10. Possession by Durga

The Mother Who Possesses

kathleen m. erndl

158

This essay was previously published as “The Mother Who Possesses,” in Devi: Goddesses of India,
ed. John Hawley and Donna Wulff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 173–83,
192–93.

Although individual Hindu goddesses possess distinctive attributes, their identities
also overlap to a considerable extent, and many—if not most—goddesses are, at
least in some contexts, considered to be manifestations of the one Great Goddess,
Devi. Similarly, goddesses tend to manifest themselves not in a single form but in
multiple iconic forms, as well as in such natural phenomena as rocks, plants, rivers,
mountains, and flames. This flexibility of identity and multiplication of form are
nowhere more evident than in the phenomenon of divine possession.
Divine possession is the most dramatic way to encounter the Goddess experien-
tially, and it also presents the greatest challenge to the Western worldview. It is one
thing to read sacred texts about the Goddess or to view her images, to analyze the
metaphors of the former or the aesthetic qualities of the latter. It is quite another to
meet the Goddess face-to-face. By way of introduction, I will present two brief vi-
gnettes that encapsulate some of what I have experienced in my encounter with
Goddess possession while doing fieldwork in northwest India and in trying to in-
terpret it in a scholarly context back home.
The first incident took place in the Punjabi town of Mohali, a suburb of Chandi-
garh, in the winter of 1983. I was sitting on the floor in the home of a lower-middle-