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--Thomas B. Allen, Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism (1993, o.p.).

--Richard Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge University Press, 272 pp.; $33.95, hardcover; $14.95, paper, 1992).

--Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton University Press, 336 pp.; $24.95, 1995).

--Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (Braziller, 256 pp.; $17.95, hardcover; $8.95, paper, 1985 [first published 1969]).

--Frances Hill, A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials (John Hopkins University Press, 279 pp.; $29.95, 1996).

--Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (Vintage, 360 pp.; $13, paper, 1989 [first published 1987]).

--Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretation (Princeton University Press, 327 pp.; $29.95, 1995).

--Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (University of California Press, 352 pp.; $14.95, paper, 1996 [first published 1994]).

Suddenly, she falls into a trance, her eyes rolling back and then her eyelids snapping tightly shut. Her body is alternately rigid, then convulsed with seizures that would seem to pull her bones out of joint. She speaks in a voice not her own, sometimes barking like a dog or howling like a wolf. She looks at people, or creatures, that no one else in the room can see, often conversing with them at length.

She cries out that she is being choked, clawed, or burned, even as welts or red marks appear on her body. If not guarded, she may try to cut herself or cast herself into a well or a fire. She has difficulty talking, sometimes becoming entirely mute, sometimes speaking in what would seem to be a foreign tongue. Some witnesses claim that in her trance state, she can see things hidden from her physical senses, that she can read their thoughts, that she has a nimbleness of mind or a facility with languages not evident in her everyday personality.

What is happening to this person? Is she1 demon possessed? Is she having a hysterical episode? Is she suffering from multiple personality disorder? Is she hypnotized?

The description given above is not taken from any one incident. Rather it is a composite of reported symptoms of the afflicted children of Salem in 1692, and of other victims of what is sometimes called "possession disorder." Most of these symptoms are also present in what a later generation would call hysteria, cases such as Freud's famous patient "Anna O." Yet again, many of these symptoms also appear in current cases of multiple personality disorder (recently renamed dissociative identity disorder).

At the risk of casting too wide a net, it should be noted that many kinds of trance states are associated with seizures, loss of feeling in the limbs, contorted bodily postures, and the emergence of a second personality. Examples may be found in the literature on topics as diverse as Spiritualist mediums, central Asian shamans, people under hypnosis, and children who report apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Less well known but no less intriguing are the so-called Sleeping Preachers in rural nineteenth-century America, laconic farmers by day who rose up in the night to become impassioned, dynamic preachers with a seeming photographic memory of the Bible, only to awaken the next morning with no recollection of their previous night's exertions.

Are these differing manifestations of a single overriding phenomenon of mental dissociation, or are the similarities merely incidental?

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