What the Dead Tell Us about Their World

Journal of Near-Death Studies, 2000

After a brief glance at "religious wars" that now embroil the field of near-death studies, I respond to Gracia Fay Ellwood's commentary on Light & Death (Sabom, 1998), in which she alleges serious problems with my discussion of Raymond Moody's research, my views on the psychic and the occult, my use of the Bible as an authoritative document, my research methodology, and my definition of Christianity. Gracia Fay Ellwood addresses "religious wars" that have broken out in the study of near-death experiences (NDEs). "[T]ensions have ex ploded into hostile exchanges," she notes, especially since the publi cation of "Michael Sabom's recent Light & Death." In her paper, she presents her view of the history and sociology of religion, followed by a "Commentary" on my book. She alleges "serious problems" with my discussion of Raymond Moody's research, with my views on the psy chic and occult, with my use of the Bible as an authoritative document, with my research methodology, and with my definition of Christianity. Before addressing each of these charges, I will first look at the nature and scope of these "religious wars" as they apply to the discussion at hand. NDE "Religious Wars" NDE "wars" are being fought on two levels. On one level, ad hominem attacks are being made between what may roughly be termed orthodox

2012

2001

In Western culture, approaches to the afterlife have mutated throughout history, from shamanism and mythology to philosophy, spiritualism, and psychical research. For conceptual reasons, however, survival research seems to many to be languishing, despite some remarkable recent advances. I urge a return to a more experience-based approach, modeled after features of the near-death experience, for its practical benefits; I intend that approach to complement other forms of research, not displace them. Finally, I underscore the unique status of survival research as a scientific pursuit.

Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2019

a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.) does not augur well for the future. To deter nefarious disinformation campaigns, Kaplan recommends a hawkish posture towards Russia, going so far as to recommend the nuclear option if the Russian government is implicated in serious cyber-attacks against America's critical infrastructure. Thankfully, much of Kaplan's pessimism now seems overwrought, as the report of the Mueller probe in late March 2019 found no evidence that the Trump administration engaged in any direct collusion with Russian agents during the presidential election in 2016. Still, the prospect of apocalyptic violence in the future remains a real possibility with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the persistence of atavistic ethnic conflicts in many parts of the world. As Kaplan avers, genocide is the logical outcome of each of the oppositional movements he presents. His study illustrates the historical continuity of this motif and will be of great interest to students of the influence of religion on political violence and terrorism.

Journal of Near-Death Studies, 2000

Reviews: Joseph Azize, in Numen 66 (2020), 5-6, 611-5 Egil Asprem, in Journal of Contemporary Religion 34 (2019), 382-4 Markus Altena Davidsen, in Reading Religion (2019), http://readingreligion.org/books/what-it-be-dead; Gregory Shushan, in Journal of Near-Death Studies 38, 2 (2020), 101-131; Simon Cox, in Aries, 20, 2 (2020), 299-302 Bruce Wollenberg, Theology and Science, 2020, DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2020.1825198; Michael Nahm, Journal of Parapsychology 84, 2 (2020), 314-317 Носачев Павел (Pavel Nosachev), НАРРАТИВНЫЙ ПОДХОД К ИЗУЧЕНИЮ ОКОЛОСМЕРТНОГО ОПЫТА. Рец. на: Schlieter, … (Narrative Approach to the Study of Near Death Experience: Review of …); 162-168

2022

Religious studies and concomitant fields within the humanities have long ignored paranormal phenomena as viable data for theory building. This thesis is an attempt to correct such an error and provide a step towards taking seriously the experiential reports of persons who recount anomalous and paranormal happenings that defy a materialist metaphysics. Post- Enlightenment societies have largely presupposed a working metaphysical model of materialism through which all acquired knowledge must be filtered. This model is insufficient to explain all the material data including paranormal phenomena. The assumption that this model contains the only method(s) that can assess data leads to a form of epistemological marginalization by which all other societies’ beliefs and experiences are subjected. The methodological approach of phenomenology and the accompanying tool known as “bracketing” are challenged and argued to be a reinforcement of the metaphysical paradigm of materialism. Other epistemological approaches are considered that advocate for more open ontological possibilities. An examination of the alien abduction phenomenon and the related research findings of several academics is presented with an emphasis upon the objective nature of the phenomenon. Related research funded by the US government pertaining to anomalous findings such as UFOs, poltergeist activity, remote viewing, telekinesis, psychokinesis, prognostication, and other psi-related abilities are discussed as they relate to the alien abduction phenomenon. The primary intention of this thesis is to showcase the serious attention that paranormal phenomena merit within the academy and the implications for incorporating such data, especially within the discipline of religious studies. New approaches and theoretical frameworks could potentially arise as a result of engaging with the possibility that paranormal phenomena are real and accepting that our current scientific understanding of the world around us is in some ways incomplete.

Building Bridges, Dissolving Boundaries: Toward a Methodology for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife, Mediumship, and Spiritual Beings Fiona Bowie Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2013; doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lft023, 2013

"The study of death, the afterlife, and related phenomena has long been of interest to anthropologists and religious studies scholars. Although such matters are of central human and cultural concern, Western academic approaches often rely on the juxtaposition between “our” rational and “their” irrational belief systems, and attempt to “explain away” or ignore emic interpretations with a subsequent loss of semantic density. A methodology for studying the afterlife and related phenomena based on cognitive, empathetic engagement involves adopting an emic interpretive lens in order to arrive at a “thick description” that does not shy away from aspects of experience outside the ethnographer's Weltanschauung. A discussion of the implications of adopting a dialogical, participative, open-minded approach to these aspects of human belief and practice are discussed in the context of case studies of spirit possession and reincarnation. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]"

The Futures of Magic: Ethnographic theories of unbelief, doubt, and opacity in contemporary worlds. A Workshop convened by Richard Irvine and Theodoros Kyriakides, 2018

I take as my starting point the premise that Western ‘moderns’ are not so different from people in so-called pre-industrial, small-scale societies and never have been (Latour, 1993; Josephson-Storm, 2017), and that in today’s world, to a greater or lesser extent, Western forms of education and globalisation mean that everyone is faced with the question of choosing between different sorts of cosmology (Taylor, 2004), or is at least aware that others might have a different view of the world. I also assume that, as Lévy-Bruhl (1975) accepted in his later writings, logical and mystical thinking co-exist in all societies and in every human-mind. Having said that, there is a disjunction between the popular appetite for the paranormal, personal experience of Psi phenomena, and religious and spiritual practices on the one hand, and a fairly extreme physicalist straight-jacket that manifests itself in the media, within academia and in academic publishing on the other. In the United Kingdom and other parts of the Western world new spaces and practices are being created that seek to legitimise forms of magical thinking. I am going to leave religion on one side and focus in particular on the spaces between science and magic in which personal experiences that cannot be accommodated by the current dominant medical and scientific models are expressed, necessitating new or expanded understandings of the way the world works. Anthropologists have made some cautious moves towards validating personal and interpersonal experience as a respectable research tool (Briggs, 1974; Jackson, 1996; Jakobsen, 1999; Turner and Bruner, 1986), and have described their own uncanny experiences in the field, whether from a perspective of doubt in the interpretations offered by their hosts (Favret-Saada, 1980; Louw, 2015), by internalising emic explanations (Stoller, 1987; Turner, 1992), or while struggling to make sense of the challenge these experiences can pose to one’s settled view of the world (Clifton, 1992; Jenkins, 2015). The potentially transformative effects of fieldwork in general and extraordinary experiences in particular have also found their way into academic texts (Goulet & Miller, 2007; Young & Goulet, 1994). Having gained at least a glimmer of a very different psychic world and range of relationships with human and non-human others in Cameroon, I was taken aback by some of the continuities I later discovered among alternative healers in the United Kingdom, particularly when discussing forms of psychic energy, possession and the fluidity of the Self. This raised questions concerning the role of personal experience and its cultural manifestations and codifications on the one hand, and the challenges of interpreting uncanny or unusual experiences in a largely secular, rationalist society on the other. Along with David Hufford (1982), Michael Winkelman, (2016), Gregory Shushan (2018) and others, I suspect that first hand and recounted experiences of ‘magical’ phenomena, particularly near death experiences, encounters with the deceased, mediumistic and shamanic experiences, out of body travel, Psi (clairvoyance, telepathy, pre-cognition, psychokinesis), sleep paralysis and spirit possession, have profoundly shaped the ways in which human beings in all times and places have formed their religious ideas and cosmological outlook. Taking the example of spirit possession, I explore some of the ways in which experiences that appear to be universal and ancient appear or reappear in Western society to be interpreted in ways that seek a sometimes uneasy accommodation with normative medical, scientific (and religious) models of reality. Ethnographic enquiry is based on a conference organised by the Spirit Release Forum (SRF) in London (Bowie, 2017), and some of the wider work of those involved in this event. Motivations for involvement in the work of the SRF and similar bodies vary, but simple curiosity and a research agenda (Haraldsson, 2012) seems to play less of a role than direct experience of the intrusion of spirits into an existing clinical practice, which then leads clinicians new and unorthodox directions (Fiore, 1995; Zinser, 2010). In some cases a first-hand haunting or possession experience leads those affected to search for an explanation and relief or release from an unwanted and disturbing intrusion. Engagement in a world of spirits is not seen as an alternative to or escape from religion, science, or the ‘ordinary’ world, but as a result of ghostly or spirit-related experiences the world as it was has often slipped from view. Rationalist explanations for extraordinary and often frightening and life-changing encounters with spirits cannot be wished away and, as Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Normandy peasant farmers informed her, the Church can generally only provide a small, and not very powerful means of combatting the power of witchcraft and other psychic phenomena (1980). The medical profession may well pronounce the sufferer insane and resort to chemical treatments and perhaps incarceration. A de-witcher, shaman, spirit release therapist or suitably trained and experienced medium is therefore sought out, often as a last resort, although they may come disguised as a regular psychologist, psychiatrist or alternative healer (almost certainly in private practice). The focus of this particular SRF conference was mental health and ways in which a phenomenology of spirits and spirit possession can help provide clinical help for various types of mental illness. Much of the focus was on schizophrenia and hearing voices, conditions poorly understood and inadequately treated by conventional pharmaceutical and psychiatric methods, but which appear amenable to spirit release therapy. A range of other conditions, including obsessions and compulsions and Tourettes, which are similarly unresponsive to psychoanalytic treatment, are fertile ground for ‘magical’ healing methods (cf. Rapoport, 1989). Most of those taking part in the conference were both open to studying the effects of spirit release techniques in clinical situations and realistic about the barriers that such ideas openly expressed encounter within the NHS.

Religion, the Occult, and the Paranormal (4 volume reprint series with Routledge), 2015

The first volume of Religion, the Occult, and the Paranormal is concerned with how people have interpreted experiences of a religious, occult, or paranormal nature, and the approaches that scholars employ in order to study such phenomena, which are often elusive and difficult to locate in the various frameworks that people accept as ‘reality’. Wouter Hanegraaff has noted that, "[i]n studying religion, scholars are dependent on believers expressing their awareness of a meta-empirical reality in empirically perceptible ways (words, images, behaviour etc.) but, qua scholars, they do not themselves have direct access to the meta-empirical … [M]ethodological agnosticism is the only proper attitude" (1995: 101). Yet many scholars involved in the study of esotericism and paranormal experiences are themselves ‘insiders’ to one or other tradition or practice, a phenomenon that has bedevilled the academic study of religion, in which a significant number of scholars have been theologically motivated. So, as Hugh Urban has asked, how do ‘outsiders’ study secret or restricted traditions, and does the intimate and closed nature of the teacher-pupil relationship result in the conundrum that ‘if one “knows,” one cannot speak; and if one speaks, one must not really “know” ‘ (Urban 1998: 210)? An unsolved question is, ‘Must the study of all non-normative experience involve the scholar as participant?’ Another important underlying issue concerns the connections between the three terms, ‘religion’, the ‘occult’, and the ‘paranormal’; how closely are they related? It is possible to situate them on a continuum, with religion at one end, signifying official, sanctioned non-normative experiences, the occult (which simply means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ and is the Latin-derived equivalent of the Greek-derived term ‘esoteric’) in the middle, and the radically de-institutionalised, individual and ‘unofficial’ experiences of the paranormal at the other end? Antoine Faivre, an early and influential scholar of Western Esotericism, posited a six-point definition of esotericism: 1) ‘[s]ymbolic and real correspondences … are said to exist among all parts of the universe, both seen and unseen’ (1994: 10); 2) Nature is experienced as alive and pulsating with energy; 3) the use of imagination to identify and utilise mediations between the material and spiritual worlds; 4) the transmutation of the individual initiate of esoteric wisdom, from a lower to a higher state; 5) the use of concordance, where attempts are made to ‘establish common denominators between two different traditions or even more, among all traditions’ (1994: 14); and 6) the transmission of esoteric knowledge directly from teacher to pupil. This model has been questioned, but it marks the occult and esoteric out as distinct from both organised religion (such as Roman Catholicism) and deregulated spiritualities (such as the ‘New Age’).