UC Santa Barbara

ABSTRACT

Āveśa and Deity Possession in the Tantric Traditions of South Asia: History, Evolution, & Etiology

by

Vikas Malhotra

In South Asia divine power is believed to manifest in a variety of ways and through a variety of means. One of the most fascinating manifestations of this is deity possession, involving the incorporation of divine power into the human body. While deity possession remained historically on the margins within the classical literary tradition, in the Tantric literature of the medieval period, āveśa, meaning the "entrance" or "fusion" of oneself with the deity, becomes a central paradigm of religious praxis, used for both pragmatic (bhoga) and liberative (mokṣa) purposes. The first part of my thesis explores pre-Tantric accounts of worldly, oracular, and divinatory practices and the various spirits beings and deities employed. Much of this data is found within South Asia's shared apotropaic and demonological (bhūtavidyā) traditions embedded in early Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, and Epic texts. I argue that certain groups of these shared deities described as bhūtanāthas ("Lord of Spirits"), often assimilated from local cults, gain growing importance in a variety of protective, exorcistic, and sorceristic rites during this period. I contend that it is these groups of deities and associated traditions which become central in the subsequent tantric traditions. Part two examines the medicalization of possession in early Ayurvedic/bhūtavidyā literature, which provides emic interpretations of possession etiologies, symptomologies, and mechanics. Many of these ideas, continue into tantric and yoga texts and influence the development of new possession conceptualizations and technologies, such as parakāyapraveśavidyā, “The Science of Entering Another’s Body.” Such practices were associated early on with the Śaiva Pāśupatas, and other renunciant traditions, who I argue began to model their behavior and practices on these earlier bhūtanātha deities and were key to the formation of later tantric groups and their institutionalization of deity possession rites. Part three, which comprises the bulk of the dissertation, examines the various discourses surrounding the adaption of the term āveśa and its use in the Tantric Śaiva literature from the 5-11th centuries. Throughout this literature we see an evolution and reformulation of āveśa in terms of techniques (e.g., nyāsa, mantra, mudrā), interpretation (its congruence with śaktipāta) and mechanics (e.g., as a phenomena involving the subtle body). Thus, the semantic understanding of āveśa expands not only to refer to deity possession, but a host of high spiritual states, including liberation. I will argue this is one of the distinguishing features of Tantric Śaivism and Tantric Buddhism, manifested in practices associated with samāveśa and Deity Yoga, respectively. While possession remains marginal in Jain Tantra, tantric techniques of divinization were also used for liberative purposes by Jain ascetics, albeit minimally. The concluding chapter includes data I collected from my fieldwork on various possession rites I witnessed in Kerala. I use Teyyam as a case study to trace how some of the concepts and techniques developed during the Tantric period were filtered back down to these low-caste groups, leading to the "Tantricization" of their particular practice. The final part of this chapter then takes insights gleaned from the data presented on Tantric deity possession in order to bring it into conversation with recent research from the larger field of possession studies, including the social and medical sciences. I end with a series of questions regarding possession etiologies for future research.