ABSTRACT
But for all the risks of possession, sex and salvation for Huxley remain separated rungs on a spiritual progress, with Surin eclipsing Grandier and the others in the end, whereas for Poor Tom sexual anguish and intimations of religious enlightenment are thoroughly mixed up in an encompassing experience of possession. In Freud these things likewise are one, but there is no religious radiance as there most certainly is in Huxley, and as there also is, albeit in the paradoxical form of the ‘darkness of revelation’, in Shakespeare. 1 I want now, like Freud and Huxley, to return to history in order to show how female, even feminist experience may mix with religious ecstasy in an intense and even ultimate experience of possession. This ultimate intensity comes from the ontological depth of the experience of possession which derives from and reveals our radical susceptibility as limited, mortal creatures born into a world that is overwhelmingly bigger and more substantial than ourselves. Our hearts, one way or another, are open to possession, try as we might to shut it out. Theodore Roethke’s first poem whispers a naked truth for all of us:
My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise. 2
