The Superhumanities
Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities
Jeffrey J Kripal
University of Chicago Press 2022 Hb, 256p, £28, ISBN 9780226820248
As a young Catholic, Jeffrey Kripal visited some Protestant churches in his American Mid-West town. He was baffled by how empty and downright unambitious they were. There were no pictures or statues of levitating saints or nuns in ecstatic union with God. There wasn’t anything obviously supernatural at all. The churches seemed to be more concerned with making good citizens than with making gods.
Kripal later became a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, and his bafflement with these anæmic Protestants became outrage at the humanities themselves.
The humanities are supposed to reflect the real nature of humans, and promote human potential. What are humans? And what they be? Jesus, quoting the Psalmist, declared that “You are gods” – a radical reworking of the idea of the – and at the heart of Eastern Christianity is the project of : the deification of the individual believer. The Egyptian pharaohs were divine. The Hermetic and related traditions taught that everyone, from pharaoh to slave, can really perceive and come to know the Source. Every religion in some way agrees. Sometimes the knowing is articulated in terms of salvation; sometimes in terms of union. The language doesn’t matter for these purposes. Every single religious and spiritual tradition insists that whatever we are, we are far more than lumps of meat. From which it follows that, as potential gods, if not potential Cosmoses, we should take ourselves and one another with divine, cosmic seriousness. Perhaps we don’t need revelation to know this: our intuitions about our significance, and the ubiquity of spiritual experiences, make it clear enough. We’re all telepathic animals who experience precognition and déjà vu. We’re all potentially bilocating, telekinetic animals who could develop stigmata, and we
