Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies 9781350272910, 9781350272941, 9781350272927

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Acute Religious Experiences

Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies Series Editors: Bettina E. Schmidt, Steven Sutcliffe and Will Sweetman Founding Editors: James Cox and Peggy Morgan Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies publishes cutting-edge research in the Study of Religion/s. The series draws on anthropological, ethnographical, historical, sociological and textual methods among others. Topics are diverse, but each publication integrates theoretical analysis with empirical data. The series aims to refresh the interdisciplinary agenda in new evidence-based studies of ‘religion’. A Phenomenology of Indigenous Religions, James L. Cox A Sense of Belonging, Stephen Friend American Evangelicals, Ashlee Quosigk Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen Becoming Buddhist, Glenys Eddy Community and Worldview among Paraiyars of South India, Anderson H. M. Jeremiah Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations, Gregory Shushan Contemporary Western Ethnography and the Definition of Religion, Martin D. Stringer Cultural Blending in Korean Death Rites, Chang- Won Park Free Zone Scientology, Aled Thomas Globalization of Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer, Christopher D. L. Johnson Individualized Religion, Claire Wanless Innateness of Myth, Ritske Rensma Levinas, Messianism and Parody, Terence Holden New Paradigm of Spirituality and Religion, Mary Catherine Burgess Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion, Eugenia Roussou Post- Materialist Religion, Mika T. Lassander Redefining Shamanisms, David Gordon Wilson Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging, Arkotong Longkumer Religion and the Discourse on Modernity, Paul- François Tremlett Religion as a Conversation Starter, Ina Merdjanova and Patrice Brodeur Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology, Julian Droogan Secular Assemblages, Marek Sullivan Spirits and Trance in Brazil, Bettina E. Schmidt Spirit Possession and Trance, edited by Bettina E. Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan, Ioannis Gaitanidis Spiritual Tourism, Alex Norman Theology and Religious Studies in Higher Education, edited by D. L. Bird and Simon G. Smith The Critical Study of Non-Religion, Christopher R. Cotter The Dynamic Cosmos, edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Matan Shapiro The Problem with Interreligious Dialogue, Muthuraj Swamy Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana, Abamfo Ofori Atiemo Rethinking ‘Classical Yoga’ and Buddhism, Karen O’Brien Kop UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age, David G. Robertson

Acute Religious Experiences Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies Richard Saville-Smith

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Richard Saville-Smith, 2023 Richard Saville-Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942242 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-7291-0 ePDF: 978-1-3502-7292-7 eBook: 978-1-3502-7293-4 Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters

Old stories retold are the preferred route for approaching stranger places. (Modern Celtic saying)

Dedicated to all who’ve been there

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements

viii ix

Introduction 1 Part I  Theoreticians of a not necessarily pathological discourse 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

William James’s Pathological Programme 9 Rudolf Otto’s Numinous 23 T. K. Oesterreich’s Possession 38 Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism 47 Walter Stace’s Mysticism 57 Walter Pahnke’s Psychedelic Experience 72 Abraham Maslow’s Peak Experiences 90

Part II  From psychiatry to madness to acute religious experiences 8 The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 101 9 Michel Foucault’s History of Madness 123 10 Acute Religious Experiences 145 Part III  Jesus as a case study 11 Re-reading the Gospel of Mark 175 Conclusion 195 Notes Bibliography Index

199 224 250

Figures I.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 8.1

Constituting a discourse – had A read B?3 A normal distribution curve15 The mystical ladder as a normal distribution curve16 Otto’s numinous, courtesy Google Ngram24 Positive and negative mental disorders on a normal distribution curve119 10.1 Acute religious experiences on a normal distribution curve163

Acknowledgements I’d like to thank the University of Edinburgh and particularly my supervisors who gave me shelter to develop my thinking within a liberating approach to religious studies. During long, dark winter nights of writing, I was distracted by Twitter but learned much from many, further destabilizing the boundaries of my knowledge and keeping my focus on twenty-first-century debates when writing about twentieth-century authors. The mad studies community, both virtual and real, played their part in keeping the struggle of how to be heard in focus. I would also acknowledge the fabulous works of scholarship which I have been privileged to draw on; although my bibliography is condensed, I would recommend it to anyone interested in further reading. This would have been a very different book without the immediacy and sparkling effervescence of Nikhil Banerjee’s ragas, which accompanied the magical crystallization of thought into words on the page. Finally, my continuing love for my darling wife, Gillian K Ferguson, and my delightful son, Comrie Saville-Ferguson, remains, eternally. All errors are mine – but let’s not sweat the small stuff.

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Introduction

This work consists of a series of readings of classic texts through a mad studies approach. It is presented as a contribution to the study of religions which may also be useful to psychiatrists and other academic disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, anthropology, consciousness studies, neuroscience, theology, history, sociology, cognitive sciences and medical humanities. My proposal is that the idea of acute religious experiences can make a contribution wherever experiences of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme1 states of consciousness constructed as ‘religious’ are studied. This work is premised as a challenge to the totalizing discourse of psychiatry which has a history of pathologizing extreme experiences such as visions, voices and possessions as disorders or disease. Although this situation is improving (Chapter 8), the reliance on unstable concepts like psychosis as being invariably pathological represents an ongoing problem which is far removed from the Greek psyche as soul, metempsychosis as transmigration of souls or Plato’s account in Phaedrus of all the non-pathological possibilities of divine madness2 (Plato [340BC] 2009: 55). As a mad person (I have the certificates), I introduce mad studies to religious studies. Mad studies is an emerging approach which is premised on the very reasonable argument that the traditionally marginalized voices of those who have experiences of madness may critically contribute to the process of knowledge exchange and theory development. The privileging of reason in western culture after the enlightenment did not extinguish the voices of madness, it simply provided grounds for them to be ignored or sanitized.3. As I show, the ways in which even the rational theoreticians in Part I frequently seek to protect their subjects from the contamination of madness is part of the problem. Fortunately, the apparent difficulty in giving voice to madness in a way which can be read – that is, rationally – turns out to be less of a conundrum than might be expected because the dark caricature of the schizophrenic perpetuated in pathologized cultural portrayals does not represent the only trajectory or destination of madness. Many extraordinary/anomalous/extreme experiences are episodic, dynamic, events rather than degenerative permanent states. There is more to madness than the extremes of schizophrenia. The particular contribution

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which mad studies offers is a recognition of and a focus on the contributions of madness within the human story. Just as feminist voices spoke what they saw and changed the way women were recognized in both the academy and wider society, so mad studies provides a standpoint4 from which to articulate insights drawn from experiences of madness, insights about humanity and the nature of reality, not just about the subject of madness. But the challenge, as Spivak recognizes in Can the Subaltern Speak? ([1985] 2020), is not just a question of whether it is possible to speak, but also whether it is possible to be heard. In this sense, this wide-ranging book is more a beginning than an end point, the start of a discussion rather than a final position. Chapter 9 further unpacks the idea of mad studies, but the key point here is the possibility of explanatory pluralism.5 While my central argument is that the visions, voices and possessions which psychiatry pathologizes can sometimes be better read as non-pathological,6 my wider position is that explanatory pluralism is about more than advancing or defending competing dichotomous positions or winning arguments. The traditions of interpretation inherited by the western academy today are made richer not by opposing or disproving them but by understanding the discourses which got us to the current positions. My focus on the adequacy of the treatment of intrinsically irrational states of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme within the contemporary discourses of psychiatry and religious studies is grounded in the observation that they both share a common interest in human experiences throughout the human story. In Part I, I present a series of critical twenty-first-century readings of twentieth-century texts and suggest that these can be understood as a fractured discourse on non-pathological approaches to the extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme. My approach is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s style of close reading in Writing and Difference ([1967] [1978] 2001), but I have not sought to emulate his prose style. I selected theoretical contributions by philosophers, psychologists, a historian of religions, a theologian and a psychedelic researcher. This sample was selected on the basis of my knowledge of this field, which I’ve been studying since 2010. As with any sample, there are (by definition) other ways of constituting it but my historiographical approach, beginning with William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and working forwards chronologically to Abraham Maslow’s Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences (1964), allows discursive connections and disconnections to be disclosed. Clearly, there are many subsequent contributions since 1964, but space is limited and the need is to demonstrate the start of a discourse, not to complete it. That my interlocutors are all white men relates to the period, not my selection criteria, and significant

Introduction

3

but subsequent contributions have been made by Erika Bourguignon, Janice Boddy, June McDaniel, Ann Taves, Emma Cohen, Louise Child, Bettina Schmidt and Tanya Luhrmann, to name a few. The readings I present for Part I of this book are as follows: 1. William James’s ‘pathological programme’ in The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902 2. Rudolf Otto’s ‘numinous’ in The Idea of the Holy, 1917 3. T. K. Oesterreich’s ‘possession’ in Possession: Demoniacal and Other, 1921 4. Mircea Eliade’s ‘shamanism’ in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951 5. Walter Stace’s ‘mysticism’ in Mysticism and Philosophy, 1960 6. Walter Pahnke’s ‘psychedelic experience’ in Drugs and Mysticism, 1963 7. Abraham Maslow’s ‘peak experiences’ in Religions, Values, and PeakExperiences, 1964 That these texts can be read as a discourse became apparent only by paying attention to the cross-referencing and the realization that the question of who hadn’t read who was as important as who had. Demonstrates these connections (and their absences)7 by answering the question: Had A read B? (Figure I.1). This discourse, fractured as it is, from the start of the twentieth century, parallels the historical development of the pathologizing account of psychiatry which also developed incrementally through clinical, institutional and theoretical trial and error. The similarities of these discourses as discourses are remarkable, down to the propensity for the deployment of neologisms to invent new ways of naming, thinking and speaking as theory advanced – schizophrenia (1911), schizoaffective (1933) bipolar (1957) and so forth. Both discourses share western cultural traditions of rationalism and colonial thinking which cast a shadow over twentieth-century theory. In this, the ‘mad’ and the ‘primitive’ are constructed as the Other, problems to be managed, classified and controlled, while (without paradox), the mysticisms of the ‘higher’ religions are welcomed Theorecian James Otto Oesterreich Eliade Stace Pahnke Maslow

1902 1917 1921 1951 1960 1963 1964

Discipline Psychology/Philosophy Theology/Philosophy Philosophy History of Religions Philosophy Psychedelic Studies Psychology

James

Otto

Oesterreich

Eliade

Stace

Pahnke

Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Yes No No No

No No Yes

Yes No

Yes

Figure I.1  Constituting a discourse – had A read B?.

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into the western world. At the conclusion of Part I of this book, I propose that I have done enough to demonstrate a nascent discourse on experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme which is not necessarily pathological and to which subsequent authors and their texts can readily be added. This discourse has been obscured by the diversity of phenomenality which ranges from the ritual vibrancy of socialized possession practices to the apparent calm of individualistic mystical experiences. The authors I present began with a textual data set which already incorporated long traditions of cultural difference. These authors did not invent the subject, they corralled it in words, naming experiences in order to advance their theoretical ambitions. They each engage in a second order approach to the evidence they had, filtered through their own experiences, a filter constructed from their own particular and peculiar cultural and historical contexts. The novel contributions of these authors reshape the subject, moulding it like plastic into models for better understanding their versions of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. It is the novel contribution of this work to offer the first close reading and comparison of these major twentieth-century works which constitutes them as a fractured discourse of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme which is not necessarily pathological. In Part II, I bring the learning from Part I to bear on a close reading of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and Foucault’s History of Madness. Reading the DSM series (Chapter 8) provides an opportunity to explore the language of the pathological constructs of psychiatry in a contemporary context. A realistic understanding of current psychiatric textuality opens the possibility of comparison, to glimpse the idea that the pathological and the non-pathological may sometimes be understood to overlap as alternative interpretations of the same phenomenality – such as visions, voices and possessions. My reading of the History of Madness (Chapter 9) allows the DSM series to be put in the wider context of the origins of madness which I relocate from Foucault’s western Europe in the Middle Ages to pre-diaspora homo sapiens in the Rift Valley in Africa. By taking contemporary genetic theory about heritable genetic variation seriously, the need to address experiences as particular and embodied becomes not only possible but also necessary. It then becomes feasible to address the idea of acute religious experiences (Chapter 10) as a means of recognizing that non-pathological experiences of extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme states of consciousness have often been established as having a non-pathological status by virtue of being framed as religious. Acute religious experiences, as a conceptual distinction of the acute from the generality of religious experiences, makes possible the reorganization of the data of

Introduction

5

religious experiences – on the basis of their excess. It is my proposal that this conceptual differentiation provides a way to move beyond the fractured nonpathological discourse sketched in Part I by suggesting a broader recognition of the significance of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme as a means of differentiation, rather than a nameable ‘type’ which is subject to the risk of reification (see later). In Part III, I apply the idea of acute religious experiences as an interpretive strategy to show how such experiences, as disproportionately significant events, modify historical-critical approaches which may have traditionally undervalued experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme.8 My case study is Jesus. By focusing on the two acute religious experiences of the baptism and the transfiguration, I show how the evidence presented in the Gospel of Mark can be re-read by considering these two experiences as pivotal and focusing on what happened as a direct result. While the nature of Mark’s account as second-hand is not contentious in contemporary biblical studies, the question of why it can be assumed that any of those close to Jesus ‘understood’ his state of mind is not asked or answered often enough. By proposing that immediate experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme have disproportionate significance (Chapter 9), focusing on the baptism and the transfiguration makes it possible to break out of accounts where one thing simply follows another. Without arguing that acute religious experiences necessarily or inevitably result in fissures, discontinuities or strategic reorientation, I suggest that in Jesus’s life they did, and must be given appropriate (disproportionate) weighting in contemporary biblical scholarship. By proposing a distinction between the generality of religious experiences and the rarity of acute religious experiences and by grounding this distinction in genetic variation on a trans-historical and trans-cultural basis, the perennial philosophy is turned upside down by giving contextualist arguments a common ground of species-wide biological embodiment which manifests particularly. By focusing on the idea of acute religious experiences as a means of differentiation within the category of religious experiences, the academic discourse on religious experience can be re-orientated. Existing discourses on mysticism, shamanism and spirit possession can be recognized as sharing an interest in consciousness which can also be traced in the phenomenal accounts of visions, voices and possessions in for example, christian, muslim and hindu scriptures. By introducing the idea of acute religious experiences as a form of words, as a not necessarily pathological approach to naming what psychiatrists call psychosis or dissociation (Chapter 8), the risk is that I’m understood to be offering solid ground from which to navigate the swamp of language in its uneasy relation

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to experience. This is far from my intention, and I am content to deconstruct my own project in advance in order to avoid its being attributed the kind of reification which has turned, for example, schizophrenia into a ‘thing’ rather than a naming of a symptomatology which psychiatrists find useful (Chapter 8). I am well versed in the problems which the terms ‘religion’ or ‘religious’ face (Chapter 10), but writing still requires recourse to words in the attempt to communicate, even if meanings remain unstable. One outcome of the fractured discourse in Part I is the way it neatly illustrates the risks of reification. By championing particular terms, theoreticians regularly privilege their linguistic formulations, their theoretical constructs, over the experiences they refer to; for example, Otto, Eliade and Stace use accounts of the embodied experiences of particular people to construct theoretical abstractions which can then be cut free from these individuals. My readings explicitly demonstrate the limits of authorial control which is repeatedly evidenced by the way proposed terms were subsequently used, abused or ignored; for example, the secondary literature on James’s pathological programme is thin, while Otto’s numinous is de-theologized and repurposed by Jung, among others. By proposing the distinction of acute religious experiences, I am explicitly advancing an anti-essentializing form of words which explicitly incorporates diversity, religiosity, extremity, ambivalence and the problems of determination as features which are integral to their identification (Chapter 10). I propose a determinable distinction rather than a determinate category and apply placeholder terminology as an intentional strategy to subvert in advance the risk of acute religious experiences becoming a reified concept – a thing in itself. As an idea, ‘acute religious experiences’ is presented as a useful way of thinking about the data of religious experience in the human story. As a second order construct its contribution to the advancement of religious studies, whether as socially engaged or as an approach to understanding particular modes of consciousness, will depend on the degree to which, having tried it on for size, you find the idea of ‘acute religious experiences’ provides utility.

Part I

Theoreticians of a not necessarily pathological discourse

8

1

William James’s Pathological Programme

William James is read as the first exponent of the not necessarily pathological interpretation of experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. His 1901/2 Gifford lectures and the resultant book, The Varieties of Religious Experience remain highly influential. Ann Taves cites William James as ‘usually given credit for constituting the term “religious experience” as a technical term in the study of religion’, in her entry on ‘Religious Experience’ in the Encyclopedia of Religion (2005: 7741). I follow her lead as the idea of acute religious experiences explored in this book is necessarily dependent on the discourse of religious experience. James didn’t ‘invent’ the idea, or the practice, of religious experience and I could readily have gone back further into, for example, the works of Schleiermacher, but James provides a convenient point of origin in the exploration of the relationship between madness, psychiatry and religious experience. The title, The Varieties of Religious Experience, can be read as suggesting that James is presenting a catalogue, but his title is deceptive. Unlike psychiatric classificatory systems (Chapter 8), James has no interest in explicating a nosology of religious experience as an exercise in theory supported by empirical research. The wealth of evidence he gathered is organized for a different purpose, to build a standpoint from which he could persuade his Edinburgh audience of his own philosophical outlook. If initial attention is shifted from the start of the book to the end of the book, the ‘More’ begins to look like an ineluctable destination reached through a determined progressive agenda. By dint of his empirical method James reels his audience in, through Healthy Mindedness, the Sick Soul, Divided Self, Conversion, Saintliness, Mysticism and Philosophy, and into his moderate and reasonable psychology of transcendence. ‘Whatever it may be on its farther side, the “More” with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life’ (James [1902] 1985: 512). The Varieties of Religious Experience is better

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understood in the light of its subtitle A Study in Human Nature. Rather than being a classification of religious experiences, it is an a-historical adventure by James into his own human nature and his apperception of the transmarginal of consciousness. This view qualifies the assumption that The Varieties of Religious Experience is about religious experience per se. It is fairly obvious that James’s conclusion represents his own position – because he says so. What is less obvious is the extent to which the whole text is driven towards the validation of his own position. As, according to Martin Marty’s introduction to the 1985 edition, the book was ready for publication before the second set of lectures, his selfrevealing conclusion is not an add-on, even if the postscript is. Evidence of his intentions can be found in James’s framing passages. In the preface, James writes: To some readers I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the end, I believe that this unfavourable impression will disappear; for I there combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will. (James [1902] 1985: xxxvi)

And, at the start of ‘Saintliness’, he commences the second round of lectures with these contextualizing remarks: With this question (the fruits for life of conversion) the really important part of our task opens, for you remember that we began all this empirical inquiry not merely to open a curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness, but rather to attain a spiritual judgment as to the total value and positive meaning of all the religious trouble and happiness which we have seen. (James [1902] 1985: 259)

In these framings, James demonstrates the intentionality which drives his book. The ‘curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness’ does not serve as a caricature, but as a launch pad. In reading James as an ideologue (the irony that pragmatism might be presented ideologically can be sustained), it becomes possible to revisit the start of the text. William James was a psychologist in a time when such disciplinary labels and distinctions were less well formed than today, when the psychology department where he taught, was spun out of the philosophy department at Harvard University. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James gives an early account of a ‘science of religion’, a term he uses fourteen times, as he paraded the empirical evidence of his case studies before his Edinburgh

William James’s Pathological Programme

11

audience. While his sample selection is far from random, his method (James [1902] 1985: 4) is philosophically informed and involves a two-part process. The first part requires an empirical description. The second part, a process of judgement, which James sometimes refers to as a spiritual judgement,1 involves a consideration of (metaphorical) fruits, the value of which he is the judge. As a consequence of this method, James does not resist the medical materialists, like Binet-Sanglé,2 who point to naturalistic causes for religious experiences – Saint Paul was an epileptic, Saint Teresa a hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi a hereditary degenerate, and George Fox had a disordered colon (James [1902] 1985: 15). In James’s method, these existential accounts form step one of his method – which then proceeds to be recontextualized by his spiritual judgement, on the basis of their fruits, in the second part of his method. This explanatory pluralism avoids conflictual approaches to binary interpretations by taking the stress out of them, by rejecting an either/or interpretation. The validity of the medical materialists’ position is conceded, but their reductionism does not cancel the value of the individual’s consciousness, their religious experience, their subsequent actions. This approach explains why James is unfazed by the presence of the pathological and the psychopathic in religious experiences as, according to his method, these are not determinative of value. James explicitly acknowledges that he has a ‘pathological programme’ (James [1902] 1985: 21) and this simmers throughout The Varieties of Religious Experience, surfacing periodically. The ostensible justification of his pathological programme, which he elaborates in some detail, is that ‘it always leads to a better understanding of a thing’s significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere’ (James [1902] 1985: 22 also c.f. 40, 132, 382). This approach comes apart in the second lecture on mysticism where he confronts the relationship between insanity and mysticism. Here he is dealing with (apparently) two phenomena which are both at the extreme. Out here, James identifies religious mysticism as ‘only one half of mysticism’ (James [1902] 1985: 426). He continues, ‘The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity supply’ (James [1902] 1985: 426). James explains: ‘classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter: “seraph and snake” abide there side by side’ (James [1902] 1985: 426). This reading is problematic on three counts. The first is quantitative, the idea that mysticism and ‘the other half of mysticism’ divide evenly as halves. I  made enquiries of

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McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital related to Harvard University. While James presents ‘214 narratives of religious experience’ (Carrette 2005: 86) of which only a fraction are the accounts of mystics (or accounts about mysticism), in 1902 McLean Hospital had accommodation for 180 people who were ‘sanctioned by the textbooks of psychiatry’ at any one time. In factual terms, the subjects of the textbooks of psychiatry numerically overwhelm the number of the mystics. James’s division into two halves is simply wrong and this point is not pedantic because the capacity to overstate the number of the mystics is a matter which will resurface, repeatedly. The second problem is James’s claim that the other half of mysticism had no accumulated traditions. This can be taken as suggesting that the voices of the mad have been ignored; it can be read in terms of Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemological injustice (see 2007) or Foucault’s accusation of psychiatry’s monologue of deafness ([1961] 2006), but from a twenty-first-century perspective James’s view must be understood contextually. The psychiatric textbooks which had no interest in the content of madness were part of a wider library of absence at a time when dementia praecox was yet to be rebranded as schizophrenia (Chapter 8). The accumulated traditions of the west had only recently given any applied consideration to the traditions of women, people of colour, the working class or the implication of classifying indigenous people as primitives across the colonial world, and recognition of LGBTQ+ was far away in the future. However, when the twentieth-century-roll call of McLean Hospital is found to include Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and John Nash, these names introduce a degree of personal recognition which challenges the voiceless and faceless ‘subject’ of James’s time. The psychiatric textbooks may have ignored the mad as people, but even in James’s day the residents of McLean Hospital were real people and included James’s brother Robertson (Capps 2008). The third difficulty is that positing a higher form of mysticism and a lower form of mysticism which spring from the same region of the mind may be reconciled with a philosophy which pragmatically focuses on ‘fruits’; but essentializing them as ‘seraph and snake’ involves an appeal to the roots by making them different species. James’s resort to the categories of classic mystic and the insane as a difference in species discounts in advance the psychological and sociological construction of religious experiences as a form of madness. There is no way of saying whether Lowell, Plath, Nash might, in earlier times, have found their madness constructed in classic mystical terms. For example, Kay Redfield Jamieson’s 2017 biography of Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, provides a clear account of Lowell’s religious ‘delusions’ which, in another age, may have been treated as mystical. The converse of this argument is that the

William James’s Pathological Programme

13

mystics whom James documents might, in contemporary circumstances, have been locked up in their local equivalent of McLean Hospital.3 In the metaphor of the seraph and the snake, James makes an awkward case for mysticism as being essentially different from insanity, the mystic seraph from the mad snake, in spite of proposing these populations form the two halves of a greater population of mysticism. This is inconsistent with his pathological programme which makes the difference wholly interpretive. His argument that description and judgement are distinct phases in his method is explicitly restated in the context of mysticism: To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life. (James [1902] 1985: 413)

In this citation there is no obstacle to the idea that mysticism is a ‘successful’ form of insanity. Indeed, this idea makes more sense of the ecstatic data, and it is consistent with the story James presents of the common origin of these states in the mind. By creating a fissure between the states of consciousness of the mystic and the insane, while accepting the pathology of both, James denies himself the possibility that some of the insane are complicit in the construction of their insanity into outcomes which bear fruit. To say that mystics are no less pathological than the mad but then avoid the conclusion that they are the mad – who bear good fruit – is an argument which is discordant with his method. Fortunately, James’s intellectual integrity obliges him to subvert his own categories in advance by conceding their rhetorical nature. James observes, immediately prior to the passage about the textbooks of insanity (James [1902] 1985: 426): ‘The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a “privileged case.” It is an extract kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in “schools.” It is carved out from a much larger mass’ (James [1902] 1985: 425, sic, emphasis in the original). In this passage, classic religious mysticism is revealed as a second order category constructed not by James but by his substantial reliance on the traditional western discourse on mysticism. The subsequent argument about the relation of madness and mysticism can be put in a fresh perspective by suggesting that the problem belongs to the deficiencies of the textbooks of psychiatry but also the excesses

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of the textbooks of religions. The (often hagiographic) accounts perpetuated by religions protect their mystic subjects from a psychopathic interpretation of their words and deeds – as well they might in a grand act of confirmation bias. Mystics are not mad because if they were mad, that would hurt the mystic brand. By adopting the idea of the privileged case of mysticism, especially qualified by the adjectives ‘classic’ and ‘religious’, James separates the mystic from the insane – against his own argument – rather than qualifying a few of the existentially insane as mystics. The mystics are a typology, or typologies, which become distanced from their underlying mad phenomenality – visions, voices, possessions – in the textbooks of religions. Where, in chapter 1, James suggested that ‘the psychopathic origin of so many religious phenomena would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting’ (James [1902] 1985: 24), his essentialized distinction between mystic seraphs and insane snakes is, in fact, a reversal of his position. As will be seen, James was not intimidated by his audience; he goes on to present ‘the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious biography’ (James [1902] 1985: 478), so why stumble over the relationship between the psychopathic in textbooks of religion and the psychopathic in the textbooks of psychiatry as if there were no common subjects? I suggest that at least part of the problem arises from James’s embrace of the metaphor of the mystical ladder. The metaphor of a mystical ladder, proposed in the first lecture on mysticism (lecture XVI), is populated with case studies which illustrate the mystical rungs: ‘realization’, ‘dreamy states’, ‘trance’, ‘intoxication’, ‘mystic moments’, ‘cosmic consciousness’ and ‘mystic states’. By marshalling his case studies according to the internal logic of his metaphor, James equates higher with better.4 This privileging of ‘upness’ is endemic to the historiography of mysticism and represents a muddling of the qualia of the state of consciousness with the attribution of value, the experience and the interpretation. I suggest this model confounds James’s methodological presupposition that existential descriptions are separable from qualitative judgements. The mystical ladder incorporates a (Jamesian) spiritual judgement into the very structure of the metaphor. The difficulties in this metaphor are not limited to considering how one rung is differentiated from another – are ‘mystic moments’ adequately differentiable from ‘cosmic consciousness’? The challenge is that the metaphor itself is dependent on the extrinsic nature of the classificatory judgement which is, in turn, dependent on the quality of evidence and the interpretive perspective/bias of the judge. Again, James knows this and warns ‘how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon’s connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the context by which we

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set it off ’ (James [1902] 1985: 384). This recognition of the role of the observer is perfectly stated and its difficulty perfectly illustrated by the fact that Martin Luther’s noetic experience, triggered by a recital of the creed and the words ‘the forgiveness of sins’ is described by James as the ‘simplest rudiment of mystical experience’ (James [1902] 1985: 382) and placed three steps below intoxication. Similarly, the category of intoxication is itself anomalous, not only because it includes an assessment of the general role of alcohol in (western) culture and the radically different effects of nitrous oxide but also because the role of drugs is causative, which contrasts with all of the other steps on the ladder. By conflating states of consciousness and value judgement, the mystical ladder metaphor is inconsistent with James’s method. An alternative contemporary metaphor is the normal distribution curve with extremes to the left and right. I suggest that James’s data of mystical states can be plotted and all of it will appear in the right-hand extreme of the curve (Figures 1.1 & 1.2).5 Such an approach satisfies two needs. First, it subverts the implication of the ladder metaphor, that a person can pass from one rung to the next in an ascending sequence – taking intoxicants is not a precursor to being a mystic and there is no presumption that being a mystic required climbing each step of the ladder. The figure of a normal distribution curve dispenses with the discrete steps of the ladder altogether, replacing them with a second order continuum in which data is plotted by the observer and any categorical classifications are also created by the observer. I have plotted James’s categories for the sake of the illustration, in spite of not accepting their adequacy, in Figure 1.2. In the conventional application of a normal distribution curve, the measure is not one of contiguous categories of data (derived by the observer), but of the experience of individuals measured as standard deviations from the normal, a

Normal

Figure 1.1  A normal distribution curve.

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Realisation

Dreamy States

Trance Intoxicants

Mystic Moments

Cosmic Consciousnes

Mystic States

Figure 1.2  The mystical ladder as a normal distribution curve.

constructed statistical concept which is, by definition, wholly relative. Out at the extreme, the substance of the relationship with normal states of consciousness becomes fuzzy due to both the lack of data6 and the quality of the data, which consists of anecdotal narrative experiences which are always time specific and therefore, as James identifies, transient. In a longitudinal study the mystical becomes a moving target which is negotiated culturally, rather than a structured progression of phenomenal states. Second, by metaphorically tipping James’s metaphorical ‘ladder’ onto its side and transferring the information of mystical consciousness to the right hand of a normal distribution curve, James’s thought experiment can be placed under further scrutiny to explore the disjunct with his method. Is it possible to separate out experience from interpretation as neatly as he supposes? The evidence of his treatment of insanity and mysticism suggests not. James’s method requires that a phenomenon can be described prior to being judged (James [1902] 1985: 4), but I assert that the process of description involves the presuppositions of the describer – whoever this is – insider or outsider, first person or third. James summarizes the ‘general traits of the mystic range of consciousness (as) on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called otherworldly states of mind’ (James [1902] 1985: 422). Is this a spiritual judgement or an existential judgement or a combination of the two? As the evidence of being a mystic is largely drawn from the western discourse of mysticism, the mystics appear as already given. The phenomenality of their experiences can be described as pathological (as James frequently does), but the value judgement

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is already in place, prior to James’s engagement. There is a circularity in this process, which is not disclosed by James’s method. These are critical issues which can easily escape the secondary literature, perhaps overwhelmed by the richness of the text and the focus on the ‘privileged case’ rather than the generality of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme states of consciousness in the whole of mysticism (in Jamesian terms – both halves). James’s methodological strategy is challenged by the organizing necessities and principles which he applies to his data. While this may be unavoidable as writing requires order, it becomes a matter of contention in relation to his pathological programme. While Robert Lowell subsequently languished in McLean Hospital, his ‘fruit’ looked in poor shape, bashed and bruised, compared to a retrospective consideration of his oeuvre as a whole. James’s method requires his spiritual judgements to be based on an assessment of the quality of a person’s ‘fruit’,7 but his account is dependent on the inclusion of moments of particular experiences. The method contains within it a contradiction, a sample bias in which the account of the fruit determines which existential accounts are included in his account of mysticism. James is perfectly clear that to the medical mind the psychological types of mystics are mad: To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life. (James [1902] 1985: 413)

The issue is no longer the relationship of the mystic to the normal, it is the relationship of the fruits for life of the mystic and the apparent lack of fruits of the mad which, given their common origins (James [1902] 1985: 426), demands attention be paid to the question of cultivation. As the mystics are only a few compared to the mad, the lessons to be learned are not for the normals, but for if, or how, madness can become more fruitful. James’s pathological programme re-emerges and culminates in the final section of Lecture 19. This is uninspiringly titled ‘Other Characteristics’ even though it has some of the strongest pathological material. It commences with a reprise of his chapter 1 argument about ‘the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious biography’ (James [1902] 1985: 478). James then argues: ‘The whole

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array of christian saints and heresiarchs (founders of heresies) including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and “openings.” They had these things, because they had exalted sensibility’ (James [1902] 1985: 478). This is not the case. ‘These things’, visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions and openings, with or without inverted commas, do not arise because of exalted sensibility, they are the phenomenality of madness as will be shown in my reading of the DSM-5 (Chapter 8). Causally relating ‘exalted’ to the symptoms of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is already the introduction of a value judgement. James’s categorical reluctance to address the relationship of mystic and madness head-on is the result of a value judgement which allows the insane to be simply disregarded as ‘other’. The hermeneutical struggle for dominance, in the world of the extreme, between the languages of religion and psychiatry and their respective interpretations of phenomenality (as experiences of exalted sensibility or madness) was a burning issue in 1902. That James acknowledges the madness of saints and heresiarchs is provocative, but his resolution that things are exalted as things have been exalted in the textbooks of religions will subsequently leave Robert Lowell languishing in McLean Hospital, his oeuvre unacceptable to the gatekeepers of mysticism (on whom James relies) and inadmissible to the textbooks of psychiatry, until the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamieson took the time to reframe his stream of consciousness as a river of fire. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James brilliantly breaks open the analysis of religious experience from a psychological, rather than a theological, perspective. Dispensing with religious dogma, he reconnects with individual accounts of encounters with higher powers, which turn out to be of the same quality as the higher parts of man accessed through the subliminal and transmarginal consciousness.8 Although his contribution of the ‘More’ is not an example of his great phrase making and has not made a significant impact on the discourse, The Varieties of Religious Experience is still a seminal text. I have set out my critique of his pathological programme, but there are two additional levels of critique which arise by considering his work from a holistic biopsychosocial point of view. By privileging a psychological approach, his attentiveness to the biological aspect is focused on neutralizing the reductionism of the medical materialism rather than addressing the role of the biological and social in religious experience. Consider his account of the perennial nature of mysticism: This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the

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Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages, and they do not grow old. (James [1902] 1985: 419)

This citation suggestively underscores the cross-cultural and trans-historical nature of James’s conception of mysticism as a perennial psychological phenomenon. It does not address the supplementary biological and sociological interpretations. As I will show in Chapter 9, the contemporary evidence for the causal impact of genetic variation in madness, as a pervasive experience among a minority of homo sapiens, is a sustainable alternative explanation. Similarly, the good fruit of mysticism arrives as if through some apparently ineluctable and largely invisible process, as does the bad fruit. St Paul’s epilepsy (the retrospective diagnosis given by the medical materialists) is significant to Paul’s religious state, but what distinguishes Paul’s particular experience from that of others with the same epileptic condition is left unexplored. Similarly, the role of religious orders, the church and the prevailing cultural expectations and their linguistic contributions to cultivating (or constructing) the religious experiences of the Bernards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes and the Wesleys is left as unexplored background. This may be a function of James’s approach to individual experiences, central to James’s definition of religion or just the emerging focus on the individual in psychology prevalent at the start of the twentieth century, but the absence of biological and sociological approaches to religious experiences in a twenty-first-century consideration of The Varieties of Religious Experience points to the limits of his psychological approach and any approach which restricts itself to psychology. It is possible to argue that it is James who encourages such a psychologistic approach to religious experience – he was a pioneering psychologist. James’s individualistic approach to religious experience is not in doubt, but this should not be confused with the idea of spirituality without religion. Such a reading of James confuses personal religious experience with institutional religion. James is perfectly clear. He expressly states that he is addressing religious experience ‘narrowly’, as a ‘fraction of the subject . . . taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for the purpose of these lectures’ (James [1902] 1985: 28, emphasis added). James carefully and explicitly acknowledges the ‘great partition

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which divides the religious field. On one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal religion’ (James [1902] 1985). For James, institutional religion included ‘Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organisations’ (James [1902] 1985: 29). When James says, ‘I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely’ (James [1902] 1985), he is not abolishing the institutional nature of religion, but he is simply circumscribing his topic. The approach of many, including Walter Clark (1968) to the abolition of the presupposition of church and religious institution, theology and ceremony may be read as an early example, which will be repeated often across the readings of Part I, of the evidence of the loss of authorial control. By abolishing the ‘presupposition of church and religious institution’, Clark himself contributes to the new institution of de-institutionalized religion, an echo chamber in which the power of institutionalized religion can now be subverted by an appeal to the innate religiousness of humans – to their religious experience – which is (allegedly) free from the perversion and control of powerful elites. Clark’s contribution in 1968 is cited here by way of illustration not because his words, as part of a careful defence of psychedelics and the rule of secular law in the United States, had any totemic significance at the time, but, retrospectively, they can be seen as a reflection of his cultural milieu. In this emerging anti-institutional milieu, in which personal experience can be detached from institutionalized religion, fresh vocabularies to describe and understand were sought and succour was found in the non-specificity of spirituality and (for some) an aspiration for mystical experiences without religion. The shift between religious experience and spiritual experience, with mystical experiences as the ultimate expression, was not a new choice of synonyms, a rebranding exercise, it was an overthrow of the dead hand of institutional religion at the dawning of a new age which required no knowledge of religious texts and institutions or even philosophical texts like Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) to understand that in the ‘timelessness’ induced by psychedelics there was an excess of ‘being’ which could be experienced immediately, without words getting in the way. The search for new ways of talking about experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme and the new belief that such experiences are available to all – and here the rhetoric of freedom and democracy shine brightly – is a theme which is richly entangled within the discourse I set out over Part I, perhaps not so much with Otto and Oesterreich, but by the time we reach Pahnke and Maslow, such ideas leave the shadows behind. That they are grounded in a peculiar and imprecise reading of James is a first example of the lack of authorial control of our theorists of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme.

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The further consideration relates, not to popular readings, but to the secondary literature which has grown up around The Varieties of Religious Experience. This broadly refuses to accept James’s interest in the relationship between madness and religious experience. The text which pays the most attention is Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (1999). There Ann Taves cites Anton Boisen’s 1938 paper ‘The Present State of William James’s Psychology of Religion’ and explains: He accurately noted that (of) James’s ‘younger associates (in psychology) in this (20th) century . . . all were critical of his interest in the pathological and his tenderness for the mystical.’ By adopting a stage-theory of evolution, in which they identified automatisms with the mental instability of primitives, the younger generation of psychologists of religion beat a hasty retreat from the ‘religious psychopath’ who played such a prominent role in the Varieties. (Taves 1999: 306)

This is a telling analysis which also haunts the work of the subsequent authors in Part I of this book. The racism in the social sciences in the early twentieth century is exactly paralleled by the treatment of the mad, which required their sanitization, and justified the supremacy of the ‘higher races’ and the sane over the primitive and the insane. In this one text Taves brings together the mad and the primitive as the Othered subjects of a white colonializing theory which justified its own privileged position by recourse to evolutionary theory. By whitewashing psychopathology out of religious experiences (a move explored further in Part II of this book), the logical ambivalence and methodological ambiguity which I identify in James’s work is superseded. Taves proposes that Boisen’s concept of psychopathology differs from James’s, but her own use of ‘religious psychopath’, a phrase which James never uses, is questionable as, even in 1999, it summons connotations which are alien to James’s approach by making ‘religious’ an adjective rather than a resolution of psychopathy. Taves’s argument explains away the madness of mystics in semantic rather than phenomenal terms. In a footnote James writes: I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as ‘levitation,’ stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented), have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they often do, in persons of non-mystical mind. Consciousness of illumination is for us the essential mark of ‘mystical’ states. (James [1902] 1985: 408)

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While this represents a departure or a supplement to his four marks of mysticism, its status as a footnote undermines the idea that James had reached a satisfactory solution. Given that the mad who are not mystics are routinely persuaded of the validity of their own ‘illumination’, James’s fix is flawed and points to a need for further research in the light of subsequent developments over the next 120 years.

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Rudolf Otto’s Numinous

Rudolf Otto published Das Heilige in 1917, the same year he was appointed professor and chair of theology at the Protestant University of Marburg. That Das Heilige was translated into English in 1923, not as The Holy but as The Idea of the Holy is an oddity. Otto’s friend and translator John Harvey gives no indication as to why ‘idea of ’ was inserted between the definitive article and the subject. It introduces an additional layer of conceptual distance – think of Das Kapital as The Idea of Capital or Sein und Zeit translated as The Idea of Being and Time.1 Given the inherent rationalizing demands of the word ‘idea’, it represents a curious interpolation in a book about the irrational – which Harvey, in turn, translates as non-rational to mitigate the prejudicial connotations of irrationality in the English language (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: xvii–xviii). Otto’s theological commitment makes him an awkward figure for religious studies, taken as a humanistic discipline, but his psychological approach to religious experience and, as I will argue, his commitment to the possibility of the experience of the numinous as extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, assure Otto’s role in this reading of the antecedent contributors to the ‘idea’ of acute religious experiences. Gregory Alles suggests, ‘Otto’s apologetics of religion contributed to a critique of modernity from within a theological modernity’ (Alles 2001: 337). Otto was certainly a modern. He embraced the language of ‘psychology’, ‘consciousness’, ‘affect’, ‘evolution’, ‘cognition’, ‘moment’, ‘schematization’, ‘ontology’ and the ‘wholly other’. But Otto locates the antecedents of his work much earlier than the enlightenment and modernity. For Otto the problem is not the alienated dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural (the objective reality of god is taken a priori); the issue is located in the dominant role of reason imposed by the western church’s adoption of Aristotelian rationalism in favour of Plato’s more ambiguous approach to the divine. the mysterious is much less in evidence in the official systems of doctrine, whether Catholic or Protestant. Particularly since the time when the great

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mediaeval scholastics (the theologi moderni, so called) replaced Plato by Aristotle and welded the latter and his method on to the doctrines of the Church, Catholic orthodoxy has been subjected to a strong rationalizing influence, to which, however, actual living religious practice and feeling never conformed or corresponded. The battle here joined between so-called Platonism and Aristotelianism, and in general the long persistent protest against the scholastics, is itself in large part nothing but the struggle between the rational and the nonrational elements in the Christian religion. (Otto: [1917] [1923] 1958: 94)

Das Heilige’s critique of modernist theology provided relief from the collusion of theologians in modernist thinking. Where Albert Schweitzer recovered the apocalyptic Jesus from liberal interpretations (Schweitzer [1906] 2000), Otto recovered the direct a-linguistic experience of god, baptizing it with the neologism ‘numinous’, introducing a new term into the lexicon of religious experience. That Das Heilige went through multiple reprints, was translated into many languages and the numinous found its way into the vocabulary of Wach, Jung and Eliade (in ways Otto would have protested) is the evidence which demonstrates that the ‘numinous’ scratched an itch which others felt. In comparison, the ‘More’ of James languished, lacking the distinction of a memorable signifier (Chapter 1). In Figure 2.1 the Google NGram chart shows the ascendency of the ‘numinous’, marred only by the Second World War. By writing about the numinous from a psychology of religions perspective as feeling/emotion/affect, as non-rational, as irrational, Otto is not setting up a numinous

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

Figure 2.1  Otto’s numinous, courtesy Google Ngram.

2000

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dichotomy between reason and unreason; he is recovering what was squeezed out of man’s account of religious experience by reason. Rationality is not dismissed, it is simply found to be inadequate, partial, an incomplete means of recounting the human story. Otto is adamant about the value of the rational, but in The Idea of the Holy he is correcting the record, rebalancing the church’s focus on the intellectual, delimiting the ology of theology, disarming language from the conceit that it represents more than a second-hand, second order account (even in first person testimony). On its own, rationality is an inadequate means of re-presenting religious experience. Through reasoned language, Otto is intent on restating and reinstating first order affective experience, distinguished from the second order discourse about experience even though he is fully cognizant of the inherent problematic. While Otto ‘jokes’ about the loquaciousness of mystics on the subject of the ineffable, Das Heilige may be seen as just such a paradoxical assault on the unspeakable,2 pointing to religious experiences which can be communicated only through the artifices of symbols, analogies, metaphors and Otto’s penchant for ideograms,3 of which the numinous is the pre-eminent instance and which Das Heilige will expound. That Otto did not have the benefit of the post-structuralist discussion of the role and limits of language, due to his historical context, reading Das Heilige with this in mind is illuminating. For Otto, the numinous is a specific state of consciousness, the experience of an object, but what is the name of this object? Otto is happy with the terminology of the ‘wholly other’, but he is less willing to simply translate the object of the numen by the name of god. He has good reasons not to. First, because his universal perspective, grounded in the prevailing stage theory of evolution, requires the numinous as an emergent possibility which remains inchoate in ‘primitive man’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 26), for whom the knowledge of the highest form (in Otto’s thinking), the christian godhead, would be presumptive. Second, Otto hesitates to equate the numen with god because, being well aware of the paradox of writing, he knows by doing so he would compromise the mysterious nature of the experience of the mystery. The problem is analogous to the unspokenness of the tetragrammaton in judaism and the unrepresented form of allah in islam. If the object, the numen, is revealed as god the lights are turned on and (your) idea of god (whatever that may be) displaces the mystery through the influx of (your) prior understanding. The ineffable moment, the overplus of the holy, the paradox of the unnamed something, subjectively experienced, now objectively named as the numinous with its object the numen, this irrational presence responding to the wholly other, beyond ethics and morality, must remain a mystery to prevent

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it being diluted by incorporation into everyday language. This is the problem. Language can evoke but cannot invoke experience: It may serve to make the essential nature of the numinous consciousness clearer if we call to mind the manner in which it expresses itself outwardly, and how it spreads and is transmitted from mind to mind. There is, of course, no ‘transmission’ of it in the proper sense of the word; it cannot be taught, it must be awakened from the spirit. And this could not justly be asserted, as it often is, of religion as a whole and in general, for in religion there is very much that can be taught that is, handed down in concepts and passed on in school instruction. What is incapable of being so handed down is this numinous basis and background to religion, which can only be induced, incited, and aroused. (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 60)

By proposing the numinous as the ideogram of the irrational overplus of the holy, Otto proceeds, with all the loquaciousness of the mystics, to introduce an expansive vocabulary. Within the secondary literature, the discourse on Otto’s neologism ‘the numinous’, it is common to find the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans (for example, Smart 1986: 188; Wulff 1991: 19; Kripal 2010: 9; Miranda 2018: 114; Partridge 2018: 203, 243; Leeming 2020: 225, 468; even Underhill [1911] 1930: 319).4,5 This is not a formulation which appears in the English translation of The Idea of the Holy, nor in the original German Das Heilige. The neatness of the formulation radically under-represents the number of terms Otto deploys in his account of the numinous consciousness. In chapter 18, towards the end rather than the beginning of his book, Otto offers the following: ‘We notice here how the elements of the numinous we discovered plainly recur: the wholly non-rational, incomprehensible by concepts, the elements of mystery, fascination, awefulness, and energy’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 151). This is still an incomplete inventory: the adjective ‘tremendum’ is missing as are other terms like ‘shuddering’6 and ‘the wholly other’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 27) along with the distinction between natural consciousness and the numinous consciousness, which is explicitly stated to not be a mere matter of degree (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 27).7 However one decides to address the proliferation of language: for Otto the numinous is a state of consciousness which exceeds the natural use of words like ‘tremendous’ or ‘awesome’ or ‘fascinating’ as they might normally be applied to the experience of a beautiful sunset (suggested here as a metonym for the whole gamut of ‘normal’ ‘spiritual’ ‘experiences’).8 It does not matter that Otto refers to an atmosphere that clings to old churches (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 12); these fixed and ordered solemnities are introduced only

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as a possible trigger for the ‘bewildering strength of sudden ebullitions’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 12). It is the contrast between the mundane trigger and the overwhelming nature of the experience of the mysterium tremendum which Otto’s grand language conveys. And it is this line of explanation which places the numinous as a way of speaking about experiences of extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme states of consciousness. It would be an unorthodox analysis which suggested that Otto’s numinous extended into the territory of mad consciousness articulated in religious terms. And it would certainly be one which Otto’s theological presuppositions debarred (see below). But I suggest this may be a more fruitful direction of discussion than simply discounting Otto’s contribution to religious studies on the grounds that his psychology of religion is too theologically predicated, or because experience of irrational affect is insufficiently accessible to the scientific method. I suggest it is possible to read around the religious boundaries which Otto erects by his claim of the numinous as sui generis. If this sui generis status is read as Otto’s attempt to defend the numinous from a psychiatric, or in this case, a mad reading, his defence becomes open to critique. Such a critique can be pursued through two distinct lines of approach. The need for such approaches can be brought to mind by remembering that the phenomenality of visions, voices, delusions, possessions are pathological in psychiatry but not necessarily pathological in the history of religions. It is the need to address this fact which I now use to test the idea of the numinous. First, although Otto’s approach can be found objectionable, as a matter of principle, due to his sui generis theological claims (that the numinous is inherently interrelated to the objectively divine), his argument can also be contested by a close reading of his text. Otto presents his numinous neologism as ‘“the Holy” minus its moral factor and minus its rational aspect altogether’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 6). This formal a-morality comes under pressure when considering practical immorality. For example, the mysterium tremendum may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures. (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 12–13)

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In this citation there may be a challenge, there may also be demonic forms, but in The Idea of the Holy the demonic is an evolutionary antecedent in a transition towards god the highest realisation of a christian god towards a ‘true line of progress’, (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 72). Otto’s commitment to a racist stage theory of human evolution should not distract from his non-engagement with a wider discussion of numinous consciousness in a non-holy context (for example) in relation to evil. It is tempting to assume that the holy context renders the numinous holy, but that predetermines the numinous as moral, in contradiction to his formal position, and such a temptation does not adhere to what Otto actually says. In a footnote to a discussion of Jakob Böhme, Otto suggests, ‘It might be said that Lucifer is fury hypostatized, the mysterium tremendum cut loose from the other elements and intensified to mysterium horrendum. . . . It is a horror that is in some sort numinous, and we might designate the object of it as the negatively numinous’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 106–7). Without exegeting the full implications of this passage (e.g. what it means to cut loose the numinous), it is possible to note that Otto allows that there can be a negative numinous. If there can be a negative numinous, this anti-numinous breaks the relationship with the object and the rational elements of holiness. If there can be a positive and a negative numinous, how many other objects can there be? Otto’s words shoogle the concept, uneasily. Unfortunately, by relating the numinous to a ‘true line of progress’ and suggesting the negatively numinous ‘should be subject of a special inquiry’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 107), that is, deferred as a topic for consideration, Otto pre-empts this line of inquiry. Otto will acknowledge but not discuss the numinous in its negative, or any other, mode. Instead, Otto’s numinous is morally conditioned by association with a concept of divinity which is morally constructed. Because the objective numen is moral, the subjective state of numinous consciousness is moral.9 Either way, the numinous as the morally negative (as opposed to existentially challenging) is excluded on grounds which are never adequately explored.10 The possibility of a non-divine numinous may be seen as an internal contradiction, a fracture, in Otto’s construct. A way of re-grounding this point, which has been derived from Otto’s text, is to reframe it in the idea of possession, but this time not as a primitive evolutionary precursor, but as a subjective state of consciousness of an unspecified numen. To construct this argument without being bound by traditional dichotomies of good and evil, black and white, positive and negative and so forth is difficult but not impossible. In a world where the objective numen is neither necessarily demonic nor divine, it might then be possible to think of it as atheistic, breaking out of Otto’s necessarily religious framing. The claim that

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the numinous is ‘ethically neutral’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 6) may be formally correct, but the religious (and therefore morally positive) connotations of the numinous are predetermined by Otto who acts as cheerleader rather than critic by excluding any alternative interpretations of numinous consciousness. The second, very different approach to considering Otto’s numinous within the domain of madness is to reflect on the very extravagance of his terminology. If his terms are treated as pointing to phenomenal affect, feelings, they can be mobilized as the basis for a factor analysis. Whether Otto’s religious (morally affirmative) interpretation of the numinous is held in place or ignored, the words Otto uses to describe the referent state of consciousness collectively point towards the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. Psychologists of religion such as Ralph Hood (1975) or psychedelic theorists of mystical states such as Roland Griffiths (2006) could readily construct questionnaires to measure subjective experiences of the numinous, graded 1–5 for intensity, along the following lines: To what extent: ●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

Did your experience feel like an encounter with a tremendous mystery? Did you feel overwhelmed? Did you feel fascinated? Was your experience irrational? Was your experience comprehensible by concepts? Was your experience wholly other to your ordinary experience? Was your experience supermundane? Was your experience characterized by energy? Did you feel awe? Did you shudder? Did you feel dread? Did you feel intoxicated frenzy? Did you feel something beautiful and pure and glorious? Was your experience sublime? Were you stupefied?

Treated as an example of a type of factor analysis of the numinous as an ideogram for the clumsy placeholder of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, Otto’s adjectival suggestions provide a different and more challenging nuance to the current versions of, for example, Hood’s mysticism scale (Hood 1975) or the Revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire (McLean 2012) I recognize that to argue that the numinous extends into the territory of madness (which may or may not be ‘religious’ [Chapter 8]) is a contentious

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position. Otto’s English translator clearly opposes such an interpretation. In the 1949 translator’s preface to the second English edition (twelve years and a global war after Otto’s death in 1937), John Harvey not only has to defend Otto’s German-ness but he also seeks to moderate the interpretation of Otto’s grand(iose)11 terminology. Harvey’s citation of Matthew Arnold’s ‘morality touched with emotion’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: xvi) is wholly inadequate and does no justice to the numinous as read from the language in the pages of Otto’s text, even after it has been translated. It is difficult to argue with a dead translator’s spin on a dead author’s intentions, but the fact that Harvey twice identifies Otto’s own words as contributing to the interpretation Harvey is trying to downplay (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: xv, xvii) only confirms the intentional literary power, the intensity and extravagance of the original. Harvey’s trump card for moderation in 1949 was a one-page foreword Otto wrote for the first English edition in 1923, in which Otto asserts he does not want to promote in any way the tendency of our time towards an extravagant and fantastic ‘irrationalism’, but rather to join issue with it in its morbid form. The ‘irrational’ is to-day a favourite theme of all who are too lazy to think or too ready to evade the arduous duty of clarifying their ideas and grounding their convictions on the basis of coherent thought. (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: xxi)

As 1923 is the first English edition, Otto’s comments must be understood in the context of the febrile time for the literature of mysticism and religious experience in both Germany and England. The contemporary literature finds instances such as the Aristotelian Society (in London), fresh to the German text of Das Heilige, in 1918 considering the numinous in terms of ‘its shattering difference from ordinary experience . . . the overwhelming nature of a theophany’ (Aristotelian Society 1918: 229). My application of coherent thought is not the fantastic irrationalism to which Otto refers; it consists of a critical analysis of his actual text. I suggest that Otto’s numinous can be read as a defence of non-pathological experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme and that this clumsy placeholder is not excessive; it does not exceed Otto’s articulation of the numinous. Another way of putting this idea in context is to return to the normal distribution curve which describes a spectrum of positions, where the median represents the normal (Chapter 1). From this perspective, both Harvey’s position and my position can be considered valid; he is interested in normalizing the numinous, making the numinous accessible to ordinary consciousness, while I am more interested in what happens at the extreme. What is not in doubt in The Idea of the Holy is

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that the realm of the mystics dwells at the extreme. On this Otto is repeatedly transparent, proposing that ‘In Mysticism we have in the “beyond” again the strongest stressing and over-stressing of those non-rational elements which are already inherent in all religion. Mysticism continues to its extreme point this contrasting of the numinous object (the numen), as the “wholly other”, with ordinary experience’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 29). If we accept Otto’s positively religious interpretation of the numinous as a partial study of a broader possibility of not necessarily religious experience, which includes the negatively numinous and therefore the possibility of degrees of diversity, and if we accept that the rich multiplicity of terms Otto deploys can be treated as phenomenal, each and all contributing to explicating the unspeakable, then there is no reason to disavow Otto’s numinous, but every reason to consider it as naming states of consciousness which can include the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme – as his treatment of the mystics confirms. Even if my arguments sit uncomfortably with Harvey’s interpretation or Otto’s intentions, it is not unreasoned and it points towards the numinous as a way of naming powerful states of consciousness of the irrational derived from experience and subject to interpretation. Otto’s choice of exemplars: Moses in front of the burning bush in Exodus 3 (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 75), Isaiah’s commission (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 75) and Arjuna’s vision of Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 62) are certainly illustrative of acute religious experiences arising from the phenomenal domain (visions/voices) of a not necessarily pathological madness, constructed as religious. In spite of Otto’s objection to James’s subjectivism, they shared the same subject matter of experience/consciousness, including instances of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme and cite many of the same sources – Augustine, St Bernard, Böhme, Buddha, St Catherine, Dionysius, Eckhart, Goethe, Guyon, Job, St John of the Cross, Mohammed, Luther, Loyola, St Paul, Suso, St Teresa – marshalling their citations to support their respective arguments. James and Otto present their material very differently. While James takes his readers on a journey, an ascending trajectory towards his revelation of the ‘More’ in lecture 20, Otto presents the numinous from the outset as a theoretical construct, then backs it up by revealing its presence in a range of variously historicized (rather than chronological) frames – the Old Testament, the New Testament, Luther, early manifestations, cruder phases, divination, history. In literary terms, James lets his experiencers’ texts (rather than voices) do the talking and he remains in control of both the order and the criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Otto’s approach to the psychology of religion is much more direct, reflecting his position as an author championing a

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neologism, relying on fair citations as proof texts12 to legitimize his theory of the numinous within the wider context of the holy. Otto’s task is to build a social/ spiritual evolutionary theory of homo sapiens in which the expression of the numinous culminates in the highest reaches – of his own religion. The respective status of James’s and Otto’s own experiences in relation to the experiences which they write about is an unavoidable question, particularly in relation to the experiences of mystics which both authors concur as being extreme. Allowing that their individual theories of mind were enhanced by reflectively studying the actions and accounts of others,13 their respective disavowal of their own status as mystics14 explains their reliance on the secondary accounts of mystical texts to inform their understanding of mystical states; to write about mysticism doesn’t require an author to be mystic, as Walter Stace will argue (Chapter 5). This does not resolve the insider/outsider question, but it does raise the need to note that there are really two questions at play. The first relates to the architecture of experience. This is the rational explication of the psychology of religion, which James presents as culminating in his metaphor of the door to the subliminal and transmarginal and Otto presents as the numinous. But there is a second question about the experience of intensity, the qualia of the experience of the mystic. This is not a question of rationality, but a question of actual experience. My suggestion is that both James and Otto can recognize and therefore theorize the experience of the mystic, but they cannot valorise the intensity of the experience because it reaches beyond their own experience and is brought into their texts by way of their readings and selections of mystical texts. I suggest this thought throws helpful light on Otto’s famous provocation for those with no religious feelings to abandon his book (Otto [1917] 1958: 8).15 The capacity to recollect religious feelings should not be confused with the need to have experienced the full range of the numinous, particularly the ‘over-stressing’ (Otto [1917] 1958: 29) of the mystics. But the absence of any feeling makes empathy impossible, Freud’s incomprehension of Romain Rolland’s concept of oceanic feelings being an apposite example (Freud 1930: 1). The relation between the general reader, the theoretician and the whole range of particular experiences is fundamentally problematic at a philosophical level as qualia of experience is difficult to convey in conversation, more difficult in text and particularly challenging in academic texts written by, respectively, professors of psychology and theology using language from the first two decades of the twentieth century, mediated through American and German culture and, in the case of Otto, an English translator. As both contributors acknowledge their own experiential limitations and their reliance on the not necessarily reliable

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texts of others, the potential difficulties are obvious and have to be factored in, rather than ignored. Otto, who had read The Varieties of Religious Experiences ([1902] 1985) is explicitly critical of James: ‘William James has collected a great number of these (experiences) without, however, himself noticing the non-rational element that thrills in them’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 37). Otto then directly cites four of James’s case studies to illustrate their ‘over-abounding’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 38) nature. Given that it’s difficult to understand how James’s ideas of the subliminal and the transmarginal can be read as rational, this critique provides an illustration of the fractious nature of the discourse on the unspeakable which will be repeated throughout the twentieth century. To settle the matter, it is not necessary to go further than James’s lecture on ‘The Reality of the Unseen’ where James respectfully admonishes his audience: ‘Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is better that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact’ (James [1902] 1985: 74). This misreading of James by Otto is not the main point of contention between the two, this is to be found in a footnote in The Idea of the Holy. There, Otto explicitly accuses James of failing to recognize ‘the feeling of a “numinous” object objectively given . . . as a primary immediate datum of consciousness’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 10). The clarity of this position separates James’s willingness to allow a ‘numinous’ (following Otto’s use of his own term to describe James’s position) object subjectively given as the basis for the experiential encounter with the subliminal and transmarginal at the door through which over-beliefs begin. In more straightforward terms, while James’s study of human nature does not require the objective status of god to be determined, Otto’s psychology of religion begins with a theological commitment which places the numinous consciousness always in relation to an outside numen, that is (a not necessarily christian) divinity. Otto is correct that his presuppositions differ from James’s, but rather than reflecting on the faith commitments his presuppositions presuppose, and agreeing to disagree, Otto settles his difference by dismissing James as naïve (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 10). James and Otto also take contrasting approaches to answering the question of the relationship of the one and the many, in the context of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme. As has been seen, James answers this by recourse to his pathological programme which morphs from being a method for studying the extreme by way of gaining insight into normality into a method for discounting the phenomenality of madness by substituting (James’s judgement of)

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the cultural value of those at the extreme. Otto’s approach, starting from his alternative presuppositions is even more convoluted. Writing about the ‘history’ of religion as an evolutionary experience, Otto invokes (1) a disposition, (2) a recognition and (3) a fellowship (knowing, feeling, willing) with the holy (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 176). His position is that experiences of the holy (described as a priori16 cognitions but understood here as the holy in all its fullness of the warp and woof of the irrational numinous and the rational holy) are not such as everyone does have – such would be innate cognitions – but such as everyone is capable of having. The loftier a priori cognitions are such as – while everyone is indeed capable of having them – do not, as experience teaches us, occur spontaneously, but rather are ‘awakened’ through the instrumentality of other more highly endowed natures. In relation to these the universal ‘predisposition’ is merely a faculty of receptivity and a principle of judgement and acknowledgement, not a capacity to produce the cognitions in question for oneself independently. This latter capacity is confined to those specially ‘endowed’. And this ‘endowment’ is the universal disposition on a higher level and at a higher power, differing from it in quality as well as in degree. (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 177)

Otto ends up with the ‘awakening’ of a universal disposition and ascribes this awakening to the more highly endowed natures of individuals. This tells us almost nothing. The universality of the disposition is presumed (no evidence is produced, and it is hard to imagine what evidence could be produced to support such a claim). More significantly, the awakening is tautologically read backwards from the evidence of those whom Otto considers to be highly endowed – and therefore awakened. In Otto’s analogy, the prophet is like the creative artist, except that in Otto’s analogy ‘the Spirit shows itself alike as the power to hear the “voice within” and the power of divination’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 177), in other words, as a power unhinged from the hours of practice which hones the genius of the artist. Despite his translator, Otto speaks towards a heightened experience belonging to the few and not the many and this can be read as congruous with his theorization of evolution as involving stages. The numinous is an important contribution to the vocabulary of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. The ‘success’ of the numinous as a neologism is relative. In the context of contemporary academic discourses in the 1920s, the numinous was buffeted by competing ideas and disciplinary developments. Otto’s exploration of the non-rational of religious experience was out of step in the academy, with the sociology of Weber, the anthropology of

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Tylor, the existentialism of Jaspers, and it was wholly irrelevant to the emergent logical positivism. Otto’s explicitly psychological approach was a poor fit with Wundt and detached from Freud’s psychotherapeutic predilections which were grounded in a medical materialist rather than a religious world view.17 But the backlash came from his German protestant colleagues. The rise of the neoorthodoxy of Barth and the hermeneutics of Bultmann, with their return to the biblical texts, had no place for religious experience as an irrational phenomenon on a cross-cultural and trans-historical basis; the word of god had no need for an appreciation of the numinous in the bhagavad gita.18 Sitting awkwardly amid dominant and emerging academic trends, the flourishing sales19 of Das Heilige nevertheless took the numinous into diverse hands and languages across the planet. The numinous, read from Otto’s text, was an experience which could ‘pass into blissful excitement, rapture, and exaltation verging often on the bizarre and the abnormal’ (Otto [1917] 1958: 37). In the hands of careful academics, its theistic framing could be destabilized. In the hands of Jung, the numinous named a feeling which freely floated above a number of academic discourses. For example: From this point of view we might conclude that the schizophrenic state of mind, so far as it yields archaic material, has all the characteristics of a ‘big dream’ – in other words, that it is an important event, exhibiting the same ‘numinous’ quality which in primitive cultures is attributed to a magic ritual. As a matter of fact, the insane person has always enjoyed the prerogative of being the one who is possessed by spirits or haunted by a demon. (Jung Volume 3 [1939] [1957] 1970: 243)

This rather delightful citation from ‘The Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia’ mixes psychiatric language with the religious studies phenomenality of magic and possession (Chapter 3) almost casually deploying the term ‘numinous’ (in inverted commas). Otto would have recognized Jung’s intentions but may well have objected to his authorial intent being overridden by Jung’s willingness to transgress his theological boundaries by locating the context within the idea of schizophrenia. But this would have been better than the Cambridge Dictionary, in which it had become ‘having a deep spiritual (= religious) quality or connection’20 with ‘the numinous mysteries of Mozart, Schumann, and Mahler’ provided by way of example and context. This contemporary fuzzying of Otto’s neologism is exemplified in its casual treatment by Ann Taves who, in a discussion of Spilka’s The Psychology of Religion, notes the ‘downplaying of the numinous in later chapters on mysticism’ (Taves 2020: 32), without pointing

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out the absurdity of separating mysticism from the numinous – its experiential grounds. This distancing of the numinous from its author; its fundamental psychological structure/role; and its continuous ‘historical’ moment in human evolution has allowed the numinous to become a floating descriptor deployed without hindrance to point in the general direction of ephemeral cognitive experiences articulated as spiritual or religious (depending on one’s point of view) – including sunsets. The numinous transcended its author. The lack of authorial control, as a common subject which links the readings in Part I of this book, should not be understood to exclude the capacity of authors to distance themselves from their own ideas. Even while he was alive Otto moved on from his construct of the numinous. Electronic versions of texts make it a simple matter to quantify usage. In The Idea of the Holy, the numinous is mentioned 404 times; in his next book Mysticism East and West ([1924] 1932), it appears only fifteen times. I don’t have an electronic version of The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man (1934), but in this, his final book, Otto cites his own sketch of Jesus in The Idea of the Holy (Otto: 1934: 333), but he abandons the ‘numinous’ in favour of the ‘charismatic’ with (for example) chapter titles such as ‘Christ himself primarily charismatic’ – the author transcended the numinous. The narrative I’ve set out deviates from the general treatment of Otto’s numinous, which tends not to get beyond explanation, discussing without comparing, as if Otto was himself sui generis. Besides the inherent inadequacy of the social scientific method to address personal experience, Otto’s theological commitment presents an obstacle to the academic treatment of the numinous. Its origination in Otto’s work makes it difficult to dislodge from Otto’s theory, tainting it as a term in the psychology of religion as practised in a humanistic tradition. Otto’s ‘numinous’ is not transcended, but abandoned, to languish as a term which, recused, removed from the field of academic play, still finds its place in popular usage which cares nothing for authorial intent. From a mad studies point of view (see Chapter 9), this position is sub-optimal because, as I have argued, the philosophical relationship between subjective consciousness and the objectivity of the divine is only one aspect of Otto’s numinous. Disqualifying the academic treatment of the numinous on this basis (for being too theological) excludes Otto’s insight into qualia; his account of the range and intensity of affect, of emotional feelings in states of consciousness; and under-represents his contribution to the literature of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. Otto built a psychology of religion in which his construct, the numinous, presented in his text, served to rationalize the irrational. Otto was not ashamed of the exuberant language which he used, he reported what he knew and drew on the expertise of

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others to supplement his knowledge. Accepting Harvey’s moderating intention, the intensity of the numinous is best conceptualized as a range rather than a diagnosis. As will be seen when I address acute religious experiences (Chapter 10), this fits well with Jim van Os’s contemporary spectrum of psychosis susceptibility (van Os 2016). On the continuum of the normal distribution curve, the weak form, the baby steps of having ‘religious feelings’ (Otto [1917] 1958: 8) contrast with the extreme, the over-stress of the mystic. In Otto, the mystics are never mad, and this not necessarily pathological construction, at the extreme of the numinous, provides utility in a wider discussion. In a book about acute religious experiences, Otto’s ‘numinous’ is a valuable contribution as an antecedent term in the discourse of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. When Otto writes that the mystics’ aspiration for the void ‘must seem a kind of lunacy to anyone who has no inner sympathy for the esoteric language and ideograms of mysticism and lacks the matrix from which these come necessarily to birth’ (Otto [1917] 1958: 30), Otto may still use the lunatic as the rhetorical other of the mystic,21 but in making the connection he points to the idea that phenomenality is valued by a particular matrix of understanding. This opens up the idea that interpretations (both the mystics’ and their observers’) collude in the valuation of the intensely irrational, on the basis of their own bias. Out at the extreme of mysticism the difference is not in the phenomenality of the experience, but in the mode of interpretation. I experience therefore I am – the identification of experience and being is determined by the matrix of understanding.

3

T. K. Oesterreich’s Possession

With the publication of Possession Demoniacal and Other Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times, ([1921] [1930] 1974), Trautott Konstantin Oesterreich secured his place as the Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. Oesterreich’s argument was that possession has fairly constant features and can be considered as a transhistorical and trans-cultural phenomenon. This was a thesis which he backed up with evidence. Most of the 400 pages of the book consist of the accumulation, presentation and discussion of case studies. Oesterreich recognizes the compendious nature of his work and justifies the extent of direct quotation as a need to make public the detail found in his obscure sources. The work is structured in two parts: the first, ‘The Nature of the State of Possession’, deals with external signs, the subjective state and the role of exorcism; the second part, ‘The Distribution of Possession and Its Importance from the Standpoint of Religious Psychology’, divides between higher and lower cultures and between past and present times. It is this breadth which makes Oesterreich’s contribution so significant to the construction of a non-pathological discourse on how to understand the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme and ensures his inclusion in my work. In the context of this book there is little to gain by repeating the material Oesterreich sets out. The gain is in the recognition of the way he crosses so many domains, not only of geography and history but also of psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, anthropology and religious studies. These are areas which have now been distinguished and separated, fenced off in subsequent scholarship. Even in 1921, his frustration is palpable: Oesterreich observes about some of the accounts he is analysing, ‘These descriptions are naturally very far from clear and show . . . (he shouts in full italics) . . . how necessary it is for ethnologists to possess a more thorough knowledge of psychology’ (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 245). The whole of Oesterreich’s Possession can be read as a case study against disciplinary

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specialization in the face of the breadth of his subject matter. But his contribution, in tackling possession as a phenotype also exposes the absence of attention to this phenomenon in the works of others. For example, reading Oesterreich shows up the absence of the construct of possession in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. When James uses the term ‘possession’, it is always in an untheorized manner, as a part of a description of what one of his case studies felt. James never addresses possession as a relevant category of religious studies in a way comparable to his approach to (for example) mysticism. Like Oesterreich, William James gathers evidence from across the planet, but a careful scrutiny finds that his sources all relate to hinduism, buddhism and islam. As noted in Chapter 2, the prevailing (racist) stage theory of evolution classed hindu and Abrahamic religions as belonging to ‘higher civilizations’. James may not use stage theory terminology, but his analysis is in practice limited to such sources and to consideration of their highest theological formulations of mysticism in ‘higher cultures’. In Chapter 9, I will echo H. C. Erik Midelfort’s cry ‘Where are the demons in Foucault?’ (Midelfort 2013: SXIII, 108), but the same cry can be raised right now against William James and expanded to include the absence of most of the phenomenon of possessions which Oesterreich takes time to elaborate. It is not my intention to set these texts against each other, far from it; my intention is to show that when William James is advanced, rightly, as the Father of the psychology of religion, his contribution has to be understood as a beginning rather than the end of the matter. This is also an illustration of the power of the critical comparative project, that what is absent from an account can most readily be brought to mind by comparison with other projects. Oesterreich also throws new light on Rudolf Otto’s numinous. Otto’s numinous is a cross-cultural and trans-historical construct, but the issues it raises are very different from those which arise in Oesterreich’s Possession. The numinous, according to Otto (Chapter 2), is a human capacity which evolves within its cultural context at a population level. By contrast, Oesterreich’s treatment of possession is always an individual matter, albeit expressed within that person’s cultural idiom and context. The consequence of this difference is that Otto’s psychological approach operates only in terms of groups. Individuals may present evidence which Otto finds useful in his argument, but the construct of the numinous is always embedded in a meta-theoretical approach which is shaped by evolution. What Oesterreich does is to privilege the individual, within their culture, as being the person possessed. In the argument I am developing, this represents a decisive point which recognizes the intimate relationship of psychology and sociological context through which the individual can manifest

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their experience of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. Although, as my argument develops in Part II, the role of the biological is yet to be seen in Oesterreich, this bringing together of the psychological and the sociological allows psychological similarities to be understood within the context of cultural difference. At this relatively early stage, Oesterreich’s position can be weaponized in my argument to pre-empt any proposal that individuals don’t matter, or, worse, the presupposition of a homogeneous humanity in which possession is generally available to all – see Part II. Oesterreich’s approach, which combines very detailed individual case studies with the broader recognition of possession as an exceptional state (however this is socially interpreted in terms of power and/or morality) continues to pose questions in the study of religions. The exceptionalism Oesterreich uncovers contrasts with, for example, the cognitive science of religion which de-emphasizes the role of individuals as the consequence of privileging human cognition as a standard model shaped by faceless people subsumed into generalizations about cultural forces (Whitehouse 2004; Barrett 2011; Cohen 2008). Reading Oesterreich, a hundred years later, is also useful as a means of deconstructing the specialisms which treat shamanism as distinct from possession. This is a problem which may not have been created by Mircea Eliade, but it was certainly accentuated by his Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Chapter 4). The theoretical demands of his construct of shamanism require differentiation from other forms of archaic practice. Oesterreich, writing thirty years before Eliade, presents a general picture of North Asiatic shamanism (within the context of a wider treatment of shamanism as a whole) from his psychological point of view and then asks, ‘Is it, or is it not, a state of possession?’ (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 305). Oesterreich’s conclusion is that contemporary Arctic shamans are play-acting, performing stereotypes of what was once spontaneous and involuntary: ‘there can be no question of true possession . . . The Siberian shaman appears to be a relatively late religious phenomenon’ (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 306). This position reverses any inclination to distinguish shamanism from possession by way of a critique of the degenerate forms of possession found in the ethnographic literature. Eliade is aware of the archaic role of the shamanism he wants to address (he uses ‘archaic’ in his title!), but although he is familiar with Oesterreich’s text, Eliade largely ignores it. His engagement is restricted to three footnotes. In one of these he compares the practices of the Batak set out by Oesterreich to ‘an imitation of certain shamanic techniques’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 347), which is suggestive of the difficulties in the broad religious studies discourse

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where scholars seek to advance their particular constructs by foregrounding them irrespective of the wider ethnographic data. What is perhaps most telling about the concept of possession, in the context of my argument, is its relation to the question of pathology. This question is addressed from a psychiatric point of view in Chapter 8, where I show how the DSM-5 directly incorporates the term “possession” into the dissociative identity disorder diagnosis. However, what stands out from my copy of Oesterreich’s Possession is a banner splashed across the front of this erudite academic text written by a professor of philosophy. The banner proclaims: ‘This is the book used to scourge the devil in “The Exorcist”.’ In the name of research, I watched the film to understand this claim. I have to say that I did not notice any direct reference to Oesterreich. What I did see was a story which was premised on the idea that after psychiatry had been proven unequal to the task, then, as a last hope, it was possible to turn to religion. This reverses the narrative that science can solve the problems that religion can’t. It also echoes a long tradition which is clear in Oesterreich but advanced most effectively by Moshe Sluhovsky in Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (2007). There Sluhovsky argues that the process of exorcism was always a last resort which was brought to bear once the prevailing medical practice has been exasperated. In this sense the film The Exorcist was drawing on a very traditional model. The difficulties are twofold. The first is that in this western/christian framing, possession is always bad, pathological, something which needs to be fixed. This is an ancient approach which draws on New Testament accounts of demon possession. As Oesterreich notes, ‘at bottom, the demonological theory of primitive Christian times is immutably perpetuated by the Catholic Church’ (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 199)1, and even if advances in medicine, including psychiatry, have pushed the practice of exorcism to the margin, possession is inherently pathological in the west. The second difficulty is that those who handle the theme of possession in popular culture must necessarily dispense with moderation to make their accounts as shocking as they possibly can. As will be seen in Chapter 8, psychiatrists find it difficult to talk about psychosis without citing the most extreme cases of schizophrenia. The parallel in popular culture is to seek to horrorize the viewer. Immediately after watching The Exorcist (1973), in which a twelve-year-old girl is turned into a monster, I watched The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018) to see how the genre had developed over forty-five years. While The Exorcist explores the relationship of psychiatry and spirit possession in a way which Oesterreich would have recognized, The Possession of Hannah Grace makes no connection

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with this subject matter. Hannah Grace is simply a murderous monster from the outset with no backstory and no connection with the spirit world, to psychiatry or to religion. Possession in western culture is bad. That Oesterreich’s masterpiece on possession is marketed on the grounds that it can assist in scourging the devil is a manifestation of this, a travesty,2 but one which was not of Oesterreich’s making. Against these two difficulties, which make possession pathological in the christian tradition, is Oesterreich’s demonstration of the many ways in which possession plays a non-pathological role in the world of non-christian origins. His passing argument is that ‘The extraordinary importance accruing to the phenomena of possession amongst primitive races has hitherto been insufficiently appreciated by ethnology’ (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 378); however, this should not be read as affirming his commitment to the future of possession. Oesterreich recognized the enlightenment as the ‘great turningpoint in the conception of the world’ (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 379), but appears intent on the possibility that while the conceptualization of possession will decline, this should not be mistaken as the end of the matter. For Oesterreich, the conceptualization of possession is, for want of a better word, theological, culturally situated. The demise of theology is not the same as the demise of the psychic needs and forces which were previously articulated. Oesterreich attaches an appendix on parapsychology in which he observes: We cannot, however, but be struck by the fact that it is always these same states which give rise to stories of analogous parapsychic phenomena . . . Given the freedom with which states analogous to possession occur amongst many primitive peoples and the alleged frequency of accompanying parapsychic phenomena, it is possible that they offer to students of parapsychology a rich field of investigation. (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 383)

At this point, right at the end of his work, Oesterreich is non-committal about his position, in a way which is reminiscent of James’s position on the transmarginal. Both point towards the role of parapsychology and the need for future research into consciousness, both are modest in their conclusions, sensing that they are at the cutting edge of a conversation which has a long way to run. If the subsequent literature of possession is a guide, it may be reasonable to say that Oesterreich’s anticipated future research did not turn out as he anticipated. In popular culture possession was sold by the bucketload, entrenching traditional christian pathology. This was reflected in psychiatry which toyed with multiple personality disorder before escaping to more anodyne concepts of dissociation.

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But it is in anthropology that most of the conversations continue. In 1971, I. M. Lewis produced Ecstatic Religion which drew heavily on Oesterreich’s transcultural and trans-historical argument for the prevalence of the possession phenomenon. Lewis’s praise of Oesterreich’s ‘magisterial study of possession’ (Lewis [1971] 1989: 21) extends to an acknowledgement that ‘Writing over fifty years ago, Oesterreich thus pushes further along the road towards a genuinely objective cross-cultural study of possession and trance than any of the more recent authors’ (Lewis [1971] 1989). Consistent with continuing along this road, Lewis subtitles Ecstatic Religion ‘A study of shamanism and spirit possession’ avoiding the trap of getting bogged down in the differences of cultural forms when discussing the behavioural common ground found in manifest experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. It is this psychological common ground which Lewis then develops, with his analysis of power, into his distinction between central and peripheral possession. The anthropological interest in possession continued through a range of scholars including (in chronological order) Erika Bourguignon (1973, 1976), Victor Crapanzano (1977), Michael Lambek (1993), Janice Boddy (1994), Heike Behrend and U. Luig (1999), Morton Klass (2003), Frederick Smith (2006), Emma Cohen (2007, 2008) and Bettina Schmidt (2010 [ed], 2016). The focus for each begins in fieldwork. And it is this body of research which can be set against Oesterreich’s concession to the power of the enlightenment. In spite of his prediction, possession as a culturally sanctioned pattern of behaviour continues as a way of articulating the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. Oesterreich was also not in a position, writing in Tübingen in 1921, just after a world war, to notice the thread of pentecostal as it emerged in the Americas. Pentecostalism provided a Christianity in which possession was not necessarily pathological. The most persuasive argument I know of for the rise of pentecostal does not relate to its doctrinal formulation but to its accommodation of ancient African approaches to the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. When the European slave trade transported its human cargo to the Caribbean and the Americas, these were not ‘Africans’ but ‘people’ extracted from communities in which traditional forms of possession were practised. The practices of the Mbundo, Yoruba, Igbo and Bakongo came to the Americas, even though the elders (old men) who were the traditional guardians of such practices were (mostly) left behind. While the direct descendants of (for example) the Yoruba and their Orishi/Orixás can be found in Candomblé (which is syncretic with Catholicism but still recognizably indigenously Yoruba) in Brazil, an extended view of cultural plasticity allows that the memory of possession practices is

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not restricted to any predictable or acceptable means of expression. In the dislocation of the slave trade, the idea that possession practices eventually find legitimizing outlets in the pentecostal/charismatic outpouring of the holy spirit provides a way of explaining the emergence of christian practices which are not locked into the ancient assumption that possession can only be pathological. Rereading the biblical text from the perspective of a nonpathological encounter with the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, as the possession of the holy spirit, provides a way of recognizing the explosive growth of pentecostal/charismatics. In Oesterreich’s 1921 position, possession was always pathological in Christianity; in these emergent traditions it may be either. Spiritual warfare is not only between the traditional exorcists and their possessed parishioners, but now, armed with the gifts of the spirits and the whole armour of god, spiritual warfare is also open season for those empowered to fight. I appreciate this argument deserves more space, but my interest is not about whether possession by the holy spirit is thought of in the same category as demonic possession or how either are named. If possession is taken in Oesterreich’s broad psychological sense, then the manifestation of a cultural form of non-pathological possession deserves further consideration, especially if it can be traced back to indigenous practices prior to the forced disruption of the slave trade. Equally, the precise teaching of the various generations of pentecostal/charismatic leadership has to be put into the wider ethnographic context which Oesterreich’s analysis makes possible. It is in the resonances with ancient epistemological contexts where we find that possession is not only for the devil. Bettina Schmidt provides useful background in Spirits and Trance in Brazil, noting the distinction between contextualizing traditions and reworking symbols and rituals to new purposes (Schmidt 2016: 40). While Oesterreich was writing of the demise of possession in 1921, it is reasonable to suppose he had not heard of the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles between 1906 and 1915, but this doesn’t explain why there is no mention of Pentecost in Oesterreich. The only explanation is that in the intervening 100 years the role of possession has been radically transformed, not only by new understandings of the role of the Holy Spirit and a commensurate epistemology which consequently assumes spirits populate the world in a way that a Professor of Philosophy in Tübingen could not foresee. Pentecost had no heft for a scholar of religion who read possession as pathological in Christianity. A century later, it appears that Oesterreich was too hasty in his judgement of the rationalism of the enlightenment and too quick to allow possession to be degraded into the rehabilitation centre of parapsychology.

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In a mad studies analysis, it is obvious from the outset that Oesterreich is taking simplifying liberties with his topic of possession. As Anita Koshen Gregory concisely observes in her critical introduction, ‘I am inclined to think that he only gets his rather neat disease entity of “possession” because he resolutely and explicitly omits hallucinatory phenomena as extraneous complications, a device which enables him to dismiss paranoia and schizophrenia as quite separate’ (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: viii). The contextual problem this reinforces is the separation of visions and voices from possession, the privileging of phenomenal parts of the panoply of the phenomenal whole. As will be seen in Chapter 8, this is a problem which is endemic in the DSM-5 (APA 2013) which ends up with the visions and voices of psychosis and the possession of dissociation in separate chapters severed from the experiential commonality. Such schisms in the phenomenality of experiences of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme, where whole chunks can be left out because they don’t fit the guiding construct being advanced by the particular theoretician, make it so much more difficult to address the field as a whole. Nevertheless, Oesterreich’s remains a remarkable work because, notwithstanding his breadth of vision and depth of scholarship, he built a trans-historical and trans-cultural perspective of the possession phenomena and backed it up with evidence. Perhaps most remarkable is the lack of engagement with Oesterreich’s text in subsequent scholarship. William James wrote twenty years before Oesterreich, but there are many who came after who have ignored or failed to acknowledge Oesterreich’s study on the basis that possession manifests in non-western contexts which are best addressed through area studies, which is the opposite of Oesterreich’s psychological thesis. Along with I. M. Lewis, Bettina Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson in their collection Spirit Possession and Trance (2010) have read Oesterreich but the lack of influence such a magisterial study has had in philosophy, psychology, anthropology and religious studies, or even in consciousness studies and neuroscience, can best be understood as a function of the disciplinary structure of the academy and the self-serving focus on western experiences. Where the demon possession in the west could be treated as being rendered archaic by the rise of modernity, mainstream scholarship on western religion or, in terms, ‘higher religion’, could effectively ignore the phenomenon altogether. From a religious studies and/or anthropological perspective an area studies approach may appear satisfactory, but from the point of view of philosophy, psychology, consciousness studies or neuroscience, ignoring the worldwide phenomena of possession can only be understood as a manifestation of cultural myopia. Even Christopher Partridge in his High Culture: Drugs,

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Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (2018) avoids any serious discussion of possession. The difficulty for philosophy, psychology, consciousness studies and neuroscience, and the scholarship of the modern world in general, is that it didn’t turn out as Oesterreich predicted and experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, which correspond to Oesterreich’s possession, continue to flourish in both pathological and non-pathological forms across the planet. The problem is compounded because, having left the field to the pathologizing psychiatrists and the profiteering marketeers, there is no literature which explores why, or how, or if, pathological possession can be redirected into non-pathological ends rather than simply being suppressed. As we shall see in Chapter 4, shamanism has been appropriated for non-pathological ends, and in Chapter 8, psychiatry is coming to recognize non-pathological possession, so any fair reading might recognize the need to rethink the idea that Oesterreich’s Possession is simply a text with which to scourge the devil.

4

Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism

Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy qualifies for its place in this critical exploration of theorists of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme not simply on the grounds of his subtitle – which immediately suggests ecstasy as an event within a discourse – from archaic to contemporary – but for his approach to theorizing shamanism as a meta-category. Treating shamanic experiences in an ‘area studies’ context, as a descriptor of a particular ethno-cultural practice occurring in a particular locale has a long history prior to Eliade. While Frazer in his The Golden Bough ([1890] 1987) mentions shamans only twice, the idea of ‘Shamanism’ as an abstract conceptual ‘ism’ was already in common currency. In his 1822 Universal Geography, Conrad Malte-Brun divides the superstitions of Central Asia into ‘three principal branches, Shamanism, Braminism, and Lamaism [sic]’ (Malte-Brun 1822: 630). Seventy years later, but still fifty-nine years before Eliade’s Shamanism, V. M. Mikhilowski considered ‘shamanism as a phenomenon characteristic of many peoples, scattered throughout many parts of the world’ (Mikhilowski [1892] 1895: 62). Mikhailowski’s Russian text did not have the same impact as Eliade’s Shamanism in 1951. The reasons for this are many, perhaps starting with the relative enticement of the subtitles: comparative ethnographic essays versus archaic techniques of ecstasy. Eliade also retrospectively benefited from his reputational reach. Although Eliade wrote Shamanism in French as an independent scholar, his subsequent contribution to the emergence of the influential Chicago School in the study of religions increased interest in his earlier work, making it disproportionately more citable, particularly after its English edition in 1964, as compared with an obscure Russian author with an unspellable name.1 Eliade’s Shamanism is now described in the publisher’s blurb as ‘The foundational work on shamanism . . . Shamanism is an essential work on the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon’. Although the reference to Otto remains subliminal, the terms ‘mysterious’ and ‘fascinating’ may not be coincidental.

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In Shamanism, Eliade follows Mikhailowski by breaking with the predominant anthropological approach of treating shamans as culturally specific to the Arctic region. Eliade begins his work by constructing a sui generis status for the phenomenon of shamanism, differentiating it from other general categories of ‘magician, sorcerer, medicine man’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 3). The scaffolding required for this construction is set out transparently in the preface, where Eliade identifies the ‘ritual of the ascent to the sky’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xx) found in Altaian culture. He then finds that, as ‘similar ideologies and rituals appear all over the world’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xx), he can construct shamanism as an a-historical primordial phenomenon, as distinct from other a-historical primordial phenomena, simply on the basis of the prevalence of the motif or idiom of the ‘ascent to the sky’ imagery recounted from ‘dreams, hallucinations and images’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xx). This tautological approach of identification – rituals of ascent to the sky = shaman, Shamanism = rituals of ascent to the sky – obviates a wider discussion of the primordial human capacity for dreaming, hallucinating and imagining in general by ascribing particular imagery as determinative. Eliade engages in a process of category formation. In a book about Shamanism, this may appear to be a reasonable strategy, a way of circumscribing the topic, but Eliade is doing more than solving a problem of geographical limits, a boundary issue in ‘area studies’. Eliade’s decisive move is to engage in a cross-cultural and trans-historical scrutiny of the human record to solicit instances of a second order abstraction and dub them shamanic on the methodological pretext of a similarity of imagery. This willingness to lump experiences together and then label them with the shamanic ‘brand’, would, in a contemporary intellectual property context, be considered as an infringement of a protected geographical indicator.2 Eliade is creating a family before Wittgenstein (posthumously) introduced the idea of ‘family resemblance’ in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and a genealogy for that family resemblance before Foucault reworked Nietzsche’s ideas on genealogy in Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire (1971). Eliade moved from the phenomenal content of dreams, hallucinations and images to the singularity of ‘a complex religious phenomenon’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xix) which, with its own morphology and history, could be synthesized, according to Eliade, only by a historian of religions (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xi). In a few short pages, Eliade, as a suitably qualified historian of religions, takes control of shamanism to do with as he pleases. To then provide a more sustainable foundation for his construct, as soon as the foreword is over, Eliade introduces a new approach to experience rather than the content of experience – ‘Shamanism = technique of ecstasy’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 4).

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Eliade’s construct of shamanism requires both the ecstatic experience, which is necessarily extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, and the interpretation of ascent – the qualia of ecstasy and the content of ascent. By constructing the category of shamanism as defined by ecstasy3 but requiring a particular (but, as it turns out, varying) set of explanatory motifs, Eliade advances a position which is designed to resist contributions from other academic disciplines, specifically psychology, sociology, ethnology, phenomenology and theology (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xxi) (psychiatry never gets a mention). Eliade allows that these disciplines may have something to say about religious phenomena, but not ‘religious phenomenon as a religious phenomenon’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xv – emphasis in the original). This sui generis distinction may be passed over by a casual reader, but its consequences for the disciplinary ‘ownership’ of subject/content are profound, not only for the future of shamanism but also for the study of religions. Two approaches to using Eliade’s construct of shamanism present themselves. The first is to respect the heterogeneity of archaic practices, the second is to homogenize and transform shamanism into a reductive category. This is not the distinction between first and second order categories as shamanism is always a second order category, even for a shaman. Where Eliade’s Shamanism is applied delicately to respect the heterogeneity of practice, integrity is respected and retained. The Altaian experience is not necessarily being diminished by being categorized as shamanism, as long as those who use shamanism, as a category, respect Altaian practices and do not seek to essentialize a hybrid shamanism which can then be applied to ‘correct’ Altaian practice (which is quite different from essentializing Altaian practices and making them immutable). Where first order feelings, acts and experiences within a particular community are judged as authentic or inauthentic within that community, this reflects the ongoing internal power struggles which underlie the subsistence of authority over time. Where the first order feelings, acts and experiences of shamans within a particular community are judged by outsiders, this constitutes the application of an essentialized hybrid normativity. Shamanism, as a concept, is constructed by Eliade as a useful way of thinking about the feelings, acts and experiences of people who subsist within a tradition which privileges ecstatic experiences. The pivot away from the specific imagery of the ‘ascent to the sky’ to the ecstatic experience allows Eliade to diversify the interpretations as his theoretical scaffolding goes up. It transpires that the ‘ascent to the sky’ is no more than the starting point, a convenient motif, a shorthand for a much wider range of phenomena which include ‘mastery over fire’, ‘magical flight’, ‘and so on’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 5 sic). The ‘and so

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on’ leaves the content of shamanism conveniently open-ended, allowing for further symptoms such as ‘dismemberment of the body’4 (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 34), ‘descent to the underworld’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 34) and ‘inner light’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 61)5 which can be possessed and added to the inventory of the peculiarly shamanic, as and when Eliade requires. This invites a consideration of the evidence Eliade relies on. As Shamanism was written in a hotel in Paris in 1950, he did not consult with shamans or even people from cultures in which shamans were integral. There was little point. He was writing about an ‘archaic’ tradition. Eliade knew it was ‘vitiated’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xxiv). Even in 1892 Mikhailovski noted that ‘Shamanism among the Siberian peoples is at the present time in a moribund condition’ (Mikhailovski 1895: 62) and continued, ‘We have already seen how the natives themselves acknowledge that the shamans of former years were stronger, and shamanism naturally deteriorates every year, and some of its representatives become mere charlatans’ (Mikhailovski 1895: 62). In contemporary language, Eliade conducted a desk-based meta-review of the cross-cultural and trans-historical evidence, gleaned from the accounts of ethnographers like Mikhailovski, not as an ethnographer, but with the special powers of a historian of religions, special because they allowed him to understand religious phenomena as a religious phenomenon. The consequential issues are considerable and not restricted to the question of what got lost in the translations. Ethnographers, often Russian, were recording second-hand accounts (sometimes passed down through generations) of first-hand articulations of unspeakable experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. In their accounts of the ecstatic, the ‘psychiatric’ presuppositions ethnographers brought to the project come into play. For example, the Russian anthropologist Sergei Shirokogoroff, who wrote works including Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (1935) (which Eliade cites), was educated at the Sorbonne and the École d'anthropologie. The reversal (a very Elidean idea) is complete – Eliade’s accounts of shamanic experiences include those filtered through the French anthropological presuppositions6 of a Russian anthropologist’s ethnography. This circularity also exists as a philosophical challenge within a wider disciplinary context – the broken discourse between the humanities and psychiatry. In Ecstatic Religion, the anthropologist I. M. Lewis argues: ‘If there is one thing which traditionally unites most British social anthropologists it is their fierce antagonisms towards psychology and psychiatry and their disregard for the psychological aspects of the social phenomena which they study’ (Lewis [1971] 1989: 160). Lewis’s restriction of this critique to the British may be seen as diplomatic caution as the Romanian Eliade, in the heart

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of Paris, was similarly intent on purging madness from shamanism. One of the unique French contributions to psychiatric nosology is the bouffée délirante, theorized by Valentin Magnan (1835–1916) as an acute but transient psychotic disorder.7 This jumps off the page as a candidate for describing the shamanic trance. That Eliade sticks to more general, and therefore opaque, terms, for example, ‘mental diseases of the hysteroid or epileptoid types’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xvii), shows his willingness to throw around psychiatric ‘lingo’ while demonstrating his lack of a capacity, or intent, to apply contemporary psychiatric explanations to shamanic experiences with any rigour.8 On the very first page of his preface, Eliade identifies ‘the threat from such psychological [never psychiatric] interpretations’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xvii) and, exercising his authorial power, simply asserts: ‘“it is inacceptable to assimilate shamanism to any kind of mental disease”’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: xviii]), with the promise of reasons to follow. These reasons appear in a section titled ‘Shamanism and Psychopathology’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 23) where Eliade begins by setting out three pages of detailed ethnographic accounts in which each ethnographer concurs that shamans are mad. This includes twelve sources reporting on eighteen people groups across not only the Arctic but also South Asia, Oceania, Africa and Latin America. Eliade’s defence of shamanism against the accusation of insanity begins by separating the shamanic sheep from the shamanic goats: Regarded in the horizon of homo religious – the only horizon with which we are concerned in the present study – the mentally ill patient proves to be an unsuccessful mystic or, better, the caricature of a mystic. His experience is without religious content, even if it appears to resemble a religious experience, just as an act of autoeroticism arrives at the same physiological result as a sexual act properly speaking (seminal emission), yet at the same time is but a caricature of the latter because it is without the concrete presence of the partner. (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 27)

While controlling the discourse by recourse to his specialism, homo religious, the recourse to the ejaculation analogy is unexpected, bizarre, but strangely powerful . . . at first glance. That masturbation has no fruit in the world of spirits certainly invokes the socially engaged nature of the shaman with the spirit world and their community. However, the implication that masturbation and sex with a partner must be mutually exclusive weakens the metaphor. If semen is a metaphor for, and a prerequisite of, shamanizing, I suggest the more interesting comparison is between the capacity to ejaculate (continuing Eliade’s metaphor for ecstasy) and

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the impotence of normals. The presence of semen is the metaphorical question at stake, prior to any consideration of its efficacy. Having separated the shamanic sheep from the goats by the power of rhetoric, rather than evidence, Eliade (immediately and contiguously) reconsiders his position: Then too, it is quite possible that the assimilation of a neurotic subject to an individual possessed by spirits – an assimilation supposed to be quite frequent in the archaic world – is in many cases only the result of imperfect observations on the part of the earliest ethnologists. (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 27)

Blaming the unreliability of the sources on which he relies is a risky strategy. Perhaps aware of the inadequacy of his first two solutions to satisfy his need to protect his category of shamanism from madness, Eliade presents an altogether more sophisticated argument which incorporates the role of initiation: Psychopaths or not,9 the future shamans are expected to pass through certain initiatory ordeals and to receive an education that is sometimes highly complex. It is only this twofold initiation – ecstatic and didactic – that transforms the candidate from a possible neurotic into a shaman recognized by his particular society. (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 14)

While Eliade concedes the possibility that initiates may be ‘psychopaths’, he mitigates the possibility by his understanding of the initiation process. Why this constitutes a mitigation is set out: ‘And we must also consider the fact that the Shamanic initiation proper includes not only an ecstatic experience but, as we shall soon see, a course of theoretical and practical instruction too complicated to be within the grasp of a neurotic’ (Eliade [1951] [1964] 2004: 31 (my emphasis)). Although Willard Trask’s translation does Eliade a disservice by translating ‘un malade’ as ‘a neurotic’ (from a general interpretation of mental illness to a specific diagnosis), the point remains. Eliade presupposes that mad people lack mental capacity. The casual ignorance encapsulated in this approach is what creates the problem for Eliade. To get over his ignorant prejudice, in which madness has no value, Eliade has to purge the madness from shamanism to protect his construct because the mystery and the fascination are despoiled if it turns out that his subjects operate within the domain of madness – in spite of all the ethnographic evidence he’s already presented which shows they do. Eliade’s third attempt at exonerating the shaman from the ‘stain’ of madness is a deductive compromise based on a self-fulfilling exclusion criteria. Mad people can’t be shamans because only ‘not mad’ people could grasp the theoretical and

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practical instruction required to be a shaman. The ‘pathological problem’ of shamanism is deduced out of existence to satisfy Eliade’s ignorant assumption that madness renders people, including me, incapable of engaging with theory and practice. This is a delightfully prejudicial position which remains prevalent today. What remain from Eliade’s tortuous approach to cleansing shamanism from the taint of madness are two things. The first is that shamanism cannot be taught, the didactic element follows the ecstatic which is the prerequisite. The second is that the role of initiation, which is clearly evidenced by all of the ethnographic accounts, mitigates madness. While Eliade’s cultural predisposition is to set shaman and madman as dichotomous, this is not the only possible approach. If the initiation of the ecstatic is understood as the beginning of a learning process, then madness as an experience which can be cultured, without being denied or extinguished, becomes possible. The initial shamanic crisis is just the first step in a shamanic career in which crises are recurrent but understood as trances/seances/events which can be invoked through a technology of ecstasy and established patterns of understanding which can be learned. Eliade’s focus on the initiation, the first crisis, is due to its pivotal significance in the birth of a shaman, not because subsequent ecstasies are intrinsically different at a physiological level. This is a dynamic process, there can be no understanding without the ecstatic experience, but the experience can be understood through repeated self-assimilation into the taught matrix of understanding. An illustration can be drawn from a recent paper in the journal Nature titled ‘Psychedelics Alter Metaphysical Beliefs’. There Timmermann et al. make a distinction between the responses of first-time psychedelic participants and experienced participants. The ‘scientists’ found that ‘especially pronounced shifts were seen in psychedelic-naïve participants’ (Timmermann 2021). My own experience supports this finding – in each mad crisis, my approach has become more practised, though no less mad.10 The implication is that the drama of the initial crisis, which precipitates initiation, may appear quite different from subsequent episodes which have been cultured by the expectations of the community and the individual who has benefited from the didactic theoretical work, which Eliade considers essential for the development of the shaman, and which allows the shaman to learn how to use their power, and the idioms of their power, more effectively. Eliade’s need to cleanse shamanism from madness is not supported by the ethnographers who wrote the accounts he relies on. Nor is it supported by the proposal that post-initiation behaviour is freed from the phenomenal

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characteristics of madness. The ecstatic experience is a mad-experience and it is not extinguished by the didactic; instead, it is nurtured. This is the position that Eliade finally reaches, without the self-reflexivity to recognize and reconsider his initial objection to madness. Whether they still are or are not subject to real attacks of epilepsy or hysteria, shamans, sorcerers, and medicine men in general cannot be regarded as merely sick; their psychopathic experience has a theoretical content. For if they have cured themselves and are able to cure others, it is, among other things, because they know the mechanism, or rather, the theory of illness. (Eliade [1951] 2004: 31)

After all the convolutions and reversals, like a river winding towards the sea, Eliade finally finds a way of living with the pathological in shamanism by proposing a theoretical content in madness (notably, not just in Shamanism). In his pejorative phrasing, ‘Psychopathic experience’ rises above the very dichotomy which he pointlessly introduced11 and which has dogged his analysis. Now psychopathic experience is redeemed as the route to the theory of illness, whatever that might be. In Shamanism, Eliade makes no reference to Jung, who published his idea of the wounded healer (Jung 1951) in the same year Eliade published Shamanism. Eliade attended Eranos, an annual meeting inspired by Otto,12 for the first time in 1950 and met Jung there. Eliade is absent from Jung’s autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung [1961] 1977) but, subsequent to the Eranos meeting, Eliade records in his autobiographical account for 1951: ‘After reading Le Chamanisme, Jung had written me several weighty and enthusiastic pages. In the oneiric and psychopathological experience of shamanic initiation rites, Jung had found confirmation for some of his hypotheses’ (Eliade 1988).13 While this encounter might be taken as an almost perfect model14 of Ulf Drobin’s moderating assertion that ‘From the point of view of the history of ideas, there is probably a certain reciprocity between evolutionism and diffusionism’ (Drobin 2016: 80) . . . but there is always the counterargument of synchronicity. Eliade’s approach to data as ‘religious data’ has gone out of fashion in the study of religion. As Bruce Lincoln quips in Apples and Oranges: Explorations in, on and with Comparison, when he arrived at History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, Jonathan Z. Smith, the incoming chair was already ‘turning his critical energies to Eliade’s methods and theories’ (Lincoln 2018: 4). However, the legacy of Shamanism lingers. As Christopher Partridge observes in High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern

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World, ‘The principal understanding of shamanism within psychedelic occulture was informed by Mircea Eliade’s seminal study . . . It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this text’ (Partridge 2018: 289). Wherever shamanism was advanced as a way of naming contemporary techniques of ecstasy, there was Eliade, providing a theoretical construct which could support an essentialized hybrid form, abstracted from its cultural domain. Perhaps the high point in this homogenizing approach is to be found in Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman ([1980] 1990). Starting from Eliade, Harner produces an essentialized core shamanism which features the ‘SSC’, the acronymized ‘shamanic state of consciousness’ and proceeded to proffer the possibility of access to anyone who participates in a series of courses which lead up to a gold certificate for the ‘Completion of Standard Advanced Foundation Trainings in Core Shamanism’.15 It is possible to be generous regarding Harner’s intentions, but his universalizing of an essentialized capacity of the ecstatic cannot be extrapolated from Eliade, or any of the sources Eliade relied on. The shaman is always the deviant who does not choose but is chosen; no matter how much practice may be applied to the didactic learning process, which may be for sale, the prerequisite crisis of ecstasy is not available at any price, it is always free. From the perspective of a mad studies critique,16 Eliade’s approach is resonant of the diagnostic approach adopted in psychiatry. A set of symptoms are observed, they are clustered into a diagnosis on the basis of common features and then named. Researchers and practitioners (practitioners refers to practising psychiatrists who act as the voice of the actual subjects of their diagnoses; as the people who have the experience traditionally make no contribution and are written up as case studies, with no editorial power) test the concept, both defending and attacking the construct for reasons found in the history of the discourse of psychiatry.17 In his role as historian of religions, Eliade conducts his meta-review and assimilates the evidence to conform to his construction, based on the work of previous scholars. The coincidence of madness and shamanism which the weight of ethnographic evidence records is a challenge, but one which can be resolved through the twists and turns (set out earlier) and the meta-category of shamanism is successfully introduced to an academic audience, swiftly spilling over into a wider cultural milieu which is ripe for a return to an imagined primal state of consciousness which, according to the Harner Foundation, has been oppressed by ‘religion’. It is notable that Eliade, writing in Paris in 1950, has not read The Varieties of Religious Experience or The Idea of the Holy.18 He deals with Oesterreich’s approach to possession as another obstacle to be disposed of (Eliade [1951] 1964:

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341). The consequences of sanitizing shamanism are paid for by the perpetuation of pathological assumptions and stereotypes about madness. By rescuing the shaman from the stain of madness, Eliade makes a negative contribution to the history of madness. The idea that madness, particularly first episode psychosis, might be schooled, empowered, made culturally significant, is precluded by an approach in which Eliade is determined to disown madness. The subsequent trajectory of shamanism as a counter-cultural type or motif which is unrelated to madness is directly comparable to Otto’s refusal to address the madness of the numinous in other than negative rhetorical terms. By recognizing the sui generis approaches exercised by both Otto and Eliade to protect their constructs, it becomes possible to think of a less defensive and more inclusive approach to madness. But whether psychiatrists are able to think beyond the cultural clutter to reflect on the way the ethnographic evidence points towards the cultural assimilation of madness – as a possibility, rather than a threat – remains an open question.

5

Walter Stace’s Mysticism

When Walter Stace published Mysticism and Philosophy, he was emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton University, where he’d taught for twentythree years. Stace did not deploy the language and concepts of hinduism or buddhism as a fashionable (post-christian, postmodern) affectation in midtwentieth-century America; his references resulted from twenty years as a colonial civil servant in the British Crown Colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). There Stace didn’t write about hinduism and buddhism but, instead, wrote about Classical Greece (1920), Hegel (1924), Beauty (1929) and published The Theory of Knowledge and Existence in 1932. As a professor of philosophy from 1935, his knowledge of hinduism and buddhism was not as a philologist or Indologist but as an interested colonial returnee, and this ‘expertise’ pervades Mysticism and Philosophy, which he published when he was seventy-four. Stace is candid enough to show his hand early, suggesting that rather than using the term ‘mysticism’, ‘it would be better if we could use the words enlightenment or illumination, which are commonly used in India for the same phenomenon’ (Stace 1960: 15). Right here, in this casual translation, is found the nub of the problem which percolates through Mysticism and Philosophy. Stace is engaging the western discourse on mysticism, but he privileges his (western) interpretation of translations of hindu and buddhist theological/philosophical traditions over western mysticism, which he considered to be second rate. In the actual text of Mysticism and Philosophy, Stace is combative from the outset: ‘Our predecessors in the field of mysticism have done nothing to help us in many of the problems which I have had to discuss. I have had to chart a lone course without guidance from the past’ (Stace 1960: 7), a claim which should concern any editor or supervisor. Stace explicitly discards the four-part factor analysis1 of William James, the seven-part factor analysis of R. M. Bucke and the eight-part factor analysis of D. T. Suzuki’s analysis of Satori on the grounds that these analyses have ‘little in common and no clear correspondence’ (Stace 1960:

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45). Stace continues, ‘we can hardly expect much light from past writers whose statements have plainly been more or less haphazard. We shall have to tackle the problem ab inifio’ (from the beginning) (Stace 1960: 45). Through this ‘new beginning’ Stace, who had read James, Otto, Underhill, Koestler and Zaehener but, almost unbelievably, had not read any Huxley, including Huxley’s deep dive into hindu theology/philosophy, The Perennial Philosophy2 (Huxley 1946), authorizes himself to take a free hand to reset the western discourse on the philosophy of mysticism. There is no need to accept such a conceit. The irreconcilability or incommensurate nature of different scholarly approaches is not an indicator of them being ‘haphazard’, any more than, by analogy, Stace’s recognition of the formal incommensurability of christian, hindu and buddhist mystical traditions (cf. Stace 1960: 34) makes them ‘haphazard’. Stace simply adds one more ‘haphazard’ approach – his own – which associates mysticism with ‘higher cultures’ (Stace 1960: 35, 125, 259). While the ‘higher cultures’ are not defined, even an inattentive reading of Stace will find that he, like Rudolf Otto, is referring to Christianity and Indian religions (Stace 1960: 171), as a way of disposing of the clutter of accounts and practices of ‘lower cultures’. But this way of dividing human cultural experience into higher and lower is not his primary solution of continuity. On page 1 of his first chapter, ‘Presuppositions of the Enquiry’, Stace locates his project in the shadow of Bertrand Russell’s Mysticism and Logic (1921) in which Russell sets up mysticism as a strawman to be knocked down. Two problems are thus indicated by Russell as tasks which philosophy ought to perform. First, since mysticism is so valuable as a component in philosophy, we ought to investigate what influence it is logically entitled to have on the thoughts of philosophers. Secondly, what influence has it actually exerted in their thoughts? The first is a problem of logic and systematic philosophy. The second is a problem for the historian of philosophy. It is with the first of these two problems that we shall be concerned in this book. (Stace 1960: 13)

The text is perfectly clear, according to its author: Mysticism and Philosophy is a work of ‘logic and systematic philosophy’ intended to identify the status of mysticism in the ‘thoughts of philosophers’. It is never clarified as to which ‘systematic philosophy’ Stace was referring to, but his takedown of Hegel3 is instructive. While, in the twenty-first-century milieu, it may seem perfectly reasonable, to anyone but a philosopher, to argue that everyone is a philosopher, just as apparently everyone can have a mystical experience, ‘everyone’ was neither Stace’s subject nor his audience. Nor was he interested in

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the relationship between ‘phenomena and religion’ and ‘religious phenomena’ which can be read as an itch in William James, Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade. Stace is intent not on denying the link between mysticism and religion, but in delinking it to allow for a not necessarily religious mystical state of consciousness, explicitly locating his work within the philosophical genealogy which Russell proposes of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato and Spinoza.4 This delinking proved attractive to a secondary literature5 looking for texts which were (paradoxically) simultaneously post-religious and post-secular. The paradoxicality of mysticism – as presented by a philosopher inspired by ideas of enlightenment and illumination – was ripe for its time at the start of the 1960s. While the psychologist William James had important things to say about mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience ([1902] 1985: 379–429), his intentional subject was much broader, exploring human religious experiences, whether considered pathological or benign, and his findings related to his own speculative construct of the ‘More’ (James [1902] 1985: 512). Stace, by contrast, is engaged in a top-down construction of an ‘ism’, a reified abstraction of a phenotype which draws on the phenomenal accounts of individual experiences. Stace’s mysticism can be usefully compared and contrasted with Eliade’s construction of Shamanism (Chapter 4). In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy [1951] [1964] 2004, having constructed his concept of shamanism, Eliade is more interested in tracing and describing actual practices, the ethnography, rather than a defence of a philosophical abstractions. In Eliade, even though it is implicit, there is no mention of the ‘core shamanism’ that comes later with, for example, the essentializing work of Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman ([1980] 1990). By contrast, Stace6 constructs mysticism as a cross-cultural and trans-historical experience, intentionally invoking mysticism as a thing in itself, as a diagnosis of which he assumes control. Concluding a long chapter titled ‘The Problem of the Universal Core’ (Stace 1960: 41–133), Stace resolves his ‘problem’ by the application of what may be thought of as an imaginary philosophical centrifuge: ‘In this general experience of a unity which the mystic believes to be in some sense ultimate and basic to the world, we have the very inner essence of all mystical experience. It is, as has been said, the nucleus round which the other and more peripheral characteristics revolve’ (Stace 1960: 132). While Stace never pays any attention to the biological (hereditary)7 context of mystics, the centrifuge spins out the extraneous matters of psychological and sociological (linguistics/cultural) differences and diversity which are separated and discarded to leave the weightless reality of a de-personalized essence – core mysticism.

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The significance and implications of this move for the western discourse on mysticism should not be understated. By turning the study of experiences considered to be mystical into a discourse on an abstracted, essentialized, theoretical concept, the discourse on mysticism commits the same error psychiatry pioneered in the reification of phenotypes such as schizophrenia which is theorized on the basis of symptoms (Chapter 8). The unwitting aspect of developing a reified object, be that mysticism or schizophrenia, abstracted from the embodied examples of people diagnosed8 as mystics or schizophrenics is that the concept quickly overtakes the embodied reality and takes on a disembodied life of its own (see Hyman 2010). As soon as the concept is philosophically theorized, its reification is advanced in both its denial and its promulgation. This is a key feature in the western discourse on mysticism which is echoed in the western discourse on psychiatry (Chapter 8). By way of a very brief example, in Robert Foreman’s book The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (1990), thirty years after Stace, the western discourse on mysticism has been diverted into a philosophical debate conducted by those who defend cognitive experiences deemed mystical as perennial against ‘the broad paradigm shift in the humanities and social sciences toward constructivism’ (Foreman 1990: 4). In his chapter ‘Does the Philosophy of Mysticism Rest on a Mistake?’ (Foreman 1990: 237), Anthony N. Perovich, Jr. finds himself in pursuit of ‘philosophical efforts to construct a metaphysically satisfying account of the phenomena’ (Foreman 1990: 248). This privileging of the reified philosophical concept over lived experiences leads him to conclude: the recent ‘Kantian’9 philosophy of mysticism rests on a mistake, the mistake of assuming that mystical experience is narrowly ‘human’ experience and, so, is subject to the same treatment as is ‘human’ experience generally. But the mystics insist that their experiences result from ecstasy, that their knowledge is gained as the result of employing faculties which are not the ordinary ‘human’ ones. (Foreman 1990: 250)

I cite Perovich not to engage his argument, but to illustrate the turn the discourse took. By placing inverted commas around the term ‘human’, Perovich reveals his normative presupposition of a homogenized humanity to whom mystics are exceptions and therefore deviants. By considering the ecstatic consciousness of mystics as the other of being human, Perovich creates a dichotomy which erases all diversity, including the vast terrain of mad ecstasies, by limiting his focus to one idealized phenotype which exists within his mind. The paradoxical difficulty is that once mysticism is allowed philosophical legitimacy as a

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meaningful category, every participant in the discourse is obliged to construct their own idea of what mysticism is – irrespective of one’s position – for, against, indifferent. While mysticism starts off being grounded on the recycled writings of unspeakable experiences often mediated through the secondary literature, these tethers (along with their cautions, qualifications and negations) wear thin and, snapping, leave mysticism, like shamanism, as another floating signifier for the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme – except, following Stace, the connotations of association with (what Stace describes as) ‘higher religions’ provides a different glaze of cultured respectability, turning mysticism into a privileged discourse about a privileged state. The result is that both perennialists and constructivists end up defending the category they debate. This logocentrism is constrained by its linguistic context and has no need to compare the phenomenality of mysticism with the broader phenomenality of experiences of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme. As soon as the idea of a reified mysticism is taken seriously, it poisons the mind of the discussant – except that this poison is mixed with the conceit of moral superiority (just as the poison of the phenotype schizophrenia engages the conceit of moral inferiority). This is, of course, ironic given the history of mysticism prior to the twentieth century in which mysticism, and its capacity to undermine theological certainty, was seen as a threat to the religious establishment. The tectonic shift in understanding reflects, as Foreman so rightly points out, the paradigmatic shift away from the perennial given, towards the constructivist discovered, and the novel possibility, unwittingly unlocked by Stace and promulgated by psychedelic research, is that anyone displaying the appropriate characteristics can be a mystic too. But before we get to that, Stace’s bid to control the category requires further scrutiny. On inspection Stace finds that his essentialized universal mysticism turns out to be not one but two, obliging him to construct a logical explanatory distinction. His solution is to introduce a (lower) extrovertive and a (higher) introvertive mysticism. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James dealt with diversity by constructing a ‘mystical ladder’ (James [1902] 1985: 383) as a metaphor to differentiate the phenomenality of different experiences within the domain of the mystical (Chapter 1). In his top-down construction, Stace finds the distinction between extrovertive and introvertive and assigns a higher value to the introvertive. Here, Stace’s selection bias becomes wholly transparent. In his construction of mysticism, Stace doesn’t ever consider the drums and the dancing, the performative experiences of the shaman or the spirit possessed. He ignores the motif of whirling, or the practice of dhikr so often related to sufism (while hanging on to the texts of sufi mystical utterances). Out too go all of

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the visions and voices which marble the world’s holy books, thus deleting the theophanies characteristic of biblical accounts: from Moses in front of the burning bush; to Isaiah’s commission; to Jesus’s transfiguration and John’s revelation, but also Arjuna’s vision of god in chapter 11 of the bhagavad gita. And what of the mad? The phenomenality of madness doesn’t merit even a mention in Stace’s sanitizing strategy of privileging an essentialized mysticism. After discarding all of this phenomenal evidence of the human encounter with the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme, in all its historical and geographical cultural diversity, Stace is left only with meditative experiences which he distinguishes. Rudolf Otto, one of Stace’s favourite sources, discusses the outward and the inward way in his 1923 Haskell Lectures, published as Mysticism East and West (Otto [1924] 1932), but Stace prefers the extrovertive and the introvertive,10 declaring, ‘the essential difference between them is that the extrovertive experience, looks outward through the senses, while the introvertive looks inward into the mind’ (Stace 1960: 61). Stace provides a table of characteristics to supersede the discarded proposals of James, Bucke and Suzuki, but this time divided by focus: Common Characteristics of Extrovertive Mystical Experiences 1. The Unifying Vision – All things are One 2. The more concrete apprehension of the One as an inner subjectivity, or life, in all things 3. Sense of objectivity or reality 4. Blessedness, peace, etc. 5. Feeling of the holy, sacred or divine 6. Paradoxicality 7. Alleged by mystics to be ineffable

Common Characteristics of Introvertive Mystical Experiences 1. The Unitary Consciousness; the One, the Void; pure consciousness 2. Non-spatial, non-temporal 3. Sense of objectivity or reality 4. Blessedness, peace, etc. 5. Feeling of the holy, sacred or divine 6. Paradoxicality 7. Alleged by mystics to be ineffable (Stace 1960: 131–2)

The most obvious point is that both introvertive and extrovertive mysticism share five out seven characteristics; the slightly less obvious point is that Stace has switched from mystics to mystical experiences, and the point which is most readily missed is Stace’s use of the term ‘common’. In Stace, there is nothing ‘common’ about mystical experiences, they are always the rarefied experiences of the few not the many. In this context ‘common’ means ‘shared in common’ by an elite group, referring to the overlapping phenomenality of the experiences of his choice of exemplars. But the question which concerns me, and which cannot be read directly from the table of characteristics, is, why Stace thinks introvertive

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mystical experiences are better than extrovertive mystical experiences? Why load so much weight onto the distinction at all? By addressing this point many of the problems in Stace’s analysis are exposed. Stace’s division of mysticism on the basis of sense perception, can most readily be understood by considering the difference between eyes open and eyes shut.11 The simplicity of this distinction is one Stace nearly arrives at much earlier on page 49, but he diverts the reader from this conclusion in his haste to differentiate the two mysticisms on the grounds of merit: ‘Extrovertive experiences may, indeed, be called sensuous, since they consist in a transfiguration of actual sense perception, but even this is not imagery but is direct perception by the eyes. Extrovertive experience, there is some reason to think, is no more than a stepping stone to the higher introvertive state, and in any case is of less importance’ (Stace 1960: 49). The inferiority of extrovertive mysticism cannot be read from his table of characteristics; its inferiority is based on and reflected by the presuppositions built into his essentialized concept of mysticism which is defended by nothing more than the phrase ‘there is some reason to think’ (Stace 1960). He formalizes this reason in the penultimate paragraph of ‘The Problem of the Universal Core’ with the assertion: ‘Consciousness or mind is a higher category than life, the top rung of the ladder of life. The extrovertive mystic perceives the universal life of the world, while the introvertive reaches up to the realization of a universal consciousness or mind’ (Stace 1960: 133). This reasoning, drawing on an uncited text of Ramakrishna which an unspecified westerner has translated as ‘consciousness’ is based on an evolutionary argument about the ladder of life which is a heuristic tool that belongs to Stace, not the mystics. As he notes in the very next paragraph: ‘The mystics themselves take it for granted that the One which is disclosed in the introvertive experience is identical with the One which is disclosed in the extrovertive experience. There are not two Ones, but only one, which, in the mystic's interpretation, is god or the Universal Self of the whole universe’ (Stace 1960). Stace, the non-mystic, then accuses the mystics of making ‘gratuitous assumptions’ that the two are one, rather than recognizing that his preference for the introvertive over the extrovertive reflects his own philosophical prejudice about perception, mocked by the half-lidded eyes of the Buddha. In his presentation of an asymmetrical valorization of a ‘logical’ distinction, Stace engages in a more insidious process of defending his essentialized mystical state. The distinction between eyes open and eyes shut, the not-me of ‘that art thou’ and the not-me of ego-dissolution in the void has practical ramifications for the western discourse of mysticism – particularly as it is

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adopted by psychedelic theorists (Chapter 6). The distinction proves useful as a way of buttressing Stace’s construction of a sui generis mysticism at the very top of the ladder of experiences. Stace gets to his concept of extrovertive mysticism by applying his mystical centrifuge to his choice of data. He selects ‘seven representative12 cases’ (Stace 1960: 63) – Plotinus (Greek 204–70), Meister Eckhart (German 1260–1328), Teresa of Avila (Spanish 1515–82), Jakob Böhme, (German 1575–1624), Ramakrishna (Indian 1836–86), R. M. Bucke (USA 1837–1902), N. M. (USA 20th century, identity disguised) – ‘each of which, while exhibiting those common characteristics of the whole group of which we are in search, shows also a variety of interesting and instructive individual qualities’ (Stace 1960). He justifies this approach by a direct appeal to Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’ (Stace 1960: 45–7). As a sampling methodology, this is a deeply flawed strategy as it consists of cherry-picking the evidence on the basis of his own selection bias in order to construct a distinction which he has already determined. While James allows that the ‘other half ’ of mysticism can be found in the insane asylums via the text books of psychiatry (Chapter 1), Stace is intent on constructing a Premier League, a Series ‘A’ team, choosing his team to fit his preconceived conclusions which are based on his cumulative western understanding of the east.13 The problem with his exemplars is not limited to his selection bias, it extends to the quality of evidence he relies on. Of the sample of seven, six are dead and one is anonymous, making his approach more of a genealogical exploration among the memories of the ‘ancestors’ than an identification parade. Of the six who are dead, four lived more than a quarter of a millennia before Stace was born. That Stace provides no bibliography in Mysticism and Philosophy blinds readers to the (in)adequacy of his sources, but from the footnotes it can be seen that Ramakrishna is included on the basis of just two texts: Lead Kindly Light14 and Ramakrishna, Prophet of New India15 but not, for example, Max Müller’s Ramakrishna, His Life and Sayings 189916, and Stace omits any mention of Ramakrishna’s relation with Bhakti practices. I haven’t sourced Lead Kindly Light, but in Ramakrishna, Prophet of New India, Nikhilananda’s intentions are clearly set out in the conclusion of his foreword: ‘May it (this translation) enable seekers of Truth to grasp the subtle laws of the supersensuous realm, and unfold before man’s restricted vision the spiritual foundation of the universe, the unity of existence, and the divinity of the soul!’ (Nikhilananda, preface). It is safe to suggest that this 1,200-page abridgement and translation of the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, like any gospel, lacked any critical aspect.

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These source problems are repeated and exacerbated in Stace’s separate construction of his second category, introvertive mysticism, as the superior mysticism. The strategy of creating a cohort is repeated, except that here he finds himself unable to identify sufficient named individuals and supplements his sources by recourse to highly mediated theological/philosophical texts. The sample he selects in the construction of his family (of resemblances) consists of the mandukya upanishad (in general), J. A Symonds,17 Jan Von Ruysbroeck, Eckhart (again), Plotinus (again), Teresa (again), Al Ghazzali (who opposes fanā)18, an unnamed hasidic mystic and unspecified mahayana buddhist scriptures. The net result is Walter Terrance Stace’s extraordinary claim: Enquiring . . . into the psychological characteristics of the experience itself [introvertive mysticism], we may now fairly confidently assert that there is a clear unanimity of evidence from Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Mahayana Buddhist, and Hindu sources, also supported by the witness of the pagan mystic Plotinus, and the modern Englishman J. A. Symonds, that there is a definite type of mystical experience, the same in all these cultures, religions, periods, and social conditions. (Stace 1960: 110)

And there it is! This is the grand conclusion Stace wants his evidence to support. The evidence base is wholly inadequate. Along with the methodological difficulties already noted in relation to his construction of extrovertive mysticism, there are new problems. Stace knows of J. A. Symonds only through the accounts he read in The Varieties of Religious Experience, yet promotes him from James’s placement as evidencing ‘dreamy states’ on the mystical ladder, the rung below intoxicants, to a full-blown introvertive mystic of equal status to Plotinus. But the elephant in the room is the inclusion of traditional holy texts rather than accounts (however hagiographic) of specific holy individuals. The problems of the historicity of individuals is challenging enough, the problem of whole texts, without specific citations, is the complete absence of transparency in relation to personal embodied experience. The reader is being asked to accept that unspecified passages in the mandukya upanishad or mahayana scriptures, passed down through the ages read by a westerner from a western translation, can justify a construction which the author is determined to justify. This is a textual exegesis at the level of ‘Yes Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so’.19 Stace is engaged in the concoction of a family of resemblances which includes only the respectable members20 of an unrelated group of ancestors and excludes everyone who does not conform to his presuppositions. But even this understates the calamity he is perpetrating. By relying on the texts of the mystics and mystical

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citations from traditional hindu/buddhist texts, Stace is relying on a very mixed bag of heterogeneous sources to construct a homogenized abstraction. While Teresa and Ramakrishna may have produced contemporary accounts of their experiences, albeit separated by 300 years and 5,000 miles and the cultural chasm in between, Eckhart’s writings come to us without the autobiography. The role of personal experiential crisis is expunged, replaced by mature reflection which tells us only what the mystic chooses to disclose. Setting aside Stace’s methodology, the inadequacy of his hierarchical distinction between extrovertive and introvertive is found in the dual status of so many of his samples. As Eckhart, Plotinus and Teresa are instanced in both categories, Stace is creating a differentiation which relates to particular experiences not particular mystics. In Mysticism East and West, Otto had already been explicit that both Sankara and Eckhart had both inward and outward experiences (Otto [1924] 1932: 40) and Otto wrote a whole appendix to affirm this point: ‘The Intertwining of the “Two Ways” of Mysticism’ (Otto [1924] 1932: 254). Stace’s distinction is not between mystics but operates as a way of designating the mode or content (or absence of content) of particular experiential episodes. While this approach usefully acknowledges the episodical nature of mystical experiences, which is reminiscent of the episodical nature of psychotic experiences (Chapter 8), it doesn’t assist his construction of his distinction. If extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences are common to so many mystics, why spend so long constructing such a flimsy distinction? One approach to answering this question is to suggest that the distinction provides utility for his ab inifio (from the beginning) approach to the philosophy of mysticism. While Stace thinks he can afford to simply dismiss the phenomena of visions, voices and the traditions of performative ecstatic experiences a priori, the extrovertive category provides a useful device for downgrading experiences within the mystical tradition that don’t accord with his privileging of an introvertive undifferentiated state of consciousness which he reads across from hindu/buddhist enlightenment/illumination. A precise instance which illustrates this point is found in his treatment of psychedelic drugs which he acknowledges may be significant, on the basis of his theory of causal indifference (Stace 1960: 29–31): The principle of causal indifference is this: If X has an alleged mystical experience P1 and Y has an alleged mystical experience P2, and if the phenomenological characteristics of P1entirely resemble the phenomenological characteristics of P2 so far as can be as certained from the descriptions given by X and Y, then

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the two experiences cannot be regarded as being of two different kinds – for example, it cannot be said that one is a ‘genuine’ mystical experience while the other is not – merely because they arise from dissimilar causal conditions. (Stace 1960: 29)

This extraordinary position demonstrates the supremacy of logic over experience and phenomenality21 over meaning. Stace’s principle of causal indifference gave the psychedelic movement not only the green light but also the philosophical backing of a crusty Princeton professor with which to proclaim that, logically, psychedelics could facilitate ‘genuine’ mystical experiences. Demonstration of this position is clearly set out in Timothy Leary’s enfoldment of Stace into his ‘Religious Implications of Consciousness-Expanding Drugs’: The question then arises whether an experience, apparently touched off by ingestion of a material substance, properly can be described as mystical. The observation and participation at least of this writer leads him to the conclusion that it is, confirming the opinion of a leading American authority on mysticism, W. T. Stace. (Leary 1963: 254)

Perhaps anticipating this implication Stace suggests the need for more research, but without waiting for that evidence, resolves the risk to his elitist mystical category by pronouncing that ‘the drug experience can never attain more than extrovertive mystical states’ (Stace 1960: 30).22 These moves demonstrate that Stace has no genuine interest in making an argument to justify his presupposition of the inferiority of ‘unity with the world’ over his preference for ‘unity with the void’. The extrovertive category is demonstrated to be a convenient second tier category of mysticism which he can use to both create and defend his construction of the superior introvertive mysticism as a sui generis category – irrespective of his principle of causal indifference. Through his authorial construction of an inferior extrovertive mysticism, Stace equips himself with the means to dismiss inconvenient experiences as being of the wrong kind. His treatment of Saint Teresa is a case in point. Her ‘union with god’ lies in the extreme emotionality of the christian tradition where ‘union with god’ is ‘burning,’ ‘violent, ’ ‘vehement, ’ ‘intoxicating, ’ ‘passionate, ’ . . . This excessive emotionalism of some saints and mystics is, according to this writer’s taste [Stace], an unpalatable characteristic, tending to show lack of balance and of good judgment and critical ability. But it is no more objectionable than the unwashed and dirty habits notoriously indulged in by some medieval saints. It is in no sense a universal characteristic of mysticism and has no bearing whatever on our problems. (Stace 1960: 54)

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Stace proposes that he can simply ignore or downgrade any phenomena which threaten his superior introvertive mysticism. Extrovertive mysticism becomes a convenient sump which allows Stace to deal with Teresa’s visions and all of the dirty habits in the western tradition,23 including drugs, without them polluting his essentialized introvertive mystical experience. Stace has already asserted his power to dismiss previous academic theorists of mysticism (James, Bucke, Suzuki) and, ab inifio, rearrange the data, but he does not have the power to rewrite the christian tradition as to who qualifies as a mystic. He can ignore many but the evidence which does not accord with his privileging of introvertive states has to be ‘managed’ to protect his construct. The totemic mystical status of Saint Teresa presents him with just such a problem. The categorical demotion of extrovertive experiences provides a resolution by allowing him to downgrade the wrong types of experiences. To summarize, in order to defend his presupposition of the superiority of introvertive mystical experiences, Stace discards all of the visions and voices, whether of the mad or of ‘lower cultures’. These are excluded, a priori, any evidence of a family resemblance is ignored, irrespective of any common phenomenality of ecstasy (in contradiction to his theory of causal indifference) because the mad and those from lower cultures simply cannot be mystics according to his racist and elitist construction. This reduces the field to the already recognized mystics of the higher cultures (christian and hindu/buddhist), plus an Englishman (J. A. Symonds) and an anonymous American N. M. By dividing mystical experiences according to whether they are extrovertive or introvertive, Stace provides a mechanism whereby the data he finds inconvenient but cannot dismiss, like the visions and voices of recognized mystics, can be relegated to the extrovertive category as second class. Stace has no pretentions to being a mystic (Stace 1960: 20) and provides no philosophical grounds for privileging introvertive experience over the extrovertive, but his defence of his spurious hierarchy has consequences, particularly in second generation psychedelic research which relies extensively on his text. After Stace, the western discourse on mysticism moved on in the academy, with contextual readings by Steven Katz;24 feminist readings from Carolyn Walker Bynum, Grace Jantzen and Amy Holywood; performative language readings by Denys Turner and Michael Sells and significant contributions by Bernhardt, Foreman, McGinn, Partridge, Proudfoot, Pyysiainen, Staal and many more. Stace’s philosophical essentialization of mysticism became the fulcrum on which the western discourse on mysticism span out of the academic mainstream of religious studies, theology and philosophy to become its own ouroboros, the snake which eats itself, a self-contained discourse about the relation of the

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signifier mysticism to the putative experience(s) it signifies. Gradually Stace was buried, if not forgotten, under the weight of the secondary literature. But in a different part of the western academy, the quest to operationalize psychedelics in relation to depression, addiction, bereavement and anxiety bled into the realization that the experience had its own value, its own mystical value. Mysticism and Philosophy provided more than a principle of causal indifference which authenticated psychedelic experience; it also provided a ready-made construct of an essentialized mystical experience which could be wrestled away from the context of the history of mysticism and accessed by anyone. In his PhD thesis Mysticism and Drugs (1963), Walter Pahnke turned Stace’s concept of mystical experience against Stace’s elitist construct of mysticism (Chapter 6). Throughout Mysticism and Philosophy, Stace presents mystical experiences as exceptional, an elite experience for the few and not the many. Although Stace complains that there is too much evidence for him to examine the descriptions of all christian mystics, the context he cites is the bibliography of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism25 (Stace 1960: 101), which includes a hundred, not thousands or millions of names. Stace simply does not operate with a popular or populist concept of mysticism. The mediaeval saints with their dirty habits (Stace 1960: 54) were disqualified on account of their dirty habits in spite of their intrinsically exceptional status as saints. Stace’s elitist construction of mysticism is fundamental to his text and can be disrupted only by being read out of context. When Stace writes: Finally, it is possible that the direction of human evolution in future millions of years – if the human race survives – will be towards the spread of mystical experience to most men and not merely its possession by a few rare individuals as now. It is possible, in short, that the superman of the future is to be the mystic man. (Stace 1960: 205)

He should not be taken as a flawed prophet at the dawn of the psychedelic revolution which shrank his millions of years to a decade. The key phrase is ‘a few rare individuals as now’. By ‘now’, Stace can be understood as referring to the cumulative population of mystics over the course of history, as his only examples of contemporary mystics are the anonymous N. M. and J. A. Symonds, whom Stace had not read and is more famous for his contribution to the LGBTQ community than to mysticism. Notwithstanding authorial intention, history shows that Stace laid the conceptual groundwork for mystical experiences to be liberated from the ethnographic accounts of the elite few and experienced by the many, thanks to his ever so logical ‘principle of causal indifference’ and

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the willingness of others to grasp his construct without worrying about his text. In his dotage, Stace watched as the unintended consequences of his argument pervaded the social sciences and the angel’s dictum to Descartes: ‘the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measurement and number’ was rolled into the unspeakable world of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, now accessible to all, and equipped with self-report questionnaires, rather than social validation. Walter Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy has nothing to do with madness because any association with such deviant states might sully the purity of the philosophical abstraction he justifies in his selected accounts of unspeakable experiences. Mad experiences, irrespective of their common phenomenality with mystical experience, have no place in his attempt to ‘investigate what influence [mysticism] is logically entitled to have on the thoughts of philosophers’ (Stace 1960: 13). Stace’s reading has no place for visions, voices and possessions which were rationalized (by both participants and observers) within the discourses of shamanism and spirit possession as meaningful. Stace, like Otto, and like Eliade, shares the same essentialized approach to higher and lower cultural practices. The mysticism of the east about which Stace asserts his expertise does not recognize the heterogeneous practices of the people bounded by his concept of their higher religions. Stace simply ignores the ecstatic Bengali practices which June McDaniel documents, most recently in Lost Ecstasies (2018) and the practices which Frederick Smith documents in The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization (2006), even though these are part of the cultural mix he draws on. The ecstasies, dances and raptures of Ramakrishna are not absent because they were unknown in 1960, they are absent because Stace deems them inadmissible to his construction of a rarefied, elite, passive, meditative mysticism. The sound of a sitar raga, starting slow and building into an ecstatic frenzy, cannot be heard in the text of Mysticism and Philosophy; the sight of Nataraja dancing in the two states of (1) the overflowing divine joy of absorption in his higher Self and (2) the state of feeling great compassion for the world26 (which precisely reflect the introspective and extrospective states) has no place in Stace’s colonial construction. It is little surprise that he finds common mystical ground, not just because he creates it by ignoring inconvenient evidence, but because his argument proceeds from an original commitment to the unity of mysticism. It is not necessary to look for clues or marginal readings to uncover Stace’s position. He makes it clear on page 34: There are two different hypotheses by which they can be explained, and we have to make a choice between them. One hypothesis is that the experiences of the Christian, the Hindu, and the Buddhist are basically different, although there

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may be some similarities, perhaps only superficial ones, which justify us in calling them all ‘mystical. ’ The other hypothesis is that the experiences of them all are basically the same – though perhaps there may be some difference. (Stace 1960: 34)

The options are dirty, some similarities versus some differences, but the need to choose is fundamental, presuppositional; it informs the interpretation, the argument, the conclusions which Stace must (logically) reach: ‘there is a definite type of mystical experience, the same in all these cultures, religions, periods, and social conditions’ (Stace 1960: 110). Because he has made his choice everything follows: the philosophical ramifications overwhelm the dubious quality and linguistic diversity of the evidence; the paradoxicality, the ineffability, the traditions of christian/hindu/buddhist nuance and contestation within their own discourses of interpretation, all of these succumb to a choice, his choice, to essentialize mysticism. Mysticism and Philosophy is not an investigation into what influence [mysticism] is logically entitled to have on the thoughts of philosophers (Stace 1960: 13); instead, it is a philosophical defence of a philosophical abstraction of mysticism which Stace creates and sustains. If Stace had suggested there was a range of experiences which can be described as mystical, he would still have had a case to argue about the relevance of these for a secularized western ‘philosophy’, but his own commitment rules this out. His task is only ever engaged in the question of how to clean up the erratic evidence left by the mystics and their dirty habits in order to advance his clean logical conclusions. In a contemporary reading, the shadow of the western philosophical discourse (analytic and continental) hangs over Mysticism and Philosophy. Nietzsche’s death of god does not stop Stace resurrecting the language of divinity, translated from the Indo-Aryan texts of hindu/buddhist scriptures and read across the colonial attribution of ‘higher’ religious traditions. Stace has no need to reinstate the personal god Russell rejects to show how the mystic’s experience of the consciousness of unity can be discussed by reference to an impersonal placeholder term, such as ‘ultimate reality’, ‘the absolute’, ‘god’, whatever. The traditions of interpretation, by which religions differentiate themselves in their contested accounts, are brought together, resolved, most perfectly realized – and united – by the mystic: ‘the superman of the future is to be the mystic man’.27 (Stace 1960: 205)

6

Walter Pahnke’s Psychedelic Experience

The opening proposition of ‘Religious Implications of Consciousness-Expanding Drugs’ by Timothy Leary and Walter1 Clark proclaims: ‘Since the dawn of recorded history men have eaten vegetables to obtain religious visions’ (Leary 1963: 251). This assertion is echoed and repeated across the hiatus between firstgeneration and second-generation psychedelic research in America. It is an attractive premise which would appear to validate past, current and future research. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the reception of such a proposition is dependent on the research context. Humanities scholars have been less willing to embrace such an indiscriminate thesis, but there are good if complicated reasons why this may be the case, not least the difficulties of evidence gathering which Eliade’s work on shamanism encountered.2 Those who prefer the power of measurement and number have less concern for such hand-wringing over cultural and historical questions. But the problems behind the succinctness of the premise are real, inviting three questions: (1) which ‘men’? (2) what is meant by ‘religious’? and (3) who wrote the ‘history’? The scientists, centred at Harvard in the first generation and Johns Hopkins in the second generation of psychedelic research,3 don’t need to address these questions. Their preferred format is the short scientific paper where there is no room to address such boundless matters. The premise is a rhetorical framing device and its repetition like a mantra has rendered it intuitive, allowing authors from scientific disciplines a jumping-off point for their empirical research. If the question ‘which men?’ is ignored, the particularity of socio-historical context is erased; did ‘men’ just run around having ‘religious experiences’ on whatever mindaltering substances came to hand as egalitarian proto-anarchists exercising their individual right to take psychoactive substances to commune with the spirits? The construction of this question serves to backlight the risk of anachronistically retro-projecting the milieu of the ‘liberated’ psychedelic sixties onto ancient cultures. If the question of ‘religious’?’ is ignored, then scientific researchers

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can sidestep the (apparent) inability of the academic study of religion to agree on an operational (read: simple) definition of ‘religion’ which can be used in scientific research. As to the question of ‘whose history?’, ‘History’ has not been generous to the use of psychoactive agents socially consumed for religious (and therefore ritual) experiences. This is not only due to ‘in-group’ support of ‘our’ everyday drugs, and opposition to ‘their’ everyday drugs, (which makes alcohol legal but cannabis illegal). In the context of the religious import of drugs, the need to protect the role of the special drugs, ritually administered by hierarchies of power, becomes an identifiable issue. The wider context is the role of ritual secrecy to protect ritual power – which includes the preference for the direct participation of speech, with its invisible trace (less possible to decode than endto-end encryption), over an accumulation of writings which can be compared, catalogued and, perhaps, deciphered. The fractured historiography of drug use in religious contexts should certainly be read in colonial terms, but not only. Western colonialism, with its machinery of classification, did not mark the advent of suppressing/ignoring indigenous cultural practices; only its most recent form, the erasure of drug use in religious contexts predates western imperialism. It is all very well for R. Gordon Wasson to speculate that the soma of the Vedic texts is fly agaric mushrooms (Wasson 1980), but the reality is that soma was lost within the Indian cultural discourse long before western scholarship tried to recover it from forgottenness. The same is the case for what might have been called kykeon at the Eleusinian festival in Greece (Wasson [1978] 2008). In a composite case, I live on the Isle of Skye surrounded by psilocybe semilanceata which pop nipple-tipped heads above ground every autumn. But in spite of the National Biodiversity Network acknowledging its ‘native’ status,4 there is no ‘history’ of psilocybin use in the west Highlands of Scotland because the Celts did not write, and the Christians had no place for another sacrament.5 The swirling patterns on Celtic jewellery or standing stones may be glossed with a psychedelic interpretation, but the physiological psychologist Heinrich Klüver classified the form constants of hallucinatory images in 1926 (Bressloff 2001). His classification may have been inspired by mescalin, but the forms are intrinsic to the brain’s processing and are not dependent on drugs, just an open mind. The difficulties of ‘men’, ‘religious’ and ‘history’ which absorb the humanities are treated as self-evident in the framings of first and second generation psychedelic research because the power of the premise lies in its simplistic presentation. Pointing out this difficulty is not to take sides in a reductive disciplinary dichotomy, but it is to raise an alert to the presumption of an easy interdisciplinarity. If scientists jump-start their audiences into novel discourses –

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such as drug use in religious practice – oblivious to the theory and practice of the humanities, their presuppositions are not exempt from being tested for validity. The corollary is that humanities scholarship might be wise not to pre-emptively invoke the full gamut of the quagmire of ‘culture’ they professionally organize just to stymie research hypotheses. Anticipating in advance the outcome of this reading of Pahnke, naïvety can produce new insights, perspectives and questions for the humanities as well as the sciences. Having established this disciplinary context, I highlight a synchronic cultural process in which the class of drugs, which included psilocybin, mescalin and LSD, were liberated from their psychiatric context. In ‘A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents’ published in the prestigious Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Humphry Osmond sought to rebrand the ‘unsettled category of psychotomimetics’ by suggesting a number of alternative neologisms: ‘psychehormic’, ‘psycherhexic’, ‘psychezymic’, ‘psychelytic’ or his first-choice, ‘psychedelic – mind manifesting’ (Osmond 1957: 432 [emphasis in the original]). The common-sense connotations of ‘mind manifesting’ were, and remain, radically different from the idea of ‘mimicking psychosis’. Osmond understood this cultural reframing; he asks rhetorically: Why are we always preoccupied with the pathological, the negative? Is health only the lack of sickness? Is good merely the absence of evil? Is pathology the only yardstick? Must we ape Freud’s gloomier moods that persuaded him that a happy man is a self-deceiver evading the heartache for which there is no anodyne? Is not a child infinitely potential rather than polymorphously perverse?6 (Osmond 1957: 429)

The frustration is palpable, the need for change pressing. The success of the new label, psychedelics, did not change the pathologizing instinct of psychiatry, but the rebranding provided a remission for the drugs by breaking the direct link with psychiatric language. As consumption of the new psychedelics exceeded the control of the scientific research community, the CIA, and ‘the establishment’ in general, hijacked by the Merry Pranksters (as a totemic metonym of the anti-establishment)7, the transformation from the psychopathological jargon of psychosis, to the ever-mind-expanding jargon of psychedelia, represented a change of lane in the public discourse, facilitated by the magic trick of a neologism. This decoupling let go of the comparator psychosis. However, tainted with the negative connotations of psychiatry, psychosis was formally recognized in psychotomimetics, now pronounced psychedelics, a model of a little madness. In this rebranding, the psychedelic experience was relativized

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– it was left to the individual to experimentally articulate their experience in whatever ‘far out’ vocabulary they found at their disposal. As with all of the chapters in Part I, the role of language games predominates, and the history of psychedelia has always been grounded in a language game. But in this chapter the relationship between academia and popular culture finds its nexus in a point of history in which all the ways of speaking about unspeakable experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme found ready expression in the existing language of that discourse: ‘mystical’, ‘numinous’, ‘Shamanic’, along with more secular terminology which was swiftly recruited and deployed: ‘peak experiences’ (Maslow 1964) and ‘altered states of consciousness’ (Ludwig 1966). While William James provided the entry point into the psychology of the western discourse on mysticism, it was Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) which provided the intellectual heft which allowed the fetishizing of mysticism as an object of study which could be subjected to the rigour of scientific investigation. The mysticisms of the east and the mysticisms of the west, found in marginal expressions throughout christian and muslim history, were now unifiable in ‘the mystical experience’. And these states of consciousness, testified to throughout history and across culture, might also be experienced and explored by anyone thanks to the promise of psychedelics. Legitimizing the transition from Stace’s philosophical approach to the production of on-demand mystical experiences required a PhD in chicanery overseen by masters of conceits. At Harvard University Timothy Leary was quick to understand the gift Walter Stace provided in Mysticism and Philosophy. Leary took personal credit for ‘confirming the opinion of a leading American authority on mysticism, W.  T.  Stace’ (Leary 1963: 255), according to Leary. This is an extraordinary conceit8 which began the tradition of rereading Mysticism and Philosophy (Chapter 5) in ways the author could not control. At the same time, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were in conversation with Walter Pahnke, a trained psychiatrist, now student of religion, in his thirties, whose PhD thesis Drugs and Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Psychedelic Drugs and the Mystical Experience (Pahnke 1963) was going to provide the scientific validation of Leary’s claims and scientifically legitimize the link between mysticism and psychedelics. As Leary puts it in his autobiography High Priest: Then there was Walter Pahnke a young country-bumpkin, fresh-faced, gee-whiz enthusiast. He had a ministerial degree (Midwest Lutheran, I believe) and a medical license and was an advanced graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Harvard Divinity School. Walter wanted to do a thesis dissertation research

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Richard Alpert, known as Ram Dass from 1967, observed, “If what our Harvard colleagues wanted was systematic research with controls, this was it, the gold standard, a double-blind, medically supervised experiment’ (Dass 2021: 91). The story of Walter Pahnke’s empirical study, known in the secondary literature as the Good Friday experiment and/or the Marsh Chapel experiment, is legendary in the history of psychedelics and the narrative is summarized by Pahnke and Richards9 in ‘Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism’ (Pahnke 1966b). Critical engagement with Pahnke’s text is harder to find.10 Pahnke’s findings served the ‘pro-psychedelic’ evangelism of Leary and Alpert by bringing science to bear on psilocybin and mysticism, while critics of psychedelics did not feel the need to explore the finer points of Walter Pahnke’s methodology prior to condemning his conclusions. Such an exploration of his methodology, his opaque presentation of his results and his conceptual misreading of Walter Stace require recourse to a still unpublished11 PhD thesis from 1963, a scattering of journal articles from 1966 to 1969 (see bibliography) and a (currently outof-print) philosophical text from 1960, Mysticism and Philosophy (Chapter 5), which provided authority for the construct of mystical experiences. In his PhD, Pahnke’s findings are as follows: ‘Under the conditions of this experiment, those subjects who received psilocybin experienced phenomena which were indistinguishable from, if not identical with, certain categories defined by our typology of mysticism’ (Pahnke 1963: 234). Pahnke, the scientist, was coy in the presentation of his data in summary form, but Huston Smith, the religious scholar was not. In an article in The Journal of Philosophy in 1964, ‘Do Drugs Have Religious Import’, Smith writes about ‘“the Miracle of Marsh Chapel” in which ten theological students and their professors ingested psilocybin and were visited by what they generally reported to be the deepest religious experience of their lives’ (Smith 1964: 517). Precisely here is the confusion. Smith was one of the guides who received 15 mg of psilocybin, half the dose the ten participants received. The experience of the guides was not part of the protocols of the experiment and no data in relation to the guides was collected or analysed. In his bestselling How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018), Michael Pollan reports a 1996 interview with Smith in which he says: ‘Until the Good Friday Experiment I had no direct

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personal encounter with God’ (Pollan 2018: 45).12 The hyperbolic ‘miracle’ Smith introduces into The Journal of Philosophy is his own experience which forms no part of the experiment. The harder to notice consequence of Smith’s report of his experience is that he subverts Pahnke’s scientific experiment by contaminating its objectives. The problem is not just that Smith fails to disclose his role in the experiment but also that he conflates ‘religious experience’, the general term operationalized by William James ([1902] 1985), with the object of study: ‘mystical experience’. Smith, the scholar of religion, fails to adhere to the philosophical construct of mysticism which Pahnke’s experiment was intentionally and expressly designed to empirically verify. This error is fundamental. By glossing over the threshold between religious experience and the extreme state of mystical consciousness (the very conceptual differentiation which is at the heart of my distinction between religious experiences and acute religious experiences), Smith not only misreports the science of the experimental mode, he misrepresents the findings. Smith’s effusive reporting of his personal experience instead of the actual results percolates through the subsequent discourse. As recently as 2018, Michael Pollan reports that ‘Eight of the ten students receiving psilocybin reported a powerful mystical experience’ (Pollan 2018: 45) and he equally incorrectly reports Pahnke’s findings as follows: ‘the experiences of those who received the psilocybin were “indistinguishable from, if not identical with”, the classic mystical experiences reported in the literature’ (Pollan 2018: 45). If a contemporary account, with all of the benefit of hindsight, can so misreport Pahnke’s findings, it is unsurprising that the pro-psychedelic community basked in the science fiction of Huston Smith’s contemporary account of Pahnke’s actual results and trumpeted them in validation of Leary’s prior claim, that ‘some forms of the psilocybin experience and mysticism are identical’ (Leary 1963: 255) – a claim which could now be upgraded and restated because the Good Friday experiment provided ‘proof scientific, experimental, statistical, objective. The sacred mushrooms, administered in a religious setting to people who were religiously motivated, did produce that rare, deep experience which men have sought for thousands of years through sacraments, through flagellation, prayer, renunciation. Psychedelic drugs were sacraments’ (Leary [1968] 1995: 314). Looking back from today, Pahnke appears oblivious to the philosophical and methodological liberties his ‘scientific’ research takes with the academic discourses of philosophy and religion. Pahnke’s sample of participants given psilocybin consisted of ten seminarians from Andover-Newton theological school (Richards 2016: 31), where Walter Clark taught. These psychedelically

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naïve, white, all-male seminarians were from ‘relatively similar religious and socio-economic background, (and) after medical and psychiatric screening, were carefully prepared’ (Pahnke 1969: 156). In his thesis, Pahnke explains that ‘the effects of set and setting were planned to maximise the possibility that mystical phenomena would occur’ (Pahnke 1963: 87),13 a scene reminiscent of any spiritualist séance. The pseudo-science of making an experiment ‘double blind’ when it was perfectly obvious in the first hour as to which ten had received the niacin and which the psilocybin was criticized by Timothy Leary, but this genuflection to the gold standard of scientific method prevailed. These are the easy and obvious points of criticism. In this reading, my interest is in the less obvious, but more important, philosophical and methodological issues of the scientific measurement of a particular consciousness dubbed ‘a mystical experience’. Pahnke begins his thesis by picking up Leary’s idea that drugs and religion have always been partners across history. But this time Pahnke provides a detailed case study instancing examples from archaic practices. This glosses over a vast conceptual cleavage in the academic study of religion which can be revealed by the recollection that Stace rejects all such practices in his construction of mysticism – which, even in its extrovertive subform, is always meditative (Chapter 5). In his thesis, Pahnke’s literature survey of ‘Religion and Psychedelic Substances’ recounts indigenous rites and rituals in the Americas with a brief mention of Siberia and Kamchatka. Pahnke piggybacks on the mycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s theory ‘that the use of such [psychoactive] plants was an important factor in the origin of religious ideas among primitive peoples’ (Pahnke 1963: 6). This is utterly irrelevant to and incompatible with Pahnke’s adoption of Stace’s characterization of mysticism which assumes ‘higher cultures’ and dismisses ‘primitive practices’. To read across from ‘primitive’ rituals to ‘higher’ mysticism requires that the imagined fissure between shamanism/spirit possession and the western discourse on mysticism is closed, or that the jumper is so naïve that they do not appreciate the impossibility of such a move and just makes it anyway. The only way to get to Stace’s mysticism – which is integral to Pahnke’s experiment – is through Stace. But Stace has already precluded the visions, voices, possessions and performativity of primitive ritual – these are pre-disqualified, they are not even worthy of his lower extrovertive category of mystical experiences. Stace’s analysis of mysticism, which Pahnke relies on to structure his concept of mysticism, has no time or place for drummers drumming let alone the ritual consumption of psychoactive drugs in collective settings. This distinction may be invisible to a scientist conducting an experiment with psychedelics, but it

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is encoded into the traditional internal boundaries in the study of religions and it remains in place today. This fissure is partially recognized, by Ralph Metzner, who collaborated with Leary on The Psychedelic Experience in 1964 and wrote much later in ‘Hallucinogenic Drugs and Plants in Psychotherapy and Shamanism’ (Metzner 1998). He argued: ‘Synchronistically14 with the revelations and insights emerging from psychedelic research in psychology and religion, a generation of students and researchers in anthropology and ethnobotany was inspired to explore the roots of humankind's involvement with psychoactive plants in shamanism’ (Metzner 1998: 336). In this statement the ‘synchronicity’ is between the WEIRD15 samples of 1960s scientific psychology of religion research and the anthropology of ancient ritual practices in ‘primitive’ cultures. The question which arises from Pahnke’s naïve read-through from ‘primitive’ tribal rituals to Stace’s individualistic ‘higher’ mystics is whether his choice to ignore this fissure can be turned into the grounds to pose questions about its reality, meaning and value in twenty-first-century religious studies? Once this question becomes visible and can be articulated, it is possible to suggest that the fissure is an academic fiction with its roots in the classificatory instincts of a western colonial era which assumed that phenomenal differences of the expression of the experiences (of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme) are not also socially constructed. Could it be that the separation of shaman and mystic as incomparable cultural responses to experiences of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme arises because mystic and shaman have become reified phenotypes, pseudo-sui generis categories which are a priori deemed inherently incomparable out of respect for inherited boundaries established in colonial times? The Kraepelinian dichotomy in psychiatry between schizophrenia and manic depression is a perfect analogy (Chapter 8). Or, to put it in the starkest terms, is the religious studies discourse on the consciousness of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme predicated on colonial presuppositions? Does Stace simply fail to recognize these because his milieu is committed to a fissure between primitive and higher cultures, while Pahnke simply ignore the question because he is not sensitive to there being a problem? These are important questions which are beyond the scope of this chapter to answer (see Chapter 10). What can be said now is that Pahnke rode roughshod over Stace’s philosophical construction of mysticism as belonging to ‘higher cultures’ and in his enthusiasm16 traversed the traditional fences, ditches and other academic boundary mechanisms of the humanities without even noticing their presence. Unfortunately, where Pahnke goes next is more akin to tripping over an unnoticed fence and falling into the muddy field beyond. He explains: ‘the

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assumption was made that for experiences most useful for comparison with the typology of mysticism, the atmosphere should be broadly comparable to that achieved by tribes who actually use natural psychedelic substances in religious ceremonies’ (Pahnke 1963: 87). By preferring Wasson’s ritual performative ceremonies over Stace’s individualistic meditative accounts, Pahnke conducts his experimental ceremony on Good Friday in 1962. The disjunct of Good Friday, the moment when god dies at human hands, the most alienated moment in the christian calendar, and the intended mystical union is never discussed in the literature. If the objective was to induce a unitive experience with god/ the absolute/whatever, the choice of Good Friday is, at the very least, counterintuitive. The idea of twenty white seminarians and ten guides in a basement, listening through loudspeakers to a service they cannot see, individualistically participating in an experiment, with ten of them on 30 mg of psilocybin and 10 controls, is not ‘broadly comparable’ to anything in the religious studies literature. Huston Smith’s account in 1996, thirty-four years later, of the participant who walked out of the experiment (Smith 2000: 99–107) is of ‘mounting disorder in the chapel. After all, half our number were in a condition where social decorum meant nothing, and the other half were more interested in the spectacle that was unfolding before them than in the service proper’ (Smith 2000: 101). Timothy Leary recounts being rugby tackled and held down by a minister on mushrooms demanding he testify to the Blood of the Lamb (Leary [1968] 1995: 295). Turning from the setting, the big trouble is found in Pahnke’s approach to Stace’s typology of mysticism. Pahnke finds succour in Stace’s ‘distinction between primary experience and the interpretation of this experience [because it] points towards an ideal of phenomenological17 analysis’ (Pahnke 1963: 46). Pahnke took Stace’s characteristics of mystical experiences and read them backwards. Stace starts with the presupposition of an essence and describes the phenomena, which he named as the characteristics, of mystical experience. Pahnke reverses the relationship by making the assumption that if Stace’s phenomenal characteristics are present, then so is the essence – the ‘complete’ mystical experience. This idea has become so mainstream in the psychology of religion18 that Pahnke’s ‘Copernican’ reversal now passes almost unnoticed. This is a philosophical error because the whole process of drawing equivalences is mediated by language. Stace, drawing on textual accounts, constructed a characterization described in language. Starting with this language, Pahnke’s plan is to induce drug experiences (in a manufactured setting) and then invite his participants to express themselves in relation to phrasings which he

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formulates and therefore controls. The immediate post-drug questionnaire (completed within a week) offers 129 short decontextualized words/phrases to which the participant responds by marking how far their experience chimes with the language presented to them.19 The full questionnaire is in Appendix C of Pahnke’s thesis (Pahnke 1963: 266–73). By way of illustration, what follows is a dozen (contiguous) language prompts. 35. Sense that what was encountered was not real at the time of the experience 36. Sense that what was encountered was not real now (in looking back) 37. Intensity of the response to ultimate reality 38. Totality of the response to ultimate reality 39. Exaltation 40. Depression 41. Love 42. Hate 43. Tenderness 44. Exuberance 45. Meanness 46. Insecurity 47. Blessedness The tickbox responses to these language prompts are not ‘raw’ data offered by the participants. It is data mediated by linguistic suggestions, a series of linguistic flash cards, which demand meaningful engagement with all the freight of their semiotic construction. For example, the term ‘real’ is fundamental to the western philosophical discourse, and the affect signified by the sign ‘insecurity’ may never have occurred to the participant until the questionnaire suggested it – and demanded a response framed in its terms. Pahnke then weaves these responses into a framework of nine categories, based on Stace’s typology. In order to avoid participants anticipating his framework, Pahnke stresses that ‘no mention was made of the characteristics of the typology of mystical consciousness’ (Pahnke 1966b: 191), so the weaving is all Pahnke’s. These results are then judged as to whether they constitute a mystical experience.20 By analogy, this is like the Pali teaching story of the blind men and the elephant who each think the elephant has different qualities, except here Pahnke suggests the qualities and then knits an elephant out of the responses. Starting from the hypothesis that psychedelics can manifest mystical experiences, Pahnke scientifically facilitates the translation of the

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immediate, pre-linguistic, drug experience into the vocabulary of mystical experience – as a reality, not an analogy. The typology doesn’t actually matter.21 Pahnke could have relied on any or all of the approaches he mentions in his thesis: James, Pratt, Bucke, Underhill, Clark, Johnson, Walker, Suzuki, Stace . . . or like Stace, started again ab inifio . . ., the problem is not in the haphazard nature of typologies of characteristics, the problem is Pahnke’s reversal of Stace’s phenomenal description of the characteristics of mystical experiences (Chapter 5) to make the presence of the phenomena constitute the ‘presence’ of the mystical experience. In Pahnke’s hands, mystical experiences morph from phenotype, constituted by Stace’s symptomatology, into the reified thing in itself – ‘mystical experience’. Pahnke’s additional contribution to Stace’s mystical experiences was to finally sever the umbilical cord of mystical experience from particular human experience, turning it into a fully essentialized concept, a pure experience, notwithstanding Stace’s explicit rejection of such an idea.22 This inconvenient point is ignored by Pahnke because the detachment of mystical experiences from the mystics, which Stace has made possible, is to be completed according to a ‘scientific’ method which requires measurement and number. Participants were not only asked to self-report in relation to words (proposed by Pahnke who was psychedelically naïve and not a mystic), they were also asked to score the intensity, the qualia, of their experience of taking psychedelics on a five-point scale from ‘0’ none to ‘4’23 strong. As Pahnke describes: It was explained that the highest rating (‘4’ or ‘strong’) was for extreme experiences. For an item to be scored as ‘4’, the experience had to equal or excel an experience which the participant considered strong, either in comparison to his personal past experience or to what he would regard as strong in terms of each particular item. (Pahnke 1963: 103, emphasis in the original)

And here it is. Pahnke’s results are dependent on a self-referential and tautological measure of intensity – with a top score henceforth treated as a synonym for ‘complete’– on a comparison of what it felt like to take 30 mg of psilocybin FOR THE FIRST TIME. Participants self-reported on a language test, with intensity gauged on the basis of a self-referential comparison with their memory of their previous experiences. In this experiment, where the participants’ ‘set’ had been groomed and their ‘setting’ prepared to produce the result the research was designed to elicit, participants were asked to mark their own homework through a comparison with what they already knew. The most surprising thing is that the experiment comprehensively failed.

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After some (opaque) statistical manipulation (in the thesis the results are expressed in p values which conflate the results of participants and controls and these are ‘supported’ by consolidated actual results which cannot be disaggregated), Pahnke is still coy about his conclusions, declining to give a clear summary of what his abundance of data on a sample of just ten people actually showed. In his 1966 publication in The International Journal of Parapsychology (Pahnke 1966a) provides a table of consolidated results by typological category, which is an advance. But it takes until his 1967 paper ‘LSD and Religious Experience’ for him to finally disclose the results of the Good Friday experiment: ‘In regard to degree of completeness, only three or four of the ten psilocybin subjects reached the 60% to 70% level of completeness’ (DeBold 1967: 67). So, six or seven did not. But what is this 60% to 70%? Where did this threshold come from? Without any methodological or philosophical discussion, any validation from Mysticism and Philosophy, or any basis in the wider literature of mysticism, Pahnke unilaterally introduces a pass grade into his method. Setting grade bars in academia may be considered unexceptional and necessary when dealing with the relative performances of a normal cohort of students, but out in the extreme of the unspeakable experience of mysticism there is no precedent for establishing thresholds, there is no basis, there are no grounds. By 1969 Pahnke had lowered the pass mark for completeness: ‘Varying degrees of completeness are possible, but to be counted as a mystical experience it was decided that the total score and the score in each separate category had to be at least 60%’ (Pahnke 1969: 153). The absence of a methodological justification for any threshold can be taken as a concession that there is none. By 1969 anyone who can scrape over the lowest 2:1 on an exam which they mark themselves is deemed to have had a ‘complete mystical experience’. To be fair, Pahnke has not misread Stace. The problem lies squarely at Stace’s door. His analytical approach to the remorseless logic of phenomenality, in relation to experience, enshrined in his principle of causal indifference (Chapter 5), is a gift to the ideologues of psychedelia who sought to liberate mystical experiences from the few and make them accessible to the psychedelic experiences of the many. The validation of the premise that psychedelics could engender mystical experiences had obvious ramifications for the drug-induced liberators who trampled America with their mystical bona fides, like a herd of knitted elephants. The identification and competence of the examiners in Harvard University’s committee on higher degrees in History and Philosophy of Religion remains obscure, but they signed off on a doubleblind, medically supervised, experiment which proved that the gold standard of scientific verification had been achieved.

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This story could be ended here, but there is another segment which relates to Pahnke’s developing thinking after his PhD and the consequences of his continuing commitment to Stace’s construct of ‘mystical experiences’. In ‘Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism’ (Pahnke 1966b), Walter Pahnke and William Richards make a distinction between ‘spontaneous mystical experiences’ and ‘psychedelic experiences of drug-facilitated mystical consciousness’ (Pahnke 1966b: 190). Besides ‘spontaneous’ being a poor way of referring to historical mystical experiences,24 the claim is that these can be the same. By deploying the formulation ‘drug-facilitated mystical consciousness’, Pahnke and Richards recognize a distinction between the trigger and the experience which they elaborate: ‘By no means is positive mystical experience with the psychedelic drugs automatic. It would seem that this specific “drug effect” [mystical experience] is a delicate combination of psychological set and setting in which the drug itself is only the trigger or facilitating agent’ (Pahnke 1966b: 196). This position is expressed more starkly in Pahnke’s 1967 chapter ‘LSD and Religious Experience’: ‘It seems clear that the drug is only a trigger, a catalyst or facilitating agent, the kind of psychedelic reaction is largely dependent upon extra-drug variables’ (DeBold 1967: 65). This can be understood in the context of Pahnke’s developing theory about the psychedelic experience. After his 1963 thesis, Pahnke settles on a recognition of five types of psychedelic experiences: psychotic, psychodynamic, cognitive,25 aesthetic and mystical. (Pahnke 1966b: 183;26 DeBold 1967: 60; Pahnke 1969: 150). If this typology is read on the basis that the drug is simply a trigger, the effect is ‘constructed’ by the participant subject. Contextually, the language of construction may be considered as anachronistic as (for example) Berger & Luckmann only published The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in The Sociology Of Knowledge in 1966.27 Without recourse to constructivist language, Pahnke’s capacity to understand and articulate his own research within his specialism of the scientific study of psychedelics was context-limited. Nevertheless, with contemporary hindsight, Pahnke’s argument still retains considerable foresight: Psychedelics trigger experiences which are constructed differently according to context. But such an analysis does not address the issue of intensity. On this, Pahnke’ recognizes that not only is the effect dose-dependent (Pahnke 1966b: 193) but contends that ‘only in mystical consciousness and some psychotic reaction is the subject-object dichotomy transcended and the empirical ego extinguished’ (Pahnke 1966b: 184). The temptation is to put mystical and psychotic states at opposite ends of the normal distribution curve (Chapter 1) of states of consciousness/experience, but again it may shed more light to recognize that psychosis and mystical experiences are

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different constructions of the same neuroplastic state. In the text on the category of ‘psychotic phenomena’, Pahnke writes: ‘Although some researchers would hold that all phenomena occurring in altered states of consciousness28 should be labelled ‘psychotic’, here we reserve the term for experiences of . . . [and there follows a list of all of the phenomena characteristic of a ‘bad trip’] . . . of paranoia of panic, or of extreme disorientation and confusion’ (Pahnke 1966b: 188). In the context of the term ‘psychotic’, it is crucial to remember that, as a scientist, Pahnke was operating in the domain of the DSM I language game, which was grounded in Freudian rather than Kraepelinian presuppositions and employed Adolf Meyer’s psychobiological view that mental disorders represented reactions of the personality to psychological, social and biological factors. The classification was divided between Psychotic, Neurotic and Behavioural reactions (APA 1958: 1). In the DSM-5 language game, many of the psychotic symptoms which Pahnke identifies are now classified in the dissociative identity disorder section under classifications such as depersonalization. Psychotic was, is and remains an unstable category (Chapter 8). When Pahnke’s co-author, William Richards, recounts his bad trip in Sacred Knowledge (Richards 2016: 106–8), it cannot be the trigger which is to blame for the experience. It may be the formal cause, but the trigger is not responsible for the contents of the experience. The same man, Richards, had recently taken the same psychedelic agent and had ‘good trips’ including ‘mystical experiences’. As Richards’ account makes clear, there is a self-fulfilling aspect of the extreme psychedelic experience where (in Pahnke’s terms) with ‘subject-object dichotomy transcended and the empirical ego extinguished’ and without external interruption or interference, good experiences pursue better, and bad experiences chase themselves towards the worst.29 The popular usage of the terms ‘good trip’ and ‘bad trip’ provide recognizable labels. The capacity for the same drug taken by the same person to have radically different effects does not require two explanations, it can be resolved with one explanation, the one that derives from Pahnke’s argument, rather than his prejudice. By separating mystical experiences from psychotic experiences, Pahnke introduces a category error. Mystical experiences are psychotic experiences – desirable psychotic experiences. In his pursuit of the chimera of putative mystical experiences, Pahnke is seeking to differentiate these from psychosis on the basis of sociological rather than neuroscientific reasons. Pahnke is using mystical experience and psychosis as binary subclassifications of the extreme psychedelic experience. Once this category error comes into view, it can be further clarified by a reprise of the previous label, psychotomimetic. But in the light of Osmond’s critique (see p. 74) the quality of the experience

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for the subject needs to be divided on the basis of whether it was desirable or undesirable, good or bad, sunny or rainy. The experience itself, according to Pahnke’s findings, is potential, a-moral, just the weather. Once experience has tripped over the threshold into the realm of (in Pahnke’s terms): ‘subject-object dichotomy transcended and the empirical ego extinguished’, then the experience is psychotic and ‘mystical experience’ becomes a particular language game played within the account of the psychedelic experience of the psychotic – desirable psychotic, good psychotic, sunny psychotic . . . mystical psychotic. Pahnke first published the results of his thesis in the spring edition of The International Journal of Parapsychology (Pahnke 1966a), followed by a longer article in the July issue of The Journal of Religion and Health (Pahnke 1966b), written in collaboration with William Richards. Pahnke was publishing in the very midst of the establishment collapsing the establishment’s scientific research into psychedelics, in the midst of a hurricane of media hysteria. Pahnke’s academic papers increasingly respond to this crisis as he moves beyond his PhD to a defence of psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. The collapse of government-funded research projects in the United States provides an explanation for why the methodology and conclusions of Pahnke’s thesis remained untested – because they couldn’t legally be repeated – but it does not explain the chasm between his conclusions and the way they have been reported, by enthusiasts like Huston Smith, with so little regard for the scientific rigour on which their validity depends. In this reading of Walter Pahnke, I began with Leary’s 1963 reading of the relation of human history, vegetables and religious visions which Pahnke’s thesis on Drugs and Mysticism validated with gold standard research. Pahnke’s foundational approach to scientifically measure mystical experience has subsequently been updated as the Revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire, in second generation psychedelic research (Griffiths 2006; McLean 2012; Barrett 2015), but Pahnke’s methodology and his misreading of Stace has never been tested. Being ‘fully validated’, not only can everyone (potentially) have a mystical experience but such mystical experiences have been resurrected as desirable constructs. As Michael Pollan, the author of the wildly successful and influential How to Change Your Mind, The New Science of Psychedelics puts it: For some reason I felt stupidly proud of my score [61 out of 100 on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ)] . . . It had been my objective to have such an experience, and at least according to the scientists a mystical experience I had had. Yet it brought me no closer to a belief in God or in a cosmic form of

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consciousness or in anything magical at all – all of which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do. (Pollan 2018: 284 [sic])

The self-reflexive honesty in Pollan’s account of scraping a numerical pass is endearing. Pollan’s ‘now officially verified mystical experience’ (Pollan 2018: 288) gives him a legitimized claim, along with anyone and everyone who performs adequately, to make mystical claims about their experiences, not merely echoing the history of mankind’s most ancient religious encounters, but authentically experiencing them afresh today, not as copies of reality, but as real, authentic, mystical experiences. Thanks to Walter Pahnke the reference (Stace 1960) is now deep in the engineering of contemporary psychedelic research, like an old chipset in a laptop, a legacy technology which has proved resilient in the past and is re-incorporated into new models because its authority is thought to be indispensable. This is ironic given that Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) does not support the conclusions Pahnke imposed on them either philosophically or methodologically. Identifying the chasm between what Stace taught and what Pahnke thought is not about acceptance and rejection, it is about the twists and turns in the discourse of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme and the limits of authorial control. McLean et al reprise the argument, ‘Mystical experiences are a common component of religious traditions across human history’ (McLean 2012: 2); they contiguously invoke Stace, ‘Historical descriptions of mystical experience from diverse sources reveal common themes, suggesting a core experience that cuts across religions and cultures (Stace 1960)’ (McLean 2012). This is not a citation of Stace, but a form of academic authority signalling. The deployment of the (Stace 1960) citation carries with it no presumption of having read Mysticism and Philosophy. Why would any psychedelic researcher want to disrupt Pahnke’s conclusions and actually read (Stace 1960)? McLean (and many others) uncritically incorporate Pahnke’s erroneous interpretation of Stace because there appears no need to test Pahnke’s conclusions which were, from the point of view of psychedelic therapy, already perfect: The results of our experiment would indicate that psilocybin (and LSD and mescaline, by analogy) are important tools for the study of the mystical state of consciousness. Experiences previously possible for only a small minority of people, and difficult to study because of their unpredictability and rarity are now reproducible under suitable condition. The mystical experience has been called by many names suggestive of areas that are paranormal and not usually considered easily available for investigation (e.g., an experience of transcendence, ecstasy, conversion, or cosmic consciousness); but this is a

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Acute Religious Experiences realm of human experience that should not be rejected as outside the realm of serious scientific study, especially if it can be shown that a practical benefit can result. Our data would suggest that such an overwhelming experience, in which a person existentially encounters basic values such as the meaning of his life (past, present, and future), deep and meaningful interpersonal relationships, and insight into the possibility of personal behavior change, can possibly be therapeutic if approached and worked with in a sensitive and adequate way. (Pahnke 1966a)

There is nothing in Walter Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy which suggests he would approve of his characteristics of mysticism being measured by the ascription of quantitative values and converted into a measure of mysticism in a self-report questionnaire which the subject marks themselves. But Pahnke has managed to persuade the psychedelic research community of exactly that, with the knowing assistance of identifiable figures in the history of psychedelics, but also the connivance of a milieu which wanted to believe. From my mad studies point of view, it is obvious that the five-part typology Pahnke reaches is not read from the Good Friday experiment. The five-part typology is constructed after 1963 and in the light of his own initiation into, and integration of, psychedelic experiences; his discussions with the likes of William Richards; and also in the light of cultural change and political pressure. In this chapter I come to a different way of looking at the role of psychedelics, which is congruent with Pahnke’s argument but avoids his prejudicial recourse to the language game of mysticism. I suggest that psychedelics are the pharmakon of consciousness. Not the pharmakon of writing (as opposed to speech) which Plato introduces in the Phaedrus (Plato [370 BC] [2002] 2009: 68) and Derrida riffs on in ‘Plato’s pharmacy’ in Disseminations ([1969] 1981: 95–117), but the original Greek idea of the medicine with the potential to poison and heal. The psychedelic pharmakon of consciousness operates prearticulately and therefore pre-theoretically, confronting the participant with a fresh, ‘immediated’, encounter with life and reality, internal and external, inward and outward, introvertive and extrovertive, invocative not only of Stace’s mysticism but also the immediate experience of reality addressed by mainstream ‘continental’ philosophy. When Merlau-Ponty, who died in 1961, prior to Pahnke’s thesis, writes, True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as 'deeply' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for

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our history through reflection, but equally by a decision on which we stake our life, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act which is validated by being performed. (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 42)

He speaks to an encounter with reality which is more authentic because it isn’t read through the prism of the archaic phenotype of mysticism and some vague association with religious ceremonies and rituals. This is a vital contemporary issue as the idea of ‘mystical experiences’ continues to be operationalized in second generation psychedelic research by people who really should know better.

7

Abraham Maslow’s Peak Experiences

‘Peak Experiences’ was the theoretical term constructed and championed by Abraham Maslow in Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (Maslow [1964] 2014). The neologism, peak experiences, echoes the historical descriptions from a wide range of traditions where accounts of mountain-top experiences proliferate in the history of revelation, suggesting an intuitive fit, an easy metaphor. Examples include Moses on Sinai, Ezekiel on Horeb, Jesus’s Transfiguration, Mohammed on Jabal an-Nour, Mikao Usui on Hiei and, of course, Shiva who lives in the Himalayas smoking ganja (Verma 2018). The appeal to mountain-top experiences also resonates with the lived experience of those who look out on the world below, experiencing a very different perspective from their mundane world of survival. This privileging of the peak is congruent with Maslow’s ideas on hierarchy which he’d previously embedded in his ‘hierarchy of needs’, introduced in 1942, in which a neat triangle looks very much like a mountain with all the good stuff at the top. As one of the central figures in humanistic psychology and the foundation of transpersonal psychology, Maslow makes clear that he is dissatisfied with both the Positivists and the Freudians (Maslow [1964] 2014: 19). Maslow introduces peak experiences as a theoretical construct with which to address both the transcendent and the spiritual; to answer questions which Positivists did not ask; and to provide a grounding for a positive psychology which was interested in more than the pathology which preoccupied Freudian psychoanalysis. By addressing the values which were a priori excluded from Positivism (‘the pure positivist rejects any inner experiences of any kind as being “unscientific”’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 19)) and Freudianism (as a ‘value-denying philosophy of man’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 20)), Maslow’s peak experiences were not an approach to achieving normality; instead, they were premised on an agenda of self-actualization which had a distinctly moral quality. Maslow is always pointing towards the ‘higher’.1 The relativity implicit in the idea of higher is a two-fold problem: First,

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in relation to comparability, of which equivalence is a particular problematic instance – is my higher the same as your higher? And second, by privileging the higher, Maslow evokes a dichotomy of ‘lower’ in a psychological approach which is opposed to dichotomies. Specifically, ‘not having core-religious experiences may be a “lower”, lesser state, a state in which we are not “fully functioning”, not at our best, not fully human, not sufficiently integrated. When we are well and healthy and adequately fulfilling the concept “human being”, then, experiences of transcendence should in principle be commonplace’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 45). Such a paragraph is a consequence of his immediately prior proposal: If ‘heaven’ is always available, ready to step into, and if the ‘unitive consciousness’ (with its B-cognition, its perception of the realm of Being and the sacred and eternal) is always a possibility for any serious and thoughtful person, being to some extent under his own control, then having such ‘core-religious’ or transcendental experiences is also to some extent under our own control, even apart from peak experiences. (Having enough peak-experiences during which B-cognition takes place can lead to the probability of B-cognizing without peakexperiences.) (Maslow [1964] 2014: 44)

Being2 and its derivatives, B-analysis, B-love, B-cognition, B-knowledge, B-realm, B-woman,3 B-man,4 B-psychology, B-attitude, B-way, B-sense, B-aspects, B-object, is a higher-value- laden world5 for Maslow, to which peak experiences provide not only access but a beaten pathway of return. The result is that his advocacy of peak experiences is susceptible to a moral mapping – peak experiences are entwined in an imagined morality which privileges a higher state of consciousness which is possible for humanity – in the future – but which is redolent of many of the characteristics of a 1950s morality which has yet to grapple with (for example) feminism. The clutter of words prefixed by the letter ‘B’ should not distract from the reference points Malow relies on in the (previous) citation. Here we have heaven, unitive consciousness, core-religious or transcendental, all in the same paragraph. The psychologization of religion is at the heart of Maslow’s project but that is not all. Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences is, according to its editor E. I. F. Williams ‘presented as a contribution to philosophical and scientific thinking, as one interpretation of a fundamental aspect of life, as a step toward a better understanding among the religions of the world, and as a possible program for the development of a healthy relationship between modern science and modern theology’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 6). In my reading of Maslow, even this ambitious characterization is insufficient to Maslow’s intent which is to redefine

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modern science and modern (liberal) theology by reinstituting the irrational of ecstatic experience, as an integral part of his naturalistic interpretation of what it means to be a better human being. In this sense, Maslow’s peak experiences play a similar counterpart (for contemporary science and liberal theology) as Otto’s irrational numinous did as a counterpart to the rationality of the Holy. The theological basis of Otto’s numinous and the humanistic basis of Maslow’s peak experiences repulse comparison at a superficial level, but Maslow had read Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy – Chapter 3) and the demand for contemporary science and modern theology to take the ‘experiences of surrender, of reverence, of devotion, of self-dedication, of humility, of oblation, of awe and the feeling of smallness’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 54) seriously, is at the heart of a project in which feeling and experience are synonymous. Maslow is perfectly clear that he grounds the idea of peak experiences in a perennial assumption about a ‘universal nucleus of every known high religion’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 33). These ‘“peak experiences” or “ecstasies” or “transcendent” experiences’ belong to the prophets of religion. In Maslow’s presentation, supernatural language can now be translated by humanistic psychologists as ‘a part of science’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 34). Maslow’s theory is that all religions are attempts to communicate the peak experiences of their founders to people in general (cf. Maslow [1964] 2014: 33). While this may appear tenable in the context of buddhism, it is an idiosyncratic reading of judaism and christianity which ignores the mediating role of sacrifice; a bizarre reading of the duty of islam which denies images of the prophet; and an ignorant reading of the indigenous diversity in (what is intended) by the term ‘Hindu’. Unhindered by a rich understanding of comparative religion, peak experiences are to be considered as ‘truly religious experiences in the best and most profound, most universal, and most humanistic sense of that word . . . (and) pulling religion into the realm of science will be the most important consequence of this line of work’ (Maslow 1962: 10). By dichotomizing science and religion as two methodologies for the interpretation of experience, Maslow puts himself in a position to show why both need to wake up to the ramifications of his project – which will resolve the dichotomy. While religion and Maslow’s psychology are the same discussion in different languages, the materialist focus of nineteenth-century science is a reactionary aberration which can be overcome by Maslow’s naturalistic approach to peak experiences. Maslow presents his solution as congruent with contemporary cultural developments: ‘Some perceptive liberals and non-theists are going through an “agonising reappraisal”’(Maslow [1964] 2014: 55), a loss of faith in positivistic science, and the realization that the separation of facts and

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values is already being overcome by a new type of humanistic scientist (who is never instanced, never cited, never named), but is, of course, Maslow. The Maslow who proposes that ‘sooner or later, we shall have to redefine both religion and science’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 27) sees dichotomies as obstacles to be overcome. But it is the same Maslow who creates a further new dichotomy between the serious and the superficial,6 in which scientists and theologians are corralled onto Maslow’s side: There is, then, a road which all profoundly ‘serious’, ‘ultimately concerned’7 people of good will can travel together for a very long distance. Only when they come almost to its end does the road fork so that they must part in disagreement. Practically everything that, for example, Rudolf Otto defines as characteristic of the religious experience – the holy; the sacred; creature feeling; humility; gratitude and oblation; thanksgiving; awe before the mysterium tremendum; the sense of the divine, the ineffable; the sense of littleness before mystery; the quality of exaltedness and sublimity; the awareness of limits and even of powerlessness; the impulse to surrender and to kneel; a sense of the eternal and of fusion with the whole of the universe; even the experience of heaven and hell – all of these experiences can be accepted as real by clergymen and atheists alike. And so it is also possible for all of them to accept in principle the empirical spirit and empirical methods and to humbly admit that knowledge is not complete, that it must grow, that it is in time and space, in history and in culture, and that, though it is relative to man's powers and to his limits, it can yet come closer and closer to ‘The Truth’ that is not dependent on man. (Maslow [1964] 2016: 66)

The good will is limited, on Maslow’s part. Maslow expresses his concerns that mystics may ‘become not only selfish but also evil . . . (and) wind up in meanness, nastiness, loss of compassion or even in the extreme of sadism’ (Maslow [1964] 2016: 8). Drawing on a model of addiction which resembles opioids, ‘needing to escalate the triggers . . . stronger and stronger stimuli are needed to produce the same response’8 (Maslow [1964] 2016), Maslow’s concern is that, as for the mystics of religious history, so, possibly, for the future of peak experiences. And here is the nub: For Maslow, the moral qualities inherent in peak experiences are dependent on their use as ends, not means, and those ends depend on the quality of the subject – serious or superficial. This dichotomy is one which will play out across the 1960s as psychedelia explodes and the fallout is found to be morally ambiguous. What Maslow underestimates is that his willingness to institutionalize the de-institutionalization of religion – where ‘each person has his own private religion’ (Maslow [1964] 2016: 40) – takes James’s privileging of a distinction between individualistic religious feelings, acts and experiences and

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institutionalized religion to a different level. Instead of being a means for James to circumscribe his field in the psychology of religious experience (Chapter 1), it is difficult to read Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences as having any place for organized religion, which only ever got in the way of religious experience. By drawing on Otto’s theological interpretation of the Holy, Maslow co-opts the experiences of the numinous and substitutes the metaphor of peak experiences. By placing the fork of disagreement at the end of the road, Maslow promotes his humanist interpretation, sidestepping the antagonisms between religion and the theories of human nature presented by Freud, on the one hand, and ‘expe​ rimen​talis​tic-p​ositi​visti​c-beh​avior​istic​’ (Maslow [1964] 2016: 76) psychology at the start of the road, on the other. But what is so fascinating about the passage cited earlier is that, at the crossroads both paths defer to a state which is independent of man. For Otto, this is the Holy, for which the numinous is only a counterpart to the ethical and rational, in which the church retains authority; for Maslow recourse is made to ‘The Truth’ with leading capitals, as a transcendent state which can be reached through self-actualization and has no need of institutionalized authority. Maslow’s is a new psychologization of the American dream. The love-in between humanism and religion may sound attractive at an abstract level, but it is let down in the practical world of real people and contingent events. Maslow began his search in the literature on saints, great persons and heroes (reminiscent of Stace – whom Maslow had not read), searching to construct a family which resembled his ideals. As David Wulff recounts: Maslow screened students for an in-depth study of ‘Good Human Beings’ (‘GHBs’). Disappointed by the rarity of undergraduate GHBs – he found only one immediately usable subject among three thousand students . . . he finally relied on personal acquaintances and friends as well as public and historical figures. His final, overwhelmingly male ‘sample’ consisted of 18 ‘fairly sure’ or ‘highly probable’ figures (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, William James, and Albert Schweitzer), 5 ‘partial cases’ (all anonymous contemporaries), and 37 ‘potential or possible cases’ (e.g., Goethe, Martin Buber, D. T. Suzuki, Benjamin Franklin, and Walt Whitman). (Wulff 1991: 602)

The challenges of finding a sample to represent a preconceived theoretical reality is, of course, awash with the easy bias of self-projected values and can only be understood as an abandonment of any pretence at ‘science’. Although Maslow wants to present his project as a redefinition of science, he is still labouring under a felt need to perpetuate an attachment to the language of science. Not

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the science of the nineteenth century, but the science which understands that ‘mystery, ambiguity, illogic, contradiction, mystic and transcendent experiences may now be considered to lie well within the realm of nature’ (Wulff 1991: 57), and what lies within nature can be addressed by the new expanded sciences, broken free from the domain of religion and therefore transcending the American separation between church and state. Maslow’s position on whether peak experiences are universal or not provides a stark insight into the problem of how to understand their phenomenality. He changed his mind. In my first investigations, in collaboration with Gene Nameche, I used this word (non-peaker) because I thought some people had peak experiences and others did not. But as I gathered information, and as I became more skillful in asking questions, I found that a higher and higher percentage of my subjects began to report peak-experiences . . . I finally fell into the habit of expecting everyone to have peak-experiences and of being rather surprised if I ran across somebody who could report none at all. Because of this experience, I finally began to use the word ‘non-peaker’ to describe, not the person who is unable to have peakexperiences, but rather the person who is afraid of them, who suppresses them, who denies them, who turns away from them, or who ‘forgets’ them.

A different phrasing can be found in Maslow’s 1961 lecture ‘Lessons from the Peak-Experiences’: ‘Practically everybody reports peak-experiences if approached and questioned and encouraged in the right way’ (Maslow 1962: 11). In this phrasing the confirmation bias in Maslow’s approach is unvarnished.9 If a person is presented with the neologism ‘peak experiences’, like a new hat, and asked if it fits, they will squash their head into it and eventually come up with an account of an experience which satisfies the researchers’ need to validate their construct. The absence of social context or social markers renders peak experiences incomparable, undifferentiated between a Munro10 and a hillock. That everyone has exceptional experiences is not in doubt, but that these experiences are in the same (mountain) range is not validated due to the lack of any means of calibration. In proposing that peak experiences are accessible to all, the concept of ‘peak’ is diluted. By 1968 Thomas Merton and D. T. Suzuki, in their defence of the idea of ‘transcendent experiences’, a rather broad concept, contrasted them with Maslow’s ‘peak experiences’ as lacking specificity (Merton 1968: 71)! Maslow’s need for a neologism can be readily understood. His humanistic psychology is not limited to the discourse of academic psychology; he sought

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to position his project as a corrective within the mid-twentieth century, a corrective to the dichotomous discourses of science and religion in the west. Peak experiences never gained traction as compared to Otto’s numinous. Maslow had read James, Otto and Eliade;11 that Maslow addresses ideas of mysticism and unitive consciousness without referencing Stace can be read either as evidence of a-synchronicity or an oversight by Maslow.12 While Stace’s elite mysticism was stormed, ransacked and democratized by the secondary literature (Pahnke 1963, Hood 1975) (Chapter 6), the universal accessibility of Maslow’s peak experiences was intrinsic to his concept. The fact that the psychedelic research community opted into the mysticism of (Stace 1960) rather than the peak experiences of (Maslow 1964) is a perplexing matter, given the relative theoretical hurdles set out on Stace and Pahnke (Chapters 5 and 6). In appendix A of Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, Maslow sets out twenty-five points of correlation between peak experiences and religious happenings, starting with ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole’ (Maslow 1964: 70) and ending with ‘unitive consciousness’ (Maslow 1964: 76). I suggest that these twenty-five points could have more readily provided the grounds for a factor analysis questionnaire than Stace’s seven characteristics. Why the psychedelic community followed Stace rather than Maslow is one of those questions which invites speculation. Was it really just a matter of a-synchronicity? Pahnke lists Maslow’s 1962 Towards a Psychology of Being, but not the 1961 lecture ‘Lessons from the Peak Experiences’, which was also published in 1962, in the bibliography of his 1963 PhD thesis Drugs and Mysticism – An Analysis of the Relationship between Psychedelic Drugs and the Mystical Consciousness. Is the explanation that Pahnke was based in History and Philosophy of Religion rather than the Psychology department of Harvard? Perhaps the association of psychedelic drugs with the established construct of mysticism was a more ideologically driven project than the association with the novel construct of peak experiences. If the ramparts of the religious establishment were to be stormed and overthrown by psychedelia, there was less to be achieved by tackling an allied concept in which the role of psychedelic drugs was already theorized by Maslow. The result is, in my opinion, unfortunate. The grand humanistic programme of Maslow was ultimately much more ambitious than Stace’s accommodation of not necessarily religious experiences within his revised construct of an alien mysticism.13 Maslow’s contribution of peak experiences to the lexicon of terms with which to address experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is grounded in a scattergun approach: awe, love, adoration, worship, humility, feeling of smallness plus godlikeness, reverence, approval of, agreement with, wonder,

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sense of mystery, gratitude, devotion, dedication, identification with, belonging to, fusion with, surprise and incredulousness, fear, joy, rapture, bliss, ecstasy, etc. (Maslow [1964] 2016: 96). The ‘etc.’ matters, the list is non-exhaustive. As a term, ‘peak experiences’ offers a way to transcend the religious baggage of mysticism and locate experience in a new humanistic word order which is already fully aligned with the old religions, minus the supernatural.

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From psychiatry to madness to acute religious experiences

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In Part I, I critically read seven texts written by two philosophers, two psychologists, a historian of religions and a psychedelic theorist. I propose these texts might be considered as constituting the beginnings of a discourse of the not necessarily pathological interpretation of experiences of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme. The idea of not necessarily pathological is a proposal which allows that some experiences are pathological but allows that not all such experiences are pathological.1 This not necessarily pathological discourse troubles the concept of pathology by inviting and inspiring comparison with the psychiatric discourse which exerts a pathologizing instinct across all behaviour identified as abnormal. More than that, this not necessarily pathological discourse provides a place to take a comparative stand between pathological and non-pathological interpretations of the same data, such as visions, voices and possessions as phenomenal proxies for experiences of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme. In beginning a reading of the DSM-5, it is necessary to keep in mind that the pathological and the non-pathological discourses which can be compared and contrasted remain located within academic traditions of interpretations. The role of the first order voices of mad people will be addressed in Chapter 9; here I am setting up the possibility of a comparison of the contributions of James, Otto, Oesterreich, Eliade, Stace, Pahnke and Maslow with the internal discourse of the DSM series, which finds its own roots within European modernist psychiatry. All of the theoreticians are empathetic to their subject of study, but largely articulate theory built without first-hand experience of the experiences they study. Both discourses arise from a rationalist and rationalizing impulse which gained momentum in the nineteenth century when colonialism was in the ascendency. Psychiatry emerged in parallel with the development of the distinct humanities disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and, latterly, religious studies. All of this occurred within the rise of a secular western academy which was

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unencumbering itself from theology and advocated for reason, which was often presented under the privileged rubric of ‘science’. At a theoretical level, the pathological discourse of psychiatry is a lot more coherent than the not necessarily pathological discourse sketched out in Part I. This has much to do with sampling strategies. Historically, psychiatry had the benefit of the catch-all category of the abnormal just as imperialists had the idea of foreigner and both had recourse to the idea of the alien, with alienist being the early name for a psychiatrist. By specializing in the pathological extreme, the onus for identifying madness was always the responsibility of the generality of medical practitioners, law enforcement practitioners and communities. Psychiatrists didn’t go looking for patients; their patients were referred to them across professional relationships which were underpinned by funding considerations. One of the key consequences of this is that although psychiatry addresses the abnormal, it has never been required to define the normal and has increasingly come to rely on the idea of distress, rather than ideas of normal/ abnormal as the proxy which justifies psychiatric involvement. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the medicalization of abnormality contrasts with the discourse constituted in Part I, where the various theorists repeatedly face challenges in setting up distinctions to circumscribe their topics. Oesterreich (Chapter 3) and Eliade (Chapter 4) have the least difficulty as their subjects are always distinguishable from the normal of their social context. But others faced challenges. Otto’s numinous has all the language of the extreme but no measure of extremity. Stace (Chapter 5) builds sui generis defences to distinguish and protect his population of mystics, Pahnke (Chapter 6) knocks these down and Maslow (Chapter 7) finds his peak experiences become relativized in the normal lives of normal subjects as little hills rather than mountain tops. James is unique in relying on pathology as his guide. In his pathological programme, he recognizes his subjects are otherwise mad, but he redeems them from the reductionism of the medical materialist through his interpretation of their fruits (Chapter 1). In this chapter my presuppositional question relates to the psychiatric capacity to provide non-pathological or not necessarily pathological interpretations for the experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme and I illustrate the nature of the problem by considering the instance of people taking religion seriously. This is an issue of legitimate concern given that 25 per cent of the detainees in the secure units of the west articulate their experiences in religious terms (Brewerton 1994; Koenig 2009; Siddle 2002). In my analysis of Otto (Chapter 2) I showed how, for him, the idea of overwhelming, irrational affect was at the

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very heart of holiness, how experience of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme was integral to an understanding of the experience of god. Such experiential qualia is central to each of the readings in Part I. What becomes clear from any dispassionate reading of the DSM-5 is that the modernist epistemology on which psychiatry was built currently has no way of accommodating the direct experience of the ‘supernatural’ or the religious symbols and language which feed the accounts of the mad. Pinel’s account of stripping religious symbols out of the Bicêtre 300 years ago [1801] [1806] 1983: 79) set the humanist tone for this insurgent discipline. This leads into a difficult place for psychiatry in which religion per se is a delusion but does not constitute a mental disorder, such as psychosis, because the other criteria are not met. The compromise which modernist psychiatry has reached with mainstream society is one of toleration. This has not always been the case, see Part III. In psychiatric terms, it is not possible to argue that the death and resurrection of a man two thousand years ago (a) happened, or (b) is efficacious in the redemption of sins and the access of eternal life in heaven. Similarly, the idea that the creator of all things is interested in an individual person’s ‘salvation’ is a prime example of a delusion of reference. Such delusions can be and are tolerated. The psychiatric profession may be built on humanist principles, but it does not exclude psychiatrists of faith. The issue arises when experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme occur in the lives of individuals for whom the religious ‘delusion’ is already present. As soon as, for example, many of Jesus’s teachings are taken seriously, or the idea of being filled with the power of the holy spirit is taken outside the rhetorical context of a church, or the presence of an angel or a demon or the voice of god is added, and the status quo ante of the person’s behavioural pattern is changed – as change it must – the opportunity for a clinical encounter opens up. It is here, in the clinical encounter, that the jeopardy is crystallized. How is it possible to persuade a psychiatrist that one is sane when in the midst of an overwhelming and ineffable experience of god? At the contemporary cutting edge of psychiatric theory is the recourse to a phenomenological approach (e.g. Zahavi 2021). But however much the categories of the psychiatric classification are bracketed through the epoché, the inquiry remains one in which madness is required to give a rational account of itself to provide the psychiatrist with the means of understanding. The patient is required to speak. This method is cloaked in the impossible notion of reasoning with madness, which is a continuation of the domination of madness by reason (Chapter 9). Except now, the mad subject is required to give their own reasonable account, to justify themselves even though the organization of the meeting place renders them the othered subject. The

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seven accounts in Part I have in common a recognition that the experience of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is irrational, un-understandable even to the subjects when they are in the midst of their own disorientated, immediate state. The asymmetrical power imbalance of the clinical encounter requires the mad to articulate themselves, to articulate the ineffable in flimsy, inadequate, useless words – coherently. The resultant disorganized speech may be an inevitable by-product of the setting of the encounter rather than an intrinsic failure on the part of the mad. The result is that all the necessary components of mental disorder line up and the voice of god is overwritten with the presumption of psychosis. The epistemological injustice (Fricker 2007) is that the delusion of religion which is tolerated by psychiatric pragmatism in normal life (or the lives of normals), when experienced as overwhelming reality, as religious experience, exceeding conventional formulae, becomes an automatic disqualification for sanity. It is against the context of this problem that I will read the DSM-5, which is the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM-5 is the result of a decade-long research process involving 400 international scientists producing white papers, conferences, monographs and peer-reviewed journal articles. The DSM-5 was written by discreet committees with distinct briefs and the consolidated text reflects cultural forces which can be traced to Kraepelin at the end of the nineteenth century with schizophrenia as the flagship mental disorder, the maddest of madnesses. At 947 pages, the DSM-5 is a monster, marbled with inconsistencies reflecting the forced aggregation of trenchant traditions, categories and particular personalities, smudged and meta-conceptualized to look like a coherent logocentric whole.2 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders can be understood as an internal conversation within the American Psychiatric Association which gives a sense of coherence due to the periodical nature of its updates and its structure as a series. The DSM-5 (APA 2013) is the fifth iteration3 and it represents a totalizing classification of the complete current set of mental disorders voted as such by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In popular culture, the DSM is sometimes referred to as the psychiatric bible. This is an entirely incorrect assessment. The role of ‘sacred’ scriptures in any religion is to conserve texts in their original formulation. A much better comparison is with the early church councils which met to think through challenging theological doctrines, such as the conceptualization of the trinity within a monotheistic faith. Over five iterations, the DSM series has been subjected to constant change as psychiatrists seek to better understand and

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better articulate their understandings. A few of these are set out here by way of illustrating the cultural sensitivity of the American Psychiatric Association in the construction of a text which seeks to encompass the whole panoply of the pathological. ●

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In 1973 homosexuality was abolished as a mental disorder. This illustrated the capacity of the APA to change its mind on a specific psychiatric matter for political and ethical reasons and demonstrates the entanglement between pathology and morality – in this instance through a disentanglement. The publication of DSM III in 1980 saw the overwriting of the underlying principles of DSM I & II. When DSM I was published in 1952, disorders were referred to as ‘reactions’. The term originated with Adolf Meyer, who had a ‘psychobiological view that mental disorders represented reactions of the personality to psychological, social and biological factors’ (Grohol 2016). This approach worked effectively with the Freudian psychodynamic approach which was popular with American psychiatrists in the 1950s. The process which saw a paradigm shift from psychodynamic Freudian principles to the Kraepelinian theory of organic illness is documented by Rick Mayes and Alan Horwitz in ‘DSM-III and the Revolution in the Classification of Mental Illness’ (Mayes 2005). The consequent rise of biological psychiatry and the ‘medical model’, which assumes there is an organic disease basis for mental disorders, can be traced to this change. This theoretical shift illustrates the capacity for psychiatry to radically change its world view and rewrite its operating system. In the DSM IV (APA 1994), multiple personality disorder was rebranded as dissociative identity disorder. Multiple personality disorder was devalued as a diagnostic category by the media storm which developed around recovered memories of child abuse cases. Rebranding and reformulating multiple personality disorder as dissociative identity disorder cauterized the overreaction in the psychiatric clinic, leaving the child protection courts, the media and wider culture to work out the residual legacy. In 2013 the DSM-5 ‘reconceptualised’ (APA 2013: 309) somatoform disorder diagnoses, which, in turn, was the previous rebranding of hysteria. In his (pre-DSM-5) book Hysteria: A Biography, Andrew Scull describes the pathoplasticity of ‘a chameleon-like disorder that can mimic the symptoms of any other, and that seems to mould itself to the culture in which it appears’ (Scull [2009] 2011: 187). At the interface between neurological and psychological disorders, the DSM-5 proposes ‘That the reliability of

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determining that a somatic symptom is medically unexplained is limited, and grounding a diagnosis on the absence of an explanation is problematic and reinforces mind-body dualism’ (APA 2013: 309). It is enough that ‘the individual’s suffering is authentic, whether or not it is medically explained’ (APA 2013: 311). The implications of this move require pause for consideration. The DSM-5 (APA 2013) also introduces the idea of ‘disruption of identity’ into the main dissociative identity disorder diagnostic criteria along with a clear recourse to explanatory pluralism. I deal with this at length in the final part of this reading of the DSM-5.

These moments in DSM history are presented to illustrate the dynamic nature of the American Psychiatric Association and its expression in the DSM texts. Taken together, these points provide the necessary evidence to show that the DSM series is an internal psychiatric discourse which is engaged in addressing the phenomena of mental disorder in a complex language game, where words really do matter. It is this collegiate approach to resolving difficult problems which differentiates psychiatry from the humanities in general. In the humanities, advances are pioneered by individual or identifiable groups of authors. In Part I, I had to address a number of proper names to achieve the same breadth of perspective which the DSM takes for granted. In the humanities, as I have shown, there is no meta-level recognition that, for example, mysticism and possession are part of the same discourse of the phenomenality of the extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme or that visions, voices and possessions can be discussed within the context of consciousness in spite of their diverse cultural manifestations. In the DSM it is certainly the case that the texts for different chapters are produced by specialist working groups, but the whole project is comprehensively completist, bringing together the best version of contemporary thinking and presenting this as a complete version in a regularly updated series, rather than as a fractured series of monographs on particular idioms, area studies or cultural practices. The united front of the DSM-5 should not be confused with monolithic certainty. This follows from the process of change identified previously, but it can also be seen by simply reading the introduction to DSM-5. Here there are moments of introspective self-analysis, confessions which subvert the confident tone of the rest of the text. While claiming that the ‘DSM has been the cornerstone of substantial progress in reliability’ (APA 2013: 5), the introduction continues: ‘past science was not mature enough to yield fully validated diagnoses – that is, to provide consistent, strong, and objective scientific validators of individual

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DSM disorders’ (APA 2013: 5). This is a disarming concession which the DSM-5 doesn’t claim to have rectified. This confession is swiftly passed over, with attention diverted from existing deficits by the promise of new technologies and new approaches. The introduction points to all the contributions which have yet to be made by ‘cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging, epidemiology, and genetics’ (APA 2013: 5); the future promise of psychiatry begins in the current recognition of own inchoate state. But the idea of a classification system built on unvalidated diagnoses must provide cause for concern at a fundamental level in any critical analysis. This is where the story of psychiatry comes under pressure. The assumption in a classificatory system is that the reality to be classified is classifiable. In Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion, David Chidester teases out the ‘doctrine’ of Classify and Conquer espoused by Max Müller at the end of the nineteenth century (Chidester 2014: 62). Classification can be viewed as a technique of power and control deployed in the service of ‘science’ (which becomes a metonym for modernity), a way of imposing understanding and organizing knowledge in the interest of the dominant western culture. The power of classification which the American Psychiatric Association deploys in the DSM series was not invented by Müller; its intellectual history traces back to the work of Carl Linnaeus. Although more famous for his work in botany and zoology, where he established the system of binomial nomenclature, Linnaeus published Genera Morborum in 1763 in which he turned his hand to the classifications of mental disorders (Munsche 2012: 19). The challenge faced by Linnaeus and his many nineteenth-century successors in constructing a scientific psychiatric nosology is that, quite unlike the physical ordering of butterflies or flowers into taxonomies, madness is neither static nor visible. All psychiatrists have to go on is the dynamic phenomenality displayed by their patients: their self-explanations and the interpretations of social networks framed by their psychiatric discourse. The ‘disease’, remains invisible to brain scans, blood tests or any other type of diagnostic machinery. The epistemological assumption that naming a classification maps and names an experience is a philosophical conundrum which is simply assumed by the DSM-5 text. It is not necessary to have even a working knowledge of Derrida to understand that the classification system is a totalizing exercise in logocentricity. The classificatory approach involves the construction of an empire of the pathological mind orientated along its difference from the normal which remains undefined but is readily recognized as reflecting the mores and culturally acceptable stereotypes of white, male, European, educated elites.

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When Kraepelin sat down with a thousand cards, each with the symptoms of a different case study (Shorter 1997: 105) and tried to find some order in madness, the sanity of this project depended on a set of assumptions about (1) the validity of the sample, (2) what indicators are relevant, (3) the reliability of the evidence (oral and observational) and (4) that patients are passive within  the process.4 But each of these considerations is subsumed within the meta-theoretical assumption that differences are stable. Kraepelin knew all of these things at the turn of the nineteenth century which is why his big move was to simplify the nosologies which had proliferated since Linnaeus into the primary distinction between degenerative madness and non-degenerative madness. Such a simplifying move proved resistible in the minds of subsequent psychiatric theorists. Over the years the struggle to construct categories made out of language to corral madness into differences produced a number of additional terms besides the psychotic flagship ‘schizophrenia’ (which had been rebranded from Kraepelin’s dementia praecox (premature dementia) by Bleuler ([1911] 1950)). In the DSM-5 chapter, ‘Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic disorders’, there is a parade of disorders consisting of ‘delusional disorder’, ‘brief psychotic disorder’, ‘schizophreniform disorder’, ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoaffective disorder’, ‘substance/medication-induced psychotic disorder’, ‘psychotic disorder due to another medical condition’, ‘catatonia’, ‘other specified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder’, and ‘unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder’. The DSM-5 explains that the concepts are ‘organised along a gradient of psychopathology’ (APA 2013: 88), although, in fact, the peak of this gradient is found in schizophrenia at category four out of ten, with the rest backfilling the detail. The key illustration of the totalizing necessity which classificatory systems require, and the DSM-5 responds to, is the final category, ‘unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder’. The text is a moment of logical, if not literary, perfection – ‘The unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder category is used in situations in which the clinician chooses not to specify the reason that the criteria are not met for a specific schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder’ (APA 2013: 122). This provision allows for the incorporation of unreasoned psychiatric intuition into the world of reason through the absence of reason. This logocentric bubble is burst by Jim van Os’s reminder that ‘categories such as these do not represent diagnoses of discrete diseases, because these remain unknown; rather, they describe how symptoms can cluster, to allow grouping of patients’ (van Os 2016: 1). The conceit within the DSM-5 approach to psychosis is that it can reasonably

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cluster any symptoms to the extent that this can include clusters even where reasons are withheld. The DSM-5 introduced a conceptual change to the schizophrenia section. In DSM IV TR (text revisions), the section is titled ‘Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders’ (APA 2000: 297). In the DSM-5, the term ‘spectrum’ has been inserted to read ‘Schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders’ (APA 2013: 87). While still privileging schizophrenia as the primary psychotic disorder, a literal reading of the phrasing begs the question as to whether the other psychotic disorders are part of the spectrum or whether the spectrum belongs only to schizophrenia. It seems entirely possible to suggest that the APA are edging towards ‘The spectrum of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders’ or, to simplify, ‘The psychotic disorders spectrum’. This would involve dethroning the iconic schizophrenia by subsuming it within an overarching category of psychosis but it would also jeopardize psychosis as a trans-diagnostic concept. The chapter now starts with a discussion of ‘the key features that define the psychotic disorders’ (APA 2013: 87). The obstacle to subsuming schizophrenia within a broader category of psychosis would appear to be the iconic status of schizophrenia as the extreme cultural manifestation of an imagined insanity, not only reinforced but also conjured across all media channels and then used as a reference point of madness which ensures its epistemological dominance in western culture. As a brand, schizophrenia has exceeded its text-book definition to occupy the public imagination. The reality is that the DSM-5 already provides a spectrum of psychosis. The gradient of psychopathy (mentioned earlier) is a misnomer for a longitudinal perspective: ‘brief psychotic disorder’ (lasting less than a month), ‘schizophreniform’ (lasting less than six months), with ‘schizophrenia’ diagnosable only after six months. The hallucinations, delusions and disorganized speech are neither better nor worse in brief psychotic disorder than they are in schizophrenia, the difference is in the persistence. The work of Patrick McGorry is relevant here. In his article ‘Schizophrenia: Transcending Old World Shadows’ (McGorry 2022) he summarizes his forty years of schizophrenia research. McGorry points to the ‘recognition of the conceptual flaw underpinning the concept of Dementia Praecox, namely the decision to blend and conflate prognosis with diagnosis, which was producing palpable iatrogenic harm to patients and families’ McGorry 2022: 84). The non-technical summary of McGorry’s argument, as I read it, is that not only is there no disease entity of schizophrenia, but by predicting a negative/pessimistic outcome such an outcome becomes selffulfilling. The denial of hope produces socialized responses of hopelessness.

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The early intervention in psychosis which McGorry advocates as an alternative provides a way of reading the transition from brief psychotic disorder to schizophreniform to schizophrenia as a journey into lostness in which the bleak outcome is not predestined from the start. Here, ‘predestined’, rather than ‘inevitable’, is the correct word as the outcome results from the diagnosis, such is the power of words in the mouths of psychiatrists. The idea that the classificatory process might have iatrogenic consequences for families is only one part of the problem. In the world of research, the classificatory approach has additional unintended consequences. These are explored by Steven Hyman in his article ‘The Diagnosis of Mental Disorders: The Problem of Reification’ published in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology (2010). Hyman was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1996 to 2001 and as his voice carries more authority on this matter than mine, I cite extensively: To me, nosology seemed a bit like stamp collecting, an absorbing activity perhaps, but not a vibrant area of inquiry. During my period as director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1996–2001, I came to realize, however, that the DSM-III-R (APA 1987) and its successor, the DSM-IV (APA 1994), exerted enormous influence both for good and ill on the research funded by the Institute. The DSM system was a critical platform for research that made possible shared understandings of disease models or affected populations under study. At the same time, it created an unintended epistemic prison that was palpably impeding scientific progress. Outside of their ongoing research projects, most investigators understood that the DSM-IV was a heuristic, pending the advance of science. In practice, however, DSM-IV diagnoses controlled the research questions they could ask, and perhaps, even imagine. (Hyman 2010: 157)

The idea of the DSM system as an epistemological prison is vital, not just for our capacity to think of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme experiences in not necessarily pathological terms, but also because of its impact on the research agenda within psychiatry. Hyman goes on to explain that as a funding body, NIMH would decline requests which weren’t constructed in terms of DSM classifications. Hyman explains: The Initial Review Groups (study sections) that evaluated grant applications that came to the NIMH almost always required the use of DSM criteria in proposed scientific studies. Similarly, journals editors and referees generally required the use of these criteria in research submitted for publication. In addition, regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA),

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understandably took the DSM criteria to represent the scientific community consensus on valid indications for the approval of new treatments. . . . It became a source of real worry to me, that as Institute director, I might be signing off on the expenditure of large sums of taxpayers’ money for clinical and translational projects that almost never questioned the existing diagnostic categories despite their lack of validation . . . The problematic effects of diagnostic reification were revealed repeatedly in genetic studies, imaging studies, clinical trials, and types of studies where the rigid, operationalized criteria of the DSM-IV defined the goals of the investigation despite the fact that they appeared to be poor mirrors of nature. A pressing need for interrater reliability in the diagnosis of mental disorders emerged during the mid-twentieth century, prompted in part by the development of diverse new treatments. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), third edition answered this need by introducing operationalized diagnostic criteria that were field-tested for interrater reliability. Unfortunately, the focus on reliability came at a time when the scientific understanding of Mental Disorders was embryonic and could not yield valid disease definitions. Based on accreting problems with the current DSM-fourth edition (DSM-IV) classification, it is apparent that validity will not be achieved simply by refining criteria for existing disorders or by the addition of new disorders. Yet DSM-IV diagnostic criteria dominate thinking about mental disorders in clinical practice, research, treatment development, and law. As a result, the modern DSM system, intended to create a shared language, also creates epistemic blinkers that impede progress toward valid diagnoses. (Hyman 2010: 155)

The contribution Hyman makes to understanding the internal difficulties of the psychiatric discourse should be alarming. The classificatory system perpetuates its own existence and reduces alternative approaches, not because they can’t be imagined but because they can’t be taken seriously and therefore properly funded. As a complete system for classifying experience, grounded in the description of a sample which is always abnormal because it is constituted on the basis of its abnormality, the DSM-5 approach to psychosis is only and relentlessly pathological. Experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme have no non-pathological interpretive options. As soon as the psychotic person is caught up in the psychiatric system, the only solution on offer is for psychosis to be defeated, but unlike the war on drugs, this war is waged with drugs. This picture can be contrasted with the DSM-5 revisions to dissociative identity disorder. There the DSM-5 introduced the novel idea of ‘Disruption of Identity’. The text is short and set out here in full, to give some sense of the actual language and to avoid selective quotation.

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Dissociative Identity Disorder Diagnostic Criteria 300.14(F44.81)5 A. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession. The disruption in identity involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behaviour, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual. B. Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. D. The disturbance is not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice. Note: in children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy play. E. The symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behaviour during alcohol intoxication) or another medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures) (APA 2013: 292). What jumps out from this text will depend on a reader’s standpoint. For those with a concern for linguistic consistency, the difference between ‘disruption of identity’ and ‘disruption in identity’ in paragraph A, along with the shift from disruption to disturbance in paragraph D might be noted. A broader problem is the whole idea of ‘identity’ which speaks to the idea of the Self. As the idea of schizophrenia as a disturbance of the ‘self ’ is in the ascendency (Humpston 2018; Sass 2015), the relationship between the psychotic disorders and the dissociative disorders is thrown into relief. Identity has the same unexamined quality as normality in the DSM-5, it is traditionally taken for granted as being culturally normative. From a religious studies perspective the normativity of identity is a cultural overextension which might readily be challenged by buddhist scholars or those with an interest in studying possession. The latter group’s interest should be piqued by the actual inclusion of the term ‘possession’ in category A. Here, in the premier psychiatric text is the direct incorporation of the term which names an ancient pre-psychiatric phenomenon, now operationalized as a cultural

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synonym with a mental disorder. But the introduction of criterion D is where the novelty lies. The working party paper on dissociative identity disorder explains, ‘Addition of a new Criterion D to distinguish pathological forms of apparent DID from normative religious or spiritual practices. The new Criterion D also helps to distinguish pathological from nonpathological forms of possession’ (Spiegel 2013: 302). And here it is. By incorporating pathological possession into criterion A and then distinguishing normative and non-pathological possession, the DSM-5 formally enters into a mode of explanatory pluralism where possession is not necessarily pathological. The implications of this for religious studies are considerable. For example, for many years anthropologists, such as Morton Klass in his book Mind over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession (2003), have sought to distinguish possession from mental disorder as if these were two different states. The DSM-5 provision abolishes this quest by its proposition that the distinction is a matter of interpretation, and that interpretation alone is determinative of the pathological or non-pathological status of the experience. By recognizing the possibility of alternative explanations of phenomenality which might be a psychiatric disorder, but which might not be a psychiatric disorder if it is ‘a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice’ (APA 2013: 292), the DSM-5 has to construct a means of preserving indeterminacy, prior to due process being applied. The language of innocent until proven guilty requires that there is a trial, and the presumption of innocence presents itself as a cultural analogy. Throughout this book I have relied on the placeholder ‘extraordinary/anomalous/extreme’ to stand in for experiences which were yet to be interpreted. This is consistent with Robert Sharf ’s position in ‘The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion’ in the Journal of Consciousness Studies where he identifies the need for a ‘substantive (but indeterminate) terminus for the relentless deferral of meaning’ (Sharf 2000: 286). This is what placeholders do. The DSM-5 text offers both ‘disruption of identity’ and ‘disturbance’ as potential placeholders for a prediagnostic moment in which something is clearly happening, something which is of concern to a psychiatrist, but something which is yet to be judged or determined as abnormal/pathological or abnormal/non-pathological. The prospect of being determinately indeterminate by acknowledging a predifferentiated state in time, an event, which awaits an interpretive process in which the same symptoms might or might not be pathological, depending on culture and religion, is a significant development in psychiatric epistemology. The placeholder extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is joined by the psychiatric placeholder of disruption of identity.

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A notable feature of exclusion criterion D (a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice) is the offer of a distinction between cultural and religious. In the canopy of religious studies this distinction is a matter of ongoing discussion and debate. When I asked David Spiegel for clarification of what the working party meant by ‘or’ he responded: We intended the ‘or’ to indicate something that might be cultural but not religious, e.g. possession states in India in which a wife essentially indentured to her mother-in-law might have angry outbursts against her that were otherwise culturally forbidden. These are not religiously sanctioned or explained. (Spiegel, personal email 16/1/2015)

This response provides an interesting alternate to concerns about the validity of religion as a category (Chapter 10) by presupposing the religious sanction and explanation of such phenomena and then providing for a non-religious framework of explanation. The response also clarifies that the DSM-5 is being written with Indian peripheral6 contexts fully in mind, which in itself is a fascinating insight into the continuing global ambition of the DSM series which may be further explored from a colonial/post-colonial perspective. A further notable feature of the psychiatric engagement with possession is the construction of the double qualification in the exception criterion. ‘Clause D’ refers to (1) ‘a normal part of ’ and (2) ‘a broadly accepted’ both of which refer to ‘cultural or religious practices’ (APA 2013: 292). This belt and braces approach to conformity is problematic in a way which may have been underestimated by the drafters. As an approach to providing psychiatrists with diagnostic comfort, such an approach may be understandable, but it excludes novelty and innovation. By placing the non-pathological explanation of disruption of identity into a normatively abnormal framework, Spiegel et al. are transferring the role (and power) of arbiters of normality from the psychiatric community to the ‘establishment’ of the cultural or religious communities which (without specifying) they have in mind.7 This conforms to the idea that possession is often a conservative phenomenon in which ancestors and/or other spirits perpetuate traditional values. However, while this is not ‘wrong’, it ignores or even pre-empts the possibility of change in the cultural and/or religious status quo. If disruption of identity is always bound to be regarded as a mental disorder unless it precisely fits into a traditional conservative (‘normal’, ‘broadly accepted’) pattern of practice, the DSM-5 hands power to cultural or religious establishments to render their internal critics insane by withholding their opinion. If disruption of identity is not necessarily pathological, then the disrupted are within the domain of the

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pathological concerns of the psychiatric gaze, but they are not yet determined as suffering from normative possession or a mental disorder. The obvious analogy would be where the police get a search warrant for suspicion of probable cause but where there is an alternate explanation and insufficient evidence of a crime, they have no authority over the suspect’s behaviour. Similarly, although psychiatrists may be involved in the assessment of the disrupted, they have no authority in the world of (for example) shamanism and spirit possession as normatively culturally constructed. The consequences of criterion D challenge the practice of psychiatrists retrospectively diagnosing the crazy in religion at least in relation to possession and the concerns about the medicalization of possession which run through Janice Boddy’s Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality (Boddy 1994) are resolved. The psychiatric gaze moves on. DSM-5 now accepts alternative interpretations of the existential state of disruption of identity: one medical/pathological, the other non-medical/non-pathological. Possession which is recognized as operating within the consensus of a community is not a mental illness, whatever the view of an outsider. From a mad studies point of view, I consider that the offer of ‘disruption of identity’ and/or ‘disturbance’ as alternative placeholders for the clumsy extraordinary/anomalous/extreme are both tenable. What is required of a placeholder is simply that it maintains the focus on indeterminacy which allows the possibility of explanatory pluralism to be a starting assumption. What is less clear is why the DSM-5 text introduces two terms rather than deciding on one and sticking to it. The concern is that they are not fully cognizant of the implications of their own text revisions and the need for these to be useful for non-psychiatrists. As the difference between being disrupted and being disturbed is debatable, I’m inclined towards a preference for disruption as this is surely at the heart of any major psychiatric disorder. However, the idea of ‘disruption of identity’ might also be considered an adumbration which includes a redundancy. In the context of the DSM-5 diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, disruption could not be of anything other than of identity. Recourse to the ‘disruption of identity’ phrasing continually draws the eye to the philosophical questions of ‘identity’, ‘self ’, ‘ipseity’, ‘person’, ‘individual’ and so forth. These words relate to legitimate philosophical and (increasingly) neuroscientific concerns, but they are a distraction from the requirement of a placeholder to be flimsy, almost meaningless, so as not to be confused with what they represent – the ball marker, not the ball. Since, by definition, ‘disruption of identity’ is about not identity, indeed it is the antithesis of identity, the risk of distraction into the world of identity politics and the philosophy of ipseity

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is present and real. Since the DSM-5’s choice of ‘identity’ is not explained within the text, there is no particular constraint or obligation to that particular construction and I suggest that ‘disruption’ may be a perfectly adequate single word placeholder. This is drawn from the text and retains the context provided by the DSM-5 proposal that disruption may or may not be a mental disorder depending on whether it is a ‘normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice’ (APA 2013: 292). Taken in this spirit, ‘disruption’, on its own as a placeholder, as a form of thought experiment, names an extreme existential state, one that is of psychiatric interest because it could be a disorder. By virtue of its inclusion in DSM-5, ‘disruption’, so constructed, invariably has some of the hallmarks of madness, but a diagnosis of mental disorder can be made only if the disrupted state can’t otherwise be explained or contextualized in acceptable ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’ terms. This normalization doesn’t make the experience any less extreme. Shamanic flight doesn’t become bland or normal just because it is an accepted practice. ‘Disruption’ as a placeholder, as uncertainty, as preceding differentiation and prior to interpretation, offers no guarantees of a pathological or a non-pathological outcome, but it is always a mark of the extraordinary, the anomalous, the extreme. The implication, which is not directly addressed in the DSM-5 text, is the changing relationship of the biological to the sociological. Assuming that the biological aspect of DID remains the same (see Chapter 9), then culture and religious practices are responsible for making ‘disruption’ non-pathological. The ramifications of this idea are considerable for the idea of discrete disease entities. In my reading of the DSM-5, the working group which compiled the chapter on the psychotic disorders and the working group which compiled the dissociative disorders need to have a better conversation. This is not only because questions of ‘identity’, ‘self ’, ‘ipseity’, ‘person’, ‘individual’ and so on are common questions to both diagnostic categories but also because the DID criterion D has fundamentally altered the game by allowing for a non-pathological interpretation of possession on the basis of cultural and religious practices, but the absence of an equivalent in relation to psychotic disorders creates an asymmetry which is philosophically challenging. The DSM-5 sets out a process of differential diagnosis for every diagnostic category to ensure that ‘one diagnosis is not made if it is “due to” another disorder’ (Slade 2002: 1203). With the new exclusion criterion D for dissociative identity disorder, the differential diagnosis might reasonably be reimagined to explicitly include ‘cultural or religious practices’ as a differential diagnosis. This

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didn’t happen. Such a move would puncture the completism of the classificatory system by the reference to external authorities. The text implicitly acknowledges that this has to happen in practice, but it is quite another thing to write it into the classificatory system on the face of the page. In the real DSM-5, the differential diagnoses for DID does, in fact, include all of the psychotic disorders. But what is remarkable is that this is not the case the other way around: dissociative identity disorder is never included as a differential diagnosis for any of the psychotic disorders. This additional asymmetry may be taken as a reflection of the imbalance of power between these diagnostic categories. The psychotic disorders which include the flagship schizophrenia diagnosis have, in line with Hyman’s analysis, always asserted more power than the dissociative disorders which have a troubled reputational history. The implication is that if there is enough evidence for psychosis there is no need to address the dissociative aspects. This is paradoxically reflected in the paper ‘Dissociation and Psychosis in Dissociative Identity Disorder and Schizophrenia’, where Laddis and Dell were clinically unable to distinguish ‘between the classical dissociation of DID and what we suspect are just the dissociation-like phenomena that occur in schizophrenia’ (Laddis 2012: 411). The assumption they make is that the distinction between dissociation and schizophrenia is meaningful and can and should be made and that the problem lies in their research. But Vedat Şar, who writes extensively about dissociation, argues that ‘dissociation may accompany almost every psychiatric disorder . . . this phenomenon leads to a unique challenge as a confounding factor in psychiatric research’ (Şar 2014: 172). The distinctiveness of the psychotic and the dissociative disorders within the classificatory system of the DSM-5 is under pressure, again. To illustrate this issue by reference to my reading of T. K. Oesterreich in Chapter 3, he finds possession in Mesopotamia but not in Homer’s Greece. It may be that this is the case, but it may also be the case that Mesopotamians constructed madness as possession more than Greeks, without that effecting the overall levels of madness. Oesterreich’s approach, as we saw, ignores hallucinations and finds evidence of possession through the proxy measure of accounts of exorcism. Because Oesterreich is looking for the phenotype of possession in his reading he may have overlooked the madness which is not possession. Was there more possession in Mesopotamia because that’s how Mesopotamians constructed madness? We will never know, but this example illustrates the basic rules of bias that you get what you look for, you find what you want to find, which Maslow subsequently takes to the extreme by finding peak experiences in everyone’s lives (Chapter 7). If the idea of neuroplasticity

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and cultural plasticity are taken together as determining the expression of the meta-category of madness as both biologically and psychosocially constructed, the philosophical difficulties faced by a logocentric classificatory system become apparent. The direct analogy is found clearly in Walter Pahnke’s work trying to construct ‘mystical experiences’ out of the symptoms constructed through the linguistic tools of questionnaires (Chapter 6). Pahnke rolled over Walter Stace’s construction of a hierarchical distinction between extrovertive and introvertive mysticism but came to recognize that both psychosis and mystical experiences involved the ‘subject-object dichotomy transcended and the empirical ego extinguished’ (Pahnke 1966b: 184). It is perfectly possible to argue that this experience is very different from the disruption of identity as imagined by David Spiegel et al. when writing the DSM chapter on dissociation, but it also has to be recognized that Spiegel is writing within an established psychiatric discourse which is historically separated from psychosis and tasked with the obligation to both look and find. To take this a little further, if the APA are edging towards a spectrum approach in the psychotic disorders, is the exclusion of dissociation from such a spectrum based on questions of different disease entity? It may be argued that dissociation is very different from the psychotic disorders. But this would be to misunderstand not only the role of neuro and cultural plasticicity but also the heterogeneity of the psychotic disorders. The DSM-5 establishes that the key features that define the psychotic disorder are delusions, hallucinations, disorganised thinking, disorganised motor behaviour and negative symptoms. The ideas that avolition (diminished purposeful activity), diminished emotional expression, alogia (diminished speech output), anhedonia (diminished pleasure) and asociality (diminished social interactions) are symptoms of the same construct of the positive symptoms of psychosis which includes delusions and hallucination requires accepting a vast gulf between the excess of positive symptoms and the deficit of the negative symptoms. If the metaphor of the normal distribution curve introduced in Chapter 1 is applied here it becomes obvious that we are being required to accept a structure of psychosis which includes experiences at both the left- and the right-hand extremes, simultaneously. Again, this is not the case in reality and it takes us back to McGorry’s argument about the role of time in the stages between a brief psychotic episode and the patterns of lostness which occur in schizophrenia. This is acknowledged by DSM-5 which states clearly that the negative symptoms don’t primarily relate to the onset of psychosis. The social and personal alienation manifested in the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (psychosis after six months) can be addressed as a

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pattern which is both expected and learned in the self-fulfilling aspect of what schizophrenia entails in western culture. If any proof were required, the World Health Organisation finds a similar prevalence of schizophrenia in India and Nigeria, but a better prognosis which is attributed to different cultural attitudes: ‘Clinical and social outcomes were significantly better for patients in Agra and Ibadan than for those in the centres in developed countries’ (Leff 1992: 131). Although this reading of the DSM-5 focuses on the relationship between visions and voices of psychosis and possession of dissociative identity disorder, it is necessary to briefly tidy up the relationship of bipolar disorder which is traditionally described as a disorder of mood or affect, hence bipolar affective disorder and its delightful acronym. The revisions introduced in the DSM added new text to the chapter on ‘bipolar and related disorders’. This recognizes their ‘place as a bridge’ (APA 2013: 123) between the psychosis chapter and the depressive disorders. Given that psychotic features are written into criterion C of bipolar 1 disorder, the idea that bipolar 1 disorder is distinguishable from psychotic disorders is already under pressure. Genome-Wide Association Studies have found that ‘bipolar 1 disorder is strongly genetically correlated with schizophrenia, driven by psychosis’ (Stahl 2019). But credulity is stretched when it is remembered that the negative symptoms of psychosis can all be thought of as (deficit) disorders of mood. If the excess of mania is aligned with the excess of delusions and hallucinations and disorganized speech (which is saying too much, not too little as in alogia) and the deficit of depression is aligned with the negative psychotic symptoms, such a reorientation would sit readily on a metaphorical normal distribution curve of experience (Figure 8.1).

Normal

Negative Symptoms

Mania Psychosis Dissociation

Figure 8.1  Positive and negative mental disorders on a normal distribution curve.

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That this is not the current approach may be due to misapprehension on the part of Kraepelin whose sample of patients was found rather than formed. In a mixed bag of institutionalized madness, the trajectory from first psychosis to the negative symptoms of those who have entrenched and embedded their madness is less noticeable due to the lack of sufficient longitudinality, as first episode psychosis occurs well in advance of hospitalization. In reconsidering the DSM-5 classificatory system, the distinction between the psychosis of psychotic disorders and the psychosis of bipolar disorder collapses as mood is inherently entwined with psychosis.8 Kraepelin’s simplifying distinction was based on prognosis, not on a differentiation of psychoses. If the manic phase of bipolar 1 is considered to be within the inchoate psychosis spectrum of DSM-5 (and this is suggested by the metaphor of a bridge with its necessary bridgehead), then we can return to the relation between the visions and voices of psychosis and the possession of dissociative identity disorder from a cultural perspective. If DSM-5 and T. K. Oesterreich are read against each other, the first thing that becomes clear is that psychiatry was not invented from scratch. There was no blank slate on which psychiatrists theorized their discipline: ‘the cultural expressions of madness were already filtered through sophisticated understandings of physical, moral and supernatural interpretation of the 18th century’ (Houston 2000: 322). But in the west, these were themselves infused with more ancient christian prejudices in which hallucinations (and their religious interpretations) were privileged over possessions, even if the phenomenality of these states has additionally to be understood within the diversity of their socio-economic context (see Chapter 9).9 If visions and voices are positively or negatively valued in relation to possessions on the basis of cultural context, it is possible that the DSM distinction between psychosis and dissociation is culturally inherited from cultural and religious biases constructed through the symbiotic relationship of neuro and cultural plasticity within ancient traditions over thousands of years (Chapter 3). The madnesses psychiatry inherited were imbued with the presuppositions of the mad, but also the cultural presuppositions of psychiatrists. In this reading of the DSM-5 I have shown how the DSM series has been sensitive to cultural change. I have shown how the logocentric completism of the classification system can include everything, including the withholding of reasons. I have shown that the questions about validity have not been resolved and I have shown the changing shape of the psychotic disorders as the APA inches towards a spectrum of psychosis and away from the totemic diagnosis of schizophrenia. With the help of Steven Hyman, I have shown how the

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classificatory system invites reification and how the psychotic disorders have only pathological interpretations but, by contrast, how the revision of the dissociative identity disorder category has pioneered the idea that there can be a pathological and a non-pathological approach to diagnosis, on the basis of cultural and religious practices. I have troubled the relationship of the positive and negative symptoms of psychosis and I have raised questions about the relationship of dissociation with the psychotic disorders. I am able to take this big picture view of the DSM-5 because, in this book, the DSM-5 is simply one of a number of texts which addresses experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. Having explored how seven different theorists unevenly approached such experiences, I am well positioned to reflect on their approaches and the lessons which can be learned. For the sake of disambiguation, there is nothing in this analysis which is anti-psychiatry per se, just as I am not ‘against’ William James when I tip his mystical ladder onto its side and represent his data in the metaphor of a normal distribution curve. It is the DSM-5 which concedes that there is a problem with the validity of its current diagnostic categories, and it is an internal matter for the American Psychiatric Association as to how it organizes its classificatory system. I am simply exploring other ways of seeing which might be useful in future discussions. In Chapter 5, I showed how Walter Pahnke’s willingness to ignore the boundary mechanisms, the fences and ditches of religious studies approaches brought oft-ignored structures to light. The colonial period approach to classification, which is encoded into the world religions paradigm of religious studies, as much as it is in psychiatry, made distinctions solely on the basis of phenomenality, without sufficient attention to the plasticity of culture or the mind. Pahnke read the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme (or as the new psychiatric placeholder), disruption, as states of consciousness which were shared by the shaman and the mystic, ignoring western cultural conventions of focusing on difference in phenomenal manifestation. In a similar way, the challenge now falls on psychiatrists to re-examine their colonial style-classificatory approach because, after 100 years, the putative disease entities remain elusive and madness may be better understood as plastic – biologically, psychologically and sociologically – shaped and shaping, both moulded and moulding.10 The advance in the ‘junior’ diagnostic category of dissociative identity disorder which formally entrenches a non-pathological construction, grounded in cultural or religious terms, is an epistemological revolution in psychiatry. That this explanatory pluralism is absent from the psychosis chapter now requires justification. From a religious studies point of view such a move would resolve

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the historic antagonism in which psychiatrists have read the record of visions, voices and delusions and judged that the religious greats of all religions suffered from a variety of mental disorders (see Part III). But the need to provide a nonpathological concept of psychosis is not just about solving historic wrongs or addressing internal consistency. The problem is in the real world of contemporary psychiatric research which, as Hyman indicates, is shaped by the available concepts. If psychosis can only ever be pathological, it must always be opposed, rather than assisted. To put this in real-world terms, the Wellcome Trust is currently investing tens of millions in research into psychosis. Their definitions of psychosis are only and exclusively pathological. It is not possible, according to their approach, to think of a non-pathological psychosis, or how psychosis might be managed towards non-pathological ends. By investing the funding prior to addressing the philosophical and cultural presuppositions of what ‘we’ (you, me, psychiatrists) mean by psychosis, they condemn themselves to funding strategies which invariably oppose psychosis. The readings of the seven authors in Part I has already demonstrated that such a strategy is inadequate.

9

Michel Foucault’s History of Madness

In building a non-pathological discourse of the extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme in Part I which has a counterpart to the ‘disruption’ offered in the DSM5’s revisions to dissociative identity disorder in the pathologizing psychiatric discourse (Chapter 8), my first intention is to facilitate strategies of comparison. In both these discourses, placeholder terms remain robustly, obviously and intentionally to the fore, to ensure the experiences, for which these terms hold the place, are not treated as understood or explained1 (away). By working in the world of rational discourses about the irrational, there is no longer any need to pretend that words are adequate substitutes for experiences, or that this is a problem.2 The ‘desire’ for explanations, understanding and definitions, whether through prose, nosologies or the non-phonetic writing of computational psychiatry may be rational, but the rational status of ‘desire’ is ambiguous. Iain McGilchrist’s argument about the relationship of the left and right hemispheres of the brain in The Master and his Emissary (2010) provides the framework for suggesting that the controlling needs and interests of psychiatry represent a decidedly leftbrain approach to the epistemology of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. This is demonstrated not only by the default assumption that the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme is pathological but also in building a classificatory system, the need for enclosing it in language (Chapter 8). By continuing to hold up two discourses which address overlapping phenomenality, my invitation is not to shut either discourse down through ‘explanation’ or ‘understanding’ (or prejudice), but to provide scope and space for reflection on what each tells us about explanatory pluralism in relation to questions about being human, human experience and the scholarship of that experience, not just from an individual but also a sociological point of view. By declining to simplify,3 reduce or resolve either discourse internally, or to collapse the comparison between them, my intention in this chapter is to give madness a voice in the imaginary space in between them.

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But history shows this idea is, if not impossible, certainly problematic. In the same year Joseph Heller published Catch-22, a 35-year-old French academic was awarded a PhD (equivalent) by the Sorbonne for a thesis titled Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l’âge Classique. Its author, Michel Foucault, aspired to give voice to the silence of the mad. Foucault understood his project in terms which would unsettle most professional historians. As he put it in a 1991 interview with Duccio Trombadori, thirty years after its original publication: If . . . I had wanted to write the history of psychiatric institutions in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, I’d certainly never have written a book like The History of Madness. But the problem isn’t that of humouring the professional historians. Rather, I aim at having an experience myself – by passing through a determinate historical content – an experience of what we are today, of what is not only our past but also our present. And I invite others to share the experience. That is, an experience of our modernity that might permit us to emerge from it transformed. Which means that at the conclusion of the book we can establish new relationships with what was at issue; for instance, madness, its constitution, its history in the modern world. (Bracken 2010: 223)

This tactic may explain why Foucault is still read and debated and why, for example, Jerome Schneck’s, A History of Psychiatry, published the year before (Schneck 1960) languishes out of print and unread in university library stacks. While Schneck kept a private practice in New York and built a glowing psychiatric CV of public service, Foucault used Folie et Déraison as his entry point to a glittering and controversial career as a public intellectual. By inserting himself into madness, Foucault provided a penetrating insight into the institutional pathologization of madness that, by the time the greatly abbreviated English language version was published in 1965, as Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, struck a chord which reverberated beyond the echo chamber of the emergent reaction against psychiatry spearheaded by David Cooper and Ronald Laing. In this chapter I do not have the space to present a detailed re-reading of History of Madness (as the first English translation of the whole work in 2006 is titled) because as Derrida pointed out in ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in 1963,4 Foucault’s claim to speak for the mad is the ‘maddest part of his project’ (Derrida [1967] [1978] 2001: 40 emphasis in the original). Without the space to take on the text, far less the secondary literature5 which for the most part addresses History of Madness from the anachronistic perspective of a

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retrospective knowledge of Foucault’s oeuvre,6 I am going to simply take as read the polarization of reason and unreason through which Foucault constructs the mad as other. Instead, there are five points which naturally arise from Foucault’s work which allow a deeper entry into the voicelessness of the mad: (1) sample bias, (2) absence of oeuvres, (3) origin stories, (4) the religious silence and (5) speaking madness. I use these five points thematically, to structure this chapter, by way of acknowledging the major role Foucault played by introducing the academy to madness as a legitimate area of study. Notwithstanding, in each of these sections, I address the lacunae, the absences, what Foucault left out, by way of thickening, populating the space between, the two discourses I have previously established. Foucault’s reading was extensive, but his literature research strategy was driven by his agenda of exploring a ‘world of horror’ (Foucault 2006: 7). Foucault may not have wanted to write a history of psychiatric institutions, but he used the history of psychiatric institutions as his frame for collecting his data on madness. If madness is always defined by the oppressive excess of western institutional responses, the interface between madness and social control, then the history of madness being accommodated in families and communities passes unobserved by Foucault’s gaze.7 The World Health Organisation’s position on the social heterogeneity of mental disorders provides the alternative context. Mental Disorders are not the exclusive preserve of any special group; they are truly universal. Mental and behavioural disorders are found in people of all regions, all countries and all societies. They are present in women and men at all stages of the life course. They are present among the rich and poor, and among people living in urban and rural areas. (WHO 2001)8

For clarity, what the WHO is not saying is that madness is banal, that anyone can be mad, that we all have a ‘bit’ of madness in us. The mad are always a minority. The WHO’s conclusions are informed by a string of research reaching back to the genesis of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) which it first published in 1949, a decade before History of Madness ([1961] 2006). While the WHO does not distinguish between the mentally disordered and the mad, if it can conclude in such a way about the prevalence of mental disorder as a minority, then the larger minority of madness remains a small minority of the human population. The evidence of Foucault’s sample bias is found most decisively in Foucault’s treatment of the Hôpital Général. He writes: ‘We do well to remember that within a few years of opening its doors the Hôpital Général in Paris was home

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to more than 6,000 people, which was approximately 1% of the population (of Paris).’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 54) The casual reader is left with the impression that the Hôpital Général was a psychiatric hospital rather than an institutional policy solution aimed at the poor, not the mad. While poverty and madness have significant co-morbidity, the headline figure of 6,000 has no relevance to the history of madness. The number of 6,000 represents a gross figure for those institutionalized by the Ancien Régime to clean up the streets of Paris. In the chapter ‘Experiences of Madness’, which is excised from the English Madness and Civilisation abridgement (Foucault [1965] 1988), Foucault discloses: ‘One in ten of all arrests made for the Hôpital Général in Paris concerned “the insane”, “demented men”, “alienated men” or people “driven quite mad”’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 108), and the related footnote states, ‘This proportion remained more or less constant from the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. See Tableaux des orders du roi pour l’incarcération à Hôpital Général’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 608). Foucault has done the research, he has the evidence: in the context of a city with a population of around 600,000 (extrapolated from Foucault’s data of 1% = 6,000), the confinement of around 600 of the mad or 0.1 per cent of the population of Paris is literally 90 per cent less than the impression he presents to the casual reader. Foucault proposed the ‘absence of an oeuvre’ as an indication of madness (Foucault 1961: preface xxxi) a view which, if taken seriously, renders most of the human population mad. Defining madness in terms of an absence of writing brings an epistemic injustice into the very heart of History of Madness: their ‘dossiers of indecipherable delirium, juxtaposed by chance to the words of reason in prisons and libraries’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: xxxi). The failure of the mad to produce an oeuvre is the very evidence of madness. In this Foucault creates for himself an invisible trap which he falls into inelegantly across his pages. Having constructed his world of horror populated by the facelessness of the pitiable mad, redeemed by the heroic efforts of the likes of Tuke and Pinel, Foucault finds himself in the worlds of the celebrated mad, including Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud, whose celebrity depends on their oeuvre. Foucault remains frustrating. His original bibliography only has absences where Nietzsche’s books, Van Gogh’s 2,000 letters and Artaud’s voluminous work should be.9 In History of Madness, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud become totemic tokens of Foucault’s paradox, the mad who produced an oeuvre. In the penultimate paragraph of History of Madness, when Foucault writes, ‘Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness: and yet madness is contemporaneous with the oeuvre’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 537, emphasis in the original), the swell of equivocal (dis)entanglement is

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palpable. The to-ing and fro-ing of ‘oeuvres’ and ‘madness’ take a final shape as ‘oeuvres of madness’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 538, my emphasis); this formulation is saved until the very last page of History of Madness. One might reasonably question why Nietzsche (1844–1900), Van Gogh (1853–90) and Artaud (1896–1948) turn up in Foucault’s History of Madness at all. They are not reasonably part of his time frame of L’ Âge Classique. There is no chronological justification for their presence when Charcot (1825–93), Kraepelin (1856–1926) and Bleuler (1857–1939), and so many others are absent. But the absence of psychiatrists and the presence of the oeuvres of madness are perhaps not so different from the discourse of the non-pathological which I created in Part I. The advantage Foucault’s presentation finds by personalizing his analysis, in the particular oeuvres of Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud, is offset by his refusal to reconsider his own argument on madness and oeuvres. The idea that madness is given a face by these exemplars, that they give madness voice (or in van Gogh’s case, paintings), risks engendering a progressive reading of history – from the faceless, voicelessness of the Classique unwashed mad, towards later instances of the particular oeuvres of madness which are still imagined within the context of mental illness. The 2006 translation of History of Madness features a copy of Ronald Laing’s readers’ comments from 1965 suggesting that Foucault’s thesis will ‘thoroughly shake the assumptions of traditional psychiatry’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: frontmatter). More than sixty years later it is certainly the case that History of Madness shook (parts of) the academy,10 but from a mad studies perspective it can also be read as shoring up the pathologizing project of traditional psychiatry. By inscribing madness into the modern imagination as pathology, Foucault cannot imagine madness defined by experience which is not validated by its institutionalization. Foucault’s world of horrors is a position designed to challenge and inspire his academic peers, and all of those who respond to his invitation, to vicariously participate in his indulgent ‘aim at having an experience myself . . . an experience of what we are today, of what is not only our past but also our present’ (Bracken 2010: 223) as if the sane could experience madness by reading a book. In the 1972 Gallimard edition, Foucault ditches the 1961 foreword, which Derrida had shredded in his 1963 lecture and, at the insistence of Gilles Deleuze (according the Khalfa) added the appendix ‘Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 541–9), which he had first published in 1964. In this swirling text Foucault plays with the limits of madness, in the present, in the future. It is a delight to read. In this supplementary text, Foucault finds his way to the question: ‘How, in a culture, could so slim an eventuality come to hold such a power of revelatory dread?’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 543) The fear of going

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mad exceeds the limited risk of being mad in such a way because, like the news media, like the novel, like the film industry, Foucault has chosen to fan the flames of fear, conjuring it into the lives of his readers as a lifelike possibility, however improbable. Far distant from the fears and anxieties of all of those who ever uttered the words ‘I thought I was going mad’ or ‘It nearly drove me mad’, the actual mad are left at the end of History of Madness, still mad, but now with a new burden, ladled on in a last rhetorical flourish: The world believes that madness can be measured, and justified by means of psychology, and yet it (the world) must justify itself when confronted by madness, for its efforts and discussions have to measure up to the excess of the oeuvres of men like Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. And nothing within itself, and above all nothing that it can know of madness, serves to show that these oeuvres of madness prove it right. (Foucault 2006: 538)

Placing this onus on madness, on the silence of madness, on the previously absent but now suddenly present oeuvres of madness, is a heavy obligation. The world does not need to meet this naïve challenge which Foucault throws down. The world does not care for the evidence of madness. Nietzsche has become a niche topic for serious philosophers and a popular source of high-sounding quotes for people who want to appear smart; on 12 November 2021, four Van Goghs were sold by Christie’s for a total of $161 million; Artaud’s theatre of cruelty is muted, not simply for being too cruel, but for being too mad. The oeuvres of madness which Foucault took so long to acknowledge prove only that the world could, indeed, accommodate them into its normal course of business. That, even at the end of his history, the mad must have an oeuvre to prove themselves not mad, or to legitimize their madness (in some cognitively dissonant manner), to Foucault is unfortunate. By wielding the axe of epistemic injustice selectively he leaves a few tall trees amid a wasteland of silence in which the mad still cannot be heard because ultimately Foucault wasn’t interested in either listening to their voice or what they had to say. In his uneasy attempts to identify an origin of madness, Foucault struggles to provide the mad with a sure footing. Traipsing through the worlds of leprosy and venereal disease (cut from Madness and Civilisation), Foucault casts the mad adrift on ships of fools in the waterways of Europe that, unlike the transatlantic slave ships or the deportations to the New World, lacked purposeful destinations. Foucault then throws the mad a lifeline coiled in the phrase ‘les fou avaient alors une existence facilement errante’. Originally translated as ‘Madmen then led an easy wandering existence’ (Foucault [1965] 1988: 8), Jean Khalfa’s

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2006 translation renders it ‘An itinerant existence was often the lot of the mad’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 9) or as (an alternate in the notes) ‘The existence of the mad might easily be a wandering one’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 594). In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Dreyfus and Rabinow read Foucault as presenting a ‘continuous story of confinement and exclusion. The meaning changes with some frequency, but a long-term continuity of form of what can only be called power is (and was) the counterpoint to these dramatic shifts in cultural classifications’ (Dreyfus 1983: 4). This is a specific example of the secondary literature on Foucault being focused on his oeuvre to the detriment of his subject of madness. The image of alienated sadhus wandering through western history does not haunt Dreyfus and Rabinow, because ‘Les fou avaient alors une existence facilement errante’ can simply be left out of their narrative without anybody noticing. The non-institutionalized mad are silenced, once more, in pursuit of the archaeology of the public intellectual and the genealogy of Foucault’s oeuvre. The mad did not inherit the confinement of the lepers; venereal disease was not a narrative sidetrack; and the ships of fools may have sailed, but not in the numbers populating the cultural imagination. The hinterland of madness is not to be found in white, Francophile Europe, it is found in the epidemiological evidence of genetics. Foucault’s ‘problematic of foundations’ (Carrette 2000: 10) can be resolved by placing the beginning of madness not in the Middle Ages in the west but in the Rift Valley in Africa, in the brains of early homo sapiens, prior to the great diaspora which will see the whole planet populated by the plague of humans. This itineracy of the mad is immediately more interesting than Foucault’s account because the diaspora from Africa did not consist of solitary crazy individuals, but of families, extended families, tribal groups. There is no record to say how the mad were treated within their communities, but their genetic legacy suggests that whatever status they might have had, they were not ruthlessly annihilated, nor left behind. Contemporary epidemiological and evolutionary theory provides the context and grounds which support the need for this larger perspective. These theoretical perspectives have been developed by evolutionary psychiatrists including Burns (‘Psychosis: A Costly By-product of Social Brain Evolution in Homo Sapiens’ (2006)), Crow (‘Is Shizophrenia the Price that Homo Sapiens Pay for Language?’ (1997)), Horrobin (The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (2002)) and Nichols (‘Is There an Evolutionary Advantage of Schizophrenia?’ (2009)). These theorists argue that the heritable genetic variations, which are the biological predisposition for schizophrenia, occurred prior to the diaspora from Africa of homo sapiens.

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The presence of a heritable genetic component in schizophrenia is now difficult to contest. With the onset of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS),11 it is increasingly clear that heritable genetic variations (continuities within diversity) are attributable to phenotypes of mental disorders. In a 2014 meta-analysis, Ripke and his 300 co-authors signed off on a six-page paper which demonstrates heritable genetic variance in schizophrenia (Ripke 2014); based on a sample of 36,989 cases and 113,075 controls, ‘Biological Insights from 108 SchizophreniaAssociated Genetic Loci’ in the journal Nature finds: ‘Schizophrenia is a highly heritable disorder’ (Ripke 2014: 1).12 The ramifications are not limited to the phenotype of schizophrenia: the 2019 paper ‘Genome-wide association study identifies 30 loci associated with bipolar disorder’, with a sample of 20,352 cases and 31,358 controls, affirms that ‘Bipolar 1 disorder is strongly genetically correlated with schizophrenia, driven by psychosis’ (Stahl 2019). Contemporary GWAS research is not only confirming that Kraepelin’s dichotomy between very bad and not so bad madness is anachronistic (Chapter 8), but it is also providing a challenge to those who simply ignore biological psychiatry because they haven’t considered the sociological implications. Deviancy has always been part of the human story, the homogenous human is an enlightenment by-product of a search for ‘man’ as the measure of all things. The mad, like women, were excluded from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man which inserted the philosophy of equality unequally into the enlightenment project. The contribution of this argument to the origin story of madness becomes clear when the prevalence of such mutations is considered in the context of World Health Organisation evidence. Their International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia published the findings of a research programme in nine countries in 1973. This has been subsequently followed up (Leff 1992) and has generated a considerable secondary literature. The WHO found and maintains that the incidence of schizophrenia is prevalent across the human population.13 While abuse (poverty, drugs, war) or communicable diseases (typhoid, black death, malaria, cholera, flu, coronavirus) might intermittently ravage people within populations, heritable genetic variations cannot be retrojected into the human timeline on a global basis. If schizophrenia is an inherited predisposition which arises from genetic mutation and it is globally prevalent, the only viable explanation is that these variations arose prior to the diaspora and spread throughout the planet as part of the global migration of homo sapiens from Africa. This analysis is not unproblematic. The most obvious challenge is that we know nothing of consciousness or experience of homo sapients in pre-diaspora sub-Saharan cultures. The homogeneity of ancestral and contemporary humans

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is an assumption based on a retrospective projection and recent findings point towards diversity rather than homogeneity (Scerri 2018). In the context of the study of deviance, assumptions are being made about sameness right at the margins of the human population, which makes even less sense. We do not know and cannot tell what stone-age man thought or felt. There is no soft tissue from stone-age brains, there is no way of understanding what optimality looked like from a Darwinian perspective. We can understand our ontogenetic inheritance, but we cannot understand our hidden roots: the relation between genes and environmental conditions, institutions, language, cultural scripts. If hindus can forget what soma is and psilocybin can be erased in the cultural palimpsest of western European history (Chapter 5), filling our absences of knowledge with retrospective projection is inherently problematic. The second problem is that the idea of a genetic variation as a predisposition for psychosis is contrary to models which privilege psychological factors such as trauma. This remains contentious territory, but my own view is that the prevalence of trauma is not matched by the preponderance of psychosis and that prior to excluding the idea of genetic variation there is a need to explain the relative lack of madness in human history. The idea that trauma may be a trigger for psychosis is wholly compatible with the idea of genetic variation as a precondition and certainly the history of madness in my own family supports the need to incorporate a genetic factor into any theory. The third problem is just a particular version of the first problem. It must be obvious that to go searching for a construct of the phenotype ‘schizophrenia’, which has been around only for ninety years, and can only be ‘diagnosed’ on the basis of contextual analysis of behavioural symptoms, is absurd. The need, which this analysis identifies, is the possibility of separating the phenotype schizophrenia from the genotype of a broader possibility of madness which contemporary GWAS evidence points to. If schizophrenia is understood as a technical specification within a particular culture-bound nosology of mental disorders in the twenty-first-century west, it is unsustainable to retrospectively apply this construct to ancient contexts for the reasons already set out. This is an example of ‘presentism’, which Spoerhase defines as ‘the retrospective application of presuppositions’ (Spoerhase 2008: 28). In a discussion about ancient genetic variations and their evolutionary consequences, the selection of schizophrenia as the exemplar, or worse, as a metonym for madness, involves a superfluosity of specificity. The anachronistic application of a technical psychiatric label like schizophrenia is not even equivalent to an anachronistic application of a capillary theory of blood circulation or a theory of enzymes. Prior to establishing

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these theories, people knew how to stop (or start) bleeding and knew how to bake bread or brew beer. A theory of heritable genetic mutation can provide an explanatory framework of deviance (in the same way that theories of capillaries or enzymes can ‘explain’ blood or cookery) which is universally applicable to human biology across all time. But Schizophrenia as a term/label/signifier/ brand has none of these qualities – because it is too specific. As demonstrated in Chapter 8, even now schizophrenia continues to exclude or distort broader concepts of madness due to its iconic powers of brand recognition as a cultural trope. It is as if the only possible interest in blood was haemophilia and the only enzyme was kallikrein 6. When researchers use schizophrenia as their exemplar in the context of pre-historic genetic variation, they do the field two disservices, first by omission, suggesting that schizophrenia has some monopoly on heritable genetic variation, which it does not. And, second by commission, suggesting that schizophrenia has any meaning outside of its culture-bound, logocentric, nosological system. The inadequacy of the term and the need to blur boundaries is identified clearly by Catherine Nichol in the final paragraph of her 2009 paper ‘Is There an Evolutionary Advantage of Schizophrenia?’ in which she writes: ‘This paper has concentrated almost exclusively on schizophrenia. However, it is now clear that most of the arguments used could be extended to other forms of psychotic disorder . . . there is now growing evidence against the original Kraepelinian view, in favour of a unitary model of psychosis’ (Nichols 2009: 836). This conclusion points to the limitations of schizophrenia but fails to push the matter far enough. In spite of the competing historiographies of ‘psychosis’ (Sommer 2011) that term has come to be dominated by the psychiatric interpretation (over its psychological interpretations) rendering it inevitably, unequivocally and intentionally pathological. The research focus in evolutionary and epidemiological psychiatry can be broadened by simply ripping the label ‘schizophrenia’ away, like a conceptual Elastoplast, to reveal an unnamed, undifferentiated, gross genetic possibility of madness in a small percentage of the human population. In this agnotological thought experiment, the reduction in clarity is palpable, but what it achieves is the removal of the baggage of the pathological presuppositions which Part I of this book has already challenged. The presuppositions of schizophrenia cannot be extracted because it is from these which it is constructed. It is in this exercise that my use of the idea of madness becomes visible as ‘purposefully imprecise’ (Shorto 1999: 63). Although the use of the term ‘madness’ is subject to its own problematic analysis,14 it breaks free, by being antecedent to schizophrenia and indeed psychiatry. In the context of the claims being made by evolutionary psychiatrists about the role of

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madness (no longer schizophrenia) in the development of language, leadership, risk-taking and evolutionary advantage, the suggestion that visions, voices and possessions are significant in meaning-making makes them precursors to the accounts which litter more recent, but still ancient, sacred texts like open secrets. The example I turn to, because it is ancient (although not compared with the diaspora from Africa which left no textual trace), is Moses standing in front of the burning bush in Exodus 3. Moses experiences visions and voices as he engages in dialogue with god. I suggest two questions: first, what do we call such an experience? And second, what was the result? In the twenty-first century, the first question may solicit a range of answers, including the following: I. Psychosis – In DSM-5, Schizophrenia is a psychotic illness, but the diagnostic criteria require symptoms to prevail over a ‘significant period of time’ (APA 2013: 99), so such a diagnosis is unlikely. A DSM-5 diagnosis of ‘Brief Psychotic Disorder’ or even Schizophreniform seems highly applicable. From a psychiatric perspective, Moses is mentally disordered, particularly in the light of the persecutory delusions which unfold in the rest of the story: ‘At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him’ (Exodus 4: 24). II. Dissociative Identity Disorder – This approach would depend on whether god is considered to be an external reality, or a distinct personality state that Moses has objectified, and questions would be raised about his ability to remember the experience. III. Fiction – It never happened. IV. Myth – It is a compelling textual narrative with unspecifiable veracity. V. Fact – The bush actually burned, god actually spoke. VI. Madness – Moses saw visions, heard voices, encountered the living god in an immediate state of consciousness (in which the pathological question is simply bracketed). VII. Acute Religious Experience - Moses saw visions, heard voices, encountered the living god in an immediate state of consciousness (in which the pathological question is simply bracketed) and, believing, he exercised his agency. Each of these interpretations is viable and might form the basis of a ‘differential diagnosis’. This might proceed by reference to the second question. Unless the biblical narrative is denied as a matter of principle (which is not required by any of these interpretations), then what happened next is that a person led ‘their’ people

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out of slavery in Egypt because they were ‘told’ to by god. In Jamesian language (Chapter 1), the fruits of the experience are the re-origination of the Abrahamic religions as judaism, christianity and islam all pass through this moment. The difficulty which this passage highlights is that the psychiatric interpretation of psychosis has no non-pathological possibility. Moses is mentally disordered. There is no way out of this. By contrast, as set out in the previous chapter, the addition of the caveat ‘a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice’ (APA 2013: 292) to dissociation acknowledges explanatory pluralism and provides an invitation to explore non-pathological interpretations. This ancient text crystallizes the need to find ways of speaking about the phenomenality of madness in non-pathological ways, but it also demands that the phenomenality of madness is recognized for what it is and not glossed over in a sanitizing reading. Foucault’s desire to locate an origin of madness at an institutional source is important in the history of institutionalization. It is not important in the history of madness read as coincidental with the earliest history of humans. The problem which any prehistorical account (the pre-primary historiography) of humans is acknowledged, but the ontological nature of madness is found in the genetic, not the written, trace and this, I suggest, is now compelling. In that much later written trace the evidence remains that experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme are pivotal to history, and the institutions of religion, as we know them now. In a work on acute religious experiences, as a particular mode of madness, Foucault’s silence on religion can be used to open up a much wider discussion. In 2012 the Schizophrenia Commission published a report which proposed: ‘Until the 19th century, what was termed madness lay largely in the realm of religion’ (Schizophrenia Commission 2012: 10).15 In one sentence the commission spikes any serious discussion of religion and madness by recourse to an untheorized application of secularization theory. The fact that, as we have seen, around 25 per cent of those locked up in the western psychiatric wards still articulate their experiences in religious terms (Brewerton 1994; Koenig 2009; Siddle 2002) haunts this simplifying cauterization. The Schizophrenia Commission have no time to justify their position, but I read it as a brusque articulation of the broad premise which Foucault brings to the history of madness. In the same way that one of Foucault’s biographers, David Macey, can say that before the 1970s ‘Foucault was indifferent to politics’ (Macey 1993: 81), this indifference extends to religion.16 When H. C. Erik Midelfort cries ‘Where are the demons in Foucault?’ in his 1992 essay ‘Reading and Believing: On the Reappraisal of Michel Foucault’ (Midelfort 2013: SXIII, 108), his point cuts through. Midelfort’s cry invokes a broader reference to all the other absent manifestations of the religious

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imagination: spirits, angels, the revelation of the divine, the power of god and the experience of the adequacy of religious vocabulary as a natural language of madness. This is the language from which the Schizophrenia Commission constructs an escape in its secular presentation by placing it back in the very time frame Foucault wants to explore. Foucault’s original 1961 preface laid down promises in respect of this territory. In the Middle Ages, and up until the Renaissance, the debate between man and madness was a dramatic debate that confronted man with the dark powers of the world; and the experience of madness was absorbed in images that spoke of the Fall and the End of All Things, of the Beast, of Metamorphosis, and of all the marvellous secrets of Knowledge. (Foucault [1961] 2006: xxxiv)

While Foucault never has time for the light, redemption, glory, the experience of god, his early promise is to at least take the darkness seriously, along with excluded knowledge. Foucault’s description of the metamorphosis of madness languidly morphs into institutionalized mental disorder through confinement and the growth of the clinic stymies the Eschaton and silences the Beast. For psychiatry and psychiatrists this is a strategically useful outcome, for which they can give thanks to their non-gods. But for the mad, to whom the Eschaton and the Beast are neither beliefs, nor figments, but mad facts that never went away, all they read in Foucault is silence. It is only on page number 466, out of 538, that Foucault revisits the dialogue between ‘religion’ and ‘madness’ in a section excised from the first English language translation of Madness and Civilisation (Foucault [1965] 1988).17 Foucault recounts the Quaker antecedents of Tuke’s York retreat: In any case, the Quakers, like many religious sects in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, found themselves caught up in the great debate between religious experience and unreason. To outsiders, and perhaps even in their own eyes, some forms of that experience were situated in the grey area that lay between sense and madness, and decisions were constantly required about which was which, while they were continually forced to confront the constant accusations of insanity that were made against them. (Foucault [1961] 2006: 466)

While the Quaker example also fascinates William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience ([1902] 1985) (Chapter 1), here, Foucault’s monochrome metaphor reveals his relative indifference to the matter of religious experience in the lives of the mad to the extent that he forgets to mention that the heroic Pinel kept the religious mad isolated and in chains. In this context, Foucault’s ‘grey area’ suggests the overlap of two separate translucent ‘things’, one black, one white.

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Why not multi-coloured or dynamic, why assume that ‘sense’ and ‘madness’ are dichotomies rather than mutually co-interpretive, plastic? Foucault presents a ‘great debate between religious experience and unreason’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 466), but this turns out to be a great debate which he silences throughout his History of Madness. This great debate is not found in the repurposed leper colonies, in venereal disease, in the easy wandering life of the itinerant mad, it is neither captain nor stowaway on the ship of fools; nor is it resolved as the poor of Paris are swept into the Hôpital Général in 1657. If Foucault knew there was a great debate between religious experience and unreason, why did he not give it more attention? Perhaps throwing ‘reason’, ‘unreason’ and ‘religion’ into a trinitarian trance added too much complexity to his polarizing thesis of ‘reason’ versus ‘unreason’. But an archaeology of the silence of the mad which mutes the voices of the visionaries and silences the ecstatic chanting of those who freely intercourse with god is limited and limiting. Foucault’s approach shares much in common with the Schizophrenia Commission. They both conjure a transition, a transformation in the way madness is seen and understood. It is the same transition which requires the construction of a narrative which addresses the ascendency of modernity through a double reduction: first, the cauterization of religion to remove it from madness, and then the reduction of madness to mental disorder. The supernatural excesses of the hyper-religious are merely a residual spandrel, a source of noise which can be ignored by historians, by psychiatrists, and also by the respectable world of religions in their orderly accommodation with the modern world order which privileges reason. The circularity of this secularizing, modernizing process separates the message from the meaning. The mad capacity of madness as encounters with the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is pathologized, institutionally reduced to an aberrant state in need of normalization, if not healing, and, with the subsequent development of psychopharmacology, the ‘hope’ of returning the mad to productive employment, stacking the shelves of a neoliberal economy. Today, poor Moses, returning from his encounter with god in a bush which burned, but was not consumed, would have been drugged, counselled and sent to work in a call centre reading from the ten commandments of a script designed to engender consumer satisfaction. In the great debate between ‘religion’, ‘reason’ and ‘unreason’, the delegitimization of madness brooks only a silent response. If an atheist and a theist disagree then, even in an authoritarian state, it would still be recognized that there were two points of view. In the world of mental disorders this is not necessarily the case. The mad who articulate their experiences in ‘religious’ terms

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cannot be heard, even inside the secure unit of the psychiatric hospitals where they are detained. My experience that ‘when I am sane, I am an atheist and when I am mad, I am driven by the hand of God’ is not tested for evidential support by the psychiatrists who lock me up. The questions they ask are about eating and sleeping and social relations, not about the Eschaton and the Beast. If I mention the Eschaton and the Beast, I sign my own psychotic fate. If I were to successfully invoke the actual Eschaton and/or the actual Beast, then the situation would be transformed, but until then, my voice is silenced either by my best attempts not to incriminate myself or by their dramatic recoil from the prophetic words of judgement which god uses me to speak. I dip into this first person phrasing as the most economical way of illustrating what is a very real problem. If Foucault failed to give the mad a voice, how can we hear them speak? As I understand it, this is the contribution which mad studies brings to the academy: subverting the tidy readings of history from the modernist pathologizing reductionism adopted by Foucault back in 1961 and now taken as a statable one-line proposition by the Schizophrenia Commission. As a mad person, I point to and celebrate a robust corpus of recent mad studies scholarship exploring not only the experiences of madness but also what insights or contributions the experiencers of these experiences might contribute to the western academy and wider society. Mad studies draws on and can be rendered compatible with many existing methodologies because it does not seek to replace existing methodologies. The contribution of mad studies is found in the novel insights which arise from the incorporation of a maligned and marginalized view into research within mainstream academic disciplines. As Lucy Costa puts it in ‘Mad Studies – What It Is and Why You Should Care’: ‘Think of what a difference feminist studies made in the lives of women, or what queer studies has done for the LGBT+ community or critical race studies to our understanding of how race and law intersect’ (Costa 2014: 2). And, just as feminist analysis is not limited to ‘women’s issues’ but can address the history and historiography of human experience (including the way women have been marginalized), so mad studies is not restricted to the study of madness but it offers a way of seeing the world, not an account which claims to be the only way to see. It is a ground, a standpoint, from which critique becomes possible, not just critique of how the mad have been treated, but a recognition of the contribution of madness within human culture. There is no need to ‘prove the world right’ as Foucault suggested, but in a world where psychedelics mimic psychosis (Chapter 5), and wherever neuroscience, cognitive science and philosophy of mind presuppose a homogenous human assembled in standardized parts, the customized deviancy

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of madness upsets such positions and calls for research which is not always based on an imaginary normal which is too often no more than a projection of WEIRD18 presuppositions. Mad studies can be read in the light of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s approach to identity politics. In her seminal article for the Stanford Law Review, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’ (1991), Crenshaw discredits the treatment of different dimensions of marginalization as independent variables. ‘The Intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately’ (Crenshaw 1991: 1244). In terms, being a black man or being a white woman does not exhaust the racism and sexism faced by being a black woman. In 1991 Crenshaw had not read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ (1985), which brings a Marxist, feminist, post-colonial perspective into view. By Crenshaw’s location of intersectionality in racial and gender terms in a US context and Spivak’s location of the subaltern in Marxist, feminist, post-colonial terms, these theorists ‘occupy’ their terms, making them unavailable to mad scholarship. I suggest that it would be unhelpful if mad scholars tacked on the additional marginalization of madness to the experience of being a black woman, who is also mad, in America, or as the sub-subaltern in a post-colonial context. This delicacy is not to ignore the marginal nature of being mad, but because the context of Crenshaw and Spivak necessarily excludes white men, including mad white men like me, from bandying these terms around. However, in this technical discussion, as a genealogy, the works of both Crenshaw and Spivak are revelatory in the way they open up the theoretical vistas of the unspeakability of marginalized experiences. The epistemological injustice, the silencing of the mad, which Foucault so correctly identified, needs to be recovered from the damage his History of Madness inflicts on the already voiceless mad. To be clear, insofar as marginalized positions are framed as being in competition, the status quo wins by redirecting the discussion of how to achieve change into a competition as to who needs change most. Crenshaw points the way out of this inwardness: Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination – that is as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands

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of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction. (Crenshaw 1991: 1242)

The argument from within mad studies is not to abolish madness, but to explore how it can contribute to a wider humanist understanding of diversity, history and power. In the context of the crazy experiences which litter religious consciousness in history, it should be obvious by now that seeking to distance religious experience from the domain of madness does the mad a disservice. When William James described the two halves of mysticism as if they were not part of the one whole, he collaborated in a view which overlooked the role of social construction in the interpretation of madness (Chapter 1). To suggest that all madness is ‘mystical’ is not the implication to be drawn. The point which requires recognition is that (phenomenally) mad experiences have shaped the social history of human culture through the words and deeds of those who managed to find a voice and a basis for action. These are few. But denying their madness, their visions, voices, possessions, while reframing them as sanitized mystics, serves to accommodate, and normalize, their deviancy, their different way of seeing, as separate and distinct from their mad experiences. The counterpoint is found in the way psychiatrists so quickly point to the extreme of schizophrenia19 to justify their pathologizing analysis. Pre-emptively relocating all discussions of the non-pathological possibilities of madness in the imagined extreme of schizophrenia, where social empowerment and liberation have a role which tends towards zero, is a move which collapses the actual diversity of mad experiences. This recourse to a homogenized, scare-quotes ‘schizophrenia’ as the only exemplar for madness lacks sophistication in 2023. It, once again, silences mad voices before hearing what they have to say. The challenge which the academy faces is not to normalize madness but to attend to the insights which the mad may bring, even those with a schizophrenia diagnosis, to those contemporary discourses which the mad consider they have something to contribute. The challenge for mad studies is not to apologize for being mad but to stand up for their insights which only experiences20 of madness can bring. The academy must be persuaded not to react by silencing mad voices if they, at first, have difficulty understanding such different ways of seeing or if their ‘presentation’ is insufficiently ‘scientific’. The days of witless obeisance to Wittgenstein’s ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (Tractatus 7) are over. The idea of feminism or critical race theory or LGBT+ theory or post-colonial theory

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being conducted in the academy without reference to the voices of those who are, respectively, women, black, queer or subaltern would now be considered eccentric or bizarre. But as Peter Beresford presents as a basic proposition of mad studies: Psychiatric knowledge has been based on the ‘knowledge’ claims of others about the experience of mad people and mental health service users. They (Psychiatrists) have played the key role in interpreting service users’ experience, while the latter’s own interpretations have . . . been excluded or devalued. (Beresford 2013: 71)

The issues which have been of concern to mad studies scholars are diverse and according to Brenda LeFrançois include: A focus on psychiatric survivors, the maddening of text, mad people’s history, a systemic critique of ‘psy’ violence and as a vehicle for subverting the erasure of mad people who have been racialized and colonized – both within Psychiatry and within mad movements . . . transnational, critical race and post-colonial lenses have been integral to mad studies from its inception. (LeFrançois 2016: 3)

LeFrançois provides an extensive bibliography of the works of other mad scholars in support of her analysis. The voices of madness are now beginning to be heard. However, the first major collections of mad studies writings in book form, Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies (Menzies 2013) and The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (Beresford 2022) are both categorized as works in psychiatry, demonstrating that the institutional organizers of knowledge, librarians, are still to be persuaded that mad studies can ever escape from the pathological clutches of the psychiatric gaze. Although this book is clearly a work within the genre of mad studies, immediately there are questions as to what a mad studies gaze might be. And this is to re-meet a traditional problem in emergent forms of thinking. In my opinion, Jijian Voronka got it about right when she wrote: I argue that using ‘people with lived experience’ as a form of strategic essentialism to unify our divergent ways of making meaning of our experiences to enact political gains holds risks. These risks include undercutting our various differences by effacing interlocking oppressions and the different ways we experience madness, conflating our conceptual and ideological standpoints as universally shared, and reifying mental illness. (Jijian Voronka 2016: 190)

Or, as Derrida put it back in 1963 in relation to Foucault, ‘The misfortune of the mad, the interminable misfortune of their silence, is that their best

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spokesmen are those who betray them best’ (Derrida, [1967] 1997: 36). The trap is obvious. I don’t speak for mad studies because mad voices are more reliable than spokespeople, even mad spokespeople, who claim to speak for madness. And, insofar as any of the published output of mad studies is ‘spoken’, the authorial power of those spokespeople should be understood in the history of authorial power as contributory rather than determinative. We have seen this before. James’s more was lost to those who preferred reading about conversion and mysticism; Otto’s numinous was dragged away from his god by Jung; Eliade’s Shamanism was sold to hopeful idealists by Harner; Stace’s mysticism was downgraded by psychedelic theorists like Pahnke, whose psychedelic experiences were then smeared and outlawed by the establishment’s fear. In this broader context, of the lack of authorial control, unpacking the chimera of who speaks for the mad can be ignored because, in line with Spivak, it depends on the agendas of those who are listening, which can neither be predicted nor controlled. This is a realistic recognition of the current state of research funding strategies and priorities which currently privilege the randomized control trials of ‘science’ which relate mad-experience in standard deviations from a putative normal, over theories ground out through mad experiences which care nothing for normal in the stories they recount back in the world of reason. There is a deeper problem. Writing the history or the philosophy of madness21 can only be a partial task because, on the one hand, the acceptable faces of the visions, voices and possessions of madness have been preserved in history by religions which disown madness as a dirty slur; and, on the other, because the dirty mad have been managed and controlled rather than heard. But this is not all. As Foucault observes, and Derrida cites against him, madness is ‘in its most vibrant state before being captured by knowledge’ (Derrida 1967: 40). When I am mad, I do not speak in a stream of consciousness, I speak from within a waterfall of consciousness. The disjunct is not found in the relation between speech and writing, neither medium is adequate for the manifold experiment of being me being mad. When psychiatrists say I suffer from disorganized speech, they reveal themselves as being too slow to keep up. When psychiatrists deploy words like phenomenology and (arguably worse) critical phenomenology, they frequently overlook the Husserlian project which begins with the investigators doing something to themselves. As long as my madness is constructed in the prejudicial language of the medical idiom, ‘delusion’, ‘disorder’, ‘dysfunction’, ‘disease’, I cannot be heard because I am being played as a typology not a voice, tested against the diagnostic tuning fork. Even if it were possible for a consultant psychiatrist to bracket their pathologizing professional prejudices, they will still

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bracket my clinical encounter when they return home to the secure lifestyle their (average) UK salary of £90,000 affords in a system which deducts my annual £3,624 carer’s allowance from my disabled wife’s benefits. In my experiences, when psychiatrists want me to be understandable, they are not seeking to be informed, but to calibrate their intervention to make me normal. When they write down my words and use them against me later, they do not understand how easy it would have been for me to use the same words in a different order or say the same thing with entirely different words. Insofar as they think there is value in analysing the glass of still water they drew from my raging cascade of consciousness, they misunderstand the vibrancy of madness. If the historiography of the histories of madness shows that madness has been written with too much psychiatry in mind22 and I remain clear that the mad do not speak with one voice, because to do so is to fall into the trap Voronka identified, what can be said and by whom about madness? If the speaking is by the mad, rationalizing their experiences, to make them understandable (the frustration of the logocentricism of writing being exceeded only by the tedious constraint of its linear form), what can be said about madness as madness? And, more importantly, can it be heard? There is a growing genre of first person accounts of madness that publishers must make some money out of, because they keep on publishing them. My personal favourite is Manicdotes by Chris Joseph (2008) which bucks the trend of heartbreaking narratives slickened by a redemptive twist. The challenge for this genre is how to write personal experience beyond what psychedelic researchers nominate as the ‘trip report’ – the particular narrative of first person experience. The darker background is that such reports present the most extreme, the most weird, the most outlandish, because it is the most dramatic, the most heartbreaking and the most saleable. This invites a comparative process of who is the maddest. Being ‘madder than thou’ is precisely the sort of competitive sidetrack which the discourse on madness could do without. As part of my PhD thesis my examiners induced me to write an autoethnography about an extended experience in India which left me on a drip in a clinic in Kerala, having tripped without falling all the way from the hills of Murree, where I worked, to Trivandrum. I regret that ‘trip report’, not just because it sat uncomfortably within a theory-laden thesis, but because it exposed too much of me. I don’t want to be your subject. I don’t covet your empathy. My PhD thesis is now restricted, undisclosed, unreadable, because I realized I’d infringed my own privacy in an unacceptable ethical manner. Such reports are complicated pearls thrown out into a careless world and although you, personally, might not be swine, there are such people who selectively read,

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cite and exploit such writings23 even subliminally (would you let me babysit for your child?). But, deep into this book, I do want to write two things about madness as madness, as my madness, for the benefit of any psychiatrists who may stumble across these words: 1. Being mad is, for me, not the aberration, it is the more, the numinous, the Shamanic consciousness, the mystical experience, the reality beyond the model offered by the psychotomimetic/psychedelic experience. Madness is the peak experience. In quantitative terms madness is a small part of my life, in qualitative terms it is the most profound, the most important, the most eye-opening, mind-altering, liberating experience, like a light-bulb moment which can last for pain-filled weeks, too hot, too bright, too harsh. I am not not me when I am mad. I am the same person, living the same life but with the costs and benefits of riding a wave of immediacy over which the only control I seek is to go higher. The reason mad people, like me (I speak for myself, but I know I’m not alone), are forcibly detained is because, in contrast with all other ‘medical’ patients, I am impatient, I don’t want to be helped or cured, I don’t want to be interrupted. 2. Speaking even more personally, when the psychiatric system trips me up and intervenes for the benefit of myself or others, I understand their good intentions. But what they don’t know is that when they lock me up, I make myself sane – in order to escape – and, and this is the key point, in pretending to be sane I become sane. This pretence is exhausting. I adopt routines, but not rigidly, ritually or obsessively – an afternoon nap, an evening bath (they don’t know whether I sleep or bathe). I walk instead of running, I sit where I can be seen, pretending to read a book, as the words bleed down the page, I eat my meals at mealtime and ask the staff to compliment the chef, I play chess by sticking to the rules, I hold my tongue and I do not rise to provocation. These strategies are not some product of autopoesis, although I learned much from my cumulative experiences; my strategic insight came from observing my dad. He went manic annually, with the October gales, and pumped full of antipsychotics was plunged so far into depression that he qualified for the barbarity of blasting his 100 billion neurons with crude electric shocks you wouldn’t inflict on a laptop. His psychiatrist said it worked because they could send him home to us, a husk with no memory. My dad was, unsurprisingly, alienated from a patriarchal psychiatry which blew his mind. I chose to

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reverse his strategy. My difficulty with psychiatry is not driven by the historic othering of the mad in their categories of pathology, it is driven by their continual refusal to understand that what they call psychosis is, referencing the phrase that Otto never used, the mysterium tremendum fascinans (Chapter 2), even though it hurts, even though I hurt the ones I love. If psychiatrists paid attention to the (rich white) world of psychedelic studies and took the same care over ‘setting’ (Chapter 5), they might make psychosis more beautiful; and they might attend to how their patients could learn how to come down through their own volition, assisting with the integration of their experiences through the ontological trauma on the climbdown (Ceriello 2020), not by interfering with my brain by chemistry, but by showing sensitivity to the question of how they might help me to live my best life. There, I’ve said it. The pathologizing bias of the terminology of mental disorder, even in genetic arguments, requires resistance, correction and reconsideration. Mad studies provides a standpoint for the review of the historic project of psychiatry which treats distress as the basis of generalizations about the phenomenality of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme experiences. The mad were always able to speak, but as Spivak found, the epistemic injustice was perpetrated by an institutional reluctance to listen. In mad studies lies the opportunity for the voices of madness to take their place neither as subject nor object, but as colleagues in the contemporary academy, subject to funding.

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Acute Religious Experiences

‘Acute religious experiences’ is a string of three words. It’s not a neologism such as, for example, ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘autism’ or ‘ambivalence’, all of which were promulgated1 by the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at the start of the twentieth century, or Humphry Osmond’s psychedelic, or Rudolf Otto’s numinous. Nor is it the novel repurposing of a single term such as William James’s more (Chapter 1), T. K. Oesterreich’s possession (Chapter 3), Mircea Eliade’s shamanism (Chapter 4) or Walter Stace’s mysticism (Chapter 5). It is exactly comparable to Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences (Chapter 7), bringing together already understood terms in a formulation which is intuitively understandable. ‘Acute religious experiences’ is a combination of three words with existing meanings, existing cultural baggage, but in its full force, as developed in this chapter, I will show that acute religious experiences offers novel explanatory power in the contested relation of psychiatry and religious studies within their shared approaches to human experiences. Of the three words, acute is the least problematic and the existing distinction between acute and general medicine provides a better analogy to illustrate the distinction than the binary geometric relation between acute and obtuse angles. When triaging a patient, judgement is required. In the emergency room there is a fuzzy line between the patient who is clearly in the acute category and the patient who is clearly in the general category. At the margin, the issue of judgement is inescapable. Similarly, there is no objective measure which can define when a general religious experience becomes an acute religious experience. In practical psychiatry, the comparable judgement, in relation to mental disorders, notwithstanding the theoretical discussion in Chapter 8, is not about diagnostic categories. The Bipolar Commission found in 2019 that the average time between people first contacting a health professional about symptoms and getting an accurate diagnosis of bipolar was 9.5 years.2 In everyday psychiatry, judgement relates to degrees of distress and an assessment

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of the risk patients present to themselves or others. This judgement is always particular, personal and contextual. This capacity to distinguish the acute from the general precedes the theoretical process of classification. The problematic nature of ‘religious’, the second term in acute religious experiences, is well documented in the critical study of religion (Fitzgerald 2000; McCutcheon [1999] 2005) and will be addressed further in what follows. Here the internal equivocations within religious studies can be temporarily sidestepped by recourse to Ann Taves’s attributional approach (Taves 2009) in which experiences are ‘deemed’ to be religious. This shifts the question from the essentializing framework of religion to a focus on the question of who is doing the deeming/framing. Reflection suggests there is a first order engagement between the individuals and their communities which might never have recourse to the term ‘religious’, but which scholars might see as being quintessentially religious. This is the corollary of J. Z. Smith’s argument, set out in ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’ (Smith [1998] 2004). My own view is that Smith overstates the power of religious scholarship to ‘own’ the term ‘religion’. The evidence that ‘religion’ escaped the religious scholar’s study is found in the freedom with which psychiatrists use the term, but it is also found in general usage, not least on census forms where no explanatory guidelines are deemed necessary in support of the religious question. Everyone thinks they know what they mean when they use the term, in a way which can be contrasted with the use of the term ‘schizophrenia’, which is more likely to be found in protective inverted commas. What Smith does is to point the discussion in the right direction by highlighting the second order role of religion as a linguistic formulation to describe human activity. While skating over the top of this disciplinary/philological minefield, it remains a matter of fact that the search string ‘religio’3 does not appear in the gospels (see Part III) and appears only in the New International Version of the bible a total of eleven times. This search string appears 0 (zero) times in the bhagavad gita (2014).4 Here, it is proposed that if an individual or their community speaks about an experience as religious, it is religious. Where first order participants do not use the term ‘religious’, the onus falls on the scholars to do the deeming, or not, as they prefer the case to be. This capacious approach is required because, as will be seen, there is no need to exclude the person in the locked psychiatric ward who believes they have been sent by god and are the current prophet of a new religion or the new prophet of an old religion. Similarly, there is no need to exclude the sadhus who rake through the human bones in the cremation grounds of Tarapith in west Bengal in the service of the goddess Tara (Cantlie in Gale 2014: 90),

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however alien such activity may be to a narrow western cultural view (which is steeped in the metaphors and shaped by the plastic forms of the language and symbols of Christianity). By keeping a broad approach to what is religious, questions of veracity and authority are relegated to a second order analysis. This approach is directly comparable to the psychiatric diagnostic process in which the discussion of how to name an experience is secondary to the recognition that there is an experience which is relevant to the naming conventions of the psychiatric classificatory systems and needs to be named. The third term in acute religious experiences, ‘experiences’, has been eloquently problematized by Robert Sharf, who argued: ‘The category experience is, in essence, a mere place-holder that entails a substantive terminus for the relentless deferral of meaning’ (Sharf 2000: 286). I agree. And, it is from Sharf that I discovered the utility of placeholders in lieu of substantive terminuses. Obviously, if there is no finality to the process of interpretation, the question remains, how can we say anything at all? The ensuing paralysis inherent in such a philosophical approach is comparable with the traditional vortex which still leads to the final terminus of solipsism which cannot be logically resisted. Again, I propose a more pragmatic approach which further deconstructs the overemphasis on ‘belief ’ characteristic of both logocentric western philosophy and logocentric western religion. If one starts with a Kantian5 approach to epistemology, in which ‘things in themselves’ cannot be known directly, then belief, understandings and interpretation become synonyms or at least contributions to the schematization through which we approach the world. An account of someone else’s experience can only ever be constructed as my beliefs/understandings/interpretations about their beliefs/ understandings/interpretations about their experiences as communicated in language, gesture or artefact, but inescapably resolved by reference to my theory of their mind.6 That I cannot know what you experienced and how you understand your experience follows unproblematically from Kant, but paralysis is not the only possible outcome as inter-subjective conversations and interactions, which thicken and share beliefs/understandings/interpretations, are the bedrock of meaning-making from the earliest developmental moments. In such an inter-subjective discussion of acute religious experiences, Husserl’s phenomenological method is one way of proceeding, but so too is the constant tick-tock reminder of the biopsychosocial method to take a more holistic view. It may be a challenge to understand the frustration of a person whose duty to do god’s will has been interrupted and obstructed by being arrested and locked into a psychiatric ward; it may be challenging to understand the sadhu raking human remains in the crematorium site at Tarapith as religious, but it must be

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theoretically possible to theorize on the basis of their integrity, their narratives about their experiences and by acknowledging the otherness of stranger things which cannot be immediately believed or understood as a problem for the observer. The challenge of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is always one of the immediate experience of the individual and the socially mediated beliefs, understandings, interpretations of normals, who, in this context, are the othered outsiders, just as in contemporary physics, the observers’ point(s) of view(s) are part of the experiment. Instead of being flummoxed by the philosophical problem of how to address the relentless deferral of meaning, it is possible, with a degree of humility, to consider ‘experience’ not as unknowable, but in the more provisional terms of the observer’s current beliefs and understanding, not yet known. David Chalmers, who is credited with formulating the problem of consciousness as the hard problem of consciousness, demonstrates his willingness to step around Sharf ’s problem of experience in his discussion of the meta-problem of consciousness: ‘I use “experience”, “conscious experience”, and “subjective experience” more or less interchangeably as synonyms for phenomenal consciousness or for phenomenal states’ (Chalmers 2018: 6). This straightforward approach collapses much of the hand-wringing which has plagued the discourse on experience in the humanities. The phrase ‘acute religious experiences’ is not only composed of three words, it also contains two pairs of terms conditioned by a third: 1. ‘Religious experiences’, conditioned by the adjective ‘acute’. 2. ‘Acute experiences’, conditioned by the adjective ‘religious’. It is not my task, my need or my intention to defend the contested concept of ‘religious experience’ as singular. Quite the opposite. I insist that acute religious experiences is always spelt in the plural, even when it jars.7 The term ‘religious experience’ has become overburdened, inexact and, in my opinion, dysfunctional. The British Library Catalogue returns a literature of more than 12,000 titles in response to a search for ‘religious experience’,8 making the term ripe for a more nuanced approach. By contrast, the British Library Catalogue returns two responses to the exact term ‘acute religious experiences’. Acute religious experiences is an empty category in the library which can be populated by instances where this idea is used to differentiate religious experiences, to distinguish between the general and the acute. Recognizing religious experiences conditioned by the adjective ‘acute’ provides a way of triaging experience on the basis of phenomenality. As shown throughout the whole of Part I, the theoreticians considered have been engaged in an implicit distinction

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between the general and the acute. And it is my proposal that the placeholder of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is only ever relevant to the acute as identified by such states of phenomenal consciousness, rather than a presumption of any particular orthodoxy or orthopraxis. The idea of ‘acute experiences’ evokes the territory of psychiatry, and it is precisely here that the use of ‘religious’ as an adjective resists the traditional tendency to read religious experience and psychiatry in opposition or conflict. The psychiatric contribution is no longer to reduce the thick discourses of religious experience to brain dysfunction, disorder, disease. Instead, the contribution of psychiatry is to be found through a recognition of the contribution of the biological where genetic variation is a precondition. Psychiatric theory offers specific contributions to religious studies thinking on the relationship between the few and the many and the temporal dynamic which William James identified as transiency. It also remains possible to think that the meaning-making dimensions of religion may provide not necessarily pathological grounds for the interpretation of madness, as already constituted in the dissociative identity disorder criteria of the DSM-5 and as not yet constituted in the psychosis chapter (Chapter 8). Acute religious experiences, in the fullness of its three words, as a pheme, accommodates all of these meanings and all of the tensions between its constituent terms. Acute religious experiences are events. As shown in the case study in Part III, they can be transformative events which change the course of a person’s life. In this sense, they provide discontinuities without being decontextualized. The identification of acute religious experiences can be useful to the study of religion just as the study of material culture, ritual, beliefs, language, texts, tradition and history may be of interest to sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and historians of religions in the general study of religions. The study of the particularity of acute religious experiences might involve all of these approaches but focus on relevant experiences of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme states of consciousness which are found within the evidence being considered. By way of a brief example, the role of a sufi shrine might be approached through a comparison of its relation to mainstream islam, through a comparison of material, ritual, beliefs, linguistic and historical traces, there might be a discussion about gender inclusion, about death, about memorialization, about sympathetic magic. Comparative differences and similarities may be drawn. But at the heart of the sufi shrine are two key elements which radically differentiate it from mainstream islam. All sufi shrines begin with an originary lifetime experience of a person, the sufi saint who is invariably linked to extraordinary/anomalous/

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extreme experiences even if it is difficult to disentangle first order experience from subsequent accounts, and, no less importantly, the historical continuity of the shrine which combines both biological and spiritual elements (el-Sayed el-Aswad 2006). The concept of acute religious experiences holds the door open to a focus on the pir’s experience of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme and prevents analysis being reduced to the general religiosity of the social and material traces of its subsequent institutionalisation. These are insufficient to explain the significance of the phenomenon of sufism. As William James parsed religious experience, ‘in its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows this well enough with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many’ (James [1902] 1985: 114). As Durkheim argued from madness to religious experience, ‘It is quite true that religious life cannot attain any degree of intensity and not carry with it a psychic exaltation that is connected to delirium. It is for this reason that men of extraordinary sensitive religious consciousness – prophets, founders of religions, great saints – often show symptoms of an excitability that is extreme and even pathological; these physiological defects predisposed them to great religious roles’ (Durkheim [1912] [1915], 1995: 228); as Karl Jaspers concludes, ‘Finally, we may go beyond the empirical field and ask how there could be any meaning in the coincidence of religion and madness; could we interpret it that where the individual himself is in extremity, the extremity of his existing vital state provides a basis for meaningful experience?’ (Karl Jaspers [1913] 1962: 731). Ronnie Laing noted, ‘madness need not be all breakdown. It may be also break-through’ (Laing 1967). Sharf observes, ‘the vigorous and often exuberant language used by mystics the world over to describe their visions, trances, and states of cosmic union must refer to something’ (Sharf 2000: 280), and Renata Mikolajczyk states, ‘While the imagination of those who are obsessed with fear produces dreadful images mistaken for demons, so the brain of men devoted to pious contemplation imagines angels and God to the extent that they appear as if in a vision. Hence the two phenomena are related by the same underlying physiological process’ (Mikolajczyk in Klaniczay 2005). As Frederick Smith presses, ‘the force of the ethnographic accounts should elicit a re-examination of classical texts for evidence of possession’ (Smith 2006: 4) and Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed suggests, ‘there is no difference between a religious experience (with psychotic phenomenology) and other psychotic experiences’ (Rashed 2010); as Willcox argues, ‘In the case of Sufism, while

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taking revealed law as the starting point and holding on to the utility of reason, practical experience and direct divine inspiration were the ultimate sources of knowledge of The Real, an academic analysis of Sufi terms cannot ascertain the veracity of any particular explication over another and is thus obliged to rely upon the anecdotal and often poetic evidence of those who have experienced the reality that such terms attempt to convey’ (Wilcox 2011: 117); as June McDaniel clarifies, ‘as we look at the texts, we notice that the more personal detail is present in these stories, the greater the violation of ritual and theology. Human devotion does not always fit the ritual pattern, especially among the highly individualistic and idiosyncratic visionaries in this book. Indeed, this is why virtually all were mistaken for mad or possessed, and many had to undergo exorcism or Ayurvedic treatment to prove the religious origins of their passions and visions’ (McDaniel 2018: 4).9 This string of citations, which could be extended, demonstrates a quality of experience which is currently subsumed within the generality of the term ‘religious experience’. ‘Acute Religious Experiences’ provides a non-psychiatric terminology which pays attention to both the content and the significance of visions, voices and possessions. When Sharf concludes there is little evidence ‘that these very disparate accounts are actually referring to one and the same experience’ (Sharf 1998: 97), he is recognizing the diversity of experiences rather than their absence. The task in hand is not to defend the perennial account of sameness, nor the contextualist account of difference but to recognize the diversity of the experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, while differentiating such experiences from the mundane. Acute religious experiences is a way of identifying and naming particular states of consciousness that are culturally plastic. As a second order construct for identifying similarities and differences in first order experiences, the rest of this chapter is devoted to the practical task of how to identify religious experiences as acute religious experiences. This is a response to Bruce Lincoln’s challenge, ‘The problem is not whether to compare, but how?’ (Lincoln 2018: 21). It is my proposal that the idea of acute religious experiences provides utility as a means of differentiation and this is part of the answer to Lincoln question. As has been demonstrated in Part I, there is already a literature which addresses existing evidence of non-pathological experiences of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme states of consciousness. At first sight, this discourse is poorly defined as it involves contributions from a range of disciplines based on a number of different

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approaches with no agreed vocabulary. Perhaps more significantly, only William James is prepared to address the pathological nature of such experiences, and then only partially. The rest of the authors are driven by the need to protect their subjects from the reductionism of psychiatric analysis. More subtly, although the theoreticians of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme had read their predecessors’ work, they proposed their own vocabulary and wrote as if there was no discourse. ‘The shaman’, ‘the mystic’, ‘the possessed’ are traditional terms which were re-theorized by Eliade, Stace and Oesterreich; the numinous, the psychedelic experience and peak experiences are introduced as novel concepts. Each of these authors wrote against madness, in spite of the common phenomenality of the evidence they faced. This bias can be attributed to their desire to escape the pathologizing instinct of psychiatry which extended to the denial of the role of hallucinations by Oesterreich and Stace to avoid the psychiatrization of their subjects. In this chapter, the politics of interpretation finally comes into view. The reduction of the non-pathological discourse to psychiatric terms can, by reversing the process, open up the possibility that the psychiatric discourse has misunderstood the cultural value of such experiences and the contribution of such rare individuals to human history. Instead of creating a dichotomy between the non-pathological and the pathological interpretations of the ‘disrupted’ or the ‘extraordinary/anomalous/extreme’, my proposal is that psychiatric theory can make a contribution within the religious studies canopy as long as it resists the temptation to pull the whole thing down. As shown in (Chapter 8), psychiatry has found its subject of study in the extreme which can now be grounded in genetic theory (Chapter 9). That psychiatry worked with pathological presuppositions is a historical bias which served the functional needs of a medicalized discipline better than it has served the interest of the humanities. The times are changing. Herman van Praag, one of the editors of the World Psychiatric Association’s compendious Religion and Psychiatry suggests: ‘For many decades religion has been psychiatry’s stepchild, being considered no more than an archaic remnant of an infantile past. In doing so, psychiatry seriously erred and harmed the interests of numerous patients’ (Verhagen 2011: 235). This is not quite an apology for Freud’s phrasing then,10 or psychiatry now, but it does indicate a willingness to think anew. And this new approach is already institutionalized in the changes to the dissociative identity disorder criterioa, which introduce explanatory pluralism to the text of the DSM-5, even if it has yet to be worked through into the psychotic disorders (Chapter 8).

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In the meantime, I offer the D.R.E.A.D. framework as a heuristic tool which may be of use to religious studies educators and psychiatrists alike. The experiences it points to are ancient, but the approach is novel. It is not (yet another) typology which essentializes experience; the high-water mark of Walter Stace has now passed, even if his legacy continues in psychedelic research. Instead, the D.R.E.A.D. framework is an approach to the data of experience that allows for a recognition of both similarities and differences, similarities which are driven by a biological reality of human divergence and differences which are reflected in the psychosocial plasticity and the long continuities of historical context found in Part I.

The D.R.E.A.D. framework The D.R.E.A.D framework is an approach to the phenomenal evidence of experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, or in DSM-5 terms, disruption. Although this may sound similar to Husserl’s phenomenological project, I am not wedded to his approach as I am suspicious of the epoché (bracketing)11 and dubious about the very concept of an eidetic vision, in the context of one person’s understanding of another’s experience. As Wouter Kusters suggests in A Philosophy of Madness: those who want to delve deeper will have to abandon the safe shores of impassive observation. As long as the phenomenologist stays on the riverbank, he will not know what swimming is – or drowning, either. He may observe people swimming in the distance, snorkelling, deep-sea diving, and sometimes even drowning. His reports, however, will remain couched in the sturdy, well-defined language of observation and analysis. By following this method, he turns madness into a static, self-contained state, fundamentally different from the normal and alien to the researcher. (Kusters [2014] 2020: 8)

While no doubt phenomenology promotes critical thinking and empathy, I remain firmly committed to the unknowability of things in themselves, including other people’s experiences. My theory of your mind is still a projection based on my cultural embodiment. I can’t walk a mile in your shoes without misshaping them, I cannot experience your crossing of Heraclitus’s river. When Otto is chastised for telling people to stop reading his book, the chastisers reveal their own lack of sophistication in their (mis-)understanding of the relationship between experience and words as texts. The ineffability of mystical experience

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is merely an exaggerated instance (arising from rarity and significance) of the ineffability of all experience, and your reading of these words can only provide an approximation of my intentions (as my reading of my words is, too). By presenting the D.R.E.A.D framework as a heuristic tool, a contribution to the way we organize the data we study in religious studies, I am not seeking to upset the religious studies canopy. My intention is to provide a means by which diverse data can be considered to ensure that similarities which arise from being human are not overlooked because they manifest differently. An analogy might be with the limitations and contribution of the biopsychosocial approach which George Engel refreshed in his seminal article in Science, ‘The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine’ (Engel 1977). The biopsychosocial model is found to be unhelpful in much contemporary psychiatry because it doesn’t provide any guidance as to what to do, how psychiatrists can address social contexts, realistically (Ghaemi 2009). But what the biopsychosocial model does is to force the need for a holistic view into sight. Insofar as psychiatry deals only with the biological it cannot ‘explain’ psychosis, or even its archetypal trope of schizophrenia, because these are also dependent on psychological and sociological factors.12 The corollary is that, as long as religious studies ignores the biological component of religious experiences, analysis is similarly deficient – unholistic. If the biopsychosocial model cannot save psychiatry, it is because too much is being asked of what is perhaps best understood as a mnemonic. The constant reminder that the biological, the psychological and the social must be incorporated in any consideration of what it means to be human is a valuable contribution which is worth repetition. The D.R.E.A.D model is, similarly, not going to ‘save’ either psychiatry or religious studies, but it offers a way of re-cognizing experiences which are held in place by the placeholders of disruption (Chapter 8) and the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme (Part I) in a context deemed religious. Here, it should be noted that the particular formulation/wording of the components of the model is flexible. It is possible to recognize the heuristic value of acronyms while being aware of their limitations. When I taught William James’s ‘PINT’ of mysticism (passive, ineffable, noetic, transient), it came back in essays and exam papers in a way that the traces of Derrida’s deconstructive process are harder to remember and re-present, but life is not about writing essays or passing exams and the subtleties of James’s mysticism were not conveyed by a four-letter acronym for four words which individually and collectively represented vast conceptual terrains. As noted in Chapter 9 there are many ways of saying the same thing. I could equally well propose a PSADV model (possible, spiritual, anomalous, dynamic, validation)

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model, but the slightly tongue-in-cheek approach of drawing on D.R.E.A.D, with its echoes of Rudolf Otto and its resonance with the Rastafarian reappropriation of a colonial disdain for a Jamaican hairstyle which was, in turn, traced back to both Africa and India is more satisfying than random letters. The key point is not the formulation but the recognition that it is not another tickbox typology. The D.R.E.A.D model is an approach, a process, a thought experiment rather than an essentialized description. The D.R.E.A.D model is a means of identifying experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme consciousness, or experiences of disruption as acute religious experiences.

D.R.E.A.D. ●

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Diversity Religious Extreme Ambivalent Determination

D.R.E.A.D. – Diversity In the D.R.E.A.D. framework the role of Diversity, as a starting place, requires the adoption of an outward-looking approach to explicitly pre-empt any propensity for scholars to operate the category of acute religious experiences within narrow preconceptions of particular traditions or idioms of religious experiences. It is the reverse of ‘bracketing’ preconceptions in that these are to be exceeded rather than enclosed. The end, the identification of acute religious experiences, is always implicitly in sight, but as a starting place the need is for a recognition that the ravings of the detainee in the locked ward of the psychiatric hospital and the sadhu raking the cremation grounds of Tarapith are relevant data. The WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) (Henrich 2010) presuppositions are the first thing that have to be addressed along with the assumption of the homogenous human, the silos of psychiatry, of religious studies, and all of the other administrative divisions of the academy; these have to be delimited as a first stage in the D.R.E.A.D process. The proxies13 of acute religious experiences are visions, voices and possessions which occur across the human population. The diversity of how they manifest is a function of cultural difference. In Part I, I showed that Walter Pahnke’s enthusiasm about the evidence of psychoactive substance use in indigenous traditions made him

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blind to the careful work Walter Stace had done to erect a sui generis defence of mysticism as a meditative state in higher religions. In Part I, the difference between Mircea Eliade’s Shamans and Rudolf Otto’s numinous is driven by the presuppositions and intentionality of the analyst, not any fundamental incommensurability. William James’s pathological programme stands at odds with Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences, and Oesterreich’s possession is fundamentally diverse, both Demoniacal and Other, reflecting the range of traditions of cultural praxis and interpretation. Whether visions and voices and possessions are attributed to an external source, or an internal source, or an internal projection of an external source (as neurotheology would have it (D'Aquili and Newberg 1999)), interpretations become culturally congruent presuppositions. And this is the rub, the point that tends to be overlooked, the concern of mad studies: interpretation involves a political negotiation in which culture acts as a conservative force. The idea of acute religious experiences begins with an unapologetically relativist and relativizing challenge which takes place in the shadow of Emma Cohen’s complaint against ‘the dominant agenda of anthropological scholarship, in which the sole mandate of epistemological relativism produces a situation in which anything goes’ (Cohen 2007: 73). Cohen’s concerns under-represent the fact that in spite of the possibility, so little actually changes. Which is why the first step in the D.R.E.A.D. model is to think more broadly about the evidence of experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme. In Part I it became clear that both Oesterreich and Stace downplayed the evidence of visions and voices because it didn’t fit the constructs they wanted to present. In the collection Communicating with the Spirits (Klaniczay 2005), Éva Pócs uses her footnotes to trace differing traditions describing the experiences of shaman and the spirit possessed. Pócs cites Findesien (1957: 121–39), Luc De Huesch (1971: 228), Hultkranz (1967, 1984) and Eliade (1987) as supporting the idea that the shaman undertakes an external voyage of the soul. By contrast she cites Boddy (1994: 411) and Crapanzano (1987) as characterizing possession as a metaphorical system which happens to the body: ‘The spirit is said to mount the host . . . to haunt, inhabit, to besiege, to be a guest of, to strike or slap to seduce, to marry, or to have sexual relations with the host’ (Klaniczay 2005: 133). In the context of the identification of acute religious experiences, these differences are a matter of cultural construction rather than means of disqualifying validity, and they require no justification, other than that provided within the community to which they relate. Acute religious experiences do not depend on an essentialist view and, contra Cohen, I am perfectly content that anything goes because that is the nature of plasticity.

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My willingness to make space for the whole diversity of expressions within the category of acute religious experiences was partly inspired by I. M. Lewis’s subsumption of shamanism and spirit possession within the category of Ecstatic Religion (Lewis [1971] 1989). The difference is that I am prepared to go much further by arguing that the need to consider diversity is sufficiently delimited to initially include ALL claims and all proxies which might be instances of acute religious experiences, no matter what their cultural manifestations or historical origins, their orthodoxy or heterodoxy and, most importantly at this stage, irrespective of claims of authenticity recognized by dominant cultural interpretations, or the presuppositions of the ‘observer’. Such an initial approach obviates the need for any kind of gatekeeper, whether that be a community or an academic discipline. Such a broad, anything goes approach is justified by the recognition that disruption (as a placeholder) or experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme (as a placeholder) operates prior to interpretation. The result of this delimited approach is the equivalent of allowing user-generated content onto the internet to replace the experts/editors/ gatekeepers of traditional scholarship. The issues of authority and authenticity will come – at the end of the process, not at the start. The idea of diversity doesn’t assist in the actual identification of acute religious experiences, instead it acts to delimit preconceptions to assist in ensuring that the population is not unnecessarily restricted by research bias.

D.R.E.A.D. – Religious In Comparative Religion: A History (Sharpe 1986), Eric Sharpe argued that ‘The new departments of Religious Studies . . . gave highly diverse companies of scholars an organisational canopy under which to shelter, and in many cases that was all’ (Sharpe 1986: 298). Throughout this book I have gently relied on Sharpe’s metaphor of religious studies as a canopy and at the start of this chapter, I sidestepped the ‘religious’ question by recourse to Ann Taves’ attributional approach which proposes that religiosity is deemed rather than defined (Taves 2009). I consider this remains a valid approach, but I recognize that I may have to do a little more when addressing the ‘religious’ in the D.R.E.A.D. model. The issue, for readers with no religious studies background, is most effectively articulated by Timothy Fitzgerald in The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000) where Fitzgerald exposes the limitations of religion as an analytical category. The problem is not only that it is a white western construct which embeds christian and (subsequent) colonial assumptions but the social scientific

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methodologies adopted by religious studies also distort the field by disguising the liberal, ecumenical, theological presuppositions which underlie its practices. I am intuitively sympathetic to Fitzgerald’s analysis and recognize the validity of his critique. My own recourse to rhetorically pointing to the problem of WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) (Henrich 2010) researchers and modernist/colonial approaches which privilege reason and the logocentricism of the academy reflects this. My critique of Fitzgerald’s position is that, just as Foucault failed to speak for the mad ([1961] 2006) and Spivak recognizsed the conundrum of speaking for the subaltern ([1985] 2020), there are risks in saying anything. If recourse to words can never resolve the relentless deferral of meaning, the question is whether it is still more useful to have placeholders than it is to say nothing and abandon the possibility of critique. If the religious studies canopy is abandoned, dis(-)solved into a broader ‘cultural studies’, the legacy issues of religion may simply be reappropriated into other disciplinary silos. There will be less multi-disciplinarity and more psychology of religion, anthropology of religion, sociology of religion, and less cross-disciplinary critical analysis. Abandoning the religious studies canopy doesn’t solve the problem of ‘religion’ because, in spite of J. Z. Smith, everybody inside and outside the academy thinks they have sufficient expertise and a right to talk about religion – even if they have no understanding of the hard work the secular study of religion has contributed over the last century as it emerges from its colonial past and the theological shadow of the christian church. As a particular example, what Fitzgerald’s position fails to recognize is that, in spite of the contemporary status quo, psychiatrists have already established their own definitions and methodologies for addressing religion. In psychiatric approaches, the cultural value of religious experience, which Fitzgerald recognizes within a wider ‘cultural studies’ context, is reduced to an instrumental formulation in which religion is considered in terms of its contribution as a coping mechanism, or as a risk factor, or as an aid to medication adherence (Gearing 2011: 150). By dissolving the religious studies canopy rather than bringing psychiatry into it, tautological definitions by psychiatrists that (for example) religion has got to do with the sacred (Koenig 2009) will never be subject to the rigorous critique they deserve or the short shrift they would receive post-Eliade. Instead, the medicalized epistemology of psychiatry will continue to do what it pleases with religion because it has no need of critical approaches. All the evidence required to validate this concern is included in the chapter on Walter Pahnke (Chapter 5) which shows how the thick, culturally embedded, concept of mysticism can be turned into a drug experience for rich white people in clinics.

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While there is more self-searching than self-flagellation in the humanist study of the human production of religion, such introspection is not unique. Biology can be reduced to chemistry, but it is sustained on utilitarian grounds. Chemistry can be reduced to physics, which still has no agreed grand theory of everything, and physics can be reduced to an incomprehensible (to most people) non-phonetic language of mathematics. All of these subjects are sustained on utilitarian grounds. The hard problem of consciousness has not been ‘solved’ and shows no signs of being ‘solved’, but neuroscience and consciousness studies maintain their utility. In his ‘antitheses’ to Bruce Lincoln’s ‘Theses on Method’, Fitzgerald concludes, ‘Unfortunately, this leaves the problem unsolved. In my view, if he (Lincoln) had taken those observations to their logical conclusion, he would have rendered the distinction between the religious and the secular useless from any presumed point of view of objective analysis or description, and usefully clarified it as a rhetorical and ideological distinction serving particular power interests’ (Fitzgerald 2006: 397). In this, Fitzgerald demonstrates that his argument privileges logic over utility, a reductionist logic which dismantles the religious studies canopy and renders the scholars, who previously found its multi-disciplinarity and mixed methodologies useful, both homeless and in need of relocation into other parts of the academy or other jobs. When such relocated scholars are no longer researching ‘religion’ and are, instead, employed as consultants to psychiatric practices determining what constitutes ‘a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice’ (APA 2013: 292), it is not clear to me that either psychiatry, or the academy or the power interests it serves (including its participants and their future cultural interests) will be the net beneficiaries of losing the canopy of religious studies. As this debate about ‘religion’ trundles on, it need not detract from an exposition of the D.R.E.A.D. model, which is first a discussion about experiences rather than religions. As the section on diversity suggests, the ‘religiosity’ of religious experience both transcends and challenges academic views of orthodoxy, particularly when framed in terms of area studies and the world religions paradigm. As June McDaniel, rightly pointed out, there can be an antithetical relationship between ecstasy and orthodoxy (see p. 151). In the context of religious experience, William James got it right when he argued that there might ‘be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act’ (James [1902] 1985: 28). If a person asserts the ‘religiosity’ of their experience, if a person articulates their experience in ‘religious’ terms, then it passes the ‘religious’ test in the D.R.E.A.D model which is based on a need for relevance and context rather than an appeal to any essential

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quality. And, for clarity, such assertions may not include the terms ‘religious’ or ‘religion’ as experiences of ‘religious’ content are not disqualified by the lack of recourse to the language of ‘religious’ or ‘religion’. In the existential approach he propounded in General Psychopathology (1913), Karl Jaspers privileged the form of symptoms of visions, voices, delusions, over their content. The difficulty is that the religious element is found within the content. In ‘Evoked Culture Ritualization and Religious rituals’, Liénard and Lawson propose that ‘Ritual drummers ritually drumming on ritual drums are still drummers drumming on drums’ (2008). But if, like Jaspers, all we see are the drummers, drumming on drums, the spirit medium is reduced to merely being a madman dancing. The takeaway is that the ‘religiosity’ of experience is a function of a combination of the specific content AND context. As the anthropologist I. M. Lewis argues in Ecstatic Religion: ‘To claim that the ecstatic raptures of St Teresa have no counterpart in the experience of possessed West African women who express their feelings in the same intimate language seems to me highly ethnocentric to say the least’ (Lewis [1971] 1989: 14). That possessed west African women may not use the terminology of religion does not affect the capacity of a second order analysis from doing so, as long as they are careful to problematize (as I am doing here) the culturally embedded nature of the language they use. William James’s distinction between religious experience as something which happens to individual people and religion which happens within communities, in institutions, and as an abstract generalization is echoed by Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s proposal to distinguish between ‘an historical “cumulative tradition” and the personal faith of men and women’ (Smith 1962: 194). However, as I discussed in Chapter 1, when James writes about the ‘great partition which divides the religious field. On one side of it lies institutional, on the other, personal religion’ (James [1902] 1985: 28), this is a second order intellectual construct which he introduces to circumscribe his topic and I suggest that the old conundrum of whether it is possible to have a private language is the appropriate analogy. This explains why I address religious and religion rather than spirituality in this book. Although this is a matter of opinion on my part, the ambition to separate spirituality from religion misunderstands the analogy of private languages which, unless determinedly designed to be secret, crave communication. Spiritual practices soon find articulation in the socialization of religious forms, ceremonies, artefacts, texts, authorities, genealogies, referencing – and always language – which provide the meaning-making infrastructure. I push back against the contemporary cultural distancing from the language of religious or religion which appears

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to me to represent a certain naïvety about the social aspect of religion which James and Smith were not denying when they contrasted and distinguished the personal and the social. For example, as recently as 2021, the ‘Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website proclaimed: ‘spirituality is a universal human quality that every person can experience independently of religion. It therefore brings together all those involved in mental health care, regardless of creed or culture’. This vapid formulation is designed to be inclusive but, from my religious studies point of view, it is an insidious approach which fundamentally dislocates spirituality and religion and, by essentializing spirituality, relegates the cultural context of specific religions to ephemeral supporting roles, thereby erasing fundamental differences in world views. Fortunately, in 2022, as I write, this website has now been updated to make more modest philosophical claims. This distinction between the social and the personal is further echoed by Russell McCutcheon who distinguishes between ‘religion’ as ‘one set of strategies for accomplishing the always completed yet never-ending recursive reproduction of social formation’, which he immediately contrasts with ‘a privileged discourse concerned with studying non-empirical numinous experiences’ (McCutcheon 1998: 71). Here, McCutcheon is perhaps less an echo of James and Smith than a foil, as his language twice shows his disdain for such experiences by making them both privileged and non-empirical.14 My general argument is that creating a dichotomy out of the distinction between the personal and social or the psychological and sociological may be useful as an artificial partition. But the risks it introduces are profound, not least because such a dichotomy (like all dichotomies) encourages essentialization and overlooks the holistic reality of the embodied person. The social nature of ‘religion’ and its capacity to provide meaning-making structures for personal experiences isn’t advanced against ‘spirituality’, the need to reform religion is not achieved by denying religion, in the same way that a critique of political order is perhaps best not framed as a programme for anarchy. The religiosity of context is a plastic matter for both first order experiencers and second order observers. It is messy. But what academics cannot do, without laying themselves open to accusations of imposing their own values, is to a priori de-legitimize or dismiss the religiosity of first order claims to such terms. In the secure units of western psychiatry, 25 per cent of the people articulate their experiences in ‘religious’ terms (Brewerton 1994; Koenig 2009; Siddle 2002). The interpretive consequence of this empirical datum broadens the idea of ‘religious’ and breaks it out of the conventional ideas and images such

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as McCutcheon’s privileged discourse of mysticism. Audrey Cantlie’s account of ‘Divine Madness – Tantric Ascetics on the Cremation Ground in Tarapith, Birbhum District, West Bengal’ (Gale 2014: 90) remains inspirational as a comparative thought experiment to further broaden the concept of the ‘religious’ in acute religious experiences. Paradoxically, by comparison with the sadhus in the cremation ground in Tarapith, the hotbeds of ‘religious’ activity in the secure units of western psychiatric hospitals remain understudied. If psychiatric hospitals are cloaked in the metaphors of illness – admissions, wards, doctors, consultants, pharmacology, visiting hours – then the assumption that the chaplaincy service is the responsible party for ‘religiosity’ seems sensible. The difficulty is that the offer of ‘religious and spiritual’ care may bear no relation to the rambunctious drama of the divine on display in the smoking room of the locked ward. Just as military chaplains tend not to preach pacifism or assist their men to desert, so hospital chaplains are unlikely to recognize the messiah in their midst and assist them to escape their confinement to fulfil their destiny. In The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (Rokeach 1964), Milton Rokeach provides a flavour of the grandiose in his account of three patients who each claimed to be Jesus while in the same hospital in Ypsilanti. But Rokeach’s contribution is mired by his attempts to manipulate these Jesuses out of their beliefs. If Rokeach had tried to re-educate and re-house the sadhus of Tarapith away from the cremation grounds and if he had tried to persuade them that the Goddess Tara was a delusion, his engaged scholarship would have reeked of colonial interference. It is precisely the dynamic of these uncomfortable discussions between documenting religious practices and the interference of the engaged scholar which keeps the study of religion vibrant. In the consideration of the religious in the D.R.E.A.D. framework, the qualification for identification as religious is a combination of self-report and the application of the reflective considerations which are central to the second order religious studies discourse with its increasingly post-colonial and post-theological contributions to the academy. In the D.R.E.A.D model, religiosity is a filter which (for example) distinguishes Kanye West from Britney Spears as potential subjects of acute religious experiences, not on the grounds of their colour, gender or music, but on the grounds of their religious claims. Religious is the first filter of the delimited data in the identification of acute religious experiences.

D.R.E.A.D. – Extreme Acute religious experiences are extreme, not normal, beyond the everyday. The introduction of the adjective ‘acute’, to qualify ‘religious experience’, creates a

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differentiation within the concept of religious experiences which is comparable to, and reflects, the psychiatric approach to the phenomenon of madness found at the margins of a normal distribution curve (Figure 10.1). A version of this chart was introduced in Chapter 1 as a way of critiquing William James’s mystical ladder and in Chapter 8, by way of distinguishing between excessive and deficit symptoms in psychiatry. Here, this expanded version provides a clear graphical metaphor to articulate the difference between religious experiences and acute religious experiences. Normal distribution curves are a basic analogue tool in all of the sciences. They describe population relative to ‘normal’ (which defines itself from the population data and the presuppositions which frame the selection criteria). The power of the normal distribution curve is its capacity to illustrate relationships in non-dichotomous terms by, instead, focusing on their relation to normal, measured in standard deviations. As one might anticipate, the border of the extreme, in the diagram set out earlier, is a fuzzy border. This is consistent with my argument about the need for judgement rather than the binary logic of geometric relationship between acute and obtuse angles. The key aspect which the chart does not illustrate is the episodic nature of experiences of the extreme. The mystical experience, the shamanic flight, the possession experience, all of these are transient. The psychotic15 and the dissociative experience are similarly ‘events’. While the left-hand side of the chart tends to zero ‘religiosity’, at the right-hand side are extreme experiences. There is no need to presuppose an equivalence between the heterogeneous terms for the experiences listed; indeed, to do so would be to offend the category of

Normal

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Disruption The More Possession Numinous Shamanic states Mystical states Psychedelic experience Peak Experiences Hyperreligious Trance Samādhi Fana Satori Ecstasy

Acute

Figure 10.1  Acute religious experiences on a normal distribution curve.

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Diversity in the D.R.E.A.D. model. These diverse experiences are presented on the same diagram only to illustrate that such experiences share the same extreme status. This chart suggests that the extremes of religiosity are not a function of morality, doctrine, tradition, practice or religion, but of the quality of experience. While the practical difficulties of defining ‘religiosity’ or measuring intensity are not disputed (and are made obvious by Peter Hill and Ralph Hood Jr in their compendious Measuring Religiosity (1999)), intensity is independent of a linear continuum between binary opposites such as good and evil. In any such dichotomous model, the moral judgement of the researcher/analyst/ observer, and their cultural presuppositions predominate – for instance, the devil is at one end and god at the other. By contrast, satanic or divine possession might reasonably both be included as instances of the extreme and represented at the right-hand side of this chart. Similarly, there is no question of truth or authenticity being considered in this representation of intensity at the extreme. The chart does not provide any construction of the qualitative difference between the shaman’s spirit flight and the sufi’s fanā, it simply locates them both as offering individual and culturally recognized instances of extreme experiences. I introduce this distribution curve as a metaphor in order to illustrate the idea that all extremes of ‘religiosity’ can consistently be located at the right-hand side of such a curve, distinguished as acute religious experiences on the basis of their extremity. Although this chart provides an illustration of a distinction between ‘regular’ religious experience and acute religious experience, it does not provide any explanation as to how or why this fuzzy line is crossed as this remains a matter of contextual judgement. As noted in Chapter 8, contemporary psychiatry is flirting with the idea of continuums and spectrums, but there is a necessary clarification where casual observers read the idea of continua as suggestive of the idea that we are all a bit mad. This is a misreading of the situation. Jim van Os’s Psychotic Susceptibility Syndrome (van Os 2016) extends only to 15 per cent of the population,16 of which only a fifth (i.e. 3 per cent of the population of humans) will be categorized as having a lifetime prevalence of a psychotic disorder (van Os 2009: 184).17 It is here that psychiatry can make a contribution which may turn out to be significant within the religious studies canopy by recognizing the genetic predisposition as a limiting factor on the numbers of people who can experience the extreme. This is a conclusion which is both challenging and difficult not least because of complicated cultural reasons to do with the history of eugenics and degeneration theory, but the evidence of genetic difference, set out in Chapter 9, provides a

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novel contribution to religious studies and the corresponding need is to have a better conversation about the implications of neurodiversity. If the human is not homogenous, there are other options than oppressing the divergent. In this book, I take the idea that biological diversity has social consequences and I look at the history of the extreme and find that its presence is no indicator of outcome: what matters is the socialized interpretation which itself may recognize divergence. In the D.R.E.A.D. model, extremity is a prerequisite of an acute religious experience. The DSM-5 diagnostic criteria of disruption of identity (Chapter 8) allow that experiences precede understanding and that understanding may be pathological, but it may also be cultural or religious. I propose the adoption of this quality of psychiatric interest as a proxy for distinguishing the acute/ extreme from the general. Consistent with the approach set out earlier, if the experience is not sufficiently extreme to be of interest to a psychiatrist, then it is not an acute religious experience. This is not to pathologize acute religious experiences, because the automatic link with a pathological interpretation has now been broken by the DSM-5 text. Instead, this is bringing psychiatric expertise into the religious studies canopy. Psychiatric interest becomes a proxy for the recognition of the extreme. It doesn’t matter how in tune with the universe a person feels when watching a sunset, this is not a psychiatric concern. This recourse to psychiatric expertise is, of course, a notional concept rather than a practical necessity for the actual presence of a psychiatrist to diagnose extremity, in exactly the same way the DSM-5 doesn’t stipulate the attendance of a suitably qualified religious scholar to determine what is or is not ‘a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice’ (APA 2013: 292). By bringing the idea of psychiatric expertise in the phenomenality of the extreme into the religious studies canopy, the psychiatric contribution is in their expertise in the recognition of experiences of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme states of consciousness, not their capacity to pathologize these by reference to their classificatory systems. The symptomatology of psychosis and the disruption of self in dissociative identity disorder are put at the disposal of the wider religious studies interest in visions, voices and possessions, but in a way where the psychiatric presumption of pathology no longer runs without challenge. This is a reversal of the traditional dominating role of psychiatry, but it is thinkable because pathologizing all extreme experience is no longer tenable. The issue of extremity is the second filter in the identification of acute religious experiences which excludes the generality of religious experiences which have no psychiatric value because they are insufficiently extreme.

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D.R.E.A.D. – Ambivalent The term ‘Ambivalence’ was promulgated, along with Autism and Schizophrenia, by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in his 1911 publication Dementia Praecox: or, The Group of Schizophrenias. Although the term is sometimes associated with being in two minds about something, Bleuler as a clinical psychiatrist, sought to convey something of the dynamic way ideas and feelings operated on the basis of his observation and conversations with his psychiatric patients in the Burghölzli hospital. For Bleuler, the idea was of alternating feelings and perspectives which conjured contrasting emotions and ideas. ‘Hate and love are infinitely closer to each other than indifference’ (Bleuler [1911] 1950: 375). There is no need to limit ambivalence to a psychiatric context. Indeed, Bleuler goes on to point out that even in ‘normals’ (sic) (Bleuler [1911] 1950: 375), ‘precisely what one does not want to think is just what crops up in our thought’ (Bleuler [1911] 1950: 375). Bleuler’s willingness to extend ambivalence beyond his patients in Zurich to the world of the normals validates it as a not necessarily psychiatric concept which can be further explored in other contexts, such as the concerns of religious studies. I include ambivalence in the process for identifying acute religious experiences specifically to undermine certainty, incorporate doubt and reinforce the idea that interpretation is a dynamic process which is non-linear and operates on both an individual and a group situation within both a general and a particular social context. The primary role of ambivalence in this framework is to deny closure and preserve an ongoing and dynamic frustration. Ambivalence represents not just uncertainty but adds a self-defeating indeterminacy. ‘What is the nature or meaning of this (any) acute religious experience?’ is a question which is not only difficult to answer, but in the very act of answering invokes its own alternative – not just that there was no meaning, but that the meaning might be alternate. Ambivalence is intrinsic to the very idea of the ineffable (qua James) or the unspeakable, in the very process of verbal crystallization the inadequacy of language is demonstrated and the ambivalence of meaning-making is made visible. Similarly, the noetic quality James identifies may invoke an ambivalent response in which subsequent reflection may undermine the certainty of what was felt as profound insight, which may or may not be recoverable. In cultures where acute religious experiences are part of a traditional way of life, for example, in shamanic, spirit possession practices, sufis and with some sadhus, expectations are modulated by active training which is framed within cultural anticipations and expectations that can be didactically reinforced as Eliade demonstrates (Chapter 4). In such instances, ambivalence may be preempted; when the lights go up, the stage has already been set and although the

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play may be different, the drama is culturally anticipated and understood. By contrast, in cultures which do not institutionally understand or include acute religious experiences, such as, for the most part, the Abrahamic religions, ambivalence haunts manifestations of the manifold language of individual revel​ ation​/piet​y/hol​iness​/bles​sing/​favou​rs. What is at stake is the question of how to interpret an overwhelming experience. Where there are no institutionalized cultural guide rails, this is unsurprisingly likely to be problematic. An assumption that an acute religious experience comes from god may be immediately followed by the suspicion that it is not only not from god but that it is from the devil. The literature of acute religious experiences in the Abrahamic religions and Oesterreich’s Possession (Chapter 3) can be read as a rich source of the literature of ambivalence. The intriguing possibility is that where there are no guide rails at all, the capacity to interpret disruption in religious terms is simply unavailable and the default interpretation of mental disorder is automatically operated (see later in Determination) – the language of religion provides the means of thinking in religious terms. The interpretation of disruption or the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme is (as we have seen) extrinsic to the experience as during the experience everything is up in the air.18 The process of interpretation does not exclude the individual from their own novel contributions to the interpretation. The role of ambivalence is less likely to be relevant to a person’s family, friends, co-workers and the social and psychiatric services who may presume that a return to how things were is the desirable option. The potential for conflict is obvious as the individual enduring the experience is caught in an ambivalent double bind. The only way out is to comply (seek help) or to resist. To choose the latter may enter into the territory which the psychiatric texts discuss in terms of delusional behaviour by continuing to pursue new ideas rather than returning to the old normal. In the DSM-5, delusions ‘are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence’ (APA 2013: 87). The point of focus here might be slightly different to the APA who are intent on setting out a whole range of delusional possibilities. My interest is in the phrase ‘not amenable’ (APA 2013). If it is possible to argue that the route out of ambivalence is the adoption of fixed beliefs, then (what psychiatrists call) delusions may be understood as a strategy of resistance to remain ‘true’ to the visions, voices or possessions of the experiential event, in spite of the conflictual pressure of social networks. If delusions are reframed as a counterstrategy or an antidote to ambivalence, they can be understood as a way of neutralizing the frustration of ambivalence in pursuit of more stable interpretations – irrespective of veracity. This matches

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Sylvia Mohr et al.’s argument in their paper ‘Delusions and Hallucinations with “Religious” Content in Patients with Psychosis’. There Mohr et al. suggest: By comparing delusions among inpatients with schizophrenia and the religious belief (God exists) of highly religious Christians acting as a control group, it appeared that the religious beliefs and delusions did not differ on levels of conviction, falsity, affect nor influence on behaviour . . . assessing the contents of beliefs is of little use to differentiate religious beliefs from delusions. (Mohr 2010: 159)

Beyond the sensationalist implications of the corollary, which makes the schizophrenics the control for the Christians, this supports the idea that the abolition of ambivalence has utility in interpretation and the meaning-making of experience.

D.R.E.A.D. – Determination The final step in the D.R.E.A.D. framework is the process that leads from ambivalence to determination. As Grace Jantzen summarizes, ‘Catholics have visions of the Virgin Mary while Hindus have visions of Shiva dancing, but not the other way around’ (Jantzen 2005: 102). The epistemological constraints of what it is possible to think are culturally embedded. But in a multicultural world where religious ideas/images/concepts are accessible beyond the cultures within which they originated, this may be too simplistic. It is possible to think of experiences (for which disruption and the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme represent placeholders) as providing opportunities for change. In the context of religion, this may include conversion. While Theresa of Avila’s ecstatic accounts are authenticated and authorized by the counsel of her confessor and the acceptance of her tradition, the conversion of Paul of Tarsus has all of the features of the D.R.E.A.D framework, but results in a radical epistemological change. As Steven Katz more specifically argues in the context of mysticism: one not only has to concentrate attention on the rarefied, and rare, moments of ecstasy, adhesion, supernal marriage, mindlessness, satori, nirvana, and unity, but one also has to pay close attention to the sorts of exegetical techniques. . . . For the actual interpretation of sacred texts in these ways comprises a substantial part of what mystics actually do and plays a significant role in achieving those ultimate states of experience that mystics seek. (Katz 2000: 57)

As shown in Part I, there is no need to limit such experiences to the trope of mysticism – just as there is no need to make all madness schizophrenia (Chapter 8). But there is every reason to understand sacred texts as just one

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important input into the socialized determination of experience. As the DSM research article on dissociative identity disorder so inelegantly but so simply states: ‘The bottom line here is that, in keeping with the cultural pathoplasticity of psychiatric disorders, the specific phenomenology of dissociative identity disorder and pathological possession trance may be shaped by local cultural attributions’ (Spiegel 2011: 843). The determination of an acute religious experience is not only a question of context, it is also a question of power and this is something western psychiatry has long understood. In the absence of acceptable religious interpretations, the 25 per cent of people who articulate their experiences in religious terms remain detained in the locked wards of western psychiatry until they have agreed with the cultural script. This may no longer need to be a modernist psychiatric script, thanks to the clarity of the wording in the DSM-5 (Chapter 8), but it does have to be a ‘normal part of a broadly acceptable’ script. What constitutes ‘accepted’ may not be in the hands of the psychiatrists but in the hands of the community, but never the individual subject. Deviancy remains outwith the scope of broadly acceptable determinations and can be pursued only in the secret of a disguise and, as alluded to in Chapter 9, acting the script results in becoming the part because plasticity is . . . plastic. This analysis clearly reflects Oesterreich’s (Chapter 3) argument about the process of possession in which both resistance and acceptance play a part. It is the process of determination which resolves the ambivalence of interpretation, however long it takes and whatever the outcome. Determination is not the ‘substantive (but indeterminate) terminus for the relentless deferral of meaning’ (Sharf 2000: 286), it is the determinate terminus which subdues the relentlessness of the deferral of meaning by providing it with a provisional terminus. This reversal remains provisional because there is no finality prior to death (Part III) but the meaning-making of acute religious experiences, which press beyond the intermediate indeterminacy of ambivalence, either loses its meaning (which is a form of determination) or loses the sense of relentless deferral by arriving at a determination, however provisional.

Acute religious experiences – summary I propose the D.R.E.A.D model as a way of providing theoretical and systematic depth to the identification and further exploration of the phenomena of acute religious experiences. Such experience always happens at a first order level in an embodied person within their social context. The second order academic

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abstraction involved in the consideration of acute religious experiences can never be isolated from this context. The utility of the idea of acute religious experiences is found in the recognition that such excessive moments are scattered throughout the library and across disciplines. The whole of Part I sketched a fractured discourse in which theorists from a variety of disciplines sought to speak about unspeakable experiences which I indicated by the intentionally clumsy placeholder language of the ‘extraordinary/anomalous/extreme’, and from Chapter 8, the psychiatric placeholder of ‘disruption’. The idea of acute religious experiences offers both a means of recognizing similarity AND maintaining difference by addressing similarity as biological (taking the evidence of genetic variation seriously (Chapter 9)) and difference as psychosocial. The language of acute religious experiences is presented as a second order form of words which could have been useful to James, Otto, Oesterreich, Eliade, Stace, Pahnke and Maslow, even as they each advanced grounds to justify their own propositions. The risk of continuing with, respectively, the pathological programme, numinous, possession, shamanism, mysticism, psychedelic experience and peak experiences is that the fractured nature of the discourse on non-pathological states of consciousness obscures the common subject matter of . . . non-pathological states of consciousness. Thus the continuous relevance of this subject may be obscured by recourse to the multiplicity of twentiethcentury linguistic formulations. For example, debating the relative merits of the mystical and the numinous (either as analytical categories or experiences) is now an archaic debate which is grounded in the language of twentieth-century theorists which risks reification (in the very presence of the definite article). The more insidious risk is the importation of twentieth-century cultural baggage into twenty-first-century analysis, for example, the colonial assumptions which were uncritically incorporated into many of these projects. These extend beyond Darwinian stage theory of the ‘primitive’ to the very categories of (for example) shaman and mystic which rely on accounts of the show of culturally plastic phenomenality, which may obscure common states of consciousness. If ‘religious experience’ is considered to have theoretical utility in the twenty-first century, after embracing the critiques previously discussed, then incorporating a distinction between the general and the acute is a modest proposal which allows the data to be reorganized to distinguish among states of consciousness, rather than between approaches which privilege the biological, the psychological and the social – or any other similar formulations – as analytical standpoints. In a holistic approach to the data of religious experience, the risk is that these standpoints, grounded in western academic disciplinary traditions,

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do too little to trouble their own propensity to essentialize. To say that the psychology or the anthropology or the sociology of religion has to work against the essentializing tendency of their concepts is nevertheless a humdrum critique compared to the recognition that the potential contribution of psychiatry has been largely ignored as a result of epistemological politics in which the idea of explanatory pluralism is still an emerging approach. In this work I seek to get beyond the disciplinary history and politics of the western academy without erasing it. This is why I started this story with William James in 1902 precisely as a recognition that any defence of the concept of religious experience had to tell something of both its archaeology and genealogy. That Part I highlighted how the language changed in the writings of subsequent twentieth-century theorists (and some of the same theorists subsequently – for example, Otto (Chapter 2)) – serves to underscore the unsettled nature of the discourse. From a twentyfirst-century perspective the need is to provide a holistic approach which, in the context of religious studies, can replace the clumsy placeholder terms I’ve had recourse to with a phrasing that is intuitively fit for purpose and ready for use, one which accommodates commonalities, defends difference and repels reification by eschewing neologisms in favour of a novel but common-sense construction of ordinary language. The D.R.E.A.D model does more than simply provide criteria to assist in the identification of acute religious experiences in the history of religions. The process of working through the stages – Diversity, Religious, Extreme, Ambivalent, Determination – mitigates against both reductionism and reification. Troubling the observer’s presuppositions by delimiting the data, then passing it through the filters of ‘religious’ and ‘extreme’, the process is not ended but reverts to the temporality of first order experiences where ambivalent interpretation may be fluid and even reverse prior to finding some shape – which remains provisional – in its determination. As a result of this process, it is not possible to point to an acute religious experience as a thing, but only to the event of an experience which can be interpreted and named as such. Acute religious experiences are events, overwhelming encounters of embodied consciousness. That this construction necessarily places such experiences in the domain of madness has been one of the most perplexing challenges, but it is fundamental to this project. The combination of the denial of madness by humanities theorists (apart from James) and the pathologization of madness in psychiatry have acted as confounding factors. It is the emergence of mad studies which has provided the beginnings of a way to talk about madness without the shame imputed in western culture. It is only now becoming possible to show

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that if madness was written out of the human record, religions as we know them would be very different stories. Paradoxically, paying attention to acute religious experiences also opens up novel ways to re-read ancient stories, and the next chapter engages in a re-reading of the Gospel of Mark, by way of a case study, which demonstrates the utility of acute religious experiences in practice.

Part III

Jesus as a case study

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Re-reading the Gospel of Mark

In turning to the case study of Jesus, this re-reading of the Gospel of Mark1 identifies the two distinct acute religious experiences in Jesus’s life and privileges these as being disproportionately significant. These occurred at the event of his baptism and at the event known as the transfiguration. After the first, Jesus commenced his engagement with people in the villages2 of Galilee and surrounds. After the second, his focus decisively shifted towards the destination of Jerusalem at the time of a major festival. These two acute religious experiences can be understood as pivot points in the life of Jesus and they can be identified through the application of the D.R.E.A.D model set out in Chapter 10. That most biblical scholars read the ‘historical’ evidence presented by Mark in a linear manner without recognizing the relationship between these two existential moments is notable. Re-reading Mark with a focus on the role of acute religious experiences can significantly contribute to a dynamic understanding of intentionality, continuity/discontinuity and narrative meaning, and it escapes a reading of history in which one thing happens after another as a linear narrative. As will be shown, a reading of Jesus’s life based on the pivot points of the baptism and transfiguration can accommodate all of the existing data provided in the Marcan text while producing a radically different interpretation. It should be noted that I recognize the challenges this reading faces, not only methodologically, but as a result of the weight of the status quo interpretations which may well resist my argument in advance without giving it consideration. My approach to biblical studies is similar to my approach to psychiatry, in that I have immersed myself in the literature and I am responding to what I see rather than pursuing a preconceived agenda. Just as I am not anti-psychiatry, I am not anti-biblical studies or anti-bible in a crude or unsophisticated ideological sense. It is my position that all of the texts in this work are addressed as texts produced by humans within their particular contexts. Similarly, it should be obvious, from the whole argument of this book, that I am not pathologizing Jesus, but

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I recognize that previous generations of scholars have sought to do exactly that and have left a legacy of framing a debate as one ‘about’ Jesus’s sanity for ideological ends, rather than as a commitment to better understanding the life of Jesus. I address this historical legacy in order to provide clarity on the ideological subtexts which make this a more difficult reading than it might otherwise be. The start of the twentieth century saw an international series of concerted attacks on Jesus’s sanity by western psychiatrists. These included contributions from Germany, George de Loosten (1905), from Denmark, Emil Rasmussen (1905), from America, William Hirsch (1912) and Charles Binet-Sanglé from France (1908–15).3 These assaults on Jesus’s sanity were coherent, considered and extensive. Binet-Sanglé’s contribution, La Folie de Jésus (The Madness of Jesus), extended to 1,861 pages over four volumes. Albert Schweitzer’s intervention in defence of Jesus’s sanity, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus4 (Schweitzer [1913] 1975) was a slim (40 small pages) defence of an apocalyptic Jesus against the muscleflexing incursions of an emerging post-religious psychiatric discipline. The attack on Jesus has to be read within the wider conflictual relationship between psychiatry and religion, the effects of which spilled into the academic study of religion as it emerged as a predominantly secular approach. Ever since the psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) theorized that Socrates’ daemons ‘were a hallucination which resulted in occasional catalepsy’ (Leudar 2000: 4), the temptation to retrospectively diagnose the religious ‘greats’ in history has seduced psychiatrists. In Voices Of Reason, Voices Of Insanity (2000), Leudar and Thomas found, a full lifetime after Pinel, that the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley (1835–1918) ‘believed that supernatural experiences could be explained in terms of disorders of the mind. He claimed that the religious experiences of great spiritual leaders, such as Mohammed, St Paul, Ann Lee (founder of the Shakers), Emanuel Swedenborg, Ignatius Loyola, George Fox and John Wesley, could be explained in terms of epilepsy’ (Leudar 2000: 108). This practice of retrospectively diagnosing ‘religious’ figures persisted, with the diagnoses moving (in line with the developing nomenclature of psychiatry) from epilepsy to psychosis, to include schizophrenia. In ‘The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience’ (1997), Saver and Rabin set out a long table of religious figures matched to their psychiatric diagnoses. A further example of this kind of retrospective diagnosis can be found in ‘The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered’ (Murray et al. 2012) published in the perfectly respectable The Journal of NeuroPsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. In this, psychiatrists from McLean Hospital (the psychiatric hospital associated with Harvard) (Chapter 1) argue for sensitivity towards the accomplishment of religious figures, but only after they retrospectively

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diagnosed Abraham, Moses, Jesus and St. Paul with experiences that resemble those now defined as psychotic symptoms, suggesting that their experiences may have been manifestations of primary or mood disorder associated with psychotic disorders (Murray 2012: 410). Leudar and Thomas build a nuanced argument which identifies disciplinary politics at the heart of these retrospective diagnoses. They draw on Tony James’s Dream, Creativity and Madness in 19th Century France (1995), which highlights Louis Francisque Lélut’s repetition of Pinel’s charges about Socrates’ daemons in his ‘scandalous’ book, Démon de Socrate published in 1836. As Leudar and Thomas put it, ‘Declaring Socrates insane was certainly a shrewd move which caught wide attention at the time, but we hope the reader already agrees that it was rather dogmatic and profession-centred as a diagnosis’ (Leudar 2000: 14). Tony James is more explicit about the disciplinary implications, arguing that Lélut was making claims for medicine of ‘areas of experience which had traditionally fallen under the authority of the Church’ (James 1995: 86). The critical point is that western psychiatry, as co-occurring with modernity, engaged in a diminution of historical figures and their accounts of experiences intentionally to disrupt religious readings in order to advance its secular arguments and disciplinary power. Viewed from the twenty-first century, the practice of retrospective diagnosis is discredited,5 but this leaves legitimate questions about how to discuss the lived experiences of those humans who have traditionally been recognized as significant in the history of religions and who have displayed abnormal phenomenality. If retrospective diagnosis is ethically flawed, then the ‘religious’ greatness of such figures remains, but what is missing is a way of discussing experience that doesn’t fall into the trap of pathologizing experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. The idea of acute religious experiences makes an obvious contribution to this process by distinguishing such abnormal phenomenality from normal religious experiences (Chapter 10) while asserting the scope for non or not necessarily pathological determinations. There remains a further issue: if religious greatness remains possible in the past it remains possible today, subject to appropriate recognition. While such recognition is unlikely in a modernist world (notwithstanding the argument in Chapter 9), it remains tenable in non-modernist contexts, which comprise most of the world.6 By taking a broad view of the epistemological politics of modernity within the academy, the difficult relationship between psychiatry and religious studies is set within a realistic and meaningful context as a legacy of a protracted ideological struggle. My own research shows that in the late nineteenth century and early

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twentieth century liberal theologians welcomed the insights of the new sciences of psychology and psychiatry to the study of the historical Jesus, publishing a string of books with titles such as Rational Godliness: After the Mind (Williams 1855) and Some Aspects of the Life of Jesus from the Psychological and Psychoanalytic Point of View (Berguer 1923). By the time Sigmund Freud published The Future of an Illusion (Freud [1927] [1928] 1962), this multi-disciplinary, or even interdisciplinary, approach stalled. Biblical scholars may argue that they found better ways of reading the historical Jesus, but it is plausible to propose they simply retreated from the fray and left the modernist disciplines of psychology and psychiatry to their secular domination. As Thomas Kazen put it defensively: ‘Many biblical scholars have strong reservations against anything that looks like psychologizing exegesis. . . . Psychologizing accounts of Jesus were seen as unnecessary attempts to solve problems that proper historical-critical methods could take care of ’ (Kazen 2013: 29). Notwithstanding Kazen’s position, this lacuna ended with Jesus at Thirty (Miller 1997), which has been followed by a spate of psychological studies at the turn of the century (Dominian 1998; Capps 2008, 2010; van Aarde 2001; Voorwinde 2005; Watts 2007; Macduff 2009; Noll 2011; van Os 2011; Oswald 2015). The resurgence of a psychological literature exploring the historical Jesus should be distinguished from what I am doing in my mad studies re-reading of the Gospel of Mark within the context of psychiatry. Justin Meggitt wholly misrepresents Schweitzer’s text in his essay ‘Psychology and the Historical Jesus’ by arguing that Schweitzer provided some validation of psychological approaches to the historical Jesus (Watts 2007: 17). Schweitzer was perfectly clear that his text The Psychiatric Study of Jesus (the clue is in the title) cast his interlocutors, beyond David Friedrich Strauss, as the psychiatrists: de Loosten, Rasmussen, Hirsch and Binet-Sanglé. The assumption Meggitt makes is that the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry can be elided. This is a matter of concern as it erases the disciplinary boundaries between psychology and psychiatry. The ‘psychological scrutiny’ of Jesus (Watts 2007: 19) in which Meggitt privileges ‘psychological analysis – particularly of a developmental kind’ (Watts 2007: 21) is profoundly different from the psychiatric focus on the existential behavioural symptoms of a person’s ‘present state’.7 The difference in approaches has a material impact on the requisite quality of evidence. A psychological analysis of Jesus requires reliable background information in order to construct a therapeutic understanding, whereas, as demonstrated throughout the DSM-5, a psychiatric consideration does not. Whether the Gospels provide sufficient knowledge to ‘bear the weight of psychological scrutiny’ (Meggitt 2007: 19) is a moot point (for

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the psychologists to decide). Evidence in a psychiatric consideration is not based on the narratives of the subject, it is to be found in assessments of what subjects say and do and the reports of others in their social network. The assessment of distress and the predictive assessment of the consequentiality of their actions (risk to self and others) is privileged over the long-form explanatory approach of psychology. This distinction in method matters because it distinguishes my mad studies reading from current psychological approaches; the nature and the quality of the evidence is commensurately different. In this chapter I do not rely on psychological developmental considerations. I do not rely on accounts of Jesus’s early years, on discerning what words/phrases Jesus actually said,8 whether he taught in parables, whether his miracles were miraculous, whether his healings healed, whether he was the son of man or the son of god; let alone the theological considerations of whether he redeemed humanity through a one-time sacrifice followed by his resurrection and ascension into heaven, or whether he will come again. Instead, I rely on a reading of Mark’s accounts of the oral tradition of the incidents, events and experiences which jump off the page when subjected to a mad studies reading which recognizes the phenomenality of acute religious experiences. Where I agree with Meggitt is in his acknowledgement of the challenges which the biblical evidence presents. However, these are challenges which face all scholars of the historical Jesus and must be dealt with contextually. The problematic nature of the material cannot be weaponized to single out and exclude any particular approach, such as this one, on an a priori basis. The defence of Jesus’s sanity which Schweitzer presents is nuanced and contextual, but it starts on the basis that there was a man called Jesus who had real experiences which were remembered and then written and that these records left sufficient traces to allow Schweitzer to mount a defence of Jesus’s sanity. Schweitzer’s premises remain accessible to my argument today.

The baptism At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’ At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him. (Mk 1.9-13)

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Prior to any detailed consideration or interpretation of the phenomenality described in this account, Mark identifies that it is Jesus who is engaged in this experience – he saw, he heard and he was sent out into the wilderness by the spirit. This point clarifies the status of the experience and pre-empts any suggestion that the description places the phenomena as external to, and therefore not involving, Jesus. Most biblical scholars place Mark’s account around seventy years after Jesus’s death. Mark relies on an oral tradition that figures the vision and voice with an externality. While this doesn’t preclude the scope for thirdparty observation, the context precludes the idea that the vision and the voice were only heard by others and that nothing happened to Jesus. Jesus’s reaction provides assurance that Jesus was party to whatever happened during his baptism. The event belongs to Jesus; it happened to him; it was not something Jesus did to others. This distinction differentiates the baptism from accounts of subsequent actions where Jesus does things to others (work miracles, heal, cast out demons, teaches), up until the second ‘event’ of the transfiguration. At a moment in time, a man endured the experience of a phenomenal event, triggered by a ritual moment.9 The voice is notably positive, affirmative, not negative or persecutory. The ritual moment is immediately followed by an extended time alone in the wilderness of Southern Judea, far from home. In the wilderness experience Mark indicates that there is a dialogue10 which, by definition, could have no witnesses. Following Oesterreich’s argument about the acceptance or rejection of possession, this may be considered as a test of will, in which Jesus succeeds in not succumbing to the hubris of power,11 but there is no need to let speculation about the detail of what happened in the wilderness distract from the unitary nature of the single event, comprising the ritual moment and the immediate response. In spite of Mark deploying the phrase ‘at once’ to link the moment of baptism and the subsequent wilderness experience, the baptism/wilderness, biblical commentaries routinely fail to grasp these two moments as the same event. This may reflect the way the continuity of the biblical text is broken down by the insertion of chapters and verses as artificial literary distinctions. Taking the evidence of Mk 3.9-13 as a whole, it would require a perverse reading to propose that Jesus did not experience an event which would have been of interest to a twenty-first-century psychiatrist. Jesus’s behaviour is not normal. The presence of visions and voices are matters of concern in all the diagnostic categories set out in the ‘Schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder’ chapter in the DSM-5. Being forty days (even figuratively, because who was counting?) in the wilderness is not normal. Jesus’s subsequent behaviour on his return to Galilee is not normal. His family report

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that he is ‘out of his mind’ (Mk 3.21) is a testimonial any competent psychiatrist would have to take seriously as an indication of distress (irrespective of any anachronistic consideration of diagnostic categories). The abnormality of Jesus’s behaviour is not based on a comparison with behaviour today, it is abnormal in reference to Jesus’s behaviour within his cultural context. While Jesus’s behaviour is abnormal, the appropriateness of attaching the adjective ‘pathological’ is quite a different matter. In ‘The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered’ (Murray 2012), Murray et al. propose that Jesus (over his lifetime) experienced auditory hallucinations, visual hallucination, hyperreligiosity, grandiosity, delusions and paranoia. They suggest, ‘Jesus’ experiences can be potentially conceptualized within the framework of PS or psychosis NOS. Other reasonable possibilities might include bipolar and schizoaffective disorders’ (Murray 2012: 415). This psychiatric view requires decoding as it was published just prior to the launch of the DSM-5 in 2013. The ‘PS’ they suggest is paranoid schizophrenia. The DSM-5 abolished the subtypes.12 The DSM-5 also abolished the catch-all category of DSM IV TR ‘psychosis NOS’ (psychosis not otherwise specified). This was replaced by two categories: ‘Other specified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders’ (APA 2013: 122) and ‘Unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders’ (APA 2013). These two categories differ from the DSM IV TR definition of psychosis NOS by introducing the criteria of ‘distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning’. As it is not clear that Jesus, at the start of his ‘ministry’,13 could reasonably be described as distressed or impaired, this catch-all diagnostic category is removed from Murray et al. The problem here is the same problem of cross-cultural and retrospective diagnosis. It doesn’t work. It is simply the extension of a classificatory approach which originated in the colonial era where the presumption of the supremacy of reason was manifested by the capacity to name phenomena in a joined-up nosological system.

The transfiguration The second event I identify as an acute religious experience is the transfiguration. Mark’s account is as follows: After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach

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them. And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters –one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ (He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.) Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: ‘This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!’ Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. (Mk 9.2-8)

The transfiguration names a specific event which occurred in the synoptic gospels (not in John)14 at a specific time. An account is also given in the second letter of Peter.15 The transfiguration involved four named people on an unnamed mountain top. The details given in the text provide a ready source for commentary: the location of the mountain, the light, the whiteness, Moses and Elijah, the shelters, the cloud, the disciples’ fear and confusion, the voice. But the transfiguration is unambiguously identifiable as an extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme experience, or a moment of disruption, which is not immediately susceptible to the historical-critical method commonly found in biblical studies. Hal Childs aims his critical comment at the biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, but it could be applied more widely: because the whole discussion remains primarily at the level of sociology and social forces, and so maintains a level of abstraction and thus idealization, the complex, ambiguous and difficult problems that accompany individual unmediated experience of the divine are completely overlooked. (Childs 2000: 211)

The result is that religious studies and biblical studies scholars who seek to disentangle the historical Jesus from the theologically privileged accounts of the gospels still find themselves without the conceptual means or practical language to address the account as the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme experiences of men experiencing an event on top of a mountain. The gospels provide evidence that the relationship between these men is close. Peter is Jesus’s ‘rock’, James his brother, and John his ‘beloved’. For months these disciples, along with the others, have left their ‘normal’ lives and been led by Jesus in haphazard and improvised travels16 from their base in Capernaum, engaging with the indigenous inhabitants they encountered at a responsive point of need, healing, teaching, spreading the good news of the ‘Kingdom of God’.17 As at the baptism, at the transfiguration, there is a vision and a voice. Unlike the baptism account where the point of view of others, including John the Baptist’s, is absent from the universal narrator, in the transfiguration Peter’s

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perspective is included in Mark’s account of the oral tradition. This raises the possibility of distinguishing the disciples’ perspective from Jesus’s perspective. There is nothing in the text which provides any assurance that what Jesus saw, heard and understood and what the disciples (individually or as a group) saw, heard or understood was the same. This point serves to deconstruct reliance on the details of the account and to establish that these do not determine the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme nature of this experience for all of the parties present, nor provide any account of content which was specific to Jesus. The idea that there might be multiple points of view within the same experience is a standard understanding of any traumatic incident (from accounts of a car crash to a terrorist attack). In the context of people participating in extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme experiences, feeling overwhelms external ‘reality’ and both overwhelm the adequacy of language to describe the event – this is reflected in the text. On the basis that both form and content are important, this is not to downplay the significance of the content of (for example) the presence of Moses and Elijah, but to ensure that the initial focus is on the quality of the experience. In recent psychiatric history there is an extensive literature of what DSM IV TR classified as ‘Shared Psychotic Disorder’ (APA 2000: 333). The most common form is folie à deux in which two people share the same psychotic moment. In this context there is usually a close emotional relationship and a stronger and a weaker party,18 with the stronger having an established psychotic disorder. The DSM IV TR records that ‘Schizophrenia is probably the most common diagnosis of the primary case, although other diagnoses may include Delusional Disorder or Mood Disorder with Psychotic Features’19 (APA 2000: 334). Although rarer, folie à trois, folie à quatre (and more)20 are documented (Peritogiannis 2009). With the introduction of DSM-5, shared psychotic disorder has been abolished as it is now the psychosis rather than the number of people which is the basis of the diagnosis.21 The DSM IV TR text proposes: ‘Usually the primary case in Shared Psychotic Disorder is dominant in the relationship and gradually imposes the delusional system on the more passive and initially healthy second person. Individuals who come to share delusional beliefs are often related by blood or marriage and have lived together for a long time, sometimes in relative social isolation’ (APA 2000: 333).22 The DSM IV TR usefully clarifies that ‘Aside from the delusional beliefs, behavior is usually not otherwise odd or unusual in Shared Psychotic Disorder’ (APA 2000) indicating that care is required to ensure that gross bias23 does not arise by extrapolating presuppositions about the behaviour of those with psychiatric disorders across what may be a relatively subtle set of relationships. In Almada, Constante, Casquinha and Heitor’s 2015 paper ‘Folie à Quatre’ the authors found

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‘grandiose delusional beliefs regarding angels and self-reference elicited in a clinical interview’ (Almada 2015: 1886). In other, less technical, terms, a family group of people had visions of angels, and these angels spoke to the mother with revelations which were specific to them. The researchers’ belief that this was an account which they could only explain in modernist psychiatric concepts of mental disorder made no difference to those who remained equally determined that they had encountered angels. Both parties are epistemologically partisan and competent. The psychiatric reinterpretation involves a dogmatic assertion of one explanatory framework at the expense of another. That such an approach empties the world of the supernatural is not the key point. The key point is that it takes away the specialness of the experience by literally ‘mundanitizing’24 the experience of the world. I draw on accounts from within a psychiatric epistemology, and therefore the language of psychosis and delusion, as a contribution to the discussion, not an explanation or a strategy of scientific reductionism, or as a means of establishing the ‘truth’. As my comparative project is between the study of the totalizing epistemology of psychiatry and the study of the totalizing epistemologies of religions (and how such a comparison can contribute to a critical perspective), the description of a religious moment in psychiatric terms should not be taken as a commitment to that psychiatric epistemology. In the Marcan account of the transfiguration, Jesus deliberately chooses his three closest disciples and takes them up a high mountain – something special was always going to happen. In a mad studies reading, and by now it should be clear that such an approach does not pathologize these events (Chapter 9), the incidents of the baptism/ wilderness and the transfiguration jump out from the pages of Mark’s account in a way which may not be noticed by scholars who adopt a historical-critical method. Mark’s account is so thick with things to attract the historical-critical gaze that the significance of these two events can readily be overlooked by the profusion of remarkable accounts of what Jesus said and what Jesus did to others as consecutive events – one thing after another. By contrast in a mad studies reading, the baptism/wilderness and the transfiguration stand out as events which happened to Jesus. They are both experiences which are appropriately represented by the placeholders introduced in previous chapters; both events are extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, and both involve disruption. While a psychiatric case study may, indeed should, notice the significance of these events, it is clear that Murray et al. in their account of ‘The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered’ (Murray 2012) did not. It is similarly the case that the early twentieth-century-psychiatric assault on the sanity of Jesus by de Loosten, Rasmussen, Hirsch and Binet-Sanglé had so much psychiatric dirt to

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throw at Jesus that Schweitzer’s defence saw no need to address the particularity of these two episodes and their role in Jesus’s life. My reading of the biblical studies literature finds that although these events are addressed, they are never presented as the twin pivots in Jesus’s life. To establish these events as acute religious experiences, I apply the D.R.E.A.D model set out in Chapter 10. It will then be possible to consider the implications for a re-reading of the evidence provided by Mark who describes the baptism/wilderness and the transfiguration experience but glosses over the consequentiality of these two events by treating them as incidents rather than pivots in the life of Jesus. The D.R.E.A.D. model necessitates consideration of Diversity, Religiosity, Extremity, Ambivalence and Determination. Diverse: Although Mark has frequent recourse to the literary technique of drawing on ‘Old Testament’ texts as if they foreshadowed and referred to Jesus, he begins his account of Jesus without any attempt to construct an ancestral genealogy which would identify Jesus as culturally or historically significant. Mark begins with a ‘prophecy’ by Isaiah which establishes John the Baptist and then Jesus simply appears. Throughout Mark’s account, Jesus spends more effort disclaiming his specialness than he does claiming it. In Mark, Jesus always speaks of himself as the son of man and only ever appears as the son of god in the word of others. In Mark’s account Jesus makes no claims about his status within the establishment, he makes no claim to be either priest or king. Even, in distress, right at the end, Mark records the interchange, ‘“Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate. “You have said so,” Jesus replied’ (Mk 15.2). The ordinariness of Jesus matters, not only because it is a measure of his resistance to hubris but also as evidence that he did not present himself within the established modes of institutional power; he did not set out to fulfil a preconceived role which already had an understandable form.25 This first order reading of diversity in the context of the experience of the person impinges on second order readings. The function of the criteria of Diversity is to pre-empt the reader’s presuppositions pre-determining who might be having an acute religious experience. The examples (which I used as imaginative reference points) in Chapter 9 were the 25 per cent of those detained in the acute psychiatric wards of the west who articulate their experiences in religious terms and Audrey Cantlie’s sadhus who rake through the human bones in the cremation grounds of Tarapith in west Bengal in the service of the goddess Tara (Gale 2014: 90). The story, which can be drawn independently from both discourses of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, one not necessarily pathological and one necessarily pathological in Part I and Chapter 9 is that the

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relevant gatekeepers are inclined to exclude or resist data which does not fit with their presuppositions and constructed knowledge. Religious: In Chapter 10, I addressed the anachronistic nature of the terms ‘religious’ and ‘religion’ in a first order context. In a second order context, it would be a hard argument to make that Jesus’s metacognitive intentionality was not (what we now call) religious. While it is possible to argue that the role of Jesus in the religion of Christianity was developed by oral tradition, by gospel writers, by theologians at the first seven ecumenical councils in which establishing ‘orthodoxy’ was a principal objective; it is not possible to escape from Mark’s insistence that Jesus proclaimed the Basileia tou Theou and that this should be understood today as a religious construction. Extreme: As identified in the psychiatric reading of the baptism/wilderness and the transfiguration, both incidents provide ample evidence of behaviours which would be of psychiatric interest. Again, the consideration of phenomena such as visions, voices, possession, delusions and the evidence of abnormal behaviour provided by social networks may no longer, in a mad studies reading, be automatically subsumed within a pathological framing, indeed such an interpretation is resisted. The DSM-5 may incorporate only the terms ‘a normal part of broadly accepted cultural or religious practice’ (APA 2013: 292) into the dissociative identity disorder classification, but the ‘Schizophrenia Spectrum and other Psychotic Disorders’ chapter repeatedly raises cultural concerns, even if it provides unrealistic guidance as to how these are addressed.26 Notwithstanding, the presence of visions, voices, possessions, delusions and abnormal behaviour is the threshold for psychiatric concern which, as I have argued, can be taken as a proxy for extremity. Ambivalence: In all of the accounts in the synoptic gospels there is no indication of why Jesus stayed in the wilderness. He was always at liberty to walk out of the wilderness any time he chose. Something of the mental struggle, the challenge of ‘satan’, his alliance with ‘angels’ kept him there in an ambivalent confrontation with himself. He didn’t return until he was ready to return. It is notable that the risk aversion of twenty-first-century health and safety is absent. Mark gives no indication that anyone mounted a search party, not his family, not John the Baptist, not the relevant authorities (if any). The wilderness experience may be understood within the idea of ambivalence as Jesus struggled with the consequence of the event. While the immediacy of the ambivalence of the baptism/wilderness experience is obvious, the meaning of the transfiguration is, for Jesus, definite (see in what

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follows). It is only on a much longer second order reading that ambivalent moments can be found in the garden of Gethsemane and immediately prior to death. In Gethsemane, Mark recounts that Jesus ‘took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled’. ‘“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”’ (Mk 14.33). These were the same three disciples who witnessed the transfiguration. Jesus then goes further on his own and, without the benefit of witnesses, Mark recounts his words: ‘“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will”’ (Mk 14.36). At the crucifixion the only words of Jesus Mark recounts are: ‘Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”’ (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”’) (Mk 15.34).27 Determination: The example of Jesus illustrates the way the process of determination is, of itself, provisional. This accurately reflects Sharf ’s conception of the need for a way to finalize the relentless deferral of meaning which undermines certainty and therefore action. From a first order perspective, irrespective of the content and the interpretation, the quality of the experience tends towards being overwhelming and definitive. As set out in Chapter 9, psychosis is of a different order to normal experience. William James puts it delicately thus in the context of mystical states, which (passed through the un-filter and delimitation of diversity in the D.R.E.A.D. model), I subsume within the category of acute religious experiences: As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them (here, James inserts a footnote: ‘I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon’). They have been ‘there’, and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind – we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs. (James [1902] 1985: 423)

That James’s footnote slips into the language of demonology is no more notable than the personal pronoun ‘his’ slipping into the depersonalized ‘its’. James takes a harder line against the scope for ambivalence than I do, but this citation well describes the authoritative quality of the experience – whatever the content or the process of reintegration, and meaning-making, which follows any such experience

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on the downclimb. In the account of the baptism/wilderness, Jesus returns home a radically different person from the one who left to go to the Jordan. This transformative process did not depend on or include a guide or a teacher. The role of John the Baptist, according to the absence of any other indication in Mark’s text, is that of trigger, not personal tutor.28 The question of who Jesus is concatenates through Mark’s account culminating in Mark’s account of 'The written notice of the charge against him (read): the king of the jews’ (Mk 15.25 emphasis in the original). Subsequent to his death this determination proves to be inadequate, but the search for a settled determination is driven by the quest to understand Jesus’s actions which I propose can be significantly re-read on the basis of identifying the similarities and differences of the two acute religious experiences in his life. Having set out the process by which acute religious experiences are identified in the life of Jesus, the question arises: So what? It is my proposal that by framing a re-reading of Mark with these events in mind allows a more holistic consideration of the inter-ictal and post-ictal consequences. The approach to ictal events is found in the vocabulary of neurology and neurophysiology and is useful in thinking about the relationship of acute religious experiences as events. The event is preceded by the pre-ictal state which (in a similar way to the language of prodromal symptoms of psychosis), can only be read/assessed/understood retrospectively, in the light of the ictal event). The ictal event is followed by the post-ictal period which may be later understood as an inter-ictal period between subsequent events. This ‘peaks and plains’ (or troughs) pattern is commonplace in psychosis. The key error to be avoided is the simplistic supposition that experience of ‘psychosis’ is repetitive, as this abstracts the form of psychosis from the capacity of people to ‘learn’ from their own experiences and shape new content and new relationships with that content. It is here that Jasper’s privileging of form over content is found to lack utility. In a mad studies reading, the language of pre-ictal, ictal, post-ictal and inter-ictal provides a useful way of describing or delineating the relation of a particular acute religious experience to the old normal, the new normal and the possible future event. The baptism/wilderness experience was the first ictal event, the first experience of disruption, the first experience of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, the first indication of an acute religious experience. Jesus only takes on his roles as miracle worker, healer, teacher, son of man – and opens himself to the outsider accusation of son of god, messiah and so on when he walks out of the wilderness and calls his first disciples. When Mark’s account of Jesus’s ministry is drawn on a map, it shows between Mk 1.14, coming out of the wilderness and Mk 9.2, the transfiguration, a meandering pattern with large loops from the sea of Galilee

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and his base at Capernaum. The text is suggestive of an improvised approach, ‘Let us go somewhere else’ (Mk 1.38), ‘Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village’ (Mk 6.6). Between Mk 1.14 and Mk 9.2 (from the baptism/wilderness to the transfiguration) Jesus was exuberant in the powers he exercised in the post-ictal consequences of his first acute religious experience. It is difficult to disentangle the relationship of miracles, healing and casting out demons to, first, the significance of Jesus and second, his proclamation of the accessibility of the Basileia tou Theou and perhaps they are best understood as part of a package, a ministry. My point is that in the inter-ictal period, between the baptism/wilderness and the transfiguration, Jesus addressed the needs of audiences as he encountered them. After the second acute religious experience, the transfiguration, in Mark 9, this situation changes radically. The transfiguration triggers an undeviating trajectory towards an intentional death in a particular place at a particular time. My proposal is that these two moments, the transfiguration and the crucifixion are consequential, the crucifixion is a post-ictal consequence of the transfiguration. That Mark’s account does not directly make this connection is, from the evidence Mark advances, based on his reading of Peter’s account of the transfiguration rather than Jesus’s which is not given (see earlier). The tone of Mark’s account also significantly changes. ‘They were on their way up to Jerusalem, with Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were astonished, while those who followed were afraid’ (Mk 10.32). Prior to the transfiguration, Jesus’s movements are impulsive, improvised and driven by local context – both towards and away from the crowds29 which repeatedly mob and celebrate this thaumaturge. After the transfiguration, the second ictal event, the second disruption, the second extraordinary/anomalous/extreme experience, the second acute religious experience, the improvisation ends. As long as the location of the transfiguration is placed North of Capernaum (Hermon rather than Tabor), Mark’s account is one of a route set for Jerusalem. If the general ministry of Jesus begins with the baptism/wilderness experience, it ends with the pivot at the transfiguration. There is no need to ask the psychological question: what was on Jesus’ mind? It is unanswerable, we do not know. The evidence is found by observing not only what the text says but also how the text describes what he did next. Mark’s new narrative30 is all about death in Jerusalem during a festival. Jesus pivots from his improvised ministry towards Jerusalem because he has to die at the hands of the authorities during the ritual/magico moment of a festival. Why did Jesus go to Jerusalem? This is not a question the historical-critical method is equipped to answer. The ‘divinely willed death’ (Bond 2012: 145) which Mark makes Jesus foretell opens a paradox. If Jesus is going to Jerusalem to die,

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the narrative from transfiguration to the crucifixion cannot be passive. Jesus must collude in making his death happen, as an act of fulfilment of that divine will. He chooses to walk the distance to Jerusalem when he could equally have returned to the safety of Capernaum. Again, this is beyond the historical-critical method. In a mad studies reading it becomes possible to propose that the ascent to Jerusalem is the post-ictal consequence of the noetic realization at the transfiguration that it is his divine duty to die in Jerusalem during a festival. Jesus is driven by the hand of god. This may sound psychiatrically disordered and that would be an entirely appropriate way of looking at it, if it did not involve a retrospective projection of twenty-first-century western31 values. In a mad studies context, being a willing sacrifice is both thinkable and doable. In the context of a culture in which animal sacrifice is engrained, the idea begins to be more thinkable. In Jesus’s culture, where the human sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham is a foundational narrative of faith, even if the human element of the sacrifice was substituted the premise of human sacrifice is thought. The prospect of giving up one’s life in obedience to a greater unknowable32 is not only thinkable, it is the most effective way of reading Mark’s text. In Jesus’s context, sacrifice is a familiar, culturally located idea and Jerusalem is the only place to die with the Passover festival ratcheting up the symbolic significance of the moment in time. The festival in which Jesus died remembered the ‘passing over’ the protection of the sign of sacrificial blood, which marked the Jews as distinct from Egyptians (whose eldest sons were then murdered by god). This is the magico-religious-cultural context for the Passover festival which Jesus knew.33 Jerusalem is the centre of the world, festivals are heightened moments, death has a transformative power: these three facts are all within Jesus’s cognitive capacity. When driven by the hand of god, there is no need to ask why, to discuss reasons, or risks, or consequences. The question ‘why?’ is not bracketed, it is simply irrelevant; acceptance and obedience are central to the mystery of faith untroubled by the ambivalence of reason. In my mad reading I now follow the evidence from transfiguration to death. If, pivoting at the transfiguration, Jesus goes up to Jerusalem compelled, obligated, determined to die at the hands of the authorities at the time of a festival, this metacognitive intentionality challenges and reframes traditional readings of the ‘last week’, not just in traditional christian theology, which does not critically address Jesus’s agency and intentionality, but also in readings such as Borg and Crossan’s The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem (2008). In this and the many other accounts of the historical Jesus which I have read, death for Jesus is always a risk, never a certainty. Helen Bond’s account is that ‘the broad substance of this material may well go back to

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a historical memory that Jesus did see death as a possible outcome. The lot of a prophet was customarily associated with rejection and death’ (Bond 2012: 145). This is correct up to the point where the word ‘possible’ is deployed in preference to the word ‘inevitable’. Bond’s analysis suggests there were possible alternative outcomes. If Jesus was destined or obligated or determined to die (and in my mad studies reading, there is little difference, because such differences are reasoned rather than felt), this would not be the case. In my mad studies reading, Holy Week presents Jesus with a problem: How to die effectively prior to the festival concluding, the participants’ draining away and the ritual moment passing. Suicide is outside of the framing of the Hebrew scriptures. Death is always an authorized function. Sacrifices (other than the scapegoat) die in an institutional context. Prophets who die do not commit suicide; they are martyred.34 Committing suicide, or even the contemporary American version of ‘suicide by cop’,35 has no cultural antecedents in Jesus’s world. My proposal is that Holy Week, rather than a series of one thing following after another, can be better read as a series of ever more reckless actions by Jesus, intentionally designed to provoke his own death at the hands of the authorities. This introduces a novel way of re-reading the actions described by Mark. As each provocation fails, a new one is improvised. The triumphal entry on Palm Sunday is a declaration, an undisguised statement of Jesus’s presence, a challenge to the authorities.36 But this act of provocation fizzles out drawing no response. On the first day, Jesus fails to enter the judicial process which is the first step towards an institutionally processed execution; there is (not yet) a plan B. As Mark records simply: ‘Jesus entered Jerusalem and came into the temple; and after looking around at everything, he left for Bethany with the twelve, since it was already late’ (Mk 11.11). This anticlimax requires the creation of a new strategy. On day two, Jesus is back, physically disrupting the operation of the temple by obstructing the temple infrastructure. The money changers convert secular coinage and sell sacrificial goods, the temple cannot operate without these transactions. Again, he fails to provoke his own arrest. According to my approach, it doesn’t matter what is said. The references to Isa. 56.7 and Jer. 7.11 in Mk 11.17 may have been spoken by Jesus or may have been added later as ideas of reference. The words are not determinative of the account of provocation. That Jesus is not touched by the authorities speaks to their risk analysis of the tension between the crowds and the chief priest and the teachers of the Law. And this problem is made explicit in Mark’s account on Tuesday and Wednesday. For Mark, and for Borg and Crossan, these days are filled with teachings and disputes with the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders who are the butt of barbed parables and a catalogue of subversion

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and sedition which escalates into heretical treason as Jesus verbally assaults the very fabric of the temple with his words (Mark 11-13). Jesus treads the temple courts provoking the authorities. The authorities want to kill him, Jesus wants to be killed, but Jesus remains alive against his wishes in a stand-off which has no means of resolution – as long as the authorities are paralysed by the fear of the crowds, Jesus lives. But there is a time limit to this unwelcome protection. When the festival ends, the crowd will recede like the tide, leaving Jesus exposed. For the magico-religious significance of the festival moment to be realized, Jesus has to die before the festival ends. As long as the authorities refuse to act, this is a stand-off Jesus cannot win. As long as the authorities are patient, they will get their man, eventually. But that will be too late for Jesus who has insulted Pilate; abused the infrastructure of the temple; insulted the authorities and blasphemed the sanctity of the temple . . . without provoking the institutional response which would secure his death. And then there is Judas. This mad studies reading radically alters the role of Judas. The stand-off remains, but if one of Jesus’s team arranges a meeting after dark, with no crowd, Jesus may be seized in a deadly resolution which satisfies both sides. In christian tradition Judas is the betrayer. But if it was Jesus who instructed Judas to open backchannels to facilitate Jesus’s arrest, Judas broke no trust with Jesus. In the Marcan account, the kiss is ambivalent, a signal of betrayal disguised as a gesture of love/friendship. In my reading, the kiss can be read as a symbol of parting, of tortured loyalty as the arrest, which Jesus depends on to fulfil his destiny and which Judas facilitates, still leaves Judas conflicted and confused. Within twenty-four hours Jesus is dead. In his audience with Pilate, Jesus doesn’t even try to defend himself; he lets Pilate kill him. E. P. Sander explicitly criticizes any view that Jesus determined in his own mind to be killed and to have his death understood as sacrificial for others, and it must imply that he pulled this off by provoking the authorities. It is not historically impossible that Jesus was weird . . . but the view that he plotted his own redemptive death makes him strange in any century and thrusts the entire drama into his peculiar inner psyche. (Sanders 1993: 333)

I am proposing exactly what Sanders rejects. That Sanders can see this possibility is evidence of its plausibility. The contrast between Sanders’ concession of ‘weird’ but his bridling at ‘strange’ is awkward, given the capacity of these two words to act as synonyms. Indeed, being thought strange might well be considered less pejorative than being thought weird. The risk Sanders takes in his argument is that it is simply a projection of his own undisclosed WEIRD (Henrich 2010) presuppositions. My mad studies approach is transparent and only too aware that it is mad. The striking

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moment in Sanders’ passage is, however, the recognition of the role of the ‘inner psyche’. This is precisely the territory which the study of the historical Jesus has eschewed for so much of the twentieth century. Having opened the door of the ‘inner psyche’, Sanders’ decision to close it again is too little, too late. Sanders goes slightly further than my reading by his use of the word redemptive. I have taken considerable care in my reading not to extend it beyond the evidence. My reading proposes that after the disruption, the experience of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme, the acute religious experience, which the Bible calls the transfiguration, Jesus turned towards Jerusalem, driven by the hand of god, following his duty/destiny, with the metacognitive intention of being killed as an act of obedience to the voice of god. Jesus eventually succeeds in this objective after five days of provocative turbulence. But my reading cannot tell exactly what Jesus thought the consequences of his death would be. The resurrection is retrojected by Mark. If Jesus was a prophet who must die in Jerusalem (and as a corollary, by dying confirm his prophetic status), that might be enough, but the scope for a greater cosmic consequence is unknown and unknowable. I don’t know and there is no evidence (beyond Mark’s crude, because formulaic, retrojections about rising after three days) that Jesus knew what doing his duty/destiny would lead to. It follows that I do not accept Sanders’ attribution to Jesus of the prior insight that his death would be ‘redemptive’ as this is a subsequent construction of christian theology. The evidence that Jesus did not know the consequences of his actions seems more compelling and is certainly more consistent with ‘being driven by the hand of god’ which puts faith before knowledge and action before reason. In my mad studies reading of acute religious experiences, knowledge is irrelevant, duty is everything. When, at the end, according to Mark, Jesus cries out, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ (My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?) (Mk 15.34), it is opaque as to what Jesus expected god to do. An expectation of the Abrahamic ‘let off ’ seems possible, that Jesus thought there was a way out of death, but this cry can also be understood as an ambivalent reassessment of the situation. By suggesting Jesus as a case study, I offer a practical and particular demonstration of how a focus on the identification of acute religious experiences can contribute to existing discourses, by attributing them with disproportionate significance in terms of meaning-making opportunities. I have identified two episodes in Jesus’s life and describe these as ictal events which can be related to each other by pre-ictal, postictal and inter-ictal analysis. This analysis is inevitably retrospective – for everyone, in the same way that William James’s reading of ‘fruits’ is not presupposed by the seeds. My suggestion is that the Marcan account of Jesus’s life can be interpreted by paying attention to these two events, rather than a verse by verse or a pericope by

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pericope analysis of the string of conjoined events or writings recording memories of speech acts, as found in the historical-critical reading of the gospel(s). The two events of disruption or extraordinary/anomalous/extreme experiences or acute religious experiences are clear in the biblical account, with multiple attestations, and they are well recognized in all christian traditions, so I am not introducing any novelty, nor does my reading abuse the timeline set out by Mark. What makes the difference is my reading of Jesus’s life through these events. When placed in an ictal framework of two acute religious experiences, it becomes possible to re-read the Gospel of Mark. In particular, this re-reading provides new insight into the (improvised) steps Jesus took, within his own metacognitive agency, to ensure that he died in the right place at the right time, killed by an authorized hand in the realization of god’s will revealed at the transfiguration. This is a single case study, a single example of deploying the placeholders of a non-pathological experience of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme as theorized in Part I, or a DSM-5 concept of disruption as discussed in Chapter 8 or acute religious experiences as developed in Chapter 10. Such an approach could readily be applied to other figures of interest to the study of religion who have experienced extraordinary/anomalous/extreme experiences – Arjuna, Buddha, Mohammed and so forth. In this I directly challenge the historic practice of glossing over ‘breakdowns’ or other euphemisms for matters of psychiatric concern,37 many of which might just as readily be characterized as ‘breakups’ or, as the Grofs would have it, ‘breakthroughs’. As set out at the start of this chapter, the legacy of poor relations between religious studies and the pathologizing instinct of psychiatry has made humanities scholarship wary of addressing matters which may be of psychiatric interest. Jesus’s sanity has been the subject of a painful reductive debate as part of an intellectual power grab by the insurgent discipline of psychiatry within the development of modernity. My argument is that it is time to move on to find better ways of bringing psychiatric theory into the religious studies canopy and to challenge psychiatrists to find not necessarily pathological ways of discussing acute religious experiences. And, that religious scholars have no need to deny the role of the ‘inner psyche’ in human events. It may be a black box, but the trace of intentionality can be found in the wider context of historical reconstructions. Intentionality as a non-rational concept precludes neither ‘weirdness’ nor ‘strangeness’. These are judgemental terms which speak to the presuppositions of scholars and cannot be advanced, even rhetorically, as reasons which are sufficient to negate the evidence of acute religious experiences and their post-ictal consequences.

Conclusion

In Part I of this book, I read seven theoreticians who each sought to invent terms or co-opt existing language to address experiences of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme. By reading these sequentially it became apparent that they can be understood as constituting the beginnings of a fractured nonpathological (or not necessarily pathological) discourse which can be contrasted with the pathologizing discourse of psychiatry. As a result of this reading it also became clear that these theorists were each engaged in a process of emphasizing and de-emphasizing aspects of their data to suit their constructs. In particular, visions and voices were repeatedly recognized as being present but then de-emphasized (Otto, Chapter2; Oeterreich, Chapter 3; Stace, Chapter 5; and Maslow, Chapter 7). This is consistent with the subtextual efforts by all of these theorists, apart from William James, to distance themselves from the psychiatric gaze. It is only James’s pathological project which concedes the madness of his subjects but then redeems this concession through a pragmatic consideration of their ‘fruit’. But as I show in Chapter 1, even James finds himself operating with a faceless, essentialized insanity as the ‘other half ’ of mysticism. In Part II, I read the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and Foucault’s History of Madness. These readings provided a way of addressing a broader psychiatric context. By bringing the textuality of the psychiatric classificatory system into the religious studies literature, the challenges and inconsistencies that psychiatrists operate with were made more visible and therefore more accessible. The way the DSM-5 is presented as a collective whole may give the appearance of joined-up thinking, but the internal inconsistencies become obvious when the actual text is treated like any other academic text in a critical reading. As I show, the inconsistency between the treatment of psychosis (visions and voices) and dissociation (possession) presents a realworld problem. While dissociation in DSM-5 now has the benefit of explanatory pluralism written into the text, there is no option for psychosis to be constructed other than pathologically. In my reading of the absences in the History of Madness, I repositioned the origin of madness, based on contemporary genetic theory and deconstructed the

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reliance of evolutionary psychiatrists on schizophrenia and the consequential distortion of always generalizing from the extreme. If genetic diversity is accepted as a precondition for experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme, this provides an explanation for their relative rarity and I suggest that this is a contribution which psychiatry can make within the religious studies canopy. Meanwhile, the prevalence of people in locked psychiatric wards who articulate their experiences in the capacious vocabulary of religions is indicative of the utility of this language in the midst of that experience. The positions I took on these texts equipped me to advance the idea of acute religious experiences as events which could be identified in the history of religions and which should be read as disproportionately significant in scholarly interpretation because such experiences are disproportionately significant in the lives of the experiencers. Where would be shamanism without the shamanic trance or mysticism without the unspeakable experience? Taking a ‘light touch’ approach to the concept of ‘religion’, I follow the implication of J. Z. Smith’s argument by supposing that the shaman or the spirit possessed need not use the western language of religion for western scholarship to recognize that the second order language of religion may have utility in a consideration of such experiences – in the scholar’s study. This approach avoids any essentialized notion of religion and recognizes that the sadhu raking the ashes in the cremation grounds in the service of the goddess Tara and those in the locked wards of the west who articulate their experience in religious terms cannot simply be discarded from the data of religious experience. The approach in this book involves a way of reading religion which runs against dominant sociological and anthropological approaches which treat populations and institutions as the key datum. But my focus on consciousness is not an embrace of the traditions of psychology of religion or the cognitive science of religion, where these approaches privilege the generality of religion and religious experience and a model of a homogeneous human. I sense an ideological difficulty in discussing extremes of experience which are accessible only to a few. The democratizing instinct in western culture and WEIRD scholarship is pervasive like, for want of a better analogy, the pathologizing instinct of psychiatry. This can be acknowledged without its being an obstacle, as this democratizing instinct is subverted by minorities like the mad who are not only silenced but also silenced selectively. The mad who find a way to make their experiences meaningful in the history of religions are no longer called the mad. This is the force of James’s two halves of mysticism. This is why Eliade’s attempt to protect the shaman from the accusation of madness is revealing. The mystic, the prophet, the shaman, the sufi, all the people who

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integrate their mad experiences into cultural and religious practices have the madness of their experience overlooked, denied, erased, sanitized – made sane. Acute religious experiences are extreme, they are different, they may appear desirable, but they are capricious, challenging and not available on demand. My argument is that, as a second order construct, the idea of acute religious experiences provides a useful way of reorganizing the data of religious experience. As Timothy Leary put it, ‘since the dawn of recorded history men have eaten vegetables to obtain religious visions’ (Leary 1963: 251). Even if Leary oversells his vegetables to promote his psychedelics, his point has some validity in pointing towards the extreme, however it is triggered. The utility of the D.R.E.A.D. model in the identification of acute religious experiences is that it brings together the biological and the psychosocial in a way which is always personal, always contextual, always embodied. Currently, the primary discourses of mysticism, shamanism and spirit possession along with the specific visions, voices and prophetic/possession traditions recorded in diverse religious texts are rarely conceptualized as parts of a larger discourse on consciousness. A trans-historical and trans-cultural perspective on consciousness is precisely what acute religious experiences allows without defining one experience in terms of another or erasing difference. Any collective term faces challenges of reductionism – this applies as much to Eliade’s Shamanism as it does to Stace’s mysticism. Acute religious experiences mitigates this risk because the correspondence, the commonality which it identifies operates at a biological/genetic level rather than in the diversity of cultural expressions or the assumption of unity in a perennial philosophy. This creates an inherently antiessentializing impulse because acute religious experiences always happen to real people in real places at particular times and are therefore necessarily peculiar. Any novel idea risks being perceived as a threat to established modes of understanding, if it left everything as it was it would be of little value. Broadly conceived, the idea of acute religious experiences has obvious ramifications for other academic fields beyond religious studies and psychiatry, specifically in future research on questions of self, not-self and identity in consciousness studies, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy of mind, anthropology, sociology and the medical humanities. The very idea of acute religious experiences subverts the adequacy of models based on the premise of homogenous humans and promotes the need to accommodate the explanatory pluralism of multiple interpretations of the same data. More narrowly, I anticipate three areas where the idea of acute religious experiences challenges existing discourses, beyond those who may a priori dismiss my reading of Jesus on the grounds of their theological presuppositions. First, acute religious experiences, with its dependence on the proxy of psychiatric interest as

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an indicator of sufficient extremity (Chapter 10), does not support the self-report of self-experience deployed in the questionnaires of the psychology of religion and psychedelic research which seek to identify mystical experiences. There are many good reasons to explore psychedelics but to facilitate some putative mystical experience is no longer tenable as I have shown these to depend on mis-readings of Stace (Chapter 5) and Pahnke (Chapter 6). Second, approaches which treat the mystics, shamans, spirit possessed and the visions, voices and possessions recorded in many religious texts as independent and incommensurate discourses may have to be reconsidered, not because cultural diversity is erased but because biological similarity is recognized within the context of cultural plasticity. Thirdly, the idea of acute religious experiences provides a challenge to contemporary psychiatric insistence that psychosis is always pathological. The discourse of non-pathological interpretations of Part I presents a challenge to the pathologizing instinct of psychiatry (Chapter 8). The partial position of the DSM-5 in which dissociation now affords a non-pathological interpretation, but psychosis is always pathological, requires further consideration to recognize the constructive role of madness in the human record. As the current resurgence in research into how psychedelics may be used therapeutically will soon generate a need for a psychiatric consideration of constructive ways of addressing such experiences, this matter is pressing. The idea of acute religious experiences presented in this work may assist in broadening approaches to madness beyond the merely pathological. Whether there is a future for the idea of acute religious experiences depends on how far it provides a useful idea in the hands of others.1 The process of reading the theoreticians of the unspeakable in Part I provided ample evidence of their lack of authorial control over their novel concepts, so I can’t force the issue as there is no power to do so which is available to me or anyone else. Instead, I have sought to show rather than tell, pointing towards rather than controlling, storifying, rather than offering experimental proof. As long as the idea of religious experience remains part of the lexicon of religious studies, I suggest that the need for recognizing and differentiating acute forms arises intuitively and may provide a non-reductive basis for better comparisons. I have found utility in the placeholders of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme and disruption, but these are too clumsy and lack specificity, particularly when addressing states of consciousness in religious contexts, and it is these placeholders which acute religious experiences can more elegantly and effectively replace. By pointing to the historical evidence of the social significance of exceptional experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme addressed in religious studies, these have to be called something and I name them ‘acute religious experiences’.

Notes Introduction 1 The construction ‘extraordinary/anomalous/extreme’ operates as a deliberately clumsy pre-theoretical placeholder for an ontological experience which is prelinguistic and therefore formally unspeakable. I use this three-term construction because, a little like an acronym, it flags ‘something else’ which has to be kept in mind – this ‘something’ is a state of consciousness which will come into view as this book progresses. All the alternatives are problematic: if I used the word mad, that would lack specificity prior to the discussion of madness in (Chapter 9), if I used the word psychosis that would bring too much pathological baggage in its train. 2 Plato has Socrates set out four kinds of divine madness, prophetic inspiration, mystical inspiration, poetic inspiration and love. 3 These are the testimonial and hermeneutic injustices which Miranda Fricker identifies in her 2007 Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. 4 The reference to Harding’s The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (2004) is intentional. 5 Explanatory pluralism should not be mistranslated as explanatory equivalence. Our points of view may differ, but I have to take the time to understand your full picture, including your presuppositions, rather than seeking to find fault based on a premise which belongs to my framework, but which is not important to you. Explanatory pluralism invites a shared process of inquiry rather than an adversarial approach, more European than English. 6 This is quite different from the argument Justin Garson advances in Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (2022), where he champions the instrumentality of madness as Darwinian design. Although the role of genetics is addressed in Chapter 9 and my conception of madness is always biologically grounded, my concern is primarily with the social contribution of madness to religions and the study of religions. 7 For example, the fact that Eliade, writing in Paris in 1950/1951, had not read James or Otto (whom he read subsequently) but had read Oesterreich was, for me, a moment of clarity. 8 This undervaluation is the inevitable consequence of any recourse to a scientific method predicated on repeatability and facticity. Unrepeatable mental states of individuals which are ineffable/irrational may be inaccessible to observers especially

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where they share few points of experiential reference. This disjunct may affect not only which evidence is gathered but also what questions are asked in theory development. Such a methodological impasse has, I argue, most readily been resolved by downgrading the significance of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme and focusing on more accessible evidence.

Chapter 1 1 The idea of ‘spiritual judgement’ is not James’s first-choice of phrasing; on page 4 he offers it as his third attempt at articulating his meaning. The first is ‘proposition of value’ (James [1902] 1985), then the German ‘Werthurtheil’ (judgement of value) and only on the third and final attempt does he ‘translate’ this order of enquiry as ‘spiritual judgement’. 2 Binet-Sanglé is mentioned in the first footnote of The Varieties of Religious Experience (James [1902] 1985: 13); we will meet him again in Part III as the author of the four-volume La Folie de Jésus (The Madness of Jesus). 3 McLean Hospital was and is a ‘high-end’ establishment for the wealthy. The high socio-economic status of mystics is a feature of the mystic case studies mentioned by James, many of whom were born into or achieved high status prior to their adoption of the religious life: Buddha, Al Ghazzali, St Ignatius, St Teresa, Angelus Silesius, Blavatsky, Swinburne among others. 4 According to James, there is also a downward ladder, which is cited in the explicit context of the alienist (psychiatrist), Dr Chrichton-Browne, who (according to James) follows dreamy states ‘along the downward ladder, to insanity’ (James [1902] 1985: 384). By contrast, ‘our path pursues the upward ladder chiefly’ (James [1902] 1985: 384). Again this is indicative of James’s dichotomous thinking. 5 Although it is extrinsic to my argument, I propose that the left-hand extreme of such a distribution curve of consciousness include the characteristics of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia: lack of pleasure, trouble with speech (alogia), affective flattening, withdrawal/apathy, struggling with the basics of daily life, no followthrough (avolition), catalepsy/catatonia. I cite the distinction between positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia by way of a convenient illustration of issues surrounding the schizophrenia diagnosis which is discussed in Chapter 8. 6 Incidentally, placing the data onto a normal distribution curve, rather than a ladder, is formally suggestive of the quantitative relationship of the extreme to the normal, the few to the many, which is a recurrent theme in my argument. 7 This is not a longitudinal assessment, but a point assessment at the end of a long time. The difference is material in respect of the role of both epigenesis and culture/ cultivation.

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8 The ambiguous quality of terms like ‘higher power’ and ‘higher nature’, along with the unresolved relation between the subliminal and the transmarginal, may be taken as lack of precision, but in this work they are priors for the acknowledgement that lack of precision in linguistic indication is sometimes preferable to spurious concision. ‘We are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously “scientific” or “exact” in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of our task’ (James [1902] 1985: 39).

Chapter 2 1 Harvey openly concedes this ‘flexibility’ in translation. Harvey also erodes the temporality of experience by his frequent translation of ‘moments’ as ‘elements’, particularly in the contents page (where he also abandons Otto’s seven-part structure of the Momente des Numinosen). 2 Wayne Proudfoot’s disparagement of Otto’s numinous as an empty placeholder (Proudfoot 1985: 131–2), in my opinion, does a mis-service to the linguistic role of placeholders. A term such as ‘schizophrenia’ will be shown to be just as much a placeholder for an experience as the term ‘numinous’ and the role of placeholders will be developed in due course. 3 Otto’s Ideograms are best ‘explained' by direct quotation: ‘It will be again at once apparent that in the use of this word we are not concerned with a genuine intellectual “concept”, but only with a sort of illustrative substitute for a concept. “Wrath” here is the “ideogram” of a unique emotional moment in religious experience’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 19). 4 Note: the first edition in 1911 predates Otto’s The Idea of the Holy which is incorporated into the twelfth edition with the following comment: ‘The whole of this work should be studied in its bearing on the contemplation of supra-rational Reality’ (Underhill 1930: 319). 5 In each of these citations no specific reference or citation is made to Otto’s text, suggestively confirming the non-textuality of the phrase. This is much more than a pedantic point. Just as Chagal paints Moses with horns due to a mistranslation from Hebrew to Greek in the Septuagint, this type of ‘error’ provides direct evidence of the way discourses can incorporate readings of subsequent secondary formulations, rather than original texts. 6 In a footnote Otto writes, ‘A spirit or a soul that has been conceived and comprehended no longer prompts to “shuddering” as is proved by Spiritualism’ (Otto [1017] [1923] 1958: 27). By rendering Spiritualism as of no interest to the

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Notes psychology of religion, I understand Otto to be emphasizing the qualia of the subject he seeks to address as being more extreme. The list could be continued; for example, Otto asks rhetorically, ‘Who is not directly conscious that it is simply the non-rational element of Awefulness, the Tremendum, for which Wrath, Fire, Fury, are excellent ideograms?’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 107). I suggest these terms overwhelm Freud’s focus on the somewhat milder ‘uncanny’ (Dawson 1989) which is distinctly unrepresentative of the force of Otto’s language – although Harvey’s translation of ungeheuer as uncanny is dubious, given it speaks of enormous, monstrous, prodigious. It is not impossible for the ‘numinous’, in Otto’s meaning of the term, to be applied to a sunset, but the setting sun would have to be read as a symbol of something greater (the numen) rather than simply being the object. Otto’s treatment of the supernatural and transcendent as not thought of but felt as ‘positive in the highest degree’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 30) is another example, from a different perspective of the overplus being a sympathetic counterpart to the holy. Even in his discussion of the Kāhin’s, (the primitive form of the prophet) experience of a numen as divine-daemonic power at first hand is not resolved, simply passed on to the seer (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 122) and a change of subject. When Kripal translates Tremendum as ‘fucking scary’ (Kripal 2010: 9), the use of the adjective to breach academic delicacy is communicatively intentional rather than merely rude or hyperbolic. Naturally, I am subject to the same limitations and have no opportunity to discuss my position on Otto’s text with Otto. Instead I have had to rely on the translated text of the The Idea of the Holy. This text remains in print and readily accessible, so my position on Otto can be tested against the text to show I have endeavoured to engage in fair use of his construct of the numinous, even in this critical reading. Or as Otto puts it, ‘a penetrative imaginative sympathy with what passes in the other person’s mind’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 60). Cf (James [1902] 1985: 379) and (Otto [1924] [1932] 2016: 254). Otto’s apparent lack of forbearance echoes a general problem related to experience and the communication of experience. Otto is only echoing Anslem’s formulation, ‘he who has not experienced will not understand’ (Jay 2005: 81). That said, as reverse psychology, inviting readers to stop is a charming provocation to continue reading. The a priori element accentuates the givenness and excludes the social construction of ‘the “tribal fantasy” of anthropology’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 175). Otto proposes that ‘“the numinous” infuses the rational from above, “the sexual” presses up from beneath, quite wholesomely and normally out of the nature which the human being shares with the general animal world, into the higher realm of the

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specifically “humane”’ (Otto [1917] [1923] 1958: 46). This is a benign reading of sexuality which leaves little room for Freud. Philip Almond records that ‘the religious collection founded by Otto (at Marburg) was referred to as the “heathen temple” by those students for whom dialectical theology (which becomes neo-orthodoxy) entailed the unnecessariness and superfluity of the history and comparison of religions’ (Almond 1984). My copy of the 2nd English edition’s 1958 paperback is from the 66th impression. I asked OUP for information on sales but they declined to provide any. https://dictionary​.cambridge​.org​/dictionary​/english​/numinous consulted 11/02/2022 This epistemic injustice which substitutes a rhetorical dichotomy for a sympathetic reading of phenomenal similarity in the context of difference, replicates James’s approach to the two halves of mysticism (Chapter 1)..

Chapter 3 1 Oesterreich traces the demonological approach in Christianity back through the Jewish encounter with Mesopotamia through the captivity in Babylon (Oesterreich [1921] [1930] 1974: 148). 2 An obvious parallel might be found in the idea that the Kama Sutra is pornography – which, of course, it is – to the western mind.

Chapter 4 1 The Royal Anthropological Institute’s journal renders the author’s name as V. M. Mikhailovskii. 2 Scots whisky (Scotch) has to be distilled in Scotland, but the same ingredients, aged in the same barrels, is produced in the United States as Bourbon, while Irish whiskey adds an ‘e’ to distinguish the same spirit with different origins. 3 The addition of the term ‘techniques’ of ecstasy should not distract from the experience of ecstasy; the issue surrounding the techniques is, by definition, technical and merely instrumental to the ecstatic. 4 In relation to the idea of a body without organs, it is a minor tragedy that Deleuze and Guattari had read Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion but not Shamanism ... 5 Eliade’s discussion of ‘inner light’ is significant for internalizing the feelings of shamanic experience when the ascent motif invites readers to an external ‘process’. That Eliade makes the connection of the role of light with the ‘higher

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Notes mysticisms’ (Eliade 1951) of the upanishads, buddhism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and christian mysticism is notable for transgressing the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ which stage theory of evolution requires and which places shamans in the ‘lower’ category. For example, in the context of fighting other shamans in dreams: ‘Undoubtedly they suffer from the mania of persecution which may attain very extreme forms with a fatal issue for the shamans, who very often perish, according to the Tungus’ (Shirokogoroff 1935: 373). In today’s psychiatric language, bouffée délirante can be translated as ‘an acute nonaffective and nonschizophrenic psychotic disorder, which is largely similar to the DSM-5 brief psychotic and schizophreniform disorders, and to ICD-10's acute polymorphic psychotic disorder’. https://www​.ncbi​.nlm​.nih​.gov​/pmc​/articles​/ PMC4421900/ (consulted 26/11/2021). I labour this point because the lack of collaboration between religious studies and psychiatrists is a major textual and subtextual theme in this book. ‘Psychopathe ou non’ is the original French. While it is beyond the scope of this work to investigate, it can be argued that the western approach to privileging normality forecloses the possibility of recurrent episodes of madness being developed as a socialized phenomenon. This is not a ‘problem of psychiatry’ as it reflects the objection to madness which has become dominant in the history of western cultures. A fondness for stark dichotomies is also to be found in Eliade’s construction of the sacred and the profane. See the History of Eranos. http://www​.eranosfoundation​.org​/page​.php​?page​=4​ &pagename​=history#:~​:text​=Beginnings​,at​%20the​%20table​%20by​%20attendees (consulted 17/2/22). The electronic version I consulted has no page numbers, but the terms are readily searchable. If Jung had confirmed Eliade’s version of events, it would have been perfect. For more information visit https://shamanism​.org​/workshops​/faq​.php​#faq2 where the connection with Eliade is explicit and we are informed that ‘Over the last several decades of the Foundation’s work, tens of thousands of students have successfully learned to journey and to practice core shamanic methods to provide shamanic healing in their communities. Since the west overwhelmingly lost its shamanic knowledge centuries ago due to religious oppression, the Foundation’s programs in core shamanism are particularly intended for Westerners to reacquire access to their rightful spiritual heritage through quality workshops and training courses.’ While prices are only on application, a similar type of course in Scotland, https://www​.embracingshamanism​.org​/training​/shamanic​-practitioner​ /intensive​-training/ charges £3,335 for a one-year course consisting of three residential ten-day blocs. As these take place in delightful surroundings, high-

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quality accommodation and include full board, they appear to represent excellent value. 16 In this context, a mad studies critique isn’t different from any other critical approach other than it privileges a focus on the way that madness is dealt with by authors and the insights which can be brought to bear on their texts. Madness is the particular area of expertise which mad studies brings to the academic process. If, for instance, a post-colonial critique was applied to Eliade’s Shamanism it would no doubt problematize Eliade’s handling of the idea of ‘primitive’ rather than his treatment of madness. See Chapter 9 for a broader treatment of mad studies. 17 These reasons may be diverse and have to do with power, inertia and the status of the status quo (for example, it took from the 1920s to 1980 for Kraepelin’s conceptualization of manic depression to be replaced by bipolar in the DSM series. See Chapter 8 for a broader treatment of psychiatry. 18 By the time Eliade wrote The Sacred and Profane he’d read The Idea of the Holy and wholly misunderstood Otto’s distinction between the rational and the irrational, subsuming both within his idea of the Sacred (Eliade [1957] 1959: 10).

Chapter 5 1 Neither James nor Bucke nor Suzuki used the term ‘factor analysis’, which as a methodology was first developed by Charles Spearman in 1904 in the context of studying intelligence. Factor analysis is an oblique approach to an unknowable experiential concept by virtue of knowable features. I use the term here because factor analysis is at the heart not only of Pahnke and Hood’s work but also that of Dittrich, who took a non-Stace-based approach to altered states of consciousness. 2 Huxley is not in the index of Mysticism and Philosophy, and a search for Huxley in the electronic text of Mysticism and Philosophy finds zero references. 3 Stace published The Philosophy of Hegel: A Systematic Exposition in 1924, but by 1960 his position had clarified, ‘For every one of his (Hegel’s) supposed logical deductions was performed by the systematic misuse of language, by palpable fallacies, and sometimes, as Russell has pointed out, by simply punning on words. It was this chicanery which was quickly exposed and which was the chief, though not the only, cause of the downfall of the Hegelian philosophy’ (Stace 1960: 213). 4 That this philosophical lineage is only ever referred to rhetorically, rather than explored in any detail, may be taken as evidence of the disjunction between intentionality and actuality. Stace’s primary reference points, as will be seen, are eastern mystical traditions and the high (established) mystics of the christian tradition.

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5 Unlike ‘The Idea of the Holy’, ‘Mysticism and Philosophy’ was never a ‘popular’ text in terms of sales; its influence is derived from the opposition it provoked to its essentialized perennialism in the discourse on mysticism and the justification psychedelic researchers found in their simplistic readings (see chapter six). 6 There is no mention of shamanism or spirit possession in Mysticism and Philosophy (1960). In possible mitigation, Eliade’s Shamanism (1951) was not translated from French to English until 1964, but as Eliade was published in the Bollingen series by Pantheon Books and the Bollingen Foundation funded Stace’s research over four years, the suggestion that Stace at Princeton was completely ignorant of the bestselling Eliade, by then at Chicago, seems unlikely, and his complete ignorance of the ethnography of shamanism is, in any case, untenable. 7 Stace entirely ignores the evolutionary perspective of Otto along with the hereditary stratification of the Indian caste system and the hereditary lineage of sufi pirs. Despite DNA being identified in 1953, Stace always conceptualizes mysticism in individualistic terms rather than its social and biological context. 8 I understand that a diagnosis of ‘mystic’ is a novel approach, but its utility is found in its capacity to draw attention to the process of naming experience, not just the name of the experience, and how this relates to the question of recognition. To be a mystic is to be recognized as a mystic. It is this social element which Stace overlooks in his analysis of the phenomenal ‘symptoms’ mystics display. 9 In his text, Perovich is attacking Kantians while defending Kant – the argument is superfluous to my point but illustrates the abstract nature of the debate. 10 Although Stace never acknowledges Jung, it is a fact demonstrable by the Ngram viewer that the terms ‘introvertive’ and ‘’extrovertive were introduced by C. G. Jung in Psychologische Typen (1921), translated into English in 1923, the year Otto gave his lectures on ‘Mysticism East and West’. 11 Perception includes more than sight, but ‘eyes open or eyes shut’ provides a neat rubric to understand the unity with the external world, the unity of everything, as contrasted with the eyes shut unity of the internal world which culminates in the mystic void. Both states of consciousness, in their fullness, involve a profound disintegration in the sense of self through, respectively, union with everything or union with nothing. 12 This sample is only representative in the sense that it represents instances of the conclusion which Stace wishes to reach. 13 Just as ‘the west’ makes sense as a metonym, I use the term ‘east’ to refer to hindu/ buddhist theological/philosophical privileging of enlightenment/illumination, noting the continuity between buddhism and hindu culture, (e.g. reincarnation and enlightenment, as differentiated from the saving of the immutable soul in the Abrahamic religions). So it becomes possible to say (for example) that the division between theology and philosophy is a post-enlightenment distinction in the ‘west’

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which is not recognized in the ‘east’ while still recognizing the limits of an approach based on metonymy. Vincent Shecan, Lead Kindly Light, New York, Random House, Inc., 1949. Ramakrishna, Prophet of New India, abridged from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. by Swami Nikhilananda, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1942. Cited by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (James [1902] 1985: 361), which Stace had read. That Müller was an orientalist (cf. Said [1978] 2003) is not in doubt, that (until his death in 1900) he directed and edited The Wisdom of the East (50 volumes, OUP 1879–1910) and, as a philologist, was conversant with Sanskrit, qualified him very differently from Stace. The evidence regarding Symonds is a single passage which Stace draws from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (James [1902] 1985: 385), shortens, and overwrites with his own emphases to extract his intended interpretation. ‘ Fanā’ is a sufi term which is often translated as absorption and is presented as the highest experience. A review of Stace’s treatment of Sufism finds that his knowledge of Sufism is mediated by western selection and editorial interpretation of sufi sources, and he concedes ‘the severe limitations of my knowledge of Sufism’ (Stace 1960: 177), which doesn’t prevent him from authoritatively proclaiming the identity of the sufi concept of fanā with the christian concept of mysticism. Strangely, Stace cites Evelyn Underhill’s citation of Al Ghazzali’s contention that the doctrine of annihilation is ‘sin’ but ignores Underhill’s contiguous comment that ‘the doctrine of annihilation as the end of the soul’s ascent, whatever the truth may be as to the Moslem attitude concerning it, is decisively rejected by all European mystics’ (Underhill 1911: 159). The unresolved nature of this dispute disqualifies Stace from simply lumping all ‘mystical’ traditions together. In a further parody of the practice of comparative religion, Stace, on a different tack to the same subject, accuses most sufis of a lack of ‘logic’ (Stace 1960: 234) to follow through: ‘They balk at asserting what is obviously the dictate of their own consciousness. They fail to implement to the full the notion of unity. They take a step backwards into dualism’ (Stace 1960). A philosopher chiding a tradition for not believing what he thinks they should and, at the same time, holding the contested state of fanā as evidence in support of his thesis presents a red flag to anyone who considers Stace to be playing fair with his evidence. The difference being that we know that Anna Bartlett Warner wrote the lyrics to the song in 1859 whereas we know neither the author, the date nor the process of transmission (including the translation) of the unspecified verses Stace relies on. The absence of Dionysius the Areopagite, whom James describes as the ‘fountainhead of Christian mysticism’ (James [1902] 1985: 416), and Sankara, whom Otto explores in Mysticism East and West (Otto [1924] 1932, is notable).

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21 Stace’s use of the term ‘phenomenology’ has no relation to Husserl’s project. 22 Ironically, this may explain why second generation psychedelic researchers oblige their participants to wear eyepads – to prove Stace wrong! 23 Stace is disparaging about mysticism in the Abrahamic religions affirming Professor E. A. Burtt’s comment that ‘mysticism, which is a major component in Indian religions, is only a minor strand in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism’ (Stace 1960: 342). 24 Steven Katz has spent much of career making a ‘plea for the recognition of differences’ (Katz 1978: 25), debunking the various formulations of the idea of a unitary mystical consciousness which can be accessed universally. 25 The subtitle, which Stace never mentions, is: ‘A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness’ (Underhill [1911]). 26 http://www​.eng​.vedanta​.ru​/library​/prabuddha​_bharata​/let​_ramakrishna​_dance​_his​ _rapturous​_dance​_nov2004​.php 27 Theresa of Avila is just a nuisance, so much so that in the text Stace deals with her union with god by misogynistically mediating it through the experience of St John of the Cross: ‘The question then is whether what John experienced was the same as what Eckhart spoke of as undifferentiated unity. If so, then St. Teresa must also have had that experience’ (Stace 1960: 102).

Chapter 6 1 The three Walters, Walter Stace, Walter Clark and Walter Pahnke, share a common first name but made very different contributions to the psychedelic story. 2 The more reflective work on, for example, ayahuasca suggests that its spread and use is a function of colonialism rather than an archaic indigenous practice; see When Plants Dream (Pinchbeck 2019). 3 In this reading of Pahnke, the very different history of research into psychedelic medicine in Europe, which did not fetishize ‘mystical experiences’, preferring, as Leary put it, to use ‘LSD to produce dirty psychoanalytic experiences’ (Leary [1968] 1995: 315). 4 https://scotland​-species​.nbnatlas​.org​/species​/NBNSYS0000021551 5 John Allegro’s ‘brave’ attempt to reread the Judeo-christian corpus in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross; A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East (Allegro 1970) illustrates what happens if nothing is read outside of the text. 6 The term ‘polymorphously perverse’ is a reference to Freud’s psychoanalytic concept proposing the ability to gain sexual gratification outside socially normative sexual behaviours. Sigmund Freud used this term to describe the sexual disposition from infancy to around age five.

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7 If you do not know the story of the Merry Pranksters, start with Wikipedia and go further. 8 The conceit is Leary’s non-appreciation that Stace had built the category of extrovertive mysticism precisely as a means of defending his privileged category of introvertive mysticism from the unwashed hoards of the Merry Pranksters with their Acid Tests. In Stace’s opinion, the evidence on drugs was not yet sufficient to reach a conclusion, but his philosophical construction of mysticism had a means of excluding them already built in, drugs could only ever produce the inferior extrovertive mysticism (cf. Stace 1960: 30). 9 William Richards, who is important to the story of psychedelic research as his career spans the end of the first generation of research and the start of the second generation, is a co-author of (Griffiths 2006). In his book Sacred Knowledge (2016), Richard also gives an account of supporting Wally Pahnke’s first experience of psychedelics in 1964 (Richards 2016: 73) – after the award of his PhD. 10 As far as I am aware there is no sustained critical secondary literature on the Good Friday experiment. Most of the detailed accounts are contemporary and written by people who knew Walter Pahnke personally. Rick Doblin’s follow-up (Doblin 1991) does not, in my opinion, count as ‘critical’ as he mis-states Pahnke’s findings. (citing Pahnke 1963: 220 instead of Pahnke 1963: 234 – the difference matters). Additionally, Doblin does not address the philosophical validity of Pahnke’s translation of the phenomenality of the psilocybin experience to Stace’s essentialized construct of mystical experience via the medium of language. 11 I do not know why Pahnke’s thesis was never published. Harvard University did not respond to communications relating to this thesis. 12 Pollan editorializes by omission: the interview is published in Huston Smith’s Cleansing the Doors of Perceptions and runs, ‘I had had no direct personal encounter with God of the sort that bhakti yogis, Pentecostals and born-again Christians describe’ (Smith 2000: 101). Context matters. 13 For a contemporary discussion of the role of context, that is, set and setting, in psychedelic research, see Carhart-Harris, R. L. et al. (2018). 14 That Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy was not published in an English translation until 1964 may appear to be one of the great ‘a-synchronicities’ in the history of psychedelia, as it can be read as a counterpart to Mysticism and Philosophy. 15 The acronym WEIRD – White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (Henrich 2010). My point is not the sample which reflects many social psychology experimental samples, but Pahnke’s comparative intent drawn from his contextualizing premise of archaic practices which include ritual use of drugs. The comparison was never between those on psilocybin and the controls, the comparison is with an imagined idea of mysticism which is conflated with unknown and unknowable presuppositions about archaic practices.

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16 The term ‘enthusiasm’ should not be read as cynical or sarcastic; a contemporary example can be found in the neuroscientist Michael Ferguson, also at Harvard, who – sixty years later – champions the term ‘neurospirituality’ enthusiastically. https:// neuromichael​.com​/about/ 17 Here Pahnke is not using the term ‘phenomenology’ in relation to Husserl’s project. 18 Largely due to the work of Ralph Hood Jr, who followed Pahnke’s reversal of Stace by ‘operationalizing’ his categories: ‘significant empirical research on mysticism is now apparently possible. The reason appears to be at least partially due to the excellent conceptual work of Stace (1960: 41–133). Stace in cold, dispassionate logic carefully demarcated the phenomenological characteristics of mystical experience and did so with such effectiveness that operational categories can easily be developed’ (Hood 1975: 30). 19 The experiment involved a battery of tests including a 129-item questionnaire, a 52-item questionnaire, six-month follow-up and a content analysis of interviews which were numerically scored by ‘judges’. See Pahnke (1963) for full details. (There is a discrepancy between the 129 items in the PhD thesis and Pahnke’s subsequent report of 147 items, e.g. Pahnke (1966a) – this is noted to save confusion, not because it makes any difference.) 20 There was an additional follow-up questionnaire and an external content analysis process (see Pahnke 1963), but these do not alter the fact that Pahnke is engaged in a language game, translating responses to linguistic prompts into typological factors which are also linguistically constructed. When Pahnke wrote, ‘Stace has emphasized, such categories attempt to describe the core of a universal psychological experience, free from culturally-determined philosophical or theological interpretations’ (Pahnke 1966b: 175), he was operating from within the bubble of a naivety which Derrida’s project would fully expose. That Huston Smith mentions only the content review process in his piece in The Journal of Philosophy (1964) and not the tickbox questionnaires is a notable lack of disclosure. 21 It is an interesting sidenote that Pahnke’s post-drug questionnaire also included items which drew upon Otto’s Idea of the Holy and which he incorporated into the typological framework he based on Stace. 22 ‘If it (mysticism) is a part of the pure experience, then it is indubitable. But is it indubitably part of the pure experience? No, because there is no such thing as an absolutely pure experience without any interpretation at all’ (Stace 1960: 203). 23 I do not have the space to engage in a full deconstruction of the statistical methodology adopted by Pahnke, but it is ‘challenging’. For example, this five-part scale (0,1,2,3,4) is eventually reported as a four-part result in his findings, and so on. 24 While mystical experiences may appear spontaneous, both Walter Pahnke (Pahnke 1966b: 194–5) and Walter Stace (Stace 1960: 121–2) agree that historically some

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mystics used some variety of disciplines which they thought were valuable. I personally do not accept it as a fair reading of the history of mysticism to suppose that mystical experiences were the primary objective of being a mystic. Pahnke does not account for the enormity of the philosophical challenges, the encounter with the pre-theoretical Being of experience, which psychedelics routinely invoke in his category of ‘cognitive phenomena’ (Pahnke 1966b: 188). The cognitive category is not fully formed in 1966b, it is developed in his later papers. Without irony, it can readily be argued that the consumption of psychedelics contributed to the unhinging of conventional certainties about power, ethics and metaphysics in the 1960s. ‘Altered states of consciousness’ is a term which had come a long way between 1963 and 1966 and would soon be theorized by the psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig in a paper of the same name (Ludwig 1966). Analogues might be the conflagrations between two people in a dispute which degenerates into a wild argument or an erotic desire which engenders passionate sex (or both, consecutively).

Chapter 7 1 In the course of the main body of this short work, ‘higher’ is used to refer to higher states of consciousness (Maslow [1964] 2014: 8), higher forms of objectivity (Maslow [1964] 2014: 12), higher levels of personal development (Maslow [1964] 2014: 12), higher life or of the ‘spiritual life’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 20), ‘higher’ or growth psychology (Maslow [1964] 2014: 20), ‘higher nature’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 49), higher possibilities of human nature (Maslow [1964] 2014: 50), higher values (Maslow [1964] 2014: 50), higher possibilities of man (Verma 2018: 52), ‘spiritual values’ or ‘higher values’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 64). 2 Although it is not as fully developed, the counterpart/inverse/dichotomy of Being and b-values is deficiency and d-values – cf. – ‘the woman seen in her D-aspect, in the world of deficiencies, of worries and bills and anxieties and wars and fears and pains, is profane rather than sacred, momentary rather than eternal, local rather than infinite, etc. Here we see in women what is equally true: they can be bitches, selfish, empty-headed, stupid, foolish, catty, trivial, boring, mean, whorish. The D-aspect and B-aspect are equally true’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 103). 3 ‘Somehow it is necessary to be able to see the B-woman, the actually noble and wonderful goddess woman, and also the D-woman, who sometimes sweats and stinks and who gets belly aches, and with whom one can go to bed’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 104). Yikes.

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4 ‘the spirit of rationality, the spirit of intelligence, of probing and exploring, of mathematics, and the like. The male as a father image is strong and capable, fearless, noble, clean, not trivial, not small, a protector of the weak, the innocent, children and orphans and widows, the hunter and bringer of food, and so on. Secondly, he can be seen archaically as the master and the conqueror of nature, the engineer, the carpenter, the builder, which the woman is generally not. It is quite probable that women, when they get into the eternal mood, or into the B-attitude, must see men in this ideal way even if they can't see their own particular man in this way’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 105). The 1950s sexual stereotypes are furthered in the following page: ‘If she cannot see her man (or any man) in a B-way, then such looking up to, respect, adoration, perhaps surrender, giving in to him, fearing him a bit, trying to please him, loving him, all of this becomes in principle impossible’ (Maslow [1964] 2014: 106), etc. 5 According to appendix G, B-values are Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Wholeness, Dichotomy-transcendence, Aliveness, Uniqueness, Perfection, Necessity, Completion, Justice, Order, Simplicity, Richness, Effortlessness, Playfulness, Selfsufficiency. 6 The other party then is made up of all the superficial, the moment-bound, the here-bound ones, those who are totally absorbed with the trivial, those who are ‘plated with piety, not alloyed with it’, those who are reduced to the concrete, to the momentary and to the immediately selfish.[1] Almost, we could say, we wind up with adults, on the one hand, and children, on the other. (Maslow [1964] 2014: 68). 7 The reference to Tillich is intended: ‘And if, as actually happened on one platform, Paul Tillich defined religion as ‘concern with ultimate concerns’ and I then defined humanistic psychology in the same way, then what is the difference between a supernaturalist and a humanist? (Maslow [1964] 2014: 57). 8 By 1964 there was already a substantial research literature into psychedelics, including the 1955 paper ‘Clinical Reactions and Tolerance to LSD in Chronic Schizophrenia’ published in the reputable The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in which Cholden et al found that ‘tolerance to LSD in chronic schizophrenics is evidenced on the second and complete on the third day of drug administration. A period of 4 to 6 days free of LSD is necessary to reinstate the original reaction to LSD’ (Chloden 1955). The read across between LSD and Peak Experiences is made explicit on page 40, so it is a curiosity that the evidence of Chloden et al is ignored in favour of an opioid model of addiction. 9 One of the most disarming moments of Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences can be found in ‘Appendix F. Rhapsodic, Isomorphic Communications’ (Maslow 1962: 88) in which Maslow begins by extolling the value of the incitement of ‘emotional contagion’, a personal evangelism for peak experiences, and ends on a self-reflexive note: ‘I became fully aware of what I had been doing only after trying to describe

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it in a conversation with Dr. David Nowlis. But since then I have not been able to communicate in the same way’ (Maslow 1962: 94). Munro is the classification for mountains in Scotland which are over 3,000 feet high (914.4 metres). Eliade provides Maslow with an idealized sense of the debasement and detachment of the west in comparison with indigenous cultures: Eliade ‘defined primitive cultures as different from industrial cultures because they have kept their sense of the sacred about the basic biological things of life’ (Merton 1968: 111). Paul Kurtz discusses Stace in his 1963 article ‘Similarities and Differences Between Religious Mysticism and Drug-Induced Experiences’ which was published in Maslow’s Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Another example of the domination of VHS over the superior Betamax, of Walkers over Golden Wonder crisps.

Chapter 8 1 I have no view about quantifying the relative relation. As shown in Chapter 1, William James proposed that non-pathological and pathological mysticism were the ‘two halves’ of mysticism. My observation that The Varieties of Religious Experiences contains ‘214 narratives of religious experience’ (Carrette 2005: 86) most of which are not mystical compares unfavourably with the 180 beds at McLean psychiatric hospital in 1900 is suggestive of the figurative nature of James’s phrasing. 2 My reading is restricted to the experiential categories of psychosis, bipolar and dissociation which parallel (but do not map) the experiences of the extraordinary/ anomalous/extreme. 3 DSM I, 1952; DSM II, 1968; DSM III, 1980; DSM-III-R, 1987; DSM IV, 1994; DSM IV TR, 2000; DSM-5, 2013, DSM-5 TR, 2022. The TR refers to text revisions which are updates as opposed to new versions. 4 In The Social Construction of What? Ian Hacking suggests that Eugene Bleuler was fairly relaxed about the significance of auditory hallucinations, resulting in patients not seeking to disguise or suppress them, which had unintended consequence when Kurt Schneider subsequently privileged auditory hallucinations (Hacking 1999). 5 These are the 2013 DSM codes mapped onto the ICD 10 codes. 6 Although Spiegel’s bibliography makes no mention of I. M. Lewis’s Ecstatic Religion, Lewis’s concept of central and peripheral possession may find an echo in Spiegel’s example. 7 The consequences of the revisions to DSM-5 are difficult to overstate. US insurance companies may now have to consult with religious studies scholars, anthropologists and sociologists of ‘religion’ to provide the necessary expertise in assessing what

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does and does not constitute a ‘normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice’ (DSM 2013: 292) as this task is certainly beyond the professional expertise provided by a psychiatric training and the conservative elders in a community are likely to resist any challenge to their power base. 8 To add further confusion, there is already a syndrome named schizoaffective disorder which was theorized in 1930 and allows mood disorders to be accommodated with psychotic phenomenality. The DSM-5 comments, ‘There is growing evidence that schizoaffective disorder is not a distinct nosological category (APA 2013: 89–90) prior to presenting it as if it is’ (APA 2013: 105–10). 9 Tamara Herzig presents a fascinating analysis of the contrasting interpretation of visions and voices in the experiences of witches and saints in ‘Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramer's Ties with Italian Women Mystics’ (2006). 10 This analysis may well attract the usual criticisms of being too postmodern and so on based on the idea that anything goes means an absence of meaning, but it should be noted that my argument identifies deep cultural continuities which mitigate against such superficial critiques.

Chapter 9 1 Richard Bentall’s Madness Explained (2003) is a delightful and wise book about madness, but its title contains a misunderstanding of the logocentrism suggested in the idea of an explication. As Bentall suggests in his closing anecdote of a conversation with Marius Romme, there is a difference between cure and liberation (Bentall 2003: 511). 2 Habermas’s linguistic turn did not solve the problem of consciousness, it just inserted a set of assumptions about the meaningfulness of language and the integrity of those who participated in ‘communicative rationality’ and ‘discourse ethics’ which necessarily negate the ‘irrationality’ of madness. 3 It shouldn’t need to be said, but for the sake of absolute clarity and in case readers come to this without engaging in Part I of this book, I am not simplistically ‘equating’ James’s more, Otto’s numinous, Eliade’s Shamanism, Stace’s mysticism, Pahnke’s psychedelic experience or Maslow’s peak experiences, as each of these is constructed by its author in their time and place to satisfy their respective agendas. The legitimacy I claim for putting them in the same frame, as part of a non-pathological discourse of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme arises because each author proposes accounts which draws on the work of (some of) the others – see Part I. 4 Derrida gave this paper with Foucault in the audience; it represents a painfully exquisite example of the student overthrowing the master, resulting in a dramatic fissure.

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5 The recent publication of Foucault in California, subtitled A True Story – Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death (Wade 2019), is like a cherry on top of the extensive secondary literature included in Khalfa’s bibliography. 6 The parallel with the success story of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, in which Eliade’s relatively early text is interpreted via the prism of his whole body of production, is usefully brought to mind. 7 Henry Maudsley’s opposition to eugenics as a practical outworking of degeneration theory was grounded in his knowledge of the extent to which madness lay hidden across the English class system, including its attics. 8 http://www​.who​.int​/whr​/2001​/chapter2​/en​/index2​.html 9 It is a tender irony that Gallimard turned down History of Madness in 1961 but published the 1972 edition, two years after it published 20 volumes of Artaud as Oeuvres completes (1970). 10 The success of Foucault as public intellectual is measured in the seventeen pages of ‘critical bibliography on Foucault’s History of Madness’ (Foucault [1961] 2006: 677–93) included in Khalfa’s translation. 11 As Duncan et al. show in their 2019 paper ‘How Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) made traditional candidate gene studies obsolete’, the search for specific genes for specific mental disorders has been superseded, along with the $250 million spent pursuing that chimera. 12 This finding confirms a host of previous research papers: ‘Jablensky (1988), Kendler and Diehl (1993); McGuffin, Owen and Farmer (1995), supported by classic familial paradigms, adoption studies, and twin studies such as Gottesman (1991), Karlsson (2001), Tienati & Wynne (1994)’ cited in Nichols (2009). 13 Prevalence is different from incidence. According to Kirkbride (2012), ‘Incidence is the number of people who develop an illness for the first time, per year, in a given place; prevalence is the proportion of a defined community who already have or develop an illness at a particular time or during a specified period.’ Broadly speaking the difference is – by analogy – between the number of new students in a year (incidence) and the student population (prevalence). 14 Substituting madness for schizophrenia doesn’t resolve any of the difficulties of matching stone-age and contemporary experience, but it does lift them beyond the psychiatric gaze and allow scope for a serious consideration of the non-pathological role of inherited deviance unencumbered by the logocentrism of a classificatory system. 15 The Schizophrenia Commission (2012) comprised fourteen experts and for their report took evidence from a further eighty experts along with 2,500 people who responded to its online survey. The Commission was led by Sir Robin Murray, one of the UK’s leading psychiatrists and professor of psychiatric research at King’s College London.

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16 Jeremy Carrette pursues Foucault’s ‘Religious Question through the whole of Foucault’s oeuvre (to the extent that it was available to him at that time), but it transpires that this ‘Religious Question’ is a heuristic device, a ‘hermeneutical tool’ (Carrette 2000: 151) with which to address Foucault, never the mad. 17 Page 243 of Madness and Civilisation (Foucault [1965] 1988) contains a break in which pages 465–81 of the original text are excised from this shorter version, on which much of the secondary literature in English relies, as the full translation was published only in 2006. The decision to excise this passage is not proof but is indicative of its relative standing compared with the text which remained in the abridged version. 18 White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (Henrich 2010). 19 I have recently had this actual experience on a zoom call with the Phenolab – a theoretical laboratory on Phenomenology and Mental Health in Seville – where the psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs was launching his In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology. 20 It is tempting to have recourse to the phrase ‘lived experience’ here, but this is rapidly becoming jargon. As all experience is lived experience, the issue is lived experience of what? Psychosis? Madness? Disruption? Extraordinary/anomalous/ extreme experiences? The contemporary discourse of lived experience is becoming a pseudonym for institutional psychiatric relationships defined by diagnoses, pharmacology or incarceration rather than the excesses of madness. 21 Wouter Kusters gets this right by avoiding the definitive article in his offering: ‘A Philosophy of Madness’ ([2014] 2020). 22 Justin Garson’s Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (2022) provides yet another example of theorizing madness from within a psychiatric paradigm of dysfunction which prevents his argument about purpose from escaping the psychiatric gaze. 23 Just imagine the vetting process of a political party considering whether I would be an adequate candidate and how they would reconcile their ‘concerns’ with the equality act?

Chapter 10 1 I use the term ‘promulgated’ rather than ‘invented’ because these terms were not neologisms generated by Bleuler, but his early use of them was influential in their development. 2 The Bipolar Commission’s research was based on the ‘evidence of 2500 responses to surveys of people with bipolar, five regional summits, 30 stakeholders, 20 commissioners and expert advisors’ and a project board led by Professor Guy

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Goodwin. https://www​.bipolaruk​.org​/Blog​/bipolar​-commission​-research​-reveals​ -delay​-of​-95​-years​-to​-get​-accurate​-diagnosis​-of​-bipolar consulted 2/4/2022. ‘Religio’ is one of the string which Bonelli and Koenig use to search Pubmed as a source of psychiatric papers for their meta-analysis ‘Mental Disorders, Religion and Spirituality 1990–2010’ (Bonelli 2013). The other search string was ‘spiritu’. They found 5,200 returns for their combined search. Applying the same search strings (independently) to the bible returns a combined total of only 32 results. This is compelling evidence that religion and spirituality are anachronistic terms. Relevant context is found in the fact that a search for ‘Spirit’ in the bible produces 563 results. The (formulations of) religion or spiritual are, as J. Z. Smith suggests, second order terms, whoever uses them. The translation of yoga as religion in some editions is not best practice. By referencing Kant, I do not engage in his transcendental outworking, my reference is to his original epistemological position in the Critique of Pure Reason ([1781] 2003). Here, theory of mind (ToM) is used in the technical sense of mentalization, whereby my own theory about what you think is a projection which is limited by what I think it is likely (or possible) for you to think. (As a side note, this suggests why part of the difficulty mad people face in their alleged un-understandability arises from the inability of other people’s theory of mind to accommodate behaviour driven by ideas which may seem perfectly reasonable to the mad/ psychotic but which exceed the capacities of the observer.) When William James presented The Varieties of Religious Experience, with experience in the singular, the ‘varieties’ held the plurality of experiences in the mind of the reader. When ‘religious experience’ was separated in subsequent scholarship from the conditioning adjective ‘varieties’, the risk of essentialization has all too frequently become a reality (see later). British library, main catalogue, case insensitive, consulted on 26 April 2022. An example of McDaniel’s theoretical observation can be found in her subsequent treatment of America’s bestselling poet, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi: ‘He would see spirit beings (ruhaniyan) as he danced at the sama, and sometimes he would strip off his clothes and dance naked, “overcome by intense ecstatic emotion”, and he would give his clothes to other people there. Sometimes he would shout and cry until dawn in the streets, and his glance could bring people into ecstatic states’ (McDaniel 2018: 42). The reference to the ‘archaic remnant of an infantile past’ invokes Freud’s analysis of religion in The Future of an Illusion (Freud [1927] 1962). By the very act of bracketing, attention is brought to bear on the ‘thing’ to be bracketed which, in my opinion, bleeds beyond the brackets. The ways of thinking we bring to our subjects are not dealt with by removing them from play; by the intention to remove them from play, by bracketing, we put them in play, either by

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Notes overthinking or by misunderstanding the depth of our own cultural situatedness and our capacity to escape our own biases. There is no solution to continuity, there are no ‘modules’, this cannot be separated from that and conveniently isolated inside grammar. It is a matter of fact that in 1977 George Engel presented a two-part model – the biological and the psychosocial. The reading of the biopsychosocial model as a three-part model is a subsequent development. The question of whether psycho would be better read as psyche is a matter of interest. From my mad studies perspective, I say ‘proxies’ rather than ‘symptoms’ as the visions and voices and possessions are also the things in themselves of experience rather than just the outward signs. Form and substance are inseparable in acute religious experiences. McCutcheon is a sophisticated author but, here, his use of the term ‘privilege’ invokes the elitism characteristic of theorists such as Walter Stace (Chapter 5), but as a negative, and he is identifying the limits of his empirical method as if these were somehow a failure on the part of a subject because it exceeds his empirical method. My re-contextualization of such experiences within the domain of madness provides an opportunity for a broader reflection, set out later. It is here that I resist all psychosis being reduced to the representation of schizophrenia (Chapter 8) in the simplifying approach which seeks to homogenize madness. The psychologists Pechey and Halligan (2012) concur with the idea of a continuum but push the total number of people with psychotic-like symptoms or experiences up to 24 per cent, based on their clinical population of 1,000. That psychiatrists face a theoretical challenge as to how to accommodate the positive and negative symptoms of ‘their’ category of schizophrenia is a problem within that construct which I don’t have to solve. My focus is on the role of acute religious experiences as a differentiation within the study of religious experience, the neurocognitive analysis of what is happening, for example, vis-a-vis the default mode network (DMN) is beyond the scope of this text but invites further consideration elsewhere.

Chapter 11 1 There is a concept known as ‘Marcan priority’ in biblical studies, in which the Gospel of Mark is understood as the first and simplest account of Jesus. The other synoptic Gospels (Matthew and Luke) had additional sources, including a common text known as Q (no relation to Q anon) and, some argue more specific cultural agendas. The Gospel of John is a matter of considerable debate with interest in it

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currently on the ascendency. In the Marcan priority there is no suggestion that Mark’s account lacked an agenda, just that it was less elaborate. By analogy, I read Mark here in a similar way to my reading of Foucault’s History of Madness rather than Foucault’s oeuvre. A longer work could readily incorporate a ‘thicker’ reading, but I suggest that the outcome would not differ significantly as the features of the baptism and the transfiguration are common to Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is a notable fact that Jesus is never recorded as visiting the new Hellenized city of Tiberius on the coast of the sea of Galilee. Binet-Sanglé is named in footnote 1 of The Varieties of Religious Experience (James [1902] 1985: 13) as one of the ‘medical materialists’. Schweitzer published this when he was thirty-eight as part of his doctorate in medicine. He already had a doctorate in theology and had published Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung in 1906, which was translated as The Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1910 and effectively brought the ‘first quest’ to an end. The Goldwater rule – the informal name given to Section 7.3 in the American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics – was agreed in 1973 after a 1964 libel case involving Senator Barry Goldwater. The gist is that a person cannot be diagnosed without a personal meeting; the implication is that all retrospective diagnosis is unethical. There are significant issues about logocentrism, knowledge exchange, the role of universities and their presence in cities. I suggest that any treatment of modernity as totalizing or comprehensive does not reflect reality and should be resisted. This allows the idea of pre-modern or non-modern as viable ways of thinking about the richness of places and spaces where modernity has never been relevant or has not reshaped popular epistemology. Instances such as India are key examples, where ruling elites went to Oxford (Nehru) or Lincoln Inn’s Fields (Jinnah) and the English medium school system incorporated European presuppositions against the backdrop of a much richer and deeper indigenous non-modern culture. But this analysis should not be restricted to colonized India; the United States retains a complex relationship with modernity with recent evidence finding that 67 per cent of Americans do not believe in the Darwinian interpretation/understanding of evolution through natural selection. https://www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2019​ /02​/11​/darwin​-day/. Constructs such as the World Health Organisation’s ‘Present State Examination’, a semi-structured interview intended to provide an objective evaluation of symptoms associated with mental disorders, contains 140 items. It may engage with the idea of a ‘clinical history’, but this term should not be understood as ‘history’, as the production is an examination of the ‘present state’ of the person. The answers given when (say) psychotic are radically different from the answers given when depressed even though the same ‘historical’ data is at stake.

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8 The Jesus Seminars and their (quasi)-successor, the Jesus project, which sought to address the evidence of the historical Jesus may be analogically compared to the search for the specific genes which ‘explain’ the disorders in the psychiatric classificatory systems. The absence of a contribution of both psychiatry and a robust post-structural approach to the culturally constructing and mediating role of language may have obstructed an appropriate understanding of the complex relationship between speech, text and (for want of a better form of words) the totality of reality which is not constructed from words within a text. 9 It is neither necessary nor possible to establish the causal relationship between ritual and the event, but the coincidence is, or should be, a matter of interest to psychiatrists and it is echoed in the attention to ‘ceremonial’ detail currently being explored in psychedelic therapy (cf. Timmerman 2021). 10 Whether this dialogue is internal or external is a moot point which is not resolved by the reference to Satan. 11 In Matthew and Luke, the hubris of power is formally suggested by the figures of the power over nature, personal invincibility and political power. 12 That paranoid schizophrenia remains prevalent in ‘popular’ (i.e., non-professionalpsychiatric) culture is yet another instance of the psychiatric public relations deficit. 13 It is notable that the Bipolar UK, the charity, argues that substantial work promotions contribute to more manic episodes than substance abuse. 14 Unless Jn 12.28-30 is considered to be a remnant of the accounts in the synoptic gospels28 – ‘“Father, glorify your name!” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.”’29 The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.30 Jesus said, ‘This voice was for your benefit, not mine.’ The contrasting explanations are of interest in this thesis as is the disavowal that the voice was for Jesus’s benefit. 15 The additional reference is in the second letter of Peter where Peter (the identification of the author is a contentious matter within biblical studies) writes, ‘we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honour and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain’ (2 Pet. 1.1618). This eye-witness account is consistent with my treatment of the event. 16 I appreciate that some believe that all Jesus’s movements conformed to god’s plan; this is a meta-theoretical presupposition which I do not accept as it denies contingency. 17 The Greek Basileia tou Theou (which may translate the Aramaic term ‘malkut’) can be read without reference to ‘King’ as it primarily refers to the subject of power. The predilection for a monarchical interpretation makes less sense when considered in the context of the theocratic system prevailing in Jesus’s time. As a metaphor

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‘King’ may be useful as a means of identifying the origin of power as a conceptual singularity, but it distracts from many of Jesus’s teachings about the offer/possibility of the existential reality of god’s power in the lives of those who choose to see the world differently. The greater difficulty is that ‘King’ as a metaphor draws on the tarnished concept found in the history of human political institutions making Jesus’s teaching about subordination to authority rather than establishing a different way of seeing. I refrain from the language of ‘dominant’ and ‘sub-dominant’ (in the same way that I refrain from the language of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘subaltern’) as these terms already occupy different meanings through their established relationship with other discourses. This range of diagnostic possibilities should be taken as another example of the lack of ‘fit’ of specific psychiatric categories to the diversity of human experience and the role of judgement in the differential diagnosis of the psychiatric process (cf. Chapter 8). Here, there is clearly a wider research question about the role of ‘charismatic’ leaders and the asymmetry of intersubjectivity with their followers, which is beyond the scope of this work. The ICD followed this approach by abolishing the ICD 10 construct of Induced Delusional Disorder with the launch of ICD 11 in 2019. The DSM IV TR continues: ‘If the relationship with the primary case is interrupted, the delusional beliefs of the other individual usually diminish or disappear’ (APA 2000: 333). This has interesting implications in a consideration of Pentecost, which is beyond the scope of my reading of Mark where the earliest manuscripts end on Easter Sunday. The lingering image of gross madness in William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century cartoons may still dominate the imaginations of those with no direct experience. ‘Mundanitizing’ is the rhetorical obverse of Weber’s ‘disenchanting’. The two terms are synonyms. The suggestion that Jesus presented himself as the Messiah presupposes a strategic intentionality which the evidence in Mark does not support. Mark thinks Jesus is the Messiah (anointed one), but the evidence he presents does not confirm Jesus’s self-understanding of this role from the outset (the baptism/wilderness). It is more plausible to argue that such a self-understanding was an unfolding process not a starting position and that after the transfiguration his death in Jerusalem during the festival would have unspecified but significant consequences. The ‘cultural formulation’ and the ‘cultural formulation interview’ in the DSM5 (APA 2013: 749–59) provide evidence of contemporary psychiatric thinking about such issues. Unfortunately, they are entirely framed as a person presenting a ‘problem’ to a psychiatrist within the context of a clinical encounter. Such a limited view is unlikely to include people who are directly engaged in acute religious

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Notes experiences. And even if such an interview occurred, the first introductory phrasing, ‘I would like to understand the problems that bring your family member/ friend here so that I can help you and him/her more effectively. I want to know about your experience and ideas. I will ask some questions about what is going on and how you and your family member/friend are dealing with it. There are no right or wrong answers’ (APA 2013), starts by ignoring the problem of ineffability which is a central feature of experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme. It is entirely presumptive to suppose that a psychiatrist can ‘understand’ the explanations given; it is entirely likely that the demand for a rational explanation puts interrogative pressure on the person, which enhances the likelihood of ‘disorganized speech’. Mark immediately follows this with ‘When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah” (Mk 15.35), ironically underscoring the potential for dissonance between saying and hearing. The elaboration of the genealogical relationship between John and Jesus is exclusive to the Gospel of Luke. Given twenty-first-century scepticism towards miracles, healing and casting out demons, the narration of the presence of crowds provides sufficient evidence that something special was going on. To make sure the reader doesn’t miss the point, Mark explicitly includes three versions of Jesus predicting his own death. The fact that one of these in Mk 8.31 precedes the Transfiguration reflects the fact that Mark does not read the Transfiguration as the ictal pivot point where the transition from the first part of his engagement with people is transformed into Jesus’s metacognitive intentionality to die in Jerusalem. In a non-western context, the motivations of Japanese kamikaze pilots and muslim suicide bombers are under-researched; for all the possible coercion, the role of duty and the promise of compensation in the next life provide alternative approaches that make death a rational choice. The general willingness to fight and die for Queen and country is rarely subjected to psychiatric study in terms of ‘risk to self and others’. The presence of such cognitive dissonances in the twenty-first century require further self-reflexive consideration prior to any dismissal on moral grounds of an account of Jesus’s state of mind based on the narrative evidence of what happened and what he did. The narrative of whether anything would be consequential to obedience is never explained in Genesis 22. That the festival of atonement would have been more congruent to the actions of one person is a matter which I can only note. It is echoed in the question of why Pahnke thought Good Friday was a good choice of festivals for the pursuit of mystical experiences (Chapter 6). The power of a festival, any festival, creates a

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heightened cultural moment of significance. Much of the christian calendar is still understood in terms of days before or days after the moment of a festival. Jesus conforms to all conventional readings of martyrdom (Mitchell 2012) but is never included among the martyrs. In a conversation with this author, the view suggested was that the theological burdens placed on Jesus diminished the relevance of this category which might, otherwise, subsume Jesus into a lesser status. The US National Criminal Justice Reference Service includes a 2005 report which explores this phenomenon; this link is to the abstract https://www​.ncjrs​.gov​/App​/ abstractdb​/AbstractDBDetails​.aspx​?id​=209318 In Borg and Crossan’s account, by entering Jerusalem on a donkey, Jesus mocks Pilate’s simultaneous entry in a different part of Jerusalem. Pilate’s entry was ‘a visual panoply of imperial power’, according to Borg and Crossan (2008: 4). In a recent discussion of Max Weber https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/programmes​/ m0015b6r Tom Wright, David Bell and Linda Woodhead glossed over his ‘breakdown’ and institutionalization in 1900, while noting that the post-ictal consequence was the writing of his most important work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. That his wife burned his autobiographical account to protect his reputation from the stigma of madness is typical, and typically overlooked, but speaks to many of the subtextual issues which haunt this text.

Conclusion 1 I have watched Ann Taves road-test different formulations, from ‘involuntary experiences’ in 1999, ‘the special’ in 2009, ‘revelatory events’ in 2016 and ‘nonordinary experiences’ in 2020 and 2022 and empathize with the challenge of articulating such experiences in ways that (1) create sufficient distance from culturebound tropes (such as mysticism) to allow a recognition of diversity, and (2) avoid the bluntness of psychiatric terms such as psychopathology which trigger scholarly defences reinforcing disciplinary fissures and (3) are sufficiently transparent to mitigate against reification but (4) are sufficiently meaningful to intuitively communicate an author’s subject matter. My offering of ‘acute religious experiences’ hopefully meets these tests.

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Index Alles, Gregory  23 Alpert, Richard (Ram Dass)  75, 76 ambivalence  6, 12, 145, 166–9, 185–8, 190 American Psychiatric Association  45, 85, 101–22, 133, 134, 159, 165, 167, 181, 183, 186 abnormal/normal  102 disruption (see disruption) dissociative identity disorder (see dissociative identity disorder) DSM-5 (see DSM-5) DSM I-IV  85, 104, 105, 109–11, 181, 183 pathological discourse  101–2 psychosis (see psychosis) schizophrenia (see schizophrenia) Artaud Antonin  126–8 authorial control (lack of)  6, 20, 35, 36, 67, 69, 87, 141, 198 autoethnography  142 being mad  143 Beresford, Peter  140 Berger, Peter  84 bhagavad gita  31, 35, 62, 146 bias  14, 17, 37, 61, 64, 94, 95, 117, 120, 125, 138, 144, 152, 157, 183. See also WEIRD (sample selection) Binet-Sanglé, Charles  11, 176, 178, 185 biopsychosocial model  18, 147, 154 Bipolar Commission  145 bipolar disorder  3, 119–20, 130, 145, 181 Bleuler, Eugen  108, 127, 145, 166 Boddy, Janice  3, 43, 115, 156 Böhme, Jakob  28, 31, 64 Bond, Helen  189, 190 Borg, Marcus  190, 191 Bucke, R. M.  57, 62, 64, 68, 82 the burning bush  31, 62, 133 Carrette, Jeremy  12, 129

Chalmers, David  148 charismatic  36 charismatic (movement)  44 Chidester, David  107 Childs, Hal  182 Clark, Walter  20, 72, 77, 82 cognitive science of religion  40, 196 Cohen, Emma  3, 40, 43, 156 colonialism  3, 12, 21, 57, 70, 71, 73, 79, 101, 114, 121, 138–40, 155, 157, 158, 162, 170, 181 comparison  4, 24, 36, 39, 51, 54, 80, 82, 92, 101, 104, 123, 149, 162, 168, 181, 184, 198 Cooper, David  124 Costa, Lucy  137 Crenshaw, Kimberlé  138–9 Crossan, John Dominic  182, 190–1 deficit/negative symptoms  118–21, 163, 180 Deleuze, Gilles  127 delusional disorder  108, 183 Derrida, Jacques  2, 88, 107, 124, 127, 140, 141, 154 devil (the)  41, 42, 44, 46, 164, 167 differential diagnosis  116–17, 133 disruption  106, 111–18, 121, 123, 153–5, 157, 165, 167, 168, 170, 182, 184, 188, 189, 192–4, 198 dissociative identity disorder  41, 85, 106, 119–21, 123, 133, 152, 165, 169, 186 DSM-5 111–18 and multiple personality disorder  42, 105 Drobin, Ulf  54 Drugs and Mysticism  3, 75–83, 86, 96 DSM-5 4, 18, 41, 45, 85, 123, 133, 149, 152, 153, 165, 167, 195, 198 American Psychiatric Association  101–22

Index and Jesus  178, 180–1, 183, 186, 194 Durkheim, Emil  150 Eckhart  31, 64–6 ecstasy  3, 13, 17, 27, 40, 47–50, 52–5, 60, 66, 68, 70, 87, 92, 97, 136, 159, 160, 163, 168 Eliade, Mircea  3, 6, 24, 40, 47–56, 59, 70, 96, 101, 102, 152, 156, 158, 166 Altaian  48–9 bouffée délirante  51 didactic  52–5 ecstasy/ecstatic  48–50, 52–3, 55 mad/madness  51–6 pathology  51–4, 56, 59 shamanism (see shamanism) Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy  3, 40,  47–56 Engel, George  154 the enlightenment  1, 23, 42–4, 57, 130 epidemiology  107, 129, 132 epistemological injustice  12, 104, 138 evil  28, 74, 93, 164 evolution (stage theory)  21, 23, 25, 28, 32, 34, 36, 39, 54, 63, 69 evolutionary psychiatry  129–33, 196 excess/positive symptoms  5, 13, 20, 30, 67, 118–19, 121, 128, 136, 163, 170, 180 explanatory pluralism  2, 11, 106, 113, 115, 123, 134, 152, 171, 195, 197 extraordinary/anomalous/extreme  1–5, 9, 17, 18, 20, 23, 27, 29–31, 33, 34, 36–8, 40, 43–7, 49, 50, 61, 62, 70, 75, 79, 87, 96, 101–3, 106, 110, 111, 113, 115, 121, 123, 134, 136, 144, 148–57, 165, 167, 168, 170, 177, 182–4, 186, 188, 189, 193–6, 198 factor analysis  29, 57, 96 feminist/feminism  2, 68, 91, 137–9 Fitzgerald, Timothy  146, 157–9 fly agaric (mushroom)  73 Foreman, Robert  60 Foucault, Michel  4, 12, 39, 48, 123–44, 158, 195 History of Madness  4, 123–38, 195 Hôpital Général  125–6, 136

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Madness and Civilisation  124, 126, 128, 135 ouevres  125–8 religion  134–7 world of horror  125–7 Freud, Sigmund  32, 35, 74, 85, 90, 94, 105, 152, 178 Fricker, Miranda  12, 104 genetics  4, 5, 19, 111, 129–32, 134, 144, 149, 152, 164, 165, 170, 195–7 Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS)  119, 130, 131 God  19, 23–5, 28, 33, 44, 62, 63, 67, 71, 77, 80, 86, 103, 104, 133–7, 141, 146, 147, 150, 162, 164, 167, 168, 179, 182, 185, 187–90, 193, 194, 196 Good Friday experiment  76–7, 83, 88 Gospel of Mark  5, 21, 172, 175–94 Griffiths, Roland  29, 86 Harner, Michael  55, 59, 141 Harvard  10, 12, 72, 75, 76, 83, 96, 176 hindu  5, 19, 39, 57–8, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 92, 131, 168 homogenous human  40, 60, 130, 137, 155, 165, 196, 197 Hood, Ralph  29, 96, 164 Hubert, Dreyfus  129 Huxley, Aldous  58 Hyman, Stephen  60, 110–11, 117, 120, 122 International Classification of Diseases (ICD)  125 Isaiah  31, 62, 185 Islam/Muslim  5, 25, 39, 65, 75, 92, 134, 149. See also Sufi/Sufism James, William  3, 9–22, 24, 31–3, 39, 45, 57, 59, 61, 64, 75, 77, 96, 101, 121, 135, 139, 149, 150, 152, 159–61, 166, 170, 171, 187, 188, 195 consciousness  10, 11, 13–18, 21 halves of mysticism  11–13 mad/madness  9, 12–14, 17–19, 21, 22

252 method  9, 11, 13, 15–17, 139 the ‘More’  9, 18, 24, 31, 59, 145, 163 ‘mystical ladder’  14–17 mystics  13–14, 17 pathological programme  11, 13, 17–18 religion  19–20 The Varieties of Religious Experience  2, 3, 9–22, 33, 39, 55, 59, 61, 65, 135 Jamieson, Kay Redfield  12, 18 Jaspers Karl  35, 150, 160 Jesus  5, 24, 36, 62, 65, 90, 101, 162, 175–94, 197 baptism/wilderness  5, 175, 179–82, 184–9 last week (holy week)  190–3 transfiguration  5, 62, 90, 175, 180–90 Johns Hopkins  72 Jung, C G  6, 24, 35, 54, 141 Katz, Steven  68, 168 Kazen, Thomas  178 Klüver, Heinrich  73 Kraepelin, Emil  79, 85, 104, 105, 109, 120, 127, 130, 132 Kusters, Wouter  153 Laddis, Andreas  117 Laing, Ronald  124 Leary, Timothy  67, 72, 75–7, 79, 80, 86, 197 LeFrançois, Brenda  140 Lélut, Louis Francisque  177 Lewis, I M  43, 45, 50, 157, 160 LGBTQ+/Homosexuality  12, 69, 105, 137, 139 Lincoln, Bruce  54, 151, 159 Linnaeus, Carl  107–8 logocentric/logocentrism  61, 104, 107, 108, 118, 120, 132, 142, 147, 158 Lowell, Robert  12, 17, 18 LSD  74, 76, 83, 84, 87 Luckman, Thomas  84 McCutcheon, Russell  146 McDaniel, June  3, 70, 151, 159 McGilchrist, Iain  123

Index McGorry, Patrick  109–10, 118 McLean, Katherine  87 McLean hospital  12, 13, 17, 18, 176 mad studies  1–2, 36, 45, 55, 88, 115, 127, 137–41, 144, 156, 171, 178, 179, 184, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193 Maslow, Abraham  2, 3, 20, 75, 90–7, 101, 102, 117, 145, 156, 170, 195 ‘Being’  91 dichotomies  91–3, 96 higher and lower  90–1 peak experiences  2, 3, 75, 90–7, 102, 117, 145, 152, 156, 163, 170 psychology  90–2, 94–6 religion  91–7 Religions, Values and Peak Experiences  2, 3, 90, 94, 96 sampling  94–5 serious/superficial  93 Maudsley, Henry  176 Mayes, Rick  105 Meggitt, Justin  178 Merry Pranksters  74 Merton, Thomas  95 Metzner, Ralph  79 Meyer, Adolf  85, 105 Mikhailowski, V.M.  47–8, 50 Mikolajczyk, Renata  150 Mohr, Sylvia  168 Müller, Max  64, 107 Murray, Evan  184 mystical experience questionnaire (MEQ)  29, 86 mysticism  3, 5, 9, 11–14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 46, 54, 57–71, 75–83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 96, 97, 118, 139, 141, 154, 156, 158, 162, 168, 170, 195, 196, 197 Nataraja  70 National Biodiversity Network  73 neurodiversity  165 Nietzsche, Friedrich  48, 71 normal distribution curve  15–17, 30, 37, 84, 118, 119, 121, 163 numinous  3, 6, 23–37, 39, 56, 75, 92, 94, 96, 102, 141, 143, 145, 152, 156, 161, 163, 170

Index Oesterreich T K  3, 20, 38–46, 101, 102, 117, 120, 162, 166, 180 Exorcist (the)  41 parapsychology  42, 44 pathology  38, 41–4, 46 Pentecostal  43–4 possession (see possession) Possession Demoniacal and Other  38, 39, 41 Osmond, Humphry  74, 85 Otto Rudolf  3, 6, 20, 23–37, 47, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 66, 70, 93, 94, 96, 101, 102, 153, 155, 170, 171, 195 consciousness  23, 25–31, 33, 36 Das Heilige/The Idea of the Holy  23– 6, 28, 30, 33, 35, 36 evolution  23, 25, 28, 34, 36 Harvey, John (translator)  23, 30 holy  25, 26, 28, 32, 34 irrational/non-rational  23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 34 mad/madness  27, 29, 31, 33, 37 modernity  23–4 numen  25, 28, 31, 33 numinous (see numinous) Pahnke, Walter  3, 20, 69, 72–89, 96, 101, 102, 118, 121, 141, 158, 170, 198 disciplinary context  72–4 Drugs and Mysticism  3, 75–83, 86, 96 Good Friday experiment (Marsh Chapel)  76–83 principle of causal indifference  68–9, 83 psilocybin  73–89 psychedelic experience and psychosis  74, 84–6 and Stace  75, 76, 78–84, 86–8 Paine, Thomas  130 Partridge, Christopher  26, 45, 54–5, 68 peak experiences  2, 3, 75, 90–7, 102, 117, 145, 152, 156, 163, 170 perennial  5, 18–19, 58, 60, 61, 92, 151, 197 phenomenology  49, 141, 150, 153, 169 Pinel, Philippe  103 placeholders  6, 29, 30, 71, 113, 115, 116, 121, 123, 147, 149, 154, 157, 158, 168, 170, 171, 184, 194, 198

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plasticity  4, 43, 85, 105, 117–18, 120, 121, 136, 147, 151, 153, 156, 161, 169–70, 198 Plato  1, 88 Pócs, Éva  156 Pollan, Michael  76, 77, 86 possession  1, 2, 4, 5, 14, 27, 28, 35, 38–46, 55, 69, 70, 78, 101, 106, 112–17, 119, 120, 133, 139, 141, 150, 151, 155–7, 163–7, 169, 170, 180, 186, 195, 197, 198 psychosis  1, 5, 37, 41, 45, 56, 74, 84, 85, 103, 104, 109–11, 118–22, 129–34, 137, 144, 149, 154, 165, 168, 176, 181, 184, 187, 195, 198 continuum/spectrum  37, 118 mystical experiences  84–5, 118 as pathological  1, 4, 5, 41, 105, 111, 122, 134, 149, 198 positive and negative symptoms  118–19 psychotic disorders  109–10 visions and voices  119–20, 195 Rabinow, Paul  129 racism  21, 28, 68 Ramakrishna  63, 64, 66, 70 Rashed, Mohammed Abouelleil  150 reification  6, 60, 110–11 Richards, William A  76, 84, 85, 88 Ripke, Stephan  130 Rokeach, Milton  162 Rolland, Romain  32 Royal College of Psychiatrists  161 Russell, Bertrand  58–9, 71 sadhus  129, 146, 147, 155, 162, 166, 185, 196 Sanders E. P.  192 Şar, Vedat  117 schizoaffective disorder  3, 108, 181 schizophrenia  1, 3, 6, 12, 35, 41, 45, 60, 61, 79, 104, 108–10, 112, 117–20, 129–33, 139, 145, 146, 154, 166, 168, 176, 180–1, 186, 196 anachronism  131–3 dementia praecox  12, 108, 109, 166 DSM-5 108–10

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Index

evolution  129–30 iconic  109, 117, 120, 132 Jesus  180–1 prevalence  130 Schizophrenia Commission  134–6 schizophreniform disorder  108–10, 133 Schmidt, Bettina  3, 44–5 Schneck, Jerome  124 Schweitzer, Albert  24, 25, 94, 176, 178–9, 185 Scull, Andrew  105 shamanism  3, 5, 43, 46–56, 59, 61, 70, 72, 75, 78, 79, 115, 116, 121, 141, 143, 152, 156, 157, 163, 164, 170, 196–8 shared psychotic disorder  183 Sharf, Robert  113 Shirokogoroff S. M.  50 slave trade  43–4 Sluhovsky, Moshe  41 Smith, Frederick  70 Smith, Huston  76, 80, 86 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell  160 Smith J Z  54 soma  73, 131 Spears, Britney  162 Spiegel, David  113–14, 118, 169 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  2, 138, 144, 158 Stace Walter  3, 6, 32, 57–71, 75, 76, 78–84, 86–8, 94, 96, 101, 102, 118, 141, 145, 152, 153, 156, 170, 195, 197, 198 consciousness  59, 60, 62, 63, 67, 71 extrovertive and introvertive mysticism  61–8, 70 family resemblance  64, 68 mad/madness  60, 62, 68, 70, 74 mysticism (see mysticism)

Mysticism and Philosophy  3, 57, 58, 64, 69–71, 75, 76, 83, 87, 88 principle of causal indifference  66–9, 83 reification  59–61 and Russell  58–9, 71 sui generis  64, 67 Stahl, Eli  119, 130 sufi/sufism  19, 61, 149–51, 164, 166, 196 sui generis  27, 36, 48–9, 56, 64, 67, 79, 102, 156 Suzuki D. T.  57, 62, 95 Symonds, J. A.  65, 68, 69 Taves, Ann  3, 9, 21, 35, 146, 157 Teresa (of Avila)  64, 66–8, 160 Timmermann, Chris  53 typology  14, 76, 80–4, 88, 141, 153, 155 Underhill, Evelyn  26, 58, 69, 82 Van Gogh, Vincent  126–8 Van Os, Jim  37, 108, 164, 178 Van Praag, Herman  152 visions and voices  1, 2, 4, 5, 14, 18, 27, 45, 62, 66, 68, 70, 78, 101, 106, 119, 120, 122, 133, 139, 141, 151, 155, 156, 160, 165, 167, 180, 186, 195, 197, 198 Wasson, Robert Gordon  73, 78, 80 WEIRD (sample selection)  79, 138, 142, 155, 158, 192, 196 Wellcome Trust  122 West, Kanye  162 Wittgenstein Ludwig  48, 64 World Health Organization (WHO)  125 World Psychiatric Association  152 Wulff, David  94, 95