Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Possessing Spirits gathers three beliefs about a spirit entering and acting through a living person, two from Jewish Kabbalistic tradition that define each other by contrast and one from northeast Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula.

A dybbuk is a disembodied human spirit that attaches to a living person and speaks through them, understood as the soul of someone who died with sins unatoned and could not be admitted to rest, so the possession is a symptom of the spirit's own trouble rather than a demonic attack; rabbinic accounts, many from the circle around Isaac Luria in Safed, describe a negotiated release rather than a battle. Ibbur is its benign counterpart in the same Lurianic Kabbalah: the soul of a righteous person enters a living one temporarily and with consent, to complete a commandment it left undone or to strengthen the host in a task, the consent and the temporary nature the whole difference from a dybbuk. Zar spirits, held chiefly in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and neighboring regions to seize a person, most often a woman, and cause illness or altered behavior, are not exorcised the way a dybbuk might be; instead the possessed person and spirit generally enter an ongoing relationship, the spirit's demands periodically met to keep it appeased, a practice that runs alongside rather than inside the region's major religions.

The grouping's edge is clearest between the two Kabbalistic beliefs, deliberately defined against each other, and least clear against zar, whose ongoing appeasement is a different relationship to possession than either dybbuk or ibbur describes.