Religion is a whole system, or holistic, which seeks to explain all life and dictate how it should be led. Religions themselves seem to have begun with shaman like individuals; essentially hysterics who become a bridgehead between the spiritual and physical. Communing with nature spirits, he would become possessed, and through orchestrating tribal ritual through dance, the individuals of the tribe formed into a single hysterical organism as they approached the god-head through trance.
Elements of this process survive in religions today. Communal prayer is less hysterical, but the psychology is the same. We feel a need to become communal on the spiritual level, as if the individual is descending to the instinctual.
The modern club culture and ecstasy seem to ape this process on a secular level. We need the connections with this first religion – we need, still, to become holistic. But what drives this need?
Mysticism speaks of the ‘whole.’ When in the normal world, mystics speak of the drabness, lifelessness and disconnectedness of the world we inhabit. Our world is individualistic and compartmentalised. The world of trance is whole, or holistic.
Trance itself is similar, psychologically, to a faint. Indeed, early ritual had this goal in mind. Even today, the Toronto Blessing and the like induce such faints. However, research in Berlin in the 1990s showed that a deep faint can produce images of the spiritual. Dependent upon the culture of the person, heaven, spirits and even dead relatives can be experienced.
The similarity, here, to the impressions felt during a near death experience, for instance, is acute. The two seem to be related. As to what causes the experience, theories can vary to the extreme appreciation of a dream world to the production of mind-altering chemicals in the brain. But no matter what causes the experience, its reality within the mind is incontestable. But what effect would this have on a primitive, superstitious hysteric and his followers in early tribal societies?
First of all the shaman collapses into trance. In the trance he visits another world which he sees is populated by gods and the dead. And then, the trance over, he comes back to consciousness. It is almost as if he had died, gone to heaven, and been reborn. Is there any wonder that heaven and the afterlife have such an impression upon us? It may only have been a symbolic, psychological afterlife the shaman visited, but to him, and to anyone who believes, it is real.
This belief in death and rebirth became the centre piece of religious veneration, with the trance seen as death, and return to consciousness as rebirth. As to its power, it is also the centrepiece of Christianity, with Christ crucified and then resurrected. But there is another important point to make about the process. For in a real sense, it apes the death and rebirth of nature itself in the autumn and spring. Indeed, is not Easter placed at spring, the point of natural rebirth?
We are beginning to see identical elements to all religions. When stripped of specific cultures, all religions seem to have identical requirements, And we have seen in the above how they could all be related to the symbolic afterlife. It is as if, from its beginnings to the present day, religion has an Under-Religion which is shared in the psychology of us all.
© Anthony North, May 2002
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