THE WRITING OF THIS VOLUME TOOK ME BY SURPRISE. I never envisaged it as part of my “research program” until it began to form a life of its own. Eventually, it grew from childhood to adolescence and, typical of adolescence, began to exact unreasonable demands on my resources, including time, place, and modes of thought. Having now achieved maturity, it demands to be set free. On the whole, I would have preferred to be in India translating Sanskrit and examining manuscripts, rather than working on a project like this that imposed on me a new and very different set of intellectual, psychic, and even physical demands. As it turned out, I was forced to examine worlds of thought and theory that I had always suspected lay in wait, less quietly than I appreciated, to ensnare me, while the project unceasingly transgressed boundaries I kept setting on it. Its conception and infancy—I thoughtlessly intended to abandon it in childhood—took the form of papers delivered at annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 1992, the American Oriental Society in 1993, and the Indic Seminar at Columbia University in 1994. My intention in these papers was to examine a few of the semantic issues surrounding some of the key terms for possession that I saw repeated in Sanskrit texts of many different periods and genres. I foolishly believed that I could accomplish this in ten, twenty, or thirty pages. Soon enough, however, I discovered the vast ethnographic literature of possession in India and became almost hopelessly entangled—and gridlocked—in the theoretical issues surrounding it. This is discussed in due course, but I must confess here that my reading of possession in modernity had a much greater impact on my reading of possession in antiquity than I had expected or desired. Instead of a paper on possession in antiquity—the initial scope of the project—this has become a work more generally on possession in South Asian culture over a long span of time.