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„Divine and demonic possession”? Farewell to a failed concept

Abstract

The applicability of the widespread general category of “divine and demonic possession” in the phenomenology of religion is not verified by the thoroughgoing analysis implemented of a limited set of religious phenomena: the religious experiences in the Christian culture. The peculiarities of the two effects of different origin, their consequences for the human being are fundamentally opposite to each other. When, in the field of science the scholars tried to look on a lesser, limited subset, to verify a statement formulated for the whole set and it hasn’t been confirmed, then they are ready to draw the proper consequences. I think that the folklorists, ethnologists of religion and the specialists of the comparative science of religion should be confronted by the fact, that they applied without much reservation the concept of “divine and demonic possession”. By this time, it turned out about this notion, that it couldn’t be used as an universal category of the phenomenology of religio

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