POSSESSION, the supposed control of a human body and mind by an alien spirit, human or non-human; or the occupation by an alien spirit of some portion of a human body, causing sick ness, pain, etc. The term obsession (Lat. for siege) is sometimes used as equivalent to possession ; sometimes it denotes spirit control exercised from without, or it may mean no more than a maniacal monoideism. The spirit is held to have entered the person in order to foretell the future or to proclaim the will of a god ; the god himself may be regarded as speaking through the mouth of his devotee. Hence the authority of a prophet. Among peoples in the lower stages of culture possession by spirits of the dead is common and is related to ancestor worship. This kind of possession is found in Africa, Polynesia and Asia. Many of the classical oracles were regarded as due to divine inspiration. The manifestations are often voluntarily induced and are provoked in many different ways; in classical times the eating of laurel leaves, the inhaling of fumes which ascended from a cleft in the rocks of Delphi, the drinking of intoxicating liquors, or of a more widely found means of inducing the phenomena—blood—were all in use. Hypnosis was produced by drugs, draughts of animal blood, or as in Siberia, America and many parts of Africa by drumming, con tortions and orgiastic dancing.
Demoniacal possession is a widely spread explanation of such psychopathological conditions as epilepsy, somnambulism, hysteria, etc.; especially in the East Indian field lycanthropy (q.v.) and magical power (for evil) are commonly attributed to possession. Demoniacal possession is familiar to us from the New Testament narratives, in which those possessed are stated to live among the tombs, to be deaf and dumb, or blind, to be possessed by a multi tude of evil spirits or to suffer from high fever as a result of pos session ; the demons are said to pass into the bodies of animals or to reside in waterless places. The facts recorded are explicable
either as symptoms of mental disease or as results of suggestion.
In the lower stages of culture diseases are explained as due to the invasion of the body by spirits (see but the effects are supposed to be physiological, not psychical. The wrath of an ancestor or other dead person or the malice of a spirit, such as the Malay hantus, or of any non-human spirit, may set up patho logical conditions. Such cases may be distinguished from the in spirational form by their invariably involuntary character and are dealt with by a variety of means such as spells, purifications, sacri fices to the possessing spirit, etc. (see EXORCISM).
anthropological data see Bastian, Der Mensch; Naevius, Demon Possession; Radloff, Das Schamanentum; Skeat, Malay Magic; Stoll, Suggestion and Hypnotismus; Tylor, Primitive Culture; Verdun, Le Diable dans les missions; Maury, La Magic, p. 258 seq.; Chamberlain, Things Japanese, s.v. "Fox." Details of the phenomena are given in all good modern ethnographical works. See bibliography to art. ANTHROPOLOGY. For discussion of New Testament facts see W. M. Alexander, Demoniacal Possession in the New Testa ment; Conybeare, in Jewish Quarterly Review, viii. 576, ix. 59, 444, 581 ; Herzog's Realencyklopddie, s.v. "Damonische." For patristic lit erature see Bingham, Antiquities, iii. •