Introduction

On a blistering hot day early in my year of fieldwork in Salvador, Brazil, I set out to have a ritual divination performed on my behalf. I had come to Brazil to study spirit possession mediumship in the African-derived religion Candomblé, and motivated by curiosity and the desire to make connections within this spiritual community, I had made arrangements to have a spiritual leader1 perform a divination for me that would reveal to which of the Candomblé deities, known as orixás, I belonged. In Candomblé, every human being belongs to, or is the filho (child) of, a pair of orixás. These two deities share responsibility for both the personality characteristics and the destinies of the humans who belong to them. In order to discover who one's orixás are, a divination, which involves throwing a set of cowry shells and reading the pattern in which they land, must be performed by a qualified spiritual leader. Before the day I had the cowries thrown for me, I did not realize the potential that such identification might have to transform experience.KeywordsPsychosocial StressAltered StateBodily ExperienceReligious ParticipationMoral PersonhoodThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Aesthetics · Art · Curiosity · Divination · Literature · Personality · Political science · Possession (linguistics) · Reading (process) · Set (abstract data type) · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion and Society in Latin America · Social Psychology