If my selection of material appears planned but extravagant, the reason is that the planning came to life as a learning process, like perfecting a rāga: I found a few unique scales and constantly improvised on them. Thus, the extravagance could never be exhaustive. The material turned out to be much more extensive than I initially expected. In many key places, in dealing with the Mahābhārata, Tantra, and bhakti texts, for example, I was forced to be illustrative and selective. As a friend, a veteran of many books, told me (paraphrasing W. H. Auden, as I recall) when I was about three-quarters done, this is the kind of book that cannot be completed but, instead, should be abandoned.+++(4)+++ The lesson for me was that both data and knowledge can be infinite, especially as they are swept up in an ever-expanding vision with ever-increasing dimensions and vocalities. The evidence of the multidimensionality and multivocality of possession that I have brought to bear on the topic is more than I had ever hoped to find or thought was even possible. Many readers will still say that I left out this or that, especially from ethnographies or modern autobiographies, or could have interpreted something differently, that I should have attended more to feminist perspectives or psychoanalytic theory. I must also mention that our knowledge of Tantra from the mid-first millennium through the first few centuries of the second millennium C.E. is rapidly expanding, in great measure because of the efforts of Alexis Sanderson and his students at Oxford University. Doubtless, there will soon be much more to say about possession in tantric literature that will add considerably to what I have written in Chapter 10, and may force new paradigms on the notion of possession itself as it was configured historically in India. Nevertheless, for me, this exercise—whatever I have adduced on the topic—has turned religion, particularly as observed in South Asia, on its head, as the material ultimately argues against much of what is stated in standard textbooks. If even a tiny amount of that is transmitted to the reader, this project will have been worth the effort.