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Spiritual possession is a concept of many religions and tales, where it is believed that a spiritual beings may take temporary control of a human body, resulting in noticeable changes in behaviour.
The term demonic possession is used when the spirit is malignant (a demon), whereas incorporation or channelling may be used in the case of supposed benign spirits.
Religious views
Some religions — in particular, most Abrahamic religions — do not admit the existence of benefical spiritual possessions; so, if they admit the concept at all, they automatically consider any spiritual possession as malign. Many of those religions have ritual practices to drive out (exorcize) the evil spirit.
Charismatic Christianity does contain a tradition of individuals being possessed by the Holy Spirit, and either Speaking in tongues, or experiencing some other manifestation of possession.
Many other creeds, including Shamanism and many African and Afro-American religions, teach that spiritual possession may be benign as well as malign, and their rituals often include incorporation: either of spiritual deities, such as the Orisha of the Yoruba, or of the ghosts of deceased people, as in Kardecism. Depending on the religion, the person who is possessed may be a priest, or a specially gifted medium, or a lay member.
ISLAMIC VIEW
Most muslim scholars believe, without any shadow of a doubt, that humans could be easily be possessed, willingly or unwillingly, by an evil spirit or a good spirit commonly known as JINNS.
Jinns are one of the three intelligent beings created by GOD[ALLAH] from a fire substance. The other two intelligent beings are the ANGELS created from light, and the ADAMS[humans] created from clay. Jinns can see humans while unpossessed humans cannot see them.
Jinns possessions to humans happenned in many ways, but could be summed up in the following:
1] Through love or more likely lust:
When a human undresses himself or herself in the bathroom or in the bedroom, without mentioning the name of GOD, and a jinn happenned to be watching, he or she ventures to enter that human body, because jinns envy us for the beauty of our bodies that GOD have provided us with, for one and only one reason to make love with us. usually a male jinn possesses a woman or a girl, and vice versa. Then he wants her for himself alone, so he tries to stop her from getting married to any human, or if she is married, he will try to make her hate her husband by causing them to fight all the time until they decide to divorce. And that's real.
2] Through hate or revenge:
When a human throws a heavy rock in an empty field or a boiling maccaroni water outside or in the gotter, and hurts, whitout knowing it or seeing it, a member of a jinn family who happenned to be there at that moment. The jinns decide to punish that human and assign one family member to immediatly possess that human to make him pay. And beleive you me they are capable of causing all kind of troubles to that innocent sole from sleeplessness to cancer.
3] Through magic:
When a human hates, envies, or wants to get even with another human, he simply goes to, what we call, a magician,[ not the one who only plays trics, but the one who uses jinns and work with them, to destroy human lives] to fulfill his or her evil desires to punish them. The magician then assigns one of his soldiers from the jinns to execute the punishment by first possessing the poor soul and later performs all kind of savagery inside it.
4] Through invitation:
When a human wants to play games with jinns[spirits] and call them to help him, or another who wants to learn how to become a magician to be able to hurt others. Jinns happily, jump to that chance of controling more human bodies and possess them.
Scientific view
Science does recognize that "possession" exists, but only in the sense that some people occasionally behave in a way that fits the expected behavior of a possessed people. However, in spite of many attempts, it has not been able to find any reproducible proof of the existence of "spiritual beings"; therefore, it finds much easier to explain such altered mental state by natural causes, such as stress, mental illness, intoxication, use of drugs, etc.. Just as migraine headaches have recently been proposed as a fitting explanation for many historical cases of spiritual visions, it may be that many cases of spiritual possession were in fact epileptic attacks.
Some cases of demonic possession may also be explainable by purely psychological or social causes, e.g. hysteria — roughly, a grown-up versions of children tantrums. In fact this explanation was liberally mis-applied since the 19th century. In the past, demonic possession may also have been alleged (by the subject or by others) in order to excuse behavior which would otherwise be severely punished — just as temporary insanity is used today in courts of law.
Incarnations are often feigned by dishonest priests and mediums for fraudulent puposes, e.g. by pretending to communicate with someone's deceased relatives in exchange for payment of "donations". The famous U.S. escape artist Houdini was instrumental in exposing several such frauds in the 1920s.
Historical cases
The Salem witch trials (1692) followed a notable string of cases of alleged demonic possession.
Possession in fiction
Spiritual possession, especially malign, has been a favorite theme of fictional works, especially in horror novels and films. The movie The Exorcist (1973) may be the best-known example of the latter.
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