Specialists distinguish between trance and possession.
Trance is a physiological state. Thus people speak of hypnotic trances, or ecstatic trances, or cataleptic trances, for example. People in trance often have a diminished awareness of their physical surroundings, sometimes with suppression of ordinary reactions to pain, for example, and with reduced experience of normal emotional responses such as fear or anger.
Possession, in contrast, is a cultural interpretation of an individual's state or behavior in which an alien presence is conceived to have taken control of the individual (or sometimes in which the individual's normal consciousness is thought to have left the body). Thus to say that an individual is possessed by a devil suggests that the person is not in full control of what he does but rather the devil is, even if the behavior seems perfectly normal.
For some writers, spirit mediumship is a special kind of possession because the possessed person is explicitly an intermediary between human beings and the supernatural world.
Not all trance involves cultural interpretations of possession. (Hypnotic trance is an example of trance that is not interpreted as possession.)
Not all interpretations of possession involve trance. A person can be thought possessed without being in trance, based on prolonged illness, for example.
Possession trance is the technical term that specifies physiological trance culturally interpreted as possession. Possession trance is the basis for shamanism. Click here for More About Shamans & Shamanism.
Content Revised: 2007-07-13
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