"Quite an interesting book... " —Religious Studies Review
"It is by far superior to anything else on demons we have seen in the past few years." —The American Rationalist
"... Goodman is to be commended for a stimulating and wide-reaching treatment of a compelling and much-debated subject." —Journal of Folklore Research
Rich in detail derived from the author's fieldwork and the anthropological literature, this work paints a picture of possession as one of the usually positive and most widespread of human religious experiences. It also details the ritual of exorcism, which is applied when things go wrong.
Felicitas D. Goodman, Ph. D. Academic background Felicitas Maria Johanna Daniels was born of ethnic German parents in Budapest, Hungary, on January 30, 1914. She was the elder of two children. In her youth, she was educated by the Roman Catholic order of Ursuline nuns, though her family was Lutheran. As a young woman, she attended the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and in 1936 earned her degree as an interpreter. It was here that she met her future husband, Glenn H. Goodman, an American from Ohio.
In 1947, Felicitas, Glenn, and their first three children immigrated to Columbus, Ohio, where Glenn became a professor of German at Ohio State University. Her fourth child was born a few years later. During this period, Felicitas taught German and English and worked as a translator of scientific articles.
In 1965, when she was 51 and her children were grown, she returned to graduate school completing a master's degree at The Ohio State University in linguistics in 1968 and a doctorate in cultural anthropology in 1971. From 1968 until her forced retirement in 1979, at age 65, she taught linguistics, cultural anthropology and comparative religions at Denison University, Granville, Ohio.
Contributions to anthropology Felicitas Goodman made two major contributions to the field of anthropology: one concerned "glossolalia" or "speaking in tongues;" the other concerned religious ecstatic trance.
As she plunged into her graduate anthropological studies, Felicitas noted frequent discussion of an odd kind of speech people spoke while they were "possessed." As a linguist, this intrigued her. Ethnographers called it "unintelligible speech" or "unintelligible gibberish." This speech reminded her of Bible stories about the "unknown tongues" spoken by the Apostles at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-13). For a seminar in anthropological linguistics conducted by Erika Bourguignon at Ohio State, Felicitas chose "glossolalia" as the topic of her paper. Dr. Bourguignon supplied her with sound tapes of such speech from Pentecostal denominations in Ohio, Texas, and the Caribbean. On the basis of this research she developed a working hypothesis that the striking accent and intonation patterns of such speech, as well as certain phonetic features were NOT a different kind of natural language, which was the "received view" on her field. These features expressed bodily changes that a person underwent during trance, accompanying or possibly even facilitating the religious experience. (1969. "Phonetic Analysis of Glossolalia in Four Cultural Settings." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 8: 227-239.)
To test her hypothesis further and explore its possible cross-cultural significance, she conducted fieldwork with Spanish-speaking Pentecostals in Mexico City in 1968. This experience validated her hypothesis: the syllables uttered during speaking in tongues were different, but the accent and intonation pattern, as well as certain phonetic features, were the same. They seemed biologically fixed.
But would these insights hold for non Indo-European languages? She conducted further field-work among Maya (Pentecostal) speakers in Yucatan which confirmed her hypothesis. Her study remains the definitive word on this phenomenon to this day. (1972. Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-cultural Study of Glossolalia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2001. Maya Apocalypse: Seventeen Years with the Women of a Yucatan Village. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Glossolalia is simply patterned vocalization without content which can even be imitated upon a single hearing.
Religious ecstatic trance: Dr. Goodman's research, publications, and on-going experience in this field are her major contribution to anthropology. In her book, Where the Spirits Ride the Wind, (1990, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), she notes how trance experience was a normal part of her life until the age of puberty when she was advised to leave behind the experiences of childhood. Happily, Felicitas did not do that. The interest remained with her throughout her life. Felicitas recognized two dimensions to reality: consensual and alternate. Consensual reality is the arena of common, ordinary, human experience. Alternate reality is parallel to consensual reality. It is the abode of the spirits, the ancestors. This, of course, is how Felicitas understood and interpreted reality in the contemporary western world. It was very different in antiquity. Until the time of Origen (circa 253 AD), the notion of "supernatural" simply didn't exist. Reality was one: spirits, gods, ancestors, and humans lived in one world. This is why biblical and other ancient reports speak of humans communing with spirits, deities, or ancestors on a regular basis. This is a concept and understanding to which westerners can return, if they choose. Felicitas was unaware of this concept. Despite her excellent qualifications as a scientist, she sometimes lapsed into ethnocentrism and anachronism, ever threatening pitfalls for anthropologists.
Felicitas' views of Christianity and antiquity were shaped by the Ursuline nuns, her primary grade teachers in Budapest. She was ever grateful to them for offering young girls the opportunity for quality education. Nevertheless, these "Catholic Christian" views are and for a long time have been antiquated and discredited. Felicitas' comments on "hell" as a notion that derived from agricultural religions such as Christianity are not based on good evidence. There is no word in Hebrew or Greek that can be translated "hell." The word never appears in the Bible nor should it in an honest translation. The notion derives from a much later period.
Nevertheless, Felicitas believed that the spirit world (the abode of the deity and the deity's entourage) could be accessed by humans, and this chiefly in an alternate state of consciousness (ASC). With her students at Denison University, she developed a ritual to enter the ASC and make contact with the spirit world. Ritual is essential to this contact.
The Cuyamugue Institute in Santa Fe, NM It was first in 1960 that Felicitas went with friends from Ohio State University to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She fell in love with it and the ambient Native American culture almost immediately. Began to search for small property in the area, and in 1963 her realtor found 300 acres for her (more than she wanted) in the area known as Cuyamungue, the name of an ancient pueblo in the area. In 1965, accompanied by friends and relatives, she discovered a place to erect a building on her property, and thus the Institute had its beginning.
Because she continued to live in Columbus, OH, she divided her time between there and Cuyamungue. In 1978, Dr. Goodman founded the Institute which today is known as Cuyamungue: The Felicitas D. Goodman Institute which continues her research into altered states of consciousness and holds workshops about the postures which she admits are but one door to alternate reality.
This review is from: How about Demons?: Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World (Folklore Today) (Paperback)
This book examines the phenomenon of "possession" - the takeover of the self/conscious mind by a foreign entity in the form of a 'guide', ghost or 'devil' that has accompanied humankind from the dawn of time. Particularly interesting to me were the similarities/differences between African and European/Christianized versions of possession.
'Primitive' cultures recognize possession and even derive benefit from it through the ability of medicine men, curanderos, shamans, ngangas, 'witch doctors' to control the set and setting. Short chapters are devoted to spiritualism/pentecostalism, umbanda, voudun, Mexican folk religion etc. The book finishes with demonic possession that we recognize from the popular culture (The Exorcist). According to G., Roman Catholic rituals can be remarkably effective in helping the possessed, however, in many countries such rituals are frowned upon and the afflicted patients are left to fend for themselves. Having lost the tools to effectively deal with possession, the West is basically helpless both in terms of diagnosis (mental illness?) and cure.
The book is slim. I wish the author who did fieldwork in Yucatan and Europe would furnish more details & examples on this phenomenon, and provide us with her take on the more esoteric issues of the soul, self, trance and the nature of the mind. Although Goodman is supposedly a scientist her central hypothesis is never made clear. At times, she appears to challenge the central tenets of Enlightenment according to which everything - myths, fears of evil powers, supplication to higher deities, the anthropomorphizing of nature - can be reduced to Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx: "That being is man." AT other times, she's more ambiguous. I wish she'd be clearer on whether she believes that multiple personalities and possessing entities are beings in their own right or simply subpersonalities projected from the unconscious mind? Or both?
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This review is from: How about Demons?: Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World (Folklore Today) (Paperback)
Gives some good arguments and gets you, the reader, thinking at a broader range. I let a friend borrow this book and he had a hard time understanding the book. Defiantly not for the laymen
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This review is from: How about Demons?: Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World (Folklore Today) (Paperback)
It's no secret that I adore Dr. Goodman and her work. This book is no exception. I truly appreciate the body of knowledge she has assembled in this one title, addressing mental illness, spiritual intrusions, modern methods of approaching both and tribal wisdom to distinguish the two. Dr. Goodman provides a bridge between healing approaches that is incredibly under appreciated.
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