ABSTRACT
Although possession in general and possession by yoginīs in particular is a subject that has often been treated in the secondary literature, the testimony of the earliest Śaiva sources of the yoginī cult have never been analysed in detail. This is due to two main reasons: on the one hand, many of these sources are still available only in manuscript form; 1 on the other, studies dealing with these manuscripts concentrated on other issues. 2 In this paper, therefore, I intend to present some of the earliest tantric sources teaching the cult of yoginīs, which, at the same time, also deal with deity or yoginī possession. I shall thus attempt to show in what forms and contexts yoginī and goddess possession appears in the tantric sources and how possession comes to be integrated into the cult of yoginīs.
