Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?
—Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
As we saw in part one, the Self can be viewed as a community of parts. Paul Bloom's research in developmental psychology suggests that at quite an early age children begin to realize that person-identity transcends what happens to the body the person is in (Bloom 2004). This intuitive dualism not only enables us to believe in life after biological death, it makes the idea that a different spirit could inhabit the body comprehensible as well.
Most of the experienced mediums with whom I have spoken feel that possessory work includes many types of trance. Some people find a level at which they feel comfortable and stay there, while others work at different levels with different Powers or may experience multiple levels at different times or during the course of a trance. Mediums learn to reach these states through training and conditioning, which will also help “natural” mediums to control when and how they go into trance.
Before you begin the exercises that will lead to possession, take stock of where you are now. Review the work you did in part one. Exercise 15.1 at the end of this chapter will help you to evaluate the relevant aspects of your background and articulate your present needs.
In the introduction I talked about what happened when Odin appeared so unexpectedly in my living room. As a result, I realized that I needed to know not only how to support possessory trance in others, but what it was like from the inside. At the time, I had made enough progress in chipping away at my shields to no longer consider myself a “cement head.” I could visit the Powers in “Their place,” but I was not making much progress in getting them to come to mine.
Figure 13: The Severed Head. Painting and plaster head created by the author's mother in the late 1930s.
That summer I visited Celtic scholar and author Caitlin Matthews in England. She had recently taken Sandra Ingerman's workshop on soul retrieval and volunteered to demonstrate. But first, she said, I would have to come up with a question. Since possessory trance was on my mind, I asked her to look for a reason why I was having so much trouble learning to do it. I recall how puzzled she sounded when her journey led to a head made of marble. Not wanting to bring back a severed head, she looked around until she found treasures from which to construct a body and brought them back to me. When the drumming stopped, we sat up and she asked if this had made any sense at all.
I was laughing. At home I had two pieces of art that my mother had created before I was born. One was a painting of an imprisoned lady holding out her head The other was a plaster head of the goddess Diana. (see figure 13). I realized that my mother, who eventually became a Christian Science practitioner, had programmed me to think of spirituality as something that ends at the neck. I don't know if the change was caused by understanding this or by internalizing the completed soul image that Caitlin brought back to me, but I began to make progress from that time on.
One experience on the possessory spectrum is channeling, in which a medium voluntarily allows a spiritual being to speak through him or her to transmit teachings, do healing work, or receive or offer guidance.
Not only did Dion Fortune write nonfiction books on occultism and spiritual thrillers, she also dictated over ten million words while in trance. As described by Fielding and Collins (1985, 73–81), her method required a warded and sealed room and a three-person support team. She worked lying on a couch positioned east–west, and put herself into trance by taking a few deep breaths and visualizing a succession of symbols. At a certain point she lost consciousness of her physical surroundings and journeyed to an inner-plane temple where she met her Guides, who took over her voice and consciousness. The response of the other people in the circle, addressed to the Guide, activated a full connection, and the Guide would then proceed to dictate spiritual teachings or answer questions.
In this kind of work, the material transmitted may come in the form of feelings, ideas, or a richness of impressions, which the channeler then translates into words. Guides choose channels with the vocabulary to express the kinds of material they are interested in communicating. The richer the channel's mind is in knowledge and experience, the more words the Guide has available to express his thought impulses. As Dion Fortune put it,
The communication brought through a medium depends to a large extent upon the capacity of the medium to act as a suitable channel. There are two aspects to this: one is the grade of the medium, which reflects the medium's own evolutionary development; and the other is the degree of education and general culture of a medium. If a medium is ill-educated and has few symbols available for the mind, then the inner-plane communicator can only work with what he has. Someone has described the process of an inner-plane communicator trying to work through a poor medium as being analogous to Michaelangelo trying to build his famous statue, David, out of tins of soup.
(Fielding and Collins 1985, 151)
In chapter 8 you began to work with taking dictation. In Exercise 15.2 at the end of this chapter you will find suggestions for developing a trance practice in which only your voice is used.
Most human cultures have some kind of masking tradition, bringing mythic figures to life and freeing ordinary people from status and inhibition. Masks were used in Paleolithic rituals. They cover the faces of modern children every Hallowe'en. They hid the faces of the actors in Classical Greek plays. For a vivid recreation of this tradition, see Mary Renault's novel, The Mask of Apollo. A mask, like any other object that has been used in ritual, takes on some of its energy. A mask that portrays a god becomes, at the very least, a powerful cue to invoke His persona.
Figure 14: The mask of Odin
After the soul retrieval helped me over some of my inhibitions, I began to make progress with possessory work for the goddess Heide, but I was not getting very far with Odin. Although I knew that in possessory traditions the gods pay no attention to the age or gender of the medium, I couldn't believe that anyone would accept that Odin was speaking from the body of a middle-aged woman if my own face could be seen.
The following spring, when another Odin priestess, Freya Aswynn, came to visit, we discussed the problem and decided to make masks. We painted and decorated plain plastic masks from the local theatrical supply store (see figure 14). Since the original mask was featureless, I chose a minimalist style, painting the mask a metallic silver. I glued some black cloth behind the left eye hole so that in use only one eye would be seen, and added a beard. I consecrated the mask with a bind rune of Ehwaz, the Horse rune, and Naudhiz, for Need. Inside the mask I inscribed several of the by names of the god.
Freya took her mask home. I hung mine over my Odin altar for a while and “fed” it with a little mead. Then I called on a friend to help me, put it on, and waited as she called the god. My body was still my own, but I found that if I sat in a chair wearing the mask, the god gave me words.
In Exercise 15.3 you will find suggestions for working with a mask.
One variety of possessory work is taking on a god form, a practice in which the image of the deity, formulated through intense focus and visualization, overshadows and surrounds the priest or priestess. One way to do this is through contemplation. In Buddhist Vajrayana practice, seekers gaze at a thangka image of the yidam, or meditation deity. They visualize themselves becoming the deity, internalizing the qualities of the Buddha (Lipton and Ragnubs, 1996). Something analogous can be done with a mirror.
In the early eighties, my Pagan spiritual focus was Darkmoon Circle, an eclectic women's spirituality group which I founded with Marion Zimmer Bradley, and which still meets today. One of the rituals we came up with was the “Come As Your Favorite Goddess” rite. One by one, each woman in the circle, dressed to represent a different goddess, took her place behind the altar. As the others sang “Goddess, heed us now, beloved Lady _______, bless us!” the woman whose turn it was would visualize the chosen goddess overshadowing her.
When the singing had gone on long enough, she lifted her hands to give a blessing. Sometimes all we got was whatever the priestess felt was appropriate. At other times, the words of the goddess were relayed as they came into her head. Occasionally, we had that sense of Presence where the skin gets goose bumps and you know that something more than human is here. Then we might see the figure of the woman overlaid by the image of the goddess as we received Her words.
In 1983, Marion gave me the following poem.
Through the smoke of incense
And across the candle flame,
I look at the woman in the mirror,
I look until her face blurs and she is not myself.
Across the incense smoke
The woman in the mirror looks out at me
And I become
The woman in the mirror.
Across the candle flame
I look at the woman in the mirror
And her face blurs
About her head I see the halo and hood
The blue crescent glows on her forehead
The ornaments of a priestess circle her brows.
I see the priestess in the mirror.
And across the incense smoke
The priestess in the mirror looks out at me
From beneath her sacred garlands;
The blue crescent burns upon my brow,
And I become
The priestess in the mirror.
Standing beneath the sacred garlands,
I behold the priestess in the mirror
Through the Delphic clouds of the laurel smoke,
And again her face blurs,
The garlands become a shimmering aura,
The robes of the priestess merge into folds of air
Never woven on earthly looms,
I see the Goddess in the mirror.
I see the Goddess in the mirror.
Who is this Goddess?
Shall I call her Ceridwen, Isis, Nuit?
Innana, Ashtoreth, Astarte....
White Buffalo Calf Woman, Grandmother of the Human Race?
I see the horns spread wide on her brow
The crescent moon shadowing her face,
Where she stands upon the wide pillars of the world,
I behold the Goddess in the mirror
And I become. . . .
In fiction, it is often possible to convey the essence of an experience more vividly than in any training manual. This is certainly true in Moon Magic when Dion Fortune describes a ritual in which the priestess assumes the form of Isis.
I saw something moving in the mirror, and knew that the Goddess was formulating. A light haze began to spread over its surface. I have to conceive of the Goddess as behind me when She formulates, so I left my chair and went and stood at Malcolm's feet with my back to the mirror . . . I began to give magnetism to the Goddess and Her form built up as I visualized it, and then power began to come through into it—power from that for which Isis stands; power from the moon and the moon-side of things, and the thing for which the moon stands. The image became alive in its own right. Then, strangest form of obsession, it slowly superimposed itself upon me, and, already fortified by the accession of Malcolm's magnetism, I received it, so that I became Isis for the time being (this is the old temple-working, not generally known), and Malcolm found himself face to face with the Goddess who both was and was not me.
My consciousness seemed to be in abeyance in the background, somewhere behind the form of the Goddess, and yet I was She, and shared Her consciousness.
(Fortune 1978, 185–86)
This sounds very close to the technique for the Assumption of God Forms described by Ivo Dominguez Jr. on pages 111–13 of Spirit Speak, which contains some excellent material. If your training is in one of the ceremonial magical traditions, you will probably find that the approach to possessory trance described in that book will work well for you.
1. What is your general state of health? Do you have any chronic or cyclical problems or conditions (especially heart, blood pressure, diabetic, menstrual or menopausal symptoms, etc.) that affect your mood, energy, or focus? Are you on any medications?
To work as a medium requires both psychic and physical strength, especially for full-body possession. Carrying a god takes a lot of energy, and some Powers engage in vigorous activity that may stress the body. Certain conditions, or the medications used to treat them, can get in the way of a clear connection.
2. Have you been in counseling? What kind and for what?
Before you can safely allow another being to use your voice or body, you need to be very clear about who you really are. Those who have been diagnosed with mood, post-traumatic stress, or personality disorders could suffer harmful aftereffects from voluntary dissociation. People who have had psychotic or bipolar problems should definitely avoid this kind of trance work. Other issues, such as anger management, might make a difference in the kinds of Powers you are able to work with.
3. What is your experience with altered states?
Analyzing your experience with trance will help you identify the skills you bring to the work.
4. What do you know about the following?
5. Have you ever had an involuntary psychic experience? Has it happened more than once?
Some people are drawn to possessory work because they have had such experiences, and others because they would like to. If you are the former, analyzing what happened will help you predict how you are likely to react to formal training.
6. How do you react to alcohol and drugs? Have you ever taken any psychoactive drug or hallucinogen? How did it affect you?
Although drugs are not necessary to reach an altered state, they can propel you into one. Drug experience may give you an idea how you might react to trance.
7. Have you ever had a life-threatening accident or illness? Did you have any weird experiences during the crisis? Did it change your attitude toward life?
Such experiences are common in shamanic traditions. They may also point you toward spiritual work of other kinds.
8. What is your religious background?
9. Do you have a strong affinity with/devotion to specific gods or goddesses? How did you encounter them? How often do you contact them, or how do they contact you?
Those who have strong relationships with deities are more likely to be able to carry them.
10. Do you belong to a circle, kindred, coven or other spiritual group? Does it practice trance work or meditation? If so, what kinds? How often? For what purposes?
Although developing a relationship with spirit requires individual work, trance possession requires other people with whom the Power can interact. To safely do the work, you need a team.
11. Are any other group members working with this book? Will your group support your efforts to master these skills? Is this group part of a wider community that a possessory team might serve?
In order to give answers, you need people who will ask questions and a support team.
12. Would you characterize yourself as god-hungry or god-bothered? What are your goals in beginning this training? Why do you want to learn how to do possessory work? In what context do you see yourself using this skill?
This is the critical question. Try to visualize yourself acting as a medium. Who are you serving? What will you get out of it? What will they?
When you have answered these questions, consider whether you are ready to take on a demanding spiritual practice. In particular, evaluate your health. If you have concerns about any ongoing conditions or problems, now is the time to deal with them.
The essential skill in mediumship is the ability to release consciousness and control. This is easier if you are lying down, are speaking rather than trying to type, and are supported by people who can watch over your body, boost your energy, and keep you focused. You will need a comfortable bed in a room that can be kept at an even temperature and where you will not be interrupted.
Prepare by practicing the breathing exercise in chapter 2 until you can maintain a state of relaxed clarity in which all the distracting thoughts can be shunted aside. Find one or two friends to work with you, and create a ritual structure that includes cleansing and warding the space. Develop an induction sequence based on the instructions for journeying in chapter 6 that will take you to the temple of your Power.
Ground and center, stretch to release tight muscles, and lie down. A light blanket will keep you comfortable—it can get cold between the worlds. Your guide will instruct you to deepen your breathing and enter the contemplative state, leaving time between instructions, and ask for confirmation from you as you reach each stage. The guide will then direct you to begin your journey to the temple. Maintaining verbal communication will keep your voice active even as awareness of other parts of your body fades. When you have found the Power, the guide will ask the question that has been decided on. Your response may begin as a relay—“He smiles, and says, ‘That's an interesting question . . .’”—but as the interaction continues it will probably become easier and easier to simply say the words as you hear them. You may find yourself carrying on another conversation with the Power in your head as you speak Her words, your consciousness may go somewhere else, or you may be aware of nothing at all until your guide calls you back and instructs you to start homeward once more.
Make a mask for your Power. Use paint, applique fabric, etc. to build the features into something resembling the image you see in your mind. Decorate with the colors and symbols you discovered in your research. Finish with fixative or another preservative. Inside, write the Power's name.
When the mask is ready, bless and dedicate it. Hang it over the altar of the Power to absorb energy, and for a week offer it a little of the Power's favorite drink every evening. Talk to it as you would to the Power.
Then, with the support of one or more friends, set up a ritual. Prepare the space as usual. Position a mirror where you can see the mask from your chair. Put on a ritual robe or appropriate garment, sit down, and start singing the songs that bring your Power most strongly to mind. When the moment seems right, put on the mask. How does that feel? Turn to look into the mirror. Who do you see?
You may simply sit, enjoying the sense of shared identity, or the Power may get you up and moving. Your friends should ask questions, to which you respond from the point of view of the Power. Presently, it may become something more. When the energy begins to fade, your friends should get you to sit down, ask the Power to depart, and take the mask off.
