to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition’.12
Then, in the nineteenth century, as European imperialism spread around the world, Victorian anthropologists increasingly associated ecstatic states with primitive cultures, that were considered less civilised, less rational and more superstitious and childish than Westerners.13 To give way to ecstasy was to degenerate to their primitive level. As the sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich said: ‘The essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythms of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality in the seductive wildness of the world.’14 If you let the drums seduce you and gave way to ecstasy, you’d end up like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – a depraved lunatic.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the discipline of psychiatry tried to prove that ecstasy was a physical disease of the brain. The French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot claimed ecstasy was one of the stages of ‘hysteria’, a degeneration of the brain that affected both men and women (but mainly women). He insisted that the ecstatics of yesteryear, from St Teresa of Ávila to Joan of Arc, were actually suffering from hysteria. This medicalisation of ecstasy was part of a broader political campaign by Charcot and his colleagues to secularise medicine and replace nuns with nurses in hospitals. Charcot wasn’t able to cure many of the hysteric women at his clinic, although one patient, Jane Avril, claimed to have healed herself through dancing – she went on to become a famous dancer at the Moulin Rouge in Paris. Charcot also failed to locate the physical basis of hysteria. But over the next century Western psychiatry moved in the direction he outlined.15 Psychiatrists were – and to a large extent still are – deeply hostile to religious experience, and tend to diagnose unusual experiences, like visions, as symptoms of neurophysical pathologies, which must be suppressed with anti-depressants and anti-psychotics.
Ecstasy, then, has been demonised over the last three centuries of Western culture. It’s been attributed to the nervous temperament or weak education of women, the working-class and non-white cultures.16 Because of our cultural suspicion of ecstasy, there is a taboo around spiritual experiences. Aldous Huxley said: ‘If you have these experiences, you keep your mouth shut for fear of being told to go to a psychoanalyst’17 – or, in our day, a psychiatrist. I’ve experienced this taboo myself - I had a near-death experience when I was 24, which I describe in the next chapter, but never told anyone about it, even though it was a positive and healing experience. It was too far beyond the bounds of the normal. But this fear of any states of consciousness besides the rational narrows our existence and makes an enemy of reality. Peter Berger, the sociologist of religion, wrote in 1970:
Human life has always had a day-side and a night-side, and, inevitably, because of the practical requirements of man’s being in the world, it has always been the day-side that has received the strongest ‘accent of reality’. But the night-side, even if exorcised, was rarely denied. One of the most astonishing consequences of secularisation has been just this denial . . . [This] constitutes a profound impoverishment . . . human life gains the greatest part of its richness from the capacity for ecstasy.18
The sixties revival of ecstasy
There have been counter-movements over the last 300 years of Western civilisation, attempts to revalidate ecstatic experiences, but on the whole they’ve taken place at the popular level. There was Methodism, Pentecostalism and other ecstatic forms of Christianity. But they were generally working-class movements, mocked by the intelligentsia. There was the political ecstasy of nationalist movements, from the French Revolution to the Nazi Third Reich, but that didn’t end very well. The rapturous mob at Nuremberg associated ecstasy in intellectuals’ minds with what Gustave Le Bon called the ‘madness of crowds’. There was the Romantic Sublime, the individual feeling overwhelmed by the arts or nature. But this was very individualistic, rather elitist, and not hugely transformative – in the Sublime, the Romantic is always on the verge of losing control, but never quite does (one wouldn’t want to make a scene in the gallery).
The biggest revival came in the 1960s, when there was a sudden explosion of ecstatic practices into mass culture. The writer Marilynne Robinson has suggested the 1960s were a Great Awakening, comparable to the religious revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.19 As Robinson notes, the ecstasy started in black churches in America, then spread to other Christian denominations. But the ecstatic explosion was not confined to Christianity. The philosopher Charles Taylor suggests we are ‘now living in a spiritual supernova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plain’. Eastern contemplative practices, including Vipassana, yoga, tantra, Transcendental Meditation and Hare Krishna, were brought over to the West in the 1960s and attracted huge followings. New Age spirituality flourished through Wicca, magic, neo-shamanism, nature-worship and human potential encounter sessions. Psychedelic drugs became widely available. The sexual revolution encouraged people to search for the ultimate orgasm at swinger parties and leather clubs. People sought immersive experiences at art-happenings, experimental theatre and underground cinema. Rock and roll took Pentecostal ecstasy from black churches, secularised it, and brought it to white middle-class audiences. Even sport became a means to transcendence – people turned to surfing, mountain-climbing and jogging as a way to get out of their heads. There was a widespread urge to lose control, turn off the mind, find your authentic self, seek intense experiences.
We’re still feeling the effects of that supernova. It permanently changed our attitude to sex, drugs, religion, pop culture, contemplation and, through all of these, ecstasy. As a result, while religious attendance is declining, ecstatic experiences have become steadily more reported in national surveys. In 1962, 22 per cent of Americans told a Gallup poll they’d had a ‘religious or mystical experience’. By 2009 the figure had grown to 49 per cent. The sixties made us more open to ecstasy – and that includes atheists. Christopher Hitchens remarked shortly before his death: ‘I’m a materialist . . . yet there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent, or at its best the Ecstatic . . . It’s in certain music, landscape, certain creative work; without this we really would merely be primates.’20
But the sixties has something of a tarnished record in many people’s minds. Baby-boomers’ enthusiastic search for ecstasy led to some dark places. Seekers ended up in toxic cults. Charismatic Christianity became associated with huckster mega-churches and the intolerant politics of the religious right. Eastern gurus turned out to have clay feet. The New Age embraced all kinds of nonsense, from horoscopes to crystal skulls. LSD turned out to be less benign than its prophets had predicted – people lost their minds, ended up in psychiatric institutions. The free-love revolution climaxed in an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases. The imperative to lose control and seek your personal high threatened to undermine the social order: violent crime rose steeply from the 1960s to the 1980s, as did divorce and single-parent families. And the world was not as radically changed as sixties utopians expected. Instead, late capitalism absorbed young people’s yearning for ecstatic experiences, packaged it, and sold it back to them.
As a result of the tarnished legacy of the 1960s, Western culture today has a deeply ambivalent attitude to ecstasy. We’re fascinated by ecstatic experiences, but terrified of losing our minds. We’re frightened of being brainwashed and ending up in a cult. We dislike the idea of religious authority: we want ecstasy, but on our own terms, preferably without dogma, hierarchies, or long-term contracts. Can we learn to lose control safely, or is it always dangerous? To answer this, I needed to look not just to history but to the new science of ecstatic experiences.
Body, mind, culture and spirit
For much of the twentieth century, the scientific study of altered states of consciousness was ‘relegated to the academic dustbin’.21 There was very little research on ecstasy, and what there was tended to
