Possessed by the Virgin: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Possession in South India

by Kristin C Bloomer

In the early 1980s, in a rural village in South India, a Dalit woman miscarried. She hovered on the edge of death--until the Virgin Mary led her to a chapel and possessed her. For years, hundreds of ailing Catholics and Hindus came to this woman for healing, and Mary made them well.

Two decades later, in the metropolis of Chennai, a boy named Alex lay in his hospital bed sick with fever when the Virgin Mary appeared to him and told him to walk. He did--and at home, he felt Mary enter his body. Soon, his older cousin Rosalind also showed signs of Marian possession. Mary told them that her name was "Jecintho." Within three years, another young woman in Chennai also became possessed by Jecintho and began exhibiting signs of blood flowing from her hands and eyes.

Possessed by the Virgin is an ethnographic account of Marian possession, healing, and exorcism among Catholics and Hindus in southeast India. Following the lives of three Tamil Roman Catholic women for more than a decade, Kristin C. Boomer attends to the women's own descriptions of their experience with Marian possession, as well as to those of the people who came to them for healing. Her book investigates how possession is possible and in what contexts such experiences can be read as authentic. Roman Catholic officials have responded in various banning certain activities while promoting others. Their responses reflect the complicated relationship of the Roman Catholic Church with non-Christian religious practices on the Indian subcontinent, where "possession" (a term introduced by missionaries) involving deities and spirits has long been commonplace and where gods, goddesses and spirits have long inhabited people. This ground sets the stage for Bloomer to explore questions of
agency, gender, subjectivity, and power, and the complex interconnection between the ethnographic "Self" and the "Other."

Genres: Catholic

348 pages, Hardcover

Published December 12, 2017

Reviews

[didi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the three women, Nancy seemed to have benefited most from Mātā at the microlevel of family dynamics. Nancy married by Mātā’s choice, not her father or mother’s— and challenged their authority, especially that of her father. On the macrolevel of larger- scale social practices, however, the comparative lack of change seemed more pronounced: she did not retain much of a following, and her possession practice had powered down. But the community of believers to which she belonged was tight and intimate, and this circle of seemingly jovial women seemed to add to her self-esteem. Despite remaining within locally normative patriarchal structures—she and her husband still lived in the same household as her father, for example
(though now on the renovated roof)— she had moved further from dominant patriarchal dynamics in her intimate life. She had escaped both the jail super-
intendent and her father’s wish that she become a nun. She had a husband and daughter whom she loved— and she had “moved up in the world” as a properly married woman and a mother. And in relation to her father, she had reclaimed a strong voice: one that was not just Mātā’s but also her own.

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of the Tamil Catholics who are relatively new converts or are uneducated bring in a lot of Hindu influence. Namely the Hindu beliefs about deities and demons, called pey. They believe that malevolent demons or benevolent deities can possess you. Some of them actually believe that the pey can inhabit inanimate objects such as rocks. Sometimes the remedy to get rid of these demons is by way of broomstick... or sequentially putting out candle fires with your tongue in order to scare the demons out. You can also get possessed by gods or goddesses in Hindu culture and since Hindus perceive Mary as a goddess, a number of women in Tamil Nadu have reported getting possessed by Mary. They speak for Mary, sometimes they take on the physicality of an old lady, despite being only teenagers or women in their 20s, and report stigmata-type bleedings. I have a creeping suspicion that a lot of these possessions are driven by mental health crises that are due to poverty and unhappy marriages though, since a lot of the apparitions seem to happen to women who are initially super unhappy with their lives. (Some of the visions have been centered around trying to get a dad to stop drinking). The bishop in the area is super frustrated by the Marian possessions and hopes that people will not support them, but sometimes the public parades of these Marian possessions have huge turnouts. Some of the people who pay attention to the Marian possessions have expressed that they believe Mary is a goddess and expressed disbelief in Christ.

Clearly, Tamil Nadu's Tamil Catholics have a lot to sort out. They live in a world where architects, event planners, and parish organizers play a larger role in evangelism than they used to in the past. Tamil churches and religious authorities are dealing with persecution and disparate belief systems. Although, I am noticing a trend similar to the one I saw while reading up on Taiwanese Catholics after China turned Communist, Taiwanese American Protestants who came to America and Korean American Protestants trying to figure out life in America, while it it is the people speaking loudly about Jesus who get the most attention, the reason people come to the churches initially is to find a sense of community, with the food that comes with these events being an added perk. Over time, as they come into contact with Catholic beliefs and questions, then their ideas start changing. Do we actually live in a world where retreat organizers, volunteer cooks and the parishioners who are hospitable to new people at church evangelize more effectively than the street preachers?