The Mind Possessed - A Physiology Of Possession Mysticism And Faith Healing

Some books sit quietly on the shelf. Others glare at you as if they know something alarming about human nature that you have spent your whole life trying not to think about. The Mind Possessed: A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism and Faith Healing is very much in the second category.

Published in 1973 and written by William Sargant, this is one of those magnificent, unsettling volumes from the age when serious men in jackets felt entirely comfortable attempting to explain the most mysterious, exalted and frightening aspects of human experience with the brisk confidence of a clinician. Possession? Mysticism? Faith healing? Perfect, says Sargant. Let us get to work and see whether all this spiritual drama can be pinned down, examined under decent light, and perhaps filed somewhere between neurology and nervous collapse.

Which is, of course, part of the book’s peculiar glory. This is not a timid work. It does not shuffle apologetically around its subject. It storms straight into some of the biggest and strangest questions available: why people fall into ecstatic states, why crowds become suggestible, why religious frenzy can seem to transform lives, and whether phenomena commonly wrapped in the language of spirit, miracle or revelation may have rather more to do with the vulnerable and highly combustible machinery of the human brain. It is a wonderfully unfashionable premise, delivered with the kind of force that reminds you there was once a breed of writer who saw no reason to separate medicine, religion, psychology, history and sheer nerve.

And what a subject to tackle. Possession and mysticism are not exactly modest topics. They come freighted with centuries of fear, awe, ritual, storytelling and argument. Most sensible people would approach them with extreme caution. Sargant, by contrast, appears to have approached them with a notebook and a determination to ruin everyone’s mystical afternoon by suggesting that extreme belief and altered states may have physiological explanations. It is gloriously provocative. Depending on your temperament, you will find it either exhilarating, outrageous or both at once.

There is also something irresistibly seventies about it all. This is a book from a period when intellectual ambition had a certain hard-edged swagger. The title alone promises a tremendous amount. Not merely a discussion, note, theory or reflection, but a physiology of possession, mysticism and faith healing. In other words: let us explain the whole strange business. One almost has to admire the audacity. Modern publishing would likely hedge, qualify, soften and workshop the subtitle into submission. This book simply marches in and starts dismantling the supernatural with clinical enthusiasm.

As sold by Crappy Old Books, this copy is in Good condition, which feels only proper. A book about ecstatic breakdown, religious intensity and the unruly depths of the mind ought not to be too pristine. Good means respectable, solid, still carrying itself well, but with enough age to suggest it has passed through thoughtful hands. One likes to imagine it being read late at night by someone with an interest in comparative religion, abnormal psychology, cult behaviour, or simply the broad and disreputable category of Things People Get Very Strange About.

And that is perhaps the real charm here. This is a book for readers who enjoy standing at the crossroads where science, belief, fear and spectacle all collide. It has the atmosphere of an argument that has been going on for centuries and will probably continue long after all parties have become far too emotional. It is a serious book, certainly, but also the sort of serious book that has a faint whiff of danger about it. Not danger in the modern thriller sense, but the older, better kind: the danger of ideas stated too boldly, the danger of explanations that offend cherished mysteries, the danger of opening a book about faith healing and discovering that the author has turned up with physiology.

So this is not merely a period hardback. It is a wonderfully intense relic of grand explanatory ambition. A book for collectors of psychology, religion, social history, fringe science, controversial medicine and books whose titles sound like they may either enlighten you or start an argument at once. It is intelligent, provocative, faintly severe and entirely unlike the soft-focus spiritual paperbacks that would later clutter the genre.

The Mind Possessed offers nothing so simple as comfort. What it offers instead is far better: a stern, fascinating, unapologetically curious attempt to explain why human beings, under the right conditions, will believe, tremble, convulse, convert, heal, obey and surrender. Cheerful stuff, in its way.

Condition: Good. Which is more than can be said for some of the minds discussed inside. Sold by Crappy Old Books, naturally.

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