Contents:
- About Wouter Hanegraaff
- Article: Psychedelics in Western Culture: Unnecessary psychiatrization of visionary experiences (2020)
- Article: The Santo Daime Church in the Netherlands: Why the ECHR Should Consider the Case (2020)
- Review of Yulia Ustinova, Divine Mania: Alterations of Consciousness in Ancient Greece
- Article: Imagining the future study of religion and spirituality (2020)
About Wouter Hanegraaff
https://www.wouterjhanegraaff.net/about
https://uva.academia.edu/WouterHanegraaff/Papers
(When I quote authors, I condense. See links for exact text.)
Article: Psychedelics in Western Culture: Unnecessary psychiatrization of visionary experiences (2020)
Article by Hanegraaff:
Psychedelics in Western Culture: Unnecessary psychiatrization of visionary experiences (2020)
Psychedelica in de westerse cultuur: onnodige psychiatrisering van visionaire ervaringen
Abstract: Historical research into the use of psychedelics in specific religious contexts may provide rational explanation for extreme visionary experiences that would otherwise give rise to questioning the mental health of those involved. If historians ignore or overlook the psychedelic factor, this can lead to an impression of ‘irrationality’ where in reality, it is about normal and even predictable reactions of mentally healthy people to the action of specific psychoactive substances.
Method: Discussion based on three examples of selective use of historical source material about psychedelics.
Result: This theme has a broader cultural-historical and science theoretical relevance, as it religious practices that have traditionally been traditionally classified as ‘magic’ and therefore were classified as irrational and potentially pathological. In this article I cover three examples: the Mithras liturgy from Roman Egypt, early modern witch ointments, and the spiritual use of hashish in the nineteenth century.
Summary: Established academics often deny the significance of psychedelics in visionary experiences. Discussion of pre-Enlightenment sources shows significant importance for a correct interpretation of important religious and cultural traditions. Critical empirical resource research without prejudice or implicit agendas is the preferred method.
Keywords: hashish, witches ointments, magic, mysticism, psychedelics,
visionary experiences
Conclusion: This is the pattern that falls where historical research into psychedelics in the western culture, from ancient times to the present day.
Enthusiastic amateur historians have been everywhere since the psychedelic 1960s; but in response to exaggerating [? check article for specifics], established academics often go back to the other side and they don’t want to see them anywhere.
The period of psychedelics as high culture arrived with the Enlightenment.
Before the Enlightenment, the source material is more modest and not always easy to interpret, but it is less scarce and more ambiguous than is often assumed, and is required for a correct interpretation of important religious and cultural traditions.
The recipe to make this ‘mystical __'[tr.?] from the past bringing light is classic and simple: critical empirical source research without prejudice or implicit agendas.
Article: The Santo Daime Church in the Netherlands: Why the ECHR Should Consider the Case (2020)
Article by Hanegraaff:
The Santo Daime Church in the Netherlands: Why the ECHR Should Consider the Case (2020)
“Prohibiting the import and use of Ayahuasca by the Dutch Santo Daime church is equivalent to ruling that church out of existence by judicial fiat, which is a clear breach of religious liberty.”
Review of Yulia Ustinova, Divine Mania: Alterations of Consciousness in Ancient Greece
Hanegraaff’s review of Ustinova‘s book: Divine Mania
Review of Yulia Ustinova, Divine Mania: Alterations of Consciousness in Ancient Greece (Routledge)
Hanegraaff’s review is 2020. The article is 2018. Her earlier work is Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (Oxford University Press 2009).
“The first comprehensive overview of the source evidence for alterations of consciousness in ancient Greece. Alterations of consciousness in Socrates and Plato as well as their predecessors Epimenides, Aethalides, Hermotimus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Democritus.”
Cyberdisciple’s weblog page:
Book: Ustinova. 2018. Divine Mania: Alterations of Consciousness in Ancient Greece
https://cyberdisciple.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/book-ustinova-2018-divine-mania-alterations-of-consciousness-in-ancient-greece/
Article: Imagining the future study of religion and spirituality (2020)
Hanegraaff’s article:
Imagining the future study of religion and spirituality (2020)
This article says scholars must like and value religion, and must present a positive narrative of this enthusiasm (a word which Hanegraaff builds his brand on distancing himself from, counter-signalling the “religionist” pseudo-scholars).
Abstract (condensed):
“Reconstruct the study of religion on new and better foundations.
Provide a positive, convincing, inspiring narrative about religion that demonstrates its great importance to societal and general human concerns.
Focus on experience, consciousness, imagination, and spirituality.
Don’t be an uncritical and unscholarly religionist like Eranos or Eliade.
Move such topics out of the taboo sphere for secular scholars.
Reclaim such topics for critical non-religionist methods and approaches.”
/abstract
“The most promising dimension here is to focus on altered states of consciousness”.
“The next step in the study of mind is the scientific study of the nature and mechanisms of the imagination.”
Hanegraaff argues we must sell ‘spirituality’ (connotes personal experience) rather than ‘religion’ (connotes institutions & discursive belief). Scholars of religion must rebrand the field as covering ‘imaginative formations’, ‘spirituality,’ and ‘alterations of consciousness’. Scholars must hold religion as important, and market the field as important.
The new vision of the field of the study of religion must be “positive, constructive, and inspiring; its human importance must be evident; and our own hearts and souls as scholars and intellectuals must be in it.” He calls for “positive inspiring uplifting narratives” and then defends himself from the charge of being one of those evil “religionists”, who jumbles religiosity with scholarship. You can be positive and inspiring about the study of religion without being one of those awful religionists.
Hanegraaff prods me to construct jokes about him, with his obsessing over and demonizing religionists. I doubt anyone can make sense of what he’s on about, splitting hairs about the Correct Scholarly Stance. This artificial, constructed, engineered infighting among practically indistinguishable factions within esotericism scholarship is not helping the field.
It’s a distinction without a difference. Just contribute good ideas and scholarly insight; stop the exaggerated fixation on rightly separating religious belief and practice vs. objective unbiased scholarship. If Hanegraaff contributes more value than Eranos or Kerenyi, it’s not because he has a more correct stance on separating belief vs. scholarship.
“Our task is to recover the empirical and historical contents of ‘rejected knowledge’ for serious research, and re-integrate those materials into new stories about Western culture, including ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ (both Western and worldwide).”
“Reject the old grand narratives but contribute a better grand narrative.”
“Reconstruct ‘religion’ and ‘Western culture’ from the bottom up, producing new and better narratives built on sounder historical and empirical foundations. We need radical innovation: after deconstruction must come a positive project of reconstruction.”
The Egodeath theory 