The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

possession 203
sadistic and severe, including mutilation, sexual disfigurement,
flaying alive, and burial alive. Any slave found
possessing a fetish (a figurine or carved image of a god)
was to be imprisoned, hanged, or flayed alive.
To save the blacks from the “animal” natures that they
were believed to have, masters baptized their slaves as
Catholic Christians. In front of whites, blacks practiced
Catholicism, but among each other, the gods of their ancestors
were not forgotten. Rites held deep in the woods,
prayers transmitted in work songs, and worship of saints
while secretly praying to the gods preserved the old traditions
while giving them a new twist.
The syncretic practices that evolved featured worship
rites in which voluntary possession was invited of the loas
or mystères, the old gods and ancestral spirits. The priest
or priestess, called houngan and mambo, respectively,
acts as intermediary to summon the loas and help them
to depart when their business is finished. The houngan
and mambo receive total authority from the mystères. The
possessed lose all consciousness, totally becoming the
possessing loas with all their desires and eccentricities.
Young women possessed by the older spirits seem frail
and decrepit, while the infirm possessed by young, virile
gods dance with no thought to their disabilities. Even
facial expressions change to resemble that of the god or
goddess. Although sacred, possession can be frightening
and even dangerous, causing mental imbalance and deterioration
of health.
Santeria Similar in practice to Vodun, Santeria centers
around the worship of the ancient African gods (mostly
Yoruban) who were blended with Catholic saints. Santeria
is derived from the Spanish word santo, or “saint”;
practitioners are called santeros and santeras.
The orishas who possess worshippers have complex
human personalities, with strong desires, preferences,
and temperaments. When possessed, the devotees assume
the orishas’ supernatural characteristics, performing feats
of great strength, eating and drinking huge quantities
of food and alcohol, and divining the future with great
accuracy.
The santeros wield enormous power, having knowledge
that can change a person’s life either through their
own skill or by the help of the orishas. To use that power
for good or evil rests with the santeros alone.
Voluntary Possession in Mediumship and Channeling
During the 19th century, belief in diabolical possession
declined in the West, while belief in spirit possession increased.
Mediumship involves communicating with the
dead and other spirits. In physical mediumship, the medium
allows a form of temporary possession to take place,
in which the spirits use the medium’s body and voice to
communicate directly. In mental mediumship, communication
is impressed on a medium’s thoughts.
In order for the temporary possession to take place,
mediums enter into altered states of consciousness that
range from dissociated states, in which they are fully
aware of what happens, to deep trance, in which they
have no awareness of events. Entranced mediums may
exhibit physical symptoms similar to religious altered
states of consciousness. Once the trance is ended, there is
a period of transition in the return to normal awareness.
Mediumship takes a physical and sometimes mental toll
and can adversely affect health.
Though mediumship is voluntary, it sometimes begins
as involuntary episodes in which spirits take over a person.
Over time, a medium learns how to control spirit
access. There are many ways of inducing entranced states
for mediumistic possession, including drugs, fasting,
meditation, and prayer.
Channeling is essentially the same as mediumship and
is a newer term, usually applied to contact with highly
evolved human spirits or nonhuman spirits, angels, and
extraterrestrials, rather than the dead.
Religious critics of both mediumship and channeling
contend that the true identities of the possessing spirits
are demons intent on deception and demonic possession.
Catholics and others are counseled not to consult psychics
and mediums.
Voluntary Possession in Spiritualism and Spiritism
Life everlasting for the spirit and the ability to contact
such spirits through mediums, proving their survival,
underlie spiritualism, a religious movement that began in
the mid-19th century and swept both sides of the Atlantic.
It declined in popularity in the 20th century but still
continues today.
A central feature of spiritualism is communication
with the dead through mediums. One of the purposes of
mediumship is to validate the tenets of spiritualism: belief
in an immanent God as the active moving principle
in nature, the affirmation of the essential goodness of human
beings, a denial of the need for salvation, and the
repudiation of HELL. Rather, the dead go to Summerland,
a place of perpetual summer where the departed spirits
spend eternity.
Spiritism evolved from spiritualism in the mid-19th
century. Its chief proponent was a French writer and physician
named Hippolyte-Léon-Denizard Rivail, who knew
Latin and Greek and wrote under the pseudonym Allan
Kardec.
Trained as a doctor, Kardec believed that certain illnesses
have a spiritual cause and can be treated psychically
through communication with spirit guides. Specifically,
he said that persons suffering from epilepsy,
schizophrenia, and multiple personality showed signs
of spirit interference or possession, either from the dead
or from remnants of the patients’ own past lives. Kardec
theorized that within each person’s personality are what
he called “subsystems” of past lives inherited with each
new incarnation. Sometimes, these subsystems dominate
the present life, blocking out reality and controlling the