The Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has spent decades studying people who hear voices: evangelical Christians who learn to hear God speak, magicians, pagans and spirit-mediums, and people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her work suggests that hearing God or spirits is in large part a learnt skill that comes more easily to people who readily become absorbed, and that culture shapes not only how voices are understood but what is actually heard: in Ghana and India the voices of people with psychosis were often kinder and more like relationships than in the United States. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that journeying is learnt by practice and that culture matters, and differs in treating the spirits as real.
Who is Tanya Luhrmann? #
An anthropologist whose work, as her university profile puts it, focuses on the edge of experience: voices, visions, the supernatural and psychosis. She studied folklore and mythology at Harvard and social anthropology at Cambridge, and is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in psychology.1 She has done fieldwork with people who practise magic, with Zoroastrians, with homeless and psychotic women in Chicago, with evangelical Christians who hope to hear God speak back, and with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and California. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back (2012), which won the Grawemeyer Prize for Religion, Our Most Troubling Madness and How God Becomes Real (2020).1
How do people learn to hear God? #
By practice, and some more easily than others. Working in a Vineyard evangelical church, where God is understood as an intimate friend who talks back, Luhrmann watched people learn to treat certain thoughts, images and feelings as God’s voice, and saw prayer improve with training. One congregant put it simply: “What does God’s voice sound like? It takes practice.”2 With the psychologist Howard Nusbaum and the statistician Ronald Thisted she tested what made the difference. People with a strong tendency towards absorption, the capacity to become wholly caught up in something, whether a book, music or the inner world, reported sharper mental images, greater focus and more unusual spiritual experiences, and the more they prayed, the more likely those experiences became.2
In How God Becomes Real she widens the study to pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santería initiates and newly Orthodox Jews. None, she finds, behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. They work hard to make them present, through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses and a belief that the mind is porous, open to presences from outside it.3 A later study across several countries, among them Thailand, China and Vanuatu, found that these two things, porosity and absorption, together made people more likely to sense gods and spirits.4
Does culture shape the voices people hear? #
Her research suggests that it does, even in serious illness. Luhrmann and her colleagues interviewed twenty people with schizophrenia in each of three places: San Mateo in California, Accra in Ghana and Chennai in India. Many in all three heard good and bad voices. But the Americans more often described their voices as harsh, violent and hated, an assault on a private mind and a symptom of brain disease. In Chennai, voices were often those of relatives, who gave advice and scolded as relatives do, and some were playful; in Accra, most heard God speak audibly, and half described their voices as mainly or wholly positive.5
The authors suggest that the Western emphasis on the independent individual makes unusual sounds feel like intrusions, where people who understand the self as woven into relationships hear their voices more as people. Their conclusion is that “the harsh, violent voices so common in the West may not be an inevitable feature of schizophrenia”.5 The study is small, as qualitative work usually is, and the authors say so.
Are spirit-mediums who hear voices ill? #
Not in the clinical sense, according to her most recent work. With John Dulin and Vivian Dzokoto she interviewed forty okomfo, priests and spirit-mediums of the traditional religion in and around the Ghanaian city of Cape Coast. Half heard a god speak audibly only once a year or less. At least one may have experiences like those of psychosis, yet none met the criteria for a psychotic disorder, because those criteria require serious difficulty in life or work, and these people were working. The authors are careful to add that some may simply never have been very ill.6 See Were traditional shamans mentally ill?
What do critics say? #
The sharpest question is whether her account explains religious experience away. Mark Baker and Dean Zimmerman of Rutgers University, discussing her work among others, argue that some key features of a full account of religious experience make more sense if God does exist, so that a psychological account need not rule God out. Luhrmann’s stated position, given in 2012, is that she does not decide the matter either way: as an anthropologist, she has said, she does not have the authority to pronounce on whether God is real.78
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in practice. Journeying uses the imagination and, like painting or playing an instrument, it gets better and better with practice.9 Beginners often find that some parts of a journey feel made up and others feel very real, and at that stage the advice is not to worry about whether they are making it up.10 Doing healing journeys for other people is one of the things that builds confidence that it is not all being made up.11 Luhrmann’s evangelicals describe a very similar apprenticeship.
Second, in culture. For most of human history people were simultaneously aware of ordinary reality and shamanic reality, and only recently has the modern world lost that awareness.12 Her finding that voices are harsher in the most individualist culture sits easily beside this.
Third, in drawing the line with madness. Healthy shamanic practice means one foot in each world; both feet in shamanic reality all the time is madness, and shamanic cultures clearly tell the two apart.12 The ability to return to ordinary reality at will is one of the differences between shamanism and psychosis, which is why anyone prone to psychotic episodes is advised to work on groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this before journeying for themselves.13 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On what is real. Luhrmann studies how gods and spirits become real to people and deliberately leaves aside whether they are. In shamanism the spirits are real, independent, living beings. The usual habit of psychotherapy is to treat spirits as parts of the human psyche and journeys as “simply ‘imagination'”, and in doing so it misses the true scope and power of shamanic experience.14 Seen from here, the training Luhrmann documents is learning to perceive something that is there, not only learning to make it feel present. See Are Power Animals and Guides just archetypes?
