Possession
The possessed of the manuals, and dissociative trance.
In the Texts
Canale, like Menghi before him, divides the afflicted into the obsessi, besieged from without, and the possessi, in whom the demon speaks: the possessed show a changed voice, knowledge of hidden things and foreign tongues, strength beyond their frame, horror of the sacred, and no memory afterward of what was done through them. The Rituale Romanum of 1614 made these the signs by which a true possession was to be told from illness, and warned the exorcist, in its first rule, not to believe too easily.
What Medicine Makes of It
Psychiatry names the picture: an altered state with a replacement of the ordinary sense of identity by another, stereotyped movements and speech, and amnesia after. The DSM-5 lists possession as a form of dissociative identity disorder when it is unwanted and causes distress, and sets it apart from the possession trances that a culture expects and sanctions, which it does not count as illness at all. Erika Bourguignon’s survey of 488 societies in 1973 found institutionalised trance in nine of ten of them, and possession trance in about half: the state is universal, its meaning local. I. M. Lewis read the possession cults of Africa and the Middle East as the resort of the powerless, women above all, whose spirit could say what they could not. The possessed of seventeenth-century Italy were likewise mostly women, mostly young, and often in convents.
The Evidence
- Bourguignon’s survey of 488 societies (1973) found institutionalised altered states in 90 per cent and possession trance in 52 per cent: the state is a human universal, its interpretation local.
- A review of 402 cases of possession-form dissociative disorder across cultures (Cardeña et al., 2009) found the possessing agent is nearly always the culture’s own: demons where there are demons, ancestors where there are ancestors.
- In India and Uganda, where possession is common, studies of possessed patients find high rates of prior trauma and of depression (van Duijl et al., 2010, in Uganda: 109 patients, most with histories of loss and violence).
- Hecker and colleagues (2015) found in Burundi and Rwanda that spirit possession after war trauma was a recognised idiom of distress, and that treating it as such did not worsen outcomes.
- Pentecostal deliverance and Catholic exorcism are still sought: the Vatican’s course for exorcists at the Regina Apostolorum has run since 2005, and Italian dioceses report more requests each year, which psychiatrists attribute to the decline of psychiatric stigma having been slower than the decline of faith in the devil.
Where They Part
The manuals’ signs of true possession, the tongues and the hidden knowledge, are what no clinical account has ever confirmed under observation; the strength, the horror of the sacred, and the amnesia are the dissociative picture exactly. The exorcist and the clinician agree on what they see and part on what it is. The rite itself, with its command, its community, and its ending, works for the possessed much as any structured healing does; the anthropologists’ name for the mechanism is in the reading on the rite as therapy.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- American Psychiatric Association (2013). DSM-5, dissociative identity disorder, criterion A and the note on possession.
- Bourguignon, E. (1973). Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change. Ohio State University Press.
- Lewis, I. M. (1971). Ecstatic Religion. Penguin.
- Rituale Romanum (1614), De exorcizandis obsessis a daemonio.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.