Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [199]
Usually in cultures that posit a non-normal state of consciousness in prophecy, dreams are also specially marked as having a divine origin. We know that this was believed true in Hebrew society because of the famous dreams of Joseph and Daniel. So from the perspective of the actor or adept, these were religious experiences, clearly understood to have religious consequences. And, although Daniel and Joseph are pseudonymous characters in the Biblical narrative, there is no reason to believe that people did not have these experiences. When Daniel begins to speak, the first thing he says is that his night visions came to him as dreams. Prophetic dreams are virtually universal throughout the world; they were especially important media for revelation in the ancient world, including early Christianity and Judaism, and are commonly held to be revelatory or the equivalent in all cultures today.10
Dreams were expected and prepared for by the prophets and seers in late Hebrew prophecy and apocalypticism. They are well documented as well later in Jewish mysticism. Vigils, usually pious night vigils of lamentation for the destruction of the Temple, are characteristic of many of the same apocalypses and are also present in 2 Enoch as well as later Jewish apocrypha. Vigils are particularly prone to bringing on hypnagogic and hypnopompic states. Whether these preparations are isolated as specific techniques by the text is beside the point; dreams are peculiarly both within control and out of rational control, so that they can be seen as messages from a deity or not, depending on the culture.
The validity of dreams as divine communication was almost universally accepted in the Hellenistic world. In those texts with remarkable frequency, they are the medium for revelation. The point of bringing in this research is not to reduce all revelations to misunderstood ordinary experience but to show that religiously interpreted states of consciousness are neither exotic nor uninterpretable in our notions of ordinary possibility. We should not treat the claims as impossible or insane; rather they can be real experiences interpreted by another system of causation than we might usually choose today.
RISC Experiences, Shamanism, and Techniques for Achieving Them in Judea
WHAT WE KNOW about dreams can be applied analogously to visions. I do not think it is out of place to read the reports of non-normal states of consciousness as important, interesting, valid, and valorizing, even when the vision excludes a specific mention of ascent. But the presence of ascent may be taken as an indicator of RISC in many different contexts. The ascent motif is known to adhere to a number of observable cases of ecstatic religious experience in the contemporary world-especially in shamanism. Many different societies valorize shamanic ascent.11
Mircea Eliade, a famous Romanian comparativist who presided over the History of Religions program for many years at the University of Chicago, studied shamanism extensively and imprinted on it certain assumptions which consciously and unconsciously color our field even today.12 We can appreciate the value of his work-especially in sensitizing us to the importance of religion in our lives-if not every one of his theories.
He suggested that ascent and possession/trance were united with healing in shamanism. The shaman normally ascends to heaven to heal a wayward “soul,” whose misadventures had caused the illness in the first place. Eliade’s well-known studies closely weld trance with ascension