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Seductive Spirits

Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism

Seductive Spirits

Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism

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Hardback

£96.00

Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9781503637931
Number of Pages: 292
Published: 12/03/2024
Width: 15.2 cm
Height: 22.9 cm

Pentecostalism, Africa's fastest-growing form of Christianity, has long been preoccupied with the business of banishing demons from human bodies. Among Ghanaian Pentecostals, deliverance is primary among the embodied, experiential gifts—a loud, messy, and noisy experience that ends only when the possessed body falls to the ground silent and docile, the evil spirits rendered powerless in the face of the holy spirit-wielding-prophets. And nowhere is Ghanaian Pentecostal obsession with demons more pronounced than with sexual demons. In this book, Nathanael Homewood examines the frequent and varied experiences of spirit possession and sex with demons that constitute a vital part of Pentecostal deliverance ministries, offering insight into these practices assembled from long-term ethnographic engagement with four churches in Accra, the capital of Ghana.

Relying on the uniqueness of the Pentecostal sensorium, this book unravels how spirits and sexuality intimately combine to expand the definition of the body beyond its fleshy boundaries. Demons are a knowledge regime, one that shapes how Pentecostals think about, engage with, and construct the cosmos. Deliverance Pentecostals reiterate and tarry with the demonic, especially sexually, as a realm of invention whereby alternative ways of being, sensing, and having sex are dreamed, practiced, and performed. Ultimately, Homewood argues for a distinction between colonial demonization and decolonial demons, charting another path to understanding being, the body, and sexualities.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Historical and Contemporary Scenes
2. Indecent Scenes
3. Singular Scenes
4. Scenes of Struggle
5. Spousal Scenes
6. Serpentine Scenes
Conclusion: Decolonial Demons
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Nathanael Homewood

Nathanael J. Homewood is a Yang Visiting Scholar in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School.