Gateways -- Possession

version

Well-known member
I remember reading an illustrated Dean Koontz thing as a kid called Oddkins which was like a nastier Toy Story with a human character who ended up possessed and it had this really unnerving (at the time) illustration of him looking into a bathroom mirror and this demonic face looking back.

You get the mirror thing in Twin Peaks too.

twin-peaks-finale-cooper-bob-mirror.png
 

version

Well-known member
William Buckley always seemed like he was wearing a skin suit or something. He had all these strange tics and mannerisms. Heath Ledger had the tongue thing as The Joker. Almost a physical manifestation of the lizard brain, or like there's something inside them trying to get out.

4.-Weird-habit-Joker.jpg
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Possession isn't really a bad thing in Afro-Caribbean religion though. It's how the spirits communicate information to individuals and the community at large.
 

version

Well-known member
You can see this happening in pretty much any clip of William F. Buckley. He's like the bug in the skin suit from Men in Black.
Different personalities fight for control of the body, the face twitches, switches from grin to grimace, growls, spit, drools. Spirits sweep in the wind.

So we look into the mirror and see different consciousnesses animate our faces, a parade of possible personalities, bumptious, saintly, forlorn, grave, growling, feral, snarling,
latent potentialities waiting to be actualised, a chaos of souls without bodies, gnashing and wailing
Mittyesque, cackling

Occupy the space for a moment
 
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version

Well-known member
Possession isn't really a bad thing in Afro-Caribbean religion though. It's how the spirits communicate information to individuals and the community at large.
Christianity has that too tbf, speaking in tongues and all that.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
 

version

Well-known member
The stuff about language, technology, capitalism and so on being intelligences and having their own agendas fits in here too. One of Pynchon's characters in GR claiming the war's being dictated by the needs of technology, Burroughs claiming language is like a parasite manipulating its host.

That, or it's all the same thing in different forms -- Bitcoin perhaps being the latest.
 
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version

Well-known member
The cashless thing/cryptocurrencies puts me in mind of Jobe trying to get into the digital realm at the end of The Lawnmower Man, also Wintermute in Neuromancer.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
I remember reading an illustrated Dean Koontz thing as a kid called Oddkins which was like a nastier Toy Story with a human character who ended up possessed and it had this really unnerving (at the time) illustration of him looking into a bathroom mirror and this demonic face looking back.
i googled the word possessed one time while writing an essay at like 3am (thrilling story, i know) and remember being genuinely shaken by the image results which showed "real life" photos of people before and after they became possessed by demons. to luka's point in the harlequin thread, it's unsettling how much a change in your inner psychology can seem to alter your outward appearance.

more on topic, said this to barty at some point on twitter:

did you follow elsagate? to me that felt like a defining event of the late 2010s. a glimpse of the malevolence underlying this infinity of brightly colored, vacuous, infantalized, seemingly autogenerating content. (youtube but also buzzfeed, tiktok etc.) now i guess you don’t have to go as far down the algorithmic rabbit hole to reach these bizarre and unsettling, unaccounted-for forces. they’ve reached us.

so that was one of the most recent examples of "there's something living in this stuff" i can think of.
 

version

Well-known member
did you follow elsagate? to me that felt like a defining event of the late 2010s. a glimpse of the malevolence underlying this infinity of brightly colored, vacuous, infantalized, seemingly autogenerating content. (youtube but also buzzfeed, tiktok etc.) now i guess you don’t have to go as far down the algorithmic rabbit hole to reach these bizarre and unsettling, unaccounted-for forces. they’ve reached us.

so that was one of the most recent examples of "there's something living in this stuff" i can think of.
Not closely, but I'm aware of it. Very unsettling. Saw someone tweeting about it the other day.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Christianity has that too tbf, speaking in tongues and all that.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Speaking in tongues is nonsensical though. When the lwa posses someone in Vodou (say) they will have clear messages.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
There are consistent comparisons in the classical world and beyond. It’s the rite to vision that gets lost or reinterpreted through the ChristIan lenses as possession. Gender roles are consistent

Veleda in her open but sequestered tower, the Pythia, priestesses of Sena (Scilly isles), Sein island off Brittany and the women of the Namnetes, Fedelm of the spiralling pupils giving Queen Medb her infamous “crimson-red from blood they are; I behold them bathed in red” bomb. Frequently in thin places, Anglesey and its bloodbath

Possession is a topographical space as much as a psychological one. Look at the Vatican or Pentagon. Festering entrails of something beyond words. Do not call up that which ye cannot banish in a pirate voice
 
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