Beings Without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Theory of the Belief in Spirits

David J. Hufford

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this Essay Concerns A Particular Set of Folk Beliefs,” that is, Unofficial Beliefs. The meanings and implications of this definition are discussed at some length below. Most academic theories have assumed that folk belief—especially beliefs about spirits—is false or at least unfounded, “non-rational” and “non-empirical.” Because my experience-centered theory is contrary to this very powerful and old intellectual tradition, the following exposition must be somewhat complex. It will, therefore, be helpful for the reader to know where we are going right at the start: the “bottom line” of my experience-centered theory is the proposition that much folk belief about spirits is reasonable, that it is rationally developed from experience. That is to say, the reasoning involved in many such beliefs utilizes methods of inference, based on observations, which are commonly accepted as valid. Such reasoning does not show neurotic defenses or other overwhelming biases that lead to obvious fallacies, such as post hoc reasoning, equivocation, or consensus gentium.

Granting such reasonableness does not entail accepting any such beliefs as true, but it does call into very serious question the academic grounds for holding that spiritual folk beliefs are false. Neither does my theory suggest that all spiritual belief is rationally derived from experience. Obviously such a claim would be false. Faith, which is usually understood as belief in the absence of evidence, is of enormous importance in religious belief. But I do mean to argue against the common assumption that all spiritual belief relies entirely on faith.

A final disclaimer: I do not suggest that my experience-centered theory conflicts with or should replace all current approaches to the study of spiritual beliefs—but it does have important implications for most of them.

Two Preliminary Illustrations

In the early 1970s, while studying folk belief in Newfoundland, I found a tradition about what was locally called the “Old Hag,” an experience said to have the following features:

1. waking up during the night (or occasionally the experience occurs before falling asleep); (2) hearing and/or seeing something come into the room and approach the bed; being pressed on the chest or strangled and therefore feeling suffocation; being unable to move or cry out until … finally breaking through the feeling of paralysis.... The victim is almost invariably lying on his back during the experience and is convinced that he has been awake throughout.

Despite the local term “Old Hag,” the attacker could be either male or female, and when a male carried out such an attack through witchcraft, he was said “to hag” his victim.

This medical student had never heard of anyone else having such an experience, but his description corresponds perfectly to accounts of supernatural assault found all over the world—not only the “Old Hag” tradition in Newfoundland, but also the da chor, dab coj, poj ntxoog, or dab tso, in Southeast Asia; the sitting ghost or bei Guai chaak in China; the Mara of Sweden; even the “witch riding” in Salem, Massachusetts, during the witchcraft trials. Each of these traditions and many more also correspond to the category “sleep paralysis” found in the tradition of modern medicine. Although medical knowledge about the experiential contents of this experience is quite impoverished compared to folk traditions, sleep physiologists do seem to have located the physical source of the temporary paralysis. However, because sleep paralysis theories do not account for the consistent subjective pattern of the experience, sleep paralysis cannot be said to “explain” or reduce the related folk beliefs.

Each traditional term for this frightening experience carries a great deal of theoretical baggage, from theories of witchcraft and the inaccurate gender implications of “Old Hag” to the physiologic reductionism of “sleep paralysis.” To avoid these difficulties, I have chosen to use the old Anglo-Saxon word for the experience, Mara. By this term I refer simply to the experience of finding oneself awake and paralyzed in the presence of a frightening being. Nothing more—neither interpretation nor cause—is implied. In 1982 I estimated that this event has a prevalence ranging from about 16 percent to 25 percent in the general population, regardless of prior knowledge or belief. That estimate has now received a good deal of confirmation.

Since complete and recognizable Mara experiences—loaded with the same experiential details reported within traditions that describe such attacks—occur in the absence of such traditions, it seems fair to infer that the Mara experience itself has given rise to a variety of similar beliefs in different cultures. The conventional expectation has long been that folk belief creates experience (and the illusory appearance of experience) in a self-fulfilling process, as when the believer dreams of a ghost and afterward believes the event to have been real. But on the contrary, here a host of traditional beliefs actually seem to be produced by a particular kind of experience, the details of which are independent of prior belief or knowledge. That realization immediately raised for me the question of whether the Mara stood alone, or whether there might be other experiential categories with a similar cross-cultural distribution and interpretations showing great similarity from one tradition to another? The answer has turned out to be “Yes.”

I am pleased to report that very positive spiritual experiences are even more common than horrific ones. The following is an account told to me by a surgical nurse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, concerning events that occurred in 1976.

David J. Hufford, “A New Approach to ‘The Old Hag’: The Nightmare Tradition Reexamined,” in American Folk Medicine, ed. Wayland D. Hand (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 74.

Interview with medical student in Pennsylvania, as cited in Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 58–59.

Joseph Jay Tobin and Joan Friedman, “Spirits, Shamans, and Nightmare Death: Survivor Stress in a Hmong Refugee,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 53 (July 1983): 439–448.

Ronald G. Munger, “Sleep Disturbances and Sudden Death of Hmong Refugees: A Report of Fieldwork Conducted in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp,” in The Hmong in Transition, ed. Glenn L. Hendricks et al. (Staten Island: Center for Immigration Studies of New York, 1986), 379–398.

Charles F. Emmons, Chinese Ghosts and ESP: A Study of Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982), 144.

Carl Herman Tillhagen, “The Conception of the Nightmare in Sweden,” in Humaniora: Essays in Literature, Folklore, and Bibliography Honoring Archer Taylor, ed. Wayland D. Hand and Gustave O. Arlt (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1969), 317.

Hufford, The Terror, 220–222.

For an extensive discussion of sleep paralysis and the mechanisms and stages of sleep, see Hufford, The Terror, Chapter 4.

For a discussion of the etymological history of the terms for this event, see Hufford, The Terror, especially 53–56 and 125.

The percentage of affirmative response depends on the context of the question; see Hufford, The Terror, 50. Corroborating results can be found in Carl C. Bell, “Prevalence of Isolated Sleep Paralysis in Black Subjects,” Journal of the National Medical Association 76 (1984): 501–508; Bell, “Further Studies on the Prevalence of Isolated Sleep Paralysis in Black Subjects,” Journal of the National Medical Association 78 (1986): 649–659; Budd Hopkins et al., Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of Data from Three National Surveys Conducted by the Roper Organization (Las Vegas: Bigelow Holding Corp., 1992); and James McClenon, Wondrous Events: Foundations of Religious Belief (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).

Example 2: A Nurse's Near-Death Experience

I was having fluorescein angiography for my heart. I was having a great deal of coronary spasm … and the pain was incredible. And when the pain became the most intense I had a horrible ringing noise and I was rushing … through sort of a black tunnel . . . and then the ringing seemed to diminish … the pain was gone … and I realized I had floated right out of … the top of my head …. And I was looking down, I was somewhere over my knees, and I could see Dr. Smith and Dr. Thompson. . . working on me. This seemed of almost no importance to me … I just observed it….

I felt like I was swimming or floating in a lovely … I don't know … if you could imagine swimming in champagne, that's what it was like, it was lovely. [And as I floated upward I became aware of a light, and then] I found that I was a part of the light, the light was enveloping me …. I could see the [operating room] clock … [and] I knew that in a given amount of time there would be brain damage. [But] the feeling I had besides the pleasurable one was one of—just unconditional love is the only thing I can think of…. I've never had a feeling like it before, so it's really difficult to describe, but unconditional love comes as close as anything. And I was in communication [with] a … being … who read my mind and I just read his mind, which I say as an afterthought, because at the time I just knew that we weren't speaking. And the whole time I was in communication with this person, there was like a Greek chorus in the background … multiple presences that I was aware of as I watched them resuscitate me….

Now the communication I had with the presence was one simply of—we discussed my life. But I also felt that I never had to say anything … and he didn't say anything, and he understood my motivation if I did something that I thought might have been questionable …. and [then] he said to me … it's time [to go back]. And I was so happy, I wasn't even sure that this was a good idea to go back to the body. But he said … everything's fine and you should … return, so I did.

And as I regained consciousness [I was aware] of this immense grin on my face. And Dr. Smith who's been my physician for years and is a dear friend, said … “Do you know what happened?” And I said, “Yes, I died.” And he said, “You sure as hell did.”

The experience reported by this nurse occurred in 1976, years before she had heard the term “near-death experience” or knew that anyone else had ever had a similar experience. But her description corresponds perfectly not only to the pattern described by Raymond Moody in the 1975 book Life after Life, in which he coined the term near-death experience (N.D.E), but also (for just a few examples) to beliefs and accounts from Pure Land Buddhism in China, medieval European Catholicism, and an account of a visit to the land of the ancestors during a Chant Way healing ceremony, as told to me by a Navajo woman.

Hufford, “Commentary: Mystical Experience in the Modern World,” in The World Was Flooded with Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered, Genevieve Foster (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 137.

Raymond A. Moody, Life after Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death (Atlanta: Mockingbird Books, 1975).

C. B. Becker, “The Centrality of Near-Death Experiences in Chinese Pure Land Buddhism,” Anabiosis: The Journal of Near-Death Studies 1 (1981): 154–170; W. Y. Evans-Wentz, trans., The Tibetan Book of the Dead; or, the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

See, for example, Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experiences in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Zaleski argues that NDEs vary greatly in different historical periods, being culturally shaped. However, she makes no distinctions among first-person interview accounts, sermons, and literary reworkings (such as comparing Dante’s Paradise in The Divine Comedy to modern first-person reports from hospital emergency rooms). Contrary to her interpretation, the actual documentation Zaleski provides suggests many transcultural and transchronological patterns.

Belief That Spirits Exist

What is it that is believed in the Buddhist, Catholic, and Navajo traditions just noted? Are there elements that traditions around the world have in common, as well as distinct elements that make each tradition unique? There is a common core, and it consists in the belief that there exists an order

1. that is objectively real, (i.e., not “all in the mind”);

2. that is qualitatively different from the everyday material world (e.g., invisible at times);

3. that interacts with this world in certain ways (e.g., answers to prayer, visits from deceased loved ones); and

4. that includes beings that do not require a physical body in order to live (e.g., God, souls of the deceased, angels, evil spirits).

In different traditions, this order is variously called “the spirit world,” “the supernatural,” “land of the ancestors,” and so on.

These four elements are held in common by folk belief traditions and religions around the world. How this spiritual order is different, when and how it interacts with the mundane world, and who the persons in it are, constitute major differences in cultural and religious traditions, and frequently between institutional religious tradition and folk belief.

Scholars have generally called such a belief in spirits supernatural belief. I rather like that term myself, but it has been so problematized by long academic misuse that now it has been given up even by many religious speakers. Here, to avoid confusion, I will instead use spiritual belief to refer to the belief that spirits and a distinctly spiritual domain exist. Even this term can be confusing, because it has been metaphorically extended to mean ideas (as in “the spirit of democracy”), and spiritual is often used as a rough equivalent to psychological.

I shall use the term in its narrowest sense:

spiritual refers to spirits (i.e., extra-corporeal beings)

This definition has the added advantage of calling attention to the important relationships between folk belief and institutional religious belief, where the word spiritual still has a comfortable home. In this use, spirits are sentient beings not requiring bodies in order to live. They may use bodies (as human souls do during Earthly life), or they may possess some kind of non-physical body (resurrection body, subtle body, astral body, etcetera), but they are conscious beings whose life is not absolutely dependent on a flesh-and-blood body for existence. This definition is derived from the observation of beliefs in such beings held in cultures all over the world. Accepting the usefulness of the definition, and its accuracy in summing up widespread belief, has nothing to do with either accepting or rejecting associated beliefs.

It has long been common for scholars to argue that various kinds of supernatural belief are characteristically western European, and that applying such concepts cross-culturally is ethnocentric. See, for example, Benson Saler, “Supernatural as a Western Category,” Ethos 5 (1977): 31–53. Theravada Buddhism has often been cited as an atheistic religion that does not include such beliefs. All such arguments that I have seen rely on extremely complex definitions, which naturally have the effect of limiting applicability to a single setting. For a good discussion of this issue and the classic example of Theravada Buddhism, see Melford E. Spiro, “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. 3, ed. Michael Banton (Edinburgh: Tavistock, 1966), 88–92.

The Latter-Day Saints, for example, rejected supernatural in favor of spiritual in the nineteenth century, anticipating the more recent shift by many other religious discourse communities. For many people supernatural lost its intelligibility as the older meanings of natural shifted and came to mean “the entire universe” or “normal.”

Spiritual Belief in the Modern World

By the 1950s, intellectuals were broadly proclaiming the death of spiritual belief. Granting that belief in God was the slowest of these to go, belief in angels, ghosts, and other lesser spirits was thought to be rapidly disappearing.

In 1953 Rudolf Bultmann, a famous theologian, laid groundwork for the anti-theological “God Is Dead” school of theology. He stated:

Now that the forces and the laws of nature have been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil... It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in … spirits.

In 1966 anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace said:

Belief in supernatural beings and in supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nature's laws will erode and become only an interesting historical memory …. [A] s a cultural trait, belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge.... [T] he process is inevitable.

And in 1971 historian Keith Thomas began his magnum opus Religion and the Decline of Magic with the statement that in contrast to the past, belief in ghosts is now “rightly disdained by intelligent persons.”

It has been widely assumed that something about modern knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is antithetical to spiritual belief. This is the basis for the secularization thesis that has guided the social sciences since their very beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century. Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, in his writings specifically described a natural and inevitable route of cultural evolution from supernatural belief to an entirely materialistic view that he called positivistic. In 1922 Max Weber, the pioneer sociologist of religion, called this allegedly inevitable secularization process the disenchantment of the world.

Apparently most folklorists have accepted such conclusions about the demise of spiritual belief, and they have studied “folk belief” or “superstitions” by going to remote areas, isolated rural communities, or people recently immigrated from less modern settings to gather up the remnants of spiritual belief—that is, when folklorists have paid any attention at all to the topic. Gillian Bennett, who—along with the other contributors to this volume—is among a growing band of folklorists who do take spiritual belief seriously, neatly sums up the problems of most modern folklorists regarding these beliefs:

No one will tackle the subject because it is disreputable, and it remains disreputable because no one will tackle it. Secondly, because no one does any research into present-day supernatural beliefs, occult traditions are generally represented by old legends [leaving] published collections of supernatural folklore … stuck forever in a time-warp.

Given all of this scholarly certitude that spiritual beliefs must and should die out in the face of growing modern knowledge, the ease with which I have been able to find people in all walks of life who not only hold spiritual beliefs but who cite their own spiritual experiences as their reason has always seemed anomalous to me. I might have begun to doubt my own findings were it not for the growing body of empirical evidence, gathered primarily by sociologists doing quantitative survey research. The Gallup organization has been documenting the spiritual beliefs of Americans for several decades, and their data most decidedly do not conform to the secularization view sketched above. In 1990, for instance, a Gallup poll found that 25 percent of Americans believe that “ghosts or … spirits of dead people can come back.” If this 25 percent were made up of the least educated and most isolated Americans, it might not necessarily contradict the secularization thesis. But this is not the case.

For example, in 1982 Gallup related the belief that it is “possible to contact the dead” to educational background. He found that the belief was held by 9 percent of those with only grade school education, 25 percent of those who had graduated from high school, and 28 percent of those with college educations. All of the best empirical data from the past several decades shows that modern education does not eradicate spiritual belief.

I am convinced that a fundamental reason that spiritual beliefs have been able to resist the enormous social pressures toward secularization is that they are, in part, rationally founded on experience (that is, empirically grounded). This assertion often elicits a howl of protest from those committed either to the falseness of such beliefs or to the proposition that the issue of truth or falseness cannot (or should not) be addressed by belief scholars. So I hasten to add the following commonplace from epistemology: The rationality and empirical grounding of a belief are separate from its “truth”; many false beliefs are rationally held on empirical grounds (e.g., the belief that the sun went around the earth, as held in antiquity), and many true beliefs are held without rational or empirical grounds.

A very common example of the latter are those beliefs accepted on the basis of cultural authority. Cultural or epistemic authority is the power or right to make “judgments about the nature of the world,” and it therefore “entails the construction of reality through definitions of fact and value.” For example, young children accept many beliefs (many of them true, others false) simply on the cultural authority of their parents, without doing their own reasoning about the beliefs, just as laypeople accept the statements of “experts” in general, largely on cultural authority.

It is not that the acceptance of cultural authority is irrational. Authority is itself subject to reasoning, and one may have more or less rational grounding for the acceptance of a particular authority or authoritative statement. But that is different from having rational grounds for particular statements themselves. When one subjects oneself to authority, one yields personal judgment and reasoning in favor of some expert who is believed to “know better.” The acceptance of authority is an essential part of knowledge-making, but it is evaluated primarily on the grounds of the validity of claims to have expertise, the claim that underlies cultural authority.

Technical experts, government personnel, parents, oral tradition, and many other sources of authority exist in society, and the claims of these sources may either conflict or harmonize with one another. Cultural authority is contrasted with social (executive) authority—the right or power to do certain things, including to give commands. The two are often, but not always, found together.

Having said that rational and empirical grounding do not prove a belief to be true, I must add that finding such a basis for spiritual beliefs does show that such beliefs are sometimes held for better reasons than most academics have granted. Rationality and empirical grounding do not settle truth claims, but they certainly don't hurt those claims, either!

The two cases given at the beginning of this chapter are examples of experience on which certain spiritual beliefs were based, rationally and empirically, by those who had the experiences. My conclusion about the rational and empirical elements of spiritual belief—its reasonableness—grows out of my experience-centered study of beliefs about supernatural assault, mystical experience, miraculous healing, consoling visits by the deceased to the grieving, near-death experiences, and haunted houses, among others. This claim about spiritual belief and experience is both radical and complex, and it requires a good deal of explanation. I shall begin this explanation with some basic discussion of the relationships of belief, experience, and culture.

Rudolf Bultmann, “A Reply to the Theses of J. Schniewind,” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: S.P.C.K., 1953), 4–5.

Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), 264–265.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), ix.

Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

Gillian Bennett, Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1987), 13.

See, for example, G. H. Gallup and F. Newport, “Belief in Paranormal Phenomena among Adult Americans,” Skeptical Inquirer 15 (1991): 137–146; G. Gallup Jr. with W. Proctor, Adventures in Immortality (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982); Andrew M. Greeley, Sociology of the Paranormal: A Reconnaissance (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1975).

Gallup with Proctor, Adventures, 195.

Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 9.

Richard T. DeGeorge, The Nature and Limits of Authority (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985).

Inferring What Is Believed

Belief is the certainty that something is true. (This is belief in the cognitive sense; belief also has important emotional meanings that associate it with such terms as faith, but those aspects are beyond the scope of this paper.) Knowledge is a particular kind of belief, that is, belief that has met customary criteria of justification; this is the basis for the strong distinction between the two terms—that knowledge is justified true belief. However, different criteria for justification are customary in different cultural settings, so this distinction does not serve us well in examining belief in a cultural way. In cultural terms, knowledge is what particular people call the beliefs that they consider to be most justified and true. This usage relies on local values and does not require the outside observer either to impose alien criteria or to enter into local debates. Under this usage we may determine which beliefs are knowledge simply by asking those who hold them, rather than by attempting to finally determine matters of truth.

For fieldwork, however, we must remember that in ordinary conversation people choose the strongest term that conforms to their own level of certainty. Therefore, if we ask for belief our field consultants may omit what they know, and if we use belief to describe their knowledge, they are likely to be insulted. As is often the case, good sense dictates that our use of terms in analysis must be different from our use of the same terms in fieldwork and in ordinary conversation. My discussion in this paper uses belief to include knowledge.

Holding a belief—believing—is an active process that refers to ideas. “The Earth goes around the Sun” and “People have souls that survive death” are statements of ideas. Some people hold the belief that one or both of these are true, and others do not. Belief is found in the process of “holding,” but it can only be described by reference to the ideas held. The ideas held are most easily expressed as propositions, although they are not necessarily “held” in that form. Yesterday I believed “that the sun would rise again” (and it did). However, not once did I articulate that proposition, even mentally, although I “acted on that belief,” and if asked I would have approved the proposition as something “I believed.” I use this example to demonstrate that the cognitive definition does not imply that people hold their beliefs as a list of articulated propositions, as some critics have suggested.

In fact, I assume that most people believe a large number of things that they never explicitly state as propositions, even to themselves. The natural vehicle of folk belief, perhaps of most belief, is stories that show what is true by what is said to have happened. This process combines beliefs with some of their reasons and some of their implications. But for tacit and embedded beliefs to be described and understood, the investigator must infer them and state them as propositions. The investigator must also ensure that the propositions as stated are agreeable to those who are said to hold them. In the cognitive sense it is wrong to attribute to someone a belief they disagree with or do not understand.

Beliefs in propositional form are to be understood as constructed by the investigator in an attempt to refer to the truth ideas of the people from whose speech and behavior they have been inferred. These beliefs in propositional form have the same status as the values, symbols, and other abstract entities that scholars infer from the behavior and statements of people.

Inevitably, belief is also used as a shorthand reference to the ideas themselves, the believed propositions, as in “the belief that ghosts exist.” This seems unavoidable in conversation, but the distinction between the proposition itself and the belief that a proposition is true must be kept in mind. Otherwise one falls into the habit of referring to beliefs that are not believed: for example, many know the “belief” that breaking a mirror will result in seven years of bad luck, but not all who know of this proposition believe it.

For a good introduction to the philosophical issues involved in the justification of belief, see Robert Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988).

This is what H. Paul Grice calls “conversational implicature” in “Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, ed. Peter Cole and J. L. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 41–58.

This fact has been ignored in the publication of lists of “beliefs” with no indication of the strength with which they are held, if at all; for example, Wayland D. Hand, ed., Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina; The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vols. 6 and 7 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961 and 1964).

Robert Hahn, “Understanding Beliefs: An Essay on the Methodology of the Statement and Analysis of Belief Systems,” Current Anthropology 14, no. 3 (June 1973): 208.

Belief, Culture, and Experience

Belief is a fundamental and profoundly powerful part of culture. Culture refers to the entire human heritage apart from biological inheritance. We receive our skin pigment from our parents through genetic transmission. We may receive some immunity to disease through our mother's milk. These are not culture, although culture can influence such transmission, as in social mores surrounding the selection of mates, and values and attitudes toward breastfeeding.

We receive our language, our moral code, and most of our beliefs from communication with other human beings. Biology is involved, since, for example, we could not hear and speak language without the biology of audition and speech. But although the potential for speech may be genetically acquired, our language is culturally transmitted. Even if our biological parents had spoken nothing but Mandarin, we would have no extra difficulty learning English if we were raised in an English-speaking family.

I have said that we obtain most of our beliefs from culture. But not all beliefs are acquired in this way. This sets beliefs apart from most language and many other features of our mental life, and herein lies a central feature of my theory of folk belief.

It has been common for scholars to argue over whether belief-inspiring experiences, such as near-death experiences, arise from biology or from culture (the “nature-nurture” debate). But such arguments assume a false dichotomy. While believing always involves both biology and culture, most belief also at least claims to involve the rest of the environment. Beliefs are claims about the world in which humans live, and they arise from many different kinds of interactions—not only social interactions.

For example, many beliefs about solar eclipses are rooted in cultural tradition, and the perception of an eclipse cannot be understood without a consideration of the biology of vision. But neither can beliefs about and perceptions of eclipses be understood without reference to the sun and the astronomical events involved. Eclipse beliefs are not only about dragons who swallow the sun. They are also about “that bright light that moves across the sky during the day.” An understanding of any belief must recognize this implicit claim of reference to the “objective” world (that is, “the world out there”).

Many beliefs about the world are acquired through culture. For almost all modern people, the belief that the Earth goes around the Sun is culturally acquired. Many are told the basics of this by their parents.

In school, most Americans are taught about the role of Galileo and Copernicus in the great historical shift away from the belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. We have also seen charts of the solar system, and so forth. But most of us have never made a personal observation that could show us that the Earth goes around the Sun. (Such observations are a great deal harder to make than most realize.) For this we rely on our culture, but Galileo and Copernicus managed to make observations that actually contradicted what they had learned from their culture. It is certainly true that they could never have made those observations without the benefit of a great deal of culturally acquired knowledge, including language.

Neither could they have done so without their biology: eyes, brains, and so forth. But, nonetheless, their new belief was not given to them by cultural transmission, nor did it originate in their biology. Their belief in a solar-centric system arose primarily out of particular experiences, observations of the environment. Modern astronomers make many such observations, building both on their cultural inheritance (all of their astronomical training) and new observations made within the context of that tradition.

The work of modern astronomers illustrates a central function of culture: to allow humans to learn from each other's experiences. The number of things that can be learned from experience of the world is vast; many of them require special training, and the opportunities of individuals are limited. Culture allows us to build on an enormous treasury composed of the experiential learning of others. This is also a central function of cultural authority, as discussed earlier.

It is not only scientists who learn from both culture and the environment. A simple example is that many people come to recognize poison ivy, and to hold the belief that touching it can cause a rash, blisters, and intense itching. Some people are fortunate enough to learn this through culture (whether from parents, friends, or a Scout handbook) without ever having the experience of a poison ivy rash themselves.

Others learn about poison ivy through direct experience of that aspect of their environment. Culture, experience, and biology intermingle constantly in life, and the variety of life experiences helps to account for the great diversity of beliefs and views found within a single society.

For an excellent discussion and presentation of this debate as it relates to belief and cultural issues, see Ronald C. Simons and Charles C. Hughes, eds., The Culture-Bound Syndromes: Folk Illnesses of Psychiatric and Anthropological Interest (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985).

Folk Belief and Official Culture

Unlike the solar-centric belief, which requires sophisticated mathematics and instrumentation, the belief that poison ivy causes itching can arise from non-technical experiences of the environment. Through the life experiences of people with no technical training in either botany or toxicology, knowledge of poison ivy has entered folklore. Technical investigation can add to that knowledge, and official culture (such as dermatology textbooks) can transmit technical information about poison ivy reactions. But such information does not necessarily displace or invalidate most folk beliefs about poison ivy, many of which are derived from firsthand experience.

When I say folk belief, I mean unofficial belief. Official beliefs are those that are promulgated through social structures invested with executive authority, while the beliefs themselves are generally based on claims to cultural authority. An example is the U.S. Surgeon General's statement that “cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer.” In some societies, social and cultural authority are largely invested in elders and priests. In modern Western society such authority tends to be concentrated in secular institutions.

Folk beliefs—unofficial beliefs—are those that develop and operate outside powerful social structures. This is an inherently political definition, but it conforms to the most common general definitions of folklore. This definition is relative: a belief that ghosts visit the living is a folk (that is, unofficial) belief in most Christian denominations (it is not promulgated in catechisms or endorsed by church governing bodies), while most official Christian belief is unofficial (that is, folk) in the United States because of the separation of church and state. (Do not confuse pervasiveness, salience, or influence with officialness. For example, simply because many Christian images and beliefs, such as those relating to Christmas, are very pervasive and influential in the United States does not make them official.) So, when calling a belief a “folk belief,” one must specify the context about which one is speaking. We should not get bogged down in this relativity, though.

For many of the beliefs that I will discuss here, there are very few settings in the United States, even within churches, where they are in any sense official. And all of them are unofficial, folk, in the national context. The belief that “ghosts of dead people can come back” is decidedly not an official belief in modern American culture. Not only is it not required to be taught in public schools, its teaching would not be permitted there.

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have no position on ghosts. Explicitly the subject does not exist at the national level of official culture. Implicitly it is understood to have been settled negatively long ago. This belief is, nonetheless, culturally transmitted through unofficial channels. It is an example of a spiritual folk belief.

My definition also refers to process, so it is entirely possible for the same belief statement to be both folk and official at the same moment for different people. The poison ivy example can illustrate this. The simple belief that touching poison ivy can cause an itchy rash is received through folklore by some and through medical textbooks (official medical tradition) by others. Some people receive both communications.

Since we are discussing the process, not two contrasting lists of propositions, the question of whether poison ivy belief ceased to be folk when it entered medical texts is a meaningless question. The belief is not “out there” leading a unitary existence. There are as many poison-ivy-causes-a-rash beliefs as there are people who hold them.

The official-unofficial distinction has major practical implications. Because official structures involve power, official belief operates with access to greater power and, therefore to resources, than does folk belief. Those resources and power make it possible for official culture to establish and maintain many beliefs—some of which may be true and some of which may not—that are actually contrary to the experience of most people. Because the Sun appears to go round the Earth, a constant communication effort is required to disseminate and stabilize the opposing belief that the Earth really goes around the Sun. School, books, magazines, T.V programs, movies, all communication channels are saturated with references to the solar-centric and other official views, references which do not so much argue or demonstrate that the view is true but rather assume that it is true. This is official cultural authority in operation.

When folk beliefs appear in such communication channels, they are usually either debunked or at least shown as deviant views that contend with consensual reality. Those media that explicitly propagate some folk beliefs, such as tabloid newspapers and T.V shows, serve to stigmatize them even as they promote them. Spiritual beliefs and related experiences are placed alongside Elvis sightings and pictures of the president conferring with aliens.

This illustrates the advantage enjoyed by official beliefs over folk beliefs. As a result of competition from official sources, many folk beliefs have been destroyed, or their influence has been reduced. And yet many spiritual folk beliefs do manage to flourish.

Folk Belief and Experience

Most features of life are open to more than one interpretation. The choices made among interpretive possibilities are influenced by many factors in addition to observation. For example, the belief that the Sun goes around the Earth seemed to many medieval people to fit better with their theology than did the theory presented by Copernicus. Not only did the naked eye suggest that the Sun goes round the Earth, but the belief that human beings are central to God's creation seemed to suggest the same thing. Culturally sanctioned values and attitudes exert a powerful influence on beliefs about the world.

That is why observation—experience—must constantly compete with other forces that shape belief. The cultural history of alcoholism as it has gradually been reconstructed from moral weakness to disease provides a good example, as does the continuing struggle to culturally construct AIDS. In both cases there are crucial biological facts, though in neither case are all of these biological facts known. But the facts themselves are never simple, and they never “speak for themselves.” Again, experience (whether scientific observation or the life experiences of ordinary people) mingles with culture.

This powerful influence of societal attitudes and values on the shaping of belief has been central to the academic prediction that spiritual beliefs would wither and die in the modern world. That just seemed to follow from the increasing social pressures against spiritual beliefs.

As my examples from astronomy and medicine suggest, the crucial elements of official culture tend to rest on experiences and interpretations that are not possible for ordinary people. Telescopes and microscopes, computers and laboratories, years of training—all are necessary to make officially authoritative statements about the world. This reflects a shift in the construction of cultural authority that really crystallized at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth: the change from life experience to technical experience as the source of authority. Developments throughout science were showing that one could not “trust one's own eyes” in making judgments about reality.

Microbes, X-rays, higher mathematics, Freud's concept of the unconscious—all of these undercut the idea that living long and well and reflecting on your life could yield authentic knowledge. Unschooled life experience seemed inadequate for understanding the complexities of such a misleading world. At the same time, communities of professional experts were developing, experts with the equipment, the knowledge, and the desire to re-create the modern worldview.

The resulting process of renegotiating cultural authority has proceeded at an accelerating pace, until now there are highly trained experts to interpret and explain every facet of life, from economics to marriage and the family to medicine to parenting to agriculture to literature to folklore!

All of this expertise is based on the general idea of using technical skills to pierce the constantly misleading appearance of the world. By contrast, intuitive understandings of the world, drawn from ordinary life experience, are treated as naive and illusory.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, a variety of factors, including a slowing of technical payoffs (cancer has not been cured, electricity is not as cheap as water, and the weather is still serenely in control of itself) coupled with the still-accelerating cost of technical development, has caused some to question whether the shift toward technical expertise may have gone too far. In medicine this has resulted in a reexamination of the doctor-patient relationship and the reinvention of “patient-centered care.” In economics it has led to the idea that workers and people in business need to join economists in developing economic policy. In a similar vein, people with spiritual experiences are seeking to be heard despite an expert modern theology that is abstract and remote.

In all of these developments, folk tradition has served as a repository of the cultural knowledge acquired from day-to-day living. And it is from folk tradition that the current challenge to official, expert knowledge comes. To some this may sound like an anti-intellectual scenario, but I disagree. This is a rebalancing in which the intellectual work and insights of ordinary people must be acknowledged, and in which the excesses of a powerful, self-regulated intellectual elite require some accountability and reform. The result should be a reinvigoration of intellectual life.

As I noted earlier, official culture in the Western world has been increasingly opposed to spiritual beliefs of all sorts, at least since the Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, philosopher David Hume asked the question, “Can we ever have rational grounds for the belief in miracles?” In his essay, which became a classic of disbelief, he claimed to demonstrate conclusively that no supernatural belief could ever be considered rationally founded. By the mid-nineteenth century, theologians had come to consistently condemn most cognitive spiritual beliefs as superstitious. These trends sometimes made exceptions for religious belief, on the condition that God was not conceived of as currently acting directly in the world. In the twentieth century, Freudian psychoanalytic theory—an enormously popular belief system that has affected every aspect of American intellectual life—identified all spiritual belief as a neurotic defense mechanism, an illusion based on infantile wish fulfillment. At the same time, Marxism explained spiritual belief in political terms as an instrument of the powerful used to maintain an unjust status quo. By the 1960s theology seemed to have completely capitulated on spiritual matters and declared that “God is dead.” Through all of these historical changes, spiritual folk belief has been under even greater official pressure than institutional religion, because folk belief consistently refers to spiritual events erupting into the everyday world: ghostly visits, angelic assistance, answers to prayer. It was the expectation that such straightforward spiritual beliefs could not be sustained in the face of hostility from the official worldview that led scholars, as illustrated by the quotes given above, to anticipate the ultimate secularization of modern society.

With spiritual folk belief under escalating official pressure, its persistence is an anomaly. The further discovery that its persistence involves all segments of modern society, even showing some positive association with educational attainment as documented repeatedly by the Gallup polls, is little short of astonishing. Folk tradition has not only survived, it has given rise to a successful revival of spiritual beliefs within modern institutional religion. In Christianity, for example, the Charismatic revival began as a folk movement with roots in Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism, and it has had enormous impact in Christian churches since the 1960s. That is, the Charismatic movement originated in unofficial religious tradition but has forced its way into the institutional church, producing remarkable changes in belief and practice in all Christian denominations during the past thirty years. As sociologist Margaret Poloma put it in her book The Charismatic Movement, this new “emphasis on the reality and power of the supernatural might be termed the resacralization of religion.” With its highly spontaneous and informal style, this spiritual revival retains a strongly folk aspect even as it revises late-twentieth-century Christianity.

Similar revivals of the supernatural aspects of religion are occurring in other American religious traditions, and worldwide. This is often treated simply as a rise of “fundamentalism” and associated with religious intolerance and interfaith violence. For example, Eleanor Munro, criticizing sociologist Peter Berger's A Far Glory (a book on religious believing in the modern world), comments that “hunger for personal immortality still gives rise not only to new philosophies and arts but also to holy wars and 'ethnic cleansings.'” Such loose generalization and stigmatization characterize the intellectual defenses that have suppressed cognitive spiritual belief throughout modern times. But spiritual belief can be either socially helpful or destructive, moral or immoral. Belief in the existence of souls, spirits, angels, or God can move one to compassion and love—or to fear and hate—just as can devotion to family and clan, commitment to a political theory, or a host of other ideas.

It is the cultural context of belief that largely determines its social consequences. And particular social consequences of a belief are not logical grounds for determining its truth.

David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” Section X, Parts I–II. 1748; reprint in Religious Belief and Philosophical Thought, ed. William P. Alston (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 408–419.

For an excellent discussion of these developments in the history of Christian theology, see J. Kellenberger, The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, rev. and ed. James Stachey, trans. Joan Riviere, International Psychoanalytic Library, No. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1972); Ludwig Eidelberg, ed., The Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (New York: Free Press, 1968), 280.

See Peter Berger’s discussion, “The Alleged Demise of the Supernatural,” in his Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, (1969; reprint, with a new introduction by the author, New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 1–30.

Margaret Poloma, The Charismatic Movement: Is There a New Pentecost?, Social Movements Past and Present Series (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 28.

Eleanor Munro, “The Religious Hunger,” review of A Far Glory by Peter Berger, New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1992.

For a good discussion of the role of politics and journalism in this process, see Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

The Experiential Theory

What accounts for the universality of spiritual folk belief and for its refusal to wither and die in the modern (and postmodern) world? Certainly many very complex theories have been suggested. I have no doubt that many factors are involved, but I propose that there is a single basic reason that must be taken into account, a reason without which other theories will consistently fail to fit the data. This reason has to do with the relationship of belief to experience and the kinds of experience that are most crucial to spiritual belief.

The conventional view has assumed that spiritual beliefs are one kind of interpretation of the same sets of experiences to which secular interpretations refer. That is, the conventional view assumes that there is no distinctively “spiritual” set of experiences, that there are, rather, spiritual interpretations of ordinary experiences that vie with secular interpretations of the same things. One person's miracle is another's coincidence, one person's mystical experience is another's sense of awe at the beauty and majesty of the universe, one person's visit from the dead is another person's dream.

There is no doubt that spiritual and secular interpretations of ordinary experience compete in society, often over the same observations. But we cannot entirely separate the discussion of what is observed from how it is interpreted. It is now widely recognized that every observation description is laden with some interpretation. Every interpretation has some impact on what is observed, so that one's belief has the capacity to shape one's experience.

But for most topics it is also accepted that observations vary in their ambiguity—the ease with which they can be shaped by what is expected and the variety of interpretations they seem to fit. An ink blot is quite ambiguous: we tend to see in it what we expect, and individual interpretations can vary widely. On the other hand, an ordinary wooden pencil sitting on my well-lit desk, viewable from many angles and available to be picked up, is relatively difficult to construe as anything else under normal circumstances. The conventional view explains dramatic accounts of spiritual experience by asserting that they refer to ambiguous observations that have been shaped by prior belief, such as hearing the sound of a house settling as ghostly footsteps.

Visual experiences are often explained by reference to special circumstances that increase ambiguity, such as poor lighting (and other environmental factors) or fatigue (and other characteristics of the perceiver, such as intoxication or mental illness). In The Terror I summarized these conventional explanations as “the cultural source hypothesis,” because they each rely on a culturally provided model in the production of tradition-confirming accounts of experience.

Based on such experiences as the Mara, the “near-death experience,” and a growing list of others, however, I propose that while the conventional view is useful for many experience-belief linkages—because cultural sources do influence experience—it is flawed by the omission of a large quantity of instances in which neither interpretive bias nor perceptual ambiguity appear to be adequate explanations. There are classes of experience that give rise to spiritual beliefs among practically all who have them, regardless of their prior beliefs. The perception and interpretation of such experiences are similar among persons with very different backgrounds and expectations.

Those who have had such experiences form a minimum core of “believers,” a substantial fraction of any population below which certain basic spiritual beliefs will not drop regardless of cultural and social pressure. It is then the extent to which the experiences and beliefs of these individuals affect those of others that is primarily governed by cultural mechanisms.

I call this the experiential source theory. Its basic points may be simply stated as follows:

1. Many widespread spiritual beliefs are supported by experiences that: A. Refer intuitively to spirits without inference or retrospective interpretation, and B. Occur independently of a subject's prior beliefs, knowledge, or intention (psychological set).

2. These experiences form distinct classes with stable perceptual patterns. I call experiences meeting these criteria core experiences.

3. Such experiences provide a central empirical foundation from which some supernatural beliefs develop rationally.

Stating that these experiences refer “intuitively” is not a naive claim that such experiences are unmediated, but rather that, like many ordinary perceptual experiences, they are not necessarily mediated by the concepts to which they give rise. One who has never heard of a hummingbird, and therefore lacks the concept, can still perceive a hummingbird if it flies into the garden. Although not experiencing the percept “as a hummingbird,” one will still have a perceptual experience.

Further, if one observes closely, one will subsequently have a concept similar to the consensual concept of hummingbird—to the extent that one sees clearly, reasons well, etcetera The experience will “refer intuitively” to a little bird that can hover by moving its wings so fast that they are a blur, and that seems attracted to flower blossoms. Granted, to get that far one would have to start with the concept bird. By the same token, core supernatural experiences require the prior concept of “beings” or persons. But it seems reasonable to assume that such a general concept is ubiquitous among intact humans above the age of infancy. The specifics by which concepts such as person vary from culture to culture are not relevant to the ability to have a core experience, anymore than whether one's concept of bird has been developed around parrots or robins is relevant to having a perceptual experience of hummingbirds. In their independence from the concepts to which they give rise, core experiences are like any novel perception of the environment.

I call these classes of experience core experiences and the basic beliefs that inevitably arise from them core beliefs. For example, I consider “near-death experiences” to be core experiences, and the belief in a soul that will survive death is one associated core belief. The paralyzing Mara attack is another core experience, and the belief that some spiritual encounters are threatening is an associated core belief.

Core experiences and related core beliefs do not logically conflict with each other or with established scientific knowledge. Space does not permit a full treatment of this important issue, but I can note two points. First, very few widespread spiritual beliefs and scientific claims actually do contradict each other; for example, creationism and evolutionary theory do so. Those beliefs are not core in my experiential sense (though widespread, they do not follow necessarily from widespread spiritual experiences).

Currently recognizable core experiences do not contradict each other or established scientific knowledge, nor are they contradicted by scientific knowledge. Mara beliefs and sleep paralysis knowledge are not contradictory; in fact, they harmonize very easily. N.D.E beliefs and neurobiological knowledge are not contradictory, and so on. Further investigation might conceivably establish some contradictory relationships with either new core experiences or new scientific knowledge, but to assert that now would be entirely speculative.

Second, core experiences and related core beliefs show the inadequacy of the skeptical view that spiritual experiences are just a form of biased interpretation of ordinary experience, that such experiences are easily accounted for by established scientific knowledge. This is the argument from parsimony or Occam's Razor. This claim arises from the nineteenth-century notion of supernatural belief as primitive explanations for observations of natural phenomena. I know of no core experiences that inherently offer an account of any natural phenomena.

What they do offer is an account of the nature of spirits and their relationship to humans. All conventional theories of such experiences treat them as hallucinations or illusions and rely on assumptions of cultural sources to account for patterning, because no psychological theories exist that could explain complex hallucinations having a complex, cross-cultural, perceptual stability. (This is not to say that such a theory is impossible, only that no such well-established theory currently exists. The closest would be the Jungian psychology idea of the “collective unconscious,” but this is not generally accepted as scientifically established, and even it does not predict the kind of perceptual stability actually found.) Therefore, even on grounds of parsimony, modern knowledge does not conflict at all with core supernatural beliefs.

The experiential theory is limited to the reasons for which spiritual beliefs are held and why they are so persistent and prevalent. It does not address the question of whether these beliefs are true, although it does show that many such beliefs are held for good reasons. That is, these beliefs are not obviously or self-evidently false even in view of modern knowledge.

This is a radical theory. It runs counter to most academic accounts of spiritual belief, as already noted, and it also runs counter to the prevailing ideas within folklore scholarship about experience. When experience is noted by students of culture, it tends to be in broad terms, as in “the American experience.” I use experience to refer to particular, datable episodes in peoples' lives, their perceptions of events.

The common folklore approach to experience focuses on life stories, and is based on a model of those stories as conventionalized fictions. As Jeff Titon said in his 1980 article “The Life Story,” “life storytelling is a fiction, a making, an ordered past imposed by a present personality upon a disordered life.” More recently, Elaine Lawless, drawing on the work of Titon and of Sandra Stahl, has argued for personal experience and life stories as folklore on the basis that “the actual, personal experience and the shared, group tradition (that is, in terms of form, content, structure, language) fused in these stories which, if closely examined, often sounded remarkably similar from one narrator to another.” Lawless goes on to speak of the “spiritual life stories” of Pentecostal women preachers, saying, “I hear the recollections to a very large degree as 'fictions' which draw on an understanding of facio, not a lie but a 'making.' The stories are creations.” The interests of folklorists in personal accounts are strongly influenced by literary ideas, and similarity from one account to another is taken as evidence of traditional borrowing, the imposition of culture on an alleged experiential report. This is similar in principal to the interpretation of “urban legends” in which, ironically, the greater the quantity of testimony that accumulates, the more certain it is that the accounts are fiction rather than fact.

This can be a fruitful approach for some purposes. But as a basis for the study of belief narratives it is hopeless. It dismisses all of the teller's claims, in advance, without the need for evidence. That cannot help us to understand why widespread beliefs are held.

In my theory I am suggesting that some spiritual beliefs show not only persistence but remarkable similarity from one tradition to another because they accurately recount observations which are themselves remarkably similar. This is a standard rational technique for assessing the reliability of experiential reports: do the witnesses agree? For the limited set of core experiences, my interpretation holds that independent witnesses do show remarkable agreement.

And, because that independence extends to individuals from very diverse traditions, the agreement cannot be explained as mere conformity to cultural expectations. I do not wish to defend the truthfulness of urban legends nor to argue that when people tell their life stories they “tell the truth” (I think sometimes they do, but I'll leave that for another time). But I do intend to argue that at least some accounts of spiritual experiences have characteristics that strongly suggest that they are accurate reports.

All reports are constructed, but that does not make all reports fiction. Accurate reports are constructed and evaluated differently from fictitious or inaccurate reports.

It is crucial to understand that the experiential theory does not suggest that all or even most stories of spiritual experience are accurate, nor that all spiritual beliefs are based on specifiable sets of extraordinary experience. I have no doubt that there are widespread spiritual accounts that, like urban legends, never had a first-person version, and that many spiritual beliefs are powerfully shaped by psychological and social forces. The experiential theory simply holds that scholars have been mistaken in their failure to seriously consider the possibility that spiritual belief traditions might have some of the same empirical and rational characteristics that other folk traditions display.

Folklife scholars have long been aware that folk traditions concerning architecture, food preparation, agricultural practice, botany, the making of textiles and pottery, and so forth, constitute impressive bodies of valid knowledge rooted in experience. This experiential theory of spiritual folk belief suggests that folk belief traditions, including spiritual beliefs, may have more in common with the practical traditions of folklife than with folktales and folksongs. The belief in spirits seems to relate to experience in much the same way as do beliefs that salt preserves meat, that the south side of a hill is a warmer place for a house than the north side, or that there is a plant called poison ivy that causes an itchy rash. Core spiritual experiences stand in relation to spiritual beliefs in much the same way that other encounters with the environment relate to traditional knowledge about it. This relationship of spiritual experience to culture, and the way that it varies in different cultural settings, is presented schematically in Figure 1.

In Figure 1, 10 represents any core experience. Remember, a core experience will occur in all populations regardless of cultural references. The use of X does not suggest that all instances of a core experience are identical.

Rather, it refers to the experiential theory's core experience categories, all members of which fall within a specifiable range that is independent of cultural factors. The use of arrows pointing from X to “Cultural Accounts” represents the experiential theory's assertion that core experiences are not dependent on (determined by) culture, but that cultural accounts are in part, shaped by core experiences.

With those things in mind, the three examples given in the figure represent the following cultural possibilities:

Cultural Accounts or Worldviews — Example #1, Example #2, Example #3, produced via Cultural Processes (including language) acting on Any Core Experience X. (Remember, if it is a “core experience,” it will occur in all populations regardless of cultural references.)

Example 1 (shown on the left) is an account that is relatively “experience-near” with regard to X. The experience category X is represented with little embellishment. The representations of Mara attacks in Mormon, Charismatic, or Jehovah's Witness traditions illustrate this. The experiences are heavily interpreted, but the experiential elements are usually given in fairly straightforward, recognizable fashion.

Example 2 (shown in the center) is a highly embellished account in which X is central, but so highly ramified and tightly integrated with other elements (other experiences, descriptions, interpretations, etcetera) that X is only recognizable and discrete to the observer who is fully familiar with X—and even then, some effort is required. The representation of Mara attacks in U.F.O abduction accounts illustrates this. The interpretation enters into ramified descriptions of the perceptual category X (e.g., “an alien entered the bedroom and paralyzed me”) and that experience is presented as continuous with and causally connected to several others (such as “transport to the U.F.O”).

Example 3 (shown on the right) is an account in which X is absent. I still represent X as associated, because its suppression is an active process. Since core experience X occurs in the population that uses this worldview, mention of X cannot be merely omitted from that culture. If it were, anomalous claims of X would constantly surface in public.

I have suggested that the removal of the Mara and N.D.E (near-death experience) categories from public knowledge in modern society has required a great deal of effort, and currently engages a variety of institutions (e.g., psychiatry, csicop [Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a major debunking organization], anti-cognitivists in theology, etcetera) and individuals (famous members of csicop—including Carl Sagan and James Randi—many clergy and therapists, and legions of local workers) in “policing” the official worldview. The representation of N.D.E's as delirium is one good example of this. If X is the N.D.E and W in Example 3 is delirium, then one basic process for omitting X is to state: “That event of which you speak [which I call X but this account does not name; it is anomalous] is just one of a great variety of forms that W takes.”

One of my reasons for including these examples for reference is to clarify the following methodological issues: First, no X (core experience) can be derived from any single worldview. Even a comparison of worldviews can only hypothesize X because some suppress reference to X (as in Example 3). Cultural documentation must be supplemented by the inquiry into experiences. Second, no worldview can be derived from X or even several Xs. Even though X suggests and constrains the experiencer's interpretation, social and cultural processes always enter into enculturation, resulting in very diverse accounts from similar experiences.

Therefore, worldviews must be described through ethnographic methods. Core experiences must be described through phenomenological methods. Understanding each and the processes linking them requires both.

This is an issue that is constantly debated in the philosophy and psychology of mysticism. See, for example, Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) to the effect that “religious experience” can only be ordinary experience interpreted in a religious way, and therefore invalid as evidence for religious belief. Arguments to the contrary are summarized in Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

By this I do not insist that core experiences provide “proof.” I mean only that they constitute genuine cognitive reasons and can reasonably be considered a kind of evidence for some belief claims. That is, they cannot be dismissed as prima facie invalid reasons.

Jeff Todd Titon, “The Life Story,” Journal of American Folklore 93 (1980): 290.

Elaine Lawless, “Rescripting Their Lives and Narratives: Spiritual Life Stories of Pentecostal Women Preachers,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7 (1991): 57–58.

Ibid., 58.

Conclusion

Because my experiential theory is so contrary to conventional wisdom, it is also very easy to misunderstand. I do not claim that all spiritual beliefs are experientially grounded, nor that all beliefs that flow from core experiences are properly inferred. I only point out that many spiritual beliefs do appear to be experientially grounded and to be supported by the experiences from which they arise. I have already noted that this does not prove that these beliefs are true, but I do not have a new interpretation that can show reasons to believe that they are false. Those interpretations that do purport to show all such beliefs false, or at least baseless, generally have two flaws: (1) poor descriptions of the beliefs actually held, and (2) lack of rigorous attention to experiential reports.

My position has also been misunderstood, occasionally, as being hostile to culture and cultural interpretations. For example, Carol Burke recently called my view of culture “deeply reductive” and “positivistic,” claiming that I was “repudiating culture, the discursive production of knowledge.” This is no more true of my theory than of folklife approaches that include information about plants and soils in the study of traditional agriculture. Unfortunately, this kind of bombastic rhetoric is often used in an effort to mark off particular topics as the exclusive property of a particular disciplinary view. But reductionism—whether cultural, biological, or other—always underestimates the complexity of real situations.

The purpose of the experiential theory is not to remove culture from the discussion of belief. Rather, it is to inform and clarify that discussion and to ground our understanding of the role of culture in sound and systematic observation. It is very important to note that such a grounding has the effect of protecting traditional beliefs and accounts from mere translation into the cultural idiom and tacit beliefs of scholars.

Carol Burke, Vision Narratives of Women in Prison (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 54 and 61. For an excellent rebuttal of that description of my position, see Gillian Bennett’s review of Burke’s book, in Folklore 105 (1994): 110–112.

For a discussion of this problem in the cross-cultural topic of psychiatric anthropology, see Hufford, “Inclusionism vs. Reductionism in the Study of the Culture-Bound Syndromes,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 12 (1988): 503–512, a book review of Ronald Simons and Charles Hughes, eds., Culture-Bound Syndromes.

Possible Classes of Core Experience

I have noted two classes of experience that seem to meet my criteria for core experiences (those criteria being intuitive reference to spirits; independence from a subject's prior beliefs, knowledge, or intention [psychological set]; and a stable perceptual pattern). I do not claim to know all of the varieties of experience that might meet these criteria. Twenty years ago no one could have said that the Mara and the N.D.E would qualify as core experiences.

And until serious attention is paid to the experiential spiritual claims of ordinary people, and those claims are subjected to rigorous cross-cultural comparison, we will have only a very incomplete view of this aspect of human life. Even now, however, I can suggest several likely core candidates.

The visits of deceased loved ones were once considered a pathological symptom of disordered grieving. But within the past twenty years these experiences have come to be considered a common and normal aspect of bereavement, and they have been documented in many different cultural settings. In fact, there is reason to believe that this experience can have a strongly positive effect in the resolution of grief.

: “Omens of death,” and deathbed visions may be a part of the N.D.E class, or they may constitute a distinct class.

Visits by unidentified loving presences constitute one or more additional classes of widely reported experience. For example, after completing The Terror I had the pleasure of working with Genevieve Foster on a project to publish her memoir centered on an intensely positive mystical experience she had in 1945. That experience changed her life but remained a personal secret until she was in her seventies. In 1985 The World Was Flooded with Light was published with her description of her experience and its meaning to her, and my commentary on the mystical experiences of people without mystical training or contemplative lifestyles.

For example, W. Scott MacDonald and Chester W. Oden Jr., “Case Report: Aumakua—Behavioral Direction Visions in Hawaiians,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 86 (1977): 189–194; William Foster Matchett, “Repeated Hallucinatory Experiences as a Part of the Mourning Process among Hopi Women,” Psychiatry 35 (May 1972): 185–194; W. Dewi Rees, “The Hallucinations of Widowhood,” British Medical Journal (October 1971): 37–41.

Rees; Gallup with Proctor; Greeley; all previously cited.

Leea Virtanen, “That Must Have Been ESP!” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death (New York: Avon Books, 1977); Melvin Morse, with Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from Children’s Near-Death Experiences (New York: Villard Books, 1990); and Melvin Morse, Transformed by the Light: The Powerful Effect of Near-Death Experiences on People’s Lives (New York: Villard Books, 1992).

Example 3: A Medieval “Intellectual Vision” in Suburban Philadelphia

I saw nothing unusual with my outward eye, but I nevertheless knew that there was someone else in the room with me. A few feet in front of me and a little to the left stood a numinous figure, and between us was an interchange, a flood, flowing both ways, of love. There were no words, no sound. There was light everywhere …. [T] he world was flooded with light …. The vision lasted five days …

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this experience is the religious background of its subject. Gen Foster said that it “was so far from my expectation, so far from anything that I had thought in the realm of the possible, that it has taken me the rest of my life to come to terms with it” (p. 36), and “occurring as it did to one reared in the most staid and unemotional branch of Protestantism, taught to believe that such things were truly impossible, or if not impossible then certainly abnormal—such an event was truly overwhelming” (p. 42).

Medieval Christian mystics described such an event as “an intellectual vision.” But Gen is not a medieval mystic. Here is another stable perceptual pattern that seems to occur independently of the kind of cultural context that conventional explanations treat as necessary and causal. Some describe this kind of experience as angelic, and I suspect that it does partially underlie the widespread belief in guardian angels and the continuing interest in angels, represented by the enormous number of current popular books on the subject. Recent popular works about angels, however, also document the process by which arguably ordinary experiences are interpreted as spiritual and mingle with more extraordinary and direct spiritual experiences.

Experiences of healing constitute several possible sets of core experience. In particular, healing accompanied by an overwhelming perception of energy passing into and through the sick person has a very wide distribution. The following illustration comes from a man who was healed of a hiatal hernia following an ecumenical healing service in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:

Genevieve Foster, The World Was Flooded with Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 43.

Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, or the Mansions, introduction and notes Father Benedict Zimmerman, O.C.D. (1577; reprint, Union City, NJ: John J. Crawley, 1980), 180–181.

For example, Joan Webster Anderson, Where Angels Walk: True Stories of Heavenly Visitors (Sea Cliff, NY: Barton & Brett, 1992); Sophy Burnham, A Book of Angels (New York: Ballantine, 1990).

Example 4

[Later] on the way to my car I thought, 'I wonder if I got healed? How are you supposed to feel when you get healed at one of these things?' And then I thought, 'Well, it doesn't matter. Whether I get healed or not, I won't lose faith in God.' … Then suddenly, I felt like high voltage touched me on my head and I had a feeling that I can only describe as like bubbling, boiling water rolling to my fingertips and back up …. And I felt the presence of God right there on the street …. I knew I had been healed.

Such experiences of healing energy are reported from all over the world. They are part of the basis for the modern alternative healing technique of “therapeutic touch.” Richard Katz's Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung describes similar perceptions of healing energy in the healing rituals of the Kung in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. The conceptions of life energy that the Chinese call ch'i and the Japanese ki, which form the basis for such healing practices as acupuncture and Shiatsu, may be based on such perceptions also.

Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who has studied reincarnation belief all over the world, has documented many cases of claimed past life memories among children. Most pertinent to the experiential theory, Stevenson has shown that, surprisingly, these memories occur even in populations in which belief in reincarnation is not only not held, but is actively discouraged. Such recollections, independent of a prior concept of reincarnation but intuitively suggesting a previous life, would constitute core experiences.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it should demonstrate that there already is a substantial body of description from which the investigation of the relation of spiritual belief and experience can proceed. I am pleased that even in the area of religious studies and philosophy of religion such a serious reexamination seems to be starting. For those interested in the complex connections of religious belief with experience, I strongly recommend Caroline Franks Davis's The Evidential Force of Religious Experience.

Hufford, “Epistemologies of Religious Healing,” Journal of Philosophy and Medicine 18 (1993): 184.

Dolores Krieger, “Therapeutic Touch: Searching for Evidence of Physiological Change,” American Journal of Nursing 79 (1979): 660–662.

Richard Katz, Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Ian Stevenson, Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987).

Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

Misinterpretation

I have noted that the experiential theory does not suggest that all folk belief is strongly founded on experience. Furthermore, culture can operate to suppress experiential knowledge as well as to highlight it; I expect the suppression of discussion about spiritual experience to produce frequent confusion, in both folk and official culture, as people try to make sense of experiences about which they lack traditional, experience-based knowledge. The current U.F.O debate will serve as a brief illustration. U.F.O beliefs provide an excellent example of the way that experience refuses to be silent, even when official culture insists.

Modern U.F.O beliefs are entirely unofficial, and official efforts to “stamp them out” have been vigorous and repeated. U.F.O reports are subject to a spiritual interpretation by many investigators and experiencers, but to physical, high-tech interpretation by many others. That very ambiguity, along with its insistent claims of an experiential basis, should make U.F.O belief a prime subject for students of folk belief.

In fact, though, only a few have given it serious attention. I find the subject fascinating, and I grant that the general claim that “something is going on” seems to be experientially based. This makes U.F.O beliefs similar to the beliefs I have discussed earlier.

Recently, however, U.F.O belief has developed a new aspect, one that has gained great notoriety and that illustrates the problems of misinterpretation that can arise when culturally shared knowledge about experience is suppressed. This is the U.F.O abduction phenomenon—the idea that extraterrestrials are repeatedly abducting humans and subjecting them to bizarre experiments aboard spaceships. Having listened to many who have memories of these terrifying events, I have no wish to dismiss or debunk the subject. I do not pretend to have a clear idea of what lies behind all of these reports.

However, within the past two years I have had it repeatedly called to my attention that many accounts of abduction begin with “waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room.” This quote is taken from a recent, privately funded poll of the American population carried out by the Roper Organization, a highly respected survey group. This survey was intended to assess the prevalence of alien abduction, and such waking paralysis events are very common in alien abduction accounts. Even before that poll was done in 1991, I had received letters from members of abduction support groups, asking help in understanding the connection between what I had reported in The Terror and what had happened to them. As a result, I have become involved in the debate.

In The Terror I had noted that when a Mara attack occurred in the life of a person interested in U.F.O's or who had recently seen a U.F.O, the experience was frequently interpreted, understandably, as U.F.O-related—usually meaning that the “strange presence” was taken to be an alien. This is entirely consistent with the general range of variation in the interpretations of this event across cultures: subjects take it as real and involving a force with extraordinary power. In most cultural settings this suggests a spiritual force that may be variously considered a ghost, a witch, a skinwalker, a demon, and so forth. Since an extraterrestrial might conceivably have mysterious powers, such beings fit within the intuitive implications of the event.

In the present abduction debate, however, a group of primary investigators, including those who funded the Roper poll, are attempting to distinguish genuine alien bedroom paralysis attacks from those that are “merely the Old Hag-sleep paralysis thing.” In their poll they found that 18% (± 1.4 percent margin of sampling error, p. 21) of the population admits to “waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room” at least once. This rate is essentially the same as that which I had documented ten years earlier.

In the abduction scenario, the bedroom paralysis attacks are often followed by being floated helplessly out of bed, out through a ceiling or closed window, and on to an alien ship. As I had reported in The Terror, Mara attacks that persist for more than a few minutes often culminate in unpleasant out-of-body experiences. Further parallels could be elaborated, but space will not permit. The idea that such experiences are “not sleep paralysis” has been encouraged by the total absence of attention to the experiential contents of sleep paralysis by sleep researchers.

Given that absence, it is not correct to say that any of these other categories is sleep paralysis, because sleep paralysis is the cultural construction of one tradition. Although it is constructed in a manner that overlaps with related categories in other traditions, as a category, it is not the same. And making sleep paralysis the same by adding good descriptions of the experiential contents would provide a major challenge to the explanatory options of sleep research.

It would be a good thing to try, but it is impossible to know in advance what they could come up with. So when scientist Carl Sagan, in a recent Parade magazine identified these experiences as just sleep paralysis not alien abduction, he engaged in the same kind of labeling without explaining that U.F.O investigators do when they say that their accounts are of authentic alien abductions and “not just 'Old Hag' attacks” (several investigators have actually adopted the Newfoundland term).

The terrifying paralysis attacks have caused serious confusion before, each error caused largely by a general ignorance of the prevalence and consistent subjective features of the Mara event—an ignorance characteristic of modern culture. For example, investigators of sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome (sunds) among Southeast Asian refugee immigrants, especially the Hmong from Laos, discovered that a number of these refugees had experienced terrifying awakenings characterized by paralysis and an evil presence. Not knowing of the universal distribution of such experiences and related beliefs, investigators took these events to refer to the experience of surviving a sunds attack (an oxymoron, since sunds is definitively diagnosed only by autopsy!), and sunds was then interpreted as a kind of culture-bound post-traumatic stress disorder related to the refugee experience.

Actually the incidence and nature of the paralysis attacks in this population is very similar to that described elsewhere, while the distribution of sunds cases, which occur among young adult men, is entirely different. Furthermore, such unexpected deaths in sleep, specifically among young men, are well-known in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific (for example, bangungot ^{63} in the Philippines and pokkuri ^{64} in Japan), and they have been documented in Southeast Asia among the Hmong in refugee camps. Unfortunately, this kind of confusion is typical of the culture-bound syndrome literature, where exclusive cultural and psychological explanations compete with exclusive biological explanations. The terror associated with the paralysis attacks may be an occasional contributing cause that interacts with more basic causes, such as cardiac conduction defects, a much more reasonable interpretation supported by the work of folklorist Shelley Adler, who in Chapter 10 of this volume examines how the Hmong themselves interpret both the nightmares and the unexpected deaths. But the argument that the paralysis attacks alone cause the deaths is contradicted by the cross-cultural distribution and prevalence of those attacks, and the strikingly distinctive and localized patterns of sunds. Even some shamans in these groups are aware that sunds and dab tsog are two different events, but some Western investigators have made a disastrously wrong connection—a sort of cultural reductionism.

This kind of erroneous association is very similar to the common pathological reductionism that assumed N.D.E's must be symptoms of delirium, an error only recently being corrected.

See, for example, Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991).

For example, Thomas E. Bullard, “Folklore Scholarship and UFO Reality,” International UFO Reporter 13 (July/August 1988): 9–13; Bullard, “UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative Returns in Technological Guise,” Journal of American Folklore 102 (1989): 147–170; Hufford, “Humanoids and Anomalous Lights: Epistemologic and Taxonomic Problems,” Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies 18 (1977): 234–241; Hufford, The Terror; Hufford, “Awakening Paralyzed in the Presence of a ‘Strange Visitor,’” in Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference, Held at MIT, Cambridge, MA, ed. Andrea Pritchard et al. (Cambridge, MA: North Cambridge Press, 1994), 348–354; Peter M. Rojcewicz, “The Boundaries of Orthodoxy: A Folkloric Look at the ‘UFO Phenomenon,’” (Ph.D. diss., Folklore and Folklife Program, University of Pennsylvania, 1984); Rojcewicz, “The ‘Men in Black’ Experience and Tradition,” Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 148–160.

Hopkins, previously cited.

For an overview of this subject from the perspective of investigators and abductees, see Pritchard, previously cited. The specific connections between abduction experiences and Mara attacks are developed in Hufford, “Awakening Paralyzed,” previously cited.

Carl Sagan, “What’s Really Going On?” Parade, March 7, 1993, 4–7.

Tobin and Friedman, 445.

See J. Z. Santa Cruz, “The Pathology of ‘Bangungot,’” Journal of the Philippine Medical Association 27 (July 1951): 476–481; J. B. Nolasco, “An Inquiry in ‘Bangungot,’” AMA Archives of Internal Medicine 99 (1957): 905–912.

Koh Gotoh, “A Histopathological Study on the Conduction System of the So-Called ‘Pokkuri Disease’ (Sudden Unexpected Death of Unknown Origin in Japan),” Japanese Circulation Journal 40 (1976): 753–768.

Ronald G. Munger, “Sudden Death in Sleep of Laotian-Hmong Refugees in Thailand: A Case-Control Study,” American Journal of Public Health 77 (1987): 1187–1190.

For an excellent and critical overview of the culture-bound syndrome literature, see Simons and Hughes, Culture-Bound Syndromes.

Robert H. Kirschner, Friedrich A. O. Eckner, and Roy C. Baron, “The Cardiac Pathology of Sudden, Unexplained Nocturnal Death in Southeast Asian Refugees,” JAMA 256 (1986): 2700–2705.

Shelley R. Adler, “Ethnomedical Pathogenesis and Hmong Immigrants’ Sudden Nocturnal Deaths,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 18 (1994): 23–59.

Glen O. Gabbard, Stuart W. Twemlow, and Fowler C. Jones, “Differential Diagnosis of Altered Mind-Body Perception,” Psychiatry 45 (November 1982): 361–369.

Finding Balance

Repeated confusion about the meaning of spiritual experiences arises from the exclusion of knowledge and discussion of them from public discourse. The stigma and the suggestion of mental disorder have served very effectively to either prevent any sharing at all or to keep the sharing very localized. Now the current in this process seems to be shifting. More and more people are speaking openly about their beliefs and experiences.

I hope that this will continue, and I further hope that interested parties will resist simple explanations from experts. This discourse, like the discourse over medical and other technical issues, will have to be opened beyond what experts can offer.

Life experience must coexist and share authority with technical expertise in order for a society to develop and maintain a rich and human view of itself and the world in which it lives. Folk belief traditions are an enormous and invaluable resource for this process. With the wisdom that they offer, we have the capacity to enrich our lives without rejecting the benefits that have come with scientific and technical progress. The usefulness of knowing the relationship of the Mara attack to dreaming sleep, of being able to distinguish near-death experiences from delirium, the necessity of distinguishing the consoling visits of bereavement from the hallucinations of insanity—all of these show the value of balance.

Today many are frustrated by facile dismissals of spiritual belief and experience by self-proclaimed experts wrapped in the mantle of science. They often assert that our understanding of spiritual matters has been corrupted by “too much science and reliance on rationality.” But the problem of the modern world is not too much intellectual activity and reasoning, and science and rational analysis do not contradict basic spiritual beliefs. The problem is a too-narrow view of what intellectual activity is and who has the capacity to reason soundly. Folklore as a field has the capacity to help our society find more democratic ways of sharing cultural authority.

Endnotes

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