encounter seemed a response to her searching. But who or what had she encountered? She had no religion to make sense of it – she had come back from a Baptist summer-camp contemptuous of the ‘mental degenerates’ she’d met there. Her confusion and sense of loss when the moment failed to reoccur led to a half-hearted suicide attempt. And then, gradually, she grew up and joined the human race: she went to college, took a PhD in cellular immunology, got married, had kids. When lab work seemed too dry for her, she became a freelance writer and campaigner for socialism and feminism. Like others in the progressive movement, she was a committed atheist, and wrote off her teenage experience as a mental disorder, possibly even an attack of schizophrenia. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling she’d betrayed her younger self.
In middle age, she experienced the ‘return of the repressed’. She started to write about the history of ecstasy, first about the ecstasy of war in her 1997 book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, and then the ecstasy of dancing in her 2006 book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, both of which were big inspirations for this book. Barbara Ehrenreich, as she was called by then, was engaging with her own past through the medium of third-person cultural history. And then in 2014 she took the plunge and wrote a first-person account of her own spiritual experiences, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything. She has decided her teenage experiences really were ‘encounters’ with spiritual beings, but she still isn’t sure who They are, what Their purpose is, whether They even care about humans. She is worried her fellow scientific atheists will think she is insane (‘when good sceptics go bad’ is how leading atheist Jerry Coyne reacted) but she insists she remains committed to rational empiricism. ‘I want science to look at these odder phenomena,’ she told one perplexed fellow atheist in an interview, ‘and not rule out the possibility of mystical experiences. We need databases. It is unexamined, the data that might be there . . . This is going to sound totally crazy to you but this is a public health issue! When people have a shattering type of experience and never say anything about it, it is time to investigate.’2
The science of spontaneous spiritual experiences
In fact, such a database already exists. In an unassuming building in the Welsh town of Lampeter there is a room full of cardboard boxes, and in those boxes – like the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark – there is a collection of 6,000 accounts of people’s spiritual experiences, filed and classified for scientific research. A crowd-sourced Bible stuffed with so many revelations that some remain unread to this day – who knows what divine message has slipped down the back of the filing cabinet?
The Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) – where this archive exists – was the brainchild of Sir Alister Hardy, a distinguished biologist who devoted the last two decades of his life to studying religious and spiritual experiences. Hardy grew up in Nottinghamshire, where as a teenager he’d experienced moments of spiritual communion with the natural world:
There was a little lane leading off the Northampton road to Park Wood as it was called, and it was a haven for the different kinds of brown butterflies. I had never seen so many all together . . . I wandered along the banks of the river, at times almost with a feeling of ecstasy . . . Somehow, I felt the presence of something that was beyond and in a way part of all things that thrilled me – the wild flowers and indeed the insects too . . . I became so overcome with the glory of the natural scene that, for a moment or two, I fell on my knees in prayer.3
Hardy studied zoology at Oxford, where one of his tutors was Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous. He eventually became the Linacre chair of zoology at Oxford, the leading marine biologist of his day, with students including Richard Dawkins. Hardy always considered himself a fervent Darwinian, yet he felt that the reductive materialism which usually accompanied evolutionary biology missed out something important – the spiritual aspects of human nature, and in particular humans’ ubiquitous sense of being in contact with a spiritual power, presence or energy, which guides and revitalises us. In this sense, he was more of a disciple of Alfred Russel Wallace than Charles Darwin. Wallace, who discovered natural selection at the same time as Darwin, believed in a spiritual and teleological dimension to reality that is part of the evolutionary process. But he was side-lined for his embarrassing views, and evolutionary biologists stubbornly debunked the spiritual aspects of human existence. As a result, Hardy believed, Western culture had become spiritually desiccated. Christianity was intellectually incredible, but there was no new cult to help us connect to God. People still had spontaneous spiritual experiences, but they were embarrassed to talk about them in case people thought they were mad. Hardy himself never told any colleagues, or even his family, about his spiritual experiences or his interest in the topic.
Perhaps, Hardy wondered, there could be a science of religious experiences, a new sort of natural theology, which would build up a sufficient evidence base to prove this was a very common aspect of human nature, one that was positive, beneficial and adaptive. ‘What we have to do,’ he later wrote, ‘is present such a weight of objective evidence in the form of written records of these subjective spiritual feelings and of their effects on the lives of the people concerned, that the intellectual world must come to see that they are in fact as real and as influential as the forces of love.’4 The database would be the foundation for a new ‘experimental faith’.
Collecting specimens
The endeavour was inspired by the example of William James, Frederic Myers and the Society for Psychical Research, which had tried to launch the scientific study of religious and paranormal experiences in the 1890s by collecting first-person accounts and searching for common features. Hardy wondered if he could continue their work in a more systematic fashion. When he turned 60, he decided to leave behind the plankton and dedicate the rest of his life to his spiritual research. He would collect specimens of religious or spiritual experience, as Darwin and Wallace had collected specimens of fossils, birds and insects. He set up the RERC at Manchester College in Oxford, then set out nets to collect the specimens, via a series of announcements in newspapers. He posed what’s become known as ‘the Hardy Question’: ‘Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence of power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’
The specimens began to flood in, numbering around 4,000 within ten years. But how to classify them all? A good science of spiritual experiences needs a reliable taxonomy – one needs to be able to categorise and classify the specimens, like Linnaeus classifying the natural world into kingdoms, classes, orders, genera and species. Without a good taxonomy, you simply have a jumble of anomalous experiences – less like the Natural History Museum, more like a seventeenth-century cabinet of wonders. And yet religious experiences proved hard to pin down. Hardy initially tried to classify experiences according to a dozen categories (visual, auditory, sensory and so on) but the taxonomy rapidly spiralled out of control, with more and more categories being added. The 18th entry in the database is classified by the following labels: ‘Visions nitrous oxide dentists movement tunnels light karma beard Paul reincarnation Jesus Christ brain’. As the decades progressed, the RERC classification system grew even more complicated. A recent entry is classified: ‘Presence of Deceased Relative. Tears. Noises. Ghost. Apparition. Dreams. Guidance. Automatic Writing. Healing. Father. Voice. Hymns. Book. David Cameron.’ Even the numerical classification for the online database goes haywire: it goes from one to 2,000, then jumps to three million, then back to 4,000. Many of the entries are also blank – revelations apparently so ineffable they were beyond words.
Bertrand Russell, who himself had a mystical experience shortly before the First World War, thought that one of the arguments mystics had in their favour was the apparent unanimity of their experiences. They seemed to point to a common core experience. But what conclusions can one draw if the specimens one collects are incredibly varied, from psychic experiences to UFO abductions to encounters with evil spirits to celestial visions on the
