Supernatural or divine power is manifested through a variety of means and locations in South Asia: through temple rituals, at pilgrimage sites, through the actions of holy men and women, in the recitation of scripture and so on. One of the enduring and predominant ways in which divinity is manifested is also through the enactment of religious rituals that induce “possession” through deities who then often speak through the medium of the “possessed” devotees. Within a reflexive and sympathetic model that attempts to move away from psychological and sociological explanations, possession and possession rituals are described as culturally constituted “systems of belief and practice”. My contention here is that postulating the existence of beliefs in the context of possession results in a hermeneutic distanciation based on the difference between knowledge and belief. Within this context I intend to create a shift in scholarly discourse from describing religious rituals that are conducted in order to invoke the presence of a deity in terms of the categories of spirit “possession” (or trance) to a notion of embodiment or rather embodied consciousness.

I will illustrate my arguments with materials gathered from recent field research into the narratives and rituals of the Central Himalayan deity Goludev who is worshipped in the region of Kumaon.