Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality

Felicitas D. Goodman

Description

"An important book which deserves the careful attention of serious students of religion." —Religious Studies Review

Anthropologist and spiritual explorer Felicitas Goodman offers a "unified field theory" of religion as human behavior. She examines ritual, the religious trance, alternate reality, ethics and moral code, and the named category designating religion.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part One: Theory

Chapter 1. The Religious: Can It Be Defined?
Chapter 2. Human Evolution and the Origins and Evolution of Religious Behavior
Chapter 3. The Independent Variable: Interaction with the Habitat
Chapter 4. Dependent Variables
Ritual Behavior
The Religious Trance
The Alternate Reality
Good Fortune, Misfortune, and the Rituals of Divination
Ethics and Its Relation to Religious Behavior
The Semantics of "Religion"

Part Two: Ethnography

Chapter 5. The Hunter-Gatherers
Chapter 6. The Horticulturalists
Chapter 7. The Agriculturalists
Chapter 8. The Nomadic Pastoralists
Chapter 9. The City Dwellers

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Body
• General
• Religion
• Mind
• General officer
• Body (disambiguation)
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 décembre 1988
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253014634
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality
Felicitas D. Goodman

Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality
Religion in a Pluralistic World
Indiana
University
Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
First Midland Book Edition 1992
1988 by Felicitas D. Goodman
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodman, Felicitas D.
Ecstasy, ritual, and alternate reality.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Religion. I. Title.
BL48.G635 1988 200 87-46248
ISBN 0-253-31899-8
ISBN 0-253-20726-6 (pbk.)
3 4 5 6 96 95
To my teachers, the shamans-past and present
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Theory
Chapter 1. The Religious: Can It Be Defined?
Chapter 2. Human Evolution and the Origins and Evolution of Religious Behavior
Chapter 3. The Independent Variable: Interaction with the Habitat
Chapter 4. Dependent Variables
Ritual Behavior
The Religious Trance
The Alternate Reality
Good Fortune, Misfortune, and the Rituals of Divination
Ethics and Its Relation to Religious Behavior
The Semantics of Religion
Part Two: Ethnography
Chapter 5. The Hunter-Gatherers
Chapter 6. The Horticulturalists
Chapter 7. The Agriculturalists
Chapter 8. The Nomadic Pastoralists
Chapter 9. The City Dwellers
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
The initial draft for this book was written during my sabbatical leave from Denison University in the 1975-76 school year. The early formulation underwent a number of revisions as I gained experience in presenting the topic in undergraduate classes, and later in intensive courses and workshops to a more sophisticated group of adults, and as I added results from my continuing research. In its formative stages, this research was supported by Public Health Grant MH 07463 from the National Institute of Mental Health, by the Denison University Research Foundation, and by a grant-in-aid for research from the Society of the Sigma Xi. I want to express my appreciation to these agencies. I am also deeply grateful to my students and research consultants who so generously shared their observations with me.
In the cultural history of the West, interest in religion keeps waxing and waning, but even in periods of apparent inattention, the subject is seen lurking just beyond the border. No matter what attitudes prevail, each generation seems constrained to write its own version. To latter-day observers, each of these versions appears incomplete, yet their own attempts will fare no better in the eyes of their successors. So we might as well accept our limitations. In this sense the present work lays no claim to completeness or finality. It is simply an invitation to contemplate yet another configuration of facets on that glittering, mysterious, elusive sphere that we call religious experience.
Introduction
Works about religion are nearly as old as writing itself. For a history of those works, the reader will have to go elsewhere. What is presented here is not a diachronic but mainly a synchronic representation of religions around the world. The account is intended to heal an old rift, to rectify an image created by the contention still extant in the modern literature that there are two kinds of religion. They are thought to be qualitatively different, one group being great, the other primitive. By implication, the former are considered to be valid, possessing the Truth (usually capitalized), or at least part of it, while the latter are a collection of superstitions, characterized by childish fancy, as John MacQuarrie, a writer on comparative religion of the 1960s, put it. In the Western world, the distinction is an ancient one, based on the universalistic claims of the Christian denominations that their god is the only god and their path the only one to salvation. Other large religious communities have come to similar conclusions. The Japanese category religion includes only those faiths possessing a known founder, a book, and a formalized body of dogma.
Mid-nineteenth-century evolutionary theory provided what appeared to be a scientifically grounded underpinning for this view. Working with pitifully inadequate ethnographic reports, social thinkers of Darwin s time applied his evolutionary theories to non-Western societies. They argued that in the same manner as there were still amoebas and reptiles and lungfish around, tokens of a distant past of the earth, there were also fossil societies that because of some innate inferiority had not been able to achieve the stage of the superior industrialist countries. Logically, then, societies with simple technologies had simple, primitive religions, while those with blast furnaces and steam engines worshipped in the most advanced way. It was not too difficult, they held, to reconstruct from the religions of existing savage societies the steps by which religion might have evolved. Thus, Lubbock, a late-nineteenth-century Scottish author, stipulated the following sequence of development:
atheism
fetishism
nature worship
idolatry or anthropomorphism
deities become truly supernatural beings
morality becomes associated with religion
The powerful paradigm of evolution remained dominant in social-science speculation for decades. Eventually, however, two other approaches also became influential. One was a simplistic kind of comparative method, still much used today, where snippets are cut from all sorts of religions, which are then assembled into a collage of doubtful value. An example of this sort of pastiche is provided by The Golden Bough of the late-nineteenth-century English writer J. G. Frazer. The other train of thought is the creation of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Drawing his conclusions from individual psychopathology, Freud invented a myth, according to which original man lived in a primordial horde, in which only the father had access to all the females. Enraged, the sons finally killed and ate him. After the deed was done, they began to feel guilty, and declared their father to be their totem, instituting prohibitions against eating it. And since it was their desire to copulate with their mother and sisters that had started the tragic sequence, they introduced the rules prohibiting incest, thus initiating religion.
The inception of modern fieldwork swept away much of this kind of speculation. We possess today a large number of excellent monographs of non-Western religions. What they demonstrate is that just as there are no fossil societies or languages, for that matter, there are no fossil religions, either. There is no way in which we could reconstruct the religion of beings antedating Homo sapiens. Scraps thrown together on the basis of superficial similarities as done by the early comparativists can teach us nothing about the early stages of religion. And Freud s myth does not stand up to the findings of modern primatology. Even nonhuman primates, for instance, have incest taboos.
One defect that the various approaches to the phenomenon of religion share is that they are very narrowly focused. Even as late as the middle years of this century, the subject was usually discussed in the rarefied atmosphere of theology alone, or in combination with some heavy-handed philosophy. For non-Western religions, the discussions did not go much beyond Frazer. But religion is a complex behavior, and a considerable number of factors have impinged on its development. If we want to gain some understanding of it that goes beyond mere acquaintance with its surface, we need to consider also insights provided by such diverse fields as ecology, psychology, neurophysiology, linguistics, and even, as mentioned above, primate studies. As we shall see, treating the topic in a more cross-disciplinary manner than hitherto attempted is going to open up truly exciting new vistas in an ancient field.
Part One

Theory
ONE

The Religious Can It Be Defined?
Magic versus religion. In contrasting the so-called great religions and others, the term magic is often employed to describe the latter. In the past, this usage was popular because it seemingly supported the superiority of the great religions. There, a religious ceremony, so the argument went, was designed to elevate, to praise, etc., while a magical rite of savages was thought to be able, falsely, of course, to manipulate the objects and circumstances of the real world.
Even when a somewhat more balanced view of non-Western humanity began to dawn, the topic of magic proved to be surprisingly slippery, despite the fact that at first blush it seemed to represent an apparently neat and well-defined category. Recognizing the difficulty, social scientists tried repeatedly to redefine the difference between religion and magic. To the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, it lay in the fact that a religious rite was obligatory, while a magical one was optional. Frazer, also much quoted on the topic of magic, subdivided the category into types, such as contagious magic, imitative magic, etc. He considered magic false science : Science worked, magic did not. The British social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, consistent with his view that all cultural behavior was functional, i.e., directed toward the goal of satisfying physical needs, advanced the suggestion that magic had a definite practical purpose, while religious rites were expressive without purpose. Harking back to Frazer s false science, he felt that magical practices attempted to bridge the hiatus between knowledge and practical control, so that m