Introduction: Persons, passages, and shifting cultural space / David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa -- A body made of words and poetic meters / Charles Malamoud -- On becoming a fish: paradoxes of immortality and enlightenment in Chinese literature / Wai-yee Li -- Transformations of subjectivity and memory in the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa / Wendy Doniger -- Madness and divinization in early Christian monasticism / Guy G. Stroumsa -- Possessed transsexuals in antiquity: a double transformation / Cristiano Grottanelli -- Madness and suffering in the myths of Hercules / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier -- Healing as an act of transformation / Shaul Shaked -- Tirukkovaiyār: downstream into God / David Shulman -- Spirit possession as self-transformative experience in late medieval Catholic Europe / Moshe Sluhovsky -- Religion and biography in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus / Margalit Finkelberg -- The ins and outs of self-transformation: personal and social sides of visionary practice in Tibetan Buddhism / Janet Gyatso -- The self and its transformation in Ṣūfīsm: with special reference to early literature / Sara Sviri -- From Platonic to Hasidic Eros: transformations of an idle man's story / Moshe Idel -- Postlude: the interior sociality of self-transformation / Don Handelman.