8
Prophecy as Justification for Religious Innovation
THERE ARE hints of ancient Israelite popular views of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. But a detailed notion of a hereafter was banished for so long from Biblical literature that when it appeared for the first time, in the prophecy of Daniel, its belated presence required special revelatory authority:
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. (Dan 12:2-3)
We have dealt with this passage previously. Now however we need to look at the justification for this religious innovation and the implications of this passage for the study of consciousness. This passage is ostensibly set in Babylon, during the Medean Empire. It outlines a novel interpretation of resurrection which culminates in some of the leaders (“those who are wise”) being transformed into angels, as the stars were conventionally understood as angels (see Judg 3:20; Job 38:7). The notion of astral immortality was not, however, out of place in the Hellenistic world of the writers of this text.
Such a major change in a scripturally based religion takes a very special justification. Starting in chapter 7, the book of Daniel represents its contents as having arrived in revelatory dream visions, not the usual method for the literary prophets, but certainly well known as a medium for God’s word, since the story of Joseph:1 “In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream, and told the sum of the matter.” (Dan 7:1).
I take this to be an example of a religiously interpreted state of consciousness (RISC), since dreams, which are a commonplace in human experience, are being interpreted as prophetic, new revelations, which justifies the scriptural innovation. Related terms are “altered states of consciousness” (ASC) or “religiously altered states of consciousness” (RASC). The terms all refer to the same phenomenon but in different guises.2 RASC stresses that an altered state of consciousness is claimed by the adept while RISC recognizes this claim but does not specify that any actual altered state needs to be achieved by the actor, only that the behavior is considered to be consonant with RASC, thus the behavior is being interpreted religiously. RASC can be used by actor and observer; RISC is an analytic term, giving recognition to the difficulty in measuring exactly what ecstasy or trance is.
The particular vision that produces the notion of resurrection in Daniel is not just a dream vision, it is a waking vision. Since it is a vision, it is clearly a religiously interpreted state of consciousness (RISC). If we grant that the narrator actually had such a vision, we could also consider it a RASC. RASC grants the native claim while RISC recognizes only that a special state of consciousness is being claimed:
At that time I, Daniel, had been mourning for three weeks. I had eaten no rich food, no meat or wine had entered my mouth, and I had not anointed myself at all, for the full three weeks. On the twenty-fourth day of the first month, as I was standing on the bank of the great river (that is, the Tigris), I looked up and saw a man clothed in linen, with a belt of gold from Uphaz around his waist. His body was like beryl, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and the sound of his words like the roar of a multitude. I, Daniel, alone saw the vision; the people who were with me did not see the vision, though a great trembling fell upon them, and they fled and hid themselves. So I was left alone to see this great vision. My strength left me, and my complexion grew deathly pale, and I retained no strength. Then I heard the sound of his words; and when I heard the sound of his words, I fell into a trance, face to the ground. But then a hand touched me and raised me to my hands and knees. (Dan 10:2-10)
Here Daniel sees an extraordinary vision but only after he has practiced ascetic discipline for three weeks. He says that it is a vision (mâr’eh), which he alone saw, though the others were frightened. He is unable to move and falls into a trance (nîrdâm), a RASC if we believe the report but, at any rate, a RISC. He interprets the state in terms of ancient Israelite prophetic categories, that the hand of the LORD is upon him as it was on the prophets of old, and interprets that phrase literally enough that the hand of the Lord can raise him to his hands and knees. By using RISC for the critical, most general category, we avoid having to decide what exactly is the state of consciousness being claimed, as well as whether it is real, imagined, hallucinatory, or faked.3 We are just noting that it is the quality of the experience that justifies its truth for the actor. The specific characteristics of the RISC are interesting questions which can be explored in various contexts, depending on what the texts claim. But we do not need to address the issue of the truth of the RISC, if the report lacks sufficient evidence for us to decide.
A Plan of Attack in the Hellenistic World
JUDGING THE issue of consciousness in the ancient texts of the Hellenistic world is an intriguing question, and it is complicated further by changing notions of the value of that experience in different classes and over time. By the Second Temple period, historical prophecy was in the eyes of the central authorities either a phenomenon of the distant past or the eschatological future.4 In other words, to the central authorities only fake prophets would claim it. But that is precisely what makes it so important to the understanding of groups like the sects that produced Daniel, the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the New Testament. They all felt that the end of time was upon them and therefore prophets would again speak authoritatively about the end. And they felt in some tension with the central authorities. What was most important was the conventions available for them to speak. Such an important doctrine as life after death and resurrection was not merely discussed as a philosophical option. It was a new dispensation revealed through revelation, which arrived through the medium of a dream to the seer whom we know only as Daniel, in approximately 165 BCE.
Elliot R. Wolfson, in his book on Merkabah mysticism, suggests how to get out of the trap of excessive reductionism:
Bearing the inherently symbolic nature of the visionary experience in mind, we can now set out to answer another question that has been posed by scholars with regard to the visionary component of this literature. Did the Merkabah mystics actually ascend to the celestial realm and did they see something “out there,” or should these visions be read as psychological accounts of what may be considered in Freudian language a type of self-hypnosis? Or, to suggest yet a third alternative, would it perhaps be most accurate to describe the heavenly journey in Jungian terms, as a descent into and discovery of the archetypal self?
From a straight-forward reading of the extant sources it would appear that some texts assume a bodily ascent, a translation into the heavenly realm of the whole person with all the sensory faculties intact, whereas others assume an ascent of the soul or mind separated from the body as the result of a paranormal experience such as a trance-induced state. But even in the case of the latter explanation, typified most strikingly in Hekhalot Rabbati in the story concerning the recall of R. Nehuniah ben Ha-Qanah from his ecstatic trance, it is evident that the physical states are experienced in terms of tactile and kinesthetic gestures and functions appropriate to the body, such as the fiery gyrations of the eyeballs, ascending and descending, entering and exiting, standing and sitting, singing and uttering hymns, looking and hearing.5
Whatever one thinks of Jungian analysis, Wolfson must be correct in thinking that mystical ascents were really experienced and that they had a salutary effect for the mystic as well as for society or they would not have been practiced and supported. Jung suggests that these images are fundamental psychological processes that aid the quest for individuation. I would certainly agree that they are normal occurences and can be significant, meaningful, and salutary to human life in cultures that value them. Yet it may not be wrong to suggest, at the same time, that some of these ancient visions may appear to us today to be hallucinations, or self-hypnosis, in the sense that we believe that they must be wholly due to internal stimuli and could not take place outside the body. But there is an important difference in the case of a religious experience, where a socially acceptable and even admirable interpretation explains the RISC and no antisocial behavior results. Wolfson is further right in pointing out that there is a complex relationship between texts and RISC in Biblical communities. Experiences grow out of texts, and texts grow out of experiences. That will be key to our inquiry.
Wolfson refers to the famous story in the Hekhaloth Rabbati where R. Nehuniah ben Ha-Qanah is sitting on a marble dias, apparently in a RASC, describing the sights of his journey through the heavens to an assembled Sanhedrin. He says something puzzling, and the attendant rabbis wish to recall him to earth. The method is not entirely clear but appears as follows: allow ben Ha-Qanah to come into contact with an object that might be polluted enough to affect his ability to remain in heaven but not polluted enough to affect his status on earth. Since there are aspects of this story that seem historically improbable (e.g., the Sanhedrin) and others that seem illogical (e.g., Rabbi Hakkanah then proceeds on his way again), the literary quality of the tale cannot be ignored. On the other hand, it is generally consonant with the material which Ḥai Gaon reports that he knows about, in which the mystic sat on earth while his “soul” traveled through the palaces and progressed toward the highest heaven.
The Gaon was aware that the journey took place internally, while the adept was on the ground. It was a social occasion in which the whole Sanhedrin was gathered around him. This culture did not interpret the experience as a hallucination, rather a RASC. There is good evidence suggesting that the experience was a self-induced, altered state of consciousness. But that does not automatically make it hallucinatory or insane. Changes in states of consciousness are trainable, even under conscious control both in their trigger and ending mechanisms, and have meanings specific to the society that values them. The understanding of the events was positive, though the evaluation may differ as the text filters down through the ages. For example, Jewish scholars have not been reticent to voice their distaste for these phenomena because they do not meet the scholars’ own definitions of Judaism.
The Heavenly Journey, Dreams, Visions, and the Soul’s Journey after Death
MARY DEAN-OTTING, in her book Heavenly Journeys,6 displays in convenient form many of the motifs of the heavenly journey. The notion that God communicates through dreams is part of the epic tradition in Israelite thought, being a special characteristic of the E source in the Pentateuch. Furthermore, the book of Daniel is probably the source for the notion that revelation could be sought by incubating dreams. Dean-Otting herself does not shy from the conclusion that these psychological states are characteristics of the ascent in Hebrew thought and vice versa, that ascent is characteristic of altered states of consciousness. Though her study does not stress the relationship between ascent and RISC, it seems to many scholars to be the most obvious interpretation of the evidence.
In a way, visions are no different from dreams. We all have dreams, several times a night. In the morning we find them strange and sometimes worthy of mention, but usually we dismiss them immediately. Without training, we remember very few for more than a couple of hours. Since most of us do not produce the hormones important for memory while we sleep, what we train ourselves to remember may not be the dream itself but a rationalized, faint recollection of it. If we lived in a different kind of culture, however, one in which dreams were thought revelations, we would be sensitive to their import in entirely different ways and, chances are, we would seek to remember them more devotedly.
Almost all aspects of our dream experience are sensitive to training. We can stimulate our remembrances of dreams directly by waking up during the dream and reciting or writing them down. Other techniques for remembering dreams include consciously or unconsciously creating conditions that disturb sleep indirectly-such as anxiety, mourning, eating too much or little, or praying.
Dreams, too, are very much related to daily experience, both in content and emotional tone. That would mean that anyone who spent his or her time in careful exegesis of the “ascent texts” which describe the heavens, the divine throne room, and the journey there, would likely eventually dream about the same details. Besides reflecting the “unconscious” issues of life, with training, people are sometimes consciously able to manipulate the content and even the progress of their dreams, a phenomenon known as “lucid dreaming.” Lastly, oral reporting and literary processes are always available to subject the dream experience to correction when it goes far from the expected details.
We should note that a person who seeks out a dream and treats it as a revelation is relying, from our point of view, on ordinary human experience but is choosing to treat the experience as a revelation, in short, a RISC. Because of the value attached to the experience, we should expect that techniques for receiving and remembering dreams would easily enter religious life either directly or indirectly in various rituals. And since we should not privilege any sort of experience from what we normally expect in our modern world, that is all that we mean when we say that someone is receiving a dream-vision. We cannot say what the dream actually was before the person sets out to explain it. If the person does explain it, necessarily more cognitive issues will come into play, including difficulties in remembering it, and the natural tendency to edit the memory in transmitting it.
However, there are some times when sleep experience is evidently treated quite differently in our society, mostly because we do not understand all of the processes of sleep. For instance, a New York Times science article describes an unusual sleep phenomenon.7 A physical condition, known as sleep paralysis, common in some people especially at the onset or subsidence of sleep, can be interpreted as a witch attack in Newfoundland, known as “the old hag,” or even as an alien abduction in the United States. It can involve paralysis, pressure in the head, weight on the chest, struggle for breath, ringing in the ears-even a near death experience. In Japan, where there is both a predisposition and a regular name for “sleep paralysis” (kanashibari), people recognize it as a particular medical complaint.
This seems to suggest that many phenomena that are common in our psychic lives are evaluated by whatever religious or cultural criteria are available. Culture imposes an etiology and explanation on a great variety of our experiences. If this is true of our sleep states, it must be equally true of our waking states. Altered waking states, such as visions, ecstasy, or out-of-body experiences, are explained in a culture by whatever mechanisms are available in religion and mythology. Depending on those explanations, the culture makes a decision about the “sanity” of the actor.
Furthermore, there is a perfectly normal reflex of dreaming which can appear as a waking vision; that is the phenomenon known variously as the “hypnagogic state” or the “hypnopompic state,” depending on whether it is experienced upon entering sleep or upon reawakening. Some people, but evidently not all of us (at least not without training), can easily induce this state. As its name suggests, it is related to hypnosis and, though it occurs during sleep, is very susceptible to conscious suggestion. It can also happen during meditation or other kinds of deep thought and it is sometimes also a state in which out-of-body experiences take place.8
Dan Merkur has made this state the basis for his analysis of gnosticism.9 Although we do not know everything about this state that we would like to know, and it is quite variable in different people, in terms of its existence, the pleasure with which it is greeted, and the insights gained from it, it is widely documented as a state in which the subject is sometimes unable to distinguish between waking and sleeping modes, confusing what we think is dream imagery with waking experience. What makes dreams such a good example of this process is that dreams are omnipresent and accepted as normal throughout the world.
Usually in cultures that posit a non-normal state of consciousness in prophecy, dreams are also specially marked as having a divine origin. We know that this was believed true in Hebrew society because of the famous dreams of Joseph and Daniel. So from the perspective of the actor or adept, these were religious experiences, clearly understood to have religious consequences. And, although Daniel and Joseph are pseudonymous characters in the Biblical narrative, there is no reason to believe that people did not have these experiences. When Daniel begins to speak, the first thing he says is that his night visions came to him as dreams. Prophetic dreams are virtually universal throughout the world; they were especially important media for revelation in the ancient world, including early Christianity and Judaism, and are commonly held to be revelatory or the equivalent in all cultures today.10
Dreams were expected and prepared for by the prophets and seers in late Hebrew prophecy and apocalypticism. They are well documented as well later in Jewish mysticism. Vigils, usually pious night vigils of lamentation for the destruction of the Temple, are characteristic of many of the same apocalypses and are also present in 2 Enoch as well as later Jewish apocrypha. Vigils are particularly prone to bringing on hypnagogic and hypnopompic states. Whether these preparations are isolated as specific techniques by the text is beside the point; dreams are peculiarly both within control and out of rational control, so that they can be seen as messages from a deity or not, depending on the culture.
The validity of dreams as divine communication was almost universally accepted in the Hellenistic world. In those texts with remarkable frequency, they are the medium for revelation. The point of bringing in this research is not to reduce all revelations to misunderstood ordinary experience but to show that religiously interpreted states of consciousness are neither exotic nor uninterpretable in our notions of ordinary possibility. We should not treat the claims as impossible or insane; rather they can be real experiences interpreted by another system of causation than we might usually choose today.
RISC Experiences, Shamanism, and Techniques for Achieving Them in Judea
WHAT WE KNOW about dreams can be applied analogously to visions. I do not think it is out of place to read the reports of non-normal states of consciousness as important, interesting, valid, and valorizing, even when the vision excludes a specific mention of ascent. But the presence of ascent may be taken as an indicator of RISC in many different contexts. The ascent motif is known to adhere to a number of observable cases of ecstatic religious experience in the contemporary world-especially in shamanism. Many different societies valorize shamanic ascent.11
Mircea Eliade, a famous Romanian comparativist who presided over the History of Religions program for many years at the University of Chicago, studied shamanism extensively and imprinted on it certain assumptions which consciously and unconsciously color our field even today.12We can appreciate the value of his work-especially in sensitizing us to the importance of religion in our lives-if not every one of his theories.
He suggested that ascent and possession/trance were united with healing in shamanism. The shaman normally ascends to heaven to heal a wayward “soul,” whose misadventures had caused the illness in the first place. Eliade’s well-known studies closely weld trance with ascension but there are so many different kinds of trances and possessions that any number of possible connections are possible.13
Eliade’s work was based on reading various literary texts and field reports. Subsequent field work demonstrated that possession, trance, and ascent-as well as the other characteristics of shamanism-are independent variables, even though they correlate at various times and places. Though various techniques of shamanism diffuse historically, not all shamanism can be shown to be historically related.
Ascent as a Marker for ASC
AS EARLY AS Daniel, the theme of night visions becomes important. Daniel 7 announces itself as both a dream and a vision. This compares with the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2:1; 4:6-7 and the subsequent revelations which are called visions (ḥâzōn Dan 8:1; mâr’ch 10:1). Daniel receives “visions of his head on his bed,” that he writes down. Most scholars have interpreted this usage to indicate a revelatory dream, which was written down afterwards.
This formulation also can be found in the early parts of Enoch:
This is the book of the words for righteousness and the chastisement of the eternal watchers, in accordance with how the Holy and Great One had commanded in this vision. I saw in my sleep what I now speak with my tongue of flesh (italics added) and the breath of the mouth which the Great One has given to man (so that) he (man) may speak with it-and (so that) he may have understanding with his heart as he (the Great One) has created and given it to man. (1 En 14:2-3)
Enoch too receives his ascent vision in his sleep and then communicates it afterwards. In the Testament of Levi, the first vision is accomplished with a spirit of understanding. Later, sleep falls upon the seer, perhaps as in Genesis 28:12, and he experiences ascent. Third Enoch begins with a scene of great mourning for the destruction of the Temple and continues to an experience of ascent. In the Apocalypse of Abraham, Genesis 15, where a deep sleep falls upon Abraham, forms the background to the story. The apocalypse retells the “covenant between the pieces.” It interprets Abraham’s sleep as a waking vision:
And it came to pass when I heard the voice pronouncing such words to me that I looked this way and that. And behold there was no breath of man. And my spirit was amazed, and my soul fled from me. And I became like a stone, and fell face down upon the earth, for there was no longer strength in me to stand upon the earth. And while I was still face down on the ground, I heard the voice speaking…. (Apoc Ab 10)
Here, the apocalypticist has interpreted the Hebrew word tardemah in Genesis 15, usually translated as “deep sleep,” as purely a daytime trance. His body was completely incapacitated but he saw the arrival of the angel and then used the sacrificed birds to ascend. It is conceivable that an exegete would have found these connections but why would the exegete then translate the experience of Abraham into a first person narrative? He must be relating it to his own knowledge, either personally or from another adept. Although this state is described as a waking vision, we may understand these changes in the same way as dreams. Naturally occurring states of consciousness can be understood in religiously important ways in the correct context. Altered states of consciousness must be stimulated for most people while others just occur naturally.
The native understanding of the phenomenon in Jewish culture is not so much “rapture” as explicitly “ecstasy” in its technical sense (ek + stasis, meaning “standing outside”), as the narrator states that his soul fled. He means this to be understood as a non-normal and religiously altered state of consciousness. He further characterizes the physical trauma with a description of a seizure. The terminologies of dream vision, spirit possession, and soul flight are used interchangeably here to indicate that the experience was non-normal, a RASC. It would be realistic to consider that ecstasy and mysticism ascents were being practiced and that they were expressed as astral journeys.
In 4 Ezra there are three famous other techniques-fasting, eating flowers of the field, and drinking a fiery liquid. They can be understood as “triggering” techniques for achieving trance, as they are quite unusual behaviors otherwise in this society. The last item, drinking a fiery liquid, may even reflect the Persian tradition of imbibing psychedelic drugs, although it occurs inside a RISC, for the purposes of remembering Scripture, having the function of a magical memory potion.
Fasting is a well understood technique for achieving changes in consciousness and was practiced frequently by the heavenly journeyers; in some sense it does not matter whether the culture chooses to mark the activity as directly related to the vision or merely one of the preparations, like obtaining ritual purity. As a physical stimulus, fasting will not only bring on vivid dreams but can produce trance and other psychagogic states. While we do not know whether “the flowers of the field” ingested by the seer had any psychotropic properties, the description of the special diet may imply a specific agent and is, at the very least, a significant part of the fasting theme. Poppies, henbane, marijuana, and jimson weed, as well as other psychoactive plants, grow wild in profusion around the Mediterranean.
Hymn singing was the most important means of achieving ascent in the Merkabah texts.14 The repetition of mantras is a well-known technique for meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism. Although Jewish texts do not valorize hymn singing as a technique, very intent and highly concentrated hymn singing occurs throughout the texts. Hekhaloth Rabbati, for example, explicitly starts the ascent by saying that a certain psalm is to be recited by the adept exactly 112 times.
Trance is itself a widely varying combination of various physical states-including pulse, breathing, a complex variety of different brain waves, as well as quite different reports about the nature of consciousness and remembrance while possessed. Therefore an enormous variety of physical phenomena can be trained and selected by the traditions within a society as meaningful for a RISC experience. There are gradients in spirit possession and meditation, everything from light or no trance to deep unconsciousness. Given the evidence, it would be foolish either to deny or affirm that prophets or apocalypticists could or could not produce their writings in an altered state. Furthermore, it would be difficult to judge on the basis of the texts whether any particular one or combination of the physical characteristics of trance were present during these revelations.
The important thing, in the end, is what the texts claim, because that is the record of at least part of what is prescribed in the society. Claiming that they are visions is, in terms of the society, tantamount to them being so, unless there is specific evidence from the society to suggest that they are being faked. There must be evidence trusting or distrusting each report.
We should not shy away from comparing these Israelite religious experiences with those narrated in Persian thought, where the vision is explicitly caused by a narcotic drink. Though the heavenly journeys of Kartir and Arda Viraf were somewhat later than 1 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Abraham, for example, it would not be outrageous to think that the adept was sitting on earth while the spirit roamed the heavens in a RISC. This differs quite significantly from the older, mythological description, where the god or hero literally went to heaven. In these later, more mystical cases, we may posit that actual RISC experience is behind the accounts, though it cannot be ordinary experience, and it cannot be reconstructed in detail. Indeed, it may even be that the earlier mythological narratives mean to suggest RISC as well. Early literature is notoriously weak on experiential terminology. Frequently in Akkadian, for instance, dreaming is expressed by the phrase: “I slept and I saw.”
The Neurological Background of the Heavenly Journey
THERE HAS BEEN a great deal of research on the various neurological states that may underlie religious and other anomalous experiences.15 These books demonstrate that perfectly normally-functioning brains can spontaneously or by various techniques be stimulated to have anomalous or religious experiences. These experiences are quite different from the hallucinations produced by mental illness, derangement, and random acts of violence, although they are alike in that they all have an etiology in unusual processes in the brain.
Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause conclude their book, Why God Won’t Go Away, by positing that feelings of mystic unity are a characteristic of the brain in some of its rarest operations. Among other things, these rare states involve deafferentation or disinhibition, two names for a misfunction in the brain when nerve fibers fire erratically and stop sending meaningful signals to the central nervous system. This state is detectable by means of a variety of brain-imaging techniques (CAT, SPECT, or MRI).16 When this happens, subjects report unusual experiences that can be interpreted religiously, if the context is right.
In a unitary mystical experience, in which Newberg, D’Aquili and Rause are particularly interested, both left and right parietal lobes are neutralized. The right lobe is very important to the way we experience physical space. It is in charge of proprioception, the body’s knowledge of where its appendages are in space-a neurological process that, though important, normally goes on without conscious intervention. The left parietal lobe, conversely, seems to be quite important to the generation of the subjective sense of self. When both centers experience deafferentation, which essentially means “quieting” the specific lobes of the brain, either through mystical meditation or through wild and uncontrolled overstimulation, making the brain unable to decode its messages, the result may be a unitive mystical experience.17
But these unitive experiences have quite a different etiology than the shamanistic experience on the heavenly journey. Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rauss are interested in the disinhibition of both right and left parietal lobes, which cover various aspects of the body’s sense that we exist in specific points in space and time.18 The result may be a unitary, mystical experience. But when only the right center is involved, we can posit a different experience.19 When the proprioception center is quiet (as determined by CAT scans, MRIs, SPECTs and other medical diagnostic means), subjects report that they can no longer perceive their bodily location, but have a distinct feeling of bodiless motion in space.
Some people are able to achieve these states spontaneously; others train to achieve the state in meditation; still others report the state after disease, trauma, or under the effects of various drugs. The drug Ketamine, known as “Special K” in the club circuit, is known often to produce out-of-body experiences in its abusers.20
These out-of-body experiences have been studied and normally differ quite markedly from shamanistic or heavenly journeys produced in religious contexts. But these drug experiences occur in quite different circumstances than shamanistic ones. There has been considerable study of the conditions that might predispose people to have out-of-body experiences, the aftereffects, and their relationship to other predispositions like epilepsy, seizures, hypnotizability, and a variety of other personality and neurological factors.21 By no means are these mechanisms well understood or entirely mapped.22 But it seems clear that there is, at the least, a physiological component of RISC and also culturally available narratives as explanations of it. It is reasonable to suppose that expectations and context count for a great deal in predisposing the content of the experience, especially where a religion provides detailed instruction through texts and lessons on how to achieve these states.
In other words, deafferentation or disinhibition experiences may be the physiological root of the experience, but the detailed ascent to heaven would be equally due to social and cultural expectations of the adept. Mystics usually train for years for their out-of-body experiences, while drug abusers normally do not even want them. There are still other people who seek to have these experiences quickly, without long training. For example, a quick check of self-help books in print will yield dozens of books that teach subjects how to “astrally project themselves” or have “out-of-body” experiences. This suggests to me that it is not that difficult for a motivated learner to achieve the experience. Mystics and shamans who have very detailed experiences must be predisposed by their years of practice and study to have specific kinds of experience while in disinhibition or deafferentation. Combined with that experience is whatever content is available in the culture for explaining such intense, mystical experiences. If the adept has been studying the texts of previous journeys in a specific mystic, apocalyptic, or shamanic tradition, chances are that the content of the experience will confirm the tradition.
There may well be similar physiological conditions behind the “Near Death Experience.” When combined with trauma, people close to death may reach disinhibition. But they also experience the familiar, long dark tunnel, the bright light at the end, combined with the distinct feeling that they are floating or moving rapidly through the tunnel. The tunneling vision is likely due to malfunctioning of the optical centers of the brain. While we do not understand these states well, it already seems clear that in back of them are neurologically determined experiences that feel distinctly like being out-of-body.
If there is a biological basis for these experiences, there surely is also a broad vocabulary of images which the individual mind brings into the experience, based on personal history, training, and culture. I suggest that the difference between deafferentation or disinhibition and a detailed mystical ascent to heaven is the long mystical training of the adepts who learn both techniques for achieving the physical states and the culture’s social and cultural lore about what the state means.23
Are Jewish Apocalyptic and Merkabah Texts Exegesis or the Record of a RISC?
APOCALYPTIC texts are not simply exegeses of previous texts but combine study with revelatory experience. The texts themselves may even be palimpsests of many adepts’ experiences stretched over generations. It is sometimes impossible to separate the literary from the mystical experiences.
One way to adjudicate between RISC and exegesis is to look at the nature of the religious innovation and its expression. Is the innovation small enough to be considered within the realm of exegetical activity, or is it so great that only a vision could justify such a change? There are significant places in the book of Daniel where exegesis cannot explain the great innovations: For instance, in Daniel 7, the scene is a heavenly throne room with two manlike figures, one an “ancient of days” and the second a “Son of Man” (bar ’enash in Biblical Aramaic and in the postbiblical dialect barnasha’). “Son of Man” is not a title and can only mean the divine figure has a manlike form, because the phrase “son of man” usually means simply “a human being” in most Semitic languages. The exact phrase in Daniel is “one like a Son of Man” (kebar ’enash), signifying that the next figure in the vision was shaped like a man. The use of the preposition “like” also signifies that this is not Daniel’s usual consciousness.
The best guess as to the identity of the figure shaped like a man is that he is a depiction of the Glory of the LORD, the Kabod YHWH, the same principal human manifestation of God-an angel or a principal angel in whose form God deigns to appear, for some angels were envisioned in human form. At his second appearance, Gabriel is described as “the man Gabriel whom I had seen in the vision at first” (Dan 9:21). Then in Daniel 10:5 “a man clothed in linen,” probably an angel, is described in a way reminiscent of Ezekiel’s description of God’s glory. Again in Daniel 10:16, Daniel sees a human figure, probably as before, an angel “shaped in the likeness of men” (kidmût běnê ’ādām). These are characters who appear in other visions as well.
All this would be conventional except for one thing: there are two different manifestations of God, one old (“the ancient of days”) and the other young (“the Son of Man”). God appearing in two different forms at once is very puzzling, a description that clearly innovates on the notion that God can appear in whatever form He wants. Behind this passage is originally a Canaanite mythologem describing ’El’s enthronement of his son Ba’al, but no one knows how it could become a proper Jewish vision.24 An obvious explanation for such an innovation is that someone was remembering an actual dream. In any event, revelatory authority was being claimed for the vision.
The Daniel passage is based upon the Ezekiel passage (Ezek 37) but no one would say that it is simple exegesis. Unlike Ezekiel, the prophet stayed on earth in his bed but he was transported to heaven at the same time as he translated the Ezekiel passage into his personal experience. Somehow the experience of the later prophet, writing under the pseudonym of Daniel, was translated and conditioned by the writings of Ezekiel. At the same time the prophet incorporates all kinds of new experience, including the Canaanite mythological image, into his scene. No obvious exegetical conventions are mentioned in the text. It is simply narrated as a story. If this was not a vision then it ought to be.
It cannot be merely exegesis of the Ezekiel passage because there is no attention at all to explaining the earlier text. Instead it is as if the previous descriptions of the heavenly throne room were experienced by the narrator. There is much manifestly new material in it, unique in the Biblical canon. In fact, in such a traditional culture no one could make up such a heretical scene as two divinities who are one without relying on some divine sanction. Novelistic imagination could not have done the trick for the ancients. So a narrative of real experience seems obvious. The big question is: “What kind of experience is it?”
The text tells us that it is a “dream vision.” And it has all the qualities of a dream vision experienced after meditating and studying the earlier texts. At the same time it follows its own dreamlike plot and logic. It seems very much like what it is supposed to be-a dream. The hypothesis that we have a transcript of the dream-vision, with the attendant caveat that all language implies interpretation, is the best explanation for the event. We have no way of knowing how many changes may have entered the text before it is witnessed in the archeological record. But from early texts that we do have, we know that Biblical texts, thought to contain the word of God, was transcribed very conservatively.
We have already seen an important and interesting case in which the seer’s vision was actually composed of a conflation of several different previous visions-that is the vision of Daniel 12. In previous chapters we have seen how Daniel 12:1-3 is actually a kind of inspired commentary on Isaiah 66, illumined by the visionary combination of images in Ezekiel 37 and Isaiah 26. When we discussed these passages earlier, it was clear that these were not exegeses but new revelatory interpretations of the Isaiah 66 passage. We may never know precisely which situations produced it. The adept whose vision we have in Daniel 12 was certainly reading Isaiah quite carefully before the dream. There is no doubt that it was a RISC. Daniel 7:9-14 is equally based on very similar images, combined with the passages above.
Many, many other religious texts in Scripture fit the same RISC pattern. Christopher Rowland describes the way apocalyptic material relates to its Biblical past.25 He notes, for instance in 4 Ezra 12:11, that the man (vir perfectus) who rises from the sea is an allusion to Daniel 7 and, most especially, to verse 13, which describes the “Son of Man,” who comes with the clouds of heaven (the passage that we just studied and that we discovered to have been itself the result of a vision).
Yet, allusions to figures rising from the sea come from earlier in the chapter in Daniel, where the beasts are said to arise from the sea. This kind of melange of images is not the result of exegesis; indeed it is totally anathema to any educated Hebrew exegesis, which is quite exacting and governed by many technical terms, but actually the result of meditation on the whole chapter, reorganized by a free-ranging consciousness. As Rowland himself concludes: “It is most unlikely that a careful interpreter of Daniel 7 would have linked the divine envoy with the home of the beasts and thereby deliberately linked the divine with the demonic in the way in which we find it in this chapter.”26
The specific details of the vision in 4 Ezra are brought about, according to the text, not just by dream visions but induced by fasting and mourning leading to a revelation. Regardless, the characteristics of the text remain the same. The writers do not comment on the text and produce a commentary. They seemingly combine the images at will and come up with a detailed new narrative which uses the fragmentary images of the Bible to forge a new story of consolation. The presence of RISC is undeniable.
These texts differ fundamentally from any of the accepted means of exegesis. They are not Midrash, not Rabbinic exegesis. Neither are they homilies, nor targums, all of which are clearly understood genres of exegesis, each with its own format and technical terms. Nor are they pesher, which is commonly believed itself to be an inspired exegesis. (So most scholars have no problem accepting even some exegesis as inspired.)27 Even more obvious is the relationship between the various ascent texts in Enoch and their Biblical forebears. Many of the traditions found in the Enoch cycle are excellent examples. The ascent texts appear to flesh out various Biblical texts into a vision of heavenly reward and punishment.
We are constantly given the details of Daniel 12 spelled out in many ways. The good are rewarded and the evil punished. We see the leaders rewarded with heavenly immortality as stars and the very worst of the sinners punished for having persecuted the righteous. A very interesting relationship between Biblical texts and those found in Enoch is formed by the elements from Ezekiel 1 and Isaiah 6. The theophany in 1 Enoch 14:8 is clearly related to the theophany in Ezekiel, but there are very few precise contacts. Apart from the reference to the throne which is just as much influenced by Isaiah 6:1 (see 1 En 14:18, “a lofty throne”) the frequent mention of fire and certain key words like “lightning” and “crystal,” as well as the reference to the wheels of the Merkabah (14:18), there are very few actual contacts. But the chapters from Ezekiel and Isaiah are clearly informing the Enoch texts.
We must not discount the idea that somewhere along the line, a literary copyist glossed some of the Biblical material. But the most obvious way to describe the relationships between the two sets of texts is that the Biblical quotations were read and understood by people who studied them carefully, and then they became parts of the dreams and visions which those same people experienced. The glossing came afterwards when the exegetes noticed inconsistencies. The reading is the process by which the seer assimilated details of the text into memory, which made them available later as the bits of experience out of which the ascensions were formulated.
Jews of the first centuries BCE and CE, like all preceding and succeeding centuries, took RISC very seriously.28 They also valued ecstasy, or trance, as a medium for revelation and developed techniques for signaling that ecstasy or trance was occurring.29 The same language also seemed to the ancients to suggest something very deep and mystical about the way in which humans resembled God and conversely how God could be figured in human form. These beliefs pervaded Jewish culture as well and enriched Jewish spirituality. In the Hellenistic period, these terms rightly became associated with the language of translation in two senses-in the translation of the texts and also in the sense of ascent, ascension, or theurgy, the magic use of shamanic techniques to stimulate these “out-of-body” experiences. This vocabulary in Greek was known to Paul and became a central aspect of Paul’s explanation of the Christian message.30
RASC: Apocalypticism and the Immortality of the Soul Compared
IN APOCALYPTICISM, the heavenly journey accomplishes many things but it can be summarized as confirming that God’s cosmos does indeed operate on moral principles, even though the enemies of God and the oppressors of the sect may appear to be powerful and arrogant. The expected end will arrive with its attendant resurrection of the dead and judgment of sinners, though there are no specific texts in the Hebrew Scripture until Daniel that describe resurrection in detail. The visionary himself in his altered state becomes a kind of eschatological verifier, going to heaven to see what is in it. We must not forget that the ecstatic journey to heaven is also a widely experienced and fully legitimate part of the classical heritage.31
The way in which altered states of consciousness verified the notion of the immortal soul was different, though the effect was similar. The notion of the “psyche” as the “essence” of a person was archaic in Greece, though we have seen that there were several competing notions for the location of life. In the philosophical tradition, it slowly and progressively took over as the religious formulation of human identity. For Plato and Aristotle the soul contained a number of faculties, including keeping the body from decomposing and serving as the seat of intellect. For us all these are properly corporeal faculties, explained by various faculties of the body, leaving us with a sense that the soul refers only to our psychic lives. But for the early philosophers there were much wider issues, as Erich Rohde makes clear:
What the Ionic philosophers in connection with the rest of their cosmology had to say about the soul of man did not for all its striking novelty bring them into direct conflict with religious opinion. Philosophy and religion used the same words to denote totally different things; it could surprise no one if different things were said about quite different objects.
According to the popular view, which finds expression in Homer, and with which, in spite of their very different estimate of the relative values of body and soul, the religious theory of the Orphics and other theologi also agreed-according to this view the “psyche” was regarded as a unique creature of combined spiritual and material nature that, whatever it may have come from, now dwells within man and there, as his second self, carries on its separate existence, making itself felt when the visible self loses consciousness in dream, swoon, or ecstasy…. In the same way, the moon and stars become visible when no longer obscured by the brighter light of the sun. It was already implied in the conception itself that this double of mankind, which could be detached from him temporarily, had a separate existence of its own; it was no very great step from this to the idea that in death, which is simply the permanent separation of the visible man from the invisible, the latter did not perish, but only then became free and able to live by and for itself.32
Similar claims are made about the soul as are being made about apocalyptic ascent, though they provide evidence for a different view of the afterlife. There would have been no need to validate and justify new texts, which promise resurrection as resurrection was not a concept to be proven. Once the soul could be shown from experience to separate from the body and return, as in an ecstatic trance, then the rest of the Platonic theory also gained probability.
Our Accounts of Consciousness and the Soul
THE PLATONIC proof for the immortality of the soul depends on the mental qualities of memory and self recognition. For the ancients, the soul had many properties which are best explained by various neurological events. So the most interesting aspects of the soul adhere to its role in defining our interior lives, our consciousness. It is therefore worthwhile to digress for a moment more about the contemporary study of consciousness. Epistemology and the more recent search for an adequate description of and explanation of consciousness are such full and interesting fields of inquiry that even a survey would demand a whole book in itself.33 The next few paragraphs merely will be a description of the working definitions that I have adopted.
We now have good physiological evidence that there is no single organ in the brain that corresponds to consciousness. Thus, consciousness is not a single unified phenomenon with a single origin; rather, it is a unitary experience which we effortlessly and unconsciously synthesize from various capacities operating more or less independently in our brains. Consciousness includes perception, cognition, and memory, but also proprioception and a variety of other functions. When organs in the brain are damaged in strokes and injuries, we observe the selective effects on our conscious processes. We may lose the faculty of speech temporarily or permanently, for instance. These are easily correlated with observable damage to areas in the brain. So we now know experimentally what various areas in the brain contribute to consciousness.
We also have the ability to selectively hone consciousness and to perform other tasks without conscious intervention. Almost everyone has had the experience of driving home from work, lost in thought, without being conscious of the process of driving at all and without being able to remember a single moment of it without the utmost concentration. By observation of hypnotic states we also know that consciousness is not continuous but the “breaks” are not always like a “black out” or “blue screen” on a television broadcast. We have breaks in consciousness when we are not aware that we have missed something.
This suggests that consciousness is an emergent property, not inherent to any one organ but something that emerges from the harmonious operation of a series of processes. Because consciousness is emergent and complex, and because consciousness itself can be the subject of thought, we have a feeling that I will call “self-consciousness.” “Self-consciousness” is affected greatly by our cultural understandings of what our consciousness is. Buddhists may not only have different notions of selfhood than Christians; because of these differing religious definitions, their experience of self may well be different. That suggests that there cannot be a simple and single description of self-consciousness. Like RISC, it is partly a culturally mediated experience. The notion of the soul or the transformed body of apocalypticism really can and does effect how we understand ourselves.
It is not consciousness in itself which should be of interest to us right now. Many species of animals may be conscious. Anyone who has observed animals closely becomes convinced of it. But self-consciousness is a human, cultural phenomenon, though animals may have the rudiments of it. By experiment, we know that the higher apes are able to recognize themselves in a mirror, while dogs and cats and other animals usually show no recognition of the image as themselves. The most they can do is mistake their reflection for another animal.
Daniel Povinelli and John Cant speculate that the evolutionary explanation for our self-concept is that it is necessary to have a self-concept to swing through the trees with the kind of advanced skills which apes evince, making far more complicated judgments than, for instance, squirrels or bats do when they move through the canopy.34 One supposes that proprioception, this sense that we know where we are in space, develops into culturally mediated notions of whom we are and how our internal states define us as individuals.
So self-consciousness is analogous to RISC but made up of yet more complex cultural conceptualizations. John D. Gottsch has shown that religions may themselves be a response to the further self-perception that not only are we unique, but we must all die.35 This certainly does not explain all religious phenomena but it is surely a partial explanation of the development of notions of the afterlife. It is tempting to posit that the notion of the immortal soul is coterminous with the emergence of self-consciousness. But since self-consciousness is a complex and culturally determined phenomenon in and of itself, this is no easy task.
This, for instance, is the major problem with the cult classic of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.36 His bold thesis was, that originally, before the Odyssey was written, the Greeks could not distinguish between internal and external processes easily because they had not yet developed the phenomenon of the bicameral mind, with each hemisphere concentrating on one aspect of cognition. Because of this, they easily mistook their own internal voice and cognitions as the voices of gods. He also said that the change to a bicameral mind took place between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which seems to him to be a clearly definable moment in historical time. (Actually, it is not. He did not take into account that the two books were being created and edited simultaneously, over a long period of time.) Since then, only transitional or abnormal personality types have approximated this state. This is a bold, interesting, and wrong hypothesis in any number of important ways. But it is also fascinating speculation that anticipates more scientific experimentation.
A number of other scholars have traced the emergence of self-consciousness to a variety of other time periods, some as late as the Middle Ages, the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, or even the Victorian novel. It now seems clear that these scholars outlined instead some important cultural change in self-consciousness, not the basic phenomenon, which must be much older than historical time.37 In the nineteenth century, many novelists-Henry James jumps to mind immediately-stressed the necessity of coming to more full consciousness, portraying the difficulties of characters who were insufficiently aware of themselves or the motives of their contemporaries. Psychological novels like those of Henry James are sometimes held up as the effect of the West’s finally having achieved full self-consciousness. For the purposes of this study, we have seen that major milestones were passed in the philosophical writing of Plato. We shall see, in later chapters, more milestones in the writings of Plotinus, and Augustine respectively. None of them invented self-consciousness per se, but each changed or added an important aspect to the description of our self-consciousness so as to resolve various intellectual problems. Each valorized personal experience in a new way and keyed into our interior lives more completely than his predecessors to explain an intellectual problem that he had encountered in his philosophy.
What we need to take from this discussion is that only great conceptual changes in religious, social, philosophical, and artistic life-in short culture-do affect how we understand ourselves, an axiom that seems little in need of demonstration. Self-consciousness builds on our biological consciousness by explaining the self in a socially meaningful way. The notion of the immortality of the soul had just such an effect on how we value our own self-consciousness. The notion of the soul and its immortality helps us understand who we are and why we think we are important. By positing that the soul was immortal, the Greeks were also positing that self-consciousness-or, better, memory, our learning, experiencing and changing mind-is a transcendent and valuable phenomenon that outlasts our earthly existence. By defining the afterlife as a resurrection of the body, apocalypticists also suggested what the purpose of individual life was and also inscribed martyrdom as a fitting and sensible sacrifice to help bring about the coming of God’s kingdom.
It follows that in investigating “the Undiscover’d Country” of the afterlife, we are actually investigating our own self-consciousness through the mirror of our culture. The words we use will be the words our culture gives to us for understanding these “peak experiences” in our consciousness. The journey to heaven is also a journey into the self. This conclusion becomes inescapable. Saying that, however, is saying a great deal more than that we build our afterlife out of our imaginations. It is saying that we then invest those imaginative constructions with the authority of reality through a very complicated social procedure. Whether we can say anything more about the afterlife and our conscious perception of it will have to wait until the conclusions of this book, if not the conclusion of our personal life!
Demonstrations of the Soul’s Separation from the Body and Immortality
WE HAVE NOTED that neither for the Greeks nor for the Hebrews was the soul exactly equivalent with self-consciousness. Technically the soul contained a plethora of other functions. For both Greeks and Jews, soul was originally a rather vague way of describing human identity, including emotions and appetites. The Greeks seemed more willing to posit that the soul could separate from the body, but both admitted the possibilities of separated souls.
With the Greek philosophers, specifically with the Platonists, the soul began to be considered “the unique” seat of identity, and demonstrating that it was immortal was also demonstrating that we were transcendent creatures. The notion of psyche was given strong support by unusual states of consciousness like dreams, visions, and ecstasy, where the soul’s presence could be more clearly studied, separated from the body and without the normal background of bodily processes like pain and proprioception. What needed to be proven was that the soul was immortal. Since part of the Platonic notion of immortality adhered to the notion that the soul was separable from the body, and every single heavenly ascent could be understood as the soul’s separation from the body, the experience of heavenly journey itself became an experiential proof and confirmation of the truth of Socrates’ (Plato’s) reasoning. The separation of the soul from the body in sleep and in mystical ascent was the demonstration of the immortality of the soul. This is true not only in the magical papyri and the hermetic writings but also in the philosophical writings of the classical world.
Nor do we have to look very far to find this demonstration in Hellenistic Jewish literature as well. Philo himself tells us quite emphatically that he experienced ecstasy (he calls it corybantic frenzy) while studying philosophy. In short, he claims that his exegesis is the product of divine revelation through meditation and study. He describes what happens to him in intellectual journeys to heaven, ascribing the experience to a special gift of God:
On other occasions, I have approached my work empty and suddenly become full, the ideas falling in a shower from above and being sown invisibly, so that under the influence of divine possession [hypo katochēs entheou], I have been filled with corbybantic frenzy [korbantian] and have been unconscious of anything, place, persons, present, myself, words spoken, lines written. For I obtained language, ideas, an enjoyment of light, keenist vision, pellucid distinctness of objects, such as might be received through the eyes as the result of clearest showing. (Migr. 35; see Cher. 27)
There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my constant companions were divine themes and verities, wherein I rejoiced with a joy that never cloyed or sated. I had no base or abject thoughts nor grovelled in search of reputation or of wealth or bodily comforts, but seemed always to be borne aloft into the heights with a soul possessed by some God-sent inspiration, a fellow-traveller with the sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe. Ah then I gazed down from the upper air, and straining the mind’s eye beheld, as from some commanding peak, the multitudinous world-wide spectacles of earthly things, and blessed my lot in that I had escaped by main force from the plagues of mortal life. But, as it proved, my steps were dogged by the deadliest of mischiefs, the hater of the good, envy, which suddenly set upon me and ceased not to pull me down with violence until it had plunged me in the ocean of civil cares, in which I am swept away, unable even to raise my head above the water. Yet amid my groans I hold my own, for, planted in my soul from my earliest days I keep the yearning for culture which ever has pity and compassion for me, lifts me up and relieves my pain. To this I owe it that sometimes I raise my head and with soul’s eyes-dimly indeed because the mist of extraneous affairs has clouded their clear vision-I yet make shift to look around me in my desire to inhale a breath of life pure and unmixed with evil. And if unexpectedly I obtain a spell of fine weather and a calm from civil turmoils, I get me wings and ride the waves and almost tread the lower air, wafted by the breezes of knowledge which often urges me to come to spend my days with her, a truant as it were from merciless masters in the shape not only of men but of affairs, which pour in upon me like a torrent from different sides. (Spec. 3.1-6)
Philo describes his own meditative experiences as heavenly journeys. He contrasts them with any number of ordinary thinking functions or the cares of a busy life, which detracts from the process of revelatory thinking. He virtually states that the meditative states are not only joyeous but also moments of the reception of divine revelations.
Hellenism itself made this religious form even more attractive as a mythic structure, much as the apocalypticists may have wanted to deny the pagan versions of it. Ecstatic religion was valued highly among the Greeks and all the countries they conquered or influenced, as it has been in many if not most societies. There were many metaphors and descriptions of these RISCs and just as many interpretations of them-from demonic spirit possession to a god taking up residence inside the person. But one important metaphor for the divine nature and importance of the phenomenon is again seen in the narration of the heavenly journey. This is not a casual trance phenomenon but, in some sense, the ultimate human experience of transformation or even immortalization.
The narrative of the pagan Paris Magical Papyrus makes this equally clear. In this “recipe for immortalization,” a magical document from the third century CE, the practitioner ascends to heaven in a trance for the purpose of gaining divine knowledge of the future, for confirming the worldview of the participants and the spectators (in the Paris Magical Papyrus it is largely an Egyptian world view), and for becoming transformed into a divine being. The Greek word used is anathanatismos, the process of becoming deathless. But the beginning of the ascent is brought on through a RASC, which is brought on apparently through hyperventilation:
Draw in breath from the rays, drawing up three times as much as you can, and you will see yourself being lifted up and / ascending to the height, so that you seem to be in mid-air. You will hear nothing either of man or of any other living thing, nor in that hour will you see anything of mortal affairs on earth, but rather you will see all immortal things. For in that day / and hour you will see the divine order of the skies: the presiding gods rising into heaven, and others setting. (PGM I.537-45)38
It is conventional in scholarly literature to treat this experience as inferior or faked because it appears in a magical papyrus. It should be seen, rather, as a valid religious experience and, hence an important clue to the fascinating relationship between magic and religion in the ancient world. Except in places where the two were radically distinguished-as, for instance, in some varieties of Judaism and Christianity where magic was seen as demonic-the ancient world saw magic as completely parallel with religion. It may have been practiced by independent practitioners instead of organized priesthoods. Indeed, as the late Hellenistic world became more impressed with the theosophic powers of independent practitioners and magicians, the importance of magicians increased in the intelligentsia, as well as in the lower classes.
Heavenly ascent can also be easily seen in the Corpus Hermeticum, which eschews other religions and practices to advocate its own communal theosophical variety of community. At the very beginning of the Corpus, the narrator makes clear that the truths contained therein were received by revelation in an altered state of consciousness or RASC:
Once, when thought came to me of the things that are and my thinking soared high and my bodily senses were restrained, like someone heavy with sleep from too much eating or toil of the body, an enormous being completely unbounded in size seemed to appear to me and call my name and say to me: “What do you want to hear and see; what do you want to learn and know from your understanding?”39
This particular experience shares with apocalypticism a community of believers and a commitment to a particular religious lifestyle. But it makes use of the notion of the immortality and separability of the soul to make its point. The one word that best describes this new entrepreneurial spirituality of late antiquity is “theurgy.”40 Theurgy, more than anything else, represents the force that transformed “magical” and hermetic tracts and rituals into acceptable religion in the Roman Empire.
Theurgy is a Hellenistic neologism that pointed to a new kind of technique in religion, which we often consider to be magic. The theurgist, as opposed to a theologian, not only studied the divine arts but learned how to control and “work” the gods.41 Indeed, since “ergon” (work) can easily refer to a ritual in Greek, theurgy implies a religious “praxis,” a ritual. Theurgy itself had been brought into the Roman Empire through the agency of the Chaldeans.
As far as we know, the earliest person claiming this art was Julianus, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE).42 He, in turn, claimed an association with an earlier Julianus, who gave him the secrets of the Chaldean Oracles. The technique of theurgy became more and more associated with the late Neoplatonic school, to such an extent that Proclus could define theurgy grandly as “a power higher than all human wisdom, embracing the powers of divination, the purifying powers of initiation, and, in short, all the operations of divine possession.”43 This explains why the term “magic” and with it the notion of personal religious entrepreneurship became acceptable in some aristocratic circles. Simply, it became a consistent religion, appealing to philosophers as well as their aristocratic students because of its promises of spiritual power together with a kind of independence from organized cults, although theurgy tended itself to be practiced within philosophical schools or religious conventicles like the Hermetic community. Theurgy involved ecstatic trances and séances to unite with the God and to gain specific powers from the specific God.44 Whether the phenomenon was judged to be religion or magic depended on a long social discourse of conflict and resolution in any number of different contexts.45
The Hekhaloth texts in Jewish mysticism and also the documents known as the Hermetic Literature46 are very much part of the theurgic movement. They all involve the use of trance to ascend to the heavens and accomplish some religious end. By the end of the fourth century, whatever their diverse beginnings, these religious groups would have all been seen as similar phenomena. The relationship between theurgy and Hekhalot mysticism is especially interesting. For instance, one of the procedures noted by Leda Ciraolo to bring down a star or, in one case, the constellation Orion as a parhedros (a “familiar”), resembles to a great degree the kinds of procedures used in Merkabah mysticism to swear an angel to do one’s bidding.47
Philosophers of the fourth century were not only the academics we expect them to be today but also members of philosophical communities which look very much like religious voluntary associations (thiasoi). Certainly the Jews who performed the Hekhaloth ascensions were also members of a very highly defined religious community. Michael Swartz’s book, Scholastic Magic suggests formal philological grounds for distinguishing between the ascent techniques and the Sar Torah (“Prince of Torah”) material. The Poimandres, also known as Corpus Hermeticum I, as well as Tractate VII, make clear that the speaker belongs to a community of like-minded people with a mutually agreed ethics where there is a missionary impulse and perhaps even a kind of eschatology present. It would be hard to say which of these phenomena was earlier but the origin is not the issue. Hypothesizing an origin for a religious phenomenon is actually more like projecting a theory onto the past.
In any case, it is clear from the hermetic literature, from magic, and these writings that the separability of the soul from the body was confirmed in these ecstatic states-indeed, standing outside the body is exactly what “ecstasy” means in Greek. These RISC experiences naturally confirmed that the classical worldview was correct, just as they confirmed for the apocalypticist the notion that he was part of the elite who would soon be transformed into an angel as a reward for his patience and suffering in God’s name. Both of these experiences were, with no difficulty at all, called prophecy in the ancient communities that produced them, though they could also be known by other names.
The long-standing consensus among Jewish scholars, based indeed on the Rabbinic proposition that prophecy had ceased centuries before the rise of Christianity, is challenged even by such a “rationalist” as Josephus. As Rebecca Gray shows in her provocative book on prophecy in Second Temple times, Josephus was capable not only of ascribing prophecy to ordinary people who were almost contemporaries but also understanding that the prophecy was for the purposes of disclosing notions of “immortality of the soul,” as he always calls notions of life after death:48
I do not consider such stories extraneous to my history, since they concern these royal persons, and in addition, they provide instances of something bearing on the immortality of the soul and of the way in which God’s providence embraces human affairs; therefore I have thought it well to speak of this. (Ant. 17.354)
Josephus demonstrates his faith in life after death by the fact that a deceased person named Alexander, the husband of Glaphyra, appears to her in this prophetic dream, thus showing God’s “providential care.” Josephus understands that such an important aspect of God’s special providence for the righteous is revealed through prophecy and that this further demonstrates that the soul is immortal. Josephus never questions the notion that the soul of a deceased husband can actually appear in a dream-vision. He illustrates that even Hellenistic intellectuals valued their dreams as divine proof that God would immortalize them after death.
Apocalypticists likewise held that the righteous would be absorbed into God’s human form. Hellenistic intellectuals thought that the soul was separable from the body, that it remembered the basics of life from previous existences, that it was immortal and so would guarantee preservation of knowledge and consciousness into the infinite future. All of that was vouchsafed to the ancients through altered states of consciousness. At the same time, their descriptions of the presumed afterlife helped them define who they were in their own society.