The “Shamanic” Travels Of Jesus and Muhammad: Cross-cultural and Transcultural Understandings of Religious Experience

In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James remarked that, as a tradition, religion is always rooted in an original religious experience of an inspirational figure.¹ Using the words of the French theologian Sabatier, James describes this as “an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent.”² James pioneered the description of religious experience in ways that revealed more than traditional metaphysics and dogmatic theology did. His research into psychic phenomena led, for example, to “the subliminal” and “a wider consciousness,” expressions that, for a long time, were used only in Jungian psychological discourse.³ Recently, however, they have been taken up in cross-cultural anthropological and historical research that aims to overcome the colonial opposition between so-called “shamanistic” and “monotheistic” religions.

In this article, I will discuss the importance of returning to the transcultural and transhistorical aspects of religious experience—after a period of fruitful cross-cultural research—for grasping the common human potential for spirituality. I propose that we look at James’s pluralistic ontology as a means of conceptualizing the connection between the cross-cultural and transcultural understandings of religious experience. The phenomenon of the spiritual journey—a practice/experience long held to be specific to traditional (Siberian) shamans but recently read into the lives of the founders of two of the “great world religions” Jesus and Muhammad—serves as a test case for this question. I will start by looking at the changes in the use of the concepts “shaman” and “shamanistic.” In the second and third sections, I will present the material on the “shamanic” travels of Jesus and Muhammad and draw some preliminary conclusions. In section four, I will discuss this material in relation to the debate on a hierarchy among religions. Finally, I will turn to James’s pragmatic ontology of the spiritual and discuss how its transcultural philosophical approach relates to cross-cultural research.

I. Shamanic Religious Experience

In her Shamans and Religion, the anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe advocated a critical use of the word “shaman.”⁴ Criticizing the large brushstrokes of the “desk-bound” fathers of anthropology Frazer and Eliade, she proposes that the word be reserved primarily for those to whom it originally referred: local Siberian spiritual mediators. Her main criticism of the old men of anthropology lies in their uncritical search for “the archaic other” in non-Western religious practices. “‘Shamans’ and ‘shamanism’ are words used so loosely and naively, by anthropologists no less than the general public, that they convey confusion far more than knowledge.”⁵ Instead, Beck Kehoe advocates unprejudiced, precise, and local anthropological research that is directed at understanding shamans in the context of their own worldview.⁶ While subscribing to the value of unprejudiced and detailed anthropological study, I disagree with her rejection of a more general use of the term “shaman.” Concepts are extended in their use, re-used, even recycled and put to new use all the time.⁷ Just as in the second half of the twentieth century, the Indian term “guru” came to signify any kind of spiritual teacher, so the term “shaman” nowadays extends to all kinds of spiritual mediators across the globe—those who work in old and mainly local traditions as well as those who experiment in nonlocal ways with practices from those traditions. This new use of the term “shaman” is so much already a reality that we should just go along with it.⁸

An older study on shamanism, Ecstatic Religion, by I. M. Lewis, also already criticized Eliade’s grand theories, extending this criticism to Luc de Heusch’s formalistic theory of religious phenomena: “Here shamanism . . . and spirit possession are treated as antithetical processes. The first is an ascent of man to the gods: the second the descent of the gods on man. Shamanism, in de Heusch’s view, is thus an “ascensual metaphysic”—a movement of “pride” in which man sees...