Abstract Occulture describes the growing presence of esotericism, occultism, magic, and spirituality in media, popular culture, and contemporary arts as part of the spiritual revolution in Western contemporary societies. The empirical study of occulture has been carried out through two main theoretical frameworks. In sociology and media studies, scholars have described the mediatization and...
Abstract This article investigates how the Sufi theorist Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ‘Arabī’s (d. 638/1240) conception of metaphysical perplexity ( ḥayra ) relates to the entropic brain hypothesis, which has been proposed by Robin Carhart-Harris in the fields of human neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Studies have demonstrated a correlation between the ego and the default mode network ( DMN ). The ego...
We review previous attempts to study mystical experience and point to problems inherent to certain methodologies. Focusing on studies that use controlled environments we advocate taking an experimental approach to mysticism. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we report findings from a new study that probes the potential for eliciting mystical experiences in the laboratory. We find...
Abstract For the Scandinavian tradition of the history of religions, in which I was trained, not the numinous, but the experience of the numinous is the sui generis subject matter of the discipline; and historians routinely emphasize the experiential aspects of religions. The better to understand religious experience, I work interdisciplinarily with psychoanalysis. Freud's treatment of group...