Fue,

An Annotated Bibliography:
Further Readings and Reliable Resources for the Research Paper

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

2
discussion in question at the particular point in time it was published (hence the importance of
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 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.

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

3
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).

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.

4
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.

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 the 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

5
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.

* * *
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
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.

6
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
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.

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 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.

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

8
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 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.

* * *

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

9
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.

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

10
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
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.

11
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.

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

12
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 University Press, 2013). An extensive collection of primary sources, with helpful brief
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

13
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.”

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.

* * *

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.
Brainard demonstrates his approach with case studies from Hinduism, Buddhism, and

14
Christianity. A very good example of how Katz and his colleagues catalyzed a new
sophistication and care with respect to comparing mysticisms.

* * *

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.

Mattjis van de Port, Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the

Quest for the Really Real

15
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, 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.

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.

16
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
(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

17
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

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

18
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
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

19
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 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.

20
 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.

“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.

21
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 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997). An edited volume exploring the
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.

22
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

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)

23
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
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

24
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
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

25
“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
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,

26
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.

* * *

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.

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.

27
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
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.

28
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,
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

* * *

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,

29
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.

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

30
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.

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 Macmillan,
2000). Two books that model what the study of Native American religions looks like from a
queer theoretical perspective.

Emotional Religion

31
 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
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

32
literatures. One of the most well known is the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt
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.”

* * *

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,
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

33
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.

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

34
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.

* * *

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.

35
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
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.

36
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

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

37
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 Stone 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
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
holdover from nineteenth-century rationalism, a left-over, moreover, that is no longer tenable

38
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.

* * *

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
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

39
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-
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

40
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
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
Parapsychology 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.

41
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
(Ashgate Publishing Company, 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
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.

42
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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

44
* * *
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
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

45
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.”

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

46
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,
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,

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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.
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:

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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/

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 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.

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.

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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
demonstrating that reincarnation beliefs are common among the indigenous religions of North
America. The book opens with a foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere comparing North

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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 afterlife 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
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.

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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
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

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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

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

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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
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,

55
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
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

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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
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

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(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.

* * *

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.

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).

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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.

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

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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
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.

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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.

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

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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.

* * *

Stewart 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.

* * *

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
future human.
Consider this. In 1850, the average American male was 5’ 7” tall and weighed 146

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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
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.

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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.

* * *

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,
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

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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

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

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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.

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,

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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,
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 poltergeist-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.

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

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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
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

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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
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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