In the early 1600s, a seemingly new topic started to dominate Kabbalah. In his daring autobiography, Hayyim Vital conjures ghosts and spirit possessions. He tells stories of dreams, visions, angels, and demons - and, above all, women possessed by wandering souls. Vital, a mystic living between Galilee and Syria, was the main disciple of Isaac Luria. Although it seems that the belief in spirit possession was already known among Jews, Vital's Book of Visions contains the first detailed narrative of such a phenomenon. A few decades later, Menasseh ben Israel published a systematic treatise on reincarnation that discusses spirit possession and other demonic phenomena at length. This presentation considers these two seminal texts within their literary, artistic, and political context. Authors such as Pierre de Lancre, artists such as Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa will be brought into focus. This comparative analysis will shed light on the relationship between those Kabbalists' stance on magic and the opinions of Christian writers. Vital shows much more sympathy for "witches" (whose counsel he relies on) than his Christian counterparts do. Both Vital and Menasseh evince a complex, Baroque sensibility that tells us a great deal about the reception of magic at the margins of early modern society. Furthermore, their stance has to be discussed in connection with the possible influence they had on later literature, including Romanticism.