3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

Ethiopian Orthodox Christians pray on the last day of ‘Abiy Tsom’, fifty-five days of fasting
ahead of Easter, at Medhane Alem Cathedral in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 7 April 2018. Photo
by Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency/Getty

Divine transports
Whether via music, dance or prayer, the trance
state was key to human evolution, forging society
around the transcendent
Mark Vernon

A change has come over the public discussion of religion in recent years. In the
decade of the New Atheists, religion was the root of all evil. Nowadays, however, it
tends to be thought of as a good, even necessary, part of society. In his recent book
<https://www.hachette.com.au/tom-holland/dominion-the-making-of-the-western-
mind> Dominion: e Making of the Western Mind (2019), the agnostic historian Tom
Holland argues that Christianity underpins our civilisation; and the atheist
philosopher John Gray has repeatedly stressed
<https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/283/283923/seven-types-of-
atheism/9780141981109.html> that atheism is not the natural default for rational
people, but is often a type of religion too. Even Richard Dawkins has admitted there

https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 1/8
3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

may be an upside to religion insofar as it stops people doing bad things. e

calculation is that, while religion undoubtedly causes bloody conflict, it also prompts
prosocial behaviour, and the benefits outweigh the downsides. In this, the thinking
has moved in line with the scientific understanding of religion’s origins, drawing on
work in the cognitive sciences that acknowledges religion and its precursors as a key
feature of human evolution that enabled our ancestors to live successfully in ever
larger groups.

But I’m wary of this argument. It makes me feel that its advocates are trying to have
their secular cake and eat it. Aren’t they neutralising what lies at the heart of human
religiosity – experiences of the supernatural, transcendence and gods? Aren’t they
turning it into a noble lie? So I’ve been glad to discover that the scientific
understanding of religion’s origins is itself changing. Different proposals are making
the running. ey not only seem better supported by the evidence, but treat the
otherworldliness of religion as critical to its prosocial effects.

e hints that our ancestors lived in worlds shaped by meaningful symbols, as well as
the need to survive, go back as far as archaeology can see. Much of the evidence is
contested, of course. But the broad picture seems settled. e evolutionary
psychologist Robin Dunbar sums it up in his book
<https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/188/188555/human-
evolution/9780141975313.html> Human Evolution (2014): ‘Anatomically modern
humans mark an important transition in our story because with them comes culture
in a way that had never happened before.’ And from that culture came religion, with
various proposals to map the hows and whys of its emergence.

Until recently, the proposals fell into two broad groups – ‘big gods’ theories and ‘false
agency’ hypotheses. Big gods theories envisage religion as conjuring up punishing
deities. ese disciplining gods provided social bonding by telling individuals that
wrongdoing incurs massive costs. ey put the fear of God into people and so
motivated them to be good. However, big gods theories have been widely criticised.
At the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, Joseph
Watts has investigated the plausibility of big gods approaches in both prehistoric
human societies and modern hunter-gatherer groups, and finds them wanting, as
effective drivers of cultural development. He told me: ‘Most societies with big gods
have had contact with one of the monotheistic faiths, and that’s an idea of God which
developed many millennia after the emergence of large complex societies.’ In short,
big gods are not a universal feature of religions and, if they are present, they seem
correlated to big societies not causes of them.

False agency hypotheses don’t do much better. ese assume that our forebears were
jumpy and superstitious: they thought that a shrub swayed because of a spirit not the
wind; and they were easily fooled, though their mistakes were evolutionarily
advantageous because, on occasion, the swaying was caused by a predator. e
upshot was that those who believed in supernatural agency tended to live, while those
who didn’t died, which meant that evolution selected for the false perception of an
enchanted cosmos. Religious delusions became part of human experience.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 2/8
3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

is simple version of the hypothesis is readily refuted. Observations of indigenous

peoples today reveal that they are astonishingly astute about what’s going on in their
environments. ey tend not to make mistakes, which is the real reason they survive.
at said, false agency proposals come in more sophisticated forms as well. One has
to do with the development of human cognition. It proposes that it was natural for
early humans to believe in gods, in much the way it’s natural for a young child to treat
its toys as animate agents. However, even sophisticated versions of the hypothesis
appear to have been holed below the waterline. Miguel Farias, who runs the Brain,
Belief and Behaviour lab at Coventry University in the UK, has tested whether an
assumption of spiritual reality leads people to attribute false agency to the world
around them. In one experiment, he examined whether practices such as going on
pilgrimage make people more inclined to adopt supernatural beliefs. ey don’t, and
his team’s findings <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-14090-9> chime
with other research that has probed the false agency hypothesis. ‘ e idea has been
tested and disconfirmed across various experiments,’ Farias told me.

So there is a need for a new idea, and coming to the fore now is an old one revisited,
revised and rendered more testable. It reaches back a century to the French
sociologist Émile Durkheim who observed that social activities create a kind of buzz
that he called effervescence. Effervescence is generated when humans come together
to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are
over. e suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or
religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them.

e explanation is resurfacing in what can be called the trance theory of religious

origins, which proposes that our palaeolithic ancestors hit on effervescence upon
finding that they could induce altered <https://aeon.co/essays/how-extreme-rituals-
forge-intense-social-bonds> states of consciousness. Research to test and develop this
idea is underway in a multidisciplinary team led by Dunbar at the University of
Oxford. e approach appeals to him, in part, because it seems to capture a crucial
aspect of religious phenomena missing in suggestions about punishing gods or
dangerous spirits. ‘It is not about the fine details of theology,’ Dunbar told me, ‘but is
about the raw feelings of experience, and that this raw-feelings element has a
transcendental mystical component – something that is only fully experienced in
trance states.’ He notes that this sense of transcendence and other worlds is present
at some level in almost all forms of religious experience. So how can the new
hypothesis be fleshed out and evidenced?

A good place to start is to see how the hypothesis fits with the deep story of human
evolution that reaches back to what we share with our evolutionary cousins. For
example, there’s evidence <https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498548465/ e-
Evolution-of-Human-Wisdom> that monkeys and apes experience the antecedents to
ecstasy because they seem to experience wonder. Celia Deane-Drummond, a
professor of theology at Campion Hall in Oxford, is also working on the trance
hypothesis. At this year’s conference of the International Society for Science and
Religion near Oxford, she cited research into the behaviour of macaques in Gibraltar.
Cameras strapped to the monkeys tracked where they looked. e footage revealed
that, on occasion, the macaques would gaze at sunsets and other absorbing scenes.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 3/8
3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

ey did so even when usually irresistible distractions were nearby, such as fruiting fig
trees. e inference is that they had become lost in awe.

Dunbar believes that a few hundred thousand years ago, archaic humans took a step
that ramped up this capacity. ey started deliberately to make music, dance and
sing. When the synchronised and collective nature of these practices became
sufficiently intense, individuals likely entered trance states in which they experienced
not only this-worldly splendour but otherworldly intrigue. ey encountered
ancestors, spirits and fantastic beasts, now known as therianthropes. ese immersive
journeys were extraordinarily compelling. What you might call religiosity was born. It
stuck partly because it also helped to ease tensions and bond groups, via the
endorphin surges produced in trance states. In other words, altered states proved
evolutionarily advantageous: the awoken human desire for ecstasy simultaneously
prompted a social revolution because it meant that social groups could grow to much
larger sizes via the shared intensity of heightened experiences.

e link between trance and endorphin-fuelled bonding appeals to Dunbar for other
reasons. Not least, it suggests tangible ways of empirically testing the thesis. Farias
and his colleague Valerie van Mulukom and researcher Sarah Charles have
investigated <https://psyarxiv.com/5r6nz/> whether modern rituals in a variety of
church and church-like settings provide measurable releases of these endogenous
opioids to bring about prosocial effects. It turns out that they do, even in the relatively
modest synchronised movements of a Church of England service in which people
stand to sing and kneel to pray. ey’ve also tested the effects in more obviously
ecstatic churches that incorporate dancing and chanting in their worship.

Freeing your mind can help you love your neighbour

e mechanisms in play are similar to those experienced by indigenous people. In

Human Evolution, Dunbar provides an illustration:

Among the San Bushmen of southern Africa, trance dances are particularly
likely to take place when relationships within the extended community have
started to unravel as people bicker among themselves. A trance dance
restores the equilibrium, almost as though it wipes the slate clean of the
toxic memories of the injustices and slights that poisoned relationships.

Freeing your mind can help you love your neighbour.

e trance hypothesis has further advantages. Notably, it rests on the rituals that
produce peak experiences, which means it doesn’t require speculating about what
ancient people did or didn’t believe about spirits and gods. To put it another way,
rituals offer a good way to get a grip on the notoriously diverse set of phenomena to
which the word ‘religion’ refers. ‘Asking when religion evolved is not a good question
because religion is more than one thing,’ says Richard Sosis, an anthropologist of
religion at the University of Connecticut. ‘But asking when the various elements such
as supernatural agents and moral obligations started to coalesce together is a better
question. And they invariably start to coalesce around rituals.’

https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 4/8
3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

S o much for the origins of human religiosity. But rituals, which other animals
perform, are not of themselves organised religion. To understand how this
secondary feature starts to emerge requires attending to further, more subtle facets of
human evolution, critically the larger brain size of anatomically modern humans. is
can be used as a rough measure of cognitive ability and, in particular, what
psychologists refer to as intentionality.

Intentionality, or focusing on someone or something, comes in various guises. A

rudimentary form is called second-order intentionality, or having theory of mind. is
is an awareness of your own mental state and that of another – hence ‘second order’.
It seems that great apes and some other animals have it. But for humans, with larger
brains, it’s possible to develop third, fourth, fifth and even higher orders of
intentionality. is means that our species, at least in principle, can hold mental states
such as: ‘I know of your beliefs that together we share about a deity’s relationship to
our tribe.’ e suggestion is, therefore, that higher-order intentionality helped our
ancestors consciously to incorporate visionary dimensions of existence into the
complex interactions of their lives: it meant that humans could forge more organised
sets of shamanistic practices and develop animistic worldviews.

It took a long time. ere’s archaeological evidence that this kind of systematisation
reaches back some tens of thousands of years. e evidence is found in the form of
deliberate burials, ornamental artefacts and cave art. How to interpret such
prehistoric remains is widely disputed, of course, but if Neanderthals possessed
perhaps four orders of intentionality, and so engaged in simple burial practices, our
closest ancestors possessed more. From these more sophisticated cognitive capacities
flowed complex rituals, increasingly elaborate burials and the making of objects such
as the Olduvai handaxe, the significance of which is that its design far exceeds the
requirements of its function, something not seen in earlier handaxes.

A further distinctive shift associated only with Homo sapiens came after another long
period, the so-called neolithic revolution. is is usually described in terms of the
invention of agriculture, though, in line with what archaeologists have discovered at
Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, Dunbar reframes the development. He
stresses that our ancestors gained the wherewithal to live together not just in large
groups but, eventually, larger settlements. It’s an achievement because, when villages
and then towns appear, they massively increase social stresses, which is to say that
new techniques for managing social pressures are required.

A release was found with the creation of what Dunbar calls ‘doctrinal religion’, by
which he means religious systems that include specialists such as priests and
impressive constructions we’d call temples and/or domestic house-based shrines.
Such features increase the prosocial effects of religiosity beyond what’s possible
through shamanic rituals alone because constructed sacred spaces, coupled to visibly
enacted theologies in the form of sacrifices and feasts, maintain the presence of
ancestors, spirits or gods in built-up communities. ey give meaning to the years and
seasons, as well as the comings and goings of every day, by translating the sense of
transcendence originally found in visionary experiences to a sense of transcendence
generated by temples and house shrines. ‘Doctrinal religion’ thereby sustains the

https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 5/8
3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

prosocial effects of earlier types of religiosity for groups that are now growing very
large indeed.

‘Humans become simultaneously transactional and

transcendental beings’

Of course, it’s not only religious activities that might have contributed to community
life at this stage, although Dunbar believes that religious activities are particularly
successful at bonding groups and so must have always played a key role. He has
looked at studies <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5756541/> of
kibbutzim in Israel. ese exist in religious and secular forms, allowing for
comparison, and studies show that the religious kibbutzim are both bigger in size and
last longer. Just why is moot. ‘It may be that religious worldviews are particularly good
at scaling up,’ he said. ‘If you share a transcendental experience with others, you bond
profoundly.’

However, there is a tension that arises when religious experiences are

institutionalised. It can feel as if what’s on offer is somewhat thinner than experiences
gained in the immersive rites that precipitate altered states. Encountering spirit
entities directly in a dance or chase is not the same as the uplift offered by a
monumental building, tremendous though it might be. e vitality of one is not easily
contained within the structures of the other. It’s as if a degree of disenchantment is
the price paid for large-scale social cohesion.

Dunbar calls it ‘the problem of mysticism’. It’s manifest in the wariness with which the
organised religions of history have regarded revivals and awakenings. Such
charismatic eruptions are perceived as a threat to the main cult, which they are
because, implicitly or explicitly, they press for a fresh connection with the original
deity or spiritual wellspring. e implication is that the tradition has lost touch with
its soul, with the result that the histories of religions are littered with suppressions
and splits. e authorities that govern doctrinal religions strive to maintain an
equilibrium between lively source and steadying system, but they’re readily knocked
off balance.

You might say that religions are caught between the Scylla of socially useful but
potentially dreary religious rites and the Charybdis of altered states that are
intrinsically exciting but socially disruptive. It’s why they bring bloody conflicts as
well as social goods. is way of putting it highlights another feature of the trance
theory. It interweaves two levels of explanation: one focused on the allure of spiritual
vitality; the other on practical needs.

It’s a crucial coupling because other research indicates that these vertical and
horizontal dimensions of experience need to be brought together to account fully for
what makes us human. A leading figure here is the anthropologist Agustín Fuentes at
the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. His study
<https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0136> of our
ancestors’ development, which he calls ‘constructing the human niche’, recognises
that it features a capacity to live simultaneously at a practical and spiritual level.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 6/8
3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

Without both elements, advances in tools and technologies, as well as groups and
societies, would not be possible.

Just why can be seen by considering what it takes to craft a handaxe with aesthetic
qualities that exceed functionality. To produce an object of symbolic worth, rather
than just practical use, requires a mind that can, first, consciously discern beauty in
the world around it and, second, see that a tool can be imaginatively transformed to
hold that value. ‘Humans become simultaneously transactional and transcendental
beings,’ writes Fuentes in his book <https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?
k=9780300243994> Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being (2019).
We are a contemplating and a problem-solving species: we possess binocular vision
with an ability to see beyond the purely empirical, and so live in a world that is not
just instrumental and material. is multidimensional capacity became crucial to our
ancestors’ strategy for survival.

S eeing other worlds and sensing transcendent dynamics takes work. ey are not
spontaneously perceived, for the obvious reason that they are not visible. ey
come with the development of subtle types of sensibility that require effort to
cultivate. Sosis puts it like this: ‘ e idea that people believe in things like
supernatural agents because of inherent cognitive capacities gets things the wrong
way around.’ It actually takes practice to become religiously cognisant, which is why
thinking about wonder, trance, higher levels of intentionality, symbolic objects,
sophisticated rituals and otherworldliness are all part of understanding it. It’s a
complex ability requiring a complex explanation.

Of course, science cannot decide whether the claims of any one religion are true. But
the new theory still makes quite a strong claim, which brings me back to the role of
the supernatural, transcendence and religious gods that today’s secularists seem
inclined to sideline. If the science cannot confirm convictions about any divine
revelations received, it does lend credence to the reasonableness, even necessity, of
having them. Where the big gods and false agency hypotheses seemed inherently
sniffy about human religiosity, the trance hypothesis positively values it. As Fuentes
writes: ‘Meaning-making, the transcendent, and openness to revelation and discovery
are core parts of the human niche and central to our evolutionary success.’

‘For myself, I remain an atheist,’ Dunbar told me. ‘ e trance hypothesis is neutral
about the truth claims of religions whether you believe or don’t, though it does
suggest that transcendent states of mind are meaningful to human beings and can
evolve into religious systems of belief.’

And in this final observation there is, perhaps, some good news for us, whether we’re
religious or not. It’s often said that many of today’s troubles, from divisive political
debates to spats on social media, are due to our tribal nature. It’s added, somewhat
fatalistically, that deep within our evolutionary past is the tendency to identify with
one group and demonise another. We are destined to be at war, culturally or
otherwise. But if the trance theory is true, it shows that the evolutionary tendency to
be tribal rests on an evolutionary taste for that which surpasses tribal experience –

https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 7/8
3/11/2020 How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays

the transcendence that humans glimpsed in altered states of mind that enabled them
to form tribes to start with.

If we long to belong, we also long to be in touch with ‘the more’, as the great pioneer
of the study of religious experiences William James called it. at more will be
envisaged in numerous ways. But it might help us by prompting new visions that
exceed our herd instincts and binary thinking, and ease social tensions. If it helped
our ancestors to survive, why would we think we are any different?

Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist and writer, and is currently working with the research
group, Perspectiva. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and degrees in theology and
physics. His latest book is A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the
Evolution of Consciousness <https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/christian-alternative-
books/our-books/secret-history-christianity> (2019). He lives in London.

aeon.co07 November, 2019

https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence 8/8