ABSTRACT
My title, ‘Possession as a sacrament’, is deliberately provocative – not to cause offence, but rather to get people's attention. Although I have a doctorate in history, specialising in religious history, I attended Inform's conference in May 2006 not as an academic but as a representative of a religious tradition that deliberately invites a deity into the body of its priests for them to be possessed. It is, for me, uncomfortable territory, for I am more at home speaking of the beliefs of others than of my own: of the practices of others, not my own. I am acutely aware how much easier it is to speak about ideas than about inner experiences, for which only poetry really has the true words.
