what is mine, I have offered as oblation what is mine. Of this, Agni is the eyewitness, Vāyu the one who hears it, Āditya the one who announces it, Heaven the father, Earth the mother, Prajāpati the kinsman. I sacrifice, being the one who I am.66

Who is this sacrificer and how is it that the ritual becomes so efficient? The answers, according to the TB, are that the sacrificer is in some sense a multiform, a composite entity of all of these gods. He “seizes Agni” (both the devatā and the fire) and thus the remaining gods “in their own abode” (agníÅ góhâāti sá evāyátane devátān pári góhâāti; TS 1.6.7.1–2). It is possible to argue that a supplicant’s conviction of a deity’s control over his or her actions, and a ritualized verbal recognition of the deity’s sovereignty, is not the same as either shape-shifting or possession. This may be the case in the Western notions of possession or shape-shifting derived from ethnographic observation and analysis, but it does not appear true of India. This is probably true of classical India, where the category of possession was quite broad, and partly overlapped with the category of shape-shifting.

In the Beginning, God Possessed Heaven and Earth Possession is, first and foremost, a quality of embodiment. It may be a uniquely configured embodiment or, under certain conditions, a viewpoint on embodiment. Embodiment is characterized in the Upaniùads as primordial, archetypal: It happened in the beginning. In that beginning, bráhman, the eternal, absolute, unlimited power, was anthropomorphized, even humanized, by manifesting recognizable qualities such as desire and fear, as


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púruùa, the first and supreme person. This neuter bráhman, with or without its masculine cloak as púruùa, desired multiplicity, thus entered, embodied, and animated an equally primordial, if initially inert, materiality. The bráhman then divided its newly adopted body into male and female, then into all different types of sexually differentiated beings. This primordial embodiment and subsequent mixing and recombinant identities is at the basis of the Indian notions of multiple and polyvalent selves. This is a self that cannot be expressed except through its multiformity—and which is therefore not reducible except by recapturing its archetypal nature through philosophical understanding or spiritual exercise. Embodiment or animation, however, in its multiform complexity, is irreducible in and to its essences without a termination in the form of death, which returns the materiality of an embodied individual to its primordial quiescence and latency. Archetypal embodiment, then, is also archetypal possession, serving as a model for the flow and exchange of substances, substance codes, and essences, which affect other psychophysical organisms for the duration of their shared locus. However, even on the eventual (and inevitable) separation of substances, this flow and exchange to a great extent produces the unique identity of every embodied individual. The most productive way to comprehend this primordial possession is by observing it at work in the vedic texts. Most of the important passages are found in the Upaniùads, and for this I have depended largely on the recent translations of Patrick Olivelle. Let us begin, however, with a passage from the Śatapatha Brāhmaâa, which relates how bráhman first saw this world, vacant and inert, and wondered how to bring it to life. ŚB 11.2.3.1–3:

bráhma v6 idam ágra āsīt | tád dev6n as ójata | tád dev6n s óù •vai ùú loké ùu vy6rohayat | asmínn evá loké ’gním vāyúm antárik ùe divy èva sXryam ||1|| átha yé ’ta ūrdhv6 lok6n | tad yā áta ūrdhv6 devátān | té ùu t6 devátā vy6rohayat | sa yáthā haivèmá āvírlok6 im6ś ca devátān | evám u haiva tá āvírlok6ś t6ś ca devátān | yé ùu t6 devátā vy6rohayat || 2|| átha bráhmaivá parārdhám agacchat tatparārdháÅ gatvàikùata | kathaÅ nv ìmān lok6n pratyáveyām íti | taddv6bhyām evá pratyávait | rXpeâa caiva n6mnā ca . . . || 3||


(1) In the beginning [all] this was bráhman. It created the gods. Having created the gods, it made them ascend into these worlds: Agni into this world, Vāyu into the midregion, Sūrya into the heavens. (2) There are worlds above these, as there are deities above these: He made these deities ascend into them. Just as these worlds and these deities are manifest, those worlds and those deities are manifest. (3) Bráhman alone went to the sphere beyond. Having gone to that sphere beyond, bráhman considered, “How indeed can I again descend into these worlds?” It descended by means of these two alone—visible appearance and name.67

The Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad (BĀU) describes the differentiation of the “single body in the shape of a man” (ātmaivedam agra āsīt puruùavishan, 1.4.1). It—he, really—perceived his singularity, discovered fear and pleasure, then split into two, creating husband and wife. They copulated, creating humans first, then “every other pair that exists, down to ants” (evam eva yad idaÅ kiÅca mithunam ā pipīlikābhyas tatsarvam as ójata, 1.4.4). This puruùa then churned Agni “from his mouth as if a vagina” (abhyamanthat | sa mukhāc ca yonin, 1.4.6), and from his semen created Soma (tad retaso ’s ójata | tad u soman, 1.4.6). These two, Agni and Soma, are the great polarity of vedic thought: heat and cold, dry and wet, the two forces that the ritualist strives to balance. “Food is nothing but Soma, and Agni is the eater of food” (soma evānnam agnir annādan, 1.4.6). BĀU 1.4.7

tad dhedam tarhy avyākótam āsīt | tan nāmarūpābhyām eva vyākriyatāsaunāmāyam idaárūpa iti | tad idam apy etarhi nāmarūpābhyām eva vyākriyate ’saunāmāyam idaárūpa iti | sa eùa iha praviù•a ā nakhāgrebhyo yathā kùuran kùuradhāne ’vahitan syād viśvaÅbharo vā viśvaÅbharakulāye | taÅ na paśyanti | akótsno hi san | prāâann eva prāâo nāma bhavati vadan vāk paśyaáś cakùun śóâvañ chrotraÅ manvāno manan | tāny asyaitāni karmanāmāny eva |

At that time this world was without real distinctions; it was distinguished simply in terms of name and form—“He is so and so by name and has this sort of an appearance.” So even today this world is distinguished simply in


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terms of name and form, as when we say, “He is so and so by name and has this sort of an appearance.” Penetrating this body up to the very nailtips, he remains there like a razor within a case or an earthbound creature within its nest. People do not see him, for he is incomplete. When he is breathing, he is called breath; when speaking, speech; when hearing, ear; when thinking, mind. These are only the names of his many activities.68

The central point of the BĀU passage is reiterated in the first verse of the Īśā Upaniùad: “This whole world is to be dwelt in by the Lord, whatever living being there is in the world” (īśāvāsyam idaá sarvaÅ yatkiÅca jagatyām jagat).69 This may be the most succinct statement of vedic theism, in which the Lord (īśā) entered, permeated, possessed, and animated the inert world. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniùad (ŚvetU) state that the world has become full (pūrâam) with that puruùa, with the strong implication that all this (idaÅ sarvam) stood empty before being pervaded by that great being. ŚvetU 3.9:

yasmāt paraÅ nāparam asti kiÅcid yasmān nāâīyo na jyāyo ’sti kiÅcit | vók ùeva stabdho divi tiù•haty ekas tenedaÅ pūrâaÅ puru ùeâa sarvam ||

All this is full with that Person, the one beyond whom there is no other; beneath whom there is nothing; smaller than whom there is nothing; larger than whom there is nothing; and who stands in heaven, firm as a tree.70

The Chāndogya Upaniùad (ChU ) states that this puruùa then not only created three distinct types of beings and entered them in order to confer upon them name and form, but refers to the primeval beings of all these three divisions as deities. This is the only instance I know of in which a vedic (or any other) text speaks of a deity’s possessing another deity. ChU 6.3.1–3:

teùāÅ khalv eùāÅ bhūtānāÅ trīny eva bījāni bhavanty aâbajaÅ jīvajam udbhijjam iti | seyaÅ devataikùata hantāham imās tisro devatānena jīvenātmanānupraviśya nāmarūpe vyākaravāâīti | tāsāÅ trivótaÅ trivótam ekaikāÅ karavāâīti |


seyaÅ devatemās tisro devatā anenaiva jīvenātmanānupraviśya nāmarūpe vyākarot | tāsāÅ trivótaÅ trivótam ekaikāÅ karavāâīti | With respect to these, then, of these beings there are only three kinds of seeds: They can be born from eggs, from living individuals, or from sprouts. Then that same deity thought to itself: “Come now, why don’t I establish the distinctions of name and form by entering these three deities here with this living self [jīvenātmanā], and make each of them threefold.” So, that deity established the distinctions of name and form by entering these three deities here with this living self, and made each of them threefold.71

This is likely nothing more than a trope, however, a manner of speaking, a divinization of the world and the body that characterized much of later brahmanical (and tantric) thought. The Aitareya Upaniùad (AiU) tells of the origin of the composite being, the man composed of deities, but clearly directed by the one original deity. See, for instance, AiU I.1.1: “In the beginning this world was the self [ātman], one alone, and there was no other being at all that blinked an eye. He thought to himself: ‘Let me create the worlds’” (ātmā vā idam eka evāgra āsīn nānyat kiÅcana miùat | sa īkùata | lokān nu s ójā iti ||). Eventually the deities were created, and they fell into a “vast ocean.” He became hungry and thirsty. The gods demanded a dwelling in which they could “establish” themselves “and eat food” (āyatanaÅ nan prajānīhi yasmin pratiù•hitā annam adāma, 1.1.2). First, a cow was brought; then, a horse. Both turned out to be inadequate; he wanted a man, and the man turned out to be well-made (sukótam). “Then he [the ātman] told them: ‘Enter, each into your respective dwelling’ (tā abravīd yathāyatanaÅ praviśata, 1.1.4) So, the fire became speech and entered the mouth (agnir vāg bhūtvā mukhaÅ prāviśat); the wind became breath and entered the nostrils (prāâo bhūtvā nāsike prāviśat); the sun became sight and entered the eyes (ādityaś cakùur bhūtvākùiâī prāviśat); the quarters became hearing and entered the ears (diśan śrotraÅ bhūtvā karâau prāviśat); the plants and trees became body hairs and entered the skin (oùadhivanaspatayo lomāni bhūtvā tvacaÅ prāviśan); the moon became mind and entered the heart (candramā mano bhūtvā hódayaÅ prāviśat); death became the inbreath and entered the navel (mótyur apāno bhūtvā nābhiÅ prāviśat); the waters became semen and entered the penis (āpo reto bhūtvā śiśnaÅ


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prāviśan).” “Then he thought to himself: ‘How can this possibly carry on without me?’ And he thought: ‘Through which of these shall I enter?’” (sa īkùata katareâa prapadyā iti, 1.3.11–12).72 The ātman considered entering though speech, prāâa, the eyes, the ears, the skin, the mind, the apāna, and the penis. Finally he decided to “split open the head at the point where the hairs part and entered through that gate” (sa etam eva sīmānaÅ vidāryaitayā dvārā prāpadyata, 1.3.12).73 The ŚvetU continues that the great deity abides unseen within all beings and all things. A natural separation between the puruùa and the world appears to be established as a doctrinal point, at least until that separation is closed due to an act of will of the deity or the brahman to close it. ŚvetU 6.11–12:

eko devan sarvavhūteùu gūbhan sarvavyāpī sarvabhūtāntarātmā | karmādhyakùan sarvabhūtādhivāsan sākùī cetā kevalo nirguâaś ca || eko vaśī niùkriyāâāÅ bahūnām ekaÅ bījaÅ bahudhā yan karoti | tam ātmasthaÅ ye ’nupaśyanti dhīrās teùāÅ sukhaÅ śāśvataÅ netareùām ||

The one God hidden in all beings, all-pervading, the inner self of all beings, the overseer of action, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the spectator, alone, devoid of qualities, the one controller of the many who are inactive, who makes the single seed manifold—the wise who perceive him as abiding within themselves [ātman], they alone, not others, enjoy eternal happiness.74

The fifth chapter of the Ka•ha Upaniùad (KU) shows, once again, that the Upaniùadic thinkers regarded the body as an inert entity until it was animated by an unattached life substance. KU 5.4 states: “When this embodied self dwelling in the body comes unglued and is freed from the body—what then is here left behind?”75 This is reminiscent of Kauùītaki Upaniùad (KùU ) 1.2, in which the seasons send a dead man into the semen of another man, who is an agent through which the dead man is poured into a mother: “Then you sent me into a man, the agent; and, through that man as the agent, you poured me into a mother” (tasmā puási kartary erayadhvaÅ puásā kartrā mātari māsiùikta |).76 The transfer of a discarnate spirit essence (see below on “transfer of essence”) from one enveloping agent or substance


to another further confirms the doctrinal point of inherent separation of essence, “coded substance,” or “spirit,” and physical or observable matter. KU 5.7 suggests reasons that why this living essence occupies a certain body. “Some embodied beings proceed [prapadyante] to a womb for the sake of a body, others move toward immovable objects—according to their actions, according to their learning.” Then Yama, the narrator of the Upaniùad, describes the integrated action of fire (agni), inner self (antarātman), and lifebreath (vāyu) adapting to its selected body. KU 5.9–10:

agnir yathaiko bhuvanaÅ praviù•o rūpaÅrūpaÅ pratirūpo babhūva | ekas tathā sarvabhūtāntarātmā rūpaÅrūpaÅ pratirūpo bahiś ca || vāyur yathaiko bhuvanaÅ praviù•o rūpaÅrūpaÅ pratirūpo babhūva | ekas tathā sarvabhūtāntarātmā rūpaÅrūpaÅ pratirūpo bahiś ca ||

As the one fire, entering the world, takes on an appearance corresponding to each form, so the one self within all beings takes on forms corresponding to each form, yet remains outside them. As the one wind, entering the world, takes on forms corresponding to each form, so the one self within all beings takes on forms corresponding to each form, yet remains outside them.77

The sixth question of the Praśna Upaniùad (PU) poses the question: “Do you, O Bhāradvāja, know the person consisting of sixteen parts? . . . Who is that person?” (ùobaśakalaÅ bhāradvāja puruùaÅ vettha . . . kvāsau puruùa iti). The sage Pippalāda instructs the pupil Sukeśa in the complex nature of the individual: PU 6.2, 5:

ihaivāntan śarīre somya sa puruùo yasminn etān ùobaśakalān prabhavantīti || . . . sa yathemā nadyan syandāyaâān samudraÅ prāpyās taÅ gacchanti | bhidyete tāsāÅ nāmarūpe | samudra ity evaÅ procyate | evam evāsya paridraù•ur imān ùobaśa kalān puruùāyaâān puruùaÅ prāpyās taÅ gachanti | bhidyete cāsāÅ nāmarūpe | puruùa ity evaÅ procyate | sa eùo ’kalo ’móto bhavati |


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Right here within the body, my friend, is that person in whom the sixteen parts come into being. . . . Now, take these rivers. They flow toward the ocean and, upon reaching it, merge into the ocean and lose their name and visible appearance; one simply calls it the ocean. In just the same way, these sixteen parts of the person who is the perceiver proceed toward the person and, upon reaching him, merge into that person, losing their names and visible appearances; one simply calls it the person. He then becomes partless and immortal.78

Just as brahman entered the world and disappeared within it, and as the rivers enter and become indistinguishable from the ocean, so the cosmic puruùa enters and dissolves within the individual person (puruùa). If the individual fails to take advantage of this ultimately divine embodiment by slipping into ignorance and pride—which the Upaniùad regards as misuse of sacred knowledge for the sake of worldly delight, or learning for its own sake—the consequence, described in the Īśā Upaniùad, is another sort of possession. ĪU 9:

andhaÅ taman praviśanti ye ’vidyām upāsate | tato bhūya iva te tamo ya u vidyāyāá ratān ||

Into blind darkness they enter, people who worship ignorance; And into still blinder darkness, people who delight in learning.79 ĪU 12:

andhaÅ taman praviśanti ye ’saÅbhūtim upāsate | tato bhūya iva te tamo ya u saÅbhūtyāá ratān ||

Into blind darkness they enter, people who worship nonbecoming; And still blinder darkness, people who delight in becoming.80

The ignorant and the arrogant become immersed in, possessed by, thick layers of darkness (tamas). The individual should, after all, be able to recognize the divine source that has entered and possessed the world and all embodied beings. Through well-directed meditative practice, the individual should be able to reverse the direction of this possession and meet this divinity within his or her own heart.


KU 4.6,7: yan pūrvaÅ tapaso jātam adbhyan pūrvam ajāyata | guhāÅ praviśya tiù•hantaÅ yo bhūtebhir vyapaśyata || etad vai tat ||6|| yā prāâena saÅbhavati aditir devatāmayī | guhāÅ praviśya tiù•hantaÅ yo bhūtebhir vyapaśyata || etad vai tat ||7|| He who was born before heat, who before the waters was born, who has seen through living beings—Entering the cave of the heart, [one sees] him abiding there. So, indeed, is that. She who comes into being with breath, Aditi, who embodies divinity, who was born through living beings— Entering the cave of the heart, [one sees] him abiding there. So, indeed, is that.81

The KùU describe more landscape on the path to the gods. KùU 1.5:

sa āgacchatīlyaÅ vókùam | taÅ brahmagandhan praviśati | sa āgacchati sālajyaÅ saÅsthanam | taÅ brahmarasan praviśati | sa āgacchaty aparājitam āyatanam | taÅ brahmatejan praviśati | sa āgacchatīndraprajāpatī dvāragopau | tāv asmād apadravatan | sa āgacchati vibhu pramitam | taÅ brahmayaśan praviśati ||

He arrives at the tree Ilya, and the fragrance of brahman permeates him. Then he arrives at the plaza Sālajya, and the flavor of brahman permeates him. Then he arrives at the palace Aparājita, and the radiance of brahman permeates him. Then he arrives near the doorkeepers, Indra and Prajāpati, and they flee from him. Then he arrives at the hall Vibhu, and the glory of brahman permeates him.82

He is entered, permeated by fragrance, flavor, radiance, glory. The passage continues to describe the throne of brahman, identified as wisdom (prajñā), constituted of sāmans. On it is a couch constituted in various places by the past and present, prāâa, prosperity and nourishment, different sāmans, ñg verses, Yajus mantras, and soma stalks. Brahman sits on this couch. But brahman cannot be permeated, entered, occupied, or possessed by anything or anybody. With its various manifestations it can, however, enter, occupy, and


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permeate an individual, dead or alive. The text continues to describe his return journey to brahman and his realization of it. It is important to note in the Upaniùads the use of pra√viś rather than ā√viś, which was used in contexts of possession almost exclusively in the ñV. The idiomatic distinction that has prevailed throughout most of the history of Sanskrit and Indic literature has, thus, already been established by the time of the Upaniùads: pra√viś is used for entry in which the intentionality of entering, pervading, permeating, or possessing originates from without, from an external agent. In contrast, ā√viś is established in cases in which the intentionality is from within; an individual invites entry, pervasion, possession by soma. In these usages, praveśa serves (in general) practical, creative ends, while āveśa more often than not describes ecstatic (and, later, oracular) possession.

Transfer of Essence Related to possession and sometimes nearly indistinguishable from it, as we have seen in reviewing vedic passages on speech (v6c) and sustenance (Xrjam), is a notion developed with considerable sophistication in the middle vedic texts and Upaniùads. This notion may be labeled “transfer of essence.” This topic is vast and fraught with pitfalls, including proximity to early notions of karma (the pervading influence of the moral quality of one’s action on the individual as a whole),83 its overlap with the often-discussed epistemological strategy called bandhu or bandhutā, linkage of one phenomenon, entity, being, notion, or concept with another, based on phonological similarities, numerological equivalences, or other formal principles,84 and the subsequent invitation into the minefield of transactional models for human (and nonhuman) action. We can barely pause to deal with the first and second of these, but will gradually unfold the third, for which McKim Marriott and Stephanie Jamison have worked out effective models, albeit separately: Jamison did not consult Marriott’s work in constructing her transactional model of vedic sacrificial ritual in her book Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer’s Wife. These essences, akin to Marriott’s coded substances, are transferred in much the same way an integrated personality with a complex identity passes into another during a conscious or otherwise felt experience of possession: as unseen though hardly undetected or unexplained forces, substances, or


entities moving from one bounded corporeality to another, from one individual to another, or from a deity or other ethereal being into a human vessel. If “essences” are to be discussed, it would be wise to locate Sanskrit equivalents. Perhaps the primary word for “essence” used in the Sanskrit lexicon is rasa. It is employed in this general sense in the Brāhmaâas to indicate a life-force or life-essence that may be transferred from one being or state to another.85 For example, the ŚB 6.1.1.4,7 speaks of rasa as the medium through which puruùa, the archetypal person, became Prajāpati, the Lord of Created Beings, and was henceforth identified with Agni in the esoteric doctrine of the agnicayana.86 In BĀU 1.2.2, heat (tejas) is identified as the essence of Death (mótyu), who, in his role as creator, became Agni (tejo raso niravartāgnin). However, the appearance in a text passage of the word rasa (or any other singularly identified word) is by no means requisite to illustrate that “essences” are transferable. Two general differences between transfer of essence and possession may be noted. First, in “transfer of essence,” the substances transferred are elemental and constitutive, such as sexuality, life-force (prāâá), disease, sacrificial essence (médhas), bráhman-splendor (brahmavarcasá), and the taint of transgression (énas). Except for prāâá in certain texts, these substances do not themselves indicate or include within them whole and integrated personalities. Second, transfer of essence is not driven by independent intentionality, but is guided externally. Intent, the psychomental vehicle accommodating the essence to be transferred flows from a conscious bearer to an (often unsuspecting) individual or locus in or on which it eventually subsists. Most often in the vedic theological texts transfer of essence is explained as either an artifact of an original and paradigmatic act of creation—it was obvious, after all, that offspring were somehow defined by the essences (semen and blood) transferred from their progenitors—or, doubtless based on this and other observable patterns in nature, part of a chain of ritual transactions that centrally invoked coded substances.87 In this way the transfer of essences was naturalized; and this, it appears, in no small measure contributed to the naturalization and widespread assumption of possession in South Asia. The Atharvaveda contains a rather long hymn (thirty-four verses, AVŚ 11.8, AVP 11.10) that describes the “putting-together” (saÅdh6) of the human body, explained by Sāyaâa as the manner in which bráhman entered the body with its own essence (śarīrasya madhye ātmatvena praviù•aÅ brahma). After noting that bráhman’s creative powers were gathered from the


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opposite energetic poles of personal austerities (tápas) and ritual action (kárman), the sage states that the body’s intentionality (6kuti) consists of inhalation and exhalation (prāâāpānáu), sight (cákùus), hearing (śrótram), wholeness (ákùitin), fissure (kùítin), the breath disseminated throughout the body and the upward-moving breath (vyānodānáu), speech (v6k), and mind (mánas) (11.8.4). At this point it appears that the divinities Indra, Soma, Agni, Tvaù•ó, and Dhātó stepped in to assist bráhman. The work of primary creation became corporate as corporeality increased in complexity. The poet then asks what realm (lokám) bráhman entered (pr 6viśan) after he brought into being (6bharat) hair, bone, sinew, flesh, marrow, and created a body with feet (11.8.11). The answer appears to be that this loká is a person whom the gods then possessed (púruùam 6viśan), a whole mortal (sárvaÅ már tyaÅ), poured together by the gods (11.8.13). The gods possessed this person (púruùam 6viśan) after Tvaù•ó made this mortal into a house (11.8.18). The realm bráhman and the gods entered is expressed with pra√viś, but the act of entering into and enlivening the whole person is expressed with ā√viś. The next nine verses list various essences that then entered into this body: AVŚ 11.8.19–27: svápno vái tandrHr nírótin pāpm6no n 6ma devátān | jar6 kh6latyaÅ p6lityaÅ śárīram ánu pr6viśan |19|| stéyaÅ duùkótáÅ vójináÅ satyáÅ yajñó yáśo bóhát | bálaÅ ca kùatrám ójaś ca śárīram ánu pr6viśan ||20|| bhXtiś ca v6 ábhūtiś ca rātáyó ’tayaś ca y6n | kùúdhaś ca sárvās töùâāś ca śárīram ánu pr6viśan ||21|| nidr6ś ca v6 ánidrāś ca yác ca hántéti néti ca | śárīram śraddh6 dákùiâ6śraddhā c6nu pr6viśan ||22|| vidy6ś ca v6 ávidyāś ca yáccāny6d upadeśyám | śárīram bráhma pr6viśad öcan s6m6tho yájun ||23|| ānand6 mód6n pramúdo ’bhīmodamúdaś ca yé | hasó naríù•ā nótt6ni śárīram ánu pr6viśan ||24|| ālāp6ś ca pralāp6ś cābhīlāpalápaś ca yé | śárīram sárve pr6viśann āyújan prayújo yújan ||25|| prāâāpānáu cákùun śrótram ákùitiś ca kùítiś ca y6 | vyānodānáu v6â mánan śárīre âa tá īyante ||26|| āśíùaś ca praśíùaś ca saÅśíùo viśíùaś ca y6n | citt6ni sárve saÅkalp6n śárīram ánu pr6viśan ||27||


Sleep, weariness, chaos, the deities named evils, old age, baldness, hoariness, entered the body afterward (19). Theft, bad action, wrong, truth, sacrifice, great glory, strength and dominion, as well as force, entered the body afterward (20). Both growth and diminution, generosity and stinginess, both hungerings and all thirstings, entered the body afterward (21). Sleep and waking, that which [says] “indeed” and “no,” trust, the sacrificial fee, and distrust, entered the body afterward (22). Knowledge and ignorance, and that which is otherwise to be taught, the bráhman entered the body, the mantras from the ñgveda, the chants of the Sāmaveda, and the recitations from the Yajurveda (23). Delights, joys, enjoyments, and those who enjoy enjoyments, laughter, leisure, and dances, entered the body afterward (24). Conversation, idle chatter, and those who utter declarations, all entered the body, whether they come already united [in their declarations], will unite with them forthwith, or are in the process of uniting with them (25). Inhalation and exhalation, sight, hearing, wholeness, fissure, the disseminated breath and the upward-moving breath, speech, and mind, all wander about with this body (26). Blessings and precepts, demands and explanations, thoughts, all intentions, entered the body afterward (27).88

This extraordinary and perhaps unlikely list includes moods, states of mind, intentional states, ethical choices, types of action, bodily functions, modes of breath, and, importantly for the Vedas, modes of speech. All of these may be classified as substance-codes, as essences that enter from without but are constitutive of the vedic person. Verse 28 is very obscure, but appears to suggest that there are certain essences, not clearly delineated, that are rejected from the human persona and “caused to settle in the repugnant one” (bibhats6vasādayan), perhaps a reference to demonic beings. The doctrine of the construction of the body is completed in the next verse: AVŚ 11.8.30:

y6 6po y6ś ca devátā y6 vir6b bráhmaâā sahá | śárīraÅ bráhma pr6 viśac chárīré ’dhi praj6patin ||

Those which are the waters, which are the deities, which is vir6j, [have come] with bráhman. Brahman has entered the body. Prajāpati is in the body.


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Several passages from the Brāhmaâa texts report that the médhas (nourishment or sacrificial essence),89 of the five paradigmatic sacrificial victims— man, horse, bull, goat, and sheep—were successively lost and subsequently transferred to the next in order after they were sacrificed by the gods. After the gods offered up a man (puruùa) as a victim, his medhas entered (praviveśa) the horse, and so on down the line until finally it entered the earth and was recovered in the form of rice and barley.90 The loss of this essence rendered the victims unsuitable for sacrifice, while dramatically increasing the sacrificial potency of rice and barley products.91 What distinguishes this from possession is its abstract theoretical nature. The transfer of medhas is a device employed by the authors of the Brāhmaâa texts to account for the supremacy of vegetal offerings;92 though “real,” it is not conceived as immediately experiential, at least not in a self-reflective or compelling sense. The knower of the Veda is expected to grasp the significance of this transfer of essence through symbolic codes rather than to experience it through the senses. Nevertheless, this demonstrates, first, that essence, hence identity, was not regarded as necessarily fixed or stable and, second, that the instability could be both encoded and codified. For states of possession, to which transfer of essence is closely related, this signified that being “out of control” while remaining within the boundaries of sanctioned behavioral parameters was tantamount to surrendering to a natural order or a phenomenon that could be safely predicted: for what is encoded may be predicted, what is predictable can be naturalized, what is naturalized can be codified, and what is codified can be roped into a realm of safety. In other words, the very fact of bringing an inherently untraceable and unstable force, medhas, under the control of an order conceived of as natural had implications for other similar forces: namely that their natural power could also be attenuated, channeled deliberately, and domesticated. A distinct case of transfer of essence appears in Book 6 of the ChU In this important account, backgrounded in the BĀU (1.4.7), creation of the material world is linked to animation of inert beings. Śvetaketu, the son of Āruâi, returns home after twelve years of Veda study, arrogant in his learning. There is still much for him to learn, his father tells him. After determining that in the beginning was existence (sat) rather than nonexistence (asat), Āruâi teaches Śvetaketu that the first individuated properties of this conscious but neuter existence were tejas (the active, creative light arising from fire), apas (water in its creative form of nourishing rain), and annam (food,


the nourishing, sustaining, active wealth of the earth). From the least substantial and solid to the most, tejas emitted (asójata) apas and apas emitted annam. This potent stew gave rise to a diversity of creatures, which in turn were individuated with name and form. It was only after this moment of individuation that personhood (ātman) was conferred. This process did not transpire through the inevitability of sat, but was galvanized by an unnamed creator deity (seyaÅ devatā) who established distinctions of name and form by entering (anupraviśya) the various beings in the form of ātman.93 BĀU 1.4.7 says that “he penetrated this body up to the tips of the nails” (sa eùa iha praviù•a ā nakhāgrebhyan). People do not see him, for he is incomplete as he comes to be called breath when he is breathing, speech when he is speaking, sight when he is seeing, hearing when he is hearing, and mind when he is thinking. These are only the names of his various activities. A man who considers him to be any one of these does not understand him, for he is incomplete within any one of these. One should consider them as simply his person [ātman], for in it all these become one.94

Just as matter is divided into discrete units, given name and form, then conferred individuality and personhood as a complex but centrally adherent whole, the essence or essences of this person can be transferred to another. The Upaniùads provide an example of this in a rite called saÅpratti or saÅpradāna (transmission), related in BĀU (1.5.17) and KùU (2.14).95 The BĀU description (1.5.14–20) opens the discussion with the familiar assertion that Prajāpati, like the year, consists of sixteen parts. “With that sixteenth part he enters [anupraviśya], on the night of the new moon, all beings that sustain life and is born again the next morning.” The sixteenth part is the supernumerary unseen essence, beyond the fifteen divisions of the fortnight, half the lunar month that constitutes the basic vedic calendrical unit. This sixteenth part, the unseen essence, enters and pervades all beings. The Upaniùad continues, “A man’s fifteen parts comprise his wealth, his sixteenth part is his person [ātman].”96 Immediately before his expected death, a man performs a rite of transfer of his essence to his son. “You are the brahman! You are the sacrifice! You are the world!” he tells his son. “I am the brahman! I am the sacrifice! I am the world!” replies his son. Thus, “he enters [āviśati] his son with these very vital functions [prāâain saha]. So it is only through a son that a man finds a


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secure footing in this world. Thereupon, these [following] divine and immortal vital functions enter [āviśanti] him. From the earth and fire divine speech enters [āviśati] him. Divine speech is that which makes whatever one says happen. From the sky and the sun the divine mind enters [āviśati] him. The divine mind is that which makes a person always happy and never sorrowful. From the waters and the moon the divine breath enters [āviśati] him. The divine breath is that which never falters or fails, whether it is moving or at rest.”97 The son thus is conferred the gifts of true speech, happiness, and unhindered, balanced breath. KùU 2.15, a slightly later text,98 is more detailed: The father lies down dressed in a fresh garment, with ritual fire kindled and a pot of water near at hand. The son lies down on top of the father, touching his father’s body parts with his own corresponding parts; otherwise, they sit facing each other.99 Not only is the lifebreath transferred but, in a similar formulaic rhythm of announcement and response, so are speech, sight, hearing, taste, actions, pleasures and pains, bliss, delight, and procreative capacity, movements, mind, and intelligence. If the father is too unwell to speak much, he may limit the transfer to the prāâas alone. The son then turns around toward his right, walks toward the east, and his father wishes him well: “May glory, the luster of sacred knowledge, and fame attend you!” (taÅ pitānumantrayate yaśo brahmavarcasaÅ kīrtis tvā juùatām iti). The son glances over his left shoulder, hiding his face with his hand or the hem of his garment, and replies, “May you gain heavenly worlds and realize your desires!” (svargāál lokān kāmān āpnuhīti). Interestingly, the KùU ends its account with the statement: “If the father recovers his health, he should either live under the authority of his son or live as a wandering ascetic. But if he happens to die, they should perform the appropriate final rites for him.”100 If he recovers, the father must submit to the son’s authority not only because his essence as lifebreath and other mental and physical functions have been transferred, which is to say he has become ritually lifeless, but because his essence as power has also been transferred, which is to say he has become ritually powerless. Olivelle contends that “the rite transfers the father’s position as paterfamilias to his son.” This, says Olivelle, “must have also involved handing over the paternal estate,” a transfer of rather more material essences. Thus “the transfer is irrevocable,” leaving only these two options.101 Essence, then, is not inexhaustible; when transferred it is gone from its source. Like possession, essence is transferred rather than spread or extended, and here the Upaniùads are unmistakably describing a rite in which


the father, ritually at least, possesses the son. Unlike most classical possession, however, it cannot be reversed, in this case readmitted into the person of the father.102 In Vedic and Upaniùadic fashion, it is a complex and piecemeal possession.103 The difference in complexity between the BĀU and the KùU accounts is important. Why did the BĀU ritualists regard the prāâas as the sole repositories of essence that required transfer, and why did the KùU require a good deal more to be transferred in order to successfully complete the job? The easy answer would be that the BĀU is a text of the Śuklayajurveda, known for its relatively simple ritual, at least compared to that of the various branches (śākhās) of the Kóùâayajurveda and the ñV, to which the K ùU belongs.104 Beyond this, however, may be the idea that the “self ” or “person” to be transferred was considered by different theoreticians of ritual exactitude to possess different degrees of complexity. In addition, the complexity exhibited in the KùU might reflect the developing tendency in Indian systematic (śāstraic) thought to provide cleaner, more detailed lists. The most convenient example of this in philosophical thinking is SāÅkhya, with its lists of embryological principles (tattvas), which may be indebted, at least in part, to thinkers of the Kauùītaki or Śāâkhāyana ritual school. It is also possible that the “self ” or “person” was analyzed as incomplete without more body parts and functions.105 In this case, the movements, procreative capacity, intelligence, and so on of the father would be regarded as equal in importance to the prāâas, but would not be regarded as subservient to them or as “naturally” carried along with them. The naming of body parts, including sense organs, as epistemological units and assigning them extrasensory coordinates is not inconsistent with theories of association invoked previously in the Brāhmaâas.106 In turn, this more complex view might reflect a greater concern with fragmentation and randomness after death, which could account for a more complex and integrated transfer of essences.107 Probably the best-known example of transfer of essence appears in the TS (2.5.1). In one of the more famous (and infamous) of vedic tales, Indra killed Viśvarūpa, the brahman son of Tvaù•ó, thus incurring “brahmanmurder” (brahmahaty6), even then one of the most feared transgressions. The name Viśvarūpa indicates an omniform being, in this case a deity. He possessed three heads: One drank soma, another surā, while the third ate food. Indra chopped off these heads with his thunderbolt (vajra) because he saw Viśvarūpa as a threat to his sovereignty. Indra, however, did not live long with this stain; rather, he managed to transfer it to others. One-third


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of it was transferred to the earth, whose surface is breached through digging; one-third to trees, whose branches are pruned; and the final third was allocated to women, whose bodies leak through menstrual periods (malavadvāsas [stained garments]).108 These three were not left defenseless, however. In return for accepting the brahmahaty6, the earth extracted from Indra the promise that each year her rifts would heal, the trees extracted the guarantee that more shoots would spring up to replace the cut branches, and women were given the boon of childbirth and enjoying intercourse at will up to the time of delivery (which is to say that during this time she is not subject to exclusion because of her menses). This story did not exist in isolation. Indeed, the notion of scapegoating is familiar from the AV and other Brāhmaâa texts. The usual locution is that the énas, generally an archetypal or “original sin” because it was perpetrated by a god, is “wiped off ” (√mój, e.g., Maitrāyaâi SaÅhitā [MS] 4.1.9: mārkùyāmahe) on others who are weakened or victimized by nature (as in the case of the earth, trees, or women) or have opposed the dictates of social order and ethics.109 For example, MS 4.1.9 lists the eventual recipients of the gods’ transgression (énas) in accepting the sacrifice of animals. These include gods known only by number—Ekata, Dvita, Trita—who in turn transferred the énas to those who sleep at sunrise or sunset (probably a reference to those who do not perform the daily agnihotra), those with brown teeth or diseased nails (poorly formed or maintained natural excesses that may have indicated a more serious ontological or social problem), murderers, abortionists, both brothers if the younger married before his elder brother, or a man who married a younger sister before the older one had married. AV 6.113, 114 describe the reallocation of disease believed to be produced by an invasive spirit ( gr6hi) to many of these same victims as well as onto the foam of a river. According to the Kauśikasūtra (46.26–29) on these hymns, the énas disappears with the vanishing of the foam.110 Several brāhmaâa passages explored by Stephanie Jamison relate the myth of Manu’s cups, a fascinating, if highly compressed, tale of hospitality and transfer of essence.111 A composite distillation, drawn primarily from MS 4.8 and Kā•haka SaÅhitā (KS) 30.1, both frustratingly fragmentary, may be presented as follows: Manu had some asura-killing cups, which the asuras, naturally, wished to destroy. Disguising themselves as brahmans, they beg the cups from Manu and destroy them. The broken vessels are then licked by one of Manu’s bulls, which causes it to take on the asura-killing essence. Two brahmans, again asuras in disguise, appear at Manu’s doorstep


and benevolently volunteer to sacrifice a bull for him. Unable to refuse the solicitation of brahmans, Manu acquiesces. The bull is sacrificed; but its unoffered haunch is stolen by an eagle, which drops it into the lap of Manu’s wife. Thus she ends up taking on the asura-killing essence. Itinerant priests (prātaritvan) then show up and importune Manu to sacrifice his wife. This he very nearly does when, bound to the stake, Manu’s wife is set free. This should be examined in greater detail. The MS (4.8.1) states that “Meni came after/entered” (ánvapadyata) the bull to be offered in sacrifice. After the bull was offered, “Meni” entered Manu’s wife. Meni, Jamison demonstrates at length, is “the power or embodiment of negative or thwarted exchange.”112 The complementary passage in the KS (30.1) says, “The two (Asuras) approached [Manu and his wife] [as] Prātaritvans” (prātaritvānā abhiprāpadyetām).113 “Then his wife approached, speaking a yajus. Her voice went to heaven.”114 The two asuric brahmans of this passage, Jamison contends, represent “the wicked mirror image of the Aśvins,”115 who are the archetypal healers and allies of Indra. The verbs employed here are anu√pad (follow, attend, enter upon) and abhi-pra√pad (to come toward, enter into).116 In spite of the neutrality of these verbs in Sanskrit literature, they appear here as equivalent to pra√viś or anu-pra√viś, which, as we have seen, are frequently used to indicate externally induced and uninvited possession. Such possession is, predictably, often charged with a negative, dangerous, or foreboding tone.117 In addition to the accounts in the MS and KS, this story is told in the somewhat later ŚB (1.1.4.14–17), which employs the verb pra√viś rather than anu√pad: “Manu had a bull. In it an Asura-killing, rivalkilling voice entered” (tásminn asuraghnī vāk práviù•āsa). Because the asuras regarded the bull as evil, they decided to have it sacrificed by their two officiants, Kilāta and Ākuli. As a result of this sacrifice, the voice departed, but quickly “entered Mānavī, the wife of Manu” (s6 mánor evá jāy6Å mānav Hm prāviveśa). This shook the asuras, because that voice combined with Mānavī’s human voice was even more frightening. So they sought permission from Manu to sacrifice his wife. He assented. On her being sacrificed that voice left her118 and “entered the sacrifice itself, the sacrificial vessels” (s6 yajñam evá yajñap6trāâi prāviveśa).119 From these loci, the two priests of the asuras were unable to expel it. In sum, the voice (once again a form of vāc)—and along with it the asura-killing mantras it verbalized—was transferred from either the asura-killing cups to the bull (and finally its stolen and unoffered haunch, which fell into Manu’s wife’s lap) to Manu’s wife (MS, KS), or from the bull to Manu’s wife to the sacrifice and the sacrificial


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vessels (ŚB). Jamison comments, “The demon-killing voice, that undestroyable force, exchanges its way through various items, the cups and the bull, until it lodges in the wife, who is then bound up as real sacrificial victim.”120 Similarly, Meni, the power of thwarted exchange, was transferred from the bull to Manu’s wife, which, it seems, forced her voice to leave her and ascend to heaven. Whatever else of interest may be seen in this brief story (and Jamison unpacks it over about two hundred pages), the main points for the present purpose are (a) that both meni and the asura-killing are substances of a sort that are transferrable, and (b) that the transfer of essence occurred forcibly from without, exclusive of the will of the possessed. This may be viewed as an example of “natural circulation” in the Vedas, circulation, to be sure, of coded substances. As Jamison points out, “in the Vedic conception of both ritual and natural circulation, nothing is lost: it is simply transformed or displaced.”121 This displacement has implications for possession: the consciousness, spirit, entity, or deity finds a new, if temporary, home. Jamison’s primary concern is with the presence and fate of the sacrificer’s wife (patnī), whose real purpose in the ritual, she says, is to “trap sexuality and its power for ritual use.”122 Although the woman’s presence is limited, it is sufficient to confer the ritual with sexuality and fertility (two more coded substances), thus helping to fuel its trajectory toward sacral or divine power and energy. Through this contact with sacral forces, Jamison maintains, “the divine is spread back to her, to increase her generative capacity,”123 in much the same way, we might imagine, that the asura-killing voice, her own voice laden with yajus mantras, ascended to heaven and, via a circuitous route, made its way back to her. In this transactional view of the vedic ritual, coded substances are borne from one entity, deity, person, or force to another through a mediating figure. In this and other examples, the wife’s contact with sacral forces produces transactions and reciprocations that are kinetic and multiple. They are occasioned, says Jamison, “through a chain of representational contact.”124 The wife, she asserts, “in some sense embodies exchange relations. She is a mediating figure between different realms, and whenever ancient Indian ritual or mythology requires or depicts the perilous contact between realms, a woman is often the central figure.”125 “She is,” Jamison concludes, “the ultimate exchange token.”126 Jamison notes that, “the frame provided by the wife’s activities stabilizes the ritual, locates it within the ongoing life of the community, and provides a safe transition into and out of the sacred realms.”127 Thus, during the prototypical animal sacri-


fice (paśubandha) the wife is called on to touch the dead animal. Jamison comments that this creates the necessary contact between the human and the divine realms, between the living and the dead that is a major aim of the sacrifice. She is the lightning rod for divine power, or, to exchange images, the point of entry, the channel for it. She gains access to powerful and dangerous forces unleashed by the killing and can direct them to her husband and the success of his ritual, without his putting himself at risk.128

Let us now turn to a few texts, more or less at random, that drew directly on vedic precedents, thus illustrating the textual routes by which the notion of transfer of essence entered later popular religious discourse. In a passage with an unimpeachable vedic pedigree—it was obviously the product of brahman theologians who knew vedic ritual firsthand—the Brahmāâba Purāâa (1.2.21.56–57b) speaks of transfer of a different kind of essence. “As the sun sets, the luster of the sun gradually enters [āviśate] the [sacrificial] fire. As a result of this the sun shines from afar at night. When the sun rises again the luster of the fire takes possession of [āviśet] it.”129 While the sun and the sacrificial fire that is forged in the Agnihotra ritual are clearly distinguished, they are connected through a regulated transfer of essence. The continuation of this passage speaks of similar cyclical phenomena flowing into one another and transferring their essence as one wanes and the other waxes, including day and night, north and south, and the two divisions of the year (uttarāyaâa and dakùiâāyana). However, the verb ā√viś is not employed consistently; it alternates with (anu-)pra√viś, demonstrating, at least in this case, an absence of distinction, and probably an identity, between words that had generally achieved semantic distinction, one meaning “to possess,” the other “to enter.” For example, the AB (8.28) employs the rather more expected anu-pra√viś for the entrance of lightning into rain, rain into the moon, the moon into the sun (on the new moon day), the sun into the fire, and the fire into the gods. Similarly, arriving at a distinction between ā√viś and pra√viś in TB 3.3.1.5 would be risky. This passage states that the prāâa, emerging from the mouth, becomes the apāna and enters (pravíśya) the body and the food, beautifying the body. The text immediately reiterates the point in an identical passage, replacing pravíśya with āviśáti.130 A case could be made for interpreting praviśya as simply the entrance of the apāna into the body and the food, while āviśati would indicate


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the transformative power of the apāna, but this interpretation is not supported by evidence from parallel texts. Subtle variants such as this occur throughout the middle and late vedic literature.131 In another passage with an honorable vedic pedigree, the MBh relates the story of Indra slaying the dragon Vótra. In the MBh (3.98–99, crit. ed.), however, Indra does not perform this momentous deed alone (cf. ñV 1.32); he is assisted by the other gods. Tvaù•ó fashions a vajra from the bones of the faultlessly unselfish sage Dadhīca. It is this vajra, invested with the power of the sage, which Indra himself invested (vyadadhāt)132 with the energy (tejas) of Viùâu and the other gods, then uses to slay the dragon and release the creative forces of the cosmic waters. The much later Bhāgavata Purāâa (BhP), though not a vedic text in any strict sense,133 contains an interesting passage familiar to vedic sacrificial ritual, in which the ritual fires are “made to ascend” (samāropaâa) the body of a qualified vedic ritualist or his fire-churning equipment.134 This brief rite is performed before traveling in order to ensure the safe passage of the sacred fire within an environment made ritually sacrosanct, because it is very difficult to transport actual fire. After the rite of samāropaâa is performed, the body of the sacrificer or his churning equipment manifests (at least ritually) the essence of the sacrificial fire. Thus they must be treated with the same attention to maintenance of purity as the fire itself. The BhP, addressing certain unusual circumstances, transforms this practice into a devotional exercise directed toward Kóùâa. The text says, “having consigned the fires [samāropya] into himself, with his mind fixed on me, he enters [samāviśet] the fire” (BhP 11.18.11cd).135 This is a prescription for ritual suicide, intended for an aged and infirm ritualist who is too weak to observe his vows. Two verses later, Kóùâa gives instructions on how a sacrificer should renounce the practice of vedic ritual and become a wandering mendicant. He should make propitiatory offerings to Kóùâa, give all his belongings to his attendant priests, and consign the fires to his own breaths (agnīn svaprāâa āveśya, 11.18.13c). Finally he should take the vows of a mendicant (parivrajet). Thus the BhP identifies samāropaâa (ritual consignment of the fires into oneself or one’s breath) as āveśa (pervasion, immersion, or possession). Āveśya in BhP 11.18.13c appears to equal samāropya in 11.18.11c and is distinct from the complete immersion (samāviśet) into the fires, the act of suicide, spoken of in 11.18.11d. Conceptually related to this is the story of Varāha, the incarnation of Viùâu in the form of a boar, as related in the Kālikā Purāâa (KāP 30–31).136


In this version of the myth, Varāha, having sired three frolicking young boars with his consort, the earth transfigured into a sow, wreaked havoc upon the earth with his wild gyrations. Thus Viùâu himself, fully incarnated as Varāha, was so overcome with lust for his wife and love for his children that he lost his sense of his true identity as the preserver of the universe. Not only did he lose his identity, however, but fully expansive and infinite, and containing within himself the Vedas and the óùis, Viùâu lost control of his own incarnation. It was left to Śiva to see that Varāha give up his boar’s body in order to reunite with Viùâu. Thus Śiva assumed the form of a śarabha, a terrifying eight-legged beast of monumental proportions. After a prolonged battle, Varāha and his boar offspring (“piglets” is not quite right) found themselves in a bad defensive position and were nearly forced to surrender. Short of that, however, like warriors on the defensive everywhere, he opted to negotiate with the enemy. In his negotiations for a lasting peace Varāha found he had an ally: Viùâu, suddenly distinct from his own incarnation, appeared at the bargaining table. And it was Viùâu who eventually offered to surrender. As he opened his mouth to beg Śiva’s pardon, Varāha saw within it NarasiÅha, the man-lion, another incarnation of Viùâu. Varāha then took hold of the energy of NarasiÅha, equal in substance and essence to his own, and made it enter (praviveśa, KāP 30.88) into Viùâu, thus re-energizing himself for further battle. In the end, however, Śiva, once again in the form of the śarabha, prevailed, and the energy of Varāha, “shining with its garland of flames like ten million suns,”137 entered (viveśa, 30.141) the body of Viùâu, who then finished the job of defeating the śarabha by wresting the energy of the three sons of Varāha and making it enter into (praviveśa, 30.144) himself. In this story, Viùâu, after losing control of himself in the form of Varāha, had literally to repossess his missing parts in order to prevent the world from descending into complete dissolution.138 He had to transfer his own missing essence back into himself through familiar processes of āveśa and praveśa. This chain of transfer is, by now, familiar from the earlier vedic literature.

The Gandharva, the Apsaras, and the Vedic Body If a single “being” or “entity” may be specified in the Vedas as more deeply implicated in possession than any other, it is, with the exception of the human being, the gandharva. A great deal has been written about this mysteri-


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ous being since A. Kuhn first addressed the subject in 1852.139 Although it is not my job here either to recount the history of scholarship on the subject or to offer my own definitive account, it may be mentioned that most of the research during the first century after Kuhn’s article appeared was dedicated to speculations on the etymology of the word and its cognates in Greek, particularly kentauros (centaur). Early generations of Indologists labored to identify the gandharva as a cloud spirit, the rising sun, Soma, the genius of the moon, the rainbow, a wind-spirit, a horse or ass, or a giant.140 These identifications were set aside, at least as unilateral interpretations, by A. B. Keith and O. H. de A. Wijesekera, who questioned the linguistic connection with Greek and noted both the incomplete vedic and other Indic evidence brought by previous scholars and uncertainty regarding the deep history of the kentauros.141 The most sensible writing on gandharva to date remains that of Wijesekera,142 who sees connections of the gandharva with all the suggested “meanings” at different points, but none, he demonstrates, are valid as exclusive interpretations. As with most important terms, its meaning appears to have shifted slightly from the ñV to the Upaniùads and the Pali canon.143 In the ñV, gandharva is found in an aqueous environment, especially in the company of Varuâa, the lord of waters. “It is thus as a side-development of the original aqueous notion,” writes Wijesekera, “that we find in the ninth book of the ñV a distinct connection of the gandharva with Soma.”144 The gandharva protects the dwelling place of Soma Pavamāna (ñV 9.83.4); it seizes the soma and takes the rasa or essence that abides within it (táÅ gandharv6n práty agóbhâan táÅ sóme rásam 6dadhun, 9.113.3cd). Wijesekera comments that this passage “establishes the gandharva’s power to impart the vital essence to plants,” a rasa that is elsewhere identified with semen in men and animals, as well as with remedial herbs in the AV.145 In one passage the gandharva is explicitly identified with soma: ñV 9.86.36:

ap6Å gandharváÅ divyáÅ nócákùasaÅ sómaÅ víśvasya bhúvanasya rājáse ||

May Soma, the divine gandharva of the waters, beholder of men, reign as king of the entire world.

The gandharva is regarded as male, the female counterpart being the apsaras. Gandharvas gained a reputation in the early and middle vedic litera-


ture for their amorousness toward women, and vice versa. For example, the ñgvedic hymn to the gandharva Vena states: ñV 10.123.5:

apsar6 jārám upasiùmiyā â6 yó ùā bibharti paramé vyòman | cárat priyásya yóniùu priyán sáu sHdat pakùé hiraâyáye sá vénan ||

The apsaras, a young lady gently smiling, supports her lover [jārám] in the highest vault of heaven. The beloved moving in the wombs of the beloved, this Vena sits on his golden wing.

This verse is weighted with sexual and cosmological symbolism, the ecstatic sexual embrace of the gandharva and the apsaras, and the indissoluble connection between the earth and the sky, the waters and the sun. In whatever way Indologists have run wild with verses like these, there can be little doubt that the gandharva is characterized as male with a fondness for females. The gandharva is also involved in one of the clearest and most complicated transfers of essence. This is demonstrated in the following passage from the Aitareya Brāhmaâa 1.27 (cf. TS 6.1.6.5, MS 3.7.3): somo vai rājā gandharveùv āsīt | taÅ devāś ca óùayaś cābhyadhyāyan katham ayam asmān somo rājā gacched iti | sā vāg abravīt strīkāmā vai gandharvā mayaiva striyā bhūtayā paâadhvam iti | neti devā abruvan kathaÅ vayaÅ tvad óte syāmeti | sābravīt krīâītaiva yarhi vāva vo mayārtho bhavitā tarhy eva vo ’haÅ punar āgantāsmīti | tatheti | tayā mahānagnyā bhūtayā somaÅ rājānam akrīâaÅs | tām anukótim askannāÅ vatsatarīm ājanti somakrayaâīm | tayā somaÅ rājānaÅ krīâanti | tām punar niùkrīâīyāt | punar hi sā tān āgacchat | tasmād upāÅśu vācā caritavyam | some rājani krīte gandharveùu hi tarhi vāg bhavati | sāgnāv eva praâīyamāne punar āgacchati || Soma the king was among the gandharvas. The gods and sages meditated on him, “How will King Soma come to us here? Vāc said, “Gandharvas desire women. Negotiate it with me as that woman.” “No,” said the gods, “how can we exist without you?” She said, “Go ahead and make the pur-


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chase. When your objectives require me, then indeed I shall come back to you.” “So be it.” With this Great Naked Lady [mahānagnī] they purchased King Soma. To impersonate her they bring forth an undamaged calf to purchase the soma. With her they buy King Soma. He may again purchase her, as she came back to them. Therefore, [the hot ó] should whisper his mantras on purchasing King Soma, because Vāc is then in fact among the gandharvas. When the fire is carried forward [from the old āhavanīya to the new one in the performance of the soma sacrifice], she returns again (to the gods).146

Once again the gandharva is associated with one of the most prominent of transferable essences, Vāc, Speech, the Great Naked Lady (mahānagnī), the feminine principle underlying the ñgvedic universe, stripped bare. As a bargaining chip she moves from the gods to the gandharvas and back again, a migration that is reenacted in the prāyaâīyeù•i, the rite at the commencement of the soma sacrifice. During this sacrifice soma is ritually purchased and the fire is brought from the āhavanīya, the easternmost of the ritualists’ three fires (tretāgni), to the new āhavanīya in the temporary pavilion used for the soma sacrifice.147 After this fire is established, Vāc returns to the hotó, the chief officiant of the ñV, who may again recite his mantras loudly. It may be assumed that at that point Vāc separates from the gandharvas, vitiating their power and contributing to the sacrifice as a realm of safety.148 The ñV is explicit in referring to the gandharva as the bird that bears vāc: “The bird bears speech with the mind, that the gandharva uttered within the womb” (pataãgó v6caÅ mánasā bibharti t 6Å gandharvò ’vadad gárbhe antán, 10.177.2). As already seen, the ñV connects the gandharva with the womb, including the hiraâyagarbha, responsible for the generation of the world.149 A gandharva can also take possession of a woman on her wedding night. The TS (3.4.8) prescribes that a staff of udumbara wood be placed in the bed between newlyweds, after which gandharvas are invoked for several days to assist in the consummation of the marriage.150 Looking back to the ñgvedic marriage hymn (ñV 10.85), two of the primary vedic agents of possession, Soma and a gandharva, are considered the first owners of the bride, before Agni and the human husband. The hymn states, “Soma possessed [you] first; a gandharva possessed [you] next. Agni was your third husband; your fourth is human born.”151 The verb here is vivide (pf. of √vid [to acquire, gain]), indicating possession in the sense of ownership. From these


passages demonstrating the gandharva’s connection with soma and vāc, its capacity to transfer its essence, with embryonic creation, and as a being that attracts women, it is not surprising that it is associated with possession in the Upaniùads, especially possession of women. Although our chief concern is the gandharva, the apsaras also possesses. In a hymn devoted to the gandharva, the AV tells of the mind-numbing wives of the gandharvas: AV 2.2.5:

y6n kland6s támiùīcayo ’kùákāmā manomúhan | t6bhyan gandharvápatnībhyo ’psarābhyo ’karaÅ naman ||

Those who wail, oppressing by darkness, fond of dice, bewildering minds, to these apsarases, the wives of the gandharvas, I have paid homage.

In another passage it implores an apsaras, Indra, Bhaga, and all the distant gods to restore a patient so that he may “be freed from madness” (yathànumaditó ’sasi, 6.111.4). The TS says that gandharvas and apsarases cause madness. TS 3.4.8.4:

māndhuká idhman . . . yá únm6dayet tásmai hotavyā gandharvāpsaráso v6 etám únmādayanti yá únmādayati

Wood from a māndhuka tree should be offered for one who suffers from madness, because the gandharvas and apsarases create madness in one who suffers from madness.

The JB mentions a gandharva and an apsaras who work together to produce madness and death in a brahman named Yavakrī (2.269–72). Here and elsewhere, the human is grasped or seized ( góhīta) by the gandharva.152 By no means, however, is possession by a gandharva always negative or destructive. Indeed, often it can be oracular. An early example of such “benevolent” oracular possession appears in the BĀU (3.3.1). A certain Bhujyu Lāhyāyani, a rival of Yājñavalkya, sought the advice of Patañcala Kāpya. Upon entering his house, he discovered that the daughter of Patañcala Kāpya was possessed by a gandharva (tasyāsīd duhitā gandharvagóhītā; note the use of the root √góh rather than ā√viś ).


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Bhujyu then asked the gandharva, speaking through the daughter, who he was. The gandharva replied that he was Sudhanvan of the family of Aãgiras. Bhujyu asked him the whereabouts of the descendants of Parikùit (kva pārikùitā abhavan). He then returned to Yājñavalkya and reported the conversation to him. Yājñavalkya accepted the possession without further question and confirmed the answer of the gandharvas in the form of a riddle: “They went where the performers of the aśvamedha go.”153 The Upaniùad (3.6) explains that gandharvas pervade the sky (antarikùalokā n) and that the worlds of the gandharvas are pervaded by suns (ādityalokā n). The BĀU further (3.7.1) relates that, on another occasion, Uddālaka went to the home of the same brahman, Patañcala Kāpya, at whose house, it seems, Uddālaka and others were studying ritual and Patañcala was possibly the teacher. This time it was Patañcala’s wife who was possessed by a gandharva (tasyāsīd bhāryā gandharvagóhītā). Through the wife, the gandharva told Uddālaka that he was Kabandha, the son of Atharvan. This gandharva also turned out to be quite learned, knowing the sūtra and the inner self (antaryāmin). The identity of the second gandharva, Kabandha, begs further investigation for his role as possessor. In the Rāmāyaâa (3.69), Kabandha, an uncommon name or designation, was a rākùasa whose body was little more than a trunk because his head and legs had been hammered into his body by blows from Indra’s vajra.154 Let us turn for a moment to Śaãkara commentary on this episode. On BĀU 3.3.1, he states that the possession signifies “some being other than human; or the term [gandharvagóhītā] may mean fire that is worshipped in the house—the deity who is a priest [to the gods]. We conclude thus from this special knowledge, for an ordinary being cannot possibly have such knowledge.” Śaãkara is here chary of possession, or at least of spirit possession, and searches for alternative meanings in spite of the clarity of the Sanskrit. This is probably motivated by that very brahmanical priggishness of which Gombrich speaks. However, for whatever it is worth in building historical arguments, it should not be forgotten that one of Śaãkara’s most famous exploits, given considerable attention in the digvajayas on his life, is his occupation of the body (parakāyapraveśa) of the dead king Amaruka.155 He entered into (pra√viś) this possession in order to experience the joys of sexual love without defiling his own body, a tale recounted at greater length in Chapter 7.156 For the present purposes, it is sufficient to note that he engaged in this possession in order to defeat Ubhayabhāratī, an incarnation of Sarasvatī, the Goddess of Knowledge, who had challenged him to debate the


subject of erotics (kāmaśāstra). His method, consistent with the rules of debate, was not madness but control, awareness, and deliberation, congruent with “civilized” goals. Because these are not theorized in the BĀU as aspects of possession—which by Śaãkara’s time had already a questionable reputation, he decided to present secondary interpretations. In his partial defense, however, the gandharvas in question appear to have exemplified brahmanical propriety in their possession and that Śaãkara was much later following their examples. These gandharvas were from more or less respectable brahman clans (though ones noted for their knowledge of sympathetic magic), the Aãgirasas and the Atharvaâas, and taught, through their possessing agents, respectable brahmanical doctrine.157 We would be remiss if we did not point out that Śaãkara’s possession is an excellent example of the application of the notions of purity and pollution and offers a lucid commentary on the role of the body in Indian religion, though a body vastly simplified from the one delineated in AVŚ 11.8 described above. Only by successfully meeting the challenge of Ubhayabhāratī could Śaãkara claim omniscience (sarvajñatā), and his only resort was parakāyapraveśa. By maintaining the celibacy (brahmacarya) of his own body, he was still able to enjoy sexual intercourse.158 Finally, it may not be too far-fetched to link the possession of gandharvas by women in the BĀU with oracular possession, notably of women and children, in later times. I deal with this topic again in Chapter 11, but for the moment we should ask an important question of the BĀU material, namely, what is missing from it? Did Bhujyu Lāhyāyani simply wander into his friend Patañcala Kāpya’s house on a couple of occasions and discover his wife and daughter occupied with housework, possessed by gandharvas, ready to take questions? This is highly unlikely. More likely, given the evidence of later texts, a ritual was taking place and Bhujyu Lāhyāyani showed up for the occasion. Although BĀU 3.7.1 leads us to believe, at first glance, that Patañcala Kāpya was merely studying some form of vedic ritual, the remaining context is one of women’s possession. It is thus not impossible that Patañcala was presiding over a possession ritual, perhaps not radically unlike those textualized from the mid-first millennium c.e. onward. The presence of gandharvas is also highly suggestive. Possession by a gandharva might in fact indicate a context (often, as we have seen, labeled shamanistic, found in cultures throughout the world, including India) in which music was played as part of a ritual to abet the onset of trance states, such as possession. Although the first-millennium and later texts do not describe oracular posses-


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sion of gandharvas, they name other spirits or minor deities who supplant gandharvas in the local pantheon. Possession by gandharvas is still reported in India. I was told the following while observing a vedic agniù•oma soma sacrifice in Kerala in 1995. According to the vedic śrauta traditions of Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu, the three most important parts of the agnicayana sacrifice are the recitations of the rudram, the camakam, and the ùobaśī, and their accompanying offerings.159 The first two are well-known chants from the Yajurveda, while the third is a chant from the Sāmaveda.160 All occur after the construction of the great birdshaped altar is completed, and every member of the sacrificer’s family must be in attendance at each of these recitations. According to local vedic tradition, the ùobaśī must be recited exactly at sunset, the moment, they say, when Indra slaughtered the demon Vótra, a deed celebrated in the chant. If the ritual is running late, by even an hour (a very frequent occurrence), the action will be suspended for the next twenty-three hours, until the next sunset. Conversely, if it is ahead of schedule (a very rare occurrence), the ritual will be suspended until sunset. At a recent performance in Andhra Pradesh, one of the members of the sacrificer’s family was at the local well, rather than in attendance, at the time of the ùobaśī chant. He fell into the well, as a result, it is said, of his inattention and absence of mind. When he was eventually pulled out, he was possessed by a gandharva, who reported to the crowd that had gathered that he was very unhappy that the person through whose mouth he was speaking was so unobservant. The gandharva then ordered him to recite the mantras used in the ùobaśī chant continuously for forty-one days. He followed this instruction, and after that whenever he was seen wandering around the village, or anywhere else, he was reciting these mantras.161 In conclusion, let us return to a point that was discussed in Chapter 4 and begged discussion several times in the present chapter: Whether in antiquity or in the modern ethnographic record, the incidence of possession states was more frequent among women than among men. Although this is surely a matter of speculation, it may be confidently stated that it was a practice with much higher crossover between men and women than was classical vedic ritual, which was unquestionably men’s religion, with but a few exceptional instances of women’s participation. The examples cited from the BĀU, from the vedic marriage hymn, and the prominence in general of women’s being possessed by gandharvas suggest the likelihood of this shared area of experience and ideology. The fact that women’s possession appears at all in texts composed by and almost entirely for men also supports this. However,


the evidence is so fragmentary and incidental that it is unwise to speculate on the reason(s) for this, or indeed whether the reasons have changed over the ensuing millennia, except to say that it is practically beyond argument that the position of women deteriorated considerably during most of the first two millennia c.e. Furthermore, as demonstrated in these pages, possession was a common feature in stories about men as well as in “men’s religion.” An excellent example of this is the present-day vedic ethnography noted in the preceding paragraph, which attests that neither possession nor gandharvas as possessing entities are limited to women.

Notes 1. I must for the present purposes avoid arguments for and against the critical edition. 2. In fact, in the Virā•aparvan of the MBh Arjuna is disguised as Bóhannabā/ Bóhannalā, a klība (transvestite; “eunuch,” the usual translation, is an overstatement) trained in music and dance, during the Pāâbavas thirteenth year in exile, in which they had to travel incognito. This no doubt contributed to his later image as somewhat effeminate; e.g., MBh 4.10.11: apuÅstvam . . . sthiram (his non-masculinity was firm). Cf. Katz 1989:98ff., on the opposition between the klība and the hero (e.g., MBh 4.18.11, Draupadī is disgusted at seeing Arjuna “in dress scorned by the world” [lokaparibhūtena veùeâa]); also Hiltebeitel 1980:153ff., for remarks on Arjuna’s disguise. The MBh, very aware of possession, does not regard Arjuna’s disguise, or those of the other Pāâbavas, as a form of possession. 3. See Bronkhorst 1986. For a much more complete account, see Crangle 1994. 4. Monier-Williams relates it to Hibernian or Old Irish arsan, “a sage, a man old in wisdom” (1899:227). Mayrhofer, under öùi, has “Wohl zu arm. heó Zorn, lit. arŝùs heftig, mhd. rāsen, rasen” (1955:125). If this is correct, the Indo-European (IE) affiliations appear to be words for anger, force, loudness, intensity, wisdom, possibly denoting an ecstatic of some kind. See, however, Lubotsky 2001:312, relating it to Old Avestan ∫r∫ŝi-. This derivation calls into question the association with vipra, as well as the association with notions of “anger, force, loudness,” etc. It also means that we don’t really know the original meaning of this critical vedic term. But since it is attested in a similar sense in Avestan, we can assume that its meaning is not only later than IE but also older than Indo-Iranian. Lubotsky assumes that it must be a borrowing from some Central Asian substratum language. I am indebted to George Thompson for these comments on Lubotsky’s derivation. 5. Cf. Staal 1963:267. Gombrich was on the right track in stating that “officiating priests in early vedic religion apparently courted altered states of consciousness with some symptoms like those of possession states” (1988:37). Ramanujan writes, “One should not assume that ‘possession’ is the monopoly of the folk genres; the Vedas had their vipras, ‘the quivering ones’” (1986a:71).


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6. Clooney 1990:167. 7. Ibid.:168. 8. The theistic schools of advaita, including the Vaiùâava schools of Rāmānuja, Vallabhācārya, and Caitanya assert that the Vedas were a product of Kóùâa, the Supreme Lord, the Puruùottama. In this way, their understanding of śruti departed from the doctrine of the PūrvamīmāÅsā. 9. Clooney discusses this extensively in ibid.: ch. 5. Indian philosophy generally exhibits a doctrine of human-centeredness opposed to such “decenteredness.” An example of the former is Vedānta with its classical infusion of SāÅkhya, quite opposed to the exegetical “ritual philosophy” of PūrvamīmāÅsā. Perhaps one of the reasons, or implicit cultural justifications, for conjoining possession and ritual is that they abide in relation to other forces. In other words, classical Vedānta with its scaffolding of SāÅkhya categories is directed toward a type of self-dependent liberation incompatible with the non- or less individually centered experience of possession or ritual. 10. Cf. Lubotsky 2001:1308–1309, for passages and grammatical description of these words. Occasionally, these boundaries are blurred, especially in the later vedic texts. See KU 1.7: vaiśvānaran praviśati atithir brāhmaâo góhān | tasyaitāá śāntiÅ kurvīta hara vaivasvatodakam || (A Brahmin guest enters a house as the fire in all men. Bring water, O Vaivasvata, that is how they appease him) (Olivelle 1998:375). Śaãkara comments on this passage that Naciketas’s father, distressed, was possessed by grief (paridevanāpūrvakam āha pitaraÅ śokāviù•aÅ kiÅ mayoktam). 11. As mentioned in the preface, I am including the Sanskrit text selectively. In this chapter I often leave it out if it is not lexically or semantically important or if I am adopting others’ translations. 12. tejo brahmavarcasaÅ gāyatryā brāhmaâo ’varundhe viśaá rājā jagatyā praviśati ||. Cf. Caland 1931:521. This use of avarundhe is the nearest reference I could find in Sanskrit to ārūbha as possession in modern Indo-Aryan (cf. above pp. 120, 127). This is also a semantic possibility in TB 1.2.1.7 (p. 183), TS 1.2.3.3 (p. 191), and TB 1.3.6.2 (p. 191). 13. Cf. Oberlies 1999:150n102: “Dieser berauschende Saft blicht herab, das Kind des himmels, der Tropfen, der die Siehe betrat.” Oberlies’s concern is with the structure and presentation of the soma ritual rather than with the experiential aspects of its consumption and the cosmology of Soma that are the concerns here. 14. Although there is a general consistency in the use of √viś with the upasarga 6 in the ñV, complete consistency is too much to expect. An example of the equivalence of √viś and 6√viś occur in ñV 9.103.4c: sóman punānáś camvòr viśad (cf. 9.107.10c) (Soma, being cleansed, enters the cups) and ñV 9.96.21c: krīlañ camvòr 6 viśa pūyámānan, ([Indu,] sporting, cleansing (you), enter the cups). The singers are referring, initially, to the physical act of cleansing or purifying the pressed soma through a cloth into wooden cups resting underneath, but doubtless to the secondary transfigurative process mentioned above. 15. Adapted from Maurer 1986:77. 16. Ibid. 17. Oberlies 1999:40n194: “Die Jahreszeit (des Regens?) ist seine Geba rerin.


Aus ihr gebopren, betrat er bald die Wasser, in denen er wächst.” He renders this passage a bit differently on p. 135n50. 18. See Krick 1982:120ff. for this verse and its ritual context in the agnyādhāna. 19. With all due respect to the opinion of one reviewer of this manuscript, it does not seem productive to me to translate the word rūpám here as “symbol.” The sand, here represented as “rubble,” may, in the vision of the poet-ritualist, be a form of Vaiśvānara in that it is a substance, hard and even fiery, that is common to all men. But this does not mean that the sand is itself a “symbolic form” or a symbol. What was symbolic, rather than an actual manifestation, in vedic India may not equal what is symbolic in Western thought. Theorizing on this is still a desideratum, thus it must suffice here to say that I feel safer translating rupám literally, as “form.” 20. Cf. Kane, HDh II.2:1227ff. The Manusmóti (11.54), Yājñavalkyasmóti (3.227), and the Viùâu Dharmasūtra (34) cite drinking surā as one of the five great sins (mahāpātaka), along with killing a brahman, stealing (usually interpreted as stealing the gold of a brahman), sleeping with the guru’s wife, and associating with anyone who commits one of the other four (e.g., Manu 11.54: brahmahatyā surāpānaÅ steyaÅ gurvāãganāgaman | mahānti pātakāny āhun saÅsargaś cāpi tain saha ||). For a slight textual variation, see Olivelle 2005:583 (11.55), his translation (p. 218), and note on the translation (p. 340). 21. See Caland’s notes on this sūtra (1928:169f.). 22. It is marginal to the present study to speculate on the “original” identity of soma. It is enough to state that the most widely accepted view, that it is a form of ephedra, has been criticized recently in Staal 2001, esp. pp. 752ff. It is not impossible that soma was any one of a number of substances, indicating more a type of ritual intoxication than a single uniformly applied plant decoction, even in the ñV, as George Thompson has suggested in a personal communication (June 2003). More germane is Brough’s analysis (1971[1996]) of máda in his refutation of Wasson’s widely disseminated, but by now little regarded, theory of soma as the mushroom Amanita muscaria (1968). Brough states: “It is difficult to give an exact equivalent, but the tenor of the hymns indicates something like ‘possession by the divinity’” (1996:374). Thus, máda appears to support the notion herein posited that the ecstatic experience resulting from the consumption of soma was one of possession. 23. In his commentary on this passage from JB, Sāyaâa interprets this to mean that the soma should enter into the offering cup for Vāyu (vāyavya-graha). The use of ā√viś is otherwise unattested for this sort of “entrance.” There is no reason from the internal context of this sūkta why the vāyavya-graha should be singled out. Thus I must register disagreement here with Sāyaâa. 24. See ñV 1.91.12 and 19 (cf. 1.91.11 above); cf. Velankar 1963:121n2. 25. Velankar (1963:213) renders svāveśán as “easy of approach,” while others translate it as “easy of access,” “easy of entrance.” Schmidt renders the last two padas: “Bóhaspati, der hohe, verschafft seinen Freunden mit seinem guten Eintritt am besten vielfach Pressung” (1968:64). Bóhaspati is not here simply “easy of approach,” etc., but is to be internalized more fully; thus my translation.


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26. Cf. Schmidt 1968:231. 27. Cf. O’Flaherty 1981:247. 28. Also ñV 9.60.3c: índrasya h6rdi āviśán; for the throat, e.g., ñV 9.86.23b: indav índrasya já•hareùv āviśán. 29. Recall that the preponderance of such occurrences of “positive” possession read ā√viś, but it is by no means a clean, clear, absolute distinction, especially in the Vedas and Upaniùads. 30. Trans. Olivelle 1998:293. 31. Trans. Thompson 1997:148. 32. Trans. in ibid. 33. This is explicated by Minkowski 1991:141–154. 34. On the other hand, it might be noted here that if speech is regarded as incomprehensible, it is given a somewhat derogatory edge by the slightly later tradition. I think here of ñV 10.106, with so many hapax legomena that Geldner did not translate several of the verses, and which has stumped many vedic scholars. Renou said that it is this hymn “qui marque le point culminant de l’abracadabra védique” (1956:22). The later tradition, which assigned authorship to unattributed hymns, states that this was the work of a óùi named BhūtāÅśa, that is one who is part bhūta. We see below (Chapter 12) that one of the characteristics of spirit or bhūta possession is confused or incomprehensible speech. 35. Trans. Minkowski 1991:143. 36. Cf. Tāâbyamahābrāhmaâa 18.7.12, Sāmaveda 1.435, Lā•yāyana ŚS 5.12.14. 37. The rite is called ibopāhvāna. See Keith 1915:85; Carri 2000:152n 463. 38. Cf. ñV 3.61.7d: vöùā mahH ródasī 6 viveśa ||,([Uśas,] the bull, has penetrated the mighty heaven and earth). 39. Departing from the padapā•ha, which reads tanv6 viveśa, I am extracting the upasarga 6 from the saÅhitāpā•ha, thus reading tanv6 6 viveśa, which provides a more consistent reading in the ñV. 40. See the notes on this verse by Brown 1978:68. 41. He is consistent in his commentary, in which he regularly glosses words derived from ā√viś in remarkably unrevealing terms, e.g., in 1.164.21 6 vivéśa is glossed praveśayati, in 6.74.2 the same word is glossed gacchantīm, in 7.97.7 svāveśán is glossed sunivāsan, and in 7.54.1 he glosses svāveśán as śobhananiveśan. The two major commentators on the Vājasaneyī SaÅhitā of the Śūklayajurveda interpret the cognate passage in that text (17.91) differently. Uva•a follows Sāyaâa, while Mahīdhara follows Patañjali (with minor variations). There is little comment on 6 vivéśa, which is glossed as pratipādayati. See also MS 1.16.2, KS 40.7, and elsewhere. 42. Minkowski 1991:135. 43. See Lüders 1924 for a discussion of this verbal root and others, viz. √gódh, √spóh, √spódh, which display phonological and syntactical similarities. 44. Trans. Jamison 1996:103. 45. Cf. Geldner, “wenn die Götter (in sie) gefahren sind” (1951:369). 46. See Padoux’s introduction to the French translation of the first five chapters


of Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka (Silburn and Padoux 1998:51n84. See also Biernacki 1999:28ff.; Padoux 1999:134ff.). Now, importantly, see Brunner, Oberhammer, and Padoux 2000:208, where āveśa is forthrightly defined as “possession, absorption, or penetration.” The authors do not speak of the more prosaic “entrance,” but deal with it strictly as a technical term. Both Padoux and Biernacki have as their main concern the significations of the word samāveśa as it is used in Tantric texts, a term we deal with in due course. 47. Deeg 1993 suggests identifying the flight of the keśin as a shamanic journey. I see no reason to contest this instance of possession as shamanic journey. 48. Bloomfield 1917; cf. Pārśvanātha Caritra 1.575ff. 49. This may sow the seeds of the story of Prajāpati and his daughter; cf. ñV 10.61.5–8. 50. See Goldman and Goldman 1996:44ff., for an analysis of Hanumān’s shapeshifting. 51. bhikùur upapraticchannaÅ sugrīvapriyakāmyayā | óùyamūkād iha prāptaÅ kāmagaÅ kāmarūpiâam || Most frequently, demons and other semi-divine beings are called kāmarūpin; e.g., yakùas, kinnaras, gandharvas, and pannagas (divine serpents) at Rām 5.1.5; Surasā at 5.1.142, 5.56.27; SiÅhikā at 5.1.166; Rāvaâa at 5.8.1. Although these examples are from the Sundarakāâba, the designation is abundantly in evidence throughout the Rāmāyaâa. The motif of animals shape-shifting into human form is not common in the early Indian literature. A thorough, if localized, account of it in Japanese culture is Heine 1999. In his study of this kōan and fox mythology in Japanese folklore he basically confirms, at least in part, what we see in the Indic material: “either a fox anthropomorphizes in order to deceive and seduce; or a person is changed into a fox as punishment or as a bodhisattva’s compassionate choice” (p. 162). 52. This is essentially the story as found in ñV 1.116.10, 117.13, 118.6; 5.74.5; 7.68.6, 71.5; 10.39.4, Aitareya Br. 8.21, Śatapatha Br. 4.1.5.1, and elaborated in the MBh 13.50ff. and other Purāâas. 53. Cf. Caland 1919, no. 124; Caland 1927; Heesterman 1991:167f.; Kauùītaki Br. 7.4. 54. Cf. See B. R. Sharma’s introduction to Jaiminīyārùeya-Jaiminīyopaniùad Brāhma âas, pp. 25–27, and the text itself, pp. 124–126; Oertel 1908:81; O’Flaherty 1985:45f.; and her further work on sexual masquerades (Doniger 2000). 55. Heesterman 1991:176. Heesterman often works over this theme in his books and articles. 56. te sarvagaÅ sarvatan prāpya dhīrā yuktātmānan sarvam evāviśanti || Trans. Olivelle 1998:453. 57. It may even be an aid to bringing on such a state; cf. the remarkable accounts of the Tibetan state oracle in the Dalai Lama’s autobiography, Freedom in Exile (1990:232ff.); and in greater detail in Avedon 1984:193ff.; also Schenk 1993. 58. By practice of the latter, I indicate dramatic performances such as Rām līlā, Kóùâa līlā, the Draupadī festival in Tamilnadu, Pāâbav līlā in Garhwal, and so on. Cf. Lutgendorf 1991; Haberman 1988; and the works of Hiltebeitel and Sax, for discus-


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sions of the transformative processes at work in these performances. This is addressed in discussions of bhakti below. 59. Recall Freeman’s comment on possession as a learned behavior (1993). 60. Cf. Taittirīya Br. 3.2.2.1, 3.2.9.1, and elsewhere; trans. Keith 1915:35–36; cf. Gonda 1965:94f., 265ff. (Kauśikasūtra 65.14). 61. Several other texts also contributed, such as Bóhadāraâyaka Up. 1.1–2, in which the parts of the sacrificial horse are identified with the parts of space and time, and Chāndogya Up. 1.6–7, in which verses of the ñV and SV are identified with parts of the cosmos and the body. But these are not as early as the mantra from TS. 62. Cf. Śrautakośa, Sanskrit 1:149–305; English 1.1:211–501. For an even more vivid impact of this phenomenon see the Sanskrit libretto (prayoga) of the performance in Darśapūrâamāsaprakāśan, 493–608. 63. Even the arch-advaitin Śaãkara states, on BĀU 1.2.7, madavayavabhūtabhyan eva (all deities are an inherent part of me). 64. Cf. O’Flaherty 1975:118–125 for the myth, p. 324 for its sources. 65. An obvious variant on the Yajurveda mantra. 66. Trans. mostly following P.-E. Dumont 1960:24–26. This and similar passages are explicated by Heesterman (1991:154n20), typically and in a rather overdetermined manner, as originating in sacrificial agon; cf. MS 1.4.11:60.7, KS 4.14:39.5; also AVŚ 6.123.3–4, AA 7.24.3. 67. This theology is slightly reconfigured in later Hindu texts, though the essence remains. The influence of SāÅkhya evolutionary principles is strongly felt in these later texts. See, for example, the following scattered verses from the Lakùmī Tantra (LT), in which the goddess Lakùmī immerses, enters, possesses the world, mahat, and ahaÅkāra for the sake of her creation, which is subsequently and reciprocally realized by the aspirant in meditation. The goddess identifies with the different principles of creation in the creative process, while the aspirant realizes them in a state of progressive dissolution. Cf. also the translation by Gupta 1972: 22, 30, 288, 341. LT 4.30:

LT 5.35:

LT 5.37:

LT 43.18:

āviśyāviśya kurute yatra devanarādikam | jagaddhitaÅ jagannāthas tajjñeyaÅ vibhavāntaram || (Having penetrated the world in various ways, the Lord of the Universe [jagannāthan] creates for himself gods, men, and others, for the good of the world. Realization of this constitutes a different power [vibhava]). mahāntam āviśanty enaÅ prerayāmi svasóù•aye | preryamāâāt tatas tasmād ahaÅkāraś ca jajñivān || (For the sake of my own creation I stimulated Mahat on entering it. Then, because of this stimulation, ahaÅkāra arose). āviśyāmum ahaÅkāraÅ sóù•aye prerayāmy aham | sa babhuva tridhā pūrvaÅ guâavyatikarāt tadā || (After entering that ahaÅkāra, I press it forward for the sake of creation. Then due to the prior influence of the guâas it became threefold). śūnyākārasamākāraÅ saÅpūrâam iva vāridhim | āviśyāmi mahāyogaÅ śūnyabhāvaniveśitam || (I am immersed in mahāyoga,


LT 50.77:

which resembles the form of the void, an ocean as if full, in which the experience of the void is adopted). This is projected by the goddess as the thought of the aspirant who realizes her in a state in which the principles of creation, namely the SāÅkhya tattvas, are dissolved in the aspirant’s practice. nābīmadhye samāyātā karomi rathavad dhvanim | vyomarandhram anuprāptā hastinādavinādinī || (When I am fully engaged in [samāyātā] the central nābī [suùumnā] I produce the sound of a chariot, and when I am within the hollow tube I produce the sound of an elephant trumpeting).

68. Revised and adapted from Olivelle 1998:47. The word viśvaÅbhara is problematic: Olivelle translates it “termite.” In my view that is most unlikely, as it would be the only occurrence in which valmīka is not used in this meaning. Olivelle acknowledges other possibilities, including “fire ant,” “insect,” and “scorpion”; see his note, p. 493. He also translates the word rūpa as “visible appearance,” rather than the usual “form,” and defends this in the same note. Nevertheless, it seems to me, the BĀU intended it in this colloquial and idiomatic usage, rather than in the more specific usage of earlier vedic texts. Although the ŚB may not be much older than the BĀU, I have retained the translation “visible appearance” in the former, because the more archaic meaning works much better there, and rūpa does not occur with its idiomatic twin nāma. 69. Olivelle 1998:407. 70. Adapted from ibid.:421. 71. Adapted from ibid.:247. 72. Note that pra√pad is translated as if it were pra√viś. Perhaps the difference is that pra√pad has more of the force of “to occupy,” e.g., “through which orifice can I occupy the man,” “the self of his that has occupied her.” The sense of penetration and permeation is stronger than mere entrance, pra√viś. Thus, pra√pad is probably closer to ā√viś. 73. Olivelle 1998:319. Cf. Aitareya Āraâyaka 2.1.4 where brahman, through prāâa, (brahman’s upādhi or defining feature; cf. Sāyaâa’s commentary), entered the human form through the tips of its feet (taÅ prapadābhyām prāpadyata brahmemaÅ puruùam) worked its way upward to the head, and again exited, leaving the body lifeless. See Keith’s notes on this passage (1909:204f.). 74. Adapted from Olivelle 1998:421; I have changed Olivelle’s vague rendering of karmādhyakùān in 11c from “the overseer of the work” to “the overseer of action.” 75. Olivelle 1998:397. 76. Ibid.: 327. 77. Cf. ŚvetU 5.12: sthūlāni sūkùmāâi bahūni caiva rūpāâi dehī svagūâair vóâoti | (In accordance with its own attributes, the embodied one assumes many gross and subtle appearances). 78. Trans. Olivelle 1998:471.


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79. Ibid.:407. 80. Ibid.:409; cf. also BĀU 4.4.10, as Īśa 9.12 is probably a borrowing from that text. 81. Ibid.:393. 82. Ibid.:329–331. 83. For example, BĀU 3.2.13, puâyo vai puâyena karmaâā bhavati pāpan pāpena; cf. Tull 1989:28ff. 84. Cf. Oldenberg 1919; Schayer 1925; Brian K. Smith 1989, 1994; Witzel 1979. 85. In Bhgavadgītā 7.8 Kóùâa informs Arjuna: raso ’ham apsu (I am the taste in water). Here the meaning of rasa as essence and taste are identified. 86. “Whatever excellence and essence there was of these seven persons, that they pressed upwards, that became his head. . . . With respect to the fire which was placed on the piled up altar, Whatever excellence and essence there was of these seven persons, that they pressed upward, that became his [Prajāpati’s] head.” 87. At the risk of opening up a new topic relevant in this context, one of comparative nature that cannot be dealt with beyond this note, we must recall that Christianity was in many ways founded on an exchange of essence between the living and the dead, namely, the eucharist. The essences involved, bread and wine, qualify as coded substances and are marked by a kind of ritual transfer that is reserved for this instance alone in Christianity (though analogous but lesser instances are common in Christian practices such as pilgrimage). If such a weighty transfer of essence occurred in Indian religion, it might be theorized as approaching legitimate notions of possession, outstripping its role as prasāda or the remains of offerings to a deity that are then “consumed” by the deity before being returned to the supplicant for consumption. In the latter case the substance consumed is not considered to be the body of the deity, as the eucharist is considered to be of Christ. 88. The translation is based on Whitney 1905:647–650. I have departed from him in several places, e.g., “chaos” rather than “misery” for níórti, “trust” rather than “faith” for śraddh6, interpretation of verse 25, and so on. In 19, the “deities named evils” (pāpm 6no n6ma devátān) might be a broad reference to varieties of “demons,” e.g., bhūta, preta, piśāca. For more on this, see Chapter 12. 89. Cf. Renou 1939:378. 90. Sexual “entry” employs the usual terminology of entrance, but does not appear to bear the sense of transfer of essence; e.g., TB 2.6.2.2: réto mXtraÅ víjahāti yóniÅ praviśád indriyám (the sensual power, the semen, enters the vagina, leaving the urine behind); AB 7.13: patir jāyāÅ praviśati (the father enters the wife). 91. Cf. Aitareya Brāhmaâa (AB) 2.8, MS 3.10.2, ŚB 1.2.3.6–9; all read pra√viś. 92. Cf. Brian K. Smith 1994:251ff. for other texts. 93. Cf. AiU 1.2.4, “Agni became speech and entered the mouth” (agnir vāg bhūtvā mukhaÅ prāviśat), etc.; also Taittirīya Up. 2.6. 94. Olivelle 1998:47. I have replaced the word “self ” with “person.” 95. Cf. Sprockhoff 1976:52–66; 1979; Olivelle 1993:123–126.


96. Here I depart from Olivelle, who translates ātman as “body.” The word ātman means “body” often in early texts, but here that is questionable, at least in part. It is clear that ātman is distinguished from vitta (wealth). While both body and “self ” (the usual translation of ātman) are surely distinct from wealth, the term “self ” is more likely to include the body within it than the reverse. Both the body and the “self ” are foundations for the fifteen parts of wealth, abodes upon which they reside. In this instance the Upaniùad perhaps intended ātman as both “body” and “self.” Thus I suggest “person” for ātman, in the sense of an embodied, substantiated self. In my view, the word ātman emerged in the Upaniùads as a category for personhood, more material than “self,” more abstract than “body.” 97. Olivelle 1998:55–57. 98. Ibid.:12f. dates the BĀU to the seventh or sixth century b.c.e., give or take a century or two, and the K ùU a century or two later, both, however, likely preBuddhist. 99. etya putra upariù•ād abhinipadyata indriyair indriyāâi saáspóśya | api vāsmā āśīnāyābhimukhāyaiva sampradadyāt | 100. Olivelle 1998:345–347. 101. Olivelle 1993:125. 102. However, on the autonomy of the senses and their ability to depart and reenter (praviveśa) an individual, see ChU 5.1.10ff. 103. These examples of transfer of essence through family lines represent a tiny fraction of what can be culled from classical Indic texts. Transfer of essence may constitute merit transfer as well as demerit transfer. In the latter one is relieved of their negative status by accepting others’ gifts, e.g., in Buddhism accepting cloth from a low-caste woman. For a summary of this doctrine in the Pali Petavatthu and in modern Sri Lankan possession ritual involving deceased ancestors (preta; Pali, peta), see Holt 2004a. 104. The K ùU belongs to the Śāãkhāyana branch of ñgvedic text and practice (rather than the Aitareya branch). The present position in India is that the Śāâkhāyana ritual texts are used for the hautra (ñgvedic portions) by ritual practitioners of the dominant Kātyāyana śākhā of the Śuklayajurveda as well as by practitioners of the Baudhāyana śākhā of the Kóùâāyajurveda, at least among the Nambudiris of Kerala (but not among the Baudhāyanīyas of northern Karnataka or southern Maharashtra). The ritual of the Kātyāyana Śrautasūtra is the least prolix and complicated of all the Śrautasūtras, while that of the Baudhāyana Śrautasūtra is the most. However, it is unwise to presume that these śākhā affiliations were in place thousands of years ago. 105. Compare this to arguments in medieval Christianity about what exactly ascends to heaven after death; cf. Bynum 1994. 106. See Jamison 1986 for examples of groups of body parts in multiples of five or seven and their significance in the Brāhmaâa literature. The perceived neatness of enumerations such as these was not simply one of the keys in the exposition of ancient Indian epistemology, but had far-reaching ontological significance as well, e.g., in medical (āyurvedic) texts or in Vaiśeùika.


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107. Another ritual of identity is the vaniù•usava, in which the warrior ritualist seeks to identify himself with Indra by bringing about an ecstatic vision of Indra; cf. Krick 1975. 108. “Therefore,” continues the text, “one should not converse with [a woman] with stained garments, nor should one sit with her or eat her food when she has emitted the color of brahmahatyā” (tasmān malavadvāsasā na saÅ vadeta na sahāsīta nāsyā annam adyād brahmahatyāyai hy eùā varâam pratimucyāste||). Cf. Keith 1914:188. O’Flaherty 1975:153ff. discusses this and parallel passages. These passages— MS 2.4.1, KS 12.10, ŚB 1.6.3, JB 2.155—diverge and do not relate to the transfer of this “essence.” The BhP 6.9.6–10, however, takes up this theme, stating that Viùâu’s brahmahatyā for killing Indra was transferred to women. 109. The word énas has been translated as “stain,” “guilt,” “sin,” and “transgression.” Translators, quite rightly, have difficulty locating this word in English. 110. The Kauśika Sūtra recommends the recitation of these hymns as part of an expiation for removal of the énas of those who have married out of turn. Cf. Bloomfield 1894, for references and an illuminating, if succinct, discussion. Zysk 1985 deals neither with these hymns from the AV nor with the KauśS. 111. Jamison 1996:21ff. 112. Ibid.:189. 113. Ibid.:23. 114. Ibid.:23; tat patnī yajur vadanti pratyapadyata tasyā dyāÅ vāg ātiù•hat. 115. Ibid.:188. 116. “Then his wife approached” (tat patnī . . . pratyapadyata). Note the use here of prati√pad (to approach, enter, undertake). In spite of the similarity of the verbs, there is no indication that the wife of Manu approached the Prātaritvans with an intention to “possess.” 117. Hara 1979a:270n57 notes a negatively charged sense of (anu)pra√viś in its frequent connection with vetāla (vampire); cf. Kathāsaritsāgara: vetālānupraviù•a (73.290, 77.68); related is vetālādhiù•hita (73.292). 118. tásyā 6labdhāyai s6 v6g ápacakrāma, ŚB 1.1.4.16. 119. Jamison 1996:24. 120. Ibid.:173. 121. Ibid.:190. 122. Ibid.:53. 123. Ibid.:55. 124. Ibid.:61. 125. Ibid.:25. In an example I need not explicate here, Jamison shows how the wife mediates between the divine and terrestrial worlds in transiting the ape Vóùākapi’s manly power to her more important partner, Indra (ibid.:80ff.; cf. ñV 10.86). 126. Ibid.:256. 127. Ibid.:40. 128. Ibid.:149. I cannot here enter into the theories of René Girard (1977), except to say that his notion of redirected human aggression, which he takes as basic to sacrifice, is also a kind of transfer of essence. In my view, certain scholars, such as


Heesterman, all too often uncritically accept Girard’s theories, based exclusively on sacrifice among the Greeks and the Old Testament Jews. It is relevant here to mention, parenthetically, a related kind of transfer of essence. In Hindi, this is called suhāg (Skt. saubhāgya), the particular merit that women accrue due to the performance of vrats designed to protect and strengthen the family. See Menzies 2004: 283–284 for a story relating the power of transferred suhāg to raise the dead; see also McGee 1987:687–688 for a similar story. 129. Cf. ŚB 2.3.1.2–5, KS 6.5, MS 1.8.5, and JB 1.7–8. In all these texts, the essence is transferred through an embryo, which is to say, through elemental pregnancy. The lexeme pra√viś is used in all four texts. For the clearest exposition of this doctrine in the Vedas, see Bodewitz 1973:35ff., passim. 130. See Dumont 1959:585f. 131. Cf. also the problematic uses of 6 in ñV 10.16.6 and práviveśa in 10.16.10. 132. MBh 3.99.9 crit. ed., also 3.99.10 samādadyun. 133. But, for the influence of the Vedas on the BhP, see my article “Purāâaveda” (F. Smith 1994). 134. See Smith 1987:2.173c ff., 3.24, 86, 104, and introduction pp. 92ff. 135. ātmany agnīn samāropya maccitto ’gniÅ samāviśet. I am unable to find any reference to this surprising rite in any Śrauta or Pitómedha Sūtras. For a discussion of religious suicide in India, see Kane, HDh II.2:925ff. Some of the Dharmaśāstras, esp. Atri, approximate the injunction in the BhP, without the bhakti infusion. 136. Cf. O’Flaherty 1975:188–197, 330 for sources. 137. Ibid.:196. 138. Among the deities who can be highly emotional, thus moving in the direction of becoming agents of possession in the extended sense intended by the Sanskrit vocabulary is Śiva when overcome by the mood of destruction, e.g., when he destroys Dakùa’s sacrifice, dissolves Kāmadeva, manifests as Vīrabhadra, or performs the Tāâbava dance. 139. Kuhn 1852. 140. Cf. Wijesekera 1945 [1994:177ff.]. See also Thite 1997:181–96 for a more recent description of the activity of the gandharva and the apsaras; Thite 1982:9f., 40, 114, passim, for vedic remedies for gandharva possession. 141. Keith 1937; Wijesekera 1945:75ff. [1994:177ff.]. Among the early studies worth consulting are Barnett 1926–28; Hillebrandt 1981:1:247–257. 142. This, despite a few mistaken textual citations and an uncritical dependence on Griffith’s ñV translations. 143. Lubotsky 2001:303, 311, sees here a derivation from a Central Asian substratum language, as he does (see this chapter n. 4) for óùi. 144. Wijesekera 1945:76 [1994:178]. 145. Ibid.:77 [1994:179]. 146. Largely following Keith 1920:128. 147. Cf. Śrautakośa, Sanskrit 2:33–46; English 2.1:100–111; Caland and Henri 1906–7:1:28–29.


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148. Another highly ambiguous tale of a gandharva’s involvement in flow, if not transfer, of essence appears in the MBh (1.95), in which a king of the Kurus, Citrāãgada, son of ŚaÅtanu, was defeated in battle by a gandharva of the same name, Citrāãgada. The absence of reference to possession in this story, compounded by its ambiguity, forces me to desist from further discussion of it. 149. As also the yakùa/yakkha; cf. Wijesekera 1943:25ff. [1994:132ff.]. 150. Cf. Meyer 1937:III:192. 151. Trans. Jamison 1996:140 and 267n44: sóman prathamó vivide gandharvó vivida úttaran | tót Hyo agníù •e pātis turHyas te manuùyaján ||. Ibid.:123, “gandharvas are ‘fond of women’” (strīkāmā vai gandharvān); cf. MS 3.7.3; KS 23.1, 24.1; TS 6.1.6; ŚB 3.2.4. See Jamison’s trenchant comments on this passage, p.123. 152. Wijesekera 1945:85 [1994:190]. 153. agacchan vai te tad yatra aśvamedhayājino gacchanti. 154. In ñV 5.85.3 kabandha had the sense of a cask or cistern (metaphorically a cloud, cf. Nirukta 10.4) for holding rain water, but already AV 10.2.3 had taken this word the sense of a human trunk; see Renou 1939: 390f. 155. The Śaãkarābhyudaya (4.36ff.), a seventeenth-century hagiography by Rājacubāmaâi Dīkùita that expands Śaãkara’s life into Tamilnadu, says the reason was simply an impulse on seeing the sleeping body of a king named Maruga. This text does not mention the debate. 156. Śaãkaradigvajaya of Vidyāraâya 9.77, praviśya; Śrīśaãkaravijaya of Anantānandagiri, ch. 58: dehāntarasañcāra (p. 178), parakāyapraveśa (p. 179). 157. It is difficult to know whether to read into this a more sophisticated notion of rebirth than most scholars are willing to assign to this early Upaniùad. It is possible that the assumption was that these brahmans were reborn in the realm (loka-) of the gandharvas. It is also possible that the Upaniùadic author regarded clans such as the Aãgirasas and the Atharvaâas to have counterparts in other realms. 158. A related story from twentieth-century India, reflects the popularity of the Śaãkara/Amaruka story. This was told in the 1930s by the well-known Maharashtrian saint Upasani Maharaj from Sakori regarding the relationship between the great seventeenth-century Maratha leader Śivājī and his reputed guru Rāmdās. The story was passed along to me in 1985 by the late archaeologist H. D. Sankalia of Deccan College, Pune, who had been a disciple of Upasani Maharaj. The English were connected with Śivājī. It could even be said that as the English were ruling, it was really Śivājī who was ruling. Śivājī dedicated his kingdom and all his exploits to Śrī Rāmdās. Thus it was in the fitness of things that Śivājī and Rāmdās united. Thus reigning over the kingdom fell to the lot of Rāmdās, because he controlled Śivājī’s consciousness. In fact, Rāmdās transferred his ātmā to the body of Śivājī and made him rule. Through the form of Śivājī, it was Rāmdās who was ruling. Conversely, the ātmā of Śivājī was stored by Rāmdās in his heart; this means that the bodies of Śīvājī and Rāmdās were the same; it was a transfer of their ātmāns only. A sadguru transfers his qualities to his devotee. The work of ruling that came to Rāmdās had to be entrusted to somebody after Śivājī. Just from being here, the English were servants of Rāma—they were all Rāmdāsas.


159. See Staal 1983: 1:509–525, 563–570, 658–663. 160. Taittirīya SaÅhitā 4.5.5, 4.5.7; Ārùeyakalpa, pp. 54ff.; also see Staal 1983:1: 559–560. 161. As recounted by T. R. Sreeraman of Thrissur. Sreeraman, now retired, worked for many years in Cementnagar, A.P., where in his spare time he took an active interest in the performance of śrauta ritual.


Friendly Acquisitions, Ho

s

The Panorama of Possession in the Sanskrit Epics


T

he two great sanskrit epics, the mahābhārata (MBh) and the Rāmāyaâa (Rām), contain extensive material for the study of possession. The MBh, the initial complete text of which was probably completed between the second and fourth centuries c.e.,1 contains the bulk of this material. It may be argued that the entire plot of the epics, particularly the MBh, is advanced through curses, boons, adventitious synchronicities, and other acts of subtle intervention, as well as by extraordinary acts of various gods and surreptitious identity shifts, including some involving possession.2 The material is practically endless; thus an accounting and analysis of it takes on the dimensions of an ethnography, for here, among all Sanskrit source material, the text approaches thick description. For this reason, the MBh assumes a major role in the remaining analysis throughout this volume and is viewed as instrumental in determining the direction of the linguistic and psychological discourse of possession in India for (at least) the two millennia since its composition. The discussion here, however, must be limited to a few important episodes. Before introducing the stories themselves, it is necessary to provide a general outline of the vocabulary and ideology of possession in the epics. Possession of most of the varieties discussed in this volume, except perhaps


of soma and the initiatory possession characteristic of Tantra, appears in the epics. Instances of āveśa, samāveśa, praveśa, and grahaâa abound. Possession of human bodies, dead and alive, by yogins, deities incarnating in kings, possession as intense emotion, devotional and oracular possession, and demonic, disease-producing possession are all attested. Indeed, an entire demonology appears in the Vanaparvan, which we look at in due course.

The Mahābhārata, Where Everything Can Be Found The Vocabulary of Possession in the MBh Minoru Hara has scoured the MBh for occurrences of ā√viś, ostensibly to shed light on the term śraddhāviveśa (possessed by faith) in the Ka•ha Upaniùad (1.2).3 Indeed, his focus is more on the MBh than on the Upaniùads, saving the present author considerable labor. He lists sixty semantic contexts in which ā√viś is found in the MBh, in verbal, nominal, and adjectival form. It is clear from Hara’s study that āveśa was a popular and highly developed notion in the MBh. Certain nuances of the word developed more fully later, for example, in tantric and bhakti texts, but its use as a signifier of intense emotional engagement, a specified ontological condition, mental state, or psychological attitude was fully manifested by the time the MBh was redacted. This range of signification has been sustained in Sanskritic and vernacular discourse ever since, a fact that may be attributed to the continuity of the two epics in local and regional culture, including their narrative progression, themes, motifs, moods, and language. Among these, the motifs, moods, and vocabulary were usually retained in regional non-Sanskritic dramatizations of the MBh and Rām, while the story was often revised according to the dictates of local culture and the predilections of the storyteller.4 Indeed, establishing mood and motif was more crucial than absolute fidelity to story line. Not only were the former more fundamental or essential to group and cultural recognition, but their comportment was codified in texts of dramatic and poetic theory (alaÅkāraśāstra, rasaśāstra). Conversely, no śāstra dictated that a story could not be altered. In a sense, a story can be anything (and often was), within reason, of course, but cultures have an inner sense of their own ethos, inclusive of mood, motif, and language. It is likely that, in addition to the contributions of early Tamil culture, the ethos of the two Sanskrit epics, in both their received texts and their

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many performed versions—the latter, at least initially, under the influence of the codices of rasaśāstra—contributed as much as any other literary and cultural production to the development of the theme of possession in South Asia. Possession gained a dossier, a consensual description and symptomatology, a recognizable look and feel. Among the emotions, states, and attitudes noted in the MBh in which engagement or immersion were not just tantamount to possession but within its very orbit are anger, sexual desire, pity, delusion or confusion, misery or grief, sin or transgression, hunger, happiness, surprise, power, and even intelligence. In a few cases, as we investigate shortly, ā√viś is used for entering fire, a forest, the sky, a cave, or a mountain peak, all of which carry the primary sense of simple entrance, but are also, by no accident, prominent environments of intense emotional weight. One series of examples, from the Strīparvan, suffices to demonstrate the consistency with which the language of possession is deployed to illustrate extreme emotional engagement. After Vidura delivers a long and moving discourse, though one typically situated for kùatriyadharma, to Dhótarāù•ra on the nature and dangers of grief (e.g., MBh 11.2.13: “Every day thousands of occasions for grief and hundreds of occasions for fear possess [āviśanti] the fool, but not the learned”), Vaiśampāyana describes to the king at extravagant and equally moving length the wholly justifiable grief of Gāndhārī and the wives of the slain heroes. First, though, the narrator notes that the slaughter was exacted on the Pāâbavas, absorbed in sleep in their camp (suptaÅ śibiram āviśya, 11.10.11b), as retribution for the undharmic ways they performed the rituals of battle. In the end, the power of the wives’ grief is wrenching and filled with the language of possession. Traumatized, the wives of the dead faint repeatedly, possessed by grief (asukhāviù•ā, 11.16.52cd, 25.11cd) at the horrifying sight of the dismembered body parts of their loved ones scattered about the field. The heroes were stretched out on beds of arrows that fully penetrated (āviśya) them, allowing them to achieve exalted status, like gods (11.19.16, 23.18). The emotional weight is too much to bear, it is indeed possession. Hara divides the semantic contexts of ā√viś in the MBh into eight categories, in each of which the Sanskrit nominal stems attested with a form of ā√viś are noted: 1. violent emotion: anger (krodha, kopa, roùa, manyu), agony (ārti), manly vigor (pauruùa), joy (harùa), grief (śoka), fear (bhī, bhaya), agitation (sambhrama);


2. selfish vice (adharma, pāpman), self-conceit (ahaÅkāra), arrogance (darpa), haughtiness (māna), contempt (avamāna), malice (mātsarya), greed (lobha); 3. affection and sexual desire (kāma, rāga, manmatha, madana); 5 4. suffering and disease: pain (dunkha, asukha), delusion (moha), depression/swoon (kaśmala), seizure (vepathu), fever (jvara), consumption (yakùman); 5. demonic beings: bhūta, yakùa, rākùasa, dānava, asura, kali; 6. physiological impulse: hunger (kùudh), thirst (pipāsā, t óùâa), drowsiness (nidrā),6 fatigue (śrama), waking up (prajagāra),7 intoxication (mada); 7. mental impulse: anguish (cintā), curiosity (kautūhala), astonishment (vismaya); compassion (kópā, ghóâā), bashfulness (lajjā);8 8. calamity (alakùmī, anartha), drought (avóù•i), flood (ativóù•i), epidemics (vyādhi), famine (durbhikùa).

Hara presents examples of its use in all these categories, often citing several verses of the MBh. Although in my view he divides ā√viś into too many categories, his analysis is nevertheless instructive.9 Let us briefly examine a few passages in which entrance into “natural” places, often regarded as mysterious and sacred, are depicted. The passages illustrate a nexus of place, attitude toward these selective locations, and intensity of mood with respect to these places. The use of ā√viś in these contexts in the sense of pervasion and emotional intensity demonstrates the sense of wonder or mystery associated with such liminal spaces. All these examples are from the Ādiparvan. (1) A cave, with its deep and uncertain recesses: “without that certainty we shall not be able to go into [āviśatum] that hole” (1.222.10cd).10 (2) A mole or gopher hole: “There’s a mole hole in the ground near this tree. Enter it quickly [āviśadhvaÅ tvaritā]; there you will have no fear of fire” (1.221.15). As early as the Vedic Brāhmaâa texts, mole holes, termite mounds, and other similar sites of non-human access to the earth were regarded as sites of power.11 Thus, in this and the previous example, it is no surprise that the verb for “entrance” is not merely √viś, but ā√viś, with the additional emotional weight it bears. (3) Fire: “After once again entering [āviśya] the fire, we shall attain auspicious realms; otherwise, the fire will not burn us, and you will again come back to us.” Here, the four infant egg-born sons of the sage Madanapāla, who has aban-

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doned them to the care of their mother, Jaritā, a Śārãgika bird, are endangered by a fire raging in the Khāâbava forest. The reference is not simply to fire but to the divinity Agni, who has already bestowed his favor on Madanapāla. Thus the sons of Madanapāla verbalize their hope that Agni will favor them as well. So, entering the fire here (agnim āviśya) is to enter into an emotionally weighted dialogue with the divinity Agni, because a good deal is at stake. (4) A forest: “Again, so that there will be no enmity, enter [āviśa] the Khāâbava forest” (1.199.24cd). Dhótarāù•ra requests Yudhiù•hira to enter the Khāâbava forest and literally possess half that kingdom. Another passage, referring to the sage Kaśyapa, who had just impregnated his two wives, Kadrū and Vinatā, and returned to the Naimiùa forest to continue his austerities, reads: “Kaśyapa entered [āviśat] the forest” (1.14.11d), rather than the expected prāviśat for such an ordinary entrance. Adding to the mystery, ambiguity, and danger of this forest-dweller is that Kadrū gave birth to a thousand eggs that hatched into snakes. After a gestation period of five hundred years, Vinatā bore two eggs: one was broken in haste, revealing a half-formed embryo that cursed her, while the other half eventually hatched. This second half was Garuba (Vainateya), who then freed Vinatā from the curse and consumed the snakes. (5) The sky, a continuation of the tale of the sons of Vinatā, reads: Thus, having cursed Vinatā, her [first, half-formed] son ascended to the mid-region. He may now be seen, O brahman, as Aruâa, ever-present, at daybreak. Then, in proper time, Garuba, the killer of snakes, was born. As soon as he was born he abandoned Vinatā and entered [āviśat] into the sky. (MBh 1.14.21–22)

A sense of pervasion appears in these verses. Although our critical vocabulary appears only in the second verse, the sense may be equally extended to the first verse, where the first-born son, Aruâa (Red), rises to the sky and pervades it as the red sky at daybreak. Garuba, whose size was as epic as the epic itself, not only flew into the sky, but owned, possessed, and pervaded it. (6) A mountain peak: “The bird entered [āviśya] that large mountain cave with his mind” (1.26.18ab). After flying from the great mountain Gandhamādana, “that which gives off an intoxicating scent,” Garuba, equal to a mountain in size, flew at the behest of his father, Kaśyapa, to the unidentified, uninhabited mountain cited in this verse, in order to perform


austerities. Both the mountain and the cave are weighted with extraordinary significance, both are suitable for penetration by the strong-willed son of Vinatā. I am not claiming that these examples of scenes depicting entrance are possession or that they even approximate possession. Rather, what I am saying is that, by expressing entrance in terms that are also characteristic of possession—which is, from all the textual and ethnographic evidence at our disposal, a decidedly emotional and risky state—these cases of entrance (to be distinguished from hundreds of others) are freighted with an unusual emotional weight that resonates with what is often found in descriptions of possession. This suggests that entrance into such “natural,” liminally efficacious places shares an aesthetic that is typified in possession states. Because the MBh is the single text in South Asian literary history with the greatest concentration of possession, it is not surprising that features of it, particularly its emotional gravity, should reappear in other descriptive aspects of the text and, conversely, that these other aspects should help culture a narrative edginess that breaks through into states that are almost always characterized by extreme emotion, such as curses, boons, and possession. In Chapter 5, and throughout this book, examples of possession from the MBh are recounted; thus it is not necessary to be exhaustive here. It suffices to recall that in the MBh possession is closely related to shape-shifting, such as in 3.197, where Indra assumes the shape of a hawk and Agni the shape of a pigeon in order to test Śibi or where Indra in the form of a Cāâbāla tests Uttaãka by offering him nectar (amóta) in the form of urine (14.55, 58). Similar instances occur in the Rāmāyaâa, where Hanumān both changes his form and possesses other beings in order to battle inimical beings. For example, he defeats Surasā, the “mother of snakes,” through expanding and contracting in order to enter and exit her mouth, and he kills the rākùasī SiÅhikā by entering her with his tiny form and piercing her vital organs (Rām 5.1.130–178). The latter cases are unusual examples of physical rather than mental entrance or entrance with a subtle or intentional body. Physical possession in the sense of a gross body occurs most often in negative possession by spirits whose most substantial forms are already less substantial, or at least differently substantial, than flesh and blood bodies. Examples of this that occur in the MBh depict the birth and exploits of Skanda (3.216– 219). This is dealt with extensively below, and in discussions of negative possession in Chapter 12. Most of the instances of possession we encounter there, as well as the examples presented here from the MBh and Rām, may

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be subsumed under the widespread theme in Sanskrit literature of possession as manifestation or incarnation.

The Possession of Nala Perhaps the best-known instance of possession in all of Sanskrit literature is that of King Nala in the story of Nala and Damayantī from the Āraâyakaparvan of the MBh (3.50ff ). In an incisive analysis of this tale, David Shulman notes that the story deals with three “general, quasi-philosophical problems,” which, in addition to other concerns, are helpful to understanding the general significance of possession states in India. These problems are “the boundaries of the self (and, within this arena, the problem of the locus of evil); the meaning of human agency and autonomy (the issue of fate); and the possibilities and implications of real self-knowledge.”12 The story of Nala and Damayantī is, in many ways, a snapshot or reduction, a brief analogue, of the main epic, Nala’s own mini-Mahābhārata. Nala was as perfect and virtuous a man as could be found. Like Yudhiù•hira, he was a king and an incarnation of dharma (MBh 3.50.1ff., 3.55.8–9). And, again like Yudhiù•hira, he was fond of dice (akùapriyan, 3.50.3c). Furthermore, like the Pāâbavas, he married a thoughtful and assertive princess, then gambled away his kingdom (but stopped short of staking his wife) to an evil sibling, Puùkara, assuming the role of Duryodhana. Nala’s defeat at the hands of his brother occurred, as the epic tells it, because he was suddenly possessed by the jealous divinity Kali, Strife or Entropy personified, the embodiment of one-legged dharma, who was late for Damayantī’s svayaÅvara, the ritual in which she, as a wealthy, beautiful, and powerful princess, selected a husband from among many eligible (and ineligible) kings and divinities. Resentful of the outcome, Kali plotted revenge, vowing, “I shall dwell in Nala” (nale vatsyāmi, 3.55.12). Kali stalked his prey for twelve years until finally he stumbled upon his moment of opportunity. After Nala committed a minor ritual lapse, which had the inadvertent effect of weakening both his purity and his resolve, Kali, the incarnation of the lowest throw of the dice and the personification of self-destruction, entered Nala and orchestrated his fateful defeat. The text tells us: “After urinating and touching water with his hands, the Niùadha king sat for his twilight rituals [saÅdhyā] without washing his feet; it was there that Kali possessed him [āviśat]” (3.56.3). Nala’s purity was breached, nullifying his virtue, and instantaneously he was stripped of his dharma. After possessing (samāviśya,


3.56.4) Nala, Kali approached Puùkara and informed him that the time was ripe for a dice competition with Nala. Kali was here not the sole agent of possession, however. His marginally less-baneful sibling, Dvāpara, the manifestation of two-legged dharma, the penultimate unlucky throw of the dice, served as Kali’s assistant, and, at the beckoning of the latter, he entered into and possessed (samāviśya) the dice (3.55.13cd). Thus the evil duo, Kali and Dvāpara, drove Nala to lose his entire kingdom and all his possessions, even the clothes off his back, to Puùkara. All that remained was Damayantī, ever faithful, her beauty unfading. But one night, homeless in the forest, Nala slipped away, in part for Damayantī’s own good: better that she should be on her own in the wilderness than with an abject failure like him. This touching scene demonstrates the fragility of Nala’s situation: Although he was possessed, the possession was not complete. Kali was “in” him, but he also was there. He battled liminality and loss of self, uncertain of his footing in the world, his confidence shattered. As a result he was weaker and less decisive than if he had been completely possessed or, of course, if he had not been possessed at all. He left Damayantī, prodded by Kali, but as Nala he was compelled to go back for a last glimpse of his sleeping wife. Even from this low ebb, the situation deteriorated as Damayantī was snared by a boa constrictor. Just as she was caught in its maws, a hunter happened by, slew the boa, and freed Damayantī. But, eschewing gallantry and adding insult to injury, the hunter then tried to rape Damayantī. She was forced to kill him with a curse, then fled, and, after many adventures, including nearly getting trampled to death by a herd of rutting elephants, ended up as a chambermaid in a royal court. As for Nala, wandering aimlessly and with nothing more to lose, he heard a voice beckoning him to enter a blazing forest fire. Upon entering it, he discovered that he was protected by Karko•aka, the King of Serpents (nāgarāja), who had been cursed by an angry sage to remain rooted to that spot. In return for Nala’s rescuing him, the Nāgarāja bit Nala on the heel, changing his tall, regal, and handsome form into that of Bāhuka (Arm), an ugly, short hunchback. But the poison went straight to Kali while the enforced shape-shifting ensured Nala’s secrecy, guaranteeing him the anonymity that enabled him to free himself from this befuddling mid-life crisis. Nala, now unrecognizable, managed to find a job as a charioteer and horse trainer in a royal court, which he undertook in exchange for the local king’s imparting to him the highest secrets of dice. After Nala concluded this transaction with the king, the power of his new-found knowledge of dice combined with the effects of

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the poison, leading Nala to violently expectorate the demon Kali. As he donned special celestial robes bestowed on him by the Nāgarāja, Nala’s original form was then restored. Kali, defeated but not terminated—consistent with Indic doctrine that nothing ever truly dies—is recycled: He still required a host. Thus, he took possession of a vibhītaka tree, whose nuts were used to make the dice. Nala, with remarkably bumptious naïveté, galloped off into the sunset to rejoin Damayantī, admitting tearfully, if reluctantly, and with no accounting for his actions, that she was responsible for his rescue. “Kali, who dwelt in my body, has been burning with your curse” (3.74.18).13 After a few trials, they lived happily ever after, Damayantī wiser for this episode and a good deal more wary about men, and Nala wiser and more constrained in his actions. This episode features both possession and shape-shifting. Unlike the Pāâbavas, who merely wandered in disguise in the forests and kingdoms of Bharatavarùa during their years in exile, Nala completed his penance undetected because of the shape-shifting conferred by the Nāgarāja. In his shapeshifting, Nala was very much “himself,” but only to himself, the possession under increasing control as the slow-acting poison of the Nāgarāja began to show its effects. This self-presencing in physical disguise may be contrasted with his tortured absent self and eclipsed personality under the mesmerizing sway of Kali, in which he was out of character and out of control, though physically very much “himself.” Thus, Nala resembled another flawed hero, Odysseus. Bruno Snell comments, “Odysseus returns to his home in the guise of a wretched old beggar, and yet remains the strong hero; but his wretchedness is merely a mask behind which Athena has hidden her favourite so that he will not be recognized.”14 As with Odysseus, Nala’s appearance and virtue are contrasted; but his virtue remains unchanged, at least in the end, after he has conquered his temptation. As an inner rather than an outer mask or disguise, possession cruelly and ironically allows the external form to endure unprotected in its full recognition. Nala, possessed, was a marked man, stigmatized because of his possession. Shape-shifting, however, is a modality of nonrecognition that is convenient and protective, but often forces the inner constitution to remain concealed. Nala, with his shape-shifting, was protected, but he could not manifest his inner qualities, except under partial eclipse. This perplexed sense of identity can, again, be compared to that of Odysseus, who conceals his identity on the island of the Cyclops by using the name “No-man.” Further along in his journeys, he continues to guard his


identity closely. He stays for seven years with the goddess Calypso (“the hidden one”), who offers him the gift of immortality at the price of remaining with him for eternity. In the long run, this strips him of his true identity, and he grieves for his wife and son, “gazing out at the imprisoning sea.”15 Like Nala and the Pāâbavas, “[h]e does not wish to remain hidden, but he cannot return home without concealing himself.”16 For both Nala and Odysseus, after the persona is revealed, the body must become a secret, so they must assume names and forms of anonymity and disfigurement. Thus, Nala becomes the hunchback Bāhuka and Odysseus the beggar No-man. Shapeshifting, then, is, in these cases at least, a defensive strategy employed to prevent recognition. Possession, on the contrary, is most often an offensive strategy engendered from within, leaving the outer form intact. As Shulman argues, Nala’s possession lifted him from his tireless but innocuous perfection and thrust him squarely into the world of men. With his body largely intact, he nevertheless experienced his own incipient fragmentation and recognition of his own self as other, demonstrating that, during possession (as is often the case in life), the body serves as an instrument for concealment. As a corollary to the risk of the dice, the possession forced Nala to develop strategies for recomposing his “disarticulated universe.”17 In another sense, the possession was cooperative, as Kali is the demon of entropy and selfdestruction, who cannot strike in the absence of the victim’s own weakness. But it was also negative and destructive, requiring forced shape-shifting as part of an antidote, eclipsing one aspect of the person while another part healed, illuminating the “desperate fantasy of fullness”18 that highlights the human condition. I end this section with a brief story from the Bhāgavata Purāâa (BhP), a text redacted eight to ten centuries after the MBh that reflects the influence of the tale of Nala. Not only is there a cursed and cornered king, but there is a possession of more or less the same nature. Purañjana, a king of great renown (bóhacchravān, BhP 4.25.10), was a good man madly in love with his wife; indeed, he was possessed with infatuation for her (pramadāparigrahan, 4.27.3), overcome with darkness (tamo ’bhibhūtan, 4.27.4c). He ruled his kingdom judiciously and sired thousands of sons, who in turn sired many thousands of sons of their own. But he was cut off from higher spiritual attainment because of his attachment to his family and was wooed by the passion-intoxicated (kāmamohitā, 4.27.21d) daughter of Kāla. Eventually, he was defeated by the Yavanas, in league with the daughter of Time. In great distress as death approached, he was possessed by darkness (tamasāvi-

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ù•an, 4.28.25) and, in this liminal state, was mercilessly chopped to bits by the spirits of animals (later revived) that he had earlier offered in sacrifice for the weal of his kingdom. Because of an infatuation with his wife, even on his deathbed, Purañjana was reborn as a woman, the beautiful daughter of the king of Vidarbha. She eventually wed Malayadhvaja, the king of the Pāâbya country. After a life of loyal devotion to him, indeed after she had lain down on his funeral pyre, she was recognized as King Purañjana by a self-realized brahman (4.28.51), who conferred on her/him knowledge of the singular identity of all beings (4.28.62–63). The element of possession by darkness is repeated here; Kali is the manifestation of the age of darkness, thus a close colleague of the daughter of Time. Tamas, of course, is darkness itself. Purañjana and Nala were both happy and benevolent rulers, thoroughly dedicated to their kingdoms and wives. Both abided in liminal existences and were forced to undergo terrible ordeals before their re-enlivenment into the orbit of true dharma and true knowledge. The legend of Nala reached mythically into far-flung corners of Indian literature, in no small measure because of the pathos of his possession. The story of Purañjana aptly illustrates this, reiterating both the human dimension of the possessed king and the conflict over dharma that often lay at the heart of possession.

The Possessions of Vipula and Vidura Before addressing the issues Shulman raises, let us note a few more tales of possession in the MBh and, to demonstrate thematic continuity, an episode from the Liãga Purāâa. An instance that stands out because it is consistent with many other tales of possession in Sanskrit literature is found in the Anuśāsanaparvan of the MBh (13.40–43). In this story Vipula Bhārgava protects Ruci, the wife of his guru, Devaśarman, against the sexual advances of the lecherous Indra by using his yogic power to enter Ruci’s body (yogenānupraviśya, 13.40.50a). Like Śaãkara entering the body of the dead king Amaruka, this possession is a benign takeover intended to accomplish a specific goal. As in the case of Śaãkara’s possession, the verb (anu)pra√viś is used, signifying an externally rather than internally induced entrance and pervasion. The story begins two chapters earlier, when Yudhiù•hira asks the virtuous and celibate Bhīùma to tell him about the nature of women, who, adds the King of Dharma, are the source of problems (mūlaÅ doùāâām), in addition to being small-minded (laghucittān) (13.38.1). Bhīùma, expatiating from his


bed of arrows, patiently lying in wait for death, answers in two painfully misogynistic chapters placed largely in the mouth of a courtesan (puÅścalī) named Pañcacūbā (Five Tufts). The message to Yudhiù•hira is that women are lascivious by nature, will sleep with anyone who shows them the slightest attention or respect, and are in serious need of protection by men. That introduction completed, Bhīùma proceeds to the episode of Ruci and Vipula. Devaśarman, a famous sage, decided to leave his home for a short trip away to perform a sacrifice. It was probably not a śrauta sacrifice, as that requires the presence of the wife of the sacrificer, and Bhīùma has already informed us that women have no ritual acts prescribed for them (13.40.11). Rather than leave Ruci as easy prey for the unscrupulous Indra, the master shape-shifter, who was known to be enamored of the beautiful Ruci, Devaśarman assigned his loyal pupil Vipula, of the Bhógu clan, the job of protecting Ruci in his absence. Vipula, we are reminded, was an ascetic whose senses were under control (13.40.24). He acquiesced to his guru’s command and, after Devaśarman’s departure, pondered how he would accomplish his task. His difficulty was that he knew Indra could not be kept out by erecting physical barriers, because of his prowess at shape-shifting, nor could he be defeated in one-onone combat. Thus, he decided to possess Ruci, disabling her mind, which was already weakened by the fact of her being a woman. He remained there in wait (saÅpraviśya, 13.40.44), reasoning that, through his yogic strength (yogabalāt, 13.40.46), he could prevent Ruci from succumbing to Indra’s attractions. He then entered her body (anupraviśya, 13.40.50), as the text is careful to inform us, with his mind controlled, directed only toward dharma, the Vedas, and his own and his guru’s austerities. This excessive emphasis on brahmanical purity informs the reader that possession is acceptable in these circumstances. After taking a seat next to Ruci, Vipula gained her attention by telling her stories. Then he stared into her eyes, a seductive gesture but for his well-advertised self-control, uniting the rays of light emanating from her eyes with those emanating from his.19 Through the open channel of the eyes, Vipula proceeds to enter her body as wind enters empty space (13.40.56cd). Then, entering her limbs and face with the corresponding parts of his subtle body, the sage Vipula remained within her, unmoving, invisible, like a shadow.20 Thus he was able to constrain (viù•abhya, 13.40.58a) her entire body, to protect her from Indra’s certain advances because she was now stripped of her volition.21 And, predictably, Indra appeared, having lain in wait for his prey, like Kali stalking Nala. He donned the most exquisitely seductive form and was met

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with the sight of not only the beautiful Ruci, wife of Devaśarman, but Vipula as well, unmoving, his eyes frozen, still as a picture.22 The lustful Indra, ignoring the odd company, decided to make his move. His sweet, enticing words caught Ruci’s attention, which Vipula suppressed, unknown to Indra. She attempted to respond positively to Indra, but this merely intensified the luminous Vipula’s yogic power, which he deployed to restrain her sense organs (13.41.11). Thus, Indra was caught off-guard when she responded to his seductive beckoning with elegant Sanskrit,23 uncharacteristic for a woman, “Oh, what is the purpose in your coming?” (bhon kim āgamane kótyam, 13.41.14a). Suddenly, Indra caught on and resorted to his own power of divine sight (divyena cakùuùā, 13.41.16d). He saw Vipula in possession of Ruci’s body, like a reflection in a mirror (pratibimbam ivādarśe, 13.41.17c). He trembled, frightened of being cursed by the young sage. Vipula then returned to his own body and, rather than pronounce another curse on Indra, reminded him of a previous curse leveled by Gautama for just such behavior toward his wife, Ahalyā, and gave him a severe tongue-lashing, after which the King of the Gods disappeared (antaradhīyata, 13.41.27d), realizing the greatness of the power of Vipula and his guru, Devaśarman. This would be the end of the story, except that after several other events in the lives of Vipula and Devaśarman, Vipula became aware that he had committed a sin of omission, equivocation. He understood that he had neglected to inform Devaśarman exactly how he had protected Ruci from Indra; he was not confident that Devaśarman would approve the method to which he had resorted, namely, possession. This omission, Vipula learned through inadvertently overhearing casual conversation around him, condemned him to hell. Devaśarman, however, learned of Vipula’s method from Day, Night, and Six Seasons and eventually confronted him with it. Vipula confessed, and Devaśarman forgave him; in fact, it was never problematic for Devaśarman, because he recognized that Vipula’s maintenance of selfcontrol while possessing his wife was a commendable yogic accomplishment. This small matter cleared up, the three of them, Devaśarman, Ruci, and Vipula, ascended to heaven and enjoyed great bliss (13.43.16).24 This episode reveals a great deal about possession in India two thousand years ago. Not only is one of the yogic processes by which possession occurs clarified (we address this further in the discussion of yoga texts in Chapter 7) and the image of possession as a reflection in a mirror introduced, but we can infer a few fragments about the deep social background of possession as well. It is clear from the repeated emphasis on Vipula’s brahmanically man-


aged self-control that possession invited the possibility of sexual abuse. This, of course, was present, though framed slightly differently, in the story of Śaãkara and the dead king Amaruka. Furthermore, it is clear that there was at least some degree of social opprobrium associated with possession, perhaps for this reason. This is considered again below, in discussion of the seventh-century Sanskrit drama Bhagavadajjukāprahasanam (Chapter 8). Vipula’s reticence was occasioned by fear of Devaśarman’s condemnation. The penetrability associated with possession rendered it ripe for deep and violable levels of intimacy that were viewed as personally dangerous. However, it was never a topic of legislative or śāstraic proscription. Thus, the known possibility of abuse or violation merely sent out danger signals or raised eyebrows. These objections were not strong enough to condemn the practice of possession, much less undermine the perception of its usefulness. The dangers also illustrate the fluidity of personhood as it was construed in India at the time. Although the story makes it clear that Ruci must have been aware of Vipula’s occupation of her body, at least after Indra’s arrival, there is no suggestion that she objected to it or found it surprising. Of course, the requirements of brahmanically biased narrative, related by the celibate male Bhīùma, might have been enough to dismiss or censor her reactions. Nevertheless, it is revealing of the unsurprising possibility of possession and the ambiguous position it occupied in the gamut of socio-spiritual practices. Another example of this type of controlled, externally induced possession, using the characteristic pra√viś, is from the Liãga Purāâa, a text composed several centuries after the completion of the core text of the MBh.25 This brief episode, from among a large number in the vast Purāâic literature, may be interjected to illustrate the attractiveness of possession to the storyteller of the time. The agent of possession was Śiva, a major deity whose yogic power the author(s) untiringly certified (apparently, omnipotence was not an assumed condition for gods); it was not a human with similar abilities (which would have been achieved through severe discipline, rather than as the result of a “natural” condition). According to this text, the Lord (bhagavān) became Lakulīśa, an incarnation of Śiva, through the act of possessing a dead brahman: “After seeing the body [of a brahman] cast aside carelessly in the burning ground, he entered it by virtue of his yogic power [praviù•an yogamāyayā] for the benefit of brahmans.”26 That burning ground [śmaśāna], added Śiva, will become a sacred place frequented by perfected beings [siddhakùetram]. It will be known by the name of Kāyāvatāra, “Descent into a Body,” and will last as long as the earth itself.”27

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This passage, like the MBh before it, continues the Upaniùadic theme of incarnation, or more precisely embodiment, as possession. On many occasions, either a body, usually that of a king or another member of a semidivine contesting royal family is usurped by a deity (though more often by an asura, daitya, dānava, gandharva, or rākùasa, to be used for their specific purposes) or, as the MBh asserts, one of these entities is born in a man or woman as a partial incarnation (aÅśāvataraâam, 1.61.99).28 The MBh explores the phenomenon of these beings’ taking birth as partial incarnations in virtually every prominent member of the cast of characters in the epic. More generally, the MBh states that Viùâu possessed (āviveśa) kings by resorting to power gained from his austerities,29 yet another example of a divinity engaged in practices familiar to humans.30 More specifically, though, the MBh explores at length the identity of these beings and the various members of the Pāâbava and Kaurava clans and their allies whom they inhabit. This massive infusion of celestial blood into the epic’s characters is Brahmā’s response to pleas from the goddess Earth, feeling overpowered and oppressed. Brahmā thus requests the gods to manifest on Earth: “With parts of yourselves, take birth among men as it pleases you” (1.58.47cd). It is not important here to provide a list of these men, except to note—because it is relevant to our subsequent discussion—the celestial bloodline of Aśvatthāman, said to be a combination of Mahādeva (Śiva), Death (antaka), Lust, and Anger.31 A further example of this type of possession is found in the fifteenth parvan, titled Āśramavāsika (Residence in the Hermitage). Vidura, it was predicted, would possess (pravekùyati) Yudhiù•hira, and as a single person they would obtain heaven (15.26.20). Vidura, arguably the least-sullied and bestintentioned embodiment of Dharmadeva, then uses his yogic skills to leave his body and enter that of Yudhiù•hira, his powerful younger counterpart and half-brother in the lineage of Dharma; indeed, it was because of this brotherhood that they were able to merge. “The intelligent Vidura entered [the body of Yudhiù•hira] limb by limb, placing his breaths in the breaths and senses in the senses [of Yudhiù•hira]. Vidura, fully established in the power of yoga, as if ablaze, entered [viveśa] the body of the king, Dharmarāja. When the king saw Vidura’s body, its consciousness gone, its gaze intact, leaning against a tree, he realized that he himself, Dharmarāja, already of great splendor, had become more powerful, and had acquired additional virtues” (15.33.25–28). We may now return to Shulman’s concerns, first as they relate to Nala,


then as they pertain to the remaining examples cited here. His first concern is determining boundaries of the self, especially in relation to the problem and locus of evil, which in this context may be defined as subversion, and consequent inversion, of a naturalized order (anóta, adharma). Although Shulman separates this from his next two concerns, those of human agency and its relation to fate, and the possibilities and implications of self-knowledge, the three should be read together because they do not operate independently. The types of possession described in the preceding paragraphs are all externally induced, in theory at least. However, the externality of the possession of Nala by Kali is open to question. To describe this possession, the author(s) employ forms of ā√viś and sam-ā√viś, rather than pra√viś. the former, as we have seen, more generally indicate a self-induced possession with high emotional stakes. The question thus arises immediately as to whether Nala invited his own possession. His ritual lapse was unintentional; given human nature and the severe demands of brahmanical ritual, it is inevitable that lapses will occasionally occur. As a result of both the exactitude of ritual and the analogical nature of the Nala story, one might say Nala was due for a fall. He was, in a sense, asking for it, inviting it, tempting fate. The name of the deity, Kali, and his unusual appearance here suggest that the author(s) did not truly envisage an embodiment, but a symbolic force of destruction. Nevertheless, these tales can be summarized in two ways. First, considering the Nala story, agency is individual, as he regains both his kingdom, after defeating his evil brother in a rematch with the dice, and a facsimile of his regal persona (illustrating the dicey nature of both kingdoms and persons). In spite of final victories, though, Nala could no longer deny his vulnerability; the possession rendered him more human: he was forced to serve as a cook and horse trainer in his shape-shifted form during his exile and was repentant toward Damayantī at least in part. Stripped of his protective (and seductive) sheen of innocence and beauty, he emerged with a newfound cautiousness and became a smarter and more mature gambler. It was his possession-induced (or possession-revealed) multiple self that lay at the basis of the dharmic inversion he wrought upon himself, Damayantī, and his kingdom, and that, in the end, forced him to recognize and negotiate within himself an unembellished and commonplace complexity. He was awakened, as Shulman explains, “through intoxication and madness, to this fragmented alienness within us and to the process of self-consummation, in a double sense, that is felt to be constitutive of human experience.”32 After this lesson was absorbed, order, dharma, and peace again prevailed. But it

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was no longer such a “natural” order; that order, revealed to be an unstable environmental simulacrum of Nala’s innocence, beauty, and perfection, was like a virgin forest. Once clear-cut, it could only be replanted, cultivated, and pruned; Nala’s own kótayuga could never be fully reclaimed. Self-induced possession led initially to a confusion over boundaries and agency but, in the end, induced a greater self-possession, an individuation, a self bounded by the discomfiting shock of the other, an alien presence without and within, irretrievably beyond the grasp of childhood’s innocence. This, at least, is what we see at first glance. Perhaps, however, it is not so simple, not so readily transactional. The complexity, even necessity, of possession is underscored by the Jain version of Nala’s story, in which possession is completely expunged, rendering it, instead, a formulaic and predictable moral tale of Jain virtue and mendicancy.33 Without the possession, there is little reason for Nala’s fall; his heroic vulnerability is siphoned away, and as a character he holds little appeal precisely because we do not recognize ourselves in him, which is to say that we do not recognize in him the unpredictable surge of alienness and possession that the reader or listener quietly feels. It is the possession that confers a center to both the narrative and the persona and adds a sense of intimacy to the transactions within ourselves that defy simplicity. It defies or grates on our own private self-recognition. Possession for Nala, as for all of us who do not embrace it as a practice, splinters the relentlessly self-justifying and self-validating mechanisms that drive us toward self-idealization. Nala’s idealization of his own agency is, from the outset, at least partially a product of his semidivine pedigree, which is, like that of Yudhiù•hira, a partial incarnation as Dharmadeva. Replicating all the major (and many minor) characters in the epic, genealogy is an important determinant of action and agency, and they all appear to be aware of their semidivine status and the manner in which this impinges on their agency. Nala, like other great kings, does not act alone, unmediated; his possession has enabled him to understand, while wandering alone in exile in the jungle, that his solitary persona is fighting an uphill battle for “his” survival, for retrieval of his “personal” history. Second, let us consider Vipula Bhārgava’s yoga, which enabled him to maintain his self-possession, even if that extended beyond the body. For a yogin, the body presents no apparent barriers to self-possession, self-knowledge, or agency. But this is not the same as one deity possessing another, as Śiva enlivening the brahman’s corpse in order to establish its identity as Lakulīśa. The difference between a deity possessing and a yogin possessing is


that the deity, with a different kind of body or degree of substantiality, can, in the Indic view of things in which ontological reality is accorded equally to humans and non-humans, place its consciousness in another body while maintaining its own self-presence, while the yogin maintains self-presence in only one body at a time. Thus, what separates humans from gods is that, for humans, the self is irrevocably bounded in space and time; it is subject to the dictates and mutations of local environment. The yogin’s body (deha) is, despite strenuous efforts, unable to maintain itself without its inhabiting personality (dehin, jīva). Correlatively, the autonomy and self-knowledge of the human, whether perfected and controlled yogin or willful and sensually out-of-control victim, are constantly spun around his or her own shifting center and appear to be limited to this mutating environment. One of the problems of possession as described in ethnographies and depicted in classical and modern literature is that of deception. Ethnographies often reveal a keen sense by local communities of authentic versus faked possession, in the same manner in which communities throughout South Asia debate endlessly whether certain saints or other religious figures are “genuine.” However, this discourse of authenticity does not link the theme of possession to that of shape-shifting or other magical phenomena, linkages found frequently in literature, where a narrative of temporal remoteness (revealed grammatically, for instance, in the proliferation of the perfect tense) gives freedom to these linkages and generates strong mythic sentiments. This discourse of authenticity found in common parlance is paralleled by a sense—not quite a discourse—of deception in classical literature. This sense is found in narratives of both shape-shifting and possession in the MBh. However, the discourse is construed quite differently for each one of them. Indeed, one of the key distinctions between possession and shapeshifting revealed in the episodes under discussion and found with nearly total consistency in Indian literature is that shape-shifting is associated with deception while possession is not; objectively, however, we should immediately moderate this statement to say that the deception that in part constitutes certain modalities of possession is of a different nature from that which lies closer to the center of shape-shifting. The latter, much more than possession, is founded on the requirement and the act of forging a new, or at least an alternate, identity. Nala straddled both domains in that he was both the victim of possession and underwent a major episode of shape-shifting. In shape-shifting he obscured his identity in order to gain the anonymity that he needed to overcome his possession; while donning his Bāhuka mask he

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was more unreservedly himself. The possession induced him to act foolishly and selfishly, but did not render him deceitful. Neither did it render Kali, the possessor, deceitful; he remained true to his nature. Similarly, Indra never lost control of his identity while he was forging a new physical form as the charming would-be seducer of Ruci. Kali’s and Indra’s acts were consciously deceitful, not least because their motivation was to subvert the natural and moral orders for selfish temporary gain. By contrast, Vipula, perhaps distressingly like Kali, did not engage in deceit; he too was true to his nature. Ruci, possessed but retaining partial self-awareness, did not easily cede her autonomy. Although she was possessed, her suppressed thoughts and efforts, known only to Vipula, strongly suggested that she might have fallen for Indra’s wiles had her sense organs not been straightjacketed by Vipula. Thus Kali’s and Vipula’s possessions, as well as that of Śiva of the brahman’s corpse, were not premeditated deceit in the way that Indra’s shape-shifting was or, more mildly, that Nala’s was in assuming the identity of Bāhuka. Rather, their possessions were deceitful in a formal sense in that they were coercive, transgressive, and unexpected. All three of these—coerciveness, transgressiveness, and unexpectedness—emanate from an exhibition of personal power, hence bear an aura of authenticity regardless of any moral judgments foisted on them. As the anthropologist Rosalind Morris comments, on her observation of possession in northern Thailand, “The verisimilitude of the possession performance depends on the unexpected detail that reveals a secret knowledge; this verisimilitude then constitutes the authenticity of the possession.”34 In all the cases considered here, the secret knowledge is of the nature and extent of one’s own power and the ideologies (and cosmologies) that lay behind it. But in the MBh and the Purāâas, these exhibitions did not constitute abuse of power. Externally motivated possession, most often indicated by the verb pra√viś, should perforce contain an element of surprise (an exception being Vidura’s possession of Yudhiù•hira, again proving that the use of these terms is generally rather than fully consistent). Yet Viùâu’s possession of the bodies of kings (expressed through ā√viś ) signifies a more “natural,” less coercive, and perhaps less unexpected order. It also expresses one of the differences between possession as incarnation and possession as a temporary vehicle for the achievement of a specific task. Perhaps most important, the former partakes of the special arrangement between higher deities and royalty and more closely resembles the Upaniùadic act of creation as possession than other, more familiar, modes of


possession. In the MBh and the Purāâas, kings were regarded as gods, and even as the earth itself (cf. the names Pārtha, Póthu, etc., for kings). Adopting a word from the Liãga Purāâa (1.70.48), parasparānupraveśa (interpenetration), we might say, then, that kings possessed deities as much as deities possessed kings.35 Behaviors labeled deceitful and coercive must, perforce, introduce moral questions to the discourse of aberrant and irregular psychophysical events like possession and shape-shifting. What may be asked here, based on these tales, is whether a morality of escape dwells in the shadows of possession. This is essentially what I. M. Lewis and others argue when they assert that possession (and, perhaps to a lesser degree, shape-shifting, if it could be documented) is a highly specialized and learned, but ecstatic, experience through which the powerless express social, economic or political oppression. The possession, then, constitutes a kind of empowerment that compensates for this oppression. Much of Lewis’s discourse is, as we have seen, inadmissible in these early Indic texts and contexts; but in one area it is helpful. If we examine possession from the perspective of escape, of compensation, we must ask: What is it that possessors and possessed escape from or to, and is this escape undertaken because they are in fact fundamentally dispossessed? This is a big question that must be answered piecemeal, but it demands intrusion here because both possessors and possessed appear to engage escape variously. As a practical matter, Vipula escaped from his body to prevent Ruci from fleeing her dharmic confines, and Śaãkara, as we saw earlier, escaped the constraints of his ritually purified but also ritually oppressed body to a state of temporary freedom. Acts of bodily surrender, whether willful or forced, are always double-edged. They commence with the outward movement of self-objectification, a churning that leaves in its wake a subjectivity in which the objectified self is distanced to a state of transaction and exchange with its interior other. Lifting and reframing a comment by Don Handelman and David Shulman in a different context, we can say that after this “selfobjectification begins, once the fragments of continuous innerness splinter and escape,” the possessing entity expends itself “in the pursuit of shadows; and every step back, every act of deexternalization, or reinternalization, is susceptible to a reversal, a diversion, or a seductive countermove. No solution on the level of externalities can really work.”36 This is what confers on possession an edge of uncertainty. The shadow may be within oneself—Nala employed his possession to explore the dimensions of his own unexplored

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self-possession—or within the other—Vipula employed his possession to explore, then resist, the darkness within Ruci. We may brandish words like “deceitful” and “coercive” here because of the person’s tendency to trick him or herself or to trick the other (which may be within or beyond one’s person). Given its transgressive capacity, the self can usually trick or deceive itself. Thus possession may be viewed as deceitful in this way: It awakens the trickster within. It raises moral questions of the most intimate kind. Hence, it is not surprising that one of the most visible and puzzling themes in the MBh is that of deception, as the stories of the deaths of virtually all the heroes constantly remind us. But because possession engages different and shifting parts of internal and external shadow worlds, as well as internal and external embodiments and instantiations, it cannot have a single definitive moral fiber, though the hot buttons of deception and escape are never very far away.

Vasiù•ha and King Kalmāùapāda The MBh (1.166–68) describes another characteristic form of possession in a tale that recapitulates the age-old feud between the families of the brahman sage Vasiù•ha (Superior) and the kùatriya sage Viśvāmitra (Universal Friend). Once upon a time, the powerful king Kalmāùapāda (Speckled Foot) of the Ikùvāku clan went hunting in the forest. The king’s party, hungry and thirsty, wandered onto a narrow densely forested path. There they encountered a mahātmā named Śakti (Power), son of the brahman sage Vasiù•ha, coming from the opposite direction. The king, undefeated in battle, ordered the mahātmā off the path. The firm but gentle Śakti, who walked the straight and narrow (dharmapatha, 1.166.6b), refused to budge, setting up another round in the eternal confrontation, as old as the Vedas themselves, between sage and king, brahman and kùatriya, religious and secular power and authority. King Kalmāùapāda, pushed to anger by the sage’s insolence, treated him to a solid whipping. By now hurt and angered, Śakti responded by cursing the good king to “roam the earth and feed on human flesh” (1.166.10). But they were not alone in the forest. The royal sage Viśvāmitra happened to be trailing the king. Sensing his chance to defeat the Vasiù•has, Viśvāmitra sneaked behind the king, but remained hidden, as the latter was trying to apologize to Śakti, as he realized the power of his curse. From his hiding place, Viśvāmitra summoned a rākùasa and set it upon the king. This rākùasa, called KiÅkara (Slave), proceeded to possess (viveśa) the king (1.166.17cd).


Seeing that the king was seized ( góhītaÅ) by the rākùasa (1.166.18a), Viśvāmitra, who apparently had no use for King Kalmāùapāda except as he might prove useful in eliminating the Vasiù•has, left. Tormented by the rākùasa, King Kalmāùapāda encountered a hungry brahman on his way home, begging for a meal with meat (samāÅsam bhojanaÅ, 1.166.20b). Loyal to the rules of royal dharma, but forced to return from the hunt empty-handed, he promised to send food. However, the king was soon absorbed (saÅviveśa) in his harem (1.166.23cd) and forgot. In the middle of the night, when he finally remembered his promise, he sent word to his kitchen staff to dispatch meat to the brahman at once. The cook was unable to locate any, so the king, possessed by the demon (rākùasāviù•an, 1.166.27a), demanded of the cook, “Then send him human flesh!”37 Unable to find any, the cook went to the home of a known assassin (sūd, 1.166.28a) and procured some from him. After feeding it to the brahman ascetic, the latter realized that he had been fed forbidden food (abhojyam annam, 1.166.30, 31). He became enraged and, like Śakti before him, condemned the king to feed on human flesh (sakto mānuùamāÅseùu, 1.166.32). Cursed doubly, and fully possessed (samāviù•an) by the power of the rākùasa, the king lost his capacity for sound judgment (1.166.33ab). As fate would have it, he soon met up with Śakti once again. He “instantly separated him from his lifebreath [prāâain viprayujya, 1.166.36b] and devoured Śakti as a tiger does its favorite prey” (1.166.36cd). Thereafter, on Viśvāmitra’s order, “he ate the other hundred sons of the mahātmā Vasiù•ha as a lion eats small game” (1.166.38).38 Vasiù•ha became extremely depressed about the slaughter of his sons and attempted suicide many times, only to be saved by fortuitous acts of nature. After realizing that he would be unable to die, Vasiù•ha learned that his daughter-in-law, Adóśyantī (Invisible), the wife of his late son Śakti, was pregnant. The gestation period of this fetus was twelve years, so long that it learned the Vedas in utero. Indeed, Vasiù•ha learned of the extended pregnancy when he heard the sounds of Vedic mantras emanating from the womb of Adóśyantī. This restored his mood and, together with his pregnant daughter-in-law, he set out in search of King Kalmāùapāda. They found the king sitting alone in a desolate wilderness (vijane vane, 1.167.16a). Adóśyantī became frightened at the sight of this terrifying rākùasa of a king, who charged at the two, intending to eat them. But Vasiù•ha stopped him in his tracks, shouting the mantra hum, and then sprinkled ensorcelled water (mantrapūtena vāriâā) on the king to liberate him from the rākùasa (1.168.3–4). As a reward, the king—a good man after his dark shadow dissipated—

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allowed Vasiù•ha to sow his seed in his own wife, thereby providing extra insurance for Vasiù•ha’s own lineage, assuring Vasiù•ha of his patronage, and dealing a blow to Viśvāmitra. The dimensions of possession in this tale are standard, perhaps even prototypical. A hubristic king violates the space and body of a brahman sage. The king is then laid low by a malevolent but forgettable rākùasa who is under the control of another powerful and well-pedigreed sage. The king’s fondness for women and meat, as well as his disregard for brahmans in his path, are exploited by the storyteller as weaknesses that predispose him to malevolent possession. No doubt, these subplots are part of the moral of the story, as is the winning of a sage’s blessings to rectify a curse and a string of bad luck. This is an excellent example of the dialogical process of a resolution emerging out of the tension between curse and blessing, which so thoroughly shapes the MBh. But this is also not without a trace of local mordant humor; one can well imagine this story being woven with great wit around a community fire at night to tease, edify, moralize, and entertain children. This was facilitated by a canned trope of possession by an anonymous bogeyman, a king with the funny name, rampant cannibalism, and a happy brahmanized ending.

Aśvatthāman as Śiva in the Sauptikaparvan Arguably the most dramatic example of possession in all of Sanskrit literature occurs in the Sauptikaparvan, the tenth book of the MBh. This was the possession of Aśvatthāman by Śiva, who slaughtered the bivouacked armies of the Pāâbavas, their victory nevertheless assured, in one nocturnal (sauptika) attack. This possession of a warrior by a ferocious spirit (in the present case, the spirit of the deity Śiva), in a demonstration of egregious, uncontrolled violence, was not, as we have just seen, an isolated instance in the MBh.39 The following excerpt from the Āraâyakaparvan demonstrates that this was a counterpossession of a great deity with the power to destroy lesser deities and spirits: The dānavas inform Duryodhana [they address him as Suyodhana] of his divinity [he is a gift from Śiva]. They tell him that “Other Asuras will take possession [pravekùyanti] of Bhīùma, Droâa, Kópa, and the others; and possessed [āviù•ān] by them they will fight your enemies ruthlessly. . . . Pitiless, possessed by the Dānavas, their inner souls overwhelmed [āviù•ān], they will battle their relations and cast all love far off. . . . Bands


of Daityas and Rākùasas will take on lives in the wombs of the baronage [kùatrayoniùu] and fight mightily with your enemies, O king, with maces, clubs, swords, and various striking weapons. Whatever fear arises in you from Arjuna here, for that too we have devised a means: the soul of the slain Naraka that has assumed the body of Karâa in order to kill Arjuna . . .” Karâa, too, with the inner soul of Naraka possessing his mind and spirit [āviù•acittātmā], set his cruel mind on killing Arjuna. The Sworn [saÅśaptakān] Heroes, whose minds had been possessed by the Rākùasas [rākùasāviù•acetasan] and were overcome with Passion and Darkness, sought the death of Phalguna [Arjuna]. And Bhīùma, Droâa, Kópa, and the others were no longer so friendly toward the sons of Pāâbu, now that their minds had been taken over by the Dānavas [dānavākrāntacetasan].40

This passage is replete with the language of possession, curses, and overwhelming emotion. If anything, these are even more extreme in the Sauptikaparvan. The succession of Kaurava commanders-in-chief had passed from Bhīùma to Droâa to Karâa to Śalya as each of these great and sage leaders was killed or disabled in turn by the Pāâbavas. Finally, the Kaurava leadership devolved to Droâa’s son Aśvatthāman, and the slaughter, which was already of epic proportion for seventeen days, became truly apocalyptic on the eighteenth and final day of the battle. Droâa, who was not only the father of Aśvatthāman but the guru of the Pāâbavas as well, took charge on the tenth day, after the Pāâbavas shot down Bhīùma in what was to be the first in a series of breaches of kùatriyadharma, the warrior’s code of fair battle. Although this code was ruptured first by the Pāâbavas (here and subsequently at the urging of Kóùâa, thus conferring a divine sanction on selective forms of deception), the Kauravas soon followed their example. On the fifteenth day, the advantage began to shift to the Kauravas as Droâa’s armies routed the Pāâbavas and their allies. At Kóùâa’s behest, the Pāâbavas lied to Droâa, telling him that Aśvatthāman had been killed in battle. To prove the point, Bhīma killed an elephant named Aśvatthāman, then announced Aśvatthāman’s death to Droâa (7.164.73ff.). This was verified to Droâa by the zealously truthful Yudhiù•hira, who, again at Kóùâa’s behest, departed from the truth, albeit mildly, by inaudibly muttering the word “elephant” after confirming the death of Aśvatthāman to Droâa. As punishment for following Kóùâa’s advice, the purpose of which was to save his kingdom, Yudhiù•hira was forced to suffer an illusory moment of stinking hell after his own death many years

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later, although he had already ascended to heaven. Droâa, victim of Yudhiù•hira’s deceit, fell into a state of deep depression at the news, set aside his weapons, entered into a yogic trance, and ascended to brahmaloka. With Droâa in this unguarded bodily state, the Pāâbava warrior Dhóù•adyumna chopped off his head. Aśvatthāman, a partial incarnation of Śiva, was overcome by rage and vowed to destroy the Pāâbavas because of this wholesale flaunting of dharma (7.166). One of the rules of kùatriyadharma was that battles must be fought during daylight. With rare exceptions, this was observed scrupulously during the first seventeen days of the war, while nighttime was reserved for the opposing sides to visit each other’s camp. Thus, Aśvatthāman’s nocturnal raid on the Pāâbavas caught the latter off-guard. The first omen was Aśvatthāman’s sighting an owl, the archetypal bird of ill fortune, in full ferocity (ulūkaÅ ghoradarśanam, 10.1.36), preying on innumerable crows peacefully sleeping in a banyan (nyagrodha) tree.41 The carnage is described in grim detail— beheadings, wings sliced, and so on—foreshadowing and inspiring Aśvatthāman’s own epic slaughter. In league with Kótavarman and Kópa (who had unsuccessfully tried to talk him into seeking a second opinion from Dhótarāù•ra, Gāndhārī, and the wise Vidura), Aśvatthāman entered the Pāâbava camp. This was not before noting, however, that he was a brahman and that Prajāpati bestowed on brahmans imperturbable self-control (brahmaâe damam avyagram, 10.3.19). (Recall Gombrich: “brahmanism inculcates control.” Was he aware that he was quoting Aśvatthāman?) However, fate now forced him to relinquish this control. This, he reasoned, was in fulfillment of his duty to his fallen comrades, slain by the Pāâbavas after breaching the rules of kùatriyadharma. His intrinsic brahmanical status (brāhmaâya, 10.3.22), he says, would be worthless under the circumstances. Standing at the gate of the Pāâbava’s camp, Aśvatthāman saw a great-bodied spirit (bhūtaÅ mahākāyam, 10.6.3), vividly described by the narrator as the very embodiment of Śiva in all his frightening and destructive splendor. Aśvatthāman, however, did not recognize this gigantic spirit (sumahadbhūtam, 10.6.29) and tried in vain to destroy it with his entire armamentarium. Finally, he recognized his indestructible adversary as the skull-garlanded (kapālamālinam, 10.6.33) Rudra and decided to place himself under his control. His gesture of subservience was ostentatious and thorough. He offered himself in sacrifice to Śiva, a sacrifice of cosmic dimensions and unprecedented destructiveness. The end result was a self-identity so seamless—after all, Aśvatthāman was already a partial incarnation of Śiva—that it became a full


possession. The text reads: “Having thus spoken to the great archer, the Lord possessed his body and gave him the best stainless sword. Then, possessed by the Lord, he again blazed up with splendor. With that splendor fashioned by the deity, he assumed a body for battle” (10.7.64–65). And the bloodbath began. Aśvatthāman, the Terminator (antaka, 1.61.66), set about his gruesome business of slaughtering the Pāâbava army.42 “He split the feet of one, the hips of another; he broke the ribs of others like the Terminator set loose by Time” (10.8.71).43 It was carnage on a millennial scale, yet it was an unusual millenarianism, at least for a Sanskrit epic, in that it was not adorned by the telltale signs of doomsday often specified in the MBh. These include brahmans behaving like crows, oppression by slaves, and lethal taxation at the hands of evil kings (3.188.61); overpopulation, foul smells, and lousy food (3.186.34); women who cast off morals (śīlācāravivarjitan, 3.186.35), sport spiked hairdos (keśaśūlān striyan, 3.186.36), and engage in oral sex (mukhebhagān striyan, 3.186.35). Finally, Kalki appears on a white horse, and dharma is made safe for brahmans. All this is missing from the Sauptikaparvan. Aśvatthāman’s massacre is presented as a sacrificial session in which the central offering, the Pāâbava army, multiplies like an unstoppable chain reaction, cut loose from the “controlled chaos” of the classical Vedic sacrifice, as Heesterman puts it. It is possession, termination, and extermination without any mitigating force. W. J. Johnson’s elegant translation and discussion of this parvan offers keys to interpreting both the possession and the actions of Aśvatthāman. Particularly relevant are Johnson’s remarks on fate. Following John Smith’s observation that the events of the MBh “must make sense as deeds performed by human beings, and they must make sense as components of the cosmic plan,” Johnson states that “in theory, any single epic event must have two motives: a human motive looking to the past (in this case, as in many, revenge—the payment of a ‘debt’ due to one’s slaughtered kinsmen and allies), and a cosmic motive looking to the future (ultimately the restoration of universal order and dharma) . . . fate and the will of God are shown to be one.”44 This, perhaps, is the central dialectic in all possession, from the MBh to oracular possession among nonliterate people in India to trance channeling in America, as well as possession in Africa, Micronesia, and elsewhere. Possession is always, at least to some degree, a millenarian event. It is partially, and often thoroughly, self-effacing; the person, except as a body, is voided. Yet possession happens to bodies; symbolic though it doubtless is, the millennium is an embodied event, as the characteristics of the MBh millennium

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(pralaya) testify. Thus it is important to note this qualification: In the absence of the personality, the body is the most accessible signifier of the possessed person. This is perhaps especially so in the MBh, where idiosyncratic reality is generated ubiquitously, and spun out with or through bodies, as the cosmos in its frightening millennial grandeur is generated and viewed through and within the mouth of Kóùâa. The body is visible, so it anticipates a deep familiarity that possession suddenly scrambles. Possession disassembles this familiarity, this assumed identity, this known person, but we continue to say it is Aśvatthāman who is possessed, it is the daughter of Patañcala Kāpya who is possessed, and so on. We hang our hats on bodies, but there comes a moment when the body is all that remains, occupied by an alien presence. The anticipation—more strongly, the inevitability—of possession is the kaliyuga before the embodied pralayic firestorm of possession. It is of central significance to our story that it is the body of Aśvatthāman that Śiva possesses, rather than Kóta, Kótavarman, Bhīùma, a randomly possessed foot soldier, or no body at all. A direct, shape-shifted, manifestation of Śiva would not do either. Just as the pralaya follows kaliyuga as a necessary continuity into the free-fall of discontinuity, so it must be Aśvatthāman’s body that becomes Śiva’s vehicle into the jolting, compelling discontinuity of incomprehensible carnage, and with good reason. The firestorm, the discontinuity, the free-fall, follows a fixed logic. In the MBh, as elsewhere, there is a certain adhikāra or standard of eligibility for possession. Here it is lineage: Aśvatthāman descends in part from Śiva and now returns fully into his orbit; the essential Śiva is now the essential Aśvatthāman. Nevertheless, this possession was not simply a portent of the inevitability of lineage, but an end product of the escalating cycle of destructiveness, of breached kùatriyadharma as well. This possession, unlike the others considered here, even that of King Kalmāùapāda with its voracious cannibalism, was beyond known and controllable boundaries. It was a cosmic counterpart to disease-producing possession ( grahaâa, rather than āveśa) that destroys the individual and his or her world, and there too it is Śiva who is at the helm. The terms of this dialectic, the human motive looking to the past and the cosmic motive looking to the future, work well with another one, at least in India: It prefigures the tension between union (saÅyoga) and separation (viprayoga, viraha), which increasingly became the central dialectic in Indian religion, modeled, surely, on life itself. In the devotionalism that became ascendant in Indian religion, human concerns were fulfilled during moments of separation, while spiritual concerns required severing one’s immersion in


these concerns, indeed sundering the separation itself and entering into a personal dialogue with divinity. This was possible only after the human personality dissolved, and the latter was possible only when it was replaced by another personality capable of bridging that gap or, more accurately, of acting through the dissolution of that gap. Thus, possession fulfilled human motives by allowing words and action to arise that commanded the authority to complete unfinished business in a past both paradigmatic and lived, while engaging universal or divine order. This is where the millenarian possession of Aśvatthāman and the bhakti-induced possession that we explore later meet. Aśvatthāman’s saÅyoga with Śiva brought an end to the deceit, as well as to the violence of the war, to the viprayoga or dissention that so visibly marks this text. The irony, of course, is the unspeakable helplessness of recognizing that it is erasure of personality in its blinding incipient destruction and freakishly logical discontinuity that allows the personal to become fulfilled, to initiate the resolution of dharmic irregularity. Aśvatthāman realized this, and his reward was to be condemned to wander the earth in anguish for three thousand years.

The Skandas One of the most prominent varieties of possession in Indian literature is demonic, disease-producing possession. This topic is largely the province of the classical medical tradition (Āyurveda), where it undergoes visible development from the earliest texts of Caraka and Suśruta in the first few centuries c.e. to the later compendia in the early to mid-second millennium. These texts describe exogenous (āgantuka) diseases caused by grahas (graspers), whose numbers grow and assume more specific identities over the centuries. Thus, a bhūtavidyā (science of spirits, or demonology) was developed to make sense of these afflictive conditions. Bhūtavidyā is articulated not only in the medical literature but in the MBh as well, reminding the reader of the MBh’s brandishing of its own grandeur: “With respect to dharma, artha, kāma, and mokùa, what is found here may be found elsewhere, but what is not here is nowhere at all.”45 Or again: “No story exists on earth that does not reside in this epic [ākhyānam],”46 a claim with far-reaching implications for our present subject and to which we return in Chapter 13. Although I examine notions and categories of demonology in greater detail in Chapter 12, it is necessary to include traces of it here as well, in order to illustrate the range of possession phenomena noted in the MBh.

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The most widely discussed specialized aspect of demonic attack is that of children by bālagrahas, which Dominik Wujastyk has translated well as “childsnatchers.”47 Much of this material, as well as seizure by the planets, which are also called grahas, is brought together in the MBh section (3.216– 219) that depicts the birth and exploits of Skanda, the general (senāpati, 3.218.42b) of the armies of spirits, whose destiny was to defeat Indra.48 This section of the Āraâyakaparvan is probably contemporaneous with the early first-millennium āyurvedic texts and was almost certainly adapted from them and mythologized in the MBh. The story of the birth of Skanda and his potent pedigree is much elaborated in the MBh.49 The dominant story is that he was born from the womb of the goddess Svāhā, the personified utterance of celebration in a Vedic sacrificial offering, who was the embodiment of six of the wives of the “seven óùis” (saptarùayan; excepting Arundhatī, the incorruptible wife of Vasiù•ha) and sired by Agni, the sacrificial fire that consumes the oblation. Agni became potentiated for this act by consuming the semen of Mahādeva, who, as discussed earlier, is intimately involved in the generation of spirits.50 Because of their illicit relationship with Agni, the seven óùis divorced these six wives. The birth of Skanda was not easy; it continued for four nights, and the babe was born with six heads, twelve arms, one neck, and a single trunk. The six mothers, now separated from the singular personality of Svāhā and bereft of their husbands, appealed to Skanda to dispense his grace and grant them an eternal heavenly home. This he did, and they became the constellation Kóttikā (the Pleiades, with six stars), which then nurtured the child Skanda, thus giving rise to Skanda’s names Kumāra and Kārttikeya. This, however, was not an entirely satisfying solution to the six single mothers craving for exclusive motherhood. Indeed, they still regarded themselves as devoid of offspring, at least of their own, so Skanda granted them the ability to take children who did not worship either himself or the Kóttikās. In order to assist them, Skanda gave them a wild (raudra [Rudra-like]; 3.219.23) replica. “Thereupon a powerful golden-hued spirit [puruùa] flew out of Skanda’s body to devour the offspring of mortals. It fell to the ground, senseless and starving, and with Skanda’s leave it became a Grasper [graha] in a Rudra-like form.”51 What follows is a summary account of the forms or pathogenic incarnations of this graha (3.219.25–58), no longer six but now eighteen, known by the best of the twice-born (dvijasattamān) as skandāpasmāra (Skanda’s forgetfulness or convulsion). Eighteen is the MBh number par excellence, often associated with the fateful, ominous side of human order. Not only are


there eighteen books to the MBh and eighteen chapters to the Bhagavadgītā, but there are eighteen armies and a war of eighteen days. All eighteen of these skandāpasmāras are fond of flesh and strong liquor (māÅsamadhupriyān, 3.219.35b) and occupy the womb for ten nights. Among the forms that grasp children below the age of sixteen are Vinatā, the ominous bird grasper (śakunigrahan), a demonic female night-stalker (niśācarā) called Pūtanāgraha, and a piśācī who aborts fetuses, called Śītapūtanā. One of them, Kadrū by name, becomes a subtle body (sūkùmavapun) and enters (praviśet) the wombs of pregnant women and eats the fetus, causing the mother to give birth to a snake. Many others, including Raivata, Mukhamaâbikā, Surabhi, Saramā, the Mother of Gandharvas, the Mother of Apsarasas, and a class of mothers called Kumārīs, also snatch or eat fetuses ( garbhabhujan, 3.219.30; bhuãkte śiśūn, 3.219.32). Two of them live in trees, including the Mother of Trees (padapānāÅ mātā), who lives in a karañja tree, and the Daughter of the Blood Sea (lohitasyodadhen kanyā), who as Lohitāyanī lives in a kadamba tree. These two demand worship in order to ward off miscarriage or deformity. The final member of this grisly enumeration is Āryā, who resides in women, just as Rudra resides in men, and is to be worshipped in order to obtain desires. All these skandagrahas should be pacified (praśamanam) with water, incense, collyrium, sacrificial offerings and gifts, especially the sacrifice to Skanda (3.219.43).52 But this is not all. The section does not end with a predictable account of ritual minutiae or brahmanical moralizing that bluntly deflates the narrative. The prescription of ritual pacification is also a rhetorical interlude preceding an account of “seizers” who grasp men after their sixteenth year. Some of these seizers are striking in that they reveal a type of “grasping” explicitly related to insanity. A man who sees gods, whether awake or asleep, quickly becomes insane and is called “god-grasped” (devagrahan). One who sees one’s deceased ancestors goes mad and is called “ancestor-grasped” (pitógrahan). One who hates perfected beings (siddhas) is cursed by them and becomes “siddha-grasped” (siddhagrahan). One who smells scents and tastes flavors that are not accurate goes mad and is known as “demon-grasped” (rākùasagrahan). One whom heavenly gandharvas touch (saÅspóśanti) is “gandharva-grasped” ( gandharvagrahan) and becomes insane. Yakùas may possess (āviśanti) a man, known as “yakùa-grasped” (yakùagrahan), who then slowly becomes insane. The category of yakùa is disputed, some saying it is of non-Aryan origin, and others countering that view. It is likely that yakùas were, in fact, Indo-Aryan deities, a general term for local divinities.53

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A “pisāca-grasped” man (piśācagrahan) becomes insane quickly, as does one whose humors (doùas) are completely out of balance. Finally, we are told that these grahas are of three types: playful (krībitukāman), gluttonous (bhoktukāman), and lustful (abhikāman). Over the age of seventy, fever becomes the equal of a graha. But grahas never touch those who are pure, faithful, and devotees of the god Maheśvara.

Notes on Possession in the Rāmāyana In striking contrast to the MBh, the Rāmāyaâa does not comprehend or explicate a diversity of possession states. In the Rāmāyaâa possession is employed entirely as a descriptor, sometimes as a metaphor of emotional engagement, not as an indicator of hostile or friendly takeover of a body by a spirit, deity, or yogin. This reflects the divergent nature of the two epics. The MBh is defined by its ambiguities of character and plot, of good and evil, and of dharma. It pits brother against brother, shaking the very foundations of culture, expectation, and familiarity. The Rāmāyaâa, as many have noted before me, is the opposite of this; it is a story of brothers coming together, of clear resolution of evil.54 The good characters are always good, always the exemplars, while the bad are nearly always unambiguously bad. An unswerving honesty and straightforward moral nobility were inscribed into this epic, and these along with the story itself have never lost their appeal in India. Nevertheless, the later Sanskrit and regional language renditions and adaptations amplified and caricatured this morality, draining it of its heady immediacy, and stripped away much of the complexity of Vālmīki’s characters. This, however, only continued what Vālmīki began, as even in his great epic moral dilemmas were nipped in the bud. As for the characters, with the exception of a few unexpectedly friendly demons,55 the most complex characters, Sītā and Hanumān, extraordinary in the Sanskrit epic, were idealized and caricatured in the later versions.56 Unlike the MBh, the Rāmāyaâa rarely presents its main characters in a state of moral uncertainty, ambiguity, or complexity; Rāma, perhaps, in a moment of doubt as to the fate of Sītā being the exception. Perhaps more important, personal identity was not constantly at stake in the Rāmāyaâa; the characters were not penetrable or permeable in a manner that created moral ambiguity or self-alienation, as in the MBh. The attraction of simplicity, the constancy of defined character, and the imperative of maintaining


established moral structures and historical validations are likely reasons the Rāmāyaâa was preferred by vernacular literati57 over the MBh, in spite of several popular Sanskrit dramas depicting parts of the latter (e.g., Bhāsa’s Urubhaãgam). As in the Rāmāyaâa, the main elements of the plot of the Sanskrit MBh were, for the most part, retained in later classical literature (recall, however, that the Jain tale of Nala and Damayantī exorcised the possession), though in the latter these elements were heavily transfigured in the non-elite folk traditions, for example, in Tamilnadu and Garhwal, in a manner that intensified, rather than reduced, the pre-existing ambiguities, while in the former personal identities were rarely questioned even though the many Rāmāyaâa variants were uniquely textured and contextualized, as A. K. Ramanujan astutely notes.58 It is important in this context to reiterate that these regional performative Mahābhāratas are replete with possession, as Hiltebeitel and Sax have shown. In the folk Rāmāyaâas, however, as well as among kathāvācaks or public performers and narrators of Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas, possession is observed only occasionally. Philip Lutgendorf reports on a kāthavācak named Ramnarayan Shukla active in Varanasi in the 1980s: On occasion—usually a Tuesday or Saturday—while he is discoursing on the wonderful carit of Hanumān, he enters a state of intense excitement and begins twisting his head from side to side with a whiplash motion, his long hair flying about him. His face turns bright red and the veins and tendons in his neck bulge from the strain. The blurred image of his oscillating features suggests a religious calendar vision of a multiheaded deity, and like the deity, he seems to be speaking out of many mouths at once.59

A question that arises immediately is whether such possession is attributable exclusively to the modern demeanor and attitude (bhāva) taken by religious storytellers or whether it may be traceable to a more distant practice of possession in Rāmāyaâa performance and tradition. The answer is both: Audiences expect a visible intensity of self-identification with the characters they portray, a self-identification that crosses the line into possession, as Ramanujan has noted. But there is also evidence that this is part of an acting tradition dating back several centuries, as we see (Chapter 9) in examining bhakti-induced possession. It is tempting here to suggest a broad affinity between the practice of

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possession of Hanumān by Ramnarayan Shukla and the possession and exorcistic practices at Bālājī. Hanumān is clearly a deity whose connections to humans are felt to be closer than those of many other deities. He is the archetypal devotee, indeed the only devotee to be widely worshipped as a deity.60 As the primary deity of wrestlers he signifies physical strength, and is often depicted with the physique of a body-builder.61 He is also a healer, revered for his flight across Bharatavarùa to acquire the sañjīvanī herb that cures the ailing Lakùmaâa in the Rāmāyaâa. Thus, Hanumān is a paragon, an archetypal figure, of the three attributes of devotion, strength, and health. Perhaps of greater immediacy—and conceptually related to these attributes— is Hanumān’s oft-told exploit as a sojourner into the underworld to rescue the Ayodhyan princes, kidnapped and held prisoner there by Mahīrāvaâa/ Ahīrāvaâa, a subterranean relative of Rāvaâa’s. Although this tale has no textual basis in either the Rāmāyaâa or the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsīdās, it has wide popular currency and demonstrates to devotees across north India Hanumān’s adeptness “in the shadowy realms below the ground as he is soaring through the sky.”62 It is no wonder that as a thoroughly virtuous expert in shamanic travel he is invoked, even possessed, by devotees, wrestlers, healers, and those in need of otherworldly assistance, and that as Bālājī he presides over an ever-expanding horde of dūts who, like him, are healing spirits. We should now survey the derivatives of the verbal root ā√viś in the Rāmāyaâa and evaluate the extent to which these usages agree with the findings from the MBh. Most of the material betrays a range of emotive situations conceptually similar to those noted in the MBh: virility (vīryam āviveśa, 5.1.33), anger (krodha, manyu);63 delight, anger, and pity as a single unit (harùo dainyaÅ ca roùaś ca);64 brahman killing (brahmahatyā);65 psychic darkness (tamas);66 confusion (moha);67 fear (bhayam);68 and sorrow (śoka).69 In one instance pra√viś indicates entrance into a general state of ferocity and transgression: “In battle, the Indrajits were possessed [prāviśan] by great and fierce transgression” (6.80.4cd).70 Twice ā√viś refers to the action of arrows, weapons that penetrate deeply into both body and quiver: “Rāvaâa’s son, victorious in battle, pierced his arrows firmly into all Rāma’s and Lakùmaâa’s critical bodily points” (sarvamarmabhidan . . . āveśayām āsa, 6.35.7). Later, in the same “War Book” (Yuddhakāâba), we learn that “after killing Rāvaâa, that arrow, soaked in blood, its job well-done, was again replaced [āviśat] in his quiver, as if undisturbed” (6.97.19). Beyond these examples, we find ā√viś in the sense of absorption into the precepts of dharma,71 and


a concern with order (yathākramāveśita).72 These demonstrate that regulation from within or without was imposing to the point of possession. Similarly, wrapping oneself in armor (kavacam) was an imposing state of transformation tantamount to possession.73 Other states labeled possession are fainting (dharaâyāÅ samupāviśat),74 sleep (nidrā) brought on by anxiety or exhaustion,75 and exhaustion (śrāntā) itself.76 Twice in the Bālakāâba it is employed in the sense of leaving a person or kingdom in the care of another, indicating that a shift of ownership or responsibility is a variety of possession.77 Like the MBh, the Rāmāyaâa employs ā√viś to indicate entrance into the sky (ākāśa) and other “natural” places of emotional gravity. Several times ā√viś is used for entering, disappearing into, or flying through the sky; for example, “Kuśa went away, then became absorbed [āviśya] in the ethereal realm, the eternal brahmaloka” (1.33.4).78 Similarly, it may indicate arrival at important mountains such as Kailāśa,79 entering a forest,80 or seizing or occupying deeply meaningful constructed spaces, such as private chambers or citadels.81 In only one instance is it used for deity or spirit possession: In the Ayodhyākāâba the townspeople, anonymously, of course, twitter among themselves as to the reasons why Daśaratha could have exiled his glorious son Rāma. One says, “Surely it is some spirit that has possessed [āviśya] Daśaratha and spoken today, for the king could never bring himself to exile his beloved son.”82 It is perhaps expected and significant that it is from the unnamed urban denizens, the hoi polloi, that possession makes a rare appearance in this epic, and at that only rumored. It is also significant to note in this context that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the Hindu nationalist movements that have achieved widespread prominence hearken back to the Rāmāyaâa rather than the MBh as their paradigmatic epic. These contemporary movements, like the Rāmāyaâa, have expunged or censored much of popular religious praxis in favor of a more formal (and, not incidentally, upper-class), Śaãkarized presentation. Recall Gombrich’s statement: “Later brahmanism, however, denied all value to possession states and they were screened out of brahmanical religion.”83 The Sanskrit epic of Vālmīki has a consistency that permits the censorship of which Gombrich speaks, while at the same time the diverse (and genuinely noncontested) regional forms of the epic have allowed popular religion, including possession, back into the epic, like water seeping into the cracks in a shiny but weather-beaten and scarred surface. Yet the pervasive and tremulous ambiguities of the MBh could never have allowed censorship into the text without denuding it practically beyond recognition. With the

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ambiguities and uncertainties of the text intact, it has become, for the most part, the dominant epic only sporadically throughout South Asia.

Notes 1. Hiltebeitel (2001:18ff.) argues for a much more consolidated dating, with the entire composition between 150 b.c.e. and the beginning of the Common Era. See Fitzgerald’s critique of this (2003). 2. It will not be possible here to deal with cases not involved directly with possession, no matter how fascinating, such as the case of the mixed-gender identity of Śikhandin, in the Vanaparvan. 3. Cf. Olivelle 1998:375; Roebuck 2000:312. 4. The literature on regional MBhs and Rāms attests to this; cf. Raghavan 1980, Richman 1991. 5. Cf. Amaruśataka: premāveśita (37), premāveśa (43), also Kādambarī 357:3; see Daśakumāracarita for madanāveśa (48:7), also Kādambarī 271.4, 280.7; in addition, KSS shows smarāveśavivaśa (37.205), ārūbhasmarāveśa (65.230), smarāviù•a (81.55), and smarajvarāveśavivaśa (119.156). Interestingly, the only occurrence in the Kāmasūtra is for anger: iti krodhād ivāviù•ā kalahāÅ prayojayet (2.5.38c). 6. Saundarānanda 14.31: nidrāÅ nāveù•um arhasi. 7. Hara 1979a renders this “sleeplessness.” 8. Lajjāsamāviù•a in HarivaÅśa (Citraśālā Press) 3.115.39. 9. For most of these words Hara supplies multiple references, though here one suffices. All references are from the MBh unless otherwise stated: adharma (12.251.17), ahaÅkāra (13.102.10), alakùmī (3.33.39), anartha (12.171.23), asukha (11.25.11), asura (3.240.11), avamāna (3.246.20), avóù•i/ativóù•i (12.91.35, ārti (6.15.4), bhaga (3.163.35), bhī (3.168.16), cintā (HarivaÅśa 109.23), darpa (1.189.17), dānava (3.240.13), dunkha (4.18.8), durbhikùa (12.68.29), dainya (12.149.105), ghóâā (3.36.18), harùa (3.162.10), hrī (9.62.54), jvara (12.27.12), kali (3.56.3), kaśmala (7.144.7), kāma (1.204.15), kautūhula (3.20.75), kopa (3.11.30), krodha (12.249.5), kópā (5.180.36), kùudh (14.57.19), lobha (12.170.14), mada (16.4.31), manmatha (Rām 4.65.15), manyu (1.204.17), māna (12.253.38), mātsarya (12.12.29), moha (7.31.32), mótyu (12.149.41), nidrā (Rām 4.26.7), pāpman (12.17.2), pauruùa (9.10.24), pipāsā (13.70.6), prajagara (7.56.7), rajas (12.329.29.2), rāga (14.42.51), rākùasa (3.240.33), roùa (3.21.18), ruù(ā) (9.25.25), sambhrama (1.73.25), sattva (6.40.10), śoka (3.2.15), śrama (13.70.6), tamas (4.55.24), tuù•i (1.187.5), vepathu (5.85.13), vismaya (3.289.23), viùâu (3.195.12, cf. 12.159.130), vyādhi (12.91.34), yakùa (3.219.51), yakùman (12.329,46.25). It should be noted that in this survey I am leaving out hundreds of references to pra√viś in its usual sense of “entrance.” On the differences between krodha and manyu, see Hara 2001. 10. Trans. van Buitenen 1973:426. 11. See Smith and Carri 1994.


12. Shulman 1994:7. 13. Trans. van Buitenen 1975:359. 14. Snell 1953:49. 15. Pesic 2002:11. 16. Ibid. 17. Shulman 1994:23. 18. Handelman and Shulman 1997:111. 19. 13.40.56ab: netrābhyāÅ netrayor asyā raśmīn saÅyojya raśmibhin. This is consistent with the theory of apperception in Nyāya and Vaiśeùika that sight is made possible by rays emanating from the eye and traveling to the object, thus grasping it. 20. 13.40.57: lakùaâaÅ lakùaâenaiva vadanaÅ vadanena ca | aviceù•ann atiù•had vai chāyevāntargato munin || 21. 13.40.58d: sā tam abudhyata || 22. 13.41.3cd: niśceù•aÅ stabdhanayanaÅ yathālekhyagataÅ tathā || 23. 13.41.14d: vāâi saÅskārabhūùitā || 24. On this story, see Bloomfield 1917:7–8. The dimensions of possession that I am addressing here are at odds with Bloomfield’s more conventional reckoning, that in the MBh “[t]here is but one elaborate instance of the art of pervading another’s body with one’s mind-stuff ” (p. 7). See also White 2004 for another evaluation of paraśarīrapraveśa in the MBh. This article came to my attention too late to take full advantage of it. 25. I agree with Rocher (1986) that assigning exact dates to these Purāâas is risky. 26. Liãga Purāâa (LiP) 1.24.128, cited by Hara 1979a:272. 27. LiP 1.24.130. 28. This concept of partial incarnation, aÅśāvatāra, was exploited by Vaiùâavas in the early second millennium c.e.; cf. Chapter 9. 29. 12.59.130ab: tapasā bhagavān viùâur āviveśa ca bhūmipān|. Fitzgerald translates: “Through the power of his inner heat, the blessed Viùâu entered into the king” (2004:311). 30. Hara cites a similar verse, supposedly also from the LiP (1.170.25[?], which, however, I am unable to find in the published edition): kūrmarūpam ahaÅ kótvā uddhareyaÅ mahīÅ imām | jalakrībānusadóśaÅ vārāhaÅ rūpam āviśat ||. This describes Viùâu’s descent (avatāra) as a tortoise (kūrma) and a boar (varāha) in language typical of the idiom of avatāra in the Purāâas. The change of voice is somewhat inexplicable; but the latter at least is phrased in terms of Viùâu possessing (āviśat) the form of a boar. 31. MBh 1.61.66ab; cf. MBh 10.7.64–65 in the discussion below of Aśvatthāman’s possession of Śiva in the Sauptikaparvan. 32. Shulman 1994:27. 33. Cf. Granoff 1998a:177ff. 34. Morris 2000:100. 35. Cf. LiP 70.43–8, in which ether and sound penetrate the element of touch, vāyu contains both sound and touch, etc. 36. Handelman and Shulman 1997:111. 37. 1.166.27cd: apy enaÅ naramāÅsena bhojayeti punan punan ||

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38. My translations are adapted from van Buitenen 1973:333–335. 39. This ferocity in which embattled warriors entered states of possession and were said to alter their appearances was not limited to India or the MBh, but may be seen elsewhere in the Indo-European world. See Cahill 1995:82–84, for an account from the twelfth-century Irish prose epic “Tain Bo Cuailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley.” This account has a striking resemblance to the MBh (though I am not suggesting any kind of direct influence). The Irish referred to their possession and shapeshifting as “warp-spasm.” Cahill writes: “The Romans, in their first encounters with these exposed, insane warriors, were shocked and frightened. Not only were the men naked, they were howling and, it seemed, possessed by demons, so outrageous were their strength and verve. Urged by the infernal skirl of pipers, they presented to the unaccustomed and throbbing Roman sensorium a multimedia event featuring all the terrors of hell itself ” (pp. 82–83). Cahill’s translation of the passage from the “Tain” is well worth consulting. 40. MBh 3.240.11–34; trans. van Buitenen 1975:692–693. 41. Cf. the note on this verse in Johnson 1998:105. 42. On Aśvatthāman’s experience as epiphany, see Laine 1989:122ff., 149ff. 43. Cf. Johnson 1998:40. 44. Ibid.:xxi; John D. Smith 1980:70. 45. dharme cārthe ca kāme ca mokùe ca bharatarùabha | yad ihāsti tad anyatra yan nehāsti na tat kvacit || (1.56.33). 46. anāśrityaitad ākhyānaÅ kathā bhuvi na vidyate | (1.2.240ab). 47. Wujastyk 1998:219ff. 48. See MBh 9.44–46 for a vivid and detailed description of Skanda’s spirit warriors. 49. See Mann 2003:15–119, which is now the most complete and scholarly account of the birth of Skanda in the MBh; also Mann 2005. 50. The Śivasahasranāma, in the Anuśāsanaparvan, gives Āveśa as a name of Śiva: āvedanīya āveśan sarvagandhasukhāvahan (MBh 13.17.115ab). 51. 3.219.24–25; trans. by van Buitenen 1975:658. 52. For a more “medically” detailed account, see a section from the KaśyapasaÅhitā translated by Wujastyk (1998:212–230). Also very important is White 2003:35ff., which locates the balāgrahas of the MBh in the art and culture of the Kuùāâas. White provides a number of cognate passages in the Purāâas and in temple architecture, and in his effort to historicize these “seizers,” provides a number of epidemiological explanations. For example, he interprets Pūtanā, “Stinky,” with the pustulant sores of chicken pox, Śītapūtanā, “Cool Stinky,” as evocative of the later smallpox goddess Śītalā, and Saramā, the mother of dogs in the ñV, Jaiminīya Brāhmaâa, and elsewhere as carriers of epilepsy, because mad dogs, like epileptics, can foam at the mouth (pp. 51ff.). Also relevant are White’s comments on the avian nature of many of these seizers, which he reads semiotically as fearful bearers of contagious diseases and carrion-eaters (pp. 43 [with a figure of a Nepalese bird-headed grāhī of the late fifteenth century], 58). 53. See Snellgrove 1987:134 and Staal 1990b:288ff., for a review of different views of the problem.


54. See Pollock’s insightful comments on this issue (1993b:282f.), where he describes the “othering” that characterizes the Rāmāyaâa, quite distinct from the MBh. 55. See the discussion by Sutherland and Goldman 1996:65–70. On the rākùasas of Laãkā, they write, “although theirs is largely a brutalized world given over to the indulgence of the senses, there are numerous indications in the book that the city also possesses a life of art and even of religion” (p. 65). See also Pollock’s discussion (1991:68–84). 56. See the excellent discussion on these two by Sutherland and Goldman 1996:39–62. 57. This is a theme Pollock develops in 1993b. 58. Ramanujan 1991:44ff. 59. 1991:199. Lutgendorf notes, however, that “[i]t is clear that most expounders do not enter into a state of actual ‘possession’—indeed, their performances are characterized by a high degree of lucidity and control—yet we must note that the relationship between possession and folk performance is a complex one and even in kathā, . . . the line demarcating the two is not always clear” (1991:184). This supports Ramanujan’s observations cited above. 60. I have seen images of Prahlāda, son of the demon king Hiraâyakaśipu and an ardent devotee of Viùâu, placed on a few altars at Bālājī, and I expect that worship of him may be seen elsewhere. But this is on an extremely limited scale compared to worship of Hanumān. 61. See Alter 1992:198ff. 62. Cf. Lutgendorf 1997:320. 63. For example, “rage possessed Rāvaâa” (rāvaâaÅ manyur āviśat, 6.62.35d); “anger could no longer possess him” (krodho nānatram āviśat, 1.64.3). 64. “Hearing of her arrival, who had lived so long in the home of a rākùasa, Rāghava was overcome [āviśat] with the triad of delight, anger, and pity” (6.102.16). 65. “Overwhelmed by brahman killing” (brahmahatyā yadāviśat, 1.23.18). 66. “Heartache over the exile of Rāma and Lakùmaâa once more swept over [āviveśa] him, the equal of Vāsava, as the demon’s darkness sweeps over the sun” (2.57.2), trans. Pollock 1991:204. 67. “But then we began to experience intense sweating, fatigue, and fear. And we were seized by confusion [samāviśata mohan], which soon gave way to a dreadful stupor” (4.60.10), trans. Lefeber 1994:182. 68. “Then Rāma’s consternation gave way to a feeling of fear that shot through [āviveśa] him with sharp pangs” (3.42.20, trans. Pollock 1991:176). “Having seen the bodies and all the limbs of Rāma and Lakùmaâa in a heap, covered with arrows, fear overwhelmed [āviśat] Sugrīva” (6.36.24). “Seeing Rāma completely enraged, all beings became fearful of a rising tide of dread, and Rāvaâa was overcome [āviśat] with fear” (6.91.4). 69. “Tell me once again, monkey, of the characteristic marks of Rāma and Lakùmaâa so that sorrow shall not overwhelm [samāviśet] me” (5.33.3), trans. Goldman

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and Sutherland 1996:201. “Grief overcame [samāviśat] Sītā, anxious, looking [for Lakùmaâa]” (7.47.17d). 70. This is exceptional in the Rām, where pra√viś is employed almost entirely to indicate simple entrance; cf. 1.66.3, 1.67.1, 76.7; 2.1.5, 9.3, 62.12, 65.22; 3.1.1, 11.15,16, 52.11; 5.16.9; 6.22.6; 7.51.5, 65.3, 73.2, 93.6,7. In one instance ā√viś indicates uncomplicated entrance: 7.14.21d, toraâām tat samāviśat, “Rāvaâa entered the gateway,” parallels pra√viś in the next verse, 7.14.22. 71. “The brothers were absorbed [samāviśan] in the precepts of dharma proper to each of them” (7.10.2cd). 72. “It had javelins and iron cudgels arrayed in rows” (yathākramāveśitaśaktitomaram, 5.45.5d); trans. Goldman and Goldman 1996:238. 73. “When Lakùmaâa and Sītā had entered [praviù•e] the cave, Rāma said to himself, ‘Good, it is all arranged,’ and then he donned [āviśat] his armor” (3.23.14), trans. Pollock 1991:137. 74. “collapsed to the ground” (dharaâyāÅ samupāviśat, 5.32.11); trans. Goldman and Goldman 1996:198. 75. “Then Rama lay down [samāviśad] with Sītā upon the pallet” (2.81.20), trans. Pollock 1991:252. “Nor would sleep come [āviveśa] to him when he had gone to bed at night” (4.26.7). 76. “Since I was exhausted, I once more sat on your lap as you sat [āviśam] there” (5.36.20), trans. Goldman and Goldman 1996:217. 77. 1.70.14: “leaving Kuśadhvaja in my care” (kuśadhvajaÅ samāveśya bhāraÅ mayi); 1.41.3: “turning the kingdom over to Dilīpa” (tasmin rājyaÅ samāveśya dilīpe). 78. 1.42.19cd: “They became reabsorbed into the ākāśa and were restored to their own realms” (punar ākāsam āviśya syāÅl lokān pratipedire ||); cf. also 3.50.29, 5.1.181, 6.31.62, 40.59, 45.33, 57.45. Not unrelated is 3.50.22: “like a streak of lightning caught [āviśya] within a storm cloud” (trans. Pollock 1991:196). Also: “If you fly about [āviśasi] in the three worlds, taking the form of a quick-witted bird” (6.130.60). 79. 2.87.17: etaÅ āviśatan śailaÅ; 7.14.3: kailāśaÅ girim āviśat. 80. 2.38.6: vanaÅ āviśate nūnaÅ sabhāryan sahalakùmaâan | 81. MBh 11.19.16, ViviÅśati absorbed (āviśa) in sleep; Rām 3.52.12, occupying (āviśat) the women’s quarters of the palace; Rām 4.19.15, monkeys possessing (āviśya) citadels; Rām 7.58.1, Śatrughna occupying (samāviśet) the arbor (parâaśālā) at night. 82. 2.30.10, trans. Pollock 1991:146 and note, p. 382, explaining that he adopts the readings of the Northern Recension sattvenāviù•a- (hence the necessity for the acc. daśaratham) and that sattva here is essence as spirit. 83. Gombrich 1988:37.


7

Enlightenment and the Classical Cultu

Spirit is the absolute substance, which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses, which in their opposition enjoy perfect freedom and independence. An “I” that is a “we” and “we” that is an “I.” —G . W. F . H E G E L , The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977:110) Image has been suppressed

I

n this well-known passage, the early nineteenthcentury German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel addresses the master/slave dialectic, hierarchizing and othering between selves, defined as units of self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein)1 engaged in an unequal struggle. Hegel’s words are also eerily reminiscent of internal othering of the sort that might appear during possession states, at least as described in greater South Asia. The self-consciousnesses that Hegel describes are like facing mirrors: They reflect themselves but also reflect themselves reflecting themselves ad infinitum. Among them are losers and winners, manifestations and demanifestations, and in the short term the prominence of alternative selves, alternative consciousnesses. We have seen this writ large in the Vedas, with the sage imploring Soma to “enter us as man’s observer” (ñgveda 8.48.15) and recording brahman’s creation of a universe, then infusing or entering it with parts of itself, many of them oppositional (e.g., Śatapatha Brāhmaâa 11.2.3.1–2 and Chāndogya Upaniùad 6.3.1–3). More appositely, we see this in the Mahābhārata, in the tales of Nala, of Vipula Bhārgava and Ruci, of Aśvatthāman, in all of which separate internal self-consciousnesses (to use Hegel’s term) are othered differently. Legitimation occurs between units of self-consciousness—rather than within personalities, beings, and essences

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through recognition or acknowledgment (Anerkennung), factors of differentiation or opposition. This process, like the entities and self-consciousnesses that it weighs and measures, is intrinsically phenomenological. We now consider more of this phenomenology, a distinctive phenomenology of possession as it occurs in soteriologically and epistemologically significant texts, including the Yogasūtras and Brahmasūtras, as well as narrative that describes modes of experience often marked with emotional signification beyond their descriptive value. Thus, the appearance of possession as prescription in texts that have been classified as philosophical, even if narrative, may come as a surprise. The domain of rarefied philosophical and other technical literary works lies somewhat beyond the realm of “public” Sanskritic culture, venues in which we might justly expect to find accounts of visually accessible, performative phenomena such as possession. However, in philosophical texts possession does occupy a small space, in both prescriptive and descriptive discussions of religio-philosophical practice. In India, practice and theory are barely separable; in fact they are indissolubly linked. Yet both fall within the culturally determined realm of philosophical discourse, an intellectual fact that has not been adequately comprehended by Western philosophers.2 Thus, texts that have a primarily philosophical signature are not out of bounds for discussion of possession. Philosophical and scientific treatises in India are often framed by creation myths, illustrate doctrinal principles with reference to obscure ritual minutiae, and resort to śruti or the testimony of the Veda as final proof (pramāâa) of the validity of doctrinal assertions. Occasionally, possession appears as a trope, and it can be jarring, though not unpleasantly so, to a reader not accustomed to the broad cultural boundaries of philosophical discourse. In such cases it may be regarded as an uninvited ontological or soteriological guest at an epistemological party. This chapter examines descriptions of possession and its deployment in Yoga, Vedānta, and Buddhist texts, with a single important reference to a Jaina text and a vital digression into hagiographies of the great Vedānta philosopher Śaãkara. We see from these discussions, somewhat in support of Lariviere’s contention discussed in Chapter 1, that philosophical and literary traditions are not always distanced from religion or other cultural practices on the ground, as I believe most of the arguments in this volume testify. The universe of practice is directly engaged or indirectly implied in philosophical discourse, from ritual prescription to the practice of everyday life. We see elements of this intrusive and occasionally bothersome universe imprinted


on Indian philosophical traditions and examine how it influences their discursive projects.

Possession as Yoga Practice Possession is mentioned in the third adhyāya of Patañjali’s Yogasūtras (YS), the chapter dealing with extraordinary powers (vibhūti, siddhi) gained through the practice of yoga. YS 3.38 reads: “Due to loosening the cause of bondage and from full knowledge of [the mechanics of psychic] movement, entrance [āveśa] of one’s mind [citta] into another’s body [becomes possible]” (bandhakāraâaśaithilyāt pracārasaÅvedanāc ca cittasya paraśarīrāveśan).3 The primary commentator on the YS, Vyāsa, believes that the cause (kāraâa) of bondage in the form of the repository of one’s accumulated actions (karmāśaya) is loosened by the power of samādhi. It is the evaporation of the natural bondage of the siddha or accomplished yogin to objects of perception that allows the citta—thought or the power of mind—to flow into the body (and mind) of another person, regardless of the extent to which the other individual is caught in the grip of his or her own perceptual universe and karmic web. Vijñānabhikùu, a sixteenth-century vedāntin who wrote an important commentary on Vyāsa, adds that the movement (pracāra) of consciousness from one body to another is conducted along a certain nābi (subtle nerve).4 Nārāyaâa Tīrtha, the author of a bhakti-oriented commentary on the YS titled Yogasiddhāntacandrikā,5 says that the citta enters and exits through the apānanābi, the nābi controlling the downward movement of breath. He adds that, after the thread connecting the citta of the yogin to his own body is severed, the experience of entering another body, whether dead or alive, becomes like that of entering another country. Analogies abound for this peculiar action: Vyāsa states that the movement of the mind is followed by that of the senses, like ordinary worker bees flying along after the “king bee.” In his Vivaraâa on Vyāsa’s commentary, Śaãkara states that the consciousness of one who is not a siddha is agitated by its fixedness to the karmic repository nearly to the point of immobility. Its limited mobility is like a bell that has been struck or the flickering of a heap of glowing coals.6 In spite of these explanations, the problem of determining the exact sense of the YS remains. What enters or possesses the psychophysical complex of the individual being possessed is the citta of the possessor. This citta is most


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often understood as “mind” or “thought.” Yet a difference exists between the two. The mind, as it is usually understood in the West, is the container of thought, inviting the possibility that a limited invasion consisting of part of the citta might occur in the form of introducing a single thought into the individual being psychically entered. Alternatively, the mind may be regarded as the container of thoughts, intentions, feelings, karmic residue, and so on, with, in the case of āveśa, a capacity for greater interaction and decisionmaking in the mind and body of the one being possessed. Although the citta in the YS usually indicates “thought” alone, here it appears to signify the mind together with the “inner organ” (antankaraâa) or heart.7 It is in this latter sense that Vyāsa and Vijñānabhikùu appear to interpret citta, at least in this sūtra. Nevertheless, the distinction is important, because the extent of possession and the manner in which it is effected are two of the important features in determining yogically induced āveśa. We have already seen that possession can be instigated either by the possessed or the possessor, and here it appears that the possession occurs as a result of the motivation or intention of an outside agent, the yogin (or yoginī), who would bring with him (or her) an entire mental apparatus containing thoughts, ideas, impressions, and so on. Still, the YS leaves open the possibility of a limited or partial possession, such as entering and influencing another’s dream state by introducing a single thought or image, or wholesale takeover of the other’s thoughts, intentions, and mental powers, such as occurred when Śaãkara transferred his citta into the body of the dead King Amaruka, an episode we examine in detail below. Thus, in this sūtra, citta probably indicates an entire mentating apparatus, though Patañjali’s certain knowledge of exemplars—such as Vipula Bhārgava’s entering the mind and body of Ruci, who retained at least partial awareness of her situation—suggests that citta here can also indicate a single thought or a localized body of thoughts. Regardless of the commentators’ formal analysis, the very presence of this sūtra in the YS suggests the accuracy of Eliade’s observation, noted earlier, of eclecticism in the practice of textually sanctioned (and sanctified) yoga: Possession states, recognized from either experience or legend, were admitted (with certain conditions) into the yoga śāstra. This sūtra does not exist entirely in isolation in the YS. Several other sūtras in the third chapter or pāda of the YS illustrate that the yogin (or yoginī) trains his (or her) mind or consciousness to temporarily leave the physical body in order to experience extrasensory phenomena. The process described in the YS for realizing any siddhi (and we must assume this for YS


3.38 on possession, even though the key vocabulary is missing) is to bring together and deploy as a single unit the three highest limbs of the eightfold path (aù•āãga) of yoga, namely, dhāraâa (concentration), dhyāna (meditation), and samādhi, (ecstasy). This process is called saÅyama (bringing together), and the YS uses it in the ablative (saÅyamāt) in a number of sūtras in the third pāda, indicating that it is a practice. For example, YS 3.21 states, “By practicing saÅyama on the [outer] form of the body, when its power to be known is stopped [and] there being no contact with the light of the eye, there is disappearance [of the yogin’s body].”8 YS 3.24 states, “By practicing saÅyama on different kinds of strength, the yogin acquires the strength of an elephant, etc.”9 The next sūtra, YS 3.25, states, “By casting the light of [higher] sense-activity toward them, there is [intuitive] knowledge regarding the subtle, the veiled, and far away objects.”10 The next sūtra, YS 3.26, states, “By practicing saÅyama on the sun, [the yogin] gains the knowledge of the worlds [bhuvana].”11 Other sūtras say that practicing saÅyama on the moon gives rise to knowledge of the arrangement of the stars (3.27), if the practice is directed to the navel cakra, the yogin obtains knowledge of the arrangement of the body (3.29), and so on. All of this indicates that the yogin or yoginī was able, theoretically at least, to use their more exalted yogic skills to move their minds or consciousness beyond the confines of the body, as well as to transform the very nature of their bodies. From this platform, entering the bodies of others was a very short (and natural) step. Āveśa’s sense of pervasion in the YS is intriguingly close to notions of pervasion expressed by Patañjali’s use of the words samādhi and samāpatti. YS 3.3 defines samādhi as a state in which one’s self-nature becomes as if void as the mind becomes completely immersed in an object of meditation.12 Samāpatti, usually translated as “absorption,” is nearly identical to samādhi. Indeed, arriving at an agreeable distinction between them has always been problematic. YS 1.41 appears to describe samāpatti as a state outside meditative practice, an experience of absorption in the world in which the mind acquires clear perception of a cognition, the object cognized, and the cognizer.13 Āveśa shares this quality of absorption or immersion, but is defined neither as a state of meditative one-pointedness nor as a state of active experience resulting from meditation. Because it is not a frequently attested technical term in yoga philosophy, āveśa remains undefined in the YS. Its meaning is assumed from other contexts as an experience of absorption in an object, entity, notion, or psychic state that lies beyond the meditative process per se.


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The great Jain scholar Hemacandra (1088–1172) addressed the topic of possession at surprising length in his Yogaśāstra, at the end of his obligatory chapter on breath control (prāâāyāma). After describing a practice in which the aspirant gains the ability to move the breath (vāyu) at will from the respiratory system through the aperture at the crown of the head (brahmarandhra), then guiding it to settle on specified objects, such as fragrant plants, camphor, small birds, then large animate and inanimate objects (5.264–73), Hemacandra states that one should enter (praviśet) “bodies from which the breath has gone” by utilizing the vāyu from the left nostril (evaÅ parāsudeheùu praviśed vāmanāsayā). The primary subtle channel or nābi on the left side of the body, terminating at the left nostril, associated with the moon and tantric practice, is called ibā.14 In the next line of this penultimate verse of the chapter on yogic use of breath Hemacandra issues a warning: “Entry into the body of a living being [jīvaddehapraveśan] is not addressed because of fear of transgression.” This, however, does not prevent him from offering a deeper analysis of the process in his autocommentary called Svopajñavivaraâa (or Svopajñavótti): After exiting through the aperture at the crown of the head, one should enter [praviśya] [another body] through the other’s downward moving breath [apānavartmanā]. Then one should spread oneself from the lotus at the navel [ānābhyambujam] to the lotus at the heart via the suùumâā or central subtle channel. At that point, one should obstruct the movement of the other’s prāâa with one’s own breath [vāyu]. From that body, he should continue in this fashion until that embodied being falls flat, his movement faded away. When that other body has been completely liberated [of its previous occupant], the yogin whose actions and senses have come alive in all the activities [of the other] should commence movement as if in his own body. The intelligent [yogin] may play about fully in that other body for half a day or even for a day. Again, through that same process one should enter one’s own body [puram].

Hemacandra concludes this interesting account of entering another’s body, one of the most detailed I have found in Sanskrit literature, by stating that mastery of this skill enables the intelligent yogin to move about willfully, without attachment, as if liberated.15


Possession and the Subtle Body in the Yogavāsiù•ha The Yogavāsiù•ha contains a passage (6.1.82) that is as detailed as Hemacandra’s on the process of possessing other bodies. This important ninth-century text in which yoga, Vedānta, and surreal transformation are central recounts stories told to Rāma as a child by Vasiù•ha, his family’s guru. The passage in question is included in a lengthy tale of King Śikhidhvaja of Mālva and his devoted wife, Cūbālā, who were supremely pious and dedicated to the pursuit of self-knowledge (ātmajñāna). It was Cūbālā who attained enlightenment first, described here as expanded consciousness (citpracetanī, 6.1.78.29). Selflessly, she wished the same for her husband. But his patronizing attitude toward her achievements spurred her to seek solitude in the acquisition of siddhis. She transformed herself into a male sage, a more convincing authority figure to her husband, then into an amorous woman, until finally she reverted to herself. This series of transformations leads the narrator, Vasiù•ha, into a lengthy digression on the nature of prāâa (vital air) and the manipulation of kuâbalinī, the serpentine energy in the spine that, when controlled, leads to ecstatic experience and enlightenment. In the course of this discussion, Vasiù•ha eventually turned to the means by which yogins were able to make their bodies either tiny, the size of atoms (aâutām), or extremely large (sthūlatām, 6.1.82.1). Vasiù•ha describes three methods for achieving this. The first involves a complex meditation in the form of a visualization on kuâbalinī, the second emphasizes knowing the distinction between the body and the self, while the third involves manipulation of the breath, kuâbalinī, and freeing the jīva or living being to enter other bodies. The entire passage is best translated in full, because all three methods discussed require entrance into other forms of matter, even if only the third is directly addressed as possession. Śrī Vasiù•ha said: Listen to this correct description of the body of yogins becoming reduced to the size of an atom or greatly expanded. A spark [kaâa] of fire, like a golden butterfly, a fragment of lightning flashing in an evening cloud, ignites above the sheath that holds the lotus cakra in the heart. It quickly expands due to the force of consciousness [saÅvitti], as if it were blown by a gust of wind. Now impelled by its form as consciousness [saÅvid], it moves like the rising sun. It has arrived in a moment, expanded, shining


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like the first ray of the rising sun on morning clouds; it makes the entire body melt, along with its limbs, as fire does to gold. This fire, which cannot bear the touch of water, desiccates the outer body down to the big toe. What remains is the subtle body in the form of the mind. Then, after shaking off this double body, it dissolves wherever it is as a result of the agitation of prāâa. In this way it is like mist dissolving in the wind. Like a line of smoke rising from fire, the kuâbalinī energy [śakti], freed through the channel [nābi] rising from the energy center at the perineum [mūlādhāra], merges into the cosmic void [vyoman]. This citizen [nāgarī, viz. the kuâbalinī], like a puff of smoke, is a spectacle vibrating internally, enveloped by the ego sense [ahaÅkāra], which comprises the living being [jīva] constituted of the embrace of mind [manas] and intellect [buddhi]. She is capable of moving about at will, entering into [niryāti] a lotus stalk, a mountain, grass, a wall, a rock, the sky, or the surface of the earth. She [kuâbalinī] alone becomes consciousness, establishing itself step by step, filled from beginning to end with its fluid essence [rasa]. Immersed in this essence, it becomes like a leather bag immersed in water. O Rāma, filled with such essence, this quickly assumes any desired shape; she places in the mind of an artist lines of a certain shape. Due to the influence of this resolute intention [dóbhabhāva] she develops an internal skeleton. Like a fetus growing inside a mother, this extremely subtle energy [śakti] becomes established in its own germinated sprout. O Rāghava, know this truth which has been formulated by the learned, that the energy of a living being [jīvaśakti] can constitute itself into anything, from Mt. Meru to a patch of grass. You have thus heard about the practice [sādhana] of reducing your size to that of an atom, etc., through the practice of yoga. Now hear my auspicious words on how this can be gained through knowledge [jñānasādhya]. Consciousness itself [cinmātram] as known here is one, pure, quiescent, devoid of any defining characteristic, subtler than the subtle, peaceful, and is neither the world nor actions within the world. As consciousness constructs the self with the self, a self in which will becomes expectant, the result is a living being [jīva] whose consciousness then becomes turgid [āvilatām] [with desire]. A jīva that is deluded as a result of confusion of will sees only the unreal, which is embedded in the physical, just as a boy sees a yakùa in an [unmarked] object that is held up. When illumination truly arises as a result of [holding up] the lamp of knowledge, then the jīva’s delusion of will [saãkalpamohan] dissipates, like clouds in autumn. The sense of willfulness disappears as the body becomes quiescent,


O Rāghava, just like the extinguished lamp when its oil runs out. Just as a being after waking from sleep no longer sees a dream, similarly, when this truth arises, the jīva will no longer see this body. When what is unreal is justified through an attitude that it is real, the jīva becomes firmly entrenched in the sense of the reality of the body. But due to the meditative experience [bhāvanā] of the singularity of reality, the disembodied ( jīva) becomes gloriously happy. Indeed, superimposition of the reality of the self [ātmabhāvanam] on the body, etc., on that which is not the self, is as difficult to remove as is the intention to force sunbeams to remove the harshness of inertia. But when the experience of the self [ātmabhāva] is with the self alone, then consciousness itself [cinmātram] is revealed as all pervasive, stainless, and pure; through the sun of knowledge the sense of “I am” is destroyed. Others who have known the self meditate [bhāvayanti] on it in such a way that they quickly see this reality through the intensity of this meditation [dódhabhāvanayā]. Nevertheless, O Rāghava, some foolish people, through the use of this kind of intense meditation, will convert poison into ambrosia and ambrosia into poison. In this way, it is often seen that whatever is meditated upon with intensity is quickly brought to bear. When the body is seen as a body, it is that alone which becomes real; but when it is seen with an attitude [bhāva] that it is unreal, then the body becomes a part of the atmosphere. O Rāma, you have heard about how to obtain abilities such as reducing the body to the size of an atom through utilizing knowledge. Now you, a good person, should hear about another method. The jīva is lifted from the sheath [ góham; lit. “house”] of the kuâbalinī through the yogic practice of breath retention after an exhalation [recaka]. It is then joined [within another body], as the fragrance of a flower carried by the wind. The body (of the yogin), its vibrations stopped [virataspandan], becomes like wood or stone. He then submerges his jīva in the body, jīva, and mind of the other person, carefully, like sprinkling water on plants. The prepared jīva enters inside anything fixed or mobile, in order to enjoy that state according to his own desire. In this way the yogin enjoys the glory of siddhis. If it is still existent, the yogin then may reenter his own body, or he can enjoy that of another; either way, the body becomes resplendent. In this way, through an act of pervasion, a yogin, through any of these bodies, can fill all other reflected forms [bimbān], or he can establish himself completely by filling up the entire universe with consciousness [saÅvit]. The yogin then becomes the light


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of consciousness, master of himself, having known that which has eternally risen and is completely free of fault. O Rāma, he can obtain whatever he desires. They know this to be the real state of unobstructed bliss. (6.1.82.1–34)16

The first practice has the earmarks of a visualization practice. The power of consciousness itself activates the energy of kuâbalinī to assume or construct any shape desired by the yogin. All supernatural accomplishments or siddhis, including possession of another body, naturally results from this matrix of realization and practice. The second is the realization of siddhis through clarity of understanding of the nature of the relationship between body, consciousness, and intention. If the body is understood and experienced as unreal, the consciousness is liberated to achieve siddhi. The third practice is more specifically yogic in that it does not require the recognition of the body as unreal, but emphasizes the same elements of breath control and suffusion of the being itself, the jīva, in the body of another being, as mentioned by Hemacandra and the commentators on the YS. Searching the literature for narrative examples of these practices does not yield much fruit, barring what we have already seen in the MBh. This is no doubt due in great measure to the normative thrust of Sanskrit literature about which we commented in Chapter 1. Most examples will be of divine or semidivine beings; they are rarely, as in the example from the Mahābhārata (MBh) of Vipula Bhārgava and Ruci, the wife of Devaśarman, of yogins. An example of possession among divine beings, which is nevertheless appropriate to this yogic context in which knowledge is gained through āveśa, is recounted in the Liãga Purāâa 1.17–20.17 In this story, sparked by a divine competitive instinct, the great deities Brahmā and Viùâu enter each other (praviù•an, 1.20.20), taking turns, for several thousand years each time, viewing the universe from the other’s perspective. In the end, they honor each other, perceive each other’s greatness, and, after realizing the superiority of Śiva to both of them, decide to abandon their contest. In these two examples, āveśa qualifies as a vótti or fluctuation within the mind, in the first case because of the involuntary manner in which Purañjana entered into his state of darkness and in the second case because of the intentionality of the deities’ entrance into each other’s mental fields. Yet both are explicitly described as states of absorption. In its practical application, then, as these paradigmatic examples reveal, āveśa is an absorptive state in which a specific vótti is isolated, which distinguishes it from samādhi, a state of yogically in-


duced absorption devoid of such vóttis.18 It is stories like these, perhaps in addition to credible demonstrations by yoga practitioners, which unfortunately remain undocumented, that must have precipitated the inclusion of a sūtra on possession in the YS and in Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra, though, of course, the narrative statements of practices in the later Yogavāsiù•ha must stand apart as a summation of the late first-millennium convergence of Vedānta and yoga.

Śaãkara’s Possession of a Dead King It is important now to return to the story of Śaãkara and the deceased king. This is told in varying degrees of detail in the hagiographies of Śaãkara life. Two may be cited here: the Śaãkaradigvijaya (ŚDV ) of Mādhava-Vidyāraâya and the Śrīśaãkaravijaya (ŚV ) of Anantānandagiri.19 The former is much more expansive on the events of his personal life, which is densely imbued with the miraculous, while the latter is both more concise and diffuse, focusing more closely on Śaãkara’s travels and debates. Both recount the tale of the great ācārya’s possession, which has become a standard narrative item in vedāntic circles. Both of these hagiographies were written several centuries after Śaãkara’s life, which was probably in the early decades of the eighth century.20 Both abound with dialogue and brief frame stories and are often punctuated by commentary and analysis. From both accounts, it appears that Śaãkara was in constant motion, traveling from place to place to debate— and defeat—exponents of countless other viewpoints (mata, darśana), from Buddhists to Jainas to Hindu sectarian leaders whose movements centered on the worship of particular deities, including Gaâapati, Indra, and Yama, as well as exponents of astrology and worshippers of bhūtas, vetālas, and semidivine beings. Śaãkara’s rebuttal to these teachers was usually a variation on the same theme: Their systems were invalid because they were not based on the authority of the Vedas. One of these systems was kāmaśāstra,21 systematic knowledge of human sexuality. After finishing off Maâbana Miśra, the noted exponent of vedic orthodoxy,22 in debate (according to the hagiographies Śaãkara later initiated him into saÅnyāsa), Śaãkara was challenged by Maâbana’s learned wife, Ubhayabhāratī, as she is known in the ŚDV, or Sarasavāâī, as she’s called in the ŚV. Her challenge was to prove his mastery of all branches of knowledge by demonstrating his erudition in kāmaśāstra. Śaãkara could not refuse the


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challenge, but it put him in a predicament; he needed to avoid both defeat and embarrassment. He was forced to consider how to gain control of this branch of knowledge without compromising his hard-won celibacy (brahmacarya). He knew that mere textual study would not be enough; kāmaśāstra required practical as well as theoretical knowledge. In the end, Śaãkara settled on a strategy of possession. After learning, then double-checking, that a certain local king named Amaruka had died, he went to the edge of town and left his body, devoid of consciousness (citigatan), in the hollow of a boulder inside a cave. He saw to it that his inert body was guarded by his disciples and then used his yogic power to enter the body of the dead king through the brahmarandhra, the aperture in the crown of the head, with his subtle body (ŚV: liãgaśarīra; ŚDV: ātivāhikaśarīra) and ego (ŚV: abhimānī).23 The ŚV provides a name for this special knowledge: parakāyapraveśavidyā (the art of possessing another’s body). Because the king rose from the dead, the texts continue, the kingdom was relieved and joyous, and sponsored tumultuous receptions and grand rituals, including anointing the king with a profusion of milk. After the celebrations, the king proceeded to the bedchamber of the chief queen and experienced great pleasure, because he was, it is said, skilled in lovemaking (ŚV: ratikauśalāt)—an innate skill, it must be supposed, given Śaãkara’s presumption of lifelong celibacy (though note the YS passage quoted above that states that one can possess another being “in order to enjoy according to its own desire whatever is desired by that being”).24 Nevertheless, he joined with his wife, her face with his, her chest with his, her navel with his, each of her parts joined with those of his, fondling her secret places (ŚV: kakùāsthāneùu) with his hands, with the confidence of a married man.25 A quick learner indeed! The queen was completely fooled. She knew the sexual arts, her husband’s love prattle, and only her husband’s body; she had no idea that he was no longer alive. In this way, Śaãkara swiftly spread his power in all directions, wherever there were lifeless bodies (yatra kutra śarīrāâi jīvahīnāni bhumiùu)—presumably meaning that he practiced this art later as well, in other, temporarily appropriated bodies. After some time, both the ministers of the kingdom and Śaãkara’s disciples became anxious, the ministers because the king was doing a much better job than before he “died,” and the disciples because Śaãkara did not return within the one month he specified to them would be the maximum time he would be away from his body. The ministers guessed, correctly, that the dead king had been possessed and promulgated an edict that all lifeless bodies must be cremated


immediately, both to avoid further incidents of possession and to discover the identity of the possessing agent, whose body would be reposing lifeless in a secret place. Śaãkara’s disciples, worried that their guru had been overcome by the delights of the good life and had fallen from the path, arranged to travel incognito to the court as musicians and play for him, thus coaxing his memory of the true dharma. In fact, they were correct; he was enjoying his life of wealth, power, and sex. Nevertheless, Śaãkara had the good sense to grant these “musicians” an audience, and, after hearing them warble a tune that was little more than a poetic rendering of basic upaniùadic theology replete with phrases like neti neti and tat tvam asi, he came to his senses. He realized he had had his fill of hands-on kāmaśāstra and immediately left the king’s body, “like a bird leaving a nest” (ŚV ), before the guests assembled at the performance. He returned to his own body just in time—it had been discovered by the king’s minions, who had laid it on a pyre in accordance with the directive to burn all lifeless bodies. In fact, although the pyre had been lit, the flames had not yet reached the body when Śaãkara arrived. Śaãkara thus had enough time to bring it to life through the same process he had used to take possession of the king’s body. He then recited a special hymn intended to extinguish the fire. This became known to Ubhayabhāratī, though it is not stated exactly how or why she elected to believe it. Nevertheless, it was sufficient proof to her that Śaãkara had mastered kāmaśāstra. Thus, the great ācārya’s quest for omniscience was complete. But, as noted, he did not pay for it with the energy or purity of his own physical body. He employed procedures known within yoga traditions, which, as we have seen, were also known to Vipula Bhārgava, as well as to Hemacandra, which is to say to yoga traditions both within and beyond Hindu orthodoxy. It must also be noted that the language employed here for sexual merging in the ŚV is almost identical to that used in the MBh to describe Vipula’s tenaciously nonsexual possession of Ruci, suggesting that possession may share some of the physical attractions or ecstasies of sex, at least in certain cases. Finally, it is important to note that this kind of possession was apparently reserved for the learned, for the yogin who has undergone the proper training. Although such stories abound—another one is recounted in the next chapter—this kind of yogic possession cannot be considered part of a tradition of possession; rather, as stated, it is part of a tradition of yoga and a tradition of textuality. If it was ever more than a hagiographical instantiation of yogic lore, it was doubtless employed sparingly and apparently had little


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ritual apparatus, except as yoga practice itself qualifies as ritual; nor was it embraced in any popular or festival context. Thus, it is perhaps little more than a textual and narrative oddity, albeit one with a background of intertextuality and a foundation in the popular spiritual imagination.

Possession and the Body in the Brahmasūtras The final section of Bādarāyaâa’s Brahmasūtras (BS) discusses the symptoms of enlightenment. One of the final sūtras in this section states that, just as the flame of a lamp “enters” (āveśan) another wick, a liberated being can enter another body (pradīpavad āveśas tathā hi darśayati, BS 4.4.15). It will be of interest to examine the remarks of a few commentators on this sūtra. We first look at what is probably the oldest surviving commentary on the BS, that of Bhāskara, composed in the mid-seventh century, whose sectarian affiliation is unclear from this commentary. This is his sole surviving work. Then we examine the remarks of Śaãkara, who wrote his advaita commentary about a century later. The next commentary to be briefly examined is that of Nimbārka, whose school is called bhedābheda (nondifference in difference) and whose date is disputed, but may have flourished in South India at about the same time as Śaãkara.26 Then, we look at the Vaiùâava commentary by Rāmānuja, who penned his viśiù•ādvaita (qualified nondualism) works in the eleventh or twelfth century. This is followed by a brief exploration of the Śaiva commentary by Śrīkaâ•ha of the thirteenth century and the subcommentaries by Appayya Dīkùita on both Śaãkara and Śrīkaâ•ha, written in the seventeenth century. Finally, we examine the śuddhādvaita (pure nondualism) commentary by the Vaiùâava sectarian founder Vallabhācārya written in the early decades of the sixteenth century. To all of them, the sūtra assumes a background in yoga: āveśa is clearly regarded by both the sūtrakāra and the bhāùyakāras as a siddhi (perfection) attainable through yogic practice or as a consequence of liberation. Examining this material also sheds light on the relationship between the different sectarian and commentatorial traditions with little studied aspects of their yogic heritage. Bhāskara’s commentary on this sūtra is perhaps the most incisive of all; indeed, one wishes his successors had followed his thought more conspicuously. He begins by stating that a liberated person may assume many constructed bodies (nirmāâaśarīrāâi bahūni) at will. He then wonders whether these bodies possess their own independent consciousness and mind. He


answers in the negative, that these belong to the individual inhabiting the body enacting the āveśa. If we do not assume this, states his philosophical opponent (pūrvapakùin), we fall into the trap that ensnared the followers of the Vaiśeùika (vaiśeùikamate): that these projected emanations of the mind of the liberated person, which seem to constitute the substance of āveśa, will no longer be under his or her power, that the creator of these constructed bodies may lose control of his or her creations.27 Bhāskara denies this possibility, suggesting that if this were the case we would encounter many more liberated people than we do. Conversely, experience is impossible for a body without consciousness or mind. Thus, the omnipotence (sarvaśaktitva) that defines this kind of āveśa occurs when the emanations of the consciousness and mind of a liberated person influence another still hopelessly embedded in saÅsāra. He adds, however, that this does not negate the possibility that the liberated person could create additional bodies and inhabit them with his consciousness and mind. Śaãkara, in his Brahmasūtrabhāùya, begins his comments by citing the śruti passage, Chāndogya Upaniùad (ChU) 7.16.2: “He is unitary, (yet) he becomes threefold, fivefold, sevenfold, ninefold.”28 This passage, Śaãkara and several others contend, may be cited in support of the present sūtra, demonstrating the possibility of a single ātman proliferating within many bodies. Śaãkara’s rebuttal of his pūrvapakùin is that mind and ātman can be separated. Through an act of positive intentionality (satyasaÅkalpatvāt), a person can, through yogic means, create another body with a mind of its own in which the emanator then joins (yokùyate) his own ātman. This, Śaãkara says, is consistent with yogaśāstra, and, as the earlier discussion makes clear, he appears correct in this assessment.29 The ensuing discussion in the BS (4.4.16–18) addresses the nature of the special knowledge available to a liberated person. The implication of the sūtras, recognized by all the commentators, is that this knowledge is gained through siddhis, a category into which āveśa falls, but which stops short of the ability to create, maintain, and dissolve universes, tasks strictly reserved for the gods.30 The subcommentaries on Śaãkara, including Vācaspatimiśra’s Bhāmatī and Appayya Dīkùita’s Kalpataruparimala, explain that the all-pervasiveness (vyāptitva) of the knowledge of a liberated person allows that knowledge to spread in any direction, in any place, into the sense organs (indriya) and the internal psychic organ (antankaraâa) of embodied beings. Although Nimbārka’s commentary on this sūtra is brief, the subcommentary Vedāntakaustubhan by Śrīnīvāsācārya and a further commentary on


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Śrīnīvāsācārya’s, called Vedāntakaustubhaprabhā, by Keśavakāśmīrabha••a, fill in some of the gaps. Nimbārka states simply that, like the light of a flame, āveśa of an individual (jīva) into many bodies is possible through the acquisition of special knowledge of the natural order (jñānena dharmabhūtena) and cites Śvetāśvatāra Upaniùad 5.9 as his vedic authority (śruti). The Upaniùad verse reads: “When the tip of a hair is split into a hundred parts, and one of those parts further into a hundred parts—the individual soul [jīva], on the one hand, is the size of one such part, and, on the other, it partakes of infinity.”31 Although the interpretation Nimbārka intends to impose on this text is clear—that the imperceptible and infinitely small jīva has the capacity to become all-pervasive and claim other bodies as part of its omnipresent domain—the commentators refine this interpretation and give it additional dimensions. Śrīnīvāsācārya notes that this is possible only for one who is liberated (mukta), while Keśavakāśmīrabha••a adds that the special knowledge referred to recognizes the distinction between the bound jīva and the liberated one. The enjoyment of the bound jīva is controlled by the dictates of karma, and this prevents such a jīva from expanding or moving beyond the boundaries of a single body. By contrast, the liberated jīva, free from the constraints of karma, has his or her own will supported by the will of the Supreme Lord (paramātman). Implicitly, then, if the liberated individual desires to possess another body, that desire is quite naturally manifested. The twelfth-century philosopher of viśiù•ādvaita (qualified nondualism), Rāmānuja, presents a lengthy discourse on the relationship between the body and the Lord in his commentary on BS 1.1.3. This sūtra reads śāstrayonitvāt, expressing the idea that the only means of knowing brahman is śāstra, the testimony of sacred text. The relevant part of Rāmānuja’s argument begins with the proposition of the pūrvapakùin that “bodies, the world, etc., are effects” (tanubhuvanādikāryam), indicating a material cause (upādānakāraâam) that must be manipulated by a more remote, intelligent causal agent (nimittakāraâam) capable of comprehending the complexity of the effect (kārya, vastu). For example, a potter has the skill and knowledge to produce clay pots. Or, continues the pūrvapakùin, if the created item in question bears a greater degree of complexity, such as a palace, we must infer that it was produced by an individual with appropriately diverse knowledge and skills. Similarly, if human bodies and worlds are the visible effects in question, we must infer that the producer is a special being (puruùaviśeùān) with much greater insight, namely, Īśvara, the generic term for an omniscient


god. From the limited power of our own observation, we know that humans do not have this ability. So, we must infer that only a special being with majesty (aiśvarya), and so forth, could possess the knowledge and skill to produce the visible world. Thus, asserts the pūrvapakùin, through inference (anumāna) we can know of this special being, this Īśvara; we do not need to resort to śāstra alone for this knowledge. The pūrvapakùin entertains some doubt regarding his own assertion, that potters produce pots using tools like sticks and wheels that are guided by their bodies. But, because Īśvara is bodiless, states this secondary objector, he cannot direct the processes of physical causation. The preferred doctrine (siddhānta), counters the primary pūrvapakùin, is that bodies are not always necessary to bring about observable effects. For example, he states, it is our experience that a spirit (bhūta), a vampire (vetāla), snake poison ( garala), and other substances can be destroyed or driven away by intention alone. Thus, Īśvara, though bodiless, is capable of impelling and guiding other objects; intentionality, he says unambiguously, is not dependent on a body (na śarīrāpekùān saãkalpan). He continues that mind alone is responsible for intention (mana eva hi saãkalpahetun), and both mind and intentionality are well within the province of Īśvara. The pūrvapakùin fields another secondary objection, namely, that if intentionality, which guides causation, is dependent on mind, then only embodied beings have the ability to create, to engender causation, because mind is possible only with embodiment. He replies that mind (manas) is eternal (nitya) and, by its very nature, can be in many places and thus may be separated from the body. In the end, the pūrvapakùin argues, there are no limits to inference.32 This argument is countered by Rāmānuja’s own position (siddhānta), which asserts that under no circumstance can we infer a creator deity, embodied, bodiless from the outset, or disembodied. The logical reasons for this are legion, and Rāmānuja admirably brings all of these into his argument. It is not necessary for our purposes to discuss these reasons in detail, except to say that, after marshalling the arguments for his final views, Rāmānuja is left with no recourse but to appeal to the authority of śāstra, which informs us of this altogether transcendent Īśvara that is beyond the possibilities of limitation implicit in beings known through other means of apprehension (pramāâa), including inference. Among these passages from śāstra are those given in Chapter 5, which state that brahman entered the inert universe, then embodied and enlivened beings that he himself created. Thus, Īśvara is qualitatively different even from liberated (mukta) beings,


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who, says Rāmānuja on BS 4.4.15, can extend their influence far and wide and create or possess as many bodies as they like. The liberated individual may invoke intention and thus manipulate the bodies for specified purposes that he or she creates and possesses. This kind of micromanagement through possession, however, is outside the interests of Īśvara, whose possession, ab origine, can be known only through śāstra. Appayya Dīkùita (1554–1626) wrote a second, insufficiently studied, commentary on the BS called Śivārkamaâidīpikā, in which he has more to say on the subject. This text, like his Kalpataruparimala, is actually a subcommentary, though one with a much more pronounced sectarian bias than the Kalpataruparimala. The Śivārkamaâidīpikā comments rather freely on the Brahmasūtrabhāùyam of the lesser-known Śrīkaâ•ha (possibly of the thirteenth century), who also provides a distinctly Śaiva interpretation to the sūtras. Śrīkaâ•ha points out that a liberated person has the ability to fully possess an infinite number of bodies according to his will (svecchayānantaśarīraparigrahaâasāmarthya). Like the other commentators on this sūtra, Śrīkaâ•ha states that a liberated person may be all-pervasive, that consciousness is not inherently limited to a single body, a view he attributes to the pūrvapakùin. Like Śaãkara, Śrīkaâ•ha and Appayya Dīkùita cite ChU 7.16.2 as a śruti that proves that occupation of a body is not necessarily serial, but can occur simultaneously in more than one body. Śrīkaâ•ha states that, at least according to the present sūtra, āveśa indicates a pervasion in the same sense that the light from a lamp pervades a house with its brightness.33 He then enters into a lengthy discussion of the meaning of deva in the word “Mahādeva,” the primary name of Śiva. This, he states, drawing on the proper etymology of the word, indicates the heavens, and, like Mahādeva, the liberated being is fully capable of exercising pervasiveness, wandering the heavens. Vallabhācārya’s Aâubhāùya on this sūtra (the final section penned posthumously by his son Vi••halanāthajī) represents a very different—and decidedly devotional—vision of the BS. He cites a passage from the Taittirīya Āraâyaka as the authority for this sūtra: “[Just as] the husband, being the provider, supports [the family], the one god [eko devan] entered into [ni√viś ] the many.”34 Vallabhācārya interprets this sūtra to mean that the Lord himself (Kóùâa) enters into the devotee, thus allowing the latter to enjoy the pleasures of the Lord’s līlās, just as the light from the newly ignited lamp functions like that of the old lamp and flame. One cannot enjoy this state through natural knowledge and actions, but only when Bhagavān


possesses the individual.35 Regardless of who is “right” in the interpretation of this sūtra, the point for our purposes is that āveśa as used here is close to the usage in YS 3.38 and indicates benevolent possession. Most scholars regard the BS as a product of the few centuries surrounding the turn of the Common Era, predating the YS, whose heavy Buddhist influence places it in all probability a few centuries later. But it is not certain whether in this instance the BS directly influenced the YS or whether āveśa was simply one among the many well-known esoteric arts which sūtra- and bhāùyakāras felt obliged to recognize and incorporate into their works. In any case, āveśa remained part of the textuality of Vedānta throughout its history, as evidenced in the sixteenth-century Vedāntasāra, a primer intended for beginning students of the Vedānta śāstra. This text speaks of the entry (praviù•atva) of caitanya (intelligence or consciousness),36 otherwise called viśva, into the gross body without losing its orientation in the subtle body.37 We cannot neglect to mention that āveśa as it appears in this sūtra fits more closely the general semantic shape of (anu)praveśa than the usual sense of āveśa, a fact that the commentators implicitly understood. The possession considered here is instigated externally and is characterized by a kind of substantiality, a mass or density that confers a physicality that is often lacking in āveśa, but present in praveśa. Mind (manas) and consciousness (cetana, caitanya), here the property of the possessor, a presumed yogin (whether liberated or not), are assigned both mass and mobility. This is consistent with data from elsewhere in Indic textuality as well as the anthropological record: These are regarded as substances, whether their weight is coded, symbolic, or physical.

Possession in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism In spite of an official absence of an inherently existent self in Buddhism, personhood nonetheless persists, as discussed earlier. As Gombrich has remarked, “the anatta doctrine has no more affective immediacy with regard to the next life than with regard to this.”38 In practice, the person in Sinhala Buddhism, the topic of Gombrich’s appraisal, is as porous as any other in South Asia, as the work of Gombrich, Kapferer, and others testifies.39 To further demonstrate the extent of this porousness, it is instructive to examine briefly some of the lexical evidence of possession in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts.


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Possession is noted, if not actively discussed, in the earlier strata of Buddhist literature. Although verbal and derivative forms of ā√viś are rarely encountered in the Pāli canon,40 the Mahāsutasoma Jātaka has bhūtapavi••ho (Skt. bhūtapraviù•an; possessed by a spirit), and the Padakusalamāâava Jātaka contains the expression “possessed by non-humans” (amanussapariggahītā [Skt. amanuùya-parigóhītā]).41 More significant is the Sanskrit phrase ātmabhāvaparigraham (taking possession of a [new] personal existence), appearing as a commentatorial gloss on the word niveśanam in verses 33–34 of the Paramārthagāthās. In a long discussion of this problematic phrase, Lambert Schmithausen concludes that it indicates a tacit assent to entering into a new “life-experience” (ātmabhāva), which is to say a rebirth (thus confirming Gombrich’s observation about the affectivity of the anatta doctrine on future births).42 Schmithausen translates verse 34 as: “[t]hat which has been stuck to [niveśanam] [by them], that the Noble Ones know to be suffering.”43 Niveśanam, infelicitously translated “stuck to,” is related to the sense of the term saÅsārāveśa (immersed in the cycle of rebirth), used in several Hindu devotional texts (see Chapter 9). The emotional weight that we have seen as a significator of āveśa is present in the description of the Buddha’s speech in the Pali Mahāvastu, where it is, in part, called āviù•haÅ (penetrating).44 The great Pāli dictionary by Trenckner et al. lists several references to the verb āvisati, including Dīgha Nikāya 3.204.17: “This yakùa seizes, this yakùa possesses” (ayaÅ yakkho gaâhati ayaÅ yakkho āvisati). It is striking that both √góh and ā√viś are used here, probably for emphasis. In this and several other passages, ā√viś appears in the sense of uninvited possession of the type generally associated with pra√viś in Sanskrit.45 In Buddhism, the yakùa occasionally supplants the more brahmanical gandharva, and with greater negative consequences.46 In his Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary, Franklin Edgerton cites the Lalitavistara (163.14): āveśād . . . jinottamānām . . . adhiù•hānena (by the supernatural power of the Buddhas; though he adds that this could mean “because of entrance, possession, on the part of the Buddhas”).47 A later Mahāyāna text, Kùemendra’s Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā (56–57) says: “SaÅyatā, inspirited by a deity [devatāviù•an], spoke to him: ‘My Lord, in the world only the enlightened Buddha, engaged in completely eradicating the afflictions of human beings [and] possessing discriminating awareness [and] determination produced from passionlessness, are calm due to peace and contentment.’”48 The situation is more complicated in Tibetan Buddhist texts. The San-


skrit word āveśa is translated in classical Tibetan as lha-babs, which, like āveśa and its variants, is used colloquially, beyond the classical texts.49 The Tibetan gronds-jug is used for forceful entry, roughly corresponding with praveśa, while bzung-ba is close to the Sanskrit grahaâa.50 Thus, the distinctions between āveśa, praveśa, and grahaâa are preserved in Tibetan. The primary contexts in which the two former terms are employed are the ritual of introducing, or generating, a deity into an image, corresponding to the Sanskrit prāâapratiù•ha (cf. Chapter 10) and conducting one or more deities into an individual through a process of visualization, also called nyāsa. The former, the presence of a deity in an icon or Tantric initiate, is called jñānasattva and the latter, the visualized or generated deity, is called samayasattva.51 Tibetan spirit-mediums (dpa’-bo and lha-pa), formally classified as dharmapālas (guardians of dharma) “are very much part of the folk-religion complex, and there is every reason to assume that they go back to pre-Buddhist times. [But] they are well integrated into the Buddhist religious system, and a number of them reside in monastic temples or gompas and are ordained monks.”52 This presupposes the assumption of full identity of a dharmapāla with a monk, a complete and seemingly permanent possession of a monk by a divine or semidivine being, or the grafting of certain divine qualities associated with dharmapālas onto monks with particular qualifications (Skt. adhikāra). This does not mean, however, that the actions of living dharmapālas are beyond question, because some of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions that accept the possibility and validity of possession states also have a history of skepticism toward it. The textual bases for the institutionalization of possession in Tibetan Buddhism are difficult to locate beyond the realm of noncanonical tantric texts, many of which are lost or remain unedited, but which we know have affinities with non-Buddhist Tantras from the Indian Himalayas. Some of this material, which is part of an extensive genre of ritual texts that addresses oracular possession, is discussed in Chapter 11. However, we can identify a manifestly eclectic religious complex in which oracular possession is domesticated through ritual, and which appears almost entirely in ritual and (auto-)biographical literature. Thus, Tibetan Buddhist textuality does not sequester the public culture of possession from either descriptions of its mechanics or from theorizing about it, as occurs in most brahmanical literature. Possession is discussed, however, in the SarvabuddhasamāyogabākinījālasaÅvara, an eighth-century text extant only in Tibetan. This text, which


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David Gray claims “is probably the earliest of the Yoginī tantras,”53 currently exists only in manuscript form. Gray asserts that the Tibetan dbab pa, a derivative of the verb ’bebs pa (to cause to descend), is the Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit āveśa. The Tibetan term, he says, “does not refer to spirit possession per se, but rather the employment of dance to invoke the deity, with whom the practitioner seeks some sort of union in order to achieve the magical powers or siddhis which that deity can bestow.”54 Gray argues that this is not a kind of deity possession in which the practitioner loses consciousness of his or her own identity. On the contrary, it “seems to call for a state of union with the deity that leads to a heightened rather than an occluded state of consciousness.”55 What Gray writes here is consistent with descriptions of shamanic trance. He concludes that Vajrayāna visualization practices had their origin in earlier possession practices.56 The state oracle of Tibet, an important and well-known public figure who hails from the Nechung monastery, near Lhasa, is a good example of a dpa’-bo. Since at least the sixteenth century he has served, in succeeding generations, as a close adviser to the Dalai Lamas. His advice comes through ritualized and highly predictable possession states.57 As a figure whose considerable temporal power arises from his skill at inducing possession states, he does not require strained attempts by the government to justify his position near the center of power in Tibet or in the present-day Tibetan government in exile. The textuality of possession has assured his position. Thus, the oracle does not exist in isolation but is supported by much older, widely distributed possession cults that share a common Buddhist, Himalayan, and Central Asian public and spiritual heritage. Among the sects of Tibetan Buddhism, the oldest, the Nyingma school, incorporates in its literature a substantial body of noncanonical tantric texts, serving as the primary venue for the narrativization of possession. Much of this echoes historical writing, because it appears in non- or semihagiographical biography or even in autobiography, genres that are sadly deficient in Sanskrit literature. This material, which has been the subject of scholarship only in recent years, is dealt with below, in the course of more detailed discussions of possession as represented in tantric texts. Suffice to say here that these texts bear some of the excitement of ethnography, of thick description. Several reasons may be cited for this, one of which is that they contain elements of criticism and doubt with respect to the experience of possession.58 What is most relevant in the current chapter, however, is to address pos-


session as it appears in doctrinal literature, which in both South Asia and Tibet includes technical manuals on yoga, sometimes presented as formal dialectical argument. One such manual, the Bhāvanākrama (BhK, Stages of Meditation), composed in Sanskrit by the Indian monk and scholiast Kamalaśīla in the late eighth century, bears semantic similarities to texts of classical yoga.59 This text has been relied on by Tibetan Buddhists for centuries, up to the present. It contains three chapters, of which two—the first and third—survive relatively intact in Sanskrit, while the Sanskrit of the second chapter is almost entirely lost. However, a Tibetan translation of the complete work was made quite early, and that survives. The first chapter outlines the goals of Buddhist practice, the second describes the practice, and the third describes the results. The key chapter for our purposes is the second, of which a “restored” Sanskrit text was composed in the twentieth century.60 All three chapters of the text describe a gradualist position in terms of a number of stages of meditation practice. On the one hand, one can argue that the Buddha achieved enlightenment suddenly in one night’s ecstatic experience under a bodhi tree. On the other hand, one can point out that this experience was preceded by performance of considerable austerities and cultivation of mental discipline and that major sections of the Sutta Pi •aka describe stages of this highly contextualized enlightenment experience. What is relevant here is that Kamalaśīla describes the practice of meditation in the familiar language of engrossment, including āveśa. The first section of the BhK states that an aspirant on the path must eventually transcend the notions that substances and qualities possess any kind of true nature (sarvadharmaninsvabhāvatā) and that nondual experience should be a soteriological goal. Then, after becoming absorbed in the highest truth (paramatattvapraveśāt), the aspirant enters into absorption without options, choices, or the possibilities of construction or representation (nirvikalpasamādhipraveśan). In this way, one becomes established in the supreme truth and “sees” (sa paśyati) Mahāyāna.61 The use of praveśa here is, of course, conventional, but it also suggests a dualism akin to that found in the Upaniùad: that substantialities or states, regardless of their relation to the perceiver—whether they are self-created (e.g., by Brahmā) or incidental—or whether they are real, unreal, illusory, or mere constructions, are (at least conventionally) separate from the cognizer and may be entered or possessed, resulting in a state of full identity, or, perhaps better, nondifferentiation. “Seeing” Mahāyāna, then, is much like yogic or folk possession, in which, for example, seeing the Goddess is tantamount to seeing through the eyes of


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the Goddess. In the BhK, nirvikalpasamādhi is not just a state in which the cognizer sees Mahāyāna, but one in which Mahāyāna sees itself. BhK part 3 describes this identity slightly differently: “One who [understands his] nature as an absence of personhood [pudgaladharmanairātmyām] has crossed over to the truth.”62 The second chapter of the BhK is filled with terms of experience that suggest an affinity with the language, and doubtless the ethos, of late firstmillennium Indic devotion. This is the language of bhāva, bhāvanā, and other derivatives of the verbal root √bhū (to become). Bhāva indicates a mood, an attitude, or a state of being (avasthā), while bhāvanā indicates an experiential mode, usually a meditative state, uses to which we have seen these words put in the Hindu Yogavāsiù•ha above.63 These terms are discussed more fully below when addressing possession as a mode of devotion; it is important here to note that they are closely associated with āveśa in bhakti texts and praveśa in Buddhism. One passage in the BhK liberally employs the terms praveśa and bhāvanā: “After the appearance of that knowledge, one enters into it [praveśan] directly.” This refers to the knowledge gained from the practice of the stages of meditation. “Then, after entering [praviśya] into the first stage, one should next resort to the path of meditation [bhāvanāmārge] in which the stages on the path of meditation [bhāvanākrama] consist of wisdom [prajñā] meditation and method [upāya] meditation. This should be achieved by both transcendence of the world [lokottara] and knowledge gained in its aftermath. Because of purification of the subtlest obstructions that have accumulated because of not practicing meditation [bhāvanāpraheya], one will obtain the highest unique attributes [ guâa]. By purifying the lower stages one is possessed of [praviśya] the knowledge of the tathāgatas, crosses over the ocean of omniscience, and completely fulfills one’s goals.”64 Several other passages referring to meditative states or practices may be noted. One passage speaks of maitrībhāvanā (love or friendliness as a practice), performed with the wish that all beings achieve happiness (bodhicitta).65 In another, Kamalaśīla cites the Ratnamegha Sūtra on entering a noncontingent, signless (nirnimitta) state of yoga. He remarks that “thoughtful reflection is the preparation for entering into this state of noncontingency [nirnimittatāpraveśam].”66 In another passage, the BhK states, “when one sees that the mind is not fully engaged, one should realize the benefits of samādhi, then cause the mind to become [bhāvayet] engaged.”67 The BhK recommends a balance between the practice of alert and active insight


(vipaśyanā) and the practice of tranquility or quiescence (śamatha): “When one embarks on both equally, then one should remain in that state without embellishing it, so long as there is no physical or mental discomfort.”68 In fact, the main point of the BhK is that both prajñā (wisdom) and upāya (practice), as well as vipaśyanā and śamatha, are necessary for attaining enlightenment. Kamalaśīla quotes the Ratnakū•a to the effect that one cannot become absorbed into nirvāâa (nirvāâapraveśan) through cultivation of emptiness alone.69 It requires a well-rounded approach.

Conclusions Despite the preceding discussions, it must be stated that possession was barely a blip on the philosophical screen in India. It was not problematized or thematized on its own merit, and when it was addressed at all it was out of necessity, because the authors of earlier texts mentioned it. When it was regarded categorically (as has always been the wont of Indian śāstra), as it was in the Yogasūtras and Brahmasūtras, possession was assigned fuzzy ontological or soteriological characteristics rather than epistemological ones (perhaps Hemacandra and the Yogavāsiù•ha aside). It lay within the realm of active human experience, an area prone to ontological and soteriological categorization. It was not presented as a topic germane for philosophical analysis in part because it was not considered empirically reproducible. Thus it was not a philosophical notion that could even awkwardly be assigned its own niche in philosophical composition. In this way, it lay at the periphery of such discourse, which, at least within the advancing genre of śāstra, employed soteriology only as a framing device within which philosophers could address more pressing epistemological symmetries. But, as elsewhere in Indian literature, it forced its way in asymmetrically, haphazardly. Neither Yoga, Vedānta, Jainism, or Buddhism could easily discard the realm of human experience from their discourse, dealing as they purported to with notions of enlightenment or, more precisely, release from individually forged bondage to the nettlesome and ever-recurring phenomenal world. Thus, systematic philosophy could not successfully escape responding to the individual; failure to do so would have constituted an egregious ethical oversight, even for systems in which ethics was not central (yet into which one can read an assumed ethics into the texts).70 And, as noted here, this was largely because the foundational texts forced them to examine the individu-


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al. In this way, the discourse of systematic philosophy was unable to escape its full commitment to responding to foundational texts—in the present cases the Brahmasūtras, Upaniùads, Yogasūtras, and early Buddhist texts. These early texts forced generations of philosophers into the realm of questions regarding personal identity and possibility, at least occasionally, and away from totalizing concerns with the more remote abstractions that were the tools of their trade. In this way, philosophers could not expunge possession from their textuality, much less, we expect, from the religious and cultural worldviews that undergirded them. Hence, they exploited possession (as well as certain other phenomenological issues within the religious domain) only to the extent that it could shed light on other, more central, issues, such as the nature of mind, the relationship between mind, body and experience, and the nature of suffering. What interceded to bring the worlds of human concern and philosophical analysis more closely together was the inescapable narrativity of religious culture. Śaãkara the possessor of the dead king Amaruka impinged on the life—and inevitably the reception of the work—of Śaãkara the philosopher, while Padmasambhava the tantric exorcist impinged on the careers of the theoreticians Śāntarakùita and Kamalaśīla. The former—in both cases— provided working space for the latter. Regardless of whether we accept the hagiographies at their word (and we are in no position to do so), Śaãkara’s (purported) possession and Padmasambhava’s (purported) exorcisms doubtless contributed to their public cachet; and even if these stories were conceived and circulated only after their deaths, both appear to have been sufficiently powerful figures in their own time for these or similar legends to arise and contribute to a popular groundswell of support for them. Possession and exorcism, at least according to religious narrative, proved to be strategies as effective for gaining knowledge as was the study of philosophy (vide Śaãkara’s acquisition of kāmaśāstra). Furthermore, it is likely that neither Śaãkara nor Padmasambhava would hesitate to employ religious, which is to say yogic or tantric, means for propagating their philosophical doctrines. This is an old strategy in India, going back to the Brāhmaâas, Upaniùads, MBh, and early Buddhist texts. We have also seen that neither Patañjali nor Hemacandra felt any contradiction between extreme religious practice and mainstream philosophical discourse. Possession and exorcism, accepting for the moment their facticity, or at least the facticity of their demonstrations and the public culture supporting them, was doubtless regarded as radical or extreme. And it is no secret in either classical or contemporary South Asia


that philosophers, religious leaders, and other members of the literati have embraced, even encouraged, extreme practices, even if it is usually off the record, so to speak. Extremism would include possession, most other yogic siddhis, difficult austerities undertaken in jungles, left-handed (vāmācāra) or Pāśupata practices, and so on, that captured the imagination, practices that people would not want members of their own family to perform but that were culturally reconciled by their inclusion in authoritative texts. It was permitted, even encouraged, to imagine and think about these things and attribute them to great teachers, even if their practice was at the outer limits of social and spiritual acceptability. The letter of the law was rarely the rule within the ashram; the cloistered life, even if lived openly in the spirit of brahmanical restraint, embraced elements of transgressiveness and active imagination. What could be normative in literature—for example, possession, asceticism, or starvation—was surely extreme or radical in the world. Thus brahmans and Jainas could map out strategies for possession that did not contradict their philosophical or ethical principles. A tradition of long standing in India is that teachers within all lineages of practice (meditation, yoga, etc.) invariably strive to locate their practices in established texts. We might label this “religion in search of a philosophy,” and rarely if ever have lineage holders or isolated charismatic teachers been short on justification for their often idiosyncratic or self-revealed teachings or practices. Thus, philosophers did not reject out of hand the practice of possession as strongly as the caricature of orthodoxy might suggest; rather, they selectively or passively advocated certain practices that did not blatantly contravene their ideas. Both brahmanical and Buddhist doctrinal traditions embrace a multivocality that, in the words of Todd Lewis, “highlight the problematic historical method of relying on the voices of ascetic monks and nuns to understand how the faith informed an ethos of living in the world as a ‘good Buddhist”71 (or a good Hindu). Thus the YS precedes the sūtra on possession with a simple, if ambiguous, warning: “These powers [vibhūti] are obstructions to samādhi but accomplishments when the mind is active.”72 The YS does not condemn these practices but, rather, recommends them in selective situations. Śaãkara and others recorded only their ontologies and epistemologies, stating that practice must be based on the Upaniùads, Buddhist texts, and so on. But they rarely described forbidden practices. They knew that their philosophical ideas emerged from the richness of life experience and, in turn, encouraged experiential experimentation, at least up to a


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point.73 No Indian philosopher composed an odium theologicum against possession or any other specific practice, as did Christian theologians and missionaries. This may be further seen in the diction of experience, especially in the use of the verb bhū in all its senses of “becoming.” What is perhaps surprising to students of Indic religion is how ubiquitously this terminology is employed in Buddhist texts of the second half of the first millennium c.e. What this suggests is that Buddhism included a strong devotional component, while bhakti included a formal meditational component. Both of these, of course, are well known; for example, the Bhāvanākrama cites the SarvadharmasaÅgrahavaipulya Sūtra on the necessity of a diversity of practices that have already inscribed in them a strong, if often unstated, devotional component.74 Conversely, many bhakti texts define standards of devotion specifically while assuming a diversity of practices that develop different experiential modes.75 I suspect that the identity of idiom indicates that there was a connection, even a reciprocity, between them in ways that have been hitherto unexplored. In any event, what this discussion demonstrates is a carefully constructed juxtaposition between the realms of the individual in the world of relationships, which includes possession as a mode of relation in the private world of the individual, a connection between the spheres of practice and theory that is closer than has been recognized.76

Notes 1. See Kelly 1998:173, and especially 188n6 on the problematic word Bewußtsein, probably better as “awareness” than “consciousness,” though Kelly himself has “reluctantly chosen the traditional term.” See my remarks in Chapter 1 on the use of the word “consciousness.” 2. For the problems surrounding this, see Clarke 1997:112ff. 3. Or, as Bloomfield writes, “penetration of one’s mind-stuff into the body of another” (1917:1). Cf. Caraka SaÅhitā, Śarīrasthānam 1.140, where āveśa is mentioned as one of the eight siddhis, and Bloomfield 1917:6, for other references. See also White 2004 on the sūtras discussed here. 4. Nābis are regarded as the scaffolding of the subtle body. Many nābis are believed to bear extraordinary power, if properly developed. For example, Ramakrishna “speaks of a special ‘memory nerve’ that develops after twelve years of celibacy. With such a nerve, the intellect develops and can comprehend God” (Kripal 1995:338n32). Elsewhere Ramakrishna says the “memory nerve” (medhā nāóī) develops after holding semen for seven years (ibid.:67).


5. This commentary that is well worth studying has thus far received virtually no scholarly attention. The only edition of the Yogasiddhāntacandrikā appeared in 1911. 6. ghaâ•ābhighātatulyasya dedīpyamānāãgārarāśidyuticañcalasya manaso ’pratiù•hasya śarīre karmāśayād bandhan pratiù•hā. 7. Hara also suggests that “the object of entering is the seat of emotion, such as the mind [mānasa, citta] or heart [h ódaya]” (1979a:263). 8. kāyarūpasaÅyamāt tadgrāhyaśaktistambhe cakùuprakāśāsaÅprayoge ’ntardhānam | Trans. Rukmani 1987:102. 9. baleùu hastibalādīni | 10. pravóttyālokanyāsāt sūkùmavyavahitaviprakóù•ajñānam | Trans. Rukmani 1987:108. 11. bhuvanajñānaÅ sūrye saÅyamāt | 12. tad evārthamātranirbhāsaÅ svarūpaśūnyam iva samādhin; cf. YS 1.43, which regards this state as nirvitarka samādhi, in which conceptualization ceases and memory is purified (smótipariśuddhau). 13. YS 1.41: kùīâavótter abhijātasyeva maâer grahitógrahaâagrāhyeùu tatsthatadañjanasthā samāpattin (Samāpatti or “absorption” arises when the fluctuations [of the mind] are weakened, when [the mind] appears as a transparent jewel, assuming the features of the state on which it rests, which includes the cognizer, the cognition itself, and the object cognized). 14. See, e.g., Silburn 1988:133. 15. Hemacandra is not speaking as a lone voice in Jainism. Cf. Merutuãga’s Prabandhacintāmaâi, p. 12: parapurapraveśa; also Pārśvanāthacaritra 1.576, 3.119. Hemacandra is regarded as a great siddha by the Jain tradition: It is said that he defeated another Jain, Devabodhi, in debate by floating in the air and manifesting the entire Jain pantheon and all the ancestors of King Kumārapāla; cf. Bloomfield 1917:2. 16. See also a verse from the previous chapter of the Yogavāsiù•ha, 6.1.81.56: “When the prāâa is led into a state of stability for some time by engaging the practice of holding the breath at the end of an exhalation at the distance of twelve fingerbreadths from the mouth, one can enter [praviśati] into the body of another person.” 17. Cited by Eck 1993:71–72. 18. See Arya 1986:373 for the view cited in Nāgojī Bha••a’s commentary Bóhatī that samāpatti is a vótti. 19. On the Śaãkara hagiographies, see Vidyasankar 2000. Bloomfield briefly describes the account in the Hindi Bhaktamāl (1917:10–11, through a French summary), which he erroneously refers to as the Bhaktimāl. This is clearly based on the Sanskrit hagiographies, to which Bloomfield, apparently, did not have access. 20. Cf. Mayeda 1999:3 and notes. 21. Cf. ŚDV 9.100: anaãgaśāstra; 10.17: kandarpaśāstra. 22. Maâbana authored several major works of advaita (Brahmasiddhi), pūrvamīmāÅsā (Vidhiviveka, Bhāvanāviveka, etc.), and philosophy of grammar (Spho•asiddhi). It is likely that Maâbana lived slightly before Śaãkara; cf. Thrasher 1979; and Raja 1991.


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23. ŚV, p. 179: liãgaśarīramātreâa ca sābhimānī (jīvan) citigato nópakalevaraniù•habrahmarandhraÅ prāviśat |. ŚDV 9. 104cd: mahipasya varùma guruyogabalo ’viśad ātivāhikaśarīrayutan || The word guruyoga refers to Yogaśāstra. The next verse reads: aãguù•ham ārabhya samīraâaÅ nayan karandhramārgād bahir etya yogavit | karandhramārgeâa śanain praviù•avān mótasya yāvac caraâāgram ekadhīn ||. karandhra is the same as brahmarandhra (Ka = Prajāpati or Brahmā). He carefully (śanain) entered (praviù•avān) the body of the king up to the toes (yāvac caraâāgram). 24. On Śaãkara’s argument in his commentary on the Bhagavadgītā that only brahmcārins, and brahmans at that, are eligible for liberation, see Nelson 1993. 25. mukhaÅ mukhena saÅyojya vakùo vakùojayos tathā | nābhyā nābhiś ca saÅkocya saÅkocena padāpadam || evam ekāãgavat krtvā gābhāliãganatatparan | kakùāsthāneùu hastābhyāÅ spóśan praubha ivābabhau || (ŚV, ibid.). The ŚDV, a more poetically accomplished text, provides a much grander rendering of his amorous loveplay and the coquettish behavior of the king’s many wives (ŚDV 10.12–16). 26. The recent publication in four large (and largely exemplary) volumes of Nimbārka’s commentary on BS with three commentaries and thirteen helpful appendices should vastly enhance future work on this little-studied commentator and Vaiùâava sectarian founder. Cf. Brahmasūtranimbārkabhāùyam (2000). 27. I am unable to find any reference to this in the Vaiśeùika. The nearest reference is Udayana’s Nyāyakusumāñjali (NKus) 230–8 (III), 239–6 (III): bhāvāveśāc ca cetasan, referring to the absorption of consciousness in being. On the notion of bhāva in Vaiśeùika, see Halbfass 1992:139ff. Cf. also Chemparathy 1972:93. In discussing proofs for the existence of Īśvara, Udayana comments on āviśya in Bhagavadgītā 15.17: the “āveśa or ‘permeation’ through which the Supreme Self ‘supports’ the triple world, as ‘the conjunction with a being that has cognition, desire, and effort’” (jñānacikīrùāprayatnavatan saÅyogan); cf. NKus 506.15. 28. Cf. Olivelle 1998:272–273 (text and translation), 567 (notes); cp. Śvetāśvatara Upaniśad (Śvet Up) 1.4 and Olivelle’s notes, pp. 615f. 29. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that locating ethnographic support for this is difficult at best. Even possible literary support is closer to shape-shifting, in which, as we have seen earlier, a deity like Indra will create a unique form for a specific purpose. 30. Cf. BS 4.4.17: jagadvyāpāravarjaÅ prakaraâād asannihitatvāc ca | 31. Trans. Olivelle 1998:429. 32. Cf. Śrībhāùyam, pp. 242–243. 33. yathā góhādivyāptin, tathā muktasya svaśaktitirodhāyakamalāpāye svaśaktyā viśvavyāptin āveśan bhavati | 34. TĀ 3.14: bhartā san bhriyamāâo bibharti eko devo bahudhā niviù•an. 35. na hi tadā naisargikajñānakriyābhyāÅ tathā bhoktuÅ śakto bhavati kintu bhagavāás tasminn āviśati yadā. 36. Recall our caveat on the use of the term “consciousness” stated in Chapter 1. The concept is multifaceted to the point of vagueness in contemporary usage, which in turn obscures Sanskrit words such as caitanya, citta, and bodha. 37. Cf. Vedāntasāra of Sadānanda, p. 23, no. 17. For an occurrence of āveśa in a slightly different sense, see Gaubapāda’s Māâbukyakārikā 4.56: yāvad dhetupha-


lāveśan saÅsāras tāvad āyatan, in which hetuphalāveśa has the sense of “involvement in causes and results”; cited in Halbfass 1991:328, 345n146. 38. Gombrich 1971:243. 39. Cf. Kapferer 1983, 1997; cf. Collins 1982 and the discussion in Chapter 1. 40. I have checked indexes, as far as they exist, for the Tripi•aka and the Jātaka tales, the latter of which are in desperate need of retranslation. 41. Jātaka Together with Its Commentaries (1963) 3:511; see also 6:383. Cf. also Mahāummagga Jātaka: gahita-bhāvam (a state of possession) (Fausboll 1963: 6:383); also naradevo nāma yakkho gaâhati (a yakùa named Naradevo takes possession of me) (ibid.). The Jātakas are, of course, likely places for such occurrences, dealing as they do with life “histories,” rather than philosophical doctrine. For a few other similar references, see Woodward et al. 1956:345. 42. Cf. Schmithausen 1987: 1:236–237, 2:552–566. 43. Yat tan niveśanaÅ kótaÅ tad āryā dunkhato vidun | 44. Le Mahâvastu (1882: 2:315): āviù•haÅ gaditaÅ sa bhāùati; note on p. 606: “pénétrant, perçant.” Jones translates: “penetrating and gushing is his speech” (1949: 1:263). Recently, DeCaroli (2004:25f., 128f.) has noted additional early Buddhist text passages on possession. In one tale “a yakkhi possesses a former monk, who was her son in a previous life, in order to get him to reenter the monastery” (p. 128). In another case, a Vinaya text explains that possession by a piśāca is sufficient reason to break the rain retreat” (ibid.). 45. See Trenckner et al. 1960–90: 2:228; cf. the causative gerund āvisāpetvā in Theragāthā-a••hakathā III.181.2: taÅ taÅ janaÅ (sisaÅ) āvisāpetvā attano gatiÅ kathāpeti (made the spirits of various dead persons enter their skulls and relate their rebirths). 46. One can still refer with undiminished pleasure to Coomaraswamy’s studies from the 1920s and 1930s (1971, 1993). See also Sutherland, who believes that the terms rākùasa, piśāca, gandharva, and yakùa are often confounded and used interchangably (1991:49–61, for descriptions of different semidivine demons). 47. Edgerton 1953: 2:109. 48. Trans. Rothenberg 1996:147, text p. 56. Note the felicitous translation, “inspirited,” of āviù•an. Cf. Jamison (1996:115), who speaks of “the inspiriting drink soma.” 49. Cf. Richardson (1993:50), who renders this lhabeb (lha-’bebs) (oracular possession). 50. I am grateful to John Dunne for this information. 51. For a further discussion of these terms, see Chapter 10. 52. Samuel 1993:194. Recall the earlier discussion of dpa’-bo and references to the works of Berglie and Srinivas. See also the study of Tibetan oracles by Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1956:398–454, passim. For a good ethnography, see Kakar 1982:108–113. 53. Gray 2004:3. 54. Ibid.:5. 55. Ibid.:6. 56. More or less in agreement with Stablein and Samuel, cf. Chapter 2, n. 133.


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57. See Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1956:100ff., 444ff. Recently another report of possession oracles participating in political processes in India came to my attention. In February 2006, in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, nearly two hundred devtās (the local term for men and women who experience goddess possession and serve as official oracular representatives from villages in Kullu district) convened a possession congress in which they all entered states of possession and performed a special form of divination as part of the local political process. The issue at stake was the proposed construction of a ski resort for tourists. In their advisory capacity they overwhelmingly voted it down, strictly, I am told, because of the results of their divination while experiencing possession. According to my informant, a graduate student in English literature from Panjab University in Chandigarh, but a native of that region, the ruling stands. I intend to investigate this further. 58. See the remarks in Germano and Gyatso 1998. An excerpt from their partial translation of the Nyingmapa Luminous Web of Precious Visions reads: “Upon the descent of blessings during his performance of the nonelaborate empowerment, the glorious and great Mantra Protectress [Ekaja•i] descended into one of the yoginīs, and she began to perform. When everyone else became full of doubt, the lama said, ‘Because a bākinī has actually descended here [in her], get over your worries! I am a yogin who has realized the single flavor of appearances and mind, and thus no obstacles will ensue!’” (pp. 251–252). 59. On the importance of this text, much greater than Tucci’s relegation of it to the category of minor Buddhist texts (see note 61), see Sarbacker 2001:16; cf. also Williams 1989:196–197. 60. This chapter is a widely used meditation manual, recommended by the Dalai Lama; cf. Dalai Lama 2001. For the extraordinary lore that has grown up around the Bhāvanākrama (BhK), see Kapstein 2000:34, 220n71; Ruegg 1989; Tucci 1958. For an English summary of the first chapter, see Tucci 1958:155–182. On this chapter, see also Demiéville 1952. For translations of the Tibetan text of the second chapter, see Dalai Lama 2001 and Sopa et al. 1998. Regarding the third chapter, see Demiéville 1952:336–353, and for a lucid translation of it, see Olson and Ichishima 1979. An excellent study of the BhK and its sources is Gomez 1983. The soteriology expressed in this text is not limited to the BhK, a text of the Gelukpa school of Tibetan Buddhism; for another example see Buswell 1997. 61. For the text, see Tucci 1958:211. In a continuation of the same passage the BhK cites a text called the Avikalpapraveśadhāraâī (Incantantation for Entrance into a State of Nonrepresentation). 62. For the text, see Tucci 1971:8. Recall the discussion in Chapter 1 on pudgala as “person.” 63. Bhava and bhāva have the sense of worldly experience. Thus the BhK cites the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra: upāyena bhavagatigamanaÅ muktin (Living in the world with method is liberation) (Sopa et al. 1998:25). Bhava also indicates the quality or characteristic of a dharma or property of a thing. 64. Sarnath ed., 220; all references in the following notes are to page numbers in this edition.


65. Ibid.: 204. 66. Ibid.: 212. See Sopa et al. 1998:19. 67. BhK, Sarnath ed., 214. Sopa et al. (1998) translate as follows: “When you see that your mind is tired, you should consider the benefits of meditative concentration and meditate enthusiasm” (p. 20). Also: tato viśramya punar api tathaiva sarvadharmanirābhāsaÅ samādhim avataret | (ibid.: 214) (After taking refuge, one should again enter into that samādhi which exposes all dharmas). Here the verb avataret (ava-√t ó) replaces praviśet or even bhāvayet. 68. Sarnath ed., 214. The word pravóttam here (translated as “embarked”) has the sense of entrance, fully entering inside a condition, equivalent to the BhK usage of praveśa (rather praviù•am). 69. ata eva kevalaÅ śūnyatāÅ sevamānasya mā bhūn nirvāâapraveśa iti | Tucci 1971:28. I thank John Newman for pointing out several of these passages. 70. Note the relationship between the concepts of response and responsibility as constructed by Derrida: “the activating of responsibility (decision, act, praxis) will always take place before and beyond any theoretical or thematic determination” (1995:26). A close examination of Indian philosophy reveals the same imperative, if somewhat differently configured, strategies of subsuming ethics to totalizing (or totalitarian) agendas. 71. Lewis 2000:47. 72. YS 3.37: te samādhāv upasargā vyutthāne siddhayan | 73. See Halbfass 1988: “Buddhism and other traditions which are built upon the insights and experiences of personal founders encourage their followers to aim at the same experiential goals, at re-living, re-experiencing the original insights. However, this does not imply that they ask them to re-examine or test the claims of the founders in an experimental fashion and to pursue their own consciousness research” (p. 393). Nevertheless, the history of spirituality in India reveals considerable variation and change within traditions and lineages. 74. BhK, text p. 216; Sopa et al. 1998:24. Nevertheless, there are limits. The BhK continues: “The views of those who follow the path of sanctification [tīrthakamārga, followers of brahmanical sects] are totally without wisdom, in every way, because of their contrary views about the self and so on. Thus they cannot achieve liberation.” For the text, see Sarnath ed., p. 216. 75. The Bhāgavata Purāâa 7.5.23 prescribes a number of practices organized around the theme of cultivating devotion. Some are to be practiced alone, others in a group. 76. See Mumford 1989 on Ortner 1978: “she argues that in promoting a personal, ‘inner’ religious path, Lamaist ideology tends to isolate individual identity from the matrix of social ties, while shamanic identity remains embedded in the world of relations, even accepting spirit penetrations into the self ” (p. 7). To see how this plays out in Mumford’s ethnography, see Mumford 1989:196ff.


8

Vampires, Prostit

s

Narrativity and the Aesthetics of Possession


Culture, Fiction, and Possession In the present study we examine possession as a descriptor for a kind or class of mood, as a mechanism of divine creation, as a possible consequence of the consumption of soma, as a factor in disease production, as part of the job description of the gandharva and other semidivine beings, as ordnance in the arsenal of accomplished yogins, and as a mode of devotion. What sets these portrayals apart from representations of possession in texts we examine here is that they were assumed by the authors of the various genres we have examined so far (Vedas, Purāâas, Sanskrit epics, Yoga texts, Tantras, medical literature, and so on) to abide in a kind of facticity based on the interplay of myth, historical event, discourse mode, and didactic intent. This presumption held its ground even when the possession episodes in question were knowingly and unabashedly embellished as part of a literary enterprise. To cite two examples, the hagiographical rendering of Śaãkara’s possession was lifted almost entirely from earlier fictional tales, as was the story of the possession by darkness of King Purañjana. What we examine here are a few explicitly fictional works that make little attempt to adorn themselves with either piety or excessive devotion to nor-


mative dharma; in other words, the fictional material presented in this chapter has not been appropriated as either fact or normative discourse by other genres. Afterward, we inquire into the aesthetics of possession, a subject that periodically occupies the remaining chapters. Because of the energy and authority invested in its Sanskritic presentation, itself based on accumulated cultural memory (reinforced by a dynamic system of mnemonics), the assumption of possession as an existential possibility was never questioned or debated, at least outside Mahāyāna Buddhist medical treatises in which “demons” were viewed as manifestations of mental afflictions and karma, thus reducing their ontological status to that of illusion.1 In ethnographies as well as in most of the texts we have examined, the debate, where it is found, has been over authenticity: Is observed possession genuine or feigned? In the absence of data on direct visual experience of spirits, deities, or subtle bodies of yogins entering others’ bodies, the parameters of the debates have concerned the reliability and veracity of the reportage, the suitability of the overall context for possession, and the evaluation by the audience of the quality of the observed possession experience. The audience might consist of an individual or group witnessing the possession event, as attested in such diverse settings as the Upaniùads and modern South Indian Draupadī cult ritual. In these settings, the individual becomes an alien party to his or her own possession or, more germane to the present discussion of aesthetics, a reader of or listener to a story. I maintain these categories of observer or observer/participant because they are valid within the broad panorama of Indic culture. All three of these barometers of reliability—veracity, context, and quality—are elastic and have been expanded (or contracted) through time, community or regional variation, and the innovations of retelling. In what we have discussed thus far, little attention has been paid to the reception of possession in premodern public culture, though in our brief discussion of possession and trance channeling we can perhaps sense a suggestion of this. In any event, that changes here. What we address in this chapter is possession as it appears in works of fiction, as part of the Indian imaginaire. This is important because this genre has been instrumental in setting the ontological and soteriological tone for other literary genres. These texts measure cultural consensus in ways that philosophical, prescriptive, or scientific literature cannot. Indic fiction—which includes drama (nā •aka), collections of didactic tales (such as the Kathāsaritsāgara [KSS], Bóhatkathā, Pañcatantra, Hitopadeśa, Prabandhacintāmaâi), and the varie-

Vampires, Prostitutes, and Poets 319

gated genres of epic poetry (kāvya) and novels (e.g., the Kādambarī and the Daśakumāracarita)—was not meant to be read literally, historically, or paradigmatically. It may also be argued that the two Sanskrit epics, the Purāâas, and the truth-bearing tales from the Upaniùads fall in the genre of fiction. However, for our purposes we classify them elsewhere. The “truth” in some of these genres (nā •aka, kāvya) lies in their significance and evocation, in the quality and emotional clarity of their reception. The motifs of Indic fiction are often drawn from the Sanskrit epics and the Purāâas, which contain good, even riveting, stories that are strongly redolent of fiction to many modern readers,2 but were, on the whole, taken literally in ancient and classical Indian public culture. It is these works that subsequently germinated and nourished the public imagination and its concurrent social reality. These contributed to further reports of possession, of a literature that grew out of these texts, and a subsequent prescriptive literature that inevitably accompanied them. Descriptive and prescriptive texts feed off and build on each other, becoming cyclical and self-generating. Among their more playful offspring are classical epics and fiction, which include or reflect both narrative and prescriptive normativity. In this way, notice of possession in the Mahābhārata (MBh), the KSS, and other texts, some of which we discuss here, had the force of becoming, as Rosalind Morris states in her discussions of possession in Thailand, “the fictions that mediums themselves inhabit.”3 One may compare the 1971 American novel The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty, and the 1973 film of the same name adapted from it as examples in which fictionalized possession had deep repercussions in popular culture.4 Blatty wrote a fictional and highly sensationalized account of exorcisms that occurred in Washington state and St. Louis in 1949. Some of the behavior of Blatty’s characters, such as fits of vomiting, which he created to sensationalistic effect, were then replicated (and theologically explained) in exorcisms conducted by both the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestant ministries. For many years, a popular kind of religious therapy consisted of repeated engagement in cathartic exorcisms, as the reigning priesthoods did little to discourage their flocks from believing in their diabolical possession. By venturing such a comparison, I am not arguing that first-millennium Indian poets and playwrights commodified possession in the way that one might observe in certain Christian evangelical denominations today; rather, I am arguing against the positions of Morris and Lambek that possession by alleged entities of one description or another, based at least in part on fictional accounts, are themselves entirely fictive.


Belief and the power of myth objectify and energize the objects of such belief and place them in a different relationship to the agent of the belief than is the case with the casual reader of a novel or the casual viewer of a film. The power of effective fiction or drama is its ability to gain the confidence of its audience, which is to say its affective power. The Indian discipline of aesthetic theory (alaÅkāraśāstra) is, in fact, constructed around notions of audience response; it engages literary and dramatic works in terms of their ability to cultivate in the audience specific emotions (bhāva) and moods (rasa). We discuss a specific case of this in Chapter 9: the connection between aesthetic appreciation and devotional possession. Although the textuality of the Bhāgavata Purāâa or any one of a number of ornate poetical works aims to cultivate the mood of divine possession through the power and sweetness of its expression and imagery, texts that are more accessible (which is to say less sectarian), such as the MBh and KSS, are also designed to capture the imagination of their audiences. The composers of various renditions of the tales of King Vikrama and the vampire had no intention of evangelizing an audience about the facticity of the events of Vikrama’s kingship or the ontological reality of the vampire, yet they must have been aware of both their contributions to the imaginaire, bringing this aspect of Sanskrit fiction to specialized and often vernacular audiences, and the limits of their project, didactic entertainment without an undercurrent of soteriological preaching. Nevertheless, such didacticism was not without its religious background. It is in the concomitance of fiction and the religious imagination, reflected in the literary descriptions of religious and social culture, that we can ascribe a kind of substantiality to possession and to spirits, at least within the topos of Marriott’s notion of substance codes. The question to be considered here is not whether these substantialities possess mass, form, and intent of their own. Rather, the preeminent issue is of representation: How has the cycle of genre, belief, and experience functioned to further constitute possession in South Asia? The following discussions are intended to enable us to cautiously approach an answer to this question.

Possession in Sanskrit Fiction Possession, especially of the dead, was a particularly lively motif in Sanskrit and other Indic fiction. This was discussed at length by Maurice Bloomfield, who noted in 1917 that possessing another’s body “is an art destined to


make a brilliant career in fiction.”5 Bloomfield, however, examined possession solely as a literary curiosity, not as a cultural phenomenon. In his study, Bloomfield summarized tales from the MBh, the KSS, including its lengthy cycle called VetālapañcaviÅśati or the twenty-five tales of King Vikrama and a certain testy vampire (vetāla), and a few Jain texts, including the Pārśvanātha Caritra and Merutuãga’s Prabandhacintāmaâi (Wishing Stone of Narratives). His texts adopt familiar themes: a person or semidivine being like a yakùa enters the body of another for the sake of personal gain, to protect the possessed individual, to learn a secret art, or to revive a deceased loved one. Some of these themes have already been observed in the MBh. The process of taking possession resembles that described in the Yogasūtras (YS) and its allied literature: forced, and usually stealthy, entry. The term attested most frequently is parakāyapraveśa, synonymous with the YS’s paraśarīrāveśan, terms consistent with our general observation that externally induced possession is recorded by forms of the verb pra√viś (the YS use of āveśan demonstrates that this is not always the case). Unlike what we find in the hagiographies and yoga texts, rarely in fiction is spiritual or religious benefit suggested as a motive for possession except as it might coincide with personal gain. Instead, what is most prominent are tales in which animals are possessed either out of necessity, as when King Vikrama is exiled into the body of an elephant after his own body has been taken over by a brahman, or to gain access to secrets, as when various individuals enter the bodies of parrots, with their innate ability to mimic human speech. Perhaps the most paradigmatic example of this is the recurrent tale of King Vikramāditya and a series of possessions, which both reprises and shadows many other possession accounts we have already explored, including the tale of Vipula Bhārgava and Ruci in the MBh and Śaãkara’s possession of the dead king Amaruka. Bloomfield devotes most of his study to investigating the textuality of the Vikramāditya tale, providing a delightful translation of its rendition in the Pārśvanātha Caritra. It must suffice here to note three principal emphases of the story: the manner in which the king learns the secret art of possession (parapurapraveśavidyā), the teachings of dharma that emerge from the mouth of the possessed, and the depiction of possession sequentially so that no other body remains without a jīva or independent conscious being. A further example of the latter, a common theme in tales of possession, occurs in the Prabandhacintāmaçi. Bloomfield cites Tawney’s translation of this text, in which the yogin Bhairavānanda relates to King Vikrama an account of the transposition of jīvas:


The king, while the Brahman kept guard, entered by his science the body of his elephant; The Brahman entered the body of the king; then the king became a pet parrot; The king transferred himself into the body of a lizard; then considering that the queen was likely to die, The Brahman restored to life the parrot, and great king Vikrama recovered his own body.6

The value of these stories as pure entertainment should not be underestimated. The themes involved, including possession, surely affected the audience differently than did similar stories found in the MBh or various Purāças, where the entertainment was both colored and deepened by its link with the archetypes that the listeners’ lives were in many ways modeled after. Hence, the “truth” of the series of possessions related to King Vikrama by Bhairavānanda was of a different order from that of Ruci by Vipula Bhārgava, of the dead king Amaruka by Śaãkarācārya, or of the wife and daughter of Patañcala Kāpya by a gandharva. In the latter examples, the flow was understood to be from life experience to story rather than the other way around. But the direction of flow perhaps does not much matter in its effect on an audience, as evidence from literature and film, for example, The Exorcist or the recent Hindi film Bhoot (2003), testifies. To employ another example, let us momentarily consider Henry James’s dark 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, a spooky tale in which children become possessed, arguably the most influential work of its kind in Western literature. Edward Parkinson, in his dissertation on the subject, details its thematic ancestry in nineteenth-century spiritualism and its influence beyond Anglophone literary culture. Like The Exorcist, The Turn of the Screw was not written in a vacuum, as a literary work unconnected with contemporary cultural phenomena. In both these cases, as in Indian history, vectors of literary ancestry and influence are difficult to determine, as personal experience, paradigm, and fiction flow into and out of one another with stunning ease.7 One can argue that the construction of an image and its subsequent interpretation or conversely an experience based on a previously inscribed image and its subsequent refashioning as a further incarnation of that image, ad infinitum, is mere representation. The argument runs that any such sequence, incontestably normal in the world, renders any experience, even (or particularly) one deeply felt and articulately expressed, as a representation, a


decaying or vanishing, that advances through an unsuccessfully wrought urge to maintain or precisely replicate itself. In this way, all experiences may be said to be mutating shadows of previous forms; they are, in other words, unstable images or representations.8 This is not thoroughly life-denying; indeed, they can still retain integrity, spontaneity and authenticity. As with a living being, its growth, thought patterns, and power mutate from infancy to adulthood to death, yet are fully formed at every moment. The fact of its mutability, however, renders its fullness unstable, an ever-vanishing incarnation of prior moments, prior images. It is, thus, a mere representation of asymptotic or ever-converging phenomena that never quite meet, its quality as representation defined by the character of its disappearance, by its solitary and uniquely defined presence in and as memory.9 Nevertheless, reducing any experience, including its authenticity, to ephemeral representation in this way also nullifies its virtue, which in the case of possession or any other intimate practice abjures the personal and altruistic value that lies at the center of the experience as practice (or, in the case of possession, even as disease). Let us see now how these themes play out in a few Indian fictional texts.

The VetālapañcaviÅśati The obvious place to begin is the VetālapañcaviÅśati, probably the bestknown example of possession in Hindu fiction (I exclude the MBh from this category). I can hardly do better than to quote Asko Parpola’s lengthy summary of the frame story of this cycle: The hero is a brave king called Vikramāditya, the “sun of valour,” or (in Somadeva’s version) Trivikramasena. A mendicant (bhikùu, śramaâa) called Kùāntiśīla donates a fruit every day to the king, who without further ado gives them to his treasurer. Ten years pass until accidentally it is found out that each fruit contains a precious jewel. The king asks the mendicant why he is giving these presents, and the mendicant replies that he needs the help of a hero in a magic ritual. The king immediately promises his help, and the mendicant asks him to come to a big cemetery (śmaśāna) on the fourteenth night of the dark half of the month. The mendicant would be waiting there beneath a banyan tree (va•a). The king does so, wraps himself in a dark blue cloak, takes his sword, and comes to the terrible cemetery full of human skeletons and skulls and


teeming with ghosts, dimly lit by funeral pyres, and finds the mendicant drawing a magic circle (maâbala) beneath the banyan tree. He asks the king to fetch the dead body of a man that is hanging from a sissoo [śiÅśapa] tree at some distance to the south. The king agrees, and finds the corpse hanging from a tree, smelling of raw flesh and burnt by the flames of funeral pyres. The king climbs the tree and lets the dead body fall down with the rope (by which it was hung) cut. Falling on the ground, the corpse makes a cry. Suspecting the body to be still alive, the king out of pity starts to stroke it, but then the body bursts into a loud laughter, from which the king understands it to be a vampire. When he says, “Why do you laugh? Let’s go!” the corpse flies back to the tree. With much trouble the king again climbs the tree and fetches the body, puts it on his shoulder and keeping silent, starts taking it to the banyan tree. Now the vampire tells a story to entertain the king on the road. The story ends in a riddling question, and the vampire threatens the king that if he knows the answer and does not say it, then his head will burst asunder into a hundred pieces. The king replies to the query, but when he breaks the silence, the body flies back to the tree again. The same thing happens over and over again, until the vampire asks such a question that the king cannot answer and therefore goes on in silence. Now the vampire declares to the king that he is satisfied with his courage, determination and smart replies, reveals the real intention of the mendicant, and advises the king how to deal with him. The king arrives at the banyan tree and sees that the mendicant has smeared the ground with blood and drawn a magic circle on it with white powder made of ground human bone, placed a pot filled with blood at each of the cardinal directions around it, and nearby a sacrificial fire flames high from rich libations of the “great oil” (made of the fat of human victims), while all the sacrificial implements are collected in readiness for worshipping the mendicant’s chosen divinity. The mendicant is overjoyed at the king’s arrival and takes the dead body down from his shoulder, bathes it, binds a garland (around its neck), places the corpse inside the circle, applies sacred ashes on his own limbs, puts on a sacrificial thread made of human hair, puts on the funeral clothes of a dead person, meditates a moment, and with the power of mantras makes the vampire enter into the corpse. Then he worships the vampire by offering it guest water from a human skull with carefully cleaned human teeth (as his offering ladles), then gives flowers, incense and ointment, fumigates with human


eyes, and makes a bali offering with pieces of (human) flesh. Then he asks the king to prostrate himself on the ground so that eight parts of his body will touch the earth, in adoration of the overlord of spells who is present, so that the deity will be pleased to give as a boon the success that the mendicant has been praying for the king. The king, following the advice given by the vampire, replies that he does not know how the prostration is to be done, and asks the mendicant to show him first. When the mendicant prostrates himself, the king chops his head off with a strike of his sword. He also pulls out the heart-lotus (hót-padma) that he has torn from the mendicant’s stomach, and gives the head and the heart lotus to the vampire. While pleased hosts of ghosts applaud, the satisfied vampire says to the king from the corpse: “the overlordship of the (deities called) ‘wisdom carriers’ (vidyādhara) coveted by this mendicant will be yours at the end of your enjoyment of your imperial rule on the earth. As you have been troubled by me, please choose as a boon whatever you wish.” The king asks for the stories told by the vampire to be told and held in honour on the earth. The vampire grants the wish, saying that whoever tells or hears even one verse of these stories with respect, will be released from sin and obtain immunity from all sorts of demons and ghosts, including Yakùas, Vetālas, Kūùmāâbas, aākinīs, and Rākùasas.10

The mendicant’s name, Kùāntiśīla, and the reference to him as a śramaâa indicate that he is a Buddhist. This ascription of unusual or magical powers to Buddhist mendicants is consistent with what appears in the earlier Bhagavadajjukā, discussed below. Thus, the attribution of skill in performing esoteric ritual to Buddhist mendicants must have been fairly common in the first millennium c.e. Although this depiction may have elements of the pot calling the kettle black, of brahmans hurling accusations of decadence or debauchery at Buddhists, this depiction appears in popular literature not only in South Asia but in Tibet and China as well. This fragment of classical ethnography supports the assertions of Ronald Davidson that popular, even tribal, practices were incorporated into Mahāyāna Buddhism in the mid- to late first millennium (see Chapter 11) and that they were easily thematized in popular fiction. The transformation of the inside of a fruit into a precious gem after ten years suggests knowledge of alchemical processes. That the mendicant was drawing a maâbala with blood and ground human bone beneath a tree, and


probably arranged to have the unidentified corpse hung from a tree some distance to the south (the realm of Yama), also indicate that the mendicant was learned in dark, probably tantric, ritual.11 The ritual self-identification with the dead—the sacred thread of human hair that was probably that of the victim, the donning of the clothes of the deceased, the offering of guest water (arghya) from a carefully cleansed human skull, and so on—conspired to create a general atmosphere of possession and enlivenment of the corpse; and as if on cue it obliged. This, we must remember, is fiction, so we must expect such excesses; these and other symmetries and synchronicities are the stuff of fiction. The main object of the ritual, to please a deity to the point that it granted a boon, was also consistent with most tantric possession. In the end the king emerges victorious over the mendicant, which indicates another stroke (indeed, a beheading) in the eternal battle between political and religious power. The head, the locus of narration, and the heart lotus, the seat of consciousness, satisfy the vetāla, who guarantees that with the assistance of a vidyādhara, a “wisdom-bearer” captured as part of the boon, the narration will continue for the benefit, even the enlightenment, of all beings who hear it. This is a standard Indian coda, tantric and non-tantric; that it should be repeated in the context of a narrative of possession and horror probably served to validate these practices in the mind of the listener. It is this validation or legitimation within the public imagination that was instrumental in the continuity of these tales in innumerable variations over countless centuries and generations. Let us examine one story from a variation on this collection, this time from Jambhaladatta’s later version of the VetālapañcaviÅśati. Then as the goblin [vetāla] was being carried along again, he told another story: Your majesty, in the land of Kaliãga there was a city named Yajñasthala. There dwelt a brahman called Yajñasoma. His wife was Somadattā. She bore to him a son named Brahmasvāmin. Though he understood the truth of all sciences [sarvaśāstratattvajñan], through the power of fate [daivavaśāt] he died. His parents, lamenting much, with their kinsfolk took him and went to the charnel grounds [śmaśāna] to perform the last rites. At that time an ascetic dwelling there saw that the body was that of a brahman’s son skilled in all the sciences and handsome, who had met an unseasonable death [ayuktakālemaraâam]. He lamented aloud in a mournful voice and then danced with the greatest gaiety. Immediately he arose and


through the power of yoga abandoned his old body and entered [praviveśa] the body of the dead brahman youth. The boy was as if he had arisen from sleep. His parents felt great joy. The whole party of kinsfolk rejoiced. Brahmasvāmin, when he had regained life, abandoned all pleasures and continually practiced meditation [yogaÅ dhyāyaás tasthau]. “Why did the ascetic dwelling in the cemetery lament and why did he dance? Let your majesty tell me the cause of those actions.” The king said: “Listen, goblin.” He lamented, thinking: “Abandoning my old body I shall acquire a brahman’s body, which is a vessel of all good qualities [sarvaguâādhāram].” As the king was saying this, the goblin hung again on the śiÉśapā tree.12

This story, like many others, and like much of what we have seen of possession in general, ends up reinforcing the social order.13 The king aspires to become a brahman as personal identities are effaced and replaced. This demonstration of the uncertainty of personal identity inspired the king to yearn for a higher position on the dharmic pecking order. Although it may be that this muffled ending reflects a sanitized, brahmanized reinscription, it also demonstrates the acceptance of the fragility of identity. In his battle to both retain and relocate his identity, the courageous king gains the upper hand over the vetāla. In this sense, the tantric ritual is delegitimized and the narrative becomes one of rationalization, as if the king were saying, “Look, we don’t have to be afraid of the powers of those old tantriks if we just use our heads and refuse to be afraid of ghosts.” We can interpret this as an Indian iteration of Freud’s notion of the uncanny (Unheimlich), discussed above. The point in this discourse is that notions of the uncanny in fiction go hand in hand with a drive to rationalize. In this dialectic, the uncanny becomes separated as a genre or motif because of social and cultural pressure to distinguish the realms of rational and irrational.14 Such pressure is often extreme in Sanskritic culture, in which the formalities of rationalization and demystification, legacies of MīmāÅsā and Vedānta orthodoxies, supersede magic, horror, and other things uncanny. This is evidenced not only here but even more so in the hagiographies of Śaãkara, whose yogic exploits extend to the heart of the uncanny. These stand manifestly apart from the hyperrationalization of Śaãkara’s advaitic discourse, in which he virtually never discusses his personal experience, the result of his unyielding priority of proof (pramāâa) based on vedic precedence (śruti) over that of personal experience and, in particular, memory.


All these stories reiterate to a certain extent one of the themes of Śaãkara’s possession of the dead king Amaruka: possible immunity from the effects of one’s actions or position in life by possessing another body. This is reinforced in the story of Indradatta from the beginning of KSS. Here, Indradatta, the brahman disciple of the grammarian Vyābi, enters the corpse of the recently deceased śūdra king Nanda in order to procure a million pieces of gold, which he intended to use to pay tuition for a very costly course in Sanskrit grammar. Unfortunately for Indradatta (and doubtless for Varùa, the grammarian who stood to gain from the transaction), the king’s minister, believing Indradatta dead, decides to have his corpse burned.15 In all these cases, the body of the possessed and the possessor have been marked— with sacred threads, blue cloaks, sectarian marks, and so on, some mentioned, others assumed—and thus possess degrees of purity or impurity that distinguish them from other bodies. The body in possession is a topic that deserves further discussion, but we must postpone this until the final chapter, when we can address the topic more definitively.16

The Bhagavadajjukāprahasanam The most extended example of possession as a motif in Sanskrit fiction occurs in the early seventh-century drama Bhagavadajjukāprahasanam (The Farce of the Saint-Courtesan), by the Pallava king Mahendravarman (though it was more likely written by a paâbita in his court). One of the peculiarities of Sanskrit drama is that it is composed not just in Sanskrit but in one or more Middle Indic (Prakrit) dialects as well, based on the social ranking of the characters. Because several words in the Prakrit parts of the dialogue do not find Sanskrit phonological counterparts (e.g., āhiâbitum [to beg]), it is possible that this drama was originally written in Prakrit, after which a full Sanskrit rendering (chāyā) was produced, rather than originally entirely in Sanskrit, after which the appropriate lines of the dialogue were translated into Prakrit. This is important because it may indicate that the flow of influence of the popularly conceived possession was from Prakrit, which is to say the public domain, into Sanskrit. However, this is by no means a final proof; it may simply be that the author worked in this fashion. One striking aspect of the drama is the ease with which possession becomes its pivot. This suggests that by the middle of the first millennium c.e. it had become a familiar cultural event. Thus, without any introduction to its subtleties the author felt comfortable introducing it as the subject of a


comedy (prahasana), which must have offered considerable enjoyment to its audience.17 In short, an unnamed mendicant (parivrājaka), a reprobate and convert to Buddhism, decides that he needs to prove his yogic skill to a particularly insolent disciple, Śāâbilya by name. He thus enters the body of a harlot (ajjukā, gaâikā, vrùalī) who had just died of poisoning from a snakebite, saying, “I will insert [niyojayāmi] my self [ātman] into the body of this courtesan.” After the mendicant has possessed her through his yogic skills (yogenāviù•ān), the harlot’s lover approaches her. To his astonishment, she replies in chaste Sanskrit, “Don’t touch me with unwashed hands!” (aprakùālitapāâibhyāÅ mā sprākùīn). This contains a clear suggestion of sexuality as a result of unregulated possession, and the disciple does not hesitate to remind his guru of it. The understanding of the relationship between sexuality and possession is also implicit in the earlier tale of Vipula Bhārgava and Ruci, in which the sexuality is blunted by Vipula’s control and his guru’s admonitions. The connection becomes more explicit in the hagiographies of Śaãkara, who lived about a century after the composition of the Bhagavadajjukā. The theme in these hagiographies is assumed by the Śaãkara traditions to be unique, but we can see a long history behind it. We can well imagine that in the public mind possession must have been regarded as an entrée into surreptitious and illicit pleasure. The woman’s penetrability, on many levels, was apparently taken for granted by this time. As the play progresses, the agent of Yama (yamapuruùan), who is holding the soul (ātman) of the harlot, realizes upon receiving a message from Yama that her death had been a mistake. It was not, in fact, the appointed time for her to die. However, in seeing that the effect of the snakebite had been reversed, effectively reviving her, he decides to have a little fun and deposits her life-breaths (strīprāâān) in the temporarily vacated body of the mendicant.18 When, unaware that she is inhabiting the body of this buffoon of a mendicant, the harlot sees her lover, she asks him, in Prakrit, for a tight embrace and some liquor (rāma{ia āliÅgehi maÅ . . . suraÅ pibāmi). This is doubtless a hilarious scene. A doctor is called in to provide a remedy for the snake’s poison, but announces that she has not in fact been bitten. Unknown to him, the agent of Yama has already removed any trace of the snakebite. Rather, the doctor declares, “she must be possessed” (āvi••hā khu bhave [Skt. āviù•ā khalu bhavet]). Eventually, at the behest of Yama, his loyal if easily diverted servant turns to the mendicant, in the body of the harlot, and asks him to release her body (bhagavan mucyatāÅ vrùalyāś śarīram). The yamapuruùa then returns the


jīvas to their proper places, normalcy is restored, and the drama comes to a rousing end.19 Read by itself, and through the screen of its deliberate humor, the Bhagavadajjukā suggests that women, especially those of low caste or disreputable professions, are highly susceptible to possession. They are regarded as penetrable, both sexually and by spirits, and susceptible to abandoned selfhood.20 Conversely, men, even buffoons like the mendicant, are depicted as ritual masters in control, at least in control of women. That women are depicted as highly susceptible to possession is largely consistent with the ethnographic record. Another Sanskrit work of fiction almost exactly contemporaneous with the Bhagavadajjukā that reaffirms these observations is the mid-seventh-century Daśakumāracarita of Daâbin. In this work, the vocabulary for possession is quite varied: In one story a maiden called Bālacandrikā is possessed (adhiù•hāya, adhiù•hitam) by a yakùa.21 Later, in an interesting tale of amorousness tinged explicitly with sexual possession, a prince declares to an enemy king whose semidivine daughter he loves, “I am your son-in-law, the one who possessed [abhimarùī] your daughter without your permission.”22 In spite of these passages, and the data from the Bhagavadajjukā, it is important here to recognize that women’s possession can be read as ritual mastery and men’s as abandoned selfhood, the opposite of what we see here. There are no hard and fast gender markers. The portrait in the Bóhadāraâyaka Upani ùad of the wife and daughter of Patañcala Kāpya, possessed by gandharvas, bears this out. It appears that they were in control of their possessing gandharvas and not under the control of Patañcala Kāpya or any other man. Similarly, the accounts of Nala’s possession by Kali and Śaãkara’s possession of the dead king Amaruka depict Nala and Śaãkara as ritual masters who lost control of their powers—they fell prey to the uncanny—while Damayantī and Ubhayabhāratī countered this with their predilection for rational action.

Can There Be an Aesthetic of Possession? Any discussion of a possible formal aesthetic of possession based on classical theories of Indian poetics (alaÅkāraśāstra), the central element of which is cognate, in spirit at least, with what is known in Western scholarly discourse as audience response theory, must be addressed more fully after an evaluation of possession in devotional religious practice and an appraisal of Indian


demonologies (bhūtavidyā). These are discussed in Chapters 9 and 12. However, it is important to begin this discussion here, because more than anywhere else, except perhaps in the more technical and inaccessible literature of Āyurveda and Tantra, possession is revealed in fiction and drama to be a conspicuous feature of popular culture, if not always well regarded among the literati. Explicitly fictional material, which we might define in the Indian context as narrative works with no pretense to direct representation of religious or cultural history,23 should, then, be more proximate to the realm of aesthetic theory than most other genres of Sanskrit literature. So, let us conclude this chapter by referring to some of the categories of mood and emotional construction, as well as audience response, in works of classical poetics, principally the Nā •yaśāstra of Bharata, noting possible resonances of these in possession performance as reckoned in both classical literature and modern ethnographies. I should emphasize that this is highly speculative, because possession, as mentioned at the outset of this study, finds almost no place in any formal śāstra or epistemologically circumscribed field of knowledge. Does possession as revealed in these variegated sources betray a distinct or coherent aesthetic definition? If this is the case, then we should ask further whether this definition is consistent with formal aesthetic theory, beginning with its experiential categories, as articulated in the alaÅkāraśāstra. If we conclude that this is so, then we must examine how classical theory trickled down into, and perhaps defined, the structure and discourse of possession as reported in both literate and nonliterate Indian cultures. If we decide that no such classical theory or influence can be detected, then we might ask whether any other consistent aesthetic that lies outside the domain of śāstraic discourse can be located, or, if there is no consistent aesthetic at all, then perhaps we can justly conclude that this is not a proper question to ask of our material. If a formal aesthetic of possession can be derived, we must consider once again the notion of a clear and unbreachable distinction between high and low culture in India, one that demarcates the aesthetics of the upper classes and literati from that of the subaltern. We commenced this discussion by distinguishing the views of Kosambi from those of Lariviere on what we can learn of the subaltern from Sanskrit literature, the subaltern being preponderantly represented in ethnographies. As a result of recent work on the origins of tantric Buddhism by Davidson and others, discussed below (Chapter 11), the scales appear to be tipping in Lariviere’s favor. This tipping of


the scales, however, may not be for the reason that Lariviere supposed, namely, renewed examination of Sanskrit manuscripts used in the construction of critical editions of often well-known texts. Rather, new strategies of deploying historical and inscriptional evidence that background these and other little-known texts has forced us to read them in new ways.24 It is impossible and inadvisable here to enter into a full discussion of categories for mood and emotion in alaÅkāraśāstra, but it will nevertheless assist us if we briefly review the most relevant aspects of “canonical” Sanskritic rasa or mood, bearing in mind Catherine Lutz’s admonition against naturalizing emotion, instead recognizing it “as a master cultural category”25 (at least in Western discourse) and treating it “as an ideological practice.”26 The classical texts, beginning with Bharata’s Nā •yaśāstra in the second century c.e., agree on the possibility of eight principal rasas, often adding a ninth. These are not just moods presented as ontological categories, but soteriological states as well. It is important to note that these rasas are constructed from thirty-three stable and transitory emotions (sthāyi- and vyabhicāri-bhāvas) and are therefore categories superseding these emotions. The eight rasas upon which all the texts agree are erotic love (sóãgāra), comic laughter (hāsya), compassion arising from grief (karuâa), ferocity (raudra), heroism (vīra), fear or terror (bhayānaka), disgust (bibhatsa), and wonder (adbhūta).27 The ninth rasa, which many texts include, is tranquility (śānta).28 These rasas look very much like emotions in Western discourse; but in India they are carefully distinguished from them. Unlike in the West, however, in South Asian śāstraic thinking neither moods nor emotions bear the weight of irrationality, nor do they operate in opposition to religious truth or discourse. The classical texts almost universally declare that a properly staged and acted dramatic performance or a beautiful poem can evoke in the observer a pure experience of rasa, thus framing a salvific experience of enlightenment. The observer, however, must be a cultured appreciator, an aficionado (rasika), “one with a sympathetic heart” (sahódaya).29 The devaluation of emotion in Western religious discourse is not generally shared in India, at least not in classical India.30 Lutz writes that “emotions, in contrast to thoughts, predominantly happen to the person and are, therefore, not fully intentional.”31 This is decidedly not the case in India. In possession states, noted for their emotional intensity, the most prevalent of these rasas—and here we must remember that it is the possessed as well as the observer whose cognitive grasp of this is essential—are raudra and śānta, which happen to a person because they are intentional; they are, indeed, cultivated.


There is considerable evidence that possession is an intensely emotive state of awareness, a state that serves as a bridge from local culture to structures of authority and rationality. Although these structures are brahmanical in origin, by the eighth century they had leaked into Vajrayāna Buddhism. They include brahmanical ritual, legal, and social power and discourse markers and are in evidence throughout the śāstraic enterprise of category formation. In these various discourses, the classification of sentiments and moods (notably devoid of stratification until, arguably, the introduction of śānta, and later bhakti, as rasas) becomes a rhetorical strategy that transforms these sentiments and moods into recognizable (and cognizable) vehicles for mokùa. Thus, the rhetorical bridge becomes an epistemological bridge, and from there it becomes an ontological force. The distance, then, between mood or sentiment and reason narrows, eventually influencing the dominant Indian scientific paradigm, which admits mood— or, as Freud would see it, the uncanny—as a legitimate option, if not a formal category. Paraphrasing Lutz, emotion (or mood) is not “linked to weakness” as an outcome of an ideological “split between emotion and thought.”32 Displays of pure or cultured emotion need not, then, represent unsocialized behavior, but become behavior that embodies high levels of cultural sophistication.33 Before moving to material that is more central to our study, let us look briefly at the coincidence of possession with classically described emotions in Varjayāna Buddhism. Indeed, the closest any formal epistemology comes to considering possession as a variable is found in a Vajrayāna text, the SarvabuddhasamāyogabākinījālasaÅvara, a yoginī Tantra that was discussed earlier. This text, originally in Sanskrit, but now extant only in Tibetan,34 explains that, by experiencing emotions (rasas) as manifestations of deities, various states of āveśa can be realized. The translation is as follows. With song, cymbals, and dance, with gestures and with the sentiments— namely eroticism, heroism, compassion, humor, ferocity, terror, disgust, wonder, and tranquility—one’s aim will be achieved. By being endowed with the sentiments of eroticism, etc., dancing with the various gestures, and by uniting oneself with all, one will achieve all āveśa states. Eroticism [ś óãgāra] corresponds to Vajrasattva, heroism [vīra] to the Hero Tathāgata, compassion [karuâa] to Vajradhāra, humor [hāsya] to the supreme Lokeśvara, ferocity [raudra] to Vajrasūrya, terror [bhayānaka] to Vajrarudra, disgust [bibhatsa] to Śākyamuni, wonder [adbhuta] to Arali, and


tranquility [śānta] always corresponds to Buddha, since it pacifies all suffering.35

This is an exceptional passage, and may very well be isolated, though considerable swaths of early Hindu and Buddhist Tantra are lost or remain unstudied. However, nowhere else that I am aware of does a śāstra or text of ritual or meditative practice (they appear to be combined here, dressed up with the accoutrements of Sanskritic formalism) link emotions with meditation on specific deities. Now, to move into material in which the links between ethnography and text are more evident, in a recent article David Knipe has identified raudra and śānta as integral parts of the discourse of possession among both brahmans and non-brahmans in coastal Andhra Pradesh.36 The possession may be of any one of a number of goddesses (local tradition enumerates 101) or of deceased children who become established as household deities through possession. Significantly, deceased children are known locally as vīrabhadra, while the subsequently deified girls are known as vīrakanyaka and the boys as vīranna or vīrubu.37 These designations carry an apparent conflation of vīra and raudra, two canonical rasas, a fact reiterated frequently in the MBh, a text of preeminent importance in public religion in Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere in South India, where heroism was often expressed through ferocity, especially in local performance.38 In the discourse of performance, then, vīra contains within it a semantic assumption of raudra. Further, the goddess, through her deeds of slaughtering demons, takes on the quality of a hero. This is true not just in popular texts such as the Durgāsaptaśati,39 but in possession ritual as well. Such possession of the goddesses is inevitably oracular, “for divination, propitiation, celebration or other purposes” and is “celebrated by ritualists for their ferocity and blazing anger.”40 Similarly, though the vīrakanyakas and vīrannas are deified, they nevertheless exhibit “the transparent rage of the deceased child deprived of a normal life-span and a timely death; the rage of the bereaved family, and the parents in particular; even the rage of the majority non-Brahman communities deprived of Brahmanic funerary symbols.”41 Knipe describes the raudra in these possessions as exhibitions of “opposition to established authorities,” “fierce possessiveness,” and other characteristics that embody the possessed with an “awesome and dangerous power.” Finally, from the heat (literally) of the possession, authenticated by fire walking, holding lit camphor and burning charcoal embers in their mouths, and so on, “they are brought down to a


state of śānti . . . through eating fresh limes and being deluged with tubs of cold water,” often saturated with turmeric.42 The questions most apposite are whether the appearances of the words raudra and śānta to describe deity and spirit possession in the culture of coastal Andhra Pradesh are in fact drawn from classical Indian poetic theory and whether their provenance is more than a local and recent phenomenon in possession discourse. This is to ask, first, whether these usages have a retrievable history and, second, whether the adoption of these discursive categories also means the adoption of an entire aesthetics. First, let us recall our earlier discussion on the relationship between folk and classical in India (Chapter 4) and consider Ramanujan’s assertion of the difference between classical and folk aesthetics in India.43 Classical poetics, he says, is founded on a series of opposites (poet and audience, poet and character, character and actor), while in folk theater, “notions of possession are never far from the audience’s mind . . . bard and character, bard and audience, bard and actor, actor and character are merged at crucial moments and separated at ordinary times. One goes to the theater/ritual to experience such mergers in different degrees.”44 Regardless of these differences, I believe that it is fair, given the vagaries of cultural processes, especially in India, where oral tradition is often equal in authority to written text (even among elites), to suspend some of the basic requirements of classical poetics. A prime candidate for suspension is the requirement that it be the responsibility of the audience rather than the actor to apprehend rasa in its purity, as already asserted above. In the case of such ritual the actor is possessed, or at least is believed to be possessed, and is thus invested with greater authenticity than that of an ordinary actor in a staged and fully scripted drama. Multiple ethnographies reveal that, like the actor schooled in stagecraft, the possessed is aware of the demands and consequences of performing for the benefit of an audience or even an individual client. Nevertheless, the possessed exploits this valorized authenticity to enhance his or her authority, thus portraying and presumably experiencing the required rasa in a manner and strength that is not expected of the audience or client. The emotion and consequent rasa of the possessed is, by all accounts, sharper, more immediate, and better defined—a more complete dissociation and transformation of consciousness than what an observer can realize merely by following stage-managed cues. The disproportionate power assumed by the possessed in such a relationship is due to the client or audience’s ceding authority to the possessed. Although it is possible that


possession—and the rasa that characterizes it—could be contagious, a contagion built on familiarity and practice, this is neither guaranteed nor generally expected. Thus, in ecstatic or divine possession, dialogue and authority tilt toward the possessed. The reasons for this are embedded in the very fascination of an audience with regard to a person whose possession has gained cultural and social legitimacy: a pregnant sense of revelation or manifestation, and the allure of the simultaneity of both attraction and danger. This could produce learned appreciators or sahódayas in the audience, even if such appreciation is not regarded as identical or tantamount to possession. In both staged classical drama and public possession ritual, emotive reciprocation, albeit not necessarily precisely replicated (given the complexity of emotion), is essential for the success of the performance and the maintenance of the performative tradition. In both cases, it is to a great extent the actor who must manifest and sustain the prescribed emotion. Both the truth and the ambiguity of this may be illustrated, for example, in the performance of the Kóùâa līlā, when the boy portraying Kóùâa becomes Kóùâa, becomes his “true form” (svarūp).45 This transformation is effected by the actor, whose costume, pedigree, and gestures help condition this transformation by contributing to the actor’s psychophysical attitude or bhāva, as well as by the audience, which recognizes this bhāva, resonates with it, and, from a state of meditative repose, intensifies it. There is an expectancy of the manifestation of the Lord Kóùâa and of an appropriate emotion (usually ś óâgāra or love) among the audience, an expectancy founded on a history of known, felt, and practiced emotional recognition and response. Nonliterate audiences as well as those more deeply embedded in Sanskritic culture develop emotional response similarly: through the application of specified and recognized bhāva. In Sanskritic culture, however, the construction and appearance of these states may be driven more definitively by rules that valorize and potentiate classical poetry and dramatic performance for author, actor, and audience alike. Yet the rules and models of presentation implicate the audience in a greater role in generating the mood appropriate to the composition. The emotional empowerment of a highly literate, Sanskritically trained audience will, thus, be constructed with slightly variant cultural tools from those employed by an audience observing a Kóùâa līlā or festival possession in South India. This is the case even if the empowerment and intensity of both of the latter tend to balance out.46 In fact, as ethnographies show, both Kóùâa līlās and “folk” possession rituals draw elites as well as “folk” in large numbers, though the former participates in Sanskritic culture through


extensive transformations into regional cultures, while the latter remains more distanced from any major Sanskritic source (e.g., the Siri rituals of Tulunad and Theyyam of Kerala). Thus, it appears that emotional or, more generally, aesthetic understanding validates performer, poet, and observer equally, in spite of power discrepancies, and is linked more distinctly with broader cultural and religious concerns and attitudes than with textual delineation of emotional structure and definition. The emotionally interactive nature of both folk and classical performance appears to offer a different perspective on the oppositions that Ramanujan rightly points out. This is why it is possible for an audience of highly educated brahmans and littleeducated subalterns to identify and generate raudra and śānta in the same possession ritual. It is also the reason that a broad heritage of stories based on the Sanskrit vampire tales can create among audiences throughout India emotional responses that tally with the Sanskritic categories (even if not explicitly named), regardless of education, class, caste, or region of the audience. This, then, brings us back to our original question: Did the Sanskrit categories influence the understanding of emotional states in non-Sanskritic performance and discourse? First, there is little evidence in Sanskrit literature of a direct association between possession and ferocity, āveśa and raudra. An example of this absence is in the tale of Nala, in which the word raudra does not appear in spite of a string of situations that could easily be described as “ferocious” or “wild.” The word raudra appears seven times in the Sauptikaparvan, in which Aśvatthāman’s behavior is notably wild and ferocious. However, it does not appear there in semantic association with āveśa or its variant forms. Never in this narrative is āveśa delineated as raudra. The Indian imaginaire as a whole derives significantly from the MBh, while the popular imagination of fabulous possessing beings derives not just from the great epic but from the demonologies found in numerous āyurvedic and tantric texts. Yet raudra appears only once in the āyurvedic descriptions of grahas or “graspers,” beings, usually demonic, that possess people.47 The absence of an explicit semantic connection between āveśa and raudra in Sanskrit literature contrasts with its notable presence in South Indian ritual possession. This suggests that the association is a fortuitous relic of locally situated Sanskritic culture, rather than a manipulation by local scholars who understood Sanskritic aesthetic theory and then intentionally imposed it on local performance. The evident absence of wholesale imposition of Sanskritic aesthetic practice onto the body of these rituals supports this.


Raudra is derived from the word “Rudra,” the name of the angry and ferocious vedic and Purāâic deity with populist roots,48 who forced his way into the sacrifice after being deprived of an equal share in the offerings. He ends up receiving his share, but outside the center of the sacrifice.49 The wildness and ferocity clearly evident in great swaths of possession events bears out the preponderance of what is classically described as raudra. This may be seen in classical tantric initiation, which employs descriptive terminology (e.g., ghūrâi [whirling]), rather than terms for emotions, as well as in modern non-Sanskritic possession from Nepal to Kerala. For example, in the Draupadī cult, the possessed Kauravas resemble “madmen” (Ta. piccarka{), and in a state of possession are overcome with anger (Ta. kōpam).50 The same can be said of śānta. Sanskrit literature reveals no direct semantic link between āveśa and śānta. As with raudra, many people in possession states appear to achieve a state of quiescence, often following an episode of raudra, anxiety, wrath, or trauma. If there is an approximation of this state in Sanskrit literature, it is likely to be found in the MBh or certain Tantras. But there is no such approximation in the former, and in the tantric texts we examine in Chapter 10 the nearest equivalent to quiescence in possession would be “sleep” (nidrā), as initiates are said to swoon, faint, or collapse. These texts also distinguish sharp moods such as raudra from ānanda (bliss), which is more often characterized as quiescent.51 Indeed, the emotional opposites, raudra and śānta, frequently alternate during states of possession. As frequently, or even conventionally, as raudra or śānta might appear in possession in certain locales—which suggests that possession embodies a series of felt and situated practices among both the possessed and the audience52—still, we might ask, is this sufficient to establish an aesthetic of possession beyond the boundaries of the local tradition and its concurrent emotional semiotic? Probably not, yet it is important to recognize that, within local traditions, as much as in the diffuse Sanskritic tradition, it is in fact possible to locate distinct aesthetics. The material from Andhra Pradesh illustrates that the mingling of Sanskritic and local cultures can produce a complex semiotics of emotion. The evidence for this is extensive and can be stretched back much farther in time. The multilingual Sanskrit dramas of the first millennium illustrate that at this time aesthetic bridges were forged between classical and nonclassical sensibilities. This is borne out elsewhere in the history of Indian literature, in countless regional languages. We cannot enter into this topic here, but the discourse of possession in regional lan-


guages (see Chapter 4) demonstrates deep and broad lexical and semantic continuities for terms that express the emotional content of possession. The aesthetic range, as it appears in possession phenomena, consistently swings between control, sobriety, and propriety, on one hand, and ecstasy, anger, eroticism, and other sharp shifts in consciousness, on the other.53 Examples of the former may be drawn from the material already presented on yogic and other forms of controlled, externally induced possession, including Śaãkara’s possession of the dead king Amaruka, possession tales from the MBh, including that of Ruci by Vipula Bhārgava, Nala by the malevolent Kali, and King Kalmāùapāda by the rākùasa KiÅkara, as well as the possession of the prostitute by the blundering mendicant in the Bhagavadajjukā. These varied examples are expressed within the semantic range of pra√viś, as explained earlier. A further example of this kind might be noted here, as it is from a distinctly fictional text. This is the didactic Yaśodharacarita by the Jaina author Vābirāja, dated to around 1025 c.e. (though the story is surely much older), replicated in Janna’s thirteenth-century Kannada text of same name. In this graphically violent lesson on nonviolence (ahiÅsā, the primary Jain virtue), a doomed king, Yaśodhara, is ordered by his mother to offer a rooster as sacrifice to the goddess. Although the rooster is made of rice flour (śālipiù•amaya-kukku•a), thereby enabling Yaśodhara to escape the karmic burden of killing a living being, it is still too close to the intent of actual killing (saãkalpahiÅsa). As fate would have it, the skillfully painted (citrasauù•hava) artificial rooster proves a tempting home for a wayward spirit (atimānuùa). The spirit possesses the rooster, which subsequently comes to life, screams, and flies upward.54 The rooster is then slaughtered by the king, an act with the worst possible karmic consequences for him, including rebirth in multiple hell worlds. Examples of possession that illustrate the opposite aesthetic, ecstasy, eroticism, and so on fit in more easily within the strict definition of ā√viś. These include the possession of the early vedic ritualists by Soma, a preponderant amount of bhakti-induced possession, and that ensuing from tantric initiation, all discussed below, and most of the possession described in the ethnographies. In sum, this chapter offers evidence for dual, if related, paradigms of emotional definition in India, one Sanskritic, the other non-Sanskritic. Although I have drawn the latter from Telugu, examples of this from most (if not all) major Indian regional languages are likely to be found. What I am positing here is an epistemology that flows from folk to classical and back again, producing new and unique Indian forms of knowing. However, these never


quite abandon old ways of knowing, in part because of a generally respected conservative tug that preserves a balance between old and new in different formulations. The Indic texts and ethnographies cited here also highlight different ways of knowing, Indian and Western, in an area of discourse that deserves more nuanced treatment than it has hitherto received.

Notes 1. See Clifford 1984:148ff. 2. See, for example, the work of Parpola, who has often speculated on the origins of the Sanskrit epics (e.g., 2002). Parpola sees a mid-first-millennium b.c.e. migration of pale-skinned (pāâbu) Iranians who migrated into India, integrated with the local population, legitimated themselves by fabricating genealogies that situated them in ruling families, and finally disseminated tales of their exploits. Few Indologists will easily subscribe to this theory, but it demonstrates that consideration of the MBh as fiction remains an ongoing enterprise. 3. Morris 2000:125. 4. Cuneo 2001 discusses this phenomenon extensively. In contemporary South Asia, the Bollywood film Aks (2000) has many of the same themes. It was not a particularly good or successful film and had little impact on Indian popular culture. The film Bhoot (2003) was somewhat better but similarly left little imprint. Much better and more successful was Paheli (2005); see preface above. 5. Bloomfield 1917:7. 6. Tawney 1901:9–10. The text reads: bhūpan prāharike dvije nijagajasyāãge ’viśad vidyayā | vipro bhūpavapur viveśa nópatin krībaśuko ’bhūt tatan | pallīgātraniveśitātmānaÅ nópe vyāmóśya devyā mótim | vipran kīram ajīvayan nijatanuÅ śrī(vi)kramo labdhavān || Sometimes talking parrots narrate lengthy tales, including those of possession. See the Śukasaptati, stories 46–47, and the translation by Haksar 2000: 150–154. 7. See Parkinson 1991, who distinguishes “apparitionist” from “non-apparitionist” interpretations of the existence of ghosts. In the former, they are viewed as veridical manifestations of paranormal reality, while in the latter they are regarded as subjective hallucinations. Parkinson maintains that James did not adopt either stance, but was neutral on the issue. Nevertheless, his work profoundly influenced later writing on ghosts, possession, and the paranormal. 8. A highly recommended example of possession in contemporary Asian fiction appears in the first volume of Osamu Tezuka’s (1928–89) six-volume phantasmagorical manga comic on the life and times of the Buddha; cf. Buddha Vol. 1: Kapilavastu (2003:311–356). This work illustrates the process of constructing a story line from elements of popular culture grafted onto historical narrative. Tezuka devotes considerable space to characters of his own invention, including Chapra, a slave boy born as


a śūdra, who in his wanderings meets a pariah boy named Tatta, who has the power to possess the bodies of animals and then have them do his bidding. 9. On the topic of authenticity in Indian ritual, which is to say the argument that what is closest to an original or archetypal form is most authentic, see F. Smith 2001b. I cannot here enter more deeply into the extensive recent discourse on the power of the image and the status of representation. For this, one must study the works of Derrida, particularly his notion of différence (1976), his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” (pharmakon) (1981), and his meditations on mourning, esp. the chapter on Louis Marin (2001:139–164). Marin argues that the virtue of the image is its reference to its own constructed, derivative nature. 10. Parpola 1998:278–280; for the text, see KSS 75.34–57, 188; 98.60–74; 99.1–30. 11. Echoes of this continue to appear in the popular tantric imagination. See, e.g., Svoboda 1986: ch. 1. 12. Translation based on Emeneau 1934:106ff. Compare this with tale 22 of VetālapañcaviÅśati of Śivadāsa, “Of the Yogi Who Went from One Body to Another” (Śivadāsa 1995:164–167). This is roughly the same story, but here it is a brahman named Nārāyaâa who had studied the art of entering the body of another. The discourse varies slightly, and there is no mention of a dead body or a śmaśāna. Both Jambhaladatta and Śivadāsa (eleventh to fourteenth century) postdate the KSS version (1070 c.e.). 13. See Granoff 1998a:222. Near end of this story, the Jain rendition of the tale of Nala and DamayaÅtī, “Dhanna hastened to his house and quickly returned with the milk. Filled with devotion, he gave the great ascetic milk to drink to break his fast.” This version becomes so whitewashed that it has none of the possession of the MBh original. 14. Cf. Harootunian 1988 on early modern Japan. 15. See Bloomfield (1917:9f.), who contends, wrongly, that notions of āveśa began with yoga philosophy and that philosophy and fairytale conspired for “the complete obliteration of the boundary line between fact and fancy” (p. 3). “Nothing is impossible,” he adds, “where the canons of time and space and number, and of every sobering empirical experience have been undermined by such a travesty on scientific thought” (ibid.). 16. Cf., e.g., Kasulis et al. 1993:39–145; more generally, see Bynum 1994, Sheets-Johnstone 1992, and especially LaFleur 1998, on the topic of the body in the study of religion. 17. The cultural resonances of this with the Doonesbury cartoon characters Boopsie and Hunk-Ra (see Chapter 3) are perhaps not too far-fetched. 18. See Lockwood and Bhat 1994:32. 19. Compare this with the central theme in Brinkhaus 1987. 20. I am reminded of Henry James Sr.’s declaration in the 1870s (I cannot remember the source) that individualism was a better idea for men than women because social order depended on women’s willingness to give up “selfhood.” Willing


or, more likely, otherwise, the anthropological record bears this out. Indeed, abandoned selfhood, at least selfhood as thought about in the West, does contribute to possession. 21. Pūrvapī•hikā, pp. 42, 44; e.g., p. 42: yakùān kaścid adhiù•hāya bālacandrikāÅ nivasati, p. 44: bālacandrikām adhiù•hitaÅ yakùaÅ balavantam. 22. Daśakumāracarita, part 2, p. 176: aham asmi bhavajjāmātā bhavadanumatyā vinā tava kanyābhimarùī. 23. Examples of works we must exclude would, then, be the MBh, Rām, Purāâas, Brajbhāùā vārtā literature, with the caveat noted with respect to the MBh. 24. See Chapter 11 and Inden et al. 2000. Despite Inden’s methodological overkill—banning the words “religion” and “ritual,” among others, from his book, which results in clumsiness and obfuscation rather than clarity—the authors’ use of inscriptional and historical sources represents a step forward in historical analysis of South Asian cultural and religious textuality. 25. Lutz 1988:54. 26. Ibid.:4. 27. See Bynum 2001:39ff., for an inquiry into wonder as emotion, based on medieval Christian writings. In constructing a theory of wonder, Bynum subsumes within it terror and disgust (among others), which in South Asia are regarded as independent emotions. She asserts that the “wonder-reaction ranges from terror and disgust to solemn astonishment and playful delight” (p. 57). Notwithstanding the excellent work of Lutz, Nussbaum, Lynch, and others, a great deal remains to be done on the study of emotions across cultures. 28. The most accessible discussions of rasas and their enumeration are Masson and Patwardhan 1969 and Raghavan 1967; cf. the discussion in Chary 1993:55–61. See also Raghavan 1978:427–433, 438–453, which addresses the question of bhāva. Bhoja regards all bhāvas as rasas, in disagreement with Abhinavagupta, cf. ibid.:283– 285). With respect to the salvific value of rasa, Bhoja says of śóãgāra: yena śóãgarīyate sa śóãgāran (it is itself the peak and takes men to the peak of perfection). The third stage of rasa is called by Bhoja uttarako •i, which synthesizes all the scattered bhāvas within the ahaÅkāra and turns them into preman, a stage of divine love. “In this stage every bhāva is a kind of love, preman, and every kind of love is a love of ātman, ahaÅkāra, abhimāna, or ś óãgāra” (ibid.:440). Thus, Bhoja’s rasa theory is called śóâgārādvaita in the SāhityamīmāÅsā (ibid.:458; SāhityamīmāÅsā, p. 161). 29. This is the translation in Ingalls et al. 1990:68ff. Abhinavagupta brings out the character of the word itself, which should be translated literally as “one with a shared heart.” On sah ódaya, Abhinava says that it “denotes persons who are capable of identifying with the subject matter, as the mirror of their hearts has been polished by the constant study and practice of poetry, and also who respond to it sympathetically in their own hearts” (ibid.:70). See also Hardikar 1994. 30. On this, note the discussions in Chapter 2, of the early seventeenth-century Danish missionary to Malabar, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, and the twentieth-century missionary in Panjab, Wayne McClintock. 31. Lutz 1988:63 (emphasis in original).


32. Ibid.:65. 33. Lutz recognizes that emotions might also bear a positive, humanizing value. She writes: “[E]motions are associated, in their positive but secondary sense of the engaged, with the spiritual and the sublime. To have feelings is to be truly human, which is to say, transcendent of the purely physical. Whereas emotions stand in close relationship to the instinctual when contrasted with cognition, they emerge as opposed to the animalistic and physical connotations of the instinctual when contrasted with what can be called the spiritual death of estrangement” (ibid.:66). This, she notes, is the position in American culture. In Indian culture, though, as we can see here, the subjectivity of emotion (or mood) becomes objectified and subject to positivistic categorization. The engagement of emotion and mood with the “spiritual and the sublime” does not mark them as truly or authentically human, but truly and authentically divine as well, and not only “transcendent of the purely physical” but deeply implicit within it. 34. See Gray 2004:4n12 for discussion of its place in the Kanjur. 35. Ibid.:4–5. 36. Knipe 2001. Halliburton is, thus, incorrect in assuming that “popular consumption of elite philosophy may be what makes Kerala unique” (2002:1126). Again: “[W]hat may make Kerala unique is that these elite philosophies and phenomenologies seem to be popularly consumed” (p. 1130); and more specifically: “What Kerala has that other states do not—and what makes its phenomenology unique—is the popular consumption of what would be considered only elite phenomenological discourses in other parts of the country” (p. 1131). The responses to Kóùâa and Rām līlā should also be included in this reckoning (as specified below). Halliburton has cast a very small net then made a dubious claim based on it. In short, his understanding of Indian philosophy and regional cultures is not commensurate with his profound command of anthropological theory. 37. Childhood possession, including of Vīrabhadra, is the main topic of Chapter 11. 38. See Biardeau 1989a; Hiltebeitel 1988, 1991. 39. See Coburn 1984, 1991. 40. Knipe 2001:344. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid.: 348–349, 351. 43. I am especially indebted to William Sax for discussion on this and some of the following points. 44. Ramanujan 1986a: 69–70. 45. Cf. Hawley 1981:13, 61. 46. See Wulff 1984:20–21 for the differences in emotional comprehension of a Kóùâa līlā performed in Vrindaban and the classical Sanskrit dramas of Rūpa Gosvāmī, one of the foremost exponents of canonizing bhakti as a rasa. 47. See Aù•āãgahódaya SaÅhitā 6.4.24 (P P . 495–499 below), for a description of a person possessed by a brahmarākùasa. 48. Cf. the litany to Rudra in the Krùâayajurveda that names those of whom he


is the lord: e.g., spirits, dogs, thieves (Taittirīya SaÅhitā 4.5.1–11). See Staal 1983:1:512–525, for a description of the rite in the agnicayana and the text and translation of the TS passage. 49. The offering to Rudra in the agnicayana consists of a stream of milk on the left-wing tip of the completed bird-shaped fire altar, not in the āhavanīya, the main fire into which oblations to the other gods are offered; cf. Staal 1983. 50. Hiltebeitel 1988:267–275 and Chapter 4. 51. See Chapter 10, nn. 27, 32, 34. 52. Rich Freeman has elucidated this in many of his articles. 53. See the remarks of Cort 2001:258. 54. See the edition and translation of the Sanskrit: Yaśodharacarita, ed. Krishnamoorthy (1963:136, 206); for the English translation of the Kannada version, see Janna 1994:32–34. Jaina authors employ the word vyantara (Kannada bantara) to designate a class of nasty ethereal beings. Vābirāja does not use this word, but the story is told in Kannada today with the word bantara used for the spirit. (I am grateful to the late D. R. Nagaraj for this information.) The Sanskrit text uses the term nivāsitadaivam to indicate the possession, which the commentator glosses nivāsitabhūtagraham. For more on the topic of the miraculous as a mediator of karma (and disease) in Jainism, see Granoff 1998b.


Devotio I am he whom I desire, whom I desire is I; We are two spirits dwelling in a single body. If you see me, you have seen him, And if you see him, you have seen us. —H US A Y N I B N - M A NS U R A L - H A L L A J (Ernst 1997:153)


Devotional Possession in the Gītā and Ānandavardhana Indian devotional (bhakti) literature is one of the most prominent genres for discussion of āveśa and allied notions of divine or oracular possession. Vallabhācārya (1479–1531) provides an epitome of this in his commentary on the Bhāgavata-Purāâa (BhP 10.27.24),1 entitled “Subodhinī.” Vallabhācārya writes: bhagavadāveśo hi sarvajñatā bhavati (one who is in a state of divine possession becomes omniscient). Bhakti literature is also the most prominent locus for discussion of the aesthetics of possession, a topic that Vallabhācārya and his followers, as well as the Vaiùâava disciples of Śrī Caitanya, take up in full. The underlying bhakti context for these notions is established in the Bhagavad-Gītā (BhG), where Kóùâa asserts that those whose “minds are absorbed in me” (mayy āveśya manan; 12.2) are the best among yogins (yuktatamān).2 Furthermore, Kóùâa adds that he saves from the cycle of death and rebirth those whose “thoughts are absorbed in me” (mayy āveśya cetasām; 12.7).3 Later bhakti texts explicitly or implicitly follow the Gītā. For example, in the BhP Uddhava addresses Kóùâa, in a statement that could easily be multiplied, “You, O Master, have said that the discipline of devotion [bhaktiyogan], by which the mind, after eliminating all attachment, en-


ters [āviśet] into you, is independent [of other disciplines]” (11.14.2). Bhakti theologians elaborate these statements, eventually expanding the domain of āveśa to include absorption in ontological states within the broad boundaries of saÅsāra, as well as in specified experiential states. Ānandavardhana, in his great work on poetic theory, the Dhvanyāloka, presents a verse that reads in part: I never found, O God recumbent on the Ocean, a joy like that which comes from love [bhakti] of thee (3.43).4

Abhinavagupta, commenting on this in his Locana, goes so far as to define bhakti in terms of possession or, in the translation of Ingalls et al., absorption: “bhakti is absorption (āveśa) in that (Lord) . . . whose nature is the highest form of the self, the essence of the universe, born of successive acts of worship preceded by faith, etc. Nothing is found equal to it, nor does anything resemble it.”5 One of the important features of North Indian bhakti theology, as already hinted, is its indebtedness to classical poetic theory (alaÅkāraśāstra). Absorption in certain highly specified moods (rasa) is the essence and goal of aesthetic experience, and bhakti was regarded by its advocates as a rasa or mood of compelling spiritual significance.6 Indeed, āveśa, rather than samādhi or any other term indicative of self-transcendence adopted from philosophical discourse, became perhaps the primary word for describing a devotional state. This exalted state of devotion retains an experiential component generally considered absent from the experience of samādhi. In the devotional experience of āveśa the experiencer is fully immersed in his or her beloved deity, yet still retains a relationship with that deity. This sense of separateness within immersion represents the paradox of āveśa as a devotional state. In that state, any one of a number of rasas, particularly śóãgāra or erotically adorned love, is fully expressed in the personality and ahaÅkāra of the devotee, while (paradoxically again) leaving the “I” standing.7 Abhinavagupta distinguishes the experience of rasa from yogic experience. The former, in his view, partakes in a similar, corresponding, paradox, though he does not refer to it in these terms. In the experience of rasa, one is immersed in one’s own self (svātmānupraveśāt) while fully engaging the subtle traces (vāsanā) of our inherent sense of love, among other sentiments (nijaratyādi-vāsanāveśavaśāt). In this statement, Abhinavagupta admits to a complex self (ātman), which is consistent with the self we are proposing as the operative Indic concept, after it is stripped of its thin veneer

Devotion as Possession 347

of institutional brahman-ātman theological detritus. Abhinava is speaking not of devotional love or any other devotional state but of aesthetic experience in relation to poetry and drama. Nevertheless, the correspondence is clear and was taken up and adapted by later bhakti theologians, especially Vallabhācārya and the two Gosvāmīs, Rūpa and Jīva in the sixteenth century. This functional paradox, appropriately labeled bhedābheda (nondifference in difference) by the Gosvāmīs, was absent in yogic samādhi.8 Thus, in his own fashion, Abhinavagupta hints at a relationship between bhakti and āveśa that was already recognized in the BhP, though he appears to have arrived at this understanding independently of the latter, which hardly, if at all, figures in his work. However, succeeding generations of bhakti theologians were consciously indebted to the BhP for expressing this relationship in narrative discourse, as well as to Abhinavagupta for providing it, albeit independently, with a subtly nuanced analytical apparatus. It is this conjunction of rasa and bhakti that we discuss here.

Vallabhācārya’s Concept of Āveśa Vallabhācārya mentions āveśa in several brief works. His Nirodhalakùaâa,9 a text of twenty verses describing the symptoms (lakùaâa) of the highest devotional state (nirodha), contains the following verses: “Indeed, for the benefit of those whose senses have become defiled as a result of immersion in the world [saÅsārāveśa], [I declare that as a general principle] one should connect all the [sense] objects with Kóùâa, the underlying omnipotent Lord. Worldly pain or separation cannot exist for those whose minds are always immersed in [āviù•a] the attributes of the destroyer of the demon Mura [viz. Kóùâa]. Their joy is similar to that of Hari.”10 Similarly, in his own commentary, Prakāśa, on the Śāstrārtha section (verse 53cd) of his Tattvārthadīpanibandha (Essay Illuminating the Nature of Truth), Vallabhācārya states that, for one in a state of divine possession (bhagavadāveśe), the Lord’s own attributes, such as pervasiveness, enter that person, even if the individual soul (jīva) is not itself all-pervasive.11 In the third verse of the Pañcapadyāni, a short text enumerating qualities of those who are best suited to listen profitably to the BhP, Vallabhācārya says: “Those who know, without doubt, Kóùâa as He really is, believing with all the faculties of their heart, are restless either because of possession [āveśa] by the Lord or because of entering into the highest state of bhakti [nirodha], not otherwise.”


The most important Sanskrit commentator on Vallabhācārya, Puruùottama (mid-seventeenth century), says on a passage from the Bālabodha, a brief tract placing Vallabhācārya’s philosophy in the context of competing systems of thought, that the Supreme Absolute, parabrahman, has entered (āveśya) various óùis in order to compel them to expound different philosophies.12 For example, claims Puruùottama, parabrahman as Nārāyaâa caused Nārada to become possessed (āveśita) so that he would compose Pāñcarātra texts. In the SaÅnyāsanirâaya, a brief work describing renunciation driven solely by unbearable longing for the Lord, Vallabhācārya says, “There can never be āveśa of Hari of bodies that are overcome by sense objects.”13 In his Subodhinī on the BhP, Vallabhācārya refers to the svāminīs (viz. gopīs) immersion in Kóùâa’s creative love games (līlā) as līlāveśa.14 One final reference may be given, out of the dozens of occasions Vallabhācārya uses the word āveśa. In the Subodhinī, Vallabhācārya cites a verse explaining that if the Lord completely possesses one’s thoughts (cittāveśan) as a result of remembrance of His name and attributes (smaraâa), Viùâu will undoubtedly grant enlightenment (mokùa).15 Vallabhācārya articulates this as part of a three-stage process: seeking (anveùaâam), absorption into the Lord’s līlās (līlāveśa), and omniscience (bhagavadāveśa). This indicates reciprocity: first, the bhakta enters the Lord’s līlā, then the Lord enters the bhakta. The realization of these latter two stages is represented in the Subodhinī by the twofold initiation into the Puù•imārga mantras, the first consisting of eight syllables (aù•ākùara), the second of five (pañcākùara). Vallabhācārya’s Nirodhalakùaâa, verses 17–19, addresses the importance of total sensory commitment to the Lord’s sevā or fully embodied performative service. Not only should all the sense organs contribute, but so should certain bodily functions that are rarely mentioned in this context. The verses translate: After undertaking a commitment to perform the Lord’s sevā [tatra], one should always meditate on the form of Hari. [Just as] it is clear that [the faculties of] seeing and touching [should be used in service of the Lord], similarly this should always be the case for [the faculties of] construction and locomotion [making and going, i.e. the hands and feet]. [The functions of] hearing and speaking are [also] clear [in that they are used for listening to and narrating the stories of the Lord]. The faculty of sexual enjoyment [rati] can be used [similarly] in [producing] a son who is beloved of the Lord. [And] by discharging impure material from the excre-


tory organ, a condition [of good health] supportive [śeùabhāvam] [to the performance of sevā] is brought to the body. On the other hand, an organ which is clearly not seen to be used for the Lord’s service should decisively be brought under complete control.16

Puruùottama emphasizes that this verse describes bhagavadāveśa, possession by the Lord. If a person possesses all the qualities of the divine, then that person is worthy of being treated as divine. These archetypal qualities ( guâas) that achieve full perfection in the “person” of the lord are majesty (aiśvarya), potency (vīrya), glory (yaśas), beauty (śrī), knowledge (jñāna), and dispassion (vairāgya).17 The nature of this possession is illustrated by the maxim (nyāya) of fire and an iron ball (vahnyayogolakanyāya). If an iron (ayas) ball ( golaka) is thrown into the fire (vahni), it becomes fiery. By taking on the guâas of the Lord, an individual can actually become divine. Puruùottama refers here to Brahmasūtra 3.3.20, sambandhād evam anyatrāpi, and Vallabhācārya’s Aâubhāùya on it,18 which states explicitly that in performing the proper spiritual practice one takes on or becomes possessed by the characteristics of the Lord, like the iron ball coming in contact with fire.19 Puruùottama states in his Bhāùyaprakāśa on this sūtra that it is the Lord who possesses the bhakta, not the reverse, and as a result some of the Lord’s attributes manifest in the devotee.20 Thus, Vallabhācārya uses āveśa in several related senses: the Lord and his attributes entering and pervading a devotee, the devotee entering the Lord or his līlās, or the supreme brahman pervading an individual. In addition, thoughts can be pervaded and an individual can become completely immersed in the world (saÅsāra). Indeed, saÅsārāveśa (possessed by the cycle of birth and death) is a common term in texts of the Vallabha tradition (sampradāya). Thus, as in the compounds līlāveśa, saÅsārāveśa, and other frequently attested terms such as akùarāveśa (absorbed in the absolute), the Vallabha sampradāya employs the word āveśa to indicate immersion in existential or psychological states. It is important to note that, in the Vallabha sampradāya and other North Indian bhakti traditions, āveśa indicates an intensity of engagement, a state clumsily regarded (or disregarded) as “emotionalism” by countless scholars and commentators. It is this intensity that sets bhakti apart from full partnership in the ethos of control advanced by previous incarnations of systematic brahmanical thought. It is not that bhakti is not brahmanical—far from it. But it participates equally in a “vernacular” ethos thinly veiled by both the obvious Sanskritization of vernacular narra-


tive in texts, such as the BhP, and the proliferation of an experientially based vocabulary in regional Indic languages. This includes the extensive use of āveśa and, in South Indian Tamil devotional poetry, of the word aru{ indicating, as Handelman and Shulman have shown, “‘possession’—a presence intensified beyond bearing—or the experience of the deity’s true (nija, aghora) form.”21 As is clear from investigations in earlier chapters, these represent strong continuities from the ñgveda and the early and medieval Tamil poems, which must be regarded as vernacular and orthodox.

Śrī Caitanya and the Gaubīya Concepts of Āveśa, Avatāra, and Multiple Bodies The material on āveśa in the Gaubīya (Bengali) tradition of Kóùâa bhakti is equally rich and is consistent with these findings. I shall briefly examine a few passages from the works of Jīva and Rūpa Gosvāmī, the two greatest disciples and successors of Śrī Caitanya (1486–1533). One of the important and unique uses of āveśa in this tradition, explicated by Rūpa, occurs in the term āveśāvatāra. Avatāras may be either full or partial “descents” or appearances of the Lord in the world, manifested for the purpose of performing a specific action or series of actions. Rūpa’s SaÅkùepa-Bhāgavatāmóta (Concise Nectar of the Bhāgavata Purāâa) catalogues various types of avatāras. Āveśāvatāras are, in the words of S. K. De, “not real Avatāras but Avatāras by analogy; because here the Lord enters into particular Jīvas and thus exalts them into Avatāras.”22 These avatāras share the essence of the Supreme Lord (svarūparūpa), but possess only a fraction of his power (śakti). Jīva Gosvāmī, one generation after Rūpa, refines Rūpa’s views in his Śrīkóùâasandarbha. According to Jīva, various sages are “in possession” (āveśa) of different aspects of the Lord’s power: his jñānaśakti or power of knowledge, his bhaktiśakti or power of devotion, and his kriyāśakti or power of action. Occasionally, adds Jīva, a special devotee is possessed wholly by the Lord (svayamāveśa).23 The earliest available account of the life of Śrī Caitanya, perhaps composed during his lifetime, is the Sanskrit Caitanyacaritāmóta by Murārigupta. Murāri reports that, at various moments in his life, Caitanya revealed himself as an āveśāvatāra of Kóùâa, based on his experiences of āveśa of Varāha, NósiÅha, and SaÅkarùaâa.24 Śrī Caitanya’s frequent bouts of divine intoxication resembled states of madness or possession, reminiscent of such accounts in ethnographies. One such account is recorded in a later vernacular


Caitanyacaritāmóta, this one the better-known Bengali version by Kóùâadāsa Kavirāja, completed by 1615. This text records that on Vijayadaśamī, the festival day on which Rāma’s victory over the demon king Rāvaâa is celebrated, while Caitanya’s disciples acted out the roles of Hanumān’s monkey-soldiers, Śrī Caitanya himself “was inspired with the spirit of the devoted Hanumanta [hanumān aveśe]. And so he took branches and felt as if he was on the wall of Lanka and was about to break it down. For he cried out in rage [krodhāveśe], ‘Where art thou, O Ravana? Thou hast stolen the Mother of the world, so I shall kill thee with all my kinsmen.’”25 In view of these accounts, the question may be posed whether other experiences of āveśa by individuals without biographers who lived in times much more remote to twentiethcentury ethnography and linguistic idiom might also have resembled spirit or deity possession in forms recognizable from ethnographies. We will return to this question in the conclusions, but for the moment we can say that there appear to be continuities, though different social, cultural, and sectarian conditions forced differences as well. Just as āveśa of the Lord or of his exemplary devotees, the denizens of Vraja, indicates to Vallabhācārya an exalted state of grace, the followers of Caitanya also maintain that “[p]erfection, or salvation, is . . . understood as total absorption (āveśa) in an eternal body which resides in Vraja.”26 This is to be accomplished by rāgānugābhakti-sādhana, “devotional practice in which one imitates the passion (of the denizens of Vraja in their archetypal relationships with Kóùâa).” This is described at length by David Haberman and involves “total identification with and absorption in (āveśa) the world of the dramatic character.”27 These characters include several of Kóùâa’s associates mentioned in the BhP, especially as they are represented in dramatic performances such as Kóùâa līlās. It is such “identification with and absorption in” characters known, studied, and felt that offers the devotee an opportunity of ecstatic participation in the Lord’s līlās. In his Bhaktirasāmótasindhu (1.2.272), Rūpa states that this ecstatic participation is passion (rāga) of the highest absorption (paramāviù•atā), because this is Kóùâa’s own true passion.28 The related notions of possession and embodiment are confronted in the Gaubīya Vaiùâava school not only in its doctrines of avatāra and āveśa but also in a doctrine of multiple embodiment. Avatāra, as we have seen, has many (indeed, innumerable possible) gradations and types of manifestation, all emanating from the top down, from Kóùâa’s own unimaginable motivations and actions. We also saw that the devotee, the bhakta, is capable of exploring these nuances from the bottom up, so to speak; this is one of the


possibilities of bhakti-induced āveśa. In an environment in which manifestations and degrees of divinity are matters of doctrine, it is not surprising that humans too are empowered to explore and occupy multiple bodies. In the version of the doctrine fixed by Rūpa Gosvāmī in the Bhaktirasāmótasindhu and the commentaries on it, the physical body is called the sādhaka-deha or sādhaka-rūpa. It is this body that is visible to others. But advanced devotees are able to perform divine service (sevā) not just with their physical bodies but with their meditative bodies (siddha-rūpa, siddha-deha) as well.29 Haberman describes the siddha-rūpa as: the eternal body one is to inhabit at the end of sādhana when perfection (siddha) has been attained. . . . [I]t is also the body the practitioners conceive of themselves as occupying during the sādhana—that is, during the meditative practices, worship, etc. . . . The body that one meditates in will be the very body that one resides in eternally after death.30

He further cites Jīva Gosvāmī’s commentary on Bhaktirasāmótasindhu, in which siddha-rūpa is glossed as “an inwardly conceived body that is useful for performing service to Kóùâa in the manner one desires” (1.2.295).31 The most striking consequence of this belief is the male practice of dressing as a woman in performing personal or public sevā. This cross-dressing enables male bhaktas to self-identify more closely with the milkmaids ( gopīs), the ideal people. This, they believe, intensifies the quality of their devotion and allows them to become more seamlessly possessed of the gopī with whom they feel an affinity. This practice, Haberman says, was never particularly common, though anyone who spends much time in Braj will occasionally see such devotees. The self-identification can be so strong, the devotion so single-minded, that the devotee truly believes he is performing his sevā, singing, dancing, or chanting, with his siddha-rūpa, though others can see only the sādhaka-rūpa. This has parallels with festival possession examined earlier from the ethnographies in Tamilnadu, Tulunad, Kerala, Garhwal, Assam, and elsewhere. Although the possession here is not oracular, it is, like the others, bhakti-induced and notably ecstatic. And, like a few of the others, it encourages gender interchangeability.32 The difference is that the present tradition is robustly Sanskritic—representing a departure from what we find in South India, Garhwal, and so on, which are traditions transmitted beyond the pale of Sanskritic culture. Although it is uncertain whether the cross-dressing is mentioned in any Sanskrit text,33 strongly sug-


gesting that it was originally a local non-orthodox practice, the Bhaktirasāmótasindhu (1.2.294–295) appears to know and condone this practice when it states that a practitioner of rāgānugābhakti-sādhana who strongly desires such an emotional experience (tadbhāva) should remember Kóùâa and his various stories and exploits, intensely identify with the resident of Vraja (viz. a gopī) who is most beloved (preù•ha) to him, then imitate that person with both his sādhaka-rūpa and his siddha-rūpa. I deal further with this cultural dynamic between folk and classical, this “vernacularization” of Sanskrit traditions, in the general conclusions in Chapter 13. The following story further augments the relationship between devotional self-identification and possession. This extraordinary account is found in the commentary by Priyā Dās, written in 1712, with further elucidations by subcommentators, on Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl. In this account of the performance of a Kóùâa līlā near Puri, the actor playing the role of NarasiÅha, the man-lion incarnation of Viùâu, became so engrossed in, or possessed by, the character he was playing that he actually killed and eviscerated the actor playing the demon-king Hiraâyakaśipu, an avowed enemy of Viùâu. In order to prove that the actor was himself innocent, and not personally responsible for the murder, he was asked by the court to take the role of Daśaratha, the father of Rāma, in another līlā. Following the story line of the Rāmāyaâa, the actor, so engrossed in—or possessed by—his character, attained such a degree of sorrow at Rāma’s exile that he actually died of grief during the performance, thus proving his innocence.34 As if once were not enough, Sarah Caldwell states that, at several temples at the other end of India, in Kerala, “we were told legends of the accidental murder of the actor playing Dārika by the actor playing Kā{i, who lost control and became too strongly identified with his bloodthirsty heroine.”35 In these accounts we find a clear lack of distinction between spirit or deity possession, intense absorption in emotion, and acting.36 Perhaps the point is not to distinguish them, but to recognize that they share certain features and are identified in a similar manner, with similar vocabulary, by the indigenous culture. Some of the repercussions of this are explored below.

Āveśa and Bhāva In view of these accounts of possession in the performances of the Kóùâa and Rām līlās, can we ask whether the equivalent of “dramatic possession” is


found in Sanskrit theater? The answer appears to be a qualified “yes.” We should be careful, however, not to confuse possession with other altered states. For example, in Kālidāsa’s rendition of the tale of Purūravas and Urvaśī, Purūravas wanders about in a state of madness born of extreme longing for his beloved Urvaśī, who had disappeared in a sage’s garden (Vikramorvaśīya, Act 4). Although one can say that Purūravas is possessed with longing for Urvaśī and that he exhibits many of the same mental and physical symptoms of spirit or deity possession, he cannot be possessed in the sense being addressed here. Kālidāsa likely would have called it āveśa, praveśa, and so forth had he intended it in the primary meanings discussed here. Nevertheless, the proximity of Purūravas’s experience demonstrates that it is probably unwise to label an experience “possession” unless the sources provide direct support. Sanskrit texts tend to be precise to a fault, even if interpretation is occasionally warranted. In spite of frequent self-censorship of possession and emotion in general, especially in the colonial period, as discussed earlier, most Sanskrit authors, especially dramatists, poets, and redactors of religious and secular tales, had the means to point the reader in that direction. It is important at this point to enquire about whether, or indeed the degree to which, the imitation participates in the essence or quintessence of possession. In support of Kālidāsa’s Purūravas, we again turn to Vallabhācārya. He asks in the second verse of his brief Nirodhalakùaâa: “Will the Lord bestow on me that pleasure that the gopīs as well as all the residents of Vraja enjoyed in Gokula?” Puruùottama, commenting on this, invokes the “maxim of delirium resulting from deep attachment” (āsaktibhramanyāya). As a result of deep attachment and longing, it is possible to become delirious and behave as if one is really in the presence of the longed-for individual. Puruùottama cites the classic example of the longing of the milkmaids after the disappearance of Kóùâa from the great circle dance (rāsalīlā; BhP 10.29–33). After Kóùâa disappears, one of the milkmaids begins playing with her comrades, acting as if she were herself Kóùâa and they were Yaśodā. Following her example, the others reciprocate. To whatever extent this might be drama or ritual, complicating the balance of spontaneity and control, the point is that it was enacted in order to help disclose their bhāva or emotional state. The gopīs were not, of course, Kóùâa and Yaśodā, at least in their occupations as milkmaids, nor are they explicitly described as entering into states of possession. But their mental states so closely resemble possession states that they are referred to as bhāvāveśa or līlāveśa. And in this way they became Kóùâa and Yaśodā, at least temporarily.


In this way, āveśa becomes closely connected with bhāva. The latter has the general meaning of “becoming, existing, a state of being” but more generally indicates “nature, condition, emotion, mood, experience.”37 It is “as much an emotional as a cogitative state and is not ideational at all.”38 It is the word usually employed when speaking of devotional experience, emotion, absorption, a state of being.39 Bhakti poets speak of bhāva, in which the devotee partakes of the nature of the deity, in terms akin to possession, including entry, immersion, ecstasy, insanity, and loss of self-consciousness. The following passages from the BhP illustrate the proximity of āveśa to bhāva. In the eponymous Bhramara-Gīta (BhP 10.47), the gopīs praise a black bee (bhramara) said to be the Supreme Lord, Kóùâa, in disguise. Kóùâa responds: “Having totally immersed [āveśya] your mind, which is completely devoid of [other] tendencies, in me, meditating uninterruptedly on my form [anusmarantyan], you will soon come to me.”40 This is nearly identical to BhG 12.2 and other passages cited above, but an experiential means, cognitive operation, or mood—in other words a bhāva—is indicated here. Bhāva, then, indicates that an immersion into an experience, an āveśa, has already occurred. In the rāsalīlā section of the same book (skandha) of the BhP, Kóùâa explains to the gopīs that “bhāva of me results from hearing [my praises], seeing [me], meditating [on me], and singing [about me], not from close physical proximity to me” (BhP 10.29.27).41 The difference between āveśa and bhāva seems to be that āveśa is a state of “open” absorption, in that the elements of the experience as well as the identity of the experiencer can shift in different directions, while bhāva denotes a specific experiential state in which the identity of the experiencer is not necessarily threatened. In bhakti-induced āveśa, the very self-identity of the experiencer is reconstituted by the Lord’s presence and bliss as the devotee “comes to” the Lord, which in the case of the BhP implies entrance into the Lord’s līlā (divine play). Bhakti induced bhāva, in contrast, is a mood that allows the devotee to experience grace, in this case Kóùâa’s, while not necessarily entering into the creative forces (or līlā) that inhere in that grace. Another passage in the BhP describes āveśa as a liberating condition, something that cannot necessarily be said of bhāva: “Even while engaged in action, one whose thoughts are absorbed [āviù•acittan] in your lotus feet—hearing, reciting, contemplating, and causing others to remember [saÅsmarayan] your auspicious names and forms—is not destined for rebirth” (10.2.37). Bhāva, an “emergent mood”42 engendered by devotional absorption, is characterized by a depth of mood familiar to āveśa. However, āveśa is a deeper and more generalized ex-


perience that can be induced only by more advanced devotees. Anyone may experience bhāva, but very few can experience true āveśa. An illuminating description of this distinction may be found not in a Sanskrit text but in the Bengali Kathāmóta, the biography of the nineteenth-century saint Ramakrishna, by “M” (Matsyendranath Gupta). It is striking that Ramakrishna’s frequent states of divine intoxication resonate with those of Śrī Caitanya (a fact that Ramakrishna himself did not fail to notice—indeed, he claimed to be an incarnation of Śrī Caitanya). In this text the terms bhāva and āveśa are brought together in an example of a usage that is still attested in contemporary North Indian spiritual discourse.43 Jeffrey Kripal notes that the Kathāmóta records Ramakrishna as bhāvāviù•ha (established in ecstasy) and samādhiù•ha (established in union).44 Kripal has not fully grasped the distinction between the two. In fact bhāvāviù•ha is better translated as “immersed in bhāva” (āviù•ha here should be read as āviù•a)45 or “possessed by divine experience.” The Kathāmóta describes Ramakrishna’s states of ecstasy in the following terms: “When Ramakrishna is in samādhi, his body becomes motionless, his eyes and lips are parted slightly in pleasure, his lips are sealed in a smile. In bhāva, on the other hand, he can move, even dance, and his lips are free to talk, even if his speech is garbled in its ecstatic drunkenness.”46 In this text, at least, āveśa and samādhi are implicitly equated and are distinguished from bhāva, which is clearly an ecstatic state coincident with ordinary relational activity. It is not without interest that the term bhāvāveśa appears perhaps as early as the seventh century, in the farcical drama Mattavilāsa, supposedly composed by the Pallava king Mahendravarman, also the reputed author of the Bhagavadajjukā. In the prologue, the sūtradhāra introduces a besotted tantric skull-bearer (kapālī) as one whose pilgrimage through the three worlds is characterized by many moods (rasa) as a result of immersion in (divine) experience (bhāvāveśavaśād).47 The state of bhāvāveśa in the Mattavilāsa is similar to Ramakrishna’s bhāvāviù•(h)a in that the bhāva is the experiential state, while the āveśa is the means by which it is experienced. In other words, āveśa here denotes a process that also helps to define an experiential state.

Āveśa, Bhāva, and Alternative Vedāntas In this connection, it is relevant to reprise an observation by A. K. Ramanujan on Nammā~vār, the great Tamil saint whose poetry predates by several


centuries the works of Vallabhācārya and Rūpa Gosvāmī. Nammā~vār “speaks frequently of being entered, filled, taken over, enslaved as well as enabled by a divine being,”48 characteristics of possession found in contemporary ethnographies. Although Nammā~vār wrote in Tamil, this description could be extended to many Sanskrit authors. In this way, bhāva adds a dimension of emotional intensity to the Vedic āveśa, in which the (ostensible) instigator is not the possessor but the one being possessed. Āveśa and bhāva appear to share this feature, except that bhāva adds a dimension of emotional clarity and direction to the āveśa. One of the characteristic features of “alternative” advaita theologies— including the viśiù •ādvaita (qualified nondualism) of Rāmānuja, the śuddhādvaita (pure nondualism) of Vallabhācārya, and the acintyabhedābheda (inconceivable nondifference in difference) of Śrī Caitanya and his disciples—is that the universe and the Lord are held to be equally real and equally absolute.49 This may be seen in the sense of identification of the sādhaka-rūpa and the siddha-rūpa in rāgānugabhakti-sādhana described above and in Vallabhācārya’s assertion that an image or (otherwise considered) representation of Kóùâa is not a representation of the Supreme Lord, but his actual embodied form (svarūpa). This continuum of reality from the absolute to the relative introduces one of the problematic issues involved in possession. If the universe is held to be false (mithya) or illusory (māyā), or as matter and spirit ontologically and phenomenologically separate, then any animation, any discernible sign of life may be construed as spirit animating, taking control of, possessing matter. This would be similar to cases we have discussed, in which brahman possesses intrinsically inert, insentient, imagined, and thoroughly malleable form, or puruùa animates prakóti but remains ever distinct from it. The corpse of the dead king Amaruka is just that—a corpse, dead, inert, insentient, devoid of divine essence, a mere product fortuitously placed. In this way, all life is nothing but possession—the “natural” interpenetration of spirit and matter—and phenomena otherwise regarded as possession are little more than embellishments on that theme, a more nuanced or higher order of possession. Irrespective of how such a general notion might interact with formal philosophical doctrine, most possession accounts in religious literature and Sanskrit fiction endorse this separation, at least for dramatic or narrative purposes. Indeed, the dramatic gravity of accounts of possession in the Upaniśads, the Kathāsaritsāgara, and the MBh, for example, would be severely diminished if this ontological gap were not assumed.


However, in Vallabhācārya’s śuddhādvaita the entire universe is divinized; brahman, always called akùarabrahman in the Vallabha school, is regarded as the body of Kóùâa. Thus the Lord cannot interpenetrate with the universe as a separate insentient entity. Furthermore, all beings (jīvas) are regarded as particles of the Lord (bhagavadaÅśa), thus the nature of their relationship with akùarabrahman is similar to that of the Lord himself. Just as embodiment is divinized, āveśa is, in the idiom readily employed in the texts of the Vallabha school, ādhidaivikī (divine), rather than ādhibhautikī (worldly). This distinction may be useful with respect to the material reviewed here: ādhidaivikī possession must bear the extra weight of special philosophical or theological context, while ādhibhautikī possession, devoid of this weight, has greater narrative and dramatic freedom. The former is limited to certain highly developed bhakti contexts (it is doubtful that devotional possession noted by anthropologists, for example, that described by Caldwell, Vogt, or Sax, would be situated in theological contexts similar to that of Vallabhācārya), while the latter dominates elsewhere, including that described in the Upaniùads, the MBh, yoga, and the medical literature. The devotional context of āveśa would not be complete without looking at related uses of the central concept of bhakti, namely love, applied in human situations, in which devotional love is also arguably manifest. Hara cites several relevant passages from the Kathāsaritsāgara (KSS) in which āveśa is linked with the word smara (erotic love): e.g., smarāviù•a (possessed by erotic love; KSS 81:55); smarajvarāveśavivaśa (in a swoon as a result of possession by lovesickness; KSS 119.156); ārūbhasmarāveśa (overcome by sexual conquest; KSS 65.230).50 The Prakrit drama Karpūramañjari (2.1) by Rājaśekhara (c. 900 c.e.) also employs the word āvesaÅ as “amorous passion.” In the Rāmāyaâa (5.1.33) we also find the expression vīryam āviveśa (possessed by virility). The meanings of Tamil aâaãku (“woman” and “possession”) were occasionally conflated. Burrow states, “Sexual desire and lovesickness can also be regarded as a kind of possession and be denoted by the word aâaãku.” He provides the following verse: “They say that infatuation with deceiving women for those devoid of discriminating knowledge is possession by an evil spirit” (āyum aôiviçar allārkk aâaãk eçpa / māyar maka{ir mayakku / Kuôa{ 918).51 The valorization of evil and diminution of women displayed here is not shared in most of these texts. Nevertheless, these terms share syntactical territory with English expressions such as “possessed by an idea” and “possessed by a desire.” Neither the English nor the Sanskrit are “possession” in the sense strictly applied by anthropologists, but


they express a pressing immediacy, a passion or passionate intent, which are indicative of the category of possession attested in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil texts, and apparently in English as well.

Notes 1. Vallabhācārya’s enumeration of the chapters differs from that of most standard editions. This corresponds to BhP 10.30.24 in the text used in other sectarian traditions. 2. Cf. BhG 8.5, 12.7; also F. Smith 1998b. 3. Cf. BhG 1.28 kópayā parayāviù•ho (filled with supreme tenderness); also 2.1; but 8.10c: bhruvor madhye prāâam āveśya samyak (having properly focused the prāâa between the eyebrows). 4. Trans. Ingalls et al. 1990:653. 5. tvam eva paramātmasvarūpo viśvasāras tasya bhaktin śraddhādipūrvaka upāsanākramajas tadāveśas tena tulyam api na labdham āstāÅ tāvat tajjātīyam; see also Ingalls et al. 1990:655. A sensitive study of the relationship between the words śraddhā, kópā, anugraha, and prasāda would greatly enhance our understanding of bhakti. Steps in this direction are: Bhattacharya 1971; Hoens 1969; Jamison 1996: 176–184. Bhattacharya and Jamison note, appositely for Abhinavagupta’s definition of bhakti, that in śraddhā the senses of trust and confidence seem to precede that of faith. 6. For a succinct discussion of bhakti-rasa according to the Gaubīya school of Vaiùâavism, see Haberman 1988:31ff. For bhakti as a rasa, see Haberman 2003:118ff., 141–153. 7. Cf. Gnoli 1968:82f.n4; Raghavan 1978:440. 8. Abhinavabhāratī on the Nā •yaśāstra; cf. Gnoli 1968:21, 82ff. 9. For a full translation and explication of this text, see F. Smith 1998a. 10. Nirodhalakùaâa (NL) 12–13. Puruùottama paraphrases this in his commentary on NL 14: the anxiety (udvega) produced by saÅsārāveśa may be remedied by constant and unconditional offerings to the Lord (sarvavastusamarpaâarūpasādhana-). 11. bhagavadāveśe bhagavaddharmā vyāpakatvādayan tatra śruyante na tu jīvo vyāpakan | Cf. Timm 1985:241. Better is Miśra 1971, a Hindi translation of the same text. 12. Bālabodha v. 14; see F. Smith 2005. 13. SaÅnyāsanirâaya v. 6. 14. Subodhinī on BhP 10.32.6–7 (Yugalagītā): āveśo devavaśaś ca pūrvanirūpitau | līlāveśo ’dhunā nirūpyate | (Āveśa as the influence of the deity has been explained before; now āveśa in līlā is explained). 15. Subodhinī on BhP 10.2.37: smaraâena kriyān purâāś cittāveśaś ca tatra hi | jñānakriye yadā viùâus tadā mokùo na saÅśayan || See also Tattvārthadīpanibandha 45c–46b: vairāgyaÅ sāãkhyayogau ca tapo bhaktiś ca keśave | pañcaparveti vidyeyaÅ yathā vidvān hariÅ viśet || (The fivefold knowledge through which a wise person may


enter into Hari are dispassion, SāÅkhya, Yoga, austerities, and love for Krùâa). The process of entering can thus work both ways: Hari entering the devotee or the devotee entering Hari. 16. For the text, see F. Smith 1998a. 17. Lālūbha••a, in his Prameyaratnārâava (cf. Das 1986:37), a Puù•imārga text of the late seventeenth century, cites Muâbaka Up. (iti śruten) 3.2.9 in elaborating on this: brahmavid brahmaiva bhavatīti śruten brahmabhāve sati bhagavaddharmāveśe jāyamānasya vyāpakatvasya bhagavadvākyaviùayatvāt. The point here is that the experience of brahman (brahmabhāve sati) brings onto the devotee the qualities of the Lord (bhagavaddharmāveśa). 18. This part of the Aâubhāùya was composed by Vi••halnāthjī. Vallabhācārya composed the Aâubhāùya through sūtra 3.2.23, and the remainder was completed by his son; cf. introduction to the text by M. T. Telivala, the original editor (1927), reproduced in Śrīmad Brahmasūtrāâubhāùyam, Caturtho Bhāgan. 19. ayogolake vahnir iva tasminn āveśalakùaâan sambandho ’sti | 20. yatra jīve svayaÅ bhagavān āviśati tadā bhagavadāveśād bhagavaddharmā api kecit tasminn āvirbhavanti | 21. Handelman and Shulman 2004:40; see also Chapter 4, p. 128. 22. De 1942:243. See also www.indiadivine.com/avatara-incarnations2-y.htm, a Web site by Atmatattva Das that succinctly describes different lists of avatāras. 23. De 1942:315–316. 24. Ibid.:36ff., 564–572. 25. Translation of Sanjib Kumar Chaudhuri (1940), quoted in Hein 1972:110. See also Lutgendorf 1991:184, 199, for further examples of possession, especially of Hanumān, in Rām līlā performance. 26. Haberman 1988:72. 27. Ibid.:75. See also Wulff 1984 for the importance of devotion in Rūpa’s dramas. Among the main themes in the Vidagdhamādhava are impersonation and disguise, distinctly on the other side of the fuzzy boundary demarcating possession. 28. “Passion (rāga) is the state of being naturally and completely absorbed [paramāviù•atā] in the beloved; that form of devotion that consists of such passion is here declared to be Rāgātmikā” (Haberman 2003:76–77). Elsewhere, Haberman duly notes that “[t]he practitioner of bhakti, however, never identifies with Kóùâa. This fact distinguishes bhakti from Tantric visualization and identification, where the practitioner does identify with the god” (1988:192n40). See Delmonico’s comments on the term paramāviù•atā in his review of Haberman 1988: “Āviù•atā is another form of āveśa, which means mental or emotional absorption in an idea or person. Thus, rāga or passion in the context of Rūpa’s discussion means a spontaneous or natural paramount absorption in the desired object, in this case Kóùâa. Both Jīva and Viśvanātha say that this state of absorption is an effect through which Rūpa means to point to its cause, a thirst or desire consisting of love (preman)” (Delmonico 1993:145). Rūpa’s meaning is that supreme emotional absorption in Kóùâa is in fact the highest access to him.


29. Haberman 1988:89–104 discusses the different views of Rūpa Gosvāmī and the apostate Rūpa Kavirāja, whose views on embodiment constituted a heresy. His views were condemned by a council held in Jaipur in 1727, and he was subsequently forced to leave Vrindavan and live out his days in Assam. It is Rūpa Kavirāja who describes the siddha-rūpa as the “meditative body” (bhāvanāmayarūpa, antaścintitarūpa). 30. Haberman 1988:89. He lists three other terms for this body: bhagavatī-tanu, vaikuâ•ha-mūrti, and mukta-puruùa. A related doctrine is found in the Puù•imārga, in Harirāya’s commentary, called Bhāvprakāś, on the Brajbhāùā vārtās or “histories” written by Gokulanātha, one of the grandsons of Vallabhācāóya. These include the tales of the 84 disciples of Vallabhācārya (Caurāsī Vaiùâavan kī Vārtā) and the 252 disciples of Vi••halnāthjī, Vallabhācārya’s second son (Dosau Bāvan Vaiùâavan kī Vārtā). Harirāya’s commentary and its doctrine of triple embodiment, called tīn janma (three lives), requires further study. Briefly, however, the three janmas are the adhibhautika, the body of the individual before initiation into the Puùtimārga, the adhyātmika or spiritual body reconstituted after brahmasambandha, the Puùtimārga rite of initiation, for use in sevā and in discourse with other bhaktas, and the adhidaivika or divine body as a consort of Kóùâa’s (e.g., Candrāvalī) adopted for use in the eternal līlā, in Goloka. 31. antaścintitābhiù•atatsevopayogidehan; Haberman 2003:96n126. 32. See Gold 1991:102–113, for an interesting discussion of the flexibility and interchangeability of gender in the Gopi Cand epic. See also Hancock 1995:85, who follows Ramanujan on the notion of the voluntary lowering of status from masculine to feminine in order to achieve bhakti, hence, possession. 33. Haberman notes that there are many manuscripts in Vrindavan that remain unexamined. 34. Hein 1972:109. 35. Caldwell 1996:204. It is perhaps natural that such folklore would arise, regardless of the historical accuracy of such incidents. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl uses the term “participation mystique” to describe the “ardent investment of the self in another object or person, as when a Zuñi dancer becomes the god whose mask he wears” (cited in Pesic 2002:148). 36. The eminent Indian archaeologist, Dr. M. S. Nagaraja Rao, a native of Mysore, informs me that his father, M. Srinivasa Rao (1900–1955), a noted actor who performed with a traveling troupe in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamilnadu for three decades, was best known for his role as Hanumān in the Laãkādahana drama. In this play Hanumān leads the army of monkeys and bears to Laãkā to rescue Sītā from the clutches of Rāvaâa. Srinivasa Rao would prepare for this role by fasting and living a celibate life, qualities for which Hanumān was celebrated. He would break his fast only during the drama itself, after sacking Laãkā, by dining on bananas, continuing his Hanumān bhāva. 37. See also Collins’s remarks on bhāva (1982:156f.). 38. Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994:212. 39. An example of the latter is found in Kathāsaritsāgara 1.2.59, mūrkhabhāva


(the state of being a fool). The anthropomorphizing of emotion in India can be traced to the ñgvedic hymns (10.83–84) to manyu (anger). One can argue that this is an early description for what later was labeled bhāva. 40. BhP 10.47.36. The sense of meditating on form is suggested by the verb anu√smó; cf. BhP 11.14.27. 41. śravaâād darśanād dhyānān mayi bhāvo ’nukīrtanāt | na tathā saÅnikarùeâa. Occasionally other terms are attested that indicate an intensity of experience usually associated with āveśa. For example, the Daśakumāracarita has the phrase upobhamatsarā prāvasan (consumed by jealousy). 42. Humphrey and Laidlaw’s term (1994:230ff.). Emergent moods, they say, “are culturally recognized psychological states cum physical actions which are available for people to switch into” (p. 233). 43. I have heard the term bhāvāveś (in Hindi) used casually in Vrindaban. 44. Kripal 1995:39. 45. It is not clear to me whether the mistake is in Kripal’s transcription or M’s Bengali spelling; I do not have access to the original. The Bengali koùas do not show āviù•ha, only āviù•a; cf. Bandhyopādhyāy 1988:293. 46. Kripal 1995:340n63. 47. Lockwood and Bhat 1994. See also bhāvāveśa in Hemacandra’s Anekārthasaãgraha (4.161). 48. Ramanujan 1981:117. See Chapter 4 for the Tamil terms. See also Gold 1987:94ff. Vaiùâava texts, particularly those on Kóùâa bhakti emphasize correctly generated bhāva, in which the bhakta is consumed by love for Kóùâa. Also relevant here is the view of Sri Aurobindo, who concludes, with respect to bhakti, that after enlightened realization has occurred, strenuous activity to maintain it is not necessary because “knowledge of the Divine takes possession of one’s consciousness on all levels” (Ghose 1971:307). 49. Cf. Puruùottamācārya’s commentary Vedāntaratnamañjuùā on Nimbārka’s Daśaślokī (Brahmasūtra-bhāùya viii–ix, 47–49). 50. Hara 1979a:270n56; also KSS 22.113, 95.23: madanāviù•a (madana = smara); 37.205, smarāveśavivaśa; also Rāmāyaâa 3.44.13, 46.17: manmathaśarāviù•a (overcome by the arrow of Eros) (Manmatha is also identical to Smara, both being names of Kāma[deva], the God of love); Skanda Purāâa 3.3.22.56: smarāveśa (excitement due to love); Matsya Purāâa 154.246: nāveśaÅ samapadyata (not fallen victim to passion); Madanaketucarita 73, a mid-eighteenth-century text on erotics, has the term bhāvāveśāsnigdhatārā (love as total immersion in passion). See also Bóhaddevatā 7.46–47, where pra√viś, a more logical choice for sexual entrance, is employed: bhagāntaram praviśya (having entered inside her vulva) (the Maruts entering the vulva of Ghoùā), and above, chapter 6 notes. It is relevant to note that the visual depiction of complete swooning to the forces of interpersonal love, an acceptable kind of possession in India, is readily available in Hindi cinema. I suspect that this aesthetic has a long history; see, for example, the 1960 classic film Barsaat ki Raat. 51. Burrow 1979:283.



IV

Worldly and Otherworldly Ruptures Possession as a Healing Modality

I

n contemporary India, Tantra and Āyurveda contain notable overlaps, because most of the clients who seek out tantric ritualists do so in a search for cures for physical or mental illnesses or for familial or social distress. Although most tantrics know little formal Āyurveda, many, and in some locales most, vaidyas or āyurvedic doctors will admit tantric notions and processes into their thinking and, hence, into their practice. These notions and processes include principles of tantric physiology, including cakras, an extensive closed circuitry of nābis or nerve channels, and the potential development of kuâbalinī śakti, an upwardly moving energy in the spine that generates ecstatic experience.1 In addition, and perhaps of greater practical value to a minority of vaidyas, is the practice of tantric homa, fire offerings in the name of a diseased client according to tantric practice. This is justified as part of daivavyapāśraya-cikitsā (spiritual treatment), which we examine in Chapter 12. More important, however, for the vast majority of vaidyas is the employment of rasāyaâas (metallic preparations and compounds) as part of a vast prophylactic pharmacopeia. Most of these are the heritage of Tantra, in both text and practice, which we also examine in Chapter 12. Scholars of Āyurveda, however, must perforce con-

364 Part IV. Worldly and Otherworldly Ruptures

sider this science as distinct from Tantra for several reasons. First, Āyurveda is and always has been primarily an empirical practice, a system (or collage of systems) of diagnosis and treatment for physical and mental illness. Generally, āyurvedic practitioners have striven to maintain the traditions of practice in which they have been educated, which are most often based on the textuality associated with one of the three primary texts of Āyurveda—the Caraka-, Suśruta-, and Aù•āãgahódaya-SaÅhitās—but have, nevertheless, adapted their knowledge (and śāstra) over time, in accord with the demands of ever-expanding cultural, textual, and religious boundaries. Tantra may be said to be one of the two primary religious movements of South Asia in first millennium c.e. India (the other being bhakti). In a generally successful quest for legitimacy, both Āyurveda and Tantra have long ascribed their origins to the Atharvaveda. This ascription is of limited use for the practice of Āyurveda in spite of such assertions in the introductions to certain foundational āyurvedic texts. For example, Suśruta states that Āyurveda is a subsidiary limb of the Atharvaveda (AV).2 The basis for this, of course, is the exposition in the AV of healing practices and rhetorical strategies for expressing knowledge of human physiology. This, however, did not amount to Āyurveda in either theory or practice.3 Similarly, Tantra was a movement distinct from practical grounding in the AV or any other vedic text. It arose in the first millennium as a series of esoteric practices, some likely from nonliterate or “folk” cultures.4 These were subsequently systematized and brahmanized over a thousand-year period. However, the distant resonances felt by both āyurvedic and tantric practitioners to the healing and biomagical practices found in the AV and its more specified ritual text, the Kauśikasūtra,5 alone were sufficient to locate both Āyurveda and Tantra within the expanding realm of orthopraxis. This was the case even though for at least a millennium before this time the vast majority of both tantrics and vaidyas knew the AV in name and reputation only, and the Kauśikasūtra not at all. Nevertheless, this rhetorical situating of Āyurveda and Tantra as auxiliary vedic “sciences” was sufficient to valorize them socially and intellectually, to render them significant beyond the boundaries of their own domains of practice. Perhaps it was not unnatural, then, that at a certain relatively proximate point in time tantric practice was admitted into the precincts of Āyurveda, though not all vaidyas in any region of India ever uniformly applied tantric principles and practices within their medical practice. Even for vaidyas who actively disregarded tantric practice, however, there was a passive recogni-

Possession in Tantra 365

tion that Tantra, intelligently applied, was a legitimate healing modality. To its primary practitioners and architects, however, Tantra was never simply a system of biomagical healing. It was a strategy for healing existential disorder, of which physical disorder was a manifestation. Like Āyurveda, it vigorously employed material of this world in its quest for physical and spiritual perfection. Possession was one of the many concepts Tantra and Āyurveda shared. The latter dealt almost entirely with “negative” possession by bhūtas, pretas, and other unbidden and inhospitable ethereal creatures, while the former explored both “positive” oracular and initiatory possession even as it admitted the possibility of “negative” possession. Because questions of identity lay at the core of possession, indeed because both disease and ecstatic (or any other) trance states were often believed to have external agents that disrupted the flow of personal identity, tantric practice sometimes progressed into tantric medicine and found a place within Āyurveda. In this way, Āyurveda and Tantra came together sufficiently in the orbit of possession to be considered together. In this section, Chapters 10 and 11 are devoted to discussions of “positive” tantric possession while Chapter 12 comprises accounts of disease-producing possession and its treatment according to both āyurvedic and tantric texts. Chapter12 also includes my own observations of spirit-healing practice on the ground based on fieldwork undertaken among āyurvedic practitioners and mantravādins in Kerala.

Notes 1. This subject has received considerable attention in Western-language sources for nearly a century. Most of it is within the popular spiritual media. The only accessible study dedicated exclusively to kuâbalinī from a historical, Sanskritic, perspective is Silburn 1988. Much more work on this remains to be done. 2. iha khalv āyurvedaÅ nāmopāãgam atharvavedasya, Suśruta-saÅhitā sūtrasthānam 1.6. 3. This has been discussed frequently. See, e.g., Wujastyk: “The fact that āyurvedic texts claim to ‘derive from’ the Veda is not evidence for medical history, but rather evidence of a bid by medical authors for social acceptance and religious sanction” (1998:17). As for the connection between Tantra and Āyurveda, a major scholarly study of the recent history of their connections remains to be written. 4. See Davidson 2002 for discussions of the origins of Tantric Buddhism in Indian lower-caste practices. 5. See Bahulkar 1994.


Possess Constructed Bodies and Empowerment Just as spirits [grahān] possess [āviśanti] people in ordinary life, in the same way those with attributes of the Lord possess [āviśanti] those who are liberated. — Ś I V Ā G R A YO G I N in Śaivaparibhāùā


Samāveśa as Tantric Realization Tantra is a category increasingly subject to debate. It is now regarded by many of the most informed scholars as a category with vague characterization and definition, an amorphous medley of practices, rites, and doctrines that became tantric by attrition; they simply do not fit elsewhere.1 This, combined with a Western fascination for things tantric (especially a mistaken identification of Tantra with sex), enables most nonspecialists to dodge the problem of Tantra. Bearing in mind this caveat, I can now undertake to unpack a knowingly (and frustratingly) incomplete inventory of possessionrelated practices and phenomena in mostly South Asian tantric literature. This includes, first, initiatory possession, which in many tantric texts is identified as samāveśa. This term may also designate another shadowy concept usually polluted by Western expectations, namely, enlightenment. Thus, samāveśa is not only the process of realization in tantric texts, an initial and startling possession by a deity that is invoked by the ācārya for the benefit of the disciple during a carefully orchestrated initiation, but its goal as well. In these Tantras, samāveśa is a brahmanical, body-centered, transformation (probably tantric by attrition) in which the deity to be realized is an active


participant. With or without the name samāveśa, however, tantric possession may also be a kind of ritually induced oracular experience practiced by people who would never consider themselves tāntrikas. It may also indicate certain exorcistic practices that survived at the margins of Tantra (and Āyurveda). This chapter first discusses the notion of samāveśa as it appears in the Tantras of Kashmir and northeastern India. We then turn to the phenomenon of divinization of the body, a peculiarly brahmanical practice involving the use of mantras and hand gestures (mudrā). This quasi-Vedic practice gained wide currency in a variety of Indian ritual traditions, where it was continually modified, especially, as we shall see toward the end of the chapter, in Tantric Buddhism. Another topic that must be addressed in the same context is pratiù•hā or prāâapratiù•hā, consecration or divinization of images, the transformation of prepared (kótrima) stone or wooden objects into deities by investing them with eyes and breath. These discussions strongly affect our deliberations on Indic notions of selfhood and personality, which, as we have seen, bear strongly on South Asian constructions of possession. These deliberations finally lead us into an area of cultural discursivity that is often neglected in studies that are largely philological, philosophical, theoretical, and text-critical, as this one is: This is the area of artistic representation. One of the principal notions explicated here is that of multiple personality and the ease with which it is accepted in South Asia. As fully as this is represented in the ethnographic record, in an array of Sanskrit texts from the ñgveda to the Mahābhārata to devotional literature to the Tantras we discuss in this chapter to the ayurvedic and allied texts discussed in Chapter 12, it is perhaps nowhere better seen than in Indian art. Because the Tantric literature explicates the themes of internal spaciousness and the divinization of the body better than other genres of literature, this chapter concludes with a few examples of how this manifests in Indian art.

Discipline and Enlightenment Along with the Vedas and the two Sanskrit epics, the Tantras provide the richest sources for the phenomenology of religious possession in premodern India, and, along with the Mahābhārata (MBh) the richest sources for its analysis. Indeed, it is evident that the Tantras, particularly those of the Śaiva and Śākta sects of Kashmir and northeastern India that developed around


the turn of the first millennium c.e., confront the issue of possession and problematize it more concretely than anywhere else in Sanskrit literature. The Tantras of both the dualistic Śaiva Siddhānta and the nondualistic Trika and Pratyabhijñā Śaiva sects of Kashmir address possession practically and philosophically, domesticating it ritually and conferring on it philosophical credibility, apparently sensitive to its historical prominence as a popular and legitimate mode of religious experience and expression.2 Drawing from northern and northeastern Tantras (mostly unpublished) of the eighth to twelfth centuries c.e., Alexis Sanderson describes tantric initiates, skull and trident in hand, muttering invocations precisely where the uninitiated were in greatest danger of possession: on mountains, in caves, by rivers, in forests, at the feet of isolated trees, in deserted houses, at crossroads, in the jungle temples of the MotherGoddesses, but above all in the cremation grounds. . . . [These initiates] moved from the domain of male autonomy and responsibility idealized by the MīmāÅsakas into a visionary world of permeable consciousness dominated by the female and the theriomorphic.3

Moreover, their spiritual practices were focused intensely on the “liberating possession” of ferocious female deities acknowledged as incarnations of Śiva’s śakti.4 Assuming the centrality of a statement in a Kāpālika text, representing a Kashmiri sect of cremation ground ritual (śmaśāna sādhana) specialists in which possession must have been prominent (as noted by Sanderson), both the Śaiva Siddhānta (saiddhāntika) and nondual (non-saiddhāntika) Kashmiri sectarian texts turn the concept of possession around, at least philosophically.5 The non-saiddhāntika (or atimārga) Kāpālika Śaivaparibhāùā, by Śivāgrayogin, states succinctly, “Kāpalikas attain equipoise [sāmyam, i.e.. enlightenment] through samāveśa. Just as spirits [ grahān] possess [āviśanti] people in ordinary life, in the same way those with attributes of the Lord [viz., Śiva] possess [āviśanti] those who are liberated.”6 This position is attacked by the saiddhāntika Śaivas because of “its dangerous resemblance to possession by evil spirits and the subject’s loss of identity and autonomy.”7 As a correction to the Kāpālika view, the Śaiva texts posit a multifaceted possession. Three facets may be identified here: first, āveśa or samāveśa as spiritual practice, from unassisted meditation to ritually assisted initiation;8 second, as a kind of special knowledge; and, third, as a state of enlightenment.


Because the texts do not deal with these separately, and because they are readily evident from the discourse, it will not be necessary here to separate them as if they were distinct categories. The texts primarily consulted here are Utpaladeva’s Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā, Abhinavagupta’s two commentaries on this text, called Vimarśinī (on the text itself ) and Vivótivimarśinī (on Utpaladeva’s lost autocommentary), Abhinavagupta’s great Tantrāloka, and Kùemarāja’s Pratyabhijñāhódayam. With respect to practice, samāveśa is identified by Abhinavagupta, in his Vimarśinī on Utpaladeva’s nondualist Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā, as abhyāsa, yogic and spiritual practice.9 Through such discipline, says Abhinavagupta, the practitioner may realize his or her identity with the Supreme Lord, even if this identity is qualified or limited by the human body, which has the capacity to realize the divine powers of the Lord only partially.10 Samāveśa is not only practice, however; it is also the goal. As Louise Finn says unambiguously, citing a commentary on the Vāmakeśvara Tantra, “in Kashmir Śaivism liberation is achieved not through samādhi but through samāveśa.”11 This is consistent with the general tenor of non-saiddhāntika Śaiva thought, in which mokùa is viewed as a state of possession or samāveśa in that it is determined by levels of initiation, which are in turn verified by symptoms of śaktipāta, recognized as a variety of āveśa.12 This śaktipāta is divine energy transmitted either by one’s guru or by a siddha who, apparently, may not necessarily be one’s guru. Abhinavagupta presents a fourfold classification of siddhas: celibates (ūrdhvaretas), heroes (vīra) who are on the path of Kula (kulavartman), noncelibates, and “non-physical siddhas who are non-physical gurus” (Tantrāloka [TĀ] 29.41–43).13 Jayaratha says that these disembodied gurus can enter (praveśa) the bodies of practitioners during the Kaula rite. Śaktipāta causes the initiate to become possessed (āveśa); symptoms are convulsions ( ghūrâi, kampa) and loss of consciousness (nidrā), the degree of possession revealed by their intensity (tīvra). Thence the objective was “immersion [samāveśa] into the body of consciousness; to make possession, or the eradication of individuality, permanent” (TĀ 29.207–208). The saiddhāntika texts recognize four means of realizing samāveśa, from least effective to most: (1) āâavopāya, corresponding to kriyā yoga with a dependence on external rituals; (2) śāktopāya, depending on the verbal practice of mantra śakti; (3) śāmbhavopāya, requiring a highly concentrated mental practice (icchā śakti) in order to merge with the absolute supreme being; and (4) anupāya, requiring no practice at all, in which merging with the absolute is achieved spontaneously, effortlessly.14


Utpaladeva asserts in his Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (3.2.12) that true knowledge (jñāna) is the primary characteristic of samāveśa. This arises when the manifestations of individuation brought on by Śiva’s projection into the individual are subordinated through appropriate yogic or spiritual practice, allowing the agency and knowledge of the conscious self to reveal themselves naturally.15 Somānanda states the goal in the opening verse of his Śivadóù•i: “Let Śiva, who is realized [samāviù•an] as our true nature, as a result of overcoming our self with his, perform obeisance to his own extended self with his innate śakti.”16 In his long commentary (Vivótivimarśinī) on this passage, Abhinavagupta compares and equates the present usages of samāveśa and abhyāsa17 with Bhagavadgītā 12.2,9–10, the foundational bhakti context of āveśa, in which Kóùâa asserts that the best of yogins are those whose “minds are immersed in me” (mayy āveśya manan) and, furthermore, that any spiritual strategy for bringing this about is acceptable. Abhinavagupta seemingly positioned himself on both sides of the debate between the saiddhāntika and non-saiddhāntika Śaivas, as he comments impartially but favorably on texts of all schools. On the one hand, his advocacy of saiddhāntika initiatory ritual (dīkùā) in the Tantrāloka and, on the other hand, his uncompromising nondualism evidenced in his Vimarśinī, Vivótivimarśinī, Parātriśikālaghuvótti, and elsewhere point to his acceptance of samāveśa as legitimate in both conservative, brahmanical initiation and transgressive nondualistic devotional, ritual, and meditative practice. In any case, the overall context was always permeated with bhakti sentiment, and, consistent with this, Abhinavagupta offers the striking, and perhaps inevitable, statement that all acts of worship, including singing hymns of praise to the Lord, making obeisance, meditation, and pūjā, are modes of possession.18 Both of these contexts, of bhakti and abhyāsa, emphasize the ritual nature of āveśa and samāveśa, irrespective of whether the ritual is external or internal. A saiddhāntika Krama example is samāveśa within the framework of a tantric initiation consisting of the ritual construction and installation of an internal maâbala, the Triśūlābjamaâbala.19 Similarly, samāveśa or “interpenetration” of the individual with the śakti or essential energy of Śiva is one of the goals of Śaiva nondualist meditative practice. While the latter may not be as complex in its ritualization as the former, meditative practice does indeed qualify as ritual—and it always did in India, accompanied as it was by rites of purification that inevitably preceded the practice, rites demarcating psychic and physical space in preparation for full immersion into ritual liminality. One of these prerequisites or ritual framing devices generally employed in


both meditative practice and in the (internal or external) construction and installation of a maâbala is divinization of the body through nyāsa, a mode of possession about which more is said below. For the moment, it must suffice to note a statement by Sanderson that could apply to nondualist meditative practice as well as to the saiddhāntika situation he is addressing: “That this internal worship should be preceded by the deification of the body accords with the general Tantric principle that only one who has become the deity may worship the deity.”20 The term rudraśakti-samāveśan (possession by Rudra’s energy), found in Tantrāloka 30.50, indicates a permanent infusion of this highest śakti within the individual. This indicates full identification of the individual with Śiva, though Sanderson notes that this term must be understood from its appearance in the Mālinīvijayottaratantra to indicate degrees of possession attained during initiation.21 Finally, āveśa/samāveśa is itself posited as a state of liberation or, more specifically, as two such states. In the text that marks the pinnacle of his teachings on Tantra, the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta offers a definition of āveśa: “Āveśa is the submerging of the identity of the individual unenlightened mind and the consequent identification with the supreme Śambhu who is inseparable from the primordial Śakti.”22 Thus the tantric sense of āveśa as possession must be nuanced as “interpenetration,” as suggested above. In this way, it represents a state of enlightenment. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this definition is that it is there at all; indeed, it may be the only definition of āveśa found in Sanskrit literature. Its definition, a description of liberation according to nondualist Śaivism, reflects the discussion noted above in Utpaladeva’s Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā and Abhinavagupta’s commentaries. This discourse on āveśa is continued in discussion on the variant term samāveśa, which, as surmised, is attested much more frequently than the former in Śaiva philosophical texts. According to the nondual Śaiva texts, samāveśa as abhyāsa or spiritual practice leads the practitioner to samāveśa as ontological state, here regarded as the “fourth state” (turyā) of the Upaniùads. Then, through samāveśa on that initial state of liberation, one enters a state “beyond the fourth” (turyātīta). Abhinavagupta expresses this in several ways. He states in the Vivótivimarśinī that samāveśa indicates a complete and perfect entry into one’s own true nature.23 Thus, Abhinavagupta “understands samāveśan to mean not the act of being entered but that of entering (into one’s true nature).”24 The reversal mentioned above, the reification of possession, is that


samāveśa is no longer an externally induced phenomenon or experience but one that is recognized as a facet of “recognition” (pratyabhijñā) within a thoroughly (and ritually) divinized individuality. Acknowledging Abhinavagupta’s dual use of samāveśa as epistemological process and ontological state, Kaw writes: “Turyā and Turyātīta are reached by yogins only when their samāveśa becomes uninterrupted after some practice. Such yogins who attain the highest state of Samāveśa are known as Jīvan-muktas, for even in their life time, they are said to be released.”25 This movement from samāveśa as process to samāveśa as state takes one further step beyond mere jīvanmukti, however. Assuming a prior equation of samāveśa with jīvanmukti, Abhinavagupta states that the highest state of contentment (tóptin), a state of divine comportment, is to be achieved by samāveśa or meditative immersion in jīvanmukti itself.26 In other words, the higher state of samāveśa is a transformation from a state of spiritual realization, an adhyātmika state, to a divine state (vibhūtirūpā tóptin), an adhidaivika state, “where the components of limitation, including saÅskāra, are totally dissolved and incorporated into the I.”27 Finally, Abhinavagupta sums up his position and issues a warning, which I paraphrase: “When the body is filled with light and takes on the form of consciousness [saÅvidrūpam], then, as a result of further spiritual practice [abhyāsāt], all the relative projections of Śiva from the void to the corporeal body [śūnyādidehāntam] become luminous with awareness and its aesthetic flavor. Then the qualities of consciousness [saÅviddharmān], empowered by the requisite śakti, rise to a divine state [vibhūtin]. But in the absence of spiritual practice this āveśa is only a momentary experience. In this case the physical characteristics may be the arising of bliss, shaking, collapsing, whirling, etc.; but a state of jīvanmukti is not achieved.”28 A generation after Abhinavagupta, his student Kùemarāja wrote a primer on the Pratyabhijñā Śaiva teachings as they were transmitted through a lineage culminating most recently with Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta. This text, the Pratyabhijñāhódaya, consists of twenty sūtras and Kùemarāja’s autocommentary. In this text, samāveśa is elevated from a term that is used only occasionally by Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta, and other nondualist Śaiva philosophers to one that obtains the greatest importance. In his introduction to sūtra 19, Kùemarāja states that cidānanda, the primary characteristic of enlightenment, a state of immeasurable ecstatic bliss, is a samādhi also known by the names samāveśa and samāpatti. Samādhi and samāpatti are, of course, the principal terms used in yoga for such transformational states of mind. In


spite of this stated equivalence, samāveśa is differentiated from them. It is a specific mode of merging with the Lord that assumes a process of demanifestation or deconstruction from the orderly processes of the manifestation and construction of individuality (krama). As a mental, psychological, and physical state, samāveśa may be identical to samādhi or samāpatti (which are differentiated in yoga texts), but it is cast in terms of specific processes and a specific teleology. In his commentary on sūtra 19, which discusses the possibility of integrating samādhi into ordinary waking state activity (vyutthāna), Kùemarāja cites a passage from the now-missing Kramasūtras: “The aspirant whose attention is directed outward remains in samāveśa by practicing kramamudrā, the nature of which is internal directedness. Under the influence of āveśa, there occurs in this practice first an entrance [praveśan] into the internal from the external, then an entrance [praveśan] into the external from an internalized state. Thus, this procedure, mudrākrama, includes the dynamics of both externalization and internalization [sabāhyābhyantaran].” Kùemarāja comments that this process confers the highest śakti on the aspirant at all times through āveśa/samāveśa, which is to say through complete immersion into or possession by cit (universal consciousness). Kùemarāja’s phrase is worth repeating: samāveśa has as its nature the unfolding of the concentrated essence of universal consciousness (cidrasa-). All of this, Kùemarāja concludes in his twentieth and final sūtra, is tantamount to entering completely into I-ness, into a state of full self-possession, possession of one’s complete and perfect self (pūrâāhantāveśa), a state in which one has total control over the vicissitudes of the external and internal realms, a state that is none other than Śiva.29

Divinizing the Body Michel Foucault noted that the body is the primary site of ritualization, where “the most minute and local social practices are linked up with the large-scale organization of power.”30 This is perhaps nowhere truer than in a ritual system in which the body is regarded as a receptive replicator of the cosmos. This is the case in much of Indian ritual, in which the macrocosm is classically held to naturalize, animate, and regulate, through ritual performance, the microcosmic power structures that engender and are defined by local social arrangements and practices. Such ritual is characterized by a close


relationship, more precisely, a seamless flow, of body and cosmos. A welldeveloped strategy for burnishing this relationship is ritual divinization of the body. One of the prominent features of religious experience as described in the Tantras, evident from the Śaiva (especially saiddhāntika) formulations of samāveśa, is the emphasis placed on the body, especially during initiation. The body is “immortalized” through the grace or revelation of Śakti in her jñāna (knowledge) aspect. One may be liberated not only while in the body, but through the body as well.31 The deity manifests within the body; indeed, it manifests as the body. This requires śaktipāta, described as a violent “descent” (pāta) upon the initiate, an immersion or possession (āveśa) of the initiate’s body and self by the śakti,32 which may be thought of as “power,” “grace,” and “cosmic (feminine) energy” together.33 The symptoms of śaktipāta resemble those of possession as described in ethnographic reports, for example, exhibitions of blissfulness, shaking, staggering, whirling, or falling on the ground unconscious.34 For example, Sax’s informants in Garhwal report that “the innermost self shakes” during possession.35 Diemberger reports that Tibetan female oracles have this sort of characteristic experience after having their “energy-channels” opened by a lama. She writes: “The god, in fact, is said to enter the body along the energy-channels and if these are not purified, the person may be affected by a variety of mental and physical illnesses. Uncontrolled visions, voices, fainting, weakness, and the experience of a death-like state are the most common symptoms.”36 There appears to be tantric influence in these initiatory experiences. The Vijñānabhairava (verse 69) also describes the entry of or possession by śakti (śaktyāveśa) in terms of sexual absorption, the man immersed not just in the śakti as the spiritual energy of the Goddess, but as real, live, full-bodied woman. This is compared to absorption in the bliss of brahman, which is then said to be the bliss of one’s own self. References to āveśavidhi (injunctions intended to bring about ritual possession) may be found in saiddhāntika Śaiva Tantras. Among these saiddhāntika texts are the Yoginītantras (employed by Sanderson) in which one of the features of an elaborate abhiùeka (ritual of empowerment) is the leading of blindfolded male initiates by female adepts (yoginī) or male assistants (karmavajrin) to the edge of a maâbala inscribed on the floor or ground. The initiates, writes Sanderson, “are made to take an oath of absolute secrecy (koùapāna) and are then made by means of mantras to become possessed by the maâbala-deities (āveśavidhi).”37 This sort of divinizing of the body is


wholesale: The divinity or divinities are seen as discrete and identifiable entities generated from without, and with the power to possess if only the connection is properly forged.

Nyāsa Two phenomena that share conceptual territory with āveśa are nyāsa and (prāâa-) pratiù•hā. There is an important distinction between them: The latter two are intentional, textualized, and enjoined bodily constructions, transformations of intellectual and social practices (arguably these are the same thing) into sacred physical terrain. Nyāsa (literally “setting upon, placing down, imposition”)38 is a common, and often standard, part of brahmanical worship that finds its greatest advocacy in the Tantras and Purāâas. As a result, extended instruction of nyāsa may be found in virtually every manual of Hindu daily practice, including those sold outside the gates of Hindu temples everywhere in India.39 Nyāsa is employed in obligatory rites (nitya) such as the daily saÅdhyā, the twice-daily rites of the twice-born performed at sunrise and sunset, as well as in the full range of rituals to be performed on special occasions, some calibrated calendrically (naimittika), and others performed to fulfill personal desires (kāmya).40 Related to mudrās or hand positions of esoteric significance (cf. Tantrarāja Tantra 4.44d, which explicitly links a certain mudrā with āveśa),41 nyāsa is a practice that combines simple mudrās with brief mantras invoking names of deities, divine powers, óùis, Vedic sacrifices, or letters of the alphabet. The intent of nyāsa is to impose or place the power of the mantras, and perforce the deities, and so on, which they inscribe, on or within various body parts, either one’s own or that of an image of a deity. This is effected, according to the widespread theology of nyāsa, through a process called bhūtaśuddhi, purification of the five fundamental elements (mahābhūtas)—earth, water, fire, mobile air, and all-pervasive space.42 The idea of a conjunction of deity and ritualist is old in India. The Bóhaddevatā, a text of probably the mid-first millennium c.e. that organized Vedic knowledge according to the deities of the ñgveda, states as part of its conclusions that “fully introducing the deity into the mind” (manasi saÅnyasya devatām) while performing a sacrifice is a true signifier of knowledge.43 Abhinavagupta and Kùemarāja describe mudrā as both an instrument of āveśa and a state of possession itself. Gavin Flood explicates this: “To say that mudrā is a way of accessing higher layers of the cosmos means that individual consciousness is absorbed into or possessed (āveśa) by mudrā, or


that the individual body absorbs mudrā into itself. The PTLV [ParātriÅsikālaghuvótti] says that one’s own body becomes possessed (āveśa) by mudrā and mantra, which can be read as, becomes a channel for, higher cosmic powers which erode the sense of individuality and distinction.”44 This agrees with the idiomatic use of āveśa and samāveśa elsewhere in the Kashmiri Śaiva and Śākta literature. Furthermore, say these philosophers, the body can become a bridge to these “higher cosmic powers” not just through mudrā but through āsana, the practice of yoga, presumably indicating variations on the teachings of Patañjali and other advocates of classical yoga.45 Āsana, they claim, is the yogic equivalent of bhūtaśuddhi, described above as the essence of nyāsa. “Both represent the destruction or purification of the gross individual body, in order that a divine body can be created.”46 Āsana, says Kùemarāja, is not simply posture but the power (bala) of the supreme śakti.47 As such, it is the original and final agent of transformation. It follows, then, as Abhinavagupta states, that mudrā is also an exercise of power, bestowed in initiation.48 Kùemarāja reinforces this, stating that all the actions of an awakened one (buddha) are in fact mudrā. In the Pratyabhijñāhódaya, he quotes the Kramasūtras, “which define this mudrā as the interpenetration of the inner and the outer due to the force of possession (āveśavaśāt); the entrance (praveśa) of consciousness from the external to the internal (antan) and from the internal to the external.”49 Mudrā, āsana, and nyāsa, then, are not mere gestures or movements; they are nuances, signifiers, or resonances of āveśa, thus āveśa itself. In the same way, they are emblematic of an empirical, even scientific, paradigm in which spirit (śakti) or, more amorphously and less specifically, consciousness (cit), transmutes into power, pattern, and matter. As matter, they qualify as substance codes, in Marriott’s terminology. They operate through an alchemical process, replicating the process of symbolic and material creation (e.g., vegetable matter > coal > diamond, solar energy > potable gold), employing śakti as a beginning as well as an ending point. Another phenomenon treated in the same conceptual terms as nyāsa and mudrā, being at once parts and the whole of āveśa, as well as its process, is orgasm (kampakāla). These four are viewed as the culmination of an organically fruitful act that replicates and “imposes” cosmic processes. According to Somānanda, orgasm reflects and recapitulates the ānanda (bliss) and camatkāra (astonishment) of Paramaśiva and thus, in the right perspective, can be a kind of realization. According to Somānanda, “pure consciousness is perceived in the heart when semen is discharged (visargaprasara).”50 The


Vijñānabhairava states that “possession by Śakti or absorption in her—the term āveśa is ambiguous—occurs during the (sexual) excitement of uniting with Śakti (śaktisaÅgamasaÅkùubdha).”51 As a process, nyāsa and mudrā are intended both to mirror and replicate the constitution of the original cosmic “person” as expressed in the Puruùasūkta (ñgveda [ñV] 10.90) and, in more extended fashion, in Purāâic deities like Varāha, who is described at great length as Yajñavarāha, “Varāha as the embodiment of the sacrifice,” Varāha whose very body is composed of the spectrum of sacrifices.52 Both nyāsa as a practice and Yajñavarāha as a cosmic image represent an extension of the theme of a composite body and self noted earlier in examples from the Śatapatha Brāhmaâa and other vedic texts. It is important here to remember that in the Indian concept of possession, identity is not closed or limited by name or definition, but is open, flexible, and integrative. Nyāsa is all of these in both the construction and embodiment of the deity, óùi, or other structure imposed on the ritualist. Nyāsa mirrors and reconstructs an original or archetypal Puruùa as well as later composite deities such as Yajñavarāha in that it is a process of resorption rather than emanation of the constituent units of the cosmos. It is an absorption into oneself, into one’s body and being or, in the case of (prāâa)pratiù•hā, into the embodied form of the deity. The cosmic Puruùa and Yajñavarāha not only emanate and disseminate the parts of the cosmos from their bodies, but embody these parts as their physical essence, a condition that is replicated in nyāsa. In this sense, nyāsa may be viewed as a simplified and dramatic reduction of the agnicayana, where the parts of the cosmos are reassembled in the form of the bird-shaped fire altar. This reassembled organic whole is regarded as nothing less than the creator god Prajāpati himself, who contains within him the entire cosmos. Both the agnicayana and nyāsa, then, become strategies for effecting “natural circulation,” though in these instances it is not essences or abstractions such as medhas (cf. Chapter 5) that are transferred or circulated, but actual cosmic (and social) structures that are collected into various patterns and energized, to be taken up anew by Prajāpati or any other deity (such as Kóùâa or Śiva) and dispersed throughout the cosmos. In practice, nyāsa is envisioned as a procedure for consecration or enlivenment, performed in order to empower, sanctify, and protect the individual, the body (part), or the iconic form of a deity, all of which must be rendered pure for ritual and other spiritual activity. And what better for accomplishing this than (ritual) introduction of sacred elements into the body (or image) itself?


The Bhāgavata Purāâa (BhP) provides an excellent example of nyāsa, along with compelling reasons why it should be practiced. BhP 6.8 provides the text of a Nārāyaâa kavaca, or ritual construction of “armor” (kavaca), which enables the devotee to obtain the protection of Viùâu, here called Nārāyaâa. The kavaca consists of nyāsa followed by a long hymn appealing to Viùâu and his many incarnations, body parts, and weapons (e.g., discus, mace, conch), for protection. The BhP (6.8.4–11) states that the nyāsa should be performed with “speech controlled” (vāgyatan), meaning that the mantras should be muttered inaudibly or recited silently. “One should equip or harness oneself with a protective covering fashioned from Nārāyaâa”53 by placing different syllables of various mantras (e.g., om namo nārāyaâāya, om namo bhagavate vāsudevāya) on parts of the body, hands, joints of the fingers, heart, and crown of the head. Finally, the devotee should complete the transformation by visualizing him or herself as the Supreme Self in the form of the embodied Lord manifest as knowledge, splendor, and ascetic heat, and possessed of the six divine virtues (power, beauty, fame, wealth, wisdom, and dispassion). In this condition, one should then recite the hymn (BhP 6.8.11). In addition, Vaiùâavas in practice inscribe tilakas or sectarian marks with white sandalwood powder ( gopīcandana) on twelve different parts of the body, each one accompanied by the recitation of one of the twelve principal names of Kóùâa. This is for the purpose of forming the image of Kóùâa on and in one’s body. Another extended example of nyāsa demonstrates the manner in which brahmanical thought constructed a “self,” an entity close to a “person,” through an accumulation of powers that are conferred a nondual or advaitic trajectory as they accumulate. The text is a quasi-vedic series of brief mantras, some of which bear vedic accentuation, which occurs as part of the introductory apparatus to the recitation of the Rudrādhyāya, the “Chapter on Rudra” from the Taittirīya SaÅhitā (TS, 4.5.1–11). This introduction, including the nyāsa, is an invention of post-vedic ritualists who recognized that the Rudrādhyāya, the most revered of all recited passages from the TS, had acquired a special sanctity and therefore deserved its own ritual apparatus. Although the Rudrādhyāya was initially prescribed for recitation during the agnicayana,54 the content of the text suggests that it likely stood on its own as an early recitational passage.55 As an independent text, it is today (as has likely been for thousands of years) recited in a large number of semi-vedic, which is to say Purāâic and Āgamic, rites practically in an ad hoc fashion. As such, the recitational ritual has grown around it. The text of the Rudrā-


dhyāya from the TS is enveloped in a classic ritual framework in which it is conferred a liminal existence, following Victor Turner’s notion of framing liminality.56 During the initial part, the rite of entering that liminal, timeless, space during which the text is recited, the ritualist, who is assumed to be a brahmanical follower of one of the half-dozen ritual śākhās or branches of the TS,57 recites this nyāsa and “intends” it on his body. After entering into this mantrically instigated state of divine personhood, the ritualist then recites the text of the Rudrādhyāya. The following account of this is taken from a popular handbook published by the Ramakrishna Mission called Mantrapuùpam.58 After enjoining the ritualist to bathe and perform appropriate purification, to keep the senses under control and observe celibacy, to wear white garments and face the deity, he should establish the deities in his body (ātmani). The text continues: prajanane brahmā tiù•hatu | pādayor viùâus tiù•hatu | hastayor haras tiù•hatu | bāhvor indras tiù•hatu | ja•hare ’gnis tiù•hatu | hódaye śivas tiù•hatu | kaâ•he vasavas tiù•hantu | vaktre sarasvatī tiù•hatu | nāsikayor vāyus tiù•hatu | nayanayoś candrādityau tiù•hetām | kar âayos aśvinau tiù•hetām | lalā•e rudrās tiù•hatu | mūrdhnādityās tiù•.hantu | śirasi mahādevas tiù•hatu | póù•he pinākī tiù•hatu | puratan śūlī tiù•hatu | pārśvayon śīvāśaãkarau tiù•hetāÅ | sarvato vāyus tiù•hatu | tato bahin sarvato ’gnir jvālāmālāparivótas tiù•hatu | sarveùv aãgeùu sarvā devatā yathāsnānaÅ tiù•hantu | māÅ rakùantu || May Brahmā be established in [my] organ of generation. May Viùâu be established in [my] feet. May Hara be established in [my] hands. May Indra be established in [my] arms. May Agni be established in [my] belly. May Śiva be established in [my] heart. May the Vasus be established in [my] throat. May Sarasvatī be established in [my] mouth [organ of speech]. May Vāyu be established in [my] nostrils. May the Sun and the Moon be established in [my] eyes. May the two Aśvins be established in [my] ears. May Rudra be established on [my] forehead [lalā •a]. May Āditya be established on the front of [my] head [mūrdhan]. May Mahādeva be established on [my] head [śiras]. May Vāmadeva be established on the crown of [my] head. May the Staff-Bearer [pinākin] be established on [my] back. May the Bearer of the Trident [śūlin] be established on [my] chest. May


Śiva and Śaãkara be established on [my] flanks. May Vāyu be established everywhere. Finally, may Agni be established everywhere outside [me], surrounding [me] like a garland of flames. May all the Gods [devatān] establish their respective places in all [my] limbs. May they protect me! agnír me vācí śritán | v6g ghödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | vāyúr me prāâé śritán prāâó hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | sXryo me cákùuùi śritán | cákùur hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | candrámā me mánasi śritán | máno hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | díśo me śrótre śritán | śrótraÅ hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | 6po me rétasi śritán | réto hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | póthivī me śárīre śritán | śárīraÅ hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | óùadhivanaspatáyo me lómasu śritán | lómāni hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | índro me bále śritán | bálaÅ hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | parjányo me mūrdhní śritán | mūrdh6 hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | īśāno me manyáu śritán | manyúr hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | ātm6 me ātmáni śritán | ātm6 hödaye | hödayaÅ máyi | ahám amöte | amötaÅ bráhmaâi | púnar ma ātm6 púnar 6yur 6gāt | púnan prāâán púnar 6kūtam 6gāt vaiśvānaró raśmíbhir vāvódhānán | antás tiù•hatv amötasya gop6 n || Agni abides in my speech. My speech abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. Vāyu abides in the lifebreath. My lifebreath abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. Sūrya abides in my eye. My eye abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. The moon abides in my mind. My mind abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. The directions abide in my ear. My ear abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. Water abides in my semen. My semen abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. The earth resides in my body [śárīra]. My body abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality


abides in bráhman. Cultivated and wild plants abide in my hair. My hair abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. Indra abides in my strength. My strength abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. Parjanya abides on the front of my head. The front of the head abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. Īśāna abides in my passion [manyu]. My passion abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. The self [ātmán] abides in my ātman. My ātman abides in my heart. My heart abides in me. I abide in immortality. Immortality abides in bráhman. Again, may my ātmán come to me for another lifespan [púnar 6yun]. Again, let my lifebreath come to another desire [púnar 6kūtam] and let that Agni common to all [vaiśvānará] choose me with his rays of light [raśmí]. Let the final limit of immortality be established as my protector. asya śrīrudrādhyāyapraśnamahāmantrasya aghora óùin anuù•upchandan saÅkarùaâamūrtisvarūpo yo ’sāv ādityan paramapuruùan sa eùa rudro devatā | naman śivāyeti bījam | śivatarāyeti śaktin | mahādevāyeti kīlakam | śrīsāmbasadāśivaprasādasiddhyarthe jape viniyogan || Aghora is the seer of the great mantra that constitutes this chapter called the Illustrious Rudrādhyāya. The meter is anuù•ubh.59 The deity is Rudra, the Supreme Being [paramapuruùan] who is the same as yonder Sun, whose natural embodiment is that of SaÅkarùaâa. The seed mantra is naman śivāya [“Obeisance to Śiva”]. The śakti mantra is [naman] śivatarāya [“Obeisance to the Greater Śiva”]. The kīlaka mantra60 is [namo] mahādevāya [“Obeisance to Mahādeva”]. When the goal of repeating [the Rudrādhyāya] is to obtain the grace of Sāmbasadāśiva, [this is the] ritual procedure [to be followed]. oÅ agnihotrātmane aãguù•hābhyāÅ naman | darśapūrâamāsātmane tarjanībhyāÅ naman | cāturmāsyātmane madhyamābhyāÅ naman | nirūbhapaśubandhātmane anāmikābhyāÅ naman | jyotiù•omātmane kaniù•hikābhyām naman | sarvakratvātmane karatalakarapóù•hābhyāÅ naman | agnihotrātmane hódayāya naman | darśapūrâamāsātmane śirasi svāhā | cāturmāsyātmane


śīkhāyai vaùa• | nirūbhapaśubandhātmane kavacāya huÅ | jyotiù•homātmane netratrayāya vauùa• | sarvakratvātmane astrāya pha• | bhur bhuvas suvar om iti digbandhan | Om! Obeisance to the two thumbs, which have as their nature the agnihotra. Obeisance to the index fingers, which have as their nature the darśapūrâamāsau. Obeisance to the middle fingers, which have as their nature the cāturmāsyas. Obeisance to the ring fingers, which have as their nature the nirūbhapaśubandha. Obeisance to the little fingers, which have as their nature the jyotiù•oma. Obeisance to the palms and the backs of the hands, which have as their nature all the sacrifices. Obeisance to the heart, which has as its nature the agnihotra. Obeisance to the head, which has as its nature the darśapūrâamāsau. Obeisance to the crown of the head, which has as its nature the cāturmāsyas. Obeisance to the aura,61 which has as its nature the nirūbhapaśubandha. Obeisance to the third eye, which has as its nature the jyotiù•oma. Obeisance to the astral weapon, which has as its nature all the sacrifices. Pha•! Thus, the syllables bhun, bhuvan, suvan, and om are fixed in the [four] directions.

It is important to read this in full, to translate this simple passage replete with redundancies, because the cadence of the text, its simplicity and comprehensibility, its organization and teleology, are reminiscent of drum rolls and chants of shamanic ritual.62 These are the cadences of possession, even as it is Sanskritized and brahmanized. Nyāsa, we can say, is brahmanical possession. It is a re-anatomization within an individual of the dismembered Puruùa. The performer, a ritualist familiar with the cadences of Sanskrit, is not just reciting a text and connecting the dots between mantras and body parts—he (usually he) is training and prompting his body to resonate with the cadences of the text. These cadences, in Foucault’s words, embed “minute and local social practices” that wield and articulate cultural and, eventually, political power. In addition to the minimal speech-act of recitation, hence re-creation, the ritualist employs various mudrās regularly during the course of the recitation. Holding these mudrās, he touches the respective body part into which the deity is said to enter, with his right (or if necessary his left) hand. Thus, this performance of the Rudrādhyāya is physically engaged, not merely recited. Ritually, which is to say intentionally and therefore not meaninglessly, the reciter adopts the persona of the gods as he recites the text. As he invests his body with divinity, he confers on himself the


power and authority with which the performance becomes effective. The brahman ritualist who recites the Rudrādhyāya in this context does not experience deity possession in the same manner as does a devotee at the temple of Khaâbobā in Jejuri on the new moon day that falls on a Monday (somavatī amāvāsyā).63 Nor will he experience the devotionally driven āveśa of a devotee performing sevā on his or her beloved deity, or the possession that Śaãkara experienced upon entering the body of the dead king Amaruka. But there can be little doubt that the ritual is designed to reorient the ritualist toward a divine realm that is the product of millennia of brahmanical tinkering. This tinkering, which has a track record of success, at least in the minds and hearts of the ritualists, is in fact tinkering with practices of power. These practices are acts of purification, isolation, and proprietary possession of divinity, facets of brahmanization that are discussed elsewhere and need not detain us here. Two further matters must be mentioned here. First, this possession, as I designate it, is described without the use of the primary critical vocabulary discussed here, derivatives of ā/pra-√viś or √góh. Instead, the verbs √sthā (tiù•hatu, etc.) (to establish, stand) and √śri (śritan) (abide in, cling to, take possession of ) establish both the motion and the contiguity that characterize āveśa, praveśa, and so on, and are nearly synonymous with them in expressing an appropriate entrance or pervasion. The root √sthā (tiù•hatu, etc.) is employed to express the occupation of deities on or in body parts. These deities are Brahmā, Viùâu, Hara, Agni, Śiva, the Vasus, Sarasvatī, Vāyu, Sun, Moon, the Aśvins, Rudra, Āditya, Mahādeva, Vāmadeva, Pīnākin, Śūlin, Śiva, and Śaãkara, and finally all the gods together (sarvā devatā). Just as appropriately, √śri (śritan) provides the sense of pervasion for natural forces, including fire, wind, sun (these three are the representatives of Agni on the terrestrial plane, the mid-region, and the celestium), the moon, the directions, water, earth, wild and domestic plants, Indra, Parjanya (Rain), Īśāna (one of the eleven Rudras, Śiva as the sun), and the self (ātmán). Thus, forms of these two verbs are used to express different aspects of what may be expressed broadly as possession. Second, to return to an earlier point, the entire passage reflects a late first- and early second-millennium c.e. brahmanical strategy of advaitic reinscription that homogenizes the earlier, much more diverse but by now superannuated, vedic ritual theology. Although the phenomenon of identifying one entity, idea, or object with another—not randomly but as a “code of connections”64—has long been noticed in vedic and succeeding


brahmanical thought, here is a text (and I could easily locate dozens of similar ones) that is engineered to reconstruct personal identity through acts of self-identification with deities and vedic sacrifices while simultaneously subordinating each identification to an absolute brahman. In the key second section of the passage translated, Agni is said to abide in speech, speech in the heart, the heart in the “me” of the ritualist, that “me” in the immortal, and finally the immortal in brahman. Thus commences a strategy of “practical Vedānta”65 designed to compel the ritualist to realize the identity of a deity with a body part, then with the individual self, and finally with brahman. In this ritual exercise, the individual’s body parts, heart, and self are so fully identified with specific deities that it must fall within the range of deity possession, though that possession is ultimately nullified and transcended by a final identification with the absolute brahman. Regardless of the perfunctory manner in which this is ordinarily performed (doubtless a consequence of text-based performance), a transformation in perception is assumed to occur. At the very least, this transformation is a result of a mantra-induced realization of a pre-existing condition, a transformation of quality, or a transfer of essence, at most through a more substantial infusion of the very deity, óùi, and so forth, into the body or image. This infusion, clearly, is reminiscent of certain aspects of āveśa: it is envisioned, intended, and set in motion by the practitioner, and it is an immersion of distinctly positive forces into oneself or an image of one’s deity. In short, deities, powers, and so on are invited to take possession of the body. But they are invited in a brahmanically programmatic, that is, “textual,” way, one that emphasizes purity at the expense of spontaneity and danger. It is likely that the introduction of nyāsa into standard brahmanical ritual represented a domestication of certain tantric (or vedic) initiatory processes or even those of popular religious possession. Through exercising programmatic control, which occurred as a result of the elimination of its unstructured, noninstitutionalized, unpredictable, and (thus) frightening aspects, possession was drained of its spontaneity. It became vidhi (ritual prescription), which denied to it experiential possibilities beyond text, by rendering it representational in the sensibilities of the ritualist, rather than actual. This is not, however, to say that, as a general rule, confinement of possession within ritual boundaries necessarily reduced its experiential potency. Indeed, for many, particularly among non-brahmanized sects, such confinement served to confer acceptable social dimensions upon it, thus legitimizing it as a viable form of religious expression, as ethnographic work has decisively shown.


Examples of the successful ritual demarcation of the unpredictable can be readily seen among the devotees of Khaâbobā at Jejuri or in dramatic performance such as Terukkūttu or Teyyam. One further example of nyāsa should be discussed. This may be seen in the fourth chapter (ullāsan) of the Kulārâavatantra (KAT). The author of this well-known text of the Kaula tradition of Śaiva ritual, written sometime in the first centuries of the second millennium c.e., is unknown, but, according to the colophon at the end of the first ullāsa, the text is supposed to be the fifth section (khaâba) of the Ūrdhvāmnāyatantra, a text now lost, but said (surely symbolically) to have consisted of 125,000 verses. Such statements aside, the fourth ullāsa consists of instructions for two progressions of nyāsa, one called “small” (alpaùōbhā, 4.17–18), the other “great” (mahāùobhā, 4.19–130). Strikingly, the KAT states that the mahāùobhānyāsa, which is indeed quite intricate, is for the purpose of devatābhāvasiddhi or perfection of the psychophysical experience (bhāva) of the deity (4.19), in this case Śiva. We have seen above that in bhakti texts the term bhāva is tantamount to āveśa; thus here the KAT can mean only that the aspirant transforms every aspect of his being (usually a male is presumed) into that of Śiva. This is nothing less than possession, as discussed above. In a verse at the end of this ullāsa (4.128), Īśvara or Śiva, who reveals this secret, reinforces the importance of this nyāsa to the goddess, his dialogical partner: “One who practices this nyāsa obtains ājñāsiddhi [the power to assure that whatever one orders is carried out]. In the world there is no protection greater than this, the bestower of the siddhi of devatābhāva. This, no doubt is the truth, it is the truth, O Fair-faced One.” The nyāsas in this ullāsa are sixfold and construct—or reveal—systematic links between mantras, deities, body parts, and elements of the cosmos. These identifications disclose a transformation of the aspirant, his devatābhāva, brought on through a code of connections that harks back to the vedic Brāhmaâa and Āraâyaka texts for their authority. The first is called prapañca-nyāsa (the nyāsa of manifest creation). This consists of three parts. In the first, the aspirant links a string of bīja mantras, Sanskrit vowels, sixteen names of the goddess Lakùmī, body parts, and geographical forms, and at the end the same bīja mantras in reverse order. For example, the first two to be recited are: auá aiá hrīá śrīá hsauá aá prapañca rūpāyai śrīyai naman śirasi s-hauá śrīá hrīá aiá auá, meaning “auá aiá hrīá śrīá hsauá aá obeisance to Śrī on the head in the form of the manifest universe s-hauá śrīá hrīá aiá auá”; then auá aiá hrīá śrīá hsauá ām dvīparūpāyai


māyāyai naman mukhavótte s-hauá śrīá hrīá aiá auá, meaning “auá aiá hrīá śrīá hsauá āá obeisance to Māyā on the face in the form of a continent s-hauá śrīá hrīá aiá auá.” The remaining loci are: ocean (jaladhi), mountain ( giri), town (pattana), ritual altar (pī•ha), field (kùetra), forest (vana), religious refuge (āśrama), cave ( guhā), river (nadī), crossroad (catvara), the domain of “sprout-born” entities (udbhidja, viz. plants), the domain of “sweat-born” creatures (svedaja, viz. mosquitoes, insects, etc.), the domain of egg-born beings (aâbaja, viz. birds), and the domain of “embryo-born” creatures (jarāyuja, viz. mammals and higher primates). In this way, the aspirant realizes the entire physical universe within him. The second part of the prapañca-nyāsa does the same for units of time, from the smallest, the lava (tiniest fraction of a second), to the largest, the pralaya (period of cosmic dissolution), identifying these with manifestations of the goddess Kālī. The third links the ten manifestations of Sarasvatī with various aspects of the functioning being. These are the five fundamental elements (pañcabhūta) linked with Brāhmī; the five senses (tanmātra) linked with Vāgīśvarī; the five organs of action (karmendriya) with Vāâi; the five sense organs (jñānendriya) with Sāvitrī, the five principal prāâas with Sarasvatī; the three guâas with Gāyatrī; the fourfold inner sense organ (antankaraâa) consisting of mind (manas), intelligence (buddhi), ego (ahaÅkāra), and consciousness (citta) with Vākpradā; the four states of awareness (waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and turīya, the “fourth” or transcendental state) with Śāradā; the seven bodily constituents (skin, blood, flesh, fluid, marrow, bone, and semen) with Bhāratī; and the three bodily humors (doùa: vāta, wind; pitta, bile; and kapha, phlegm) with Vidyātmika. Thus, through the prapañca-nyāsa, space, time, and human function are appropriated, experienced, and transformed within the body of the individual. The remaining sections of the sixfold nyāsa are the bhuvana-nyāsa, in which different divine Śaktis and their entourages of hundreds of millions of yoginīs are identified on the body with the fourteen planes of the universe, employing the same bīja mantras and formulaic pattern as used above. In the mūrti-nyāsa, the aspirant places on his body the sixteen forms of Viùâu and their corresponding śaktis, the twelve manifestations of Śiva and their śaktis, and the ten forms of Brahmā and their śaktis. Then follows mantranyāsa, in which billions of two-lettered mantras, three-lettered mantras, and so on ascending up to sixteen-lettered mantras are placed symbolically by their goddesses on ascending parts of the ritualist’s body. Then comes devatā-nyāsa, in which various goddesses and their respective legions of


thousands of realized beings, celestial beings, and male deities are imposed on various body parts. Finally, in mātókā-nyāsa the aspirant places different “Mother Goddesses” (mātókā) along with myriad tens of millions (anantako•i) of members of the families of the Bhairava form of Śiva, including negatively charged beings (bhūta, preta, piśāca, etc.) and other denizens of the universe under their authority, on ascending body parts and energy centers. In sum, says Śiva himself in the KAT (4.119), “When nyāsa is performed in this way, O Goddess, the mantrin who is patient in times of both contraction and grace without doubt becomes a direct manifestation of the highest Śiva.” In this way the individual, rather than retreating into a kind of advaitic oneness, expands into one. The process is, literally, one of taking possession of, arranging, and integrating the constituent parts of this world, the cosmic realms, all earthly and divine beings, and the functions of manifestation. The nature of life as a practical reality requires that the individual protect him or herself in infinite ways from the responsibility and awesomeness of the universe (cf. Arjuna in the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavadgītā). This shield— culturally, individually, or otherwise configured—enables that person to construct and conduct a manageable definition of his or her own individuality. Nyāsa, when used as part of an initiatory apparatus, as it is in Tantra, becomes an instrument for effacing that safe definition and emerging as a complex multiform personality that assumes divine and incomprehensible proportion; indeed, it is so awesome that it forces the individual to reconsider selfhood.

Pratiù•hā Related to nyāsa are pratiù•hā (establishment of a deity in a material object), attested as early as the vedic Brāhmaâa literature and, more specifically and recently, prāâa-pratiù•hā (installation of vital breath [prāâa] into an image of a deity).66 The relatively recent Tantrarāja Tantra (2.39–40) notes the possible loci of pratiù•hā in the case of the goddess: She can be established in a cakra (viz. a yantra), a disciple, or a fashioned image of herself. Pratiù•hā and prāâapratiù•hā are (when they can be distinguished) intricate brahmanical rituals as well as the immersion or pervasion of deities within physical objects. Like nyāsa, these actions share conceptual territory with āveśa in that they engage positive forces (viz. deities), are induced by the performers, and are highly regulated.67 Interestingly, one of the older citations of prāâapratiù•hā is from the Brahmāâba Purāâa (3.30.4; fourth to tenth centuries


c.e.),68 where it refers to the restoration of life to a corpse. Generally, however, it involves rites that infuse life breath and open the eyes of a deity. This transformative process occurs in both Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic ritual.69 An example from a recent ethnography of Tamil possession states: “Periyān•avar’s divine essence (mūrtiharam) is transferred to the earthen body through an ‘eye opening rite’ (kaâ tiôappu). Beyond a cloth screen a musician paints with black charcoal the pupils of the god’s bulging eyes. When a camphor flame is waved before his face, the crowd cheers ‘Kovintā! Kovintā!’ the cry that always greets the reincorporation of gods in human bodies.”70 This cry, “Kovintā! Kovintā!” (Govinda, Govinda), is common in Tamilnadu when possession is invoked.71 It is not irrelevant, especially given the discussions in Chapter 11, to mention that practices startlingly similar to nyāsa occur elsewhere in Asia. In China, such practices were an important component in Daoist meditation. Isabelle Robinet notes: “Before reciting a sacred text, the adept concentrates himself by calling the deities of the four horizons and by naming and summoning the spirits of his various body parts (his face, members, and viscera). It is necessary that the divine bodily spirits fix or stabilize his body and stabilize themselves within the body.”72 One of the most spectacular of Daoist practices is meditation on the stars, particularly the Big Dipper (which the Chinese call the “Northern Bushel”). In this meditation, the stars are made to descend into the practitioner’s body, after which the practitioner reciprocates and ascends onto the stars. Robinet writes, “before stepping on the dipper,” the adept “must dress himself with stars.” Each star of the Dipper is visualized and “invoked one after the other . . . and made to enter into, after each invocation, a bodily organ. After this is accomplished, they enlighten the whole body.”73 The repercussions of such practices on notions of the self in China, discussed below, resemble those in India.74 Also relevant is the frequent attestation of āveśana (entrance, possession) in both Buddhist texts and classical Sanskrit lexicons, in the sense of śilpiśālā (factory, workshop, cottage industry, or sculpture studio).75 This suggests that the nature of artistic creation was regarded as an invocation or pervasion of ordinary material by positive, if not divine, forces. Āveśa, āveśana, and related notions such as nyāsa and (prāâa-)pratiù•hā indicate a more attendant premeditated and performative context than do instances of praveśa, grahaâa, and other evolutes of possession. Āveśana, like āveśa, indicates a positively charged immersion, a state of absorption in which, rather ironically, the one possessed instigates the possession. This combination of posi-


tive with apparent externally imposed possession is unusual, but must be explained by regarding the created image as uniquely capable of attracting the deity, and so on, which ultimately settles into it.

Possession in Buddhist Tantras Tantric or Vajrayāna Buddhism spread from North India, Kashmir, and Nepal into Tibet between 500 and 1000 c.e., as many scholars have shown. It was then enhanced in Tibet by the indigenous Bön and other local cults and cosmologies and by the spectacular environment that is Tibet, all of which have conferred on it a unique position among the various versions of Asian Buddhism. Among the unique features of Vajrayāna Buddhism is the importance of initiations, a legacy of the Śaiva traditions of Kashmir and northern India. It was not simply a matter of taking refuge in the Three Jewels—the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saãgha—but of receiving initiation into the practice of multiple Buddhist deities and maâbalas. Indeed, the path as conceived by Vajrayāna Buddhism was fueled by initiations. This is not to discount the complexity of tantric Buddhist doctrine, the subtle layerings of Buddhist philosophical thought, the profound sectarian differences, the importance of assiduous practice, or the complex relationship between lay Vajrayāna and monastic practice and institutions. But it was initiation—infusions of divine energy delicately forged by detailed attention to ritual—that motivated the remaining aspects of Vajrayāna Buddhism. An opportune, though admittedly uneasy, comparison may be made with the Mahābhārata. Bearing in mind that the latter is a single (if multiauthored)76 text, albeit a gigantic all-encompassing epic, while Vajrayāna Buddhism is a complex and far-reaching religious system, we must recall an observation made earlier: that the plot of the MBh is consistently advanced through curses and boons, acts of divine intervention, possession, odd synchronicities, and other extraordinary occurrences. If the Vedānta, SāÅkhya, Dharmaśāstra, and other palimpsests of orthodoxy were stripped away (even from the critical edition), a mythic series of miracle tales, some wondrous, some horrific, would be most of what remains of the MBh.77 At the risk of oversimplifying, I might say that in the case of Vajrayāna, if the yāna were stripped away, what would remain is the vajra. By this I mean tales of innumerable saints, such as Padmasambhava, Nāropa, Saraha, and Milarepa, arduous pilgrimages to far-flung places such as Kailāśa and Mānasarovara,


devotionalism with powerful resonances in South Asia, and yogic siddhis. But most prominent as vajra are the initiations. We can see from the following brief extract that these have obvious points of resonance with Śaiva śaktipāta initiation described by Abhinavagupta in the Tantrāloka.78 The passage is a translation from the Vajrabhairava abhiùeka as compiled initially by the seventh Dalai Lama, based on Indian sources. Also included is a brief section from this Dalai Lama’s autocommentary in which he quotes Nāgabodhi’s description of the signs of āveśa.79 Expunge [obstructers] with: oÅ hrīÅ śrīÅ vikótānana hūÅ pha •. Purify into emptiness with: oÅ svabhāvaśuddhan sarvadharman svabhāvaśuddho ’ham. Think the following: From emptiness I myself become the syllable hūÅ; I myself, the syllable, become a vajra marked with hūÅ; I myself, the vajra, become the great Vajrabhairava; my body is dark blue with one face and two arms holding in my hands a goad and skull bow; I stand with my left foot extended. On the crown of my head from baÅ arises a circular white water-shape marked with a vase; on that shape is haÅ. At my heart from laÅ arises a square yellow earth-shape marked at its corners with three-pronged vajras; on that shape is hūÅ. At my navel from raÅ arises a red triangular fire-shape, intense and blazing; on it is ān. Under my feet from yaÅ arises a bow-shaped, rippling blue wind-shape, its two far corners marked with pennants; on it is jhaiÅ, in a fierce and unbearable form. Agitated by the wind, the jhaiÅ ascends to the lotus of fire at the navel; again due to the wind’s agitation, the earth at the heart begins to blaze, and from the water at the crown a stream of nectar falls; it completely satisfies me. Chant: o Å hrīÅ śrīÅ vikótānana hūÅ hūÅ pha • pha • / āveśaya sthambhaya / ra ra ra ra / cālaya cālaya / hūÅ haÅ jhaiÅ hūÅ pha• // 80 As a result of saying this many times, the wisdom [beings] enter. At that time, with the visualization of it being thrown by the wind and with firm deitypride in Guru Vajrabhairava, one should brandish the vajra with the right hand, ring the ghaâ•a [bell] with the left, and properly scent [oneself?] with incense. Visualize that the light-rays of the fire in one’s body spread out to the ten directions and invite all the buddhas and bodhisattvas in the form of Mañjuśrī Yamāri; like rain falling, they melt into one. Then the vajra is placed on one’s head, and by saying, tiù•ha vajra (“Stay, Vajra!”), one should make the blessing firm. [After going through the meaning of the mantra, the Dalai Lama com-


ments as follows]: As a result of the Wisdom beings entering in that way, the minds of the deities—i.e., the non-dual wisdom that has the nature of the first bodhisattvabhūmi and so on—actually enter the mindstream of the disciple, or else one visualizes and believes that it has done so. Thereby, the wisdom blessing has entered the disciple; this is called the “Shared [blessing]” [Tib. skal mnyam; Skt. sabhāgan]. Concerning the signs that [the wisdom beings] have entered, the root Tantra of Guhyasamāja says, “. . . shaking and tremors . . .” Ācārya Nāgabodhi comments, “One should know that the signs of entrance are shaking, elation, fainting, dancing, collapsing, or leaping upward.” In the translation by Chag lotsawa, it says, “. . . shaking, hair standing on end . . .” Thus, many signs are said to arise, from leaping—to a height of one cubit, two cubits or even eight cubits— to hair standing on end, trembling and so on.

The use of long series of bīja mantras, the visualization of maâbalas as embodiments of deities, the assertion of deities entering the initiate, and Nāgabodhi’s citation of “shaking and tremors,” and so on as signs of successful initiation are familiar from Indian Śaiva initiatory sequences. We might here recall the term ātmabhāvaparigraham (taking possession of a [new] personal existence), discussed in Chapter 7, appearing in an early Buddhist text. In that text, it appeared to indicate taking on a new rebirth. Here, however, many centuries and Buddhist cultures removed, the notion of taking possession of a new personal existence is radically altered to indicate a transformation occurring in this life as a result of undertaking a powerful initiation. As one might expect, Vajrabhairava, called Vajrāveśa (“he who is possessed by a vajra”), is represented iconographically, as the image in Plate 2 attests. This transformation is analyzed in the Kālacakratantra (KT) more explicitly in terms of possession. It is a possession strongly reminiscent of the brahmanical, liturgically actualized possession discussed earlier in this chapter. Like the brahmanical example, this discussion is situated in terms of constructing a divine body from the visualized image in a maâbala. Among the texts that describe such maâbalas are, in addition to the KT, the Vajrayāna texts Sādhanamālā and Niùpannayogāvalī, which describe a large number of maâbalas to be used as meditation aids.81 These texts describe two types of beings, called samayasattva and jñānasattva. Both Stephen Beyer and Alex Wayman translate samayasattva as “symbolic being” and jñānasattva as “knowledge being.” These, says Wayman, “are among the

Possession in Tantra 393 Image has been suppressed

plate 2. Vajrāveśa (rDo-rje dbab-pa), a gate guardian (dvārapāla). His mantra is o Å sarvavit sarvāpāyagatigahanaviśodhani hūÅ ho n pha • (Om, Omniscient One, the Deliverer from the Bonds of All evils, HūÅ Hon Pha•). The image of Vajrāveśa is taken from Laxman S. Thakur, Buddhism in the Western Himalayas (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 115. For the mantra, see Tadeusz Skorupski, The Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra: Elimination of All Evil Destinies (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983), 9, 128; cf. 93, 260–261.

most difficult and important ideas of the Buddhist Tantric literature. . . . The samaya-sattva is the yogin who has identified himself with a deity he has evoked or imagined, while the jñāna-sattva is either a human Bodhisattva, or a celestial Bodhisattva or Buddha.”82 The samayasattva, more accurately, is the visualized image of the deity, with which the meditator can identify in the “self-generation” stage of deity yoga. Beyer states that the samayasattva is “the projection upon the ultimate fabric of reality of the practitioner’s own visualization,” that the meditators visualization manipulates and “empowers the senses”83 of a jñānasattva, thus dissolving it into the figure of a samayasattva.84 This occurs through the operation of the mantra jan hū á ba á hon, which summons, absorbs, binds, and dissolves the former into the latter. Beyer quotes Tsongkh’apa: “If one makes the knowledge being enter in, his eyes and so on are mixed inseparably with the eyes and so on of the symbolic being, down to their very atoms: and one should visualize their total equality.”85 It is striking how close this


is to the precise physiological mirroring and pervasion that define āveśa in the yoga literature, to Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci in the MBh and to the imprinting of form and essence found in the Bóhadāraâyaka and Kauùītaki Upaniùads’ description of a moribund father entering the body of his son. The Vajratārā sādhana chapter of the Sādhanamāla describes the attraction of a jñānasattva being located in the northern part of a certain maâbala. The āveśa is initially induced by repetition of the syllable ra (rekāra), the same syllable prescribed for possession of Vajrāveśa.86 Then a specified pose is maintained with vajra, bell, and so on. The aspirant then installs this being on a lunar orb in the heart and worships it appropriately. The mantra jan hūá vaá hon should be recited, says the Sādhanamālā, while performing the attracting, entering, fixing, and pleasing (ākarùaâapraveśanabandhanat oùaâam) of the jñānasattva.87 The agents in the following passage from the KT are, then, aspirants who fit the description of samayasattva. The KT passage in question, from the abhiùekapa •ala, the section on initiation, contains a passage on the visualization and internal manifestation of both bodhisattvas and wrathful deities (krodharāja), notably Vajrāveśa, who is emblematic in this text of the latter category. The commentator, Kalkin Śrīpuâbarīka, fills in important lacunae; thus the following account weaves together the KT and Kalkin’s commentarial notes. The aspirant (which the KT consistently calls śiùya [disciple]) first prepares himself for this possession or re-embodiment by reciting the mūlamantra for Vajrāveśa ten million times followed by one hundred thousand offerings with it into a fire. This mantra is: oá a ra ra ra ra la la la la vajrāveśāya hūá.88 Then the maâbala is consecrated with a long series of mantras, and the aspirant positions himself ritually, with bell and vajra in place, hands and fingers arranged in proper mudrās, suitably attired, and gifts properly distributed.89 He then declares vows of good conduct, service to gurus, buddhas, and bodhisattvas, protection of his senses, and so on. He bathes, freshens his body with scented powder, and reinforces his vows (vrataniyamayutan, v. 87). He momentarily assumes earlier stages of practice (pūrvabhūmyāÅ niveśya, v. 87) by inviting and pacifying the directional buddhas and those of the external circles of the maâbala with the standard meditation mantra oá ān hūá. He purifies his tongue with three mouthfuls of pañcāmóta,90 screens off or places a cloth over these external circles of the maâbala (presumably to sharpen his concentration), and lights incense, which encourages possession (dhūpam āveśanārtham). Then, says Kalkin Śrīpuâbarīka, through meditation alone


he gains the ability to become possessed by the wrathful deity (smaraâamātreâa krodhāveśaÅ karoti). The next verse (v. 88), with Kalkin’s help, tells us how this deity behaves. After the deity is fully manifested within the aspirant, he is capable of killing all beings moving and nonmoving, of crushing them, by easily obstructing their progress. By threatening that host of Māras (māravóndam), that destroyer of dharma (Kalkin glosses this as dharmavihe•hakam), he makes them fall to the ground, immobile. Even an aspirant who does not know the proper movements is then able to perform the “vajra dance” (vajranótyam). He executes this dance in mid-air, thus slaying these killers of dharma, by placing his left foot forward and right foot back (pratyālībhādipādain). Then he laughs and sings the vajra in the form of a loud hūá, which could never emanate from a human and which creates fear in this inimical host of Māras. This, then, is the nature of a wrathful deity when the practitioner is being possessed by it. The next several verses of the KT are best translated in full, along with Kalkin Śrīpuâbarīka’s introductions. “[The commentary states:] Now, with respect to establishing [within oneself] the body, etc., of a wrathful deity [krodharāja] or bodhisattva, it is said: After the body is possessed [kāyāveśena], a yogin will realize the purpose of that body by acting under the influence of its fundamental qualities [prakótiguâavaśāt]. After becoming possessed by its voice [vāgāveśena] the yogin becomes its spokesperson and secures victory over gods, nāgas, and asuras. After becoming possessed of their mind [cittāveśena], the past and present, secret within everyone’s heart, becomes known. After becoming possessed of their knowledge [jñānāveśena], the yogin becomes a buddha, a guru of gurus, an achiever of great worldly attainments, and a ruler over all.

The commentator explains that the fundamental qualities (prakótiguâa) of a wrathful deity and a bodhisattva are, respectively, ferocity (raudra) and peacefulness (śānta), startlingly in keeping with the discussion in Chapter 8 of the rasas associated with possession in South India. Just as wrathful deities and bodhisattvas can fly through the air (kurvanty ākāśagamanam), a good disciple should be able to enter hell worlds, fly over the world, become invisible, and fly to mountain tops as a result of possession by a divine body. Just like Mañjuśri, even a stupid student whose senses are under control as a


result of possession by divine speech should be able to overcome gods, nāgas, and asuras. Possession by a divine mind91 enables the pupil to know the past, present, and future, all of which are invisible (atītānāgataÅ vartamānam adóù•aÅ sarvam). Becoming possessed by knowledge means that gaining control of the psychomental predispositions from previous births enables one to become perfected in the world. [The commentator states:] Now, with respect to establishing [within oneself] the eye, etc. [of a wrathful deity or a bodhisattva], it is said: After becoming possessed by its earth element, the yogin becomes sturdy as a mountain, and after becoming possessed by its water element, it attains the same coolness. After becoming possessed of its fire, the yogin acquires its fiery nature, and by becoming possessed of its wind, similarly he acquires its dryness. After becoming possessed of its emptiness, the yogin becomes invisible and becomes like an aereal being on the surface of the earth.92 In this way, the composite form, constructed under the influence of fundamental qualities, is to be understood.

Kalkin discusses the results of possession by (as well as of ) divine elements and divine senses. He says that the aspirant becomes so powerful as a result of arrogating the divine counterpart of the earth element that he cannot be moved even by hundreds of men. Embracing the divine water element enables him to ward off fever even when it rages within him. After assuming within his body the divine fire, he gains the ability to burn whatever he touches. By taking possession of the wind element of a wrathful deity or bodhisattva he can blow anything he embraces many leagues away. And by assuming the element of emptiness he can make anything he touches invisible. When possessed by the divine eye, he sees divine form, though it is insubstantial (adóù•adravyam). Similarly, possession by divine hearing enables one to hear the unheard sounds of beings; possession by a divine mind (divyamanas) permits one to gain the knowledge of another’s thoughts (paracittajñānam); possession of a divine body and sense organs enables one to obtain divine touch and achieve a divine abode; possession of a divine tongue results in a divine sense of taste, and of a divine organ of smell a divine sense of smell. [The commentator states:] Now the symptoms of those with divine possession will be explained. O king, for those who know the proper mantras,


possession [āveśa] is realized through powerful meditation [bhāvanā]; but sometimes also through different kinds of devotional service [sevā], through various kinds of stipulated practice, through repetition of mantras, and so on. Success in achieving this kind of possession [siddhi] of those who know mantras is nowhere possible in the generation of a maâbala [even] by buddhas with a great variety of richly textured experiences, without first establishing themselves in this manner.

Kalkin states that “various kinds of stipulated practice” (bahuvidhasamaya-) means protective or reinforcing practices that engage bodhicitta or the vow to work towards the enlightenment of all beings. Most of the practices referred to here are visualizations and possession of different classes of Buddhist divinities and spirits. These, says Kalkin, involve entrance into a maâbala and are described in the fifth pa •ala of a text called the Jñānasiddhi or otherwise taught by one’s guru. [The commentator states:] Now, for quelling one’s possession, the following is said: After the aspirant relinquishes his possession, the Jinas, who have gone to the part of the maâbala that represent his Buddha-families, should touch his forehead, his heart, the top of his head, his navel, his throat, and his anus with their triple-pronged vajras [svatrivajrain] in order to invoke protection for him. Then the disciple becomes eligible to enter the maâbala [atra] upon being blindfolded and given a yellow robe. For the sake of convention [i.e., the collection of merit, not wisdom], one should also grant to him the vows that contain the station [gati-, i.e., rank] of the supreme ones.93

Because it is believed to be as fraught with danger as entering into or remaining in a state of possession, disembarking from such a state is equally specified. All Indic ritual texts on possession (mostly unpublished manuscripts, as we see in Chapter 11) give detailed instructions on how to “abandon” (tyaktvā, KT 92) or, in Kalkin’s gloss, “calm” or “quell” (upaśamana) possession. Kalkin, consistent with others, prescribes a series of mantras designed to invoke the protection of various buddhas. He states that if an aspirant is possessed by a wrathful deity, and so on, then the teacher (ācārya) should ask him what the effect was. He should recite the three syllables oá ān hūá over a flower and place it on the aspirant’s head. The latter will then be released from his possession and return to his own place. This appears to


mean that after the aspirant leaves the consecrated space, in this case, the proximity of the maâbala, he is back in “his own place” (svasthānam). Unlike in other texts we examine in Chapter 11, neither the KT nor Kalkin states explicitly that the aspirant enters a maâbala or yantra that is drawn on the ground and sits down on it, thus becoming himself a quasi-deity within the maâbala and enacting his possession from that locus of power. This, however, is certainly the case,94 enabling the aspirant to more easily convert the visual to the visualization. With the syllable oá, the ācārya invokes the protection of the buddhas on the aspirant’s head, then with hūá on his heart, and with haÅ on the crown of his head. This is accomplished through the practice of his own “triple-pronged vajra,” which Kalkin clarifies as his body, speech, and mind. Similarly the ācārya should place the syllable ho on his navel, ān on his throat, kùan on his perineum. Thus, this nyāsa follows the possession rather than precedes it and, unlike the brahmanical recorporealizing, is enacted by the teacher. Kalkin adds that the long (dīrgha) syllable hūá is the vajra of speech, while the short (hrasva) syllable (presumably huá) is the vajra of the mind. The latter part of this verse seems to indicate that the aspirant’s monastic vows only superficially, or at least only in part, serve the purpose of “traditional” study of Buddhist doctrine and practice. In fact, however, in tantric Buddhism they may be deployed to keep secret more esoteric practices. These secrets, says Kalkin, are laden with merit (puâyādisaÅbhāran) and include auspicious rebirths in buddha realms all the way up to the status of Tathāgata Śākyamuni. This is in keeping with a theme of secrecy in India that extends back to the vedic Brāhmaâas and, most pointedly, the Āraâyakas, texts that were to be studied only in the seclusion of a forest.

Tantric Possession and Images of a Multiple Self What is revealed here is a continuum of practice from brahmanical to Buddhist, always with the underlying themes of physical divinization and multiplicity within an apparent singularity of personality. First, we briefly explicated the important term samāveśa, which occurs frequently in the Śaiva Tantras to indicate both the practice of immersion into a deity and the state of liberation that results from this practice. The unvarying requirement for these, the contingency that confers eligibility (adhikāra) for samāveśa, is tantric initiation. Second, we described the practice of nyāsa. In this prac-


tice, abbreviated mantras based on vedic models are employed to purify the five elements that constitute the body and all other materiality (bhūtaśuddhi). Subsequently, brief cadenced mantras are employed to compel deities and archetypal forms to enter the body, thus ontologically transforming and substantively re-indexing it. This process is complemented, even replicated, by the brahmanical practice of consecration and enlivening of images ([prāâa-]pratiù•nā), an ontological movement from inert material to sentient deity comparable to movement in nyāsa from the human to the divine. This practice, which became widespread in Asia beyond brahmanical text and lineage boundaries, was transmitted into tantric Buddhism through the Śaiva lineages of Kashmir and north India late in the first millennium c.e. In this delineation, the individual and the cosmos were amalgamated by mantrically situating the practitioner inside a maâbala and enacting a simultaneous transformation on both. Bhūtaśuddhi, nyāsa, and the ontological (as well as physical) repositioning of the person within the maâbala may be viewed as initiatory renewals, which led the practitioner to meditate on his own body as the basis for the deity. This is recognized in Himalayan and East Asian Buddhism as āveśa, where the deity Maheśvara is realized in this manner.95 Thus, the use of bhūtaśuddhi, nyāsa, mudrās, and pratiù•hā mantras rendered the sonic reconstitution of the body a form of possession. As in other modes of possession, the tantric practitioner’s identity and persona were eclipsed, even if the individual in this case retained a grounded, continuous, and prepatterned interior sense of personal identity. This, then, is proximate to what we examine in Chapter 11: tantric ritual that is more definitively oracular, in which the practices described here are compressed for greater practical applicability. Even if the argument is put forth that much of what follows is a brahmanical or tantric palimpsest on local practices, the fact remains that it bears a striking continuity with the material presented here. In this way, too, nyāsa and pratiù•hā may be regarded as ritualizations of a multifaceted and multiform self. This is consistent with most of the other material found in these pages, including the ethnographies, Upaniùadic accounts of creation and notions of transfer of essence, an expanding and nuanced corpus of ritual inclusiveness (e.g., the thousand bricks of the agnicayana), apocryphal tales of possession (such as that of the dead king Amaruka by Śaãkara), and bhakti-induced possession. The ethnographies in particular argue that Indian culture on a local non-Sanskritized level bears witness to a complex and permeable self. This is disclosed at spirit healing centers such as


plate 3. Lunar asterisms (nakùatras) located within a man. From Collette Caillat and Ravi Kumar, Jain Cosmology, trans. R. Norman (New Delhi: Harmony Books, 1981), 183.


plate 4. Yajñavarāha. Wadhwan, Surendranagar, Gujarat (thirteenth century). See http://dsal.uchicago.edu/images/aiis/aiis_search.html?depth=large&id=32166/. For another, similar example, see Vasudeva S. Agrawala, Matsya Purāâa—A Study (Varanasi: AllIndia Kashiraj Trust, 1963), 311. Another example of this figure, also from Gujarat, may be seen at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Watson Museum, Rajkot, Gujarat.

Bālājī and at various places in Sri Lanka, among shamanic healers in the Himalayas, and in divine, oracular possession virtually everywhere else in South Asia. As mentioned earlier, we conclude this chapter by briefly looking at another area of South Asian culture in which divinized bodies are employed to express a multivocal yet integrated selfhood: the diverse realm of Indian art. One can argue, effectively in my view, that art may not be the most promising medium for expressing a pure, uninvolved, disengaged, unadulterated self, a brahman-ātman relationship. Many examples of modern Indian “Vedāntic” art testify to this (for example, the art of the Brahma Kumārīs). However, in its capacity to graphically represent the interests of complex, imaginative relationships, to portray internal psychological, mental, and even physical conditions, art should in fact prove a valuable locus for confirmation of the themes that we are working with here, in particular, a ritually constructed complex self. The complex self in possession, which has been

402 Part IV. Worldly and Otherworldly Ruptures Image has been suppressed

plate 5. Kāmadhenu, the “wish-fulfilling cow.” Indian poster art.

shown repeatedly to disrespect geography as well as class and caste boundaries (for example, oracular possession in the Himalayas [Erndl, Sax, Srinivas, Mumford, etc.] or festival possession in south India [Hiltebeitel, Honko, Claus, etc.]), is invariably physical and representational, not just mental and psychological. Such pellucid dimensions of disease-producing possession are also abundantly in evidence in āyurvedic texts, the Mahābhārata, and tantric literature. Thus, the tendency of Indian art to represent the self as a complex and not always perfectly interlocking set of identity structures is well worth our consideration here.96 Let us, then, look at a few examples of such artwork here, including a remarkable drawing of a human body enclosing the lunar asterisms, the kāmadhenu, and the Yajñavarāha constituted of the Vedas and the parts of


plate 6. Kāmadhenu. From the collection of Dagmar Benner Wujastyk.

the vedic sacrifices. Most of these refer back to the complex Puruùa of the ñgveda (10.90), constructed of a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, the seasons, the four varâas, the sun and moon, and much more. The most obvious common element of these plates is that they depict embodiments of cosmic or elemental powers. They all help define the embodied being, whether, in the case of the Indian images, a man, a boar, a cow, a bird, or an elephant. Plate 3 depicts the lunar asterisms (nakùatra), the twenty-eight constellations through which the moon passes in its monthly journey, enveloped in the body of a man, himself stretched out like a constellation. Plate 4 shows the Yajñvarāha, the “boar as sacrifice,” in a thirteenth-century sculpture from Gujarat. This image is described at length in Matsya Purāâa, chapter 238, while the iconography is given in the


plate 7. Composite elephant. Gift of George Hopper Fitch, 1991.9.a-.b. ©Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Used by permission.

Vaikhānasa Āgama.97 Every part of the boar’s body is identified with a different part of the Vedic sacrificial ritual. The boar is Varāha, the avatāra of Viùâu that descended to earth to bore to the bottom of the cosmic ocean and rescue the Vedas, which had been endangered by demons. Plates 5 and 6 show the kāmadhenu (wish-fulfilling cow), a popular and enduring image in Indian art. According to Hindu mythology, this friendly beast was created by the gods and demons during the “churning of the ocean of milk” (kùīrasāgaramanthana) and was taken by the seven sages (saptarùi) who comprise the Great Bear constellation. She is considered the mother of all cows. Her four legs are the Vedas, her horns are the gods, her face the sun and moon, her shoulders Agni, and her legs the Himalayas. Her allinclusive nature, along with her origins as the offspring of both the gods and demons, reveals the deep complexity of this apparently simple and unadorned mythical beast. Plate 7 depicts the elephant, large, powerful, and multifaceted, which has been a source of unending fascination in India. Plate 8 depicts the mighty bird Garuba, with the great god Viùâu and his


plate 8. Viùâu and Lakùmī on Garuba. Gift of George Hopper Fitch, B84D3. ©Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Used by permission.


consort LakùÅī astride. This visual representation of dual divinity, male and female, all-encompassing, naturalizes a complex and multiform godhead. In sum, the symptoms of Tantric initiation and the brahmanical ritual actions of nyāsa and pratiù•hā transform the initiate, the ritualist, or the inert form, respectively, by imposing on or constructing within them a divine body, or even a deity. This, I am asserting, is a Sanskritized mode of possession, supported by a vocabulary and structure of selfhood that matches what is found elsewhere in the Indic discourse of possession. This reverberates through Indian culture, and is reconfirmed in South Asian art, where esoteric portraits of human and animal forms reveal a complex visual discourse of possession.

Notes 1. See Lopez 1996:83–104; Padoux 2002; Sharf 2002:263ff.; Urban 1999; White 2000:4ff. and his elastic definition of Tantra on p. 9. 2. See Muller-Ortega, who notes: “There were various forms of non-dualistic Tantric Śaivism represented by a series of related preceptorial lineages: the Trika, Pratyabhijñā, Kaula, Krama, and Mata, which were by no means identical in practice or doctrine. In addition, there were also powerful lineages of conservative, dualistic Śaiva Siddhānta in Kashmir, as well as the centrist cult of the worship of Svacchandabhairava. Of these, it is the first, by no means homogeneous, group that seems to have generally and imprecisely been referred to as Kashmir Śaivism” (1996:188). On the history and development of these sects, see Sanderson 1988:692ff. 3. Sanderson 1985:201. Sanderson writes of his work, that it “is concerned with the processes by which the learned tradition has transformed (and domesticated) the element of possession in Śaiva practice” (personal communication, October 1993). The places Sanderson lists in this passage (mountains, caves, forests, etc.) are among those that the MBh also regards as liminal, and for which the epic employs the verb āv√iś denoting entry into them; see above pp. 248f. 4. Sanderson 1985:202. 5. The most complete description of śmaśāna sādhana, in fact of śavasādhana, a ritual that employs a corpse, occurs in the Āgamarahasyam, pp. 117–135. This is not a Kashmiri Tantra, but a copious modern north Indian compilation of all manner of tantric and domestic ritual, including sections on nyāsa, ha•hayoga, and initiation. 6. kāpālikān samāveśena sāÅyam upagacchati | tathā hi–yathā grahān puruùeùv āviśanti tatheśvaraguâā mukteùv āviśanti | cited in Torella 1994:xxxiii n. 49; also mentioned in Sanderson 1985:213n90. On symptoms of āveśa according to the Kāpālikas, Pāśupātas, and the Lākulas/Kālamukhas, see Śaivaparibhāùā, p. 156. Though the Kāpālikas aspire to the Lord’s qualities ( guâa) through samāveśa, the other atimārga sects, the Pāśupatas and the Kālāmukhas, aspire to the same through saÅkrānti and utpatti.


7. Torella 1994. See also Bha••a Rāmakaâ•ha’s views expressed in his commentary on the Kiraâatantra 1.20c–22b: [śivatvasya] vyaktir iha mokùān na [tu siddhe] saÅkrāntir āveśan samutpattir vety etad apy atan siddham | “In this system (iha) liberation is the revelation of [innate] Śivahood. It is not [characterized by] transference [of Śivahood] into the adept (siddhe) or possession or the coming into being [of Śivahood]. This too is proved by this [verse].” Cf. Goodall 1998:28; see also Brunner’s observations (1986:518–519) on the sectarian distinctions between saÅkrānti, āveśa, and samutpatti, seen in this passage. 8. For an intriguing possibility of initiatory possession from a different culture, note the case of Jesus. The evidence for this was reviewed in a very interesting article by DeMaris (2000), who enters an older debate over the historicity of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. If in fact it occurred, argues DeMaris, then the baptism could represent a case of positive, ritually induced, possession of the Holy Spirit. If it did not occur and was a later addition to the Bible, as some suggest, then Jesus’ visions could be a case of negative, spontaneous, nonritually induced possession by a spirit. Either of these scenarios challenges certain articles of Christian belief. In the former, the baptism would challenge the notion of Jesus’ born perfection, which calls into question his very need for a baptism, while in the latter the baptism would legitimate Jesus’ spontaneous possession. DeMaris raises the issue because of the frequent references in the Old Testament (which he discusses) to possession as an accompaniment to visionary experience. 9. See also the reflections of Padoux 1999. 10. See Kaw 1967:230, KSTS ed. of the text, 131–132. 11. Finn 1986:65. 12. Failure is also possible: Tantrāloka, ch. 31, uses the term piśācāveśa to indicate incorrect rise of kuâbalinī. 13. Adapted from Flood 1993:294. 14. Summarized from Finn 1986:65f. For an elaboration of this see Vasudeva 2004:185ff., 303ff. Sanderson states that Abhinavagupta “understands samāveśan to mean not the act of being entered but entering (into one’s true nature)” (1986:177n33). This is to be distinguished from the Mālinīvijayottara’s use of āveśa as being possessed by the deity (Vasudeva 2004:304n10), in this case the śakti or goddess Parā. It is important here to examine Mālinīvijayottara 2,17–23, 12.15–20. For more on the Mālinīvijayottara’s nuancing of both samāveśa and āveśa, see Biernacki 2006. 15. Cited in Kaw 1967:233, 1975:175; Sanderson 1986:176; Torella 1994:203. Śiva’s projection into the individual is fourfold: as a sensationless void (śūnyam), as internal sensation (āntaran sparśan), as the intellect (buddhin), and as the body (śarīra) (cf. Sanderson 1986.). 16. asmad rūpasamāviù•an svātmanātmanivāraâe | śivan karotu nijayā naman śāktyā tatātmane || 17. Cf. Utpaladeva’s Vótti on Śivadóù•i 1.1, that samāveśa is to be practiced assiduously, after which it grants fruit commensurate with the vision it generates. 18. tasyaiva ca pallavabhūtān parameśvarastutipraâāmadhyānapūjādayan. 19. See Sanderson 1986:176ff. 20. Ibid.


21. Sanderson 1986:177n33 cites only the Mālinīvijayottaratantra. 22. āveśaś cāsvatantrasya svatadrūpanimajjanāt | paratadrūpatā śambhor ādyāc chaktyavibhāginan || Tantrāloka 1.173. Gnoli translates this as: “La penetrazione (āveśa) consiste nell’assunzione della natura suprema, preceduta e determinata dalla sparizione della nostra natura individua di essere non liberi. Tale assunzione proviene da Śambhu, l’originale, inseparato dalle sue potenze” (1980:92). 23. satyasvarūpe samyag ā samantāt praveśalakùaâam, Vivótivimarśinī on ĪPK 3.2.12. 24. Sanderson 1986:177n33. 25. Kaw 1967:236; citing Abhinavagupta on Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī (p. 236n35): seyaÅ dvayy api jīvanmuktāvasthā samāveśa ity uktā śāstre. 26. Laghuvótti on Parātrīśikā, verse 2, cited by Muller-Ortega 1989:183; 1996: 191–192. My interpretation of this passage is as follows: “Contentment [tópti] is of two kinds: as a state of living liberation it is to be attained by conscious realization [lit. “recourse to the heart”]. But it is also a state of divine comportment to be attained by samāveśa on that [state of living liberation].” 27. Torella 1994:xxxiv. 28. Vivótivimarśinī on Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā 3.2.12, see also this chapter, note 34. 29. For an explication of this text, with notes, see Singh 1963. For a statement approximately two centuries earlier than Kùemarāja of this same identity achieved through full possession, see the first verse of the Śivadóù•i cited in note 16. 30. See Bell 1992:202 for an elaboration of this. 31. See White 1996, which deals extensively with this theme. 32. Cf. Goudriaan in Gupta et al. 1979:60–62. Also Mālinīvijayottara 2.17ff. (devāgre viniveśayet, 2.17); Vijñānabhairavatantra 111–112; Kavirāj 1963:58f. Paramārthasāra supplies a formal description of śaktipāta: “As one’s face is illumined in a spotless mirror, this (Lord) who is the very embodiment of illumination [bhārūpan] is revealed in the faculty of illuminated intellect [dhītattva], which is spotless as a result of the śaktipāta of Śiva” (ādarśe malarahite yadvad vadanaÅ vibhāti tadvad ayam | śivaśaktipātavimale dhītattve bhāti bhārūpan ||9||). The methodology is supplied later in the text: “When one completely realizes this supreme path quickly from the mouth of the guru, then only, as a result of this extremely intense śaktipāta, can one obtain Śiva alone, without any obstacle” (paramārthamārgam enaÅ jha•iti yadā gurumukhāt samabhyeti | atitīvraśaktipātāt tadaiva nirvighnam eva śivan ||96||). 33. Śakti, grammatically feminine, can, however, be the property of males: cf. rudraśaktisamāveśān in Mālinīvijayottara 2.17, 20.29. 34. Mālinīvijayottara 11.35 lists the qualities of śaktipāta, when constitutive of an advanced initiation, as bliss (ānanda), the awakening of kuâbalinī (udbhava), physical shaking (kampa), sleep (nidrā), and whirling ( ghūrâi) (lakùyec cihnasaãghātam ānandādikan ādarāt | ānanda udbhavan kampo nidrā ghūrâiś ca pañcamī ||). The Tantrāloka mentions similar symptoms of possession by Rudra’s sakti: āviśantī rudraśaktin kramāt sūte phalaÅ tv idam | ānandam udbhavaÅ kampaÅ nidrāÅ ghūrâiÅ ca dehagām || (29.208). The commentary glosses kampa as shaking of the


subtle body (prāâātmani vāyau tatkāritvāt kampasya), nidrā as the focusing of the intellect inside the body, which occurs as a result of sleep bringing about a state in which false notions of physical consciousness cease (antas tanau buddhir puryaù•ake tattanmāyīyavóttinirodhāt nidrāyān), and ghūrâi or whirling as external activity which is no longer dependent on the ego (bahis tanāv ahantāvaù•ambhabhaãgāt ghūrâin). The commentator adds that this extremely sharp śaktipāta incinerates the pāśas (nooses) that bind one to the relative world. The Mālinīvijayottara continues: evaÅ āviù•ayā śaktyā mandatīvrādibhedatan | pāśastobhapaśugrāhau prakurvīta yathecchayā || góhītasya punan kuryān niyogaÅ śeùabhuktaye | athavā kasyacin nāyaÅ āveśan saÅprajāyate ||. See also Tantrāloka 5.100c–108b, for further associations of āveśa with śaktipāta; esp. 5.102. This can be compared to similar phenomena described in ethnographies; cf. Erndl, Freeman, etc. 35. Sax, using the Hindi ātma hil jātā hai (personal communication, June 2000). For similar notions in his work, see Sax 1991a:185, passim. 36. Diemberger 2005:120. 37. Sanderson 1994:88. 38. For general information and examples of nyāsa, see Kane HDh II.1:319f., 2.2:900, 5.2:1120ff. For descriptions of different varieties of nyāsa, see also Śabdakalpadruma 2:935ff. An important exposition of nyāsa is found in Davis 1991:47– 60. The diagrams on pp. 76–82 show nyāsa being performed on one’s own body as well as on a Śiva liãga. Khanna 1986:222ff. also contains much relevant information. Khanna (ibid.:225) cites an esoteric etymology of nyāsa provided by a Śrīcakra practitioner from Varanasi, viz. from √ni (to lead, set or fix down) and √as (to dwell or abide). In fact, however, it is surely from the prefix ni + √as (to throw or cast). 39. For example, Hanumad-Rahasyam (cf. Mishra 1971), has dozens of pages of nyāsa for different manifestations of Hanumān (e.g., five-faced, seven-faced) drawn from ritual handbooks and mantra compilations with titles such as Hanumadrahasya, Atharvaâarahasya, and SudarśanasaÅhitā (for more on this text, see Chapter 11). 40. This division of ritual into nitya, naimittika, and kāmya has been productive since vedic times; see F. Smith 1987:122–131. 41. parivóttāãgulī kótvā nakhāśliù•atalau karau | aãguù•au tarjanīśliù•au nakhair āveśakāriâī || (One should curve the fingers of both hands so that the nails embrace the surface of the palms, then touch the nails of the thumbs and ring fingers. [This is the mudrā that] brings about āveśa.” The commentary calls this the āveśanamudrā and glosses āveśakāriâī as devatābhāvodbodhanakāriâī (inducing awakening of the experience [bhāva] of the deity). 42. Cf. Flood, who writes of its presentation in the Jayākhya SaÅhitā: “The textual representation of the bhūtaśuddhi is set within a sequence in which the physical or elemental body (bhautika śarīra) is purified and the soul ascends from the heart through the body, and analogously through the cosmos, to the Lord Nārāyaâa located at the crown of the head” (2002:29). 43. Bóhaddevatā 8.132cd: tasmān manasi saÅnyasya devatām juhuyād dhavin


(Thus one should offer an oblation after fully introducing the deity into the mind). See Patton 1996a:188. 44. Flood 1993:245. 45. Yoga was always (or nearly always) practiced as an adjunct to realization through theological frameworks outside Patañjali’s YS. Like SāÅkhya, yoga has always worked better as an auxiliary to other systems, usually those self-identified as varieties of Vedānta. In the present case, ha•hayoga texts such as the Ha•hayogapradīpikā or GheraâbasaÅhitā, with Nāthayoga affiliations, provided the reference points. 46. Ibid.:242. 47. Ibid., on Śivasūtravimarśinī of Kùemarāja, p. 94, commentary on Śivasūtra 3.16. The sūtra reads: āsanasthan sukhaÅ hrade nimajjati | (one happily established in the posture plunges into the ocean [of consciousness]) (translation by Flood). Kùemarāja comments: āsanaÅ paraÅ śaktiÅ balam. 48. ParātriÅśikāvivaraâa, p. 86. 49. Flood 1993:244; PH, p. 86. Dyczkowski writes: “Abhinavagupta says that mantra and mudrā have a body made of the powers of cognition and action (jñānakriyaśaktiśarīra)” (1987:161), and PTLV, p. 11. 50. Flood 1993:283. 51. Ibid. Vijñānabhairava 68–69: vahner viùasya madhye tu cittaÅ sukham ayaÅ kùipet | kevalaÅ vāyupūrâaÅ vā smarānandena yujyate || śaktisaãgamasaÅkùubdhaśaktyāveśāvasānikam | yatsukhaÅ brahmatattvasya tatsukhaÅ svākyam ucyate || (One should cast this sublime mind [citta] into the midst of contraction and expansion [downward and upward moving kuâbalinī]; this by itself or with the breath suspended yields for one the bliss of sexual union. The bliss which results from possession [āveśa-] of feminine energy brought about through orgasm [saÅkùubdha-] during sexual intercourse with a woman is said to be the bliss of brahman that is inherent in one’s own self ). See the explanatory notes on this passage in Singh 1979:65–67. 52. Cf., e.g., KālikāP 31, MatsyaP 22.13, VāyuP 6.11–23. See the visual representation of this below. 53. NārāyanamayaÅ varma saÅnahyet, BhP 6.8.5. 54. In an important rite called śatarudrīya, “that during which the hundred names of Rudra are recited” (though in fact the designations of Rudra total far more than a hundred), the Rudra chapter is recited while milk is poured in a steady stream over the front of the left wing of the completed bird-shaped altar; cf. Staal 1983: 1:509–525. 55. The popularity of the Rudrādhyāya may be noted in its frequent use as a solo recitation in large performances. These performances, called atirudra, are fairly frequent today. In them the Rudrādhyāya is recited by eleven (because there are eleven sections in the text) or even 108 brahmans, 11 or 108 or 1,008 times, usually with offerings of rice mixed with black sesame seed into one or more fires. For example, the Sringeri Śāradā Pī•ham advertised fairly extensively (including on the Internet) for an “Athi Rudra Maha Yagnam” in 1997 to consecrate the opening of a branch of the Pī•ham in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. In 2006 the well-known saint Sathya Sai Baba from Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, sponsored an event with 121 brahmans re-


citing the Rudrādhyāya 121 times per day for 11 days, with 11 brahmans sitting around 11 fires into which they made offerings after each verse. 56. V. Turner 1969:94ff., passim. 57. These are the followers of the Śrautasūtras of Baudhāyana, Āpastamba, Bhāradvāja, Sa•yāùābha-Hiraâyakeśin, Vaikhānasa, and Vādhūla. Cf. Gonda 1977:514– 525; Kashikar 1968:48–69. 58. Mantrapuùpam, pp. 218–221. An earlier, nearly identical, edition was published under the title Taittirīyamantrakośa. Two of the six śākhās of the Taittirīya school of the Kóùâayajurveda, Bhāradvāja and Vādhūla, are virtually extinct, with no active followers today. Of the remaining śākhās, the greatest number of those who might use the Mantrapuùpam are followers of the Āpastamba sūtra texts, as they predominate in most of south India. The Mantrapuùpam was probably composed with an audience of Āpastambins in mind. Indeed, the prototype for these (and other) extended nyāsas is the camakādhyāya (hymn containing words ca me), TS 4.7.1–11 (cp. ŚuklayajurvedasaÅhitā 18.1–27, cf. Staal 1983.1: 563–570 for its use in the agnicayana), in which the entire creation is, piecemeal, dedicated to the chief ritual patron (yajamāna), in the first person. 59. Because the Rudrādhyāya is a prose text, there can be no identifiable poetic meter. Apparently, a ritualist who (perhaps long ago) redacted this introductory material believed that the identifying markers of a ñgvedic hymn—a óùi, devatā, and chandas—were necessary to situate the Rudrādhyāya within the most sacred of Vedic frameworks. 60. Kīlaka (nail, pin) is a tantric term indicating “fixing” of the deity in order to better obtain his or her grace or power. The terms kīlana (piercing, nailing) and stambhana (immobilizing, rendering inert) are often used together to indicate ritual control of a deity. These two terms are also used interchangeably as one of the “six acts” (ùa• karmāâi) of Tantra; cf. Goudriaan 1978:263,374f. 61. Kavaca, usually translated “armor,” “shield,” etc. In the context of body parts, this makes the best sense. 62. Ripinsky-Naxon writes that “means of attaining a shamanic state of consciousness . . . include fasting, self-immolation, physical and mental deprivations, torture, lack of sleep and other exhaustions, ceaseless dancing, and rhythmic activities, such as drumming and chanting” (1993:142). 63. Cf. Stanley 1977:27–43. I have observed this festival twice (in 1975 and 1990), both times from atop the wall that surrounds this fortresslike temple. Without relating much detail of this remarkable spectacle, I can report that a large number of people (fifty or more) at each festival were in possession states. They were clearly dancing to a different tune, so to speak, with body movements, gestures, and articulations guided from sources other than their own conscious motivations. 64. Heesterman 1957:6; Brian K. Smith 1989, 1994; Witzel 1979. 65. I take the phrase, though not the content, from Halbfass 1995, who took it from Paul Hacker and Swami Vivekananda. 66. Cf. BhaviùyaP 379.16, 388.1; ŚivaP 2.1.13.36; Śāradātilaka 4.78; Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati 1.43.6, 1.47.55; Nityotsava 18.24, 20.10; Nirâayasindhu 249.16


and elsewhere in the Purāâas and Dharmanibandhas. Gonda describes prāâapratiù•hā as “the establishment or installation of vital breath, or life, endowment with animation, . . . a process of ‘consecration’” in which the images of deities “become containers of life and supranormal power” (1954:34). In addition, prāâapratiù•hā is a ceremony that “serves to ennoble the worshipper to realize the presence of the divine power, God’s presence, in the image, so that it becomes an effectual means of contact between the divinity and himself ” (ibid.). See also Kane, HDh II.2:896ff. on Devatā-pratiù•hā. 67. Cf. Devībhāgavata Purāâa 5.34.6, which mentions prāâapratiù•hā and nyāsa together. On the role of nyāsa in ma âbala construction in Southeast Asian Hinduism, see Hooykaas 1983:541ff. 68. See Rocher 1986:157 for dates of this Purāâa. 69. A process astonishingly similar to prāâapratiù•hā is recorded in the medieval and Renaissance Christian debates surrounding the “god-making passages” in the Hermetic Asclepius. The Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, though a Christian prophet and defender of monotheism, is said in the Asclepius to have defended practices in which the Egyptian priests would animate their temple statues by attracting the souls of higher beings to enter them. See Hanegraaff 2004. 70. Nabokov 2000:158. 71. See Hiltebeitel 1991:454–455, 465, passim. 72. Robinet 1993:103–104. 73. Ibid.:205–206. See also Andersen 1989–90:17 for an account of what may be considered a reverse nyāsa, in which millions of demigods “issue forth from my body to assist me in writing the talisman and to manifest their power and exterminate evil demons, monsters, goblins, wicked devils, and noxious influences”; also Andersen 1995, esp. 194ff. 74. For more on the diffusion and lines of transmission of related non- or quasiBuddhist ideas from India to China, see Chapter 11. Along different lines, Victor Mair has written extensively on this project, with highly controversial results among Sinologists (see, for example, 1990:140ff.). 75. Cf. Mahāvastu 1:328, for āveśanaśālā (workshop), and Senart’s note, p. 612; also Rhys-Davids and Stede 1921:113 for āvesana. See also the following lexicons: Trikāâbaśeùa (1080–1159 c.e.) 3.230; Anekārthasaãgraha of Hemacandra (1089– 1172 c.e.) 4.161; Vaijayantīkośa 160.22; Kau•ilya’s Arthaśāstra 2.36, also 2.14 āveśanin (artisan). 76. See Inden’s comments on “composite authorship” (Inden et al. 2000: 33– 41). 77. One might imagine the appearance of many more non-brahmanized, nonBhārgavized Mahābhāratas, such as the Draupadī cult in Tamilnadu or the Pāâbavalīlā in Garhwal, documented by Hiltebeitel (1988, 1991) and Sax (1995, 1996, 2002), respectively. 78. John Dunne informed me that though āveśa is discussed in Buddhist Tantras and duly commented on, the practice has almost entirely disappeared in Tibetan Buddhism, the exceptions being high-profile examples such as the Nechung oracle (personal communication, October 2001). This observation was confirmed by


Georges Dreyfus (personal communication, November 2003). The example of the oracle I note near the end of Chapter 11 and other examples of spirit mediums among practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism cited in Chapter 4 must be considered differently, as their possession is not instigated by tantric initiation by lamas, nor are their oracular visualizations knowingly derived from Vajrayāna texts. Their experience is more akin to spirit mediumship found across northern India and Nepal, regardless of religious affiliation. Nevertheless, as I discussed in Chapter 4 and elsewhere, the experience of these mediums feeds into the ebb and flow of regular traffic between folk and classical that I assert has been going on for millennia in South Asia. 79. Translated from the Tibetan by John Dunne, from two works by Dalai Lama VII: Rgyal ba bska . . . , folio 52a3ff.; and Rgyal ba Sbkal bzang rgya mtsho. 80. Compare this to some of the Indian tantric mantras used in oracular possession discussed in Chapter 11. 81. For rather quaint notions of the “psycho-physical changes” associated with visualization, drawn from the Sādhanamālā and other texts, see Tachikawa 2000. 82. Wayman, in Lessing and Wayman 1978:162–163; see also ibid.:n17; Beyer 1973:100ff., passim. Wayman is here citing the Tibetan Tantrārthāvatāra-vyākhyāna. He also cites the Sãags rim chen mo (338a–3, 4) to the effect that “[t]he samayasattva is the body of the deity graced with face and hands, actually the manifestation of one’s own mind, a transfiguration of ordinary ego” (pp. 163–164). The text Lessing and Wayman translated is Mkhas Grub Rje’s Rgyud sde spyini rnam par ’zag pa rgyas par brjod. The text states, “One generates the Symbolic Being (samaya-sattva) and draws in the Knowledge Being (jñāna-sattva)” before applying mudrās. In a footnote, Wayman says: “The idea seems to be that the Knowledge Being is a veritable manifestation of the self-existent Buddhas, or the tenth stage Bodhisattvas such as Mañjuśrī, while the Symbolic Being is the imaginary deity which the yogin generates himself into” (p. 235). These terms frequently occur in the Sādhanamālā and the Niùpannayogāvalī, cf. the latter pp. 7, 9. Hartzell adds the following, in his massive unpublished dissertation on Tantric yoga: “As we see in Tantric initiation sequences, a samaya-sattva or ‘covenant being’ is a Tantric initiate who has been accepted into the Tantric community and is permitted to undertake practice of sexual Yogas” (1997:889). See also Bentor’s discussion of the Tibetan “Literature on Consecration (Rab gnas),” (1996:292ff.) for the use of the jñānasattva (Tib. ye shes sems dpa’ ) and the samayasattva (Tib. dam tshig sems dpa’ ) in the generation (utpatti; Tib. bskyed pa) and consecration (pratiù•hā; Tib. rab gnas) of images, books, stūpas, etc., as receptacles into which the body, speech, and mind of the Buddha are to flow. Tachikawa understands jñānasattva to be “the existence of wisdom” and samayasattva to be “the existence of promise” (2000:234). 83. Beyer 1973:101. 84. See Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Tayé 2005:277, 278. The translators of this volume have a more elegant and exact suggestion for this process: the “ritual procedure through which the pristine awareness deities [viz. jñānasattva-s] merge with and are stabilized within the pledge deities [viz. samayasattva-s].” 85. Beyer 1973:101.


86. The Sādhanamālā does not provide the actual mantra (for which see below), but it could be sequenced similarly, replacing the masculine vajrāveśāya with the feminine vajratārāyai. 87. Sādhanamālā, p. 191. Tachikawa asked Tibetan Buddhist monks in Kathmandu about their experience of unifying jñānasattva and samayasattva. One monk commented to him that, though it is rare, “it does happen on occasion. When the unification of the two existences is obtained, the Tantric monk practicing visualization will feel pain in several parts of his body, and cannot hold his body straight” (2000:235). 88. Kalkin (on verse 87, KT vol. 2:85): asya ko •ijāpena daśalakùahomena pūrvasevāÅ kuryāt; also Dalai Lama and Hopkins 1989:446, replaces a with ān. 89. The commentator cites the following verse: loharatnānnagovājigajakanyāvasundharā | iù•ā bhāryā svamāÅsāni dānaÅ daśavidhaÅ matam || (The ten kinds of gift are said to be iron, gemstones, food, cows and horses, elephants, virginal girls, land, sacrifices, one’s wife, and one’s own flesh). 90. The ingredients of this vary, but usually this mixture of “five immortal substances” consists of ghee, milk, sugar, honey, and dates. Dates, not known in ancient India, are probably a replacement for butter or another fruit. 91. In different contexts, citta can mean “mind,” “intellect,” or “thought.” In the present instance, “mind” is most apt. 92. That is to say, the possession is of the five elements (pañcamahābhūtāni) that constitute its physical form. The fifth element, ākāśa (empty space) is, in this Buddhist text, interpreted more forthrightly as “emptiness” (śūnyatā) than would otherwise be the case. 93. The Sanskrit text for all four verses reads: idānīÅ krodharājasya bodhisattvasya vā kāyādyadhiù•hānam ucyate— kāyāveśena yogī prakótiguâavaśāt kāyakótya Å karoti vāgāveśena vādī bhavati ca vijayī devanāgāsurāâām | cittāveśena sarva Å parahódayagata Å jñāyate bhūtabhavya Å jñānāveśena buddho bhavati guruguruś ca rddhimān ekaśāstā ||89|| idānīÅ locanādyadhiù•hānam ucyate— bhūmyāveśena yogī bhavati girisamo ’mboś ca śīta Å prayāti vahnyāveśena dāha Å vrajati ca marutā śoùam eva Å prayāti | śunyāveśair adóśyo bhavati bhuvitale khecaratva Å prayāti eva Å rūpādisarva Å prakótiguâavaśād veditavya Å krameâa ||90|| idānīÅ divyāveśānām utpādalakùaâam ucyate— āveśo mantriâāÅ vai bhavati narapate bhāvanāyā balena sevābhedain kadācid bahuvidhasanayair mantrajapādibhiś ca | buddhair āsvādyamānain kvacid amótavaśān maâbale bhavyasunor na svādhiù•hānahīnā bahuvividhabhavair mantriâāÅ siddhir asti ||91|| idānīÅ āveśopaśamanādikam ucyate— tyaktvāveśasya paścāc chirasi ca hódaye mūrdhni nābhau ca kaâ•he guhye rakùāÅ jinaiś ca svakulabhuvigatain kārayet svatrivajrain |


dattāãge pītavastrasya pihitanayanasyātra śiùyasya veśan saÅvótyarthaÅ vratāni pravaragatigatāny eva deyāni tāni ||92|| (KT, pp. 86–87)

Thanks to John Dunne for help with the translation of the last verse. The meaning of dattāãge remains unclear. 94. See Snellgrove 1987:205 for a related example from the KT. 95. See Granoff 1979:78, in which the Japanese word abisha, a cognate of āveśa, is given (see Chapter 11 for more on this). 96. This art of fabulous beings, mostly mythical animals, has a long history. They have been represented in Persia, Harappa, Crete, Sumer, Central Asia, and elsewhere for millennia. In India, such beasts include a variety of dragons, the griffon, the Persian simorgh, a fabulous bird of wisdom, the śārdūla (Sanskrit), and a lion, sometimes winged. The Rudrādhyāya of the Taittirīya SaÅhitā, discussed above, attests to the centrality of animals in the mythology of Rudra/Śiva in antiquity, especially in his form as Paśupati, the “Lord of Beasts.” For more on this kind of body cosmology, see White 2003:174ff. 97. For the descriptions from the Matsya Purāâa, see Agrawala 1963:313–331; and Nagar 1993:65–70. See the latter (pp. 76–77) for the account of the iconography from the Vaikhānasāgama.


1

Tantra and the Diaspora of Child


C

hapter 10 dealt with tantric generative processes that were formally designed and executed and that gradually evolved into possession as the reconstruction was effected and the symbolism became pervasive. This chapter addresses a different mode of tantric possession, one that, as described in the previous chapter, is “positive,” but is much more dramatic, cutting through deeper cultural and sociological layers.1 The term we adopt for this hitherto unrecognized form of oracular possession, taken from a few Sanskrit texts discussed below, is svasthāveśa (literally “possession of one who is in a good state of [mental and physical] health).2 Two preliminary observations are in order. First, this term itself indicates “positive” possession, the opposite of opportunistic possession of one who is ill, which, as we see in Chapter 12, falls under the āyurvedic category of āgantuka (pathology induced from without by demonic grahas [seizers]). Svasthāveśa is, however, much more specific than the literal meaning of the term indicates. Second, the textual evidence presented here demonstrates that oracular possession akin to that which fills the pages of modern ethnographies, described in Chapters 2 and 4 above, may be historicized much more than scholars have recognized. That svasthāveśa has been barely my-

Tantra and the Diaspora of Childhood Possession 417

thologized and narrativized lends weight to this historicization and allows us to trace with a greater degree of confidence its origins and diffusion beyond the borders of India and South Asia. Although the term svasthāveśa was, apparently, never widely used, it is attested in many Sanskrit texts beginning in the second half of the first millennium c.e.. We examine these occurrences shortly. It is prudent, however, first, to provide a summary description of this possession. In svasthāveśa, a medium causes a spirit or deity to descend into any one of several reflective objects or into the body of a young boy or girl, after which the medium or youth answers questions from a client regarding events of the past, present, or future. Most of the Sanskrit texts in which svasthāveśa is mentioned by name or described without using this term are unedited tantric compendia from northern and eastern India that may be dated from the ninth to twelfth centuries. A few texts that mention svasthāveśa or its distinctive components predate this material, while others describing this practice without identifying it by name are, with rare exception, much later manuscript fragments found in libraries in South India. To the best of my knowledge, the name svasthāveśa is mentioned in only four published texts: the Harùacarita, a prose hagiography of King Harùa composed by Bāâabha••a in the mid-seventh century; the Kathāsaritsāgara, composed by Somadeva in the eleventh century; a tantric compendium called Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati (ĪŚP) by the eponymous Īśānaśivagurudevamiśra, composed in Kerala in the eleventh century; and the anonymous tantric digest titled Tantrarāja of the sixteenth century. Except the ĪŚP, all of these were composed in North India. I discuss these texts below, but more important are the unpublished manuscripts in which this term appears. Of central concern is the transmission of this ritual, at least in its textual redactions, from its probable point of origin in North India, eastward across the Himalayas into China and southward into the Deccan and the presentday states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu. I discuss the condition and extent of the Indic material, a revealing intermediate tantric text called Mantramahodadhi, the key ritual and ontological terms, the ritual participants, and the immediate historical roots of the practice. I cannot here enter into a discussion of the deeper historical roots of svasthāveśa, which, I suspect, are enmeshed in shamanistic practices that are unrecoverable today. I mention this simply to acknowledge a question that will arise for many readers, not because I am in a position to answer it. The available evidence simply does not permit this. However, I examine compa-


rable and largely derivative Chinese texts, before finally turning my attention more fully to the South Indian manuscripts. It is also important to note the historical events that facilitated the transmission and dissemination of this unique tantric material. Because svasthāveśa involves as its most striking project the inducement of deity possession in children, I conclude this chapter by speculating on the reasons for this.

The Śaiva and Buddhist Tantras and the South Indian Texts The Himalayan Śaiva and Buddhist Tantras that mention svasthāveśa are primarily dedicated to descriptions of the worship of Śiva and various goddesses. The Śaiva texts fall within a class called Siddhānta, rather than under the better-known but highly suspect designation “Kashmir Śaivism.”3 Thus, the texts are not the commonly cited ones ( by Abhinavagupta, Kùemarāja, Utpaladeva, and their predecessors), but the lesser-known Jayadrathayāmala, Tantrasadbhāva, Sekoddeśa, Niśvāsaguhya, Bóhatkālottara, and CakrasaÅvarapiâbārtha.4 None of these except the Sekoddeśa has been edited or published;5 the remaining ones exist in manuscript form only and have been examined almost solely by Alexis Sanderson.6 These texts undoubtedly represent but a few of what must have been a much greater number of Sanskrit texts that mentioned this and other similar apotropaic rituals current at the time. What is striking about svasthāveśa, and what occupies us here in part, is the remarkable continuity of these texts with certain early Chinese Buddhist tantric texts cited by Edward L. Davis in his recent volume Society and the Supernatural in Song China and Michel Strickmann in Mantras et Mandarins and, much more extensively, in Chinese Magical Medicine,7 as well as in later manuscripts written in Sanskrit and mixed Sanskrit and Telugu in South India dating to perhaps seven or eight centuries later. This broad conformity sparks several questions. Were specific possession cults transnational? Was Asian, especially Indian, religion organized along more microscopic definitions of lineage than I had hitherto believed? And if so, what sorts of identifiable historical forces could account for this organization? These were just some of the questions I began asking of this material. I cannot claim to provide fully satisfactory answers to all these questions, but I hope here to initiate the process of determining them. Among my most frustrating, though not unexpected, discoveries in the course of working on this project is that Sanskrit texts dedicated wholly to


deity or spirit possession are relatively few in number. Given the ritual nature of most possession, I optimistically hoped to find practical guides (prayogas, paddhatis) on ritual invocation of possession. These, I anticipated, would resemble other nontheoretical ritual texts in form and composition. Although it appears that such texts were rarely composed, they were surely written in greater numbers than the available evidence from manuscript catalogues suggests. A perusal of the available volumes of the New Catalogus Catalogorum (NCC) reveals just four manuscripts with the word āveśa in the title. All these manuscripts are housed in Chennai, in the Adyar Library and the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library (GOML).8 Three of these, including two of which are very revealing and fairly complete, are in Telugu script. The other is in Grantha, a variety of Tamil script that better reflects Sanskrit. To this must be added eight manuscripts from the recently published Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts. Volume XVI: Tantra Mantra Śāstram of the Oriental Research Institute (ORI) in Mysore. All of the Chennai and Mysore manuscripts are prayogas, though most of them are fragmentary or incomplete. In the Mysore collection, four single-folio palm leaf manuscripts in Nāgarī script appear to be copies of a prototype. Another, slightly longer, is in Tamil script, while the three longest and most detailed are in Telugu script.9 This small number, given the vast quantity of tantric and āgamic ritual ephemera, suggests that most of these manuscripts did not survive precisely because they were “ephemeral.” They probably existed only in locally produced “chapbooks” that were not, on the whole, deemed sufficiently important or respectable to hand over to manuscript libraries.10 It is likely, however, that a fair amount of material on possession, and probably svasthāveśa, remains buried in collections of unexamined tantric manuscripts housed in personal and institutional libraries in various parts of India, especially in the south. Most of the recognized (and published) tantric literature in South India is dakùiâācāra (literature of the “right-handed path”). This “path” and its literature eventually became dominant in Tamilnadu, Karnataka, and much of southern and coastal Andhra Pradesh because of its support by the Śaãkarācāryas, who authorized the domestication and transformation of “left-handed” practices involving Tripurā and other goddesses, assigning them an advaitic and, therefore, “right-handed” trajectory.”11 Nevertheless, an appreciable quantity of vāmācāra material was permitted within rather wide latitudes of secret teachings. Among these culturally and textually subcutaneous practices were strategies for inducing oracular possession, which


was regarded by the brahmanical orthodoxies as “folk” or “popular” practice, even when brahmans participated in them as fully as others. Notable among these “others” were women and people of lower social rank, whose social and religious orbit brahmans supposedly did not frequent. Many of these practices were considered indelicate and potentially polluting, even menacing, by certain segments of the brahmanical orthodoxy. Thus, their social locus encouraged their secrecy. This marginalization included manuscripts as well, which were rarely distributed outside small communities of practitioners. I know from my own experience and that of Indian scholars with whom I have spoken that certain individuals allegedly holding manuscripts on possession and other vāmācāra topics have refused to hand them over to libraries or have even destroyed them after they have learned that scholars have suspected them of owning such manuscripts. They have been kept secret because their contents are regarded as dangerous, polluting, and unbrahmanical. This has occurred in South India, including Andhra Pradesh. I mention this state because the most complete Sanskrit manuscripts on āveśa that I have thus far been able to locate, in the NCC and the Mysore catalogue, are in Telugu script and thus from Andhra Pradesh.12 The other relatively complete and seemingly intact manuscripts are in Grantha and Tamil scripts, thus from Tamilnadu. The most important manuscript I am aware of is a collection of āveśa sections in Telugu script culled from various Tantras.13 One section is titled Āveśabhairavamantran and another is called Bhairavāveśan. Neither have colophons, thus we do not know their provenance. Another section is described as the tenth pa•ala of the Dakùiâakālikāgama, while another, titled Āveśakālikāmantran, is recorded as the fifth pa•ala of the Vetālatantra. An apparent addendum to this, possibly also from the Vetālatantra, is titled Bhūtāveśakraman.14 The very existence of this manuscript suggests that a paâbit or tantric practitioner (or both) took an interest in this topic, at least to the extent of collecting various accounts of it, almost certainly for performative purposes. One of the Telugu manuscripts that I have examined, housed in the GOML, states in its colophon that it is the third chapter (pa•ala) of a text called SudarśanasaÅhitā. Complete manuscripts of this text (in Telugu script) are housed in the ORI in Mysore,15 the Academy of Sanskrit Research in Melkote, and Sampūrâānanda SaÅskóta Viśvavidyālaya in Varanasi,16 while scattered chapters of it are found in the libraries of the University of Pennsylvania,17 the GOML, and (very likely) in many private libraries. I have ex-


amined the Pennsylvania manuscript, which is troublesome and corrupt18 and have found certain affinities between it and the Chennai manuscript. Although the Pennsylvania manuscript is in Nāgarī script and may be from Maharashtra, the compositional style, diction, liberal sprinkling of bīja mantras, and subject matter dealing with an obscure aspect of vāmācāra Tantra (worship of Kārtavīryārjuna) reveal a respectable similarity to the Chennai manuscript. The colophon in the Pennsylvania manuscript states that it is the twelfth pa•ala of the SudarśanasaÅhitā,19 suggesting that this text is a loose compilation of tantric ephemera.20 Of the remaining manuscripts that I am currently examining, the ORI catalogue lists three composed on palm leaf, one in Grantha, and two in Telugu script. An extract from one of the Telugu manuscripts appears in the appendix to the catalogue. It is called Hanumaddīpavidhin (Injunctions on the Light of Hanumān) and is identified, according to the colophon, as the twentieth pa•ala of the SudarśanasaÅhitā.21 An apparently related fragment from the GOML, discussed below, is identified as the third pa•ala of this text, called Āñjaneya Āveśavidhin (Injunctions to Induce Possession of Āñjaneya).22 It is important to mention this here, because Hanumān has emerged as one of the primary deities for possession in India, especially in his five-faced (pañcamukhī) form.23

Svasthāveśa and the Prasenā Of the two primary divisions of possession, involuntary and voluntary, the former found textual bases principally in the specialized fields of āyurvedic and tantric exorcistic literature.24 However, voluntary possession, particularly that with an oracular component, appears to have been regarded as more suitable material for textuality. Two reasons may be cited for this. First, because it could be practiced, hence prescribed—and, in general, prescription was formalized through literary production. Precedents for the commission of such material to the written word are found in the literature on omens and portents, dating back to the Vedic vidhāna literature,25 scattered passages from the Sanskrit epics, and the landmark works of the astrologer and mathematician Varāhamihira around 550 c.e.26 In addition, possession was experienced as a symptom of tantric initiation, as we have seen, and for this reason it took on greater soteriological, hence literary, urgency.27 Its commission to textuality was part of an ongoing process of domesticating the ever-receding fringe, part of the expansion of Sanskritic culture into new


areas of discourse that extended from the periphery to the center. This is likely a case of Sanskritization in which popular practice was brought into the realm of brahmanical orthodoxy, albeit to a place on the fringe of such orthodoxy. Sanskritization in this case might have also mitigated the threat possession presented to more normative brahmanical orthodoxy.28 This threat was of a total and unrecognizable transcendence that undermined orthodox notions of purity and an independent and impermeable ātman or self. Transcendence achieved during a state of full possession, known to many but experienced by relatively few,29 not only eroded confidence in a stable self, which now hosted other voices, but also annihilated the wellformed and complex personality, the carefully, if culturally, crafted person that served as custodian to the self. Thus, possession negated both the metaphysical and social entities, the self and the person.30 The two key Sanskrit terms that are given momentum in the Śaiva texts and define our present investigation reflect this Sanskritization, this movement from periphery to center, are svasthāveśa and prasenā. The former, as mentioned, is positive, oracular possession, a state of health (svasthā) that by its very designation must be distinguished from negative, disease-producing possession. Svasthāveśa thus indicates voluntary or invited possession of deities or middle-level spirits for the purpose of divination, while negative possession, for which there also exists no single descriptive or denotative term,31 is involuntary possession brought on by the independent agency of malevolent spirits or lower ranking semidivine beings for destructive purposes. Because an extended discussion of early Indic demonologies (bhūtavidyā) appears in Chapter 12’s discussion of āyurvedic texts, it is necessary to mention here only that the taxonomy of spirits and deities migrated to China with material trade and Buddhism.32 Of particular interest, however, is a spirit not noted in any āyurvedic text: the prasenā, a spirit mentioned, as far as I am aware, only in these tantric texts, and in Tibetan and Chinese Esoteric Buddhist texts. Neither the word prasenā nor its variant pratisenā, found in a few Sanskrit Buddhist texts, is listed in this sense in any Sanskrit dictionary.33 The word prasena (with a short, rather than long, final a) appears in the Sanskrit lexicons only as a proper name; never does it appear in its literal meaning, in spite of its clear martial associations (Skt. senā [army]).34 However, prasenā is found in its Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) variant, pasiâa, in the Pāiasaddamahaââavo (Prākótaśabda-mahārâavan, PSM), a Prakrit-Hindi dictionary compiled in


the 1920s. In this entry, it is defined as a minor female deity who, through metonymy, becomes identified with the divinatory practice in which she was the primary oracle. In this way, the prasenā largely escaped the purview of mainstream Sanskritic culture. What is striking is that the Sanskrit prasenā appears to be derived from the MIA pasiâa, the Prakrit form of the Sanskrit praśna [question]. Prasenā, then, is a back formation, derived from a non-Sanskrit word that has been subsequently Sanskritized. I am indebted to Alexis Sanderson for this insight and for forwarding to me references to some of the texts through which this can be proved.35 This is confirmed by the PSM, which cites Jaina texts that predate or are contemporaneous with the Kashmiri and other northern material and provide a meaning for pasiâa that is very close to that of prasenā in the svasthāveśa ritual. The PSM glosses pasiâa as “calling a deity into a mirror, etc.; a special kind of mantric knowledge,”36 citing the Jaina ĀyaraÅgasutta (Ācārāãga Sūtra) and §hānaÅgasutta (Sthānāãga Sūtra).37 The former had a long history of textual composition and accretion and contains some of the earliest Jaina writings, dating to the last centuries b.c.e. However, the later portions consist of separable texts that include exegetical commentary on the earlier parts as well as exhaustive accounts of monastic behavior. Among these later portions is the Niśītha Cūrâi, composed in the midseventh century by the prolific Jaina scholar Jinadāsagaâi Mahattara.38 This is likely the section of the ĀyaraÅgasutta that the PSM cites.39 The earlier parts are much too early to include any mention of the word prasenā. The PSM also cites the term pasiâāpasiâā, employing the feminine pasiâā, attested here as well as in the Jaina Pravacanasārodhāra and the Bóhatkalpabhāùya (available in manuscript only). This term, which could be rendered in Sanskrit as prasenā-praśna (the art of resolving questions through the mediation of a prasenā), is glossed by the PSM as “calling a deity in dream, etc., through the power of mantric knowledge, after which it relates the fruit, both auspicious and inauspicious.”40 According to the Niśītha Cūrâi, a question is asked of a pasiâā, which had entered one’s thumbnail (aÅgu••ha-pasiâā) or arm, the leftovers after eating a sweet called kaÅsāra, a piece of cloth, a mirror, a sword blade, water, or a wall. Pasiâāpasiâā, according to this text, is also a kind of divination in which a question is answered by a pasiâā who appears in a dream, thus confirming that the PSM drew its definition from this late section of the


ĀyaraÅgasutta. This pasiâā is called “dream deity” or “dream-divination” (suviâā-pasiâā).41 It must be noted that the northern and eastern (and subsequently the Tibetan and Chinese) use of this kind of divination may well have been adopted, at least partially and indirectly, from these Jaina sects. The word praśna, which lies at the root of this divinatory practice, means not only “question” (it is the primary word for “question” in Sanskrit) but also “horary astrology,” a usage traced at least to Varāhamihira, who uses it in this sense in the BóhatsaÅhitā.42 This sense persists into modern astrological practice (jyotiùa). The two primary tasks of Indian astrology are prediction and fixing times and places for auspicious events. This is no less the case in horary astrology, in which the client asks the astrologer a question about the past, present, or future, and the astrologer answers based on the current position of the planets, rather than on the client’s natal horoscope. Because of the difficulty of determining specific birth times before the modern era of precise timekeeping, most premodern astrology in India was praśna. Eventually, it appears, praśna/pasiâa became a more generally employed word for “divinatory practice”; it was subsequently feminized as pasiâā or prasenā and identified as a spirit or minor deity that could be invited into the body of the practitioner or a child, or into an inanimate object, and reveal answers to questions about the past, present, and future.43 The word prasena is used by Bha••otpala (or Utpala) in his commentary (Vivóti) on BóhatsaÅhitā 2.15. Varāhamihira’s verse translates: “One who is instructed through magic [kuhaka-], possession [āveśa-], or by any concealed being, or from hearing [advice whispered] in the ear should never be consulted; such a person is not an astrologer [daivavit].”44 Utpala expands these exclusionary categories. He glosses kuhaka- as indrajāla- (Indra’s net), a more common term for “sorcery” or “magic.” He adds the category prasenā (prasenādikena). Āveśa, he says, means “entrance of a body by a deity, etc.” (devatādidehapraveśena).45 Concealed beings (pihita-) are those whose bodies are covered and unseen. All of these, he says, speak with disembodied voices after they situate themselves in cavities of rocks, in walls, and so on. An entity that whispers in the ear, he says, is a karâapiśāca (ear demon).46 Those who control karâapiśācas are well known in the world, Utpala adds. After they master certain mantras, the karâapiśāca will reveal to them anything they want.47 Utpala offers a second interpretation. He says that those who have questions should sit around a child in a circle. The child’s father then subjects him to a certain ritual and listens to the clients’


issues. The child will then articulate the answers to the questions. My impression is that Utpala had limited knowledge of this practice and appears to have regarded it as possession; perhaps he observed such a session. It is more likely that he merely heard about it from others, as his account has a definite secondhand texture to it. That Bha••otpala was Kashmiri must not be overlooked.48 It was in northern and eastern India that the practice of svasthāveśa through employing a prasenā to speak through the mouth of a child received its greatest impetus. We shall discuss this material momentarily. But what both Varāhamihira, who lived in Ujjain in the sixth century and who declined to grant authority to āveśa in any form, and Bha••otpala, who expanded Varāhamihira’s exclusionary categories, pointedly argue is that knowledge that is neither scientifically verifiable nor systematically obtained, which is to say through a recognized lineage, is valid. Varāhamihira understood that the nature of astrological and other forms of classifiable but fluidly realized knowledge, such as lore associated with omens and portents, invited frauds, amateurs, and charlatans.49 Thus, in the second chapter of the BóhatsaÅhitā he attempted to delineate professional standards. This was obviously a delicate topic that required firmness by both the author and the commentator. What it also demonstrates, above and beyond the situating of arcana as a śāstra or legitimate body of knowledge, is the division between “folk” and “classical” that was readily perceived by the bearers of Sanskritic culture in the first millennium. Varāhamihira’s exposition also illumines his efforts to encroach upon the margins of folk culture by incorporating certain elements of it into the Sanskritic mainstream.50 Despite the apparent ease with which Sanskrit literati co-opted or classicized folk elements, the division between folk and classical always remained sharp, even if the contours of the division proved variable or fluid. Indeed, the awareness of inside and outside, and the readiness to blur and amalgamate alterity, was in India one of the keys to the surprising duration of the control by the Sanskrit literati of a variety of discourse modes. This control, as well as the ever-shifting distinction between folk and classical, was often presented as little more than an exercise by the literati to uphold the epistemological requirements of Sanskritic knowledge systems.51 Indeed, what most people, including brahmans, did in practice was surely quite different. This is the situation today, and there is sufficient evidence in Sanskrit texts of all periods to demonstrate that it was the case in antiquity. Thus, the discourse models adopted by Varāhamihira, Bha••otpala, and most Sanskritic philosophers and systematizers, omitted the inconsis-


tencies that we find, for example, in similar literature in China, as the work of Strickmann and Davis testifies. An example of the Sanskritization to which we refer, and the challenge to accepted Sanskritic epistemological agendas, is the employment of children as central in Sanskritic ritual. This certainly represented an encroachment of popular practice into the corpus of Sanskritic culture, as there is no evidence for it in earlier vedic, epic, or purāâic ritual. Nor is there evidence that it is an innovation of mid- to late first-millennium tantric systematizers. The engagement of children as spiritual factotums in adult rituals thus subverts ritual boundaries that are, for the most part, set by the Vedic ritual theorists, who do not grant children adhikāra for Vedic ritual performance. Indeed, even in the Tantras that are key to our understanding of both the ritual use of children and the incumbent epistemological process, this subject is mentioned only sporadically. Nevertheless, these are the passages that we must examine here. Children are as capable as adults of understanding and responding to ritual,52 and, apropos of our current project, it is the Chinese rather than the Indians who appear to have recognized and legitimated this capability in texts that offer thicker descriptions of the responses of children to such ritual. Regardless of whose texts may be more revealing, the question of the use of children is an important one. I speculate on this below; but it may be said now that inducing possession in another person, whether in an adult or a child, rather than in an inanimate object or in oneself, not only was good theater but also gave the impression that the responsibility of agency and the temptation to manipulate results were reduced, which doubtless conferred a greater sense of authority and authenticity upon both the oracle or medium and the intermediary ritual officiant. As in the Jaina Prakrit and Kashmiri Sanskrit texts, in Tibet and East Asia the terms cognate to pasiâa/prasenā denoted both the tantric ritual and the deity that mediated the oracular experience. In a few esoteric Buddhist texts of the Kālacakra tradition, notably the Sekoddeśa, which appears to have been a section of the “root” Kālacakra Tantra (the Paramādibuddha or Kālacakramūla Tantra),53 and Kalkin Puâbarīka’s Vimalaprabhā on the Laghukālacakra Tantra, the term pra phab-pa, a translation of the Sanskrit pratisenā (prognostic image), is attested in the Tibetan versions.54 This is surely a variant of prasenā. It also appears in chapter 43 of the CakrasaÅvaraTantra, in a verse that reads, “Having repeated the mantra over a sword, water, one’s thumb, a lamp or a mirror, one will cause the descent of the


divinatory image [prasenā] by means of the yoga of oneself [as the deity].”55 This is clearly drawn from earlier Indic material. Giacomella Orofino has written an important and informative article on the Tibetan art of mirror divination, in which pratisenā occupies a major place.56 Orofino understands pratisenā as “a hyper-Sanskritization of the word prasenā, a term of uncertain etymon.”57 We have here dealt with the etymology, though Orofino is incorrect in labeling pratisenā a hyperSanskritization.58 The commentator on the Tibetan version of the Sekoddeśa, Nāropā, cites a text called the Pratisenāvatāratantra (Tib. pra dbab pa la ‘jug pa’i rgyud), now lost, which, he says, enumerates eight kinds of prognostication, all of which, it seems, we may regard as varieties of svasthāveśa.

Epigraphical Evidence for the Practice of Svasthāveśa We now turn to the Himalayan and eastern rite of svasthāveśa, not losing sight of our objective of comparing it to the manuscript material from China of the same period and southern India of later epochs. Although the relevant Tantras are themselves undated, Sanderson suggests that one of the earliest, the Niśvāsaguhya, could be a product of the sixth century, though it can be dated with certainty only to a single ninth-century Nepalese manuscript. Thus, Sanderson states that, though the Niśvāsaguhya “seems to be one of the very earliest Tantras of the Siddhānta,” it is nevertheless representative of “a tradition for which we have epigraphical evidence from the sixth century onwards.”59 Sanderson’s remaining texts, which describe svasthāveśa in greater complexity and variation, were composed at various times up to the twelfth century. The epigraphical evidence to which Sanderson refers is important because it helps establish a general dateline for the diffusion of svasthāveśa to China. This evidence exposes a Śaiva tradition from Central and South India that appears to have entered Kashmir only in the first few decades of the eighth century with the ascendancy of Lalitāditya, the wealthiest and most successful of Kashmir’s imperial monarchs. It is worth noting that Lalitāditya and his successors patronized both brahmanical sects and Buddhism, establishing a climate conducive for intellectual exchange. Given the strong tantric presence in Kashmir at that time, this active exchange of ideas quickly engendered a common tantric foundation for Hindu and Buddhist sects.


Sanderson and others have extensively explored the epigraphical evidence for the background of northern Tantrism. Among the most important epigraphia are the following:60 (1) A hoard of nine copperplate inscriptions of a local monarch named Mahāśivagupta Bālārjuna discovered in Sirpur (Śrīpura, the ancient capital of Dakùiâa Kosala; Raipur District, Chattisgarh), which includes records of grants to Śaiva ācāryas. This is shown by their initiation names, which confirms that the Śaiva Siddhānta was established by the second half of the sixth century.61 (2) The Senakapā• stone slab inscription issued in the fifty-seventh year of the reign of Śivagupta (c. 647).62 This records a grant to an ascetic named Sadāśivācārya, who, the inscription implies, is the lineage successor to an ascetic named Sadyanśivācārya who hailed from a hermitage (tapovana) called Āmardaka.63 The latter is also a name of Kālabhairava, a form of Śiva dominant in this tradition, who, as we see below, is closely affiliated with the possession deities in some of our texts.64 It is also important that this hermitage is the parent institution of most of the Saiddhāntika lineages recorded in inscriptions, lineages that eventually became ascendant in Kashmir. (3) Inscriptions recording the Śaiva initiations to several important southern monarchs in the latter half of the seventh century.65 Although this is evidence for the broad dissemination of Śaiva lineages, the inscriptions do not take note of specific practices. Nevertheless, linguistic and cultural evidence permit us to speculate on the range of practices that constituted the divinatory milieu of svasthāveśa. It is striking that the year 647 is mentioned; this coincides with the conclusion of Harùavardhana’s reign in northern India (r. 607–647). It was in approximately this year that his court poet Bāâa wrote the Harùacarita (The Deeds of Harùa), a hagiographical description of Harùa and his reign. This well-known and exemplary text includes the earliest attested mention of the term svasthāveśa, referring in one passage to a kind of powder used to induce it.66 This is noteworthy because the later Sanskrit manuscripts of South India, to be discussed below, require scented and powdered ash (bhasma) from an offertory fire ritual (homa) as one of the ingredients. Together with the Jaina evidence, this suggests that svasthāveśa had by this time entered into the general currency of cross-disciplinary esoteric practice,67 even if textual mention of it was rare. This, however, is not surprising, as Harùa was known for his tolerance toward both heterodox and orthodox sects and took an active role in bringing them together. Indeed, along with twenty kings, the most eminent śramaâas and brāhmaâa are said to have attended a great assembly he once convened in his capital city, Kanyākubja. It is at convoca-


tions such as this that exchange of knowledge that contributed directly or indirectly to the formation of svasthāveśa ritual could have occurred.

The Ritual of Svasthāveśa With this in mind, then, let us now turn again, briefly, to the Śaiva and Buddhist Tantras and to the ritual employment of the prasenā. The Niśvāsaguhya, the Tantrasadbhāva, the CakrasaÅvarapiâbārtha, the Sekoddeśa, the Bóhatkālottara, and, most importantly, the Jayadrathayāmala (JY), the latest and most compendious of these texts, present a complex intertextuality.68 So, it is fair to present a composite account of the ritual of svasthāveśa. The texts state that the prasenā is a divinatory form assumed by a female deity (vidyā) that appears before the practitioner during a ritual performed at a site sacred to Maheśvara (rudrasthāna) or in a temple to the goddess (māt ógóham). The practitioner, called mantrin, māntrika, or simply sādhaka, repeats (japa) relevant mantras one hundred, one hundred and eight, one hundred thousand, or five hundred thousand times. This empowers him to undertake the āveśa. In these Tantras this ritual is always presented by Śiva, sometimes called Bhairava, as a great and wondrous secret, in response to queries from his dialogic counterpart, the Goddess, who is given a large number of names. As a result of these mantra repetitions, a conjunction (saÅyoga) is forged with a prasenā, classified as a Vidyā or Mahāvidyā goddess. This assumes a kind of communication, in which the mantrin either becomes fully identified with the prasenā or gains control of her. The JY declares that the mantrin possesses a special reverence, which is a result of meditation properly performed on this highest śakti (feminine energy). In a statement reminiscent of later Tibetan esoteric Buddhist initiatory practice, the JY states that this śakti arises in one’s belly on the disk of the moon, and it is here that the mantrin accesses her, in waves.69 The practitioner becomes established in a divine body (divyakāyasthitan) and is able to perceive the expanded significance of a single point (bindumandiram). There is apparently not just one standard prasenā but, potentially, many. These prasenās prevent the ill effects of poisoned food, repel all manner of black magic (the well-known ùa•karmāâi are listed), prevent capture by serpents, and counter destruction by the weapons of enemies. Through a seamless connection with such a divinity, the progress of ensorcelled boats, carts, and machines (yantra) is halted. Through a hundred thousand mantra rep-


etitions, says the JY, one achieves the goal of this ritual, freedom from adversity. The goddess abiding or being reflected in various media is seen directly. She shows the past and the future that the sādhaka himself sees. The loci of the prasenā are many. She appears in highly insubstantial and unstable form as a shadow or apparition. Her appearance does not come out of thin air, however, but on the surface of water, a metal pot, a sword-blade, in the flame of a lamp, in a mirror, the eye of a girl, the sun, the moon, his own thumb smeared with oil, or within his body in the point of light between his brows, and there reveals the answer he seeks. The answer may take the form of apparitional writing or a disembodied voice, or it may be uttered by a young boy or girl placed in a trance for this purpose (svasthāveśan); or it may appear to such a medium in one of the aforesaid substrates; or it may arise in the sādhaka’s mind when he awakens after a night spent in a temple of the deity.70

The Buddhist practice of pratisenā, noted by Orofino, requires fairly extensive preparatory ritual, including the propitiation of spirits, the consecration of the ritual ground by covering it with a fresh layer of cow dung, the construction and disposition of yantras, the recitation of mantras, offerings to various divinities, and the employment of a youth to gaze at a specified reflective surface. This may be a mirror, a sword, a thumb, a lamp, the moon, the sun, water, and the eye, any of which can become a medium through which a pratisenā appears.71 Citing the Tibetan version of the Subāhuparipócchānāmatantra, (Questions of Subāhu), Orofino notes that the youth must be washed and dressed in clean white clothes, and possess certain physical characteristics, including “perfect limbs, no prominent veins, bones or muscle joints, a beautiful shape, clear and slanting eyes.” Furthermore: He or she should sit on a rug of kuśa grass facing eastward, incense should be burnt, and the secret mantras should be recollected. After having removed the dust from the mirror, one [the officiant] should recite the mantra, mentally concentrating on the boy (or the girl), seven, eight or ten times. . . . [Then] the young medium, facing westward, looking through the eye of the divinity, will see past, present, and future events.72


The South Asian texts, including the Tantras in question73 and the South Indian manuscripts, omit much of this detail. Some of it may be assumed, however, including the physical prerequisites for the youth, as these were common features of Indian ritual prescription. Orofino’s description gives the impression that this type of divination was not uncommon, that it was part of the known complex of shamanistic practice in Tibet. We have seen from the mid- to late first-millennium Jaina texts that the ritual of svasthāveśa was multidenominational in South Asia, that this was shared across sect and lineage boundaries. A further example of this, though not explicitly labeled svasthāveśa, is found in Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra (5.173– 176). The context here is very specific, the determination of lifespan. In this passage, the deity is said to enter into an inanimate reflective medium, such as a mirror, after which a young girl picks up and passes on messages transmitted by the deity through the reflective surface. One might argue that this is not possession of the girl; rather, it is an allied divinatory practice. However, in South Asia, people, especially women, are considered possessed if they transmit such messages in trance states. There is every reason to believe that this was also the case in the first millennium. Hemacandra says: Upon being queried, a deity [devatā], who has been made to descend into a mirror, a thumb, a wall, or a sword through a rite involving mantra repetition, announces her verdict regarding time [of death]. The mantra to be recited is oÅ naravīre svāhā, and is perfected after 10,008 repetitions of it during a solar or lunar eclipse. After that, whenever such a question is asked, the ritualist need repeat it only 1,008 times at that moment. The deity then becomes absorbed in the mirror, etc., following which a young girl [kanyā] announces the verdict. In this way, the deity, attracted by the virtues of a good sādhaka, herself speaks decisively on topics regarding the past, present, and future [trikālaviùayam].74

This variety of media that might become possessed appears to be retained in the comparable Chinese texts, though the later Sanskrit manuscript material focuses on inducing āveśa only in young boys. It is interesting to consider that the earliest Sanskrit suggestion of this procedure is found in one of the foundational texts of Āyurveda, the Suśruta-SaÅhitā, composed in approximately the second century c.e. This text includes the following verse: “As a reflection is to a mirror or other similar surface, as cold and heat are to living beings, as a sun’s ray is to one’s gemstone, and as the one sustaining


the body is to the body, in the same way ‘seizers’ [ grahān] enter an embodied one but are not seen.”75 This raises an important question: Do we see in this statement a movement from metaphor to metaphysics as the idea proceeds from āyurvedic texts to tantric texts? Can we assume that what began as a trope ended up assuming a concretized cosmological and ritual locus? Or does Suśruta take an older known divinatory practice and turn it into a trope? Based on the present state of evidence, it is impossible to answer these questions confidently.

Possession Across the Himalayas The question arises as to whether we can justly assume that the primary Indian source materials are in fact the basis of the practice of svasthāveśa found in China or whether China had its own indigenous sources quite apart from the Indian ones. To take this one step further, we can ask whether the advent of svasthāveśa and similar divinatory practices in India might be explained as borrowings from China, which, it is well known, had a rich history of such practices. Although I believe that we may preemptively reject this, the question arises because Davis cites Tang texts of the seventh and eighth centuries that agree almost verbatim with the Indian Śaiva and Buddhist texts that may be slightly later in composition. Furthermore, the epigraphical evidence cited above, though clearly linking the northern Saiddhāntika tradition with similar traditions farther south, fails to specify practices, as we have seen. An objection might then be raised concerning the provenance of these practices, especially because the earliest reference to svasthāveśa in South Asia, in the absence of other data, appears to be in the Harùacarita, a text almost precisely contemporaneous with the earliest Chinese material. With this in mind, we should settle any lingering doubts regarding the matter of the direction of transmission. Possession ritual is documented in China from the mid-first millennium b.c.e. onward, and scholars point to artistic and epigraphical evidence that might push that date back another millennium.76 Most of this speculation revolves around the issue of shamanism, which, because of cultural variation and lack of perspicacious definitions, falls prey to the same sort of amorphous characterization (and caricature) as befalls Tantra.77 Indeed, in South and Central Asia, what may have been more strictly speaking shamanistic became identified and classified as tantric, a problem that continues to find


no agreeable solution among either scholars or indigenous participants. An example of this definitional vertigo may be found in modern-day South Asia, where spirit healers who might more accurately be described as shamans are widely regarded by both their clientele and scholars as tantrics, a label that they stridently eschew.78 In partial answer to our question, it must be noted that not only do the sinologists Strickmann and Davis acknowledge the Indian origins of this kind of divination (references to Ucchuùma,79 Nāgārjuna, Gaâeśa, and other figures traceable to Sanskrit abound), but they do not entertain the possibility of influence flowing in the opposite direction. This view is enhanced by the studies of Iyanaga, Stein, Snellgrove, Davidson, and others who have addressed the Buddhacization of Maheśvara/Rudra/Śiva and his journey to the east. Iyanaga recounts the submission and conversion of Maheśvara by Trailokyavijaya according to the Chinese and Japanese sources.80 Stein tells of the conversion of Maheśvara to Buddhism by Vajrapāâi, “the wrathful suppressor of all evil ones,” using several Tibetan tantric sources,81 while Snellgrove describes the rise to prominence of Vajrapāâi and his defeat of the demon Maheśvara according to the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa.82 Davidson employs Indic and Tibetan (Sa-skya-pa) sources to relate the tale of Maheśvara’s subjugation and rebirth as Heruka, “the cosmic policeman,” and analyze historical, literary, and doctrinal functions.83 Maheśvara, says Davidson, “became one of the great scapegoats of Buddhist Mahāyāna literature.”84 As in Davidson’s passage from the SarvatathāgatatattvasaÅgraha, Snellgrove’s from the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa has Vajrapaâi crushing Maheśvara with his foot. Following this, the Buddha himself “entered the body of Maheśvara and he pronounced this verse: ‘Oho! The peerless wisdom of all the Buddhas. Even a body which is dead returns to the sphere of the living!’”85 Vajrapāâi then uttered the mantra oÅ vajra mun and formed a mudrā with his fingers, after which Maheśvara rose from the dead, imbued with the spirit of the Buddha, and made the world safe for mankind. Most important, however, is the work of Robert Mayer on the assimilation of Maheśvara in Tibetan Buddhism.86 Greatly influenced by Sanderson’s work on early Śaiva Tantras, Mayer concludes that the figure of Maheśvara in Tibetan Vajrayāna (and onward into Chinese esoteric Buddhism) was a reconfiguration of this deity from the sectarian Śaivism of the Indian Himalayas, specifically of the kāpālika sect.87 From there, Davidson notes, it was a short step to the transformation of Maheśvara into a powerful spirit, a


Heruka under the control of Buddhist deities. It is this Maheśvara, much more prominent in India, who, in his many guises and aspects, particularly as (Ba•uka-)Bhairava and Hanumān, was possessed in the ritual of svasthāveśa and assumed a major role in other divinatory practices.88 In China (though not quite in Tibet) these guises fell away, leaving Maheśvara as a divinatory deity in his own right. The early epigraphical evidence in India testifies to the existence of the kāpālikas and other transgressive Śaiva cults89 and lends credence to the argument for a literature, now missing, that linked these epigraphical sources to the later Śaiva siddhānta texts that contained sections on svasthāveśa (and other forms of āveśa). These texts, then, must have been transmitted to Tibet and China, serving as the textual basis for oracular possession along the lines of svasthāveśa. Sanderson’s continuing work on Śaiva and Śākta literature and traditions that derive from this demonstrates that this mountainous region was home to a large number of sects from roughly the sixth to fourteenth centuries that worshipped Śiva/Rudra/Maheśvara and a large number of goddesses, many of whom are not described elsewhere in Indic literature. This veneration was largely apotropaic and divinatory, utilizing yantra and mantra, and much of it was better preserved in Tibet (and subsequently China) than it was in India, at least in northern India. These practices found a much more agreeable home in Tibet, where Buddhism, in its “co-option of Śaiva kāpālika tantrism,”90 tamed the wild god, as the studies of Mayer et al., indicate. This was due in some measure to the influence of certain shamanistic practices in Central Asia. Regardless of the reason(s), however, Mayer tracks the taming process.91 As suggested, his primary focus is on the manner in which Buddhist mythic narrative transformed Śiva, subverting his raw, menacing, transgressive power to the aims of Vajrayāna Buddhism, assigning him a secondary place in Buddhist maâbalas, and so on. Two forms of this conversion appeared in Tibet, “one Mahāyoga concerning the converting of Rudra, and one Anuttarayoga, describing the converting of Bhairava.”92 It is striking that in southern India of later periods, as well as Tibet, the deities invoked in svasthāveśa were Maheśvara and Bhairava (though in India Hanumān was later added to the staff ). In sum, in spite of contemporaneous, or perhaps earlier, Chinese sources, we must assume on linguistic and cultural grounds that Indic texts preceded both the Chinese and surviving Kashmiri texts. The linguistic evidence, which we now examine more closely, consists of the appearance in the Chinese texts of cognates for the Sanskrit āveśa and Maheśvara, as well as descriptions of the practices of ritual that are indisputably borrowings from India.93


Aweishe: The Indic Character of Chinese Possession Strickmann and Davis cite several texts that contain material strongly reminiscent of Indic and Tibetan āveśa and svasthāveśa. Indeed, the Chinese employ the word aweishe 阿尾奢, a direct transcription of āveśa, “to designate possession rites in which a spirit was invoked into the living body of a medium. The term might also apply to procedures in which the spirit of a living person was co-opted, so to speak, into the pantheon.”94 Strickmann and Davis cite a large number of passages, including one from the Amoghapāśasūtra,95 which strikingly resemble Orofino’s description of childhood possession in the Tibetan Subāhuparipócchānāmatantra. According to Strickmann, the Amoghapāśasūtra, which was translated from Sanskrit into Chinese around the end of the seventh century, was the first Chinese Buddhist text to give instructions for inducing deity possession. It was at this point, says Strickmann, that a “new Tantric synthesis was about to become known in China”96 The purpose of this aweishe ritual, which invokes Guanyin (=Avalokiteśvara), was therapeutic, to heal an individual suffering from spirit-induced illness. The passage is not an isolated ritual option, but occurs in a more general discussion of ritual healing. The entire passage is worth citing: Or again, there is this method. If it is desired to enchant a person, the spell-possessor should bathe himself and put on fresh garments. Next he should recite the spirit-spell to protect his own person. Then he is to construct a ritual area using cow dung, making it square and painting it in the appropriate colors, strewing assorted flowers, and setting out various whitecolored food-offerings. Next he should take a virgin boy or girl, bathe the child, and imbue its body with fine fragrances. He should clothe it in a pure white garment and adorn it with all manner of ornaments. He should then have the child sit cross-legged in the ritual area; he recites the spell bandha (“bind”) and he plaits the child’s hair. When he is done reciting the spell and plaiting the hair, he takes more flowers and fills the child’s hands with them. In addition, he takes fine quality incense, crushes and scatters it. Then, additionally, he recites a spell over uncooked rice, which he sprinkles, together with flowers and water, within the ritual area. Next he should burn sandalwood incense and recite Kuan-yin’s spirit-spell; he should recite it three times over the flowers and then cast them in the child’s face. Then the child’s body will begin to tremble. If you wish it to


speak, pronounce another spell [given in the text] over pure water and sprinkle it in his face. As you recite the spell, be sure that your hand does not touch the child. When you have recited in this manner, the child will speak. If you ask about good or evil things in the past, future, or present, it will be able to answer all your questions. If the spell-holder wishes to send away the spirit who has lodged in the child, there is another spell given which he should recite.97

In fact, the phenomenon of child possession receives much more attention in Chinese religious texts than in South Asian or Tibetan ones. Whether this indicates greater occurrence of this kind of svasthāveśa in China is an open question. Although I suspect that this was the case, it is also possible that the Chinese texts were simply more richly descriptive of such activity and more amenable to including the experiences of non-elite groups, whereas the South Asian prescriptive material was more vigilantly or fastidiously spare and brahmanical. There is little point in reviewing all the examples set forth in Strickmann’s books. He does, however, translate and comment on the Chinese translation of the Subāhuparipócchā, where Posseu-na, Sseu-na or the god Po reveals desired knowledge after being caused to descend into objects similar to those on the list in the Kashmiri Sanskrit material.98 Strickmann comments on some of the terms discussed here. He recognizes the importance of the word prasenā, admitting that its origin is obscure. He suggests, incorrectly it seems, that it might be related to the name Prasenajit.99 However, the Bukkyōgo daijiten, a Japanese dictionary of Buddhist terms, gives the transliteration of prasena (here, contrary to Strickmann’s texts) in Chinese as poluosai 波羅塞, a kind of chess game based on military formations that use elephants and horses, also called xiangqi 象棋.100 This is based on Fazang’s 法藏 (643–712) commentary on the Chinese translation ofthe Brahmajāla sūtra (Fanwang jing 梵網經), the Fanwang jing shu 梵網經疏. What this suggests is that the name Prasenajit, which in any case is much too early to indicate one who is victorious over a spirit called prasenā, probably means “one who is victorious over a ruler whose military strategy included formations of elephants and horses.”101 As for the Tibetan pra pha[b]-pa, he rightly translates this as “to make a pra spirit descend.”102 Both Strickmann and Davis suggest that the entry abhisha (the Japanese transcription of the Sanskrit āveśa) in Hōbōgirin (I:7ab) indicates that hashina, the Japanese term for the āveśa ceremony, may also be derived


from the Sanskrit praśna, again from the questions that are put to the medium by the performer of the ritual or his client.103 Davis’s work also demonstrates that during the seventh and eighth centuries the terminology and character of certain varieties of divination took on a decidedly South Asian character. During these centuries, the “aweishe rite” was introduced through esoteric Mahāyāna Buddhism. Davis discusses at length this rite and the general question of the use of prepubescent mediums. He says, in part: All in all, the āveśa rituals seem to have been not too distant from the most popular kind of séance performed by the Tang-dynasty spirit-medium for officials and members of the aristocracy. In these séances the spirit-medium summoned a divinity either into himself or into some other localized place. Then he either answered himself, or communicated the divinity’s responses to, specific questions posed by the supplicant about “good and evil fortune,” “matters past, present, and future,” or “things yet to come.” What has changed in the āveśa rites is the fact that the spirit-medium’s trance was officiated by a Tantric master and resulted from the power conferred on the master by his own identification with a Buddhist deity. In The Rules of Āveśa as Explained by the Deva Maheśvara, a text in one short scroll submitted to the throne by Amoghavajra, the officiant or “practicant,” as he is called, must first transform himself into the eponymous Maheśvara, thereby empowering the mantras and mudrās he then employs to compel an “emissary of Maheśvara” to possess the children. The text notes that after the appropriate spell has been recited seven times, “the boys and girls will tremble violently, causing one to realize that the “Holy One” (shengzhe) had entered their bodies.104

Davis indicates that the children were placed on yantras, though he does not describe them. He informs us, however, that “the Tantric master recites various incantations to summon one or more Buddhist deities, sometimes identified, sometimes not, into either a luminous, reflective object (water, mirror, jewel, pearl), the image or icon of the divinity, or the body of a child.”105 From two to ten boys or girls between the ages of eight and fourteen were possessed. They were subjected to elaborate purifications after their eligibility had been confirmed as a result of meeting certain requirements in physical appearance. The Chinese texts state that “when the divinity has


descended into the children, they will speak of ‘all matters past, present, and future,’ of ‘things yet to come,’ or of ‘good or evil fortune,’ or that they will be able to answer any question asked of the god.”106 Two of the texts require the children “to gaze into a mirror, which had either been purified with ash from a homa offering or otherwise empowered by the divinity, and then to answer all manner of questions based on what they saw.”107 With respect to the emissaries of Maheśvara mentioned above, whatever their original identity, it is certain that in later periods, in India at least, Hanumān and Bhairava were regarded as emissaries of Śiva, identical to the eponymous Maheśvara. Who were these children? Davis excerpts part of a Buddhist tantric text that records the possession of a boy by Ucchuùma. In Sanskritic mythology Ucchuùma, “the Crackler,” is an aspect of Agni. However, in esoteric Buddhism Ucchuùma, glossed as “the Vajra-Being of Impure Traces,” commands a considerable host of spirit-soldiers. The possessed boy was called “Holy One” (daozhe) by the monk who wrote the text, either because he was considered to have dedicated himself to a religious life as a follower of “the Way” or because he was transparent to the divine, the “Venerable Spirit,”108 who may have been Ucchuùma. The possession here is described vividly, but not paradigmatically. That the boy is said to have jumped and flung himself about, grabbed a sword, run out of the temple gate until he reached a pile of cow dung, struck the pile three times with his sword, then collapsed on the ground,109 leads Davis to conclude that in this episode: we are far from the highly controlled, rarefied, and even claustrophobic atmosphere of the Buddhist āveśa rites, in which two or more virginal and purified children stood passively before the master amidst lighted incense and strewn flowers; in which the descent of the divinity and the onset of trance were distinguishable only by the most subtle of signs—the cessation of breathing, unblinking eyes, and a slight reddish tint around the pupils; and in which the children had in essence become living icons, as luminescent, but also as confined, as the pearl or crystal for which they were substitutes.110

The “basic structure of the Tang rituals of āveśa,” says Davis, consists of “the controlled possession of a boy by a cultic divinity and his subsequent clairvoyance.”111 The archive of āveśa material that Davis and Strickmann introduce demonstrates that possession ritual in Chinese religion, whether


identified as tantric Buddhist, Daoist, Daoist-influenced esoteric Buddhist or vice versa, as well as rites of Daoist- and Buddhist-influenced independent spirit exorcists, changed radically during the Tang dynasty (618–907).112 This, it appears, was due to Indic (and Tibetan) influence. The general tenor of the change was that late- and post-Tang possession ritual was more extreme than that of the non-tantric ritual whose practitioners frequented the early Tang imperial court. The vast majority of cases of possession described by Davis and Strickmann share the essential elements of the ritual of svasthāveśa found in the earlier tantric texts and the later South Indian manuscripts. Other Chinese aweishe and Japanese abisha materials that they cite support this ritual kinship. The most important common features of these rituals are the following: (1) the imposition of the spirit into the medium or into a compatible third party, which is, characteristically, a child, though the texts add that a divinity “could also be compelled to enter a reflective object or hollow icon,” such as a mirror; 113 (2) mention of “matters past, present, and future,” which indicates an oracular function to the ritual; (3) the engagement of Maheśvara, which directly indicates a link, first, to the deities of the Indic ritual of svasthāveśa, which include Maheśvara and, second, to Bhairava and Hanumān, both aspects of Śiva, of whom Maheśvara is a multiform; and (4) the use of mantras and mudrās, which help induce the possession. Davis states: “The unity of practitioner and divinity is a defining feature of Esoteric Buddhism and a mark of the extent to which even Daoist therapeutic rituals had become ‘tantracized’ in the Song.”114 This is a feature not only of Esoteric Buddhism, but also of Indian Śaiva theology and practice. To take this one step further, this is a feature not only of Himalayan Śaiva and Śākta practice, but of subcontinental Indian devotionalism (bhakti), a fact readily evident in both mid-first-millennium Tamil devotional poetry and approximately contemporaneous Sanskrit counterparts. It is generally agreed that Tamil devotionalism exerted critical influence on the Sanskrit texts, helping to establish both the fundamental patterns of devotional practice and the emotional or evocational parameters of the devotional constitution.115 This Sanskrit devotionalism subsequently influenced the Kashmiri Śaiva and Śākta practice and textuality, where elements of tantric urgency and severity, including worship of Mahāvidyās and other sanguinary goddesses,116 were compounded with this otherwise zealous devotionalism. This was then replicated in the devotional fervor characteristic of Esoteric Buddhism. In short, the devotional impulse (bhāva) expressed most decisively in


the Vaiùâava literature of the subcontinent (e.g., the Bhāgavata Purāâa) is heavily implicated in the development of Esoteric Buddhism, a link that has been insufficiently explored.117

Svasthāveśa in South India We must now briefly examine a few Sanskrit āveśa manuscripts found in the South Indian libraries. These manuscripts are quite ordinary in that they prescribe the construction of easily inscribed yantras or maâbalas that were likely in common use.118 Other normative features are the recitation of bīja mantras found in nearly all mantra collections (though they have their own unique order here), and brief statements of purpose and fruits to be gained (saãkalpa). Although they have a standard format and structure, these manuscripts have unique content, as shown by a composite summary. The ritual of āveśa should be performed secretly, in the privacy of one’s house or, better, at an isolated Śiva temple. An officiant (māntrika)119 oversees the construction of one or sometimes two maâbalas inscribed on the ground with colored powder. The maâbalas are described in minute detail; indeed, these descriptions occupy the greater part of the manuscripts. They are oversized yantras, geometric representations of the deities for whom they are intended, in the present cases Hanumān and (Va•uka-) Bhairava.120 The latter is, in a manuscript titled “ĀveśabhairavaÅ Śarabhakalpe,” identified with the śarabha, the ghastly eight-legged celestial beast brought into the realm of the gods by Śiva.121 After the maâbala is constructed, an eightyear-old boy with good qualities, who has bathed and is pure, is seated on it in lotus pose.122 Then the māntrika recites a hundred times the long and intricate mantras designed to bring about possession. After this, cooled, powdered, and scented ash (bhasma, vibhūti) from a havana (ritual fire) is applied to the boy’s forehead. The boy should then become possessed by Hanumān or Va•ukabhairava as the māntrika calls out āveśaya āveśaya (let him become possessed, let him become possessed), after which the boy gains the ability to communicate knowledge of the past, present, and future, including auspicious or inauspicious fruit that may be reaped by the client in a future birth.123 The manuscripts do not state whether this information is given only upon questioning or whether the boy is understood to speak at the independent instigation of the deity. The possession is lifted


after the ash has been applied twenty-one times, accompanied by another long mantra. A partial model for the Hanumān āveśa understood in these manuscripts occurs in the Rāmāyaâa. The manuscript called “Āveśa Hanumantam”124 states that the boy becomes identified with Āñjaneya after mantras for Hanumān as the messenger of Rāma (rāmadūta) and Lakùmaâa are recited. The exorcist should utter the words āveśaya āveśaya ehi ehi praveśaya praveśaya (Possess! Possess! Come! Come! Enter! Enter!), followed by an exhortation to follow the example of the Rāmāyaâa, “O Rāma and Lakùmaâa, possess the violated palace in Laãkā” (laãkāprāsādabhañjanam). Hanumān is referred to here by the appellations Jagatprāâatanūbhava (“Son of the Wind,” equivalent to Vāyuputra, a similar name in more common use) and Prāâavāyusvarūpa (One Whose Form Is Vital Wind), both suggesting the qualities of pervasiveness, invasiveness, and penetration, as well as, more subtly, indicating the importance of prāâa in “tantric” yogic practice. Hanumān is also one of the two archetypal devotees in Hinduism, the other being Prahlāda, the son of the demon king Hiraâykaśipu, who maintained his devotion to Viùâu against all odds and successfully invoked him to appear personally and defeat his own father. This he did in the form of NarasiÅha, Viùâu’s Man-Lion avatāra, emerging from a pillar to eviscerate Hiraâyakaśipu. It is no accident that the healing and exorcism center at Bālājī, in Rajasthan, is a Hanumān temple pilgrimage site and that Prahlāda is also represented there as a deity, which in my experience is unique. Thus, it is consistent with recognized practice that notions of ethereality, devotion, incarnation, and violence, all attendant during possession, are brought out in these manuscripts.

The Mantramahodadhi The procedures for employing children for divinatory purposes in India were not limited to a shadowy presence in a few obscure, regionally specific texts. This is similar to the situation in China, where it was relatively widespread, as Davis’s extensive documentation shows. However, even if the practice was not as widespread in India as in China, corroborative evidence from other Tantras shows that it spread beyond the confines of a few local cults. At any rate, knowledge of it appears to have entered into more main-


stream Tantra śāstra.125 The Mantramahodadhi (MM), a popular and diffuse compendium of both dakùiâācāra and vāmācāra tantric practice composed in the sixteenth century by Mahīdhara,126 includes several verses on this practice or on an adaptation of it. First, the sādhaka should properly worship the goddess (specific goddesses are not named here), thoroughly divinizing both himself and the maâbalas or yantras that he is using to replicate the goddess. This he should do by observing certain vows, divinizing his body through performance of nyāsa and enlivening the maâbala or yantra with other mantras, some of them complex and extremely long, totaling hundreds of syllables. He should then “mount a corpse either at a crossroad or a cremation ground [śmaśāna], abandon shame and fear, and keep his mind concentrated on the mantra (vidyā).127 Then, in the middle of the night, concentrated on his japa, he should hear these distant words: ‘Become transcendent and obtain complete perfection in all mantras’” (pārago bhava vidyānāÅ sarvāÅ siddhim avāpnuhi).128 The text continues: “He should seat two eight-year-old children born into learned families before him and place his hands on their heads. He should then perform japa of this mantra. Both of these children will then become capable of expounding on Vedānta and Nyāya. One who is curious about this ought to see for himself the wonders of this Vidyā.”129 Although the instructions for this ritual do not mention possession, we must assume that it is implicit, as important components of svasthāveśa or other related practices of oracular possession are evident here. This description is replete with marks of brahmanical orthodoxy and represents a major transformation compared to the earlier material on child mediums. The evidence from the earlier Tantras as well as the brief and highly specified manuscripts from southern India suggests that the tantric practices on which this description was based are here adapted to “higher” goals of brahmanical orthodoxy. The prasenā is not mentioned, and apparently had a short life, at least for a deity (or even a spirit), and disappeared by the sixteenth century, her shadowy station having been usurped by a Mahāvidyā130 or by Bhairava or Hanumān, aspects of Śiva. Knowledge of the past, present, and future as the goal of this sādhana was replaced by the more brahmanical goal of gaining knowledge of Vedānta and Nyāya. Similarly, the strings of bīja mantras employed to invoke the Goddess and so on seem to have disappeared. Concerning the acquisition of knowledge of Vedānta and Nyāya, it is important to note that these verses occur in a brief subsection (5.83–90)


prescribing three tantric rituals to be performed on children, of which this is the third. The first states that after cutting the umbilical cord, the sādhaka (the father?, a hired tāntrika?) should inscribe a mantra for Vācaspati, the Lord of Speech, on the tongue of the newborn child with a sharp blade of dūrva grass that had been dipped in gorocanā, an extrusion from the biliary tract of a cow (either a large gallstone or a bezoar), which is used for tantric and alchemical purposes in India.131 Upon reaching the age of eight, the child will then become proficient in all śāstras (sarvaśāstrajñatā). The second ritual prescribes mantras and offerings (balidāna) that enable the child to become a great poet (kavitvakót). Neither of these mentions possession; but it is difficult in the tantric culture of these texts to imagine that gorocanā or balidāna by themselves confer extraordinary knowledge on a child. The purpose of these offerings, certainly, was to attract spirits or minor deities to enter the child, either permanently or temporarily, thus enabling the child to recite śāstras or compose poetry. As for the uncharacteristic absence of mantras, the text of the MM is replete with strings of such mantras; indeed, this fifth chapter (taraãga) is particularly congested with them. Thus, it may have been assumed that the aspirant has practiced certain sādhanas and mastered the complex mantras before settling in the śmaśāna and reciting this mantra of intent. This is supported by the earlier tantric texts and the South Indian manuscripts, all of which prescribe strings of bīja mantras for this purpose. It is likely that Mahīdhara was well aware of the tantric environment and background of this practice. To give him the benefit of the doubt, it may not be so much that for a popular handbook he decided to opt for the sanguine over the sanguinary (there is plenty of sex and violence in this Tantra), but that he was vigilant about not losing the sometimes tenuous connection between tantric and other, more public, brahmanical practice.

The Tantrarāja The term svasthāveśa is attested in the sixteenth-century tantric compendium Tantrarāja (TR), brought to public notice by Sir John Woodroffe in 1918.132 This text presents a fairly close, if highly condensed, depiction of at least some of the material found in the early tantric materials and the South Indian manuscripts. The TR describes two yantras of the goddess and a ritual (TR 9.61–101), the most important part of which is the act of


situating on one of the yantras a young girl who is to be guided into and out of svasthāveśa. The text speaks of the “performance” of svasthāveśa, an admission that should not be overlooked. The relevant verses state, “one should perform svasthāveśa” (9.76–78) on the first of the two yantras, because it is over this that the officiant recites the relevant possession mantras. The girl should then become identified with the deity, after which the officiant should burn a kind of incense called sarjjarasa. When she enters into the possession, the girl is worshipped reverently and with appropriate ceremony. Afterward, the client should ask for whichever objects are desired, upon which the girl will always reply fittingly. After being worshipped suitably, the deity becomes her, and after rites, such as sprinkling water, are performed on the first yantra the officiant causes the girls to disembark from their condition in which they are controlled by others.133 The Tantrarāja does not specify who these “others” are, and the commentary states, rather aimlessly, “piśāca, etc.,” apparently to qualify his previous assertion that it is a devatā. The TR does not in itself shed any light on the South Indian manuscripts. No mantras are given, nor are deities named, whether Hanumān, Bhairava, or a goddess. Moreover, the commentator, Subhagānandanātha, reacts to this rite with an unfamiliarity reminiscent of Bha••otpala’s in his comments on Varāhamihira’s reference to prasenā in the BóhatsaÅhitā, which is to say that he responds as a tantric paâbit rather than a tantric ritualist. In any case, this reference is noteworthy by its very presence. It demonstrates that the term svasthāveśa was current, at least in some tantric circles, in the sixteenth century, a period that approximates the composition of the South Indian manuscripts (though the latter could be a century or two later).

Indian Āveśa and Chinese Aweishe: A Comparison To complete the comparative aspect of this topic, an examination of svasthāveśa not only as a term for nonpathological possession but, more specifically, as oracular possession of children, we must offer more examples of this phenomenon in Chinese literature. Only then can the extent to which the Chinese material is derivative of the Indian be determined. Some compilations of Tang dynasty stories tell of children possessed by the spirits (shen) of learned men. Glen Dudbridge explicates several such accounts from a genre called zhiguai (志怪 tales of the marvelous), one ex-


emplar of which is the eighth-century Guangyi ji (廣異記 The Book of Marvels). In Dudbridge’s first story, a girl named Wang Fazhi from the town of Tonglu serves the spirit of a young man called Teng Quanyin, with whom she had an affinity in a previous birth; she begins to experience regular possession of his spirit before the age of five. In frequent meetings with the county magistrate, writers and poets, and Buddhist monks, Quanyin, speaking through Fazhi, demonstrates his literary, scholarly, and religious erudition, composing poetry extemporaneously.134 If the story is to gain any credibility, it must be assumed that the girl was subjected to ritually induced possession. Even if the story is to be treated as a member of another genre—for example, didactic tales, fiction, folklore, or an intermediate genre—we must still ask how, even in the imagination, a five-year-old girl is able to “serve the spirit of a young man.” My sense is that this “service” must have been ritual, and ritually induced, under the supervision of a learned master in this art. Even if the story is regarded as pure fiction, this element of cultural background must be assumed. This inference is based on the presence of frequent descriptions (and tales) of oracular possession weighted toward either their narrative or ritual components, when, in fact, in any “real” or “imagined” event, both are assumed to be equally present.135 In the case at hand, the description of the ritual must have been suppressed in favor of the narrative. As in the Mantramahodadhi, this story does not state or imply that the erudition revealed during possession was maintained by the girl outside the mediumistic act. This too argues for ritually induced possession. Oracular possession is rarely reported as a spontaneous experience; it nearly always adheres to known, effective, and ritually adumbrated models, as mentioned several times earlier. It is, as noted elsewhere, publicly performed, even if that public is very small. In general, it requires an expectant and knowing audience. Strickmann, in Chinese Magical Medicine, relates an aweishe tale in which the Chinese emperor’s twenty-fifth daughter was at the point of death. The tantric master Vajrabodhi attempted to intercede by sending the souls of two seven-year-old girls from the palace as emissaries to Yama, in a bid to save her. The strategy was to coerce them to deliver to Yama an edict that was written for this purpose but was then ritually burned while Vajrabodhi recited an incantation over it. As a result of this ritual, the girls, whose faces Vajrabodhi wrapped in red silk, after which they lay on the ground, were able to recite the edict perfectly. “Vajrabodhi then entered into samādhi. With inconceivable force he sent the girls to King Yama with the edict.” King Yama


relented, but only briefly. He sent the soul of the princess back with the girls, but after half a day she died. In that brief period, she delivered a message to the emperor: “It is very hard to alter destiny as fixed in the other world. King Yama has sent me back to see you only for a short while.”136 As in the previous story, the aweishe ritual is implied more than it is stated. Here at least we are told some of the outline of the ritual: the girls’ heads are wrapped in red silk, they are laid on the ground, an edict is written and burned, Vajrabodhi recites an incantation, he then enters samādhi. This is not prescriptive literature, however, and the narrative element dominates: the spirits of the girls travel to Yama’s world with the burnt essence of the edict and deliver it to Yama.137 The latter, no doubt out of deference to the emperor (as well as to Vajrabodhi), sends the princess’s spirit back with the two girls. In the end, though, it is a temporary measure; once dead, the princess cannot remain alive in the human world for more than an additional half a day. In this story the aweishe empowered the girls to engage in shamanic travel. Patently, this aweishe does not match the primary deployment of āveśa in Sanskrit, where it most often indicates deity or spirit possession instigated by the person being possessed. In what ways, however, does this differ? It is definitely aweishe, because it is labeled as such in the text. It is also clearly oracular. In addition, the description of the girls in aweishe is reminiscent of that found in tantric texts. They collapse on the ground in a trance as a result of what is, by any other name, ritual initiation, or at least ritual inducement.138 The observed symptoms are consistent with possession. This is, it appears, sufficient to confer upon it the label aweishe. The text does not identify, or even suggest, a possessing entity; yet, for it to be aweishe, the assumption of one must have been present. This suggests a gray area in indigenous identification of possession: Sometimes, for the sake of clarity, we want possession to conform to its simplest notion. But this is not always the case in India or China, where an experience is labeled āveśa or aweishe according to its intensity, rather than to other criteria, such as elision of personality. The girls, young as they are, have had a powerful experience of physical collapse, induced by the weaving of hypnotic spells by a ritual master, with an incumbent interpretation that the spells attract a deity who then possesses the girls and carries the message inscribed on the burned edict to Yama. There is no indication, however, that their personalities have shifted to those of others. We are, then, bound by the word of the text, which calls this aweishe, even if it is not explicit how exactly the spirits or the possession manifest.


Strickmann also notes the use of the word āveśa when exploring the link between dream and divination among children. Although both dream and memory are regarded as unreliable for establishing philosophical truth, because they are regarded as fragmentary, they are to a great extent rehabilitated in religious and historical narrative.139 In Mantras et Mandarins, Strickmann discusses the nexus of dream, divination, and possession, showing their convergence within the realm of Tantra.140 This is an attractive association, and Strickmann works it into a discussion of a ritual performed on children that produces initiatory dreams. In this ritual a mantra is recited 108 times, a mudrā is formed with the fingers, the child falls into a kind of sleep or reverie, possession descends (it is here that Strickmann uses the word āveśa), and the child then will relate matters good and bad.141 Much of this, it appears, is derived from rites of svasthāveśa. Most pertinent for our purposes is the point that all three—dream, divination, and possession—are regarded as authoritative when emanating from children. This introduces the possibility that any kind of oracular divination, with even the slightest hint of possession, could qualify as āveśa. If so, would this dilute the entire category and render it nearly meaningless? My answer is no, it would not. In the final analysis, the oracular experiences under discussion were āveśa, conceptually even svasthāveśa. This would still be the case even if these experiences lacked the characteristic behavioral shifts accompanied by specifically identified possessing entities. As these texts demonstrate, oracular divinatory practice, especially when enacted through other media, most notably children, is a central feature of healthy (svasthatā), nonpathological possession (āveśa). Indeed, this alone would qualify the practice as svasthāveśa, even if other practices might also qualify. These stories are sufficient to demonstrate the similarities found in the Indian and Chinese practices of divinatory possession. The evidence is conclusive that much, though by no means all, of the similarity is due to influence from the India and possibly Tibet. The presence of Indian terms and names, from āveśa/aweishe to Mahādeva, render it certain that both the Indian tantric textuality and the transmission of esoteric Buddhist narrative substantially influenced the Chinese practices in question, at least to the extent that their texts reveal these practices (though it is possible that, like Indian texts, the Chinese texts provide us with a normative, sanitized version of them). The results of oracular possession as a primary component in divinatory practice—knowledge of the past, present, and future, displays of miraculous learning, healing secrets and other prognosticatory or revealed


knowledge—are attested in many cultures; they are not limited to areas of Sino-Indian cultural contact. With respect to these regions, however, sporadic examples of such oracular or divinatory possession are quite ancient, as we have seen. Recall, for example, the tales of Bhujyu Lāhyāyani in the Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad that exhibit important resonances with the material discussed here, though they do not contain the same degree of certainty with respect to retrievable knowledge as asserted in either the Chinese stories or the MM. Despite these relatively parallel attestations, it nevertheless appears that the Chinese ritual texts address therapeutic or exorcistic practice to a greater degree, and with more subtle distinctions and nuances, than does the Indic material. For example, Davis writes of this practice in China: “The style of these exorcisms appears to reflect many things at once—the late Tang rituals of āveśa, the Daoist rites of kaozhao [kaozhao fa, “Rite of Summoning for Investigation”], and especially the characteristic practices of village spiritmediums in the Song.”142 The Indic texts domesticate and Sanskritize practices that appear to be derived from village spirit-mediums, women, or others of lower social rank. The problem with the Indian material, to state the obvious, is that the textuality, particularly in Sanskrit, reflects the interests of the literate brahmanical and ruling classes, whereas in China, at least during the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties, the textuality was more likely to include direct accounts and interests of a greater range of social classes. We know, for example, from modern ethnographic accounts in India (including my own observations) that a strong and widespread tradition of therapeutic possession exists that is startlingly similar to the “Rite of Summoning for Investigation,” though I have no evidence that the Chinese practice influenced the Indian one or vice versa. In India, this practice is found largely among non-brahman communities that are underrepresented in Sanskrit accounts of exorcistic practice.143 In spite of these sociological and anthropological resonances, the Chinese and Indian practices appear at present to be wholly independent developments.

Conclusions In lieu of decisive conclusions on this vast material, I instead pose a question: Why was possession induced in prepubescent youths? I cannot produce a confident reply; the answers lie in addressing both the nature of childhood


and its various Indian and Chinese cultural constructions; in other words, both nature and culture. My initial impulse is to tread lightly on questions of culturally constituted psychology and the applicability of psychoanalytic theory, an impulse that should be evident from my earlier methodological explorations. I believe that, in spite of the efforts of Kakar and others, these areas have been insufficiently explored and I am particularly unqualified to offer a mature opinion on them. Answers to this question, as to so many others, risk being naively obvious or incomprehensibly complex. My first answer is that youths may have been used because they were regarded as pure, as embodiments of moral neutrality, and because youth itself was regarded as a natural restorative. The single scrap of supporting evidence for this is found in Kalkin Puâbarīka’s Vimalaprabhā on the Laghukālacakratantra, which specifies that a virgin’s (kumārikā) success in this ritual, which enables her to predict events of the past, present, and future based on visions seen in an oracular mirror (pratisenādarśe), is due only in part to the grace of the guru or presiding ācārya. Equally important is the fact that she has not yet experienced sexual union. Puâbarīka rejects the view that it is the ācārya’s grace (ācāryaprasādan) alone that causes the virgin to be empowered by the deity of the mantra. He suggests, instead, that if the ācārya has the ability to empower the girl, he ought to be able to empower himself as well, thus gaining the ability to answer questions as an oracle. But this does not occur, notes Puâbarīka: The ācārya is not able to generate the visions that produce in himself oracular skill. In fact, says Puâbarīka, the empowerment is only effective in a virgin who “has not experienced the pleasure of ejaculation that comes about through the friction of the two [sex] organs [dvīndriya].”144 Pressing this further, one can say that this explanation could also be associated with notions of undiluted and unambiguous sexual and gender identity, which would become too complicated to withstand the temptations of this divination after sexual maturity and activity have been achieved. A further indication of the vulnerability of children to possession may be seen in the evidence amassed in Chapter 12, as well as in Chapter 6, to possession of children, even fetuses, by destructive spirits called “childsnatchers” (bālagraha). It is surely the purity, innocence, and emotional unguardedness of children that was believed to make them easy targets for such spirits. It is likely that these same qualities made them attractive to ritualists who administered induced childhood possession. This, however, differed from possession by bālagrahas in that it was “positive” or oracular rather


than “negative” or disease-producing and was characterized by the guided and protective presence of the experienced ritualist. A second suggestion is that the mantrin must be only that; he can officiate, but he has neither the innate ability nor the extrinsic eligibility to perform the possession. It is essential that he immerse himself fully in his officiating duties and that, conversely, he not open himself up to the risk of losing control of the ritual process. Such a loss of control or power would implicate him in loss of control not only over the boy or girl in possession but also over the forces of destiny that are being exposed and manipulated under his priestly control. This is a matter of masculine brahmanical power, of control over personality and identity where complete eclipse or transcendence of self and person is an accepted fact of successful possession. Although answers to certain questions (praśna, pasiâa, prasena, etc.) might be sought by anyone in a crystal ball as it were, for example, in water, a mirror, or an oil-smeared thumb, a person in an inferior social and intellectual position was preferred because he or she could articulate divinatory or oracular answers under the watchful and practiced eye of the mantrin, who would, according to the conventions of hierarchy, retain the right to censor or reinterpret the words of the oracle if they were to appear immature, wild, or irresponsible. Svasthāveśa is still performed in India, though the only example of it that I have seen was at the Bylakuppe refugee colony near Mysore by an elderly Tibetan woman, who is highly regarded in the community and uses an “oracular mirror.” The woman, called Ama Ta Bap (Plate 9), a name indicating that she divines by plucking a hair and “reading” it (though I observed no cases in which she used a hair), lives in a small house in a remote corner of this 35,000-acre colony, far from the Gelugpa and Nyingmapa monasteries that dominate the Bylakuppe landscape. Central to her practice is a shiny brass surface with an abstract pattern lightly etched on it into which she stares, which serves as the backdrop of her pūjā altar. The client sits on a chair in front of her and off to her right as she sits cross-legged on an elevated cushion before her altar. After she hears and acknowledges the question, she makes a few offerings with rice, water, and other items, stares into the brass plating, and answers the questions. In my experience her answers are vividly descriptive of visions she has just experienced. This, of course, does not in itself imply possession, and she did not provide me with that level of detail. Although the nexus of possession and reported visionary experience is well attested, it is also sometimes denied.145 I cannot, therefore, say with certainty that Ama Ta Bap believed that she was possessed or that the question


arose for her clients; I can say only that the setting and proceedings resemble classical accounts in which possession is a possibility.146 The likelihood that her oracular trances are the result of possession, however, is increased by Diemberger’s ethnographies of female oracles in Tibet. The usual practice among Tibetan oracles is to undergo an initiation or empowerment in which certain “energy-channels” (rtsa) are opened. This psychic opening permits the individual to become possessed by any number of minor deities or spirits. Diemberger writes, The popular perception is that impurities in the energy-channel are responsible for aberrant behaviour. Once these are ritually purified, possession is considered to be under control and confers upon the oracle an extraordinary competence in helping the other living beings.147

With the deity or spirit in control, the oracle then resorts to mirror divination, which “allows the gods to express themselves, with the oracle acting as an intermediary who can also provide the relevant explanation while in a lucid state.”148 I have heard reliable reports that a few monks in this Tibetan colony perform similar divination, confirming it as a respected practice among diaspora Tibetans. The textual evidence noted herein similarly confirms that it was practiced in India in the past. Much of this history is encapsulated in a Mughal-era painting (Plate 10), a late sixteenth-century projection of the use of an oracular mirror by Alexander the Great. The painting, dating to the year 1597 and ascribed to a Hindu artist named Dharmadāsa in the court of Akbar, was a visual interpretation of part of a long Persian poem by Amīr Khusraw of Delhi, called “Ā’Īnah-i Sikandarī” (Mirror of Alexander), composed in the year 1299.149 What is remarkable for our purposes is that this painting by a Hindu in a late sixteenth-century Muslim court, an interpretation of a Persian poem of three centuries earlier, portrays the use of an oracular mirror by a legendary Greek conqueror of fifteen centuries earlier. In this way, the life of magical or oracular mirrors is stretched seamlessly through thousands of years and numerous cultural, religious, and political boundaries, without apparent discrimination.150 A few additional examples should shed a bit of light on a few variants of the practice of childhood possession, if not exactly on its diffusion. One is the divinatory process employed to discover a tulku (sprul-sku) or reincarnation of certain recently deceased lamas. This process often has been de-


plate 9. Ama Ta Bap–Bylekuppe, Karnataka. Photo by the author, 2002.

scribed and needs no recounting here,151 but Orofino writes that the “pra divination has been, over the centuries, one of the arts used to foresee the place where the Dalai Lamas would be born.”152 In Taiwan, child mediums, who are required to be illiterate, may still be found. They are called jitong (divination lad), a term that implies that they are both male and young. However, some jitong are older, and others are girls. A practice that appears to have evolved from this is still observed. Certain adult mediums in Taiwan wear bibs designed for children in their oracular practice. This appears to be commemorial, a relic from earlier times when children acted as mediums.153 This mild attempt at disguise or impersonation was probably intended both to incite the medium to assume a childlike state and to inspire the local deity


plate 10. Alexander erects an enchanted mirror that allows him to monitor activity on the high seas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.


to possess the medium. An explanation for the use of children as mediums in China, which conforms with the likely intent of this practice, is that their hun (soul) is less stable and therefore more displaceable.154 This notion is not found in South Asia, though it may be implied by the very fact of the use of child mediums.That said, however, we must enquire still further into the texts. Unfortunately, I have found no Indic text that addresses child mediumship or reflects on it in this manner. As expected, the texts are an amalgam of myth and prescription, mostly the latter. Much of the prescriptive aspect, as also should be expected, implicates paradigmatic figures. Perhaps primary among these is Hanumān, a widely invoked exemplar, who, we have seen, is the archetypal devotee and “Son of the Wind,” a name that evokes his ethereal ancestry. He is also celebrated for his strength; he is the patron deity of wrestlers.155 This is not unimportant, because strength is a natural attribute and symbol for victory—and possession is always an ordeal of sorts, in both its performance and its aspirations. Furthermore, Hanumān is forever youthful. His personality is opposite that of other monkeys: He is celibate and therefore retains one of the characteristics of youth. He is also the embodiment of devotion, a requisite of the teacher-disciple relationship that is close to the heart of svasthāveśa, as it is to the power of spirit healing at Bālājī. His youth, strength, and virility, channeled into his master’s service, render him the embodiment of truthfulness and dharma. Thus, he is characterized as a dharmic and therefore (marginally) Sanskritic, an exemplar for those who require such a figure to legitimize their possession practices. There is no question that children are held in high regard in India, as potential bearers of crucial esoteric knowledge.156 In both South and East Asia, it appears that their supposedly natural talents for innocence and purity, as well as an apparent moral neutrality that distinguishes them from adults, rendered them more trustworthy in delivering unbiased answers to questions of weighty and biased human (which is to say, adult) concerns. This was even more important when considering the ambivalent position of the mantrin. On this ambivalence, I note Stanley Tambiah’s observation of Thai Buddhist exorcists as “both a caricature and an inversion of the orthodox Buddhist monk. He uses Buddhist sacred words for purposes diametrically opposed to those of the monk; the latter chants sacred words in order to teach morality and to transfer merit and blessings, whereas the exorcist uses the sacred words to frighten spirits and drive them away.”157 The mantrin (Mandarin) or māntrika in tantric ritual was similarly afflicted: He was


often an adept, but not always trusted or regarded as a moral exemplar by the general public, even by his own clientele. He therefore had to turn to his opposite to bring about the goals of tantric divinatory ritual. In conclusion, we have seen here wide-ranging data demonstrating that the practice of svasthāveśa, regardless of whether the practice was identified by that name, had a broad distribution in South and East Asia. It appears to have begun in northern India among tāntrikas (whether or not identified by that name) affiliated with Buddhist, Hindu, or even Jain lineages, who adapted and textualized practices that predated them (cf. the citation from Suśruta). It then spread into Tibet and China through transmission of tantric lineages beginning in the seventh century. It is impossible, in general, to know for certain how the geographic distribution of a particular practice coincides with the distribution of its textuality, especially if that textuality is sporadic, geographically widespread, and stretched over more than a millennium. This is especially the case where literacy is low and popular practices are legitimated (in this case, through Sanskritization) on an ad hoc basis, and where the practice in question has all the earmarks of a nonexclusive, nonbrahmanical production. What first surfaced in north India in the fifth to seventh centuries as a variety of praśna or pasiâa became prasenā farther north and east a few centuries later. Then it appeared half a millennium later in tantric texts and an assortment of prayogas in South India that strikingly resemble the Chinese texts. The description of the ritual, or at least clear references to it, most prominently its use of children in oracular possession, found its way at various points into Indian and Chinese narrative literature (cf. Kathāsaritsāgara and Guangyi zhi). It is a very colorful history and one that raises significant question about notions of personal agency and epistemology, the nature of childhood in India and China, and the transmission of ideas, practices, and textuality across lineage, class, and geographic boundaries.

Notes 1. I am particular grateful to Alexis Sanderson, who brought the unpublished Śaiva texts to my attention, shared with me his copious transcriptions and notes on them, and eventually went through a draft of this chapter, offering many positive suggestions, some of which are worthy of specific attribution. I am also indebted to E. Muralidhara Rao and H. V. Nagaraja Rao for help in transcribing a number of Sanskrit manuscripts from Telugu script into Nāgarī; to the participants of a conference on Tantra and Daoism held at Boston University in April 2002, especially John Lagerwey, David Ger-


mano, and Ronald Davidson; and to Wendi Adamek for explicating the Chinese and patiently answering many questions that must have seemed basic to her. 2. Subhagānandanātha’s commentary, called Manoramā, on the Tantrarāja Tantra 9.76, where he glosses svasthāveśan as svasthasya devatāveśanam. 3. Suspect because it is limited neither to Kashmir nor to the worship of Śiva. Even in its most generous specifications, the term “Kashmir Śaivism” could never include the works we consider here. “Kashmir Śaivism,” instead, includes texts of the Trika, Krama, or Bhairava traditions. On the place of each of them in Śaiva sects and lineages, see Sanderson 1988. See also p. 406 n. 2. 4. Sanderson has exploited one or more of these texts in virtually all his published work. The manuscripts that Sanderson used, parts of which he has shared with me, are the following: Jayadrathayāmala National Archives, Kathmandu (NAK) 5–4650; Niśvāsaguhya, NAK 1–277; Tantrasadbhāva, NAK 5–1985, and the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP) A188/22; Bóhatkālottara, NAK 1–273. In Sanderson’s estimation, the provenance of the two Buddhist texts among them, the CakrasaÅvarapiâbārtha and the Sekoddeśa, is probably eastern India. 5. The Tibetan translation appears in full, while only the first chapter of the Sanskrit text has been thus far edited; cf. Orofino 1994b. 6. Sanderson has been utilizing manuscripts of these texts in his scholarship for two decades; see, e.g., 1986, 2001. 7. Davis 2001; Strickmann 2002. 8. The NCC is not yet complete. Eleven volumes have been published to date, and it appears to be about half completed. Thus, more relevant manuscripts may yet be located. However, I have also checked the more likely catalogues from which the NCC is drawn and have come up empty. 9. Rajagopalachar 1990:1:50–53, catalogue numbers 48062–48069. Extracts from three of these appear in the appendix (which has separate pagination), pp. 57– 59. #48063 (4868/22), in Telugu script, describes possession of Āveśabhairava (asya śrī āveśābhairava mahāmantrasya agastya óùin). It states, however, that the devatā of the ritual is named Svasthāveśabhairavan (Bhairava [viz. Vīrabhadra] who induces svasthāveśa). #48067 (10024/12), one of the brief palm leaf Nagari manuscripts, appears to be no more than mantras, as the title indicates (Āveśamantran). I have examined #48062 (548/7) and #48069 (548/3), both in Telugu script. Although these differ significantly from the Chennai manuscripts, and probably come from different (though related) lineages, they do not add much to our knowledge of the procedures for svasthāveśa. However, #48067 (10024/12) has an unusually complete colophon: iti śrī āgamarahasye atharvaâatantrakhaâbe umāmaheśvarasaÅvāde āveśamantrayantrapūjādividhir nāma prathaman pa•alan | (Thus ends the first pa•ala called “Instructions on mantra, yantra, and pūjā to bring about possession,” appearing in a discussion between Umā and Maheśvara in the section on the Tantra of the Atharvaâas in the illustrious Āgamarahasya). However, I do not find this in the published edition of the Āgamarahasya (see Chapter 10, n. 5). This title, meaning “Secret of the Sacred Doctrine,” could well be generic; thus, more than one text of this name could exist in manuscript.


10. On the range and local production of such ephemera, see Diehl 1956:42–65; equally important on the origins, history, contents, production, and distribution of chapbooks is Hanaway and Nasir 1996. 11. The term dakùiâācāra is to be distinguished from the directional āmnāya transmission known as the dakùiâāmnāya. See Sanderson’s guide to medieval Śaiva lineages, 1988:681–690ff., for a description of the directional āmnāya transmissions. For a discussion of Śākta Tantrism under the influence of the Śaãkarācāryas, see Brooks 1992:43ff.; also Kavirāj 1963. For an account of Śrīvidyā practice, see Khanna 1986. 12. On the proximity of the Sanskrit vedic ritual traditions and both brahmanical and nonbrahmanical possession in Andhra Pradesh, see the various articles by Knipe, esp. 2004, which compares the two traditions. 13. ORI ms. #548 (see accession numbers 48062, 48069). 14. This manuscript appears to be only about 150 years old, but is in very poor condition, crumbling to dust upon mere touch. I am not familiar with the Dakùiâakālikāgama or the Vetālatantra. 15. Rajagopalachar 1990: 2:276–277. 16. I have not yet examined the manuscripts at the latter two institutions. 17. Cf. Poleman 1938:#4658, 14 ff. 9.5 x 4.1. 12–13 lines; University of Pennsylvania manuscript #578. 18. As modern (rather than nineteenth-century) Sanskritists, we are hesitant to comment too negatively on the language and diction of our materials. Thus it is striking (and encouraging) to see Sanderson refer to a text written in “barbarous Sanskrit” (referring to the Yonigahvara); cf. 2001:15n14. 19. iti sudarśanasaÅhitāyām uttarakhaâbe śrīkārttavīryārjunadīpakalpakathanaÅ nāma dvādaśapa•alan I am in the process of preparing an edition of this text, which appears to deal primarily with coraśāstra, the art of thievery, as the presence of the semidivine character Kārtavīryārjuna might indicate. One text of this peculiar śāstra, called úaâmukhakalpa, was edited by George (1991), published in 1966 and revised twenty-five years later. 20. A quick perusal of the SudarśamasaÅhitā manuscripts in Mysore reveals that most of it consists of rituals (vidhāna) for Hanumān. 21. Ms. #51670. The colophon reads: iti śrīsudarśanasaÅhitāyāÅ hanumaddīpavidhir nāma viÅśatin pa•alan. The section dealing directly with possession of Hanumān, which we address below, is the third pa•ala, called Āñjaneyāveśavidhin. 22. Manuscript number D 7763: iti śrīsudarśanasaÅhitāyām ānjaneya āveśavidhir nāma tótīyo pa•alan || (Āñjaneya is another name of Hanumān). 23. Thanks for this information are due to Philip Lutgendorf, who sees Hanumān as occasionally shamanic. Cf. Lutgendorf 1991:48 on Hanumān’s “crude strength and occasional destructiveness,” attributes which are sometimes invoked in possession. The pañcamukhī Hanumān has Hanumān in the center, flanked on its four sides by NarasiÅha, Varāha, Garuba, and Hayagrīva; cf. Lutgendorf 1994. Although this is Vaiùâava imagery, Hanumān has also been associated with Śiva since antiquity, as one of the eleven Rudras. I have seen many large and very recent images of this


form of Hanumān in Andhra Pradesh, where we also find a good deal of possession of Hanumān. 24. We investigate this in Chapter 12. It is sufficient for now to note that one of the most prominent appearances of this is Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati 41–44. The character of these chapters as mantravidhāna is unquestioned. Tantric healing practices derivative from the ĪŚP survive in Kerala, though in Malayalam medium rather than Sanskrit, in both the aù•avaidya tradition of the Nambudiris and other less brahman-dominated Āyurvedic traditions. On the former, still insufficiently researched, see Zimmermann 1987:213. 25. Cf. Bahulkar 1994, Bhat 1987, and Caland 1908. 26. His monumental BóhatsaÅhitā served as the basis for all later works on the subject. After the Atharvaveda, the medical literature, where we might expect to find systematic accounts of omens and portents, turns self-consciously scientific and rational; see Roçu 1986. On the dating of Varāhamihīra, see Pingree 1994:570. 27. Especially in the semantics of samāveśa; see Chapter 10. 28. Sanderson 1985 also speaks of this, though rather differently. 29. See the discussions above on the MBh and the Bhagavadajjukā. 30. The voluntary or involuntary status of possession during public or semipublic ritual is often problematic. Participants in festival possession often report that their possession is spontaneous and involuntary. In these situations, however, it is almost always learned, suggested, and socially advantageous. For one such report, see Neff 1995:194 ff. 31. See Chapter 4, which discusses words and terms used for negative possession in Sanskrit and different regional languages. 32. On the antiquity of cultural traffic across the Himalayas, dating to the third millennium b.c.e., see Xu 1991. Xu’s research is archaeological and focuses on Karuo, near Qamdo on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. The physical evidence reveals considerable cultural affinity between Burzahom in the Kashmir valley and Karuo. Xu speculates on routes across Tibet by tracking the evidence from Neolithic cultures of the period. See also Samuel 2000. While Samuel is not able to comfortably posit “significant influence from the Indus Valley cultural tradition” (p. 653) into Tibet from the mid-third to mid-second millennium b.c.e., he points out enough evidence for early contact “to suggest that the Indus Valley should be taken seriously as a possible source for early Tibetan cultures, and that its neglect in the literature so far is unjustified” (p. 666). He speculates that perhaps “a reflection of the Indus Valley civilization” may be found “in the accounts of the semi-mythical Bonpo homeland ’Ol-mo lung-ring, the place of the original teacher of Bon, ston-pa gShen-rab” (ibid.); cf. Martin 1995. 33. This includes Sanskrit-English, Sanskrit-French, Sanskrit-German, SanskritHindi, and Sanskrit-Sanskrit. 34. This curious lacuna includes the massive scriptorium of the Deccan College Sanskrit dictionary project, which, like the other lexicons, lists it only as the name of various royal personages. This should reflect not on the choice of texts selected for


use in compiling this dictionary but on the difficulties incumbent on any attempt to compile a complete Sanskrit lexicon. The earliest reference to this name is in the Maitrāyaâi SaÅhitā (3.1.9) and appears often in the HarivaÅśa, sporadically in the earlier Purāâas, and once in the Jaina Mahāpurāâa of the ninth century (3.150). The best known of these, however, is Prasenajit [Conqueror of Prasena], a king of Srāvasti (in the northeastern part of present-day Uttar Pradesh) in the time of the Buddha, who was converted to Buddhism by his wife, Mallikā; cf. Hirakawa 1990:33. 35. E-mail communication, September 13, 2001. 36. darpaâa ādi meÅ devatā kā āhvān, mantravidyāviśeù | 37. The PSM also cites the compound pasiâavijjā, viz. Skt. praśnavidyā, from the same texts. I am unable to find these terms in the texts; thus, it is likely that they are from the commentaries. The commentary on the Āyaraâgasutta was written by Śīlāãka in 876, a date that is more consistent with the remainder of the evidence. It is important that, among the sixty-four baneful vidyās listed in Sūtrakótāãga Sūtra 2.2.13(26–27), a text that probably predates almost entirely the period that concerns us here, does not list pasiâa, etc. See Jacob 1895:xl for cautionary words on dating this text, and 366f. for a translation of this passage. It may be mentioned here that the Sanskrit word vyantara, a general term for all manner of spirit-beings, is also attested much more in Jaina than in brahmanical texts. 38. Cf. Jain 1999:8; more detailed is Sen 1975:6–9. 39. Cf. Sen 1975:317. This is also mentioned by Jain 1984:264–65. See also Nandi 1994:395 and passim for an account of a detailed Jain tantric text called Jvālinī Kalpa. This text remains unpublished, and exists in only one manuscript housed in the Jaina Siddhanta Bhavan Library, in Arrah, Bihar. I have not examined it. 40. mantravidyā ke bal se svapan ādi meÅ devatā he āhvān dvārā jānā huā śubhāśubh phal kā kathan | 41. Niśītha Cūrâi 3, p. 383: suviâayavijja kahiyaÅ kathiÅtassa pasiâāpasiâaÅ bhavati; cf. Sen 1975:317. 42. BóhatsaÅhitā (BóS) 2.5, which reads in part: tātkālikapraśnaśubhāśubhanimittāni, predicting “good and bad omens upon timely inquiry.” This section of BóS addresses the qualities required of an astrologer, much of which concerns the ability to answer questions. I refer here to the 1895 edition of the BóS, ed. by Sudhākara Dvivedī. Other works attributed to Varāhamihira whose titles suggest a prior history of this term are the Praśnamahodadhi and Praśnacandrikā. These, however, are lost. BóS 50.6 gives the best direction and time for praśna. Thus, it is likely that the astrological art of praśna was known to Varāhamihira. 43. I have encountered no instances of the Sanskrit praśna/praśnā in this sense. 44. kuhakāveśapihitain karâopaśrutihetubhin | kótādeśo na sarvatra praù•avyo na sa daivavit || 45. This is something of a reversal, as āveśa is usually interpreted as a deity entering the body of the sādhaka or practitioner. Utpala, it appears, had little knowledge of these practices. 46. The Vidhānamālā, p. 26, defines karâagraha and prescribes a brief exorcism.


One who hears the voice of a relative, one’s guru or guru’s wife, or hissing sounds (ci•ci•ākāram) is possessed by a karâagraha (taÅ karâagraho góhâāti). The exorcism is quite simple. Both pure offerings of fruit, flowers, sesame seed paste, etc., and impure offerings consisting of the five, liquor, meat, etc., are offered as bali at a crossroad at dawn, and a simple petitionary mantra is recited: góhāâemaÅ baliÅ deva karâāriù•akara graha | āturasya sukhaÅ siddhiÅ prayaccha tvaÅ mahābala ||. See the Madamamahārâava section in Chapter 12 for more on this kind of exorcism. 47. See Kalkin Puâbarīka on Laghukālacakratantra, vol. 3, p. 89, that a karâapiśācikā can relate knowledge gained in astrology and other mathematically based divination. I have heard certain tāntrikas in present-day India employ the term karâapiśāca in this same sense. 48. On Bha••otpala and his works, see Bhat 1981:1:xxxvi–xlv; also Shastri 1962, who argues that Bha••otpala completed his commentary in 830 c.e. Bhat argues for a much later date, 966 c.e. Although Bhat knows the Vivóti well, he does not follow it in many instances where he should. In addition, Bhat never states which edition of the Sanskrit text he is following; indeed, he gives no critical apparatus whatsoever. Thus, for example, in his translation our present verse is numbered 2.33, without explanation. 49. Strickmann incorrectly cites the use of the word prasena by attributing it to Utpala’s tenth-century commentary on Varāhamihira’s Bóhajjātaka. In fact, it does not occur in this text, which is dedicated to the formalities of predictive astrology. Strickmann cites Böhtlingk’s 1879 revisions and additions to the earlier St. Petersburg lexicon of Böhtlingk and Roth (1855–1875) (Böhtlingk has the citation right), which glosses Utpala’s meaning as “eine Art Gauklerei.” Strickmann adds, “c’est–àdire une sorte de prestidigitation, d’illusionisme, de charlatanisme” (1996:226). Strickmann’s error reappears in his posthumously published Chinese Magical Medicine (2002:215). In his Sanskrit-English dictionary, Monier-Williams (1899:698) defines prasenā as “a kind of jugglery,” citing the “scholiast” (surely Utpala) on Varāhamihira’s BóS (this is in addition to references to several kings named Prasena). 50. This is borne out in the course of the next several centuries, as astrology becomes an indispensable element in priestly education. On the history of this movement, see Inden 1992. 51. I maintain this position, though I also agree with Sanderson (e-mail communication, September 27, 2001) that it was a literary and stylistic issue. The latter, in my view, are at least partly an outcome of these epistemological exigencies. Sanderson defends the Indian mode of presentation as follows: The Indian sources give us straightforward prescriptions of kanyāveśa and similar rites involving children. These naturally tend to be a little thin on the incidentals that would animate rich descriptions, but I see no evidence that they are epistemologically inhibited. A fairly detailed “Sanskritic” prescription of the prasenā ritual is seen in, for example, the Indian Buddhist Subāhuparipócchāsūtra. A copy of this text was in the possession of the Chinese monk Wuxing in 674. and it was translated into Chinese by ŚubhākarasiÅha in 726 (T. 895), and by Fatian (T.


896) in the late tenth century. It is listed with other Tantras of the Kriyātantra class in the Tibetan Ldan dkar library inventory of the early 9th century. The fact that the ritual is mentioned only sporadically in Sanskrit texts is not surprising. This is true for most kinds of special Tantric ritual, since the Tantras are by convention overwhelmingly concentrated on setting out the obligatory rituals (initiation, regular post-initiatory and pratiù•hā) of this or that Mantra system and, incidentally, on the kāmya inflections of the regular rather than on such special performances.

I deal with the Subāhuparipócchāsūtra shortly. Sanderson is doubtless correct about the “convention” of the Tantras in addressing certain kinds of ritual. Nevertheless, these accounts rarely exhibit the narrative intimacy of the Chinese texts. In this sense, the Subāhuparipócchāsūtra could be the exception that proves the rule. 52. On ritual as a learned response, see Chapter 2, n. 100. 53. See Orofino 1994b:11ff, for a lengthy discussion of the place of this text in the Kālacakra textuality. 54. Cf. Newman 1988:133. For the Sekoddeśa passage, see Orofino 1994b:134. 55. Translated from the Tibetan by Gray (2006, in press). The Sanskrit of this chapter is lost. Gray provides a translation of Bhavabha••a’s commentary on this verse: “Having repeated [the mantra] one hundred and eight [times] over a sword, etc., one will cause the descent of the luminous divinatory image.” The name of the mantra that causes the divinatory image to descend into the object is upah ódaya. 56. Orofino 1994a. See also Bellezza 2005:23, 68f., 437f., plates 42, 43, and passim, on different kinds of divinatory mirrors and their use by Bön shamans in the largely unexplored and undocumented regions of northern Tibet. 57. Ibid.:614. Orofino suggests (pp. 615–616) that the word pratisenā is an intentional recasting of the word prasenā, thus turning it into a metaphor that conveys the idea of reflection. It would then have been modeled after words with which it is associated that also express reflection, in particular pratibhāsa (see n. 128). I have no alternative proposal. 58. This can occur only if the word from which it is derived is not Sanskrit, and prasenā is Sanskrit. 59. Personal communication, September 13, 2001. Sanderson further notes, “Tantric Śaivism of this relatively public and strongly soteriological variety was not merely present in the seventh century but well established” (2001:11). 60. This account is based on a long message sent to me by Sanderson (March 10, 2002) and references he has suggested, as well as on his 2001 article. 61. Cf. Bakker 2000:15f. n42. 62. Cf. Dikshit and Sircar 1955–56; Shastri 1995: 1:169–172, 2:154–159. 63. āsīt sadyanśivācāryan śrīmān varyas tapovatāÅ (-tām) | śrīmadāmarddakakhyātitapovanavinirggatan || 64. Dikshit and Sircar state: “Āmardaka, which is the name of Kāla-Bhairava, a form of Śiva, was probably derived from the locality where Bhairava was worshipped” (1955–56:34–35).


65. See Sanderson 2001:8–10n6: These kings are the Cālukya Vikramāditya I of Bādāmī, the Eastern Gaãgā Devendravarman, and the Pallava NarasiÅhavarman of Kāñcī. 66. svasthāveśacūrâam ivendriyāâām asantoùam iva kautukasya; cf. Harùacarita, ucchvāsa 1, Führer’s edition, pp. 37–38 (I thank Professor Sanderson for this reference); cf. also the Harùacaritam, ed. by Musalgaonkar and Musalgaonkar, p. 61. Musalgaonkar states in his Hindi vyākhyā, “indriyoÅ ko niścal karanevāle cūrâ ke sadóś.” See also the edition by Kane, text p. 10, note p. 196. In this note Kane states, “he was as though a powder that influences the senses to be comfortable. The idea is: in his presence, the senses of the spectators were lulled into pleasure.” Both Kane and the Musalgaonkars, great paâbitas and scholars though they were, missed the point here. Another, later, mention of svasthāveśa is in the Kathāsaritsāgara, dated 1064 c.e.: so ’haÅ kadāpy akaraâaÅ svasthāveśaÅ prasaãgatan | śubhalakùaâam āsādya kaÅcit kùatrakumārakam || (70.56) (Once I apprehended a certain kùatriya boy with good characteristics and, through perseverance, instigated him to enter a state of svasthāveśa without any apparent cause). The purpose of this svasthāveśa was to enable the instigator of the possession, an ascetic (tapasvin) student of Śuddhakīrti, to find magical herbs and ultimately the subterranean palace of a serpent king (nāgendra-bhavanam) in which he would obtain a magical sword that would enable him to become Lord of Siddhas and roam about unconquered (sa siddhādhipatir bhūtvā vicaraty aparājitan|| 70.61d). Recall the reference to “good characteristics” (śubhalakùaâaÅ) noted above by Orofino in the Subāhuparipócchānāmamantra. 67. I remain cautious about the proliferation of the word Tantra in contexts such as this. Thus, I avoid saying that svasthāveśa “entered into general Tantric currency.” 68. Regarding these texts, Sanderson writes: The Niśvāsaguhya survives in a ninth-century Nepalese ms., but seems to be one of the very earliest Tantras of the Siddhānta, a tradition for which we have epigraphical evidence from the sixth century onwards. The Tantrasadbhāva is known to Abhinavagupta and there are Nepalese mss. from around the same time. The Bóhatkālottara, also called the ùa•sāhasra in reference to its length, is not cited by the famous abundantly quoting Saiddhāntikas of the period 975– 1050. I know of no citation in a work that predates the twelfth century. By then it was a very popular, widely known source. The Jayadrathayāmala, also known as the Tantrarāja, was widely known by the twelfth century. Kùemarāja quotes from the first of its four ùa•kas (sections of six thousand verses) and Abhinavagupta quotes from the Mādhavakula, a work that is part of the fourth. Vimalaprabodha, Rājaguru of King Arimalla of Kathmandu, who ruled from 1200– 1216 c.e., knows the whole work. The Buddhist Tantric texts belong to the tenth and eleventh centuries. (personal communication, September 13, 2001)

For more on the character of these texts, see Sanderson 2001:31–32n33. For a brief discussion on the date of the JY, which was cited by Kśemarāja in the first half of the eleventh century, see Sanderson 2002:1–2.


69. kótayogāñjalin samyak candracakrodaroditām | cintayet paramāÅ śaktiÅ taraãgakulavigrahāÅ | 70. Sanderson, personal communication, September 13, 2001. 71. pratisenāvatāratantre kila darpaâakhabgāãguù•hapradīpacandrasūryodakanetreùv avastuùu [read: a ù•asu] pratisenāvatāra uktan; cf. Newman 1988:133. 72. Orofino 1994a:615. 73. Sanderson has examined the relevant Śaiva texts that have survived in manuscripts. However, given the large number of such works that are cited in the extant texts and commentaries, I would be surprised if these details, and much more, were not mentioned in some of these missing texts. For our present knowledge of the names of these texts, see Sanderson 2001:3–4n1. 74. The syllables •ha •ha are code for svāhā. See now the translation by Qvarnstrøm (2000:600), that in part misunderstands this passage. This chapter of the Yogaśāstra is very much in the tradition of omens and portents established by Varāhamihira. 75. SuSaÅ 6.60.19: darpaâādīn yathāchāyāśītoùâaÅ prāâino yathā | svamaâiÅ bhāskarasyosrā yathā dehaÅ ca dehadh ók | viśanti ca na dóśyante grahās tadvac charīriâam || 76. For example, Paper 1995. Though this is not the most reliable source for commentary on such material, Paper does present the evidence; for my views on this book, see F. Smith 2001. 77. Samuel writes of “the multiple misunderstandings that seem inevitably caused by any use of the term ‘shamanic’ in scholarly discourse, however carefully defined” (2000:663). 78. See Chapter 4, in which the exorcistic healers at Bālājī deny any tantric pedigree. 79. Contra Iyanaga 1985:693f., followed by Davis 2001:129. The derivation of this word can hardly be from Sanskrit ud√śiù, ucchiù•a (rejected [from the mouth]). Ucchuùma as “the Crackler,” or, better, “the Desiccator,” is unproblematically derived from ud√śuù (to dry up). As an aspect of Agni, Ucchuùma crackles or desiccates as he dries up the offerings presented to him. 80. Iyanaga 1985. 81. Stein 1995. 82. Snellgrove 1987:134–141, esp. 139. On Vajrapāâi, Snellgrove remarks, “I confess to finding him by far the most interesting divine being throughout the whole history of Buddhism, for he has a personal history and considerable personal character” (p. 134). 83. Davidson (1991) rightly notes that the functions of myth in Buddhist practice have been overlooked. Moreover, his critique of Stein and Iyanaga must be seriously considered (p. 214ff.). 84. Ibid.:202. 85. Snellgrove 1987:139. 86. Mayer 1996, 1998. 87. This is described at length in Mayer 1996:115–128.


88. In his essay titled “Born to be Wild: Siddhas, Outcastes, Shabaras, and Local Esoterism,” Davidson counters Sanderson’s argument. He states: Heruka was developed in imitation of Maheśvara, and is thus the appropriation of Śaiva/Kāpālika systems for Buddhist purposes. Unfortunately, this excessively reifies the potential sources, and when we examine the record on Heruka, it appears much more problematic. While Heruka is formed in imitation of Maheśvara in the myth contained in the mid to late eighth century version of the Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaÅgraha, the 726 c.e. translation of the Subāhupariprcchā contains an apparently earlier reference to Heruka, there depicted as a local demon like a ghost (piśāca). This is in close consonance with the probable origin of Heruka, as stated in the Kālikā-purāâa, which identifies Heruka as the divinity of a cremation ground (śmaśāna), possibly where human sacrifice was to be performed. The cemetery was close by the Kāmākhya-pī•ha, and Heruka was provided a specific iconography. (p. 9)

Sanderson argues this often, perhaps most appositely providing details on the “iconography of subjection” as a tool employed by both Buddhist and Hindu tantric sects (1994). 89. See Bakker 2000 for Pāśupata evidence. 90. Mayer 1998:306. 91. Some of what Mayer proposes does not strike me as right or reasonable within the extended South Asian religious complex. For example, he suggests that “the Buddhist tradition in India would have found the facts of its debts to Śaivism embarrassing” (ibid.:305). For more on these Central Asian shamanistic practices, see Bellezza 2005. 92. Mayer 1996: 116. See also Granoff 1979, which employs art historical evidence to date the Buddhist Śiva to the sixth century. 93. To the question addressed in this section, Sanderson responds: “We know only that we do not know for sure that Śaiva sources teaching this practice are earlier than the Buddhist materials transmitted to China. It is only extremely probable that there were such sources for the Buddhists to draw on, and the fact that Bāâa can refer to svasthāveśa in a literary composition strongly suggests that this was so. Certainly the descriptions of Bhairava tantric practice found in his writing are based on exactly the class of Śaiva sources that is richest in references to prasenāvidhi/ svasthāveśa” (e-mail communication, September 27, 2002). 94. Strickmann 2002:208. I employ pinyin romanization unless citing a secondary source that uses the Wade-Giles system. Strickmann points out that āveśa is “sometimes translated into Chinese as ‘total entering’ (pien-ju)” (p. 207). This fits the semantic profile of āveśa as “immersion,” “absorption into,” etc. 95. Strickmann 2002: 204f., citing T. 1097, Bukong juansuo tuoluoni Zizaiwang zhou jing, the Chinese translation of Amoghapāśasūtra. 96. Ibid.:204.


97. Ibid.:204–205. Strickmann translates Amoghapāśa, “He whose Noose is Unerring,” the name given to the twelve-armed form of Avalokiteśvara, with the melodramatic “Slipknot That Never Misses Its Target” (p. 326n17). The Sanskrit text of the Amoghapāśasūtra is only now in the course of being edited and published. This is in the form of a roman transcription of a codex unicus that has come to light in Tibet; cf. Kimura et al. So far, a bit more than one-third of the text is published (66 folios out of 162). However, the section translated by Strickmann has yet to appear, so we eagerly await its publication. Before this work, the only description of the text, indeed what is probably a mere fragment of it, has been Meisezahl 1962. For an interesting reference to the healing practices described in this text, see Granoff 1998b: 218n1. This work includes two edited Tibetan versions, one from Dunhuang, the other a later Kanjur version, and an edition of a fragmentary Nepalese palm leaf manuscript in Sanskrit (University Library Cambridge, Oriental Ms. 152). This dhāraâi text sheds no light on the material dealt with here, except that many unusual words in it overlap with what we have found, appositely, kākhorda (pp. 291, 315), a kind of evil spirit (cf. Edgerton 1953:2:175, who cites this as an Iranian loanword). See also entry 3826, khakhōrda, in Turner 1969:201. Sanderson has collected a large number of attestations of this word not noted in these dictionaries. He informs me that this word “occurs widely in Mahāyāna texts and in the Rājataraãgiâī and in Śaiva texts that may well have been composed or redacted in Kashmir, in whose vernacular alone it has survived through to NIA” (e-mail communication, October 10, 2002). One interesting usage occurs in the Netratantra 19.132, where khārkhoda- appears as a kind of malevolent being, though Kùemarāja, the commentator, glosses it khārkhodān paraprayuktā yantrān (yantras that may be used against others). 98. Cf. Strickmann 1996:226f., and in greater detail in 2002:211–218. 99. Strickmann 1996:227. The Sanskritic philological speculations in which he indulges in his long note 43 on pp. 327–328 of Chinese Magical Medicine should be summarily discarded. Causing spirits to descend is otherwise known in Tibet and South Asia. Cf. Allen 1986, Aziz 1976, Macdonald 1975, and other references mentioned in Chapter 4. The notion of the spirit or jīva of a teacher passing into the body of the lineage successor is also found in Sikhism, where it became an article of belief that the spirit of one guru passed to his successor “as one lamp lights another.” This notion gained acceptance not just in the Tibetan institution of tulkus but by the convention adopted in India by the ten Sikh gurus, who all used the signature of the first one, “Nānak,” in their compositions. 100. See Nakamura 1975:2:1092c. 101. The sole support I could find for this in Sanskrit literature—and it is vague, at best—occurs in the Hastyāyurveda, a text on the care of elephants: svapnaśīlaś ca bhavati mandakram aviceù•itan | prasenaÅ kurute kāmaÅ gambhīraÅ vedayaty api || (2.61, p. 306). This verse occurs in a section on minor diseases (kùudraroga-), in this case a ślaiùmika or kapha-based condition that slows elephants down but nevertheless leaves them deeply lustful. The word prasenam is by no means clear, but it could refer to a formation of elephants. Neither Strickmann nor Davis suggest the possibil-


ity that the name Prasenajit here could refer to the hermit scholar of that name in eastern India with whom the Chinese Buddhist scholar and traveler Xuanzang reputedly studied at the end of his sojourn in India (he began his return journey to China in 643). On this Prasenajit, see Lusthaus 2002:408–412. 102. “faire déscendre le pra.” 103. Cf. Davis 2001:280f. n27 lists both Chinese and Japanese āveśa texts, as well as secondary-source references, many of them in Japanese. For the Hōbōgirin, see Lévi et al. 1929–83. On the āvesa ritual in esoteric Buddhism in Japan, a descendant of that practiced in China and Tibet, see McCullough 1973. 104. Davis 2001:124–25. I have left out Davis’s many notes to this paragraph, but see pp. 280–282nn17–27 for identification of āveśa texts and comparisons with the cognate rite in Japan. 105. Ibid.:123–124. 106. Ibid.:124. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid.:127. 109. Ibid.:126. 110. Davis takes this description directly from a Chinese Buddhist text (ibid.:128). 111. Ibid.:140. 112. The names of the Chinese works cited by Strickmann and Davis that contain sections on aweishe reveal culturally sinified Buddhist titles: e.g., Buding shizhe tuoluoni binifa (Secret Rites of the Spells of the Divine Emissary, the Immovable One, T. 1202), in which the Immovable one is the tantric Buddhist deity Acala; Jingangfeng louge yiqie youzhi jing (the Yogin’s Book of All the Yogas of the Diamond-Pinnacle Pavilion,, T. 867), translated by Vajrabodhi (662–732 c.e.); Yaoshi rulai guanxing yigui fa (The Medicine Buddha Contemplation Ritual, T. 923), also translated by Vajrabodhi. Strickmann (2002:218–227) discusses treatments of negative, diseaseproducing possession, viz. bālagrahas, that reveal Indic influence from āyurvedic sources (e.g., Caraka 7.5, Suśruta ch. 60, see Chapter 12 for explication of these sections) or even the MBh (3.216–219). The Chinese works are: Hu zhu tongzi tuoluoni jing, or Tongzi jing (Book of the Dhāraâi for Protecting Children, T. 1028a), translated into Chinese during the first half of the sixth century, and the Luofonu shuo jiuliao xiao’er jibing jing (Book of Rāvaâa’s Explanations of How to Cure the Ailments of Children, T. 1330). On the latter, see Filliozat 1935, 1937. For a medically detailed account of bālagrahas, see the section from the KaśyapasaÅhitā translated by Wujastyk (1998:212–230). 113. Davis 2001:124. 114. Ibid.:125. 115. See, most forcefully, Hardy 1983. Though this long and detailed study has received substantial criticism over the years, its principal theories regarding the influence on North Indian Sanskritic devotional culture by Tamil religious culture and sectarian poetry remain intact. Another excellent study that came out at nearly the same time is Yocum 1982, esp. pp. 187–194.


116. For example, Sanderson (2001:6n4) notes a goddess named BahumāÅsā ([She who possesses] much flesh) in a ninth-century Nepalese manuscript of an UrSkandapurāâa. 117. I have been looking into this for another current project on the development and distribution of the terminology for different types of memory in Sanskritic culture and discourse, viz. the distinctions between smóti, smaraâa, and smara, all derivatives from the Sanskrit root √smó (related, of course, to the English word “memory”). Smóti denotes a class of legalistic socioreligious texts, cultural or religious tradition, and the function of memory; smaraâa indicates meditation, repetition of divine name, and memorialization; smara is another word for “love” or “the god of love” (Kāmadeva, etc.). 118. The use of yantras for bhūtnivārak (warding off bhūts) is still in common practice in India. See, e.g., Hanumān-Upasanā, by Rādhā Kóùâa Śrīmālī (pp. 34ff.). Among the yantras he discusses are the bhūt-pret-nivārak yantra, the bhūt-nivārak yantra, and the mū•h-nivārak yantra. In conjunction with this, a peacock-feather fan is employed to “sweep away” spirits, especially from small children (p. 56). 119. This term is widely attested in South Asia for “exorcist.” See Mumford 1989:148n12 and Chapter 4, n. 194. 120. Mysore ms. #48062 states that the procedure described therein can be used for possession by any deity: brahmaviùâumaheśādi devatāveśaniścayam | This manuscript is unusual in that it does not specify that the possession occurs in any locus other than the ritualist. Recall the association of Bhairava with possession in the Prabandhacintāmaâi of the late first millennium. 121. Unfortunately, this manuscript is incomplete and lacks a colophon. On the link between Bhairava and the śarabha in coastal Andhra Pradesh, where both are regarded as avatāras of Śiva, see Knipe 1989:142. He adds: “The śarabha rūpa (monster form) of Śiva appears to be conflated with the bhairava rūpa (Vīrabhadra) in the Rajahmundry cult and its symbols, as indeed it is in the Śiva-Purāâa” (p. 153n11). For this and other sources, see Gonda 1970b:106f. See also the translation from the Kālikā Purāâa in O’Flaherty 1975:193–197, an account that contains several episodes of possession. 122. GOML D7763 reads: brahmacārī samabhyarcya aù•ahāyanamātrakan | yantropari ca saÅsthāpya bhasma mūrdhni vinikùipet | . . . evaÅ yantraÅ samālikhya ba•ukaÅ ca tathopari padmāsanena saÅsthāpya bhasmamantreâa nikùipet |. Mysore #48069 reads: abhyaãganaÅ ca kótvā tu brahmacārī tathopari | svastikāsanasaÅyuktaÅ pūrvābhimukhataś śucin | aù•ahāyanamadhyasthaÅ kóśaÅ śokavivarjitam | 123. Mysore #48062: etanmantroccāraâena pratyakùāveśam āpnuyāt | atītānāgataÅ caiva janmāntaraphalaÅ tathā || bhaviùyaj janma karma ca śubhāśubaphalaÅ tathā | On the link between Bhairava or Vīrabhadra and svasthāveśa, see note 9; and on the identity of Vīrabhadra in Andhra Pradesh, see Chapter 8 and Knipe 2001. 124. GOML D7763. 125. I use the word śāstra guardedly in this context. Because of the amorphous nature of Tantra, it is not possible to locate a single pedagogy or set of systematics that usually qualifies the word śāstra.


126. There is no evidence that this is the same Mahīdhara who composed a commentary on the Mādhyandina recension of the ŚuklayajurvedasaÅhitā. 127. The word vidyā is a synonym of mantra. 128. Compare this to Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati 1.25.75: svaikyatan śūlinīÅ dhyātvā svasthāveśo bhavej japāt (After meditating on the goddess who holds a stake [śūlinī] and realizing one’s unity with her, one should gain svasthāveśa through the performance of japa). 129. Mantramahodadhi 5.87–90. Cf. GOML D7763: evaÅ yantraÅ samālikhya ba•ukaÅ ca tathopari / padmāsanena saÅsthāpya bhasmamantreâa nikùipet / śatavāraÅ mantritaÅ ca āveśaÅ ca bhavedhóvam / [corr.: bhaved dhruvam]. 130. In the earlier Śaiva and Śākta texts Vidyās served as embodiments of female divinity and existed alongside the prasenā. Mahāvidyās were “specific to the late East Indian Tantric literature and its pan-Indian development” (Sanderson, e-mail communication, October 10, 2002). 131. See Strickmann 2002 for the use of an “ox bezoar,” either alone or mixed with cinnabar. When rubbed on a certain kind of seal, it “will not only summon all manner of spirits but will work large-scale geological, hydraulic, and cosmological changes as well. These include shifting mountains, draining seas, causing lightning and thunder, causing darkness in the heavens and over the earth, making the sun and moon fall from the sky, and bringing clouds and rains” (p. 323n102). On the consumption of the human gorocanā, said to be located in the heart, and the powers derived from this peculiar anthropophagy, discussed in certain Yoginītantras, see Gray 2005:55f., and for more on its identity, ibid.:47-48n8; for its use as an artistic symbol in Tibetan art, see Beer 1999:188. 132. See Taylor 2001:217ff. for evidence that Woodroffe knew no Sanskrit at all. 133. Śrī Subhagānandanātha’s Manoramā glosses svasthāveśam in 9.76a as svasthasya devatāveśanam. On this peculiar incense (9.76d), he says simply sarjjaraso nāma dhūpadravyaviśeùan. It appears to have been unknown to him. 134. Dudbridge 1995:1ff., 190–191 (#84–85). Dudbridge’s interpretations are not as convincing as his translations. He relies much too closely on interpretative methodologies of possession formulated in the 1930s and 1950s, which now appear seriously dated, not least because they were based on prevailing psychoanalytic and Christian viewpoints of the day. However, compare this story with Diemberger’s brief ethnography of a teenage girl who experienced an initiatory dream, after which she became possessed, giving her the ability to recite major sections of the Gesar of Ling (2005:154). See also Baptandier 1996, which discusses the rise of the cult of Lady Linshui in Fujian province and how it was based on mediumistic activity, in which the founder, a girl named Chen Jinggu, who lived a very short life during the Tang dynasty, appears in possession. This possession often occurs in male mediums called fashi who dress as women on this occasion and address calamitous issues. See Chapter 4 note 41 on this term. It appears that most cults in China have been based on spirit-mediumship. I am increasingly convinced that this is also the case in South Asia.


135. See my review article of ten books on possession, F. Smith 2001. 136. Strickmann 2002:208. 137. Here we have a mixture of Buddhist and Daoist ritual. Strickmann writes: “We already know that Taoist written documents were burned in the flame of the incense burner, and that they make their way heavenward in the company of special emissaries, spirit-messengers transformed by priests from the breaths of their own bodies” (ibid.:210). 138. Recall the symptoms of tantric saktipāta discussed in Chapter 10 (cf. Tantrāloka 29.207–208). 139. On the unreliability of dream and memory, see, e.g., Yogasūtras 1.5–11 and commentaries. Halbwachs 1992:41ff. argues that memory is a social category while dream is individually constituted and unreliable. 140. Strickmann 1996:291ff. “Le rituel est l’essence du bouddhisme tantrique, et ses traditions oniriques font partie intégrante du processus rituel” (p. 295). 141. “Dans le livre du yogin de tous les yoga du pavillon au faîte de diamant [T. 867], les instructions recommandent de réciter le mantra d’Acala cent huit fois, de former mudrā-épée avec les doigts, et ensuite de s’endormir immédiatement. La divinité viendra alors ‘prendre possession de vous’ (āveśa), et vous verrez en rêve toutes sortes de choses concernant le bien et le mal” (ibid.:298).The possessing spirit is not identified. I suspect, however, that it is not a prasenā, which he would certainly mention if it were the invader. 142. Davis 2001:136. 143. As discussed earlier, the clientele at Bālājī and other centers of exorcistic healing in India today includes members of all classes, castes, and religious affiliations. 144. Compare this to Orofino (1994a:613), who adds: “In the same way the yogin can see the images in the ether through the power of meditation on the supreme immovable bliss once he has abandoned the pleasure of the emission of his bindu” (ibid.). The text of the Sarnath edition reads, in part: tatkāraâam asti yena kāraâena kumārikāyāÅ dvīndriyasaÅgharùaâāc cyutisukhopalabdhir nāsti | (3:88). Sanderson notes, “the expression dvīndriya for the sex organs is standard Mantrayāna terminology” (e-mail communication, October 10, 2002). 145. Tachikawa (2000:234) points out that Tibetans distinguish visualization from possession, just as Japanese shamanic healers of the Shugendo sect do. The latter is a synthesis of Buddhism and Shinto. 146. Knecht discusses this as a general problem in deciphering shamanism. Consultations with tutelary spirits—a phenomenon just short of possession, though distinguished from it—are another possibility (2003:16). 147. Diemberger 2005:132. See ibid.:134 for a photo of a female oracle holding a divination mirror. 148. Ibid.:135. Similarly, Bellezza’s extensive ethnographic evidence (2005) of a connection between mirror divination and possession in Northern Tibet all but confirms it in the case of Ama Ta Bap. 149. For the remarkable Islamic account of the exploits of Alexander the Great, see Seyllor 2001:19–20.


150. The revolving mirror, cast under a magical spell, is mounted atop the high tower at the top of the painting. According to Khusraw, the tower was erected at the edge of the Sea of Rūm (the Mediterranean Sea), which is depicted here. For a description of the scene, see ibid.:84. For another use of mirror divination in Tibet, see Yang 1993. In this practice, certain mirror divinization chanters (pra-ba) are able to “see” the written forms of the Tibetan epic Gesar of gLing, which they then copy and chant. On the possibility of the export of magical mirrors from India, or at least their concept, to the Near East at undetermined points in antiquity, see Allen Thrasher’s inquiry on “Bhattah mirrors” on the Indology-listserv dated February 22, 2006 (http://listserv. liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0602&L=INDOLOGY&P=R1807& D=1&F=P&H=0&I=-3&O=D&T=1), and his references to Deveney 1997. 151. See, e.g., Avedon 1984:4ff.; Aziz 1976. 152. Orofino 1994a:616. On the general phenomenon of incarnation as possession in Tibetan Buddhism, see Aziz, who writes, “Tibetan Buddhism, as it is practiced in India and Nepal, allows for a host of diviners, spirit-mediums, oracular devices, monks and yogins, each of whom deals in his own way with malevolent as well as friendly forces encountered in the normal course of people’s lives” (1976:357). On the use of the word avatāra for possession in Buddhist texts (viz. the Mañjuśrimūlakalpa) see below, ch. 12 note 141. On the use of mirrors in Central Asian Islamic divination, see Levin 1996:245. 153. I am grateful to Urs App for this information. He has filmed some of these mediums (all female) in an ongoing project designed to collect some of the remaining shamanistic traditions of Taiwan on video. 154. I am grateful to John Lagerwey for this point. 155. See Alter 1992. 156. One need look no further than the stories of the baby Kóùâa for attestation of this. Examples could be easily multiplied. 157. Tambiah 1970:322.


2

The Medicalizatio in Āyurveda and Tantra


Disease-Producing Spirit Possession The Caraka-SaÅhitā, the oldest of the major āyurvedic texts,1 mentions three kinds of therapy (cikitsā): daivavyapāśraya (spiritual), yuktivyapāśraya (rational), and sattvāvajaya (psychological).2 Regardless of readily available (and well-known) definitions of these terms in canonical āyurvedic texts, practicing physicians most often quote the following Sanskrit verse as a prelude to any discussion of the treatment of mental illness, including those diagnosed as caused or exacerbated by spirit possession: janmāntarakótam pāpaÅ vyādhirūpeâa jāyate | tacchāntair aushadhain dānain japahomārcanādibhin || When it takes the form of disease, a moral transgression effected in another birth may be overcome through rituals of pacification [śānta], medicines [auùadha], gift giving [dāna], repetition of the name of god [ japa], fire offerings [homa], temple offerings [arcana], etc.3


plate 11. An astrologer’s shop, Bombay, 1947. Henri Cartier-Bresson. Reprinted with permission of Magnum Photos. All rights reserved.

This verse is used conventionally to explain daivavyapāśrayacikitsā (treatment based on daiva or fate, “spiritual” treatment employed to alleviate the effects of karma or actions performed in past births).4 Although a detailed discussion of the specifics of daivavyapāśraya- (and yuktivyapāśraya-) cikitsā is given later in this chapter,5 the verse, for us too, is a window into the general subject of mental illness, specifically disease-producing spirit possession. This chapter is organized around the general theme of bhūtavidyā, the vidyā (science) of bhūtas (existent beings),6 most of which are invisible or assumed to be inhabiting other beings, the most important of which is humans, and are believed to cause various diseases, including certain forms of mental illness. This is a vast subject in India, but the present discussion examines only a few of the many texts within a surprising number of genres in which this is delineated. These include the Atharvaveda (AV) and its ancillary texts, the first millennium c.e. canonical āyurvedic texs, certain Tantras and dharmaśāstra texts, and texts otherwise regarded as philosophical. In Chapter 6, we examined a bhūtavidyā section from the Mahābhārata (MBh, 3.216–219). This is augmented in the present material. After discussions and translations of the key passages in the early āyurvedic texts and a com-

The Medicalization of Possession in Ayurveda and Tantra

473

plementary passage in the SāÅkhyakārikā, we discuss certain modern interpretations of the āyurvedic passages, employing an important early Tibetan medical text as a counterpoint. Then we expand the discussion to include material on bhūtavidyā from the tantric and dharmaśāstra texts, as well as from a few contemporary ethnographies. The primary purpose of this examination, as of much of the remaining parts of the chapter, is to illustrate that India has a long history of viewing disease-producing spirit possession in moral terms: that behavior, viewed within a framework of moral concern, is a major component in the diagnosis of mental illness, more specifically in the diagnosis of spirit possession.7 Along the way it is necessary to discuss at length terms used for certain important possessors, in particular the graha and the piśāca. The chapter closes with discussions of diagnosis and treatment, drawn from both classical āyurvedic texts and contemporary practice, which do not always coincide. It would be a mistake to assume that the āyurvedic texts and traditions are invariable, unchanging, in agreement, or applied consistently in practice. Indeed, in response to changing cultural and intellectual practices, these traditions increasingly embraced elements of Tantra, dharmaśāstra, and unclassified local practices, producing a mosaic around bhūtavidyā that, like so much of Indian praxis, leaves everything different, yet somehow the same. Because possession was widely regarded as an affliction, whether for good or ill, it was medicalized very early. Āyurvedic texts of all periods locate possession within a category of pathology called unmāda (madness), though it is commonly known in āyurvedic circles more sanguinely as mānasika-roga (mental illness). Within that category, possession is regarded as an affliction that enters a person from outside, a condition with “exogenous” (āgantuka) causes,8 beyond the scope of identifiable medical or social pathology. In this way, it was regarded as suffering of divine origin (adhidaivika dunkha), “effected by providential causes or acts of the gods, that is, factors that are beyond human control.”9 This view is expressed consistently from the early compendia of Caraka, Suśruta, and Vāgbha•a, through the later commentaries and independent āyurvedic treatises of the mid- to late second millennium. Complementary to this viewpoint, a theoretical system of bhūtavidyā developed. This was not a static concept, and, as we shall see, it went through significant changes over time, eventually becoming, more plainly, a demonology in which increasingly feral or bluntly amoral nonhuman beings were identified and classified. This helped foster an environment of spirit healing


that was characterized by a great variation in pharmacological, ritual, and social modalities, many of which we discuss here.

Bhūtavidyā: Vedic and Āyurvedic Demonologies The history of bhūtavidyā can be extended back to the early vedic period, in which, in the ñgveda ( ñV), the gods (deva, sura) were distinguished from their archenemies (asura, dānava), and in which the battle between the gods and demons was eternally fought, often to a standstill, though with a slight, if temporary, advantage to the gods. The ñV identifies other categories of ethereal beings as well, who opposed humanity rather than the gods. In form they were anthropomorphic but, like the gods, insubstantial or, more accurately, endowed with a different substantiality. Among the most important of these beings were the gandharva, rakùas, yātu or yātudhāna, and, later, the piśāca.10 The term bhūtavidyā first appears in Chāndogya Upaniùad (ChU ) 7.1.2, a text of the seventh century b.c.e. or perhaps a century or two later, where it is listed along with other vidyās including the Vedas, Purāâas, divine knowledge (devavidyā), and understanding of brahman (brahmavidyā).11 It is probable that at this date the term bhūta indicated any type of being, animate or otherwise, visible or otherwise, as certain texts describing domestic ritual (Góhyasūtras) prescribe offerings of water to be made to all beings, including deities, heaven and earth, days and nights, the year and its divisions, lunar asterisms, the spatial midregion, the syllable om, numbers, oceans, rivers, mountains, trees, serpents, and birds. In addition, the following celestial, semi-celestial, and other bhūtas are to receive similar offerings: apsaras, gandharva, nāga, siddha, sādhya, vipra (viz. brahmans), yakùa, and rakùas, as well as cows, ancestors, and teachers, both living and long deceased.12 Thus, by the mid-first millennium b.c.e. the word bhūta was applied to all manner of perceived ontological entities, including “spirits.” Bhūta may also have signified beings allied with an “element” (also indicated by the word bhūta), hence used to “personify the elemental fragments of creation, infinite in number.”13 One hymn of the ñV (10.162) makes it clear that both the female body and fetuses were considered to be at great risk of possession by an exotic being, a rákùas further identified as an ámīva, a flesh eater (kravy6dam, 10.162.2) that separates the thighs and enters the womb while the husband


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and wife are sleeping together, in order to lick the inside of the womb (10.162.4) and, presumably, destroy the fetus.14 This was likely a precedent to the florid demonology in the MBh section on skandagarahas (childsnatchers) examined earlier, and similar pediatric sections of āyurvedic texts we examine more closely here. The ñV, AV, and Yajurveda (YV) saÅhitās speak not only of spirits but of diseases, demons, and the punishments of Varuâa and other deities pervading or overpowering the individual. As several scholars have pointed out, deities and spirits do not necessarily work against each other, nor do gods uniformly represent order while spirits represent resistance. As Shail Mayaram notes, spirit possession can “reproduce hegemony and hierarchy, [while] gods and goddesses, on the other hand, can sometimes be countercultural.”15 This is certainly the case in ancient and classical India, where reversals are as much the rule as the exception16 and is nowhere more transparent than in the āyurvedic texts, in which deity possession is medicalized in the same way as spirit possession. The ñV (10.161.1) speaks of a gr6hī: a female spirit that seizes people, causing death, disease, and fainting. muñc6mi tvā havíùā j Hvanāya kám ajñātayakùm6d utá rājayakùm6t | gr6hir jagr6ha yádi vaitád enaÅ tásyā indrāgnī prá mumuktam enam || With this oblation I free you from unknown yákùma [consumption] and royal yákùma. Or if the grasper [ gr6hī] has seized [jagr6ha] him, free him from her, O Indra and Agni.17

This feminine grasper is further mentioned in the Śaunaka recension of the AV (AVŚ 16.5.1), where Sleep (svápna) is identified as her son. This is reminiscent of later analyses of possession, for example in tantric texts, where sleep and other forms of extinguished memory or obliterated personality, such as fainting, are described as symptoms of possession. Finally, one passage from the vedic Śrautasūtras recommends that if a person who is possessed (“touched”) by a spirit (bhūtopaspóù•a) speaks during the performance of the pravargya, an important rite preceding the main ritual of the soma sacrifice,18 the adhvaryu or chief officiant should offer a stick lit at both ends into the āhavanīya (eastern fire), reciting mantras first to Agni (Taittirīya Āraâyaka [TĀ] 4.28), then directing the words of the piśāca-possessed


person to follow (and) possess (anvāviśya) the enemies of the sacrificer, urging death upon them (TĀ 4.21).19 The AV, as must be expected of a vedic saÅhitā, does not systematically discuss either bhūtavidyā or possession. Nevertheless, bhūtavidyā became more prominent in the medical sections of the AV, while the text mentions possession and remedial measures only casually. In spite of this, the allied sciences of Āyurveda, developed much later, always regarded the AV as their source text, as the inaugural text on Āyurveda.20 In several instances (AVŚ 1.16, 2.4, 3.9), the text provides mantras designed to empower amulets that are to be used to overcome víùkandhas (disorders or disturbances caused by invasive and malevolent rákùases [demonic beings in general] or piśācás [flesh-eating demons]).21 Other hymns (e.g. AVŚ 4.20, 5.29) reveal an awareness of malevolent ethereal beings, including piśācás and yātudh6nas (wandering ethereal sorcerers). Another hymn (AVŚ 4.37) discusses gandharvás and their apsarás wives, beings with malevolent intent, though seemingly not equal in negative force to the rákùas or piśācá.22 The AVŚ (2.25) identifies an embryo-eating ( garbhādám) being called a káâva, extending the notion from the ñV that pregnancy had to be protected with great care.23 The most common word for such invasive disease-causing spirits in Āyurveda is gr6hī, a term inherited from the ñV and AV. An example of a ritual invocation for the removal of such spirits occurs in AVŚ 6.112.1: “O Agni, foreknowing, loosen the fetters of the gr 6hi.”24 Thus, upon diagnosis of diseasecausing possession, ritual was a prescribed therapeutic adjunct to medical procedures like herbal treatments or surgery.25 This multifaceted approach to healing has continued undiminished in India. For example, the Tantrarāja Tantra (31.27–29, 67) prescribes that a mannequin (puttalī) of clay mixed with earth from a cremation ground, ashes, salt, ginger, garlic, asafoetida, and so on, representing an enemy, be stabbed with a thorn or nail if, due to injury, one is possessed by a piśāca (piśācāviù•a), thus dispatching the enemy to Yama’s world.26 This kind of “folk medicine” may be found today in India, as K. P. Shukla discovered while conducting his study of traditional healers near Varanasi in 1969–71.27 Later we turn to further examples of this from the Īśāçaśivagurudevapaddhati and some derivative Keralan traditions. AVŚ (6.111) is a hymn to be recited as a palliative for únmāda. Kenneth Zysk sees: two types of insanity or madness mentioned in the charm: únmadita which implies the demented state brought on by the patient himself as a result of


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his infringement of certain divine mores or taboos; and únmatta which suggests an abnormal mental state caused by possession by demons, such as rakùas-s (verse 3). To the ancient Indian, insanity, like death, was considered to be a state when the mind leaves the body (verse 2). Likewise the patient exhibited the distinctive symptom of uttering nonsense (verse 1). In order to cure such a condition, the healer had to return the mind to the body (verse 4). He did this primarily by making offerings to the gods in order to appease them, in the case of únmadita-madness (verse 1). He also prepared medicines, perhaps to calm the patient, to drive away the evil forces invading his body, in the case of únmatta-madness (verses 2, 3). There is also the suggestion that a victim was restrained, perhaps in a sort of straitjacket, presumably so that he could not harm anyone (verse 1).28

The hymn reads as follows: 1. O Agni, for me, release this man who, bound [and] well-restrained, utters nonsense [l6lapīti]. Hence, he shall be making an offering to you when he becomes sane [ánunmaditan]. 2. If your mind is agitated, let Agni quieten [it] down for you. [For] I, being skilled prepare the medicine, so that you may become sane. 3. I, being skilled, prepare the medicine so that he, insane [únmaditam] because of a curse of the gods and demented [únmattam] because of the rákùas-demons, may become sane. 4. Let the Apsarases return you; let Indra [and] Bhaga [return you; in fact,] let all the gods return you so that you may become sane.29

In examining this passage, it is important to note that if Zysk’s interpretation is correct, the division it describes foreshadows the later āyurvedic distinction between unmāda caused by accountable pathological factors and unmāda brought on by unaccountable invasive entities. Although I do not see in verse 2 evidence for the assertion that “insanity, like death, was considered to be a state when the mind leaves the body,” nevertheless the deployment of únmaditam and únmattam in verse 3 is striking, and the use of the stronger, more direct, únmattam for madness caused by possession is more notable still.30 However, in the absence of evidence for systematic usage of these words in the AV it is questionable whether this is more than a fortuitous effect of the poetic form. In any event, it does appear that at this


early stage a distinction was seen between pathological madness and madness caused by possession. It is useful to consider the deployment of gods (and, we can easily speculate, demons) as arbiters of moral action in the AV, and compare this to the much later Tantras, which also describe the openness of individuals whose moral transgressions made them vulnerable to possession by disease-causing spirits, a topic we discuss at length below. Sanderson observes that, according to the Netra Tantra and Jayaratha’s Viveka on Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka, “Yoginīs, Śākinīs and other female obsessors suck life from their victims into themselves as an offering to their regent Mahābhairava enthroned in their hearts.”31 Sanderson demonstrates that, according to brahmanical thought, such possession was due to the relaxation of both self-control and conformity to one’s dharma. Thus, “these ever alert and terrible powers of the excluded could enter and possess, distorting his identity and devouring his vital impurities, his physical essences. . . . Possession, therefore, was doubly irrational: it obliterated the purity of self-control and contradicted the metaphysics of autonomy and responsibility.”32 In his Tantrāloka (15.595–99), Abhinavagupta cites the authority of the Kulagahvaratantra and NiśisaÅcāratantra as predecessors to his own symbolic interpretation of demonic possessors ( graha). Sanderson states that these grahas “conceal the true self (autonomous, unitary consciousness) beneath a phantasmagoric pseudo-identity, contaminating and impoverishing it with categories unrelated to its essence.”33 These grahas are “obsession with caste (jātigraha), vedic learning (vidyā), the social standing of one’s family (kula), with orthodox conduct (ācāra), with one’s body (deha), one’s country (deśa), and material prosperity (artha),”34 in other words, the demons of personal identity. We might compare this sense of possession as identification with aspects of the ordinary human condition to Kauśikasūtra 28.12, an early ritual commentary on the AV, in which “infringement of certain divine mores or taboos” is illustrated through the prescription of an Atharvavedic mantra (AVŚ 5.1.7) as an antidote for amatigóhīta, possession by “cluelessness” (amati), another ordinary human condition. Dārila, the commentator on the KauśSū explains this term as “one with no idea about dharma, artha, and kāma” (trivargaśūnyabuddhin).35 This, however, does not go as far as Abhinavagupta in bringing symbolic weight to a possessing entity. Indeed, Abhinavagupta and his predecessors are the only figures in Sanskrit literature to provide an explicitly symbolic reading of possession, except, of course, if one considers the entities in the āyurvedic categories


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purely symbolic. Although the latter is doubtful, as we now investigate, the line between the symbolic and the ontologically actual in these texts is nearly erased.

The Āyurvedic Demonologies Possession in the āyurvedic texts has been addressed before, notably by Mitchell Weiss,36 who analyzes Indian categories of unmāda and exogenous disease-causing spirits with reference to Freudian and other psychoanalytic categories.37 In addition, Jan Meulenbeld has succinctly described views and categories of bhūtavidyā set forth in different āyurvedic texts. These textual differences have been considerable and should be kept in mind in the ensuing discussions. Among the areas of disagreement were the nature of bhūtas, their ontological reality, their number and identity, their cultural origins, and what constitutes the discipline of bhūtavidyā, including knowing not just the names and descriptions of bhūtas but the diagnostics, pharmacology, and ritual treatment for possession by bhūtas.38 Weiss’s results, in my view, are not particularly helpful in understanding the āyurvedic categories and, like many comparative studies, make little attempt to bridge the cultural and philosophical gap between the loci of comparison, in this case India of two thousand years ago and Vienna of the early twentieth century. The psychoanalytic prism has the singular advantage of offering an explanation of possession as represented in these texts to a reader with interests in Freudian psychoanalysis, but it neither sheds much light on what these texts attempt to illustrate nor offers an effective model with which to evaluate notions of selfhood that arise from a consideration of possession as defined in these texts. In addition, by failing to consider the emic gravitas of possession, an interpretation that constantly looks over its shoulder at Freudian psychoanalysis unwittingly abets Western cultural and scientific hegemony and authority. As the foregoing discussion should make clear, the etiology and identification of bhūtas cannot be adequately examined in terms of any single theory. Meulenbeld’s article is of quite a different nature. It provides insight into the complexity and contentiousness of first-millennium āyurvedic debate over the nature of unmāda, which are absent from Weiss’s study. It appears, in short, that the early compendia of Caraka and Suśruta modernized the study of medicine in the first few centuries of the Common Era. One topic with which they were forced to grapple was the notion inherited from the


AV and other earlier texts that nearly every disease could be personified or anthropomorphized and attributed to possession by spirits and other divine beings. In their attempt to make medicine more empirical, Caraka and Suśruta placed distinct limits and conditions on this notion. They were not always in agreement, and this sense of debate persisted through the next millennium or so of āyurvedic textuality. Their fundamental solution to bhūtavidyā, however, was similar: They relegated it to a subcategory of unmāda and conditionally of apasmāra, both of which they believed to have a number of possible causes, including those that were inherent (nija) or explicable. Caraka (Cikitsāsthāna [CaCi] 3) treats four categories of fever (jvara) brought about by external factors: (1) abhighātaja (those resulting from injury); (2) abhiùaãgaja (those resulting from afflictions by evil spirits, as well as emotional overload, including uncontrollable passion, grief, fear, and anger); (3) abhicāraja (those arising from sorcery, including hostile ritual, mantras and oblations); and (4) abhiśāpaja (fever brought on by the curse of a spiritually advanced being). CaCi 3.123, addresses abhiùaãgaja fevers: “Abundant tears [are observed] in [fever caused by] grief; when fever is due to fear, terror becomes prominent; extreme agitation [is evident] when [fever] arises out of anger; nonhuman [symptoms are observed] in [fever arising from] possession by spirits [bhūtāveśe].”39 The foundational texts of Āyurveda, Caraka SaÅhitā (6.9.16ff.), Suśruta SaÅhitā (6.60), and Aù•āãgahódaya SaÅhitā (ch. 6), discuss the “epidemiology of possession,”40 in this case bhūtatantra (doctrine of bhūtas), a category that includes bhūtonmāda (insanity produced by the influence of bhūtas).41 Although these enumerations are regarded as different categories of graha or bhūta, they share fundamental territory with categories of personality. This resonance is borne out in complementary sections of Caraka and Suśruta, as well as in the most important texts belonging to the second chronological level of āyurvedic textuality, the Kāśyapa SaÅhitā and the texts of Vāgbha•a, which postdate the earlier compendia by four or five centuries.42 These sections describe sattvas—essences, personality types, or mental states43—as part of a discourse on embryology, the human body in its development from conception to birth. Many of these sattvas correspond in both personality and name to the various grahas listed in the bhūtavidyā sections.44 From this, we must assume that grahas or possessing entities may be viewed as substantialized or reified collocations of personality attributes. Nevertheless, it appears that the authors of these foundational texts main-


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tained the distinction between native personality and grahas that independently personified these attributes. This is consistent throughout the canonical āyurvedic literature. Bhūtavidyā consists, formally at least, of two divisions ( graha or bhūta), though in much of the literature they are used interchangeably, with the word graha attested more frequently. Nevertheless, when a distinction is required, the category of graha is used to denote bālagrahas, the mostly female possessors of pregnant women and children. But bhūtas are almost entirely male grahas that are known by their specified characteristics. Bhūtas may be regarded as subspecies under which no further taxonomic breakdown is required. Thus, the category bālagraha may include sixteen, eighteen, or more varieties, while grahas as subcategories of bhūta may be gandharvas, yakùas, pitós, niùādas, and so on, without further subspecies. The latter division consists of bhūtas called grahas, which the brahmanically constituted āyurvedic texts have drawn from vedic and other more “orthodox” sources. This categorical and taxonomic arrangement is represented fairly consistently from the MBh through the āyurvedic literature and in modern folklore. These two divisions appear to emerge from quite distinct local traditions and probably from different strata of society as well. Their odd integration into the Vanaparvan of the MBh and the pediatrics sections of the āyurvedic texts suggests that bālagrahas existed outside the realm of Sanskritic culture and discourse until they were incorporated into the fold, Sanskritized, gaps filled in, and systematized, one for every year, and so on, as we saw in the MBh and see again later in this chapter. The more brahmanically inclined (if not always more benign or better-behaved) grahas were taken from an assortment of vedic texts, reconceptualized in a way that brought them into a closer, even familial, relationship, and presented in a coherent and systematic discourse. Another difference between them is that pregnant mothers and children possessed by bālagrahas appeared to maintain their “own” personalities, while those possessed by more orthodox bhūtagrahas appear to have been consistently overwhelmed by the personality of the possessing agent. Subsequently, the project of bhūtavidyā, including taxonomies, diagnostics and treatment, provided the āyurvedic texts with an exegesis on, and to some extent a solution to, the problem of deviant personality management. Indeed, through the very organization of these passages, the texts have called into question the notion of personality. In a chapter titled unmādacikitsā (treatment for madness), Caraka (9.20–21) describes in detail the unmāda


produced by possession (abhidharùayanti; lit. “overpowering”) of eight kinds of divine and semidivine beings, as well as the characteristics of people who might be possessed by each one, a topic we address in detail shortly.45 It must be noted that all the canonical texts kept the bhūtavidyā sections distinct from the sections on bālagrahas. Although I am here including them both within the broader parameters of bhūtavidyā (knowledge of [nonhuman] entities), the texts regarded bālagrahas as a part of pediatric medicine, rather than of mental illness. In a chapter of similar content, titled amānuùopasargapratiùedha (repulsion of contact by the nonhuman), Suśruta (6.60.8–18) divides grahabalas into nine classes. First, however, he defines graha. “A graha,” he says, “is well-known as an unstable quarrelsome entity that engages in nonhuman activity and has knowledge of what is hidden or lies in the future. They afflict the unclean, [and] fracture [social] boundaries in whole or in part, even if the purpose of such affliction is [not explicitly malevolent, but] merely frivolous or to satisfy a religious obligation” (6.60.4–5). These are distinguished from bhūtas, a distinction that yields little practical difference, as Suśruta himself observes (see Suśruta [Su] 6.60.27). Half a millennium later, in the Aù•āãgahódaya SaÅhitā’s equivalent chapter, bhūtavijñānīyabhūtaprati ùedha (entities to be known and repulsed), this number grows to twenty (AH 6.4.9–44).46 This suggests that the canon of bhūtas, so to speak, was open, a fact verified by the introduction of grahas with non-Sanskritic names into the AH, a process that has continued to the present. This transition from folk to classical was discussed in Chapter 4, while commenting on descriptions of the phenomenology of possession as represented in modern ethnographies. Here, too, first-millennium chroniclers of mental illness not only did not standardize the list of grahas, which perhaps might be expected of a developing scientific enterprise, but encouraged an expansion of the list. The dynamics of this early interaction between folk and classical are clarified below, in the discussion of enumerations of grahas outside the primary āyurvedic literature. Convulsions, or seizures of any kind, constitute another condition believed to be caused by malevolent spirits, as well as by planets, also called grahas, that are malevolent and badly placed in one’s horoscope. The general word in Sanskrit for “convulsion” is apasmāra (literally, “forgetfulness”), which is often wrongly assumed to signify epilepsy alone.47 The early medical texts did not consider that apasmāra could have an organic cause. This was only realized much later in Europe by Jean Martin Charcot (1825–


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1893), the “Napoleon of Neuroses,” an early founder of neurology and one of Freud’s teachers. Charcot developed the concept of hysteria and distinguished it from epilepsy, the former of which had psychological causes and the latter organic causes. One definition of apasmāra—striking because it is not in a medical text—is found in the Daśarūpa, a treatise on dramatic theory, which regards seizure as a transitory state (vyabhicāribhāva) of giddiness to be replicated in dramatic performance. The Daśarūpa states, “Apasmāra is āveśa induced, properly speaking, by the influence of the planets, by misfortune, etc. Its results are falling on the ground, trembling, heavy sweating, and slobbering, frothing at the mouth, etc.”48 Two synonyms of āveśa, given by Hemacandra, are apasmārarogan (seizures as disease) and ahaÅkāraviśeùan (a variety of self-identity).49 We have confirmation of the latter in the sections from the Tantras cited by Sanderson above, which are roughly contemporaneous with Hemacandra, as well as from the much earlier KauśSū. Apasmāra is also found as the name of a certain bhūta or disembodied spirit in South Indian mythology and appears most notably as the demon on whom Śiva Na•arāja treads in the great temple in Chidambaram.50 The primary āyurvedic texts enter into significant detail on possessing entities. These passages shed light on the manner in which possession and possessing entities rearrange personality and behavior. They also reveal to some extent the constitution of selfhood as conceived by these texts. This makes it useful to translate several lengthy āyurvedic text passages in full.51 This is equally essential if we understand personality and behavior as paramount and grahas and bhūtas as materializations of these behaviors. Before translating these passages, however, we must first describe the nature of grahas.

Graha: Grasper and Possessor As Suśruta’s definitions of graha and bhūta clarify, the bhūtavidyā passages employ the word graha to describe certain kinds of bhūta. A bhūta, in its very etymology, is any existent ontological entity, while a graha is an entity further delineated by its ability to “grasp” or “hold” (√góh). The archetypal “grasper,” which the authors of these texts perhaps had in mind, is the alligator, which in Sanskrit is indeed called grāha. It is perhaps no accident, then, that a grāha is also an idea or notion, and a grāhaka is a perceiver, one who grasps an idea or notion. Consistent with the passage from ChU 7.1.2 cited earlier, if considerably pared down, later Sanskrit literature limits the term to include only these exotic beings and the planets.


In Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad (BĀU ) 3.2, Jāratkārava Ārtabhāga asks Yājñavalkya how many graspers there are, and how many overgraspers (kati grahān katy atigrahā iti). There are eight of each, replies Yājñavalkya, and they come in pairs, a grasper that is overcome by its paired overgrasper (atigrāheâa góhītan): the inbreath (prāâa) which is overcome by the outbreath (apāna), speech (vāg) by name (nāman),52 tongue (jihvā) by taste (rasa), eye (cakùus) by form (rūpa), ear (śrotram) by word (śabda), mind (manas) by desire (kāma), the two hands (hastau) by action (karman), and skin (tvac) by touch (sparśa). Taking this as a guide, a graha or personality-laden ethereal grasper would assume the role of the overgrasper during possession, taking control of the sense organs and sensory functions of the individual, who would in a healthy individual be the grasper of these organs and functions as well as their perceiver, a complex person consisting of both grāha and grāhaka. One of the common meanings of the word graha in Sanskrit is “planet,” of which nine are counted, the seven after which the days of the week are named, plus the two nodes of the moon, Rāhu and Ketu, which are held to be responsible for eclipses.53 According to the astrological literature, planets are called grahas because they grip or hold people in their power. The Bóhatparāśarahoraśāstra (3.4) says, in what is surely a very old idea, “those which grasp [ g óh âanti], constantly moving in the sky, are called planets [ grahān].”54 Indeed, one of the late books of the AV, possibly dating to 1000 b.c.e., uses the word graha to refer to planets, at least as they are represented in the Indian system. The planet named here is Rāhu, not actually a planet but, rather, the northern node of the lunar path, which W. Caland identifies, at least in this hymn, with Vótra, the cosmic serpent, thus a “grasper” par excellence.55 An eclipse is also called grahaâa (bhāskaragrahaâam [solar eclipse]) in Varāhamihira’s Bóhat SaÅhitā.56 The grahas Rāhu and (in later texts) Ketu, the southern node of the lunar path and thus not “planets” at all, seize the sun or moon, a celestial act of general affliction that requires ritual expiation.57 Whether human or cosmic, the result is the same: The sun and moon during an eclipse, as well as individuals who are “afflicted” by grahas, require remedial procedures often resembling those employed in cases of possession as described in medical texts. Thus the influence of planets resembles possession by bālagrahas in Āyurveda as well as in instances of pra√viś, discussed earlier. This influence from the planets is invasive, pervasive, and motivated from without.58 Consequently, the remedial or expiatory procedures recommended in astrological treatises are called grahaśānti (pacification of a planet).59 Two other related words that share many of the semantic attributes of


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possession are vigraha (an embodied image) and anugraha (grace). Both can attract the attention of a person and overwhelm one’s sense of identity. The primary meaning of vigraha, following its etymology, is “separation, isolation, conflict.” One of its most common occurrences is in Sanskrit grammar, where dissolution of compounds into their constituent parts is called (pada-)vigraha. Supporting this notion of division into individual units is its meaning in the śrauta ritual, where vigraha refers to a “portion,” for example of soma or ghee, which has been removed or separated from the main vessel.60 Thus, in its early applications it conveyed a sense of individualizing, approximately the same sense it obtained in the MBh and the Purāâas, where it indicated the form or image of a deity. In the only study of this word, G. B. Palsule states that vigraha “is something which is taken up or assumed. It is assumed by the jīva; it is something external, something shell-like, which the jīva assumes (vigóhâāti) temporarily. An ‘avatāra’ or incarnation is a vigraha, i.e. a form of the God which He has assumed.”61 After examining its occurrences in the epics and certain late Upaniùads, Palsule concludes that vigraha appears in two contexts: “(1) assumption of a form, false impersonation or disguise; and (2) personification (real or imaginary).”62 Furthermore, because it connotes an assumed form, it never becomes a synonym of deha or śarīra, the usual words for “body.” Philip Lutgendorf records the contemporary North Indian notion among Vaiùâavas that “the Lord has four fundamental aspects [vigrah]; name, form, acts, and abode [nām, rūp, līlā, and dhām]—catch hold of any one of these and you’ll be saved!”63 This doubtless reflects a much earlier view, in which an embodied form (rūp) is a “portion” of a deity. This helps explain, linguistically at least, the Vaiùâava view that an image of Kóùâa is not a “representation” of the Lord, but the Lord Himself (svarūpa).64 Thus, vigraha, like grāhi and graha, indicates an external presence appropriating or “seizing” form. Anugraha (lit. “favor, kindness, assistance” in early literature) becomes a synonym of kópā (grace) in devotional literature.65 The Taittirīya SaÅhitā (1.7.2.3) says, in a passage that is fairly typical of anu√góh in early Indic usage, “[I have invoked] her [Ibā] who favors with kindness [anugóhâ6ti, i.e., extends her grace to] people in distress and nourishes [ góhâ6ti, takes] them as they recover.”66 Anugraha does not appear in Upaniùads until at least the mid- or even late first millennium c.e., in a few SaÅnyāsa Upaniùads and sectarian Vaiùâava Upaniùads, such as the Nārāyaâapūrvatāpanīya and Gopīcandana.67 A typical usage is found in the Kathāsaritsāgara, “realizing that the grace [anugraham] of Kumāra toward them had blossomed.”68 In


all cases the meaning is mild compared to the “seizing” characteristic of other forms of √góh. The prefix anu- (following along) softens the sense of the verbal root, rendering the seizer’s engagement with the seized emphatically, if curiously, benevolent. Although anugraha never, to my knowledge, indicates destructiveness, disease, or sheer power, a further distinction is made in Śaiva Siddhānta: “God’s grace in its tender aspect is called anugraha and in its tough or punitive aspect, nigraha. It will be seen that even nigraha [restraint] is really anugraha because punishment is meted out only to correct and reform the erring individual.”69

SāÅkhya Entities The SāÅkhya school of philosophy was rarely (if ever) followed in India as an independent soteriological path, as were most other schools. However, it had a major, even pervasive, influence on the “higher” schools of yoga and Vedānta, on the Mahābhārata, as well as on many other systems of thought, including Āyurveda. Without SāÅkhya, Āyurveda would look very different; indeed, it is SāÅkhya that weaves the disparate threads of Āyurveda into a coherent system. The evolutionary principles (tattva-) that constitute SāÅkhya’s main doctrine are the building blocks of the āyurvedic body, mind, and cosmos.70 Within a set of fourteen types of sentient (bhautikasarga) that hierarchizes beings “from Brahmā down to a blade of grass,” the SāÅkhyakārikā (SK, 53–54), which predates Caraka and Suśruta, presents a list of divine beings that was almost entirely accepted by the latter two āyurvedic authorities. This is not to assert, however, that the SK was the sole influence on the early āyurvedic texts; such ethereal beings were, we might say, very much in the air at that time. More specifically, SK 53–54 speaks of divine (daiva) realms, the human realm, and lower realms of animals, plants, and immovables, though it does not list these realms by name. This is left to the commentaries, particularly the Suvarâasaptati (on kārikā 53), which lists the daiva realms as Brahmā, Prajāpati, Indra, Gandharva, Asura, Yakùa, Rakùas, and Piśāca. However, the SāÅkhyasaptativótti on kārikā 53 lists Brahmā, Prajāpati, Indra, Pitó, Gandharva, Yakùa, Rakùas, and Piśāca; thus it eliminates Asura and places Pitó before Gandharva.71 The SāÅkhykārikābhāùya of Gaubapāda on the same kārikā lists the divine realms as Brāhma, Prājāpatya, Saumya, Aindra, Gāndharva, Yākùa, Rākùasa, and Paiśāca. These are realms named after the specific divine or semidivine beings believed to characterize or inhabit them.


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In this list Soma, the lunar realm, is indexed before Indra’s realm, in place of either the Pitó or Asura realms. The anonymous commentary on the SK called Jayamaãgalā presents the following list: Brahmā, Prajāpati, Sūrya, Asura, Gandharva, Yakùa, Rakùas, and Piśāca. In this list Sūrya replaces Indra, and Asura occurs once again.72 The Yuktidīpikā, an important early SāÅkhya text, lists Nāga in the place of Yakùa. These lokas (realms) assuredly represent domains in which beings that possess humans reside. These beings have cosmological roles and functions other than possessing innocent people; they comprise a balance of living beings that necessarily populate the existent worlds. Therefore, they may be regarded as archetypal ingredients in a cosmic soup that blends and separates in different consistencies according to proximity, locational strength or weakness, and so on, functioning much like elements of a multivalent, multidimensional, and complex personality. This is the SāÅkhya cosmos and the SāÅkhya individual, the thousand-headed, thousand-armed being, ever-shifting within itself. It is a classical expression of fluidity, which is so apparent in the modern ethnographies. The list of divine or semidivine beings in the SK may be briefly compared to similar lists in Caraka and Suśruta.73

sāÅk h ya

car ak a

suśruta

brahmā

deva

deva

indra (sūrya, soma)

pitë

gandharva

gandharva (pitë, indra, asura)

gandharva

yakía

asura (gandharva)

yakía

pitë

yakía (nāga)

rākíasa

bhujaéga

rakías

brahmarākíasa

rakías

prajāpati

guruvëddhasiddharíi

śatrugaâa

piśāca

piśāca

piśāca

The Bhūtavidyā Sections of Caraka, Suśruta, and Aíìāãgahëdaya Saåhitās A good general statement introducing the textuality of bhūtavidyā is Caraka’s succinct description of unmāda: The general symptoms of disease caused by unmāda are psychic confusion, agitated consciousness, unsteadiness of vision, impatience, unre-


strained speech, and emptiness of heart. Such a person, whose mental processes are confused, does not experience pleasure or misery, cannot behave properly or understand dharma, finds no peace at all, and has dissipated memory, intellect, and power of recognition. In this way, then, his mind wavers. (6.9.6–7)

A few verses later, Caraka gives a more in-depth explanation. CarakasaÅhitā 6.9.16–21: 16.

Externally induced [āgantu] [madness, unmāda] has as its [direct] cause attacks [abhidharùaâāni] by gods [deva], seers [óùi], celestial musicians [ gandharva], flesh-eating demons [piśāca], semidivine protector demons [yakùa], dangerous demons [rakùas], and deceased ancestors [pitó]; [indirectly] it is the result of incorrectly performed internal and external vows, etc., and actions from a previous existence.74

17.

If, as a result of one’s knowledge, skill, strength, and other qualities, one’s speech, heroism, power, and actions resemble those of an immortal, one should declare about him that his unmāda is brought about by a bhūta, so long as the time of the onset of this unmāda remains unspecific.75

18.

By virtue of their own powers and attributes [ guâaprabhāvain], the gods and the rest enter [viśanti] the body of a man quickly and imperceptibly, without defiling it, like a reflection in a mirror or sunshine in a crystal [sūryakānta].

19.

The time of the attack by the gods, etc., as well as an account of previously observed symptoms were already stated in the nidāna section [CaSū 2.7.12]. Now understand the various forms of unmāda, as well as the times and the kinds of people upon whom these forms chance to fall.

20.1 Let it be known that one who has a soft gaze, is serious and modest, not given to anger, does not crave sleep or food, who has little perspiration, urine, feces, and flatulence, who has a sweet scent and a face like a lotus in bloom is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by the gods. 20.2 Let it be known that one whose actions, diet [āhāra], and speech reflect a curse [abhiśāpa], malevolent spell [abhicāra], or subtle


intention [abhidhyāna] of a preceptor, elder, perfected being, or seer [guruvóddhasiddharùīâām] is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by any of them. 20.3 Let it be known that one whose gaze is unfavorable, is uncomprehending, languid, whose speech is blunted, lacks appetite, and is seized by indigestion is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by deceased ancestors.76 20.4 Let it be known that one who is passionate, impulsive, sharptempered, serious, modest, enjoys wind instruments [mukhavādya], dance, song, food and drink, bathing, garlands, incense, and perfume, is fond of red garments, offering sacrifice [balikarma], and indulgence in humorous stories, and has a sweet scent is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by a gandharva.77 20.5 Let it be known that one who sleeps, cries, and laughs frequently, is fond of dance, song, musical instruments, reciting sacred texts, telling stories, food and drink, bathing, garlands, incense, and perfume, has red and tearful eyes, vilifies the twice-born and physicians, and divulges secrets is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by a yakùa. 20.6 Let it be known that one whose sleep is disturbed, who dislikes food and drink, is very strong in spite of not eating, craves weapons, blood, meat, and red garlands, and is threatening is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by a rākùasa. 20.7 Let it be known that one who has a primary interest in laughter and dance, exhibits hatred and defiance of gods, brahmans, and physicians, [yet] recites hymns, the Vedas, mantras, and other canonical texts [śāstra], and self-flagellation with sticks, etc., is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by a brahmarākùasa. 20.8 Let it be known that one whose thoughts are unhealthy, has no place to stay, indulges in dance, song, and laughter, as well as idle chatter that is sometimes unrestrained, who enjoys climbing on assorted heaps of garbage and walking on rags, grass, stones, and sticks that might be on the road, whose voice is broken and harsh, who is naked and runs about, never standing in one place, who broadcasts his miseries to others, and suffers from memory loss is afflicted with unmāda [caused by possession] by a piśāca. 21.1 Under those circumstances, the devas attack [abhidharùayanti] a person of pure behavior, skilled in religious austerities and

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scriptural study, generally on the first and thirteenth lunar days [tithi] of the waxing lunar fortnight [śuklapakùa] after noticing a weakness [chidram]. 21.2 The óùis attack a person who is devoted to bathing, purity, and solitude, and well-versed in the teachings of sacred law and the Vedas [dharmaśāstraśrutivākyakuśalaÅ], generally on the sixth and ninth lunar days.78 21.3 The deceased ancestors [pitó] attack a person who is devoted to the service of his mother, father, teachers [guru], elders, spiritually perfected ones [siddha], and spiritual teachers [ācārya], generally on the tenth lunar day and on the day of the new moon. 21.4 The gandharvas attack a person of pure behavior who is fond of hymns of praise, singing, and musical instruments, who is fond of other men’s wives, perfumes, and garlands, generally on the twelfth and fourteenth lunar days. 21.5 The yakùas attack a person who is endowed with intelligence, strength, beauty, pride, heroism, is fond of garlands, massage oils, and laughter, and is loquacious, generally on the seventh and eleventh lunar days of the waxing lunar fortnight. 21.6 The bramarākùasas attack a person who dislikes scriptural study, religious austerities, internal vows, fasting, celibacy, and honoring deities, mendicants, and teachers, a brahman whose purity has been compromised or a non-brahman who speaks like a brahman, whose comportment is that of a hero, and who is fond of playing games in temple waters, generally on the fifth lunar day of the waxing lunar fortnight as well as on the day of the full moon. 21.7 The rakùases and piśācas attack a person who is devoid of intelligence, who is a backbiter, lusts after women, and is deceitful, generally on the second, third, or eighth lunar days. 8.8 Thus, of the innumerable agents of possession [ graha], the eight most prominent have been described here.

SuśrutasaÅhitā 6.60.1–28 1–2. Now we shall present the chapter on warding off the onset of nonhuman beings as it was accordingly explained by the illustrious Dhanvantari. 3. One who suffers an injury must always be protected from


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“wanderers of the night” [niśācara]. This topic was introduced before and will now be discussed at length. 4. A person in whom one finds knowledge of secrets or things that have not yet occurred, or is unstable or quarrelsome, and whose actions are not like those of a human may be regarded as possessed [sagrahan]. 5. They may harm one who is impure, uncontrolled [bhinnamaryādam],79 or injured; or if one is not injured they may harm for no other reason than the fun of harming or else because they are made welcome [satkāra]. 6. The categories of “seizers” [graha] are innumerable, but the principal ones, which manifest in various forms, are divided into eight types. 7. These eight categories of deity [devagaâan] called “seizers” are gods [devān], various categories of their enemies [śatrugaâān], celestial musicians [gandharva-], semidivine protector demons [yakùān], deceased ancestors [pitaran], serpent spirits [bhujaãgān], ordinary demons [rākùasāÅsi], and the class of flesh-eating demons [piśācajātin]. 8. A man who is contented and pure, has the proper scent and garlands, is strong and possessed of truthful and refined speech, is vibrant, steadfast, grants boons, and is devout is inhabited by gods [deva]. 9. He who is sweaty, speaks badly of the twice-born, gurus, and gods; whose eyes are shifty, who is completely fearless and vigilantly seeks out evil ways; who is satisfied by neither food nor drink; and whose character is defiled is inhabited by enemies of the gods [devaśatru]. 10. One whose character is joyous, who frequents sandy river banks and the interiors of forests, who is well-behaved, who is fond of singing, perfumes and garlands, who laughs while dancing, is agreeable but is a person of few words is a man tormented by gandharva grahas. 11. One whose eyes are coppery, who is fond of wearing red clothes, is serious, quick-thinking, reserved, and patient, is vibrant and says, “What shall I give to whom?” is tormented by a yakùa graha. 12. A person of peaceful nature whose clothes cover the left side, who supplies rice balls and water, properly arrayed, to the deceased, who desires and eats meat and sweets [pāyasa] made from sesame and jaggery [guba] is overwhelmed by pitó grahas. 13. One who sometimes crawls around on the ground like a serpent and licks the corners of his mouth80 with his tongue, who is drowsy and


desires sweets made from jaggery, honey, and milk is known to be inhabited by a serpent spirit [bhujaãgama]. 14. One who desires meat, blood, and various kinds of alcoholic beverages, who is shameless, excessively harsh and powerful, is angry and immensely strong, who wanders about at night and detests ritual purity is seized by a rakùas. 15. One whose hand is raised,81 is thin and severe, chatters endlessly, is foul-smelling, excessively impure, and staggers around, who eats a lot and enjoys isolated places, the cold, watery places and the night, and who is extremely uneasy and wanders around crying is inhabited by a piśāca. 16. One whose eyes are dull and gait is fast, who licks up saliva and other foamy substances from his own mouth, who is sleepy, falls and trembles a lot, and when falling due to injury from a mountain, an elephant or a tree, etc.,82 does not heal is afflicted by demons who intensify the condition.83 17–18. Deva grahas enter [viśanti] on the full moon day, asuras at dawn and dusk, gandharvas generally on the eighth lunar day, yakùas on the first lunar day, pitós and serpents [uraga] on the fifth day of the waning lunar fortnight, rakùases at night, and piśācas on the fourteenth lunar day. 19. As a reflection is to a mirror or other similar surface, as cold and heat are to living beings, as a sun’s ray is to one’s gemstone, and as the one sustaining the body is to the body, in the same way grahas enter an embodied one but are not seen.84 20. Severe austerities, generosity, vows, righteousness, observances, and truth, along with the eight attributes, are always present in the possessed person, in part or in full, according to the power of the graha.85 21. Grahas do not cohabit [saÅviśanti] with humans, nor do they possess [āviśanti] people, and those who say they do possess them are to be disregarded because of confusion with respect to knowledge of bhūtas [bhūtavidyā].86 22. There are virtually infinite numbers of night-stalking attendants of these grahas, who devour blood, fat, and flesh, and are very frightening, and it is they who possess [āviśanti] him.87 23. With respect to those night-stalkers whose condition is determined by various classes of deities [devagaâam], because of their


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connection with that [deity’s] nature they are to be known as anointed by them. 24. In addition, those who are described as deity grahas [devagrahān] are impure, though honored and invoked as deities. 25. Each of these classes of grahas, beginning with the gods, has the nature, actions, and behavior of their respective masters. One should keep in mind that they are the offspring of the daughters of Chaos [niróti].88 26. The behavior of those who have strayed from truthfulness is shaped by the multitudes of these [daughters of Niróti] who are generally intent on injury as sport or divine states [devabhāvam]. 27. The designation bhūta was given to them by the experts in such terminology; in this way the physician [bhiùak] knows bhūtas who are designated graha by this term. 28. This, then, is called the “science of bhūtas” [bhūtavidyā], and with this knowledge the physician [vaidya] is very intent in his desire to pacify them.

Aù•āãgahódayasaÅhitā 6.4.1–44: Now we shall narrate a chapter on the understanding of bhūtas as the sages Ātreya and others told it long ago. 1. One should take note of a person’s knowledge, understanding, speech, movement, strength, and humanity. Whenever in a man there is an absence of humanity, one might say there is a bhūta graha. 2. By the tenor of one’s appearance, temperament [prakóti], speech, gait, etc., which one assumes in conformity with a bhūta, one may conclude that he is possessed [āviù•am] by that bhūta. 3. There are eighteen types, according to divisions such as deva, dānava, etc. When a person is in their grip, the cause may be immediate or it may be due to a previous action.89 4. An extreme transgression of one’s better judgment [prajñāparādhan],90 wherein one’s ordained life-style, religious vows, and proper behavior are transgressed, may be due to lust and so on. In such a case, one also offends honorable men. 5. Uncontrolled [bhinnamaryādam] in this way the transgressor becomes self-destructive. The gods and others also attack, and the grahas strike at his weak points.


6–8. These weaknesses include undertaking a transgressive act, the ripening of an undesirable action, residing alone in an empty house, or spending the nights in burning grounds and other similar places;91 public nudity, maligning one’s guru, indulgence in forbidden pleasures, worship of an impure deity, contact with a woman who has just given birth,92 and disorder with respect to tantric or Purāâic fire offerings [homa], the use of mantras, sacrificial offerings not involving fire [bali], vedic sacrificial offerings [ijya], and positive actions or rites that counter negative ones [parikarma]; as well as a composite neglect of prescribed conduct in the form of daily routine and so on. 9. The gods [surān] possess [ góhâanti] a man on the first or thirteenth day of the waxing lunar fortnight, the dānava seizers on the thirteenth day of the waxing lunar fortnight or the twelfth day of the waning lunar fortnight. 10. However, the gandharvas [possess] on the fourteenth and the serpent demons [uragān] on the twelfth and fifth days, while the Lords of Gifts [dhaneśvarān, i.e., yakùas] [possess] on the seventh and eleventh days of the waxing fortnight. 11. Brahmarākùasas [possess] on the fifth and eighth days of the waxing fortnight as well as on the full-moon day, while [ordinary] rakùases, piśācas, etc., [possess] on the ninth and twelfth days of the waning fortnight as well as on either the new-moon or fullmoon days. 12. The deceased ancestors [pitaran] [possess] on the tenth day and the new moon day, while the others, including gurus, elders and others [guruvóddhādayan] [possess] on the eighth or ninth days. In general, the time at which [possession] should be noted is at dawn and dusk [saÅdhyāsu]. 13–15. One whose face is like a lotus in bloom, whose gaze is soft, who is without anger, who speaks little and has little sweat, feces, and urine, who has no craving for food, who is devoted to the gods and the twice-born, who is pure and possessed of refined speech, whose eyes blink infrequently, who has a sweet scent and grants boons, who is fond of white garlands and clothes and enjoys dwelling by rivers or on high peaks, who does not sleep, and who is inviolable is regarded as one who has been brought under the influence of the devas.


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16–17. One whose gaze is crooked, who is evil-natured, who is inimical toward his gurus, the gods and the twice-born, who is fearless, conceited, strong, angry, and resolute, who goes around saying, “I am Rudra, Skanda, Viśākha; I am Indra,” who savors liquor and meat is regarded as possessed [ góhītakam] by a daitya graha. 18–19b. One whose behavior is good, who has a sweet scent, who is blissful, who engages in song and dance, who takes delight in bathing and gardens, who wears red clothes and garlands, and adorns himself with red oils, who enjoys erotic play is said to be inhabited [adhyuùitam] by a gandharva. 19c–21b. One whose eyes are red, who is angry, whose gaze is fixed, whose gait is crooked, and is unstable, whose breathing is incessantly short, whose tongue dangles and shakes, licking the corners of his mouth, who likes milk, jaggery, bathing, and who sleeps face down is regarded as inhabited [adhiù•hitam] by serpent demons [uraga], being fearful of sunlight as well. 21c–24b. One whose eyes are red, swimming, and fearful, whose scent is clean and energy is bright, who is fond of dance, storytelling, song, bathing, fine garlands and oils, who enjoys fish and meat, who is blissful, contented, strong, and intrepid, who shakes his finger saying “What shall I give to whom?,” who tells secrets and mocks physicians and the twice-born, who is irritated by small matters and has a swift gait is regarded as possessed [ góhītakam] by a yakùa. 24c–26b. One who is fond of laughter and dancing, whose gestures are wild [raudra], who excoriates others’ weaknesses, who is abusive, fast-moving, who is inimical toward the gods and the twice-born, who beats himself with sticks and knives, etc., who [hypocritically] addresses others with the respectful term bhon and recites the śāstras and Vedas is regarded as possessed [ góhītam] by brahmarākùasas. 26c–29. One whose eyes are filled with anger, whose brows are furrowed, revealing agitation, who assaults others, who runs around with a fearful visage making a racket, who is strong without taking food, whose sleep is disturbed and who wanders about in the night, who is shameless, impure, heroic, and


violent, who speaks harshly, who is irritable, who is fond of red garlands, women, blood, wine, and meat, who licks his chops after seeing blood or meat, and who laughs at mealtime is said to be one who is inhabited [adhiù•hitam] by a rākùasa. 30–34b. One whose thoughts are unhealthy, who runs around, not remaining in one place, who is fond of leftovers, dancing, gandharvas, laughter, wine, and meat, who becomes depressed when rebuked, who cries without reason, who scratches himself with his nails, whose body is rough and voice trails off, who trumpets his many miseries, whose speech freely associates what is relevant and irrelevant, who suffers from memory loss, who enjoys nothing, who is fickle and goes around desolate and dirty, wearing clothes meant for the road, adorned with a garland of grass, who climbs on piles of sticks and rocks93 as well as on top of rubbish heaps, and who eats a lot is understood to be inhabited [adhiù•hitam] by a piśāca. 34c–35b. One refers to a man whose appearance, actions, and scent are like those of a preta, who is fearful and dislikes food, and who has many minor imperfections94 is regarded as possessed [ góhītam] by a preta. 35c–36b. One who chatters incessantly, has a dark face, is late wherever he goes, whose scrotum is swollen and dangling is said to be inhabited [adhiù•hitam] by a kūùmāâba.95 36c–38. One who wanders around in rags taking up sticks, clods of dirt, etc., [or] runs around naked, with a frightened look, adorned with grass, haunting burning or burial grounds, empty houses, lonely roads, or places with a single tree, whose eye forever embraces sesame, rice, liquor, and meat, and whose speech is rough is believed to be inhabited [adhiù•hitam] by a niùāda. 39. One who begs for water and food, whose eyes are fearful and red, and whose speech is violent is a man known to be afflicted [arditam] by an aukiraâa.96 40. One who is fond of fragrant garlands, speaks the truth, shakes, and sleeps a lot is believed to be under the control of a vetāla.97 41–42. One whose visage is detrimental, whose countenance is dispirited, whose palate is dry, whose eyelashes quiver, who is


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sleepy, whose natural effulgence is dull, who wears his upper garment over the right shoulder and under the left arm, who is fond of sesame, meat, and jaggery, and who stammers is believed to be under the control of a deceased ancestor [pitógraha]. 43. One whose anxieties are consistent with the curse of a guru, elder [vóddha], óùi, or siddha may describe his own speech, diet, and movements in terms of that graha. 44. One should abandon a person who is followed by a crowd of children, is naked and whose hair [mūrdhajam] is disheveled, whose mind is abnormal, and who has been possessed [sagraham] for a long time.

The Psychodynamics of Bhūtas I must now evaluate two important critiques of the material on bhūtavidyā presented in the āyurvedic texts: the first by Mitchell Weiss, the second by Terry Clifford. Weiss, as we have seen, deals with the data presented in the texts translated above. Clifford discusses material presented in a Tibetan text called the Gyu-zhi (rGyud-bzhi) (The Four Tantras), “the most famous and fundamental work in Tibetan medical literature.”98 Let us first consider Weiss’s study, which summarizes the symptoms of unmāda according to the type of graha possessing the individual. Occasionally he supplements these with psychoanalytic interpretations. For example, with respect to unmāda caused by devagrahas he states that the devas “cause one to see, possibly indicating a paranoid delusion or hallucination, or perhaps an autoscopic hallucination.”99 Furthermore: “In the deva and guru et al. types hyperpious, obsessive-compulsive, and paranoid symptomatology are characteristic suggesting rigid internalized controls, preoccupation with the cultural values, and a psychodynamically significant role for guilt. There are hallucinations, and paranoid schizophrenia has been suggested.”100 Weiss continues, cogently, that the arrangement of the types of graha, in Caraka at least, “suggests a successively decreasing capacity for organized social functioning and a decreasing influence of internalized control mechanisms.”101 To this statement he adds that the sequentiality of the indigenous categories reveals “the psychodynamic significance of obsessive-compulsive, anal personality traits which yield to oral and then phallic narcissistic psychodynamics.”102 These observations, in my view, fail to consider local context, especially for the deva and guru types, namely, possession as devotional practice. In this


context, the “decreasing capacity for organized social functioning and a decreasing influence of internalized control mechanisms” deviate from the norm, as he states, but the incipient context sanctions such emotionally laden behavior as derivative of devotional practice. Thus, to label this particular set of psychodynamics obsessive-compulsive, phallic narcissistic, and so on, is to fix both a taxonomy and a set of values on an experience, in this case the devagraha experience, which misstates, ignores, or downplays its cultural locus and significance as deviant behavior. Similarly, such preemptive classification ignores complementary passages in the āyurvedic texts that describe equivalent personality types not regarded as the product of possession. Let us turn briefly to some of these passages, which present a de facto argument for bhūtas as substantialized collocations of personality attributes. The primary passage in question is from Caraka’s Śārīrasthāna (CaŚā 4.36– 40),103 the section that describes embryology. This passage details the generation, construction, and development of the body (śarīra), describes different types of sattvas, essences or intelligences, as the final ingredient in the construction of the body. It is important to note that the canonical āyurvedic compendia are inclusive texts: they contain everything from creation mythology to diagnostics to anatomy (as in the present case) to descriptions of innumerable physical conditions to surgery (in Suśruta only) to a broad range of therapies, including ritual, dietary, and pharmaceutical.104 I refer to sattvas (states of being) as “essences,” or, following Meulenbeld, “personality types.”105 CaŚā 4.36 states that “sattvas are of three types: pure [śuddham], dynamic [rājasam], and slothful [tāmasam].106 Among these, the pure (personality type) is said to be faultless [adoùam], bearing a degree of auspiciousness. The dynamic [type] is said to be defective [sadoùam], because it bears some anger. The slothful [type] is said to be defective, because it possesses a certain degree of delusion.” Caraka continues that these categories reveal dominant modes, within which individuality is manifested by unique mixing or texturing of the three. In some cases the personality follows the body’s tendency toward any one of these three, while in others the reverse is found—the body responds to the dominant tendency of the personality. Caraka then subdivides these categories into seven śuddha types, six rājasa types, and three tāmasa types. The śuddha types have a clear affinity for divinity. These include: (1) the brāhma type, with the qualities of brahmā, is given to purity, passionlessness, tolerance, good memory, and so on; (2) the ārùa, with the qualities of óùis, is given to ritual performance and keeping vows and are hospitable, elo-


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quent, free from anger, and so forth; (3) the aindra, with the traits of Indra, is brave, regular in performing rituals, authoritative in speech, generous, virtuous, and so on; (4) the yāmya, one with the qualities of Yama, are economical in action, self-motivated, is free from attachment and negative qualities; (5) the vāruâa, one with the qualities of Varuâa, is brave, patient, pure, religious, generous, fond of water, and proper in exhibition of anger and pleasure; (6) the kaubera, one with the qualities of Kubera, exhibit prestige, wealth, philanthropy, purity, and recreation; (7) the gāndharva personality type, who, like a gandharva, is fond of song and dance, poetry and epic narration, scents, garlands, women, and passion. The six rājasa and three tāmasa personality types are closer to the accounts of grahas given in the texts. The rājasa types include: (1) the āsura, with the qualities of an asura, is brave, powerful, cruel, lordly, and intolerant; (2) the rākùasa, resembling a rākùasa, is intolerant, angry, violent, envious, and fond of sleep, indolence, and nonvegetarian food; (3) the paiśāca, one with the qualities of a piśāca, is gluttonous, lustful, dirty, cowardly, prone to poor dietary habits; (4) the sārpa, one with the qualities of a sarpa or snake, is brave when wrathful but otherwise cowardly, indolent, but with sharp reactions, and fearful when eating and walking; (5) the praita, with the traits of a preta or spirit of the dead, is always hungry, exhibits extreme suffering, is envious, indiscriminate, and excessively greedy; (6) the śākuna, one with the habits of a śakuni or bird of ill omen, is attached to passion and overeating, and is unsteady and ruthless, yet is nonacquisitive. The three tāmasa essences or personalities include: (1) the pāśava, whose nature is like that of a beast (paśu), is one whose actions are wasteful, is unintelligent, has disgusting habits and diet, and is excessively interested in sleep and sex; (2) the mātsya, who resembles a fish (matsya), is cowardly, unintelligent, hungry, unsteady, passionate, wrathful, fond of water and constant movement; (3) the vānaspatya, whose personality resembles a vegetable (vanaspati), is indolent, always hungry, devoid of intelligence or any of its attributes. Thus, the texts describe personality patterns as both products of birth and forms of madness. In both cases the characteristic behavior must be manifested as habitual, spontaneous, and nonritual. The only way to tell one from the other, apparently, is that in the latter madness diagnosed as exogenous, the characteristic behavior appears as a sudden and marked change that then becomes habitual, spontaneous, and nonritual. In addition, what confers on the possessed individual the psychophysiological identity of a


graha is not just antisocial behavior in the case of a few of these grahas but an āyurvedic diagnosis of humoral imbalance that distinguishes their current condition from their earlier psychophysiological norm (prakóti). In this case the unmāda may be diagnosed as exogenous (āgantuka) or inherent (nija), in the latter case attributable to identifiable causes other than possession, rendering it medically treatable. The descriptions of grahas and sattvas, possessing entities and personality types, are noteworthy because of their close resemblance. They elucidate a differentiation not only in order to expose various abnormalities but also to express a sense of variation within the field of personality. The identification of these sattvas as independently or exogenously materialized grahas, which appears to have inspired in the authors of the āyurvedic texts a greater need to describe them graphically, is a kind of cultural phenomenology that in part harks back to the associative thinking of the vedic Brāhmaâas and Upaniùads. The linking of the infestation of certain grahas with days of the lunar month in the AH and elsewhere, and the systematic stigmatization of certain personality types as possessed who suffer from social aggravations, such as disrespect for brahmans, are also indicative of this. Whether one is possessed or otherwise, whether natural or exogenously acquired personality, one can well imagine engaging in normal social relations with individuals of many of these categories, including the deva, gandharva, rākùasa, uraga, yakùa, and several others. As suggested, it is the intensity of the experience as well as its suddenness, which according to Āyurveda distinguishes an identifiable pathology from possession by a graha. In moderation, then, many of these behaviors reflect psychological conditions (as distinguished from sociological ones) that were not particularly aberrant within norms that were deemed culturally acceptable in classical India, but that nonetheless signaled danger that in extreme forms were regarded as pathological. It is for this reason that I question the impulse to unhesitatingly resort to Western psychoanalytic labeling. It is by no means certain that classical Indian sociocultural contexts would consistently yield to this sort of labeling. Thus, I am uncomfortable with Weiss’s full-scale application of psychoanalytic categories because he does not demonstrate their necessity in the sociocultural milieu of classical India. His method might have been more convincing if he had attempted to demonstrate the viability and applicability of a few carefully selected Freudian categories based on a cultural study of Dharmaśāstras and Sanskrit literature.107 Weiss might legitimately counter that the fact of possession is not the


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point; rather, the point is that the descriptions conform with Freudian psychoanalytic categories. My rebuttal, however, would then be twofold: first, in the Indian context they do not necessarily conform with Freudian psychoanalytic categories; second, and conversely, these categories shed little light on unmāda or possession from an Indian or āyurvedic perspective. Simply put, the success of any methodological or interpretative framework in cross-cultural analysis depends on its addressing discourse modes and epistemological issues on both sides of the divide. One thing that neither Weiss nor any other Freudian interpreter of Indic culture has attempted to understand on its own terms is the Indian notion of the dynamics of the interpenetration of the world of spirit with the world of matter. The usual strategy has been to wave it away with a Freudian wand, which, quite simply, is inadequate.108 Therefore, I would not agree with Weiss’s acceptance of Jane Murphy’s conclusion in which she disputes the argument that cultural relativism as a factor in evaluating deviance is sufficient to undermine the notion that there are typologies of “affliction shared by virtually all mankind.”109 Now, let us turn to Terry Clifford’s inquiry into the “psychiatric” aspect of Tibetan medicine. It is contemporaneous with Weiss’s study, but is not at all in the same vein. Although Clifford’s book appeared in 1984, she conducted her research in 1976–77,110 a fact worth noting because it appears that the application of Freudian psychodynamics to Asian medical systems peaked at about that time.111 Clifford, a psychiatric nurse who took such a great interest in Tibetan medicine that she traveled to Nepal to study with Tibetan doctors, based her extensive study on the Gyu-zhi. This work was originally written in Sanskrit by Candranandana, who lived in the eighth century and also composed a commentary on the AH.112 Indeed, the Gyuzhi is based to a great extent on the AH, a fact that Clifford notes, though, curiously, she did not utilize the AH in her study, much to the detriment of her work.113 Candranandana’s work was probably translated into Tibetan shortly after its composition. Chapters 77–79 of the third Tantra of this text are devoted to demonology.114 Clifford’s project is designed to elucidate the text in the framework of Tibetan Buddhist psychological principles, but she also occasionally enters into discussions of its resonances with Freudian and other psychoanalytical theories. Clifford’s discourse is strongly influenced by Mahāyāna assertions of the self-reflexivity of “demons.” For example, demons are said to be linked to “the devil of the aggregates [skandha-]—frailty of body and mind; the devil


of the kleshas [kleśa-]—the devastating power of the afflictive emotions; the devil of pleasure—the alluring trap of comfort; and the devil of death.”115 “In a psychoanalytic sense,” she adds, “these demons are in the role of the id trying to obstruct the super-ego’s higher promptings.”116 The legitimacy of such lightly contextualized statements may be questioned, as they are voiced in an attempt to expose, with a demonstration of Western moorings, the Mahāyāna declaration of the nonexistence of demons (or of any independent principles). To this end, she states that demons (Tib. gDon) are, externally at least, “forces whose existence is a coagulation as a direct result of bad and particularly poisonous karmic vibrations . . . that on some levels they are the embodied forms we give to our negative projections . . . , the imprints of mental habits and thought patterns whose unconscious hold is so strong that they are projected, unawares, onto the world.”117 Nevertheless, as a point of comparison, Clifford seriously considers the views of the early Protestant psychiatrist Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843) that mental disturbances were caused by sin (cf. AH 6.4.4 above, prajnāparādhan), by transgressive behavior, meaning “selfishness, the instinctual and intellectual self-aggrandizing ego.”118 This “sin,” in Clifford’s understanding of Heinroth, results from a sense of guilt and inner moral conflict, from knowingly transgressing cultural codes. These mental or psychological substantialities (which, once again, may be linked to Marriott’s “substance codes”) are “demons” that overtake and possess an individual. Clifford also considers Freud’s declaration “that the Oedipal complex was at the core of every neurosis and that prototypical anxiety was generated by our earliest separation experiences. He managed to place sexuality and the anxiety surrounding it smack at the center of psychopathology.”119 The Tibetan Buddhist tradition does not disregard this, she says, pointing out that “desire, lust, and craving are the basic mental-emotional feelings that affect the inner humoural winds, and the stability of the mind is directly related to the condition of the winds.”120 Clifford defends the Buddhist stance, arguing that sexual intercourse was occasionally prescribed as therapy and that disciplining the sex drive was part of spiritual practice, rather than “repression in the sense that we know it.”121 The defensibility of such statements is suspect, as is Clifford’s attempt to demonstrate that the Gyu-zhi recognizes something akin to the Oedipal complex in its assertion that the family into which an individual is reborn is dependent on the “attraction to one parent and aversion to the other.” A few randomly selected statements like this in Asian medical texts, while interesting and tantalizing, do not add up to a “com-


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plex” in psychoanalytical thinking, in part because they do not share the same analytical discourse or scientific paradigm. With respect to exorcism (bgegs-bzlog-chog), Clifford maintains the standard Mahāyāna position, that the afflicted individual must understand through Buddhist practice that these demons do not “really” exist, even if exorcism is otherwise mediated through a variety of ritual procedures, supplemented by appropriate pharmacology. Although the trained lama who serves as the ritual officiant “has compassion for ghosts and wishes to liberate them,”122 this is quite different from what Vogt found in Sri Lanka, where the objective was “bringing the demons under the control of Dhamma.”123 With respect to bhūtavidyā, afflicting spirits are often said to be victims of suicide, murder, or other forms of sudden death (akālamótyu) and are thus afflicted by extreme clinging and panic. Other kinds of demons or negative entities are the projections created by sorcerers, advanced psychics, or black magicians. Regardless of their point of origin or immediate symptomatology, the afflictions themselves are “the result of obscuration of mind.”124 The sheer number of these geks (bgegs) or obstructing entities is staggering: 84,000 (a standard South Asian large number) of which 1,080 are deemed sentient and malignant spirits ( gDon), broken down as 360 said to arise from ignorance, 360 from desire, and 360 from hatred. They are also classified as arising from above, below, and in-between. Others are “rulers of planetary forces” ( gza-yi gdon), comparable to the grahas that are the possessing energies of the planets in Indian astrology. These are very difficult to treat medicinally, but require therapy in the form of mantra, meditation, and ritual (daivavyapāśrayacikitsā). In a passage that probably does not have an Indian cognate, Clifford states (without textual attribution): “One Tantric medicine used for these diseases is the fresh blood of a murdered person on the tip of a knife. If it is immediately touched to the lip of the patient, he will recover (dried blood will do if necessary).”125 Clifford writes at length of the entities from above, below, and in-between, of diagnosis by pulse, skin tone and texture, and urinalysis—information distilled from the practice of modern Tibetan doctors as well as the classical texts. Chapters 77–79 of the Gyu-zhi describe three types of possessing entities. Chapter 77 contains a list of eighteen “elemental spirits” (’byung-po’i gdon) that in name largely resembles the list from the AH and appears to be drawn from it with several carefully considered emendations. The descriptions of these spirits, however, can be quite different. Three examples should suffice. On gandharvas (Tib. dri-za [scent eaters]), the Gyu-zhi says: “They come


from the zone of scents. They are attracted to sweet smelling things, but also to dung hills and other foul smelling places.”126 The effect that these beings have on those whom they afflict is that “they are graceful and delight in fragrant smells. They like to sing, dance, and play. They love to wear nice clothes and are attracted towards red ornaments.”127 Compare this to AH 6.4.18–19b: “One whose behavior is good, who has a sweet scent, who is blissful, who engages in song and dance, who takes delight in bathing and gardens, who wears red clothes and garlands, and adorns himself with red oils, who enjoys erotic play, is said to be inhabited by a gandharva.” Nāgas (Tib. glu), the Gyu-zhi says, “have serpent bodies with human heads. They live in water and trees. The deities among them guard great Dharma treasures beneath the ocean. They are extremely powerful and dangerous when angry.”128 Their effect on those whom they afflict is that they “have radiant faces and red bloodshot eyes with straight piercing stares. They desire the whites [curds, milk, and butter] and the reds [presumably blood]. They flick their tongues and sleep face downwards.”129 Compare this to AH 6.4.19c– 21b: “One whose eyes are red, who is angry, whose gaze is fixed, whose gait is crooked, and is unstable, whose breathing is incessantly short, whose tongue dangles and shakes, licking the corners of his mouth, who likes milk, jaggery, bathing, and who sleeps face down, is regarded as inhabited by serpent demons [uraga], being fearful of sunlight as well.” The Gyu-zhi describes ro-langs [zombies] as: “A dead body infused with an evil spirit. Some cannot bend from the waist; they have enormous strength.”130 In fact, this is the usual interpretation of vetāla from Sanskrit literature, especially the “dead body infused with an evil spirit,” from the VetālapañcaviÅśati. Those who are afflicted by them “speak the straight truth, sleep much, like ornaments, and have shaking bodies,”131 This is similar to the AH ’s definition of a vetāla (6.4.40): “One who is fond of fragrant garlands, speaks the truth, shakes, and sleeps a lot is believed to be under the control of a vetāla.” The differences between the bhūtavidyā of the Gyu-zhi and the AH may be seen in the following table, illustrating their taxonomies, with Sanskrit translations where applicable: . a stāng ahrdaya .

..

deva

g yu-zhi lha (deva)

daitya

lha-min (jealous gods; Skt. asura)

gandharva

dri-za (scent eaters; Skt. gandharva)


uraga

kLu (serpent spirits; Skt. nāga)

yakía

gNod-sbyin (harm-givers; Skt. yakía)

brahmarākíasa

tshangs-pa (pervasive spirits; Skt. brahma)

rākíasa

srin-po (cannibal spirits; Skt. rākíasa)

piśāca

sha-za (flesh-eater spirits; Skt. piśāca)

preta

yi-dag (hungry ghosts; Skt. preta)

kuímāçfa

grul-brum (vampire ghouls)

niíāda

byad-stems (evil-curse ghosts)

aukiraça

yeng-ched (mental agitators)

vetāla

ro-langs (zombies; Skt. vetāla)

pitë

mTshun-lha (ancestor gods; Skt. pitë)

guru

bla-ma (lama, guru)

vëddha (elder)

drang-srong (sage)

ëíi

rGan-po (respected elder)

siddha

Grub-pa (magical emanation)

505

It is important to remember that formally, if perhaps not in practice, the Tibetan text recognizes, through use of the word gDon for these demons, that what possesses an individual is the effect or negative force of each of these, not the entity itself. Chapters 78–79 of the Gyu-zhi deal with two categories of insanity for which possessing beings are not named. In these chapters, insanity is derived more from organic or identifiable physiological factors, rendering it consistent with Āyurveda.132 Thus, it is not essential to describe these here, though it is important to acknowledge that the Tibetans maintained this distinction. As an addendum to the translations, Clifford provides “A Few Parallels to Modern Psychiatry.”133 They are just that—parallels, and, to her credit, Clifford does not attempt to draw the entire enterprise into a psychoanalytic model. In fact, like the Indian texts, many of the categories in chapter 77 of the Gyu-zhi resemble personality profiles rather than pathologies. Clifford states that the effect of these “elemental spirits—the sudden onset of behavior of a consistently alien nature with little physical disturbance and no perceptible organic causes—corresponds to what the Western model . . . classifies as functional psychosis.” This statement is of limited scope, though she continues that the effects “suggest schizophrenia and manic depressive illness.”134 In sum, though Clifford correlates certain categories of the Gyu-zhi with Western, notably Freudian, categories of psychopathology, it is not an all-embracing attempt. And this is one of two elements that confer on it


slightly more credibility than Weiss’s study; the other is that she does not predicate her study on the assumption of correspondence.135 Since Murphy, Weiss, and Clifford conducted their research in the 1970s, a number of studies have argued forcefully for the “social construction of emotion,”136 a powerful notion dealt with here in Chapter 8 that must be considered carefully before generalizing psychological affliction across cultures. This is not the place to enter into a full-scale study of such construction or such emotion, except as they bear on the topic of possession. Clearly, both the Indian and Tibetan classical medical texts articulate emotionally thick symptomatologies in their discussions of bhūtavidyā. But these pools of emotional complexity and density are not always regarded as negatively afflictive, even if, taken to extremes, they are sufficiently transformative to become realized as possession. There appear to be trigger points after which a personality configuration emerges as either affliction or possession. These points are not articulated in the texts; they do not codify medically identifiable points at which any of these bhūtas may be conclusively diagnosed in an individual as possession. Yet the assumption is implicit that at certain points this boundary is crossed. Determining these points requires a more complete analysis of the sociocultural aesthetics of classical India (and Tibet) than medically oriented researchers with agendas that depend on comparative taxonomies have hitherto conducted. One approach to this may be to recognize that one of the key constructive elements of emotion from culture to culture, if indeed we are warranted in such a generalization, is the manner and degree to which emotion is somaticized. By this I mean that different cultural archetypes, worldviews, political formations, and practices of everyday life contribute to the manner in which emotion is embodied, understood, and recognized within a cultural system.137 An emotion that remains hidden to the outside world reflects a certain conditioning that encloses and embodies it uniquely, while the transmutation and activation of an emotion or emotional state into a bhūta of any definition reflects different cultural parameters of conditioning, recognition, and expressiveness. In this sense, anxieties that express acute emotional distress, such as fear (bhaya), apprehension (cintā), envy (īrùyā), sexual excitement (kāma), anger (krodha), or grief (śoka), are somaticized as psychogenic or physical symptoms that express themselves in different ways in different societies. But in India they emerge in a unified sensory manner as possession when they achieve a certain critical mass that is specifically defined yet remains elusive and is impossible to quantify. Thus, it is unsafe and unfair to


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guess the psychophysical coordinates of the threshold beyond which emotion is somaticized into possession or debilitating affliction. This is further complicated upon recognizing that the processes of emotional somaticization in India are not referenced in medical literature, except as the texts state that an extreme emotion may result in a debilitated humor. At best one can gain a tentative understanding of these processes through a study of allied or corresponding cultural processes and the normativization of these processes through religious doctrine and practice. Thus, one must be guarded in essentializing such broad and ill-defined processes as the somaticization of emotion. It is perhaps safer to avoid the issue entirely, at least in the present context, and limit our comments to merely recognizing that the cultural configurations of such somaticization serve as the basis for descriptions not only of bhūtas but also of unmāda in the āyurvedic and tantric texts. As we have noted, most Western thinking on the topic of demons and possession has been shaped by a century of Freudian opinion, in which demons and associated phenomena are conceived as repressed traumas and developmental conflicts. This conviction, supported by a wealth of scientific data, is based on a single virtually unquestioned paradigm of scientific understanding. The results are then projected by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and many others onto alien cultures, whether ancient or modern, with little regard for the indigenous dimensions, gestalt, or characteristics of emotional embodiment, or of conflicting scientific paradigms that may be employed in these cultures (e.g., humoral diagnostics in Greek and āyurvedic medicine, circulation of qi, or functional energy associated with breath and movement, in Chinese medicine along a system of meridians not recognized by Western science). In this way, the absence of reference to repressed trauma and developmental conflict in Āyurveda and Tantra is barely considered by Western-style academics. To do so would be to admit the possibility of a different and little understood sphere of psychodynamics, as well as of a different scientific paradigm, in which embodiment is accorded a more active and transmutable status. Nevertheless, both Western and South Asian images of psychodynamic processes reflect rich symbol systems, behaviors pregnant with hidden meanings, and an axiomatic acceptance that self and person are not limited to the reflections of our conscious mind. Perhaps unexpectedly, the ethnographies of oracular possession, and to some extent of disease-producing possession, support the āyurvedic and tantric viewpoints, as well as the viewpoints of formal aesthetic theory (alaÅ-


kāraśāstra), in a programmatic pursuit of emotional definition. What is revealed is a nakedness of emotional expression, a clarity borne of a quest for emotional purity and conciseness that is somaticized in a relatively uncomplicated manner. This means that the quest for emotional definition is not too deeply enshrouded and caught in repressed trauma and unresolved conflict, but reveals a “natural” momentum that can be identified and defined. This does not mean that emotions generated through possession are unadorned in their nakedness. Indeed, emotions that are envisioned as part of secondary constructions—and possession definitely falls in that category—are identified by theoreticians from Bharata to Abhinavagupta to bhakti philosophers, such as Vallabhācārya and Rūpa Gosvāmī, by their adornments: the gestures, garb, and language that help express it. AlaÅkāraśāstra specifies adornments in poetry, drama, and dance; yet these are not entirely the constructions of Sanskrit paâbits. They are based on observation of emotional expression around them, which is to say on local context. In this way, both unmāda and bhūtavidyā must be regarded primarily as social and intellectual constructions that are primarily referential to local contexts. This is why I hesitate to transfer onto either Indian textuality or the sociocultural practices of emotional somaticization on which the texts are based a body of psychodynamic perceptions based on a scientific paradigm alien to Indian local context.138

Other Indic Demonologies I have limited the above critique to medical texts because Weiss and Clifford have offered the most important theoretical contributions to the consideration of negative possession in South Asia available to date, and they both do so in the context of classical medical texts. However, bhūtavidyā has a broad panorama in South Asian culture, and much of it lies in areas peripheral to these texts. Therefore, in the interest of providing a more complete portrait of negative possession in South Asia, let us consider a few other demonologies, from both texts and ethnographies. The large number of demonologies in Indian literature and culture vary greatly in content, by region, and according to genre. And, as is the case with demonologies found in first-millennium texts, the lists cannot be called fixed or stable. It is certain that different informants from the same area, cultural, or textual tradition offer different lists. It is outside the scope of this volume,


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indeed it would be impossible, to attempt to relate them all systematically.139 However, a brief précis of this ever-shifting terrain is relevant to illustrating “traditions” of bhūtavidyā. This is best managed by presenting several examples out of what are unquestionably dozens of demonologies, or even hundreds if one considers the idiosyncratic views of one or two texts or religious authorities.140 Thus, we briefly examine five demonologies, presented chronologically: (1) the list contained in the Bower manuscript; (2) the list presented in the Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati; (3) a list found in the Madanamahārâava, a text on karmavipāka (karmic ripening); (4) a list presented in an ethnographic account of healers in Varanasi; and (5) an account of a demonology found among the Divehi of the Maldive islands.141

The Bower Manuscript The Bower manuscript is so-called because it was sold to a British lieutenant named Hamilton Bower while he was staying at Kuqa, an old Silk Road trading stop on the northern rim of the Taklamakan desert in northwest China, in 1890, while engaged in a desperate search for the murderer of another British soldier. The manuscript consists of seven fragments, including three on āyurvedic medicine, two on divination with dice, and two on incantations to combat snakebite, all dating from the late fourth or early fifth centuries c.e.142 This is later than Caraka and Suśruta, and, in one of the incantations against snakebite, it provides a list of twenty-one types of seizure ( grahāto) caused by various ethereal beings. The list appears as part of a long mantra called mahāmāyūrī (the great peacock); indeed, the peacock has long been regarded as a consumer of poison. In this Buddhist text, the Blessed One (bhagavaÅ) recites the mahāmāyūrī for the benefit of his disciple Ānanda, who is instructed to use it to cure the mendicant Svāti, who had been bitten by a large black snake (mahatā kóùâasarpena). In addition to serving as an antidote to snakebite, this mantra mentions other uses for it, including against seizures.143 These are “seizure [ grahāto] by a deity [deva], a serpent [or chthonic] spirit [nāga], a titan [asura], a god or spirit of the wind [maruta], a sky spirit [ garuba],144 a celestial musician [ gandharva], a horse-headed spirit [often under the control of Kubera] [kinnara], the spirit of a great serpent [mahoraga], a semidivine protective spirit [yakùa], a demon [rākùasa], a spirit of the dead that has not received full [or any] post-mortem rituals or offerings [preta], a flesh-eating demon [piśāca], a ghost [bhūta], demons with jar-shaped testicles [kuÅbhāâba], a foul smell or foul-smelling spirit [pū-


tana],145 the spirit of a negligent kùatriya [ka•apūtana], a childsnatcher [skanda], madness [unmāda], a shadow spirit perhaps causing nightmares [chāyā],146 convulsions [apasmāra], and the evil eye [ostāraka].”147 Among these, the maruta, garuba, kinnara, kuÅbhāâba, pūtana, ka•aputana, chāyā, ostāraka, as well as the unmāda and apasmāra, are themselves kinds of grahas and are not found in the earlier lists, though certainly most of these were known from other contexts. Maruta and garuba are included because they explicitly suggest airborne grahas;148 kuÅbhāâba is likely a local attempt to make sense of the words kuùmāâba or khārkhōda; kinnara and pūtana are known in Purāâic lists, the MBh, and elsewhere; ka•apūtana is mentioned in Manu (12.71);149 and the latter four, chāyā, ostāraka, as well as unmāda and apasmāra, are clearly reifications of their literal significations. This testifies to the geographic range of Indic demonologies, which were shared by Buddhists and the medical traditions of Central Asia and the Silk Road.

The Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati (ĪŚP) The twelfth-century ĪŚP contains four chapters (pa•alas 41–44) on diseaseinducing possession, specifically on childsnatchers (bālagrahas), behavior of the possessed ( grahaceù•ā), exorcism (bhūtabādha),150 and seizure disorder (apasmāra), respectively.151 As mentioned earlier, this text was quite popular in certain circles of medical and tantric practitioners in Kerala. The first thirtysix verses of pa•ala 42 succinctly identify eighteen specific types of graha. This pa•ala also links other grahas with the four varâa-groupings, provides succinct descriptions of humoral imbalances complicit in possession, and offers a description of apasmāra. Because of its brevity and usefulness as a twelfth-century tantric point of comparison with the language of possession and identity of grahas found in classical āyurvedic texts, it is relevant to translate these verses. 1–3. Eighteen kinds of graha take hold of people: (1) nisteja, (2) deva, (3) asura, (4) nāga, (5) yakùa, (6) gandharva, (7) rakùas, (8) pitó, (9) hebhra, (10) bhasma, (11) yonyudbhava, (12) kaśmalaka, (13) pralāpa, (14) vighna, (15) kuśa, (16) antya, (17) piśāca, and (18) bhūta. All of these, as well as brahman and other [varâa-based] rākùasas that are complicit in madness [unmāda] and convulsions [apasmāra], and that desire sacrifice [balikāmān], sex [ratikāmān],


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or killing [hantukāmān] grab hold of men.152 They may be divided into two categories: gentle [saumya] and fiery [āgneya]. 4–5a. These grahas reside in empty places, lakes, wells, mountains, gardens, rivers, individual trees in cremation grounds, as well as in Buddhist and Hindu temples [caityadevālayādiùu]. 5b–8b. They afflict [pīdayanti] people who are angry, excited, laughing, afraid, alone at night; are either in a state of impurity, ostentatiously attired, or gain or lose money at night; those who are separated [from their loved ones] or about to die; women who are naked, pregnant, ill-behaved, in the course of having their menstrual period, have bathed immediately after the cessation of their period [thus preparing for sexual intercourse], have just given birth, are afflicted by lust, are drinkers of liquor or eaters of parched grain, who stand at a crossroads at sunrise or sunset, who have not before experienced [sexual] enjoyment, have just been oiled [as in massage], or are disrespected. 8c–9b. Grahas take hold [of their victim] because of personal indebtedness, the ripening of karma, or previous enmity resulting from their denunciation of deities, brahmans, or great people, but not otherwise. 9cd. One possessed by a nisteja [langorous spirit] is weak, keeps its eyes shut, and talks a lot. 10ab. One possessed by a sura [deity] graha bathes regularly, wears a cloth with a sweet-scented garland, is gentle, and is excited. 10c–11b. One possessed by an asura [titan] graha is defiled, fearless, arrogant, divisive toward dharma, deities, and twice-born, has many desires, laughs at everyone, and has trembling limbs. 11c–12b. One whose illness is caused by a nāga [serpent] graha licks the corners of his mouth out of a longing for sugar [gula], water, milk, etc., slithers on the ground, has red eyes, and enjoys embrace [krobī]. 12c–13b. One afflicted by a yakùa longs for the scent of red garlands, etc., suffers from redness in the eyes, is free of anger, moves quickly, and is deep [in character]. 13cd. One afflicted by a gandharva is playful and fond of garlands, fragrances, song, and music. 14ab. One possessed by a rākùasa is shameless, is fond of liquor, meat, and blood, and is physically impure.


14cd. One possessed by a pitó [ancestor] graha performs ancestral ritual offerings of rice and sesame balls, along with water, and is fond of meat. 15ab. One possessed by a hebhraga graha stands on his knees, keeps his head down, smiles, and holds his hands in a fist.153 15c–16b. One afflicted by a bhasma [ash] graha is unpolished, speaks haltingly, has cold limbs, holds the eyes askance, has wellformed limbs, has a big appetite, and is [otherwise] pure. 16c–17b. One possessed by a yonija [womb-born] graha has sweaty limbs and the scent of sheep, is unrestrained [viz., has criminal tendencies], has unsteady vision, has many desires, acts deliberately, and knowingly has a taste for flesh [māÅsārthī]. 17c–18b. One possessed by a kaśmala [dirty, weak] graha has no physical purity, is covered with stains and mud, sleeps on ashes laughing and wailing, hates women, and always terrifies others while eating. 18c–19b. One afflicted by a graha known as pralāpa [incoherent, chattering] dances and laughs, has desiccated limbs that are prone to injury, has many desires, and talks a lot aimlessly. 19cd. One possessed by a vaināyaka [obstructer] graha hisses,154 vomits, and grinds his teeth. 20. One who is possessed by a kuśa-graha [probably one that resides on kuśa grass], lives in solitude, has pale limbs, washes regularly, makes harsh noises, is nourished on unheated food, and does not speak. 21. One possessed by an antyaja [outcaste, tribal] graha is smeared with excrement and mud, has red, bloodshot eyes, is threatening, has many desires, speaks disconsolately, is greedy, and has shaky limbs. 22ab. One possessed by a piśāca [flesh-eating demon] smells bad, is physically impure, is restless, and speaks exceedingly harshly. 22c–23b. One afflicted by a bhūta-graha can imitate anyone, gets into fights, shouts at people, and becomes transformed in order to climb trees. 23c–24b. One seriously afflicted by vāta-based insanity [vātonmādī] experiences [uncontrolled] quivering, laughing, singing, wailing, throwing about of one’s limbs, and possesses a lean, copper-colored body.


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24c–25b. Those suffering from pitta or kapha-based insanity bellow loudly, move quickly, express anger, cast a cold shadow, are insatiable about food, have hot yellow bodies, and tend to spit. 25c–f. The symptoms of apasmāra [convulsions] are open eyes, falling down, senselessness or unconsciousness, foaming at the mouth, vomiting, contraction of the feet and hands, moaning piteously, exhibiting a frightening demeanor, gnashing of the teeth, [behaving as if ] intoxicated, and [the appearance of] bliss. 26. A brahmarākùasa is a graha that constantly offers sacrifice to gods and brahmans [viprān], reciting the Vedas and placing kuśa grass [on an altar] while performing rituals of the twiceborn. 27. One possessed by a kùatriya-graha moves quickly, leaps about, laughs, and exercises power. 28ab. One possessed by a vanij [vaiśya] graha is expansive, laughs, moans a lot, rubs himself, and shouts. 28c–29b. One possessed by a vóùala (śūdra or outcaste) graha speaks out what should not be spoken, dances, is easily provoked, dines on feces and urine, touches his penis, etc., and despises brahmans.

This section from the ĪŚP deserves much more comment than can be accommodated here. Nevertheless, I must offer a few words. First, it provides more detail on the vulnerability of women to spirit possession than is found in the earlier canonical āyurvedic texts. It is not that this supposition of increased vulnerability necessarily intensified over the centuries; it may simply be that the ĪŚP was more prolix in negotiating its various dimensions. In fact, as we have seen in the BĀU, references to women’s possession, hence their vulnerability, may be dated to the mid-first millennium b.c.e. or earlier. The somewhat later discussions of bālagrahas in the MBh and the early medical literature also reveal that women were viewed by the later centuries b.c.e. as highly susceptible to possession. The standard attributed causes of this were their monthly release of blood, regarded as attractive to spirits, and their childbearing capacity, in which protective measures to guard newborns against threats both visible and invisible were extreme. The latter was doubtless due to comparatively high infant and childhood mortality rates. Regardless, the disadvantaged condition of women worsened, or at least hardened, over the course of the first millennium c.e. to the point that they were equated with śūdras in


much of the Dharmaśāstra literature of the day. Thus, it is nearly irresistible to argue that in a patriarchal society that was increasingly oppressive toward women, their stigmatization was more pronounced in the early second millennium, the date of the ĪŚP, than it was earlier. This would encourage us to project back by at least a millennium the arguments of Lewis and others regarding the correlation of oppression of women and spirit possession, which, as discussed earlier, have a good measure of validity in modern-day India.155 Second, although the presence of varâa-based grahas is much more evident in the ĪŚP than in the medical texts (note the brahmarākùasa, kùatriyagraha, vanig-graha, vóùala-graha, antyaja-graha), the influence of the AH and Suśruta is nevertheless clear. Third, the variation in clearly defined psychophysical disability is more pronounced. Thus, the hebhra( ga)-graha, bhasmagraha, and yonija-graha, not mentioned in the earlier medical texts, look less like personality variants than different forms of congenital or neurological disease, or mental retardation.

The Madanamahāóâava The Madanamahārâava (MM), written by Viśveśvara Bha••a in the fourteenth century,156 is one of the two most important works of a little-studied genre that falls between Āyurveda and dharmaśāstra known as karmavipāka (the fruition of karma). 157 This literature correlates diseases with actions (karman). Sometimes these are actions said to have been performed in previous births, but by no means is this always the case. The remedies for these conditions consist of ritual expiation (prāyaścitta) rather than medicinal preparations, leading, the texts say, to full recovery (niùkóti).158 The fortieth and last chapter (taraãga) of the MM describes symptoms of possession by thirty-one different grahas, all the result of ill-begotten past karma, most—if not all—of it accumulated in the present birth. In addition to describing symptoms, the text speculates on their causes and prescribes ritual remedies. The names of many of these grahas are unusual. They are unlike the names of grahas in the other texts and ethnographies examined here, which are largely the toponyms of general categories such as rākùasa or piśāca, ruthless feminine grāhīs such as Vinatā or Mukhamaâbikā, or the frightening bhūtas of Varanasi (see below). The names of the possessors here often do not have obvious connections to the disease or affliction described. Rather, they suggest a brahmanical normativizing, as their names, hence identities,


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appear to have been sanitized, blunting some of the impact of the afflictions described. Furthermore, the classifications betray a pedantry that foregrounds orthodox morality.159 This has the effect of conferring on the ritual treatments a sense of formulaic brahmanical efficacy. Because of this framework, the only one I know of that consciously applies principles of śāstra to possession, the possibility of endogenous pathology is never considered as a cause of the affliction being discussed. The unyielding agenda, then, is to suggest that questionable moral judgment, contiguous with the appearance of suspect symptomatology, plays a crucial role in weakening the individual, encouraging the hostile takeover of the individual by an untoward spirit. As we have seen repeatedly from the vedic period to the present, in India no less than elsewhere, adherence to normative social and moral codes programmatically sustains cultural foundations, providing areas of comfort and control for cultural elites and ruling classes. In India, perhaps more than elsewhere, however, socioreligious law (dharma) has been self-regulating, requiring marginally less external control. Nevertheless, it has not always been a procrustean bed on which people bind themselves, as often depicted by scholars and cultural advocates alike. There have always been mechanisms of escape, and these have either been recognized by socioreligious codes or these codes have turned a blind eye to them, knowing that they are necessary for the maintenance of cultural harmony. Not everyone fits into the system. So, rather than forcibly displacing or suppressing those who are ill-fitting, the system has served up and sanctioned these escape routes. Specifically, transgressiveness in India has found culturally acceptable norms and mechanisms in the forms of wandering mendicancy and forest dwelling through religiously inspired renunciation, transgressive modes of sexuality or ritualizing through tantric practice, or, appositely, locating niches for abnormal or resistant personalities through an edifice of multiple or dissociative personality–inspired bhūtavidyā. Oracular possession, as we have seen, takes advantage of these well-articulated loopholes in a positive religiously acceptable manner. However, negative possession does not and cannot always locate or negotiate these loopholes. It is, therefore, dealt with by texts that address abnormal bahavior. These include not just āyurvedic texts but more programmatic texts on the margins of Āyurveda, including the MM. The usual result in the event of such abnormality is an unwitting victim in need of exorcism and healing. We see this in a range of texts and examples, from the paradigmatic possession of Nala by Kali, a child possessed by a bālagraha because of a lapse by the mother or another relative, or an enemy hiring a tantric to curse an indi-


vidual with an evil spirit, a belief that Dwyer has shown holds sway over large numbers of victims of possession at Bālājī. In all these cases, even if unintended, there is the construal of dharmic or moral lapse. This, then, backgrounds the “ripening of karma” that requires ritual treatment. The fortieth taraãga of the MM consists largely of a prose commentary on material from two earlier karmavipāka works, now lost, the Karmavipākasaãgraha and the Karmavipākasamuccaya. The taraãga begins, typically, with general rules (paribhāùā) for ritual exorcism or expiation, include fasting, chanting (japa) brief mantras and names of deities, reciting simple vedic hymns or verses including the Puruùa-sūkta (ñV 10.90) and the gāyatrī mantra (ñV 3.62.10), though non-vedic mantras are also prescribed. The MM prescribes a general expiatory mantra, unattributed to any other text, in which the name of the graha is replaceable: pragóhīùva baliÅ cemaÅ dāharūpa mahājvara | āturasya sukhaÅ siddhiÅ prayaccha tvaÅ mahāgraha || (O, Great Fever [ graha] in the Form of Fire, possess this offering [bali]; bestow, O Great Graha, comfort and fulfillment on this afflicted person). The second line remains unchanged throughout, while the names of the different grahas are substituted in the second half of the first line, for example, pragóhīùva baliÅ cemaÅ aikāhika mahājvara, pragóhīùva baliÅ cemaÅ karâākhya tvaÅ mahāgraha. The principle of transfer, found throughout Indian religious texts and analyzed in Chapter 5 as “transfer of essence,” is also seen here. The graha is neither killed nor dissolved nor destroyed, but is transferred into the offering material used in a small localized sacrificial offering called bali.160 This recommended bali consists of offerings of fragrant red flowers, oil, incense, and various other material, placed in a new brass pot (kāÅsyapātra, bell-metal), which is then left in a temple (devālaye) or at a crossroad (catuùpathe). In addition, homa is often prescribed with offerings of cooked rice (caru), black sesame seeds, and parched grain (lāja). On some occasions, well-known homas, such as the kūùmāâba,161 are recommended, as is the gifting of gold and other valuable objects to brahmans. These rules are set in the context of exorcistic expiatory ritual for the first graha on the list, the prajāgraha (offspring seizer). This graha possesses a man who eats leftover food or has sex with his wife while she is having her menstrual period. It is noteworthy that many of the grahas on the list in the MM possess their victim for this offense. The victim then develops a fever, diarrhea (atisāra), skin disease (kuù•ha), and palsied limbs. It is not clear why this graha is called prajāgraha.


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The fortieth taraãga of the MM is too long to present full details of all of the karmavipāka grahas mentioned there. It must suffice to list them, noting their meanings and the offenses that lead to their possession, and to discuss only a few of them in order to better explicate the intellectual processes deployed by the dharmaśāstra establishment to link possession by these grahas with moral lapses and brahmanical ritual exorcism. 1. prajāgraha (offspring grasper) possesses one who has sex with a woman while she is having her menstrual period or eats leftover food. 2. jvaragraha (fever demon) possesses a man who has sex with a cāâbālī or a woman while she is having her menstrual period. 3. aikāhikādi jvaragraha (ephemeral fever grasper) possesses a thief, is vain, is unkind or injurious to animals, and behaves improperly. 4. pratuâbagraha (snouted grasper) possesses a person who, in a state of ritual impurity, touches a brahman, the image of a deity, or one who is well-educated or wise (buddhipūrvakam). 5. kāmilagraha (lustful grasper) possesses one who eats in the afternoon from dirty vessels, without having washed his feet. 6. kālanāyakagraha (or lokanāyaka-) (time-lord grasper) possesses one who does not properly perform sacrifice to the planetary deities when the sun and other planets are in the eighth or other (inauspicious) houses of the horoscope. 7. pitógraha (ancestral grasper) possesses one whose anger while conducting ordinary affairs in the world causes pain or sorrow for another. 8. lokāyatagraha (materialist grasper) possesses a person who urinates or defecates on an auspicious tree in a temple compound. 9. āpastambagraha (Āpastamba grasper) possesses a certain kind of arrogant person (see below). 10. vótragraha (snake grasper) possesses a man who has slept with another man’s wife (paradārābhimarśinam). 11. mahājvaragraha (great-fever grasper) possesses a man who has sex with a woman while she is having her menstrual period. 12. kumbhakagraha (pot-bellied grasper) possesses a man who has sex with an outcaste (antyaja) or with another man’s wife. 13. kapilagraha (red grasper) possesses one who spits on a sacred fire or pours (polluting material) on it.


14. śivapādagraha (Śiva’s-foot grasper) possesses one who denounces or acts arrogantly toward his mother, father, deity, or guru. 15. ūrdhvakeśigraha (grasper whose hair stands on end) possesses a person who is disgusting, takes other people’s possessions, causes suffering, and spreads rumors (karâejapam). 16. viù•ambhagraha (fixing spirit) possesses people, including brahmans, who are totally confused in their judgment. 17. mahājihvagraha (great-tongued grasper) possesses a peson who steps on a mortar and pestle or sacrificial implements. 18. navagraha (new grasper) possesses a man who has sex with the wife of a friend, an ascetic, a guru, or a master. 19. vāsavagraha (Vasu demon) possesses one who kills or beats a snake. 20. vāyasagraha (crow grasper) possesses one who defecates under trees or in gardens of temples or brahmans. 21. kùetrapālagraha (land protector spirit) afflicts one who disparages gods (devatānindana-), brahmans, cows, etc. 22. acalagraha (immovable grasper) afflicts one who acts friendly with a helper or family member, but then refuses to reciprocate and reviles or steals from them. 23. hastipādagraha (elephant-foot grasper) afflicts one who consumes substances meant for a deity or violates material set aside in a vessel meant for a cow, the sacred fire, or a brahman. 24. karâagraha (ear spirit) possesses one who consumes temple property. 25. dhanagraha (wealth grasper) possesses a man who has sex with the pregnant wife of an ascetic, a friend, or an employer. 26. avatolagraha (weighted-down grasper) possesses a person who faults a relative, sells prohibited substances, and is heavy-handed with an assistant. 27. kóśagraha (emaciated grasper) (also called śaśigraha [moon grasper]) possesses one who eats during an eclipse of the sun or moon. 28. skandagraha (Skanda grasper) possesses a person who, attendant on a sacred fire, eats other people’s leftovers after bringing a child already possessed by a childsnatcher (bālagrahayutam). 29. skandāpasmaragraha (Skanda’s forgetfulness or convulsion) possesses one who urinates or defecates into fire. 30. śiśugraha (infant grasper) possesses (saãkramate, “steps into”) a


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person who show disrespect toward gods, brahmans, gurus, nobility, cows, or holy places. 31. meùagraha (sheep grasper) possesses a man who throws sacred ash on a child possessed by a bālagraha.

Now, we elaborate on a few of these categories. The victim of a pratuâbagraha suffers from fever, fainting, exhaustion, and paralysis on one side. He liberates himself from this graha by performing the cāndrāyaâa kócchra,162 a type of purificatory fast, reciting (japet) a certain mantra a thousand times (in addition to the standard verse mantra described above), and giving away (presumably to brahmans) as much gold as he can afford. The victim of a kālanāyakagraha suffers from sudden dryness in the mouth and his sounds become harsh. To alleviate this condition and exorcise this graha, one should offer a mixture of three sweet substances—sugar, ghee, and honey—along with mango sprouts 1,008 times while chanting the jātavedasa mantra (ñV 1.99). He should also offer as bali scented red flowers and other normal material, as well as powdered parched grains, oil cake (piâyāka), black sesame seeds, and as much gold as he can afford, in a brass pot at a crossroad. While offering this bali he should recite the appropriate variant on the usual mantra: pragóhīùva baliÅ cemaÅ lokanātha mahāgraha | āturasya sukhaÅ siddhiÅ prayaccha tvaÅ mahāgraha || (O, Lord of the World, Great Graha, possess this offering [bali]; bestow, O Great Graha, comfort and fulfillment on this afflicted person). The āpastambagraha is explained as a spirit ( graha) that possesses an unworthy person who sits in a row of brahmans and, because of excessive pride, takes for himself the best plate and consumes special food. This graha is capable of afflicting the transgressor with heart and stomach problems, as well as with consumption. The afflicted person can turn back this possession by performing the cāndrāyaâa fast and making an offering (balidāna) at a crossroad with the accompaniment of mantras. This, however, does not explain why the graha is called āpastamba. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only occurrence of the word āpastamba that does not refer to the ritual school of that name belonging to the Taittirīya śākhā of the Kóùâayajurveda.163 It is not out of the question, however, that pejoratively it does refer to that ritual school, so-called because a brahman of that school once behaved in this way in a community of non-Āpastambins. The Āpastamba school is the dominant vedic sub-śākhā in Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu, and many areas of Karnataka and Maharashtra. The ritual school of the reputed


author of this text, Viśveśvara Bha••a, is not given in the colophon or commentary, but in all likelihood he was not an Āpastambin, because he was from North India.164 Thus, he was probably a member of a different school and had a negative experience with a ritualist of the Āpastamba school, who might have accepted gifts in a manner Viśveśvara Bha••a judged arrogant. The victim of a vótragraha, an affliction that apparently harks back to the archetypal serpent demon Vótra (cf. ñV 1.32), suffers from dryness of the buttocks, a possible reference to a sexually transmitted disease.165 As exorcistic expiation, he must perform the prājāpatya fast, offer a homa of black sesame seeds with the gāyatrī mantra, recite the gāyatrī an additional ten thousand times, and give away as much gold as is possible. These are very ordinary expiations, particularly compared to the often-exotic prescriptions in the Āyurveda texts and the rich variety of practices documented by ethnographies. The victim of a kumbhakagraha (also called jambhakagraha) suffers from fever, incoherent speech, and symptoms of asthma. The exorcism consists of the cāndrāyaâa fast plus offerings of cooked rice with ghee (carusarùipī ) into a fire while reciting the Puruùa-sūkta with the vyāhóti mantras (the syllables bhur bhuvan svan).166 This and similar passages suggest that offerings into the fire, supplemented by fasting, are in fact āyurvedic remedies. Nearly all possession is classified as vāta disorder in āyurvedic texts, and certainly the uncontrollable body movements and mental disconnectedness that partially characterize possession support this diagnosis. Kapha-producing (and therefore grounding) food such as cooked rice with ghee is often prescribed to combat vāta debilitation. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the exorcisms prescribed here constitute a kind of daiva Āyurveda, which is still practiced in a few places in India. More specifically, these practices could easily fall within the category of daivavyapāśrayacikitsā (spiritual therapy). Although I have not seen this stated in the primary texts, the implicit āyurvedic argument is that fasting combats severe vāta debiltation, while the offerings of rice with ghee, consistent with the ideology of the balidāna given in the beginning of the fortieth taraãga of the MM, is designed to attract and capture the offending spirit. The karâagraha has a long history, some of which we have recounted earlier (see Chapter 11). This graha is not depicted as disease-producing by Varāhamihira or the commentator Bha••otpala. However, in the MM it is made to conform with the disease-producing norm, stripped of its earlier significance as an oracular spirit. Here, on the authority of Kātyāyana, the


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MM says that a karâagraha possesses one who consumes temple property, causing sudden deafness, a freezing of the tongue, and great itching on the limb (= penis?). The antidote is the cāndrāyaâa fast, homa with the vyāhóti mantras, and recitation of a hymn from the ñV (6.24) to Indra 1,008 times. This hymn has little obvious relevance to the exorcism of a karâagraha, but is prescribed in the śrauta ritual as a hymn to be recited in for slaying of the demon Vótra.167 The balidāna to be offered to the graha consists of ground black sesame, wine (surā), meat, rice, parched grain, yogurt, and (probably) onion (kanda). This should all be placed at a crossroad along with a banner, scented flowers, and incense, over which a tantric ritualist (mantravit) should recite the relevant mantras.168 Another challenging figure is the avatolagraha. The MM quotes the Karmavipākasaãgraha as its main authority on this. This graha, according to the MM, possesses a person who is disagreeable and a social problem. The texts do not help us with the word avatola, however. This neologism might indicate deceitfulness, more literally “weighing down” or fixing the scales when weighing and selling any substance (perhaps a prohibited one).169 The physical debilities produced by an avatolagraha include coughing, chest problems, aching limbs, and decreased appetite. The three-step exorcism is a mix of the usual prescriptions: recitations of the Viùâu- and Puruùa-sūktas, performance of the kūùmāâbahoma, offering of a thousand pots for bathing an image of a deity (sahasrakalaśasnānam), and recitation (japet) of a mantra (ñV 4.31.1) 1,008 times. Like most of the expiations, this one assumes that the victim is a person of means, as these rituals require large expenditures. Another ethereal enemy of moral lassitude is the śiśugraha. This graha afflicts its victim with fever, diarrhea, eczema (āsyaśośī), and shaking of the hands and feet. The name of this graha is striking because in both the ethnographic record and at modern spirit healing centers such as Bālājī the possessors are often identified by the families of the victim and the ritual authorities alike as children who have died young, their souls (jīva) tortured and unappeased, having not undergone the standard rites of passage (saÅskāra). Thus, an echo of popular possession is probably present here, though it is not stated. Once again, then, we are left with a name with no obvious link to the offense at hand. The victim will achieve peace if he offers as bali a pot filled with parched grain, liquid milk sweet (pāyasa), chicken, lamb, and gold. Along with this, he should hire a priest to offer bali of red cloth on a banyan root (va•amūle) with the usual mantra. Very few of these


grahas take nonvegetarian food, but for some reason this one does. It is possible that this passage reflects a local practice of offering meat to spirits of deceased babies and children. Thus, in spite of a nearly crushing brahmanical palimpsest, the MM appears to reflect a propinquity of Sanskritic and local practices.

Bhūtas of Varanasi An important contemporary source of bhūtavidyā is K. M. Shukla’s ethnographic account from the environs of Varanasi of the exorcism of eleven kinds of piśāca responsible for different illnesses.170 Two features of this account are immediately noteworthy. The first is that these bhūtas are extremely malevolent, more evidently gruesome than those in the lists examined above. The second is that Shukla’s study is deeply contextualized; most of the bhūtas are easily located in the prevailing cultural environment— which raises questions about the cultural environment that surrounded the composition of the earlier lists in the Sanskrit medical and tantric literature. These texts, of course, were not multifaceted anthropological tracts, but specialized texts safely within the disciplinary boundaries established at the time. However, it is this feature of broad-based cultural understanding that separates Shukla’s account from earlier lists of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury “orientalist” scholars (particularly those who also happened to be missionaries), which tend to be thoroughly decontextualized or only randomly contextualized.171 The piśācas are the following: (1) a cuóail, a bloodsucking witch with feet turned backward, found in bamboo groves, bel trees (Skt. bilva [wood-apple, a tree sacred to Śiva]), or banana trees. Sheldon Pollock refers to this demonic creature as “the succubus of the Indian male’s nightmare world, who threatens him with death through sexual depletion and must therefore be suppressed”;172 (2) a savat or spirit of a deceased first wife, hence the rival of a second, who attacks the latter when she is not properly regarded; (3) a daitya, a nocturnal spirit that dwells in a pipal tree; the word daitya is commonly attested, and not, apparently, a relic of its usage in AH 6.4.16–17 cited above; (4) a brahma, or spirit of a brahman who dies an unnatural or untimely death (akālamótyu); (5) a haábikaś brahma, the spirit of an unwanted newborn that is kept in a basket (haábi) and buried; (6) a budnua,173 the spirit of one who has drowned and attacks an individual who comes to bathe in that pond, tank, and so on; (7) a jin or jinnad, a Muslim spirit who


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resides in a palm or pipal tree or in a graveyard near a mosque; (8) a śahīd, or Muslim martyr; (9) a bhavānī, an unmarried female who dies an unnatural death, then troubles children and other family members if she is not properly worshipped; (10) a marū,174 the spirit of a person killed because of the wrath of the goddess (also bhavānī, but not identical to the spirit of that designation), who dwells in a house and causes trouble in the family; (11) a bīh, a minor spirit who fails to receive promised offerings. The offering of choice to a bīh is gāñjā (cannabis), promised to it after a cure is enacted.175

Possession Among the Divehi The Divehi are an indigenous people of the Maldive islands, far to the southwest of the subcontinent, but well within the Indo-Islamic cultural orbit. Clarence Maloney, who conducted close and lingustically informed fieldwork there in the 1970s, states: “Within the [Divehi] village, jinnis cause spontaneous abortion, barrenness, sickness, epidemics, fainting, unexplained noises or any other sudden or unexplained phenomenon.”176 Indeed, the general word there for bhūta is jinni. Maloney records forty-two varieties of Divehi jinni, many derived from Tamil or Simhala words, many others seemingly indigenous Divehi words, but eleven probably derived from Sanskrit. These are (1) devi (< Skt. devī), “a generic name for a personified spirit or godling, now applied to male or female spirits which were pre-Muslim deities”; (2) hanbi (< Skt. caâba, cruel; cf. Caâbī), a “generic name for jinni, especially smaller ones; usually but not always female; one may fly through the air or along the ground; it may make a sound like a tongue click, and has a ‘strong spirit’”; (3) furēta (< Skt. preta), “any large or fearful spirit; male or female; esp. an apparition of light over the ocean at night; bad people might become one; it may walk with a shroud”; (4) ferēta (< Skt. preta), “lights on the sea; like a ship full of lights; it may have an eye on the top of its head, so it has to bend forward to see; may catch people; as lights on the sea, often frightens fishermen”; (5) hāmunbi (< Skt. Cāmuâba, Cāmuâbī), which “may take any form, lives in village; disturbs domestic fowl; may be seen as a hen with chicks about it”; (6) buddevi (< Skt. bhūdevi),177 “a devi of a budu (idol)”; (7) dēyō, diyō (< Skt. devī), a “spiritual queen, a devi”; (8) kandā hanbi (< Skt. Skanda), “a female; troubles men; makes sexual dreams and shows intercourse; it may have children by men, and makes men unconscious”; (9) ava•eri (< Skt. avatāra),178 “a kind of hanbi that lives in the jungle; female; she has long hair and old clothes; if people leave out supplies


in the kitchen at night she will grind the condiments, scrape the coconut, cut up the fish and fix the fire”; (10) furāna (< Skt. purāâa), a “ghost of the dead;” and (11) ravo (< Skt. Rāvaâa), “a devi that causes disease to children; makes them lean and troublesome”;179 Maloney notes that jinnis “do not usually possess people as Hindu patron deities may.”180 By this, he means that there is no evident oracular possession. This indicates that the perceived spirit presences are largely infestations; sources of trouble rather than ecstasy. However, further work must be done on this. These multiforms of bhūtavidyā demonstrate that it is an enduring feature of the South Asian cultural area, both in time and space, from the vedic period to the present, from the Silk Road and Tibet to the Maldives. These extravagant, even baroque, demonologies nearly always suggest possession, as affliction, harassment, and influence by a bhūta or graha indicate this likelihood in the South Asian psychophysical and cultural systems. The vedic demonologies, like those of modern Varanasi or the Maldives, are integral aspects of folk traditions. The former, however, were captured and canonized by early Sanskritic culture and, therefore, left deep and long-lasting influences on the images and typologies of bhūtavidyā in all strata and nearly all regions of South Asia. The more systematized demonologies, in the sense of being directly associated with an extended literary tradition, such as are found in BĀU 3.2 and the āyurvedic texts, are consequently concerned primarily with formal epistemologies. In the āyurvedic texts these are more reminiscent of human personality, at least of powerful elements of its relatively normative dark side, than of uncontrolled, irrepressible, and dangerous elements of an invisible nonhuman wilderness, in spite of the exotic labeling in these texts. In other words, the Sanskritic demonologies appear to participate more in the domestic than the wild. In a cultural sense, then, they bespeak the domestication of possession. It is as if relegating them to the realm of literature both sanitizes and scientizes them, which is why they appear both better defined and less dangerous than, for example, the bhūtas of Varanasi. The grahas in the bhūtavidyā lists in the āyurvedic texts may also be compared to the childsnatchers, who were systematized in the MBh and in other sections of the āyurvedic texts. The latter were clearly regarded as horrific and relentlessly dangerous and were, in this sense, closer to the demons of present-day Varanasi. In practice, however, medical practitioners did not rely strictly on the designations from the āyurvedic texts. There always has been, I believe, a spillover from popular culture to text, which may be seen in the increasing


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numbers of possessing beings from Caraka to Vāgbha•a, as well as a spillover from āyurvedic texts into popular culture. The latter may be seen in the list of childsnatchers in the MBh and tantric texts, as well as in some of the more recognizable bhūtas of Varanasi and the Maldive islands.

Piśācas and the Piśācmocan Temple Because of the ubiquity of the piśāca, a few words must be said about it. An illuminating passage appears in the Nīlamata Purāâa (NP), a text from Kashmir that depicts a social and spiritual universe densely populated with ethereal beings of nearly unimaginable variety, which readily interact with one another as well as with humans. These beings comprise devas, gandharvas, apsarases, yakùas, guhyakas, kinnaras, nāgas, rākùasas, piśācas, and millions of others.181 Piśācas enjoy an honored place in this pantheon. They roam the heavens and the earth, including the rivers, mountains, towns, and forests of Kashmir. Indeed, the geography of Kashmir is vividly portrayed, rendering this Purāâa a valuable source of historical knowledge. It is also a handbook of popular festivals and astrologically based rituals. Although recent efforts have been made to historicize the NP, much work remains to be done. The NP depicts gargantuan battles between hordes of these beings. NP 210ff. tells of piśācas in the employ of the gods. These piśācas are under the direct command of the piśāca lord Nikumbha, who has been hired by the god Kubera, himself commanded by Viùâu. These piśācas, numbering fifty million, are hired guns for the good guys and, therefore, themselves in some sense good, because they are allied with Viùâu.182 Their job is to battle an equally voluminous number of malevolent piśācas on calendrically regulated dates. In spite of their affiliation with Kubera and Viùâu, however, they remain dangerous to humans, thus deserving of their offerings. In one passage the goddess asks the sage Kaśyapa why she should attend to Kashmir, since it constitutes her very body, when there is more important work elsewhere. Kaśyapa replies that in Kashmir humans are always associated with piśācas, so she needs to see that their minds do not become perverted because of this association. Despite the watchful eye of the goddess, the NP (397–410) describes a highly transgressive festival in which humans become possessed by these good piśācas and appear to enjoy themselves immensely. Whether this constitutes defilement or perversion, or whether this matters, is undetermined.


The text of the NP has no clear divisions or properly marked narrative transitions. It moves in stream-of-consciousness fashion from the middle of one topic to the middle of another. Nevertheless, with respect to our story, we may surmise that, beginning on the full moon of the month of Āśvina (mid-October), the celebrants should worship brahmans, honor their own ātman (probably indicating some form of meditation, mantra recitation, or brief ritual practice), then enjoy a vegetarian banquet and an evening concert or dramatic performance. On the following two days, they should bathe as usual in the morning, then attire themselves finely and perform appropriate fire rituals. The remainder of these two days should be spent relaxing in the company of friends. After the morning rituals, in contravention of the usual dictum not to engage in sexual activity during the daytime, the celebrants, followers (anuyāyinan) of the good piśāca Nikumbha, should smear their bodies and those of their friends with mud, then engage in revelry and well-turned lascivious speech that is both sexually enticing and arousing (talliãgārthaprabodhakain [brings about an erection]). They should shout vulgar words and cavort about. At that time, they become possessed by frightfullooking piśācas—the ones who work for Kubera, we later learn. In the late afternoon or evening, after the celebrants bathe once again, these piśācas exit the bodies of those who have properly engaged in this ritual and enter and curse those who have not. Then those followers of Nikumbha should worship Keśava. Afterward, they should keep an oil lamp lit outside their houses for one month, until the full moon of the month of Kārttika and observe certain ritual vows for six months. It is not clear how much of this is protest, redemption, escape, or just good clean sybaritic and festive fun. It is possible that the sectarian and political history of Kashmir had an impact on this ritual, but this has not been researched. It is also not clear to what degree this mud-wrestling possession orgy has been reframed or fictionalized by the NP. I know of no equivalent ritual in modern-day India, though it is possible, even probable, that other sexual rituals, such as the tantric cakrapūjā, at one time had variants in which the dramatis personae became possessed by the goddesses of the cakra before engaging in ritual sex.183 We can also posit that the possession in this ritual was protective as well as transgressive, the ritual possession being the safety net that thwarted adharma. As a ritual mechanism, this possession shifted the onus of transgressive sex from dharmically conscientious citizens to liminally relocated and reconstituted personalities. Although the sexual


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aspect does not, to the best of my knowledge, appear in modern possession ritual, group possession ritual is often documented in India, for example, in the Draupadī festival in Tamilnadu and the Siri festival in the South Kanara District of Karnataka. Pollock’s remarks on the genesis and role of the rākùasa are apposite here. He cites the Rāmāyaâa to the effect that the concerns of rākùasas are “to master the sports of lovemaking and hold crowded fairs and festivals.”184 Their pursuit of lovemaking can be traced back to the Śatapatha Brāhmaâa and their powers of transformation to the ñV.185 Pollock argues that rākùasas are “the imaginative product of the confrontation of traditional Indians with their particular forms of desire—in its two primary forms, libidinal and aggressive—representing all that traditional Indians most desired and most feared. . . . [I]n their libidinized forms, they enact the deepest sexual urges— total abandonment to pleasure, as well as absolute autonomy and power in gratifying lust.”186 This verdict applies as well to the piśācas in the NP, where ritual both domesticates and liberates them, providing their hosts an opportunity to release their pent-up sexual aggression in a context that not only does not threaten to corrupt or overturn established cultural standards but, through that context—namely, the ritual—reinforces them. This, then, is a ritual of reversal—in this case, reversing an established expectation of monogamy—and is rather like certain other rituals of reversal in North Indian festivals. What comes immediately to mind is the day during the spring festival of Holi on which the women of certain villages in Braj (e.g., Nandagaon, Gokul) beat their husbands and other men, immune, that day, from reciprocation.187 The piśācas of the NP, at least the good ones, differ radically from the malevolent piśācas depicted in the āyurvedic and tantric texts cited above, where they are described as impure, dirty, desolate, restless, incapable of enjoyment, and so on.188 The latter piśācas are ever threatening and require ritual expiation. A specific venue for such expiation, the Skanda Purāâa informs us, is a certain Pāśupata Śaiva temple called Piśācamocana in Varanasi.189 It is here, so the story goes, that once long ago, during the tretayuga, a great-souled ascetic named Vālmīki performed brahmanical rituals before the Kapardīśa liãga, then sat for meditation on the banks of a nearby lake. He saw there a ghastly and miserable rākùasa who described to him how he attained that sorry state. While alive he was a brahman temple priest in faroff Pratiù•hāna on the banks of the Godavari river, and while performing his priestly duties he accepted gifts from pilgrims (tīrtha-pratigraha), but kept


them all, failing to donate any of them to the temple. For this he was condemned to exist as a piśāca. One day, while he was floating as a piśāca in Pratiù•hāna, a young brahman passed by. He failed to perform his sandhyā rites and did not purify himself properly after urinating and defecating. Like Kali possessing Nala, this piśāca passed into the body of this brahman boy (taccharīre ’haÅ saÅkrāntan). Eventually that brahman made his way to Varanasi, for business rather than pilgrimage, but the ethereal guardians of the holy city refused to allow him into the inner shrine area (antargeha) without expunging him of his sins, along with the invasive piśāca, at least temporarily, both of which would reenter him when he left. So, the piśāca was stranded in the outer neighborhoods without a host. Just as it was about to seize and eat a healthy pilgrim, the latter uttered the name of Śiva, purifying the piśāca, which then followed the pilgrim to the Kapardīśa liãga. There he was noticed by the ascetic Vālmīki, who gave him a small quantity of sanctified ash (bhasma, vibhūti) from his fire to apply to his forehead. This was sufficient to purify the piśāca to the point that it could be admitted for bathing in the sacred pond. As a result, the piśāca lost its frightful qualities and attained a divine body (divyadeham). The Piśācmocan temple continues as a venue for exorcism. Two types of officiant serve those in need: the bhagat, who invokes the deity in charge of the exorcism, and the ojhā, who actually performs the exorcism. The important elements of the exorcism are, first, ritual procedure and, second, speech, which at Piśācmocan and elsewhere in Varanasi includes mantra and secret language. Among the substances employed are cloves, which, given to the client, serve to transport the pret away from the body, while lemons and sometimes rice-flour balls (piâba) are used for bali or simple sacrificial offerings to the deity. Thus, the spirit, often that of an ancestor (pitó), is pacified, after which it is seated (bai•hnā) in the temple, where the deity is deemed strong enough to hold it forever. Occasionally, the client will drive a nail into the trunk of a large tree on the temple grounds, fixing the offending spirit to it. It is important to note that the prevailing viewpoint is that the spirit rides or sits on the individual, not inside the person. Many ojhās who frequent Piśācmocan are from or are connected with outlying villages. They bring their clients to Piśācmocan after working with them for lengthy periods, sometimes for years. Many of the clients are women who have suffered a miscarriage, influenced by the notion that an evil spirit has been sent by an enemy. Others are men—often brothers—enmeshed in legal disputes, believing that they have been cursed by spirits sent by the opposing


plate 12. Piśāc Bābā, Piśācmocan Temple, Varanasi. Photo by the author, 2001.


party through hired tantrics. Many more are relatives of people who have died suddenly, a condition that is said to render the subtle body of the deceased vulnerable to possession by nasty spirits.190 Most of the traffic at Piśācmocan, however, is for fairly ordinary postmortem rites (śrāddha, piâbadāna). This is performed throughout the year, though preponderantly during pitópakùa, the fortnight of the waning moon in the month of Bhādrapad (usually mid- to late September). This serves the dual purpose of feeding the ancestors, the usual intent, and exorcising them of evil spirits, just in case.

Childsnatchers and Therapy to Counter Demonic Possession (Piśacagóhītabhaiùajyam)191 A section from the MBh (3.216–219) on the birth of Skanda and the origin of bālagrahas or childsnatchers was explored in Chapter 6. That passage contains much of the essential information found in the āyurvedic texts, including specialized works on pediatrics, descriptive lists of bālagrahas, diseases attributed to them, and remedies. Perhaps the most comprehensive of these passages appears in the Kāśyapa SaÅhitā (KS) of the seventh century, a text that now survives in only two fragmentary manuscripts, testifying to the fact that it was soon eclipsed by other texts, particularly the AH, despite sections like this one that are more comprehensive than the corresponding sections of the later texts. The passage in question is intact and has been translated well by Dominik Wujastyk.192 For this reason it is not necessary to enter into a full translation of it or corresponding texts.193 The important point is that the fundamental interpretation of the action of grahas, including bālagrahas, at least in the classical āyurvedic texts (we have seen that the perspective in the Tibetan medical texts can be different), is that they are agents of possession. Other symbolic interpretations of the meaning of grahas and verbs used to describe their actions (such as abhigharùayati [attack]) may be valid as well,194 but they cannot override the centrality of possession or of moral missteps (even if inadvertent) or weaknesses that are consistently seen to lie at the basis of disease-causing possession. The KS describes many conditions, moral lapses all, ideologically consistent with what is found elsewhere, in which the archetypal childsnatcher, Jātahāriâī, invades a pregnant woman and terminates her pregnancy. As expected, “only dharma can turn her away,” says the KS. 195


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Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati 41 Rather than discussing the canonical āyurvedic texts, it will better serve our interests to examine pa•ala 41 of the Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati. With respect to the relationship between the ĪŚP and the āyurvedic texts (as well as with the MBh), it is notable that the former is consistent with the latter in rendering semidivine grahas called “mothers” (mātó) as bālagrahas that afflict children below the age of sixteen, especially fetuses, while, as we saw above, the ĪŚP is also consistent with the āyurvedic texts in regarding yakùas, gandharvas, rākùasas, and so on, as possessors that bequeath insanity to adults.196 The author of the ĪŚP proposes that, out of the many traditions of treatment of bālagrahas, he discusses two of them in brief: the procedures described in the Khabgarāvaâa and in the Nārāyaâīya.197 The procedure described in the Khabgarāvaâa enumerates several general procedures, then prescribes modifications depending on the age of the child and the identity of the māt ókā (Little Mother), the offending spirit. The ritualist should take earth from both banks of a river and construct an effigy (puttalīm) from it in the shape of a child. This will then substitute for the child in the ritual, though it appears that the child should also be present. Then the ritualist should make a packet of cooked white rice along with fresh rice grains, fish, meat, and liquor, together with flowers, yogurt, milk, and black sesame seeds. The wrapper should probably be a strong leaf (this is not mentioned, but is usually the case) and should, according to the text, be tied tightly with yellow thread. The intent seems to be to combine pure and impure offerings, presumably for Gaâeśa and Vīrabhadra and the ill-intentioned spirits. After the ground for the ritual is cleaned, it should be embellished with thirteen svastikās, eight ghee lamps, and different kinds of fruit, including bananas. One should then make a large vessel, in the middle of which one should place the effigy, then set lamps and other ritual items around it. Then, at the time of the midday sandhyā, Gaâeśa should be worshipped with incense and other appropriate offerings. Brāhmī and the other mātókās should be installed as the deities of the primary directions around it, and Vārāhī and other goddesses, including Caâbikā, should be installed and worshipped in the directional corners. After the tantric ritualist invokes and worships Vīrabhadra and Gaâeśa at the center, the substances for sacrifice (bali) should be divided in half, with four parts each for Vīrabhadra and Gaâeśa,


and four parts for the goddesses, placed on pipal leaves. The prescribed mantra should be recited for each deity separately, and peaceful (sāttvika) offerings should be given to both Khabgarāvaâa and whichever goddess is to be named, in this case Nandā as the possessor of children in their first year. The mantra is: oá namo bhagavate khabgarāvaâāya dīrghadarśanāya hana góhâa muñca bālakaÅ •ha•ha (Oá, salutations to the illustrious Lord Khabgarāvaâa whose vision is far-reaching. Kill! Possess! Liberate the child! Svāhā.).198 Variants of this mantra are given for each of the offending māt ókās. After these offerings are made and the child is exposed to them, one may take the child away. The text then prescribes certain fumigants or demonifuges to be used as direct therapy on the victim. The substances that comprise these fumigants should be collected and burned in the presence of the victim in order to create an environment unpleasant to the spirit, hence encouraging its departure.199 Fumigation therapy is still practiced in India, including in Kerala, Varanasi, Rajasthan, and Pune.200 I was informed by a well-known vaidya in Kerala who still manufactures and prescribes such fumigants that they should not be burned for more than fifteen minutes three times a day.201 It is doubtful that the recipes used for fumigants today anywhere in India are identical to those listed in the AH, Caraka, Suśruta, or other classical āyurvedic texts, or even in classical Tantras, such as the ĪŚP. In Kerala, the ingredients and processes employed in their manufacture are secrets closely held by the families of aù•avaidya Nambudiris who have been handed down these ancient medical traditions.202 These physicians have studied the appropriate sections of the AH (but probably not Caraka and Suśruta) and have a rough familiarity with the ĪŚP, though it is no longer formally studied or used as a ritual handbook in any of the surviving Kerala āyurvedic traditions. The fumigation rite for an infant prescribes igniting neem leaves and ghee mixed with mustard seeds left over from offerings made to Śiva.203 This smoldering concoction should be carried around the infant clockwise, probably in an earthen bowl (though this is not mentioned). Neem leaves have long been regarded as a natural antiseptic,204 and, along with mustard seeds, they give off an intense smoke when burned. The ghee is prescribed because it helps ignite fire and encourages smoke to become dense when the flames die down. This combination of substances is apparently inhospitable to bhūtas, as it surely is to humans. At the same time, the ritualist should place sprouts germinated from nyagrodha, udumbara, aśvattha, bilva, and pālāśa seeds in a pot, rinse or sprinkle them with water for three days, and wash


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them thoroughly on the fourth day. The reason for this is not stated, but these are all “auspicious” plants, recommended for use in sacrifice (medhya) or as offerings to deities, and are regarded as conducive to the growth and renewal of the child.205 We may assume from this that the ritual should be repeated for three or four days. The procedures and substances are identical if the affliction, this time by Sunandā, occurs in the child’s second year. The instructions for the third year’s exorcism state that ajaś óâga (this should probably read ajaśóâgī) should be added to the fumigant. This is a malodorous shrub whose fruit is said to be sharp as a horn, recommended as early as the AV (AVŚ 4.37; AVP 13.4) as a remedy for sore eyes as well as for destroying evil beings.206 For the fifth- to twelfth-year ritual, neem leaves should be burned (dhūpayet) mixed with ghee and guggulu, an aromatic resin prescribed to strengthen bones and connective tissue but also commonly used in homa because it ignites easily and burns continuously. In all cases, after the fourth day the ritualist should take a purificatory bath. According to the Khabgarāvaâa, grahas can take hold of children up to the twelfth year. Īśānaśivagurudeva adds, however, that it can occur up to the sixteenth year, though others say bālagrahas can attack up to age seventeen. The text does not state what one should do with the puttalī after the exorcism is concluded, but, following traditional practice, it is likely that it was to be discarded in a river, temple tank, or other body of water considered sacred (tīrtha). The ĪŚP does not give the rationale for the puttalī, though it is consistent with both earlier textuality of healing and current practice to infer that the disease, as well as the grāhī, will leave the patient or victim and enter the puttalī. The Kauśikasūtra, for example, prescribes a treatment for hepatitis in which a yellow bird should be placed in a bowl on the floor beneath the head of a person lying on a bed with his head extended over the end of the bed. While a certain hymn from the AVŚ (1.22) is being recited along with other mantras specific to the Kauśikasūtra, water should be poured over the person’s head so that it flows onto the bird.207 The disease then exits the patient and enters the bird. The notion that diseases might disappear but exogenous disease-causing agents continue to circulate is also attested at Bālājī, where possessing spirits may be temporarily transferred to a ritualist or clinician, as described earlier, and eventually be retrained as good spirits in the phauj or army of Hanumān. In that case, they permanently leave the body (and mind) of the client, whose psychosocial dysfunction gradually disappears as the grip ( grahaâa) of the bhūt-pret attenuates.


The (Viùa-) Nārāyaâīya The (Viùa-) Nārāyaâīya, so-called because its first ten chapters deal with poisons (viùa, primarily from snakes) and their treatment,208 mentions grāhīs not only for specific years of the child’s life but for the first ten days of life and the first twelve months as well. It does not mention a puttalī, but does prescribe the construction of yantras, the placement of divinities within them, and the offerings and primary mantras to be employed for them, some of the latter being quite long and complicated. After noting the name of the grāhī, Pāpinī, which might afflict a child on the day it is born, the text states that a square sacrificial altar (balipī•ham) should be consecrated. This should be performed in the home, though the alternative is given of a crossroad (catvari), a ritually potent locale that is prescribed as a site for balidāna in the Madanamahāóâava. Vīrabhadra should be installed in the center and the goddesses (mātõn) in the corners and primary directions. Gaâeśa (vināyakam) and Cāmuâbī should be installed in the northeast and worshipped with grain cakes, fish, meat, cooked rice, sesame, powdered spices, and other similar items, including liquor, representing, as in the case of substances prescribed by the Khabgarāvaâa, the spectrum from pure to impure, cooling to heating, right-handed to left-handed. As before, fumigants or demonifuges should be burned, but here the ingredients may consist of more exotic substances. A simple demonifuge is prescribed for the first day: neem leaves dipped in ghee, then mixed with shoots from the uśīra, (apā)mārga, and pipal trees. More difficult is the one prescribed for the second day. After rubbing an ointment of sandalwood, uśīra leaf, māyūra leaf, and goat’s urine on the baby, a demonifuge of cow’s teeth, horn, and hair should be burned. More difficult still is the one prescribed for the eighth day. After an ointment of goat’s urine mixed with vacā, a “hot” root often recommended for bestowing mental clarity or sharpness, and kuù•ha, a very bitter plant, is applied to the baby, a demonifuge of tiger’s nails is burned. On the tenth day, monkey’s hair and nails are burned, and the ritual for the second month consists of, among other things, the burning of a fumigant of neem leaves and garlic. The procedures are often lengthy, thus I cannot enter into a full-scale treatment of them. It must suffice to provide the names of the goddesses and discuss some of the mantras. The goddess for the first day is Pāpanī (Transgressive Lady), for the second day Bhāùiâī (Lady of Speech), for the third Jhaâ•ālī (Misty Lady[?]), for


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the fourth Kākolī (Raven Lady), for the fifth SiÅhikā (Lion Lady),209 for the sixth Pha•kārī (Lady Who Exclaims pha•!), 210 for the seventh Mukakeśī (Lady Whose Hair Smells Like Cowdung), for the eighth Daâbinī (Lady Who Holds the Staff ), for the ninth Mahāmahiùī (Great Buffalo Lady), and for the tenth Rodanī (Tearful Lady). The grāhī goddess for the first month of the first year is Putanā (Stinking Lady), for the second month Maku•ā (Crested Lady), for the third Gomukhī (Cow-Mouthed Lady), for the fourth Piâgalā (Tawny Lady), for the fifth HaÅsikā (Goosey Lady), for the sixth Paãkajā (Lotus Lady), for the seventh Śītalā (Cool Lady), for the eighth Yamunā (Goddess of the Yamunā River), for the ninth Kumbhakarâī (PotEared Lady), for the tenth Tāpasī (Lady of Austerities), for the eleventh Rākùasī (Demoness), and for the twelfth Capalā (Trembling Lady). The second year the grāhī is Yātanā (Vengeful Lady), the third year Rodinī (Weeping Lady), the fourth Ca•akā (Sparrow Lady), the fifth Cañcalā (Fickle Lady), the sixth Dhāvanī (Loping Lady), the seventh Yamunā, the eighth Hāyanī (Relinquising Lady), the ninth Kālinī (Lady of Time), the tenth KalahaÅsī (Supreme Goose Lady), the eleventh Devadūtī (Lady Emissary of the Gods), the twelfth Palitā (Crone), the thirteenth Vāyavī (Lady of the Wind), the fourteenth Yakùiâī, the fifteenth Muñjakamuñcī (Wicked Lady of the Bullrushes [?]), the sixteenth Vānarī (Monkey Lady), the seventeenth Bandhavatī (Lady Who Binds), and the eighteenth Kumārī (Princess). For all of these, sesame is offered into a fire with the mantra oá muñca paca daha āgaccha bālike •ha•ha (Om, Liberate! Cook! Burn! Come! Young lady, svāhā). After these bali offerings are made, japa (simple repetition of a mantra) is performed while the ritual officiant touches the child. The japa mantras are long, for example, naman sarvamātõâāÅ hódayamo•aka mañja kabhbha spho•aya sphura góhâa ākarùaya tro•aya evaÅ jñāpayati hara nirdoùaÅ kuru bālakaÅ •ha•ha (Salutations, O remedy in the form of a heart-pill for all the Little Mothers, cleanse! kabhbha[?]! Flash! Spring forth! Possess! Attract! Break apart! Thus one should announce. O Hara, make this child faultless, svāhā).211 Other, longer mantras follow, which are said to lead to the liberation of the spirit ( grahamukti). A number of protective verse mantras should then be recited. These resemble versified nyāsas, invoking an abundance of male divinities to protect the directions and the parts of the body. In these texts, male deities are protective and liberating, especially Gaâeśa and Vīrabhadra, while goddesses either play a subservient role or are themselves the possessing grāhīs.


Healing and the Circulation of Knowledge As important as it is to examine the categories and taxonomies of bhūtavidyā, it is equally important to examine the healing process. This involves investigating the broader dynamics of exorcism: ritual, pharmacopia, healers, and the interaction between healer and client. Some of this has been addressed above, in anthropological and other ethnographic discussions of the healing process.212 We shall here look more closely at selected passages from the vast āyurvedic and tantric material, mostly the former. It is impossible to address the exorcistic material in all the relevant texts. With the limitation of employing selected passages it is best to approach them chronologically, because this is the best way to convey an idea of how the practices and, indeed, the vidyā of bhūtavidyā evolved. This also helps illuminate key aspects of the morphology of the cultural, linguistic, and moral underpinnings of mental illness, especially of exogenously produced unmāda. A much longer study could be undertaken on this if more material is used. But the following should provide a few guidelines for such a study. In discussion of these treatments, I must first summarize some of the exorcistic procedures found in Caraka, Suśruta, and Vāgbha•a, including the diagnostics, pharmacopeia and other “rational” modalities (yuktivyapāśrayacikitsā),213 as well as ritual and moral treatments (daivavyapāśrayacikitsā). Then I discuss in some detail the procedures found in the Cakradatta, an important āyurvedic text of the eleventh century that brings together āyurvedic and tantric therapies. It would be a mistake to assert that exorcisms are of a single style of practice or generated by indigenous scholars equally informed about the intricacies of medicine and ritual, especially after the turn of the first millennium c.e. Like all ritual in India, this was diversified even within specific performative traditions.214 The ethnography that concludes this chapter is drawn from fieldwork I conducted in Kerala and demonstrates how medical, tantric, and astrological traditions operate in tandem, in a seamlessly functioning and fairly ancient system of referral, how they strengthen rather than isolate one another.

Treatment in the Early Āyurvedic Compendia The earliest compendia, Caraka and Suśruta, of the early centuries of the Common Era, as well as those of the next chronological level four or five


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centuries later, Kāśyapa and Vāgbha•a’s AH and ASaÅ, do not mirror each other as closely as might be expected in their treatment of unmāda. Considerable differences may be found among the texts, including differences in opinion that go beyond the enumeration and designation of grahas. The most glaring instance of this is Caraka’s overall treatment of unmāda, which is less nuanced and more straightforward than Suśruta’s. One aspect of this is Caraka’s more substantial treatment of the psychopharmacology. Suśruta defines the terms graha and bhūta more specifically than Caraka, but he adds details that were probably borrowings from other genres (e.g., the Sanskrit epics), namely, that grahas are powerful beings who achieved their present form through severe austerities, religious donations, performative and moral vows, and observation of appropriate socioreligious duties. These enabled them to achieve the “eight powers” according to their respective strength.215 However, adds Suśruta, they do not themselves possess humans; it is their minions who do their bidding, who do the dirty work of possession, and, in a statement presumably directed at Caraka and others, Suśruta states that “those who say that they possess are to be removed from the orbit of bhūtavidyā due to their ignorance.”216 This agrees with the general tenor of what may be found in the Mahābhārata, Rāmayana, and other major texts of the time, which mention myriad demons under the control of a few, an ideology of bhūtas that we still find today at Bālājī in Rajasthan, Chottanikkara in Kerala, and generally throughout India (as well as in many areas of Christendom, where the “evil one” is said to have innumerable agents). After distinguishing the different bhūtas, Caraka (CaCi 6.9.23) declares that, if unmāda is caused by possession by spirits that demand sex or worship, the physician (bhiùak) should determine the nature of the possession through the intent and behavior of the client and then prescribe suitable medicinal treatment and mantras, as well as sacrificial offerings and gifts of food.217 Caraka subsequently recommends a variety of therapies common to both exogenous (āgantukā) and endogenous (nija) unmāda—intended to cleanse the victim internally and restore his or her balance of doùas. The therapies include laxatives, dietary modification, emetics, medicated oil applied to the head (śirovirecana), full-body oil massage, inhalation (of smoke from a dhūmavarti, a medicated cigar) and fumigation therapies, bloodletting, and, especially for exogenous unmāda, consumption of ghee. These therapies “enliven the mind, intellect, memory, and consciousness” (manobuddhismótisaÅjñāprabodhanam; CaCi 6.9.32cd). Incurable insanity is also recognized, in which case treatment is not recom-


mended. However, extreme insanity that is deemed curable may be treated with extreme therapies, including forms of shock therapy including beatings (tābanam), which might be useful in “stimulating the mind, intellect, and body” (manobuddhidehasaÅvejanam; CaCi 6.9.29cd). A person might also be tied up tightly, though gently, with cloth (rather than rope), and confined to a dark room from which dangerous objects like iron rods and wooden sticks have been removed. Other kinds of shock therapies include shouting angrily at the patient, terrorizing him with the help of the local police who threaten to arrest or even execute him, having snakes that have had their fangs removed bite him, and threatening the patient with tamed (if still frightening) lions and elephants.218 At the same time, the victim should be given presents, reassurance, and consolation by friends, and exposure to emotions opposite from the one on which the patient is obsessing—passion, grief, fear, anger, exhilaration, jealousy, and greed are mentioned—that might help turn the mind in a different direction. The principles of these largely exotic treatments appear to be, first, to rebuild the mind and body with medicines that address both the humoral imbalance and the personality affliction; second, to bring the patient out of his or her condition by exposure to positive emotions; third, to shock the patient out of his or her obsessions; and, fourth, to bring a constant undercurrent of support and consolation to the patient. All of these should “lead to a state of mental normalcy by countering memory loss.”219 Thus, a full arsenal of treatments is brought to bear on possession. CaSū 11.54 defines the three areas of treatment mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: daivavyapāśraya, yuktivyapāśraya, and sattvāvajaya: “Daivavyapāśraya indicates the use of mantras, herbs, gemstones, auspicious offerings, gifts of food, fire offerings, scriptural observance, expiatory rites, fasting, chanting of hymns, surrender to deities, and pilgrimage. Yuktivyapāśraya indicates proper food, medicine and [other] substances. Sattvāvajaya is the holding back of the mind from harmful objects.”220 The last of these, sattvāvajaya, is not mentioned beyond this, possibly because it was regarded as implicit in proper observation of daivavyapāśraya.221 Thus, the texts describe in detail only the first two, at least by name. Much later in his text, as a conclusion to his section on treatment for unmāda, Caraka expands on his description of daivavyapāśrayacikitsā. As a partial remedy for unmāda, he enjoins, One should perform pūjā, offer sacrifice [bali], give offerings of food, ritually apply collyrium sanctified by mantras, and perform pacification


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rituals, Vedic sacrifice, repetition of divine name, rituals for auspicious occasions, and expiatory ritual. Worshipping Īśvara [viz. Śiva], the lord of the universe, the leader of bhūtas, constantly and with effort, one becomes victorious over the fear born of unmāda. One should perform pūjā to Rudra’s attendants [ gaâān] called pramathas, who roam about in the world, thereby releasing them from various forms of unmāda. Exogenous possession [unmāda] becomes pacified [praśamam] through sacrifice, auspicious actions, fire ritual, wearing amulets that are healing because they contain appropriate herbs, observing truthfulness and good conduct, performing penance [tapas], developing knowledge, becoming charitable, observance of scriptural limits and vows, through honoring deities, cows, brahmans, and gurus, and through the application of perfected mantras and medicines. (CaCi 6.9.89–94)

Caraka’s exposition of the “rational treatment” (yuktivyapāśrayacikitsā) of unmāda consists largely of descriptions of medicinal preparations used to treat multiple conditions, most of them vāta debilitations.222 Because, according to Āyurveda, vāta evolves into prāâa, it is in many ways a more fundamental doùa than pitta or kapha. This is why, according to many practitioners, treatment for vāta derangement is more capable of abetting a cure for pitta or kapha conditions than treatment for one of the latter two would be for healing vāta debilitation. This may also explain why ghee-based herbal preparations are prescribed as a remedy for unmāda in general, for one whose “mind is struck by a bhūta” (bhūtopahatacitta), for bad luck (alakùmī), for transgression (pāpa), and for demonic seizure (rakùoghna). These preparations are also said to destroy all grahas (sarvagrahavināśanam; CaCi 6.9.41d). Ghee is believed to act directly to alleviate vāta and pitta debilitation, while taken in moderation it does not exacerbate kapha debilitation. Because of the esoteric nature of the descriptions of ghee-based preparations, and the extensive lists of ingredients used in their preparation, I can here offer only a brief description. To begin with, most of the preparations consist of a large number of herbs mixed with ghee. However, a few special, relatively simple, recipes require “old ghee” (purāâaÅ ghótam). Caraka states that ten-year-old ghee used as a base is capable of rectifying all the doùas and eliminating grahas. Ghee older than ten years is called prapurāâa (very old), and ghee which is a hundred years old can cure any disease: “just the sight, touch, or smell of this casts out all grahas.”223


This practice is still current. In the eighteenth century, when the British finally defeated the Peshwas in Pune, they are said to have found a large number of pots of prapurāâa ghee in Shanwar Wada, the fortress in the center of the old city. With respect to its manufacture, I am informed that “you must make sure that it is totally cooked, meaning that all the water is evaporated, and then it must be kept very dry. Then it begins to age.”224 Other informants in India have told me that the production of purāâa-ghótam, which includes the manufacture and vigilant protection of ghee, occurs elsewhere as well. It is stored in large clay pots lined on the outside with copper or bell metal (kāÅsya), and was once a relatively common āyurvedic practice. In an ensuing discussion of treatments for apasmāra, also said to be effective against demonic infestation and other kinds of unmāda, Caraka prescribes a large number of animal products to be mixed into the preparations. Most common are recipes containing pañcagavya, the “five products of the cow”: milk, sour yogurt, ghee, urine, and liquid squeezed from dung.225 Goat’s or cow’s urine is also frequently mentioned as an ingredient independent of pañcagavya. One recipe calls for a number of herbs to be mixed with cow’s or goat’s urine along with leech excrement, ash from incinerated goat’s hair, donkey bone, elephant’s toenail, and hair from a cow’s tail (CaCi 6.10.39–40). From a modern perspective such recipes appear to be exotic, to say the least. However, Caraka and others probably did not include them for shock value, except possibly to shock an offending graha; a patient suffering from convulsions or any kind of mental disorder quite likely was not able to identify the ingredients in these preparations. More likely, animal products were deemed more antithetical to the possessing spirits, thus indirectly influencing, and even rectifying, humoral imbalances.226 Suśruta offers greater detail on antidotes to specific grahas (SuUt 6.60.29–37), as well as a number of more generally applicable remedies. The latter are not as profuse as are found in Caraka, but the attention paid to individual grahas indicates that Suśruta emerges from a different, if related, medical tradition than Caraka, an oft-noted fact. Suśruta states that grahas are nourished by the color red; thus, they should be given gifts of red clothes and offerings of red flowers, meat, and blood. The eight grahas mentioned by Suśruta should be pacified with these and other appropriate items in rituals held in a temple (for a devagraha), at a crossroad (for an asura), amid cows (for a gandharva), in a pleasant room (for a yakùa), by a


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river (for a pitógraha or a nāga), at a crossroad or in a dense forest (for a rakùas), and in an abandoned house (for a piśāca). If these offerings do not succeed in alleviating the possession, the next recourse is fumigation therapy. One of these fumigants consists of goat, bear, porcupine, and owl skin mixed with asafoetida and goat’s urine. Another consists of oil (taila, unspecified, but sesame is usually the default oil) mixed with feces of a donkey, mule, owl, camel, dog, vulture, crow, or pig. Most of the recipes, however, consist of a mixture of herbs and animal products, including bile from different animals, including fish and cow, and the nails of various feral beasts, including a variety of large and small felines, alligator, mongoose, and so on. Like Caraka, Suśruta may have selected these creatures in part because of their perceived dominant doùa, but probably largely because they were feral and could thus overpower the afflicting graha. Suśruta adds a chapter (6.62) on the diagnostics of unmāda according to humoral imbalance. It is not necessary to enter into the details here, but it suffices to note that the diagnoses comply with the characteristics of the grahas and that the details of the shock therapy are in essential agreement with those given by Caraka (a few details are added, such as whipping or tying the victim with chains), and a bit more dietary advice is given. Kāśyapa Kalpasthānam, chapter 1, lists a large number of recipes to be used as demonifuges, for example, “A fumigant [dhūpa] named Uttama [Best] is recommended for people overcome by pretas and pūtanās [indicating all bālagrahas]. It should be prepared from ghee, siddhārthaka [?], honey, sheep’s horn, goat’s milk, donkey’s hair and urine, and soma” (KSKa 1.11–12).227 The AH Uttarasthāna (AH-Ut) 6.3 discusses bālagrahas and recommends an array of possible treatments for such invasion, including various fumigants, medicated ghee, decoctions for nocturnal baths (snapana), and ritual. Much of this is found in Caraka and Suśruta, but the corpus is here expanded. AH-Ut 6.5, titled bhūtapratiùedha (repulsing bhūtas), again covers a gamut of remedies, including recipes for pills ( guba) to ward off insanity (6.5.15–17), again with an exotic mixture of vegetal and animal products, special offerings for most of the species of offending grahas listed in 6.4 (translated above), mantras invoking Dvādaśabhuja (Twelve-Armed) Īśvara or Āryāvalokita Nātha, the mahāmāyūrī mantra (cf. discussion of the Bower manuscript above), and worship of various other multiforms of Śiva, including Bhūteśa, Sthānu, and the latter’s attendants, called pramathas (agitators, shakers).228


The Cakradatta: Pharmacopeia As an example of the discourse of healing in the āyurvedic text passages on possession, I draw on the CikitsāsaÅgraha, otherwise called Cakradatta, a therapeutic text of the mid-eleventh century, thus placing it chronologically in the third tier of āyurvedic textuality.229 The author, Cakrapāâidatta, is best known for his commentary on Caraka. But he also wrote this independent treatise, which became widely followed in his native Bengal. Although much of the material is drawn from Caraka, it updates and situates it in a healing locus more definitively systematic, as Āyurveda had by then become a śāstra with a long and distinguished tradition. This compendium of āyurvedic therapeutics is conspicuous for its rich pharmacopeia. Although it does not come out particularly strongly in the passage at hand, the Cakradatta surpassed its predecessors in integrating tantric medicine and practices, which include mercurial and other mineral-based preparations and a tantric repertoire of mantra and yantra, into the formulary and ritual recommendations of Caraka. This text probably came as close as any to representing a complete form of Āyurveda, in north India at least, at the time of its composition. Chapter 20 of the Cakradatta addresses unmāda, distinguishing psychological dysfunction with identifiable causes (nija) from exogenously induced (āgantuka) unmāda. In discussing the latter, Cakrapāâidatta describes the pharmacopeia and mentions certain aspects of ritual treatment. 44. The practice of consuming ghee, etc., as well as the use of mantra, etc., are introduced for [treatment of] the exogenous variety [of unmāda]. The physician [bhiùak], having undergone his own purification, should treat exogenous unmāda with ceremonies of worship [pūjā], normal sacrificial oblations [bali], nonsacrificial offerings [upahāra], vedic fire ritual [iù•i], non-vedic fire ritual [homa], mantra repetition, ritual application on the head or body of colored or scented salve or paste [añjana], etc., each according to its respective ritual injunctions. 45. A salve [añjana] prepared from long pepper [pippalī], black pepper [marica], black sulphurous salt [saindhava], honey, and bovine bile [ gopitta] destroys extreme insanity caused by all kinds of spirits. 46. A pill [ gubika] made from dāruharidrā and honey in the lunar asterism called puùya is [powdered and] made into a salve.230 47. Alternatively, marica mixed with bovine bile that has been placed in


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the sun for one month may be beneficial as a salve. This is used for distorted vision [hallucinations] when memory is lost due to imbalance of humors or spirit possession. 48. A fumigant [dhūpa] that wards off enchantment [bākinya], etc., made of neem leaves, vacā,231 asafoetida [hiâgu], sloughed-off snake skin [sarpanirmoka], and mustard seed, may be used to destroy madness caused by spirit possession. 49. According to tradition, a fumigant [dhūpa] made of a ball packed together with cotton seeds, coppery eye of peacock feathers [mayūrapiccha], bóhatī, and nirmālya, [added to a bundle consisting of] cinnamon [tvak], the soft extrusions at the joints of bamboo segments [vaÅśalocana], cat excrement [vóùadaÅśa-vi•],232 grain husks, vacā, jatāmāÅsī,233 and sloughed-off snake skin [ahinirmoka], and equal quantities of [powdered] cow’s horn and dvipadanta, asafoetida [hiâgu], and black pepper [marica], alleviates fever that arises due to possession [āveśa] caused by the skanda entities [skandonmāda], piśācas, rākùasas, and suras. 1. A nasal preparation [nasyam] of roots and ripened fruit of aindrī [indravāruâī] and cow urine234 allows victory over brahmarākùasas. A nasal preparation of śvetā and ricewater [ jyeù•hāmbu] mixed with ghee wards off bhūtas. 2. In the case of madness caused by deities [deva], sages [ óùi], deceased ancestors [pitó], and gandharvas, an intelligent person should avoid irritant salves, etc., and other harsh measures. 3. The symptomatology of the departure of madness is clarity of the senses, intellect, self, and mind, as well as normalization of the dhātus.

We have seen many of the exotic substances recommended here in earlier texts. Among them, cat excrement (which may have been dried and powdered), sloughed-off snake skin (ahinirmoka), and the coppery eye of the peacock feather (mayūrapiccha) were probably classified, at least informally, as vāta (wind-reducing substances) and thus antispasmodics that at the same time rebuild afflicted systems.235 In present-day Kerala the vaidyas praise classical recipes like this one. They employ the herbal ingredients recommended, such as vacā, black pepper, asafoetida, neem leaves, and cinnamon, but use other substances in place of the animal products, including garlic, white śaãkhapuùpi, and chili.


Although unmāda could result from a specified imbalance of any of the three doùas, most of the evidence encountered in both the āyurvedic and tantric texts suggests that externally induced (āgantuka) negative possession is vāta-based more often than it is pitta- or kapha-based. Among the symptoms of spirit possession described in these texts that are more characteristic of vāta debilitation are excessive facial gestures, uncontrolled body movements, stammering, cold limbs, and attention-deficit disorders. These symptoms, we should recall, align closely with Caraka’s general description of unmāda cited earlier, which, more than the other do ùas, is a description of vāta debilitation. Nevertheless, afflictions more often associated with other doùas are also found in descriptions of the various grahas, as we have seen. Primary among these is extreme anger, more frequently associated with debilitated pitta. In all cases, however, it appears that antispasmodics, prescribed primarily to mitigate vāta debilitation, are recommended for alleviation of spirit possession.

Possession and Exorcism in Contemporary Āyurveda Much of the following is based on research conducted in Kerala in 2002 and 2004. I undertook this research after hearing a rumor from a usually reliable source that a number of āyurvedic physicians and tāntrikas (or mantravādins, as they are called in Kerala) still follow the practices of possession and exorcism outlined in the ĪŚP. On close investigation, I learned that this is not true. Nevertheless, it is likely that some of the current practices are derivative of what is found there or at least from a complex heritage of texts and practices that gave rise to the ĪŚP. My primary conclusions, after speaking extensively to more than a dozen highly placed vaidyas, mantravādins, and jyotiùis (astrologers), are that: (1) notions of bhūtas and bhūtavidyā are substantially unchanged from what appear in the classical texts;236 (2) most of the clients are women, including a large number of Muslims; (3) an entrenched system of referral among the three groups of practitioners, which constitutes a mental health-care delivery system of considerable sophistication, is still very much in place;237 (4) the groups freely borrow both textuality and ritual apparatus from one another. A full ethnography of the possession events that I witnessed in Kerala is beyond the scope of the present work.238 Instead, I present a summary account of the points mentioned above, particularly the latter two, the sys-


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tem of referral and the shared textuality. These are most important for our purposes because they are crucial in assembling an epistemology that encourages the development of a complex and integrated healing tradition among the vaidyas, mantravādins, and astrologers of central and northern Kerala, particularly in districts of central Malabar, north of Cochin. Two lineages of āyurvedic practice are currently found in these and the districts to the south, from Kollam (Quilon) in south-central Kerala to Kozhikode (Calicut) and beyond in the northern districts of the state and from the coast to Palakkad (Palghat) in the hills of eastern Kerala and beyond to Coimbatore, a city of over a million people in Tamilnadu, barely fifteen kilometers from the Kerala border. The two lineages are the aù•avaidya tradition, transmitted for centuries by Nambudiri brahmans, and the non-brahman tradition established by Vaidyaratnam P. S. Varier in 1902 in the town of Kottakkal in Mallapuram District. The latter has since spread throughout Kerala and is now creating a discernible presence on the āyurvedic map as far north as Delhi.239 Both lineages maintain the AH as their primary text. My most valuable informants were Vaidyamadham Narayanan Nambudiri of Mezhathur and Kumaraswami Nambudiripad of Kāttumataâ Mannā, both in Palakkad District. The latter is well known locally as an expert in mantravidyā to whom Vaidyamadham occasionally refers patients diagnosed with exogenous unmāda. Vaidyamadham, who learned Āyurveda from his father in the aù•avaidya tradition, is one of Kerala’s most-respected āyurvedic practitioners. His practices and opinions carry considerable weight.240 I spoke with him at length and observed some of his practices. As is the case with the other vaidyas in the predominantly Muslim districts of Malabar, most of Vaidyamadham’s patients are Muslims, including those who come to him for treatment of mental dysfunction or illness. After observing a fair amount of practiced, but nevertheless unpredictable and captivating (to both ethnographer and participant), possession ritual at the Chottanikkara “Bhagavathy” temple, a well known goddess temple about thirty kilometers east of Cochin, where the use of puttalīs is common, it became clear to me that most of the victims were girls and young women from about fifteen to about twenty-five years old. This is in keeping with ethnographic reports throughout India. The women exhibited the classic symptoms of possession on having darshan of the goddess, exhibiting rhythmic rotating of the head with hair unbraided, wild body movements, shouting and thrashing about, and so on. Although this temple is noted for both possession and exorcism, what I observed was not entirely “negative” pos-


session, even if there was undoubtedly a negative onus cast on the girls by their families. I say this because their apparent dissociation is in many cases accompanied by palpable states of exhilaration, rendering it more accurately a highly focused, if at a certain point uncontrollable, liminal state, albeit one without an apparent oracular component. Were it mere dissociation, as most scholars understand it, this complexity would be negated, particularly as the girls in question appear to maintain some awareness of their complex state of consciousness and the transformations (albeit temporary) wrought on their persons as a result of their possession. The temptation to express themselves through possession states appears to contain an element of choice, at least some of the time; even if many of the girls are “clinically” ill, the temptation to “act possessed,” to unleash this “spirit” within themselves to the point at which their self-imposed liminality overwhelms their socialized personalities, includes critical elements of excitement and fascination. Similarly, their psychophysical attitude or comportment (bhāva), regardless of whether a product of illness, is clearly liberating, at least in the short run. In either case, whether the possession fits into indigenous categories of ecstasy or derangement (or both), the experience is valorized, sanctified, and healed or exorcised by the goddess. In cases of negative possession, the evident attraction of this kind of ecstatic healing environment is that the uncontrollable meandering and eclipse of the socialized personality are given an opportunity to express themselves. This is exemplified in girls who appear to engage in both sides of a dialogue, in different voices and intonations, in which the goddess and the possessing spirits argue or even fight. If the possessed person is deemed by the healer, family members, or ritual officiant to be ready to expel the spirit, and if adequate administrative and ritual preparations are made, including payments and the acquisition of the proper material items (including a puttalī), a brief ceremony is then performed. Several regular attendees who had seen this ceremony (I did not witness it) described it to me. In it, I was told, the officiant drives the bhūtam, sometimes in the form of the puttalī, into the tree with a nail or railway spike in the presence of the afflicted individual and accompanying family members, after which the victim beats her (or, less frequently, his) fists or head on it. As expected, this act is less practical than symbolic and “ritual”; the human head cannot beat a nail or railway spike into a tree without causing irreparable damage. Thus, we must assume, the nail has been placed in a hole already drilled or otherwise hammered into the tree. The purpose of beating the nail with the head or fists, then, is to provide conviction and a sense of


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personal immediacy to the exorcism and, perhaps, to draw blood as an attractive offering to the goddess. It is important to note that the girls (and a few men) at Chottanikkara are Hindus (and possibly a few Christians), and their conditions did not appear to be irreversable. By contrast, most of the victims of unmāda who attend the clinics of the local vaidyas are either Muslims who would not travel to Chottanikkara or members of other communities with serious psychological dysfunction. Vaidyas of both the aù•avaidya and Varier traditions, when repeatedly asked why most of their patients suffering from unmāda diagnosed as āgantuka were young women, gave one response with regularity: Young girls did not modernize as seamlessly as young men, and this opened them up to possession. This was not a satisfying answer, and it gave the impression that they were not telling the whole story. Finally, Vaidyamadham Nambudiri told me that these girls frequently are depressed, abused, and isolated, and suffer from drug addiction. Much of the abuse is sexual, he said, and occurs within the family; they have no outlet for expression in their families, and thus they are psychically weakened and become susceptible to possession, a situation greatly exacerbated by drug addiction. Regardless of the identity of the intoxicant, which from its description could be an opiate, he treats the victims with his arsenal of āyurvedic medicines, or refers them to Kumaraswami Nambudiripad for ritual treatment. Kumaraswami was also very forthcoming with me, and I asked him what he does with these girls. On the whole, he counsels them and uses his position to establish a comforting and positive rapport with them. Very rarely does he perform tantric rituals for these girls. More than ritual, he says, they need someone to talk to, an admission that he has little ability or authority to deal with their actual problems. But Vaidyamadham, a physician, takes a more proactive āyurvedic approach. He prescribes fumigation (dhūma) with “foul-smelling substances,” three times a day for up to fifteen minutes, usually for several consecutive days. Although the vaidyas of Kerala continue to praise classical recipes for fumigants, such as the ones we saw in the Cakradatta, they employ only some of the herbal ingredients recommended, including vacā, black pepper, asafoetida, neem leaves, and cinnamon. They use other substances in place of the animal products, including garlic, white śaãkhapuùpi,241 and hot chili. Fumigation is administered on the premises of his clinic by his trained staff. He also prescribes emesis or induced vomiting (vamana) in which the patient expels the offending bhūta after drinking a concoction of goat’s milk, white śaãkhapuùpī, and a few other unnamed


herbal substances (this concoction is used by several vaidyas in Kerala), oil massage (a specialty of Kerala āyurveda), and, if necessary, mantravidyā, in which case he refers the patient to Kumaraswami Nambudiripad. If Mr. Nambudiripad or certain other members of his family who are privy to the meticulously protected family secrets deems mantravidyā to be advisable, they will counsel the victims and prescribe for them certain kinds of medicated ghee that help eliminate the bhūta. In the āyurvedic idiom employed by Vaidyamadham and Kumaraswami, drinking ghee (snehapānam) and inducing vomiting (vamana) are effective therapies for unmāda because they “boost buddhi [intelligence].” They manufacture their ghee-based medicines themselves and subsequently potentiate them by offering them to their deities, Bhagavatī (Durgā) and Gaâapati, with mantras known only to them. Only then are they dispensed to their clients. In fact, irrespective of whatever ritualizing they might enact on the patient, their main form of mantravidyā is empowering these medicines with mantras. I asked both Narayanan Nambudiri and Kumaraswami Nambudiripad whether their mantravidyā and practices of exorcism derive from the ĪŚP or other similar tantric compendia that were composed in Sanskrit long ago in Kerala. They had heard of this and other similar texts, including the (Viùa-)Nārāyaâīya, and knew, vaguely, that they contained mantras and instructions on possession and exorcism. However, they had not read any of them. Because of the secrecy of their traditions, I have no way of knowing whether their mantras resemble those found in these texts. I can only conjecture that the tradition of employing mantravidyā in exorcism remains unbroken in Kerala and that this tradition has always allowed considerable flexibility and variation, but with only a small number of survivals into the past few generations. Kumaraswami Nambudiripad, as well as members of an unrelated family of Nambudiris from Poomkutil Mannā near Manjeri, in Mallapuram District, about fifty difficult kilometers away, state that they learned their mantravidyā and associated healing practices from their forefathers through direct observation and instruction, not from books or Sanskrit manuscripts.242 Kumaraswami, as suggested, is not the recipient of any immediate Sanskrit tradition. He regards himself as a mantravādin, not a tāntrika. In Kerala, he explained, tāntrikas perform temple ritual with the help of Tantras and Āgamas. He hails from one of four Nambudiri families of mantravādins ritually affiliated with the Mookambika goddess temple of Kannur, in


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northern Kerala. Not all four families, he says, actively practice mantravāda. Mantravādins specialize in treatments that require personal attention outside the temple. These treatments need not be based on known śāstra. On Sundays, he says, more than a hundred people come to his Mannā for treatment of bhūt-bādhā. The mannā itself is picturesque, consisting of a large family house at the bottom of a long driveway sloping down from the main road. Next to it is a well-maintained temple. These are surrounded by several acres of lush and well-tended fruit trees, with one prominent pipal tree in the front yard, which, says Kumaraswami, houses a chāttan. This is a spirit indigenous to Kerala. All my informants agree that this is a class ( gaâa) of bhūtas, specifically a janglī bhūta (primitive, undomesticated jungle spirit).243 Among the symptoms of harassment by a chāttan are rocks falling inexplicably on one’s roof or large amounts of hair found in one’s food (specifically in bāl). A chāttan is also explained as “a force, something like a yakùa.” It is not always malevolent and could even be protective if regularly and properly appeased, which, it is said, is accomplished by leaving votive offerings for it at a shrine constructed beneath certain large trees. In addition, certain people are called chāttans. They are most often depicted as members of backward classes who are short, dark, and demonic in a modest, nonfatal manner. They practice chāttan upāsana, meaning that they are possessed by a chāttan and practice chāttan jādu (black magic associated with a chāttan). However, even Nambudiris are capable of performing chāttan upāsana. In Thrissur District live several chāttan ma•has or extended houses of people, mostly related, who are trained through family or lineage tradition in ritual appeasement of chāttans by making offerings at their shrines. Although leaving votive offerings beneath trees appears to be a simple matter, it is not so simple that any untrained person can do it. Another person informed me that his father once called in a Nambudiri from Kāttumatan Mannā to perform chāttan sevā, as the Nambudiris call it. His father believed that he was being bothered by a chāttan, as his businesses were going bad and illnesses were occurring in the family. Kumaraswami’s clients report that they are afflicted by enemies, ancestral spirits (pitós), and chāttans. When they come to him, he recites simple mantras, most of them inaudibly, talks to the client, ties a black string around the wrist—a protective device that lasts several months before it weathers away, and, as mentioned above, gives medicated and ritually empowered medicinal ghee. Most referrals are through astrologers (jyotiùī), but some come from


vaidyas, such as Vaidyamadham. Kumaraswami says he knows only pratihāra (exorcism), mantra, and other procedures that “strike against” invasive beings; he does not claim to know medicine or astrology. Vaidyamadham Nambudiri and Kumaraswami Nambudiripad also accept clients referred from astrologers. I therefore contacted a few highly recommended practitioners of this ubiquitous South Asian art form in Coimbatore and Kozhikode. Astrology and priesthood have had a long association in India,244 as have astrology and medicine, especially in South India. One of the convergences is textual. Perhaps the most important text of praśna or horary astrology (see Chapter 11), at least in Kerala, is the Praśnamārga (PrMā). The twelfth chapter of this complex text discusses the influence of the planets on health. Most of the chapter (verses 18–62) is dedicated to a discussion of unmāda and apasmāra. Verses 18–20 divide disease (roga) into the two familiar divisions of nija and āgantuka. Nija diseases may be either physical (śarīrottha) or mental (cittottha), while those classified as āgantuka are unnatural, though they may be born of either visible or invisible causes (dóù•ādóù•animittajān). The PrMā then describes the astrological configurations in a person’s natal horoscope (kuâbali) that indicate mental dysfunction. Space limitations prevent the discussion of the astrological significations here; I can only note that if a critical mass of discord exists between the planets, houses, and signs that govern one’s mind, emotions, general state of well-being, social capacities, and tendencies toward conflict, then mental or emotional instability of the visible (dóù•a) type results. If these conditions are not met, and there is still instability, then the unmāda must be judged to be the work of obstructive spirits (bādhakagrahasambhavān; 12.24d). The PrMā and its commentaries link planetary discord with emotional instability, untoward life-style choices, curses (śāpa-), black magic (abhicāra-), and other kinds of incidental decline, including social ostracism, into a fully evidentiary and cross-referenced whole, which is to say as consistent with the general presentation of astrology as a tightly woven epistemological or śāstraic system.245 According to my āyurvedic informants in Kerala and Coimbatore, the AH recommends astrology as an adjunct to Āyurveda. Their authority for this is AHSū 1.31c, which suggests that healing is facilitated when the planets are congenial ( graheùv anuguâeùu). This is widely quoted as a justification for employing astrology as a diagnostic tool.246 The PrMā (12:34a–c) describes the causes of unmāda in language familiar from the āyurvedic texts: excessive joy, desire, fear, grief, eating forbidden or unclean food, and the wrath of the gods and gurus. After breaking down


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the symptoms of unmāda according to the afflicted doùa, the PrMā describes possession by a devagraha in familiar terms, but does not name other grahas. Instead, the text personifies as female grahas a dozen symptoms of seizure (apasmāra, 12.53–54): Śvāsanā (Gasping), Malinā (Dirtying), Nidrā (Sleep), Jómbhikā (Yawning), Anaśanā (Not Eating), Trāsinī (Fear), Mohinī (Enchantress), Rodanī (Weeping), Krodhanī (Anger), Tāpanī (Excitable), Śoùaâī (Dryness), and DhvaÅsinī (Destructress). Throughout this section the PrMā prescribes different kinds of medicated ghee, including pañcagavya, and various kinds of sacrifice and homa. Most of these are to be administered only by qualified āyurvedic physicians and tantric ritual specialists. One ritual, however, deserves special praise in the PrMā: the mótyuñjaya homa (13.36–39). This consists of a simple burnt offering of rice, black sesame seeds, and other uncooked grains, roots, fruits, and so on, with the socalled mahāmótyuñjaya mantra, the mantra that “conquers death.” This is perhaps the most commonly recited mantra for homa in India. The mantra, oá tryàmbakam yajāmahe sugandhím puù•ivárdhanam | urvārukám iva bándhanān mótyór mukùīya m6mötāt| (We make offerings to Tryambaka (Rudra), the fragrant, increaser of prosperity; like a cucumber from its stem, from death may I be loosened, not from immortality) (ñV 7.59.12, TS 1.8.6.2, etc.).247 The PrMā 13.36ab states that this ritual should be practiced to pacify all diseases, especially sharp fever (tīvrajvara) and those brought on by black magic (abhicāra; 13.37), a category in which most spirit possession generally abides. This belief, as mentioned earlier, continues to the present day, as Dwyer’s survey at Bālājī attests. In Kerala, this takes the form of kaiviùa, a Malayalam compound meaning “poison from someone’s hand” (Mal. kai [hand]; Skt. viùa [poison]). In this form of abhicāra, a poison that is said to bring on unmāda or apasmāra is given surreptitiously to a person to drink or swallow, often with milk. The poison may be an ensorcelled hair, iron powder, aconite, or an insect’s body. Thus, the PrMā, standing outside the textuality of Āyurveda and Tantra, at least formally if not practically, actively invites the participation of experts in these two allied bodies of knowledge to treat what is to this text primarily astrological affliction.248

Diagnosing Possession Beyond astrology, and beyond our concern with practices in Kerala, it is relevant to ask how is nija unmāda (mental illness with traceable physiolog-


ical or psychological origins) distinguished from āgantuka unmāda (mental illness believed to be the result of possession)? In the case of nija unmāda, the vaidya takes a case history and undertakes a medical evaluation. In most cases, the cause is readily acknowledged: family problems, a death in the family, financial pressure, a life-threatening illness. The usual problems are depression and anxiety, as elsewhere in the world, and the unmāda is usually diagnosed as a vāta affliction and treated accordingly. The tool most commonly employed for diagnosing āgantuka unmāda is observation. What vaidyas look for is abrupt and specifically defined behavioral change. However, this is not usually accepted as the final word, as most vaidyas try to verify these findings by taking a detailed case history and initiating a full medical evaluation. Never, to the best of my knowledge, except at last-resort places that specialize in exorcism, such as Bālājī, is there an assumption of possession. Besides observation, the diagnostic tools ordinarily used to check for āgantuka unmāda are pulse diagnosis, urinalysis, and the detection of physical signs of different families of spirits. For example, Clifford reports, “If the brightness of the eyes has deteriorated, if there are changes in the blood vessels in the whites of the eyes, if there are very small black dots on the whites of the eyes, or if the eyes look blurred or scratched, these are all signs of possession by a kingly or royal spirit (rgyal-po).”249 With respect to pulse, according to some of my informants in Pune, one should stare at the third eye of the patient, then take one’s own pulse. If the radial pulse is strongest, the unmāda is judged to be nija; if the ulnar pulse dominates, it is believed to be spirit possession (bhūtonmāda); if the medial artery pulse is dominant, then the unmāda is said to be caused by possession by an ancestral spirit (pitógraha). The urinalysis procedure reported by the same vaidyas is as follows. First, fill a cup with the patient’s urine. Then carefully place at the center of the urine one drop of sesame oil. If the oil flows to the south, then the unmāda is caused by a malevolent spirit, to the east by a devagraha, to the west by an animal spirit, but if it flows to the north then it is regarded as internal (nija). This procedure, called tailabindu-parīkùā (examination through a drop of oil), is related to a divinatory technique of urinalysis described in an eighteenth-century text called Yogaratnākara (YR), which is an excellent example of the integration of Āyurveda with tantric principles.250 The practice described to me in Pune is not found in the YR, but it appears to emerge out of a body of practice that is old and gave rise to the practices described in the YR. The passage in question is contained in the first chapter of the


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YR, in a section called mūtraparīkùā (examination of urine). It will be instructive to give a near-verbatim account of the passage, because it illustrates the manner in which divination has been accepted in a medical work of the past few centuries. This is given neither to discount nor to accept the findings of the text and derivative practices, but to note that principles of a very different scientific paradigm were applied. In the last hour of the last part [yāma] of the night, a vaidya should collect the urine and store it in a glass [kācamaya] vessel. He should then examine it after sunrise. The first part of the stream of urine should not be used, but the middle part of the stream should be collected. Only in this way can the vaidya determine the cause of the illness and its remedy. One should then take a drop of oil with a blade of grass and carefully place it in the middle of the vessel of urine. If the oil spreads, the disease is curable. If it does not spread, then the disease is difficult to cure. If it floats randomly on the surface, then the disease is incurable. If it flows to east, good health will be restored quickly. Movement to the south indicates a fever that will subside only gradually. If it flows to the north, a cure is definite. Movement of the oil to the west indicates happiness and health. If it flows to the northeast, then the patient will die in one month. If it flows to the southeast or southwest or if it breaks up, death is inevitable. If it flows to the northwest, then the patient will die even if treated with the best medicines [sudhā]. The same is true if it outlines the form of a plow, a tortoise, a buffalo, a beehive, a headless man, a part of an arm or leg, a weapon, an axe, a wooden pestle or spear, an arrow, a mace, or a crossroad with only three roads. In such cases it is better to do nothing at all. If it takes the shape of a goose, a duck, a pond [tābāga], a lotus, an elephant, a chowrie [cāmara], an umbrella, an arch, or a mansion, then good health will definitely be restored. If the drop of oil wanders aimlessly, there is possession by a family member [kuladoùa] or a spirit [pretadoùa]. If it resembles a human being or two skulls [mastakadvayam], there is possession by a bhūta [bhūtadoùa] and bhūtavidyā should be applied. If it takes the shape of snake, the condition is due to vāta aggravation. If it takes the shape of an umbrella, the condition is due to pitta aggravation. If it takes the shape of pearls, the condition is due to kapha aggravation.251

In addition to the fumigants and varieties of medicated ghee prescribed for alleviation of bhūtonmāda, some vaidyas in Maharashtra prescribe bhas-


ma or ash from incinerated emerald (pannabhasma) or from the nine gems (navaratna) associated with the planets.252 Emerald is associated with the planet Mercury, which in astrology is associated with the mind. Thus, in astrological thought, an infusion of emerald in its subtlest form, alchemically produced bhasma, is believed to strengthen the influence of Mercury and, consequently, the mind.253 I am unable to find a prescription for this in any āyurvedic text. However, Indian alchemical literature of the last three hundred years has been insufficiently researched.254 I should add that these prescriptions do not appear to be followed in Kerala, where the physicians inform me that they do not use such bhasmas. However, the most consistent statements on the application of pulse and urinalysis for diagnosis of possession come from Tibetan sources. Clifford states that these are not found in the Gyu-zhi. Her sources, rather, were contemporary practitioners, who probably learned these from other texts and from oral tradition. The most likely source is a series of thangkas that is used as a textbook, along with copious written and oral commentary, in Tibetan medical colleges.255 Three of the thangkas depict (among other things) divinatory diagrams that appear within the larger maâbalas that constitute the thangkas themselves. These smaller diagrams are circles trisected vertically and horizontally, thus yielding nine divisions, the central one being a square.256 To produce this maâbala or yantra, a circle is inscribed on a small mobile object, possibly a glass or copper plate. On this, the grid is created by placing four thin sticks one-third of the way into the circle from both sides, the top, and the bottom. The resulting nine sections are imagined as a turtle lying on its back, with its head toward the north, as a mirror of male urine, and as a turtle sitting right side up, with its head toward the south, as a mirror of female urine. The nine partitions represent the residence of sadak (sa-bdog; ground-owner demons), said to come from the Bön tradition.257 The center represents the self. Surrounding it, clockwise from the northeast corner are, in the case of the upside-down turtle, the ground-owner demons represented as gods (lHa), ancestors (pha-mes), cremation ground demons (dur-sa), house demons (khang), field demons (shing), progeny (bu-tsha), ghosts ( gDon), and humans (mi). In the case of the right-side-up turtle, they are, from the northeast, cremation ground demons, ancestors, gods, humans, ghosts, progeny, field demons, and house demons. The category at the center, namely, self, requires explanation. According to the Fundamentals of Tibetan Medicine, a widely used handbook, this represents “a spirit associated with a person with whom the patient is


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emotionally close, although not necessarily friendly.”258 This yantra is then placed over a bowl of urine. If a bubble that looks like a fisheye appears in the urine and settles beneath one of the partitions, then the identity of the invading spirit becomes known.

Conclusions: Notes on the Textuality of Āyurveda The recognition of disease-producing spirit possession in South Asia has an epochal history of more than three thousand years and an equally epic variation and complexity. It can be traced from the Atharvaveda, where unmāda was first discussed, to the early canonical texts of Caraka, Suśruta, and Vāgbha•a, where diagnostics and treatment modalities were more formally discussed. Contemporaneous with these texts, it is discussed in the Mahābhārata and Buddhist medical treatises. From these sources it was dispersed to a variety of Tantras and āyurvedic texts beginning in the late first millennium and finally drifted into dharmaśāstra and astrological literature. It will come as no surprise, then, that, given this deep history, the idea of negative, invasive spirits has not ceased in India. Rather, under the influence of thousands of years of new religious movements and sociopolitical formations, as well as updated scientific notions, it has been reconfigured and reintroduced in recent medical and paramedical texts, the latter represented by Tantras composed in the past few centuries. One of the chief characteristics of this history has been a flow of ideas on bhūtavidyā and bhūtonmāda from educated elites who control texts into the popular imaginaire and, conversely, from popular, non-Brahman, culture into texts. The juxtaposition of and exchange between classical and folk is, in fact, nowhere more evident than in the area of bhūtavidyā. It appears from the material presented copiously in the preceding pages that the banishment of the subaltern from much of classical discourse is a thin and tenuous construction or, perhaps more generously, an artifact of orthodox conditioning within the minds of both classical Indian and modern Western-trained scholars. One of the dynamic aspects of bhūtavidyā, the dialectic between continuity and change, is the identity of possessing entities. The vedic literature recognizes an array of such beings, most of them male, including the gandharva, nāga, siddha, sādhya, vipra, yakùa, rākùasa, piśāca, and yātudhāna. Only rarely are female possessors mentioned in the Vedas, notably the apsaras, the wife of the gandharva. Many of these appear to be early instances


of Sanskritization, imported into the pantheon of vedic deities as minor but essential players in a sumptuous cosmogony. Contemporaneous with the latter phases of the vedic period, the second half of the first millennium b.c.e. or perhaps a few centuries later, an alternative genus of female possessors appears to have been imported from popular culture into the MBh and the early canonical āyurvedic texts.259 These were the bālagrahas (childsnatchers) who attacked and possessed pregnant women and children. They were much more malevolent and far less playful and Sanskritic than the male grahas who preceded them in the literary record. Most grahas found in the bhūtavidyā sections of the āyurvedic texts, the Bower manuscript, the ĪŚP, the Madanamahārâava, and, to a lesser extent, the ethnographies of Varanasi and the Maldives are male and described by their personalities. It is as if they have life histories that can be deciphered through their names and literary contexts. By contrast, the grahas of the MBh, the pediatric sections of the āyurvedic texts, and, to a great extent, those represented in popular culture, are female, usually demonesses known only by their names, with little discernible life history, such as Mukhamaâbikā and Lohitāyanī (MBh).260 The more general terms found in modern Indian culture, such as the bhavānī and the cubail, signify categories of demoness, rather than historically situated ones. This representation in popular culture is, however, consistent with the earliest vedic literature and with a number of intermediate genres in which minor goddesses are given much less definition than male gods or demigods. Also evident in the modernization of the texts is an updating that has taken a turn perhaps unexpected by Caraka. It is clear, as Meulenbeld has pointed out, that Caraka and Suśruta attempted to forge an empirical medical system, in part by expunging from their texts material from the AV and its supporting literature, such as the Kauśikasūtra, that was viewed as unscientific or otherwise opposed to the system that they were attempting to construct. However, with the rise of Tantra and the application of astrology to nonritual, personal situations, a good deal of material from these increasingly defined bodies of knowledge was adopted into āyurvedic literature and the discourse of āyurvedic practice, as the medical textuality of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries testifies. The tantric and astrological literature differs considerably from that associated with the AV and could not have been derived from it in any significant way. Rather, the infusion of textual elements of Tantra and astrology into medical texts, as well as the reverse, an infusion of medical textuality, including extensive passages on bhūtavidyā, into texts on astrology, Tantra, and karmavipāka, indicates a blurring of


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boundaries between these genres in the past five hundred years. Thus, Āyurveda has, in a limited and updated manner, come full circle. Caraka and Suśruta might not approve, but the project of scientizing and sanitizing, as well as the introduction of Tantra and astrology into Indian popular culture have afforded them access into the expansive domain of Āyurveda. The evidence from Kerala, with its history of intertextuality and the overlapping concerns of vaidyas, mantravādins, and jyotiùīs, appears to resist the notion that the rise of Western educational models, the ascendance of allopathic medicine, a national āyurvedic curriculum, and an increasing reliance on text rather than apprenticeship as authoritative,261 could end the diagnosis and treatment of exogenous mental illness any time soon.

Notes 1. The composition was cumulative, dating from the second or third century b.c.e. to the fourth or fifth century of the Common Era. For a summary of the evidence see Wujastyk 1998:39–41. For a more precise dating of the core of the text to 50–150 c.e. and exhaustive evidence for this date, see Meulenbeld HIML IA:105– 115 and references. 2. Caraka-sūtrasthāna (CaSū) 11.54, Caraka-vimānasthāna (CaVi) 8.87; also Aù•āãgasaÅgraha-sūtrasthāna (ASaÅSū) 12.3; and HārītasaÅhitā 3.2.3 for variants daivapathāśraya and yuktipathāśraya. On the word sattvāvajaya, see Murthy and Singh 1987, Shankar and Unnikrishnan 2004:168, and note 221 below. 3. None of my informants knew the textual source of this verse, and I am unable to trace it. However, for a number of similar passages in Purāâas and Smótis see Thite 1982:17–18. One vaidya told me that it is from a karmavipākaprāyaścitta, or section on “expiation of ripened karma,” found in various Tantras and Dharmaśāstra texts. For more on karmavipāka, see the discussion below on the Madanamahārâava. 4. Daiva, lit. “divine,” from deva, “deity,” has the extended (and usual) meaning “fate.” See CaŚā 1.116: “Action that a person performs in a previous body is known as daiva. In time this also becomes the cause of diseases”; also CaŚā 2.44: “That which is done in a previous birth is called daiva, while whatever action [karma] is seen in the present birth is called pauruùa. That which is seen to be unbalanced is the cause of the onset [of disease], while that same thing brought into balance is the cause of its cessation.” Thus, daiva is contrasted with pauruùa (human), from puruùa (man or person); cf. CaVi 3.33–34. 5. Scant mention is made of sattvāvajaya, following the āyurvedic texts themselves. 6. Engler 2003:438 translates this as “science of demonic seizures.” This is a misunderstanding of the term. 7. See Kleinman and Seeman (1998:237–252), who show, through comparative analysis, that religious healing is a form of moral practice. They write: “Calculations


of locally defined utility, construction of self and cosmology, and the micro-politics of local social life are all central to healing as moral practice” (p. 251). This assertion is abundantly supported by the āyurvedic and folk texts and practices presented in this chapter. 8. For example, CaCi 9.33:93–94. Zysk (1985:63) translates this as “accidental” and distinguishes it from madness caused by external agents such as gods, sages, deceased ancestors, and a variety of demons. My reading is that the latter are the primary agents of āgantuka unmāda. Zysk states the general theme as follows: Causes of diseases are not attributed to physiological functions, but rather to external beings or forces of a demonic nature who enter the body of their victim and produce sickness. The removal of such malevolent entities usually involved an elaborate ritual, often drawing on aspects of the dominant local religion and nearly always necessitating spiritually potent and efficacious words, actions and devices. . . . The Vedic Indian’s attitude toward disease, therefore, was dominated by the belief that evil spirits, demons and other malevolent forces invade the body and caused their victims to exhibit a state of dis-ease. (p. 8)

See Zysk 1991:15 for another similar assertion. 9. Dash and Kashyap 1980:1. These authors, following §obarānanda (hence the intellectual lineage of Suśruta), divide Āyurveda into ādhyātmika dunkha (śārīraka and mānasika), ādhibhautika dunkha, and ādhidaivika dunkha, employing familiar Indic hermeneutical categories. 10. For convenient summaries see, e.g., Keith 1925:231–242; Oldenberg 1988:131–134. Bhattacharyya 2000 supplies much more detail in his diffuse and irregularly documented study of bhūtavidyā; see esp. ch. 2 on “Vedic Demonology.” I cannot here enter into all the detail Bhattacharyya discusses, because the nature of the present project is to discuss only those bhūtas that are involved in possession, rather than all manner of vedic bhūtas. 11. Cf. also Chāndogya Upaniùad (ChU) 7.1.4, 7.2.1, 7.7.1. The best accounts of bhūtavidyā are Filliozat 1937 and Śukla 1985. Filliozat’s remarkable work provides a succinct introduction to the topic (p. 24–28) and tracks bhūtas through a stunning array of texts, languages, and cultures. Śukla contains more data than anyone else, except Bhattacharya 2000, but he organizes it much more effectively. I do not here address postcolonial interpretations or what Langford calls the “narrative of decline,” in which Āyurveda has been subjected to a secularization process. As part of this narrative, bhūtavidyā has been regarded by many indigenous scholars and physicians dedicated to discovering modern science in ancient knowledge as superstition or psychotherapy, and bhūtas as microorganisms such as fungi, bacteria, and viruses; see Langford 2002:85ff. and notes. 12. Cf. Śāãkhāyana Góhyasūtra (GS) 4.9.3, Āśvalāyana GS 3.4.2; cf. also Pāraskara GS 2.12.2. 13. Dhaky 1984:240. His interpretations are often far-fetched, but he may be right to take bhūtas back to their roots in the elements, the bhūtas or mahābhūtas.


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He posits bhūtas as “elementals” and bhūtanāyakas as “captains of the elementals.” Cf. MBh 9.44.74–108; Matsyapurāâa 53.1–46, 182.64–66, for physical features and other details of gaâas, gaâanāyakas, and gaâeśvaras. The elements—earth, water, light, air, sky—have bhūtas and gaâas (clans or tribes of the divine retinue) as their representatives, their symbols of noumenal and phenomenal reality. 14. yás ta ūrX viháraty antar6 dámpatī śáye | yóniÅ yó antár āré{hi tām itó nāśayāmasi || (He who opens your thighs, who lies between husband and wife, who licks inside the womb; him do we cast away from here). On 10.162.4c, see Sāyaâa’s commentary, yonim antan praviśya āre{hi niùiktaÅ reto jihvayā āsvādayati, bhakùayatīty arthan. See Sharma 1972:99; also Zysk’s perspicacious rendering, 1985:51–53. 15. Mayaram 2001:215. See also, notably, Taussig 1987. 16. For example, the case of Indra, the king of the gods, who becomes disfigured and degraded because of his untoward sexual advances on respectable women, or Śiva, who destroys Dakùa’s sacrifice because of his exclusion. 17. Cf. AVŚ 3.11.1, 20.96.6. On yákùma, see Bahulkar 1994:129f.; Filliozat 1964:43f., 96; Zysk 1985:12–17. 18. On the pravargya, see van Buitenen 1968; Houben 2000. 19. Āpastamba ŚS 15.19.4; Bhāradvāja ŚS 11.19.12; cf. Baudhāyana GS 3.7.27,28. 20. Āyurveda is often considered an upāãga or upaveda of the AV; cf. e.g., Śukla 1985, in Sanskrit, intro. p. 10; cf. e.g., Aù•āãgah ódaya SaÅhitā (AH) 5.84; Aù•āãgasaÅgraha (ASam) 7.118cd: daivavyāpāśrayaÅ tadvad atharvoktaÅ ca pūjitam. However, Wujastyk notes, “such medical material as is recoverable from the Vedic literature is remarkable more for its differences from classical āyurveda than for its similarities. . . . Of course there are some points of contact, but the overall sense is that, culturally speaking, āyurveda comes from somewhere else” (1998:17). Wujastyk’s translation of this chapter of the AH (ibid.:294–301) is the clearest exposition of its kind yet published. See also Meulenbeld: “In my opinion, Caraka’s list of sages, many of whom are known from Vedic literature, may have been inserted in order to stress the connection between āyurveda and the Vedic tradition, the orthodoxy of its teachings, and its association with the brāhmaâa” (HIML IA:10). 21. See also the commentary by Sāyaâa, cited in Whitney 1905:1:17. 22. Cf. Kauśikasūtra 28.9 for a linked remedial rite against possession by evil spirits. The commentary on the KauśSū explains that this rite is a mahāśānti called gāndharvī; cf. Bahulkar 1994:159f.; Whitney 1905:I:211. 23. See Zysk 1985:52 and, especially, Bahulkar 1994:126f. for the ritual and pharmacological prescriptions of the KauśSū and the commentary of Dārila, as well as a summary of scholarly opinions on the hymn. The hymn itself, AVŚ 2.25, is addressed to a póśniparâH, a “spotted leafed” plant, which was used to help redress the condition. 24. agna . . . sa gráhyān p6śān vi cóta prajānán. Cf. Bloomfield 1894:cxix ff., 1897:521 ff. 25. This is a much recognized and discussed aspect of healing traditions in ancient India. See, e.g., Bahulkar 1994 and Zysk 1985 for extensive discussions of this.


26. Beyer (1973:100) describes a Tibetan ritual in which the yogin makes a wax effigy into which he subjugates an enemy—a king or a demon are mentioned—by visualizing and bringing it into the effigy, which he then torments over flames and tramples. 27. Shukla 1980:135ff. and infra. 28. Zysk 1985:62. 29. Ibid.:63, Sanskrit words added. 30. Cf. AH 6.6.55cd: “One should examine the patient for supernatural possession. The signs which were earlier described as applying to madness appear exaggerated” (trans. in Wujastyk 1998:301). 31. Sanderson 1985:213n89. 32. Ibid.:200. 33. Ibid.:211n69. 34. Ibid.:211–212n69, abhiniveśam is translated as “obsession.” Sanderson notes a further symbolic or, from the Indian point of view, adhyātmika reading in Jayaratha’s commentary. 35. Bahulkar 1994:160; his translation of amati- is “unconsciousness,” but this does not quite fit the context. 36. Weiss 1977. This remains unpublished, though the author is now preparing it for publication. For a comprehensive bibliography of works on unmāda, see Meulenbeld, HIML IB:65n93. 37. Cf. Weiss: “The object of the present study is to gain an understanding of the psychiatric conceptual formulations of the early Indian medical authors in the light of Western nosology, and our interest in therapeutics is limited to the extent to which it serves to elucidate the diagnostic categories” (1977:3). 38. Meulenbeld 1997:186–198. 39. One of the primary alleged causes of abhiùaãgaja disease is abhicāra (cf. Türstig 1985); that is, a bhūta that “sticks to” (abhiùaãga) a person is regarded as abhicāraja, sent by a hired sorcerer to possess the person. Cf. Dwyer 1998 and Chapter 4, note 35, and above p. 517f. 40. Lewis 1966:308 (reprint 1986:24). 41. Sanskrit lexicographers also acknowledge bhūtāveśa; cf. Trikāâbaśeùa 3.230 and Hemacandra’s AnekārthasaÅgraha 4.161. The Rasaratnasamuccaya (5.2, 6.7), a thirteenth-century medical text prescribes a bhūtāveśapraśānti (procedure for pacifying possession by bhūtas). For further attestations of bhūtāveśa and piśācāveśa (and variants), see Kalhaâa’s Rājataraãgiâī (c. 1150) 8.114.6 and the late dramas Vasantatilaka (c. 1800) 25.19 and Amótodaya (1710) 3.7, 3.18. Synonymous with āveśa is upahata (struck, afflicted); thus, also attested in the lexicons are bhūtopahata (afflicted by bhūtas); bhūtopahatacitta (the mind possessed by bhūtas); and, of course, the antidote, assuming the former: bhūtapratiùedha (warding off bhūtas). 42. Other texts, many of them now lost, existed in both periods. See Meulenbeld HIML IA:689ff. (and notes), for a discussion of ancient authorities cited by Caraka, Suśruta, Vāgbha•a, and their commentators, and HIML IIA:117–55 (and notes) for discussion of a number of other texts from the seventh to the eleventh centuries.


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43. Meulenbeld (HIML IA:42) calls them “character types,” which is more accurate than “mental faculty,” “psyche,” etc., used by other translators. For discussions of the category sattva, see the many sources cited in Meulenbeld HIML IIB:82n112. 44. Cf. CaŚā 4.36–39, SuŚā 4.88–98, Kāśyapa 28.8–36. 45. For additional details, see Caraka SaÅhitā, ed. Sharma and Dash:3:416– 420. 46. Cf. also Śārãgdhara SaÅhitā (composed around the beginning of the fourteenth century) 1.7.38. Meulenbeld states that this expansion represents an “incorporation of material from popular medical lore” (1997:189). 47. Thanks to Robert Svoboda, a trained āyurvedic doctor, for this information. On the relationship between bhūtas and apasmāra described in different āyurvedic texts, see Meulenbeld 1997:212–215. 48. āveśo grahadunkādyair apasmāro yathāvidhin bhūpātakampaprasvedalālāphenodgmādayan (4.31); for references in other texts on poetics and dramaturgy see Haas 1912:119. 49. Cited in Śabdakalpadruma. 50. This is discussed in the Cidambara Māhāytma, a text describing the greatness of the Na•arāja (Śiva) temple in Chidambaram, Tamilnadu; cf. David Smith 1996:222ff. 51. I present my own translations because I find that I differ with Weiss 1997 in a significant number of places. 52. In a rather different vein, see AVŚ 5.4 and commentaries, in which hrūbu, the secret name of the graha, is uttered to appease the spirit in charge of giving consumption (yákùma) or fever (takmán); cf. Zysk 1985:53. 53. One word for “comet” is upagraha; cf. MBh 3.216.1. 54. For a good brief synopsis of the evolution of the application of the word graha to the planets, see Yano 2003:380ff. 55. Cf AVŚ 19.9.7,10. See Caland 1926. Verse 10 reads: śáÅ no gráhāś cāndramas6 N śáÅ ādity6ś ca rāhúnā | śáÅ no mótyúr dhūmaketún śáÅ rudr6s tigmatejasan || (Weal for us be the planets belonging to the moon, and weal the sun with Rāhu; weal for us smoke-bannered death, weal the Rudras of keen brightness) (trans. Whitney 1905:2:914). 56. BóhatsaÅhitā 5.11; BóS 5.13 reads uparāga (darkening) for eclipse; cf. also Bhāgavata Purāna (BhP) 5.24.3. 57. I am not able to find the words āveśa or praveśa in these contexts to indicate the sun or moon becoming possessed by Rāhu or Ketu (or vice versa). Rather, these two grahas assail (abhidhāvati, BhP 8.9.26, Rāhu only) or devour ( grasati, MBh 1.17.8, again only Rāhu) their quarry, rather than “enter” or “possess” them. For references and discussion see, e.g., Bedekar 1967; O’Flaherty 1975:273–280. Although the word ketú is found as early as AVŚ 19.9.8–10, where the word appears to mean “comet,” its reconfiguration as the descending node of the moon occurs only in the early second millennium c.e.; cf. Gail 1980. 58. This is consistent with the use of √góh in BĀU 3.3.1, 3.7.1 described above.


59. For example, BóhatsaÅhitā 43.37. Cf. Bóhatparāśara 84.17–20; Kane HDh II:749 ff.; Gaur 1979; Karma•hagurun 74ff., 110ff. In the Purāâas, see, e.g., Matsya Purāna 17.56, 24.46, 93.2ff., instructions for a grahahoma. On the growing importance of astrology in India during the first millennium c.e., see Inden 1992. 60. Cf. Kātyāyana Śrautasūtra 9.14.14, Āśvalāyana Śrautasūtra 8.1.10. 61. Palsule 1967:11. On avatāra, see note 141 below. 62. Ibid.:13. 63. Lutgendorf 1991:250, 322. See also Eck 1985:38. 64. Cf. Bennett 1993. 65. On its Tamil synonym aru{, see Chapter 4, p. 128. 66. Cf. ñV 7.103.4 (anugóbhâāti), where frogs kindly receive one another; 2.28.6 (anugóbhāya), in which the supplicant implores Varuâa to accept or extend his grace to him. Cf. Kā•haka SaÅhitā 25.8, AB 7.18. 67. For dating, see Olivelle 1992:8ff. 68. manyamānau ca kaumāraÅ puùpitaÅ tadanugraham (KSS 1.2.76). 69. Devasenapathy 1983:10–11. Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya 1984:7 (cf. Honko 1998:251) speak of nigraha and anugraha in Tulunad, meaning the protective and punitive activities, respectively, of different spirits. Honko notes that the Siri epic was performed at possession rituals that were similar to bhūta rituals “with the purpose of supporting the mental health of participants with a history of illness” (p. 261). 70. On this, see Zysk 1993. 71. Eventually Āyurveda was used to confirm SāÅkhya. The SāÅkhyasaptativótti, an early commentary on the SāÅkhyasaptati of perhaps the sixth century, uses examples from Āyurveda to support its arguments. See Larson and Bhattacharya 1987:193ff. 72. For these lists, and accompanying discussions, see ibid.:59–61, 161, 177, 206, 284. Larson’s speculations linking the eight realms of the SK to the eightfold prakóti (p. 61) are thought provoking, but entirely lacking in textual support. 73. For the use of some of these categories in the Mālinīvijayottaratantra, see Vasudeva (2004:326). 74. Cakrapāâidatta glosses abhidharùaâam as āveśan and niyamavratādi as niyamety ādinā aihikaÅ karma devādyāveśakāraâaÅ brute (by niyama, etc., worldly action caused by possession [āveśa] by gods and others is indicated). The term niyamavratādi may be a reference to Yogasūtras 2.30–32. In these sūtras the five yamas ([external] restraints) (YS 2.30)—non-injury, truthfulness, abstaining from theft, sexual continence, non-covetousness—are called mahāvrata (the great vow) (YS 2.31). The niyamas ([internal] restraints) listed (YS 1.32) are cleanliness, contentment, austerity, studiousness, and devotion to Īśvara. Āyurveda and Yoga have long claimed a connection, but hitherto it has been difficult to actually find textual connections between the two, especially for the early periods. However, a sixteenthcentury text called Āyurvedasūtra, which closely links the two, was published in 1994. This late, and rather labored, sūtra collection contains within it the entire text of the YS, interspersed with material drawn from āyurvedic texts. Whereas it is fairly certain that Caraka predated YS by several centuries, it may be assumed that many


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elements of the YS were well known long before the final compilation of the sūtra text. Thus, there is no reason that the yamas and niyamas, as well as other elements of the eightfold (aù•āãga) path, which were quickly incorporated into yogaśāstra and may be found in Buddhist texts, could not have been known to Agniveśa or other compilers of the Caraka SaÅhitā. 75. This verse is adopted as a basic definition of possession in many later texts; cf., e.g., Mādhavanidānam 20.17. 76. On the evolution of the pitó in Indic thought, especially in the HarivaÅśa, see Saindon 1995. 77. One wonders about the models on which some of these categories are based. Mozart, it is reported, would suddenly burst out laughing in the middle of a conversation, jump up and down, turn somersaults, and impulsively leap over tables and chairs. 78. Often the texts do not distinguish between waxing and waning fortnights. We must assume that both fortnights are assumed unless otherwise specified. 79. aalhaâa: bhinnamaryādaÅ tyaktocitakramam abhakùyabhakùaâe agamyāgamane; abandonment of propriety, such as eating what should not be eaten or going where one should not go. 80. aalhaâa: sókkiâyau où•haprāntau. 81. aalhaâa: uddhasto vikótadarśanan (deformed or disfigured). Verses 8, 9, 13, 15, and 16 contain the word juù•an (pleased, welcomed, visited). This is a rather milder and more positive manner of speaking than Caraka’s equivalent verses: unmattaÅ vidyāt. Verses 10 and 11 read, for “possession,” paripībitan; verse 12 reads abhibhūtan; and verse 14 góhītan. 82. aalhaâa: adrin parvatan, dvirado (two-tusked) hastī, nago (non-moving) vókùan. 83. After aalhaâa, who cites the variant reading vardhakena rather than vārdhakena: vardhakena chedakena hiÅsārthinā kenacid graheâa juù•o góhīta iti vyākhyānayanti. 84. This apparently general description could also be an indication of oracular possession, which we have seen from the account of Pātañcala Kāpya and his daughter in the BĀU, was well known by then. 85. aalhaâa: the eight attributes ( guâān) are the eight siddhis: aâimā (minification), laghimā (lightness), mahimā (physical expansion), garimā (heaviness), prāptin (instant acquisition), prākāmyam (irresistable will), īśitvam (lordliness), vaśitvam (power of influence). aalhaâa also cites CaŚā 1.140, which has a different list: āveśaś cetaso jñānam arthānāÅ chandatan [or ca svatan] kriyā | dóù•in śrotraÅ smótin kāntir iù•ataś cāpy adarśanam-ity aù•avidham aiśvaryam āhun | (Possession [āveśa] of [another’s] mind, knowledge of objects according to one’s will, and [the powers of ] action, vision, hearing, memory, beauty, and invisibility, all gained in accordance with one’s desire, these, they say, are the eight kinds of majesty). aalhaâa glosses vyastan as dvitricaturan and samastān as sarve, which is to say fewer of the eight siddhis are manifested according to the power of the possessing agent. He concludes that fewer of these attributes are found in asuras, etc., and all in divinities (tatra vyastā guâā asurādigrahāâāÅ samastā devagrahāâām).


86. aalhaâa confirms that saÅviśanti refers to sexual intercourse (te devayonayo manuùyain saha na saÅviśanti). Thus, medical practitioners of the day must have encountered such claims, based, no doubt, on references in the epics and elsewhere to divinities and semidivine beings cohabiting with humans, e.g., Purūravas and Urvaśī. aalhaâa glosses āviśanti with anupraviśanti. Cf. Weiss 1977:54 for discussion of this verse. 87. “Infinite numbers,” ko•isahasrāyutapadmasaÅkhyān: ko •i, ten million; sahasra, one thousand; ayuta, ten thousand; padma, according to aalhaâa, fourteen times the multiples of the previous numbers. 88. aalhaâa asks, rhetorically, how a being who shares at least part of the essence of deities can relish blood, fat, and flesh, etc. He answers that Niróti is the grandfather of the demons (nirótī rakùasāÅ pitāÅahan), who, through their association with the deities, etc., acquired part of their natures. 89. Aruâadatta glosses: sadyan adhunātanan pūrvajanmakóto vā hetun (action performed at the present time or during a previous birth). 90. See this chapter, n. 236, for more on the continued use of this term. 91. The editor of the text cites “Candra” (Candranandana’s Padārthacandrikā): śmaśānacatvaracaityādiùu (burning ground, crossroad, or [Jain or Buddhist] funeral mound). 92. parasūtakasaãkaran, cf. Candra: strīprasavasaãkāryam; also Meulenbeld HIML IB:563n90, on this difficult term. 93. The critical text reads kāù•hāśvaÅ tathā (who mounts a wooden horse). This makes no contextual sense and at best could be an idiom (found nowhere else, so far as I am aware) for delusional sensory activity. In the absence of certainty with regard to that, however, the translation I offer is of a minority reading: kāù•nāśmarāśim, for which, compare Caraka 6.9.20(8): aśmakāù•hādhirohaâaratiÅ (who enjoys climbing on assorted heaps of garbage and walking on rags). 94. t óâachidram, lit. “one [who digs] holes in the grass”; Weiss: “who burrows in the grass” (1977: 291). Unfortunately no commentary addresses this compound. I prefer to take it metaphorically: chidra in its known meaning of “imperfection”; tóâa as “straw,” “grass,” “insignificant,” “minute,” “worthless.” 95. Aù•āãgaSam 7.2 replaces kūùmāâba with kārkhoda, but includes the kūùmāâba elsewhere. See Chapter 11, n. 97; this is surely a variant of khakhōrda. For more complete information on the kūùmāâba see Meulenbeld HIML IB:563n101. 96. The notes to the text provide several alternative readings: maukiraâa, uttaruâā, ramautkiraâa. None of these help in identification of this enigmatic graha. For other occurrences of this word see Meulenbeld HIML IIB:564n103. 97. Cf. ibid.:564n104, for a discussion of this word. Cf. KSS 73.290 for vetālānupraviù•a, and 73.292 for vetālādhiù•hita. 98. Clifford 1984:10. 99. Weiss 1977:116. 100. Ibid.:183. It may be of interest to note here that what is now regarded as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was interpreted in Europe as demonic possession and treated with exorcism until the nineteenth century, when clinicians decided


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that this condition was a disease rather than the devil’s work. Freud recommended psychoanalytic guidance to free such victims from their obsession, which he believed was the result of being torn between guilty fear and defiant rage born of draconian toilet training. One treatment to which OCD has been surprisingly responsive is prefrontal lobotomy (PFL). Since the heyday of this treatment, genetic markers for OCD have been discovered in laboratory animals, and drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft, which are selective serotonin uptake inhibitors, have become cornerstones of treatment, though PFL is still often recommended in extreme cases. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. It is important to recognize that Weiss is not the first to attempt such an analysis. His work represents significant advances over that of Sinh Jee, who wrote in 1896: “The demoniacal diseases of the Hindus are but other words for hysteria, epilepsy, dancing mania, and other disorders of the nervous system” (cited by Weiss, 1977:53–54). 103. Though see Suśruta, Śārīrasthāna 1.18 for a similar, if less-detailed, passage. See also Manu 12.40–51 for a different model of sattvas. 104. Wujastyk (1998) gives an accessible account of the contents of these texts. 105. See also Weiss 1980:105, for a discussion of sattva. He says that Ca 4.4 uses it in the sense of “personality,” but that Ca 4.3 identifies it with manas. 106. Śuddham here is equivalent to sāttvikam, characterized by sattvaguâa. 107. Weiss mentions the “insane character” (1977:34) in the Mattavilāsaprahasana, but fails to mention that the character is possessed. 108. Meulenbeld states: “Weiss tried to correlate [mental disorders according to Āyurveda] with the syndromes of Western psychiatry. In my opinion, the results of his efforts are not convincing” (1997:197). However, I also agree with Meulenbeld’s more nuanced sentiment on Weiss’s work: “I would misrepresent the basic assumptions and views of M. Weiss if I were to attribute to him a simple scheme of one-toone equivalents of Indian and Western diagnostic entities. He explicitly rejects this in theory, but, nevertheless, he often suggests it” (ibid.:192). 109. Murphy 1976:1027; cf. Weiss 1977:5. 110. Clifford 1984:xiii, 12. 111. This was the same decade that Obeyesekere published his initial studies and that Kakar (1978), Goldman (1978), Masson (1974, 1976), and others initially applied Freudian psychodynamics to Indian cultural and literary history. These studies stand out today as period pieces. Kripal 1995, discussed in Chapter 2, is much more substantive and sophisticated, though, as I pointed out there, not beyond criticism. 112. On Candranandana and his works, see Meulenbeld, HIML IA:665f. and notes; IIA:120ff. and notes. 113. See Fenner, who asserts: “All Tibetan writers have accepted the tradition that the rGyud bzhi is a translation of a Sanskrit medical book titled Amótahódayāù•āãgaguhyopadeśa Tantra” (1996:458). This text needs to be found and checked, as there is much in Fenner’s article that is questionable. It is not mentioned at all by Meulenbeld in HIML. For a good discussion contextualizing the Gyu-zhi, see Obermiller 1989.


114. For an outline of the entire text, see Clifford 1984:237–241. 115. Ibid.:148. 116. Ibid.:149. 117. Ibid.:151–152. Also: “‘Ghosts’ and ‘evil spirits’ are not regarded simply as the projections of an unhealthy mind. For although they arose from projections, they are said to be real in a relative sense. That is, they have to be dealt with” (p. 159). Along the same lines, she states: “Two predominant themes emerge in the Dharma view of ‘demons.’ One, from the level of absolute truth, they do not exist. Like everything else, they have no self-nature. Two, from the level of relative truth, they have conditioned existence. One should protect oneself from their negative influence” (p. 161). 118. Ibid.:214. Heinroth’s most famous work was Störungen des Seelenlebens (Disorders of the Soul, 1818). Heinroth was the first to use the term “psychosomatic” to describe the connection between the psyche and the body. 119. Clifford 1984:219. 120. Ibid. On the relationship between emotional and humoral imbalance, see Meulenbeld 1997:208–209. 121. Indeed, Clifford repeatedly defends Buddhist positionings. I look forward to a more perspicacious approach to cross-cultural, particularly Buddhist, psychology. Clifford’s effort may be compared to Vogt 1999, discussed in Chapter 4, in that the point of reference for both is abhidharma and that neither inspires confidence in their psychoanalytic expertise. In this sense, Weiss’s study is more reliable. As mentioned earlier (see Chapter 2), a more productive cross-cultural methodological exercise is Littlewood 1996. 122. Clifford 1984:167. 123. Vogt 1999:48. 124. Clifford 1984:154. 125. Ibid.:155. 126. Ibid.:176–177. 127. Ibid.:180. 128. Ibid.:177. 129. Ibid.:180. 130. Ibid.:177. 131. Ibid.:180. 132. Ibid.:184–195. 133. Ibid.:195–197. 134. Ibid.:195. 135. Nevertheless, her study would have been greatly enhanced if she had utilized Weiss’s work, which was completed several years before the publication of her book, or if she had used the published and translated āyurvedic texts as a check on her textual history. 136. For example, Lutz 1988; Lynch 1990. Recall Lutz’s argument that emotion is an “ideological practice.” 137. On this, and much more about the sources and variation of emotion, see the comprehensive study of Nussbaum, 2001:151ff., passim.


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138. This opposes Freud, who argued, at least in Totem and Taboo (1946), for the universal applicability of his system. 139. Very few studies have been conducted on the origins of any of these classifications. See, however, Mukherjee (1981) for speculations on an early group of five: pitó, gandharva, deva, asura, and rakùas. 140. In addition to those mentioned below, some Purāâas describe a certain class of beings as simply “possessors” (āveśaka); cf. VāyuP 2.8.40, ŚivaP 2.2.33.22a, SkandaP 1.2.26.42c. 141. A brief text that I cannot deal with extensively here (because I did not discover it until the present manuscript was sent off to press) is the Āviù•aceù•āvidhiparivartan (ĀCVP), “Chapter on Instructions Regarding Behavior of the Possessed,” appearing in the MahāyānasūtrasaÅgraha, Part 2, pp. 255–259. This text is taken from the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa (MMK), the exact dating of which is uncertain, but appears to have roots as early as the fourth century c.e., but was probably not fully compiled until the tenth century. This fragment, like the rest of the MMK, is presented as a dialogue between Śākyamuni and Mañjuśrī Kumārabhūta. The question Mañjusrī poses to Śākyamuni concerns the behavior of people whose bodies have been possessed by other beings, including Buddhist teachers (ārya), divine beings, mendicants, perfected spiritual practitioners, gandharvas, yakùas, rakùasas, piśācas, great serpent beings (mahoraga), and so on, whether human or nonhuman, what kinds of physical actions and symptoms of these beings are revealed by these individuals, as well as the different courses of action to be taken in such cases. Śākyamuni then delivers a discourse in 59 verses that covers two topics. The first deals with the symptoms of positive possession, describing the symptoms of auspiciousness in a person thus possessed by a deva. The second topic is a linguistic circumnavigation of India, attributing the peculiarities of speech in different parts of the subcontinent to a primal ancestor that could be identified as a yakùa, mahoraga, kinnara, piśāca, garuba, and so on, along with a caricature of the speech of these regions, in phonological detail. Thus, this text should be of interest to scholars who study the dialectology of first millennium c.e. South Asia. Also of interest is the fact that the word most commonly employed in the ĀCVP for possession is avatāra (“descent,” which we have discussed above in reference to bhakti texts), though the words āveśa and āviù•a also appear in the text. It appears then, that the ĀCVP employs demonology as a sociolinguistic trope, rendering it qualitatively different from its use in the āyurvedic and tantric literature. 142. For the full story of the discovery of the manuscripts and an accounting of the contents, see Wujastyk 1998:195ff. 143. Hoernle 1909:2:223, 227; plate 49, part 6, leaf i, Reverse. Compare this to a sixth-century manuscript fragment from Bāmiyān; cf. Ojihara 1984:308. 144. Perhaps this is identical to Vinatā, the śakunigrahan, from the MBh (3.219.26) noted earlier. 145. Cf. MBh 3.269.2, in which Pūtana is an enemy of Rāma. But this is probably the same as the Pūtanā-graha (despite the short “a” at the end of the word) from MBh 3.219.26–27.


146. Cf. AVŚ 8.6.21, ch6yaka; this hymn is meant for the protection of pregnant women and therefore precedes the notion of bālagraha in the MBh and the medical literature. This hymn contains a large number of difficult words; cf. Whitney 1905 II:493ff. Hoernle suggests “unnatural change in appearance” (1909:2:227n5) after Caraka 5.7, Suśruta 1.31: “morbid appearance” (ibid.:172n383). On chāyā-graha, see Jamison 1991:142ff. 147. Hoernle regards this problematic word as most likely an orthographic error for dustāraka (difficult to cross over), hence “evil eye” (1909:2:227n6). However, this word appears in the ĀCVP unambiguously as the name of a possessor. 148. It is not possible that in this context maruta indicates either the vedic deities known as the Maruts, or Hanumān, even as a possessing entity, one of whose names more than a millennium later was Mārutī; cf. Chapter 11, on possession of Hanumān. 149. Cf. Manu 12.71cd, amedhyakuâapāśī ca kùatriyan ka•apūtanan (a ka•apūtana is a kùatriya [spirit] that eats impure objects and corpses). Kullūka glosses amedhyakuâapāśī as purīùaśavabhojī (an excrement and corpse eater). Manu 12.71–72 contains equally horrific fates for members of other varâas who neglect their ordained duties, but for some reason kùatriyas alone were singled out here. 150. This term is still widely used in Kerala; cf. Caldwell 1999:213. 151. There is a class of tantric texts, now mostly lost, called bhūtatantras. One of them, the Totula, is quoted by Kùemarāja in his commentary on Netra Tantra 19.70. 152. This division (or variants of it) is often found in tantric texts. See, e.g., NT 19.30c–31: balikāmas tathā cānye bhoktukāmās tathāpare || ratikāmā hantukāmā vātajān pittajān pare | śleùmajān saÅnipātotthā bhūtā vividharūpakān || (Various species of bhūta, fond of sacrifice, of eating, of sex, and of killing, are produced from disorders of wind, bile, phlegm, and all three together [saÅnipātajān], respectively). The commentary on NT glosses bhoktukāmān as māÅsaraktābhilāùiâan (desirous of meat and blood). 153. Verse 1 reads hebhra. I am not able to locate this word elsewhere in Sanskrit or Prakrit. I am grateful to Robert Zydenbos for the following: “It could be a Sanskritised Dravidian word. Kannada has a word hebba, ‘a dull, stupid man, a fool’ [Kittel 1968–71:4:1755], with derived words like hebbatana / hebbu ‘stupidity, foolishness,’ and hebbā•a, ‘stupid, foolish behaviour’” (e-mail communication, February 16, 2003). It appears, then, that we can be fairly certain that hebhra was Sanskritized from this or a related South Dravidian word. See Praśnamārga, an astrological text in Sanskrit from Kerala (dealt with below), for the word hedva (15.62c), with probably the same meaning. The description could be that of spasticity or another kind of muscular or motor disorder, or, just as likely, severe mental retardation. 154. śūtkāravān (makes the sound śūt). This could also refer to whistling. 155. Dwyer reports: “As many Hindus often comment, ‘Women have a weak heart; so spirits severely attack them’” (aurato ke kamzor dil hotā hai; islīe bhūt-pret us par jyādā hamlā karte hai)” (2003:45). 156. Kane (HDh I.2:800 ff.) dates it to 1360–1390.


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157. The other important work is the VīrasiÅhāvaloka; see below, n. 248. 158. For a more extended explanation of the principles of this literature, see Nambiyar’s introduction to the Sanskrit text of the Madanamahārâava, pp. 15ff. 159. Nambiyar, in his introduction to the MM, writes: “Most of the causes are more or less connected with immorality and violation of the social customs and manners” (p. 25). For an account of karmavipāka in more canonical dharmaśāstra texts, see Rocher 1980. 160. On the problems of violence and killing in the ritual arena, see Knipe 2004: “goats and humans have identical structures and therefore goats are the best offerings to the gods. No goat is ever ‘killed,’ that is, annihilated. Rather, it is transformed by ritual speech and practice” (p. 438). See also Houben 1999; Tull 1996. 161. Cf. Taittirīya Āraâyaka II.7. This is performed before most śrauta rituals, rites of passage (saÅskāra), and other complicated brahmanical ceremonies. 162. Cf. Kane HDh IV:134ff. 163. Ashok Aklujkar has suggested to me that the reading āpastamba could be wrong, that it could be avaù•hambha, which can have the meaning “arrogant” or “resolute.” However, the text does not record a pā•habheda here, nor do the orthographic possibilities support such a reading. 164. Probably he was a ñgvedin, as he quotes the entire sūkta ñV 6.24 in his comments on the karâagraha. This sort of block quotation is unusual in Sanskritic commentarial tradition. 165. The discussion on the navagraha, probably a “new” or “recent spirit” rather than one of the nine planets, refers explicitly to a sexually transmitted disease. This spirit afflicts a man who has had sex with the wife of a friend, an ascetic, a guru, of a master. He is afflicted with a burning penis (mebhradāhī), among other things. 166. This is the view of Kātyāyana, cited by the MM. Viśveśvara Bha••a comments that the rice and ghee can be offered separately. 167. Cf. Śāãkhāyana ŚSū 9.9.5 (cf. Āśvālāyana ŚSū 8.6.13 for a slightly different application). That Viśveśvara Bha••a would know the ritual applications for this also suggests that he is a ñgvedin. 168. The Vidhānamālā (Garland of Ritual), a text probably dating to the nineteenth century, deals with this topic in much more abbreviated and bloodless fashion. Cf., e.g., VM, p. 26, for an account of the karâagrahapībāśamana-vidhānam (ritual that allays affliction by a karâagraha), p. 27, for the skandagrahapībāśamana-vidhānam (ritual that allays affliction by a skandagraha), and p. 28, for the skandāpasmārapībāśamana-vidhānam (ritual that allays affliction by a skadāpasmāragraha), and other childhood and planetary grahas. 169. Thanks to Ashok Aklujkar for this suggestion. 170. Shukla 1980:170f. For a lively but fragmentary account of a local North Indian demonology, see Kakar 1982:20-31. 171. Shukla 1980:170f. Also see Parry 1994:230f. for discussion of some of the same material. Note Parry’s statement, which we have countered often here, “that spirit possession is really an oblique aggressive strategy by which the weak and the exploited get back at those who oppress them” (p. 231). An example of a more re-


cent “orientalist” missionary who dealt with this is McClintock (1990), dealt with in Chapter 2. His detailed account of bhūtavidyā draws largely from others’ ethnographies, rather than from his own work in Pakistan in the 1980s. Thus, his account does not situate the material in a specific local tradition or geographic area. He lists five categories of bhūta among Muslims in India (and presumably Pakistan): (1) jinn (a class of beings between angels and men); (2) pari (fairy of entrancing beauty); (3) shayatin or shaitan (devils, demon hosts, fallen angels); (4) ifrit (a powerful and malignant genius, the ghosts of the wicked are sometimes so termed) (5) marid (an evil genius of the most powerful kind) (pp. 39–40). McClintock’s Christian evangelism biases his description and views of other people’s beliefs and practices; it is thus comparatively unhelpful. Although his outlook is more generous than that of Ziegenbalg in the early eighteenth century, he still does not understand academic ethnography. His main source is Crooke 1894. It is valuable that he brought together Crooke’s data in a single organized list; yet to him it serves no purpose other than to vouchsafe the indigenous people’s need for a liberating nonsuperstitious Christianity. 172. Pollock 1991:81. 173. This word is uncertain, possibly from būónā. Shukla’s transliteration is random, at best. 174. Another problematic word, possibly marua. 175. The word bīh refers to a mound on which its shrine is situated. I am grateful to Philip Lutgendorf for assisting me with these Hindi terms and their significance. For another extensive catalogue of local bhūtas and a discussion of their relations with disease, see Prabhu 1977. 176. Maloney 1980:245. 177. Maloney suggests, rather, that this is from “Buddha,” but I question this. 178. I have doubts about this etymology. 179. For these descriptions, see ibid.:242–246. 180. Ibid.:254. 181. Such numbers occur in Tantras as well. For example, see NT 19.62cd-63: “I made thirty trillion (triÅśatko•ī sahasrāâām) fearsome Vināyakas with the brightness of blazing fires from my thumb. If someone is impeded by them he will be overcome.” Cf. McHugh 2000. 182. The idea of hordes, gaâas, acting for good and ill is a persistent and powerful idea, dating from the earliest vedic texts to the adālat of Bālājī described in Chapter 4. 183. For the cakrapūjā and tantric sexual ritual, see Bharati 1965:228ff.; Marglin 1985:227f., White 2003. 184. Rāmāyaâa 3.36.20ab: krībāratividhijñānāÅ samājotsavaśālinām; cf. Pollock 1991:79, 163. 185. Ibid.:79n170. 186. Ibid.:83–84. 187. In the NP, however, this ritual of apparent fertility appears, rather oddly, in the fall, perhaps as a final opportunity for revelry before the Kashmiri winter sets in.


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188. See the translations earlier of Ca 6.9.20.8, Su 6.60.15, AH 6.4.30–34b, ĪŚP 42.22ab. 189. See the Kāśīkhaâba of the Skanda Purāâa (uttarārdha, ch. 54) and trans. Tagare (1997:28–35). See also the Piśācamocanamāhātmyam, published in 1910, which contains an introduction in Hindi describing the Piśācmocan tīrtha and its importance, the SkP chapter, the Śrīkapardīśa Stotra, and instructions for the ancestral rites to be performed at the temple tank (piśācamocane tripiâdīśrāddhavidhin). See Parry 1994:242ff. for an ethnography of an exorcism at Piśācmocan. 190. Daniel Cohen reports a phenomenon known as pretpañcāyat, modeled after the local village governing body called pañcāyat (cf. Chapter 4, on the venue for exorcism at Bālājī modeled on another judicial paradigm, the adālat). The pretpañcāyat features competition between exorcists, usually in family disputes, brother against brother. Cohen observes that the primary locus of exorcism in Varanasi is the exorcist, not any temple or specific place, including Piśācmocan. What this means in practice is that exorcisms are generally performed in the home of the client or the “office” of the exorcist, not usually in a public arena like a temple. I am grateful to Cohen for sharing with me his research and insights on the Piśācmocan temple. 191. This term is used by Dārila, in his commentary on Kauśikasūtra 25.22; cf. Bahulkar 1994:90. 192. Wujastyk 1998:212–235; cf. also Kāśyapa SaÅhitā, pp. 351–374. 193. For a fairly comprehensive discussion of bālagrahas in the major āyurvedic texts and the Agnipurāâa, see Kumar 1994:284–312. See especially p. 287, table 42, which compares the names of the bālagrahas in different texts (though without explanation). Kumar does not theorize about bālagrahas, except to enter into highly suspicious speculations on the diseases wrought by them. For example, affliction by Revatī (“Lady Opulence,” in Wujastyk’s felicitous translation) results in diarrhea, dehydration, anemia, and vitamin B deficiency; Mukhamaâbikā afflicts with “Indian Childhood Cirrhosis,” etc. (p. 304). 194. Also bhūtābhiùaãga (intimate contact with a bhūta) (Su 6.39.60; Ca 6.3.116; Bhāvaprakāśa 8.1); and bhūtopasarga (touched by a bhūta) (BhP 4.29.23). The Śabdakalpadruma cites under āveśan (1:194): bhūtādinā rogan; bhūtasaÅcāran, grahādayan (Rājanighaâ•u); āsaktin, abhiniveśan (RaghuvaÅśa 5.19). 195. tasyās tu dharma eva nivóttikāraâam uktam iti | KS kalpasthānam 6(?).3.7 (Kāśyapa SaÅhitā, p. 352). 196. To take one further example from the later āyurvedic tradition as a case in point, see Abhamalla’s Dīpikā on the varieties of bālagraha presented in the thirteenthcentury Śār ãgdhara SaÅhitā. Abhamalla states that “seizers [graha] beginning with skandas possess children” (skandagrahādayo bāleùv āviśanti). Thus, by the time of Śārãgdhara, followed by Abhamalla in the fifteenth century, graha was defined in terms of āveśa (rather than the more expected praveśa). Śārãgadhara lists twelve varieties of bālagraha: tathā bālagrahān khyātā dvādaśaiva munīśvarain | skandagrāho viśākhan syāt svagrahaś ca pitógrahan | naigameyagrahas tadvac chakunin śītapūtanā | mukhamaâbitikā tadvat pūtanā cāndapūtanā || revatī caiva saÅkhyātā tathā syāc chuùkarevatī | (1.7.189–191b).


197. On Khabgarāvaâa and the lost Khabgarāvaâabālacikitsā, see Goudriaan 1977. On Khabgarāvaâa as a form of Śiva, also called Caâbeśvara, Rudra, and Caâbāsidhārāpati (Lord of the Edge of the Fierce Sword), see Bühnemann 1999:325. On the importance of Rāvaâa in this context, see Zysk (1985:67) for discussion of the Rāvaâaproktabālācikitsāsūtra, a pediatrics text; also Filliozat (1937:159–178), on the Buddhist transformation of Rāvaâa into a peaceful king with healing powers. Filliozat’s volume is an expansion of his earlier article (1935). The Kumāratantra draws heavily from the MBh, AV, Caraka, and Suśruta, all of which Filliozat discusses in detail. The Nārāyaâīya mentioned here is undoubtedly the TantrasārasaÅgraha, known in Kerala as the Viùanārāyanīya. For this text, see below. 198. The text prescribes the manner in which the mantras are to be recited. The terms tārapūrvaÅ namo ’ntam and praâavādinamo ’ntam (beginning with oá and ending with naman) or svāhāntan (ending with svāhā) often indicate the recitation of a full mantra or series of mantras. This is irrespective of whether the mantra actually ends with naman or svāhā. Tāra is equivalent to praâava while •ha•ha indicates svāhā. 199. Cf. ĪŚP 41, p. 288. 200. On Rajasthan (and rural UP), see the video Kusum (see Chapter 4, n. 17). The healer, who was not an āyurvedic physician, gave the father of the possessed girl (Kusum) a handful of packets of an undisclosed substance with instructions to burn them regularly in front of the girl. 201. I am grateful to Vaidyamadham Cheriya Narayanan Nambudiri for this information. 202. On aù•avaidya physicians, see Zimmermann 1987:212–213, and below. 203. This sort of “hot” substance is a tantric innovation; it is not commonly offered to Śiva, generally considered a “cool” or ascetic deity. 204. For this reason neem twigs have long been a common form of toothbrush in India and are still widely used in the countryside. 205. In modern-day India, sprouts of various kinds are germinated on a small raised plot of ground inside the house as part of the ritual of the nine-day festival to the goddess (Durgāpūjā) in the month of Āśvina (September–October). It is likely that this is a very old practice. 206. Cf. Meulenbeld HIML IB:237n6. Meulenbeld does not suggest a botanical name or identification for this plant. 207. For closer examinations of the KauśSū on this, see Bahulkar 1994:109–110, Bloomfield 1897:263–264, and Zysk 1985:29–31. 208. Chapters 11–16 deal with bālagrahas and unmāda. This text is in print and can thus be compared to the account in the ĪŚP; also see Meulenbeld HIML IIA:456– 457, IIB:468–469. 209. Mother of the dark graha Rāhu, daughter of Dakùa or Kaśyapa and wife of Kaśyapa or Vipracitti; cf. MBh 1.59.12,30. 210. This bīja is exclaimed at the funeral pyre when the skull cracks and the jīva exits the body.


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211. Many of the words here (e.g., mañja, kabhbha, and •ha•ha) are incomprehensible and would be accepted for their mantric value alone were it not for the fact that this mantra reads rather differently, and more comprehensibly, in the text of the Nārāyaâīya, viz. the TantrasārasaÅgraha (pp. 158–60), demonstrating that the ĪŚP had either corrupted it or was itself in possession of a corrupt version. The mantra in the Nārāyaâīya reads: oÅ naman sarvamātõâāÅ hódayaÅ mo•aya bhañja pa•a spho•aya sphura góhâa āka•u tro•aya | evaÅ siddhiÅ jñāpayati | hara nirdoùaÅ kuru bālakaÅ bālo vā sarvagrāhīâām upakramyatu | (Om, salutations to the heart of all the Little Mothers. Crush! Break! Rip! Flash! Spring forth! Possess! āka•u [You whose pungent odor comes forth(?)]. Break apart! One should announce this clearly. O Hara, make this child faultless or let the child approach all the possessing demonesses!) (The commentator advises doubling the impv. 2 sg. forms, e.g., mo•aya mo•aya, bhañja bhañja, consistent with what we have seen in the South Indian manuscripts examined in Chapter 11.) The text continues: oÅ cāmuâbe namo divye hraÅ hrīÅ apasarantu duù•agrahān | hrūÅ tathā gacchantu guhyakān | anyatra sthāne oÅ rudro jñāpayati •ha •ha | One of the striking features of these mantras is the extensive use of retroflex consonants, e.g., ka•a, •ha•ha, tro•aya. This could be due to a brahmanical assignation of these mantras to lower-class, non-Sanskritic strata of society, in this case an assumption or recognition of Dravidian or tribal origins, as these languages have much more retroflexion than Sanskrit. For somewhat similar speculations regarding the secret speech of Himalayan tantras, see Davidson 2002:267ff. 212. Cf. the discussions in Chapter 4 of the work of Srinivas, Mumford, Pakaslahti, Dwyer, and Vogt, which provide very different models of healing processes associated with possession. 213. For a review of scholarship on the term yukti see Engler 2003:426, 428. Engler describes it as “empirically based inference,” drawing principally on CaSū 11.21–25 and arguing against its modern interpretation as scientific reasoning. 214. See F. Smith 1987 for an idea of how the vedic sacrificial rituals varied within traditions defined by affiliation with a single Śrautasūtra, such as Āpastamba or Baudhāyana. 215. The eight powers ( guâān) are probably the eight archetypal siddhis; see note 85. 216. SuUt 60.21cd: ye tv āviśantīti vadanti mohāt te bhūtavidyāviùayād apohyān|| Though Caraka says that grahas are innumerable (Ca 6.9.21.8, above, p. 490; also Su 6.60.22, above p. 492), he does not attribute the possession to lesser spirits in a hierarchy of fiends. 217. See Stephens for accounts of sex with demons as an “aspect of the more general European fixation on physical interaction with demons” (2003:14). Agreements were contractual, including the sale of one’s soul to the devil. This idea does not appear to have resonance in India, where such sexuality is more prominently formalized and medicalized. Nor did this lead to crises of belief among the Hindu clergy, as appears to have been the case among Christian clergy in Europe. 218. This is not so far-fetched as it may seem at first glance. See Slater 2003 on


the work of the psychologist David Barlow of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. Slater writes: Barlow’s method for treating anxiety disorders is surprisingly simple, although its philosophical and clinical implications are anything but. He aims to reduce anxiety not by teaching customary relaxation techniques involving calming mantras or soothing imagery, but by doing just the opposite: forcing the patient to repeatedly face his most dreaded situation, so that, eventually, he becomes accustomed to the sensation of terror. Barlow claims he can rid some people of their symptoms in as little as five to eight days. His treatment promises to be psychotherapy’s ultimate fast track, but while many clinicians praise its well-documented results, others take a dimmer view of what one clinician calls “torture, plain and simple.” (p. 34)

There can be little doubt that the extreme forms of psychological treatment recommended by Caraka et al. were as controversial in their day as Barlow’s are today, testifying, at the very least, to the composite nature of the āyurvedic compendia. 219. CaCi 6.9. 31cd: vismóter hetor nayanti prakótiÅ manan; cf. also 6.9.79–98. 220. On daivavyapāśrayacikitsā, see, in addition to the above, AHCi 1.171, 5.83–84; ASaÅSū 9.76; cp. Hārīta 3.3.2–3. Rasaratnasamuccaya 22.60–69; Chattopadhyaya 1979:314–320. 221. It is also possible that this term referred to internal practices, such as yoga, which do not require priestly or other formal mediation. Neither Caraka nor Suśruta mentions yogic or Buddhist practices, to which sattvāvajaya might refer. Such practices might have been expunged from these texts in an attempt to enhance their scientific credibility. Their empiricism would have admitted observable or inferred phenomena, which to them included at least some ritual, use of gemstones, etc. By the same token, possession was admitted as a valid category, legitimated by repetition of characteristic behavior. For the same reason, sattvāvajaya, which must have been an inherited category with which they were uncomfortable, was relegated to the scantiest offhand mention. On the word sattvāvajaya, see references in note 2. 222. Oracular possession also may be characterized as a vāta disorder. Knipe observes that most goddess ritualists in coastal Andhra Pradesh are “by nature excitable, sometimes volatile and raucous, their monologues punctuated with belches, yawns, hiccups and other marks of incipient possession” (2004:440). All of these are characteristics of vātaprakopa (affliction due to vāta imbalance). 223. dóù•aÅ spóù•am athāghrātaÅ tad dhi sarvagrahāpaham; CaCi 6.9.62cd. 224. I am grateful to Robert Svoboda for this information (e-mail communication, March 4, 2003). 225. See the comments of Raman 1991:1:383. He states, on PrMā 12.62, that the proportion of dung, urine, milk, and yogurt should be 1:2:16:5. Raman does not note the proportion of ghee, but presumably the mixture should consist predominantly of ghee, the quantity of which might remain unspecified. Raman does not state his source. Vaidyamadham says that the ghee should measure four times the quantity of yogurt.


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226. Cf. CaCi 6.9.50–52, for dog’s bile (śunan pittam), beak and feather, probably incinerated, from inauspicious birds including the owl, vulture, and crow. These were likely recommended for their native properties that could contribute to an atmosphere inimical to bhūtas. 227. Recall that the mixing of animal with vegetal substances goes back to vedic times. Note in particular that surā, a kind of multigrain wine, produced for the Sautrāmaâī sacrifice, is mixed with milk and the hair of a lion, wolf, and tiger (cf. Kane HDh II.2:1224–26). The Śatapatha Br. 12.7.3.19–21 (Eggeling 1900:229– 230) demonstrates that the mythic idea is to include potent elements of wildness (raudra), because this is for Rudra. A similar notion of integrating different aspects of nature is presented here, the purpose of which is to present a multilevel front against offending bhūtas or grahas. 228. For recipes from the Tibetan Gyu-zhi, see Clifford 1984:88. 229. For a summary of the text, see Meulenbeld HIML IIA:86–90 and notes. 230. For dāruharidrā, elsewhere called dāruniśā, see Meulenbeld HIML IIB:305n900, given as Berberis aristata DC. Like the barberry in Europe and the Oregon grape in North America, it is more a bush than an actual tree and possesses at least some of the medicinal properties of turmeric (haridrā). The reason for preparing this under puùya nakùatra is not stated, but possibly the name puùya itself, “prosperity,” is sufficient. 231. Vacā (Acorus calamus Linn.) is a widely used root that is dried and chewed to alleviate the discomforts of a sore throat. As mentioned earlier, it is also recommended for the enhancement of mental clarity. It is “hot” in the sense that it induces the release of heat in the body. 232. According to two of my āyurvedic informants, this is included because the cat has the capacity to recognize a bhūta, and the dried and ground up excrement captures that quality. Whether this kind of associative thinking was also that of the authors of the classical texts is uncertain. 233. The text says keśa (hair). However, according to my āyurvedic informants, this means ja•āmāÅsī, a cooling and sweet root that is easily acquired and is often used in havan (tantrically inspired fire ritual). The word ja•ā means “dreadlock,” specifically those of sādhus, grown in the image of Śiva. Thus, ja•āmāÅsī may be viewed as a kind of keśa. 234. Priya Vrat Sharma, the editor and translator of the published text of the Cakradatta, translates pakvaindrī, as “ripe fruits of indravāruâī mixed with cowurine and ghee,” following the commentary (pakvaindrīphalamūlajam sājyam). 235. In fact, mayūrapiccha does contain trace elements of copper and gold, which was apparently known by classical practitioners of tantric medicine. Baidyanath, the well-known Indian pharmaceutical firm, manufactures an antispasmodic under the trade name Mayūracandrikā Bhasma, in which the central ingredient is mayūrapiccha. The indications on the container state: “Antiemetic. Relieves hiccough, asthma, and vomiting.” All of these are vāta conditions. Similarly, sarpanirmoka (snake skin) is recommended today as an ingredient in a dhūpa meant for alleviating piles—another vāta affliction.


236. Some vaidyas have altered their views, however, under the influence of Western scientific and psychological theory. Dr. Raghavan Thirumulpad of Chalakudy (Thrissur District), the most prolific modern author of āyurvedic texts in Malayalam, explained to me that bhūtonmāda is always the result of one’s mistaken or non-dharmic actions, prajñāparādha, a word taken from the āyurvedic texts (cf. above AH 6.4.4), which I have often heard vaidyas (and many others, including a variety of vedāntins) use as a descriptor for moral transgression. In his view, bhūtonmāda is comparatively rare today, because of changes in contemporary belief systems. This, he says, is an artifact of outdated cultural notions. This view expresses the voice of modern, Westerninfluenced Sanskritic culture. On his diagnostic approach to bhūtonmāda, he said: udāharaâamātraÅ tu budhimatāÅ, yadoktānusāram evāśrayo maâbabudhīnām (An intelligent physician is free to design a clinical approach to each problem, irrespective of the texts, but a slow-witted one strictly adheres to the letter of the texts). This has apparently been the practical approach of Āyurveda for millennia. 237. Shadows of this might have once been found in Buddhism, where Āryaśūra, in his Jātakamālā, refers to experts in bhūtavidyā as Siddhavidyās; cf. White 1996:58. 238. For an account of the possession at the Chottanikkara “Bhagavathy” temple near Tripunithura in the eastern suburbs of Cochin/Ernakulam, see F. Smith 2004. 239. The institution founded by P. S. Varier, the Arya Vaidya Sala, maintains its home base in Kottakkal, but has dispensaries and pharmaceutical outlets throughout India. According to one of my informants familiar with the Arya Vaidya Sala educational system, this institution has trained more than four hundred non-Hindu vaidyas, most of them Muslims. I have also encountered a number of non-Brahman and Christian vaidyas trained at the aù•avaidya medical colleges. The education in the latter institutions is still conducted by Nambudiris, some of whom know the entire AH by heart. I have met a few non-Brahman Hindu pandits in the Varier tradition who have also memorized the entire AH. I mention this to counter the common assertion that only Brahmans study Sanskrit and only Hindus study Āyurveda. In both Kerala traditions, however, I found the non-Hindu vaidyas considerably less skilled because they did not have access to the Sanskrit texts. 240. A measure of his prestige is that he also bears the title śālāvaidyam. This title indicates that he has the unique eligibility (adhikāra) to sit in a vedic sacrificial arena (yāgaśālā) during the performance of a soma sacrifice. In Kerala a doctor is required in a sacrifice, and only a śālāvaidyam is qualified. Vaidyamadham is a follower of the Dakùiâāmūrti temple at Shukapuram in Mallapuram District. Historically, he says only members of his family have served as śālāvaidya. Frits Staal does not mention this position in Agni, his massive 1983 study of a vedic agnicayana performed in central Kerala in 1975. Thus, it is doubtful that this tradition is or has been in general currency throughout Kerala. In order to confirm his eligibility for the position of śālāvaidyam, at one time he had to spend forty-one days at this temple “doing dhyāna and bhajan,” meditating and singing hymns to the deity. In addition, he says, yājñikas or sacrificial patrons (āhitāgnis) assemble at this Dakùiâāmūrti temple to practice for their sacrifices, as Dakùiâāmūrti is “the deity for right thinking.”


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241. The botanical identity of this herb is disputed, as several plants have been identified with this name. One possibility is Convolvulus pluricaulis. Another is Canscora decussata, reportedly used for śaãkhapuùpi in Bengal and parts of north India. A third is Clitoria ternatea, reportedly used for śaãkhapuùpi in Kerala. In any case, śaãkhapuùpi is said to increase sattva (brightness, mental clarity, positive qualities) and was prescribed for use in brāhmighóta and other tonics for the nervous system. (I am grateful to Robert Svoboda for this information.) For similar information, see AH Uttarasthāna 1.43, 6.24–25, 7.24, 39.44–51. It has also been called viùâukrānta, probably denoting that parts of the plant were used in Hindu worship. See www. thehimalayadrugco.com/herbfinder/h_evolvulus.htm; for the results of research on it, see http://ccras.org/publication/clinical&experimental_1.htm. 242. This is the family of P. Nilakanthan Nambudiri, with whom I also spoke at length. Their burgeoning practice is limited to the treatment of mental disorders. A large majority of their clients are Muslim girls, as Mallapuram District, listed in the 1991 census of India at 68 percent Muslim, now probably has an even higher proportion (this information is missing in the 2001 census). The family of Nilakanthan has a residential facility and empowers their medicines with mantras and pūjā, all of which are tightly guarded family secrets. For a more complete description of the Poomkutil treatment center, see Unnikrishnan 1998. 243. For more on this bhūta, see Tarabout 2003. 244. Cf. Inden 1992. 245. For all of this, see the rather hurried and unreliable edition and translation by Raman (1991). It is to a great extent this systematic elegance (or elegant systematics) that makes astrology (jyotiùa) so attractive in India to this day. 246. See Brahmānand Tripā•hī’s note on this in his Hindi commentary on the AH titled Nirmalā: āyurved kā jyotiùaśāstra se ghaniù•h sambandh hai (Āyurveda’s relationship with the śāstra of astrology is of the closest kind). 247. Trans. Keith 1914:118. 248. The connection between astrology, tantric ritual, and Āyurveda is found elsewhere in India; it is not limited to Kerala. Another text that is much more expansive on this than the PrMā is the VīrasiÅhāvaloka, composed in North India, possibly in Gwalior, dated 1383 (see Meulenbeld HIML IIA:229–230 and notes). This text, never the subject of serious academic study, deserves far more attention than I can give it here. It purports to be a jyotiśśāstrakarmavipākāyurvedaprayoga, a term that appears in the colophon to each of its seventy-one chapters. It is a handbook discussing the astrology (jyotin) and karmic causes of disease (karmavipāka, see the above discussion on the Madanamahārâava), and at length describes medicinal treatments for more than fifty diseases. Curiously, the astrological significations are absent from the account of unmāda, though they are present in the account of apasmāra. The bulk of the section on unmāda consists of recipes for medicated ghees, powders (cūrâa), and fumigants (dhūpa). It is possible to argue, drawing from Langford’s view of Āyurveda as a cultural commodity in the West today (2002:263ff.), that the four of these taken together—astrology, medicine, ritual, and karmavipāka—have constituted a form of local knowledge and correlative local commodity for more than


a thousand years. For more on the situation at present, see Friedman 1986; Perinbanayagam 1982; Pugh 1983. 249. Clifford 1984:157–158. Kakar reports the following on Tibetans in exile in India: “If the patient is possessed by a bhuta, his eyes move downward toward the left; in the case of possession by a dakini—a female spirit often addressed as ‘Mother,’ who is said to bestow esoteric knowledge and power on its devotees—the eyes move upward toward the right” (1982:110). 250. Cf. Meulenbeld HIML IIA:348–52. This text is widely cited in Maharashtra as an authority on strīroga (diseases of women), especially regarding questions of childbirth. 251. This is from the first few pages of the YR, pp. 12–14 of the Varanasi edition, verses 1–3, 11–20, 22. 252. The same vaidyas prescribe pearl (muktā) and silver (rajata) bhasmas for nija unmāda. 253. The nine gems are: Sun–ruby (māâikya), Moon–pearl (mauktika, muktā), Mars–red coral (pravāla, vidruma), Mercury–emerald ( gārutmata, garudodgāra), Jupiter–yellow sapphire (puùparāga = topaz), Venus–diamond (vajra, hīra, or often simply ratna), Saturn–blue sapphire (indranīla), Rāhu–hessonite or onyx ( gomeda), Ketu–cat’s eye (vaibūrya). For variations on these gems and how to prepare them, see the sixteenth-century encyclopedia Āyurvedasaukhya 4.649–701. For information on gems in ancient India, see the references cited in Meulenbeld HIML IIB:742– 743nn.389–403. Navaratna bhasma is, needless to say, very expensive. It is, however, available. 254. Cf. Meulenbeld HIML IIA:581–787 (Part 10), works on rasaśāstra and ratnaśāstra. 255. An edition of this was published in the 1990s in Lhasa. See Byams-pa ’Phrin-las and Wang Lei n.d.:32, thangka 63 and description, pp. 402–405, and thangkas 66–68, pp. 33–34, descriptions, pp. 430–443. This extraordinary text deserves much closer work than that volume gives it. 256. One of these is reproduced schematically in Clifford 1984:158; two are reproduced in Tsarong et al. 2001:116. 257. Clifford 1984:159. 258. Tsarong et al. 2001:118. 259. While virtually all āyurvedic compendia of the past few centuries have an obligatory section on bhūtavidyā, this was not always the case in the first millennium. For example, the Siddhasāra of Ravigupta (from Kashmir, c. 650 c.e.) does not. See Siddhasāra:2:307–313, ch. 20, on unmāda, Āveśa is not mentioned. Ch. 29, called kumāratantra, is somewhat more relevant in its concern with pharmacopeia. The Siddhasāra was translated into Tibetan, Uighur, and Khotanese (at least). This text includes Ronald Emmerick’s edition of the Sanskrit and Tibetan versions. 260. However, see White 2003:35ff., and above Ch. 6 note 52. 261. See Reddy 2000 and Langford 2002 for illuminating theoretical accounts of the modernization of Āyurveda.


3

s Identity Among the Possessed and the Dispossessed All in all, one would probably prefer to have a self. — DAV I D S H U L M A N (1994:1)


Variation and Vocabulary Having worked our way through this whirlwind tour—this grand if sometimes bewildering tapestry of Indic literature and ethnography, emotions big and small, ritual formations, health and disease, initiatory trauma and transformation, and much more—we now offer reactions and a few conclusions. First, however, summary descriptions of various kinds of possession are in order. Possession may be destructive (Kali possessing Nala and childsnatchers invading the bodies of pregnant women), instructional (the possession by gandharvas of the daughter and wife of Patañcala Kāpya in the Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad (BĀU) in what must have been a semipublic séance, and Śaãkara’s possession of the dead king in order to obtain knowledge of erotics and defeat Ubhayabhāratī, the wife of Maâbana Miśra, in debate), healing or unifying (possession by Soma, transfer of essences described in the Upaniùads, tantric śaktipāta initiation), protective (Vipula Bhārgava possessing Ruci), symptomatic of perfected devotion (the līlāveśa or bhagavadāveśa of Vallabhācārya and Rūpa Gosvāmī), a tool used by advanced yogins to influence others (Yogasūtras, Brahmasūtras), or indicative of a state of immersion in erotic love, in the cycle of rebirth, in the Lord’s love games, or even


in the Lord’s very body (again bhagavadāveśa, saÅsārāveśa, līlāveśa). When humans possess others, as in the case of Vipula Bhārgava or Śaãkara, the purpose is viewed as benign. It is regarded similarly when the possessing agent is a substance, an abstraction, or an essence (soma, medhas, etc.). When negative spirits (bhūta, piśāca, etc.) are the agents of possession, it is considered destructive. But when the agent is a semidivine being with a preponderance of good qualities, such as a gandharva, ambiguous results are weighted toward the positive. I have identified three distinctions within the lexicography of possession, all with wide margins and hazy boundaries: those represented by āveśa, praveśa, and grahaâa. In spite of these margins and boundaries, however, āveśa exhibits much less polysemy than the other terms, indicating that its semantic field rarely slips beyond the boundaries proposed here. Āveśa suggests self-induced pervasion of a distinct and attractive force within the personality, even if what is attractive is negative, such as anger. More appositely, it is self-induced possession of a celestial or ethereal being, from a goddess who confers oracular experience (this is often found in the ethnographic record) to an experience of thorough destructiveness, such as the possession of Aśvatthāman by Śiva (Mahābhārata [MBh] 10.7.64–65). In all cases, āveśa indicates a significant shift in personality. This is usually a learned and controlled dissociative behavior that is consuming, integrative, and seamless, with little trace of inner conflict, at least in the short run. In these two varieties of āveśa, the experiences of emotional absorption and that of spirit or deity possession are nearly indistinguishable. An example of this occurs in the MBh when “a bitter rage took possession” (tīvraroùasamāviù•ā; 3.60.34)1 of Damayantī after a hunter who rescued her from the jaws of a boa constrictor, then tried to rape her. It is important to understand that this manner of speaking, which is familiar in the English language, is taken more literally in South Asia. In the West, emotion is devalued much more than it is in South Asia, as we saw in Chapter 8, and this example is one among countless numbers that reveal the nexus of emotion and possession (see Chapter 6, for evidence from the MBh). Āveśa is driven to another level when it becomes samāveśa, a term used profusely in Tantric texts to indicate a state of complete absorption in an object or deity.2 The use of the word praveśa reflects possession’s hazy boundaries. Generally it bears the sense of externally motivated possession, as in parakāya- or paraśarīra-praveśa, possessing another’s (para-) body (kāya, śarīra), though more infrequently āveśa is used in this sense. Praveśa, when it is distin-

Conclusions 581

guished from āveśa, indicates suppression of the individual personality without disturbing its constructed identity. An entity or thought form is introduced by an external agent in order to bring about a specific result in the body, or less often the mind, of the one possessed. A result may occur without the knowledge of the possessed individual, thus not interfering with his or her conscious intention or volition. Externally induced possession in this sense differs significantly from the kind of brahmanical possession that is embodied through nyāsa and (prāâa-)pratiù•hā (Chapter 10). The main difference between them in this context is that nyāsa is self-induced whereas (prāâa-)pratiù•hā is externally induced. Nevertheless, the piecemeal or gradual manner in which the pervasion and transformation occurs in these rituals is ambiguous with respect to āveśa and praveśa, not fitting easily into either category. Yet, like both of them, these serial invocations fundamentally alter the identity and character of the ritualist or iconic form. Another instance of the absence of standardization in the vocabulary of possession is seen in the use of the word parigraha in Yogācāra Buddhism, in the phrase ātmabhāva-parigraha (taking possession of a [new] personal existence) (Chapter 7). This is similar in meaning to Vallabhācārya’s saÅsārāveśa (Chapter 9), immersion in the cycle of rebirth. Possession expressed as grahaâa and etymologically related terms more often than not indicate conflict with the possessing agent without suppression of the intent or personality of the possessed. The desires and attributes of one afflicted by spirits called grahas remain intact, though the presence of the graha introduces into the personality an element of conflict, instability, or destructiveness. The section on childsnatchers (bālagrahas) in the MBh (Chapter 6) and the chapter on demonologies (bhūtavidyā) in Āyurveda, Tantra, and various ethnographic reports (Chapter 12) bear this out.

Possession and Embodiment Among the prominent images in the Upaniùads is that of the body as a locus for external forces. Although the early Upaniùads are best known for their discussions of interior topography, they also display a sure knowledge of and deep concern for the physical body. Their knowledge of organs and other aspects of human physiology is derived largely from the antecedent Brāhmaâa literature, in most cases indicating that this knowledge served purposes other than health. Principally, the purpose was to describe animals fit for sacri-


fice. This vision is modified in the Yoga, Śaiva, and other, later subgenres of Upaniùads, when interest in the vedic sacrifices had begun to wane, to one in which the body is seen to encase nābīs (channels that circulate within the body) and cakras (subtle energy centers that are lined up vertically from the perineum to the crown of the head). Thus, the tantric vision of the body led to modifications in the Upaniùadic view (e.g., Dhyānabindu Upaniùad 50– 72, Yogacūbāmaâi Upaniùad).3 Increasingly, through various practices of yoga (āsana and prāâāyāma), the body was viewed as transmutable. Although this is most evident in the later Upaniùads, the early ones foreshadow them in this regard. In the waking state, the “self ” (ātman) is said to abide in the heart, but in deep sleep and dream it wanders in the nābīs (BĀU 2.1.17). Sometimes it exits the body entirely, leaving the prāâas in charge. At death, according to the later Upaniùads, it leaves the body via the suùumnā nābī (central upwardly flowing channel) (Yogaśikha Upaniùad 6.5, etc.). The chief function of the body, then, is to house the life force (jīva) and, according to some Upaniùads, the ātman. Brahmā, the Taittirīya (2.1.1) and Muâbaka (3.1.7) Upaniùads state, dwells in the guhā, the space in the heart. Similarly, according to the Ka •ha (2.20) and Śvetāśvatara (3.11) Upaniùads, the deity dwells in the guhā of all creatures. The Muâbaka (2.1.8,10) and Śvetāśvatara (3.20) add that puruùa is placed in it, while the Maitrāyaâi Upaniùad (26) states that ātman enters into it. The Ka•ha (4.6) says that the firstborn of Brahmā and Āditya enter and abide there, while many later Upaniùads list a number of possible deities who assume residence in this secret place. The late Subala Upaniùad (7.8), for example, states that Nārāyaâa dwells there, while the Kaivalya Upaniùad (3) states that the mendicant (yati) enters (viśānti) what shines in the secret place.4 As explicated in Chapter 5, the Indic body was ripe for possession. It should be clear by now that the possession experience as revealed in Sanskrit texts and modern ethnographies is at once embodied and disembodied. Allowing liberal room for variation, the descriptive and linguistic material presented here reveals a consistency, a more or less consensual affirmation that the subjectivity of emotion, both as experienced and evaluated states, merges in possession states with the (presumed) objectivity of spirits, deities, or entities and notions with an even greater degree of abstraction.5 What the evidence here reveals, moreover, is that the embodied self in possession states “on the ground” in Sanskrit texts only vaguely resembles the normative self of Indian analytical thought as presented in SāÅkhya, Vedānta, Buddhism, and Āyurveda.6 More generally, the ubiquitousness of possession

Conclusions 583

states in South Asia calls into question the very notion of personal identity. The Upaniùads, says Wimal Dissanayake, “reflect a certain unwillingness to take adequately into consideration the world of sense perception.”7 Although the Weltanschauung officially registered by brahmanical and other South Asian orthodoxies idealizes an asceticism that in its public presentation takes a dim view of corporality, Frits Staal points out that, on the contrary, embodiment is highly valued, at least to practitioners of yoga, where “physical exercises are not ascetic mortifications [but] are conceived of as ‘perfections’ (siddhi).” Indeed, what is sought after through development of the body “is ‘altered states,’ but not ‘of consciousness’ (as in contemporary Western adaptations), but of the body.”8 This can also be said of possession, which is necessarily an altered bodily state, regardless of whether the possession is deemed positive or negative. What possession states reveal is an embodiment dominated by intentionality, emotion, desire, aversion, physical need, subtle essences, a tendency to action, and cyclical or ritual modes of functioning. This paradigm is very different from the description in Bhagavad Gītā 13.1–6, in which the self as body is said to be composed of the five mahābhūtas or great elements (earth, water, fire, air, space), ego, reason, the unmanifest (avyakta), the ten senses and the mind, the five sensory fields, desire, aversion, happiness and suffering, the embodied whole, intelligence, and steadfastness. The former reveals a body constructed of abstractions closer to the early and middle vedic model than to the model presented in SāÅkhya and most of the Upaniùads.9 What, then, is the body possessed? As Staal understands it, the meaning of the body is its very presence, the fact of its being and its movement.10 Its meaning does not reside in secondary analysis, in verbalizing, in communicating. The body possessed is not symbolic of something else, nor is it, in itself, a message to be communicated to a culturally conditioned public, a reinforcement of a set of beliefs. If Staal is to be believed, and his argument appears cogent, the important anthropological theory that communication is the very essence of being, action, and ritual, is nullified. Following Humphrey and Laidlaw, it is not necessary that we project our own drive (especially an academic drive) for derivative meaning onto others. Personality was never far removed from visions of the body. In classical India personality was described in different terms from those familiar to the modern world, with very different abstractions and psychological influences. Whereas modern societies express personality as the sum of one’s experiences, thoughts, emotions, inhibitions, moments of freedom, and so on, in


India of old the complexity was expressed differently. One of the vehicles for understanding personality in classical India was the grid of physicality presented in the SāÅkhya philosophy, with the senses and sense organs evolving in a linear fashion from primordial materiality (prakóti), an abstraction absent in Western thought. In this way, the structure of the body and its perceptual equipment reached deeply and directly into the nature of reality itself. Thus, fundamental changes in the surface levels of individuality resonated deeply into the shared level of primordiality, creating a channel by which penetration of external forces could be felt through the entire system. Although possession is nowhere described in this manner, it seems to be a viscerally felt mechanism running throughout most formal Indian epistemological systems. After SāÅkhya became incorporated into the Mahābhārata and the foundational āyurvedic texts in the early centuries of the Common Era, personality was most often constructed along its gridlines. However, the SāÅkhya explanatory system did not obliterate other systems completely; it was in fact coeval with the remnants of an earlier more vedic system, in which personality included cosmological trace elements that entered the individual from outside. Thus, whether it was constructed according to SāÅkhya or its antecedent systems, the individual was not conceived of as autonomous, as is the dominant position in the West.11 The individual was, instead, conceived of as porous, allowing trace material from Brahmā, the Ādityas, and other beings from devas to rākùasas to enter. As shown in Chapter 12, categories of invasive bhūtas or grahas corresponded to categories of sattvas that served as the foundations of personality. The brief summary of the mechanics of entrance from the Upaniùads given above, then, may be regarded as paradigmatic of the way personality was formed, regardless of whether it took root along the gridlines of SāÅkhya. Possession, regardless of the term used for it, was often understood in Sanskrit (and other Indic) texts as a modification of personality, rather than as a psychological aberration for which the individual must necessarily be held accountable. “Positive” possession was esteemed, if somewhat feared, and those subject to it were most often productive members of their communities. By contrast, “negative” possession befell individuals regarded as unstable; indeed, their possession was the mark of their instability. In most cases, however, negative possession was usually regarded as treatable, and the practice of mental health care in India beginning in the ancient period has regarded the possessed individual as a victim, rather than a perpetrator.

Conclusions 585

Even if the treatments were sometimes heavy-handed, as the āyurvedic texts indicate was possible, they were invariably designed to exorcise the bhūta or graha as well as rebalance the individual’s humors or doùas. Whether positive or negative, possession was viewed as a fortuitous, though by no means unnatural, experience of intensity that was often so subtle that it went unnoticed by others in everyday life. Possession may or may not be recognized by the conscious mind of either the possessed or the observer, occurring as it does as a result of an inherent capacity or vulnerability, or, viewing it from the perspective of the widely assimilated SāÅkhya cosmogony, the effect of an openness structured by the fluid progression from sense organs (indrīya) to primordial materiality (prakóti). Within that space, any idea or internal form can materialize and mutate. As such, it may also fall anywhere within the extreme limits of subjectification and objectification, which are often the same thing. As such, it has not and cannot have been completely censored by the agents of brahmanical prudery; it is available in the interstices and thus has been addressed less graphically by the classical philosophers, poets, and mystics, to whom organization, boundaries, and control have been paramount, than by poets, indigenous medical authors, and ethnographers, to whom physical symptoms and gestures were often more accessible.12 Regardless of the brahmanical source, possession has been dealt with as a kind of intrusion and intensity, an undermining, shifting, or transforming of the identity of the possessed. And regardless of the form that the possession takes, it demonstrates the fragility of personal identity, its instability, elusiveness, and permeability. The latter is illustrated in the juxtaposition of the gross (sthūla-), the subtle (sūkùma- or liâga-), and the causal (kāraâa-) bodies (śarīra), in classical Indian religio-philosophical thought, each with progressively diminishing corporality, which nevertheless command the capacity to pass to one another data in the form of trace material of past experience.13 Another ready illustration of the threat to the notion of the autonomous person is the Indian ideal of enlightenment, in which the limitations and defects of personal identity are transcended. The transactions and transformations involved in this are rooted in bandhu or bandhutā, an epistemological strategy dating to the middle vedic period, discussed in Chapter 5, in which entities or ideas are identified with each other, all of which are believed to possess degrees of affective physicality.14 These range from “The dawn is the head of the horse,” the classic beginning of the Bóhadāraâyaka Upaniùad, to “I am brahman” (ahaÅ brahmāsmi; BĀU 1.4.10), one of the classic utterances of enlightenment (mahāvākya).15 These contribute to the


conclusion that personal identity as construed in brahmanical India is characterized by permeable boundaries. Āveśa, praveśa, and related terms represent extensions into later India of this “vedic” way of seeing the universe, the self, and the body. The individual, in this case, would not be fractured by possession, but recognized as intrinsically vulnerable, permeable, and connected with other objects, many of them unexpected. The components of the individual, including the mind, body, and physical and conceptual environments, are equally permeable; possession in all its different varieties expresses the collapse of their boundaries, or even of their substantial differences.16 The distinction between mind and body, humanity and nature, essence, idea, quality, and deity, would be (largely) one of degree rather than of kind, as, indeed, one tends to understand from Indian texts. The sharp limitation imposed by Vedānta, that the self (ātman) is identical in essence with the absolute (brahman) but not with anything relational, is not borne out in other literary contexts, where “floating forms” are equally constitutive of the self and of personal identity.17 This view is supported by Marriott’s and Inden’s ethnosociology and the view of the person construed therein,18 in which, states Arjun Appadurai, “South Asians do not separate the moral from the natural order, act from actor, person from collectivity, and everyday life from the realm of the transcendent.”19 In this way possession is simultaneously utopian and dystopian; this dialogic quality is the sine qua non of its body politic. The embodied self, porous and available for possession, becomes contested geography, a condition of uncertainty that invites openness and frustration. The latter occurs because openness embeds a liberating multivocality, but one that is challenged, first, by the expectation of identity and the habitus implied therein and, second, by one’s locus within the social system. Personal habits and peculiarities are what distinguish an individual within a culture, even one with a rigid social structure. One’s locus in the social system is defined by occupation, family, and, in India, caste. All of these recede into liminality when the agent is possessed. This liminality, in which human and divine or two humans are centrally attributed, tugs at one’s identity so strongly that the fabric of the individual becomes reshaped and risks being permanently scarred. Identity is transferred from moment to moment, guided by a circumscribed set of conditions and conditionings. This constantly mutating identity threatens to implode into creative openness while simultaneously exploding into social and political catastrophe. Possession, no matter how it manifests,

Conclusions 587

is traumatic in the same way that disease or enlightenment can be. Disease, such as consumptive cancer, or physical injury, such as the loss of a limb or amnesia resulting from brain damage, disrupts our sense of self, as does death in the family, loss of our home, failure in our job, and so on. So, it is said, does an experience of enlightenment, as we can no longer function as we did previously. When our sense of who we are shifts unexpectedly and suddenly, our identity is disrupted and we lose our center. Partial or complete personality or identity displacement, which could be a product of an extreme and often practiced dissociation (usually acknowledged to be enticing and attractive) is a generally recognized aspect of the experience of possession. It is an experience of alterity, a fundamental, even unrecognizable strangeness, within the individual. It is the outsider within the complex individual, with his or her narrative of identity, who evaluates and comes to terms with the multivocality within. Possession, then, whether positive or negative, is a state of tension, of lived irony, in which dilemmas are resolved (for better or worse) because the volition of the dominant, socially hegemonic voice is reduced to the point of disappearance as another authority is expressed through the body. In possession, the self-interest inherent in individual agency is overcome, replaced with a force that is, improbably, more believable and trustworthy than that usually expressed by the individual. Thus, possession expresses what Durkheim regarded as the heterogeneity of the sacred and the profane: the divine authority of the body and the bodily authority of the divine. Can we characterize a dominant structure of personal identity in India, at least before the modern period of Westernization?20 Have there always been battle lines between individual autonomy and multivocality in which, in the end, the dominance of the former must be threatened, disrupted, or even terminated? This, arguably, is what Kóùâa did to Arjuna on the battlefield at Kurukùetra. He presented to Arjuna an alternative to his narrative of himself. Arjuna had locked in a notion of himself through a selective narrative that refused to recognize his multivocality. In the end, though Arjuna capitulated, he shied away from the vision of finality, the viśvarūpa-darśana, that Kóùâa presented to him in the eleventh chapter of the Gītā. More germane is a 1995 editorial in The Times of India by Dipankar Gupta, which states, “A close reading of our Constitution and of the Constituent Assembly debates will show that there was a marked hesitation among our national representatives to articulate the notion of a self-subsistent and unencumbered individual.”21 Although the editorial was concerned


with the supposedly fundamental human right to success in the face of the Indian system of job quotas and educational reservations based on caste, the startling fact is that the ill-defined notion of the “self-subsistent and unencumbered individual” in ancient and classical India changed little throughout Indian history. The individual was rarely considered the definitive human unit, at least in Hindu India, generally relinquishing that role to the family or caste (jāti rather than varâa). Because the social boundaries of the individual were intrinsically permeable, the notion of possession, of not subsisting or acting alone, was easily realized. Indeed, bodily boundaries were penetrated or dissolved by the simple ritual of nyāsa, by an advanced yogin or yoginī projecting his or her consciousness or thoughts, by demons of disease, or by intense emotional engagement. This is not just an Indian peculiarity. It is echoed in China as well. Isabelle Robinet comes to similar conclusions based on her research into Daoist meditation practices. She writes, “Man is not conceived of as a completed whole formed from a single entity. Rather, man appears as a turbulent world whose unity is still to be achieved—as a plurality of forces which must be unified or as a totality which must be realized.”22 Westerners, and perhaps scholars in particular, whose livelihood depends on individual achievement and self-sufficiency and who must commence any study of identity with the view that the individual self is sovereign, unique, and inviolate, find it difficult to comprehend the shadowy frontiers of the individual in India and its cultural acknowledgement of deity and spirit possession. Diana Eck writes appositely of the “distinctively Western habit of thought, grounded primarily in the Western tradition of monotheism: the expectation of singularity and uniqueness, and the valuing of such singularity and uniqueness.”23 Eck refers to James Hillman’s notion of a “‘monotheism of consciousness,’ which has to do not only with our way of thinking about God, but with our way of thinking about persons as ‘individuals,’ our ways of thinking about authority in the structures of family, church, and state, and our way of thinking about questions of truth.”24 This contrasts with the Indian sense of identity grounded in an indigenous religious and cultural imagination, with its marked hesitation to articulate an autonomous individual. Eck continues: “Oneness and manyness are not seen as true opposites. In the Hindu tradition, matters of importance are thought of quite naturally in the singular and the plural. Singularity or uniqueness is not the sole mark of significance. . . . The profusion of gods and scriptures is matched by a polycentric religious life, social structure, and family structure. There is

Conclusions 589

no one clear, unmistakable center. Manyness is valued; indeed, it is seen as essential.”25 Ariel Glucklich points out that this notion of an inviolate, sovereign self is of recent vintage in the West. He cites Carl Jung in support of this: “Not so very long ago even highly civilized people believed that psychic agencies could influence our minds and feelings. There were ghosts, wizards, and witches, daemons and angels, and even gods, who could produce certain psychological changes in human beings.”26 Glucklich adds, “This kind of thinking resulted not only, or even mainly, from a primitive philosophy but from a porous sense of self lacking rigid external boundaries.”27 Thus, by adhering to culturally and academically bounded assumptions of the singularity and inviolability of the individual, the phenomenon of possession has been analyzed (chiefly by anthropologists, as we have seen, who have claimed it as their bailiwick) as psychological illness, even schizophrenia, as sociological role-playing or status seeking, as expressions of cosmological beliefs, willful manifestation of good or evil, or as an aspect of cultural performance: as anything, in fact, except spirit or deity possession, phenomena that defy both the solid boundaries of the individual assumed by Westerners and the scientific rules of the academic trade.28 The fact is that the individual in India disappeared into family or caste, or into spiritual unity with brahman, or was infiltrated and transfigured by deities and spirits. John Stanley, defending the indigenous voice, contends that during possession states the individual believes that cosmic forces are expressed. He states, “since scientific knowledge is based on empirical experience, a religious experience such as possession which cannot be rationally understood, gets reduced to ‘symbols,’ ‘projections’ or illusions. In this way the reality of possession as a religious experience is ignored by many anthropologists.”29 This may not be a very popular notion among social scientists, many of whom, I daresay, still harbor assumptions that may be labeled “orientalist.” One of the purposes of this book is to question certain orientalist presuppositions. The one to which I refer here is that a particular soul and a particular body are coexistent and are the solitary makers of personal identity—a Western pre-Christian notion that is both elaborated and undermined in various phases of Christian narrativity.30 Possession undercuts this notion, but it is a notion that will prove very difficult to shed, as it is the foundation of the notion of the individual autonomous being, which is in turn the bedrock of the empiricism of the social sciences. What anthropologists, ethnographers, and historians of religion have failed to recognize is the extended context of what was regarded in India as


possession. Most scholarship has limited possession to intrusive and disintegrative states that fall within the realm of graha(âa) or else to oracular possession expressed in festival or other ritual contexts. But, as we have seen here, possession has many more dimensions in India, for example, the Buddhist concept of ātmabhāva-parigraha, a person “completely gripped by the experience of the self,” or devotional possession. The former is conceptually close to Vallabhācārya’s saÅsārāveśa, a person “possessed by the cycle of rebirth.” It would be a mistake to disregard these and countless other examples as simply tropes. Such statements were intended more literally than our own tropes, such as “she’s writing like a woman possessed,” or “he’s possessed by love.” For Aśvatthāman to be possessed by rage meant that he was possessed by Śiva, not just by the power of Śiva. With respect to devotional possession, Yocum writes: “In no case does Māâikkavācakar’s—or any other devotee—use his possession as a means for divination, curing, or mediumship.31 Māâikkavācakar’s possession, his god-intoxication, has no reference to third parties. It is solely a manifestation of his communion with Śiva, which is an end in itself.”32 Similarly, for Ramakrishna possession brought about, and was sometimes equated with, ecstatic vision. Under the control of the goddess, possessed by her, he extended his tongue ecstatically (and transgressively) “to commune with wine, human meat, fish, polluted rice, even feces and urine. Again and again, it reaches out to commune with that which society deems disgusting and shameful.”33 Because this ecstasy is relational, it meets the criteria of āveśa rather than samādhi. These are the types of thick descriptions that I have been searching for, largely in vain, in Sanskrit literature. We must conclude that in India possession was a state of mind characterized by intensity, emotional excitement, and desire, and that the perceived distinction between these states and those more easily labeled possession by ethnographers and others is a matter of degree rather than kind.34 While we must, on the one hand, recognize a broadly defined category of possession that includes āveśa, praveśa, graha(âa), and so on, we might, on the other hand, be better advised to abandon the category entirely in favor of closely related indigenous categories of human experience marked by the permeability of human identity. If for no other reason, this may be recommended in order to heal the stigma left by the application of the category “possession.” Although I have not found it practical to do that here, I have left sufficient room for that to serve as the basis for a future undertaking.

Conclusions 591

Sudden and Gradual I cannot disagree with Gombrich’s statement that “brahmanism inculcates control,” but I believe that such a notion must be nuanced based on the foregoing discussions. We have established that possession is a liminal state of mind,35 with mundane concerns and discourse reconfigured though not ignored. We have also seen that “positive” possession almost always emerges from ritual. Such ritual works in one of two basic ways. The first, brahmanical, inculcates a controlled state of possession through the observance of complicated and precise processes. The second, typically non-brahmanical in the sense of non-Sanskritic (this was never a disincentive to brahman participation),36 encourages possession by inculcating strategies for release rather than control. The former amounts to a guided gradual transformation through metamorphosis, while the latter amounts to a guided sudden release. In both cases we are speaking of ritual that depicts the tension between freedom and discipline. Although the gradualists are beset with a greater number of formal rules, in both cases style and structure are important, conferring a sense of rigorousness that is essential for materialization of the process. The “gradualist school” is śāstraic, analytical, and process-oriented, while the “sudden school” (apologies to Zen aficionados) creates release through intense emotional engagement. The former bears the ritualist into a state of ontological hybridity through a series of identifications, while the latter accomplishes the same through a wholesale submersion into an idealized form of a deity (such as Kālī or Hanumān), a mood (love, ferocity, quiescence, etc.), or an environment (e.g., Krishna’s līlās). Brahmanical hybridity may be thought of as a tapestry, a planned and executed complex pattern woven on a single uniform backing. In this particular tapestry each essence, deity, spirit, or other entity occupies a discrete space on or within the body, empowering and transfiguring it. This usually requires the complementary observance of brahmanical rites of purification. Compared to “sudden school” strategies, it inculcates control by keeping the consciousness and intentionality of the ritualist intact and dominant. It is neither festival nor oracular and may be very private. Yet it is a metamorphosis, but it cannot be called shape-shifting. Thus, I argue, it is fair to label it possession. In the sudden school, the hybridity is more deeply rooted, as two beings or essences coexist, with one supplanting another in an internal and idiosyncratic scale of identity mark-


ers. Unlike in gradualist possession, the intentionality and decision making capabilities of the agent are ambiguous and often absent. Bynum would label the former as metamorphosis and the latter alone as hybridization. But I would disagree with that assessment in this context. Both, it seems to me, are hybrids in different formulations. Bynum writes: “Metamorphosis breaks down categories by breaching them; hybrid forces contradictory or incompatible categories to coexist and serve as commentary on the other.”37 Bynum’s analysis of metamorphosis based on medieval Christian narrative cannot be readily applied to the array of material in South Asia. In brahmanical possession, the process of metamorphosis transforms categories of bodily integrity by breaking them down and rebuilding them analytically. The result is a hybrid being seamlessly constituted out of a collocation of compatible entities or notions. This is in contrast to non-brahmanical possession, in which contradictory or incompatible beings, entities, notions, or categories may exist. The orthodox impulse, which does not have the marks of a conspiracy, has been to control this phenomenon through benign neglect, by ignoring or avoiding it in formal discourse, by tacitly declaring it irrelevant,38 though we have seen here that possession is acknowledged or discussed in more than 170 Sanskrit texts.39 This is not a large number, however, considering the vast number of texts in Sanskrit. Perhaps as the ultimate form of emotional engagement, possession can assume a place in Indic intellectual culture only by confining it in nonthreatening ritual, making it retrievable through occasional fable and story, or locating it in the discourses of engagement described in this volume. Nyāsa, the brahmanical practice of possession, has a restricted domain because of its locus within rarefied Sanskritic culture. But in the larger cultural domain, it is closely juxtaposed with other orbits of ritual, including small séances or festivals in which oracular possession might occur. The evidence for this is both textual (the brahman Bhujyu Lāhyāyani’s presence at the séances held by the wife and daughter of Patañcala Kāpya and my own analysis herein of svasthāveśa) and ethnographic (cf. Sax, Hancock, and others who write of brahman participation in “non-brahman” possession ritual). What Pollock calls the “massive presence of discursive domination in Sanskrit culture,”40 does not, apparently, figure into this aspect of Indic culture. We are accustomed to imagining India’s being pervaded by philosophical doctrines of control and a self (ātman) situated in a straightforward relationship with either an abstract absolute (brahman) or a single supreme deity. Equally significant and pervasive, however, were a hybridized self and

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notions of identity that were open, permeable, and without fixed boundaries. Examination of the phenomenon of possession (and its typological kinfolk) demonstrates that the “notion of a self-subsistent and unencumbered individual” hardly existed in “Sanskrit culture.” Multiple or hybrid identities were sanctioned, indeed often idealized, in the literate cultures of classical India (which is to say they were not considered pathological), even as they were appropriated—in fact induced—by techniques of ritual, yoga, and Vedānta. Pervasion by soma, the transfer of an essence like medhas, influencing the actions of another as a result of entering his or her body with one’s mind, disease—particularly mental—induced by the entrance of destructive spirits, shifts in consciousness as a result of initiatory experience or devotional absorption into a deity, and so on—all erode the “notion of a selfsubsistent and unencumbered individual.” The power of the gradualist school was somewhat deceptive, except on paper, where it reigned supreme, and very few Indians, save a few hopeful brahmans, accepted the “discursive domination of Sanskritic culture” in matters religious when deeply emotional and richly transformative possession was available. The ideologies, and to a lesser extent the processes, of gradual and sudden possession are dialogical; they negotiate in both directions: less privileged nonelite nonprofessionals poach on the discourse of privileged elite professionals by adopting their symbols and images, thus demarcating a realm of social and political safety for their experience, while the elites, the priesthoods, extend their domain by creating discourse mechanisms through which they domesticate popular practice. As shown in culture after culture, elite participation in popular practice contributes to this negotiation between professionals and nonprofessionals, highly educated elites and lesseducated subalterns. Thus, at the risk of appearing immoderately Dumontian, I find myself in substantial agreement with Madeleine Biardeau, who writes: “From the beginning of my Indological studies, I have been quite convinced that Hindu society was much less divided ideologically, that the top and the bottom were not so utterly alien to each other, than was usually contended, particularly among anthropologists.”41

Questions and (a Few) Answers In Chapter 2, I inquired as to what extent we can equate possession as discourse with possession as event. My answer(s) to this difficult question


should have become clear in the course of this study. Essentially, the wealth of evidence both textual and ethnographic demonstrates that the link between discourse and event is so proximate that it is nearly indistinguishable. The discourse of possession in India is not just verbal or linguistic but performative as well. Possession is not just an inner experience defined by one’s intensity of feeling and focus, dissociative powers, and linguistic and performative capabilities; it is an event that is publicly negotiable and verifiable. Standards and paradigms of possession are available in South Asian public culture, both contemporary and ancient, and may be verified in the ethnographies and classical texts. The issue of discourse is closely tied in with the nature of individuality and the individual in South Asia and whether possession can contribute to a greater understanding or unveiling of that nature. I ask, in effect, whether a partially or fully manifested and attributed deity or spirit, within the locally constructed nexus of discourse and event, destroys the fabric of the individual. I have also wondered, apropos of these questions, whether it is a mistake to assume an autonomous individual in the first place. Keeping in mind the four definitions of possession given in the first section of Chapter 2, I answer these questions by first noting that possession is a strategy or series of strategies employed for developing an interconnectivity of prescribed social and spirit(ual) universes (and discourses) with the improvisatory nature of fate, a method of coping with and examining the collision between the fixity of role and the randomness of life. Indeed, possession has always had an intriguing subversiveness that seeks to turn the mysteries of asymmetry and randomness to one’s advantage. What I’m suggesting is that possession reveals the individual to be so porous and indefinite that we must conclude that it is a tenuous social construction. This is not a unique or surprising conclusion in this day and age, when spirit and spiritual universes and discourses appear to be more isolated, disconnected, and inimical than ever before, and fate more improvisatory. Neither is this a negative assessment; it is, rather, an acknowledgment that possession is both self-affirming and radically transformative. As part of a socially sanctioned religious system, it affirms the social self while eclipsing the spiritually isolated self. The South Asian experience indicates that the disjunctions, isolations, or alienations that typify our lives emanate from collusions of moral and natural order, act and actor, person and collectivity, and everyday life and the realm of the transcendent, to adapt Appadurai’s ethnosociological observation cited above. In this disjunctive and disjointed world, possession

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is healing: It concentrates essences, entities, actors, and agents while bringing the above-mentioned polarities together experientially. In essence, the mutual impact of discourse and event forces us to acknowledge that we become more ourselves when we recognize that we are, in fact, less ourselves. This is the paradox of both oracular possession and the Indic concept of selfhood, stripped of its institutional veneer of brahman-ātman ideology. By now we should be able to evaluate the sources that speak of possession in all its Sanskritic lexical incarnations and discern specific patterns of what is and is not included under this rubric. Possession is abundantly evident in the ñgveda and other early vedic texts. It is equally visible in certain Upaniùads, the Mahābhārata, medical and tantric texts, fiction and didactic literature, bhakti texts, and passages scattered in systematized śāstra. It is more difficult to discern in dharmaśāstra and philosophical sūtras, though we have seen it in the Yogasūtras, Brahmasūtras, and the Madanamahārâava. Both classical texts and modern ethnographies suggest that possession was common as a way of thinking in Indian culture and performance. It is perhaps no accident that possession, so noticeable in the Vedas and epics but sporadic in first-millennium canonical literature, surfaced widely in the realm of actual human experience, as the ethnographic literature attests. The local traditions, often derided by the educated elite in both India and the West for their nonvedic practices, are very possibly the most “vedic” of all Indian traditions. This may be said as well for the North Indian bhakti traditions, which are often local traditions repositioned in brahmanical settings. Before the Veda of the MīmāÅsakas became the guiding light of orthodoxy and began to enjoin and shape human religious experience and concern from its own self-representation, a broad spectrum of religious experiences and concerns existed regionally and locally, as they do today, many of which might be recognizable in the Vedas but were later expunged from the vedic orthodoxy’s catalogue of central concerns. This reflects a process that might be called “vernacularization,” in which elite traditions reach into local practice to keep themselves afloat. This would constitute the obverse of the oft-discussed “Sanskritization.” Sanskrit literature does not identify, at least in what I have been able to locate, a “vernacular” norm of ritual that keeps the Sanskrit performative ideologies alive. However, just as Sanskritization conferred prestige and legitimacy on local practices and traditions, vernacularization legitimated the Sanskritic enterprise by localizing it, which is to say by injecting elements of local culture into it. This is evident in the ñgveda, the Atharvaveda, the MBh, the Purāâas,


and the Tantras.42 Although I have not been able to find in Sanskrit literature the richness of detail that modern ethnographic description brings to bear on possession ritual—for example, Hiltebeitel’s observations on the “paraphernalia of possession,”43 in which he records the use of an anklebracelet rattle (cilampu), hourglass-shaped drum (u•ukkai), whip (viracātti), trident (vīrakuntam; Skt. triśūla) portable pennant (ko•icilai), firepost (akkiçkampam; Skt. agniskambham), clay pot (karakam), and lemon-tipped sword in Draupadī cult possession in Tamilnadu—I expect that increased study of mid-second-millennium Tantras and tantric prayogas, most still in manuscript form (such as those discussed in Chapter 11), will uncover more of this. Returning to Lariviere’s point discussed in Chapter 1, it is not so much that better critical editions of well-known texts are crucial in revealing a more accurate picture of the lives of subalterns, as if brahmans systematically exorcised such material from their texts (which I do not believe they did). Rather, the more important enterprise is examining manuscripts that may be unclassified by the orthodoxy among both Western-style scholars and śāstraically oriented paâbitas. This territory remains surprisingly uncharted. The sorts of issues that Davidson has dealt with in his study of esoteric Buddhism and I have addressed in Chapter 11 may be replicated or enhanced through attending to such unstudied texts and ritual ephemera. It is often said that Christ would not recognize or approve of Christianity as it is practiced today. Similarly, the vedic seers would probably be more at home with any one of a number of devotional and ecstatic sects that arose in India than with the philosophically rigorous and repressive orthodoxies that were established in their name.44 These devotional and ecstatic sects find common ground with the Vedas in their appeal to the viability, safety, and sanctity of individual experience; what they subvert is the institutional authority of the Vedas. Jack Miles, a biographer of Jesus, writes, with reference to American Christianity, that “the social viability of religion for the many depends significantly on the intellectual viability of religion for the few.”45 This statement finds resonance with religion in ancient and classical India. The supposition of the intellectual and religious elite that an ounce of theology is sufficient to legitimize or spawn a pound of popular movements certainly has merit, but it may not be as true as the reverse: that broadly based and socially viable religious movements force on an orthodoxy an additional, and often awkwardly integrated, ounce of theology. As vedic orthodoxies recast themselves as Purāâic or tantric, they were forced to support the legitimacy of deity and spirit possession, at least in practice. But this support

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was indirect; it occurred in the interstices and at the margins, through absorption and consequent prescription, rather than through argument. Thus, it appears to have been an effort of liberals among the orthodox to remain on the cutting edge of popular culture through ontological outreach even if they rarely extended enough epistemological rope to draw the fringes into mainstream Sanskritic philosophical systems. In short, orthodoxy in India has a history of finding ways to accommodate, express, and sanction that which is outside what is normally orthodox as well as that which is orthodox in the extreme, in this case the recognition and validation of forms of possession. In sum, it is highly inadvisable to essentialize the phenomenon of possession. As the foregoing discussion demonstrates, possession in South Asia is not just one thing. Amid this shifting ground, however, we can with some certainty assert the following. 1. Whatever may have been the origins of possession in India—it would be fruitless and incorrect to posit its origin in a single event, locality, or religious complex—it has become perhaps the region’s most widespread form of spiritual expression, with a vibrant presence in semipublic divinatory practice and public festival. 2. Possession is sharply divided between positive oracular possession and negative disease-producing possession. The two have occasionally converged, as literary and ethnographic evidence over several millennia amply testifies. 3. Both positive and negative possession are commonly believed to have a moral source. In the case of negative possession, the “mistake” might occur unwittingly. Negative possession is attributed to pollution, contact with evil or degraded people, or being unprotected while in terrifying environments (such as burning grounds or deep jungle). More generally, it is believed that women and children, who are regarded as weaker than men, are more susceptible to possession. Positive possession, by contrast, may be attributed to virtuous action (including action from past births), successful devotional practice, properly performed ritual, or divine grace. 4. Possession cannot be reduced to a single descriptive prototype, but is a complex phenomenon characterized by terms that convey broad semantic possibilities. These can be distinguished through close linguistic study.


5. Possession is always to some extent disruptive and almost always in some sense violent. The disruptiveness occurs in every form of possession, from ecstatic initiatory possession to oracular possession to disease-producing possession. The violence is often expressed as rage (raudra). On occasion, however, possession can be peaceful (śānta). 6. Acceptance of the ontological and substantive reality of spirits and deities has always been widespread in South Asia, as it has been in most societies in which the dominant scientific paradigm(s) differ from the one developed and accepted in the West since the Renaissance (hence, the stance of Western scholarship toward the subject). Thus, the South Asian literary and psychological universe has always been inhabited by innumerable spirits and deities. In spite of occasional orthodox efforts to excise possession from mainstream discourse, it is inevitable that a belief so widespread would find its way into Sanskrit texts. 7. Possession has a strong horizontal and vertical presence in Indian society. Although it has a vigorous presence in women’s religion, it is by no means limited to women or to members of any particular class or caste, linguistic grouping, or economic stratum. 8. Possession in South Asia is so varied, multivocal, and ubiquitous—it arises as a result of a large number of possible physical, mental, social, moral, and psychological circumstances—that it is inadvisable to offer a grand theory of possession, in spite of certain consistencies in its narrative logic.

Bringing It All Back Home: The Mahābhārata and Traditions of Possession As pointed out earlier, most Indic possession can be spun from the MBh: from the tales of two kings, Nala and Kalmāùapāda, who experienced very different kinds of possession; from the story of Aśvatthāman, arguably the most heinous villain in an epic with an outsized cast of reprehensible characters; from the protective possession of Ruci by Vipula Bhārgava, the composed and dutiful, yet inscrutably uncertain, pupil of the powerful sage Devaśarman; and from the tale of the birth of Skanda, which for millennia has served as the exemplar for certain demonologies in āyurvedic and tantric

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texts and, doubtless, in popular culture as well. Fictional though these characters may be, they connect directly to enduring features of South Asian religious and narrative culture, both Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic. Possession by the Skandas, the bālagrahas or childsnatchers, or other allied invasive agents of negative possession are not addressed further here, as I have dealt with them sufficiently. Nor do I address further the topic of possession identified as escalation of emotional engagement, except to emphasize, first, that it too can be traced in considerable measure to epic discourse and, second, that devotional possession, a form of intense emotional engagement that has its origins in a culture of mixed classicism, folk religion, and a probable early layer of shamanistic practice, has been explained in Sanskritic and certain folk cultures in terms of Sanskritic aesthetic categories. Instead, we close by revisiting some of the primary characters depicted in MBh tales of possession. In the final analysis, the trauma of Nala’s possession was absorbed largely by himself and Damayantī, as he eventually regained his kingdom, reputation, and status, and everyone lived happily ever after, albeit with greater wisdom and maturity; Aśvatthāman’s and Kalmāùapāda’s possessions were malevolent, even viciously so; while Vipula’s possession emerged as a challenging if sanguine act of service to his guru. All four possessions were violent, though in the fourth, that of Vipula, the violence was veiled, assuming the forms of threat and intimidation. Nala’s possession was destructive to his personal and professional life—he lost his wife, his kingdom, his wealth, his identity and self-esteem, and, eventually, as part of a violent exorcism, his body, too, became disfigured and unrecognizable. Yet Aśvatthāman, through the most gruesomely violent possession, became more distinctly himself, his genetic links to Śiva, Death (antaka), Lust (kāma), and Anger (krodha) emerging conspicuously. Kalmāùapāda, bidden by the possessing rākùasa KiÅkara to indulge in compulsive cannibalism, suffered a possession potentially more lethal to himself than even Nala’s. Eclipse of the self, its erasure through violence or extreme disruption, marks all these possessions. This is similar to the oracular possession recorded by ethnographers throughout South Asia as well as in disease-producing possession recorded from the Atharvaveda to Caraka and Suśruta to modern āyurvedic and nonmedical healing practice (e.g., at Bālājī or Chottanikkara). With the self now cast into doubt, I return to the epigraph from Shulman that opened this chapter, regarding the preferability of a self. Let us inquire what kind of a self he is talking about and whether it is a viable option for


the possessed or is possible only for the dispossessed, which is to say, for one whose identity is not under assault, who has not experienced the disruptive openness of possession, who has not struggled with competing voices or personalities, or with the visceral attractiveness of extreme dissociation. Shulman continues his inquiry into the possibility of a self, identifying it as “[s]omething minimally integrated and not wholly discontinuous, where memory, or its more powerful and personal multiform, forgetting, could reside. Something to hide and veil, if need be, in the interests of preserving ultimacy in some residual, individual form. Even a fictive self might do.”46 Although I acknowledge the question of fictive selves, which many, including some of India’s most important philosophers, would argue is the only self we have, it is more pressing at this point to return to Nala, Shulman’s immediate concern: to his loss of self through possession by Kali, the personification of the worst of times, and his eventual emergence “from the shadowy mirror-state to a kind of personhood.”47 Nala’s personality, including his sense of his self, which is to say, his self-possession, was, compared to that of many of the other epic characters, arguably underdeveloped. As the narrative analogue to the Pāâbava king Yudhiù•hira, he was dharma incarnate, warts and all, his tenuous control over his personal life mirroring Dharmarāja’s ironic moniker “steady in battle” (yudhi-sthira). Nala became truly human only after his harrowing adventure with Kali, brought about, we might recall, by a breach in an ostensibly minor matter of ritual purity. Before his trifling but egregious slip-up, his persona was the very incarnation of rectitude and righteousness; he was, above all, an advertisement for the safety of uncomplicated virtue. With the onset of his possession by Kali, however, he morphed into a man troubled and lost, demonstrating the decisiveness of possession and the fragility of such uncomplicated virtue. We see a tenderness in his love for Damayantī slipping through the cracks in his possession, as he quietly tears himself away from her in the dark forest night, stealing loving glances at her while abandoning her, he believes, for her own good. Although he is archetypally the royal (and regal) hero, his heroism and capacity for self-possession matures only after he is forced to confront his own personal demon. His road to recovery, however, is unexpectedly medical. Bitten by the Nāga king Karko•aka, whose poison slowly weakens the grip of the entropic Kali, Nala eventually vomits him out.48 This is quite different from the norm in the MBh in which, for example, King Kalmāùapāda’s possession by a vicious rākùasa was cured by ensorcelled water sprinkled on

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him by the óùi Vasiù•ha. In āyurvedic terms, Nala was cured through scientific or rational treatment (yuktivyapāśrayacikitsā), even if the curative agent, poison, was administered by a nāga, while King Kalmāùapāda was cured through ritual means (daivavyapāśrayacikitsā). The connection of Āyurveda with nāgas is vouchsafed in the myth of the “churning of the ocean of milk” (samudramanthana; MBh 1.16). In this famous story, the mighty serpent Vāsuki served as the rope wrapped around Mount Mandara, which served as the vertical churning wood (araâi), placed on the back of the tortoise king Akūpāra, who served as the lower flat churning wood. The serpentine rope was pulled at opposite ends by the devas and the asuras in their efforts to churn out the much-sought-after elixir of immortality (amóta). Eventually, Dhanvantari, the legendary founder and patron saint of Āyurveda, was produced, holding the vessel with the elixir.49 Regardless of the fact that celestial bedlam ensued, the connection was secured, thus conferring rationale to Karko•aka’s gift of the poisonous healing elixir. In addition, we see several links in these stories to possession as it has been textually represented and popularly practiced. Although Nala’s possession may be insufficiently remarked on in what has become a popular romance and narrative of devotion,50 the cure, at least, reflects popular and āyurvedic practice, where vomiting, induced by mildly poisonous substances (e.g., white śaãkhapuùpi mixed with milk), is employed in Kerala as part of exorcistic practice. Possession here becomes Nala’s physical disability, which empowers the spirit of the waters to produce, out of itself, an antibiotic. The exorcism for King Kalmāùapāda, by contrast, works in the opposite direction. Rather than seeking the spirits of the deep for a cure, he is cured by the sages, which is to say, from above rather than below. The realm of ritual is the domain of the sages, while the realm of medicine is, by association, the domain of the nāgas. Turning to Aśvatthāman’s possession, its cultural continuity is vouchsafed in its performance in the annual Draupadī festivals in Tamilnadu. The actors transform the violence and devastation of Aśvatthāman’s deadly march through the Pāâbava army into a victory march, as Draupadī leads her troops across burning coals in a remarkable display of ecstatic fire-walking. The cultural sense of Aśvatthāman’s mythic violence is reduced to its most recognizable and resonant culture significator—pure focused intensity—and is transformed into a blissful and liberating experience of possession.


In Vipula’s case, the link is to initiatory possession. It is uncertain whether Vipula’s ability to possess other people was part of an initiatory practice, like that seen much later in the northern and eastern tantric material. The process employed by Vipula (he entered his limbs and face into hers, remaining within her, unmoving, invisible, like a shadow) is, as we have seen, strongly reminiscent of the descriptions of “transfer of essence” from father to son when the father is approaching death (BĀU 1.5.17, Kauùītaki Upaniùad 2.14). It also closely resembles the later descriptions by the commentators on Yogasūtras 3.38 on the physical processes necessary to engineer possession, as well as on Hemacandra’s description of possession in the Jain Yogaśāstra. Thus, this kind of yogic possession has both mythic and practical foundations, giving it the basic requirements and appearance of a “tradition.” Thus, possession casts extreme doubt on the viability of the socially constructed individual, as he or she swings from bliss and integration to terror and fragmentation, an alternation of saÅyoga and viprayoga, unity and separation, recognition and alienation, as the bhakti saints would see it. The problem refuses to go away and is presented afresh in each generation. Perhaps the central insight of possession is the recognition and acceptance of self as other, an insight that also casts doubt on the psychoanalytic project of reclaiming submerged parts of the self as an exercise in regaining wholeness, as Shulman reminds us.51 Although this project is to a great extent shared by Indian philosophers, who have theorized it through adopting and adapting the associative thinking of the Vedas, it can be successful only after dispersion and alienness are recognized as facts of life. Convergences can be anticipated, even guided, idealized, and perhaps achieved in a grand reconciliation of self-possession. But the difficult, perhaps irreconcilable, problem remains the acceptance of one’s own multivocality.

Notes 1. Trans. van Buitenen 1975:335. 2. To the best of my knowledge, no text actively distinguishes samāveśa from samādhi. The former, it appears, indicates blissful pervasion by an external force, while the latter, in the Yogasūtras, the key text that defines it, suggests an internal pervasion that transcends relation. 3. Many other equivalent passages are found in the Yoga Upaniùads; see the edition by A. Mahadeva Sastri. 4. See Brown 1921:153ff. for further references. 5. Cf. Csordas 1990.

Conclusions 603

6. See the articles by Koller, Larson, and Dissanayake in Kasulis et al. 1993. These articles, which do little more than examine well-known canonical doctrines, abundantly reveal the truth of Gombrich’s observations often cited here that “brahmanism inculcates control.” 7. Dissanayake 1993:39–40. 8. Staal 1993:71. See also Goodman 1990, who makes a strong case for a positive correlation between physical posture, spirit or deity possession, and states of altered consciousness. 9. The body as conceptualized in the ñV and in India in general, as we have seen, occupied a surprisingly liminal space. Based on his analysis of the afterlife in the ñV, Reat notes, “in Vedic thought the most essential element of the human being is his individual identity, which resides primarily in the quasi-material tanū” (1990:63). (In spite of the general absence of historical and linguistic surety in this book, Reat’s observations on tanū, at least, are sound.) This individual identity is a composite entity called ātmán in the ñV and Yajurveda SaÅhitās. This is to be distinguished from the ātman of the Upaniùads, where it becomes the microcosmic equivalent of the absolute brahman. 10. Staal 1993. His writing on ritual (e.g., 1983, 1990a) also demonstrates this point. 11. Tambiah speaks of Western “notions of bounded self and atomistic individualism” (1990:133) opposing the more fluid, transactional, and interactional notions of the self in Indian thought. On “fluidity” of the self in India, see Daniel 1984. 12. See the discussion in Chapter 2 on the equal attraction of possession performance to ethnographers and enculturated peoples. 13. Cf., e.g., Kakar 1982:238ff.; Koller 1993:52ff. 14. Cf. Heesterman’s felicitous statement on the Vedic ritualist’s conception of the universe: “In this world of floating forms there are no hard and fast lines; conceptually different entities and notions interchange with bewildering ease. All things, entities, notions, powers, are connected with each other. Nevertheless this world is not the chaos it appears to be at first sight. The point at issue for the Vedic thinker is not to disentangle and differentiate conceptually different entities and notions but to realize, to know, their connections” (1957:6). See also Chapter 5, n. 80. 15. This corporeal liminality is seemingly built into the Vedic language itself. Gonda observes with respect to the enigmatic power expressed by the word bráhman that it belongs to a type of Indo-European terminology that blurs the distinction between “nomen actionis and nomen rei” (1950:72), that is between action and object. This blurring, which is in fact a blurring of identity, is a characteristic of Vedic thought, and it is most visible in bandhutās such as these. 16. Cf. Csordas 1990:1ff. 17. Cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1992 for the related term, “free-floating monad.” 18. Marriott and Inden 1977; see also Marriott 1990. 19. Appadurai 1986:755. 20. Cf. Swami Vivekananda’s “vedāntafication” of the Ramakrishna Mission, amply demonstrated in Kripal 1995. See also Appadurai, who, summarizing Ashis Nan-


dy’s argument (1983), writes that Swami Vivekananda “largely succumbed to the androcentric, linear, protestant, and activist strands in the dominant colonial culture” (1986:748). 21. Gupta 1995:10. 22. Robinet 1993:103. 23. Eck 1993:59. 24. Ibid.:59–60. 25. Ibid.:60. 26. Jung 1990:495, cited by Glucklich 1997:53. 27. Glucklich 1997:53. 28. See also Orsi: “Western styles of knowledge, which typically give priority to detachment over engagement, to textuality over vocality, to mind over body, are to be exposed to radically different ways of constructing and inhabiting reality” (2001:109). This, he asserts, runs counter to the priorities of the “once-dominated” and “once-oppressed” other. Doubtless this is largely true. However, one of the facets of Indian orthodoxy is that this allegedly Western style of knowledge is also true of it, though one may argue that the facets of Indian orthodoxy that interested Christian-inspired Western intellectuals were the ones most framed in this manner. The reliance of mainstream brahmanical śāstra on reason and logic appealed to Western intellectuals, especially the discourses of Nyāya, Vedānta, and Theravada Buddhism. Poetics (alaÅkāraśāstra) was taken slightly less seriously, as was Purāâa, and, of course, Tantra and bhakti literature. All of these were more embodied, vocal, and engaged, and were it not for the intriguing character of their antiquity, most of the vedic literature would have met with the same fate, as the oft-cited derogatory comments of Max Müller, Julius Eggeling, and others testify. For these, see Tull 1989, ch. 1. 29. Cf. Kjaerholm, who states: “We do not really believe that a person can be possessed by spirits or the devil or what have you. Although this was a common belief in medieval Europe it is not generally held now, certainly not by social scientists” (1982:184). 30. See Bynum 2001, which examines twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives of metamorphosis and hybridity. 31. Recall Varāhamihira’s warning (Chapter 11) to astrologers against the use of possession. 32. Yocum 1982:193. 33. Kripal 1995:271. Kripal does not distinguish between possession and ecstatic vision (72, passim). The Kathāmóta 4.232 contains “a self-description of how the saint’s ecstatic states used to possess him like ghosts until he finally could expel them out through his bowels” (Kripal 1995:335). 34. Bhattacharyya (1986) also demonstrates this in her work on cultural configurations of insanity. 35. I have used the word “intermedial” for this state; see F. Smith 2004. 36. In spite of the active participation of brahmans in non-brahmanic possession ritual, certain artifacts of brahmanical inhibitions remain in their performance. Wil-

Conclusions 605

liam Sax informs me that the bodies of low-caste people in possession gyrate more wildly than those of upper-caste members. 37. Bynum 2001:31. 38. Thus Gombrich can argue that “both brahmanism and Buddhism oppose possession and commend self-control, while the communal religion of the Sinhalese, as of the Indian, village centres, and has probably always centred, on a cult of local deities whose priests become possessed and so act as mediums to help villagers solve their problems” (1988:145). 39. Humphrey and Laidlaw see this at work in contemporary India as well, in the Jain stance towards emotional engagement in religious practice. They write, “The more puritan of our informants disapproved of [episodes of emotional engagement], in the same way, one imagines, that ‘enthusiasm’ was frostily dismissed in the eighteenth-century Church of England” (1994:228). 40. Pollock 1990:333. 41. Biardeau 1989a:21–22. 42. White discusses “vernacular ritual strategies” in his undated and not yet published paper. This is not quite identical to what I am positing here, but the article presents more evidence of the influence of “vernacular” practices on Sanskrit textuality, thus broadening the perimeters of Sanskritic culture beyond what many, including Pollock, might contend. This effectively broadens the discourse of power in Sanskritic culture, reshaping at least these elements of it to reach beyond the MīmāÅsā-laden orthodoxy. 43. Hiltebeitel 1989b:450. We might also here consider Haberman’s description (1988:98ff., 137ff.) of male practitioners of rāgānugabhakti sādhana who wear women’s clothes. This is not mentioned in any Sanskrit text before the eighteenth century, but its presence as part of the local tradition supports and strengthens Rūpa Gosvāmī’s textuality of this sādhana in the Bhaktirasāmótasindhu. 44. Thus, textual, performative, and religious traditions like those arising out of the Nā•yaśāstra and certain Purāâas and Tantras, as well as vernacular literatures expressing the same human religious concerns, may thus be correct in envisioning themselves as the fifth Veda. On this, see F. Smith 1994. 45. Miles 1997:59. 46. Shulman 1994:1. 47. Ibid.:25. 48. See the descriptions of the nāga in Chapter 12, from bhūtavidyā accounts in Sanskrit and Tibetan medical texts. These, however, do not square with what we have here. This is not the place to enter into a study of nāgas; it is sufficient to note that they occupy a place of great importance in the MBh. Generally, they are depicted as water spirits who also possess the secrets of the earth. They are alternately dangerous, poisonous, and helpful, with a reputation for divination. They may be exotic serpents or half-human and half-serpent (as appears to be the case here). In Tibet the iconography is somewhat clearer. There a nāga is typically depicted with a divination arrow and a jewel in its hands (cf. Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1956:305).


49. The story is much less complete in the Rāmāyaâa; cf. Rām 144.15ff., esp. verse 18, and Goldman 1984:210 and notes. 50. Cf. Wadley 1999. This is perhaps not so odd, as the peripheral nature of this episode (ākhyāna) to the main action of the epic renders this aspect of it dispensable. Nor is it depicted in Draupadī epic performances in Tamilnadu or Garhwal. Neither Nala nor Damayantī are mentioned by Hiltebeitel in his Draupadī volumes or by Sax in Dancing the Self. As mentioned earlier, the Jain story of Nala excises the possession completely; he is an archetypal good king who ends up renouncing the world. 51. Shulman 1994:27.


b


Abbreviations ĀSS BORI GOS IGNCA IIJ IJHS JAAR JAOS KSS KSTS OUP SUNY Press

Ānandāśrama Sanskrit Series Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute Gaekwad’s Oriental Series Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts Indo-Iranian Journal International Journal of Hindu Studies Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of the American Oriental Society Kashi Sanskrit Series Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies Oxford University Press State University of New York Press

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abhicāra, 560n39 abhicāraja, 480 Abhinavagupta, xxv; on bhūtavidyā, 478; on defi nition of possession, 13; on devotion, 346–347, 359n5; on mudrās, 376–377; on possession as enlightenment, 372, 373; on possession as knowledge, 371; on possession as practice, 370, 407n14; on sah ódaya, 342n29; on śaktipāta, 391 abhi ùa ãgaja, 480, 560n39 abhiśāpaja, 480 abhyāsa, 371, 372 acintyabhedābheda, 357 adālat, 114, 115–117, 152. See also legal models Abhamalla, 571n196 adhikāra, 154, 271, 304, 398, 426, 576n240 ädurā, 133 advaita, 233n8, 357

aesthetic theory. See alaÅkāraśāstra Āgamarahasyam, 143, 406n5, 456n9 agency, 68–69, 260–261, 587 aghau, 140 Aghori Vimalananda, 77–78, 94n197 Agni: and creation/incarnation, 204; and pervasion/immersion in Vedas, 188–189; and shape-shifting, 199– 200, 250; and transfer of essence, 212, 239n86; and Ucchuùma, 438 agnicayana, 183, 212, 231, 245n48, 378, 379, 576n240 Agnihotra ritual, 222 AH Uttarasthāna (AH-Ut), 541 Aitareya Brāhma âa (AB), 222–223, 226–227 Aitareya Upani ùad (AiU), 206–207 Akanā çū ôu, 132 ākar ùa âa, 75, 92–93n180 Aklujkar, Ashok, 569n163 ak ùarabrahman, 358 Aks (Hindi fi lm), 340n4

666 Index

alaÅkāraśāstra, 320, 330–340; and authenticity, 335–336; and bhūtavidyā, 507–508; brahmanical orthodoxy on, 6; and Buddhism, 333–334; and ethnographies, 334–336, 343n36; and folk-classical relationship, 331–332, 335, 336–337, 339–340; and legitimization of emotion, 333, 343n33; and performative contexts, 335–337, 343n46; rasa categories, 332–333, 337–338, 342n28; and sah ódaya, 332, 342n29; and social construction of emotion, 332, 342n27; and vocabularies of possession, 338–339 alchemy, 325, 377, 443, 554 Alexander the Great, 451, 453, 470n150 amanussaparaggahītā, 303 Amaruka. See Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka Amaruśataka, 108n22 Ama Ta Bap, 450–451, 452 amatig óhīta, 478, 560n35 āmil, 143 Amma, Andavan Pichchi, 87n97 amma ç vantatu, 128 Amoghapāśasūtra, 435–436, 465n97 ānanda korā, 161n49 Ānandavardhana, 346 a âa ãku, 70, 72, 92n172, 171n227, 358 Anantānandagiri, 294–297 anatta, 302 Andersen, Poul, 412n73 androgyny, 105, 131 Angala Amman, 129–130 angāt vā bhlā, 162n68 angāt ye âe, 121 anger. See raudra ā ãgmā ca óhnu, 125 animals: in art, 401, 402, 404, 406, 408, 415n96; in fiction, 321–322; in Mahābhārata, 280n30; products used in healing, 540, 541, 575nn226, 227, 232; and shape-shifting, 236n51 anthropological approaches, xv, 3–4, 33–

39; defi nitions of possession, 35– 39, 79n12; and Eurocentrism, 36– 37; interpretive strategies, 36–39, 79–80nn17, 19; and psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories, 87n104; on ritual, 33–34, 38, 79n3, 80nn21, 23; and social control/resistance, 88n107; and vocabularies of possession, 35–36; and Western unitary self, 589. See also ethnographies Aâubhā ùya (Vallabhācārya), 301–302, 349 anugraha, 485–486, 562nn66, 69 anu-pra√viś, 220, 222, 241n117, 255, 302 apad óù •i, 120 apasmāra, 482–483, 510, 540, 550–551, 561n47, 577–578n248 āpastambagraha, 519–520, 569n163 Āpastamba Śrautasūtra (ĀpŚS), 182– 184, 573n214 apauru ùeya, 177, 180 Apollonius of Tyana, 159–160n31 Appadurai, Arjun, 39, 586, 594, 603– 604n20 Appayya Dīkùita, 297, 298, 301 apsaras, 194, 225, 228, 474, 476, 477, 525 Arjuna, disguise of, 232n2 army of spirits, 115, 118, 158n26, 160n40 art: animals in, 401, 402, 404, 406, 408, 415n96; and fluid/multiple self, 368, 400, 401–406 ārū be, 127 āru bha, 75, 93n182, 120 arugu darśana ātu âbu, 138 aru {, 130, 350 Āryaśūra, 576n237 āsana, 377 asceticism, 53, 82n43, 85n84 Asclepius, 412n69 Assamese vocabularies of possession, 139–142, 167–168nn177–179

Index

association of possession with low social status, 4, 23–24n5; and control, 25– 26n23, 450; and cross-dressing, 361n32; and folk-classical relationship, 147, 170n222, 420; and “irrationality,” 69, 91n156; and shamanism, 61, 63; and svasthāveśa, 420, 450. See also possession as primitive; social control/ resistance Aù •ā ãgah ódaya SaÅhitā (AH), xxvi, 364; bhūtavidyā in, 480, 482, 493– 497, 500, 503, 504–505, 541, 560n30, 561n46, 564nn93, 94, 96; and contemporary Āyurveda, 545, 550 astrology (jyoti ùa), xxvi; and bhūtavidyā, 484, 561nn53, 57; brahmanical orthodoxy on, 6; and contemporary Āyurveda, 550, 551, 577–578nn245, 248; and prasenā, 424, 425, 459n42, 460nn47, 50; and vocabularies of possession, 145 Aśvatthāman. See Śiva’s possession of Aśvatthāman Atharvaveda (AV): and Āyurveda, 364, 365n3, 476, 559n20; bhūtavidyā in, 475–478, 561n52, 568n146; discourse vs. practice in, 24n13; fluid/multiple self in, 9; gandharva in, 228, 230; pervasion/immersion in, 180–181, 193–194; soma ritual in, 180–181; and Tantra, 364; transfer of essence in, 212–214, 219, 239n88 atirudra, 410n55 ā •ko {, 133 ātmabhāvaparigraham, 303, 392, 581 Ātmajñānānanda, Svāmī, 86n90 ātman/brahman, xxiii, 18, 20, 21, 346– 347, 586, 603n9 attabhāva, 22 audience. See performative contexts audience response theory, 330 authenticity: Derrida on, 341n9; ethnog– raphic overview, 155, 172n246; and fiction, 322–323, 341n9; and Nala’s possession by Kali, 262–263, 264–

667

265; and performative contexts, 335– 336 authoritarian societies, 59 Avaloiteśvara, 435, 465n97 avatār, 163n78 avatāra: as Viùâu’s descents, 280n30, 404, 441; similarity to āveśa in devotional possession, 350–351; śarabha as descent of Bhairava, 461n121; as a vigraha, 485; on its use in the Āvi ù •ace ù •āvidhiparivarta n, 567n141 avatolagraha, 521 āvēcam, 127–128 āveśa, 195, 236n46; Bengali usage, 120; and bhakti, 346; and bhāva, 14; in Brahmasūtras, 297, 298, 301–302, 313n27; in Buddhist Sanskrit literature, 303, 306, 314n44; and Chinese vocabulary, 464n94; control of, 41– 42; and creation/incarnation, xxiii, 192; in devotional literature, 346– 351; and emotion, 333–334; in Mahābhārata, 246, 580; and Malayalam vocabularies of possession, 136; and possession among deities, 293; review, 580; in Tantra, 372; and transfer of essence, 223; and Vajrayāna Buddhism, 304, 305, 306; Vallabhācārya on, 347– 350; in Vedāntasāra, 302; and vocabularies of possession, 14, 112–113; in Yogasūtras, 286, 287, 288, 311n3 ā√viś , xxii; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 339; in Buddhist Sanskrit literature, 303; and entrance, 184–185; in Mahābhārata, 246, 247–248, 260; and night/darkness, 193; and poetic meters, 177–178; in Rāmāya âa, 277, 282–283nn63–78, 81, 82; Sāyaâa on, 193, 235n41; and soma ritual, 179, 183, 184, 233n14, 234n23, 339; and transfer of essence, 222–223 avishkara, 78 Āvi ù •ace ù •āvidhiparivarta n (ACVP), 567n141

668 Index

āvi ù •atā, 360n28 aweishe. See Chinese aweishe ritual ĀyaraÅgasutta, 423–424 Ayodhyākā âba, 278 Āyurveda, xxvi; and Atharvaveda, 364, 365n3, 476, 559n20; and attabhāva, 22; on bālagrahas, 531, 571n196; Cakradatta, 536, 542–544, 575nn230–235; on disease-producing possession, 272; healing in early texts, 536–541, 573– 574nn215, 216, 218, 221, 225, 575n226; and SāÅkhya, 486, 487, 562n71; Siddhasāra, 578n259; skandagrahas in, 122, 272; and svasthāveśa, 431–432; and Tantra, 363–365; and textual traditions, 364, 365n3; and vocabularies of possession, 144, 145; and yoga, 562–563n74. See also bhūtavidyā; contemporary Āyurveda Aziz, Barbara, 470n152 ‘bap pa, 127 Bādarāyaâa. See Brahmasūtras bādhā āveśam, 137 bad na μar, 120 bahar âābhūt, 170n220 BahumāÅsā, 467n116 baithak, 78, 94n197 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 125, 126 baki, 143 Bālabodha, 348 bālagrahas, 530, 571nn193, 196; and bhūtavidyā, 481, 482, 513, 530–535, 571nn193, 196, 572n198; and folkclassical relationship, 556; and healing, 531–535, 541, 572nn198, 203–205; and Kuùāâas, 281n52; and Skanda, 273–274; and svasthāveśa, 449–450; and women’s preponderance in possession, 513 Bālājī temple: and association of possession with low social status, 23–24n5; demographics, 83n53, 114, 119, 158n21, 469n143; and devotion, 441;

diversity of healing techniques at, 114, 157n17; and healing as moral practice, 516; and legal models, 114–117; pitósthān, 160n36; and psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories, 47, 83n55; and puttalī, 533; recent growth of, 157n16; rural setting of, 157n14 Balfour, Henry, 139–140 bali-ädura, 133 Bāâabha••a, 417, 428 bandhanaya, 133 bandhena, 133 bandhutā, 74, 211, 585, 603n14 Bargen, Doris R., 85n78 Barlow, David, 573–574n218 barwa, 143 bayan, 116 bāyu, 163n76 Becker, Carl, 36 belief vs. practice. See discourse vs. practice Bell, Catherine, 152, 172n240 Bellamy, Carla, 93–94n196, 157n19 Bellezza, John, 461n56 Bengali ma ãgalkābyas, 66 Bengali vocabularies of possession, 119– 120 Benz, Ernst, 27n42 Berglie, Per-Arne, 122, 126–127, 144, 150 Berti, Daniela, 122 Bertrand, Didier, 165n133 Beyer, Stephen, 392–393, 560n26 bhagat, 117, 143, 528 Bhagavadajjukāprahasanam (Mahendravarman), xxv, 107n16, 257–258, 325, 328–330, 339, 356 bhagavadāveśa, 349, 360n17 Bhagavad-Gītā (BhG), 239n85, 345–346, 355, 371, 388, 583, 587 Bhāgavata Purā âa (BhP): Abhinavagupta on, 347; and Bhagavad-Gītā, 345– 346; bhāva in, 355, 361nn40, 41; and fiction, 320; Kóùâa as puru ùottama

Index

in, 21; and Nala’s possession by Kali, 254–255; nyāsa in, 379; practices in, 316n75; shape-shifting in, 197–198; and svasthāveśa, 440; and Tamil/ Simhala vocabularies of possession, 166n135; transfer of essence in, 223; Vallabhācārya on, 347 Bhairava: and conversion of spirits, 160n32; and Hāratī, 169n200; and legal healing models, 114, 115, 119; and nyāsa, 388; and svasthāveśa, 429, 434, 438, 439, 440, 442, 444, 464n93, 467nn120, 121 Bhaktamāl (Nābhādas), 353 bhakti: and āveśa, 346; and ā√viś, 339; brahmanical orthodoxy on, 6; and discourse vs. practice, 24n13, 311; and Marathi vocabularies of possession, 121–122; and personhood/self, 21–22; and philosophical texts, 311, 316n75; and śakti, 70; and social control/resistance, 57. See also devotion Bhaktirasām ótasindhu (Rūpa Gosvāmī), 351–353, 605n43 bhaktudù/bhaktudràlu, 170n219 Bhāmatī (Vācaspatimiśra), 298 bharā, 119, 161n49 Bharata, xxv, 331 bhar hāo ±ā, 120 bhar karā, 120 bhar âābhūt, 170n220 bhar nāmā, 120 bhasan, 169n211 Bhāskara, 297–298 bhasmas, 553–554, 578nn252, 253 Bhat, M. Ramakrishna, 460n48 Bhattacharyya, Deborah, 54–55, 119– 120, 143, 359n5 Bha••otpala (Utpala), 424–425, 444, 459n45, 460nn48, 49 bhāva: Bengali usage, 120; in Buddhist Sanskrit literature, 307, 315n63; and contemporary Āyurveda, 546;

669

and devotion, 354–356, 357, 361– 362nn36, 39–43, 48; and emotion, 102, 336, 357; and fiction, 320; and nyāsa, 386; and vocabularies of possession, 14 Bhavabha••a, 461n55 bhāv ānā, 113 bhāvanā, 307 Bhāvanākrama (BhK), 306–308, 311, 315n63, 316nn68, 74 bhāvāveśa, 120, 356, 362n43 bhedābheda, 347 Bhoja, 342n28 Bhoot (Hindi fi lm), 322, 340n4 bhopā, 143 Bhramara-Gīta, 355 bhutācā asvār ā âūn, 162n68 bhūta pattu âbu, 138 bhūtapavi • •ho, 303 bhūtaśuddhi, 399 bhūtavidyā, xxvi, 472–530; abhi ùa ãgaja, 480, 560n39; Aù •ā ãgah ódaya SaÅhitā on, 480, 482, 493–497, 500, 503, 504–505, 560n30, 561n46, 564nn93, 94, 96; and astrology, 484, 561nn53, 57; in Āvi ù •ace ù •āvidhiparivarta n, 567n141; Āyurvedic text overview, 479–483, 558nn8, 9, 560n41; bālagrahas, 481, 482, 513, 530–535, 571nn193, 196, 572n198; Bower manuscript on, 509–510, 567n145, 568nn146–149; Caraka SaÅhitā on, 479–480, 481–482, 487–490, 498, 562–563nn74, 77, 78; and contemporary Āyurveda, 544, 549, 576n236; and deities, 475, 559n16; Divehi, 523– 524; and elements, 558–559n13; and emotion, 506–508, 566n136; and folkclassical relationship, 481, 482, 555– 557; and gandharva, 476, 503–504, 559n22; graha overview, 483–486, 561nn52, 53, 57, 562nn66, 69; Ĩśānaśivagurudevapaddhati on, 510–514, 568nn150–154; Madanamahār âava

670 Index

bhūtavidyā (continued) on, 514–522, 569nn159–161, 163– 167; McClintock on, 570n171; overview, 472–474; and personality, 22, 480–482, 497–500, 505, 515, 524, 561n43; piśacas, 522–523, 525–530, 570nn181, 182, 187; and pregnancy, 474–475, 476, 559n23; psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories on, 479, 497– 508, 560n37, 565nn102, 108, 567n138; in Purāâas, 567n140; and SāÅkhya, 486–487, 562n71; secularization narrative, 558n11; and sexuality, 502, 520, 526–527, 537, 569n165, 573n217; and Siddhasāra, 578n259; and skandagrahas, 272, 475; and speech, 235n34; and Sri Lankan vocabularies of possession, 133; Suśruta SaÅhitā on, 479– 480, 482, 490–493, 498, 563nn79, 84–86, 564nn87, 88; and transfer of essence, 516, 569n160; Varanasi ethnography on, 522–523, 569–570nn171, 175; and Vedas, 474–479, 500, 558– 559nn11, 13, 560nn30, 35. See also disease-producing possession; healing bhūt bhādā cuma ãkali, 121, 162n67 bhūt bharā, 120 bhūte ā ãgī vā bhu lāglī, 162n68 bhūte pāo ±ā, 120 bhūt grasth, 113 bhūt kī bīmārī, 113, 117 bhūt lagnā, 113 bhūt-pret, 113, 114 bhūts, 103, 108n28, 113–116, 170n220. See also bhūtavidyā bhuva, 143 Biardeau, Madeleine, 593 Biernacki, Loriliai, 167n179 biography, 77–78, 94n197, 174, 305, 356 Blackburn, Stuart, 137 Blatty, William Peter, 319 Bloomfield, Maurice, xxv, 280n24, 311n3, 312n19, 320–321, 341n15 Boddy, Janice, 10, 35, 67

Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā (Kùemendra), 303 body, 581–584; Brahmasūtras on, 297– 298; cakras, 363, 582; composite, 9–10; and creation/incarnation, 202– 204, 237–238n67; and devotion, 351–353, 358, 361nn29, 30, 32; and discourse vs. practice, 582, 603n6; divinization of, 358, 368, 370, 372, 374–376, 391, 408–409nn32–34; and fiction, 328; and fluid/multiple self, 583–584; as inert, 207–208, 357; and liminality, 586, 603nn9, 15; in Li ãga Purā âa, 259; lists of body parts, 218, 240n106; multiple embodiment, 351– 353, 361nn29, 30, 32; nā bis, 286, 311n4, 363, 582; and psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories, 50, 84n70; and social control/resistance, 586– 587; and yoga, 582, 583, 603n8 body piercing, 131, 132, 154 bombo, 124, 125, 144, 152 bone chewing, 129–130 Bourguignon, Erika, 35, 48, 62 Bower manuscript, 509–510, 567n145, 568nn146–149 Brahmā, 171n236 bráhman, xxiii; and creation/incarnation, 202–204, 210–211, 238n73, 357; and dualism/nondualism, 357, 358; and fluid/multiple self, 603n15; and transfer of essence, 212–213. See also ātman/brahman Brahmā âba Purā âa, 222, 388–389 brahmanism: and Buddhism, 6, 325, 333; and contemporary Āyurveda, 545, 576n239, 603n6; and control, 8, 25– 26nn23, 30, 41, 43, 199, 385, 591, 592, 605n38; and devotion, 349–350; and discourse vs. practice, 8, 26n27; and gandharva, 229–230, 243n157; and gradual vs. sudden possession, 591–593, 604–605nn36, 38, 39; and literacy, 12–13; and nyāsa, 201, 376,

Index

379, 383–385, 388; and possession as practiced behavior, 422, 458n30; scholarly orthodoxy, 5–8, 24–25nn18– 21; and shape-shifting, 198–199; and soma ritual, 147–148, 170n224; and svasthāveśa, 420, 421–422; and text sources, 421–422; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, 258; and Western discourses, 604n28. See also folk-classical relationship Brahmasūtrabhā ùya (Śaãkara), 298 Brahmasūtras (BS), xxiv, 297–302, 308, 309, 313–314nn26, 27, 29, 36, 37, 349, 361nn29, 30 brāy, 158n27 B óhadāra âyaka Upani ùad (BĀU): bhūtavidyā in, 484, 563n84; creation/ incarnation in, 204–205; and discourse vs. practice, 8; gandharva in, 228– 230, 330; localization of divinity in, 73–74; nyāsa in, 237n61; and svasthāveśa, 448; transfer of essence in, 215– 216, 218, 239n94, 240n96; and Vajrayāna Buddhism, 394 B óhaddevatā, 376, 409–410n43 B óhatkālottara, 418, 429, 462n68 B óhatkalpabhā ùya, 423 B óhatsaÅhitā (B óS) (Varāhamihira), 424, 425, 444, 458n26, 459n42, 484 Brown, Michael F., 95, 104, 105 Brückner, Heidrun, 138, 144 brujo, 169n218 Buddha, possession by, 151, 171n234 Buddhism, xxiv, 302–308, 314nn41, 44, 46, 48; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 333–334; and brahmanism, 6, 325, 333; and Cambodian possession, 165n133; and contemporary Āyurveda, 576n237; control in, 9, 26n30; and conversion of spirits, 160n32; and devotion, 311, 316n74; discourse vs. practice in, 26n28, 316n73; and folk-classical relationship, 150, 171n228, 390–391, 412–413n78; and Himalayan vocabu-

671

laries of possession, 122–123, 124, 125, 126, 164n94; and mediumistic possession, 99, 107n14; nonexistent self in, 9, 22, 29n69, 302; and prasenā, 426–427, 461nn55, 57; and sexuality, 502; and shamanism, 90n134, 171n228, 305; and Shinto, 469n145; and Sri Lankan vocabularies of possession, 134–135, 136, 166–167n153; and svasthāveśa, 430, 433–434, 463nn82, 83, 464nn88, 91, 93; Tibetan Sanskrit literature, 303–308, 314n49; in Vikramāditya story, 325; and Yogasūtras (YS), 302. See also Vajrayāna Buddhism Burrow, Thomas, 92n172, 358 būta nemā/kolā, 138 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 342n27, 592 bzung-ba, 304 ca bhnā, 113 Cahill, Thomas, 281n39 Caitanya. See Śrī Caitanya caitanya, 302 Caitanyacaritām óta (Kóùâadāsa Kavirāja), 351 Caitanyacaritām óta (Murārigupta), 350– 351 caitanyam, 136 cajitas, 169n215 Cakradatta, 536, 542–544, 575nn230–235 cakras, 363, 582 CakrasaÅvarapi âbārtha, 418, 429 CakrasaÅvara-Tantra, 426–427 Caland, W., 484 Calantā, 141, 142 Caldwell, Sarah, 37, 54, 55, 56, 136, 145, 153, 353, 358 Cambodia, 158n27, 165n133 cāmiyā •i, 145, 155 Campany, Robert Ford, 27n38 Candranandana, 501, 565n113 Caãkam poetry, 133, 165–166n135 Caraka SaÅhitā, xxvi; bhūtavidyā in, 479– 480, 481–482, 487–490, 498, 562–

672 Index

Caraka SaÅhitā (continued) 563nn74, 77, 78; healing in, 364, 471, 536–540, 544, 573–574nn215, 216, 218, 221, 225, 575n226; and SāÅkhya, 487 Castillo, Richard, 37, 54, 101 caukī, 117 celibacy, 101 central vs. peripheral possession, 61, 62– 63, 89n126, 89n128, 123 Chalmers, David, 27–28n47 Chan Buddhism, 26n28 Chāndogya Upani ùad (ChU): bhūtavidyā in, 474, 483; creation/incarnation in, 205–206; nyāsa, 237n61; oppositional consciousness in, 284; Śaãkara on, 298; transfer of essence in, 215–216, 239n93 Chandrakumar, S. M., 130 channeling. See New Age trance channeling The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Brown), 95 Charcot, Jean Martin, 482–483 chāttan, 549 childhood possession. See svasthāveśa childsnatchers. See bālagrahas; skandagrahas China: āveśa, 464n94; children in ritual, 426; cultural migration to, 432–434, 458n32, 463nn79, 82, 83, 464n88, 91, 93; and disease-producing possession, 422; fluid/multiple self in, 588; healing, 117–118, 119, 160–161nn37, 39, 41, 45; and Himalayan vocabularies of possession, 163n79; mediumistic possession, 98, 107n13, 468n134; and nyāsa, 389, 412n73; shamanism, 158n24, 432, 463n77; svasthāveśa origin question, 432–434, 463nn79, 82, 83, 464n88, 91, 93. See also Chinese aweishe ritual Chinese aweishe ritual, 435–440, 444–

448, 465n97; and Daoism, 448, 469n137; and mediumistic possession, 468n134; and prasenā, 436–437, 465– 466nn99, 101, 102; use of children in, 454 Christianity: ambiguity of possession in, 42–43, 81n37, 82n39; and Assamese vocabularies of possession, 139; and contemporary renewal of oracular possession, 106–107n11; and ecstasy, 62; and exorcism, 40, 81n28, 161n945, 319; initiatory possession in, 407n8; and New Age trance channeling, 106n2; on possession as evil, 39–43, 81nn28, 30, 32, 34, 38; and prati ù •hā, 412n69; and psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 83–84n58; and Sri Lankan vocabularies of possession, 135; and study of possession, 3, 23n3, 39; and transfer of essence, 239n87, 240n105; unitary self in, 19, 604n28; and vocabularies of possession, 164n114. See also Western discourses chūdāl/cu óail, 116 chyèkpa, 124 cidānanda, 373 Cilappatikāram, 133 Citrāãgada, 243n148 citta, 286–287, 312n7, 414n91 cittāveśa n, 348 Claus, Peter J., 37, 57, 65, 88n107, 138, 147, 168n197 Clifford, Terry, 497, 501–503, 505–506, 552, 554, 566nn117, 121, 135 Clooney, Francis X., 177, 233n9 cognitive science, 27–28n47 Cohen, Daniel, 571n190 Collins, Elizabeth Fuller, 130 Collins, Steven, 22 colonialism: and contemporary renewal of oracular possession, 98, 99; and possession as evil, 43; and social control/resistance, 56, 87–88n105; and study of possession, 23n3, 39;

Index

and vocabu laries of possession, 133, 139–140 composite self. See fluid/multiple self consciousness: Hegel on, 284, 311n1; and Himalayan vocabularies of possession, 126; and Malayalam vocabularies of possession, 137; oppositional, 284–285; problematic nature of term, 15, 27–28nn46, 47; and psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 46; and Vedānta, 313n36 contemporary Āyurveda, 544–551, 576n236; and astrology, 550, 551, 577–578nn245, 248; bhasmas in, 553– 554, 578nn252, 253; and bhāva, 546; and bhūtavidyā, 544, 549, 576n236; and brahmanism, 545, 576n239, 603n6; and Buddhism, 576n237; diagnosis in, 551–555, 578n249; mantras in, 548, 577n242; Tibet, 554–555; and women’s preponderance in possession, 544, 545, 547 control: and association of possession with low social status, 25–26n23, 450; and brahmanism, 8, 25–26nn23, 30, 41, 43, 199, 385, 591, 592, 605n38; in Buddhism, 9, 26n30; and emotion, 25n23, 592, 605n39; and limits of social control/resistance, 58–59, 88n113; and nyāsa, 385; and possession as evil, 41–42, 43; and ritual, 9, 26n31; and shape-shifting, 199; and spontaneity, 9, 26n28, 27n35; and svasthāveśa, 450; and transfer of essence, 215, 239n90; and vocabularies of possession, 11–12. See also social control/resistance Conversations with God: Book I (Walsch), 107n16 conversion of spirits, 116, 160n32 Coomaraswamy, A. K., 314n46 court model. See legal models creation/incarnation, xxiii, 202–211; and dualism/nondualism, 207–208,

673

357; and fluid/multiple self, 203, 206– 207, 208–209; ignorance of, 209; and pervasion/immersion, 192–193, 235n39; and primordial embodiment, 202–204, 237–238n67; and transfer of essence, 207–208, 215–216; and Vedic theism, 204–207, 238n73 cross-dressing, 352–353, 361n32, 605n43 Csordas, Thomas, 20 cuma ãkali, 57 Cuneo, Michael, 67 Cyavana, 197–198, 200 daivavyapāśraya, 538 daivavyapāśraya-cikitsā, 363, 471, 472, 536, 557n4 dak ùi âācāra, 419, 457n11 Dalai Lama(s), xxiv, 31nn58, 60, 56, 305, 391–392, 451–452 Dalai Lama VII, 391–392 aalhaâa, 563nn65, 85, 564nn86, 88 Damayantī, 330, 580. See also Nala’s possession by Kali Danforth, Loring, 44 da ãgārīya, 143 Daniel, E. Valentine, 92n176 Daoism, 389, 412n73, 448, 469n137, 588 Dārila, 478, 560n35 darśana, 137, 138 darśapūr âamāsau, 201 dāruharidrā, 542, 575n230 Daśakumāracarita (Daâbin), 330 Daśarūpa, 483 Dattatreya, 151 Davidson, Ronald, 325, 331, 433–434, 463n83, 464n88 Davis, Edward L., 118, 158n24, 418, 433, 435, 436, 437, 438–439, 448 dbab pa, 305 De, S. K., 350 debaddhani festival, 140–142, 145, 167– 168nn178, 179

674 Index

DeCaroli, Robert, 314n44 decentered self. See fluid/multiple self deception. See authenticity Deeg, Max, 236n47 Delmonico, Neal, 360n28 Delphi oracle, 90n133 DeMaris, Richard E., 407n8 democratization (prajātantra), 99–100 demographics: conclusions, 598; and healing, 83n53, 114, 119, 157n15, 158n21, 471n143; New Age trance channeling, 105. See also folk-classical relationship demonologies. See bhūtavidyā deodhā, 141–142 Derrida, Jacques, 316n70, 341n9 dēva āveśam, 137 devācī jhā b, 162n67 devotion, xxv, 345–359; Abhinavagupta on, 346–347, 359n5; and ā√viś, 339; Bhagavad-Gītā, 345–346, 355; and bhāva, 354–356, 357, 361–362nn36, 39–43, 48; and body, 351–353, 358, 361nn29, 30, 32; and Buddhism, 311, 316n74; and discourse vs. practice, 24n13; and fiction, 320; and fluid/ multiple self, xxv; and folk-classical relationship, 349–350, 353; and Hanumān, 276–277, 282n60, 441; and passion, 351, 360n28; and personhood/self, 21–22; and philosophical texts, 311, 316n75; and religious drama, 351, 353–356, 360n27, 361nn35, 36; and śakti, 70; and sexuality, 358–359, 362n50; and shamanism, 64; and social control/ resistance, 57; Śrī Caitanya, 345, 350– 351, 356; and svasthāveśa, 439–440, 454, 466n115, 467n116; and Tantra, 371; and transfer of essence, 223; and union/separation dialectic, 271–272, 346–347; Vallabhācārya, 345, 347– 350, 351, 354, 359–360nn10, 15, 17; and vocabularies of possession, 121–

122, 128, 131, 165–166n135. See also bhakti; Vallabhācārya dev óùi, 64–65, 143 dharmapālas, 304 dharmaśāstra, 6 dhokhebāz, 116 Dhvanyāloka (Ānandavardhana), 346 Dhvanyālokalocana (Abhinavagupta), xxv, 348–349 Dhyānabindu Upani ùad, 582 diagnosis, 473, 541, 551–555, 578n249 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 45, 47, 48–49, 82–83n47 dialogic interaction, 125, 126 Diehl, Carl Gustav, 130 Diemberger, Hildegard, 88n106, 89n126, 91n160, 451, 468n134 diet, 117 Dietrich, Angela, 127, 144–145 Dīpikā (Abhamalla), 571n196 Dirks, Nicholas B., 39, 59, 155 discourse vs. practice: and bhakti, 24n13, 311; and body, 582, 603n6; and brahmanism, 8, 26n27; in Buddhism, 26n28, 316n73; conclusions, 593–594; and philosophical texts, 285, 308–311, 316nn73, 74, 316nn75, 76; and psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 53, 85n84; and social control/resistance, 59; and study of possession, 5, 8, 24n13, 26n28. See also experience disease-producing possession, xxii, 471– 472; diagnosis of, 473, 541, 551–555, 578n249; and fluid/multiple self, 402; in Mahābhārata, 272–275, 281n52; and moral transgressions, 472–473, 478, 515–516, 530, 557–558n7, 576n236, 597; vs. New Age trance channeling, 97; and pervasion/ immersion in Vedas, 188; and shamanism, 64; text sources for, 458n24, 555–

Index

557; and vocabularies of possession, 117. See also bhūtavidyā; healing displacement, 221 Dissanayake, Wimal, 583 dissociation, 45, 48–51, 53, 59–60, 84n64, 101 Dissociative Identity Disorder, 48 dissociative trance disorder, 48–49, 53 Divehi, 523–524 divinization of body, 368, 374–376; and devotion, 358; and nyāsa, 372; and śaktipāta, 370, 375, 391, 408– 409nn32–34 dpa’-bo, 126, 144, 164n94, 305 Draupadī cult (Tamilnadu), 96, 128, 148– 149, 151, 170n225, 176, 338, 412n77 dre, 123 dream, 447, 469n139 ‘dre glud, 125 Dreyfus, Georges, 412–413n78 Driver, Tom, 76, 93n191 d óù •ipātam, 120 drug addiction, 547 dualism/nondualism, 207–208, 357, 357–358. See also union/separation dialectic dubiye, 144 Dudbridge, Glen, 444–445, 468n134 dukhi, 116 dumbiyānē, 139 Dumont, Louis, 4, 8, 29n57, 131, 157n14, 171n231 Dunne, John, 412–413n78 Durgā, 71 Durgāsaptaśati, 334 During Caspers, E.C.L., 89–90n131 Durkheim, Emil, 587 Dwyer, Graham, 119, 158n23, 516, 568n155 dyah-mā, 144 dyā n waipī, 144 Eck, Diana, 588–589 ecstasy, 62, 89n126, 121–122, 154

675

Ecstatic Religion (Lewis), 60–61 Eder, Matthias, 161n45 Edgerton, Franklin, 303 education, 69, 69–70, 91n156 effigies. See puttalī ekāgratā, xxv Eliade, Mircea, 13–14, 61, 62, 89n122, 287 eligibility for possession, 154–156, 172n245, 271, 398 embodiment. See body Emeneau, Murray, 73 emergent moods, 355, 362n42 emotion: and body, 582; in Buddhism, 333–334; and control, 25n23, 592, 605n39; legitimization of, 333, 343n33, 580; in Mahābhārata, xxiii, 247–248, 250, 268; and Malayalam vocabularies of possession, 137–138; in philosophical texts, 285; and possession as evil, 41; and possession content, 101–103, 108n24; as primitive, 4, 23n4; social construction of, 332, 342n27, 506–508, 566n136; and social control/resistance, 102– 103; somaticization of, 506–508; and transfer of essence, 242n138; and vocabularies of possession, 27n42, 137–138, 247–248, 250; and yoga, 312n7. See also alaÅkāraśāstra empowerment. See social control/ resistance Engler, Steven, 573n213 enlightenment: and body, 306; and discourse vs. practice, 308; and fluid/ multiple self, 585–586, 587, 603n14; and New Age trance channeling, 100– 101; and rasa, 332; in Tantra, 367, 369, 372–374; in Tibetan Buddhism, 306–307, 308 Enlightenment (Europe), 81n34 entrance: in Mahābhārata, 248–250; and sexuality, 239n90; in Vedas, 177,

676 Index

entrance (continued) 184–186, 234n25. See also ā√viś; pervasion/immersion in Vedas epics, 245–246; brahmanical orthodoxy on, 6; and fiction, 319, 340n2; and psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 52, 76n85; recitation of, 150, 171n229, 172n245. See also Mahābhārata; Rāmāya âa epilepsy, 83n49 Erndl, Kathleen, 13, 37, 71, 76, 113, 172n239 Ervin, Frank R., 82n44 escape, 264, 264–265 ethics, 308, 316n70 ethnographies, xv, 3–4; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 334–336, 343n36; and devotional literature, 350–351; and dualism/nondualism, 358; and fluid/ multiple self, 399; possession overview, 153–156, 172nn245, 246; and shamanism, 88n115; Varanasi, 522– 523, 569–570nn171, 175. See also anthropological approaches Eurocentrism, 36–37 evil eye, 120, 161n53 exorcism: and Christianity, 40, 81n28, 161n945, 319; contemporary U.S. rise in, 81n28, 161n45. See also healing Exorcism of Emily Rose, The, xvi–xvii The Exorcist, xxiv, 81n28, 319, 322 experience, 16–18, 28n54, 356. See also discourse vs. practice Fabricius, J. P., 127–128 faked possession. See authenticity fakīr, 145 family therapy, 47 fan bita, 146 faqīr, 145 fashi, 160–161n41 Feldhaus, Anne, 121, 122 feminist theory, 68–69

Fenner, Todd, 565n113 ferocity. See raudra Ferris, Timothy, 38 fiction, xxiv–xxv, 317–330; Bhagavadajjukāprahasanam, xxiv–xxv, xxv, 107n16, 258, 325, 328–330, 339, 356; Bloomfield on, 320–322; contemporary, 340–341n8; defi ned, 331, 342n23; The Turn of the Screw, xxiv, 322–323, 340n7; VetālapañcaviÅśati, 323–328, 341n12, 504; and yoga, 341n15. See also alaÅkāraśāstra fi lm, xvi–xvii; and devotion, 362n50; The Exorcist, xxiv, 81n28, 319, 322; and fiction, 319, 322, 340n4; music from, 114, 115, 157n20 Finn, Louise, 370 fi re walking, 132 Fitzgerald, James L., 280n29 Flood, Gavin, 376–377, 409n42 fluid/multiple self, 9–10; and agency, 69; and art, 368, 400, 401–406; and body, 583–584; and bráhman, 603n15; contemporary concepts, 587–588; and creation/incarnation, 203, 206–207, 208–209; and devotion, xxv; and disease-producing possession, 402; and enlightenment, 585–586, 587, 603n14; in fi lm, xvi; and gradual vs. sudden possession, 592–593; and healing, 594–595; and Himalayan vocabularies of possession, 125; and New Age trance channeling, 101; and nyāsa, 378, 388, 399, 401; and personhood, 19; and shape-shifting, 200–202, 237nn63, 65; and social control/resistance, 586–587; and study of possession, 588–589, 604nn28, 29; and Vedas, xxiii, 9–10, 177, 233n9, 603nn9, 14; vs. Western unitary self, 588–589, 603–604nn11, 20, 28, 29; and women’s preponderance in possession, 74–75 folk-classical relationship, xxii, 146–156;

Index

and alaÅkāraśāstra, 331–332, 335, 336–337, 339–340; and association of possession with low social status, 147, 170n222, 420; and bhūtavidyā, 481, 482, 555–557; and Buddhism, 150, 171n228, 390–391, 412–413n78; conclusions, 595–597, 605nn42–44; and deities, 150–152, 171–172nn231, 232, 234–237, 239; and devotion, 349–350, 353; and Draupadī cult, 148–149, 151, 170n225, 176; Kerala, 343n36; and Mahābhārata, 148–149, 151, 170n225, 176, 390–391, 412n77; and ñgveda, 147–148, 175–176; and soma ritual, 170n224; and svasthāveśa, 420, 421–422, 425–426, 448, 460– 461n51; and Tantra, 364; and traditionalization, 152, 172n240; and Vedas, 147–148, 175–176; and vocabularies of possession, 146–147, 149– 150, 153, 170–171nn226, 227, 172n241 Foucault, Michel, 23n2, 92n167, 374, 383 Foulston, Lynn, 130 fragmentation, 19, 21, 59–60 Frank, Jerome D., 82n45 Frank, Julia B., 82n45 Frasca, Richard, 76 Freed, Ruth, 54, 113 Freed, Stanley, 54, 113 Freeman, Rich, 55, 136–137, 145 Freud, Sigmund. See Freudian theory Freudian theory: and bhūtavidyā, 479, 502, 507, 567n138; and dissociation theory, 45; on hysteria, 45, 52, 85n81; on obsessive-compulsive disorder, 565n100; and psychodrama, 135, 166n147; on Unheimlich, 52, 327, 333. See also psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories Fuchs, Stephen, 50–51, 143 fumigation therapy, 532–533, 547–548, 572n200, 577n241 Fundamentals of Tibetan Medicine, 554– 555

677

Gaborieau, Marc, 144, 162–163nn76, 78 gandharva, xxiii, 224–232; and abandonment of self, 330; and bhūtavidyā, 476, 503–504, 559n22; and brahmanism, 229–230, 243n157; in Buddhist Sanskrit literature, 303; contemporary reports of possession by, 231; and insanity, 274–275; and keśin, 194, 195; and oracular possession, 228– 231; and ritual, 231; and transfer of essence, 226–227, 243n148; and Vikramāditya story, 322 Gaâeśa, 151, 433 Garrett, Clarke, 52–53 Garuba, 404, 405, 406 Gaubapāda, 486 Geertz, Clifford, 48, 66 Gellner, David N., 25–26n23, 99, 144, 168nn195, 199, 171n231 Gelong, 123 gender, xxii; and abandonment of self, 330, 341–342n20; and Buddhism, 26n28; and central vs. peripheral possession, 89n126; cross-dressing, 352–353, 361n32; and fluid/multiple selfu, xxvii; and gandharva, 225– 226; role-reversal, 71–72, 92n167; and social control/resistance, 57; and svasthāveśa, 449; and Tamil/Simhala vocabularies of possession, 131; and Tantra, 369. See also association of possession with low social status; women; women’s preponderance in possession genocide, 132, 165n133 Gesar of Ling, 150, 171n229, 470n150 ghee, 414n90, 520, 532, 539–540, 541, 548, 574n225 ghūr âi, 338 Girard, René, 241–242n128 gling, 164n94 glossalalia, 41–42 Glucklich, Ariel, 113 Gold, Ann, 72, 113

678 Index

Gombrich, Richard, 8, 10, 25n23, 41, 61–62, 199, 229, 232n5, 278, 302, 603n6, 605n38 Gonda, Jan, 21, 27n44, 411–412n66, 603n15 Goodman, Felicitas, 66–67 Goodman, Felicitas D., 603n8 Gopīcandana Upani ùad, 485 gori yùba, 125 graha: Āyurvedic texts on, 480–481, 482, 537, 540–541, 561n43, 573n216; overview, 483–486, 561nn52, 53, 57, 562nn66, 69; psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories on, 497, 499, 500; and raudra, 337. See also bālagrahas; bhūtavidyā; skandagrahas grahacāraya, 133 graha âa, xxvi, 14, 89n125, 304, 581. See also graha; √g óh gr6hī, 47; as skandāpasmāras in Mahābhārata, 274ff., 281n52; in Madanamahārâava, 514; in Iśānaśivagurudevapaddhati, 533–535 Gray, David, 305, 461n55 √g óh, xxii–xxiii, 194, 303, 483, 486. See also graha âa; grahas gronds-jug, 304 Guangyi ji, 445 Gujarat vocabularies of possession, 170n220 gu âī, 145 gu âina, 143 Gupta, Dipankar, 587–588 Gyu-zhi (Candranandana), 501, 503–505, 554, 565n113 Haberman, David, 351, 352, 360n28, 605n43 Halbfass, William, 16, 17–18, 316n73 Halliburton, Murphy, 343n36 Halperin, Daniel, 37, 67–68, 92n166 Hancock, Mary E., 57, 71, 91n162, 128, 131, 164n108 Handelman, Don, 128, 264, 350

Hanegraaf, Wouter J., 108n21 Hanumān, 114, 119, 151; and devotion, 276–277, 282n60, 441; and nyāsa, 409n39; and shape-shifting, 197, 250; and svasthāveśa, 421, 434, 438, 440, 441, 442, 444, 454, 457–458n23 Hara, Minoru, 246, 247–248, 312n7, 358 Hāratī, 164n98, 168–169n200 Hardy, Friedhelm, 133, 166n136 Haridāsa, 172n246 Harper, Edward B., 51 Har ùacarita (Bāâabha••a), 417, 428, 432 Harùavardhana, 428–429 har ùāveś, 121 Hart, George L., 72, 132, 165–166n135 Hartzell, James Francis, 413n82 havā lagnā, 113 hāzri, 78, 93–94n196 healing, 536–544; animal products used in, 540, 541, 575nn226, 227, 232; and army of spirits, 115, 118, 158n26, 160n40; and association of possession with low social status, 23–24n5; and bālagrahas, 531–535, 541, 572nn198, 203–205; brāy, 158n27; Cakradatta on, 536, 542–544, 575nn230–235; China, 117–118, 119, 160–161nn37, 39, 41, 45; and conversion of spirits, 116, 160n32; and demographics, 114, 119, 157n15, 158n21, 471n143; diversity of techniques, 114, 157n17; early Āyurvedic texts on, 536–541, 573– 574nn215, 216, 218, 221, 225, 575n226; and effigies, 476, 560n26; and ethnographic overview, 154; and fluid/multiple self, 594–595; and former trauma, 158–159n28; fumigation therapy, 532– 533, 547–548, 572n200, 577n241; healer terms, 159n29; and Himalayan vocabularies of possession, 125–126; and interrogation of spirits, 116, 159– 160n31; legal models, 114–119, 157n19, 158n25; and liminality, 154;

Index

and loose hair, 115, 158n23; as moral practice, 472–473, 478, 515–516, 557–558n7; and New Age trance channeling, 97–98, 101, 105; and psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 47, 83n55; shock therapy, 538, 573– 574n218; and sorcery, 116, 117, 160n35; and Sri Lankan vocabularies of possession, 133–136; and surrogate possession, 115, 158n24; and urban/ rural distinction, 157n14; (Vi ùa-) Nārāya âīya on, 534–535, 572nn209, 210, 573n211; and Western medical paradigm, 98, 101, 106n9. See also Āyurveda; bhūtavidyā; Chinese aweishe ritual; contemporary Āyurveda; Tantra Heesterman, J. C., 58–59, 88n113, 198– 199, 242n128, 603n14 Hegel, Georg W. F., 284, 311n1 Heinroth, Johann Christian August, 502, 566n118 Hemacandra, xxiv, 289, 308, 309, 431, 483, 602 Henry, E. O., 143 Hermes Trismegistus, 412n69 high-low culture distinction. See folkclassical relationship Hillman, James, 588 Hiltebeitel, Alf, 76, 96, 108n26, 128, 148, 276, 279n1 Himalayan Dialogue (Mumford), 125 Himalayan vocabularies of possession, 122–127, 162–163nn76, 78, 79, 81, 88, 91, 164nn93, 94, 96, 98 Hindi vocabularies of possession, 112– 113 Hinduism, reification of, 3, 23n2 Hindu nationalism, 23n3, 170n222 Hoernle, A. F. R., 568nn146, 147 Höfer, András, 124–125, 144, 163n83 Holy Land Experience, 96 Holy Spirit, 42–43, 81n37 homa, 363 Honko, Lauri, 51–52, 85n76, 138, 144

679

humor, 267, 328–330, 341n17 Humphrey, Caroline, 33–34, 37, 38, 79n3, 80n21, 87n100, 362n42, 583, 605n39 Hutton, J. H., 139, 140 Huxley, Aldous, 79–80n17 hysteria, 45, 48, 52–53, 83n55, 85n81 identity. See fluid/multiple self; self illness. See disease-producing possession impersonation, 128–129, 136 incarnation, 451–452, 470n152. See also body Inden, Ronald, 24n8, 25n20, 75, 342n24, 586 Indra: and bhūtavidyā, 559n16; and shape-shifting, 196–197, 199–200, 236n49, 250; and transfer of essence, 218–219; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, xxiii, 255, 256–257, 263 Indradatta, 328 Ingalls, Daniel H. H., 346 Inglis, Stephen, 90n132, 145, 169n215 initiation: and ā√viś, 339; in Christianity, 407n8; and control, 26n23, 385; and divinization of body, 375, 408– 409nn32–34; and eligibility for possession, 155, 398; and enlightenment, 367; and fluid/multiple self, 388; and mudrās, 377; and personhood, 19, 22; and possession as knowledge, 371, 372; and possession as practice, 370; and rasa, 338; and social control/resistance, 72, 92n169; and text sources, 421; in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 390–392; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, 602; and vocabularies of possession, 124, 141; and women’s preponderance in possession, 72, 92n169 inner organ, 46–47 insanity: and eligibility for possession, 156; and skandagrahas, 274–275;

680 Index

insanity (continued) unmāda, xxvi, 161n52, 473, 481–482. See also bhūtavidyā; healing intermedial state. See liminality interpenetration, 186–188, 264, 280n35 interrogation of spirits, 116, 159–160n31; in Vedas, 173 Irish, 281n39 īr ùyāveś, 121 Irula vocabularies of possession, 138– 139, 167nn169, 172 Ĩśānaśivagurudevapaddhati (ĨŚP), xxvi; bālagrahas in, 531–533, 572n198; bhūtavidyā in, 510–514, 568nn150– 154; and contemporary Āyurveda, 544, 548; svasthāveśa in, 458n24, 468n128 Ĩśā Upani ùad, 205, 209 Islam: and adālat, 114, 115–117, 152; and contemporary Āyurveda, 577n242; and vocabularies of possession, 123, 145, 146 Ĩśvara, 299–301 Ĩśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (Utpaladeva), 370, 371, 372 Iyanaga, Nobumi, 433 jādugar, 143 jā bu •onā, 117 jāgar, 113 Jaiminīya Brāhma âa (JB), 198, 228 Jaiminīya Upani ùad Brāhma âa (JUB), 198, 199 Jainism, xxiv; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 339, 344n54; brahmanical orthodoxy on, 6; on emotion, 605n39; and fiction, 321; on Nala’s possession by Kali, 261, 276, 606n50; on personhood/self, 29n69; and prasenā, 423; and svasthāveśa, 428; and Vikramāditya story, 341n13; and yoga, 289; Yogaśāstra (Hemacandra), xxiv, 289, 308, 312n15, 431, 463n74, 602 jāki, 143

Jakobsen, Merete Demant, 109n37 Jambhaladatta, 326–327 James, Henry, xxiv, 322–323, 340n7 James, Henry, Sr., 341–342n20 James, William, 27n46 Jamison, Stephanie, 72, 92n169, 211, 219, 220, 221–222, 241n125, 314n48, 359n5 Janet, Pierre, 45 janka, 143 Japan, 436–437, 439, 469n145 Jātakamālā (Āryaśūra), 576n237 Jātakas, xxiv, 303, 314n41 ja •āmāÅsī, 575n233 jāya, 138–139 Jayadrathayāmala (JY), 418, 429, 462n68 jāyakāra, 138–139 Jayākhya SaÅhitā, 409n42 Jayama ãgalā, 487 Jayaratha, 370, 478 Jejuri mass possession, 95–96, 106n2 Jesus, 407n8 jhā b, 143 jhā bâewālā, 143 jhākri, 77, 93n194, 143, 144 jhārphuk, 144 Jilek, W. G., 36 Jinadāsagaâi Mahattara, 423 jinnis, 523–524 jinn/jind, 116, 145 Jīva Gosvāmī, 347, 350, 352 jīvanmukti, 373 jñānasattva/samayasattva, 304, 392–394, 413–414nn82, 84, 86, 87 joga ugādu, 138–139 Johnson, W. J., 270 Jonas, Adolphe D., 83n49 Jones, J. J., 314n44 Jones, Rex L., 35–36, 90n142, 150 Jung, Carl, 589 Jungian theory, 135 jyoti ùa. See astrology

Index

kabirāj, 145 Kaivalya Upani ùad, 582 Kakar, Sudhir, 47, 83n55, 90n137, 449, 578n249 Kālacakratantra (KT)/Laghuālacakratantra, 392, 394–398, 414–415nn89– 93, 426, 449 kālanāyakagraha, 519 ka {arippayattu, 137–138, 152 Kali, 64, 118, 248, 528, 600. See also Nala’s possession by Kali Kālidāsa, 354 Kāli/Kā{i, 55, 132, 136, 141–142, 353, 387, 591 Kālikā Purā âa (KāP), 223–224 Kālī’s Child (Kripal), 54, 86–87nn90, 91 Kalkin Śrīpuâbarīka, 394–398, 426, 449 Kalmāùapāda, King. See Vasiù•ha and King Kalmāùapāda Kalpataruparimala (Appayya Dīkùita), 298, 301 kāmadhenu, 10, 402, 403, 408 Kāmākhyā, 141 Kamalaśīla, 306, 309 kāmarūpin, 197, 236n51 kāmaśāstra, 294–297, 309 kāmāveś, 121 kamma, 22, 135 kampakāla (orgasm), 377–378 Kane, P. V., 462n66 kanyā, 124 kaozhao, 448 Kapadia, Karin, 131 Kapferer, Bruce, 133, 134, 302 kapisainyaprakāra, 158n26 Karim, Anwarul, 145, 169n211 karma, 211. See also kamma karmavipāka, 514, 557n3 Karmavipāka-sa ãgraha, 521 kar âagraha, 459–460n46, 520–521 kar âapiśāca, 424, 459–460nn46, 47 Karpūramañjari, 358 Karumāriyamman, 71 karu âā-bharala, 119

681

Kāśyapa Kalpasthānam (KSKa), 541 Kāśyapa-SaÅhitā (KS), 480, 530 Kā •haka SaÅhitā (KS), 219 Kathām óta, 356, 604n33 Kathāsaritsāgara (KSS), xxv; anugraha in, 485; dualism/nondualism in, 357; and fiction, 319, 320, 321, 323–328, 341n12; sexuality in, 358; svasthāveśa in, 417, 462n66 Ka •ha Upani ùad (KU), 207–208, 210, 246, 582 kathāvācaks, 150 ka • •ā biya, 133 ka • •ātikal, 146 Kauśikasūtra, 220, 364, 478, 483, 533, 559nn22, 23 Kau ùītaki Upani ùad (KùU), 207, 210– 211, 216–218, 240n104, 394, 602 Kaw, R. K., 373 Keith, A. B., 225 Keller, Mary, 68–69 Kelly, George Armstrong, 311n1 Kerala, xxvi, 334, 343n36, 532, 543. See also contemporary Āyurveda; Malayalam vocabularies of possession kēruka, 137 Keśavakāśmīrabha••a, 299 keśin, 194–196, 200, 236n47 Keśin Dārbhya, 198, 199 Kha bgarāva âa, 119, 533 khakhōrda, 465n97 Khaâbobā, 121–122, 151, 171n232, 384, 411n63 Khaâbobā festival (Jejuri), 384, 386, 411n63 khelnā, 113, 125, 157n8 khhelye khhaba, 164n96 Khusraw, Amir, 470n150 kīlaka, 382, 411n60 Kjaerholm, Lars, 90n142, 604n29 Kleinman, Arthur, 557–558n7 klība, 232n2 Klimkeit, Hans-Joachim, 164n114 Knight, J. Z., 96

682 Index

Knipe, David, 5, 147, 169n219, 170n224, 334, 574n222 kōmaram, 137, 145 kōriccu varutal, 129 Kosambi, D. D., 7, 24n18, 25n20, 331 kō •a ãki, 145 Kramasūtras, 374, 377 Kripal, Jeff rey, 54, 56, 86–87nn90, 91, 356, 604n33 krodhāveś, 121 k ópāveś, 121 Kóùâa, 21, 151, 358, 379 Kóùâadāsa Kavirāja, 351 Kóùâa līlā, 336, 343n46 Kùemarāja, 370, 373–374, 376–377, 568n151 Kùemendra, 303 kud óù •i, 162n56 Kuhn, A., 225 Kulagahvaratantra, 478 Kulār âavatantra (KAT), 386–388 Kumar, Abhimanyu, 571n193 kumārī, 124 kumbhakagraha, 520, 569n166 ku âbalinī, 290–293, 363 ku âbalinī śakti, 137 Kuùāâas, 281n52 Kusum, 572n200 kū •uka, 136–137 Kuvera, 141 Laidlaw, James, 33–34, 37, 38, 79n3, 80n21, 87n100, 362n42, 583, 605n39 lajye cu ãba, 124 Lalitāditya, 427 lama, 122, 124, 125–126, 375, 412– 413n78, 451, 503; on Lamaist ideology, 316n76; as spirit, 505 Lambek, Michael, 45, 47, 51, 83n57, 319 Lambert, H., 143 Langford, Jean M., 558n11, 577– 578n248 language. See vocabularies of possession

Lariviere, Richard, 7, 25nn20–22, 285, 331–332, 596 larje, 124 Larson, Bob, 40 Larson, Gerald, 21 law. See dharmaśāstra Lawrence, Patricia, 132, 146, 154 legal models, 109n31; bhūts, 103, 108n28; and healing, 114–119, 157n19, 158n25; and New Age trance channeling, 103– 104 Levy, Robert I., 50 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 361n35 Lewis, I. M., 60–61, 62–63, 65, 89n126, 98, 100, 119, 122, 123, 264 Lewis, Todd, 310 Lewis-Fernández, Roberto, 82–83n47 lexicography. See vocabularies of possession lha (Tib. deity or spirit), 123–124, 504– 505, 554 lha-babs (Tib. oracular possession), 304, 314n49 lhaba/lha pa (Tib. oracle), 123–124, 163n79 liberation. See enlightenment līlā performers, 150 liminality: and bhakti, 57; and body, 586, 603nn9, 15; and contemporary Āyurveda, 546; and entrance, 248, 250; and gradual vs. sudden possession, 591, 604n35; and healing, 154; and Nala’s possession by Kali, 255; and nyāsa, 380; and ritual, 371–372; and sexuality, 526; and shape-shifting, 252; and social control/resistance, 586. See also fluid/multiple self Li ãga Purā âa, 255, 258–259, 264, 293 linguistics. See vocabularies of possession literacy, 12–13, 27n38, 104–105 literary record. See text sources Littlewood, Roland, 48, 50, 53, 101 lobhāveś, 121

Index

localization of divinity, 72, 73–74, 92nn172, 176, 142, 155 love. See sexuality Luminous Web of Precious Visions, 315n58 lunar asterisms (nak ùatra), 400, 402–403 Lutgendorf, Philip, 276, 282n59, 485 Lutz, Catherine, 332, 333, 343n33, 566n136 Lutze, Lothar, 113 luyar, 123 Lynch, Owen, 29n56 Macdonald, Alexander W., 77, 89n128, 144, 168n99 Madanamahār âava (MM) (Viśveśvara Bha••a), xxvi, 514–522, 569nn159– 161, 163–167 Mādhava-Vidyāraâya, 294–297 Mahābhārata (MBh), xxiii–xxiv, 246– 275; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 339; āveśa in, 246, 580; bhūtavidyā in, 475, 481, 556, 567n145; dates of, 245, 279n1; diachronic aspects of possession in, xxvii; disease-producing possession in, 272–275, 281n52; dualism/nondualism in, 357; entrance in, 248–250; escape in, 264–265; and fiction, 319, 320, 342n23; as fiction, 340n2; and folkclassical relationship, 148–149, 151, 170n225, 176, 390–391, 412n77; gandharva in, 195, 243n148; guilt in, 118–119; importance of, 174, 598– 602; influence of, xxv; interpenetration in, 264, 280n35; interpersonal possession in, xxvi; Kóùâa as puru ùottama in, 21; and Li ãga Purā âa, 255, 258–259; millenarianism in, 270–271; oppositional consciousness in, 284–285; vs. Rāmāya âa, 275–276; rasa in, 334; and SāÅkhya, 486; shape-shifting in, 197, 250, 252, 253–254, 262–263, 264, 265; Śiva’s possession of Aśvatthāman, xxiii, 113, 267–272, 337, 599, 601; skandagrahas in, 122, 272–275; transfer

683

of essence in, 223; and Vajrayāna Buddhism, 390–391; Vasiù•ha and King Kalmāùapāda, 265–267, 339, 599, 600–601; Vidura’s possession of Yudhiù•hira, xxiii, 259; violence in, 267, 281n39; vocabularies of possession in, 246–251; and women’s preponderance in possession, 513; and Yogavāsi ù •ha, 293. See also Nala’s possession by Kali; Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci mahābhāva, 120 Mahādeva, 141, 151 Mahāsutasoma Jātaka, 303 mahā-ullās, 120 MahāvaÅsa, 135, 166n150 Mahāvastu, 303, 314n44 Mahāvidyā, 442, 468n130 Mahendravarman, 356. See also Bhagavadajjukāprahasanam Maheśvara, 399, 433–434, 438, 464n88 Mahīdhara, 417, 441–443, 468n126 māi/māiju, 124 Maitrāya âi SaÅhitā (MS), 219 Maitrāya âi Upani ùad, 582 Mālavayā, 122 Malayalam vocabularies of possession, 136–138 Mālinīvijayottara, 372, 407n14, 408– 409n34 Maloney, Clarence, 146, 162n56, 523 manas, 302 Manasā, 141, 145 ma âbalas: in contemporary Āyurveda, 554–555; and divinization of body, 375; and possession as knowledge, 372; in svasthāveśa, 440, 442; in Tantra, 399; in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 392, 394, 397–398 Maâbana Miśra, 294, 312n22 Māâikkavācakar, 133, 156, 590 Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa, 433, 567n141 Mantramahodadhi (MM) (Mahīdhara), 417, 441–443, 468nn126, 130, 131

684 Index

Mantrapu ùpam, 380, 411n58 mantras: and bālagrahas, 532, 572n198; in contemporary Āyurveda, 548, 577n242; and divinization of body, 368; in nyāsa, 200–201, 376, 379, 386–387; and soma ritual, 179, 182, 183; in svasthāveśa, 440, 442, 468n127; in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 393, 394, 398–399; (Vi ùa-) Nārāya âīya on, 573n211 mantravidyā, 143–144, 548–549 māntrika, 143, 440, 467n119 Manu’s cups myth, 219–222, 241nn116, 117, 125 Marathi vocabularies of possession, 120– 122, 162nn64, 67, 68 marginalized people. See association of possession with low social status Māriamman, 70, 71 marriage, 227 Marriott, McKim, 19, 20–21, 74, 75, 125, 211, 320, 586 martial arts, 137–138 maru ~ o •utal, 129 maru {u, 128, 129 masks, 18–19, 199–200, 236n57 Masson, J. Moussaieff, 44, 53, 54, 82n43, 85n84 māthā-garam, 161n52 māthā-khārāp, 161n52 māthāra golamāla, 55 māthār golmāl, 120, 161n52 mativah, 143 Matsya Purā âa, 408 Mattavilāsa (Mahendravarman), 356 maulvī, 145 Mauss, Marcel, 18–19, 29nn56–58 Mayaram, Shail, 153, 475 Mayer, Robert, 433, 434, 464n91 Mayes, Elizabeth, 85–86n85 Mayrhofer, Manfred, 232n4 may •u battu âbu, 138 Mayūracandrikā Bhasma, 575n235 mayūrapiccha, 543, 575n235

McClintock, Wayne, 40–41, 81n30, 143, 570n171 McDaniel, June, 120 mediumistic possession: and Buddhism, 99, 107n14; China, 98, 107n13, 468n134; and New Age trance channeling, 99; and shamanism, 64–65; and Vajrayāna Buddhism, 412–413n78. See also New Age trance channeling; oracular possession men. See gender menstruation, 219, 241n108 mental illness. See bhūtavidyā; diseaseproducing possession Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20, 28n47 Merutuãga, 321 Meulenbeld, Jan, 479–480, 498, 556, 559n20, 561nn43, 46, 565n108 Meyer, Eveline, 128–129, 136, 154 mikha, 124, 163n81 Miles, Jack, 596 milk, 125, 163n88 millenarianism, 270–272 miracles, 141 mirrors: and Himalayan vocabularies of possession, 126, 164n94; and prasenā, 427, 461n56; and svasthāveśa, 431, 438, 451, 453, 470n150; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, 257 mkha’ ‘gro Ye shes mtsho rgyal, 126, 164n93 Mkhas Grub Rje, 413n82 modernity, 66–67, 98–99, 99, 104 mohāveś, 121 mok ùa, 370 Molesworth, J. T., 120–121, 162n64 Monier-Williams, M., 232n4, 460n49 monotheism, 588 Moreno, J. L., 166n147 Moreno, Manuel, 67 Morris, Rosalind C., 26n28, 83n57, 99, 263, 319 MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder), 48 m ótyuñjaya homa, 551

Index

much-lāge, 161n52 mudiyettu, 136 mudrās: and divinization of body, 368; and nyāsa, 376–377, 383, 410nn45, 47, 49; in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 394 Muller-Ortega, Paul Eduardo, 406n2 Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), 48 multiple self. See fluid/multiple self Mumford, Stan Royal, 26n28, 125–126, 168n193, 316n76 Mu âbaka Upani ùad, 199, 582 muni, 194–196, 200, 236n47 Murārigupta, 350 Murphy, Jane, 501 Murphy, Jane M., 85n73 Murugaç, 132 music, 114–115, 157n20, 230 Muslims. See Islam Naagin, 115 Nābhādās, 353 Nabokov, Isabelle, 39, 75, 79n5, 106n11, 129, 130–131 nā bis, 286, 312n4, 363, 582 Nāgārjuna, 433 nāgas: Āyurvedic texts on, 541, 555; in Bower manuscript, 509; in Gyu-zhi, 504; in Ĩśānaśivagurudevapaddhati, 510, 511; and Nala’s possession by Kali, 600, 601, 605n48; and piśācas, 525; and SāÅkhya, 487; in Upaniùads, 474; in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 395–396 nak ùatra (lunar asterisms), 400, 402– 403 Nala’s possession by Kali, xxiii, 251–255; and abandonment of self, 330; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 339; and authenticity, 262–263, 264–265; and escape, 264– 265; and guilt, 118; Jain version of, 261, 276, 341n13; and raudra, 337; and self, 260–261, 600–601, 606n50; and violence, 599 namājī, 145 Nambiyar, M. R., 569n159

685

Nambudiri, Nilakanthan, 577n242 Nambudiri, Vaidyamadham Narayanan, 545, 547, 548, 550, 574n225, 576n240 Nambudiripad, Kumaraswami, 545, 547, 548–550 Nammā~vār, 356–357 Nandy, Ashis, 603–604n20 Nārāya âapūrvatāpanīya Upani ùad, 485 Nārāyaâa Tīrtha, 286 narrative elements, 309. See also epics; fiction nārttikam, 145 Nā •yaśāstra (Bharata), xxv, 331, 332, 605n44 Nechung oracle, 56, 305, 412–413n78 negative possession: and female competence, 70; in Mahābhārata, 250; and Marathi vocabularies of possession, 121, 122; and pervasion/immersion in Vedas, 194; and Tamil/Simhala vocabularies of possession, 128. See also bhūtavidyā; healing; sorcery nērttikam, 145 Netra Tantra, 478, 568n151 neurophysiology, 27–28n47 New Age trance channeling, 95–106; and charismatic/Pentecostal Christianity, 106n2; content of, 100–102, 108nn21, 24; demographics of, 105; and folkclassical relationship, 152; and healing, 97–98, 101, 105; legal issues, 103– 104; legitimization of, 99, 104, 107n16, 109n33; and nostalgia, 96– 97; and social control/resistance, 99– 100, 104–105 night/darkness, 193–194, 255 Nīlamata Purā âa (NP), 525–526, 527, 570nn181, 182, 187 Nimbārka, 297, 298–299, 313n26 Nirodhalak ùa âa (Vallabhācārya), 347, 348–349, 354 nirvikalpasamādhi, 306–307 NiśisaÅcāratantra, 478 Niśītha Cūr âi, 423–424

686 Index

Ni ùpannayogāvalī, 392–394, 413n82 Niśvāsaguhya, 418, 427, 429, 462n68 niveśanam, 303 nonexistent self, 9, 22, 29n69, 302 nostalgia, 96–97 Nuckolls, Charles, 55–56, 87n104 nyāsa, 237n61, 376–388, 398–399; Bhāgavata Purā âa example, 379; and Daoism, 389, 412n73; and deity, 376, 409–410n43; etymology of, 409n38; examples of, 379–388, 410nn54, 55, 411nn57–61; and fluid/multiple self, 378, 388, 399, 401; Kulār âavatantra example, 386–388; and mudrās, 376– 377, 383, 410nn45, 47, 49; popularity of, 376, 409n39; and possession as knowledge, 372; and prati ù •hā, 368, 376, 388, 399, 411–412nn66, 69; Rudrādhyāya example, 379–388, 410nn54, 55, 411nn57–61; and sexuality, 377–378, 410n51; and shamanism, 383, 411n62; and shapeshifting, 200–201; and Tibetan Buddhism, 304; and vocabularies of possession, 384; and yoga, 377, 410n45 Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, 305, 315n58 Oberlies, Thomas, 233n13 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 37, 54, 55, 62, 75, 127, 133 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 564–565n100 Odysseus, 253–254 ojhā, 143, 145 Olivelle, Patrick, 203, 217 onbo, 124 Ong, Walter, 12, 13 oppression. See social control/resistance oracular possession: and Buddhism, 304– 305; contemporary renewal of, 98– 100, 106–107nn11, 17; and gandharva, 228–231; New Age trance channeling

as, 95, 96; and pain, 132; and performative contexts, 76–77, 93n193; psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 55–56, 87n102; and shamanism, 64, 65, 90nn132, 133; and social control/ resistance, 70–71, 99–100, 107n17, 515; in Tantra/Āyurveda, xxvi; and Tulu/Irula vocabularies of possession, 138–139; in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 412–413n78; and vāta, 574n222. S ee also mediumistic possession; svasthāveśa orientalism, 6, 24n15, 39, 40, 81n30, 139, 589. See also Western discourses Orofi no, Giacomella, 427, 430, 431, 435, 452, 461n57, 469n144 Orsi, Robert, 604n28 Ortner, Sherry, 316n76 Östör, Akos, 161n49 Padakusalamā âava Jātaka, 303 padmapurā â, 145 Padmasambhava, 126, 163n93, 309, 390 Padoux, André, 195 pa bthal, 108n28 pāgalāmi, 55, 120 Paheli (The Riddle) (Hindi fi lm), xvi pain, 132, 154 Pāiasaddamaha ââavo (PSM), 422–423, 459n37 paju, 125–126, 143 Pakaslahti, Antti, 47, 83n55, 85n76, 116, 117, 119, 157n17, 160n36, 170n222 Pāli vaÅsas, 166n150 Palsule, G. B., 485 Pañcapadyāni (Vallabhācārya), 347 PañcaviÅśa Brāhma âa, 178 Pāâbav Līlā, 76, 412n77 pa âbita, 146 pāpad óù •i, 162n56 Paper, Jordan, 65 parakāyapraveśa, 101, 196, 229, 243n156, 321, 580 parakāyapraveśavidyā, 295

Index

Paramādibuddha, 426 Paramārthagāthā, 303 Paramārthasāra, 408n32 parasparānupraveśa, 264 ParātriÅsikālaghuv ótti (PTLV), 377 Parātriśikālaghuv ótti (Abhinavagupta), 371 parhez, 117 Parkinson, Edward, 322, 340n7 Parpola, Asko, 323–325, 340n2 Parry, Jonathan P., 159n29, 569n171 Pārśvanātha Caritra, 196, 321 partial incarnation, 259, 280nn28–30, 350–351, 360n22 participation mystique, 361n35 pasi âa, 423–424, 426, 450, 455, 459n37 passion, 351, 360n28 paśvā, 143 Patañjali, 193, 286–288, 309, 377 pātri, 144, 168n197 paya ãkara, 137 performative contexts, 75–77; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 335–337, 343n46; and authenticity, 335–336; and oracular possession, 76–77, 93n193; and Rāmāya âa, 276–277, 282n59; and rasa, 332–334; and svasthāveśa, 444 permeable self. See fluid/multiple self personality: and ātman, 21; and attabhāva/puggala, 22, 29n69; in Āyurvedic texts, 483, 487; and bhūtavidyā, 22, 480–482, 497–500, 505, 515, 524, 561n43; and fluid/ multiple self, 9, 583–584; fragmentation of, 19, 59–60; and psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories, 44, 48, 50– 51; and shape-shifting, 199–200; and Śiva’s possession of Aśvatthāman, 272; and social control/resistance, 105– 106; and svasthāveśa, 422. See also self personhood: in Buddhism, 302; and psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 48; vs. self, 18–23, 29nn57, 69; and

687

shamanism, 90n142; and vocabularies of possession, 122, 135 pervasion/immersion in Vedas, 177– 195; Agni, 188–189; and creation/ incarnation, 192–193, 235n39; disease images, 188; and entrance, 177, 184– 186, 234n25; and interpenetration, 186–188; and keśin, 194–195; and negative possession, 194; and night/ darkness, 193–194; and poetic meters, 177–179; pra√viś, 189–190, 195, 235n29; and ritual, 182–184, 190, 234n19; and soma ritual, xxii, 173, 179–184, 233–234nn13, 14, 19, 22, 23; and speech, 184, 186, 191–192, 193, 235nn34, 37, 38; and surā, 183, 234n20 Petthavatthu, xxiv pēy, 131 pey pirichu, 130 pēy pi •ikkatu, 137 Pfleiderer, Beatrix, 113 phauj, 115, 158n26 philosophical texts, 284–311; Brahmasūtras, xxiv, 297–302, 308, 309, 313–314nn26, 27, 29, 36, 37, 361nn29, 30; Buddhism, 302–308; Buddhist Sanskrit literature, xxiv, 302– 308, 314nn41, 44, 46, 48, 49; and discourse vs. practice, 285, 308–311, 316nn73–76; and ethics, 308, 316n70; Yogavāsi ù •ha, 290–294, 307, 308, 312n16. See also Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka; Yogasūtras Philostratus, 159–160n31 pīr, 143 Piśācamocan temple, 527–530, 571n190 piśācas, 522–523, 525–530, 570nn181, 182, 187, 571n190 piśācāveś, 121 pit ó: Aù •ā ãgah ódaya SaÅhitā on, 497; Āyurvedic texts on, 541, 543; and bālagrahas, 481; Caraka SaÅhitā on, 487, 488, 490; in contemporary

688 Index

pit ó (continued) Āyurveda, 549; and diagnosis, 552; and insanity, 274; in Ĩśānaśivagurudevapaddhati, 510, 512; and legal healing models, 116; Madanamahār âava on, 517; and piśācas, 528; SāÅkhya on, 486; Suśruta SaÅhitā on, 491, 492; text sources for, 563n76 pit ósthān, 160n36 play, 76, 113 Pocock, David, 157n14, 171n231 poetic meters, 177–179, 382, 411n59 poetic theory. See alaÅkāraśāstra politics, 305, 315n57 Pollock, Sheldon, 25n20, 282n54, 522, 527, 592 polyvalent self. See fluid/multiple self popular culture, xxv positivism, 36–37 possessed as vessel, 169n215 possession: anthropological defi nitions of, 35–39, 79n12; as coming into being, 128; ethnographic overview, 153–156, 172nn245, 246; gradual vs. sudden, 591–593, 604–605nn36, 38, 39; multidimensionality of, 111, 589– 590, 604n33; problematic nature of term, 10, 26n34; release from, 397– 398; vs. transfer of essence, 212; type review, 579–580 possession as evil, xvi, xxiv; Christianity on, 39–43, 81nn28, 30, 32, 34, 38; as misconception, 116–117 possession as ontological reality, 66–68 possession as practiced behavior: and brahmanism, 422, 458n30; and escape, 264; and Malayalam vocabularies of possession, 137–138; and psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories, 55, 82n44, 87n100 possession as primitive, 4, 23n4, 26n28, 52, 85–86n85. See also association of possession with low social status poy ā • •am, 137

Prabandha-cintāmaâi, 321–322, 467n120 pracāra, 286 practice vs. discourse. See discourse vs. practice Prahlāda, 282n60, 441 Prajāpati, 212, 236n49, 239n86 prajātantra (democratization), 99–100 Prakāśa (Vallabhācārya), 347 pramā âa, 17, 327 prā âa, 290–293, 312n16 prāna-prati ù •hā, 304. See also prati ù •hā prā âāyāma, 289 pra√pad, 207, 238n72 prasenā, 422–427; and astrology, 424, 425, 459n42, 460nn47, 50; and Buddhism, 426–427, 461nn55, 57; and Chinese aweishe ritual, 436–437, 465–466nn99, 101, 102; etymology of, 423–424; and folk-classical relationship, 425–426, 460–461n51; and kar âagraha, 459–460n46; and mirrors, 427, 461n56; in svasthāveśa ritual, 429–430; text sources for, 422–423, 458–459nn34, 37; Utpala on, 424– 425, 459n45, 460nn48, 49 praśna, 424 Praśnamārga (PrMā), xxvi, 550–551 Praśna Upani ùad (PU), 208–209 Pratisenāvatāratantra, 427 prati ù •hā, 368, 376, 388–390, 399, 411– 412nn66, 69, 581 Pratyabhijñah ódayam (Kùemarāja), 370, 373–374, 377 Pravacanasārodhāra, 423 praveśa, 14, 304, 306, 307, 580–581. See also pra√viś pra√viś: and creation/incarnation, 211; and fiction, 321; in Mahābhārata, 258, 263; and pra√pad, 238n72; and transfer of essence, 220, 222–223, 241n117; in Vedas, 189–190, 195, 235n29. See also praveśa prav óttam, 316n68

Index

pregnancy, 122, 242n129, 474–475, 476, 559n23 preta: in Aù •ā ãgah ódaya SaÅhitā, 505; Aù •ā ãgah ódaya SaÅhitā on, 496; Āyurvedic texts on, 365, 499; in Bower manuscript, 509; and ethnographic overview, 154; and nyāsa, 388; and transfer of essence, 240n103; Varanasi ethnography on, 523; and vocabularies of possession, 113, 131 preta do ùa, 127 pretpañcāyat, 571n190 Pretrāj, 114, 115 primitivism. See possession as primitive primordial embodiment, 202–204, 237– 238n67 projection, 47 Proudfoot, Wayne, 16 psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 43– 56, 83nn49, 57; and anthropological approaches, 87n104; and asceticism, 82n43; on bhūtavidyā, 479, 497–508, 560n37, 565nn102, 108, 567n138; and body, 50, 84n70; and Christianity, 83–84nn50, 58; cultural sensitivity in, 53, 54–56, 82n45, 85n73; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on, 45, 47, 48–49, 82– 83n47; and discourse vs. practice, 53, 85n84; dissociation theory, 45, 48–51, 53, 59–60, 84n64, 101; and epics, 52, 76n85; and externalizing primitive, 52, 85–86n85; hysteria, 45, 48, 52–53, 83n55, 85n81; on obsessive-compulsive disorder, 565n100; and oracular possession, 55–56, 87n102; and physiological evidence, 45, 55, 82n44; and possession as practiced behavior, 55, 82n44, 87n100; and social construction of emotion, 506–508, 566n136; vs. social control/resistance, 57 psychodrama, 135, 166n147 pu biccikira bu, 131 puggala, 18, 22, 29n69

689

pukutal, 128 pūnakam, 169n219 Purāâas, xxiii, xxiv; bālagrahas in, 281n52; bhūtavidyā in, 567n140; and fiction, 319; fluid/multiple self in, 9– 10; interpersonal possession in, xxvi. See also Bhāgavata Purā âa; Brahmā âba Purā âa; Kālikā Purā âa puru ùa, 18, 21–22, 204–207, 209, 357, 378 Puruùottama, 348, 349, 354, 359n10 PūrvamīmāÅsā, 177, 233nn8, 9 PūrvamīmāÅsāsūtras, 154 Pūtanā, 281n52 puttalī, 476, 531, 533, 545, 546, 560n26 Raheja, Gloria, 72 Rajam, V. S., 92n172 Rājaśekhara, 7, 24–25n19, 121 rak ùas/rāk ùasa: in Aù •ā ãgah ódaya SaÅhitā, 505; Aù •ā ãgah ódaya SaÅhitā on, 496; Āyurvedic texts on, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491, 499, 500, 555; Bower manuscript on, 509; in Buddhist Sanskrit literature, 314n46; contemporary reports of possession by, 89n125; and fluid/multiple self, 584; and insanity, 274; Ĩśānaśivagurudevapaddhati on, 510, 511, 531; Li ãga Purā âa on, 259; Madanamahār âava on, 514; Mahābhārata on, 248, 250, 265–267; and moral certainty, 282n55; and piśācas, 527; Rāmāya âa on, 282nn55, 64 Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, 54, 86n90, 312n4, 356 Raman, Bangalore Venkata, 574n225 Rāmānuja, xxiv, 297, 299–301, 357 Ramanujan, A. K., 148, 232–233n5, 276, 335, 337, 356–357 Ramaswamy, Vijaya, 87n97 Rāmāya âa, xxiii, 275–279; ā√viś in, 277, 282–283nn63–78, 81, 82; gandharva in, 229; moral certainty in, 275–276, 282n55; and performative contexts, 276–277, 282n59; sexuality in, 358,

690 Index

Rāmāya âa (continued) 527; shape-shifting in, 197, 236n51, 250; and svasthāveśa, 441 Ramtha, 96, 104 Rao, M. Srinivasa, 361n36 rasa: and bhakti, 346; and brahmanism, 333; categories, 332–333, 337–338, 342n28; and devotion, 346; and ethnographies, 334–335; and fiction, 320; and gandharva, 225; and transfer of essence, 212, 239nn85, 86. See also emotion Rasaratnasamuccaya, 560n41 rasāya âa, 363 rationalization, in fiction, 327 Ratnakū •a, 308 rātrī, 194 raudra: and āveśa, 337; Āyurvedic texts on, 575n227; as rasa category, 332, 334–335; and sacrifice, 338, 344n49; in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 395; and violence, 598 Ravigupta, 578n259 realization. See enlightenment Reat, N. Ross, 603n9 “religion” term, 24n8 religious drama, 75–76; and devotion, 351, 353–356, 360n27, 361nn35, 36; and Rāmāya âa, 276–277, 282n59 Renou, Louis, 235n34 ñgveda (ñV), xxvi; Agni in, 188–189; anugraha in, 562n66; and art, 403; ā√viś in, xxii, 177–178, 179, 233n14; and bhāva, 362n39; bhūtavidyā in, 474–475, 476; on body, 603n9; and devotion, 350; disease images in, 188; entrance in, 184–185, 186, 234n25; and folk-classical relationship, 147– 148, 175–176; gandharva in, 225– 226, 227–228; interpenetration in, 186–188; keśin in, 194–196, 236n47; oppositional consciousness in, 284– 285; poetic meters in, 177–179; shape-

shifting in, 195–197; soma ritual in, xxii, 179–180, 181–182, 234n22; speech in, 186, 190–191, 192, 193, 235n34. See also pervasion/immersion in Vedas Rgyud sde spyi ni rnam par ‘zag pa rgyas par brjod, 413n82 Richardson, Hugh, 314n49 riding/mounting vocabularies of possession, 69, 71, 92n166, 113, 124–125, 137, 143, 168n189 Rigopoulos, Antonio, 151, 171n232 Ripinsky-Naxon, Michael, 89n124, 411n62 ritual: anthropological approaches on, 33–34, 38, 79n3, 80nn21, 23; in contemporary Āyurveda, 546–547; and control, 9, 26n31; and divinization of body, 374–375; and ethnographic overview, 153–154, 155; and folkclassical relationship, 148; and gandharva, 231; and gradual vs. sudden possession, 591–593, 604– 605nn36, 38, 39; and initiation, 390; and Marathi vocabularies of possession, 122; and New Age trance channeling, 96; and pervasion/ immersion in Vedas, 182–184, 190, 234n19; and possession as practiced behavior, 55, 87n100; and shapeshifting, 198, 199, 200–202; and social control/resistance, 58–59, 69; and Tantra, 371–372; and text sources, 11; and Tibetan Buddhism, 305; and traditionalization, 172n240; and transfer of essence, 216–218, 222, 223, 240nn96, 103, 104; and vocabularies of possession, 11. See also nyāsa; svasthāveśa The Ritual Process (Turner), 92n167 rnam shes, 126, 127 Robinet, Isabelle, 389, 588 rojā, 143 ro-langs, 504

Index

Rorty, Richard, 28n54 Rouget, Gilbert, 89n126, 158n24 óùis, 176–178, 232n4 Ruben, Walter, 90n138 Ruci. See Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci Rudra, 338, 344n49 Rudrādhyāya, 379–388, 410nn54, 55, 411nn57–61, 415n96 Rūpa Gosvāmī, 343n46, 347, 350, 352, 360nn27, 28, 361n29 Rūpa Kavirāja, 361n29 rūpāntarak óti, 196 sacrifice: and ethnographic overview, 154; and raudra, 338, 344n49; and Tamil vocabularies of possession, 132; and transfer of essence, 221–222, 241– 242n128. See also violence Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer’s Wife (Jamison), 211 sādhana, 154 Sādhanamālā, 392–394, 413–414nn82, 86 sah ódaya, 332, 336, 342n29 Sai Baba, 171n232 Said, Edward, 25n20 Śaivaparibhā ùā (Śivāgrayogin), 369 śakti, 70–72, 171n227 śaktipāta, 370, 375, 391, 408–409nn32– 34 śālāvaidyam, 576n240 samādhi: and devotion, 346, 347, 356; vs. samāveśa, 602n2; in Tantra, 373– 374; and yoga, 286, 288, 293–294, 602n2 samāpatti, 288, 312n13, 373 samāropa âa, 223, 242n135 samāveśa, 236n46, 367–368, 398; as enlightenment, 372–374, 408n26; as knowledge, 371; as practice, 369, 370, 407nn12, 14; review, 580; vs. samādhi, 602n2; sectarian differences in, 369, 406–407nn6, 7

691

sam-ā√viś, 260 samayasattva/jñānasattva, 304, 392– 394, 413–414nn82, 84, 86, 87 sami ati, 130 SāÅkhya, 233n9; and Āyurveda, 486, 487, 562n71; and bhūtavidyā, 486– 487, 562n71; and body, 584; and transfer of essence, 218 SāÅkhyakārikā (SK), 486 SāÅkhykārikābhā ùya (Gaubapāda), 486 SaÅk ùepa-Bhāgavatām óta (Rūpa Gosvāmī), 350 SaÅnyāsanir âaya (Vallabhācārya), 348 saÅpratti/saÅpradāna, 216–218, 240n96 saÅsārāveśa, 303, 349, 581 saÅskāra, 179 Samuel, Geoff rey, 458n32, 463n77 saÅyama, 288 Sanderson, Alexis, 29n58, 372, 375, 406n3, 407n14, 423, 427, 456n4, 461n59, 462n68, 464nn88, 93, 465n97, 469n144, 478, 483 Sankalia, H. D., 243n158 Śaãkara, xvi, xxiv, 229–230, 297, 298, 327, 329–330. See also Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka Śa ãkarābhyudaya, 243n155 Śaãkarācāryas, 91n162, 419 Śa ãkaradigvijaya (ŚDV) (MādhavaVidyāraâya), 294–297, 313n25 Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka, xxiv, 294–297; and abandonment of self, 330; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 339; content of, 101, 108n22; and discourse vs. practice, 309; and dualism/nondualism, 357; and escape, 264; and gandharva, 229–230, 243n155; and sexual abuse, 258; and Śivājī, 243n158; text sources for, 294, 312n19; and Vikramāditya story, 321, 322, 328; and yoga, 287, 296–297 Sanskritization. See brahmanism; folkclassical relationship

692 Index

śānta, 332, 334, 335, 338, 395, 598 Saramā, 281n52 Sarvabuddhasamāyoga bākinījālasaÅvara, 304–305, 333–334 SarvadharmasaÅgrahavaipulya Sūtra, 311 SarvatathāgatatattvasaÅgraha, 433 śāstra: and Āyurveda, 364; and Brahmasūtras, 299, 300–301; and eligibility, 154; and emotion, 332, 333, 334; and fiction, 331; and folk-classical relationship, 175, 425; and Mahābhārata, 246; and philosophical texts, 308; and Tantra, 442, 467n125; and transfer of essence, 218. See also brahmanism; specific śāstras śāstrakāraya, 134 Śatapatha Brāhma âa (ŚB): creation/ incarnation in, 203–204; fluid/multiple self in, 9; healing in, 575n227; and nyāsa, 378; oppositional consciousness in, 284; pervasion/immersion in, 189, 194; sexuality in, 527; transfer of essence in, 212, 220, 239n86 śatarudrīya, 379n54 Sātī Āsarā, 122 sattvas, 480, 498–500, 561n43, 565n105, 584 sattvāvajaya, 538, 574n221 satyasaÅkalpatvāt, 298 Sauptikaparvan, xxiii, 267–272, 337 śauryāveś, 121 śavasādhana, 143, 406n5 Sax, William, 37, 55, 57, 76, 87n102, 96, 143, 147, 149, 170n222, 276, 358, 604–605n36 sayana, 143 Sāyaâa, 193, 195–196, 234n23, 235n41 scapegoating, 219, 241n108 Schelling, F. W., 52 Schleiermacher, Arthur, 16 Schmidt, Hanns-Peter, 234n25 Schmithausen, Lambert, 303 Schoembucher, Elizabeth, 38, 76 scholarly orthodoxies: brahmanical, 5–8,

24–25nn18–21; neglect of possession in, 3–4, 8, 10, 12, 23nn3, 4, 24n7; problematization of religion term in, 24n8; reification of culture in, 3, 23n2. See also study of possession science, 23n3, 104. See also psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories; Western discourses Scott, A. O., xvii Scott, David, 133, 136, 166–167nn151, 153 Seeman, Don, 557–558n7 Seidel, Anna, 117, 119 Sekoddeśa, 418, 426, 427, 429 self: abandonment of, 330, 341–342n20; and bhāva, 355; fragility of, 327; and Nala’s possession by Kali, 260–261, 600–601, 606n50; as nonexistent, 9, 22, 29n69, 302; vs. personhood, 18– 23, 29nn57, 69. See also fluid/multiple self; personality; unitary self Seligmann, Brenda, 68 Seligmann, C. G., 68 semantics. See vocabularies of possession Śerāãvālī, 71, 172n239 sexual abuse, 54, 55, 258, 547 sexuality: and a âa ãku, 92n172; and bhūtavidyā, 502, 520, 526–527, 537, 569n165, 573n217; and devotion, 358–359, 362n50; and divinization of body, 375; and entrance, 239n90; and ethnographic overview, 154; in fiction, 329–330; and gandharva, 226; and nyāsa, 377–378, 410n51; and riding/ mounting vocabulary, 113; and Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka, 229, 294–295, 296; and svasthāveśa, 449, 469n144; and transfer of essence, 212, 221–222, 239n90; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, 255, 258, 296, 329; and Western discourses, 573n217; and women’s preponderance in possession, 26n28, 329–330 shamanism, 60–66, 89n122, 90nn137,

Index

138; and Assamese vocabularies of possession, 167n178; and Buddhism, 90n134, 171n228, 305; and central vs. peripheral possession, 61, 62–63, 89n128; China, 158n24, 432, 463n77; confusion about, 432–433, 463n77; in early Indus civilization, 89–90n131; and ecstasy, 62, 89n126; ethnographic interest in, 88n115; and folk-classical relationship, 150; and gandharva, 230; and graha âa, 89n125; and Hanumān, 277; and keśin, 236n47; and mediumistic possession, 64–65; New Age, 109n37; and nyāsa, 383, 411n62; and oracular possession, 64, 65, 90nn132, 133; and personhood, 90n142; and shape-shifting, 236n47; and soul-journeying, 62, 89n124; and svasthāveśa, 431; and text sources, 65– 66; Tibet, 90n134, 305, 434; and Tulu/ Irula vocabularies of possession, 138– 139; and vocabularies of possession, 144, 145 shape-shifting, 195–202; and animals, 236n51; and brahmanism, 198–199; and Brahmasūtras, 313n29; and fluid/ multiple self, 200–202, 237nn63, 65; and Indra, 196–197, 199–200, 236n49, 250; in Mahābhārata, 197, 250, 252, 253–254, 262–263, 264, 265; and masks, 199–200, 236n57; purpose of, 197–198; and ritual, 198, 199, 200–202; and shamanism, 236n47 Sharf, Robert, 16–18, 28n54 Sharma, Priya Vrat, 575n234 Shastri, Ajaya Mitra, 460n48 Shinto, 469n145 Shirokogoroff, Sergei, 63–64, 109n37 shock therapy, 538, 573–574n218 Shukla, K. P., 113, 145, 476, 522–523 Shulman, David, 5, 26n34, 73, 128, 251, 254, 255, 259–260, 264, 350, 579, 599–600 “sick medicine-man” thesis, 36

693

Siddhasāra (Ravigupta), 578n259 sidh, 143 sight, 256, 280n19 Sikhism, 465n99 śilpiśālā, 389 Simhala vocabularies of possession, 127–133, 164nn100, 108, 114, 165– 166nn133, 135, 136 Simons, Ronald C., 82n44 Sinh Jee, Bhagwat, 565n102 sí ãsi ã-khòlkhol, 124 Siri epic, 138, 152 sir/kum ca óhnu, 125 śiśugraha, 521–522 Śītalā, 281n52 Śītapūtanā, 281n52 Śiva: and bālagrahas, 532, 572n203; and bhūtavidyā, 559n16; Buddhist transformation of, 434; conversion of, 160n32; and emotion, 242n138; and fluid/multiple self, 201, 237n65; and folk-classical relationship, 151, 171n236; and possession as knowledge, 371, 407n15; possession of brahman’s corpse, 258–259, 263; and svasthāveśa, 429, 438, 439, 442 Śivadāsa, 341n12 Śivad óù •i (Somānanda), 371 Śivāgrayogin, 367, 369 Śivājī, 243n158 Śivārkama âidīpikā (Appayya Dīkùita), 301 Śiva’s possession of Aśvatthāman, xxiii, 113, 267–272, 337, 599, 601 Skanda, 250, 273–274. See also skandagrahas skandagrahas, 122, 272–275, 475 Skanda Purā âa, 527 smara, 358 śmaśāna sādhana, 369 Smith, John, 270 sm óti, 17 S ãags rim chen mo, 413n82 Snell, Bruno, 253

694 Index

Snellgrove, David, 433, 463n82 sngags-pa, 143, 168n193 social control/resistance, 56–60; and anthropological approaches, 88n107; and bhūtavidyā, 515–516, 569– 570n171; and body, 586–587; and colonialism, 56, 87–88n105; and emotion, 102–103; and ethnographic overview, 154; and fluid/multiple self, 586–587; limits of, 58–59, 88n113; and New Age trance channeling, 99–100, 104–105; and oracular possession, 70–71, 99–100, 107n17, 515; and ritual, 58–59, 69; and shamanism, 63; and Tamil/Simhala vocabularies of possession, 131; and text sources, 57–58; Tibet, 56, 88n106; and Vikramāditya story, 327; and women’s preponderance in possession, 51, 68–69, 70–72, 92n169 social status. See association of possession with low social status; demographics śokāveś, 121 sokhā, 145 Solomon, Robert C., 108n24 Soma: and creation/incarnation, 204; and entrance, 185; and gandharva, 225; and interpenetration, 187–188; and marriage, 227; and soma ritual, 179, 180, 184 Somadeva, 417 Somānanda, 371, 377 soma ritual, xxiii, 11; and ā√viś, 179, 183, 184, 233n14, 234n23, 339; and brahmanism, 147–148, 170n224; and gandharva, 227–228; and pervasion/ immersion in Vedas, xxii, 173, 179– 184, 233–234nn13, 14, 19, 22, 23 Sontheimer, G.-D., 64–65, 107n17, 143, 162n67, 171n232 sorcery: and bhūtavidyā, 480, 560n39; and healing, 116, 117, 160n35; and Himalayan vocabularies of possession, 125–126

speaking in tongues, 81n37 speech: and gandharva, 227–228; and pervasion/immersion, 184, 186, 191– 192, 193, 235nn34, 37, 38 spontaneity, 9, 11, 26n28, 27n35 śraddhā, 359n5 śraddhāviveśa, 246 śrauta, 148, 150, 154, 231 Sri Aurobindo, 362n48 Śrī Caitanya, 345, 350–351, 356, 357 Śrīkaâ•ha, 297, 301 Śrīk óùnasandarbha (Jīva Gosvāmī), 350 Sri Lankan vocabularies of possession, 132, 133–136, 166–167nn147, 150, 151, 153 Srinivas, Smriti, 37, 65, 122, 124 Śrīśa ãkaravijaya (ŚV) (Anantānandagiri), 294–297 ś óãgāra, 346 Śrīnīvāsācārya, 298–299 Staal, Frits, 576n240, 583 Stablein, William, 90n134 Stanley, John, 121, 589 Stein, Rolf A., 433 stigmata, 81n37 Stoller, Paul, 80n19 Strickmann, Michel, 418, 433, 435, 436, 438–439, 445–446, 447, 460n49, 464n94, 465nn97, 99, 469n137 study of possession, xv–xvi, 3–4; and discourse vs. practice, 5, 8, 24n13, 26n28; and emotion, 23n4; Eurocentrism in, 36–37; and fluid/multiple self, 588–589, 604nn28, 29; fundamental questions in, 8–9, 593–598; and literacy, 12–13, 27n38; modern attractiveness of, 33, 34, 79n5; theories, 39, 80n23; and vocabularies of possession, 10, 11–15, 13–15, 26n34, 27nn42, 44. See also anthropological approaches; scholarly orthodoxies; text sources Subala Upani ùads, 582 Subhagānandanātha, 444

Index

Subhā ùitaratnako ùa, 7, 24–25n19 Subodhinī (Vallabhācārya), 348, 359– 360n15 substance-code, 19, 20–21, 74–75, 125, 211, 320 śuddādvaita, 357, 358 suhāg, 242n128 suicide, 223, 242n135 Śuklayajurveda, 218, 240n104 surā, 183, 234n20, 575n227 surrogate possession, 115, 158n24 Suśruta SaÅhitā, xxvi, 364; bhūtavidyā in, 479–480, 482, 490–493, 498, 563nn79, 84–86, 564nn87, 88; healing in, 536–537, 540–541; and SāÅkhya, 487; and svasthāveśa, 431–432 Sutherland, Gail Hinich, 314n46 Sūtrak ótā ãga Sūtra, 459n37 Sutta Pi •aka, 306 Suvar âasaptati, 486 svasthāveśa, 416–455; and Alexander the Great, 451, 453; and Chinese aweishe ritual, 435–440, 444–448, 454, 465– 466n97, 99, 101, 102; Chinese origin question, 432–434, 463nn79, 82, 83, 464n88, 91, 93; current practice of, 450–451, 452; and Dalai Lamas, 451– 452; and devotion, 439–440, 454, 466n115, 467n116; and dream, 447, 469n139; epigraphical evidence for, 427–429, 434, 461nn59, 64, 462nn65– 67; and folk-classical relationship, 420, 421–422, 425–426, 448, 460– 461n51; and Hanumān, 421, 434, 438, 440, 441, 442, 444, 454, 457– 458n23; in Ĩśānaśivagurudevapaddhati, 458n24, 468n128; in Mantramahodadhi, 417, 441–443, 468nn126, 130, 131; ritual of, 429–432; South India, 440–441; in Tantrarāja, 417, 443–444; text sources for, 417–421, 456nn3–6, 8, 9, 457nn14, 18–22, 458n26; use of children in, 448–450, 452, 454–455. See also prasenā

695

svayamāveśa, 350 Śvetāśvatara Upani ùad (ŚvetU), 205, 207, 299, 582 Svoboda, Robert, 77–78, 561n47, 574n224, 577n241 Svopajñavivara âa (Hemacandra), 289 symbolism, 215, 239n90 Tachikawa, Musashi, 413n82, 414n87 tailabindu-parīk ùā, 552–553 Taittirīya Āra âyaka, 301–302 Taittirīya Brāhma âa (TB), 182, 183– 184, 191, 201–202, 222–223 Taittirīya SaÅhitā (TS): animals in, 415n96; anugraha in, 485; gandharva in, 228; nyāsa in, 379–384, 410nn54, 55, 411nn57–61; pervasion/immersion in, 178, 185–186, 191–192, 194; poetic meters in, 178; shape-shifting in, 200–201; transfer of essence in, 218–219, 241n108 Taittirīya Upani ùad (TU), 189–190, 582 Taiwan, 98, 452, 454 The Tale of Genji, 85n78 Tambiah, Stanley, 46, 48, 454, 603n11 Tamil vocabularies of possession, 127– 133, 164nn100, 108, 114, 165– 166nn133, 136; and devotion, 128, 131, 165–166n135, 350 Tantra, xxvi, 236n46, 367–408, 406n3; and art, 368, 400, 401–406; and ā√viś, 339; and Āyurveda, 363–365; on body, 582; brahmanical orthodoxy on, 6; divinization of body in, 368, 370, 372, 374–376, 408–409nn32–34; on emotion, 333–334; and fluid/multiple self, 368, 399, 401–406; possession as enlightenment in, 369, 372–374, 408n26; possession as knowledge in, 369, 371–372, 407nn15, 17; possession as practice in, 369, 370, 407nn12, 14; and rasa, 338; and ritual, 371–372; śāstra, 442, 467n125; sectarian differences within, 368–369, 371, 406–

696 Index

Tantra (continued) 407nn2, 6, 7; and Vikramāditya story,325–326, 327, 341n11. See also nyāsa; svasthāveśa; Vajrayāna Buddhism Tantrāloka (Abhinavagupta), 370, 372, 391, 478 Tantrarāja (TR), 376, 388, 417, 443– 444, 476 Tantrārthāvatāra-vyākhyāna, 413n82 Tantrasadhbhāva, 418, 429, 462n68 Tantric Buddhism. See Vajrayāna Buddhism Tantric Healing in the Kathmandu Valley (Dietrich), 127 Tarabout, Gilles, 136 Tara Devi, 97–98 Tattvārthadīpanibandha (Vallabhācārya), 347 Tawney, C. H., 321–322 Taylor, Mark C., 16 Teiser, Stephen F., 158n24 Telugu vocabularies of possession, 169– 170n219, 339 temo, 123 terms. See vocabularies of possession text sources, 6–8, 10–11, 24–25nn18– 22; and brahmanism, 421–422; conclusions, 595; for disease-producing possession, 458n24, 555–557; for prasenā, 422–423, 458–459nn34, 37; for Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka, 294, 312n19; and shamanism, 65–66; and social control/resistance, 57–58; for svasthāveśa, 417–421, 456nn3–6, 8, 9, 457nn14, 18–22, 458n26; for vocabularies of possession, 111–112, 156–157n2, 3, 162n71. See also specific sources teyvam ā •ukākkal, 146 teyyam, 136–137, 138 teyyam tu { {al, 129 teyyā • •am, 129 Tezuka, Osama, 340–341n8 Thailand, 96, 98–99

Thaipusam festival (Malaysia/Singapore), 96 §hānaÅgasutta, 423 theory vs. practice. See discourse vs. practice Thirumulpad, Raghavan, 576n236 Thomas, Keith, 42, 81n34 Thompson, George, 234n22 Tibet: bhūtavidyā, 501–506, 565n113, 566n117; Buddhist Sanskrit literature, 303–308, 314n49; Chinese occupation of, 123; contemporary Āyurveda, 554–555; Dalai Lamas, xxiv, 56, 391– 392, 451–452; Gesar of Ling, 150, 171n229; incarnation as possession in, 451–452, 470n152; shamanism, 90n134, 305, 434; social control/ resistance, 56, 88n106; state oracle, 305; svasthāveśa, 450–451, 452; vocabularies of possession, 123–124, 125–127, 143, 163n79, 168n193; women’s preponderance in possession, 91n160. See also Himalayan vocabularies of possession; Vajrayāna Buddhism Tieken, Herman J. H., 166n135 tirayā • •am, 129 §obarānanda, 558n9 Totula, 568n151 tovil, 133–134, 135 traditionalization, 152, 172n240 trance, vs. ecstasy, 89n126 trance channeling. See New Age trance channeling tranquility. See śānta transfer of essence, 211–224; in Atharvaveda, 212–214, 219, 239n88; and bhūtavidyā, 516, 569n160; and body part lists, 218; in Brāhmaâa texts, 215, 219–222, 241nn116, 117, 125; in Brahmā âba Purā âa, 222; in Chāndogya Upani ùad, 215–216, 239n93; and Christianity, 239n87, 240n105; and control, 215, 239n90; and creation/incarnation, 207–208,

Index

216; and emotion, 242n138; and fluid/ multiple self, 75; and gandharva, 226– 227, 243n148; and Manu’s cups myth, 219–222, 241nn116, 117, 125; vs. possession, 212; and possession as ontological reality, 67; and pregnancy, 242n129; and rasa, 212, 239nn85, 86; and ritual, 216–218, 222, 223, 240nn96, 103, 104; and sacrifice, 221–222, 241–242n128; and scapegoating, 219, 241n108; and suicide, 224, 242n135; and Vedas, xxiii, 222– 224; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, 602 transgression, 26n28, 41, 108n23, 131, 265 Trautmann, Thomas R., 24n15 Trawick, Margaret, 70, 71 treatment. See healing Trenckner, V., 303 Tsongkh’apa, 393 tuk/tuktāka, 120 tu { {al, 137 Tulpule, S. G., 121 Tulu vocabularies of possession, 138–139, 167nn169, 172 turīya, 28n47 Turner, Edith, 37, 67 Turner, Victor, 92n167, 380 The Turn of the Screw (James), xxiv, 322– 323, 340n7 Ubhayabhāratī, 294–295, 296, 330 Ucchuùma, 433, 438, 463n79 Uganda, 96, 103, 108n29, 160n40 uncanny. See Unheimlich Unheimlich, 52, 327, 333 union/separation dialectic, 271–272, 346–347. See also dualism/nondualism unitary self, xvi, 584, 588–589, 603n11; in Christianity, 19, 604n28; and fundamental questions, 9; and psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories, 44, 48. See also fluid/multiple self; Western discourses

697

unmāda, xxvi; Atharvaveda on, 477, 555; and bhūtavidyā overview, 473; Bower manuscript on, 510; Cakradatta on, 542; Caraka SaÅhitā on, 481–482, 487–489; contemporary Āyurveda on, 545; diagnosis of, 551–552; and māthār golmāl, 161n52; Praśnamārga (PrMā) on, 550–551; psychiatric/ psychoanalytic theories on, 497, 508; VīrasiÅhāvaloka on, 577–578n248. See also bhūtavidyā; disease-producing possession upahata, 560n41 Upaniùads, xxvi; anugraha in, 485; on ātman/brahman, 21; bhūtavidyā in, 474, 484; on body, 581–583; and brahmanism, 199; and Brahmasūtras, 299; creation/incarnation in, 203, 204–211; and discourse vs. practice, 8; dualism/nondualism in, 357; gandharva in, 195; localization of divinity in, 73–74; and nyāsa, 237n61; pervasion/immersion in, 189–190, 192–193; and philosophical texts, 309; shape-shifting in, 198; and Tibetan Buddhism, 306; transfer of essence in, 216–218 ūpar āna, 121 ūpar honā, 121 upari havā, 117 Upasani Maharaj, 243n158 Upasena Gurunnanse, 134, 135 u ôayuka, 137 urban/rural distinction, 157n14 Urdu vocabularies of possession, 114– 119 Utpala (Bha••otpala), 424–425, 444, 459n45, 460nn48, 49 Utpaladeva, 370, 371, 372 Vāc, 190, 227–228 vacā, 543, 575n231 Vācaspatimiśra, 298 Vābirāja, 339

698 Index

Vāgbha•a, 480 vaidyas, 144, 168n195. See also healing Vaikhānasa Āgama, 403–404 Vaiùâava schools, 233n8, 280n28, 297, 345, 485 Vajpeyi, Ananya, 25n22 Vajrapāâi, 433, 463n82 Vajrāveśa, 393, 394 Vajrayāna Buddhism, 390–398; and brahmanism, 333; contemporary practice, 412–413n78; emotion in, 333–334; and folk-classical relationship, 390–391, 412–413n78; initiation in, 388–390; Kālacakratantra, 392, 394–398, 414–415nn89–93; maâbalas in, 392, 394, 397–398; samayasattva/ jñānasattva, 392–393, 413–414nn82, 84, 86, 87; and shamanism, 90n134, 305; and vocabularies of possession, 143, 144 vakku, 169n219 vākku sollu ôatu, 132, 146 valgan, 170n220 Vallabhācārya, xxiv; on aesthetics of possession, 345; on āveśa, 297, 301– 302, 347–350, 351, 359–360nn10, 15, 17; and bhāva, 354; and dualism/ nondualism, 357–358; on saÅsārāveśa, 349, 581; and yoga, 297 Vāmakeśvara Tantra, 370 vani ù •usava, 241n107 Varāha, 223–224 Varāhamihira, 421, 424, 425, 444, 458n26, 459n42, 463n74, 484 Varanasi ethnography, 522–523, 569– 570nn171, 175 Varier, P. S., 545, 576n239 varuka, 136 Varuâa, 225 Vasiù•ha and King Kalmāùapāda, 265– 267, 339, 599, 600–601 vasos prefiridos, 169n215 Vāsuki, 601 vāta, 520, 539, 544, 574n222, 575n235

Vātsīputrīyas, 29n69 Vedānta, xxiii, xxiv, 233n9, 302, 313n36, 586; Yogavāsi ù •ha, 290–294, 312n16. See also Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka Vedāntakaustubha (Śrīnīvāsācārya), 298– 299 Vedāntakaustubhaprabhā (Keśavakāśmīrabha••a), 298–299 Vedāntasāra, 302 vedarala, 133 Vedas: anugraha in, 562n66; and bhūtavidyā, 474–479, 500, 558–559nn11, 13, 560nn30, 35; brahmanical orthodoxy on, 6; eligibility for possession in, 155; and fluid/multiple self, xxiii, 9– 10, 177, 233n9, 603nn9, 14; and folkclassical relationship, 147–148, 175– 176; gandharva in, xxiii, 224–232; √g óh in, xxii–xxiii; importance of, 173–174; localization of divinity in, 73; manifestation of, 176–177, 232– 233n4, 5, 8, 9; oppositional consciousness in, 284–285; shape-shifting in, 195–202, 236n51; vipra, 176–177, 233n5. See also creation/incarnation; pervasion/immersion in Vedas; ñgveda; transfer of essence Vedic theism, 204–207, 238n73 Velankar, H. D., 234n25 ve {iccappe •uka, 137 ve {icchapā •u, 145 vetāla, xxv, 504 VetālapañcaviÅśati, 323–328, 341n12, 504. See also Vikramāditya story Vidagdhamādhava (Rūpa Gosvāmī), 360n27 Vidhānamālā, 459–460n46 Vidura’s possession of Yudhiù•hira, xxiii, 259 vidyā, 442, 468n127 vigraha, 485 Vijñānabhairava, 375, 378 Vijñānabhikùu, 286

Index

Vikramāditya story, 320, 321–322, 340n6 Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra, 315n63 Vimalaprabhā (Kalkin Śrīpuâbarīka), 426, 449 violence: and bhūtavidyā, 569n160; conclusions, 598, 599; and emotion, 101; and ethnographic overview, 154; and healing, 115, 118, 125, 163n91; Indo-European examples, 281n39; in Mahābhārata, 267, 281n39; as memorable, 108n26 vipra, 176–177, 233n5 Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, xxiii, 14, 255–258, 280n24; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 339; and sexuality, 255, 258, 296, 329; and shapeshifting, 263, 264, 265; and transfer of essence, 602; and Vajrayāna Buddhism, 394; and Vikramāditya story, 321, 322; violence in, 599; and yoga, 256, 257, 261–262, 287, 293, 602 vīra, 334 VīrasiÅhāvaloka, 577–578n248 √viś, 177, 233n14 (Vi ùa-) Nārāya âīya, 534–535, 548, 572nn209, 210, 573n211 viśi ù •ādvaita, 300, 357 Viùâu: and folk-classical relationship, 151, 171nn235, 236; possession of kings, 259, 263–264, 280nn29, 30; and transfer of essence, 223–224 Visuvalingam, Elizabeth-Chalier, 108n23 Visuvalingam, Sunthar, 108n23 viśva, 302 Viśvarūpa, 218–219 Viśveśvara Bha••a, 514, 569n167 Vivara âa (Śaãkara), 286 Viveka (Jayaratha), 478 Vivekananda, Swami, 603–604n20 Viv ótivimarśinī (Abhinavagupta), 370, 371 vocabularies of possession, 13–23, 27n44,

699

28n49; and alaÅkāraśāstra, 338–339; and anthropological approaches, 35– 36; Assam, 139–142, 167–168nn177– 179; Bengali, 119–120; Chinese, 464n94; and control, 11–12; and emotion, 27n42, 137–138, 247– 248, 250; English term, 10, 26n34; experience, 16–18, 28n54; extent of, 110–111; and folk-classical relationship, 146–147, 149–150, 153, 170– 171nn226, 227, 172n241; Gujarat, 170n220; Himalayan, 122–127, 162–163nn76, 78, 79, 81, 88, 91, 164nn93, 94, 96, 98; Hindi, 112– 113; and literacy, 12–13, 27n38; in Mahābhārata, 246–251; Malayalam, 136–138; Marathi, 120–122, 162nn64, 67, 68; and nyāsa, 384; overview, 142– 146; and personhood vs. self, 18–23, 29n69; review, 580–581, 602n2; riding/mounting, 69, 71, 92n166, 113, 124–125, 143, 168n189; Sri Lanka, 132, 133–136, 166–167nn147, 150, 151, 153; Tamil/Simhala, 127– 133, 164nn100, 108, 114, 165– 166nn133, 135, 136, 350; Telugu, 169–170n219, 339; text sources for, 111–112, 156–157n2, 3, 162n71; Tulu/Irula, 138–139, 167nn169, 172; Urdu, 114–119; and Vedas, 176–177, 232n4 Vodoun, 168n189 Vogt, Beatrice, 133–136, 166nn147, 151, 358 v ótragraha, 520, 569n165 vyākara âa, 6 vyāptitva, 298 Vyāsa, 286 Wade, T. E., 40, 80n26 Wadley, Susan S., 15n8, 25n23, 76, 77, 143 Wagle, N. K., 103 Walsch, Neale Donald, 107n16

700 Index

Walters, Jonathan, 166n150 Wayman, Alex, 392–393, 413n82 Weber, Max, 24n7 Weiss, Mitchell, 83n49, 85n73, 479, 497–498, 500–501, 560n37, 565nn102, 108, 135 Western discourses, xvi, xxiv; and bhūtavidyā, 507; and brahmanism, 604n28; and contemporary Āyurveda, 557, 576n236; on emotion, 343n33, 580; on experience, 16, 18, 28n54; and healing, 98, 101, 106n9; influence of, 587, 603–604n20; on personhood, 19, 20; and psychiatric/psychoanalytic theories, 46, 48, 479; and sexuality, 573n217; and shamanism, 62; and study of possession, 6, 24n16, 36– 37, 38; and Tantra, 367; and vocabularies of possession, 111. See also Christianity; orientalism White, David Gordon, 281n52, 311n3, 406n1, 605n42 Wijesekera, O. H. de A., 225 Will, S. S., 40 Winquist, Charles E., 20, 28n49 Wirz, Paul, 133 women: and gandharvas, 226, 227–228, 230; and transfer of essence, 219, 221– 222, 241nn108, 125. See also gender; women’s preponderance in possession women’s preponderance in possession, xxii, xxvii, 68–75; and abandonment of self, 330, 341–342n20; and a âa ãku, 70, 72, 92n172; and association of possession with low social status, 4; and bhūtavidyā, 513–514, 568n155; and biography, 94n197; and Buddhism, 26n28; and contemporary Āyurveda, 544, 545, 547; and control, 25–26n23; and education, 69–70; and ethnographic overview, 153; and female competence, 70, 91n160; and fluid/multiple self, 74–75; jhākri, 93n194; and localiza-

tion of divinity, 73–74; and New Age trance channeling, 105; and śakti, 70–72; and sexuality, 26n28, 329– 330; and social control/resistance, 51, 68–69, 70–72, 92n169; and Tamil/ Simhala vocabularies of possession, 133, 166n136 Woodroffe, John, 443 Wujastyk, Dominik, 273, 365n3, 530, 559n20 Xu Chaolong, 458n32 Yajñavarāha, 9–10, 401, 403–404 Yajurveda (YV), 178, 200–201, 475 yakädurā, 133–134 yakku, 133 yak ùa, 303 yaktovil, 133–134 yantras, 440, 442, 467n118 Yaśodharacarita (Vābirāja), 339, 344n54 Yocum, Glenn E., 5, 133, 590 yoga, xxiv; and Āyurveda, 562–563n74; and body, 582, 583, 603n8; enlightenment in, 373–374; and fiction, 341n15; and nyāsa, 377, 410n45; practice, 286–289, 311nn3, 4, 312nn7, 12, 312nn13, 15; and Śaãkara’s possession of Amaruka, 287, 296–297; and Tibetan Buddhism, 306; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, 256, 257, 261–262, 287, 293, 602; and vocabularies of possession, 13–14; Yogavāsi ù •ha, 290–294, 307, 308, 312n16 Yogacū bāma âi Upani ùad, 582 Yogaratnākara (YR), 552–553 Yogaśāstra (Hemacandra), xxiv, 289, 308, 312n15, 431, 463n74, 602 Yogasiddhāntacandrikā (Nārāyaâa Tīrtha), 286 Yogaśikha Upani ùad, 582 Yogasūtras (YS) (Patañjali), xxiv, 286–

Index

289, 308, 309, 310; āveśa in, 286, 287, 288, 311n3; and Āyurveda, 562– 563n74; and Buddhism, 302; on citta, 286–287, 312n8; on nā bis, 312n4; samādhi in, 286, 288, 312n12, 602n2; on samāpatti, 288, 312n13; and Vipula Bhārgava’s possession of Ruci, 602 Yogavāsi ù •ha, 290–294, 307, 308, 312n16 yogenānupraviśya, 255

701

Yoginītantras, 375 Yuktidīpikā, 487 yuktivyapāśraya, 536, 538, 539, 573n213 Zarrilli, Phillip, 137 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomaeus, 40, 68, 81n30, 139, 164n114, 570n171 Zvelebil, Kamil, 72, 138–139, 167n172 Zydenbos, Robert, 568n153 Zysk, Kenneth G., 476–477, 558n8

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