The article addresses the sociopolitical history of mental otherness within the Western discourse on shamanism. It explores how the inability of various discourses to reveal the ‘truth’ concerning the nature of shamanism has been continuously underpinned by a parallel inability to definitively describe the nature of the mental disorder commonly referred to as schizophrenia. The analysis focuses...
This paper sheds light on the interactive process in which religious practitioners work to achieve states that appear to contradict individual agency. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Buddhist meditation retreats and Torah study in a Haredi yeshiva, we track the delicate balance between ‘doing religion’ (active engagement) and ‘being done by religion" (experiencing religious forces as taking...
The research literature on religious dreaming demonstrates the commonness of supernatural agent (SA) imagery, as well as various ritualistic and divinatory uses of dream content in the waking state.Less well mapped is the related domain of dream imagery about rituals (DIR).This article aims to provide a survey and analysis of DIR items and interactions in line with dream and ritual theories,...
Magic and fortune-telling have been standard elements in stereotypes about Europe’s Romani minorities since the fifteenth century. These stereotypes produced two mutually contradictory images of the Roma: That they possess real occult powers, and that they are frauds. Both images were perpetuated by nineteenth-century ‘gypsylorist’ scholarship, which construed ‘the gypsies’ as Europe’s internal...
The environment for Buddhist organisations in Britain has changed since the period of their initial establishment. As a result of the rise in popularity of secular mindfulness and the spread of Buddhist teachings, Buddhist groups in Britain are forced to consider their sustainability in a crowded spiritual marketplace. This article examines the recent growth of secular mindfulness teaching by...
ReligionJanuary 13, 2020Brian C. Wilson2 citations
The current revival of interest in psychedelics, coupled with the death late last year of Ram Das (Richard Alpert), make for a fitting occasion to look back again at the origins of the psychedelic ...
ABSTRACT Except for a few studies that explore the intersections between esoteric ideas/practices and white supremacy, race has largely been ignored in the field of Western esotericism. This article seeks to partake in remedying this lacuna. To do so, it provides a deconstructive analysis of the way race has operated in the field. I argue that race, although consistently overlooked, has...
This article discusses how the Sami word noaidi and the word for the noaidi’s trade (noaidevuohta) have been translated in missionary texts and academic research. It traces context-related translations of these Sami concepts: first by clergy into terms connoted to ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’, then by scholars into the technical terms ‘shaman’ and ‘shamanism’, and finally by contemporary scholars...
Dreams are a universal human experience and they form cultural themes in folk traditions and religious rituals, such as pilgrimages and dream incubation. Dreams and dream beliefs are important since they contain representations of interacting supernatural agents that have full access to information of strategic importance to humans. The relevance of dreams often relates to the dreamers'...
I identify two problematic strands of Ken Wilber's transpersonal theory. First, I question Wilber's claim that his spectrum model is supported by the materials of all the world's major mystical traditions. I argue that his integral, hierarchical perspective privileges some traditions but distorts others. Drawing heavily upon Andrew Rawlinson's recent, taxonomic study of mystical traditions,...
ReligionOctober 1, 1993Willard R. Johnson1 citation
This paper presents an interview on the visions of the contemporary Native American shaman Luciano Perez. Born of southern Mexican Indian (P'urepecha) ancestry in Laredo, Texas, on 31 December 1950, he was trained in shamanic practice by the Lakota Sioux spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog. He begins the interview with general comments on visions, how he experiences them and how they have matured...
Researchers in psychology of religion in America and Britain have inherited the theoretical and research traditions established by W. James, S. Freud and J. Dittes. New nomothetic or theoretical frameworks have been called for in order to organize a plethora of idiographic data. A response to the call has been slow, but Paul Pruyser designated at least six areas in which the development of...