Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Reviewed by A. Gregory Schneider
(From Spectrum magazine, autumn 2001)

Ann Taves’s Fits, Trances, and Visions, winner of a 2000 Outstanding Professional and Scholarly Publication award from the Association of American Publishers, tells a story of three ways in which people have made sense of Protestant religious experience in Anglo-American history. There was a naturalistic and secularizing tradition that ran from seventeenth-century theological polemics against "enthusiasm" to twentieth-century academic psychologies that disparaged religion. There was, in opposition, a supernaturalist and religious tradition that ran from John Wesley and the transatlantic revivals of the early eighteenth century to Holiness and Pentecostal churches of the early twentieth century. Taves’s distinctive contribution is to argue for the existence and integrity of a third, "mediating" tradition that was naturalistic but not secularizing. Its origins were in German philosophical Romanticism, but it first emerged in American culture with the mid-nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement and flowered with the idea of the subconscious in the early twentieth century. Taves casts William James as its chief exemplar.

The religious experience at issue in Taves’s narrative, which covers two centuries, includes a range of involuntary phenomena:

uncontrolled bodily movements (fits, bodily exercises, falling as dead, catalepsy, convulsions); spontaneous vocalizations (crying out, shouting, speaking in tongues); unusual sensory experiences (trances, visions, voices, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences); and alterations of consciousness and/or memory (dreams, somnium, somnambulism, mesmeric trance, mediumistic trance, hypnotism, possession, alternating personality.) 1

Taves structures her story in three parts. Part One, 1740-1820, covers the Enlightenment attack on the "enthusiastic" religion that, said critics, had moved some to kill their king (Charles I) in the Puritan Revolution, and had driven others mad. This section also details the construction of a renewed evangelical theology and practice of religious experience led by John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards but completed by their followers, especially Wesley’s Methodist followers in America. Part Two, 1820-1890, traces the rise of popular psychologies like Mesmerism and the complex struggle that ensued as some skeptics used it to explain religious trance states. Some religious figures demonized it, and others appropriated it as a naturalistic means to contact spiritual realities. Part Three, 1886-1910, deals with the rise of the idea of the subconscious as a way both to explain and to respect the religious claims implied in fits, trances, and visions. It also chronicles the fall of the idea, as academic and professional psychology opted for the prestige of scientific materialism and both liberal and many conservative Protestants sought rational self-control and social respectability more than religious experience.

Ellen White becomes a major player in Part Two of Taves’s story. Taves makes the Adventist prophet a member of a pair of former Methodists who took directly contrasting attitudes and courses of action regarding their common roots in what Taves calls the "shout tradition." The other member of the pair is La Roy Sunderland, Methodist preacher turned free-lance healer and philosopher/psychologist.

Sunderland claimed that the experiences he had witnessed and induced in his revivalist preaching and had attributed to the Holy Spirit he could readily reproduce through the naturalistic psychology of mesmerism and therapeutic interventions of phrenology. He made good on his claims, furthermore, by inducing feelings of religious joy and visions of heavenly places in several mesmerized subjects. He also healed a case of religious melancholy by a combination of mesmeric trance and the manipulation of phrenological "organs" of the brain. 2

Demonstrations like his resembled the interactions of James and Ellen White enough to cause James to withhold publication of Ellen’s visions, for a time, and to publish instead explicit denials that he knew anything about mesmerism or its practice, all in a bid to reassure the fledgling Seventh-day Adventist community that was forming around his wife’s prophetic authority. 3

The shout tradition that White and Sunderland had in common was overtly Methodist and in self-conscious continuity with the Anglo-American revivals led by John Wesley and his disciples. Taves reveals Baptist and African-American layers in this tradition that made it something different from just an English import. The African strand of the shout tradition included the call-and-response pattern of preaching, testifying, and singing. Most important was the Africans’ expectation that they would come to know and experience God in and through their interpersonal connections in group worship.

Skeptical Enlightenment critics had stigmatized such emotional interaction as a disorderly social contagion of "animal spirits." What were mere animal spirits to elite skeptics, however, was Holy Spirit to the plain folk of the shout tradition. The Baptist layer of the shout tradition added an "iconic" reading of Scripture that inclined believers to create or legitimate their experiences and practices as copies of Biblical images, "antitypes" of Biblical types. All baptisms, for instance, were antitypes of Jesus’ baptism, and all bodies of water were antitypes of the river Jordan.

These two elements combined with the distinctively American Methodist practice of the camp meeting to help create the central characteristics of the shout tradition. First, the preaching, praying, and singing together of believers in the camp generated intense collective emotion accompanied by weeping, shouting, falling as if dead, traveling in trance to see heavenly places, and similar bodily exercises. Far from seeing such extraordinary emotions and bodily exertions as signs of disorder, believers in the shout tradition counted them as signs of the presence of God.

Second, both the bodily exercises of the believers and the space of the camp became antitypes of Biblical types. The great collective emotion of the camp was an antitype of Pentecost, when the early Christians were together in one place and the Spirit fell upon them as holy fire. Falling as if cut down by the sword of the Lord was an antitype of the prophecy of Ezekiel 21:7: "and every heart shall melt, and all hands shall be feeble, and every spirit faint, and all knees shall be weak as water." (KJV) The shouts of praise and glory to God by the converted were antitypes of the actions of the Jews at the rebuilding of the Temple under Ezra: "And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid" (Ezra 3:11 KJV). These shouts, finally, were understood to be uttered in "the camp of Israel," the wilderness encampment around the ark of the covenant and its tabernacle. The camp ground itself, then, became sacred space for believers of the shout tradition.

Notes and References

1. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 3.
2. Ibid., 141-48.
3. Ibid., 163-64.