Where gilgul in its constructive form describes a soul returning to complete or repair something, the dybbuk, literally "attachment" or "clinging," describes the doctrine's darker counterpart: a wandering or unsettled soul that fails to move on after death and instead attaches itself to and speaks through a living person, understood as possession requiring exorcism.
Early modern Jewish communities, particularly in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Safed and later Eastern Europe, produced documented accounts of dybbuk cases and of the rabbis called to perform exorcisms, typically through prayer, the blowing of a shofar, and formal adjuration commanding the spirit to depart through the smallest toe, on the reasoning that a soul should leave the body causing the least damage; a number of these accounts were recorded and circulated as cautionary and edifying literature, presenting the phenomenon as evidence of divine justice rather than mere superstition.
The concept reached its widest audience through S. An-sky's play The Dybbuk, written in the early twentieth century and first performed in 1920, in which the soul of a dead young man, denied marriage to his beloved in life, possesses her on the eve of her wedding to another, drawing directly on the folklore and exorcism rituals of the Pale of Settlement's shtetl culture that An-sky had documented as an ethnographer. The play became a foundational work of modern Yiddish theater and, through later adaptations in film and drama, the primary channel through which the dybbuk, and a popularized image of gilgul generally, became familiar to audiences with no connection to the kabbalistic tradition that originated it.