The Jews of the time of... «Possession»
Napoli3 октября 2016The Jews of the time of Jesus attributed two classes of behaviour to possession by "unclean spirits". On the one hand, there were madmen; they were characterized by the states in which spirits spoke out of people--spirits who answered questions and revealed their names, and left when ordered to do so by Jesus. On the other hand, there were spirits that did not speak. The possessed persons were not thought to be insane, but rather they were deaf, or mute, or lame. And these spirits could be exorcised also. In the first instance, the possession the people believed in revealed itself in a psychological alteration; in the second, in a physical alteration. the distinction between these two types of possession is important, and appears in much of the literature, although it is usually not made explicitly. To make it explicit, we shall call the first type possession trance. We shall say that a belief in possession exists, when the people in question hold that a given person is changed in some way through the presence in or on him of a spirit entity or power, other than his own personality, soul, self, or the like. We say that the possession trance exists in a given society when we find that there is such a belief in possession and it is used to account for alterations or discontinuity of consciousness, awareness, personality, or other aspects of psychological functioning.
In psychological and psychiatric terms, what we are calling possession trance includes a variety of different phenomena. However they all share alteration of consciousness, of sensory modalities, and the like.
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