Possession comes into its own as a literary motif with accompanying procedural specificity in the Mahābhārata, a subject addressed in Chapter 6. Among the possession stories in this great epic are
- the well-known tale of Nala’s possession by Kali;
- another in which Vipula Bhārgava protected Ruci, the wife of his guru, Devaśarman, against the sexual advances of the notorious womanizer Indra by entering (anupravisya) the body of Ruci through his yoga-power;+++(5)+++
- the account in the Sauptikaparvan of Asvatthaman’s destructive possession by Rudra/śiva;
- and the account near the end of the epic in which Vidura, an incarnation of Dharma, employs his yogic abilities to leave his own body, permanently, and enter that of Yudhiṣṭhira. +++(4)+++
Although the Mahābhārata contains many stories in which possession is central, the other Sanskrit epic, the Rāmāyaṇa, frequently refers to possession as a dimension of intense emotion but has few stories in which it is central. Thus the nexus of possession and emotion appears fully developed in the epics, a feature that characterizes Indic possession from that point on. Countless narrative passages in the epics and later literature describe extreme anger, love, anxiety, concern, or faith in terms of possession.