Plural Stories

"'Have I the honour to address Ti?'

This answer did not seem to have quite the effect I hoped it would.

'You are addressing the Sole Companion of the King, the Overseer of All the Works of the King, the Overseer of the Scribes of the King's Book, the Director of the Palace, the Superintendent of the Canal-Banks, the Overseer of the Schools, the Director of the Court-Wigmakers, Overseer of the Pyramid of King Nefer-ir-ka-Ra, Overseer of the Pyramid of King Ni-user-Ra, the Honoured One Before His Lord, Ti.'

I stood corrected!"

Blurb: A green Egyptologist, upon falling asleep in Ti's tomb, gets taken on an educational journey of ancient Egyptian life, accompanied by (the somewhat pompous) Ti, along with illustrated carvings on the tomb depicting the events described.

Why is it worth your time?: It's a lighthearted, informative journey into ancient Egyptian life, made more meaningful by it representing in broad strokes Eady's own experiences of past-life memory. The illustrations are nice additions!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, creator speaks from experience, the dead, visions, voices, nonswitching

Content Warnings: None.

Access Notes: Reprinted in its entirety in Jonathan Cott's The Search for Omm Sety, which is available in paperback, hardback, and online at archive.org

Full title: Searching for Catherine Auger: The Forgotten Wife of the Wîhtikôw (Windigo)

"Whatever else happened during the course of her life, Catherine Auger was a woman who witnessed the foretold arrival of 'flesh eaters'; literally, in the form of her own husband, who proclaimed himself a cannibal, and metaphorically, in the form of people who symbolically consumed of the blood and body of a Jewish prophet each Sunday. She had beheld the arrival of cannibals."

Blurb: A scholarly history of the life story of Catherine Auger, a Métis woman in Alberta, Canada who in 1896 watched her husband lose himself to a wîhtikôw, which compelled him to devour his own children. She protected both them and herself, and witnessed his murder by the local medicine man.

Why is it worth your time?: This is possibly the most negative possible form of spirit possession, covered in scholarly detail by Carlson, who is an academic and a distant relation of Auger, but also a solid writer. The story is riveting and tragic. He uses sources ranging from oral history, witness journal entries, and government records about how an apocalyptic wîhtikôw prophecy, the Augers, and religious and racial tensions between Europeans, Métis, the Cree, and Salteaux, led to tragedy. Give it a shot; it's academic but very readable.

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, nonhumans (wîhtikôw, more commonly known as witiko/wendigo), enmity, spiritual

Content Warnings: Violence, threats of cannibalism of children and loved ones, murder, racism, apocalyptic religious prophecies and religious tension. Also a tragic ending for Felix Auger, AKA Napanin. Due to the academic style of writing, though, it's not as horrifying as you might think with those warnings.

Access Notes: This is a 20-page chapter in the anthology Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, edited by Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack. The anthology is available on archive.org (well, if/when archive.org recovers from the mass attack on it), and also as a paperback and ebook.

Misc Notes: Nathan D. Carlson has previously written "Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of 'Cannibal Monsters' in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910" in Ethnohistory (2009) 56 (3): 355–394, which is available at https://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article/56/3/355/8822/Reviving-Witiko-Windigo-An-Ethnohistory-of It is not a story, so does not qualify for this catalog, but if you want to learn more about the wîhtikôw, check that out too!

"The woman who tells her life in the following pages is a Korean shaman [mansin], one who invokes the gods and ancestors, speaks with their voice, and claims their power to interpret dreams and visions."

Blurb: The anecdotes and life stories told by Yongsun's Mother, a mansin who lives outside Seoul.

Why is it worth your time?: Despite its academic source, this book is very readable, namely transcriptions of the stories Yongsun's Mother tells about herself in casual conversation or at work. There's a lot of possession stuff (her deceased husband has just as fractious a relationship with her while dead as he did while alive) that's very different from American norms!

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate-focus, the dead, nonhumans (gods, spirits), relationships of family and enmity, spiritual, voices, visions (dreams), possession

Content Warnings: Domestic violence in the past, and results of the Korean War--starvation, the torturing to death of a spy, and Yongsun's Mother got taken for a spy as a teenager, starved, interrogated, and marched north until she escaped. The war stuff is all in Chapter Four (aptly named "War Stories and a Meeting with the Mountain God"), the DV all over. Yongsun's Mother's familial relationships have always been complicated.

Access Notes: Paperbacks are pretty cheaply available for a few bucks secondhand; the ebook is only available for $149 for some unfathomable reason, which is highway robbery. This is a rare case where we recommend pirating it off Library Genesis instead.

Misc Notes:

(Full title: Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr and Madwoman)

"Like her sister Nana, Ida too would have a spirit husband, but unlike Nana's posthumous nuptials, Ida would join her partner on this side of the grave."

Blurb: A biography of Ida C. Craddock, a sex educator who married a spirit in the 1890s and who was hounded to death by Anthony Comstock for it.

Why is it worth your time?: It's well-researched, and one of the only biographies of Craddock. Schmidt doesn't seem to know what to do with her spirit marriage, shoving it into two chapters ("Pastor of the Church of Yoga" and "One Religio-Sexual Maniac") and treating it with bemused incomprehension, but he does an excellent job explaining the cultural context around Craddock's work and harassment. The excerpts of her diary that he quotes regarding her relationship with her spirit husband Soph remain touching and relevant a century later. Recommended, despite its limitations!

Plural Tags: abuse low-focus, otherworld, the dead, family, and romantic relationships, spiritual, voices

Content Warnings: Kidnapping, institutionalization, imprisonment, era-expected ableism, misogyny, racism, and classism, plus religious oppression, parental violence, suicide. Despite this, the book isn't that rough a read; most of that happens in the chapter clearly labeled "Every Inch a Martyr."

Access Notes: Available in paper, audio, and ebook forms. Very easy to get ahold of.

Misc Notes: If you want to read Ida C. Craddock's writings, including Heavenly Bridegrooms and Psychic Wedlock, check out https://www.idacraddock.com/ There's also Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: the Essential Ida Craddock, but we haven't read it and can't say anything about it.

"The actions and utterances of the possessed person are not the expression of the individual, but the loa."

Blurb: A journey into the Voudoun religion of Haiti, filmed by Maya Deren during 1947-1951 and edited posthumously by Teiji and Cherel Ito in 1981, focused primarily on religious song, dance, and possession.

Why is it worth your time?: Maya Deren experienced Voudoun possession herself (though it doesn't come up in the film--for that, see the appendices of the BOOK version of Divine Horsemen) and was an avante-garde filmmaker, which makes this film singular. It doesn't really have a story, but it's a cinematic expression of an experience from a time period that's hard to find without grotesque trappings of racism. Voudoun is treated matter-of-factly in this film, and it's worth your time. Mostly, it lets the footage speak for itself, with little commentary.

Plural Tags: spiritual, switching, on purpose, community, abuse not mentioned, possession

Content Warnings: Matter-of-fact but explicit animal injury and sacrifice (chickens, goat, bull). It isn't treated as lurid or disgusting, and the narrator makes it clear what's going to happen well ahead of time.

Access Notes: Available on DVD, VHS, and streaming. Alas, the DVD version I had contained no subtitles. There's also a book version, but because it is more about Voudoun as a religion than about plural or personal experience, it doesn't make the cut for this catalog. (That said, if you want to read Deren's experience of possession, that's Chapter 7.)

Someone has uploaded the film to archive.org here!

It is very tacky to recommend one's own work, so this is the only listing we will make for it.

"I am nineteen, and I have just joined the plural communities of Livejournal. I find myself talking to a man named Neo, a metaphysical multiple—in other words, he is one of many within his body, and he sees his origins as being spiritual or mystical in nature. He is from the Matrix, and when I mention that I have heard of him, he replies, 'Heard of, eh? Slanderous rumors and cult tidings I hope...'

Blurb: Three histories of three plural cult leaders, who ran abusive, mindbreaking authoritarian groups. Cultiples #1 follows Tristan, who will be in prison until 2030 due to kidnapping, branding, and sexually assaulting two teenage sisters who he convinced were really their roleplaying characters. #2 follows Draven, who's been running fictionkin soulbonding cults since the mid-90s, the most successful of which was Neo's Matrix cult, leaving a string of poverty and domestic violence charges behind. And #3 follows the harassment campaigns Panopticon embarked on from 2015-2018, using the Gallifreyan Tradition Society (their Doctor Who religious/cultural reconstruction group) as their attack dogs

Why is it worth your time?: Other people have covered plural cults, but mostly from a voyeuristic, mock-the-freaks perspective. As far as I know, Cultiples is the only one to examine it from a plural perspective. We made this series to warn people about the dingy underbelly of plural community.

Plural Tags: plural community, metaphysical plurality, fictivity, soulbonding, fictionkin, (all in the worst possible sense, sadly). Abuse high-focus

Content Warnings: Contain spoilers; in the comments below.

Accessibility Notes: Available only as ebooks now. Please pirate this series. It is on archive.org and libgen, and that is on purpose.

You can buy my work here.