Christian Jarrett, an editor at Aeon magazine, approached me after reading my response to a Japanese newspaper query on ghost beliefs in the West last year to commission a short article on a similar topic. I was happy to comply, and my Aeon piece on the hidden history of hallucinations and visions went online in January.

Even though I was explicitly writing as a historian, I was perhaps a little light on actual history, at least concerning the periods we typically look at here on Forbidden Histories. In fact, I only gave a couple of examples to illustrate typical Enlightenment responses to reported ‘spirit-seership’ and briefly mentioned studies of hallucinations and apparitions of the dead in non-pathological populations by William James and English colleagues in the outgoing nineteenth century.

The remainder of the short piece is mainly concerned with relatively recent medical findings concerning constructive functions of certain hallucinations and ‘mystical’ experiences. Whereas previous generations of medics have regarded hallucinations, apparitions of the dead and similar experiences as inherently pathological and undesirable, these views began to be drastically modified in the early 1970s with new research on so-called ‘hallucinations of widowhood’.

From then on, it seemed like friendly ghosts and otherworldly visions were gradually making an entry into the mainstream medical literature not only in the shape of comforting visitations from the departed in widowhood, but also in often profoundly moving end-of-life experiences in palliative and hospice care. At around the same time, mystical experiences sometimes occurring during close brushes with death began to be recognized by mainstream medicine as often having constructively transformative effects. Not least, similar but psychedelically induced (rather than spontaneously occurring) experiences have been shown to be effective in the treatment of severe conditions including treatment-resistant depressions and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Following a summary of these clinical revisions, I touched a point that’s not usually raised: Questions of the ultimate reality of spirits and ‘magic’ aside, if otherworldly experiences can have constructive and even therapeutic functions at least for a part of humanity, could it be harmful to follow blindly the outdated historical standard narrative of Western modernity (to quote myself),

“according to which ‘materialism’ is not only the default metaphysics of science, but an obligatory philosophy of life demanded by centuries of supposedly linear progress based on allegedly impartial research?” “Sure, the dangers of gullibility are evident enough in the tragedies caused by religious fanatics, medical quacks and ruthless politicians. And, granted, spiritual worldviews are not good for everybody.”

Still, neither the fundamental shift in pragmatic medical views on ‘weird’ experiences in mainstream medicine nor the professional historical scholarship on science-magic links discussed here on Forbidden Histories are widely known. In fact, both have equally failed to inform ongoing debates over science and the ‘supernatural’. I therefore concluded my short article by implying that rather than exclusively focusing on the undisputed harm caused by uncritical approaches to ‘magic’,

“it might be time to restore a balanced perspective, to acknowledge the damage that has been caused by stigma, misdiagnoses and mis- or overmedication of individuals reporting ‘weird’ experiences. One can be personally sceptical of the ultimate validity of mystical beliefs and leave properly theological questions strictly aside, yet still investigate the salutary and prophylactic potential of these phenomena.”

Another potential opportunity to air these thoughts outside Forbidden Histories arose a couple of days ago, when members of the History of Science Society (HSS) received an email from its Executive Director, Jay Malone, ahead of his visit to Washington, D.C., next week. These are times of crisis for historical research as state funding has severely declined not only in the US. Hence, during his visit to Capitol Hill, Malone will try to persuade legislative aides of the importance for Congress to fund the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and other US American humanities programmes and initiatives.

As an example of the concrete relevance of history, Malone is planning to use a letter to the New York Times by Hannah Marcus at Harvard, which was recently published online as “What the plague can teach us about the coronavirus”. Addressing recent instances of discriminations and violence against Asians in the wake of the coronavirus scare and COVID-19-related anxieties in expressions of hatred against Syrian and other migrants in Italy, her letter is a reminder of how outbreaks of disease have led to persecutions in the past, such as anti-Jewish pogroms in late-medieval Europe during the plague.

The main purpose of Malone’s email to HSS members, however, was to invite us to submit missives explaining why we think our work matters, and, as he put it, “how it helps us better the human condition”. Malone is planning to use some of our missives to support his discussions at Capitol Hill and to post a selection on the HSS site. Since I don’t know if my input will make the cut, I thought it may not hurt to post the main part of my message to Jay here regardless:

I think one area in which history of science & medicine scholarship can make a difference is by informing ongoing controversies over science and religion, and the related area of science/medicine and ‘magic’.

By demonstrating the vast complexities in historical debates over these issues, and drawing on historical scholarship exploring the concrete reasons for the ‘decline of magic’ in Western science & medicine, historians can make an instructive contribution to the teaching of critical thinking.

In terms of practical relevance, critical appreciations of science/medicine-magic relationships should be symmetrical if they want to prevent not only damage caused by charlatans and quacks, but also some rarely addressed but real clinical and social harm resulting from widespread confusions of methodological with ontological naturalism.

I concluded with a reference to my Aeon piece and mentioned that I have since developed these thoughts more fully in an article manuscript. Entitled “Conflicts and complexities: Medical science, exceptional experiences, and the perils of simplistic history”, it will appear in Spirituality and Mental Health Across Cultures, an interdisciplinary volume co-edited by the current chair of the Section on Spirituality of the World Psychiatric Association and a former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London, and published as part of the Oxford Cultural Psychiatry series.

I hope to get permission from Oxford University Pres to post a PDF of my chapter here once it’s published. In the meantime, some of you might find it useful to have a list of some of the studies which I used for the empirical and clinical part of both my Aeon article and the forthcoming chapter. After all, historians of, say, climate science or ‘scientific racism’ are expected to be up to date on directly relevant current empirical studies and scientific debates. And I think the same requirement should hold for historians of other scientific controversies that are still ongoing, including debates concerning medical science and its relations with the ‘supernatural’.

Needless to say, these references are not supposed to be exhaustive, but merely meant as possible starting points. Some of this literature is hidden behind paywalls of academic presses. However, most can be freely downloaded and I provided links to articles whenever open access PDF files were available.



The (somewhat creepy-looking) cover of an important edited volume published by the American Psychological Association, whose chapters survey the empirical and clinical state-of-the-art of ‘weird’ experiences. Chapters include relatively common experiences like synaesthesia and lucid dreams, but also much more controversial problems including near-death and mystical experiences as well as alleged reincarnation memories and ‘alien abduction’ experiences.

[US readers] [UK readers] (Amazon affiliate links)

‘Hallucinations of widowhood’ & apparitions

Olson, P. R., Suddeth, J. A., Peterson, P. J., & Egelhoff, C. (1985). Hallucinations of widowhood. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 33, 543-547.

Rees, William Dewi. (1971). The hallucinations of widowhood. British Medical Journal, 4, 37-41 [open access PDF].

Stevenson, Ian. (1983). Do we need a new word to supplement “hallucination”? American Journal of Psychiatry, 140, 1609-1611 [open access PDF].

Streit-Horn, Jenny. (2011). A Systematic Review of Research on After-Death Communication (ADC). (Ph.D. dissertation), University of North Texas, Denton, TX [open access PDF].

Death-bed visions & related experiences in hospice and palliative care

Devery, K., Rawlings, D., Tieman, J., & Damarell, R. (2015). Deathbed phenomena reported by patients in palliative care: Clinical opportunities and responses. International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 21, 117-125 [open access PDF].

Fenwick, P., Lovelace, H., & Brayne, S. (2010). Comfort for the dying: five year retrospective and one year prospective studies of end of life experiences. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 51, 173-179 [PDF at academia.edu – registration may be required].

Kerr, C. W., Donnelly, J. P., Wright, S. T., et al. (2014). End-of-life dreams and visions: A longitudinal study of hospice patients’ experiences. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 17, 296-303.

Renz, D., Reichmuth, O., Bueche, D., Traichel, B., Schuett Mao, M., Cerny, T., & Strasser, F. (2018). Fear, pain, denial, and spiritual experiences in dying processes. American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine, 35, 478-491 [open access PDF].

Transformative near-death experiences

Greyson, Bruce. (1983). Near-death experiences and personal values. American Journal of Psychiatry, 140, 618-620 [open access PDF].

Greyson, Bruce. (2014). Near-death experiences. In Etzel Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & Stanley Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (second ed., pp. 333-367). Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association.

Klemenc-Ketis, Zalika. (2013). Life changes in patients after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 20, 7-12.

Psychedelic inductions of mystical experiences



Carhart-Harris, R. L., Bolstridge, M., Day, C. M. J., Rucker, et al. (2018). Psilocybin with psychological support for treatment-resistant depression: six-month follow-up. Psychopharmacology, 235, 399-408 [open access PDF].

Griffiths, R. R., Johnson, M. W., Carducci, M. A., et al. (2016). Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30, 1181-1197 [open access PDF].

Mithoefer, M. C., Wagner, M. T., Mithoefer, A. T., Jerome, L., & Doblin, R. (2010). The safety and efficacy of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder: the first randomized controlled pilot study. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 25, 439-452 [open access PDF].

Like this: Like Loading...