An Annotated Bibliography: Further Readings and Reliable Resources !

If you have enough book space, I don’t want to talk to you. British fantasy author Terry Pratchett

There is only so much one can say and cover in any single book, but this basic fact of human finitude is particularly extreme in a book like Comparing Religions, which attempts to say at least something about pretty much everything. We are, of course, aware of the inherent impossibility (or absurdity) of such a project. As a partial response, we are providing the present annotated bibliography as a running commentary on the published text. A bibliography is a list of books, essays, and, more recently, Internet sources on a particular subject or theme. An annotated bibliography is a list of such sources that contains descriptive or interpretive comments on each of its entries. These descriptive or evaluative summaries are called annotations. They are generally composed of brief sentences, which do not need to be sentences in the full grammatical sense. In some cases here, we have taken this genre further and turned some of these annotations into mini-essays on a particular comparative topic or body of literature that we did not have space to treat in the textbook. We have written all of this with the introductory student and the traditional undergraduate research paper in mind. We have listed only easily accessible English sources. It is important to know, however, that there are immensely sophisticated literatures on the study of religion in other languages, including and especially French and German. Generally speaking, we have focused in this annotated bibliography on texts that fulfill one or more of the following five criteria:

1. the work is explicitly comparative in nature; 2. the work is relatively accessible and not addressed only to other scholars; 3. the work is one of the definitive works on a subject featured in the respective chapter; 4. the work is about a relevant topic that we were not able to treat in the chapter; and/or 5. the work offers an alternative or counter view to those highlighted in the chapter.

As with all rules, there are a few exceptions to these general criteria in what follows, but these were our basic principles. Finally, it is important to note that we have not listed sources that we employed and cited in the chapters themselves, as those sources and our commentary on them can easily be found there. It seemed redundant to repeat that material here. What this means for the undergraduate researcher is that any initial study of a particular subject should include both the chapter material, where many of the classic texts on that subject are treated or at least cited, and the annotated bibliography material, where more material is annotated. Another way of saying this is that the annotated bibliography should not be used alone, as it was not written to stand alone. It was written as a supplement to the chapters, whose material is assumed. We are fully aware, of course, that students will be tempted to simply Google a topic or go to Wikipedia for their research. This can be a helpful beginning, for sure, and there is a vast amount of wonderful material available on the Internet (we have included some of it below). Still, such simple searches seldom constitute adequate research, and it is a dubious comparative method that relies entirely on a computer program to perform one’s observation, selection, pattern recognition, and classification, much less one’s theorizing of what these observations and data mean. Internet search engines are basically comparative engines (they look for similarities and differences), but they work with very primitive comparative principles. They do not call this “surfing” for nothing. Generally speaking, such methods are only a kind of cognitive skimming on the surface of things. Here, then, is a bibliography of reliable resources for the serious student who wants to do real research, as opposed to superficial surfing. The vast majority of these are “peer-reviewed,” that is, they are only published after being anonymously reviewed and critically analyzed by other scholars. This does not make them perfect or entirely objective, of course. As we have repeatedly made clear, there is no such thing as pure objectivity. The peer review process, then, does not render a source infallible or neutral. It simply assures its over-all quality and the likelihood that it can function as an accurate barometer of the state and direction of the discussion in question at the particular point in time it was published (hence the importance of !2 dates attached to the publication details). The present annotated bibliography follows the discussions of the chapters of Comparing Religions. The books are arranged in each section, more or less, along the lines and development of the chapter discussion. What follows makes absolutely no pretense to completion or exhaustion. Indeed, the real question when writing this was always “So, where do we stop?” For this and simple digital reasons (read: cheap and easy to update), we consider this part of Comparing Religions to be very much a work in progress. Any further suggestions for additions to this annotated bibliography would be much appreciated. Please supply both a full reference and a brief one- or two-sentence annotation, as we have done for the references below. Such suggested additions can be submitted here: hyperlink. !

Introduction: Beginnings !

In fact, if I went back to college today, I think I would probably major in comparative religion, because that’s how integrated it is in everything that we are working on and deciding and thinking about in life today.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, 7 August 2013 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4461670 !

The Introduction attempts to set the tone or spirit of the comparative project as a whole. Here are a few books that capture especially well this same spirit or “feel” of the comparative study of religion, from either an autobiographical or a biographical perspective. !

!3 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: Life of Friedrich Max Muller (Chatto and Windus, 1974). The range and scope of this book has since been surpassed by the work of Lourens van den Bosch (cited in chapter 2), but Chaudhuri’s biography remains a wonderful introduction to both the life of a pioneering scholar and the birth of the professional study of comparative religion. That it is written by a major Bengali intellectual adds a rich cross-cultural perspective.

Aril L. Goldman, The Search for God at Harvard (Ballantine Books, 1992). Although technically about the graduate study of religion, this remains one of the best books on the promises, costs, and culture of the comparative study of religion at any level. Written by an Orthodox Jewish journalist working at The New York Times who took a year off to study at Harvard Divinity School, the book inspired a number of imitations and attempted traditionalist responses, but none that measure up to the original.

Diana L. Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). As an intellectual and spiritual autobiography from one of the most accomplished scholars of comparative religion working today, this book captures beautifully what it can mean for someone from a Christian background to study religion comparatively. Reads well in conjunction with Goldman, who studied with Eck at Harvard Divinity School.

Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (New York: HarperOne, 1995). Although not technically an autobiography, this book by New Testament scholar Marcus Borg contains autobiographical material and captures especially well what can happen when a person of faith takes up the tools of the modern study of religion and engages them seriously and deeply. Very accessible.

Dana Sawyer, Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper. Living the World’s Religions (Louisville, Kentucky: Vons Vitae, 2014). This is the definitive biography of the man who helped pioneer the comparative study of religion in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s. Sawyer treats Smith’s life and work both sympathetically and critically. Unlike the Goldman and Eck books, this is not an autobiography, although Smith has written one of those as well: Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography (New York: HarperOne, 2010).

!4 Jon R. Stone, The Craft of Religious Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). A collection of fourteen autobiographical essays by major scholars of religion, explaining why they do what they do and how they do it. This volume is particularly helpful for its first-person descriptions of a wide range of comparative methods, from the philosophical to the sociological.

Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffe, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1989). Jung’s life and thought had a tremendous influence on the development of the study of religion in the twentieth century. This is his autobiography, written with Jaffe. It captures well Jung’s spiritual journey from his early disillusionment with Lutheran Christianity to the eventual development of his own comparative practice: depth psychology. !

1. Comparison in Global History: If Horses Had Hands !

In all ages people have distinguished interaction with superhuman powers from other forms of action. In different times and cultures, religious actors and institutions have seen each other as similar, no matter whether this perception was expressed in competition and polemics or in cooperation, assimilation, and identification.

Martin Riesbrodt, The Promise of Salvation, A Theory of Religion, xii !

Chapter 2 seeks to demonstrate that comparison is neither exclusively modern nor western, that it reaches back, particularly in its implicit theological and mythological forms, as far as we can see in the historical record. Here are some works that supplement, challenge, and extend those discussions. ! !5 We immediately began to discuss different models of God, that is, different theologies: monotheism, polytheism, cosmotheism, and panentheism, for example. Monotheism and polytheism are reasonably clear, and we discussed cosmotheism in theh chapter. Panentheism, however, is likely confusing to the reader. Two helpful resources here are:

John W. Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2006). An extremely helpful and detailed history of the idea in western culture by a Christian Evangelical intellectual who does not like the model but nevertheless finds it important. A model of intellectual engagement and intellectual generosity.

Loriliai Biernacki and Philip Clayton, eds., Panentheism across the World’s Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). An important volume demonstrating that panentheism is hardly restricted to western religion but can be found throughout the world religions. Also includes thoughtful discussions on why panentheism is becoming more prominent today via the development of various global spiritualities. !

The Birth of Interpretation

In this same chapter, we spend some time discussing polytheism as an implicit form of comparativism, mostly in the light of the work of Jan Assmann. Polytheism, it should be noted, was/is also a form of interpretation. Indeed, the scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions Fritz Graf sees ancient polytheism and the tendency of these systems to translate foreign deities into local deities (and vice versa) as the western beginning of interpretatio or “interpretation” itself. In his own words, such ancient comparisons involved treating “the divine names of other religious systems as translations of one’s own: a divine name, in this reading, is nothing more than a linguistic marker, different in each individual culture, for a divine entity whose existence transcends those cultures” (9). In short, sameness and difference once again. As a concrete example of this process, consider the second-century Roman Latin novel The Golden Ass, so named after the human named Lucius who is turned into a donkey in the

!6 story. Here is Graf describing a striking example of how polytheism empowered comparison across cultures and climes:

[The human-turned-donkey] has barely escaped from yet another humiliation, public copulation with a woman in Corinth’s circus, and he is at the very end of his considerable wits. He awakens to a brilliant full moon rising over the dark waters of the Corinthian Gulf. He addresses a prayer to the moon and its goddess. And lo and behold! a beautiful woman rises out of the silvery path on the water; she consoles Lucius and introduces her astonishingly multiple personality: “The Phyrgians, earliest of humans, call me the Pessinuntian Mother of the Gods; the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropian Minerva; the sea-tossed Cyprians call me Venus of Paphus, the arrow-bearing Cretans Dictynna, the trilingual Sicilians Ortygian Proserpina; to the Eleusinians I am the ancient goddess Ceres, to others Juno, to yet others Bellona, Hecate, or the Rhamnusian Goddess; and the Ethiopians who are illuminated by the first rays of the sun, the Africans, and the Egyptians full of ancient lore and wisdom honor me with the true rites and call me with the true name: Isis.”

After quoting from the same ancient novel, Graf himself offers a bit of historical observation about what will happen in the centuries to follow: “Soon enough, the Virgin Mary would top— and topple—all of them” (3). Very similar stories, we might add, could easily be found in medieval India and classical Hinduism, where the Hindu tradition’s various goddesses were, and still are, also often understood to be local manifestations of a single, variously named Mahadevi or “Great Goddess.”

All quotes are from Fritz Graf, “What Is Ancient Mediterranean Religion?” in Sarah Iles Johnston, ed., Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004).

!7 Stephen Benko, Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (E. J. Brill, 2003). A powerful historical study of how the early Christian cult of the Virgin Mary emerged out of an earlier pagan mythical and ritual context.

David R. Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). A very accessible and elegant book on similar interpretive processes in the history of Hinduism. !

* * * !

Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine, 1994). An accessible general history of the various conceptions of “God” in the three monotheisms.

Rodney Stark, Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New York: HarperOne, 2007). A reading of the general history of religions, this time from an accomplished sociologist of religion. What makes this book so provocative is Stark’s strong thesis that God is more than a human projection or social expression, and that the human capacity for experiencing and knowing God has actually evolved over the millennia; that, in short, we today are in a better position today to know God than our prehistoric ancestors were.

Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (William B. Eerdmans, 2010). A rich treatment of the biblical world’s multiple understandings of foreign gods that challenges both the common assumption that these deities were believed to not exist and the theoretical model that polytheism is inherently tolerant whereas monotheism is inherently intolerant.

Christopher D. Stanley, The Hebrew Bible: A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010). A textbook example of comparison done exceptionally well, this time through a study of ancient Israelite religion and the Hebrew Bible (which this book demonstrates are not

!8 the same thing) through the comparative categories of scripture, symbol, worldview, myth, ritual, community, sacrifice, purity codes, the supernatural world, and the human encounter with the holy or sacred.

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1989). One of the earliest, one of the best, and certainly one of the most eloquent, introductions to some of the Gnostic Christianities of the first few centuries we possess. Pagels shows, in my own terms now, how the early Gnostic Christians were radical reflexive re-readers of religion, engaging the scriptures in profoundly original and critical ways (for example, reverse-reading the creator-god and the serpent of the story as the villain and hero, respectively) in order to locate the source of revelation and knowledge in the divine human soul and not in any external institution or lower deity.

Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). An important book that explores the thesis that the earliest followers of Muhammad did not think of themselves as belonging to a distinct religion vis-à-vis Judaism and Christianity (see p. 57 of Comparing Religions).

Arvind Sharma, “Hinduism,” in Sharma, ed., Our Religions (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993). A chapter summary of Hinduism by a major scholar of comparative religion that does an admirable job of balancing and analyzing both Hindu tolerance and Hindu fundamentalism from the first page to the last.

Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY, 1988). Easily one of the finest books ever written on the deep historical conversation between Indian and European civilizations over the course of the last two and a half millennia—required reading on this subject and a real lesson that implicit forms of comparison reach far back into the distant past. As Halbfass shows again and again, we’ve been “comparing religions” all along.

Thomas C. McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002). Written by a non-specialist, in this case a historian of postmodern architecture writing out of a kind of pure philosophical love, this is a more eccentric study than that of Halbfass but still well worth engaging. The shape of ancient

!9 thought for McEvilley is circular or round, that is, there has been a constant back-and-forth between the two great civilizations as far back as we can see in the historical record.

Louis Komjathy, The Daoist Tradition: An Introduction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). A comprehensive and integrated introduction to Daoism (Taoism). Utilizes a historical, literary, and thematic approach. Also includes insights from a postcolonial and postmodern perspective. ! !

2. Western Origins and History of the Modern Practice: From the Bible to Buddhism ! !

People began studying religion because people began having ‘big’ problems concerning religion—fundamental problems about the very nature of religion itself.

Ivan Strenski, Thinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion, 9 !

Chapter 2 treats the rise of the professional study of religion in Europe and the U.S. in the last five hundred years, explaining in the process some of the “big problems” that honest intellectuals and open-minded religious leaders began to have with the claims and institutions of religion. There are a number of excellent histories of the study of religion in the modern West, as well as large literatures wrapped around every issue treated in this chapter. Some key texts are listed here. !

!10 Ivan Strenski, Thinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). An excellent history and summary of the basic problems and theories that have driven and inspired the study of religion over the last four centuries, emphasizing the intellectual integrity and the positive and constructive nature of this project.

Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). An important work on how the comparative study of religion between 1850 and 1930 functioned as a theorization of, response to, and critique of the processes of modernization and rationalization. That response boiled down to the historian of religions discovering “elements of human existence beyond the realm of progress and rationality” both in history and in modern culture (xii). Put in the terms of Comparing Religions, “reason” and “modernity” do not exhaust, and cannot exhaust, what it means to be human. We are more.

Gregory D. Alles, ed., Religious Studies: A Global View (Routledge, 2007). A demonstration of how the study of religion is now a global phenomenon and is no longer restricted to Euro- American contexts.

Charles B. Schmitt, “Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966), 505-532. One of the classic texts on the origins and transformations of the “perennial philosophy” in western culture.

James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). An especially powerful book that uncovers and explores the real-world results of how we read. Interprets the Protestant Reformation’s biblical literalism and its placing of the Bible in the hands of unlearned unprepared vernacular readers as the beginnings of fundamentalism, an intolerant literalist logic that has now gripped, in different forms, the entire world.

Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Argues that Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was the first to argue that the Bible is not the literal word of God but a work of human authorship and points out that Spinoza argued that religious authorities should have no

!11 power with the state. Also demonstrates that the Dutch philosopher was one of the first to mount arguments for religious tolerance and democracy, arguments than in turn influenced people like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

Condemned Comparisons in Amsterdam (1723-1737): Breaking with the Fourfold Scheme

One of the earliest successful attempts to perform a dispassionate comparative study of religion in Europe appears in the seventeenth century with Jean Frederic Bernard and Bernard Picart’s Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde, or “Religious Ceremonies and Customs of all the Peoples of the World.” This work was first published between 1723 and 1737 in Amsterdam by the French Protestant refugee Jean Frederic Bernard in seven weighty folio volumes. It contained more than 3,000 pages and 250 plates of engravings. The work covered all the religions known to Europeans at that point in time. The name of Bernard Picart, who was the most famous engraver of the age, appears in large red letters on the title page of every volume. It was Jean Frederic Bernard, however, who compiled the descriptions relevant to the engravings. The volumes begin with Judaism and Roman Catholicism, move on to the Americas and India, then to Asia and Africa, and finally to the many forms of Protestantism and Islam, to which a single separate volume is dedicated. The historical context is crucial. This was a period in European history in which religious belief was very much a matter of life and death. Europe had just gone through tormenting periods of violence, persecution, and religious strife between Catholics and Protestants. This in fact was the reason why Picart and Bernard ended up in Amsterdam. They both had fled their homes in France in the wake of the persecution of Calvinist Protestants by the Catholic monarch, King Louis XIV. Their attempt to create the first European global vision of human religiosity and to emphasize similarities needs to be understood in this context and their own commitments to religious toleration. For its time, this comparative project was truly extraordinary. In their vision, all religions could be viewed as fundamentally similar in both their spiritual impulses and in their respective ritual practices. Influenced by contemporary religious and philosophical movements like Deism,

!12 the author and artist sought to show how in the course of history, “humankind began to lose the True Idea of the divine being and took upon itself to attribute corporeal qualities and human frailties to [that being]. Man added superstition to his worship, served God under corporeal notions, and, being no longer capable of contemplating him in spirit, whether through pride, fear, or weakness, he was pleased to represent him by images and statues” (quoted in Jacob, Mijnhardt, and Hunt, 5). This statement from Bernard can be read as a robust critique of idolatrous religious behavior in the world religions, but it is also an implicit commentary on the elaborate rituals and ornate statues of Roman Catholicism. As persecuted Protestants, the author and the artist obviously had much to say about the Church, but even here they attempted a comparative perspective. In sharp contrast, the overwhelming majority of European writings at this time on religious issues were obsessed with matters of “true” versus “false” doctrine. Catholics and Protestants, for example, wrote vehemently against one other, and both, of course, wrote against Islam and Judaism. The dominant system of comparative classification was a simplistic fourfold scheme in which there was only three genuine religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (with Christianity as the most perfect). The rest of humanity was lumped together in a fourth class under the vague and condemned category of pagan idolaters. So the comparative practice up to this point was a hierarchical one that looked like this:

1. Christianity 2. Judaism 3. Islam 4. Paganism

This is the comparative scheme that Picart and Bernard definitively broke with in both their words and their images. By offering a new approach that was more sensitive to differences, that engaged in more or less accurate depictions of other people’s rituals, and that placed all these systems of belief and practice on a common ground for the purpose of analysis, Bernard and Picart changed the contours of the category of “religion,” removed it from the debates of “true” and “false,” and began to shape it into a genuine and more generous comparative term. In !13 doing so, they effectively contested the assumed position of Christianity, which now began to shift from “the religion” to “a religion” among others that was subject, like every other religious system, to study and cultural comparison. The last volume of this work was the most comprehensive account of Islam of the time. Rejecting the earlier popular depictions of the “Mohametans” as idolaters (the traditional expression suggested that Muslims worshipped Muhammad, which is patently false), Bernard and Picart employed Islam to ask a series of provocative question, which went something like this. Given that Jews and Christians were generally tolerated in Muslim societies, might not Christian rulers learn at least to tolerate differences within Christianity? Or given the enduring success of Islam as a monotheistic religion that denies the Trinity, is it possible that deism is a valid theological perspective? Or again, if Muhammad was an imposter, as Christians believed, could it be that Jesus was as well? Another subtle comparative move was the manner in which Picart’s engraving subdued and downplayed the category of race in order to emphasize a shared humanity. Thus Picart often makes native peoples, whether in India, Mexico, or Canada, look European in order to render them more familiar and therefore more comprehensible. Moreover, in his depictions of Muslim Turks, Picart breaks with earlier conceptions of Saracens (this is what Turks, and generally Muslims, were called in the age of Crusades) as uncivilized, inferior, despicable barbarians and emphasizes their similarity with Persians (as the descendents of the great ancient Persian civilization, Persians were generally positive figures in the European imagination). Bernard and Picard clearly recognize religious difference in their work as well. Rather than using this difference to dehumanize the other, however, as countless earlier Europeans writers and travelers had done before them, they advocated religious toleration and comprehension of other people and their religious world guided by a sense of universal kinship. Such bold acts of comparison and the implicit anti-Catholic undertone of the work enraged the dominant religious authorities of the time. The Catholic Church put Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses on its Index of Forbidden Books. Yet another work of comparison thus ended up as an object of religious censorship and suppression, but only after its author and artist were safely ensconced in liberal and tolerant Amsterdam. (AA with JJK)

!14 Here are two books on this most remarkable story of “comparing religions”:

Lynn Avery Hunt, Margaret C Jacob, and W. W Mijnhardt, Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion, Issues & Debates. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). This works includes gorgeous reproductions of many of the engravings.

Margaret C Jacob, W. W Mijnhardt, and Lynn Avery Hunt, The Book That Changed Europe : Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). !

* * *

Think scholars and intellectuals are no longer harassed, persecuted, and hunted by authoritarian political and religious regimes? Think again. http://scholarsatrisk.nyu.edu/

Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations: Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan, Christian, Ancient and Modern (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). A summary and analysis of Adams’s life and most famous work, with a helpful introductory essay by Thomas Tweed. Another early example of “comparing religions,” this time in the U.S.

Richard Hughes Seager, ed., The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893 (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1993). A collection of speeches and texts around this important event, which introduced many Americans for the first time to representatives from the “world religions,” not quite named as such, not at least in popular parlance.

Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism & Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The best book on the earliest “spiritual but not religious” demographic in American history (the Bostonian Transcendentalists) and the ways that they appreciated, understood, and transformed Asian religious ideas.

!15 Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). A magisterial study of the birth of comparative religion and sinology (the professional study of China) in the nineteenth century through the prism of the life and times of James Legge, close friend and colleague of Max Müller at Oxford University.

Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: HarperOne, 2005). Probably the best book on the general history of “spirituality” in American culture and history, especially incisive in answering all of the usual criticisms of the category and why these seldom address, and often misrepresent, what has actually transpired in this history.

Leigh Eric Schmidt, Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York: Basic Books, 2010). A page-turning study of a fascinating figure whose belly-dancing, proto-feminist, yogic, and Tantric interests in the late nineteenth century prefigured much that would come later, including the countercultural fascination with Tantra and the sexual revolution. She was born (and tragically died) well before her time. Should be read alongside Love just below.

Robert Love, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America (New York: Viking, 2010). My favorite book on the early origins of yoga and Tantra in American culture, long before these practices and teachings became popular in the counterculture: the story of Pierre Bernard is a page-turning romp from Tantrik rituals in the 1890s of San Francisco through the court cases and sexual scandals among the gilded elite of the Jazz Age of New York to the settled success of a super-wealthy banker. Why this is not a Hollywood movie is beyond me.

Philip Goldberg, American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation (Harmony Books, 2010). An accessible, positive, and page-turning history of Hinduism in the history of American culture, with much useful material on the central catalytic era of the counterculture.

Jeffery Paine, Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004). Pretty much exactly what its title announces: a book on how Tibetan Buddhism

!16 transformed itself from the religion of isolated mountain communities to one of the most popular religions of the countercultural West.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). A robust analysis and critique of the ways that Tibetan Buddhism has been idealized and romanticized in its various western translations. A must read for anyone who wants to think seriously and deeply about the pitfalls of idealizing another religion—any religion.

Andrea R. Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). A critique of modern yoga in the context of contemporary consumer culture, with an analysis of yoga's late twentieth-century ascent from the counterculture and transformation into a pop culture practice.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). A history of the human potential movement, the early intellectual and literary foundation of what would eventually become the New Age movement of the 1980s and 90s and the “spiritual but not religious” demographic of the new millennium, with a special focus on the central roles that the Asian religions (and particularly their Tantric countercultures) played in these histories in the second half of the twentieth century. Also treats the vibrant social activism of the human potential movement, including its extensive work in American-Soviet diplomacy in the 1970s and 80s.

Dana Sawyer, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (Crossroad, 2002). The finest and fairest treatment of Huxley from the perspective of a scholar of comparative religion interested in the explicitly spiritual dimensions of Huxley’s life and work, particularly in its later mature phases. Literary treatments of Huxley tend to focus on his early career and ignore his later explicitly spiritual writings. Hence, for example, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is read and discussed endlessly in high school English classes, but few read Huxley’s own utopian answer to his early dystopian novel, his final novel and spiritual testament, Island (1963), which became a major inspiration for the counterculture.

!17 For my own understanding of Huxley, whose influence on Comparing Religions is more than obvious, see Jeffrey J. Kripal, “An Island in Mind: Aldous Huxley and the Neurotheologian,” for Dinesh Sharma, ed., Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Religions: Essays in Honor of Sudhir Kakar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). A classic work in the study of comparative mysticism that picks up two historically unrelated systems and demonstrates how they share similar structures and metaphysical conclusions, particularly around a cosmic or divine understanding of human nature. A good example of the perennialist comparative method done well.

Steven T. Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). This is probably the most influential and important book in the field’s general move from a perennialist model of comparison to a contextualist or constructivist one. Of special importance is Katz’s essay, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism.” Required reading for anyone who wants to think seriously about “mysticism.”

Robert K. C. Forman, The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). An answer to the Katz volume that wants to preserve elements of the earlier perennialist model, but an answer that takes in and accepts much that Katz and his colleagues accomplished in their fundamental critiques. Like so many other scholars of mysticism (and key figures in the history of religions), Forman’s comparative project is rooted, autobiographically, in his own mystical experiences of pure consciousness. He has described and theorized these experiences in two works, the first technical, the second more popular: Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness (Albany: SUNY, 1999); and Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up to Be: A Journey of Discovery, Snow and Jazz in the Soul (Changemakers Books, 2011).

Steven T. Katz, ed., Comparative Mysticism: An Anthology of Original Sources (New York: Oxford Univerisity Press, 2013). An extensive collection of primary sources, with helpful brief

!18 introductions to the different religious traditions and extensive bibliographies. The volume includes generous sections on Judaism, Christianity, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, and Native American mystical traditions.

Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds., A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). A series of reflection pieces that function as a defense and revisioning of comparison after the various criticisms leveled at it in the 1980s and 90s. “Postmodern” is a complex adjective with many meanings, but here it functions as a general culture of thought that rejected any universalizing, grand, or systematic comparative projects as too homogenizing and, potentially at least, as politically dangerous. !

3. The Skill of Reflexivity and Some Key Terms: The Terms of Our Time Travel !

My community was a community that knew that one of the important meanings about it was the fact that it was a community signified by another community. This signification constituted a subordinate relationship of power expressed through custom and legal structures.

Charles H. Long, Significations !

Chapter 3 deals with the nuances and complexities of the major comparative categories that are used in the study of religion. There are now multiple excellent reference works on almost any theme or category in the study of religion, including a number of volumes on “key terms” or “key categories.”

!19 First and foremost, there is The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edition, ed. Lindsay Jones (New York: Macmillan, 2004), which remains an excellent place to go to do initial research on almost any question, religion, or historical figure.

On the History of Religions School

In this chapter, I located the textbook’s general approach or comparative method in the history of religions school. A few more words about the same are in order here. With roots in the humanities or “Sciences of the Spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften) of the German universities, this intellectual lineage is often associated with the University of Chicago Divinity School, where it took shape in the late 1960s around four figures: Mircea Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, Joseph M. Kitagawa, and Charles Long. As Long has observed, this collective powerfully signaled a commitment to perspectives outside the mainstream, that is, to “the other.” Eliade, for example, was a Romanian, a country that was, as Long put it, a pawn in the geopolitics of the world. Smith is a Jewish historian of the ancient Greek world, including its Jewish and Christian movements. Kitagawa was an ordained Episcopalian priest and Japanese American who had been forcibly imprisoned during World War II (I still remember watching him open his reparation check while I was his research assistant in the late 1980s). And Long is a black intellectual who grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a culture of open and systemic racism. Long explains: “Our very being was problematic in many cases as far as the norms of the prevailing ideology were concerned. We were all historians of religion. We were, simultaneously, the other, and the others” (25). In a similar spirit, Eliade was adamant about what this comparative practice should be about: it should be about challenging western ethnocentrism and helping people to envision a “new humanism” that was not simply a mimicking of the modern materialist assumptions of who we are and what is really real. Numerous other scholars have contributed to this intellectual lineage since its founding, of course, including Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, whose narrative and paradoxical thinking I discuss toward the end of this chapter, and Bruce Lincoln, whom I reference in the very first pages and return to again below in the annotations for chapter 4. I have done my best to embody, enact, and push forward this intellectual tradition in this textbook, of course, in my own way and

!20 on my own terms. !

Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986). !

* * * !

Stephen V. Monsma and J. Christopher Soper, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). A study of church-state relations in five western liberal democracies: the U.S., the Netherlands, Australia, England, and Germany. Very helpful in our chapter analysis of the simultaneous births of “secularism” and “religion” in the modern world.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A Revolutionary Approach to the Great Religious Traditions (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Though now a bit dated, this is a classic, if ever there was one, in the study of the history and limitations of the category of “religion.” One of the few books that is required reading for anyone wanting to understand the debates around the same basic category.

David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (Humanity Books, 1997). Probably the best single-volume introduction to this central topic in the history of religions, of special concern and importance in the study of the Asian religions but not unknown in the western monotheisms. Focuses on Hindu Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Chinese Taoism.

F. Samuel Brainard, Reality and Mystical Experience (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). A balanced book that honors the various criticisms leveled at naïve uses of “experience” in scholarship and provides the reader a way to understand the radical “incommensurable” (or irreconcilable) differences in the world’s religions with respect to their reported experiences of subsequent claims about the nature of ultimate reality.

!21 Brainard demonstrates his approach with case studies from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. A very good example of how Katz and his colleagues catalyzed a new sophistication and care with respect to comparing mysticisms.

Meister Eckhart and the Comparativists

One of the major themes of Comparing Religions is the observation that the deepest origins of the modern comparative study of religion lie in ancient mystical forms of thinking; that, if you will, there are deep cognitive resonances between mysticism and comparativism. We began chapter 1 with this observation with respect to the ancient Greek Mysteries, and we end the book on a similar claim, now refigured in the light of some traumatized neuroscientists. But it is also relevant here in chapter 3, under the category of “experience,” since much of the discussion of religious experience has in fact been about “mystical experience.” One major historical figure that has been prominent in these debates is Eckhart von Hochheim, better known as Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), whom we looked at briefly in chapter 7. Perhaps nowhere is the connection between traditional mysticism and modern comparativism more obvious than in the case of Eckhart. To take just one of many resonances, I might note that Eckhart had a crystal clear sense of what I have called the human as two. Eckhart wrote and preached constantly about what he called the “ground,” “spark,” or “fount” of the soul, which he sharply distinguished from the human personality or surface ego. There is the ground or spark of the soul, which is uncreated and divine, and there is the creature, the surface personality or social self, which, as he put it in a most striking phrase, is “pure nothing.” In the eternal ground of the soul, the Master insisted, “there is neither Conrad nor Henry there,” that is, there is no person, no limited social and historical self in the deepest core of human nature. The human is two. Part of this human as two is created and is caught in time: it is “historical,” as we say. The other part Eckhart calls the intellectus or “intellect,” which is not restricted to time at all (and which is not to be confused with what we mean by that term today). By this term, Eckhart meant to refer to a kind of pure or absolute Mind that perceives transcendent truths directly and immediately, which Eckhart in turn distinguishes from the ratio or rational, discriminating,

!22 analytical cognition, which is more or less what we mean by “intellect” or “reason” today. Whereas the ratio or human reason plods away in linear time and the structures of logic and knows things through inference and from a distance, the intellectus or Mind participates in eternity and knows things through identification. For a modern analogue, recall here the Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who advanced a similar model of left-brained reason and right- brained nirvana or Mind after her stroke. Eckhart died in 1328, shortly after he had been put under a formal investigation by the Church authorities and shortly before Pope John XXII condemned many of his teachings in an official papal “bull” or declaration in 1329 (the mystics and the comparativists, as we have seen, are always in trouble). To give you a flavor of what caused all the uproar, here are some of the condemned teachings taken directly from that papal document:

We are fully transformed and converted into God. Everything that Holy Scripture says of Christ is entirely true of every good and holy man. God loves souls, not external works. A good man is the only-begotten Son of God. All creatures are pure nothing. I do not say that they are a little something, or anything at all, but that they are pure nothing. God is neither good nor better nor best. (Walshe, 26-28)

All of this is of further interest and significance for Comparing Religions since, although the medieval pope was not very happy with him, Meister Eckhart has been especially popular with modern scholars interested in bold comparisons across cultures and times. Moreover, this link between Meister Eckhart and “comparing religions” goes back to the early foundations of the discipline and to some of its most important practitioners. For example, over eighty years ago now, in 1932, the pioneering German historian of religions Rudolf Otto wrote a book-length study comparing Eckhart’s teachings to those of the great Hindu philosopher Shankara. A quarter century later, the early Japanese missionary of Zen Buddhism to the West, D. T. Suzuki, wrote another influ ential book comparing Eckhart’s

!23 emphasis on God as Nothing and the “nothingness” of creatures to Mahayana Buddhism’s famous insistence on the “emptiness” of all things. Nor have these irresistible comparisons ceased. Recently, Randall Studstill has compared the transformation of cognitive processes and the deconditionings of ordinary awareness in the German mysticism of Eckhart and his disciples and the Dzogchen school of Tibetan Buddhism. And it is probably no accident that the finest English translation of Eckhart’s sermons was recently accomplished by a practicing English Buddhist, Maurice O’C Walshe. And what finally to do with the simple fact that one of the most popular contemporary spiritual teachers of today, Eckhart Tolle, appears to have taken on the name of the German mystic as his own? This new Eckhart makes numerous comparative gestures to the esoteric traditions of the West and Asia in order to explain his own enlightenment event and what he thinks it means for the rest of us. He is a “comparative mystic” through and through.

The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, with Foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. by Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009). The place to start, with the Master’s sermons.

Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (New York: Macmillan, 1932). The book that began this comparative stream, still useful, still insightful.

D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, The Eastern and Western Way (New York: Macmillan, 1957). An important Japanese Buddhist teacher’s take on the same comparisons.

Mommaers, Paul, and Jan van Bragt, Mysticism: Buddhist and Christian: Encounters with Jan van Ruusbroec (New York: Crossroad, 1995); and Randall Studstill, The Unity of Mystical Traditions: The Transformation of Consciousness in Tibetan and German Mysticism (E. J. Brill: Leiden, 2005). Both of these books, largely because of their sophisticated philosophical matter, may be on the technical side for an undergraduate reader, but well worth the effort for the reader willing to make the effort.

!24 Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Penguin, 2008). Another example of the comparative practices of popular culture, this time from a writer writing directly out of his own mystical experiences. !

* * * !

Bernd-Christian Otto and Michael Strasberg, eds., Defining Magic: A Reader (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013). A collection of readings on the nature and interpretation of magic from the ancient world to today. The inclusion of ancient and medieval Greek and Latin authors alongside nineteenth and twentieth century anthropologists, philosophers, and historians—even a founder of Theosophy—is particularly illuminating.

This chapter ended with the insider-outsider problem/promise and a brief discussion of paradox in the comparative study of religion. Here is a very different approach to the topic of paradox and religion, this time from a philosophical perspective.

Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). An original approach to the topic of paradox in religious expression, with a special focus on the roles that asceticism, skepticism, and mysticism have played in these very common cognitive structures. !

4. The Creative Functions of Myth and Ritual: Performing the World !

Reality does not comply with our narrations of it.

!25 Mattjis van de Port, Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real !

This chapter focused on the nature of myth and ritual as primary grounds for doing comparison across space and time. The literatures here are particularly immense, but some helpful texts for the student include the following.

William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Alabama University Press, 2000). Just a marvelous collection of selected texts from theorists of myth and ritual, including many we have treated in Comparing Religions, including functionalist, political- economic or Marxist, Freudian, Jungian, and structuralist approaches.

Bruce Lincoln and the “Theses on Method”

One major voice in both the history of religions lineage and the contemporary study of myth is Bruce Lincoln. Lincoln, a student of Mircea Eliade, practices a different form of comparison than his teacher, demonstrating in the process that what we have come to call the history of religions school is not one thing, nor does it speak with a single voice. Lincoln has extended and developed the traditional Marxist argument that mythologies are political and economic ideologies in disguise, and that it is the historian of religion’s duty not to believe them or honor their presumed sacred or transcendent referents. The scholar’s role here is to stand outside the stories and critically analyze the myths as coded expressions of power and political authority. His essays and books treat an astonishing array of cultural and historical material, from ancient Vedic India and Indo-European mythology to modern American professional wrestling and the horrors of 9/11.

Bruce Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Probably the best book to start with, however, is his most recent, as this volume begins with his famous “Theses on Method,” which capture in just a few sentences his views as one of our pre-eminent rational re-readers of religion.

!26 Those thirteen theses can also easily and quickly accessed here: http://religion.ua.edu/thesesonmethod.html

Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). A collection of Lincoln’s earlier essays, including the study of the American television program “All-Star Wrestling” and its uses of “ritual inversion” as a means to preserve the social and economic structures before potential challenges or questions (148-159). !

* * *

E. J. Michael Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). A massive and exceptionally bold study by a well known Sanskritist and scholar of Indo-European languages that employs comparative linguistics, archaeology, and genetic anthropology to trace back the common myths that unite the world’s cultures and peoples—what he calls our “first novel”—to the posited spirituality of an “African Eve” some 100,000 years ago. This book is way too much for a typical undergraduate student, but it clearly represents a new major move in the comparative study of mythology and is well worth engaging, if nothing else, to see just how expansive, global, and ancient comparison can become.

David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002). An extensive genealogy and discussion of the category of “worldview” in the history of western thought.

William E. Paden, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). This is a helpful introduction to a number of our key categories, including the notion of religion as a symbolic system or “world.”

Stith Thompson, Motif-index of Folklore: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-books, and Local Legends

!27 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-1958). An on-line version can be accessed here: http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/thompson/index.htm. Probably most useful as a simple exercise in just how complex the motifs and patterns of folklore and, by extension, mythology, really are.

Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, Alan Dundes, Robert A. Segal, In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Introduced and edited by Segal, this is a very reliable collection of important texts on the study of the hero or quest pattern in world mythology.

Jeffrey Carter, ed., Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader (London: Continuum, 2003). A rich collection of theoretical essays on sacrifice and probably the best single sourcebook on historically influential texts on the comparative study of sacrifice.

Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2008). A state-of-the-art comparative study of sacrifice in Judaism and Hinduism that argues, among many other points, that violence and death are not necessarily central to ritual sacrifice. Judaism and Hinduism, by the way, are often compared as uniquely suited conversation partners, partly because of their similar understandings of revealed scripture (see the Holdredge volume cited below), partly because of their stress on ritual and purity codes. The fact that one is often described as “polytheistic” and the other as “monotheistic” hardly prevents such rich comparisons.

Kimberley Patton, Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). An especially sophisticated comparative study of gods who perform rituals of worship or sacrifice in seven (very) different cultures, arguing, in effect, that ritual itself originates in the divine realm as the activity of deities, and challenging the conventional projectionist theory that the gods are just “big people” projected into the sky. Patton is a master- practitioner of comparison, as is evident in her multiple appearances in this annotated bibliography.

Divination in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean World

!28 We discussed divination rituals in this chapter. What we were not able to discuss is just how common they were in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Mediterranean Sea acted as a watery exchange route for numerous ancient cultures. The sea both separated and linked these different cities and peoples. Not surprisingly, then, a few common patterns between the different cultural complexes can be noted immediately. First, very generally speaking now, divination worked through pattern recognition and more particularly through pattern anomalies, that is, diviners (not unlike the comparativist modeled in Comparing Religions) were most interested not in the common or ordinary, but in the exceptional and the strange. These anomalies were then read as hidden codes or “signs” of a god speaking to the human community. We might say, then, that divination works through the recognition of pattern anomalies, that is, through “difference.” Put another way, we might say that divination is a kind of comparative practice. Second, these cultures commonly distinguished between two types of divination: “natural” or spontaneous forms (such as signs that came in dreams or visions) and “artificial” or ritual forms (such as messages that came through some ritual technique or specialist that was intentionally sought out). Dreams were especially important examples of the first class. Indeed, numerous Mediterranean cultures composed elaborate “dream books,” which collected and classified different dream narratives and symbols. Thirdly, many of these same cultures also used blood sacrifice to “open up” the divination channel between the human and divine world. Sacrificial violence was, to use a hopelessly anachronistic metaphor, the “turning on the television” that picked up and broadcast the signal of the gods. Fourthly, it should be noted that these signals were seldom clear (as we saw with King Croesus in the pyre), and that different individuals and communities did not hesitate to argue about them, interpret them in different ways, even reject them and seek out another divination until they got what they wanted. For the sake of discussion, we briefly treat here divination in ancient Egyptian, Israelite, and Greco-Roman religion. (1) Egypt. Oracles and prophecies were used extensively in Egypt, for everything from

!29 determining the divine will, through planning or justifying a political or military venture, to help with practical problems and concerns, like finding stolen clothes. There appears to have been many techniques for such divination. A sacred bull or sacred crocodiles were allegedly used. As were statues, some of which, much later in the Greco-Roman period, could “talk” through holes bored in their mouths, through which the priests could then utter prophecies and oracles, or so we assume. Dreams were especially important, as is evident in the famous biblical story of Joseph the dream diviner, who won much favor with the Egyptians by interpreting their dreams for them. The Egyptians categorized dreams into two basic types: “Horian” dreams (those associated with the god Horus) and “Sethian” dreams (those associated with the god Seth). The former were positive, the latter negative signs. Lecanomancy (vessel divination) was also used, as is evident in Joseph’s use of a silver cup to practice divination (Genesis 44:5). (2) Israel. As the above references to the Israelite patriarch Joseph makes clear, the Hebrew Bible is filled with divination practices. The Hebrew word for “prophet” (nabi), for example, appears more than 250 times in the Torah, and not always in reference to the prophets of Israel’s god (1 Kings 18). There is also good evidence of groups of prophets or “prophetic guilds,” particularly around the figures of Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 20; 2 Kings 2-9), who displayed some most unusual behavior, including Elisha cursing some young boys to be mauled by two female bears for calling him “baldy” (2 Kings 2.23-24) and, just before this mauling seen, Elijah being taken up directly into the sky within a whirlwind (a tornado?) by a fiery chariot and its steeds (2 Kings 2). There were also different types of prophetic calls and experiences. Some involved dramatic visions, as in Isaiah’s famous vision of the six-winged seraphs in the Temple in Jerusalem (Isaiah 6), or Ezekiel’s equally famous vision of the “chariot” of God, with the weird spinning and fiery wheels (Ezekiel 1). Others seem to involved a kind of “channeling” of a divine voice, or, if you prefer, “a form of spirit possession leading to a direct verbal communication from the deity” (379). Others still involved fasting (Daniel), eating a flower and downing a mysterious fiery drink (Ezra), or acting out the prophecy, as when Hosea marries a prostitute to enact Israel’s unfaithful relationship to Yahweh, or when Ezekiel is told to lie on one

!30 each side for six months and cook his bread with human feces. Happily, Yahweh retreats on the latter command (Ezekiel 4:12-13). Dreams also appear to have been considered a form of prophecy, if of a somewhat lesser or direct type. Later Jewish mystical writers would write of dreams as “1/64th of prophecy.” Then there were the famous “lots,” that is, the Urim and Thummim. We do not know exactly what these were, but they appear to have been a divination device used by the Israelite priests or Levites. They were carried in something called an “ephod,” which was part of the ritual dress of the priests. Drawing lots and other forms of prophecy (like speaking in tongues) would continue well into the New Testament period among the Jewish and eventually gentile communities, apparently with no negative judgment (Acts 1:26). Not every form of divination, of course, was acceptable in ancient Israel. The Torah also contains prohibitions against divination (Deut 18:10), and one well-worn warning story about the “witch of Endor,” a story which involves a famous cross-dressing king (1 Samuel 28). Another queer biblical scene. (3) The Greco-Roman World. We began this section with a Greek example of divination, the example of King Croesus consulting the Pythia or Delphic Oracle in Athens. Like many of their Mediterranean counterparts, Greek writers engaged in comparison and classification of divination. The sheer variety of their neologisms (new or invented words) speaks volumes about the extent of divination in Greek society. The Greeks, for example, had special names for different specialists: an ornithomantis, for example, divined through birds, whereas an oneiromantis divined through dreams. “Belly talkers” or engatrimuthoi uttered prophecies as if these were coming from their stomachs. They were also called “pythons,” probably to invoke the Pythia, that is, the prestigious female oracle of Delphi, and professional seers who traveled with armies, no doubt to give them advice and “scout ahead” in time. Dream divination was again extremely popular in Greece, particularly among intellectuals, who attempted to systematize and test different interpretive choices. There were also dream incubation sites, where people could come to sleep in a temple and wait for a famous hero or mythical figure to appear to them. We even encounter individuals who we would today call “clairvoyants,” that is, individuals who could see what was happening a great distance away.

!31 The Roman writers inherited much of this from the Greeks and took it in their own directions. Of particular concern to them was what they called prodigia or “prodigies,” that is, extraordinary or anomalous events, often seen in the sky. Examples included wild animals appearing in the streets of Rome, malformed births, eclipses, meteors, comets, and other strange objects in the heavens. The Romans took these so seriously that they developed a political process to handle them, whereby reports of such prodigies were taken to the senate and processed there. From this legal body, they might be passed on to one of the colleges of religious experts, who might have consulted one of the handbooks for such things. But it was always the senate that decided, in the end, what to do about the prodigy. There was even a body of special law, called augural law, and an “augural college,” that is, a special body of experts who were authorized by the state to read and respond to such signs or anomalous portents. Although it is more properly a topic of chapter 8 of Comparing Religions, there is, by the way, a fascinating modern parallel to this Roman political process in the way that anomalous aerial phenomena were handled by the U.S., British, and French governments since the late 1940s—that is, through various secret military and astronomical projects. In the U.S., these resulted in something called Project Blue Book in the 1950s and 60s, basically a public holding house and propaganda unit run by the Air Force for handling the excitement, and occasional hysteria, around public sightings of “UFOs.” The ancient Romans saw flying “shields” in the sky. Medieval Europeans saw “hats.” People today see “saucers.” Those darn prodigia just won’t go away. Finally, we might note with respect to the Greco-Roman scene that, as in the other Mediterranean contexts, the ancients did not receive or accept all of this without doubt or argument. Far from it. One of the most famous texts on Roman divination, for example, is Cicero’s On Divination, which was composed in 44 BCE. The text is written in the form of a debate between Cicero himself, who presents himself as a skeptic, and a certain Chrysippus, who argues for the importance and truth of divination practices. Significantly, no conclusion is reached about the ultimate truth or falsehood of divination.

!32 “Divination and Prophecy,” in Sarah Iles Johnston, ed., Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). 370-391. This is a multi- authored essay and the basis of the present essay entry.

Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: Tarcher, 2010). Originally entitled Prodigies, after the ancient Roman term, this is a collection of 500 cases of mysterious aerial events, beginning with a “star” that defeats a Nubian army in 1460 BCE and ending with a large unexplained airship floating over Dubuque, Iowa, in the U.S. on October 10, 1879. The book then takes up the interpretation of the same in light of modern science and the study of folklore, including a demonstration of multiple hoaxes. !

* * *

The Jesus and . . . Literature

We ended this chapter with a comparative study of two founders. There are many studies of founding figures, but none have attracted more attention than the figure of Jesus, the presumed founder of Christianity (although he almost certainly did not intend to found a new religion separate from his own Jewish faith). There is an entire genre that I call the “Jesus and . . .” literature. This is basically a series of books comparing the figure and teachings of Jesus to other founders and/or religions. Here are a few sample texts.

Geoffrey Parrinder, Avatar and Incarnation: The Divine in Human Form in the World’s Religions (Oxford: Oneworld). Originally published in 1970, this is a slightly dated but still useful comparative study of the divine human in mythology and doctrine, with an obvious base in Christian conceptions of the divine nature of Jesus.

James H. Charlesworth and Loren L. Johns, eds., Hillel and Jesus: Comparisons of Two Major Religious Leaders (Minneapolist: Fortress Press, 1997). An edited volume exploring the

!33 similarities and differences between these two Jewish rabbis who lived and taught “the golden rule” in consecutive centuries, Hillel in the first century BCE, Jesus in the early first century CE.

Gregory A. Barker and Stephen E. Gregg, Jesus Beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). A collection of 56 texts from authors from the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions on the person and teachings of Jesus.

Marcus Borg and Jack Cornfield, Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings (Ulysses Press, 2004). The joint project of a major New Testament critic (Borg) and a Buddhist monk and meditation teacher (Cornfield). Helpful for the beginning student.

Martien E. Brinkman, The Non-Western Jesus: Jesus as Bodhisattva, Avatara, Guru, Prophet, Ancestor or Healer? (London: Equinox, 2009). An exercise in Christian comparative theology from the perspective of global Christianity, particularly Christian minorities living in Asia and Africa.

William E. Phipps, Muhammad and Jesus: A Comparison of the Prophets and Their Teachings (New York: Continuum, 2003). A careful and responsible act of comparison by a biblical scholar.

Robert F. Shedinger, Was Jesus a Muslim? Questioning Categories in the Study of Religion (Fortress Press, 2009). The title question is not an anachronistic one. Shedinger rather asks a deeper question, namely, whether Muslims sometimes understand Jesus in ways that are more historically accurate than Christians do. He also uses this question to call into question our usual separation of religion from politics, emphasizing in the process what he calls Christian-Muslim solidarity against injustice. !

5. Religion and Sacred Ecologies: The Super Natural !

!34 More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.

Lynn White, Jr., “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967) !

This chapter is on the relationship between religion and nature and the shifting relationships between religion and science over the last few centuries, particularly as these have shaped and reshaped the religious imagination. We also looked at purity codes around food and eating and how these are built on a basic embodied metaphor: that of the human body as container. !

Bron Taylor, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London: Continuum, 2005, 2008). A two-volume reference work of manageable essays on practically any topic in the study of religion and nature. The first place to go for almost any query in this area.

Elaine Howard Ecklund, Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). We began the chapter with a discussion of the assumed antagonism between science and religion and attempted to show throughout this chapter that this relationship is in historical fact an extremely complex one, including and especially today. For an excellent sociological study of professional scientists and their religious beliefs, one can do no better than read this book. After surveying 1,700 scientists and interviewing 275 of these, Ecklund concluded that most of what is assumed about “science vs. religion” is simply wrong. About half of the scientists she surveyed are religious in a traditional sense, and many others are what she calls “spiritual entrepreneurs,” essentially creative intellectuals attempting to create new syntheses or resolutions of the scientific and spiritual dimensions of the human experience outside the parameters of any established religion. Basically, if I may invent a new but obvious category, these latter scientists participate in an immense demographic running through modern

!35 western culture: the “spiritual and scientific but not religious.” The mystically traumatized neuroscientists with whom I ended this textbook are very good examples of the same.

Frederick Denny and Ninian Smart, Atlas of the World’s Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Just what it says. A marvelous visual feast and a dramatic lesson, via expert commentary and hundreds of maps, of how geography and religion have been intertwined both in the past and in the present. Also demonstrates just how complex the contemporary scene has become after modern transportation and the intricacies of immigration. !

The Sedentary Divide: Or How We Stopped Moving and Changed Everything

Today we tend to think of technology in terms of information technologies, that is, in terms of computers. But this modern equation is a fantastically recent phenomenon, a mere blip on the historical screen, and a blip that too easily blinds us to previous technological revolutions and their profound effects on how we understand ourselves, our religions, and the natural world. Take, for example, the wall. The technology of the wall has been reconstructed and re- imagined by Rob Swigart, a novelist who has worked closely with a team of archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of religions all working on what looks like one of the planet’s largest early human settlements: Catal Höyük. Catal Höyük was a neolithic village in southern Anatolia of about 8,000 inhabitants that appeared, developed, and then disappeared between 7400 and 6200 BCE. “The future is a relatively recent development,” writes Swigart. “For the first two or three million years of our existence as tool-making hominids the future did not exist. Time was grounded in cycles: the days, the months, the seasons. Our ancestors wandered the world in small bands, making and discarding stone implements, hunting when they could, gathering when possible, eating as they moved. . . . Habitation was temporary, transparent, opportunistic; a cave, a few branches tossed over a frame, a rock shelter.” Then humanity took a most dramatic turn around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, especially

!36 in southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe. Swigart coins a new expression to give this moment a name: the sedentary divide. “People discovered the wall, and everything about the world began to change.” Swigart explains: “A wall is a technology. Connect four and cover them, and you have a house, a permanent, fully enclosed cave, exactly where you want it, shaped by human hands, built, not found. Heat stays in, strangers stay out. Risk appears reduced, comfort increased.” A division thus opened up between the “inside” and the “outside,” between the natural world and the social space of the house or human dwelling. Culture had begun walling itself off from nature. The soil outside was becoming dirt inside. There is some evidence that humans settled down before they invented agriculture. Perhaps that is how they noticed that plants seeded themselves and grew other plants. Eventually, these early human communities would have discovered that they could shape, even control, this mysterious process of plant growth. Agriculture would be the result. But not quite yet. At first anyway, Catal Höyük appears to have been a hunting and gathering community. Its little houses were organized in larger units of five or six, with their “doors” in the roofs. The actual dwelling spaces were basically subterranean units, which branched off into smaller cave-like rooms, for sleeping, cooking, storage, and so on. The archaeological team that dug up these dwellings found strange things down there. They found decapitated men and plastered cattle skulls embedded in the walls or benches. They found early forms of pottery. They found what looks like the world’s first mirror—a clear sign of reflexivity and self-awareness in the species. They also quickly realized that Catal Höyük was actually a series of communities, with each new community built over the debris and remains of the previous ones. “The house became a tomb,” as Swigart puts it. Over the centuries, this village mound of tomb-houses would grow some 60 feet into the air, as generations built on previous generations, literally. But there was as yet no truly public ritual centers, no temples or courtyards or halls of worship. “Catal is essentially one large, densely populated apartment house in the middle of nowhere.” As the mound community grew, the people, of course, could look down and see the different layers of the past. In a sense, they could see time, and not just any time—they could see

!37 and sense linear time. The results were revolutionary. Swigart’s thought experiment on this is as eloquent as it is provocative:

Burial is memory, and space, changing visibly through time, is memory too. Turn around, then, and look the other way, and men began to see there was a future separate from the cycles that had determined life until then. The wheel that was time left a line behind it, straight and flat into the past. Time, spatialized, took a new form, and with it demanded, insisted, coerced men into searching for ways to understand it. Because time no longer repeated, the world had grown unpredictable.

Basically, human beings were leaving the cyclical world of nature and entering the linear world of human history. Domestication and breeding of animals would have radicalized this linear notion of time. Such activities, after all, are clearly aimed for a future good, not a present one. And there were all sorts of unexpected consequences, too. Farming could provide more and more certain food sources, but it was not as nourishing as animal flesh and fat, and the work was harder, particularly because the fields themselves were a good distance away. Lives were shorter now. So were the bodies. Moreover, those walls may have created stable communities, but they also created all sorts of other promises and problems. The village would have become “a breeding-ground for conflict and demanded more complex forms of social control and symbolic manipulation.”

See Rob Swigart, “Past Futures, Future’s Past,” electronic book review 07-26-2005 at http:// www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/oracular. !

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Nicholas Campion, Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions (New York: New York University Press, 2012). A sophisticated comparative study of astrological and cosmological systems as reflections or models of the societies from which they spring.

!38 Kimberley Patton, The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils: Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). A comparative study of ancient myths about the sea as absorber of human sins and impurity from ancient Greece and India to contemporary Inuit (or Eskimo) mythology, demonstrating in the process the disastrous assumptions modern human cultures are making about the limitless abilities of the oceans to absorb and purify their waste, trash, and pollution. Comparison with an ethical edge and urgent contemporary implications.

Holley Moyes, ed., Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012). Exactly what its subtitle announces, with a focus on prehistoric archaeological sites. Richly illustrated and mapped.

Paul Marshall, Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences & Explanations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Probably the finest study of modern western experiences of the natural world as imbued with mind and meaning. Also challenges the standard or conventional position that mystical experiences are primarily “constructed” by language and social context, as many of the cases Marshall treats appear to have been spontaneously generated and often match, in striking detail, mystical experiences from other places and times. The nonlocal self again.

Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, trans. by Trevor Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). A speculative reconstruction of the immense intellectual and symbolic revolutions that reshaped the human being as early Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies gave way to agricultural practices in the Neolithic era between 10,000 and 7,000 BCE.

Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue, The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995). A series of essays on the history and theory of deep ecology. Probably the best place to start on this subject.

George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his Followers (New York: Oxford, 2012). A fascinating study of some of the effects of space travel

!39 and modern cosmology on the religious imagination in twentieth-century Russia, particularly with reference to Russian Orthodox Christianity. A provocative example of how science is reshaping the religious imagination, even in ostensibly secular contexts.

I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (Routledge, 2003). A classic study emphasizing the social dimensions of spirit possession and shamanism, suggesting, in effect, that possession tends to happen amidst communities and individuals who are on the bottom or near the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Religious Animals

The animal is literally an “ensouled one” (anima is Latin for “soul”). Most human cultures consider animals to be human-like and give them prominent roles in mythology, folklore, and daily life. Here are a few books that explore different aspects of this long cross-species history.

James H. Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol Became Christianized (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). An impressive performance of comparison in the ancient Near Eastern world around the symbolism of the snake that shows how a symbol can change its meanings from era to era and from cultural complex to cultural complex.

Lisa Jemmerer, Animals and World Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). A cutting-edge look at the world religions as basically animal-friendly that raises profound moral questions about the human treatment of animals.

Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (Broadway, 2011). A report and reflection on a controlled study of canine-human communication of a seeming telepathic nature. Deeply resonant with traditional religious reports of animal-human communication.

Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton, eds., A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, & Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). An astonishing collection of essays on animals in the world religions, in science, agriculture, scientific experimentation,

!40 myth, ritual, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. A vast array of subjects opening up vast problems for almost anyone’s easy categories.

There is a rich folklore around dolphins as helpers of stranded seafarers and as psychopomps or guides of the soul. Here is a modern instance of a story working in the opposite direction, that is, a story of a human helping a dolphin at what appears to be the dolphin’s request. The event suggests the obvious presence of non-human intelligence and can function as a dramatic example of cross-species cooperation: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=2gvgkHSyKFE !

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Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora,” The New Yorker, 23 December 2013 at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/ 2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_pollan : A spooky essay on the apparent intelligence of the plant world. Pollan begins with the New Age classic The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird, which argued that plants could think, were telepathic, possessed emotions, and could do things like pick out a killer (of another plant no less) in a line-up. Pollan discusses the self-censorship and problems this book created among scientists for the emerging field of plant neurobiology. The irony here is the embarrassing fact that versions of the same theses are looking more and more likely. Plant neurobiologists, for example, now seriously discuss the hypotheses that plants possess signaling systems, can be rendered unconscious by anaesthetics (and produce their own), appear to possess memory, exhibit social behavior, can learn, create extraordinary networks of information, have evolved between fifteen and twenty senses (!), and may even be conscious in some sense. As Pollan puts it, “plants do have a secret life, and it is even stranger and more wonderful than the one described by Tompkins and Bird” (10). A New Age worldview, of course, is the least of the scientists’ cultural problems now, as what they are finding fits seamlessly not only into many New Age beliefs but into global and ancient forms of animism. What would the vegetarian say about all of this? Plants, by the way, dominate the earth. They compose 99% of the biomass, rendering us minor players, to say the least. So these are hardly tangential or minor matters, like us. !41 !

6. Sex and the Bodies of Religion: Seed and Soil !

Is not the gift of the body the complete and natural form in which the natural power of matter offers itself for sublimation? And is not spirit waiting to be produced, like a spark, from the shock of this encounter? And the great surges of energy released by physical love—is it not precisely these which it should be our first concern to stimulate, to master, and to transform?

Catholic priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin !

As we discussed in the chapter, probably no topic in the study of religion has received more attention and merited more sustained scholarship than the comparative bases of the body, sexuality, and gender. Here are a few supporting texts—only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. !

Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing and Valerie H. Ziegler, Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Just a marvelous collection of readings from the ancient world to the modern world on the Adam and Eve story that demonstrate how radically different the readings and interpretations have been over the centuries. Begin here.

Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking, eds., Queer(y)ing Religion: A Critical Anthology (Continuum, 1997). A collection of essays on queer criticism and the comparative study of religion.

!42 Arlene Swidler, ed., Homosexuality and World Religions (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1993). A fairly early and still helpful book on the subject. A good place to begin on this subject.

Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). A sophisticated historical treatment of the issues, from the history and psychology of the veil to the birth of Muslim feminisms. Treats Islam as a living religion, that is, a contested and dynamic tradition that is constantly changing and profoundly plural.

Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). A fascinating case of comparison with unexpected results that looks at anorexic behavior in medieval religious virtuosos (in this case, medieval Italian nuns) and modern American teenagers, demonstrating in the process both the cross-temporal consistency of a particular eating behavior and how culture- specific a diagnosis of mental illness can be. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/220/testosterone Listen to the Prologue and Act One about an anonymous man who had a medical condition that reduced his testosterone level to more or less zero. The result was a total lack of desire or ability to do anything at all. This suggests, once again, that most human activity, including cultural and social activity, is driven by forces intimately related to human sexuality. Note also how the man describes his extraordinary state in religious terms.

Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (University of New Mexico Press, 1992); and Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2000). Two books that model what the study of Native American religions looks like from a queer theoretical perspective.

Emotional Religion

One rich area of comparative inquiry that we were not able to treat in this chapter is the scholarship around religion and the emotions. The basic idea here is this: because human biology and cognition work in conjunction with culture to produce context-specific emotional states, and

!43 because religious experiences are also often emotional experiences, we can only fully understand religious experience if we account for the cultural construction and shaping of emotion. Scholars arguing on behalf of the view that religious emotions are culturally constructed suggest that, since emotions depend on a certain interpretation of ideas or events (what psychologists call appraisal), persons must resort to their culturally-specific worldview in order to produce and make sense of a particular emotion. The ways that persons experience their religious emotions thus reflect various aspects of their cultures, including doctrinal, aesthetic, and ethical presuppositions. And culture not only frames the ways that persons experience emotions. It also determines the rules that regulate when and why persons experience specific emotions. Consider, as a representative example, a study by Paul M. Toomey on bhakti or devotional love among devotees of the Hindu deity Krishna at Govardhan, a pilgrimage site in northern India. Krishna devotees cultivate and materialize their devotion for Krishna by identifying this love with food and the various aspects of eating, including the food’s ambiance, menu, preparation, and consumption. All of these aspects of eating are considered repositories of love for Krishna, a love that can range from the affection and care a mother feels for a small child to the erotic passion of young lovers. The type of love one adopts toward Krishna can depend on both the personal devotional preferences of the individual and membership in a particular sect specializing in the cultivation and celebration of that particular kind of devotion- emotion. In each of these, however, Krishna, in the form of a ritual image, receives and consumes the devotee’s love in the form of food and then returns this love to his devotees as prasad, a gift of food made holy by its contact with Krishna. By consuming the food that was consumed by Krishna and then graciously returned to them, devotees take into themselves “holy emotion.” When Krishna devotees speak about religious emotion in terms of food like this, they resort to languages that make it possible for them to articulate their personal emotional experiences to themselves and to communicate them to others who share the same cultural context. There are countless other examples in the anthropological and religious studies literatures. One of the most well known is the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt

!44 cultures.” The former are cultures that rely on public perception and public observation of illicit or inappropriate acts to regulate human behavior, hence the emotion of “shame.” The latter are cultures that internalize moral and social norms so that the person feels “guilt” regardless of whether anyone is watching or knows. Shame and guilt might serve similar functions, then, but they are in fact different emotional states that are produced in different ways. (ARJ with JJK) Here are four texts that explore the ways in which religions shape emotions and emotions shape religions:

John Corrigan, ed. Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). A collection of essays on the cultural construction of religious emotion from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos. Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). An annotated bibliography of sources from several disciplinary perspectives for the academic study of religion and emotion, including an introductory essay.

Patton, Kimberley Christine, and John Stratton Hawley, eds., Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). A collection of essays on the religious nuances and ritual cultivation of weeping in different religious systems.

Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). A rich book laying out the thesis that the emotion of wonder is central to the human experiences of meaning, beauty, and spirituality. Fuller uses this idea to throw new light on the psychology of the modern spiritual seeker, the science/religion debates, and the study of religion itself, which for him, like any good philosophy, “begins in wonder.”

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Raines, John C., and Daniel C. Maguire, eds., What Men Owe to Women: Men’s Voices from World Religions (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). Relying on decades of feminist scholarship,

!45 mostly by female scholars, this is a collection of essays by male scholars from within various religions to describe and analyze—bluntly, honestly, and radically—both the gender injustices of the religious traditions and some of the potential resources within the same traditions that might yet prove useful in addressing and resolving the same. Pairs nicely with Eilberg-Schwartz and Doniger below.

Runzo, Joseph, and Nancy M. Martin, Love, Sex and Gender in the World Religions (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000). One of numerous collections on the same. For another, and more recent, one, consider Dag Oistein Endsjo, Sex and Religion: Teachings and Taboos in the History of World Faiths (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).

Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger, eds., Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). An elegant collection of essays on the erasure and denial of female identity in the world religions. Pairs nicely with Raines and Maquire above.

Stephan Klasen and Claudia Wink, “’Missing Women’: Revisiting the Debate,” Feminist Economics 9 (2-3), 2003: 263-299. A brief history, critical discussion, and update of Amartya Sen’s famous thesis and statistics.

Comparative Celibacies, Comparative Eroticisms

There are a number of excellent books or collections on celibacy in the world religions. Among them, we might list:

Carl Olson, ed., Celibacy and Religious Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A volume in which each chapter focuses on the meanings and functions of celibacy in a particular religious tradition. An excellent place to start a comparative study of celibacy.

Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000). A very readable historical study of celibacy and its various aims across different human societies from the ancient world until today, from saints and shamans to modern-day athletes.

!46 Virginia Burrus, Sex Lives of the Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). A marvelous study of early Christian ascetics, demonstrating that their rejection of procreative heterosexuality was not a rejection of desire per se, but an affirmation of different forms of sacred eroticism. Burrus is wonderful in relating this ancient material to modern concerns and passions, including her own. Will shatter any simplistic notion that holiness = asexuality.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). My own take on the topic of male asceticism as a form of eroticism, demonstrating that male homoerotic forms of mysticism (with a male mystic loving a male deity) in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism tend to become orthodox or traditional, whereas male heteroerotic forms (with a male mystic loving a female deity) tend to become unorthodox or heretical. Includes a frank spiritual autobiography that discusses my early formation and training in a Roman Catholic seminary in which I “walk the talk.” Probably not for the beginner or the faint of heart. If you are neither, I suggest you read this book in conjunction with Mark Jordan’s The Silence of Sodom, discussed and cited in Comparing Religions, 328-329.

Dale Launderville, Celibacy in the Ancient World: Its Ideal and Practice in Pre-Hellenistic Israel, Mesopotamia, and Greece (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2010). Exactly what it announces in its subtitle. A fantastically rich study of celibacy in the ancient world by a Christian Benedictine monk with a profound sensibility around the “cosmic” or transcendent nature of human sexuality, particularly among sexual “outliers” and their search for “communion with the real.” Too much for the beginner, but a goldmine for the serious and the committed.

Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). An historical study of celibacy in early Christianity and the ways that sexual renunciation reflects varying notions of the human person and the functions of society. Too much for the beginning student but well worth the time for the advanced student. ! !47 * * *

Browning, Don S., M. Christian Green, and John Witte Jr., Sex, Marriage, & Family in World Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). A collection of essays on an immense range of subjects, from marriage contracts, sexual ethics, polygamy, and wedding ceremonies to filial piety, contemporary same-sex unions, and celibacy. Pairs nicely with Maguire below.

For more on the historical construction of the Christian family over the centuries, see also Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, annotated below, in chapter 10.

Maquire, Daniel C., Sacred Rights: The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). A collection of essays by scholar-practitioners of different religions that demonstrate that the religions, although primarily oriented to “pronatalist” stances, also contain positive resources for the practice of contraception, abortion, and family planning—a profoundly difficult issue that promises to grow only more important as the global population patterns continue to grow and put pressure on human resources and environmental sustainability. Pairs nicely with Browning, Green, and Witte Jr. above. !

7. Charisma and the Social Institutions of Religion: Transmitting the Power

!

This chapter is on the social institutions of religion and the manners in which they attempt to preserve, transmit, and transform the charisma of the founder or original revelation event. In it, we also discuss the saint and the miracle.

Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Robert Bellah, easily one of the premiere

!48 sociologists of religion of the last four decades, argues here, in effect, that evolution remains our most powerful intellectual tool to understand the entire history of religions, from the paleolithic period to the recent past, here defined as the axial age of the ancient world. This was, in effect, his last statement before he passed away in 2013. The book is as relevant for chapter 11 and our discussion of evolutionary psychology as it is for chapter 7 and our discussion of the sociology of religion.

Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). A very solid historical and theoretical approach to the subject, tracing this position back to the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, and Transcendentalism, and demonstrating the sophistication and radicalism of this quintessentially American response to religious pluralism.

One of the means of transmitting charisma we examined briefly was the mechanism of writing via revealed, channeled, or inspired texts, that is, via “scripture.” Here a few resources for the comparative study of scripture:

William Albert Graham, Beyond the Scripture: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Reminds us that for most of human history most human beings could not read or write, hence the importance of the oral aspect of scripture and revelation.

Barbara Holdredge, Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture (Albany: SUNY, 1995). The expression “Veda” functions like “Torah” in Judaism, that is, as an exceptionally broad and expansive metaphysical and historical space of revelation, meaning, symbol, and myth. This is the definitive comparative study of these two bodies of written and oral revelation and their surrounding commentarial literatures and interpretive histories. The work functions as a model of comparison at its most sophisticated and nuanced.

Miraculous Scholarship

!49 We also looked at the miracle as an anomalous event that is interpreted as a sign that witnesses to the truth of a particular religious system. We saw in chapter 2 how the rejection of the New Testament miracles was a kind of litmus test for real scholarship in the nineteenth century. The scholarship on the miracle has been exploding recently in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, especially in New Testament Studies and the medical humanities, if now in a very different direction. Here are some sample texts:

Bilinda Straight, Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). A gorgeously written study of the fantastic and the extraordinary among the Samburu of northern Kenya as “invitations to consider that the imagination is real in crucial ways” and “as examples that illuminate a very real, cross-cultural need to understand the inexplicable” (9-10). Immediately, the book begins with Straight’s musings on magical realism, a revelatory dream (“the universe revealed itself to me. Omniscient, omnipresent, it told me everything at once”), and a blunt confession: “I have spoken to the resurrected. That experience is again its own undeniable proof” (9).

Randall Sullivan, The Miracle Detective (New York: Grove Press, 2004). A page-turning account of the religious conversion of investigative journalist and Rolling Stones contributor Randall Sullivan, who finds his worldview and beliefs turned inside-out as he comes face to face with the miraculous in modern-day Catholicism.

Graham H. Twelftree, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). A collection of essays on defining miracle, miracles in the history of Christianity, and miracles in traditional religions, Hinduism, Islam, Indian Buddhism, and Jewish philosophy. Also helpful essays on the history of the debate and the miraculous cure in modern medicine.

Erik Pema Kunsang and Marcia Binder Schmidt, eds., Blazing Splendor: The Memoirs of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (Boudanath: Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 2005). A warm and accessible compilation of Tulku Urgyen’s (1920-1996) favorite stories, featuring several of Tibet’s greatest meditation masters. As the reader is introduced to each of these yogis, Tulku Urgyen casually

!50 presents their miraculous deeds as acts that are but a small part of their daily routines. An excellent source for the miraculous in a non-western context. My thanks to Joshua Ramey for this recommendation.

Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, two vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2011). An interesting and extensive attempt to establish the credibility of the New Testament miracles from a conservative Christian perspective. Keener advances a two-pronged historical and theological argument, namely: (1) that one can quite reasonably take the accounts in the Gospels and Acts as plausible eyewitness accounts, and (2) that supernatural or suprahuman causality cannot be taken off the table for at least some of these. He also makes a strong case for reading the traditional academic resistance to miracle claims as a hold over from nineteenth-century rationalism, a left-over, moreover, that is no longer tenable given the massive weight of the ethnographic and historical evidence that we now have at our disposal.

Knut A. Jacobsen, ed., Yoga Powers: Extraordinary Capacities Attained Through Meditation and Concentration (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011). A collection of essays on theme of magical capacities or superpowers in the Asian traditions, particularly around the practice of yoga and various forms of meditation.

Graham H. Twelftree, Paul and the Miraculous: A Historical Reconstruction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013). Argues that the miraculous was central to the teachings and ministry of the apostle Paul and cannot be ignored or overlooked.

Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. Baker, Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001). A sociological mapping of paranormal beliefs according to religious affiliation, socio-economic background, race, and gender, among other demographic factors. Very helpful for getting a handle on the basic sociological facts and for coming to terms with a category that is not going away anytime soon. !

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How to Tell a Saint (Devilishly)

We looked at the legal procedures for determining who is a saint in Roman Catholicism and the role of miracles in the same formal processes in this chapter (228-229). Few individuals were more influential in developing and systematizing these procedures than Cardinal Prosper Lambertini (1675-1758), who became Pope Benedict XIV. By almost anyone’s standards, Lambertini was a remarkable man, and his story is well worth telling her as an example of how religion and critical thinking can go together very well, indeed. During the hot summer of 1740, when the Cardinals were taking forever to decide on a new pope and the citizens of Rome had grown very frustrated, Lambertini stood up and suggested the name of one cardinal, “if you want a saint,” another name, “if a statesman,” and then quipped, “and if you want a booby, here am I” (90).

They elected the booby.

Benedict was no booby, though. He was much beloved of the people for his refusal to take his own prestige too seriously. He would take long walks in the streets of Rome, chatting with whomever he met. He wore his learning, which was considerable, humbly. He was also advanced in his gender expectations: he supported, for example, the case of Laura Bassi, a female scientist appointed to a Chair at Bologna University in 1732. He had a near encyclopedic knowledge of the medical literature, all in Latin, of the time. He owned his own microscope. And a minor but telling point—he was a friend and correspondent of the French Enlightenment icon and vicious critic of all things conventional and traditionally religious, Voltaire. The friendly feeling was mutual. Voltaire confessed to keeping an engraving of Benedict in his study, under which he wrote: “I pray heaven that it may be long before your Holiness is received among those Saints . . . whose canonization you have so carefully investigated” (180).

Voltaire was referring here to Lambertini’s earlier work and writing for the Congregation of Rites. As a young man, Lambertini had spent twenty years fulfilling the office in Rome of what would later be called the Promotor Fidei or Devil’s Advocate. And he was really good at it.

!52 In one case, for example, he was sent to a convent to investigate the claims of the nuns there that one of their own was miraculously living without food. Lambertini walked into the room and asked the woman a single blunt question: “Mother, do your bowels open every day?” The shocked nun answered, “Yes, of course.” Lambertini knew from his medical reading that she had to be eating. It was eventually shown that the story was a fabrication designed to attract pilgrims and alms to the convent.

And that was just the beginning. Lambertini recognized that ascetic practices like beating or whipping oneself can have some very surprising effects, like arousing “lust” (86). He thought that most “miraculous” cures or healings, as well as the famous stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi, were the result of the imagination’s power over the body, or what we would today call “suggestion.” As for Saint Francis, Lambertini observed that, “he had meditated so long on Christ’s death that he saw himself crucified with the Lord, and in the end the true image of his devoted contemplation was transferred from the soul to the body” (148). He went on to insist that for a cured disease to be considered truly miraculous it must be “organic” (atrophied limbs or cancers, for example), as opposed to “functional” (rashes or various nervous disorders, for example, what we would today call “psychosomatic” conditions). He debunked the Eastern European and Russian lore around vampires, pointing out that none of the stories had been proven, and that individuals thought dead may not have actually been dead. He was especially suspicious of drowned bodies, which had a tendency to revive. He was also suspicious of “incorruptible bodies,” that is, corpses of supposed saints that did not deteriorate, since people of no particular religious repute were also discovered to have remained “incorruptible.” Lambertini suspected embalming techniques and environmental conditions as the usual factors here. He also thought that the Star of Bethlehem in the famous Gospel of Matthew nativity scene was probably a comet (128-133).

Such remarkable thoughts were voiced in Lambertini’s work Of the Beatification of the Servants of God, and of the Canonization of the Blessed (1734-1738). Never translated into English from the Latin, Lambertini’s British biographer, Renée Haynes, has described it for us in some detail in three chapters, one entitled “The Holy and the Paranormal.” One could well argue

!53 that this text makes Lambertini the first modern scholar of psychical phenomena. Such things were not framed this way yet, of course. The technical theological term of the time and tradition was “preternatural.” The preternatural was not the supernatural. It referred to any phenomenon that appeared to lie beyond (preter-) the present scientific understandings of the world, but that was not truly divine or of supernatural origin. In short, the preternatural was a more or less precise Catholic equivalent of the later and much more Protestant “paranormal.”

What most of the faithful considered to be a miracle or a divine intervention Lambertini concluded, through extensive medical study and on-site interviews, was natural or preternatural. He was also a robust comparativist. Apparitions and significant dreams appear to all sorts of people, whatever their religion or lack thereof, he correctly pointed out. He even thought that genuine miracles can flow through human beings who are not Catholic, or even Christian (121). He also recognized phenomenon like “natural prophecy” or “a natural gift of divination” (what we would today call clairvoyance or precognition). But he did not see these as evidence for anything truly miraculous. These were simply parts of nature that we do not yet understand. We picked up these same ideas, of course, in chapter 8.

All quotes are from Renée Haynes, Philosopher King: The Humanist Pope Benedict XIV (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970).

Anyone interested in this subject must also read Lisa J. Schwebel, Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas: Christianity and the Paranormal (Paulist Press, 2004), which is annotated in the next chapter. !

* * * !

The Heretical Imperative

A final provocative sociological note before we move on. The American sociologist of religion Peter Berger has accurately observed that, at least in the modern western context, we are

!54 all heretics now. That is to say, we all must choose our religious beliefs and practices (recall that the word for “heresy” comes from the Greek for “chosen opinion”). We all grow up in a radically pluralistic society in which no single religion can function as a “Church” in the sense that Troeltsch and the sociologists have defined it. No one gets to grow up in an all-encompassing, definitive worldview that goes unquestioned by other special people and special institutions. And even if one does manage to escape the pluralism of modern society for a time (say, on an isolated Amish farm or a carefully controlled Orthodox Jewish kibbutz), it is only for a time and only in a little local place. Eventually, news of other ways of religion will seep in. Then one must choose. Then must deal with the global facts of religious pluralism and injustice. Then one must become a heretic, literally, a “chooser.” Berger aptly calls this necessity the “heretical imperative.”

Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1980). !

8. The Religious Imagination and Its Paranormal Powers: Angels, Aliens, and Anomalies !

If there’s advanced life elsewhere we must not be too anthropomorphic about it. It may be something that we would not recognize. . . . I tell my students that it’s better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science. It’s more stimulating—and no more likely to be wrong. . . . There could be diffuse living structures floating in interstellar clouds. . . . It is remarkable that our brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to understand the counterintuitive worlds of the quantum and the cosmos. But there is no reason to think that our comprehension is matched to an understanding of all key features of reality. Some of these insights may have to wait for post-human intelligence. They may be phenomena, crucial to our long-

!55 term destiny, which we are not aware of—any more than a monkey comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies. Lord Martin Reese, Britain’s Royal Astronomer http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/ 2/0412e562-35f5-11e3-952b-00144feab7de.html#axzz2j7KueVO5 !

This chapter looks at some of the complexities involved in trying to interpret religious experiences as expressions mediated by the religious imagination (the “sixth super sense”) and its symbols. It also looks at the comparative practices of popular culture (via the monster and the UFO) and hence at “the paranormal.” This, of course, is a subject especially fraught with interpretive difficulties and misdirection and, as such, is nearly impossible to navigate safely alone. Here are some resources to help you not get lost at sea, as it were. !

Etzel Cardena, Steven Jay Lynn, and Stanley Krippner, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2013). Invoking William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, this is collection of essays by contemporary psychologists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, examining the evidence for anomalous events (everything from synesthesia and lucid dreaming, through out-of- body, psychical, alien abduction, near-death, and mystical experiences, to past-life memories and dramatic healing events). The volume as a whole comes to a generally positive, if careful, conclusion about the same.

Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal. A reliable on-line resource. All of the issues can be downloaded for free here: http:// paranthropologyjournal.weebly.com/

Stanley Krippner and Harris L. Friedman, eds., Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion? (Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2010). A conversation between accomplished

!56 parapsychologists and well-known skeptics, modeling what a genuine intellectual conversation between differing parties can look like.

Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Evidence of Psychic Phenomena (HarperOne, 2009); Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (Paraview Pocket Books, 2006); Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities (Deepak Chopra, 2013). Radin is probably the most reliable, eloquent, and accessible single author on the relevance and explanatory power of laboratory parapsychology in the contemporary scene. These three books constitute a kind of trilogy.

For another major and state-of-the-art statement, see James C. Carpenter, First Sight: ESP and Parapsycholgoy in Everyday Life (Lanham, Maryland: Roman & Littlefield, 2012). Stresses the ordinariness and unconscious nature of most psychical functioning in realms like creativity, perception, memory, personality, and fear.

Ipsita Roy Chakravarti, Sacred Evil: Encounters with the Unknown (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2003). Though very much a western category, what we have come to call paranormal phenomena are by no means restricted to western cultures. Far from it. Chakravarti, a Kolkata born activist defending the rights of women in India, a student of the mystical and the esoteric in Canada, a Jungian therapist, and a self-confessed witch, tells nine true stories from her own personal experience and professional work. The book captures beautifully what we have framed here as “the sacred”—a powerful presence at once positive and negative.

Olu Jensen and Sally R. Munt, The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures (Asghate Publishing Compay, 2013). A recent set of essays that employ the category of the paranormal in a variety of ways not to proclaim a set of certainties or beliefs but to critique and question the dominant models of knowledge and religion assumed today, much as I have done in the present chapter.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). An intellectual history of the psychical and the paranormal as these categories emerged from elite British and American academic contexts in the late

!57 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then migrated into the comparative practices of popular culture. Also includes extensive discussions of the UFO phenomenon from a religious studies perspective, especially in the works of Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and the French sociologist Bertrand Méheust. The real background of the present chapter.

There are a number of reliable websites and blog sites that manage to balance criticism and sympathy in their discussions of the paranormal, among them: www.theofantastique.com. Created and managed by John W. Morehead, this is an astonishing site on what John calls “a meeting place for myth, imagination, and mystery in pop culture.” The range of topics and the smartness with which John engages them in his posts and interviews are as refreshing as they are insightful. http://forbiddenhistories.wordpress.com/ A site that focuses on the history of science, with special attention to tracing the historical suppression of early psychical research and parapsychology. http://jonescinemaarts.com/impossible-talk/ “Impossible Talk,” a podcast series hosted by film- maker Scott Jones and myself dedicated to sophisticated, open discussions of and lectures on the paranormal and anomalous dimensions of American culture, particularly as these have orbited around the human potential movement and its simultaneous embrace of cutting-edge science and the further reaches of mystical experience.

Kelly Bulkeley, Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2008). An excellent introduction to the central role that dreams and dream-visions play in the world’s religions.

Gary Laderman, Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (New Press, 2010). The place to go for serious and sustained reflection on how American popular culture is often also a camouflaged religious culture, how, in Laderman’s term, “religion is everywhere,” from a Star Trek convention and the Super Bowl to the attractions and obsessions of pornography.

!58 There is also now a web magazine on the same, headed up by Laderman and a team of advisors: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/sacredmatters/

The Medical Humanities and the Paranormal

As my treatment of Dr. Amatuzio suggests, one of the richest sources for studying anomalous events is modern medicine and the hospital. As part of what we might call the “medical humanities” (the study of medicine and the medical professions through the prism of the humanities and its methods), we might list the following books.

Robert A. Scott, Miracle Cures: Saints, Pilgrimage, and the Healing Powers of Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). A sociologist looks at the very real cures that have taken place at pilgrimage sites in both the medieval, early modern, and modern worlds through the power of relics, apparitions, and sacred journeying, focusing on Roman Catholic Marian shrines. None of these practices, he points out, have lessened, much less gone away, with the appearance of modern biotechnology and modern medicine, which simply lack these powerful emotional and religious powers.

Allan J. Hamilton, M.D., FACS, The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008). A Harvard educated neurosurgeon reflects on the powers of belief, premonitions, and unusual experiences to heal and give hope in real-world contexts.

Pim van Lommel, M.D., Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2011). A cardiologist reflects on the evidence for the survival of bodily death from his own professional experience and from the larger NDE literature, speculating about possible models of the brain-mind relationship in the process. !

* * * !

Fr. Herbert Thurston and the Physical Phenomena of Mysticism

!59 I employed Jess Hollenback’s work on materialization in the present chapter. Related here is the work of the Jesuit priest and scholar of Catholic hagiography Fr. Herbert Thurston (1856-1939). Thurston’s work is important for three reasons. First, Thurston is nearly alone in his focus on the specifically physical effects of mystical experience as recorded in the annals of Catholic sanctity and in the broader history of religions. Secondly, Thurston repeatedly pointed out that the Roman Catholic Church, through its beatification and canonization processes and its legal institution of the Promotor Fidei (again, “the Devil’s Advocate”), has always approached such phenomena with the initial presumptions of doubt and likely pious exaggeration or even actual fraud. Thirdly, and perhaps most radically, Thurston bravely turned to modern spiritualist, psychical, secular, and psychiatric material as a comparative base to understand the older hagiographical material: he read the past through the new knowledge of the present. Indeed, he insisted that our present psychiatric knowledge about hypnotic trance, hysterical suggestibility, and dissociative states can be used to correct and humanize the misreadings of the religious past (and, by implication, some of the horrible moral judgments, physical tortures, and even executions that were inflicted on so many individuals for their nonordinary abilities and gifts, which were so often interpreted as “demonic” or “from the Devil”). In short, Herbert Thurston was a comparativist. Thurston’s major comparative breakthrough came in 1933 when a German doctor demonstrated conclusively that stigmata (the phenomena of the bleeding wounds of Christ appearing on the body, usually on the hands, head, or side) could be produced by suggestion in a hysterical patient. Thurston had expected just such a link but never had this kind of dramatic confirmation. Now he did. Accordingly, his long multi-chapter treatment of the history and psychology of stigmatics in both the medieval and modern worlds demonstrates a real familiarity with early psychiatric models of multiple personality disorder, dissociation and hysteria, whose very terminology, he notes, designates a female—and I would add, sexual—origin (hysteria is derived from hysteros, a Greek term for womb). The relevance and importance of Thurston’s breakthrough for the study of religion can hardly be overstated: Thurston saw and understood that a historical “supernatural” phenomenon, in this case the stigmata, could be produced within an entirely secular context and by entirely “natural” means. This hardly answered all of his (or

!60 our) questions, but it was certainly a fine start. Thurston goes on to examine any number of physical-mystical phenomena, including the stigmata cases, levitation (Joseph of Copertino again), telekinesis (for example, floating or flying communion wafers), luminous or glowing bodies, incombustibility (the resistance to burning, otherwise known as the “human salamander” phenomenon), bodily elongation, the experience of the incendium amoris or “fire of love” (an intense heat felt by the saint in and as the body), the odor of sanctity (pleasant and mysterious smells in the vicinity of a saint), incorrupt corpses (corpses of saints that apparently do not decompose), blood prodigies (blood that flows for months or even years after death), seeing without eyes, inedia (living without eating), and the multiplication of food. There are many places in this material to doubt and raise one’s eyebrows, for sure, but Thurston acknowledges the same. The total effect of the comparative material presented here is quite different, though: it is difficult to finish this book without a rather uncanny sense that both the human body and the physical universe are not quite (or at all) what they appear to be. One of the strongest comparative patterns he settles on is the dramatic gender pattern of the stigmata phenomenon. That pattern boils down to this historical fact: most complete stigmatics have been women. Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), who is often considered to be the first stigmatic, and the twentieth-century Italian priest Padre Pio (1887-1968) are important exceptions to this general gender pattern. More dramatically still, not a single male stigmatic has demonstrated the periodic bleeding that defines so many of the female cases. The psychosexual dimensions of an ascetic, sexually inactive female body which is penetrated— sometimes in five or six different places—and which bleeds periodically within intense states of devotion, love, and physical suffering seem obvious enough, even if what it all means is hardly clear. Another kind of super sexuality.

Herbert Thurston, S.J., The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, ed. by J. H. Crehan, S.J. (London: Burns Oates, 1952). The classic study.

!61 Joseph Crehan, S.J., Father Thurston: A Memoir with a Bibliography of His Writings (London: Sheed and Ward, 1952. Just what the title says. Crehan was Thurston’s brother Jesuit and colleague.

Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: ZONE, 1992). A major historian of medieval Christianity engages seriously with Thurston’s work to mine her own historical material.

Lisa J. Schwebel, Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas: Christianity and the Paranormal (Paulist Press, 2004). Simply the best book on the Catholic paranormal, demonstrating over and over again that one can be deeply suspicious of the traditional religious explanations while taking the phenomena themselves very seriously. Also excellent in its sophisticated discussions of how such phenomena lie at the historical root of much religious doctrine, devotion, and ritual practice.

Patricia Treese, The Mystical Body: An Investigation of Supernatural Phenomena (New York: Crossroad, 2005). An accessible updating of the study of the physical phenomena of mysticism in the line of Thurston with some more recent cases. !

* * * !

I took up in this chapter the alien abduction literature as a very good place to look for modern religious experiences and popular comparative practices. One important figure I could not treat there, for lack of space, was John E. Mack. Mack was a Harvard psychiatrist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Nightmares and Human Conflict (1970). When, a quarter century later, he published Abduction (1994), on his clinical patients whose alien abduction experiences he came to realize could not be slotted into the standard material/mental maps or explained away with any known psychiatric models, he became the subject of what amounted to a heresy trial at Harvard. In 1994, the Dean of Harvard Medical School launched a fourteenth-month peer investigation of Mack’s clinical work with abductees, which ended in a decision to re-assert Mack’s intellectual

!62 freedom to study what he wanted. Obviously, the man had hit a nerve. Here are two books worth looking at if you want to hit that same nerve.

John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1994). The book that made Mack (in)famous. It is relevant here for a number of reasons, including the fact that he engages Eliade and the history of religions school as one means of trying to understand the abduction phenomenon. Among many other moves,Mack compares the abductees to a kind of unconscious shaman whose out-of-body experiences and visions he then contextualizes within humanity’s long history of encounters with beings from the sky. In short, he practices a kind of comparison in order to make sense of his patients and their traumatic spiritual experiences.

John E. Mack, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (Largo, Florida: Kunati, 2008). This book, published after Mack was killed in 2004 in London (he accidentally stepped out in front of a van), represents a series of philosophical reflections on the phenomenon. Very briefly, Mack came to realize that the abduction experiences of his patients violated our usual splitting of the mental from the material, the spiritual from the physical, and so on. He called these “crossover phenomena,” that is, “events of various sorts that appear to manifest in the material world but seem not to be of it” (9). In our own terms, he came to see the abduction experiences as paradoxical liminal phenomena. He became convinced that modern science, however important, could not in the end fathom such events in principle, since its methods had been designed to study only the material world, that is, only one side of the both- and. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/americans-alien-abduction-science A refreshingly fair and balanced Vanity Fair article on Mack’s life and thought, with numerous photographs and personal reminiscences. The article concludes with one of Mack’s research associates reporting a message she received from the deceased psychiatrist on the nature of the alien abductions they had been studying. It could well function as a motto for the study of religion as a whole: “It’s not what we thought.”

!63 Other reliable and thoughtful resources on the UFO phenomenon, from a variety of perspectives, include:

Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia, and UFOs (London: Constable, 2010). A wonderful and often funny book by a hip British researcher on the disinformation campaigns and hoaxes of the American story, interspersed with his own dramatic encounters with . . . well . . . UFOs. The both-and done beautifully right.

Thomas E. Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010). The state of the art in terms of folklore scholarship, arguing that much of the lore is in fact exaggerated, overly literalized, constructed, or hoaxed, but that a core mystery nevertheless remains behind the myths, visions, and anomalous experiences. ! Partridge, Christopher, ed., UFO Religions (London: Routledge, 2003). A collection of scholarly essays on UFO-based religious movements. Excellent examples of new religious movements emerging out of this mythical complex, including the idea of the alien as ancient astronaut and guider of human evolution.

Matheson, Terry, Alien Abductions: Creating a Modern Phenomenon (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998). A much needed discussion of the literary formations of the abduction experience, exploring the basic narrative structure of these accounts and their reliance on earlier texts and narrative themes. What the abduction literature looks like to a literary critic.

Pope, Nick, The Uninvited: An Exposé of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon (Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1997). A discussion of the UFO phenomenon by a former British government UFO analyst, laying out the various interpretations and suggesting, in the end, that something real and important is occurring behind the scenes, even if we do not know what that something is. An important perspective to hear for those who imagine that the phenomenon is simply “subjective.”

Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (Berkeley: And/Or Press, !64 1979). Although self-violence is rare in UFO religions and ancient astronaut thinking, these forms of religious expression are sometimes open to conspiracy thinking and cultish behavior. This is the first book, of which I am aware, to examine this aspect of the UFO phenomenon in detail. A photo and discussion of Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles appear in chapter 4, eighteen years before the mass suicide of Heaven’s Gate that they inspired and led. ! The Ancient Astronaut Thesis: Understanding a Popular Comparative Practice

The material of John Keel and James Gallant provoke an obvious question with respect to the comparative practices of popular culture: What are we to make of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, that is, the wildly popular notion that the ancient gods were really extraterrestrial astronauts? Such an idea is widely distributed today and branches off into numerous related notions (alien-simian cross-breeding toward the evolution of the human species, ancient nuclear warfare, alternate secret world histories, paranoid conspiracy theories, and so on), but the core idea is perhaps best known through the books of Eric von Däniken, especially Chariots of the Gods? (1967), the classic sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which appeared just a year later, and the much more recent R. Scott Ridley film, Prometheus (2012). The same theme is evident, however, in numerous other books and films, including one of my own favorites: Knowing (2009), starring Nicholas Cage. The real historical landscape, however, is far more complicated than this. Well before von Däniken, the famous skeptic and popularizer of science Carl Sagan advanced an almost identical “paleocontact” thought experiment with Russian colleague Iosif Shklovskii in 1966.

I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966), 448–62. The aforementioned paleo-contact thought experiment—a serious problem for anyone who wants to imagine that the ancient astronaut thesis is simply the function of crackpots and naïve believers. Again: a badly used or performed idea is not the same thing as a bad idea. !

!65 And well before Sagan and Shklovskii, the notion was advanced by nineteenth and twentieth- century novelists, theosophists, occultists, mediums, and channelers in a mind-boggling array of variants and versions, including the books of Charles Fort (1919-1932), the pulp magazines of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and the countercultural classic The Morning of the Magicians (1963), briefly discussed in ch 2. Much of the most recent popular theorizing, including and especially that of von Däniken, can be chalked up to what can only be called a naïve and historically unsophisticated comparative practice. That is to say, the ancient alien hypothesis assumes, without real question, the contemporary UFO mythology and then “reads it back” into the ancient religious past— hence the ancient gods become aliens. In other words, it takes as given or granted our present mythical imagination and its technological obsessions (aliens and spaceships) and then uses that frame to “explain” the historical past (the gods). But it is just as possible, of course, to use the ancient mythologies (the gods) to “explain” the present UFO phenomena (the aliens). And, if we were to practice comparison in a truly rigorous way, as a writer like Gallant does so well, we would use the present UFO mythology to read the past religious mythologies and the past religious mythologies to read the present UFO mythology, without prioritizing or privileging either. We would, in effect, destabilize both registers with the techniques of comparison. I am, of course, articulating my own position here, which I have set out in two books, the already cited Authors of the Impossible and:

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). A study of the catalytic and creative roles that paranormal experiences have played in the lives of professional authors and artists in the sci-fi, comic book, and film worlds, including numerous discussions of the alien ancient astronaut motif (for example, 111-120, 222-228). To observe the obvious, Superman, who heralded the superhero genre in 1938, is a crashed alien.

But others before and after me have attempted a similar both-and approach. Foremost among these are Joscelyn Godwin and David Halperin: ! !66 Joscelyn Godwin, Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2010), 202-5, 273, 285-288. A learned and balanced discussion of the occult and channeling background of the ancient alien idea, including the case of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star-Trek, and his engagement of a medium around a possible alien invasion. ! David J. Halperin, Journal of a UFO Investigator: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2011). Perhaps one of the most instructive, and certainly one of the most interesting, examples of “comparison done right” with this particular topic is the work of the scholar of ancient Judaism, David Halperin. Halperin wrote his University of California, Berkeley, dissertation and his first two books on the theme of the “chariot vision” of chapter 1 of the biblical book of Ezekiel. This biblical chapter, one of the most sacred (and considered by the ancient Jewish rabbis to be one of the most dangerous) of the entire Hebrew Bible, became one of the source-texts for later Jewish “merkabah” or “chariot” mysticism. It is also often cited today as a case of an ancient UFO encounter. Halperin would go on to write a most provocative analysis of Ezekiel’s psychosexual pathologies and outrageous misogyny in Seeking Ezekiel and, most recently, published a popular novel based on his experiences as a youth hunting for flying saucers, Journal of a UFO Investigator. He has also written essays comparing the ancient case with the modern case, both for conferences and on his blogsite. These texts, taken together now, present a most dramatic example of how rigorous, how incisive, and how popularly relevant the study of religion can be, particularly when it is robustly comparative, reflecting back and forth, as in a double mirror, between the ancient past and the contemporary present.

David J. Halperin, Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Press, 1993). A powerful psychoanalytic interpretation of Ezekiel, exposing in particular the prophet’s virulent misogyny. ! http://www.davidhalperin.net/ Halperin’s website and blog on the subject of UFOs and religion. Make sure you don’t miss this blog entry and its follow-up, in part 2: http:// www.davidhalperin.net/the-box-of-crazy-ufos-and-ezekiels-vision-part-1/ !67 !

9. The Final Questions of Soul and the End of All Things: The Human as Two !

An old master says the soul is created in the middle between one and two. The one is eternity, which maintains itself ever alone and without variation. The two is time, which is changeable and given to multiplication.

Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52 !

This chapter is on different conceptions of human identity and the human person, particularly those that posit multiple selves or other dimensions of the human being than the social self or ego, including and especially different religious notions of the “soul.” It also treats models of salvation and the end of all things as these are imagined, practiced, and sought after in the religions. !

David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). A collection of essays on how so much of religion is designed to do one thing: change the human person. The self is not stable. The self is not one thing.

Peter Heehs, Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). An elegant book on the debates around the assumed existence and nature of the “I” and the history of self-expression and self-making through the act of first-person writing in Europe, America, Asia, and the Islamic world. An excellent way to consider the self and how the experience of it changes from culture to culture and age to age.

!68 David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). A cogent treatment of panpsychism in the history of Western thought from a philosophical perspective.

Jerry L. Walls, The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A volume of essays on “the end of all things” from the ancient biblical world and the world religions, through the various philosophical and theological debates, to the contemporary scene in phenomena like near-death experiences, fine art, and pop culture.

Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). A masterful textual and historical analysis of the biblical origins of Satan, arguing, in effect, that the figure is a mythical projection and embodiment of inter-religious hatred and intolerance, particularly between the early Christian communities and their Jewish and pagan contemporaries.

Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). A reliable and insightful history of the devil and hell in the West.

Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Burton’s take on the history of heaven after his “history of hell.” These two books read well together.

Glenn W. Shuck, Marks of the Beast: The “Left Behind” Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2004). A study of a mega-popular series of books that came to shape Evangelical eschatology around the turn of the new millennium.

Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). A learned set of reflections and comparisons on rebirth or reincarnation in North America, ancient Greece, and Buddhist South Asia by one of our most accomplished anthropologists.

Antonia Mills and Richard Slobodin, eds., Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Belief Among North American Indians and Inuit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). A volume

!69 demonstrating that reincarnation beliefs are common among the indigenous religions of North America. The book opens with a foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere comparing North American beliefs with those of South Asia entitled “Reincarnation Eschatologies and the Comparative Study of Religions.”

Brian Ogren, Renaissance and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009). A technical study of reincarnation beliefs and biblical interpretive methods among Jewish mystical writers in the Italian Renaissance. Demonstrates that such beliefs are not restricted to the Asian religions and can be found in the monotheisms, where they function in very different ways.

Alan F. Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2004). A magisterial historical treatment of the development of conceptions of the afterlife in ancient Judaism and Christianity, with a chapter on Islam as well, by a major scholar of Judaism. There are numerous relevant issues treated here, including the attempted syntheses between the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body in these ancient sources. A very big book, too technical for the beginning student but marvelous nonetheless.

Hick, John, Death & Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976). A still quite useful theological study of conceptions of the after life in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. One of the features that sets this book apart from other similar performances, even up to today, is its elegant incorporation of modern parapsychological research and its discussion of the mind/brain problem in chapters 6 and 7.

MacGregor, Geddes, Images of Afterlife: Beliefs from Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: Paragon House, 1992). A condensed but very useful overview. For another treatment of conceptions of the afterlife in the world religions, see Obayashi, Hiroshi, Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1992).

Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Probably the classic comparative

!70 study of medieval Christian and modern NDE accounts of the afterlife. Required reading for anyone seriously interested in the NDE as a viable comparative category.

Ian Stevenson, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). An abridged version of Stevenson’s massive study of unusual birthmarks as apparent signs of a previous violent death.

Jim B. Tucker, M.D., Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005). This the best single introduction to the legacy of Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia. Dr. Tucker followed this book up with a second one very recently, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), where he also engages in some speculative reflections on what these cases might suggest about the ultimate nature of Mind and reality, the former which he suspects is a kind of singular “cosmic consciousness” (a la William James) or “Mind of God,” and the latter which he compares to a consciousness-created shared dream from which the NDE experiencer suddenly wakes up (in a traumatic death) and then falls back into (in another life). We are all “islands” in an ocean of Mind dreaming the world of experience. “This is a far, far cry from my Southern Baptist roots,” he reflects at the very end, like a seasoned comparativist, “and yet . . . this Ultimate Source of all existence must be the thing that our feeble minds can only comprehend in some shrunken, anthropomorphized, clouded facsimile we call God” (218). In my own terms, Dr. Tucker has reflexively re-read religion.

Reincarnation Is a Comparative Practice

I have noted Anita Moorjani’s reading of reincarnation beliefs in light of her near-death experience. I have also briefly alluded to the thousands of other modern documented cases of the reincarnation type studied by Ian Stevenson and his colleagues at the University of Virginia. If we note in these the pattern of the nonlocal self, that is, the ways that a past life memory does not always fit the present cultural worldview of the family in question, we might go further still and suggest that reincarnation memories and models—for whatever else they are or are not—can function as very sophisticated and very dramatic comparative practices. Reincarnation is an

!71 implicit comparative practice. Why? Because reincarnation models balance sameness and difference in complex and nuanced ways. Something (the reincarnating “soul”) remains the same, and yet the model insists that this something-of-the-same embeds itself, expresses itself through, becomes a different social, historical, and cultural self with every new birth. In some sense, then, reincarnation models take the constructivist insights of the modern study of religion around how all of our emotions, ideas, perceptions, and self-understandings are constructed by historical, social, cognitive, and biological processes and radicalize these by pushing them into previous and future lives. In these models, at least, not only is the present self and life constructed by elaborate conditionings (which is all the constructivist models suggest), but this self and this life are constructed by patterns and memories from previous lives, and all of this in turn will construct selves and social relations in future lives. The constructions and conditionings go on and on in both directions in the reincarnation model, whereas they are restricted to a single life in the contemporary constructivist models. Karma is a kind of constructivist theory. Only more so. This, please observe, is not necessarily the case with the one-life models of the afterlife. These often suggest that the constructed social and historical differences remain the same beyond the grave, and that all that follows after death will be determined, “judged,” by what happened in that single life. Indeed, in some popular forms of this belief, the person, the ego goes on and on, along with its family, relationships, and memories. The afterlife is like this life, only it never ends and all the bad stuff is removed (or really, really bad stuff is added, in a hell world). If reincarnation as comparative practice balances sameness and difference, the one-life model as comparative practice privileges a kind of sameness, forever. !

10. Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism, and Justice: Faithful Re-Readings !

Theology is not universal language; it is interested language and thus is always a

!72 reflection of the goals and aspirations of a particular people in a definite social setting. James Cone, God of the Oppressed !

This chapter was on religious ways of re-reading religion after the effective realization of religious pluralism. We looked in particular at exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist models, as well as models of religion that attempt to re-read the future of religion in light of social justice (as sameness-and-difference) in all of its ramifications, be these organized around the categories of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation.

The chapter began with a brief description of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and his very modern experience of revelation. Here are a few more resources on Dick, the first from the perspective of the study of religion, the second a lovely biography of Dick that captures especially well the deeply religious dimensions of the writer’s life and work: Gabriel McKee, Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2004); and Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York: Citadel Press, 1991).

Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). A deep historical treatment of European Christianity’s theologies of persecution and the birth of the notions of religious toleration and religious freedom out of this troubling history.

Dual Belonging, the Interspiritual, and Syncretism

There are at least three other forms of faithful re-readings that we were not able to treat in the textbook. One is dual belonging, that is, the phenomenon of modern individuals choosing to claim allegiance and faithful belonging to two different religious traditions. One especially common dual belonging has featured particular forms of Christianity (both Protestant and Roman

!73 Catholic) and Buddhism, as can be seen in Paul F. Knitter’s book title, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. I recall here a conversation I once had with the late Roger Corless, a scholar of Buddhism who taught at Duke University. Roger was both a practicing Roman Catholic and a devout Buddhist in the Tibetan tradition (although I am not sure “devout” can possibly capture the hilarious humanity that was Roger). When I voiced my young opinion that these two commitments were mutually incompatible, he quipped back, in the literal stuttering flare that was uniquely his, that this was in fact so, but that there was nevertheless some mystery in him that knew the truth of both. That silenced me. Another type of faithful re-reading worthy of mention is the category of the interspiritual, which is quite recent. The adjective was coined by the Benedictine monk Brother Wayne Teasdale, who was attempting to name what he saw as the next stage of interreligious dialogue, in which contemplatives from different traditions would share with each other the details of their respective mystical experiences, with no desire to convert the other or defend their own specific worldviews. The intention here appears to revolve around a hope or intuition that this kind of sharing would eventually create a liminal space or “interspiritual” zone in which new forms of humanity and religion could take shape and stabilize. An older term that names similar processes, if in a much less sophisticated way, is syncretism. The term names an extremely common historical process found in all religions. The spirit of syncretism feels compelled to create something new out of selected elements of the existing religious traditions, often in light of some unique social situation or personal religious experience. Syncretism is like the art of collage. It uses little bits and pieces of this or that and puts them together toward some greater whole or larger vision. Or, alternately, it like the act of shopping: one picks a little of this and a little of that in the market of religious ideas and practices. As with all comparative categories, there is a problem here with the terminology. The problem with the term “syncretism” is that it originates in early Protestant writings attempting to show the illicit and pagan “mixings” of Roman Catholicism and, later, in Christian missionary theology, where it named the inappropriate mixing of Christian and indigenous beliefs or practices. The early Protestant writers detested what they saw as the Platonic and pagan

!74 adoptions of Catholicism, and the missionaries wanted to convert the natives to their culture, not mix the two. So in both case, “syncretism” meant “what we don’t want” or just “bad.” It is often assumed, quite incorrectly, that syncretism, particularly when it takes on a market structure, is a strictly modern phenomenon, even that it is somehow necessarily tied to the economic structures of modern capitalism and the wealth of the middle or upper-middle classes. It is certainly true that this kind of market structure lies at the basis of many modern forms of religion. It is also true that in the modern world these forms of religion have indeed created a real and important synergy with capitalism, one of the basic principles of which is that one can choose to purchase whatever goods or commodities (including religious commodities) one wishes and can afford. But it is definitely not true that these syncretistic processes are simply expressions of modern capitalism or, for that matter, of the modern world. Very similar syncretistic processes, after all, can easily be found in the ancient world as well, as we saw, for example, with king Croesus “comparison shopping” for the best oracle in chapter 4. There are at least two further things to note in this context. First, one should not mistake the syncretistic process with randomness, chaos, or superficiality. Syncretistic processes are usually highly selective and operate with strong theological principles, even if these principles are implicit or unconscious. The syncretistic spirit does not just choose anything from any religion to put on her canvas, as it were. She chooses only those forms and colors that “fit” the picture that she is painting. Second, one should understand that many forms of syncretism originated in personal revelation events. Take, for example, what is often called the New Age movement, that immense sweep of occult, esoteric, and mystical movements that spiked in the American and European countercultures of the 1960s and 70s and came into public form and a kind of conscious self- understanding in the 1980s and 90s (hence the “New Age” shelves of the mega-bookstore or internet site today). These movements are usually described as highly syncretistic and individualistic, even as “narcissistic,” usually in order to criticize or dismiss them, as if they constituted little more than a “spiritual marketplace” in which rootless individuals selfishly choose what they want and ignore the rest. This is a simplification, to say the least. There is, as we have already observed, both an

!75 ancient history to these practices and a clear pluralist logic in the choices made here. Moreover, and more to our present point, many key elements and classic texts of the New Age movement originated in dramatic revelation events—for example, encounters with discarnate beings or lightforms, miraculous healings, channeled scriptural texts—that in turn advanced highly syncretistic practices. Syncretism may or may not be a form of narcissism or capitalism in a specific New Age instance, but it is also a natural and perfectly logical response to a pluralist revelation and a multicultural society.

Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld, 2013). Knitter, a well- known and prolific comparative theologian, reflects on his journey as a Christian in conversation with Buddhism and on the religious possibility of “double belonging.”

There are at least two fine readers or collections of texts on the historical consistency and importance of religious syncretism. They are: Eric Maroney, SCM Core Text: Syncretism (London: SCM Press, 2006); and Anita Maria Leopold and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, eds., Syncretism in Religion: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005).

Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Western Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1998). Probably the best book ever written on the New Age movement, and especially sophisticated in its treatment of New Age teachings as modern revelation events. !

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Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). A classic of feminist theology that demonstrates how traditional talk of God (theology) has really been male talk about God from the perspectives and life-experiences of men that in turn shut out the voices and views of women. Also engages the modern political notion of “family values” and the traditional Christian family as historically constructed practices and as fundamentally unjust.

!76 Vine Deloria, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1972). The founding text of doing theology from the perspectives of Native American religious traditions, a tradition of theology-as-justice that we were not able to treat in the textbook.

We did not get to address it in the textbook, but a related question with the religious re-readings is the obvious one: what is the future of religion?

Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009). A clear statement from a major Christian theologian about where he thinks things have been moving for the last half century, that is, away from dogmatic beliefs and hierarchical/patriarchal institutions and toward faith and the life of the spirit. In essence, “spirituality is replacing formal religion,” and we are heading toward a “new Age of the Spirit” (224). Cox reads fundamentalism as a fearful reaction, point by point, to these increasingly porous religious boundaries and the rich pluralistic theology of this future faith: “Fundamentalism . . . is on graphic display around the globe because it is dying” (front flap). http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Why-Limit-Ourselves-The-Future-of- Religion.html My own take on the question of the future of religion, and the present of religion: “Basically, you’re worshiping Zeus.” There is a future, of course, and a genuinely positive one, if only we will write it. !

11. Masters of Suspicion, Classical and Contemporary: Rational Re-Readings !

In synesthetes, stimulation of a sense triggers an anomalous sensory experience: one may hear colors, taste shapes, or systematically experience other sensory blendings. . . . Think about that—microscopic changes in brain wiring can lead to different realities. The mere existence of synesthesia demonstrates that more than one kind of brain—and one kind of mind—is possible.

!77 David Eagleman, Incognito

This chapter was on various ways that intellectuals have “reduced” religious phenomena to non- religious causes, mechanisms, or processes, often for ethical reasons and always toward explanatory goals. We began with brief summaries of the rational re-readings of Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim as exemplars of the psychology and sociology of religion, respectively, and moved on from there to postcolonial theory, cognitive science, and the difficult question of violence and religion after 9/11.

The literature on Freud’s engagement with religion is immense. Here are some reliable and relatively accessible sources, beginning with a brief essay on a school of psychoanalysis that we were not able to treat in the chapter discussions due to a lack of space.

Freud and Object Relations Psychology

Freud is often labeled an extreme individualist. As with most things assumed about Freud, this is only partially true. He, after all, wove social processes into the innermost life of the individual through his insistence on the oedipal complex and the family romance. Moreover, his insistence that the conscience or superego is constructed through social values interjected into the psyche is a sociological insight par excellence. Later psychoanalytic thinkers radicalized and developed this social aspect of the Master’s thought. One particularly influential later school of Freudian psychology is called object-relations theory. Here the psyche, and so the person, is no longer conceived as an independent thing or essence. Rather, the person is now understood to be a constantly shifting set of relationships within a complex social and physical field. The implications of object-relations theory are profoundly sociological. The theory, after all, argues, in effect, that the subject is constructed by its objects. Hence the potent expression self-object, that is, an object that helps make up a self. By “self-objects,” these theorists mean primarily other people, that is, parents, siblings, friends, lovers, and so on. These self-objects, however, can also be literal objects or things. Hence what is called the transitional object. A transitional object—the classic example is the

!78 Teddy bear or blanket—is an object that allows a psyche to relate to its constantly shifting social environment through the stable medium of this possession. Once again, the subject comes into being via an object, here a literal one. Self-objects and transitional objects are not, of course, restricted to infants and children. Sports cars, particular kinds of clothing, religious necklaces or devotional objects, even entire mythical worlds and ritual practices—almost anything can be read as a transitional object (or perhaps transitional space) that provides an intermediate environment within which to work out the various stresses, relationships, and negotiations that living in society inevitably requires. As this single example of object relations theory makes clear, there are other schools of thought within the psychoanalytic tradition. Freud was the beginning, not the end.

David H. Wulff, Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary (Wiley, 1996), chapter 7. This is the chapter on psychoanalysis, but this is probably the single best book on the psychology of religion across the board, with rich discussions of the biographies of the major figures and a broad and balanced grasp of the clinical, empirical, and theoretical literatures. Wulff writes with an expert eye on the study of religion as well, fully conversant in the field’s debates and concerns.

Diane Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons, eds., Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (New York: Routledge, 2000). The best single volume on a broad spectrum of psychological approaches to the study of religion. Particularly good at relating psychology to theology and comparative studies and addressing the modern phenomenon of psychology as religion.

James W. Jones, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Religion: Transference and Transcendence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Particularly good on the object-relations schools of psychoanalysis.

Ana-Maria Rizutto, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). A classic study of how images of God are formed in the mind through paternal imprints (Freud’s view) but also through various social, religious, and cultural influences. !79 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Probably the single best book on Freud ever written, but probably also too much for the beginner. Take up only if you are willing to do the work.

T. G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). A collection of essays from both Indian and western writers on the rich twentieth-century dialogue between psychoanalysis and Hinduism, arranged chronologically from the pioneering Bengali psychoanalyst Girindrisekhar Bose onwards.

Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Originally published in 1978, this is probably the most important book ever written on the psychoanalytic study of Hinduism. All of Kakar’s books, including his novels, are wonderful entries into the same.

Anthony Molino, ed., The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism (North Point Press, 1999). A collection of essays, both classical and contemporary, on the dialogue between psychoanalysis and Buddhism.

Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). A classic study of matted hair and the creative back-and-forth between personal symbols and public meanings in a group of ecstatic women in modern Sinhalese Buddhism. Obeyesekere did for the psychoanalytic study of Buddhism what Kakar accomplished for the psychoanalytic study of Hinduism.

Harvey Aronson, Buddhist Practice on Western Ground: Reconciling Eastern Ideals and Western Psychology (Shambala, 2004). A particularly sensitive and balanced comparative treatment of Buddhist and western psychological notions from a practicing American Buddhist and professional therapist. !

!80 * * * !

Steward Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). A sophisticated updating and nuancing of one of the ancient theories of religion we looked at briefly in chapter 1—religion as anthropomorphism and projection—with the tools of anthropology, cognitive science, perception theory, and contemporary materials like advertising and animal studies.

Richard A. Horsley, Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). An excellent source for thinking difficult thoughts about the historical relationship between conversion and empire, which we briefly addressed under our discussion of postcolonial theory.

Embodied Cognition

Embodied cognition is the fundamental notion in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science that human thinking tends to follow closely along the metaphors of the human body and its kinesthetic or physical self-location in space and time. Hence the common spatial metaphors with which we all think—“behind,” “before,” “above,” “below,” and so on—are reflections and expressions of the body’s experience in space. But this basic insight goes much further, since the “self” itself in this model is also an embodied cognition, that is, it looks very much like a function of the body and its sense of being a separate entity in a social world. When you look in the mirror and see “yourself,” what is it that you are looking at? The body, of course. Language, social conditioning, and perception itself, then, all work together to create a “natural” sense of a body-self, of you as physical form. The Buddhist countercultural writer Alan Watts had a wonderful expression for this basic cognitive insight (long before cognitive science): he called it the “skin-encapsulated ego.” This identification between self and body, of course, then generates the fear of suffering, disease, and death, since it is the body that will suffer such things and so presumably eventually end “you.” From here, we can see how different cultures generate different religious systems of soul and

!81 salvation to solve this basic body-self problem. All of religion, in this view, is an attempted response to the basic conflation of the self with the body, which ends. Although we never quite named the approach, we have employed similar notions throughout the textbook. For example, in chapter 5, we engaged in comparative reflections on the religious imaging of “up” as sacred and on the basic bodily metaphors behind purity codes, the latter of which rely on a sense of the body-as-container that must be preserved or protected from intrusion. In chapter 9, we discussed the soul as image, shadow, or reflection of the body. In chapter 12, I briefly reflected on the religious framing of “right” and “left” (handedness) as “good” and “bad.” But, in truth, similar insights around embodied cognitions could be extended into almost any of our chapter discussions. For example, the very notion of “having a religion,” which we discussed in chapter 3, is an embodied cognition, since it is bodies that “possess” objects. So too, in the same chapter, with the language of the “insider” and the “outsider,” which, of course, assume an understanding of the body/self-as-container again. So too again with the categories of gender (always about the characteristics of a body) and sexual orientation (about particular bodies desiring other particular bodies) of chapter 6. And on and on. There is a single, fairly short, and very accessible book that set the terms of this discussion over three decades ago and still remains a classic in the philosophy of mind and now cognitive science: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). !

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Techno-Cultural Models of Human Evolution

Most recently, a fourth model of evolution has been appearing on the horizon. Since the evolutionary role of culture is central to it, and since religious practice is a central component of culture, it seems at least worth mentioning, despite its still forming and speculative nature. Here, after all, we might detect the early lines of a kind of reversal of the evolutionary cognitive models: human culture not as a meaningless by-product or spandrel but as an actual driver of the !82 future human. Consider this. In 1850, the average American male was 5’ 7” tall and weighed 146 pounds. By 1980, that same male averaged 5’ 10” and weighed in at 174 pounds. And the patterns are global. Over the last 300 years, through new agricultural techniques, food distribution networks, and biomedical advances, humans on the planet have increased their average body size by 50% and their lifespan by 300%. Those are immense changes, and in a virtual eye-blink of evolutionary time. And they are just the beginning. We have also taken control of our environment through technology, modern medicine, and political arrangements to a scale unprecedented in any other era of human history. And as we do so, those changes are in turn impacting our sexual practices, our gender constructions, and, with them, our gene pool (think about the birth control pill, the Caesarian birth, or the abortion of fetuses with severe birth defects or fatal diseases). In effect, we are manipulating the processes of human evolution. Most of all, though, we are speeding them up. We have even arrived at the point where we are beginning to manipulate the human genome itself—our own secret code. And again, it is getting faster and faster, fast. In 1990, it cost three billion dollars to read a single person’s genome. Today you can do it for $1,000. Estimates put the price at around a mere $10.00 within a decade or so. Then what? There are some clear precedents here. “Think about dogs,” neuroscientist Richard Granger observes. “Used to be they all looked like wolves. Now they don’t. In just a few thousand years of messing around with their genes, humans have created canine breeds that are completely physically incompatible—a Great Dane and a Chihuahua could not produce off- spring without help.” And this was a cultural project driven by human desires, needs, and whims, not a natural, random biological one driven by adaptive needs or survival pressures. So too with humans. We are changing ourselves as we change our environment through technology and all sorts of human cultural practices and desire. This process has been called techno-physio evolution or “niche construction,” but we might better frame it for our own purposes here as simply “techno-cultural evolution,” since all technology is, in the end, a function of human beings and their cultural institutions. It does not make itself. We make it in the context of

!83 institutions like research universities, hospitals, and corporations. Juan Enriquez, the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, follows the logic of these present forces to an extreme, sci-fi like future: “We’re now no more than a generation or two away from the emergence of an entirely new kind of hominid. Homo evolutus: a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over its own evolution and the evolution of other species.” Reflexivity, that turning around of the human biocomputer to witness and manipulate its own exposed programming, is taking on a biological dimension now. Which begs numerous moral questions. And this one: how else have we been evolving ourselves all along through other types of cultural activity, like ritual practice, meditation, prayer, purity codes involving sexuality and sexual selection, moral discipline, and the various “technologies of the soul”? Is religion really just a spandrel? Or is it also one of many cultural drivers of human evolution?

All quotes are from Steven Kotler, “Evolution Full Tilt,” in Discover, March 2013, 32-36. !

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We ended the chapter on the matrix of religion, violence, and the suppression of human rights. Here are some resources for thinking about the same further.

Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). One of the earliest, and certainly most important, comparative studies of religious terrorism in the contemporary world.

Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Appleby helped pioneer the comparative study of fundamentalism with Martin Marty at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. This is one of his major statements on why the robust study of religion, particularly in its extreme, “strong,” or fundamentalist forms,

!84 must be a central component of any effective public policy or international political strategy. Balanced, calm, and as sensitive to the positive as to the negative.

Religions take different positions on the legitimacy of war and military operations. For a few comparative studies, see: Vesselin Popovski, Gregory M. Reichberg, and Nicholas Turner, eds., World Religions and Norms of War (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2009); and Thompson, Henry O., World Religions in War and Peace (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1988).

Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). A classic study on the militaristic aspects of Zen Buddhism in Japan during World War II, demonstrating that Buddhism, widely considered a “peaceful” religion, can be employed like any other religion for violent and warring purposes, particularly when it is aligned with state power and politics.

William H. Brackney, ed., Human Rights and the World’s Major Religions (Santa Barbara: ABC- CLIO, 2013). A summary treatment (from an earlier and much larger five-volume set) of five religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) that is sensitive to both the positive and negative roles that religion has played in the promotion and protection of human rights and of the modern history of the category itself.

Austin Dacey, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights (London: Continuum, 2012). Blasphemy, or speech deemed offensive to a community’s religious sensibilities, is used to justify censorship, harassment of intellectuals and writers, mass arrests, torture, even political assassinations. The same religious logic has been used for centuries, if not millennia to shut down difficult questions about religion itself. Here Dacey demonstrates why speech deemed “blasphemous” is so important for our modern world and why we should protect it. !

12. Reflexive Re-Readings: Looking at the Looker ! !85 In the beginning, God created humanity. But now humanity creates God. This is the way it is in the world—human beings invent gods and worship their creation. It would be more fitting for the gods to worship human beings.

The Gospel of Philip !

This chapter is my own thought experiment around a future form of re-reading religion that can embrace the most robust and reductive forms of rational re-reading and also take seriously the experiential realities of religious experience and revelation. After a discussion of some historical examples of reflexive re-readings, I focus in on the “filter thesis,” a model of the brain-mind relationship that sees consciousness (which is not the same thing as ordinary awareness or the ego-with-a-name) as an independent reality that is filtered through or transmitted by the human body-brain but not ultimately produced by it. Such a model allows us to take seriously and relate both the most advanced findings of neuroscience, biology, and interpretive methods like psychoanalysis (as related to the body-brain-ego filter) and the most extreme forms of religious experience (as relating to consciousness as such). To support and demonstrate this re-reading of religion, I end the chapter with some contemporary neuroscientists who have come to a filter- thesis model not through reason or experiment but through their own extreme traumatic experiences: the human as two cracked apart.

Although it is too much for the introductory reader or the beginning undergraduate student, I first set out the basics of this approach in The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For those really interested in exploring the intellectual roots of the reflexive re-readings set out in this chapter (particularly in the writings of the nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian Ludwig Feuerbach), this is probably the best place to go next. Be forewarned, though: this book hisses and bites.

Mikita Brottman, Phantoms of the Clinic: From Thought Transference to Projective Identification (Karnac Books, 2011). A short and accessible treatment of some of the radically reflexive (and psychical) dimensions of the history and practice of psychoanalysis.

!86 Christopher Hauke, Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities (London: Routledge, 2000). One of the best books on Jung, particularly in the psychologist’s bolder moves concerning the nature of reality and the ways that modern rationalist and mechanistic ways of knowing have missed the mark.

Mircea Eliade, “Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge,” translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts and anthologized in Bryan Rennie, ed., Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader (London: Equinox, 2006). A brief and clear example of a major comparativist re-reading miracle in the light of modern parapsychology.

On Synchronicity as Magical Comparison

We addressed the topic of synchronicity as a means of re-introducing “magic” back into the modern world, here through the friendship and correspondence of a major psychologist (C. G. Jung) and a pioneering quantum theorist (Wolfgang Pauli). It can also be seen as a comparative method, since, at its core, synchronicity is about connecting and relating events that do not appear to be causally related. There are numerous books on the subject, but the most helpful for the student of religion, in my opinion, are these five:

Robert Aziz, C. G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (Albany: SUNY, 1990). Excellent at relating Jung’s psychology to the concerns and questions of the comparative study of religion, all the while demonstrating the central importance the category of synchronicity plays in Jung’s thought.

F. X. Charet, Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung’s Psychology (Albany: SUNY, 1993). Demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt that the roots of Jung’s thinking lie in the occult and psychical research currents of nineteenth-century European culture, including and especially Spiritualism.

Roderick Main, The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). Treats synchronicity as critique of modern rationalism,

!87 mechanism, and linear logic. Also includes excellent discussions of Jung’s engagement with the history of religions school via the work of Mircea Eliade.

Roderick Main, Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (Albany: SUNY, 2007). Expertly relates Jung’s thesis to traditional comparative categories, like revelation, providence, and miracle. Also includes a thoughtful discussion of Jung’s engagement with the Chinese divinatory text, the I Ching. Main’s grasp of Jung’s body of work appears exhaustive. !

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Michael Clarkson, Poltergeists: Examining Mysteries of the Paranormal (Firefly Books, 2006). A popular but striking study of polergeist-like events, particularly around extreme states of fear. Take a special look at what I would call the “Harry Potter” scene (14-15), the police reports (11-13), and Clarkson’s fascinating reflections on how extreme fear can produce radical altered states and call up paranormal abilities, no doubt as survival responses (26). So you do not believe medieval religious accounts or the lives of saints. How about modern police reports?

Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). My favorite book on Mesmerism and the origins of psychoanalysis. Crabtree demonstrates a deep historical narrative that begins with an expansive, essentially cosmic model of mind, which is then repeatedly reduced and shrunk until we get modern “hypnosis” and the personal unconscious of classical psychoanalysis, both of which nevertheless retain the traces and potential expansiveness of their deep mesmeric origins.

Deborah Blum, Ghosthunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). Blum is a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer. This is probably the best single book on William James and Frederic Myers and their deep involvement in psychical research just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Science writing at its best, that is, at its most generous and open-minded.

!88 Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). My own framing of the filter thesis via the history of psychical and paranormal phenomena and the bilateral brain.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, "Mind Matters: Esalen's Sursem Group and the Ethnography of Consciousness," in Ann Taves and Courtney Bender, eds., What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a (Not So) Secular Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). My take on and history of Irreducible Mind, the book that lies behind this chapter’s discussion of the filter thesis.

Simon Conway Morris, “Nine Evolutionary Myths: The Closing of the Darwinian Mind” (2 May 2013), at http://www.princeton.edu/csr/events/webcasts/index.xml An astonishing lecture by Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge at the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University. Includes a discussion of "convergence" as strong evidence of some sort of deeper structure to biology that is not random and ends (beginning at 51:15) with some personal reflections on the possibility of the mind-brain as an "antenna" of consciousness (that is, yet another version of the filter thesis), the latter suggested by the seeming presence of "a universal music out there" and a Platonic model of the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." Conway ends with an attempt to “unhinge” us with two stories (“because I am so close to retirement it doesn’t matter”): one about a time-shift vision of an air marshall seeing five years into the future; the second about a Catholic priest and friend of G.K. Chesterton, Fr. John O’Connor, reporting a story about a mental patient in a lunatic asylum who appears to have levitated up to a window in order to escape. As Conway quips before the second, “Again, this will not go down well with the materialists, but, as I said, too bad” (56:00).

Brain Trauma and Savant Phenomena

Splitting the human in two does not simply manifest states of nirvana, as we saw with Jill Bolte Taylor. Sometimes such a splitting also manifests new capacities, or what Charles Fort called in his last book “wild talents.” Take brain injuries. One common trope in biographies of psychics and mediums is that they first discovered their powers after a brain injury. But the same pattern

!89 can also be seen in secular contexts in what the medical field now calls trauma-induced savant phenomena. Not all savant phenomena, it should be noted, are catalyzed by trauma. Others are associated with psychological deficiencies of various sorts. We will focus on the former here. Consider the case of Derek Amato, as reported by the Wisconsin Medical Society. Amato collapsed at a party after striking his head on the bottom of a swimming pool. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with a severe concussion. Amato eventually recovered, but not without significant loss to his hearing and memory. But he also, oddly, gained something. As he went to say goodbye in the hospital, he sat down, without explanation, to a piano and found “these black and white structures moving from left to right.” They represented, he realized, “a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation.” Not only could he play and compose music now, but he could recall any piece that he had once heard. And he could not just play music. He could really play music. In 2007, Derek Amato was voted the 2007 Independent Artist of the Year. The same Wisconsin Medical Society also reports cases of: a ten-year-old boy hit on the head by a baseball, after which he could do calendar calculations and remember weather patterns on any day of his life thereafter; a fifty-six-year-old builder who, after a stroke, suddenly becomes a poet, a sculptor, and a painter; an eight-year-old boy who manifested calendar abilities again after a left-hemispherectomy; and a case of a boy who, after several temporal lobe seizures, developed astonishing mathematical abilities, including the ability to memorize PI to 22,514 decimal places and an ability to see numbers in specific colors. Even more astonishing, he now could learn languages, like Icelandic, in just seven days. I’m not sure I believe that. After a discussion of brain scans and an analysis of which parts of the brain were injured and which activated, some researchers have speculated that these “hidden talents” lie dormant until diseases and injuries “disinhibit” artistic regions of the brain and release individuals from “the tyranny of the left hemisphere,” that is, from the side of the brain that processes logic, reason, language, ego, and math. I would only add here that the religious lore on saints who are “mad” or “crazy” is impossibly rich and richly suggestive of similar savant phenomena. Injury, trauma, and psychopathology are often, it turns out, the site of the most unusual and fantastic of

!90 hidden abilities, be they understood in secular or religious terms. The traumatic secret and the filter thesis again. And again. http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant_syndrome/savant_profiles/derek_amato This and the next internet source are the basis of the present entry. It is not clear whether Amato had had any musical ability before the injury. What is clear is that the injury super-charged his musical abilities, whether they were present or not. My thanks to Robert Rosenberg for pointing this case out to me. http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant_syndrome/savant_articles/acquired_savant

Darold A. Treffert, M.D., Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome (Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, 2006). Dr. Treffert is a psychiatrist and consulted on the Hollywood movie Rain Man (1988), in which Dustin Hoffman plays a savant. Treffert reads savant phenomena as evidence that these extraordinary potentials reside in all of us, that they are, in effect, part of human nature. !

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“One day the masks will come off, and you will understand all”—it came to pass, and I was one of the masks.

Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis

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