Seductive Spirits
Award Winner
2025: Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize
Winner of the 2025 Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize, sponsored by the Human Sexuality & Anthropology Interest Group (HSAIG) of the American Anthropology Association (AAA).2025: Awards for Excellence in the Study of Religion
Finalist in the 2025 Awards for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Analytical-Descriptive Studies, sponsored by the American Academy of Religion (AAR).
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.
—Elias Bongmba, Rice University
"However disturbing its insight into bodies and desires might be, Seductive Spirits skillfully navigates the risk of ethnographic voyeurism by thematizing our discomfort and reflecting on the related ethical and theoretical challenges. It is one of the most thought-provoking and boundary-pushing studies of Pentecostalism I have come across since long."
—Adriaan van Klinken, University of Leeds
"Those familiar with the anthropology of pentecostal-charismaticism will recognize that its pneumacentric spirituality both presumes and enables the pervasiveness of witchcraft that, in turn, ensures a continual haunting of 'Christian life' and thereby also the never-ending need for deliverance. All the more reason for us to attend to this book."
—Amos Young, Journal of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity
"Seductive Spirits is a sophisticated and significant contribution to the field of Pentecostal studies and African religion in general. While it inserts itself into a very crowded field of scholarship on Pentecostalism that has in one way or another argued for the need to take the demonic serious, it breaks new ground, both through its detailed ethnographic descriptions of demonic eroticism and through its theoretical analysis of deliverance as being about so much more than simply getting rid of demons."
—Martin Lindhardt, Reading Religion
"Ghana is a frequent site for studies of African Pentecostalism, and many of them focus on the prosperity gospel and rituals of deliverance.Seductive Spiritsadds to this growing body of literature, giving special attention to the body, sensuality, and deliverance (or the failure to be delivered) from sex with demons.... Recommended."
—D. Jacobsen, CHOICE
"Simply put, Homewood's account is highly erotic and deeply sensory. It invokes the sonic, ocular, and tactile senses to paint a lucid and vivid, yet intellectually stimulating account of human bodies and demons and the banishment of demons from human bodies."
—Ruth Vida Amwe, Utambuzi
"Nathanael J. Homewood's book Seductive Spirits is a boundary-pushing monograph that combines a groundbreaking theoretical approach to Ghanaian Pentecostalism with insightful ethnographic reflections around sex, colonialism, demonology, and human pleasure. The book is valuable and stimulating reading for researchers interested in sexuality, embodiment, spiritual possession, and deliverance rituals in West African Christianity."
—Antonio Montañés Jiménez and Angelo Vasco, Journal of Africana Religions
"I appreciate how Homewood allows the reader to journey through the multiple deliverance scenes he writes about, thus troubling the nervous bifurcation between Pentecostalism and sex. In a milieu where conversations on sex and desire unfold furtively, the book's description of deliverance scenes as fecund with erotic possibilities highlights the liminality of these geographies."
—Kwame Edwin Otu, Journal of Africana Religions
"Homewood's work makes a significant contribution to the discourse on decoloniality and knowledge production by exploring how demons and African Pentecostalism have othered Black and African people while offering ways to reconstitute that Other. His approach resonates with and offers much to Black and African feminists' arguments about knowledge and knowing."
—Megan Robertson, Journal of Africana Religions
"Seductive Spirits offers important insights into hitherto underexplored landscapes of sexual religious worldmaking. It invites us to trouble deep-seated assumptions concerning the ways in which we theorize embodiment in religion."
—Nina Hoel, Journal of Africana Religions
"This book offers rich insight into the psychosocial aspects of religious beliefs in relation to sexuality—that is, demonic interventions in sex. It is one of the few books I have read that presents a vivid picture of the everyday life of Pentecostal/charismatic Christians and how it intersects with sexuality, as evidenced by a wealth of firsthand primary data."
—Daniel Yaw Fiaveh, Journal of Africana Religions
