The Illusion of Conscious Will (42 page)

One theory of the role of rhythm is that it creates a unique brain condition that yields an altered state of consciousness and that this promotes trance and possession (Locke and Kelly 1985; Rouget 1985). Auditory rhythm may stimulate corresponding rhythmic activity in the brain that contributes to trance. Although there is evidence that rhythmic auditory stimulation can cause changes in EEG patterns and other behavioral effects (e.g., Neher 1961; 1962), the rhythmic driving hypothesis of possession trance has little independent evidence other than the frequent co-occurrence of trance with music. The ecstatic movements of dancers and musicians at rock concerts and raves in this culture suggest that rhythm has a disinhibiting influence even when it occurs outside the context of a belief in the spiritual meaning of rhythm-induced states of mind. However, rhythm is clearly not sufficient by itself to produce spirit possession. If it were, everyone with a loud stereo in the apartment upstairs would soon glaze over and be taken by a spirit.

11.
Glossolalia is the production of vocalization that sounds like language but isn’t (Goodman 1972). Like the “scatting” of jazz singers (shoobedoowopwop), the sounds made in glossolalia seem interesting and potentially intelligible, and there are unskeptical reports of actual production of languages unknown to the speaker. There is no scientific evidence for this, however (Samarin 1972), and the actual production of glossolalia is something most people seem to be able to do with only a bit of coaching (Spanos et al. 1986; Spanos and Hewitt 1979).

The social interaction between possessed and nonpossessed group members is a further common feature of spirit possession in many cultures. In general, people don’t seem to become possessed alone. Rather, this is something people do in groups who share the belief that it can happen, for special socially oriented purposes, and with important social consequences. The spirits are often seen as guides, and their advice is sought in matters of love, health, work, or social discord. Shamanism (once known as witch doctoring or spirit healing) is common in many societies worldwide, and individuals in this role often experience trance and possession on the way toward offering their healing nostrums (e.g., Eliade 1972).

The interaction between individual believers and the spirit-possessed goes beyond such advice-giving, however, and in some societies the spirits appear to have as complex and multilayered a social life as do the real people. Lambeck (1988) recounts how, in Malagasy speakers of Mayotte, individual spirits with unique identities visit each of several people in an assembled group in turn, taking care not to possess different hosts at the same time but offering consistent demeanor, stories, and advice from one host to the next. None of this is particularly magical, of course, as the people present conduct their interaction in public and everyone knows when a particular spirit has taken over a particular host. Certain spirits possess some people and not others, and each member of the community not only has an appreciation of the social life of the people but also knows all the spirits, who they like and dislike, and who they will inhabit and who they will not. In a society that shares belief in spirits, the individual spirits can take on the role of members of the society, albeit fairly special ones. Observing these clearly social features of possession, many theorists have remarked on the apparently crucial role of culture and social expectations in shaping the phenomenon.

What is it like to be possessed? Reports people offer after the experience recount a mixture of consciousness and nonconsciousness. Describing the experience of speaking in tongues in their Pentecostal church, for example, Abell’s (1982) respondents talk about it in various ways:

When I got the Holy Ghost, it took a while before I came back. I was off in another world. (134)

I was over on one side of the church on my knees. When I came to myself later, I was on the other side of the church, still on my knees. (134)

I was just playing the piano one time in church. I felt the power of God and the next thing I knew, I was underneath the piano bench speaking in tongues. . . There is no way I forced it. There is no way I tried to make myself do that. (135)

I’ve had the Spirit just nearly cover me up . . . and I just nearly lost sight of the world. I’ve not done that often . . . the Spirit is so strong that you lose sight of everything. (137)

In these and a variety of cases from other cultures, it appears that the frequent response of hosts after the spirit possession is over is to report some degree of amnesia for events and for their thoughts and actions during the experience. This reported lack of consciousness of the experience may be complete or, as observed in the Shango religion of Trinidad, may suggest “a halfway state between full possession and normal behavior, [in which] a high degree of consciousness is retained” (Mischel and Mischel 1958, 439). More often, however, lack of consciousness seems to be partial or sporadic at best (Samarin 1972). Spirit possession, like channeling, then, seems to have both trance and conscious varieties. Unlike channeling, however, which generally seems to be anticipated by the channel, spirit possession may be unexpected, involuntary, and even dreaded in some cases. The
Njarininsty
possession of school children in Madagascar, for instance, is generally undesired by the children and their teachers (“How will I ever get her to clap erasers now?”) and is thus credited to bad or evil spirits rather than to the desired spirits that populate spirit religions (Sharp 1990). Even possession by desired spirits, however, is often described as happening involuntarily to the host despite all the preparation and ritual that seems to precede it (Besnier 1996). What appears to be a highly intentional, complicated, and almost theatrical performance is nevertheless experienced as involuntary and unwilled (Lee 1989).

There is reason to doubt the validity of some of these claims of unconscious, unwilled possession. Among believers in unconscious possession, there is likely to be great pressure for any who express the outward appearance of possession to report inward experiences of going unconscious. This pressure can create a tendency to report unconsciousness as the rule when it more often may be the exception. In a telling set of interviews, Halperin (1995) used the technique of
praising
conscious medium-ship in talks with a number of “unconscious” mediums to see if he could prompt them to admit consciousness. These were people practicing

Tambor de Mina in Northern Brazil, an Afro-Brazilian possession religion related to Umbanda, and they were normally quite reticent to discuss the degree of consciousness in their trances.

Although the general expectation in these mediums was that conscious possession was less desirable and a poorer reflection of spirit involvement than unconscious possession, this interview strategy allowed respondents to admit that much of their experience involved conscious possession. One such medium remarked that his possessions are usually of short duration and that in these brief intervals he “goes in and out of consciousness.” He reported, “In some moments, I lose all control and blank out. . . . It is like a dream, I remember some things but the rest is blurry or forgotten” (11). He reported that at other times he remains aware of what he sees, hears, and does while possessed. The doubts of this medium were sufficient so that he noted he might not be alone in his worship group because most of his compatriots “always seem to come out of trance just in time to catch the last bus home” (12). Although there may be strong enough pressure so that most people in a possession group report unconscious mediumship, their individual experience may more often amount to an “ebb and flow of awareness, with the medium sometimes in contact with the events around him and sometimes aware only of internal sensations” (Leacock and Leacock 1972, 210). The experience of possession seems not to imply a total oblivion and loss of self as much as it does the “total or partial loss of control of the body and the feeling that someone else is moving and talking through the possessed individual” (Frigerio 1989, 7).

Reports of the possession experience that are collected
during
the possession, of course, may come from the spirit and are difficult to collect or assess. Spirits are notoriously recalcitrant virtual agents who may not make a lot of sense even when they’re not speaking in tongues. Their references to their hosts may range from indicating no knowledge of the host at all to full knowledge of the host’s thoughts and concerns (e.g., Lambeck 1981). Any knowledge the spirit reports of the host suggests an incomplete amnesia for the host’s memories, of course, so knowledgeable spirits also fuel doubts of the degree to which real partitions of consciousness and memory characterize the transition from self to spirit in possession.

Taken together, the evidence on spirit possession is not easy to put in a simple theoretical package. The usual simple packages that suggest themselves are two: trance and faking. A trance theory suggests that pos-session involves a major change of mental state (which perhaps could be measured in the brain), during which time people may be unconscious of their prior selves and are entirely operated by some new executive system corresponding to an imagined spirit (Lewis 1971; Locke and Kelly 1985; Price-Williams and Hughes 1994; Winkleman 1986). The faking theory suggests that people are always conscious of themselves and are simply overwhelmed by the social pressure to report trance phenomena (such as unconsciousness) while they are pretending to be a spirit, and so report such things falsely (Lee 1989; Spanos and Hewitt 1979). The widespread self-reports of unconsciousness, the dramatic behavioral changes in possession (such as convulsions), and a smattering of brain activity studies (Lex 1976; Winkleman 1986) support the trance theory. In contrast, the strongly social character of trance, the widespread self-reports of consciousness, and some reports of feigned unconsciousness during possession support the faking theory.

There is not enough evidence at this time to decide between trance and faking, but a better approach than deciding may be to suggest a middle position—a
self-induction
theory. Maybe people generally get into possession by faking or, to put it less pejoratively, through a process of pretending to be spirit-possessed. Then, during this process of social deception, a kind of self-deception develops (Gilbert and Cooper 1985; Gorassini 1999). The process of imagination becoming real intervenes to make the person experience progressively less action as willed by the self and more action as willed by the spirit. Processes creating perceptual detail, emotional experience, and feelings of uncontrollableness support the acceptance of the imagined virtual agent as real. In this process of action projection, the person becomes so deeply involved in performing the spiritlike behaviors and enacting the spirit role that consciousness of self is intermittently lost. Just as one might lose self-consciousness in driving a car and not “come to” very often with an awareness of driving, the person driving a spirit might not “come to” during the pretense. The person could forget, for a time at least, that there is a self that started this process.

In essence, self-induction would occur as a result of the failure of continuous identity rehearsal during the possession trance. The person is privy to much behavioral and mental evidence—feigned and self-produced though it may be—in favor of the idea that a spirit is running things, and might thus have to make a special effort to rehearse the idea that the self is still there in order to maintain awareness of this through-out the performance. This effort, then, is simply not made for some interval. In addition, alterations in mental state might accompany this transition. These trance states might be understood as sleeplike, altered states of consciousness (e.g., Barrett 1994), but they would not necessarily have causal role in the possession. Rather, the self-induction explanation would suggest that pretending generally precedes any such state changes. Just as people go to sleep, for example, by following a regimen (lying down, head on pillow, closing eyes), they may induce various alterations in brain states by following the spirit possession induction rituals. The self-induction theory, in short, says that people might fake themselves into a trance.

A self-induction theory is consistent with some evidence on both ends of the trance/faking dimension. The observations that people differ in their degree of consciousness and amnesia, and that they differ in their enactment of the spirit, for instance, can be understood in terms of variations in the ability to pretend and in the degree to which the imagination becomes real for each person. Those individuals who become professional channels or mediums may self-induce quickly and easily. This ability may be related to the ability to be hypnotized. But, also, important conditions in the person’s situation could account for stronger or weaker self-inductions. Imagination could seem real because of emotion, perceptual detail, or lack of control. If a person is particularly emotional one evening (for reasons unrelated to the spiritual ritual), this emotion could fuel higher levels of self-induction. A person might have recently experienced something that could give rise to greater perceptual detail in the imagined experience of the spirit (e.g., hearing someone else give items of information about the spirit, or watching someone else become possessed), and this could fuel greater self-induction. And experiences of lack of control of own thoughts or actions could fuel this transformation as well, authenticating the person’s progress into possession and prompting further self-induction.

Where does the self go during the possession? The self-induction theory would suggest that the conscious self is simply not being rehearsed or used during such a thorough and deeply felt imagining of another agent. Indeed, there are a number of cultures in which the loss of self is reported as a symptom by itself, without any spirit possession that replaces the self. This phenomenon of Susto, or spirit loss, for example, involves just such an absence of self, along with protracted illness, lethargy, and wasting away (Logan 1993). Victims of Susto report symptoms like those of
depersonalization,
a mental disorder (
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, IV
1994) characterized by a vague sense of self and by difficulty in understanding boundaries between self and nonself (Simeon et al. 1997). The person may feel like an automaton or as if he or she is inhabiting a movie or a dream. There can also be sensations of being an outside observer of one’s own mental processes and of lacking control over one’s actions. People with depersonalization disorder, like those who experience Susto, realize that these feelings are just feelings— they do not believe they are automatons. However, the feelings are deep and very disturbing. The sense of being an agent seems to be an important organizing scheme for the mind, one that provides a constant source of orientation and understanding, whether one is oneself or a visitor from the spirit world.