Dr. Nandor Fodor
The incipient stage of possession is personation during which the medium's own personality is still in the body but is assuming the characteristics of someone departed.
The next stage is partial possession, the excitation of the medium's motor or sensory centers by a discarnate agent either through the subconscious self or in some direct way. Myers suggested the word telergic as a correlative to telepathic for such action.
Full possession postulates the vacation of the organism by the medium to allow the entrance of another spirit. Alternating personalities offer the first suggestion of the possibility of possession. An arbitrary personality may possess the organism of the hypnotic subject at the hypnotizer's suggestion. Traveling clairvoyance in dreams points to the wandering of the spirit while the body is asleep. Cases of religious ecstasy in which an excursion is made into the spiritual world furnish another instance of the temporary separation of body and soul. Once we admit the possibility of the soul leaving the body, we have to admit the possibility of another spirit entering it.
Whether possession has actually taken place or whether it is a secondary personality which speaks through the organism this is a question of evidence. The evidence should be furnished by the nature and contents of the communications. The testimony of the medium is not available. As a rule he does not remember what has happened. Swedenborg remembered his excursions into the spiritual world but in his case there was no possession. The subjects of Cahagnet described heavenly visions in trance but there is not enough evidence to rule out the possibility that even when evidential communications from discarnate spirits were forthcoming they were not controlled by the subconscious self alone. Mrs. Piper never remembered her visions of the spiritual world and, the fragmentary utterances during her passing from trance to the waking life disregarded, she was the tool, for writing and utterances, of alien entities.
If no new knowledge is shown in the trance state there is no reason to ascribe the communication to an external intelligence. The character of the communicator alone does not furnish convincing proof. Secondary personalities are often hostile and antagonistic to the primary one, the cleavage might not be intellectual alone but also moral, therefore the difference between the normal self of the medium and the communicator does not necessarily clinch the case for possession. Supernormal knowledge which the medium could not have acquired, is an indispensable condition to prove the presence of an external spirit. Incoherence in the communicator does not militate against possession. It is rather in favor of it. If the spirit of the medium vacates the body his brain will be left behind in a dreamlike state. To control such a brain and to make it obey the will of the communicator may not only be an enervating process, but full of pitfalls and possibilities of confusion.
Taken as a phenomenon, possession presents to us the central mystery of human life. We are seeing a mind use a brain.
Possession is always temporary and implies a wilful surrender of his organism on the part of the medium.
If possession takes place against the will of the medium and endures in the waking state we witness the phenomenon of obsession.
The possibility of an instrumental test of possession was first suggested by Mr. Whately Smith. He advised the use of a galvanometer which measures the emotional reactions of the medium to a certain set of questions. The different controls, if they are different personalities, should exhibit different emotional reactions to the same questions. It was by such tests that the independence of Mrs. Garrett's controls was established at the John Hopkins University and at the New York Psychical Institute in 1933.
Is it possible that a materialized spirit should be possessed by another? Archdeacon Colley claims to have observed such a case in the mediumship of F. W. Monck. "Samuel," the guide of the medium, controlled the body of an Egyptian phantom, "the Mahedi," spoke through him in his own voice and wrote in English in his own characters (there were samples of direct writing available for comparison) in good idiomatic English of which the Mahedi himself could not utter a word.
For Possession by the living see: Control.
