Behold the Nightmare

Addressing Understandings of the Supernatural: Ann Waltner & Peter Harle
Religious Studies Teaching Colloquia
Sponsored By: Religious Studies Program
Additional Sponsors: Institute for Advanced Study
Thursday, February 26, 2009
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Is this you? Take a course in religious studies now to find out.

This lunchtime colloquium convinced me that getting involved in religious studies as a way of looking at and teaching literary texts is something that I personally would like to do. One reason for this is simply that all of the coolest teachers I know are excited about religious studies, and I want to be like them. Ann Waltner has worked on the case of a teenage girl Daoist mystic cult leader who is recorded to have "ascended into heaven" in 1580. And Paul Rouzer teaches are a really popular and quite wonderful class on the "fantastic" in East Asian literature and film. I had not heard from Peter Harle before, but his perspective on how people's living, actual beliefs in the supernatural reveal the need for a neutral look at the terms we use : terms like reality, truth, and even supernatural differ from culture to culture and even person to person. A really interesting example is the "Mara experience" -- you are sleeping or in a sleep-like state, and suddenly you feel that you are being invaded by an unseen force. In Newfoundland, scholar-doctor David Hufford has documented this as a commonly acknowledged experience described as a visit from "the old hag." But some people don't believe in the old hag, and prefer to think of the experience as a medical condition with a Greek-based name like "sleep paralysis." The idea that the experience is common, and only the terms differ here, is really intriguing to me, because it's yet another example of how great the power of words is on our very ways of being.

Coming Issues: the term "Supernatural"

Ann Waltner perceives a break between my own use of the term "supernatural" and her own. I used it that afternoon as a synonym for "the fantastic," by which I mean (and here I'm making up a definition on the spot): the elements of stories that indicate creatures, forces or whole worlds beyond what we experience in normal, everyday life. Waltner didn't seem to agree that this general usage of supernatural was suited to religious studies and the larger scope of social sciences, but I couldn't at the time understand why, except that perhaps Waltner wants to argue for a stronger relationship between the term "supernatural" and terms like "religious experience" ; this connection should perhaps be stronger than the connection between "supernatural" and terms like "the fantastic" which were developed within narrative analysis. For the moment, I think it's important to note the issue and remain open to new information. Back to the books.