In the ruins of Nippur, in what is now southern Iraq, almost every house that archaeologists excavated had at least one clay bowl buried upside down under the floor. The bowls were inscribed with spiraling text in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, sometimes with a figure of a demon drawn at the center. The text coiled inward, tighter and tighter. A demon following the words would be drawn into the spiral and trapped.
The bowls date to the fifth through seventh centuries CE. The Penn Museum in Philadelphia holds 285 of them. Some invoke the names of rabbis. Some mention Jesus Christ. Some borrow the legal language of a Jewish divorce writ to formally sever the bond between a demon and its human victim. One reads: “Thou liliths, male lili and female lilith, hag and ghool, I adjure you by the Strong One of Abraham, by the Rock of Isaac, by the Shaddai of Jacob… here is your divorce and writ and letter of separation.”
This is exorcism. Not the Hollywood version, not the spinning heads and projectile vomiting, but the real thing: a practice so ancient and so widespread that it defies any single explanation. Erika Bourguignon, an anthropologist at Ohio State University, surveyed 488 societies worldwide between 1963 and 1968. She found that 90% had some form of institutionalized trance. Seventy-seven percent had specific spirit possession beliefs. These were not connected societies sharing a common tradition. They developed these beliefs independently, across every inhabited continent.
The question is not whether exorcism exists. It demonstrably does, and has for at least four thousand years. The question is why.
The Āšipu: Where It Began
The oldest documented exorcism tradition belongs to Mesopotamia. The āšipu (Akkadian for “incantation-priest,” though “exorcist” is the scholarly convention) was a specialized priest-scholar who functioned as healer, diagnostician, and ritualist. He was not a doctor in the modern sense and not a priest in the Christian sense. He was both, and neither. He diagnosed illnesses attributed to supernatural causes, performed rituals to address them, and compounded remedies. His counterpart, the asû (physician), focused on drugs and physical treatments. Modern scholarship, particularly the work of Troels Pank Arbøll at the University of Copenhagen, has shown that the two were complementary, not opposed.
The āšipu worked from canonical text series preserved on thousands of clay tablets. The most extensive anti-witchcraft ritual was the Maqlû (“Burning”), composed in the early first millennium BCE, comprising nine tablets with nearly a hundred incantations. It was performed during a single night and into the following morning, at the end of the month Abu (July/August), when spirits were thought to move between the netherworld and the world of the living. The āšipu burned clay and tallow figurines of witches (the clay burst, the tallow melted), fumigated the household, massaged the patient, invoked the fire god Nusku, and greeted the dawn with a prayer to the sun god Shamash. The definitive scholarly edition is by Tzvi Abusch, Cohen Professor of Assyriology at Brandeis University.
The Šurpu (“Purification”) addressed a different problem: when the patient did not know what they had done to anger the gods. It was essentially a vast confessional. The āšipu burned symbolic objects (onion peels, date clusters, goat hair, red wool) while the patient recited a litany of possible transgressions. One famous passage reads: “My illness, my weariness, my guilt, my crime, my sin, my transgression… be peeled off like this garlic so that the fire-god, the burner, consumes it today!”
The Udug-hul (“Evil Demons”) series, spanning sixteen bilingual tablets in Sumerian and Akkadian, is among the earliest texts written in Sumerian and among the last Mesopotamian texts of late antiquity, some rendered in cuneiform with Greek transliterations. Markham Geller of University College London published the definitive edition in 2016.
What made Mesopotamian exorcism distinctive was its taxonomy. These were not generic “evil spirits.” They were classified with the precision of a medical manual.
Utukku (Udug): A general class that could be protective or malevolent. King Gudea of Lagash (ca. 2144-2124 BCE) asked a goddess to send a “good udug” to guard him. The āšipu routinely invoked protective udugs during exorcisms.
Alû: An incorporeal, wind-like spirit. Faceless, mouthless, earless. It attacked sleeping victims at night, enveloping them “like a garment,” inducing paralysis and nightmares. The clinical parallel with sleep paralysis is striking.
Gallû (Galla): Underworld demons who served the death goddess Ereshkigal. Seven of them accompanied Inanna when she returned from the netherworld and seized her consort Dumuzi when she found him celebrating rather than mourning her descent. They did not eat, did not drink, and could not be bribed.
Lamashtu: Unique among Mesopotamian demons because she acted of her own volition, not under the gods’ orders. Called “Daughter of Anu,” she attacked pregnant women and infants. She was dealt with not through moral rhetoric but through pragmatic counter-measures: amulets and the invocation of an even more terrifying entity.
Pazuzu: King of the wind demons. And here is the most Mesopotamian thing imaginable. Pazuzu was a demon. He was also protection. His greater evil was believed to overpower and repel Lamashtu’s evil. A demon deployed against a demon. The most famous Pazuzu statuette, a 15-centimeter bronze figure now in the Louvre, bears the inscription: “I am Pazuzu, son of Hanpa, king of the evil spirits of the air, which issue violently from mountains, causing much havoc!” Women wore Pazuzu amulets during pregnancy as protection against miscarriage.
This was not a moral crusade against evil. It was management. The Mesopotamian worldview operated outside a strict good-evil binary. The word udug originally carried no connotation of good or evil. Scholars argue that the Greek daimon, with its morally neutral overtones, is closer to the Mesopotamian concept than the loaded Christian “demon.” The āšipu’s job was to appease, bind, redirect, or banish. The same entity could be helpful or harmful depending on circumstances. If you force these spirits into “good” or “evil,” you lose the worldview that created them.
The Soul That Clings: Jewish Exorcism
The earliest biblical account that touches on exorcism is not called exorcism in the text. In 1 Samuel 16:14-23, after God’s spirit departs from King Saul, an evil spirit “from the Lord” begins tormenting him. David plays the lyre. The spirit departs. This is proto-exorcism: music as therapy against spiritual affliction. But it is not formalized. There is no ritual, no invocation of divine names.
The formalization begins in the Second Temple period. The Book of Tobit (c. 2nd century BCE) describes the demon Asmodeus, who has killed seven of Sarah’s husbands on their wedding nights. The angel Raphael instructs Tobias to burn the heart and liver of a fish. The smoke repels Asmodeus, who flees to Egypt. This establishes key elements that persist for millennia: fumigation as an exorcistic tool, angelic assistance, the demon as a named entity.
Then comes the Testament of Solomon, the extraordinary pseudepigraphal text in which King Solomon receives a ring from the archangel Michael that grants him power over demons. He summons them one by one, interrogates them, and forces each to reveal its name, its powers, and what thwarts it. The structure is essentially a diagnostic manual: match the affliction to the demon, invoke the counter-angel. The Testament created a framework, Solomon as the original exorcist-king, that influenced Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions for the next two thousand years.
The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed this framework back further. Manuscript 11Q11 contains four exorcism psalms, including Psalm 91, which rabbinic tradition (Shevuot 15b) calls “the song for those afflicted by demons.” The Songs of the Sage (4Q510-511) describe exorcism through doxology: the sage vocalizes God’s praise, and demons, reminded of God’s overwhelming glory, are terrified into retreat.
Josephus, writing in the first century CE, provides the most detailed eyewitness account of ancient Jewish exorcism. In Antiquities 8.42-49, he claims to have watched a man named Eleazar perform an exorcism before the Emperor Vespasian. The method: a ring containing “a root of one of the types prescribed by Solomon” was held to the demoniac’s nostrils. The demon was drawn out. Eleazar adjured it never to return, speaking Solomon’s name and reciting “the incantations which Solomon composed.” To prove the demon had actually departed, Eleazar placed a cup of water nearby and commanded the demon to overturn it as it left.
The Talmud’s demonology is rich, morally complex, and resolutely non-binary. In Gittin 68a-68b, the longest demon narrative in the Talmud, Solomon captures Ashmedai (Asmodeus), king of the demons, by getting him drunk on wine. On the journey back, Ashmedai weeps at a wedding (the groom will die within thirty days), laughs at a man ordering shoes built to last seven years (the man will not live seven days), and guides a blind man to the correct path. He is dangerous. He is also morally complex. He studies Torah in the heavenly academy. If you force him into the category of “evil,” you lose him.
In Me’ilah 17b, a demon named Ben Temalion volunteers to help Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai on a diplomatic mission to Rome. The plan: Ben Temalion possesses the emperor’s daughter, Shimon arrives and exorcises him, and the grateful emperor allows Shimon to destroy anti-Jewish decrees. The rabbi weeps that God sent him a demon instead of an angel, but accepts: “Let the miracle come from any source.” This is the pragmatic, relational approach to demons that characterizes rabbinic tradition.
The most distinctive development in Jewish exorcism came in the sixteenth century with the emergence of the dybbuk. The word comes from the Hebrew davak, “to cling.” And here is the critical distinction: a dybbuk is not a demon. It is a displaced human soul. A person who died with sins so grievous that even Gehenna was insufficient punishment, whose soul wanders until it finds a living body to inhabit. The exorcism is not a battle against evil. It is a process of tikkun, spiritual repair, for a wandering dead.
The theological infrastructure came from Isaac Luria (1534-1572) in Safed, who elaborated the kabbalistic doctrine of gilgul neshamot (transmigration of souls). The first recorded dybbuk case dates to 1571 in Safed: a widow possessed by a spirit that spoke in a man’s voice, identified itself, and addressed Luria by name. Hayyim Vital, Luria’s principal disciple, participated in the exorcism and recorded the account.
The dybbuk exorcism became a formalized procedure: ten men (a minyan) gather after fasting and immersing in a mikveh. They recite Psalm 91 three times. A shofar is blown to shatter spiritual barriers. The rabbi interviews the dybbuk, taking a personal history: who it was in life, what sins it committed, what it needs for release. If negotiation fails, increasingly forceful measures follow, culminating in excommunication (herem) of the spirit. The dybbuk typically exits through the pinky toe of the left foot. This detail recurs with remarkable consistency across centuries of accounts.
S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk (premiered December 9, 1920, Vilna Troupe, Warsaw) transformed this kabbalistic phenomenon into a universal dramatic archetype. Ansky himself died just weeks before the premiere, on November 8, 1920. The play is simultaneously supernatural horror and social critique, a story about a wandering soul that is also about broken promises, economic inequality, and the tension between mysticism and modernity.
The Church Militant: Christian Exorcism
Jesus’s exorcisms are central to the Synoptic Gospels in a way that modern Christianity tends to understate. The Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20), the single longest episode in Mark, lives among the tombs, breaks chains, howls, and gashes himself with stones. Jesus demands the demon’s name. “My name is Legion,” it replies, “for we are many.” The word would have been immediately recognized: a Roman military unit of three to six thousand men. Jesus sends the demons into a herd of about two thousand swine, which rush down a steep bank into the sea.
The pattern Jesus established was distinctive: he commanded with a single word. No incantations, no elaborate ceremonies, no Solomonic ring. When the Pharisees accused him of casting out demons by Beelzebul (the prince of demons), Jesus replied with a question that reveals the context: “If I by Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out?” (Matthew 12:27). Jewish exorcism was already being practiced. What was new was the claim of immediate, unmediated authority.
This authority was delegated to the disciples. When the seventy returned with joy, saying “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” (Luke 10:17), the name-based model was established. But Acts 19:13-16 provides the cautionary tale: the seven sons of Sceva, itinerant Jewish exorcists, tried to use the formula “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” The evil spirit responded: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” The possessed man overpowered all seven and they fled naked and wounded. The name was not a magic formula. It required genuine authority.
By the mid-third century, exorcist was a formal church office. Pope Cornelius’s letter (c. 252-253 CE), preserved by Eusebius, lists “52 exorcists, lectors, and porters” among the Roman clergy. Every baptism was understood as a minor exorcism: the catechumen faced west (the direction of darkness), renounced Satan three times, then turned east (toward the light) to affirm faith. The Apostolic Tradition (c. 215 CE) describes daily exorcisms during the three-year catechumenate. The candidate was anointed with the Oil of Exorcism and breathed out (exsufflation) to expel the devil, then ministers breathed in (insufflation) to infuse the Holy Spirit.
The Rituale Romanum, authorized by Pope Paul V on June 17, 1614, standardized the rite for the entire Roman Catholic Church. It listed four signs of genuine possession: speaking unknown languages, revealing hidden things, displaying superhuman strength, and vehement aversion to sacred objects. The exorcism used both deprecative forms (prayers to God) and imperative forms (commands directly to the demon): “Imperat tibi Deus Pater… Imperat tibi Deus Filius… Imperat tibi Deus Spiritus Sanctus.” Holy water, the crucifix, relics, and the sign of the cross served as sacramental tools. The rite could be repeated over days, weeks, or months.
The Loudun possessions (1632-1638) became one of the most infamous cases in the history of Christian exorcism. In the Ursuline convent, Prioress Jeanne des Anges and eventually seventeen nuns displayed signs of possession. By December 1634, nine were declared possessed and eight “obsessed.” Jeanne des Anges alone claimed to house seven demons, each lodged in a specific part of her body. The accused, Urbain Grandier, the local parish priest, was tried and burned at the stake in 1634 despite never confessing. Most modern scholars, including Michel de Certeau in his classic The Possession at Loudun (1970), conclude Grandier was the victim of politically motivated persecution, likely orchestrated by Cardinal Richelieu. The possessions did not end with Grandier’s death. They continued for four more years, and the convent turned the exorcisms into twice-daily public spectacles.
The Anneliese Michel case (1975-1976) confronted the modern world with a question it thought it had answered. Michel, a 21-year-old German woman diagnosed with epileptic psychosis and bipolar disorder, underwent 67 exorcism sessions over approximately ten months, conducted by two Catholic priests. She stopped eating. She died of malnutrition and dehydration on July 1, 1976, weighing 30 kilograms. Both priests and her parents were convicted of negligent homicide. This case was the primary catalyst for the Vatican’s 1999 revision of the exorcism rite, De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam, which made medical and psychiatric evaluation mandatory before any exorcism could be authorized.
The 1999 revision shifted the emphasis from imperative forms (commanding the demon) to deprecative forms (praying to God for intervention). The change was controversial. Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist who claimed over 60,000 exorcisms in his career (though he clarified that most were brief prayers for troubled people, with only about 100 cases of “outright demonic occupation”), argued the imperative form was more effective and its demotion weakened the rite. But the Vatican also expanded training. Since 2005, the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome has offered a course covering theology, psychiatry, neuroscience, pharmacology, and law. In the United States, the number of trained exorcists grew from roughly 12 to over 100 in about fifteen years.
Protestant approaches varied dramatically. Luther retained baptismal exorcism in his 1523 rite, but Reformed theology under Calvin embraced cessationism: the doctrine that miraculous gifts, including exorcism, ended with the apostles. This meant Reformed churches had no exorcism rite at all. The Pentecostal revival of the twentieth century brought “deliverance ministry” back. By the early 1990s, sociologist Michael Cuneo counted over 600 deliverance ministries in the United States, up from a handful before 1983. Cuneo attended more than 50 exorcisms across Catholic, Protestant, and charismatic settings. His finding: he never witnessed “one spinning head, levitating body, or anything else that struck him as belonging to the realm of the paranormal.” He also noted that popular culture, especially the 1973 film The Exorcist, was central to why people sought exorcisms.
The Jinn and the Quran: Islamic Exorcism
Islamic exorcism begins with a theological premise that distinguishes it from both the Mesopotamian and Christian frameworks. Jinn are not fallen angels. They are not generic “evil spirits.” They are a separate category of created beings, made from smokeless fire (Surah Ar-Rahman 55:15), endowed with free will, capable of belief and disbelief. Surah Al-Jinn (72:14) states: “And among us are Muslims, and among us are the unjust.” There are righteous jinn and wicked jinn. They have societies, marriages, and religions.
This moral complexity echoes the Mesopotamian approach. A jinn is not automatically an enemy. Iblis (Satan) is identified as a jinn who chose to disobey (Surah Al-Kahf 18:50), not an angel incapable of choice. The theological debate about whether Iblis was originally an angel or always a jinn goes back to the earliest period of Islamic theology, with the Mu’tazilite and Ash’ari schools taking opposing positions.
Solomon’s authority over jinn is established in the Quran itself (Surah An-Naml 27:17). An Ifrit, a powerful jinn, offered to bring the throne of the Queen of Sheba before Solomon could rise from his seat. When Solomon died, the jinn did not realize it until a termite ate through his staff and his body collapsed (Surah Saba 34:14). The theological point: jinn, despite their power, do not know the unseen. This directly parallels the Testament of Solomon in Jewish tradition, and the Solomonic exorcism framework in the Ars Goetia.
Ruqyah shar’iyyah, the permissible form of Islamic exorcism, uses only Quranic verses and prophetic supplications. The most commonly recited passages are Surah Al-Fatiha, Ayat al-Kursi (2:255), and the last three surahs. The hadith literature provides the foundation: in Sahih al-Bukhari 5736, a companion recited Al-Fatiha over a snake-bitten man, who was cured. The Prophet smiled and said: “How do you know that Surat al-Fatiha is a ruqya?” One of the most striking hadiths involves a jinn who told Abu Hurairah to recite Ayat al-Kursi before sleep for protection. When Abu Hurairah reported this, the Prophet responded: “He told you the truth, although he is a liar; and it was Satan.” Truth from a liar. Advice from an enemy.
Each person, according to prophetic tradition, has a qareen, a jinn companion assigned from birth. When the Prophet’s companions asked if he too had one, he replied: “Even me, but Allah helped me with him and he became Muslim, so he only enjoins me to do that which is good.”
The regional variations of Islamic exorcism are vast. In Morocco, the Gnawa tradition (rooted in the cultural fusion of West African peoples brought to Morocco in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) uses the lila ceremony: seven musical suites with seven colors of incense, seven types of veils, seven distinct rhythmic patterns. The possessing spirits, called mluk (“the owners”), are not exorcised but placated through music, trance, and animal sacrifice. The Gnawa maalem (master musician) guides the process.
The zar tradition of East Africa and the Middle East represents yet another approach. Documented in Ethiopia since at least the eighteenth century, the word derives from Amharic, meaning “to visit.” The fundamental difference from ruqyah: zar does not seek to expel the spirit. It seeks to accommodate it. A specialist identifies the spirit, interrogates it, learns its demands (typically gifts, attention, special treatment from the patient’s family), and negotiates a settlement. The patient enters into a lifelong relationship with the spirit. Periodic ceremonies maintain the spirit’s satisfaction. As I.M. Lewis argued in his classic Ecstatic Religion (1971), the zar functions as a culturally sanctioned space where women, who make up the vast majority of zar patients, can make demands on husbands and families that they could not make in their own voice. Janice Boddy, based on nearly two years of fieldwork in northern Sudan, complicated this reading: the zar is not simply a pressure valve for the oppressed. It is a complex cultural system through which women construct alternative identities and engage with questions of selfhood, power, and meaning.
In Southeast Asia, the bomoh (Malaysia) and dukun (Indonesia) traditions syncretized pre-Islamic animistic practices with Islamic elements. The main puteri ceremony of Kelantan, Malaysia, recognized and published in medical journals as effective psychotherapy for depression and conversion disorder, involves a healer who channels spirits while a rebab player serves as interrogator. The diagnosis includes not just spirit possession but also “angin,” unfulfilled desires. The Malay tradition explicitly recognizes psychological causes alongside spiritual ones.
The tension between Salafi-oriented ruqyah and folk traditions runs deep. Salafi reformists view practices like the zar and Gnawa as bid’ah (innovation) at best and shirk (polytheism) at worst. Folk practitioners view Salafi ruqyah as spiritually impoverished. The commercialization of ruqyah into YouTube channels and apps, the rise of what journalists have called “jinnfluencers,” adds a third dimension.
East and South: Possession in Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, and Japanese Traditions
The Atharva Veda (c. 1500-1000 BCE), the youngest of the four Vedas, is the primary textual source for healing and exorcism mantras in the Hindu tradition. Its Book II includes charms for driving away rakshas and pishakas. Book IV prescribes an amulet of ten kinds of wood against demons of disease.
What makes the Hindu framework remarkable is that spirit-caused illness is not folk superstition separated from legitimate medicine. Bhuta vidya (also called graha chikitsa) is formally one of the eight branches of Ayurveda, on equal footing with surgery, toxicology, and reproductive medicine. The Charaka Samhita classifies eleven distinct types of spirit-induced insanity, each caused by a different category of being: gods cause it by their vision, sages by their displeasure, ancestors by exhibiting themselves, gandharvas by their touch, yakshas by seizure, rakshasas by making the patient smell their body, pishachas by riding their victims. Each type has distinctive symptoms. Gandharva possession produces violent acts, love of music and dancing, preference for red clothes, pleasant aroma from the body. Pishacha possession: impaired mind, dancing and singing in delirium, fondness for climbing on garbage, nakedness, lost memory. The level of classificatory detail suggests extended empirical observation, not casual superstition.
At the Mehandipur Balaji temple in Rajasthan, dedicated to Hanuman, thousands of possessed devotees arrive daily. Every day at 2 p.m., spirits are “treated” in Pret Raj’s court. People lie with heavy stones on their bodies. Others scream, thrash, or speak in voices not their own. This is not a fringe practice. It is one of the most visited temples in India.
Buddhist traditions developed their own protective framework. The paritta system in Theravada Buddhism consists of specific discourses recited for protection. The Ratana Sutta, according to tradition, was recited by Venerable Ananda while touring the city of Vesali, and evil spirits were exorcised and a pestilence subsided. The Atanatiya Sutta, presented to the Buddha by King Vessavana (the king of yakkhas), is specifically a mantra for protection against hostile spirits. All-night paritta chanting ceremonies remain common in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
In Sri Lanka, the Sanni Yakuma consists of eighteen masked dances, each depicting a specific illness demon. Butha Sanniya for spirit-related insanity. Kana Sanniya for blindness. Kora Sanniya for paralysis. Maru Sanniya for delirium and death. The performances run from dusk to dawn, mixing elaborate dance with comic, sometimes obscene dialogues between the drummer and the demon, in which the demon is systematically humiliated.
Tibetan Buddhism contributed the phurba, a three-sided ritual dagger associated with the wrathful deity Vajrakilaya. It is not a physical weapon but a spiritual implement: demons are drawn to the blade, bound, and the practitioner pierces the earth or a bowl of rice to transmute and release them. Thread-cross traps (mdos), ranging from simple diamond shapes to complex structures up to eleven feet high, decorated with colored threads representing the five elements, are placed outside a sick person’s house. The demon enters the elaborate construction, and once captured, the trap is burned.
The Nechung Oracle, Tibet’s state oracle, represents institutionalized positive possession at the highest level of governance. The spirit Pehar Gyalpo, originally subdued and bound by oath by Padmasambhava, possesses a human medium (kuten) who becomes extremely agitated, tongue lolling, bloodshot eyes, displaying superhuman strength. The current oracle, Venerable Thupten Ngodup, entered his first spontaneous trance in 1987. He still advises the Dalai Lama from Dharamsala.
Chinese Taoist exorcism operates through a bureaucratic model. Spirits exist within a celestial hierarchy paralleling earthly government. The Taoist priest issues what are essentially official warrants to remove unruly spirits. The Way of the Celestial Masters, founded in 142 CE when Zhang Daoling announced that Laozi had appeared to him, established core practices of curing illness through confession, exorcism, and fu talismans written on yellow paper or silk. Thunder Rites (leifa), which rose in popularity during the Song Dynasty, evoked the celestial department of thunder. The practitioner transformed his body into that of the Dark Emperor (Zhenwu) to command spirits.
In Japan, tsukimono (“possession-thing”) encompasses at least twelve types of spirit possession, the most famous being kitsunetsuki (fox possession). Documented since the Heian period (794-1185), the fox was believed to enter beneath the fingernails or through the breasts, and the victim’s facial expressions could change to resemble a fox. Kitsunetsuki remained a common medical diagnosis until the early twentieth century. The Tale of Genji (c. 1000 CE) contains one of world literature’s most famous depictions of spirit possession: Lady Rokujo, consumed by jealousy, sends her living spirit (ikiryo) to torment and ultimately kill Genji’s wife Aoi. In Japanese belief, intense emotion alone could cause your spirit to detach from your living body and harm others.
The Other Side of Possession: Africa, the Caribbean, and the Shamanic Traditions
Across sub-Saharan Africa, spirit possession operates on a spectrum that the Western word “possession” obscures. On one end: unwanted affliction requiring healing. On the other: desired, ritually cultivated, and socially prestigious mediumship. The Western default assumption that all possession is pathological and requires expulsion maps onto only one end of this spectrum.
In Yoruba tradition (Nigeria, Benin), during drumming ceremonies called wemilere, practitioners drum, sing, and dance to summon the orisha to earth. The orisha “mounts” the devotee, who becomes the “horse.” This is not an attack. It is the entire point of the ceremony. The possessed individual is dressed in the orisha’s specific regalia and returns to offer guidance and warnings. Batá drums are the sacred instruments through which the orisha are called.
Among the Zulu of South Africa, becoming an isangoma (diviner) is not a career choice. It is a sacred calling from the ancestors, manifest through an initiatory illness called ukuthwasa: psychosis, severe headaches, illnesses that defy medical treatment. Resisting the call makes you sicker. Accepting it, and undergoing formal training under a gobela (mentor), heals you. The “pathology” is the resistance, not the possession.
In Zimbabwe, Shona spirit mediums (svikiro) channel mhondoro, royal ancestral spirits of deceased chiefs believed to reside in the bodies of maneless lions until they find a human host. Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, medium of the Nehanda spirit, was one of the spiritual leaders of the First Chimurenga, the 1896-97 revolt against British colonization. She was executed by the British in 1898. The spirit continued to be invoked during the Second Chimurenga in the 1960s-70s. David Lan’s Guns and Rain (1985) documents how spirit mediums became leaders of the liberation war.
Haitian Vodou, emerging from the fusion of West African Fon/Ewe and Kongo traditions under slavery, centers on the lwa (spirits) who serve as intermediaries between Bondye (God) and humanity. The lwa descend through the poteau mitan, the central post of the temple, and “ride” devotees. The possessed person is the chwal (horse). This is not pathological. It is communion. Baron Samedi, leader of the Gede family of lwa, associated with death and the crossroads, appears as a robust black man with a long white beard, a koko makak stick, and a bottle of white rum.
Brazilian Candomblé, developed among enslaved Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu peoples, revolves entirely around orixá incorporation. The orixá “descends” onto his or her iaô (“wife” or “horse”). Most of the largest and most prestigious houses (terreiros) are led by women. The initial initiation involves at least 21 days, 14 of them in a semi-conscious reclusion state, with blood sacrifice creating a sacred bond between the initiate, the orixá, and the terreiro’s ground.
The Siberian shamanic tradition, from which the English word “shaman” derives (via the Tungus/Evenki word šaman), operates differently. The shaman is the one who controls spirits, journeys to the spirit world, retrieves lost souls. The initiatory crisis, documented across Tungus, Yakut, and Buryat traditions, involves visionary experiences of bodily dismemberment and renewal: the aspiring shaman’s body is torn apart and reassembled by spirits, organs replaced, identity reconstituted. This is symbolic death-rebirth.
Mircea Eliade famously argued that the shaman (who controls spirits) and the possessed person (who is controlled by them) represent fundamentally different phenomena. Most contemporary scholarship rejects this clean binary. Anna-Leena Siikala demonstrated three modes of spirit interaction among Siberian shamans, journey, possession, and summoning, which could be combined sequentially. The two categories bleed into each other in practice.
The Patterns Nobody Can Fully Explain
Here are the patterns. Make of them what you will.
The universality. Bourguignon’s 488-society survey found 90% had institutionalized trance and 77% had possession beliefs. These were geographically and historically unconnected populations. The rationalist explanation (psychological distress plus cultural framing produces possession belief) accounts for the mechanism but not the near-universality. Why did nine out of ten human societies, independently, converge on the same phenomenological experience?
The naming. Across virtually all exorcism traditions, the exorcist demands the possessing entity’s name. The Mesopotamian āšipu needed the name to prescribe the correct treatment. Jesus asks “What is your name?” (Mark 5:9). The Jewish divorce writ against demons on the incantation bowls names the target. The Islamic raqi identifies the jinn. The Tibetan exorcist interrogates the gdon. The principle is universal: knowledge of a name confers power over the named. This is one of the most ancient and widespread magical beliefs.
The gender. Women are disproportionately identified as possessed across most (not all) cultures. The ratio in cross-cultural psychiatric literature runs approximately 1.28:1. Lewis argued this serves as compensation for women’s social exclusion: through possession, women gain attention, resources, and temporary authority. Boddy argued this is reductive, that the zar is not merely a pressure valve but a way women construct alternative identities and engage with questions of selfhood. Both arguments have force. Neither fully explains the data.
The cultural scripts. Historian Brian Levack, in The Devil Within (2013), demonstrated that Catholic demoniacs responded to crucifixes and holy water, spoke Latin, and had sexual content in their complaints. Protestant demoniacs responded to Scripture readings, did not react to Catholic sacramentals, and rarely had sexual themes. The form possession takes mirrors what the possessed person’s culture expects. This does not necessarily mean possession is not real. Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann of Stanford has shown that cultural learning can produce genuine, involuntary phenomenological experiences. A person who has internalized possession narratives from their cultural environment may genuinely, involuntarily enter a dissociative state that follows those narratives. The experience is culturally shaped but subjectively real.
The modern revival. The International Association of Exorcists, founded in 1990, had its statutes approved by the Vatican on June 13, 2014. Cuneo documented over 600 Pentecostal deliverance ministries in America. Online ruqyah channels proliferate. In India, millions visit exorcism temples annually. The Nechung Oracle still advises a government in exile. Exorcism is not declining. In many traditions, it is growing. Sociologists Giuseppe Giordan and Adam Possamai have argued that exorcism functions as a site of social regulation: managing deviance, reinforcing boundaries, performing deep-seated cultural tensions in ritual form.
The deaths. The documented cases are not hypothetical. Anneliese Michel in Germany, 1976: 67 exorcisms, death by starvation. Maricica Irina Cornici, a 23-year-old novice nun at Holy Trinity Monastery in Tanacu, Romania, 2005: bound to a cross, gagged, deprived of food for three days, death by suffocation. The priest received fourteen years. Janet Moses in New Zealand, 2007: drowned during an improvised Maori makutu-lifting ceremony, five family members convicted of manslaughter. Arely Naomi Proctor, a three-year-old girl in San Jose, California, 2021: three relatives spent approximately twenty hours trying to “purge the demon.” She died of mechanical asphyxia. In nearly every documented death, the victim had a diagnosable psychiatric condition and proper medical care was either abandoned or never sought.
What We Know and What We Don’t
The materialist reading accounts for much of the evidence. Dissociative states are well-documented in psychiatric literature. The DSM-5 (2013) explicitly incorporated possession into the diagnostic criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder: “Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession.” Cultural framing shapes how distress is expressed. Social functions (protest, attention-seeking, community bonding) explain why the practice persists.
But the materialist reading does not account for the near-universality. It does not explain why 90% of unconnected societies independently developed the same phenomenological category. It does not explain the structural parallels: the naming, the dialogue, the authority claim, the material and verbal acts working together. It handles the mechanism but not the distribution.
The other reading notes that these traditions span at least four thousand years, at least six major world religions, every inhabited continent, and share structural elements across cultures that had no contact with each other. The incantation bowls exist. The cross-cultural parallels exist. The āšipu’s Marduk-Ea formula and the Christian exorcist’s “In the name of Jesus Christ” and the Islamic raqi’s recitation of Al-Fatiha all operate on the same underlying logic: divine authority overrides spiritual power, naming confers control, material and verbal acts work together.
Whether these patterns mean what the traditions claim they mean, that invisible entities interact with human beings and can be addressed through ritual, is an open question. That the patterns exist at all is not.
We are not going to resolve this. We can document the evidence, present the traditions with the seriousness they deserve, note where the patterns align and where they diverge, and trust you to think about it.
The incantation bowls are still in the basement of the Penn Museum. The spiral text still coils inward, tighter and tighter, toward the figure at the center. Whatever was supposed to be trapped there, the bowls themselves remain: 285 physical objects testifying to a practice that spans millennia and continents, defies any single explanation, and shows no sign of disappearing.
