Ritual and religius experince: William James and the study of 'alternative spiritualities.'.

Our most unbelieving century ... cannot have done with Religion ... Were men stisfied to be Atheists, the melodius dithyrambs of Mr. Swinburne would never have awakened curiosity." (Quarterly Review, 1895: 51)

Introduction

The mid-to late nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of certain attitudes and practices that together constitute the antecedents of contemporary Pagan and Magical religions, Algernon Swinburne (1) was exhibiting a 'paganism as an attitude of mind' (2) from the 1860s onwards, the Theosophical Society (1875) and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888) (3) were founded, and William James was writing about the 'eccentric and spooky dark side of religion'. (4) The 'constant and integral potential' of this dark side of religion cannot be ignored in our study of James, nor can it be rationalised as 'irreligion' (5) as magic, witchcraft, and ritual often are. Psychology, as the study of the soul, did not arise ex nihilo but can be found within the currents of the Western Esoteric Tradition that underpins contemporary magic. But today, as in James' time, magic, ritual and witchcraft are ignored or treated as deviant irreligion; I cannot help but think that James would have been interested in their study! With James, 'we must be willing to forget conventionalities and dive below the smooth and lying official conversational surface' (1985: 145), and so my focus in this article will be religious experience facilitated by ritual in, specifically,

English Wicca, which I shall at times extend into Paganism and magic in order to assess James's Varieties in terms of the study of what are increasingly called contemporary 'alternative spiritualities'. (6)

Wiccan Ritual and Religious Experience

James does not talk at any length about ritual--he was writing at a time when ritual was still a 'dirty word'; it was something far removed from the Protestant experience of the time, confined to the world of anthropology, existing only in 'the primitive' or as popery (7). James suggests that

   Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist,
   as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a
   deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in
   toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and
   mummery, and finding his 'glory" incomprehensibly enhanced thereby;
   just as on the other hand the formless speciousness of pantheism
   appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of
   evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak
   (1985: 330) (8).

However, religious experience is explicitly linked to ritual context by many ritual theorists (9) who have witnessed at first hand or through their own experience the powerful emotions released by the posture and movement of the body and the transformations which are then carried through into everyday life. Following Roy Rappaport's argument, ritual inverts the quotidian contexts in which thoughts dominate experience, and this displacement of thought by experience in the process of ritual is often claimed as one of the keys to mystical, spiritual or religious experience by contemporary magico-religious practitioners. To borrow a phrase from David Napier (1992:181), through ritual these practitioners aim to exchange 'cognitive tyranny' for 'actual [religious] experience'.

Of course, this does not necessarily happen straight away, though it may do for some practitioners. (10) The exchange of 'cognitive tyranny' for 'actual [some might say 'authentic'] experience' is facilitated by the central role played by ritual in Wiccan practice. And whilst rites may be written down, and some training may he given, there tends to be an acknowledgement that ritual can only be learned by doing, by opening oneself to the religious experience which ritual facilitates, beyond the intellectual faculty. Wicca's emphasis on the experiential dimension allows for the learning of a mechanical, repetitive, organized framework, the function of which is to move the participants away from the practical and intellectual world of everyday experience and into the realm of feeling and intuition which facilitates the experience of the numinous. It involves, in a variety of ways, the casting of a circle (sacred space), calling of the four quarters (earth, air, fire and water), raising of energy (dance and chant), and the invocation of deity, utilising movement, music, incense, fire and candlelight, and often ritual nudity--a very obvious pointer to the importance of the physical body when approaching 'the divine'. The carefully constructed, symbolic form of the ritual circle empowers the religious experience of Wiccan ritual by providing a protected space in which the participants may experience other, new modes of thought--it is 'a bounded and ordered symbolic domain, an experiential context for exploring different instruments of cognition' (Napier 1992:xxvi). But to focus only on this framework in studying Wiccan ritual is to miss the point. For 'ritual', in Wicca, is seen as a legitimate means of'knowing' in its own terms, as an embodied, incarnate means of knowing, rather than as a reinforcing interpretation of something else, and this knowing occurs both within and beyond the ritual framework.

This view has been expressed by Rappaport, who claimed that 'ritual is not simply an alternative way to express certain things, but that certain things can be expressed only in ritual' (Rappaport 1979:174-emphasis mine). This is probably closest to the Wiccan emphasis on experiential knowing as the root of their religion. According to practitioners, the true meaning of their religion can only be expressed and experienced through direct participation in its rituals--rituals which are deemed to be an experiential mode of interacting with oneself and others, nature, the cosmos, and the divine in whatever construct the individual develops for him-or herself. There is an emphasis not just on what is experienced but on how experience occurs--the emphasis on the religious experience facilitated by ritual in Wicca reveals an attempt to manipulate and shape experience, as well as to actively undergo it.

So what happens beyond the ritual framework--what is the religious experience and how is it experienced? James's method of gathering spiritual autobiography is a useful technique for understanding the religious experience facilitated by Wiccan ritual, and so I follow James by presenting an abridged excerpt from Vivianne Crowley's account of performing a rite of initiation:

   Andy, as High Priest, knelt before me and began the invocation to
   the Goddess. There was a stillness and silence within me. Then the
   flow of the power came, down through my crown chakra, down to my
   feet and out into the circle. She had come... I was far away, deep
   into samadhi; that state of consciousness whereby there is no longer
   any 'I and other', 'this and that', 'far and near', only a sense of
   oneness with the universe ... My consciousness was spinning, diving
   down through the levels of being to that centre within us where all
   things are one. Where we are one within ourselves, with one another,
   and with the One Divine Source who unites all Gods and peoples.
   (Crowley, 1990: 77-79)

To gloss this account, what is happening here is the invocation of the Divine, in this case the Goddess, into the body of the practitioner; the body, in Roof and Taylor's (1995) terms, is most definitely 'embodied', some might even say possessed. There is a sense in which the priestess is indeed 'grasped and held by a superior power' (1995: 201), even though she has been actively involved in a process of readying herself for such a state--cultivating a 'mystical' experience by using the body to facilitate feelings or mental states which facilitate a powerful religious experience. Roof and Taylor talk of James's 'transport', the 'mechanism by which an individual achieves a mystical state--that is, some sort of action, practice, or exercise that 'brings you there'. To get 'there' involves mental and bodily exercises that trigger the experience, a catalyst for the emotion (1995: 201). In Wicca, these 'transports' include blood control through binding; scourging; rites, chants and spells; dance; sex (the Great Rite); incense, drugs and wine; meditation/concentration; trance, and are known as the 'eight paths to realisation' or the 'eight paths of magic'. Fasting before a rite is also commonly practised.

All, we should note, involve the body (11) and are not far removed from the transports named by James (1985: 314), which he takes from Yoga: diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline--preliminary voluntary operations which facilitate the oncoming of the mystical state (1985:300). We might also note Crowley's use of eastern terms borrowed from Saivite tantra (the notion of chakras) and also the description of her state as 'samadhi' (12). As noted earlier, this necessitates some training--learning and methodical practice that allows the practitioner to consciously manipulate the senses in order to achieve this state. And this, as Roof and Taylor point out, means that 'religious experience can arise out of practice and that people have the capacity to learn to have religious experiences ... they can learn how to create their own brain states, which are defined or labelled as religious' (1995: 202), the aim being to cultivate qualities which imbue everyday life rather than merely to facilitate transient altered states of consciousness. This ability comes gradually from the practice of ritual rather than from rules or ideas about Wicca or its borrowings from tantra, and the experience enabled by it must be distinguished from the preliminary efforts by which it is preceded. (13) It does not mean that the experience itself is forced or controlled--it is often powerful and manifests in unexpected ways, and is as frequently terrifying (opening doors to demons which must be slain) as it is uplifting. For 'beyond the threshold of waking consciousness, we have dimensions of experience not readily understood by the normal self' (Taylor, 1996: 85) and there are good reasons why, as James argued in 'The Hidden Self' (and here I both rely on and quote from Eugene Taylor), 'normal waking consciousness remains forever familiar only with itself and is fearful of anything beyond the margin of the known' (Taylor, 1996: 42). Ritual is clearly one of the mechanisms by which consciousness beyond the margin might be tapped, a subconscious doorway through which we may experience the plurality of selves and of consciousness parted from our normal waking consciousness by only the filmiest of screens.

William James and the Study of 'Alternative Spirituality'

It seems also to be the case that James's Varieties is itself separated from us by the filmiest of screens. In his short essay that seeks to revisit the Varieties, Charles Taylor describes his experience as he reread James's Varieties:

   The sense I had of treading in the footsteps of this
   trail-blazing predecessor was enhanced by the powerful recurring
   impression, in passage after passage of James's work, that (style
   and topical references aside) it could have been written yesterday,
   as against almost a hundred years ago (2002: v)

At the beginning of Chapter 1, he continues to stress the point:

   It is astonishing how little dated it is. Some of the detail may
   be strange, but you easily think of examples in our world that fit
   the themes James is developing. You can even find yourself
   forgetting that these lectures were delivered a hundred years ago
   (2002: 3)

My own re-reading led me to the same conclusion, but to me the detail was not particularly strange and I did not feel myself to be entering another world. In large part, this is due to the fact that anyone studying Wicca, Paganisms, contemporary magical practitioners, New Age spiritualities etc. is required to enter the world of the late nineteenth century, the world of which and in which James is writing, in order to understand something of the context from which these 'alternative spiritualities' developed. Theosophy, mind-cure, mesmerism, and spiritualism are a part of this context. So too are western explorations of Hinduism and Buddhism (not only in Theosophical circles), as well as Protestant developments and anti-Catholicism. In fact, in many ways, James's varieties are an expression of a late nineteenth century Anglo-American zeitgeist which argues for a combination of vision and observation, the Romantic assertion of the importance of intuition and imagination, the theme of individual identity, (14) and a return to Hellenic Paganism (15) as a protest against the 'mechanical and graceless formalism of the modern era' (16) and, according to Walter Pater (1839-1894) and Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), to redress the imbalance caused by Hebraic values, 'where all sides of one's being were sacrificed to the religious side, and where systems of conduct and moral codes threatened to become more important than the spirit which originally inspired them'.(17)

Pater maintained that the value of religion lay in the states of mind that worship induced rather than in any doctrinal element, and that these mental states could be maintained without the dogma which hitherto accompanied them.(18) Religion, he argued, should not be informed by profound ideals imposed by the intellect but by those things which 'arise gradually and directly from concrete experience, from a sensory and spiritual appreciation of nature and harmony' (Uglow 1990: xiii). Pater's Marius the Epicurean, published in 1885, contains many of these themes, and it was one of the most influential books of the era--he was one of the key writers whom everybody read, a kind of nineteenth century 'life-style guru' although he was not happy to be so positioned at the centre of a circle of influence. Whether James read it himself is not clear, but it is certain that his brother Henry was well acquainted with this philosophical novel and its influence, for he coined the adjective 'Paternal' to describe those writings that closely followed Pater's ideas.(19)

Many of the themes contained within James's Varieties are recognisable here: ideas of faith not reduced to a creed (20); the Stoic and the Epicurean as narrative devices in philosophical debate; an acknowledgement that we cannot view anything from an objective stance--that there is no view from nowhere (21); a stress on feeling; (22) ideas about the 'twice-born'; (23) the importance of the individual, indeed an individuality found in feeling, thus a valuing of the emotions; a celebration of plurality; an acknowledgement that different people react differently to, and need, different religions, suited to their own personality; and, of course, 'religion' versus institutionalised, established 'church'.

My aim here is not to dismiss James as simply reiterating the thoughts of others--clearly, he does far more, particularly in terms of his work with psychology and his specific focus on religion. My point is merely this: that James's Varieties is not a voice crying in the wilderness but in fact belongs in part to that highly-educated class known as 'the Latter Day Pagans'. And by this I am not claiming James as a 'pagan' either, which in any case meant something very different in 1890 than it did in 1950, 1990, or 2003! Nevertheless, the antecedents of contemporary Paganism are to be found coalescing in the 1890s, and any serious scholar of this field would do well to take far more notice of this era. It is here that I include William James, although I would not hesitate to guess that far more people involved in the study of religion have read Varieties than have read Pater's work. Yet, despite the stress laid by James on the religious experience of the individual, 'religion' beyond a church 'contaminated by the spirits of corporate and dogmatic domination' (Wulff 1997: 485), and methodological practices (24) still followed by many scholars (25) working in the area of 'alternative spiritualities', it is surprising that Varieties has been largely ignored--a perfunctory look through indices confirms this, and I might add that here I am recognising a failure in my own work as well as offering a criticism of other scholars working in the field.

This dismissal of James is perhaps in part due to his perceived focus on Protestant Christianity, but this is to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water and fails to take into account the lack of testimonies from practitioners of other religions available in James' day. We would do well, for example, to look again at James' testing of religious experience in terms of'fruits for life', particularly in light of Steve Bruce's 'significance theory' which argues that some sort of critical mass must be attained if a religion is to be considered significant. (26) When this charge is levelled at Wicca, Paganism, and magical groups (or any other religious group for that matter), it absolutely fails to take into account those fruits for life which practitioners claim to derive from their religious experience. Rather, with James, the language for understanding religious experience is to be found in literature, art, and music, in the operation of the poetic imperative rather than in numbers, (27) and the methods of study must be hospitable to the religious experience of others. (28) As James argued,

    [t]he first thing we should bear in mind (especially if we
   belong to the clefico-academic-scientific type, the officially
   and conventionally 'correct' type, the 'deadly respectable' type,
   for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that
   nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our
   notice, merely because we are incapable of
   taking part in anything like them ourselves (1985: 108-9).

Conclusion

The tendency towards jargon and number-crunching accentuates a worldweariness in some religious studies scholarship which is not found in James's Varieties. We need to retain (or regain!] James's fascination and wonder so that we too can offer not only an examination, but a celebration, of the varieties of religious experience expressed by our contemporaries in the twenty-first century, for our own 'most unbelieving century' has not yet done with religion. We need to see again with 'fresh wonder ... with a conviction of the profound enigma in things.' (29) For as James argued, 'a mere textual analysis of his writings leads nowhere ... [without] an imaginative grasping of his center of vision' (Wulff, 1997: 482). We shall never find 'the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge,' (30) nor exhaust religion 'in a solid something, complete where it stands.' (31) Instead, it is by 'losing the beauty of academic neatness' (32) and using imperfect devices that we shall be able to 'detect the passion and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of [religious experience]', always as exquisite amateurs! (33)

Bibliography

Art (1895), 'Latter-Day Pagans' in The Quarterly Review, vol. 182, London:John Murray, 31-58.

Beckson, Karl & John M. Munro (1989) (eds), Arthur Symons: Selected Letters, 1880-1935, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Bloch, Maurice (1992), Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crowley, Vivianne (1990), 'The Initiation' in Jones, Prudence & Caitlin Matthews (eds.), Voices From the Circle: The Heritage of Western Paganism, London: Aquarian, 65-82.

Fitzgerald, Timothy (2000), 'Experience' in McCutcheon, R. T. and Willi Braun (eds), Guide to the Study of Religion, London and New York: Cassell, 125-139.

Harrington, Melissa (2000), 'Conversion to Wicea?' in Bowman, Marion & Graham Harvey (eds), Pagan Identities special issue of DISKUS [www.unimarburg.de/fb03/religionswissenschaft/journal/diskus /harrington.html]

Hood, Ralph W. (1995), 'The Soulful Self of William James' in Capps, Donald and Janet L. Jacobs (eds), The Struggle for Life: A Companion to William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Princeton: Society for the Social Scientific Study of Religion and Princeton Theological Seminary, 209-219.

James, William ([1902], 1985), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Napier, A. David (1992), Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art and Symbolic Anthropology, University of California Press: Oxford.

Pater, Walter ([1885], 1985), Marius the Epicurean, edited and introduction by Michael Levy, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Pearson, Joanne (2004, forthcoming), 'Neopaganism' in Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek, Jean-Pierre Brach & Wouter Hanegraaff (eds), Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Leiden: Brill.

Pearson, Joanne (2001), 'Going Native in Reverse': The Insider as Researcher in British Wicca', in Nova Religio, 5 (1), 52-63.

Rappaport, Roy (1999), Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rappaport, Roy (1979), Ecology, Meaning and Religion, North Atlantic Books: Berkeley. Roof, Wade Clark & Sarah McFarland Taylor (1995), 'The Force of Emotion: James's Reorientation of Religion and the Contemporary Rediscovery of the Body, Spirituality, and the 'Feeling Self', in Capps, Donald and Janet L. Jacobs (eds), The Struggle for Life: A Companion to William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Princeton: Society for the Social Scientific Study of Religion and Princeton Theological Seminary, pp. 197-208.

Salomonsen, Jone (2001), Enchanted Feminism: the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco, London: Routledge.

Taylor, Charles (2002), Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Taylor, Eugene (1996), William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Uglow, Jennifer ([1973],1990), 'Introduction' in Pater, Walter Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Jennifer Uglow.

Werner, Karel ([1994], 1997), A Popular Dictionary of Hinduism, Richmond: Curzon Press.

Wulff, David M. [2002), 'Listening to James a Century Later: The Varieties as a Resource for Renewing the Psychology of Religion'. Paper presented at the conference William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience, University of Edinburgh, July 2002.

Wulff, David M. (1997), 'William James and His Legacy' in Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary, New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 482-523.

Notes

(1.) It is interesting to note the fascination with the sea evident in the work of both Swinburne and James. Indeed, James uses Swinburne's poem 'On the Verge' to illustrate 'the verge of the mind ... whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.

   Here begins the sea that ends not till the world's end. Where we
   stand Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves
   that gleam, We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of
   man hath scanned ... Ah, but here man's heart leaps, yearning
   towards the gloom with venturous glee. From the shore that hath no
   shore beyond it, set in all the sea' (James, 1985: 421).

(2.) Pearson, 2004 (forthcoming).

(3.) An interesting aside in relation to the Golden Dawn is James' friendship with the philosopher Henri Bergson whose sister, Moina, was married to the Chief of the Order, Samuel Liddell McGregor Mathers and was the main conduit for the channelling of Golden Dawn rituals.

(4.) Wulff, 2002 (I am paraphrasing from my notes here).

(5.)Wulff, 2002.

(6.) An awkward and rather arbitrary term, which is why I prefer to spell out the foci of my study.

(7.) A decade after James's delivered his Gifford Lectures, Durkheim was arguing that rites are secondary to belief, the function of ritual being to legitimise and reinforce beliefs, and this 'chicken and egg' argument has been a base-note running through ritual studies for the past century. This is interesting in terms of James's assertion that feeling lies at the root of religion--and this can surely be expressed physically as a rite without any belief necessarily being present; in fact, in James's view, beliefs may well be part of the theological and doctrinal structures which are later built up around the initial propulsion of emotion which itself is produced at least partially through the body. This is only rigidified, routinised, 'rafionalised' even, in beliefs that may later be encoded in theology and doctrine.

(8) It is interesting that James also speaks of the importance of aesthetics in choosing one's religion, with Protestantism offering 'an almshouse for a palace' and pauperising 'the monarchical imagination' (1985: 458-60), particularly because the ritualistic nature of Wicca, Paganism, and Magic are attractive chiefly to people living in Northern European Protestant countries and their colonial offspring--North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa--rather than Mediterranean Catholic countries.

(9.) Turner; Bloch; Bell; van Gennep. Indeed, Bloch goes so far as to say that most religious experience is fundamentally a ritual process by which the transcendental is reconstituted as a permanent reality (Bloch, 1992).

(10.) It is almost impossible to generalise about Wicca, for we are talking about individuals who, although they come together in groups and indeed make very intense group bonds, regard their spiritual journey as one to be undertaken alone. James's method of collecting 'spiritual autobiographies' is thus of great import in the study of Wicca.

(11.) And as Roof and Taylor insist, we should remember that, through his course on anatomy, James 'literally "taught the body"' (1995: 200).

(12.) Defined by Karel Werner as 'concentration; unification; deep meditative absorption in some yoga systems ... regarded as a state of higher cognition... (1997: 135).

(13.) Though it should be noted that, in the one study of conversion to Wicca the mystical motif was cited most often, suggesting that people become involved in Wicca as a direct result of what they perceive to be mystical experience (Harrington, 2000).

(14.) Another legacy of the Romanticism, which provided the basis for the nineteenth century's abiding concentration on the self, though really one might argue that the emphasis on the personal derives in large part from the theological assumptions of Protestanfism.

(15.) See James 1985: 142--'The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature may engender ... [but] The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction'!

(16.) John Morely in Fortnightly Review, no. XIII, 1873, cited in Uglow 1990: ix. Morley traced a line of pagan movements from the Oxford Movement, through Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and Morris, to Pater's The Renaissance.

(17.) Both Pater and Arnold advocated a return to Hellenism and a resistance to 'Hebraic' values, although Pater didn't actually use the term Hebraic. See Uglow, 1990: xii.

(18.) Uglow, 1990: xii. Pater, 'Coleridge', Westminster Review, January 1867.

(19.) In a letter to Gosse, 3rd April 1900, Henry James calls Arthur Symons, author of The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 'too solemn and Paternal' (Beckson & Munro, 1989: 148, n.1).

(20.) J. A. Symonds--the height, the space, the gloom, the glory', in which 'we know', but cannot frame a creed', The Quarterly Review, vol 182, 1895: 38.

(21.) 'Experience is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced'. We may give our impressions a pleasurable tone, if we know how; but to make them vehicles of the 'not ourselves'...impossible! ibid.: 48.

(22.) He must be kindled by feeling, or remains a statue blind and dumb (QR 51).

(23.) The dedication to things beautiful must henceforward take into its scheme grief and trial; without them no perfect life is conceivable' (QR 53).

(24.) James seeks to understand from within and to appreciate the uniqueness of every individual experience (Wulff 484). The only sound plan ... is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe' (Varieties, in Wulff 485).

(25.) See Pearson 2001; Salomonsen 2001.

(26.) One can only be relieved that such theories are not applied by conservationists to endangered species!

(27.) 'Beethoven and the C Minor Symphony, music, rather than metaphysics, might suggest 'the height, the space, the gloom, the glory', in which 'we know', but cannot frame a creed' (Quarterly Review, 1895, 38).

(28.) Salomonsen (2001) argues for a 'compassionate methodology' in her work in contemporary witchcraft, but makes no link to James' work even though this would seem to echo his own insistence on hospitality.

(29.) Quarterly Review 1895: 55.

(30.) Quarterly Review 1895: 48.

(31.) ibid: 57

(32.) Taylor, 1996: 80.

(33.) Quarterly Review, 1895: 48.

James O. Pawelski is Assistant Professor of Human and Organizational Development and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University.