Acute Religious Experiences

In Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies, Richard Saville-Smith begins, after a general introduction, with a series of chapters reading through classic texts in Religious Studies, examining key ideas from William James (mystical and common religious experiences), Rudolf Otto (the numinous), T. K. Oesterreich (possession), Mircea Eliade (shamanism), Walter Stace (mysticism), Walter Pahnke (psychedelia), and Abraham Maslow (peak experiences).

Through these critical readings he outlines a genealogy of religious psychosis (voices, visions, possession) which does not a priori assume that these experiences are invalid. Using these theoreticians while drawing on mad studies, he re-includes the mad people who were bracketed out of these theories, even though they relied on their experiences for data. By re-examining a range of texts through this lens, Saville-Smith illuminates the ecstatic experiences and states of consciousness that are foundational to religion, placing them on a continuum that includes madness. By reading against the grain and validating the voices of the mad, he enables readers to better understand these states. He also examines the fragmentation of discourse in the academic study of religion in the 20^th century, invoking ecstatic and mad states as a counterpoint to the pathologizing of these states in psychiatry as it developed in parallel to the discipline of religious studies.

Saville-Smith then addresses the psychiatric discourse directly by reading the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, the “Bible” of psychiatric diagnosis) alongside Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (Vintage, 1988), bringing these two approaches together to develop his own formulation of “acute religious experiences,” which offers a non-essentialist, anti-colonialist, and non-pathologizing approach to the unusual and extreme experiences that are foundational to religions (although typically marginalized as the religions institutionalize).

Saville-Smith is particularly effective in discussing the shifting understandings of extraordinary/mystical experiences in the various editions of the DSM, enabling a conversation between psychiatry and religious studies around these experiences. He is not antagonistic toward psychiatry, but instead seeks to integrate its insights into the larger umbrella of religious studies. His reading of Foucault is critical but effective. He points to Foucault’s overemphasis on structures and institutions, his denial of individual agency, and his tendency to talk for others rather than with them. This last criticism, which Saville-Smith develops by drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", applies to the other theoreticians he engages with as well.

After these critical readings through Religious Studies foundation texts, the DSM and Foucault, Saville-Smith outlines a method for validating different experiences as a way to organize and address religious data and identify acute religious experiences. His method begins by considering a diverse set of experiences, eschewing a priori judgements about their legitimacy and then applies criteria to assess them: Is the experience interpreted as religious by the person who has it? Are the qualia of the experience extreme or unusually intense? Is the experience difficult to explain in language, making any interpretation provisional? Saville-Smith uses these questions to make a pragmatic determination:  if experiences cause a person to change their life and act differently, they are real.

The final chapter is a case study of the Gospel of Mark and two episodes in the life of Jesus—his baptism and the transfiguration—to which he applies his theory. He is not completely successful in this, but the attempt is provocative.

The work is thoughtful and careful. Saville-Smith defines his terms carefully and is extremely precise. However, his writing style can make the text difficult to follow—some of the sentences are long and convoluted, which perhaps reflects the inadequacy of language to capture direct experience, a point Saville-Smith emphasizes. He deliberately uses placeholder terms, particularly the clunky “extraordinary/anomalous/extreme,” when discussing the intense experiences of religious ecstasy, and while such compound nouns remind the reader of the limits of language for understanding experience, they interrupt the flow of the book. The book is clearly directed at academics, although not exclusively in his discipline. And even though he relies heavily from his academic background, he also draws frankly throughout
on his own experiences of madness, which is one of the more notable features of the book.

Saville-Smith has interesting things to say about integrating acute religious experiences into life, calling to mind James' discussion of mysticism and insanity, which James argues can be distinguished by their fruits (although Saville-Smith accepts a broader range of mad experiences as useful than James). By reintroducing biology and arguing for a transhistorical and transcultural genetic basis for the experience of madness and religious ecstasy, he suggests that a small proportion of all human populations can have these experiences. In other words, he extracts acute religious experiences from the confines of culture, broadening their potential to create meaning for both individuals and communities. As many have observed, madness often seems linked to creativity, and recognizing acute religious experiences as madness (and not sanitizing the experiences by denying this) makes the field of religious studies more sensitive to a greater range of intense spiritual experiences.

Saville-Smith emphasizes that it is our diversity and peculiarities that leads us to create, not our bland day-to-day life, and presents a bracing challenge to the Enlightenment notion of a homogenous human nature (really the White, male, upper-middle-class, Protestant model of the colonizers that still prevails in the academy).

Yes, but pragmatically, practically, how can this approach be useful to scholars? On the human level, no longer dismissing or explaining away these experiences will bring comfort to those who have them, allowing them to integrate intense religious belief and experience into their lives. Moreover, given that sect formation and the birth of new religious movements are frequently sparked by acute religious experiences, a clearer identification of and validation of these experiences will lead to better understanding—not only of the sects and NRMs themselves, but also of the influence and appeal of revelations by mystics, which need to be better integrated into our understanding of the evolution of religions. Finally, studying these experiences allows us to better understand the establishment of monastic orders and secret magical societies, and how they relate to the institutionalization of religions They can be seen as protecting the mainstream from the corrosive antinomian influence of the acute religious experience and madness, and as heterotopian sanctuaries for working out the consequences of acute religious experiences. Acute Religious Experiences may be a corrective to the tendency in Religious Studies to downplay the intense and non-rational heart of religion.

Samuel Wagar is the dean of Edmonton Wiccan Seminary, and the priest of Edmonton Sacred Oak Wiccan Temple.

Samuel Wagar

Date Of Review:

February 24, 2024