PART THREE—
SPIRIT POSSESSION AS A FORM OF THE SPIRITUAL QUEST

Chapter Eight—
The Varieties of Spirit Possession

Communal ritual and mythic tradition are thus great stabilizers of social order. Yet if this order, like every organic structure, is a dynamic equilibrium forever adapting to change, and if man is a questing animal open to transcendence of his given condition, the very tendency of priestly ritual and heroic myth to perpetuate an immutable past guarantees their insufficiency. Variation cannot be so nearly excluded nor communication confined to one-way transmission of formulaic chants and sacrificial offerings, nor can collective ceremonies wholly satisfy the need for personal contact with the indeterminate and the wild. This uncontrollable power, safely assimilated in the liminal phase of rites of passage but never banished far from the clearing or subdued for long, can suddenly intrude with the shattering transformative force of disease or madness against which cultural prophylaxis and priestly exorcism may be, in the end, unavailing.

Spirit Possession as Dialogue: Oceania and Asia

Just as the wild irresistibly encroaches on man's laboriously tilled crops, its untamed spirits perpetually menace the cultivators themselves, who view their onslaught with panic, fear, and trembling. For not only in ritually hedged liminality do these forces bring power or destruction; the individual who survives their seizure and submits to their sway may be endowed with a capacity for communication with the divine rivaling that of the institutional priest. Among the Lugbara of Uganda, God "in his evil or immanent aspect," who lives in waste places outside the compound and is an inversion of both sky God and man, "possesses adolescent girls and drives them into the bush," Middleton writes (1960, 256;

cf. 1969, 224), whence they emerge with powers of divination. Similar experiences are common in many tribal cultures, where unforeseen possession (of both men and women) and ensuing illness often initiate a diviner's or medium's vocation.

"A Tikopia priest talked to his gods and ancestors, but they did not talk back," Firth observes (1970, 261–62); "an ordinary Tikopia, through a spirit medium, could hold two-way converse with such a spirit." Here is a relationship with the superhuman inherently more variable and dynamic than communal ritual can provide, for by inaugurating a dialogue the medium opens a space, which ritual had carefully fenced off, in which the unexpected and undetermined have entry. Here too there will be pattern and structure, of course, but no fiction of invariance and little coercive control: the spirit who speaks through a medium can be questioned but not commanded, anticipated but never foreknown.

Communication with the divine through spirit possession is widespread in tribal (as in other) societies from almost every part of the globe. Sometimes, as among the highly centralized Ashanti of Ghana, the spirit speaks through his priest (Busia, 194). More commonly, in Africa and elsewhere, the office of medium or diviner is distinct from the priest's, although the same person may hold both. In some tribes the diviner is identical with the medium, whom some anthropologists call "shaman." Where the two are distinguished, it is through the medium that the spirit speaks directly, whereas the diviner, though he may at first be empowered by unpredictable possession, thereafter interprets signs such as the patterns of scattered stalks or winnowed grain in accord with strict rules and conventions.

The office of medium, though not restricted by family or class (as the priest's frequently is), may be inherited by those of a given lineage who show aptitude for trance; sometimes different mediums communicate with different classes of spirits, such as ancestors or tribal gods. After first being possessed, the medium may contract a lifelong association, even a formal marriage, with a particular spirit, or may become a receptacle open to various spirits as summoned. He or she may experience trance alone, delivering oracular words which another interprets, or may share the experience with others caught up, through rhythmic dance or rhapsodic speaking in tongues, in the contagious rapture of possession. Some prophesy only on formal occasions such as festivals, others whenever requested and paid; some convey advice or information about the dead, others diagnose and prescribe for disease, or combat it by assaulting the spirits that cause it. In nearly every case, however, possession of the disciplined medium, in contrast to the demonic fury of random seizure, is a communication with the beyond voluntarily solic-

ited, in the interest of others, through the heightened condition of trance—ranging from ecstatic frenzy to cataleptic torpor—in which the medium's ordinary self is either entirely displaced by the spirit who speaks through her mouth or strictly subjected to the dominant will of the spirit who "rides" her.

A few accounts of spirit mediumship in tribal societies, and in the popular strata of "civilized" cultures, will suggest both the phenomenological diversity and the underlying unity of its forms. (The ethnographic material has been greatly enriched since Oesterreich's classic study, Possession .) In Polynesia, spirit possession was no less typical of the ancient religion than ancestor worship, agricultural rites, and human sacrifice, which it complemented by permitting direct contact with the gods outside the elaborate pyramid that reached its apex in the sacrosanct chief through whom all ritual was ultimately channeled. By his mastery of magic incantations and esoteric traditions, the aristocratic priest (and a fortiori the chief) of the New Zealand Maori was believed to resurrect the dead or slay the living; yet despite his lack of such miraculous capacities, not to mention social prestige, the humble medium, when possessed, spoke with no less authority, since the god himself spoke through his mouth.

Early travelers in Polynesia, like William Ellis in Tahiti, left vivid descriptions of seances.^[1] Possessed by the god, the oracular taura medium "became violently agitated, and worked himself up to the highest pitch of apparent frenzy," muscles convulsed, features distorted, eyes wild and strained. "In this state he often rolled on the earth, foaming at the mouth, as if labouring under the influence of the divinity by whom he was possessed, and, in shrill cries, and violent and often indistinct sounds, revealed the will of the gods." Transcendence of the everyday human condition could scarcely be more emphatic.

Throughout Micronesia, too, spirit possession is widespread. In Ulithi the medium, who trembles and may fall into an epileptic fit during possession, is the channel through whom the ancestors provide information sought by the living (Lessa 1966b, 51). In Palau "the god may possess the medium at any time, without warning. He or she will shout loudly and then start speaking in the voice of the god" (Leonard, 157). In Melanesia and New Guinea manifestations of possession trance are as varied as attitudes toward the ghosts and ancestors who are its agents. In the Solomon island of Florida, sudden trance was a vehicle for prophetic utterance; a villager, "known to have his own tindalo ghost of prophecy, would

[1] Ellis, Polynesian Researches (London, 1829), 2:235–36, in Oliver, 80. Cf. Oliver, 94: "The distinction between shaman [taura ] and priest [tahu'a pure ] is quite clear-cut; the former served as a medium through which a spirit addressed humans, while the latter addressed spirits as a representative of humans."

sneeze and begin to shake, a sign that the tindalo had entered into him; his eyes would glare, his limbs twist, his whole body be convulsed, foam would burst from his lips; then a voice, not his own, would be heard in his throat, allowing or disapproving of what was proposed" (Codrington, 209). Among the Manus of the Admiralty Islands, as among the eastern Kyaka of the New Guinea highlands, the medium communicates between ghosts and the living through whistles, which she then interprets (Fortune, 32; Bulmer, 145). Elsewhere in highland New Guinea, the Tsembaga "smoke woman" invoked by tobacco and ritual songs enters the medium's body through the nostrils, after which the medium "dances about the embers in a low crouch, sobbing, chanting, and screaming in tongues" (Rappaport 1968, 119–20).

From the sneezing and whistling, thumping and gibbering, of Melanesia to the stately dances of Bali two thousand miles west, the cultural distance could hardly be greater; yet spirit possession is here far more central than among the warlike pig-breeders of New Guinea or the rugged mariners of the western Pacific. The everyday behavior of the Balinese, Belo notes (1), "is measured, controlled, graceful, tranquil. Emotion is not easily expressed. Dignity and an adherence to the rules of decorum are customary." Yet these people, defying Benedict's bifurcation of cultures, show a striking susceptibility to states of trance, ranging from riotous to quiescent, in which the ordinary personality is transformed by a transcendent spirit; in some places "they claimed that all the members of this village group, down to the smallest children, could and had entered into trance" (53). Group trance might take violent forms, as when maskers impersonating Rangda the Witch or Barong the Dragon "would go wild, rush out of the accustomed performance place into the crowd,. . . then fall unconscious and have to be revived" (3). In Gianjar district, the temple court would at times be filled with wild figures brandishing krisses, leaping, and shouting, as they enacted the giant Pig, Lion, or Witch that possessed them (66–67), and the rapt followers of Barong, men and women alike, would stab themselves with their krisses and frenziedly "hurl themselves forward to suck the gushing blood" from a fellow trancer's wounds (164). But individual mediums also communicated with the gods in more controlled ways. Those known as sadegs dance, shout, ask questions of the gods or answer in their name, jump up, swivel their heads, or hurl themselves backwards into the arms of others.

In parts of Sumatra, as in the very different cultures across the Strait of Malacca, communication with spirits through a medium is frequently practiced despite the influence of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and secular European civilizations. In Chinese Singapore a spirit of vast powers possesses the body of the dang-ki medium "and enables him to

inflict injury upon himself without feeling pain, and to speak with divine wisdom, giving advice to worshippers and curing their illnesses" (Elliott, 15). During a seance (63–64) the possessing shen spirit is summoned by deafening drums, gongs, and monotonous chants amid burning incense while the medium sits with icy body and bowed head, until trance begins. Limbs quivering, body swaying, hair flying, he staggers up as if intoxicated, then slobbers and rolls his head as he prances and mutters. As frenzy mounts, he cuts his tongue with his sword, sticks spikes through his cheeks, or climbs a sword ladder. Consultations follow as an interpreter translates mutterings supposed to come from the shen into an intelligible dialect (67). Finally the medium leaps into the air and is caught by an assistant. "He will never admit that he has more than a few vague memories of what has happened since he went into trance" (65).

In the north Malaysian provinces of Perak and Kelantan, a dancer enters a state of lupa , forgetfulness, during which he becomes a spirit's medium (Endicott 1970, 20) and rises up, possessed by a tiger-spirit; he draws blood from his arm, fights an invisible foe, sits, claps, and lies down exhausted. In Buddhist Thailand and Burma, as in Hindu Bali and Muslim Malaya, this ancient form of contact with the divine by no means vanished with the advent of "higher" religions; its need is felt most intensely in times of crisis. In northeast Thailand, the tiam medium diagnoses disease by answering questions in the name of the possessing guardian spirit (Tambiah 1970, 278–79). Extreme maladies, such as malignant spirit possession, require the more potent services of a "medium cum exorcizer" (313) who learns an incomprehensible foreign language during trance and speaks in the voice of the Buddhist angels within him as he kicks and whips the patient, or stabs him with a tiger's tooth, so that the afflicting spirit will cry out and reveal its identity (322–29).

The "nat wife" of village Burma becomes a medium because a nat falls in love and wishes to marry her (Spiro, 208), even against her will. As curer, she either identifies the nat responsible for an illness or learns in trance from her spirit husband the remedy of the disease. Severe mental illness may require the services of an exorcist, the "Master of the Upper Path," not a medium but a master of esoteric lore who induces possession of the patient by the offending nat whom he attempts to command (230–36). This quasi-Buddhist Master seems (241) to have taken over the original function of the female medium, leaving her role far more marginal than in many societies.

Among the Kachins of highland Burma, where mediumship may coexist with Catholic or Baptist Christianity, "the medium in a trance state is able to transport himself to the world of the nats and consult the nats in person" (Leach, 193)—a form of spirit journey reminiscent of northern shamanism. On the Indian side of the mountainous Burmese bor-

der, too, the medicine man of the Ao Nagas, on recovering from trance, speaks of having seen the patient's soul in the heavens and visited friends among the spirit-doubles dwelling there (Mills, 245). And among the Konyak Nagas, shamans were believed to visit the land of the dead in trance, and to be able to bring back a soul kidnaped from a sleeping body (Fürer-Haimendorf, 93).

Soul flight is exceptional on the Indian subcontinent, even among many Naga tribes; but spirit possession pervades the countless "Little Traditions" of village India. In many regions, from the Himalayas south, communication through mediums in trance complements the less flexible institutions of the dominant priestly religions. The frenzied Kachári medium of Assam "seems for the time to be lifted above the world of time and sense" as she decapitates a sacrificial goat in search of knowledge concerning the cause and cure of disease (Endle, 40–41). Among the Buddhist Lepchas of Sikkim in the Himalayas, everything in the lamaistic religion is theoretically fixed, like the horoscopes of the hereditary priesthood. By contrast, in the indigenous Mun religion, possession of mediums by a "private god" is not astrally predestined but inaugurated by unpredictable sickness (Gorer, 215–19). In the mountainous borderland between India and Nepal, the Brahmin priest of the Indo-Aryan Paharis performs or directs the "carefully prescribed, stereotyped, highly ritualized religious activity" of the learned or great tradition, above all through annual ceremonies and life-cycle rites (Berreman, 55–56). His actions are determined by well-known precedents and his prestige derives from inherited class status and from elaborate religious education (60–61). Complementing these priestly functions, a variety of non-Brahmanical religious practitioners concern themselves with the worldly welfare of their clients, which they promote through personal contact with the supernatural world (56).

During ceremonies of the wild Baiga tribe of tropical central India, who have been little affected by Hinduism, mediums fall into frenzy, Elwin writes (1939, 381), and "throw themselves on the ground, their limbs twitch spasmodically, they wag their heads desperately to and fro" as the god rides upon them. Among the neighboring Kol, many of whom consider themselves Hindus, acts of the Brahmin priest have more a social than a religious validity (Griffiths, 147), and worship of the local goddesses is conducted by a village medium, the panda , who in trance "begins to tremble, then shout, beat himself upon the ground, and become in appearance a totally different person" (159). The Hindu priest of the savage Bondo of the Orissa highlands is likewise consulted for routine matters, the medium for anything out of the ordinary. He diagnoses the trouble, Elwin writes (1950, 161), "by means familiar throughout aboriginal India; he falls into trance and prophesies; he

commands the winnowing fan and the gourd; he gets drunk and his ravings are interpreted as the voice of the god."

Another Orissa tribe studied by Elwin, the Hill Saora, are noted for the complexity of their indigenous religious practices. The male medium's knowledge derives from spiritual marriage to a wife from the Under World (1955, 130–31), and the female medium is similarly wedded, despite initial refusal, to "a suitor from the Under World who proposes marriage with all its ecstatic and numinous consequences," including birth of a spirit child (147). Both male and female mediums "torment themselves with clonic convulsions; they roll on the ground, tear at their hair, sway to and fro in complete abandon, dance on their knees" (215) when possessed by the supernatural consorts who endow them with knowledge of a condition transcending their own. In all these instances from tribal cultures (as in many others, to be sure, from Hindu devotional cults of Shiva or the Goddess), the contrast with the ascetic self-denial of the learned brahmanical tradition of India could hardly be more pronounced.

Tribal and Intertribal Cults: Africa and America

So widespread is spirit possession in tropical Africa, and so fully documented in anthropological literature (see Beattie and Middleton, and Zaretsky and Shambaugh), that a few examples will stand for many. Among the Dinka of the Nilotic Sudan, the "Powers" (jok ) may possess an unsuspecting tribesman, who has little or no control over trance; a medium, on the other hand, translates the twittering sounds spoken by the divinity through him and thus channels for the public good an experience intermittently shared by others (Lienhardt 1961, 57–72). Among the neighboring Nuer, not the leopard-skin chief or priest but the prophetic medium, who alone is the "owner or possessor of Spirit" (Evans-Pritchard 1956, 44), wields greatest influence through charismatic inspiration. The priest's virtue resides in his office, the prophet's in himself, and "whereas in the priest man speaks to God, in the prophet God, in one or other of his hypostases, speaks to man" (304). Thus the medium of these nomadic and nearly anarchic cattle-breeders, far from being secondary to the priest, takes on the authoritative dignity of prophet.

Among the Mandari of the southern Sudan, possession ranges from mental disorders caused when "Spirit-of-the-Above" falls upon them to several clearly differentiated kinds of mediumship employed in healing others. The medium's call "is typified by mental crisis involving withdrawal to the bush, wandering there aimlessly, and refusal to eat, speak, or take part in social life" (Buxton 1973, 45); it is thus an individual

counterpart to the tribal initiant's liminal separation during ritual exposure to the wild. At a seance for a patient the afflicting Power (jok ) might either speak directly through the possessed doctor or engage in a dialogue after possession—during which the doctor's body might be uncontrollably convulsed and hurled against a wall, or the hut might begin to tremble—had run its course.

In parts of Africa where ancestor worship is more prominent, spirit possession is often closely associated with it. Among the Tallensi of Ghana, to be sure, domination of tribal thought by the ancestors leaves little room for other supernatural forces (Fortes and Mayer, 11), and divination, through which ancestral demands are revealed, is "a matter-of-fact business," making possession by a departed ancestor or any other supernatural agency inconceivable. Elsewhere in West Africa, ancestors are often among the spirits thought to possess their devotees, especially at festivals in their honor. Thus among the Fon of Dahomey (Benin), the spirits of impersonated ancestors descend into the heads of dancers possessed by them (Herskovits 1938, 1:212–18). The wild behavior characteristic of possession among other peoples is largely absent, however, in their ceremonies both for the ancestors and for the vodun , or gods: "Even during the strongest frenzy it is evident that a dancer is most rarely, if ever, completely in a trance" (2:199). In this well-ordered former kingdom, where divine dispensation was traditionally revealed not through ecstatic trance but through meticulous divination in the cult of Fá, or destiny, spirit possession has been thoroughly assimilated to ritual, in which only the most marginal variation can be granted entry. Among the Nago-Yoruba and other Yoruba tribes of Nigeria, too (Verger, 50), possession trances are the culmination of elaborate festivals for the orisha , gods widely held to be of human origin, hence not fundamentally different from ancestors. The future is revealed through divinatory practices such as the famous Ifá, in which the multiplicity of poems and stories associated with each figure makes it possible for the diviner's client to choose among them (Finnegan, 154), but spirit possession permits a more personal communication with the divine than even the inspired interpretation of palm nuts or cowrie shells can provide.

In Ashanti, and elsewhere in southern Ghana, less relentlessly regulated forms of spirit possession find place, although the normal identification of medium with priest restrains their never-unbridled excess. An Ashanti seized by an obosom spirit in the excitement of a festival may suddenly run forth into the wilderness, whence he or she may emerge, if at all, as an obosomfo priest, and even after becoming a trained mouthpiece of the spirits may unexpectedly vanish into the bush for hours or days at a time, as if to renew inspiriting contact with the wild. Here ancestor worship is largely a prerogative of the consecrated chief; among

the neighboring Gã, where a more typically West African form of ancestor worship prevails, the agent possessing a medium at either an annual festival or a private seance may be not only a spirit or god but one of the dead. When possessed, rarely more than once a year at her god's big dance, the medium "speaks with a voice not her own and greater than that of any human being" (Field 1937, 100). Several weeks of emotional disturbance verging on madness normally follow, and several years' training may be required before she can recognize the spirit possessing her and speak in its name. At a dance she trembles and struggles while attendants dress her; then a whole string of gods come rapidly upon her: "She may be a lame man or a hunchback, she may assume the gait and posture of a pregnant woman or a most amusingly coquettish young damsel," or may bark or go on all fours when seized by an animal god, or speak a language she does not know, until she collapses in her attendants' arms (105–07).

African spirit possession remains for the most part tribal, yet a medium will often have a following nearby (the most authoritative spirits frequently speak a foreign tongue), and the cult of one influential tribe will sometimes be adopted, and adapted, by another, as the jok possession of the Dinka was by the Mandari. Even when such a complex crosses tribal borders, however, and is acknowledged as foreign in origin, it is usually (as diverse Nilotic usages of jok suggest) transformed, far more quickly than an international religion "of the Book" such as Christianity or Islam can normally be, in accord with existing tribal beliefs and practices, which it transforms in turn.

A notable instance is the Cwezi complex of the Bantu-speaking peoples bounded by lakes Tanganyika, Victoria, and Albert. Among the Banyoro of western Uganda, traditional religion centers on Cwezi spirits "associated with a wonderful race of people supposed to have come to Bunyoro many centuries ago, to have ruled the country for a couple of generations and performed many wonderful things, and then to have vanished as mysteriously as they came" (Beattie 1964, 143), leaving behind them the mbandwa mediumship "through which the Nyoro people still retain access to the magical power and wisdom which they represented" (1969, 160). Among the Zinza of northeastern Tanzania, on the other hand, the Cwezi spirits (bacwezi ) are considered recent, foreign, and malevolent, in contrast to the old and beneficent mbandwa (Bjerke, 42–43): "They are the spirits appropriate to a changing and anomic world" (53). Unlike the traditional (usually female) mbandwa medium, the "shaman" who protects the social order against the "bacwezi of the outside" can control the spirits who possess him (140), combining the powers of medium and medicine man, diviner and exorcist. At a seance he shakes his rattle, sings, and calls upon the bacwezi to fall upon him,

but in his "lucid" possession he conveys their words in indirect discourse rather than passively surrendering himself to them.

So fundamentally do spirits bearing the same name differ that Cwezi possession is no more a truly intertribal cult among Bantu peoples of this region than is jok possession among Nilotic peoples further north. Only the zar cult—diffused through much of Ethiopia and the African horn, North Africa, and the Arabian peninsula, where Christianity and Islam had long since breached the barriers of tribal religion—deserves, for all its local variations, to be called international. (The somewhat similar bori cult of Nigeria and northwest Africa also crosses national borders, but is mainly concentrated among the Muslim Hausa.)

Thus in Ethiopia, patients (usually married women) afflicted by such symptoms as sterility, convulsive seizures, or extreme apathy, and thought to be possessed by amoral zar (or wuqabi ) spirits, are treated by a healer who has mastered their power. Through his offices, "the zar's identity is revealed by the patient's 'individual' zar dance ('gurri'), which the spirit obliges his human 'horse' to perform publicly while the doctor watches and directs," without himself entering trance (Messing, 286; cf. Leiris, 15–18). The procedure is essentially identical in Egypt, where the practitioner attempts to convert the zar from evil to protective spirits (Fakhouri, 52). Zar possession thus resembles exorcism in that the specialist induces trance in the victim of malignant possession, with the crucial difference that here the spirit is not expelled but conciliated, so that the patient, by induction into the cult, becomes in effect a medium capable of communicating in trance with a spirit both within and beyond her, and thus of bringing under her own control dimensions of her existence previously alien to her.

Only with the near disintegration of tribal ties in the cataclysm of overseas slavery, however, did black African spirit mediumship find new forms of expression, above all in the Caribbean and Brazil, that necessarily transcended old tribal barriers. In Haiti, the complex amalgamation known in English as voodoo (from vodun ) incorporated components of African religions, especially the Dahomean, along with others from Native Americans and French Catholic colonizers, into a new religion in which possession trance is central. Here the spirit possession frugally meted out at the annual festivals of Dahomey is dispersed, in very different degrees, among the "servitors" at large; as they dance and sing to the beating of drums in the peristyle of an hounfor temple after sacrifice has been made, each may become the "horse" of a loa —a divinity usually thought of as human in origin—who temporarily displaces the servitor's soul (gros-bon-ange) and animates his or her body during possession. Various degrees of initiation separate the lowest grade of hounsi —"spirit wife," though few are ritually wedded to a loa (Courlan-

der, 71; cf. Métraux 1959, 212–19)—from the female mambo or male houngan medium at the top of the hierarchy. But each is repeatedly ridden, pre-eminently by the loa lodged in the servitor's head (whether by birth or ceremonial initiation) and known as maît' tête , who normally takes possession of the body when solemnly invoked in the ancestral langage of the prière Guinée . Any devotee can be possessed, but for important matters a trained houngan or mambo should be consulted.

Possession varies widely, not only with the individual's capacity and stage of initiation but with the nature of the loa, for these comprise a colorful pantheon of divinities from different "nations," who manifest their characteristics in those they ride. Thus a mambo possessed, as Métraux describes her (1959, 125), by the battle god Ogoun, jams a saber into her stomach, duels wildly with the temple's master of ceremonies (laplace ), hacks at the center post of the peristyle and chases the terrified hounsi: possessed by another loa on another occasion she will act in a wholly different way. The American artist Maya Deren, who found herself drawn into the voodoo dances she attended in 1947, gives an extraordinary personal account (260) of the first occasion when the goddess of love, Erzulie , mounted her head:

There is no way out. The white darkness moves up the veins of my leg like a swift tide rising, rising; it is a great force which I cannot sustain or contain, which, surely, will burst my skin. It is too much, too white, too bright; this is its darkness. "Mercy!" I scream within me. I hear it echoed by the voices, shrill and unearthly: "Erzulie!" The bright darkness floods up through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me. I am sucked down and exploded upward at once. That is all.

In Spanish-speaking America, the cult of Santería , centered in the Caribbean but with offshoots as far north as New York, has also assimilated, along with a medley of magical practices, gods worshiped in the African homeland—mainly Yoruba orishas identified with Catholic saints—who are capable of possessing their devotees when summoned, at a fiesta or tambor , by the sacred drums. But it is in Brazil that possession cults of African origin have had the widest influence, outside Haiti, on the religious life of the western hemisphere. As in Santería, the Dahomean vodun and above all the Yoruba orishas generally prevailed over other tribal gods and of course over local ancestral spirits (Bastide 1978, 128), and were syncretized with Catholic saints, becoming known interchangeably as orixas or santos.

In the candomblés of Bahia State and its capital city, Salvador, "the deities have African names and are thought to have permanent residences in Africa, and all of the songs the faithful sing are in what are supposedly African languages" (Leacock and Leacock, 284–85). As in

Dahomey and Nigerian Yorubaland, the trance states of participants in the public candomblé ceremonies "are rarely if ever spontaneous; rather, mediums always go into trance on cue, they dance together as the deities, then they come out of trance together," so that with rare exceptions the ceremonies always follow the expected pattern (286).^[2] They give expression not to a Durkheimian "collective ecstasy" but to "an ordered set of individual trances," each of which, Bastide argues (1978, 237–38), has its own distinctive character.

The influence of African spirit possession on Brazilian religion permeates other cults to which various non-African peoples have more richly contributed. No sharp distinction is possible between groups known in different regions as Macumba, Umbanda, Batuque, and so forth, but in each the African nucleus has been enriched—or corrupted—by elements drawn from Catholic liturgy, Indian folklore, and European spiritism, especially in the mid-nineteenth century form given it by Hippolyte Rivail, who wrote under the name of Allan Kardec (McGregor, 86–119).

Macumba is the amorphous term most widely applied to Afro-Brazilian cults, especially in their more popular forms. (In Rio de Janeiro, where macumba originated, the word is often used in deprecation, like English "mumbo-jumbo," being replaced by Umbanda when a more respectable synonym is needed.) The medium in charge of a terreiro , the cult center where sacrifice is made and initiates are possessed to the beat of drums, is known as the mãe (or more rarely pai ) de santo , the mother (or father) of the "saint" or god, translating the Nago-Yoruba terms employed also in the Candomblé. In the words of one mãe de santo , Maria-José, as reported by an enthusiastic French pupil, "The terreiro represents Africa, the source" (Bramly, 44), the land of life and origins, force and power (199). When possessed, "The medium has no will, no memory, no personality," and once the god has left can remember nothing that happened during trance (37). But possession is not random, for the initiate—usually female in macumba as in the candomblés—makes "a kind of pact with a god" (53) who becomes the master of her head, until, through progressive initiation, she becomes his "bride" and experiences her first controlled trance (55), which she will henceforth enter at will.

In Belém (or Salvador), the largest city of the Amazon Basin in northern Brazil, the central feature of the "Batuque"—a name also used for the cults of Rio Grande do Sul half a continent to the south—is a kind

[2] Yet spirit possession is much more widely experienced even in this most conservative Afro-Brazilian cult than in the tribal festivals of West Africa, where "a small number of privileged persons" fall into trance (Rodrigues, 101).

of contract by whose terms, Seth and Ruth Leacock write (52), "the human receives the spirit and allows it to participate in ceremonies, and in return the spirit looks out for the welfare of the human being." Possession takes place, as in other Afro-American religions, to the beating of drums, the shaking of gourds, and the singing of songs and invocations at a public ceremony (batuque ) in the open pavilion of the terreiro, and its forms again vary widely in accord both with the possessing spirit and the person possessed. Younger and less experienced initiates are especially prone to frenetic seizures. When the demonic spirits called Exus —after the divine intermediary of Yoruba mythology who sometimes, like Dahomean Legbá, displays unpredictable malice—are invoked at midnight (23–24), young people seized by them dance contortedly, roll on the ground, and bark like dogs to rapid clapping, drumming, and singing. But what is most admired in the accomplished medium, the Leacocks affirm (171–72), "is very often the behavior that appears the least frenzied and the most normal to the outside observer."

Finally, the merger of African spirit possession with the megalopolitan world finds expression in Umbanda, a term plastic enough to be expropriated by other sects, but referring more specifically to the syncretistic cult widely practiced in the great urban centers of Rio and São Paulo. The various Umbanda sects, whose devotees in this vast multi-racial country include educated members of the predominantly white middle class, draw their core components from other Afro-Brazilian cults like the despised Macumba, segregating the sacrificial ritual and black magic of the latter from itself as Quimbanda (its dark twin and secret sharer), systematizing the spirits of its polyglot inheritance into an elaborately ordered hierarchy, and overlaying the whole with the spiritism of Kardec and the spirituality of Jesus. Of the five major types of spirits distinguished in one account from São Paulo, the Yoruba orishas —syncretized not only with Christian saints but, in some versions, with the Olympian gods (Pressel, 335–37; McGregor, 185–86)—are considered "so powerful that a medium would explode if possession were to occur"; they therefore send spirits of the dead from the other four categories in their place (Pressel, 338). Possession, despite occasional frenzies, is thus generally less shattering than in other Afro-Brazilian cults, tamed to the point of becoming nearly routine.

In a modern Umbanda consultation, as Bastide sums it up (1978, 332), "each client has a number, handed out to him at the entrance. . . . The medium is in paroxysm, but the initial violence has worn off. . . . The clients, also seated on low benches, recount their sad stories—unemployment, a missing husband, a rebellious child, a persistent illness. . . . The séance ends with a moral homily or a prayer." At a session in São Paulo described by Pressel (341–45), the directors collect dues

and signatures in a guest book. "Somewhere near the entrance there may be a bulletin board on which various items have been posted: a notice of a fund-raising picnic; a reminder that women are not permitted to wear slacks in the center; and perhaps a few photographs of members possessed by their spirits, taken at a religious festa ." After a brief sermon on Christian charity, some mediums spin round while spirits descend into their "horses." When the drumming stops, clients wishing to consult a spirit wait in line, sometimes taking a number at the door; the consultation may cover any subject from aches and pains to family difficulties, love problems, or even poor grades. After receiving advice the client "is rid of his bad fluids"—a Kardecist heritage—in a ritual known as passes . "A spirit may occasionally," despite the general decorum, "possess a member of the audience, causing the individual to shriek and shake violently," but the cult leader or an assistant, who is not himself possessed, restores calm.

Manifold though its variations may be, spirit mediumship is everywhere a potentially transformative experience of communication with a transcendent force that displaces the everyday self. But here in Umbanda a sanitized and prepackaged, almost parodic possession trance tailored for the metropolitan masses no longer threatens to shatter those whom it routinely seizes or to communicate anything of the unknown that could not have been easily conveyed by a competent guidance counselor. Despite its exotic trappings and nostalgic yearning for a mysterious Africa that is in fact all around it, this synthesis of Christ and Kardec with a spirit mediumship smacking of the palmist's salon if not of the dentist's office seems as distant from the ancestral Africa of voduns and orishas, bacwezi and jok, as it does from the age-old tribal and popular religions of India, Thailand, Malaya, Bali, or Tahiti. What is missing from spirit possession in Umbanda, for all its spinning mediums and batteries of gods, for all its elaborate spiritism and ostentatious spirituality, is precisely its spirit: the continual possibility of a never wholly predictable alteration of the given human condition through the overpowering intrusion of the divine.

Chapter Nine—
Possession and Transformation

In Delphic priestess, Hebrew prophet, Muslim Sufi, Christian Pentecostalist, and many others outside tribal religions, communication through spirit possession is complexly intermeshed with divergent ideologies of spiritual ascent; of salvation through adherence to law, submission to God, or infusion of grace; of emancipation or extinction of the self. By contrast, the core belief of tribal spirit-possession cults—that it is not man who raises himself to the heavens in these postmythical times but the gods who descend, with individually variant and never fully predictable results, upon man—remains consistent in most instances from the tropical or subtropical regions we have been examining.

The Ardors of Passivity

What connection does spirit possession have with the questing dimension of religious experience? At first blush, very little, for the quester actively seeks what the medium—repeatedly described as an instrument, a vessel, a vehicle, a horse ridden by a power she cannot resist—passively awaits. During mediumship a person loses his own being, Mbiti writes (226), "and becomes simply an instrument of the spirit in him," like a radio transmitting messages between divine and human (230).

The initial call is typically conceived as an onslaught of madness or disease against which the patient struggles in vain before submitting to a destiny, a tremendum , too great to withstand. Even if the call is initially rejected, Buxton writes of the Mandari (1973, 277), "it is believed that the chosen individual must eventually acquiesce." The medium is helpless before a vastly superior force and can only submit to its dictates; she does not seek but is sought and, being sought, cannot refuse. Choice is

thus reduced to a minimum or annulled: in the Batuque, the Leacocks observe (59)—and the same might be said far beyond Brazil—"it is the encantado who initiates the relationship and not the human being. . . . No matter how much an individual may feel drawn to a particular encantado, or how much he may want to be possessed by it, there is no way in which this may come about except through the volition of the supernatural." The medium's coerced (though possibly desired) union with a familiar spirit is often a bond until death, and where change from one dominant spirit to another is possible, as in the Haitian ceremony of lavé tête or "washing of the head," mental derangement is a frequent consequence of so dangerous a severance (Courlander, 21–22).

Nor is the medium's self-effacing submission limited to the initial call; on the contrary, every experience of possession entails temporary annihilation of the self. Action, like choice, is indispensable to the quest, but what the possessing power requires of his vessel is not activity—only the invading spirit can act—but passivity: not actions but, Lienhardt suggests (151), their etymological opposite, passiones , "sufferances" (we might translate the term) which give carte blanche to the spirit's overriding superpersonal will. In this dissociated condition, as we have repeatedly seen, the medium becomes another, or a series of others, who speak and act through him; having "ceased to exist as a person," the entranced individual "is in no way responsible for his deeds or words" (Métraux 1959, 132).

Stripped of initiative, action, will, choice, and hence responsibility, the medium is less a questing voyager than the road traveled by another—a not-uncommon metaphor to express her receptive function. The journey is for the spirit to make, from his otherworldly home to the world of men, and whatever exertion it involves is the spirit's alone. "When a spirit comes into a person he may have to struggle through because," Firth writes (1967a, 301), "in Tikopia terms the person does not present a clear path or, as we should say, is not a good medium." But although the path may be blocked, the will of the medium, as always, has no effect on the outcome: "The spirit just comes all the same," and no merely human power can conceivably prevent him.

Yet the practiced medium's passivity is not the bewildered neophyte's; it is an achieved passivity in which the medium's exertions, though attributed to another, find fulfillment. The very word passivity, insofar as it connotes inertness rather than passionate sufferance, is misleading. Neither vehicle nor horse is static, and a vessel—the most comprehensive metaphor for the medium—is characterized by receptivity or openness , in this case to incorporation of the transformative spirit that negates the everyday self by suddenly expanding its potential actualizations. This openness to assimilation of the unknown constitutes the accomplished

medium's receptiveness to the spirit: a trained passivity that is an act of voluntary surrender to the beyond through which man becomes momentarily other and more.

The literature of spirit possession repeatedly emphasizes the contrast between the convulsive spasms of the disoriented novice and the controlled trances of the authoritative medium who is no longer, in the Afro-Brazilian distinction, an undisciplined child but a mother or father of the god. The initial seizure is not always a call to the medium's vocation. Unexpected encounters with the wild can lead to destruction as well as mastery, and malignant possession, whether from witchcraft or random demons of the bush, may result in wasting illness, madness, or death unless the invading spirit is exorcized or appeased. If the seizure is diagnosed as a call, moreover, the vocation to which it summons may be that of an exorcist or diviner who will not thereafter enter possession even if inducing it in others.

The early states of an incipient medium's "uncontrolled" or "unsolicited" possession, to employ Lewis's terms (55),^[1] are characteristically followed by increasingly controlled states demonstrating a degree of mastery in summoning spirits to which the medium then submits. In some cultures different categories of possession represent clearly distinguished degrees of control, as among the Tonga of Zambia where the basangu medium plays a public role as channel to the divine largely absent in less voluntary forms of ghost possession (Colson, 70–71), or in Bali where the relatively sedate behavior of the dancing sadeg mediums contrasts with that of the frenzied self-stabbing maskers of Barong the Dragon. But the distinction in degrees of control pertains above all to successive phases in a given type of medium's career.

Thus the more spectacular elements of !Kung Bushman trance performances, such as fire-walking and running amok, Lee remarks (41), were not typical of experienced trancers but "were largely confined to the young novices who would plunge into trance and exhibit uncontrolled reactions." Mandari doctors "are controlled personalities, and it is the uncontrolled, the non-professional, the sick and the immature who suffer inappropriate or adventitious possession" (Buxton 1973, 42). Among the Nago-Yoruba, "the first possession fits, which come before initiation, are often wild and violent; but under the supervision of the head priest of the god, they become calm and settled after a short period in his temple" (Verger, 51). In Afro-Brazilian cults such as the Batuque of Belém, the most admired behavior is often the most apparently nor-

[1] Lewis's "more neutral" terms uncontrolled/controlled and unsolicited/solicited or Oesterreich's comprehensive involuntary/voluntary (236–43) are preferable to Bourguignon's negative/positive or pathological/non-pathological (1968, 6).

mal, and in Haiti, where elaborate rites such as the kanzo or brulé zin ("boiling pot") mark the passage to higher stages of control, "the houngan eventually establishes a conditioned, formalized response to possession, and once this is achieved, the 1oa is regarded as having been tamed" (Courlander, 11).^[2]

The distinction between controlled and uncontrolled spirit possession in tribal cultures is similar to that made in Oughourlian's psychology of mimetic desire between possession and hysteria. Possession, he writes (179–80), "understood in the true sense, that is, as adorcism" (in contrast to exorcism),

is the recognition or acknowledgment [reconnaissance ] of the interindividual relation and the mimetic character of desire. Hysteria is its misunderstanding [méconnaissance ]. . . . Consequently, possession is submission to the other, the taking of the other as a model and as the origin of the self's desire. Hysteria, in contrast, is revolt , strife, insurrection against the other. . . . Possession manifests identification , whereas hysteria manifests an inability to identify . . . . Possession is accompanied by catharsis. But no cathartic process is really possible in hysteria.

The medium's true mastery thus lies in the fullness of her recognition and acceptance of the otherness to which she is willingly open and which she thereby incorporates into herself.

The novice becomes a medium to the extent that she is able, through discipline and training, to turn initially involuntary spirit possession to the use of others through controlled communication with the spirit world—a use requiring that her behavior be "intelligible or able to be interpreted," Firth writes (1967a, 296), and therefore that it "follow some fairly regular, predictable pattern, usually of speech." Though not a true "master of spirits" like the North Asiatic shaman, the practiced medium is far from a merely passive instrument of forces wholly external to her and thus altogether beyond the reach of her powers.

The vocation thrust upon her against her will must thenceforth be repeatedly won, for in order to convert the potentially destructive onslaught of the untamed spirit to advantageous ends, the medium must actively seek and in some measure command the transformative influx that will no longer come unbidden. To the extent that the Nuer prophet, like every medium, is "the mouthpiece of a spirit" and "speaks under its control," Evans-Pritchard remarks (1956, 304), he may seem the mere implement of another's will. But in contrast to the ordinary Nuer, the prophet is a seeker: one who "sought inspiration, entry of Spirit into

[2] On the brulé zin and other Haitian initiation rites, see Courlander, 41–44; Métraux 1959, 192–212; and Deren, 220–24.

himself and its filling him; and in seeking it, he could not but have been aware of the influence it would bring him" (307).

The medium possessed by a spirit cannot simply be considered, then, a passive conductor of messages originating in undisciplined impulses from without or within, from the heights of the spirit or the depths of the psyche; her trained receptivity to powers beyond and within her is a hard-sought and always perilous attainment. But this necessary disciplining of initially uncontrolled seizures raises the question of the medium's susceptibility not to impulse but to the conventional expectations of her social role: the possibility, that is, of another kind of passivity. Older interpretations of possession trance (propounded for Afro-Brazilian religions by Nina Rodrigues and Ramos) as fits of hysteria or even epilepsy have rightly given way to the emphasis of Bastide (306) and others on "the discipline of the cult, the control of ecstasy," understood as a normal social phenomenon (310). But does this replacement of a psychiatric by a sociological thesis imply that the medium has exchanged one domination for another, becoming the instrument not of neurotic frenzies externalized as spirits but of pre-established behavior patterns regulated, like ritual in general, by an inflexible communal tradition to which she unconsciously conforms?

Bastide was writing in particular about possession of dancers at stylized festivals like those of Dahomey and the candomblés of Brazil, in which spirit trance shares in the putative invariability of priestly ritual. Here dance is paramount, and the dancer's movements, attributed to the possessing spirit, are regulated almost as rigorously as other aspects of ritual, leaving slender if any margin for individual expression. Up to a point, similar observations apply to almost all spirit possession, individual as well as communal, seemingly ecstatic no less than rigidly controlled. All varieties of trance behavior in Bali, Belo writes (1), "bear the imprint of cultural patterning" in children and adults, self-stabbers and sadegs . And among mothers of sick children possessed by jok in frenzied seances of the Nilotic Alur scarcely less than among performers at Dahomean tribal festivities, "dancing and trance alike are highly stylized, even at their most violent, following a pattern to which all have been mentally and physically conditioned from infancy, so that to become possessed is itself to give oneself up to a pre-ordained pattern" (Southall 243).

In this light the medium's "controlled" surrender is not to erratic psychic impulses but—with equal servility—to predictable social norms. Society masquerading as a god would appear to possess the medium, just as Society is the hidden object of worship, for Durkheim, in all ritual. So inert a conformity to collective expectations can hardly be characterized

as a quest: not if the medium can discover, albeit unwittingly, only what was given to start with.

Yet involuntary and voluntary possession suggest not merely two successive phases of passivity—surrender to uncontrollable powers of the "wild" followed by compliance with socially dictated behavior patterns—but a tension between opposing demands in whose interplay lies the medium's margin of freedom and opportunity for discovery. The "remarkable general similarity" in the speech and behavior of mediums during trance among the Hill Saora of India, as elsewhere, by no means excludes an "endless diversity in detail" permitted by absence of the rigid program of priestly ritual, nor the possibility that once a medium enters trance "anything may happen" (Elwin 1955, 470). The cultural pattern, however pervasive, is not the sole determinant of the possessed medium's behavior but the matrix giving shape to forces through whose conflict the unexpected can arise. Without the cultural pattern spirit possession could not become a communicable experience, but if every impulse were defined by that pattern alone there would be no experience to communicate, and the medium's message, like that of ritual, would be a continuously repeated self-referential tautology, "communication without information."

Such would be the case if the medium's behavior were totally controlled. As Firth writes, however (1967a, 306), in most performances "there seemed to be some kind of balance between involuntary behaviour and the exercise of personal control"; trance was unpredictable, but "most of the events within it followed a fairly set pattern." Because of this tension between individual impulse and cultural pattern the medium communicates, as she professes, something beyond the socially constituted self that she shares with others—hence something transcendent.

Thus the medium's progression from largely involuntary to increasingly controlled states of possession need not be understood as passive conformity with social conventions, for these patterned states—like the seemingly self-enclosed genome, the repetitive Freudian id, the fixed grammatical component of language, and every other organic and cultural structure—are dynamic systems never wholly closed to the outside world. The behavior of both disciplined medium and the person seized by a malignant spirit "tends to be largely stereotyped, to conform to a kind of code. But what is particularly interesting here," Firth suggests (1969, xi), "is that in many societies the code of the medium is used to provide an interpretation of the code of the possessed patient. Under pressure of the social conventions, the medium in his spirit terms works out the stresses which the patient displays in his ," thus turning to pur-

poseful use, through the interplay of codes as open systems, an impetus that might otherwise remain destructively undirected.

The medium's interpretive code is pre-eminently linguistic , since speech during spirit possession is a hallmark of the most practiced mediums: in others the spirit may move but through these it speaks . And unlike the fixed movements of the dance, language, once released by the solvent of trance from the formulaic repetitiveness of ritual, can never be confined to the self-referential closure of communicating absence of newness, but by its assimilation of experience will continually create the indeterminate future to which information alone pertains.

Through the creative power of speech the medium thus introduces into spirit possession a dimension of purposeful change lacking in its involuntary manifestations; her "interpretation" typically takes the form of prognosis, revealing not only the patient's current condition and its causes but the potentiality for transforming that condition as the medium has already done. Language, quintessentially patterned by culture, is therefore truly a manifestation of spirit, conceived precisely as the potential for purposeful self-transcendence inherent in all living things: a potential apprehensible only through the symbol understood (in Peirce's sense) as esse in futuro . Spirit possession interpreted through the medium's never wholly stereotyped language thus opens, like myth, onto an undetermined future. To this degree the structure of ecstasy, Bastide observes (1961, 252), "is equal to the structure of myth, which serves it as a model"; both complement the invariance of ritual by extending its latent (or liminal) dynamic dimensions, and thereby reorient tribal religious activity away from exclusive concern with affirmation of the communal past toward incorporation of the variable and the new.

Even more than myth, however, whose subject matter looks back to a legendary past, verbal communication attributed to the spirit in trance pertains explicitly to present and future needs of living individuals in transition or crisis. And unlike myths, which frequently become dissociated from ritual, spirit mediumship, where it exists among tribal peoples, is an integral part of religious praxis—one which may even (as in Tikopia)^[3] briefly survive more conservative forms of ritual long associated with it in the dialectic of closure and openness, stasis and change.

Inasmuch as the medium's practice finds culminating expression in speech ascribed to spirit, then, her trance can by no means be dismissed

[3] Returning to Tikopia in 1952, Firth (1967a, 294–95) found only small sectors of the largely Christian community practicing such pagan rites as the Work of the Gods, yet spirit mediumship was still flourishing as in 1928–29. But during a third visit in 1966, when all pagan ritual had lapsed, everyone agreed that mediumship "had ceased completely and I could find not the slightest evidence of any private or secret practices of this order" (356).

as mere compliance with preordained social norms but must be understood as an actively pursued state of indeterminacy whose communications pertain essentially not to what is given but to what remains to be found and must therefore, with no certainty of its outcome, be continually sought. Both that uncertainty, that possibility (rigorously excluded from priestly ritual in all but its carefully confined liminal phases) that the unexpected may happen, and the stereotyped redundancy of most messages against which such novelty can be measured, are fundamental to the medium's capacity to convey information held to derive from a realm of the spirit surpassing the everyday self: a transcendent realm made immanent in the incarnated word. To communicate this "news of the beyond" is the never fully attainable object of the spirit medium's often arduous quest.

Dancing toward the Unknown

The word "medium" carries inevitable connotations in modern western languages of dubious if not fraudulent practices ranging from tableturning to ouija boards and other forms of fortune-telling. But in contrast to the spiritism of modern Europe and America, which grew up in reaction to both institutional Christianity and positivistic science, the spirit mediumship of tribal religions is in its own context by no means reactionary. On the contrary, as the communally sanctioned complement to priestly ritual, it has generally been associated with an opening toward the unknown, a potentially transformative exploration of the new.

This does not, however, imply that the claims of mediums are universally believed by their credulous followers, or that their ecstatic performances are always free of the deceptions rampant in Western spiritism—and not unknown in Western science. Both tribesman and anthropologist may be skeptical with good reason of inspired pronouncements, knowing how easily trance can be dissembled. Yet the undoubted (and sometimes openly acknowledged) pretense noted by Nina Rodrigues in his pioneering study of Afro-Brazilian candomb1és (103–04)— and by many ethnologists since—in no way contradicts the "profound conviction" of their devotees. The conclusion that for those who experience it "trance is very real" (Bastide 1961, 251), though often pretended, is reinforced positively by many instances of the possessed medium's increased physical powers and immunity to pain, and negatively by occasional failure to achieve a condition so ardently sought. "I myself saw filhas-de-santo desire trance, do everything, with touching good will, to be possessed by the god," Bastide writes (1973, 303–04), "without achieving anything. . . . This proves that simulation is neither general nor normal in Afro-Brazilian religion."

Not only initiates but experienced mediums may fail to enter trance: "Despite everything," Colson writes (76) of the Tonga of Zambia, "the medium may not be able to involve the spirit," which sometimes refuses to speak. Such instances, though very rare—normally the accomplished medium can enter possession almost at will—contrast sharply with the supposed infallibility of properly performed spells and rituals. However great a degree of control the medium has attained, a remote possibility exists that the unpredictable spirit, who can be summoned but not coerced by drumbeat and song, may not deign, after all, to descend.

More fundamentally, our preoccupation with distinguishing pretended from genuine states is largely alien to tribal religion. The Dinka recognize that early stages of possession may be counterfeited, Lienhardt observes (1961, 235), but "unlike us they do not think that this voluntary co-operation of the conscious person in any way invalidates his final state of possession as coming from a source other than himself." Conscious manipulation thus precedes and may even, up to a point, accompany the medium's surrender to a transcendent and therefore unknowable power, suggesting a purposeful quest for an indeterminate object.

"Every possession has a theatrical aspect," Métraux comments (1959, 126); in Haiti as elsewhere the medium's impersonation of a familiar spirit is a skilled performance enhanced by elaborate costumes and props. In great festivals such as the Brazilian candomblés (Bastide 1961, 249–51), dances tend toward theatrical representation in which various trances follow a mythic scenario. The fact of dramatic impersonation need not, however, any more than occasional dissimulation, suggest that spirit possession is "only" an acted and not a genuine experience. For in this primitive theater there can be no paradox of an actor self-consciously distinct from his role: person and persona are one, and to act —for drama is essentially praxis, or action—is to be the god. The theatrical aspect of possession is not a sign of deception but of involvement, by both actors and audience, in a drama of roles vastly surpassing those of everyday life, a drama of spiritual transcendence, of the human capacity for harboring the divine. The "theater" of spirit possession is not a theater of artifice only but, as Leiris (90–91) calls the Ethiopian zar, "a lived theater," un théâtre vécu , whose life is that of the spirit which infuses the body with its unbounded potentiality and thus immeasurably expands the momentarily nullified self.

The tribal priest, Firth writes (1970, 32), finds his role in "reaffirmation of the existing order and traditionally accepted meanings. He tends to be conservative." The medium, who responds to a personal call, generally occupies a more ambiguous social position; but as the priest's institutional counterpart does she, or the spirit possessing her, equally re-

affirm, in the end, the rightness of the traditional order? Her patterned trance, as Herskovits emphasizes for Haitian voodoo (1966, 359), follows rules well understood and accepted by all. Possession, in Bastide's words (1973, 310), "is a normal phenomenon because it is a social phenomenon." Those subject to spirit possession—pre-eminently practiced mediums—appear for the most part, to both ethnographers and fellow-tribesmen, "physically and mentally normal" individuals, as Gelfand (133) writes of the Shona of Zimbabwe, well in control of their emotions. With conspicuous exceptions, African mediums, like most others, are not deviants, homosexuals, epileptics, or misfits, Beattie and Middleton observe (xxiii–xxiv); "often indeed they are chosen expressly for their moral probity and virtue," and may even (as among the Ashanti) be priests. Although attitudes toward the medium vary widely both among different cultures and within a given culture, only rarely will one be regarded, like the "nat wife" of Burma (Spiro, 209–10), with widespread contempt. As a rule, despite the extraordinary experiences she undergoes during trance, the medium is no dissenter, much less a rebel, against a social order that readily accommodates such experiences to its norms; she in no way threatens things as they traditionally are.

In contrast to priests, however, who belong to the upper classes in most socially differentiated societies, tribal mediums are often drawn from the lower orders. The priesthood is generally a closed corporation allied (when not identical) with the governing class, but communication through spirit possession is often open to all, including those (like women) normally excluded from other prestigious activities. Among the Banyoro of western Uganda, for example, women have low social status and are subservient to men, but as mediums, Beattie notes (1969, 169), they can command respect and earn a substantial income. The predominance of women is especially notable in cults like the North African zar and Brazilian candomblé, where possession is widely disseminated among the initiates. In Ethiopia, members of the lower classes, such as the Sudanese Muslim minority, find social contact across religious barriers in the zar cult, most of whose members are married women neglected in a man's world; even ex-slaves from alien tribes are admitted to full membership (Messing, 286). And in Bahia, Landes remarks in her extraordinary memoir of a visit to Brazil during 1938–39, The City of Women (148), "mothers" and priestesses of the candomblé did not marry, since submission to a husband was incompatible with female dominion. In this cult ruled by African American women the hierarchy of the outside world is turned decisively upside down.

Such facts led I. M. Lewis to consider "peripheral" possession cults of this kind as "thinly disguised protest movements directed against the dominant sex" (31) by women channeling, through "ritualized mutiny"

(114), the "revolutionary fervour" (116) and "pent-up resentment" (117) of "the weak and downtrodden" (72) against their social and sexual superiors—a function diametrically opposed to the conservative role of the priesthood. A "feminist sub-culture, with an ecstatic religion restricted to women and protected from male attack through its representation as a therapy for illness" (89), aspires by "an oblique strategy of attack" (117), in Lewis's view, "to achieve entirely new positions of independence and power" (97). Many forms of spirit mediumship no doubt serve as a protest, or recompense, for those whose rank or sex excludes them from a more authoritative role in societies whose immutable order priestly ritual insistently affirms, but Lewis's bellicose interpretation requires, at the very least, qualification.^[4]

Indeed, although mediumship is usually open to a broader social spectrum than the priesthood (when the two are distinguished), most mediums—both male and female—in tribal societies are not downtrodden outcasts rebelling against their inferior status but highly respected members of their community admired by men and women alike. Nor is the change in condition effected by cults like the zar always liberating, since "individual adepts may become involved in new situations of dependence" even more binding than the old (Morton, 198). More fundamentally, insofar as spirit possession can be called a channel of protest at all, its main effect, as Lewis well understands (86), is to uphold "the official ideology" ("male supremacy" or whatever), since it "ventilates aggression and frustration largely within an uneasy acceptance of the established order of things" (120–21).

[4] Lewis's main examples of sexual polarization, the Hausa bori cult and the zar of Ethiopia and North Africa (including Somaliland, where his field work was done), are far from typical of tribal religions. In both cases the official religion (Islam or Christianity) is an international one introduced from without and bringing major social changes. Lewis (82) quotes Onwuejeogwu's assertion (290) that "In Bori , women find an escape from a world dominated by men, and through Bori the world of females temporarily subdues and humiliates the world of men." But Onwuejeogwu also notes (281–82) that before complete Islamization of the Hausa in 1804–10, women were sometimes politically equal to men, serving as rulers and holding political office. As Muslims, they lost their pre-lslamic political, legal, and economic freedom, becoming completely dependent on husband or kin. The bori possession cult, far from arising as a protest movement, apparently occupied a central place in Hausa religious life until intensification of Islamic belief thrust it into a subsidiary position as men gravitated toward male-dominated Muslim rituals (Onwuejeogwu, 291). Only the loss of its former influence made it a peripheral cult. Sexual polarization and protest against it (insofar as a cult in which prostitution is common can be called a protest against male domination!) are thus not inherent to the bori qua possession cult but probably arise from its recent historical status as the remnant of a religion in which men and women once participated in mediumship together, as in many tribal societies. Even now, male experts in medical or magical practices are frequently consulted in the bori (290–91), and in the Ethiopian zar the healer in charge of the ceremony in which possessed women dance is often male.

"Homeostatic" reconciliation of social tensions by incorporating potential outsiders into communal religious life is characteristic of tribal religion in general, whether in rites of passage or rituals of stereotyped rebellion. In the end the medium too challenges social norms (if at all) only to confirm them. The Tikopia medium's wildest fantasy, Firth remarks (1967a, 314; cf. 1970, 29), uses conventional concepts and follows ordinary norms of etiquette and morality, allowing him "to express his desire for self assertion . . . harmlessly in a manner which does not conflict with existing social privileges." The medium's relative freedom of expression under the spirit's sway knows its limits within a social order indispensable to it; it is not a rebellion or protest against that order itself.

Lewis's contention that possession cults are a means of protest against dominant (mainly male) social values has been both endorsed and disputed. None of the cases adduced in support of his thesis, however, concerns the more controlled and authoritative forms of trance in which the spirit is held to speak through the medium. Thus Haitian voodoo, where both male houngan and female mambo speak with full authority of the god, cannot properly be classified, as Bourguignon has demurred (1976, 35; cf. 50, 53), either as an "amoral peripheral possession" cult or a "protest" religion: for only cults un able to challenge the pretensions of alien beliefs need confine themselves to so feeble a role. In most tribal situations, where priest and medium are allied when not identical, Firth's recognition of the interdependence of center and periphery seems a more judicious appraisal than Lewis's disproportionate emphasis on mutiny and attack.

Yet the opposite emphasis can be equally misleading. As channels for ancestral wisdom, spirit mediumship cults may indeed be "a powerful force for social conformity" (Beattie 1969, 170); by their "dramatic restatement of the ultimate values of community life" and demand for compliance with them, they can play a fundamentally conservative role in preventing changes and upholding tradition (Horton, 26–27). In this context spirit possession is little more than an appendage of institutional ritual, whose confirmation of established tradition it colorfully reinforces.

Yet even if the medium's pronouncements were "an elaboration rather than a criticism" of values upheld by priests and aristocrats in Tikopia, spirit mediums, Firth reminds us (1967a, 309), were always "a possible countervailing force" in a traditional system of checks and balances. Indeed, as Lannoy writes (201) of the ecstatic oracles of India's "Little Traditions"—the tribal religious inheritances that coexist with the "Great Tradition" of Hinduism—the potentially uncontrollable powers incarnated in the medium not only "balance" but "in some cases menace" (hence check) those of the Brahmin priest "by restoring the element of

disorder which normal regulation has outlawed." The relation of spirit mediumship to priestly ritual is not simply one of protest or insurrection, then (though this may arise when "official" religion is seen as alien), but of interaction in which the less formulaic, more exploratory ecstatic cult at the institutional periphery is continually extending (above all in times of crisis) the boundaries of the more conservative priestly religion toward assimilation of the unknown.

The creative role of mediumship in tribal religion finds expression, Firth suggests (1970, 284–85), in expanded information about the spirit world, in creation of new spirit entities, and in initiating social action. Because the actions and words of the possessing spirit, stereotyped though they may be, are never formulaically fixed as those of ritual ideally are, they are subject to continuous individual variations endowed with the prestige of the divine. The medium's relative freedom to improvise during trance—in contrast to the priest's obligation to maintain ancient traditions to the letter—makes certain possession cults, however conservative their social function, "a promising channel," Horton observes (46), "for innovations in belief and doctrine which may eventually come to assume importance in the community at large." Spirit possession is thus a principal means by which mobility enters into tribal religions otherwise overwhelmingly oriented, by ritual, ancestor worship, and the content (if not the form) of myth, toward the timeless past.

In a religion like Haitian voodoo to which possession trance is central, religious innovation arising from states of dissociation in trance is frequent (Bourguignon 1965, 55). The Himalayan Pahari medium, too, Berreman observes (58), "has considerable leeway for choice and originality, a fact demonstrated by the diversity and the constant and surprisingly rapid turnover in gods worshiped in the Pahari village." Unlike the fixed rites performed by the Brahmin who memorizes age-old formulas, the details of each Pahari medium's performance are unique (61), thereby introducing constant novelty into the religious life of the people. Innovation alleviates the frustrations of lower-caste mediums' positions (63) not through protest against the existing religious system but by incorporation of the variations which give them, as opposed to the conservative Brahmins, their authority. The potential for adaptation and growth that characterizes any religious—indeed, any living—system, though latent in ritual and myth, thus finds full expression in the institution of mediumship which consistently ascribes it, however, not to any human effort but to the incursion of a power external to man.

The innovation characteristic of spirit-medium cults is evident not only in the expanded powers and multiple identities experienced—if not normally remembered—by the person possessed, but in the aura of newness and foreignness that often adheres to these cults as opposed to

reputedly (and sometimes demonstrably) older priestly institutions. The Nuer prophet, the Mandari jok doctor, the Zinza bacwezi doctor, like other mediums, gain prestige not as upholders of age-old traditions but as innovators able to communicate with newly assimilated foreign spirits and to speak, very often, in a foreign tongue. This reaching out to embrace the alien and the new exemplifies the expansion of information, or extension of horizons, characteristic of spirit possession in its orientation toward the unknown future; and the possessing spirits, benign or malignant, may accordingly be far from traditional. The "black" mbandwa in Bunyoro, all of foreign origin, include spirits of tanks, airplanes, and Europeans (Beattie 1969, 161); and among the masabe spirits viewed by the Tonga as "something new, appearing within living memory," are an Airplane spirit and train dancers who whistle like a locomotive (Colson, 94, 86–88). By no stretch of imagination could such a possession cult be considered a form of ritual immutably inherited from ancestral times; the adaptive incorporation of change, indeed, is its essence.

As we might expect, new forms of mediumship tend to arise in response to crisis or rapid social change. In such situations, where the perennial need to explore the unknown is dramatically intensified, mediumship, Beattie and Middleton observe (xxviii–xxix), is both a means to incorporate change and a basis for legitimizing new authority. To the Nilotic Alur of northwest Uganda, jok possession, unlike less flexible forms of ritual, assimilates the disruptive changes that threaten the traditional, essentially closed society with disintegration. By contrast to this closure, Southall writes (265), the recently invading jok spirits "are as mobile as modern man." Because the new cults not only represented the problems and anxieties of a changing world but also, through controlled inducement of possession in those afflicted by these uncertain spirits, provided new techniques of treatment (266), the medium became, as in many other tribal societies, an agent of change identified not with the fixity of the old but with the mobility of the new: no mere protester against the inherited past but, in potential, a charismatically inspired prophet guiding his people in quest of an unpredictable future.

The "essentially reciprocal element in men's relations with the spirit-world" noted by Beattie and Middleton (xxii) is paramount in possession trance, with its rapidly shifting roles and its culminating exchange of questions and answers channeled through the medium from man to spirit and from spirit to man. What most characterizes the medium's relation.with spirit, then, is not passivity but interaction, and in this dialogue at its fullest "man takes the initiative," like the Mandari jok doctor (Buxton 1973, 94–95), "in establishing a reputed communication with para-normal forces, reversing the order of traditional man-spirit com-

munication." Instead of idly awaiting the spirit's descent, or ritually compelling its presence, he "deliberately sets out to call his Power, to question it and to discover its needs."^[5] Lacking any means to coerce this protean force, or any assurance where it will lead when it seizes upon him, the medium's invocation of spirit is in essence a quest without end.

The marginal uncertainty of its outcome marks the medium's solicitation of trance as a quest, for in a domain of mobility never subject to full conscious control, no cultural pattern, however ingrained, can preclude the unexpected. In most cases Tikopia spirit mediumship, in contrast to fixed rituals, "related to situations of uncertainty," Firth observes (1967a, 293); the medium's function was "to resolve a situation of some anxiety and ambiguity." But the resolution can only be provisional, for recurrent uncertainty is itself a condition of any form of communication that (unlike the invariant repetitions of ritual) conveys information and helps create a future distinct from the determinate past. "A message conveys no information unless some prior uncertainty exists in the mind of the receiver about what the message will contain," Jeremy Campbell writes (68), summarizing the findings of twentieth-century information theory: "And the greater the uncertainty, the larger the amount of information conveyed when that uncertainty is resolved." To resolve this uncertainty once and for all would be to annul the essence of spirit possession and reduce it to ritual.

Only inasmuch as it responds to the uncertainty of a changing world, then, can the spirit mediumship of tribal religion communicate the new. The often amoral spirits with which the medium communes "stand for moral indeterminacy and an uncertain universe," and their outlook, Nadel declares (1946, 34), is "a philosophy of uncertainty"; for spirit possession "absorbs all that is unpredictable and morally indeterminate," and thus "saves the conception of an ordered universe from self-contradiction." Its practitioners explore and assimilate the seeming chaos of the undetermined without whose controlled infusion the social order insistently affirmed by ritual to be immutable could not adapt or long survive. The medium "dancing on the edge of the unknown," in Seth and Ruth Leacock's phrase (2), is dancing where she must, though she give the appearance, in doing so, of folly or madness: for on that edge, or just beyond it, the goal of every spiritual quest must continually be sought.

[5] Such interdependence and human initiative characterize mediumship primarily in its more voluntarily controlled manifestations, like Mandari jok possession. In "orthodox" Mandari possession, Buxton notes (95), "'Above' falls upon a man arbitrarily. To attempt to summon the spirit would be unthinkable."