Fits, trances, & visions: experiencing religion and explaining experience from Wesley to James

Abstract

Fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, possession. Believers have long viewed these similar involuntary experiences as religious--as manifestations of God, the spirits, or the Christ within. Skeptics, on the other hand, have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics, or other natural causes. In this sweeping work of religious psychological history, Ann Taves explores the myriad ways in which believers detractors interpreted these complex experiences in Anglo-American culture between the mid-eighteenth early-twentieth centuries.Taves divides the book into three sections. In the first, ranging from 1740 to 1820, she examines the debate over trances, visions, other involuntary experiences against the politically charged backdrop of Anglo-American evangelicalism, established churches, Enlightenment thought, a legacy of religious warfare. In the second part, covering 1820 to 1890, she highlights the interplay between popular psychology--particularly the ideas of animal magnetism mesmerism--and movements in popular religion: the disestablishment of churches, the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy, the expansion of Methodism, the birth of new religious movements. In the third section, Taves traces the emergence of professional psychology between 1890 1910 explores the implications of new ideas about the subconscious mind, hypnosis, hysteria, dissociation for the understanding of religious experience. Throughout, Taves follows evolving debates about whether fits, trances, visions are natural (and therefore not religious) or supernatural (and therefore religious). She pays particular attention to a third interpretation, proposed by such mediators as William James, according to which these experiences are natural and religious. Taves shows that ordinary people as well as educated elites debated the meaning of these experiences reveals the importance of interactions between popular elite culture in accounting for how people experienced religion explained experience.Combining rich detail with clear rigorous argument, this is a major contribution to our understanding of Protestant revivalism the historical interplay between religion psychology.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 183 citations exist upstream.