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

Cross Currents, Fall, 2003 by Jo Pearson

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.