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By Root 2211 0

or bodily comforts, but seemed always to be borne aloft into the heights with a soul possessed by some God-sent inspiration, a fellow-traveller with the sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe. Ah then I gazed down from the upper air, and straining the mind’s eye beheld, as from some commanding peak, the multitudinous world-wide spectacles of earthly things, and blessed my lot in that I had escaped by main force from the plagues of mortal life. But, as it proved, my steps were dogged by the deadliest of mischiefs, the hater of the good, envy, which suddenly set upon me and ceased not to pull me down with violence until it had plunged me in the ocean of civil cares, in which I am swept away, unable even to raise my head above the water. Yet amid my groans I hold my own, for, planted in my soul from my earliest days I keep the yearning for culture which ever has pity and compassion for me, lifts me up and relieves my pain. To this I owe it that sometimes I raise my head and with soul’s eyes-dimly indeed because the mist of extraneous affairs has clouded their clear vision-I yet make shift to look around me in my desire to inhale a breath of life pure and unmixed with evil. And if unexpectedly I obtain a spell of fine weather and a calm from civil turmoils, I get me wings and ride the waves and almost tread the lower air, wafted by the breezes of knowledge which often urges me to come to spend my days with her, a truant as it were from merciless masters in the shape not only of men but of affairs, which pour in upon me like a torrent from different sides. (Spec. 3.1-6)

Philo describes his own meditative experiences as heavenly journeys. He contrasts them with any number of ordinary thinking functions or the cares of a busy life, which detracts from the process of revelatory thinking. He virtually states that the meditative states are not only joyeous but also moments of the reception of divine revelations.

Hellenism itself made this religious form even more attractive as a mythic structure, much as the apocalypticists may have wanted to deny the pagan versions of it. Ecstatic religion was valued highly among the Greeks and all the countries they conquered or influenced, as it has been in many if not most societies. There were many metaphors and descriptions of these RISCs and just as many interpretations of them-from demonic spirit possession to a god taking up residence inside the person. But one important metaphor for the divine nature and importance of the phenomenon is again seen in the narration of the heavenly journey. This is not a casual trance phenomenon but, in some sense, the ultimate human experience of transformation or even immortalization.

The narrative of the pagan Paris Magical Papyrus makes this equally clear. In this “recipe for immortalization,” a magical document from the third century CE, the practitioner ascends to heaven in a trance for the purpose of gaining divine knowledge of the future, for confirming the worldview of the participants and the spectators (in the Paris Magical Papyrus it is largely an Egyptian world view), and for becoming transformed into a divine being. The Greek word used is anathanatismos, the process of becoming deathless. But the beginning of the ascent is brought on through a RASC, which is brought on apparently through hyperventilation:

Draw in breath from the rays, drawing up three times as much as you can, and you will see yourself being lifted up and / ascending to the height, so that you seem to be in mid-air. You will hear nothing either of man or of any other living thing, nor in that hour will you see anything of mortal affairs on earth, but rather you will see all immortal things. For in that day / and hour you will see the divine order of the skies: the presiding gods rising into heaven, and others setting. (PGM I.537-45)38

It is conventional in scholarly literature to treat this experience as inferior or faked because it appears in a magical papyrus. It should be seen, rather, as a valid religious experience and, hence an important clue to the fascinating