Tag: religion

Tanya Luhrmann on prayer as emotional management

Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, presents her work on prayer as a set of meta-cognitive practices that have health benefits. This is the first time I can remember getting ideas for magick and mindfulness practices from contemporary American evangelical Christianity.

Dr. Luhrmann briefly discusses some ways of understanding common prayer activities as emotional management techniques:

  • The practice of offering gratitude during pain and suffering as a form of cognitive behavioural therapy
  • Confessing sins as a way of verbalizing experience to gain a sense of control, and setting small, manageable goals
  • Asking for help as “externalizing hope”, in a similar sense as many placebo medical treatments

She then goes into detail about another prayer practice, adoration of God and experience of God as a real presence. Parts of this seem similar to other ways of personifying spontaneous thoughts, and I enjoyed the descriptions of activities people use to learn to talk to God. Luhrmann emphasizes that feeling God as a personal presence requires learning (and even play) as well as constant work, which I found reassuring given how much effort I put into my own (admittedly very different) practices for meeting presences in my mind.

The panel responses at the end are solid as well, but as usual I skipped out after the first “this is more of a comment than a question” from the audience.

Meaning response syndromes

“Stendhal syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly viewing art.”

“Jerusalem syndrome is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem.”

“Paris syndrome is a transient psychological disorder exhibited by some individuals visiting or vacationing in Paris or elsewhere in Western Europe. It is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others.”

The Bible as a colonial grimoire

As Christianity spread across the European colonies natives wondered whether the Bible was the occult source of power of the white colonizers. Amongst the peoples of parts of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific, anthropologists have found a widespread notion that the white man deliberately withheld the full power of Christianity in order to keep them in a state of subjugation. This was not necessarily achieved by restricting literacy, but by deliberately withholding some of the true Bible and therefore the complete key to wisdom, knowledge, and consequently power. In the Caribbean today, for instance, the Bible is considered by some as an African divine text appropriated and controlled by Europeans. When asked why he accepted the Bible but not Catholicism, a worshipper of the Trinidadian spirit religion of Orisha explained, ‘The Bible came from Egypt; it was stolen by the Catholics who added and removed parts for their own purposes.’

— Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books