Paxson - The essential guide to possession, depossession, and divine relationships

Praise for Diana Paxson's Trance-Portation

Trance-Portation belongs on every Pagan and occultist's bookshelf; it's destined to become a classic of the field. Diana Paxson's down-to-earth style speaks directly to real people with real problemsracing thoughts, distractibility, over-sensitivityand lets them know that they, too, can achieve trance states that will enrich their spiritual lives.

Deborah Lipp, author of The Study of Witchcraft and The Way of Four

Diana Paxson has written a travel guide for trance and out-of-body experiences that will be a great help to anyone seeking to navigate the complex worlds that lie both within and beyond our internal landscapes.

Michelle Belanger, author of Psychic Vampire Codex and Psychic Dreamwalking

Diana Paxson has penned another great work. If you were a newborn to the world of the spirits, you can take her hand and she will teach you how to walk the paths of other realms. You will feel totally taken care of, all mishaps have been exposed and diminished, and only the safest ways to trance travel are in this book. She is a virtuoso of the practical yet totally blended into the mystical. A rare, rare find.

Zsuzsanna Budapest, founder of Dianic Wicca and author of Holy Book of Women's Mysteries

[Trance-Portation] is beautifully written and filled with both wisdom and practical advice. It should interest all practitioners of the Craft and help anyone who is having difficulty with things such as astral projection or trance magick.

Eileen Holland, author of The Wicca Handbook

First published in 2015 by Weiser Books

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

665 Third Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2015 by Diana L. Paxson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-552-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design by Jim Warner

Cover photograph Czajka / Mauritius, Superstock

Interior by Frame25 Productions

Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro

Printed in the United States of America.

EBM

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To the memory of Niklas Gander

Who are you?

Grimnir...

My friend Niklas stands before me, but that is mot his voice. One of his eyes is hidden by an eye patch. When I look into the other, I see a whirl of stars.

Oh dear...

In His aspect as Grimnir, the Hidden One, Odin himself has come to the party. What do I do now? The rest of the kindred are following my instructions and pretending to give the guest a hard time. I recognize what has happened, but this is the first time I have had to deal with someone possessed by a god.

It had been such a simple plan.

I turn to Raudhildr, who is threatening Him with the spear dedicated to Odin. She has experience with possessory trance in another tradition, and despite my panic, her expression when she realizes just Who she is poking with that spear makes me laugh.

Raudhildr, put the spear away, now! Fill the horn with mead and bring it here, now!

When she brings back the horn, which I had decorated with symbols of Odin as a gift for Niklas, I begin to suspect that we have been set up by the god. For some time Raudhildr has been telling me that the Norse gods might like to work with us through possessory trance and I've protested that there is no evidence for the practice in the lore.

Clearly Odin thinks differently. He takes the horn and in one long swallow the contents go down. By this time, I've gotten the rest of the crew to shift from threats to hospitality. We escort the god to the high seat, where He settles down with a second horn of mead.

High One, tell us about the creation of humankind comes the first question.

We were walking along the shore..

Instead of citations from the lore, the answers come from the perspective of the god. Some make people laugh, others bring tears. Finally, they are done, and I have to figure out how to get Niklas back again.

My lord, the hour grows late. We thank You for your presence, but we need You to release this body now

We pull off the eye patch and I ask Odin to give us back the medium under the name he uses in the pagan community, and then for that persona to shift to the one that goes with his name in ordinary life. To my profound relief, when we have reached that point Niklas goes limp and collapses into my arms.

We lead him to the dining room table where the feast is waiting. He asks how he got there, as the last thing he remembers was putting on the eye-patch as my dog came bouncing up the stairs, so we spend the next half hour explaining. He looks confused.

I've done Drawing Down in my Wiccan tradition for years! I never completely lost awareness before

Everyone at the table is discussing the ritual. They all think I wrote it with exactly this outcome in mind, but I'm thinking that I had better find out how this works. I don't know if possessory trance was part of Heathen practice before, but it certainly is now.

At the time this occurred, I had been a pagan for over twenty years and a consecrated priestess for almost ten. Since I began work with Odin and the Germanic traditions, four years had passed, and my group was already doing the work described in my 2012 book, The Way of the Oracle: Recovering the Practices of the Past to Find Answers for Today. I had read about Santeria, and had even written about possessory trance in my novel, Brisingamen. At various times I had felt the presence of various goddesses and spoken the words they gave me, but I had never experienced full possession, nor had I ever had to deal with someone who was possessed.

Odin's unexpected arrival at our ritual started me on a search through the literature of religious experience. It has been a long, strange trip, during which I have learned from people in a variety of traditions, and from more than a few gods. I have searched for ethnographic accounts of what happens in traditional cultures and contemporary research about how such states occur. To learn how to get people in and out of trance safely I spent many years working with the American Magic Umbanda House in Northern California, and I have learned how to step back and let my body be operated by a god.

My group and I are not the only ones to have discovered that possessory trance is not limited to people in traditional cultures. It is one of the oldest ways to get closer to the Divine. In some form, it is known in almost every human culture, and it is occurring, spontaneously or intentionally, in many spiritual communities today.

The idea that another personality can take over your body, displacing the person you think of as you, is disturbing, and yet this dance with the Divine has been a goal of ecstatic religion for millennia: from the shaman dancing his animal allies to the early Christian speaking in tongues; from voudou initiates ridden by the loa to New Age channelers. American anthropologist Erika Bourguignon called it possession trance (Bourguignon 1976). Dr. Emma Cohen, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Oxford, identifies trance in which identity is transformed or replaced as executive possession, as opposed to that in which invading spirits cause illness or misfortune (Cohen 2008, 1).