The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World

Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, Karen Polinger Foster, Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, Karen Polinger Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000464764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

For millennia, people have universally engaged in ecstatic experience as an essential element in ritual practice, spiritual belief and cultural identification. This volume offers the first systematic investigation of its myriad roles and manifestations in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

The twenty-nine contributors represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, seeking answers to fundamental questions regarding the patterns and commonalities of this vital aspect of the past. How was the experience construed and by what means was it achieved? Who was involved? Where and when were rites carried out? How was it reflected in pictorial arts and written records? What was its relation to other components of the sociocultural compact? In proposing responses, the authors draw upon a wealth of original research in many fields, generating new perspectives and thought-provoking, often surprising, conclusions. With their abundant cross-cultural and cross-temporal references, the chapters mutually enrich each other and collectively deepen our understanding of ecstatic phenomena thousands of years ago. Another noteworthy feature of the book is its illustrative content, including commissioned reconstructions of ecstatic scenarios and pairings of works of Bronze Age and modern psychedelic art.

Scholars, students and other readers interested in antiquity, comparative religion and the social and cognitive sciences will find much to explore in the fascinating realm of ecstatic experience in the ancient world.

Part One Setting theStage

1 Contextualizing the Study of Ecstatic Experience in Ancient Old World Societies

Sarah Kielt Costello

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041610-3

Introduction

Ecstasy, trance, soul flight… these powerful and potentially transformative elements of ancient experience have long been left to the fringes of archaeological research. This is due in part to our own cultural unease with the esoteric. A historiographic review reveals several key reasons why archaeologists may have shied away from this subject in the past: a bias towards accessible, empirical data; the concomitant reluctance to engage with the non-material, spiritual aspects of ancient life; the association of the esoteric with counter-cultural movements of the past, in particular, the psychedelic milieu of the 1960s; and concerns over reductive claims about shamanism as a cross-cultural set of behaviors. Today, new work in cognitive science, pharmacology and religious studies demonstrate that we, broadly speaking, are ready to talk more seriously about altered states of consciousness. Archaeologists, however, have been relatively slow to take up this work, perhaps because of the challenges of accessing spiritual behaviors in the past, especially those that might be small-scale, personal, or even secret—as opposed to those of state-sponsored religion and ritual, which are well-attested. Despite increasing attention to the subject, lingering biases can still negatively impact reception of work on this subject. When we recognize the source of those biases, we can more readily embrace this area of scholarship.

In this chapter, I review developments in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, religious studies, psychology and pharmacology over the past few centuries and explore how those developments have contributed to the theoretical, methodological and cultural biases that have worked against the archaeological study of ecstatic experience.

Beginnings: nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The cross-cultural study of religions within anthropology has typically included a broad range of spiritual experiences such as trance, ecstasy, soul flight and possession. It is from such ethnographic work that many of our analogies in archaeology are drawn. The empirical foundations of our modern disciplines, however, established a distrust of phenomena that do not follow expected, observable and measurable rules. The belief in a world governed by “universal and eternal rules,” with God as a distant, absent creator, can be traced back to the seventeenth century, in the writings of René Descartes (Trigger 1989: 61). Inspired by Descartes, Baruch Spinoza also conceived of a God distant from human affairs, yet nevertheless posited a pantheist divine presence in nature (Kripal 2016: xxi). Jason Josephson makes the case that there has been an intellectual predisposition against, specifically, esoteric experiences since the Enlightenment, when Diderot drew a line between rational religion and the “illegitimate” pursuits of the mystical or magical (Josephson 2013: 312). More powerful still is the statement by Kant cited by Josephson, that “if only a few spirit tales were true, it would call the whole basis of the natural sciences into question” (Josephson 2013: 313). Kant’s concern illuminates the roots of the broader, post-Enlightenment intellectual anxiety around mysticism and ecstatic experiences: they defy science, they defy reason.

Intellectual discomfort with a phenomenon, however, does not make it go away. Despite Enlightenment efforts to “banish mystical ‘sciences’”, public interest in the supernatural persisted and, indeed, resurged in the modernity-driven angst of the nineteenth century (Josephson 2013: 313–14). Late nineteenth-century esotericism and occultism have been viewed as expressions of a desire to mend the rupture between science and religion (Pasi 2006, cited in Strube 2017), using scientific techniques to access the spiritual realm (Green 2015: 384). Nile Green defines “occult” as “the many new religious firms that flourished between around 1880 and 1930 through their characteristic claims to access hidden knowledge/power by the performance of specialist techniques” (Green 2015: 384). The occult was viewed as a new direction in science, rather than as antithetical to science. The influence of occult thought on culture is evident, from the popularity of séances, mediums and astrologers, to the use of clairvoyants by the police (Hales 2021) and literature such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula.¹ While we tend to dismiss fin-de-siècle occultism as either fringe or merely popular, interest permeated the halls of science, as well. Indeed, Josephson Storm (2017) argues that many of the figures we associate with rationalist science, like Marie Curie, were engaged with the occult sciences. Egil Asprem (2015) catalogues a long list of scientific contributions with roots in esotericism.

In the nascent fields of anthropology and religious studies, the same is true. The first broad theory of religion as an element of culture came from Edward Burnett Tylor, who developed an evolutionary structure to understand religion. In this structure, “primitive” animism (animism meaning a belief in spiritual beings) develops into polytheism as cultures “advance” and, finally, into monotheism (Josephson 2013: 317; Morris 1987: 100). Tylor saw the development of animist thinking as an entirely rational response to observations about life, death and sleep (Morris 1987: 100). Furthermore, in Tylor’s view, even magic could be part of a rational world. Magic, according to him, was poorly done science, in which observable phenomena were falsely assumed to have a causal connection (Morris 1987: 101). Tylor thus represents an acceptance of animism and magic, while still staying squarely within the rationalist, empirical tradition of Enlightenment thought. A lasting principle of his theory of cultural evolution that is particularly relevant to the subject of this volume was that of “survivals,” vestiges of older practices that carry forward into more complex societies (Morris 1987: 99). This notion is, in part, behind the idea that shamanic practices observable today are relics of much older traditions.

The evolutionary model developed by Tylor was part of a larger intellectual movement that framed change in broad, evolutionary terms. Drawing on analogies of the living cultures studied by ethnologists, archaeologists used the evolutionary model as a way to understand the material evidence of past societies. Past cultures could be placed anywhere along an evolutionary continuum on the basis of the material evidence of their cultural “progress” (Trigger 1989: 111). Our still-current usage of terms like “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age” reflects how material culture was used as an index of progress. The legacy of such evolutionary approaches is the continued devaluation of certain societies and their beliefs, past and present, as “primitive”—an imperialist, colonialist structure of control. These ideas of evolution and progress informed the culture-historical approach in late nineteenth-century archaeology, in which history could be understood as a march through time, when groups, defined by their material culture, were passively influenced by other (more “advanced”) groups, thus inciting change and progress. While evolutionary frameworks were gradually replaced with more historical heuristic models, it was the close attention to material culture as a means to group people into cultures that shaped the direction of archaeological research.

Nineteenth-century studies of religion had, at their core, the same empirical foundations. So, the observation and recording of experiences was the basis for developments both in hermeneutics and in the study of religion as an expression of the human psyche (e.g., Freud) (Kripal 2016: xxiv–xxv). Colonialist attitudes meant that the study of world religions relegated those traditions to a lower category relative to Judeo-Christian traditions, labeling them as “primitive,” like the societies in the evolutionary frameworks described above (Kripal 2016: xxv).

Moving into the twentieth century, archaeologists developed more refined definitions of culture and historical change, thanks to advances in stratigraphic excavation and seriation (Maca 2010: 8). Nevertheless, this culture-history model of archaeology was limited in its interpretive power. By the mid-twentieth century, Walter Taylor, in a stinging critique of the field, pointed out that archaeologists were able to define and date culture groups but could not say much more about them (Taylor 1948, cited in Hawkes 1954; see also Folan et al. 2010). “Cultures” could be placed in space and time, but the theory and analysis that would allow us to understand their culture was absent. Taylor’s critique and Hawkes’ consideration of it were part of what motivated the acceleration of “scientific archaeology” in the decades that followed, as discussed below.

In religion, popular enthusiasm for the esoteric continued, even as the Judeo-Christian tradition became a formalized subject of study in universities (Kripal 2016: xxviii). The divergence of popular and academic interests would culminate in the mid-century countercultural movement.

Alongside these developments within anthropology, archaeology and religious studies, the contemporaneous cultural perception of hallucinogens has affected archaeological research into altered states, trance and ecstatic experience. I therefore turn next to exploring how our understanding of certain drugs was developing at the same time as our ethnographic and archaeological research.

The most common psychoactive substances known to produce ASCs are LSD and psilocybin (mushrooms); others include cannabis, mescaline, ayahuasca and opiates. Their use (with the exception of manufactured compounds such as LSD) goes back into antiquity, but the nineteenth century marked a period of intense research and interest. Studies were done within the field of mental health—for example, trying to understand brain disorders—but drugs were also recognized as therapeutics, especially in the case of cannabis. In 1897, the psychotropic compound of mescaline was isolated from peyote, synthesized and studied in the decades following (Boire 2008: 146). Opium, also long used for pleasure and as a therapeutic, became overused when the British began aggressively to market its use at home and abroad (Isralowitz & Myers 2011: 21). Cannabis, likewise, fell out of favor as a therapeutic in the late nineteenth century as more effective alternatives were found (Isralowitz & Myers 2011: 18).

Mid-twentieth century

The period following World War II shows two strong and opposing trends. First, in archaeology, we see a further withdrawal from the study of religion, as the field’s commitment to empirical practices intensified. That withdrawal by archaeology was countered by the emergence of the second trend: a powerful cultural interest in “non-Western” spiritualities, an elaboration of the fin-de-siècle occultist interest in global religious practices discussed above. At the same time came a surge of interest in psychedelics.

The movement of archaeology away from the consideration of religion has much to do with the scientific turn in the field in the 1950s. Christopher Hawkes published a landmark essay that broke down the areas of human life inferable from archaeological remains into broad sections: the most accessible (easy to infer) type of behavior is the means of creating the archaeological object found. If you find a stone tool, you can figure out how it was made. Next is subsistence, which he characterizes as “fairly easy” to infer, using observation and natural science (Hawkes 1954: 161). Understanding socio-political institutions is harder, he argues, because of the range of possible variability a material record could indicate (Hawkes 1954: 161–2). But the category of human life most difficult to infer, according to Hawkes, is the “spiritua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One Setting theStage
• Part Two Psychoactive Substances Past and Present
• Part Three Ecstatic Experience and the Numinous
• Part Four Expressions of the Ecstatic Mind
• Index