Maya Deren describes what spirit possession is like

This is an out-take from Chapter Eight, "The Protohuman Rhythm Band", of Beethoven's Anvil.

Shortly after the end of World War II a young Russian emigrant journied from her new land, the United States, to the Caribbean country of Haiti where should would become a participant observor in the religious rituals of Voudoun. Maya Deren documented these rituals on film and sound recording and in a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. As a participant in these rituals, she knew what it was like to become possessed, to be ridden by the god as the horse by a rider--the metaphor used by the practitioners themselves. She describes the experience thus:

It is the terror which has the greater force, and with a supreme effort I wrench the leg loose--I must keep moving! must keep moving!--and pick up the dancing rhythm of the drums as something to grasp at, something to keep my feet from resting upon the dangerous earth. No sooner do I settle into the succor of this support than my sense of self doubles again, as in a mirror, separates to both sides of an invisible threshold, except that now the vision of the one who watches flickers, the lids flutter, the gaps between moments of sight growing greater, wider. I see the dance one here, and next in a different place, facing another direction, and whatever lay between these moments is lost, utterly lost. I feel that the gaps will spread and widen and that I will, myself, be altogether lost in that dead space and that dead time. With a great blow the drum unites us once more upon the point of the left leg. The white darkness starts to shoot up; I wrench my foot free but the effort catapults me across what seems a vast, vast distance, and I come to rest upon a firmness of arms and bodies which would hold me up. But these have voices--great, insistent, singing voices--whose sound would smother me. With every muscle I pull loose and again plunge across a vast space and once more am no sooner poised in balance than my leg roots. So it goes: the leg fixed, then wrenched loose, the long fall across space, the rooting of the leg again--for how long, how many times I cannot know. My skull is a drum; each great beat drives that leg, like the point of a stake, into the ground. The singing is at my very ear, inside me head. this sound will drown me! “Why don’t they stop! Why don’t they stop!” I cannot wrench the leg free. I am caught in this cylinder, this well of sound. There is nothing anywhere except this. There is no way out. The white darkness moves up the veins of my leg like a swift tide rising, rising; is a great force which I cannot sustain or contain, which, surely, will burst my skin. It is too much, too bright, too white for me; this is its darkness. “Mercy!” I scream within me. I hear it echoed by the voices, shrill and unearthly: “Erzulie!” The bright darkness floods up through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me. I am sucked down and exploted upward at once. That is all. [Divine Horseman, pp. 259-260]

Note that, while Deren danced, she did not play a musical instrument nor did she sing. Those tasks belonged to others. As we will see, this is typical. The participants in ritual have different roles to perform. Being host to a deity--in this case, Erzuli--is only one of these roles, albeit the one that commands the attention of all the other participants. To paraphrase an African saying popularized by Hillary Clinton, it takes a village to make a god.