After several years, at first intermittently, of data gathering and absorbing stories of possession, then reading and reflecting on theories of possession, and finally engaging it actively, I have arrived, with this book, at a meditation, a perilously intimate one, on personhood, which is sometimes, though not always, contiguous with selfhood. As the title of the book suggests, I find myself attempting to reconcile in this project the self, possessed, with a presentable veneer of self-possession. In this way, the final product has also become a meditation on embodiment and incarnation, gain and loss, transformation and transition, and tradition and imagination, which, my friend Robert Beer reminds me, “must become the same thing” (1988:9). However it began—and the raison d’être of scholarship is often contested, perhaps especially within the mind and body of the scholar him or herself—it was, upon reflection, inspired by the constant, elusive, and very personal conundrum of embodiment, by a sense of the irreducible strangeness of life, by the shock of an eternally mutating present and presence when we seek only past and future permanence, which is to say by the trauma and bewilderment of continuity when we seek resolution and termination. This was aided by a vision of the simultaneity of multiple selves clamoring for dominance, propriety, order, and voice as they succumb to the inexorable force of entropy, by dreams pushed aside incomplete and irretrievable by the disappointment of awakening, and by awakening to (and within) the disappointedness of dream. In short, the process of creating this book has been a long and complicated exorcism.