After finishing the compelling Seductive Spirits, Nathanael J. Homewood’s book on the sensual and sexual dimensions of deliverance practices within Ghanaian Pentecostalism, one question kept recurring: ‘What if, paradoxically, the massive expansion of deliverance within Pentecostalism had ultimately brought back to centre stage the ambiguity and fascination associated with demons?’ Rather than being marginal or residual, such fascination appears here as constitutive of Pentecostal worldmaking itself. This question has been explored by several scholars working on Pentecostal cosmologies, particularly in African contexts. While engaging with this established literature, Homewood places this fascination – and the role of what he terms ‘demonic sexualities’ – at the very heart of the process of worldmaking enacted by Pentecostal believers in the four Accra-based settings where he conducted his ethnographic research.

The result is a largely original perspective on deliverance and its relationship to sexuality. Throughout the book, the bodies of those subjected to deliverance rituals are treated as sites of critique of the order imposed by Pentecostal churches through their systems of control over sexuality and believers’ bodies. These are “undisciplined” bodies, bodies that experience pleasure in erotic encounters with demons. While the pastors whose practices and perspectives Homewood documents are engaged in spiritual warfare against demonic forces, the attitudes of those undergoing deliverance are far more complex and ambivalent in relation to their role as sexual partners of spirits. Alongside rejection, shame and fear, the ethnography reveals pleasure derived from these encounters, the difficulty of relinquishing the role of spiritual wife or husband to demons, and, crucially, the refusal to frame such experiences solely in terms of victimhood or possession. At times, there is even a desire not to give them up – or a denial that sexual behaviours deemed ‘deviant’ by Pentecostals, most notably non-heteronormative sexualities, are of demonic origin.

This perspective, or more precisely, the perspective of Homewood’s interlocutors, becomes explicit in the detailed description of the deliverance rituals performed on two women identified as homosexual, Morowa and Kifah, recounted at length in Chapter Four. It is here that bodies reveal their full capacity to resist the normalising violence of Pentecostal ritual. Despite being subjected to rites of particular vehemence – and indeed violence – the women are not rendered ‘docile’, nor do they reach the immobilised state that often marks the conclusion of deliverance rituals and signals the successful expulsion of demonic presence. Instead, the ritual fails, making explicit a refusal of binarism not only in the domain of gender but also in that of spirituality. This failure is analytically productive rather than incidental. Sexuality with demons, which is one of the book’s most powerful arguments, functions as a means to challenge and destabilise the Manichean worldview underpinning Christian religious order. It reactivates forms of ambiguity in human-spiritual relations that characterised many precolonial religious cosmologies in African regions while remaining fully embedded within contemporary Pentecostal practice rather than outside it.

Homewood succeeds in the difficult task of addressing themes such as masturbation, nocturnal intercourse with spirits and orgiastic encounters without falling into voyeurism or pornography. At times, however, some descriptions appear to linger somewhat excessively on detail, rendering them overly exposed to the researcher’s gaze, an element that, in a work that rightly foregrounds multisensorial and synaesthetic dimensions, might have benefited from greater reflexive distance. Nonetheless, the richness of the ethnographic descriptions effectively draws readers into deliverance rituals, even those with no direct experience of them. The author’s long-term engagement with his field sites emerges clearly through this narrative density.

The chapters connect seamlessly, forming a coherent whole skilfully guided by the author, consistently placing bodies at the centre: bodies and their desires, contradictions, subjection to rituals of indocilisation and their capacity to function as instruments of resistance to the normalising forces of Pentecostal deliverance. The conclusion is that ‘seductive spirits’ can be decolonial, not in the sense of a romanticised alternative spirituality, but as openings that expose fractures within Pentecostal cosmology itself. In doing so, Seductive Spirits shows that demonic figures function not as residues of a pre-modern worldview, but as sites in which alternative modes of world-making are articulated, challenging the logics of modernity and colonial heteronormativity from within contemporary Pentecostalism.