Challenging orthodox science

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Radical Transformation

The Unexpected Interplay of Consciousness and Reality

Imants Barušs

Imprint Academic 2021

Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418

The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psychologist William James. At the front of his Sourcebook anthologies (of anomalies reported in scientific journals), Corliss would put this passage:

“Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to … Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when the science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.”

In the 19th century, the venerable academy of anthropologists and historical folklorists was confronted by a new breed of scholar more interested in “fieldwork”, recording the living experiences of shamans, mediums, spiritualists and the like. Where the old archivists and cultural revisionists were content to codify sagas and legends, the new took an active part in firewalking, telepathy or the use of trance, frequently discussing the apparent “reality” of parapsychological and psychical phenomena. The animosity – including character assassination of opponents of either party – became so notorious that Scottish anthropologist and folklorist Andrew Lang wrote a scathing commentary, calling it the “War of Two Sisters”. Of greater interest, he describes how the conflict gave rise to the formation of the Society for Psychical Research, backed by many of the world’s top scientists and thus reconciling the different approaches.

Similar rifts have opened on the fronts of other, different fields, the proponents of the new. One of these – discussed here by Imants Barušs – is currently in progress as orthodox anthropologists (who like to keep the subject at arm’s length) are closing ranks against their fellows who argue that the religious and mystical experiences triggered by entheogens (consciousnessaltering substances) can only be fully understood by directly experiencing the drugs themselves.