The Manuscript – Strange Factories
(For the first installment in this series covering the FoolishPeople’s ritual performance craft see – Entering the Theatre of Manifestation – Unveiling the FoolishPeople)
“There was a time when I found the concept of possession alien, exotic and dangerous. We Westerners have come to see possession a something akin to what we find in movies likeThe Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Serpent and the Rainbow and many other movies that feed the fear of the unknown taking possession of us. But these movies speak solely about the possession and obsession that might happen by the intrusion of hostile spirits upon ones being.”
– from The Mystery of Possession, Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold
Possession is an odd phenomena. Portrayed in the media as rare and uncertain, observed more carefully the basic elements of possession can be used to understand the underlying nature of our conscious experience. We are possessed by our self identity, a phantom, so easily unmoored, an accretion of habitual responses and memory that we cling to with such intensity we often miss the benefits of taking on another type of personal agency. Especially when we begin to realize that possession does not end with the body, or with the self, but exists within a web work of wider relationships and environmental memories.
FoolishPeople make a game of possession, they play with it, and fool’s play is a serious games to engage in. Whatever the internal driver we want to assign for possession, the state seen symptomatically involves changes in action and self perception radically altering how we interact with and experience the world around us. To invoke these changes willfully, to court the disassociation and potential permanence of alternate personalities and memory sets, is a very potent artistic tool.
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