Hillel Horacio Athias-Robles

Doubt and the Displacement of Consciousness in Mounting Across Africana Religions

Abstract

While scholars of religion traditionally avoided value judgments on the veracity of religious claims, many still continued to view possession as a false phenomenon to be explained away by disparate theories – psychiatric, psychological, biological, and social. As an academic and a priest of Africana spirituality, I depart from the subjective premise that “mounting,” a preferred term emic to many Africana religions, is true, not only as a social fact, but as an actual phenomenon in which supernatural beings can come to inhabit humans for meaningful purposes. My paper will focus on the doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity that some practitioners of different Africana religious have around “mounting” in their perspective traditions, the impetus for which comes from my own anxieties during my development as a medium. While for most devotees mounting is a given, some may doubt whether specific mediums fake their experience for ulterior motives, including prestige and authority. For others, uncertainty and insecurity can manifest in the questioning of whether they themselves will ever be chosen as spiritual vessels by mounting entities, and what they lack if not; whether their altered states of being actually amount to mounting or its pre-stages; or whether their mounting will be recognized as such by others. At the heart of many of these doubts is the question as to whether the displacement or retention of individual consciousness serve as the metrics to validate mounting. I will explore the relationship between mounting and consciousness in several Africana traditions, including Haitian Vodou, from those for which unconsciousness must be an absolute, tested through harsh trails; to those that recognize mounting as a developmental process in which consciousness is progressively surrendered; to those that recognize that mounting will manifest differently for different individuals, some of whom will remain aware as their bodies are inhabited by those beyond.