Egil Asprem is professor of the history of religions at Stockholm University. His many research interests include the history of European esoteric and magical traditions, as well as psychological and cognitive science perspectives on religion. Photo credit: Rickard Kilström/Stockholm University
A post by Egil Asprem
Imaginative initiates
In 1888, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn opened the doors to its Isis-Urania Temple in London. Founded by a coterie of Freemasons immersed in Victorian occultism, this initiatory order soon attracted an esteemed membership of upper- and middle-class Victorians, including the Irish author William Butler Yeats, the actress, composer and director Florence Farr, and the theater manager Annie Horniman. In the Golden Dawn they found an elaborate set of initiation rituals that invoked a mythical past of secret Rosicrucian lineages and ancient Egyptian wisdom; but at its center was a curriculum for the practice of ceremonial magic. Initiates like Yeats, Farr, and Horniman would learn to have clairvoyant visions, travel to other worlds in their “astral bodies,” and communicate with angels and other spiritual beings.
As historian Alexandra Owen (2004) has suggested, a main attraction of Golden Dawn magic was that it provided an exploration of subjectivity, inner worlds, and the imagination, a “place of enchantment” at a time of rapid modernization. While couched in a language of primordial tradition, the order’s practices drew heavily on a fashionable interest in psychology and the unconscious. Imagination, dreams, and unusual experiences were cast as ways of gaining knowledge, whether of the “subliminal self” or layers of reality otherwise hidden from view.
The practices through which the Golden Dawn attempted to achieve such illumination have provided scholars with a model case of the human ability to induce experiences that have typically been labelled either “supernatural” or “hallucinatory,” depending on one’s ontological commitments. Central to these practices was the training of the imagination.
Mental imagery and interpretive drift
Scholarship on sensory encounters with postulated numinous realities (e.g. hearing voices or having visions) is increasingly paying attention to the role of mental imagery cultivation. That there are marked individual differences in people’s ability to form vivid mental imagery has been known since the nineteenth century (Galton 1880); in recent decades it has also become clear that mental imagery ability is a skill that can be trained (Kind 2020). That imagination, like other skills, can provide unusual abilities through a combination of talent and training allows us to better understand some of the experiential outliers associated with religious, ascetic, and esoteric movements. It points to how cultural practices engage and develop mental imagery, but also to the interpretive frameworks that make sense of inner experience and the social context in which such interpretive practices take place.
Evidence of imagery cultivation in spiritual practices is not hard to come by. In a seminal 1985 target article, psychologist Richard Noll argued that the cultivation of mental imagery vividness, along with mental discipline designed to control such imagery, are at the center of “shamanic” traditions worldwide. Historian Yulia Ustinova (2009) has suggested that the effects of mental imagery cultivation under conditions of sensory deprivation help us explain the common association between visionary experiences and rituals performed in caves in ancient Greek religion. Anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann (2020) has conducted cross-cultural and semi-experimental research on the hard work done by people in a range of religions – from evangelical Christians and orthodox Jews to Zoroastrians and Neo-Pagans – in order to make otherwise invisible divine entities feel real and present in their daily lives. This sort of god-producing work includes the cultivation of inner senses, emotional and imaginative engagement with storytelling, and prayer and ritual practices that similarly engage the senses and sustain strong mental imagery.
That mental imagery and its cultivation is involved in sustaining religious experience seems both theoretically reasonable and empirically well-documented, but how and why do such practices work? Consider Luhrmann’s theory of “interpretive drift”: “the slow shift in someone’s manner of interpreting events, making sense of experiences, and responding to the world” (Luhrmann 1989, 12). By studying occultist literature, internalizing esoteric symbolism, participating in rituals, guided visualizations, and meditation exercises, and keeping diaries of dreams, experiences, and progress in magical experimentation, Luhrmann found that budding magicians learned new ways of paying attention to what went on in their own minds and relating it to the external world. The result was not simply new interpretations of experiences one would have anyway; through interpretive drift the magicians came to inhabit entirely novel experiential worlds.
Religious experience in predictive minds
Predictive processing accounts of imagination, perception, and action can help us make better explanatory sense of this form of experience training. As in so many other fields, predictive processing has over the past decade become an area of interest to the cognitive science of religion (Schjødt 2018). It has cast new light on the effects of participating in rituals (Schjødt et al. 2013; Nielbo and Sørensen 2013), on how charismatic authority works (Schjødt 2011 et al.), on the processing of obscure texts attributed with sacred meaning (Markússon 2017), and on the generation, narration, and transmission of religious experiences (Andersen et al. 2014; Taves and Asprem 2017; van Elk and Aleman 2017; Asprem 2017).
Central to these accounts is how religious activities exploit the brain’s strategy of understanding and engaging with the world through constantly producing predictive models of what goes on, monitoring its errors, and updating its expectations both on the short and long run. For example, error monitoring appears to be downregulated in the presence of a charismatic authority, allowing for top-down expectations shared with the authority and the community that supports it to determine one’s understanding of the world (cf. Schjødt et al. 2011). Similarly, the exposure to goal-demoted and causally opaque action sequences – two distinguishing features of ritual behavior – imposes a heavy cognitive load that hinders participants from successfully comprehending the actions and forming their own narrative of what happened. This leaves room for adopting shared cultural narratives and interpretations of the ritual instead (Schjødt et al. 2013).
Tipping the balance between top-down and bottom-up processing is central to producing religious experiences. Laboratory studies have been able to produce subjectively meaningful religious experiences by inducing strong expectations of a “sensed presence” under a condition of modest sensory deprivation, especially in subjects that already possess conceptual schemas that allow for contact with “spirits” (e.g. Andersen et al. 2013). That dream incubation in sacred caves or temples would regularly produce vivid encounters with gods in Greco-Roman religion is thus hardly surprising; neither are the countless accounts of haunted houses, spiritualist séance phenomena, or mystical experiences in monasteries and meditation retreats. Strong cultural expectations combined with ambiguous sensory stimuli are sufficient for producing such outcomes.
What does all this have to do with imagination? On the predictive processing view, mental imagery constitutes the store of possible perceptual hypotheses. When a hypothesis successfully explains the sensory input, it is experienced as a percept. But “successfully explaining” means that error signals are suppressed – or that the error monitoring process itself is disrupted in a way that allows top-down processing to prevail. Having a strong set of prior expectations tied up in mental imagery that are culturally imbued with spiritual significance is a prerequisite for unusual experiences that will be interpreted as “religious.” Engaging in practices or situations that inhibit error monitoring – e.g. certain rituals, sensory deprivation, interacting with a charismatic authority, or taking certain psychedelic substances – are triggers.
Expecting the Astral Plane
Returning to the magicians of the Golden Dawn, we find all these aspects seamlessly weaved into a long-term training program and utilized in ritual actions meant to trigger spiritually significant experiences (Asprem 2017). Initiates began by internalizing complex systems of correspondences that related esoteric concepts such as the kabbalistic sephirot and astrological planets and zodiac signs to numbers, letters, shapes, and sensory stimuli such as colors. They studied such symbolism in more complex arrangements, such as Tarot cards, and were trained to recall and visualize the symbolism in their minds’ eyes. They were taught ritual sequences such as “the kabbalistic cross” or “the lesser ritual of the pentagram” that utilized this symbolism and invoked entities such as the archangels and the sephirot, constructing a ritual space that imaginatively placed the practitioner at the center of an enchanted universe. They would learn about novel experiential categories, such as “clairvoyance,” “scrying in the spirit vision,” “astral travel” and “raising on the planes,” and taught how to differentiate such experiences from similar ones such as “phantasy,” mind-wandering, and dreams. This practice of discernment would be deployed in concrete exercises, often to be performed in a darkened room or a specially consecrated chamber decorated with relevant symbolism. While not a part of the curriculum, some would experiment with drugs like hashish or opium. The resulting experiences were carefully recorded and reported to co-initiates. In the surviving records (e.g. Torrens 1976; Regardie 1989; King 1987) still influencing practitioners to this day (Asprem 2012; 2014), we can read how Golden Dawn magicians visited distant planets, interacted with angels and other spiritual creatures, and gained knowledge from interviewing gods and goddesses – all while physically seated or lying down with eyes closed in a ritual chamber following the careful execution of the preparatory invocations and mental exercises for which they had been trained.
Imagination sets the limits of possible experience. The limits can be pushed, but it is hard work that requires social support, collaboration, and a certain material infrastructure. The varying ways in which “religious” experiences are cultivated around the world may clash with the expectations of the “weird” (white, educated, industrialized, rich, developed) outlier of human culture that saturates much of academia (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010). That makes them all the more suitable as laboratories for studying how imagination work functions.
References
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Asprem, E. 2012. Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Asprem, E. 2014. “Contemporary Ritual Magic.” In: Christopher Partidge (ed.), The Occult World, pp. 382-395. London: Routledge.
Asprem, E. 2017. “Explaining the Esoteric Imagination: Towards a Theory of Kataphatic Practice.” Aries 17:1, 17–50.
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Taves, A. and E. Asprem. “Experience as Event: Event Cognition and the Study of (Religious) Experiences.” Religion, Brain & Behavior 7:1, 43-62.
Torrens, R. G. 1976. Secret Rituals of the Golden Dawn. London: Aquarian Publ. Co.
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