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.