‘She Talks to Angels

This chapter attempts to develop the foundations of a methodology for a comparative perspective on spirit possession and related experiences. I examine the emergence of the Archangel Metatron and his role in a Roman Catholic exorcism and in the life of Maria, a person possessed by the devil. A focus on how spirits emerge through possession offers a useful path to comparison and a practice-based approach to cosmological beings. I contend that creative skills related to affect or, as I call them, ‘affective imagination skills’, grounded in bodily feelings, play a major role in such processes of emergence and the ontogenesis of spirit entities, for they are central in their identification. By focusing on affective imagination skills, I also shed light on the centrality of processes of enskilment and on how affective correspondences and embodied memories are entangled with the cultural, discursive, and institutionalized aspects of spirits during (ritual) practice

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · History · Philippine History and Culture