Quick Answer
Zaehner took mescaline in order to prove Huxley wrong about it, and reported having a rather silly afternoon. The book behind that stunt is a serious argument that mystical experiences come in distinct kinds which cannot be collapsed into one, and it broke the assumption that all mystics are describing the same thing. It is combative, it is well written, and its ranking of the types is Catholic apologetics rather than argument.
Key Takeaways
- Three types, not one: nature, monistic, theistic.
- Written at Huxley, and the animus shows on every page.
- He took the drug and published the result, which was unusual and effective.
- The ranking fails. Separating the types is the achievement; ordering them is not.
- The ancestor of constructivism, the position that now dominates the field.
🕑 17 min read
What This Book Is
Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience was published by Oxford in 1957. It runs a little over two hundred pages.
The subtitle is doing more work than the title. Varieties, in the plural, is the whole thesis, and the echo of William James is deliberate.
Zaehner's argument is that mystical experience is not one thing. There are distinct types, they are distinguishable by what the people who have them report, and treating them as variations on a single underlying event is an error rather than a discovery.
The book is also a polemic with a named target, and the polemical energy is what makes it readable and what has kept it in print.
The word praeternatural. Zaehner chose it deliberately over supernatural. It means beyond the ordinary course of nature without implying divine origin, which lets him discuss experiences he considers real and does not consider holy.
Who R. C. Zaehner Was
Robert Charles Zaehner was born in 1913 to a Swiss family in England, and had an unusual career even by the standards of Oxford orientalists.
He was a specialist in Zoroastrianism and Persian religion, with a genuine command of the languages, and his scholarly work on the Zoroastrian material is still cited.
During and after the war he worked for British intelligence in Iran, in a capacity that was never fully disclosed and that included involvement in the events around the 1953 coup. He returned to academic life afterwards.
In 1952 he took the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, succeeding Radhakrishnan, who had held a broadly perennialist view. Zaehner's inaugural lecture made clear he did not.
He had converted to Catholicism in his twenties, and the conversion is directly relevant: the hierarchy of experiences he proposes is the hierarchy his faith requires.
The Book He Was Answering
The provocation was specific and recent.
Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception in 1954, describing a mescaline session and interpreting it in the strongest possible terms: that the drug had given him access to the reality the mystics describe, and that the brain ordinarily filters this out.
Huxley had earlier published The Perennial Philosophy, arranging quotations from mystics of every tradition to show that they all say the same thing.
Zaehner found both books infuriating, and the reasons were partly scholarly and partly confessional.
Scholarly: Huxley's anthology flattens the traditions, quoting out of context and ignoring the theological commitments that give the passages their meaning.
Confessional: if a drug produces what the saints attained through decades of discipline and grace, then a great deal that Zaehner believed about the spiritual life is false.
His Own Mescaline Session
The episode the book is remembered for, and it was a shrewd move.
Zaehner arranged to take mescaline under supervision in Oxford in 1955, and published his account of it.
What he reports is a state of heightened colour and pattern, considerable amusement, an inability to take anything seriously, and a persistent sense of the ridiculous. He laughed a great deal. He describes the whole thing as anti-religious in tone.
His conclusion is that the drug produced a distortion of the ordinary self rather than a transcendence of it, and that nothing in the experience resembled the accounts of the mystics he studied.
Two things should be said about this. It was genuinely admirable to test the claim rather than argue against it from an armchair, and it was a single session by a hostile subject who had published his expectations in advance.
Set-and-setting research since has established that both matter enormously, and Zaehner's session is close to a demonstration of the point.
The methodological problem is worth stating clearly because it recurs. Zaehner argues from his own experience that the drug does not produce mystical states. Huxley argued from his own experience that it does. Neither has any way to establish that their session was representative rather than a report about themselves, and the whole exchange consists of two men generalising from one occasion each. The literature has not entirely escaped this pattern.
The Three Types
The substantive contribution, and it survives the polemic.
Zaehner proposes that the reports fall into three groups, distinguished by what is said to happen to the self and to its object.
Nature mysticism. The boundary between self and world dissolves; the person feels merged with nature, with all things, with the universe. No deity need be involved.
Monistic mysticism. The self is found to be identical with an impersonal absolute. There is no relation, because there are not two things. The Advaita formulation, that the individual self is the absolute, is his standard case.
Theistic mysticism. A union of love with a personal God, in which the two remain distinct even at the closest point. The Christian, Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions supply the material.
His claim is that these are not stages of one thing and not descriptions of one event in different vocabularies. They are different, and the reports say so if you read them without assuming otherwise.
Nature Mysticism
The type he takes least seriously and describes best.
The reports here are of a sudden loss of separateness, a sense that everything is alive and connected, and an overwhelming impression of significance without any specific content.
Zaehner assembles examples from poets, from Wordsworth and Rimbaud and Proust, from accounts of spontaneous experience in childhood, and from the drug literature.
His argument is that this is a natural human capacity, that it occurs to people with no religious formation and no practice, and that it can be triggered by open country, by exhaustion, by illness, by chemistry.
He also notes that it can be experienced as terrifying rather than blissful, which is documented and which the perennialist literature tends to pass over.
His placing of the psychedelic material here is the polemical point of the whole book.
Monistic Mysticism
The type he handles with respect and evident discomfort.
The reports are of the discovery that the self is not what it appeared to be, and that what it actually is has no relation to anything because there is nothing else.
Zaehner takes Advaita Vedanta as the developed case, and treats Samkhya and certain Buddhist material as related.
He grants that this is a real and profound attainment, achieved by disciplined people through long practice, and not reducible to the nature type.
His objection is that it terminates in isolation. There is no love in it, because love requires two, and the state as described has no room for another.
This is where his own commitments become fully visible, and where the argument stops being descriptive.
Theistic Mysticism
His own position, presented as the summit.
The reports are of union with a God who remains other: a relation of love in which the distinction between lover and beloved is not abolished, because abolishing it would end the love.
He draws on Teresa, John of the Cross, Ruysbroeck, and on the Sufi tradition, where the same tension between union and distinction is worked out at length.
The theological claim underneath is that a personal God can be loved and an impersonal absolute cannot, and that the highest possible state is therefore relational.
As description this is defensible. The theistic mystics do say something different from the monists, and reading them as saying the same thing requires ignoring what they insist on.
As ranking it is not an argument at all, and Zaehner does not really attempt one.
How He Argues for the Distinction
The method is textual and it is his strongest suit.
He takes accounts from the traditions and reads them closely, attending to what is claimed about the persistence of the self, about whether there is an object, and about whether the state involves relation.
Where the perennialist reads a passage about union and files it with all the other passages about union, Zaehner asks whether the writer means that two became one or that there were never two.
The difference is substantial and the texts are usually explicit. A Christian mystic who says the soul is annihilated in God will typically also say, within a few lines, that the distinction remains, because the tradition requires it and because they mean it.
This kind of close reading is what the anthology method cannot do, and it is the durable part of the book.
Where He Stands to William James
A comparison the book invites and mostly leaves implicit, and it clarifies what Zaehner is doing.
William James had done the obvious precursor work in 1902, collecting first-person accounts and analysing them, and he arrived at four marks of the mystical state: it cannot be adequately described, it presents itself as knowledge, it does not last, and the person undergoing it feels held rather than active.
Those four marks are the reason the common-core assumption looked so secure. They are found across traditions, they are found in people with no tradition, and James established them from a large body of evidence.
Zaehner's objection is that the marks are formal. They describe the shape of the reports rather than the content, and reports about entirely different events can share a shape.
Ineffability in particular does very little work. A person unable to say what happened has told you that language failed, and not what it failed to capture. Two failures of language are not evidence that the same thing defeated both.
This is a sharp criticism and it applies to a great deal of comparative work that has followed James without noticing how thin his criteria are. It also, characteristically, does not license Zaehner's own hierarchy, which needs content that his method has just shown to be hard to establish.
The Ranking and Why It Fails
The clearest weakness, and it should be stated without hedging.
Zaehner arranges his types in ascending order: nature at the bottom, monistic in the middle, theistic at the top.
He offers reasons: the higher states require more discipline, are less accessible, involve moral transformation, and produce love rather than detachment.
None of these establish the ranking. Difficulty is not evidence of superiority. The requirement that the highest state involve love is a theological premise, not a finding, and it is precisely what a monist would deny.
What has happened is that a real descriptive achievement, distinguishing the types, has been used to support a normative claim that comes from elsewhere.
Readers can take the distinction and leave the ordering, and most later scholars have done exactly that.
The Treatment of Indian Material
The other substantial criticism, made forcefully by scholars who know the sources.
Zaehner's Advaita is a system in which the goal is the extinction of relation, and this is a defensible reading of some texts and not of all of them.
The tradition contains devotional strands, a substantial literature on the relation between the soul and a personal deity, and philosophical schools that explicitly reject the monist reading. Shankara is one voice among several, and the qualified non-dualist schools argue against him at length.
By selecting the strictest monism as representative of Indian religion and then finding it inferior to Christian theism, Zaehner constructed a comparison that could only come out one way.
His defenders note that he knew the material well and was not being careless, which makes the selection a choice rather than an error and does not improve the position.
A reading exercise for the argument. Take two accounts of union from different traditions, side by side, and mark every clause that says something about the self. Did it vanish, thin out, remain and become transparent, or was it never there. Then mark every clause about what it met. Something other, nothing at all, or itself. Most anthologies quote the passages that describe intensity and cut before the writer specifies these things, because the specification is where the traditions part company. Finding the full passages takes an afternoon and it settles more than any amount of reading about whether the mystics agree.
What Came After
The book's most important consequence was to make the common-core assumption arguable.
In the 1970s Steven Katz and others developed the constructivist position: that there is no unmediated experience, that the concepts and expectations a person brings shape what they undergo, and that a Buddhist and a Christian therefore do not have the same experience and interpret it differently, but have different experiences.
This is Zaehner's insight in a more rigorous form, detached from his theology and given a philosophical basis.
The perennialist reply, developed by Robert Forman and others, is that certain states involve the emptying of conceptual content and therefore cannot be constructed by it.
The argument continues and has not been settled. What has changed permanently is that nobody can now assume the common core without defending it, and that is Zaehner's doing.
The Psychedelic Question Now
Worth revisiting, since the material has moved considerably.
Zaehner's flat denial that these substances produce anything resembling mystical experience has not held up. The research since, including controlled studies using standard measures of mystical experience, reports that a substantial proportion of sessions produce states scoring as complete on those scales.
His deeper point is harder to dismiss. A state that scores identically on a questionnaire may still differ in what it does to a person, and the traditions were concerned with a life rather than with an afternoon.
The current literature, including the popular accounts, tends to hold that the acute experience can be genuinely comparable and that its integration is what differs.
That is closer to Zaehner than to Huxley on the point that matters, and further from him on the point he actually argued.
What Survives
Three things.
The distinction. Nature, monistic and theistic remain useful categories and are still taught, whatever is done with them afterwards.
The close reading. His demonstration that the texts say different things when read carefully is the model for everything the constructivists later did.
The willingness to test. He took the drug. Whatever the limits of one session, the instinct to check rather than assert was right.
How to Read It
With the theology in view. Zaehner is a Catholic apologist as well as a scholar, and the two roles are not separated in the text.
Read the analytical chapters closely and the evaluative ones sceptically. The line between them is usually visible.
Read Huxley first, both books, so you can see what is being attacked and judge whether the attack lands.
Read James for the tradition Zaehner is working in, and McGinn for a more careful modern treatment of the definitional problem.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have absorbed the assumption that all mystical experience is the same and want to see it challenged by someone who knew the sources.
Read it if you are interested in the psychedelic debate at its origin rather than in its current form.
Read it if you enjoy a good polemic, because this is one.
Do not read it for a fair account of Indian religion, and do not accept the ranking.
The useful discipline Zaehner models, whatever he did with it, is refusing to let a family resemblance settle a question. Two people describe something overwhelming, beyond words, in which the ordinary sense of being a separate person gave way. It is very easy to conclude they had the same experience. It is more work, and more honest, to ask what each of them says happened to the self, whether anything was there to meet, and whether the state left them different a year later. Those questions have different answers across the traditions, and the answers were always in the texts for anyone prepared to read them instead of collecting them.
The book that took mescaline in order to argue with Aldous Huxley.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of where the ranking argument fails and where the Indian material is misrepresented is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Mysticism Sacred and Profane about?
R. C. Zaehner's 1957 argument against the claim that all mystical experience is fundamentally identical, proposing instead that there are distinct types which cannot be reduced to one another.
Who was R. C. Zaehner?
A British scholar, 1913 to 1974, professor of Eastern religions and ethics at Oxford, a specialist in Zoroastrianism and Persian material, and a convert to Catholicism whose faith shapes the book's conclusions.
What are the three types he proposes?
Nature mysticism, in which the self merges with the natural world; monistic mysticism, in which the self is found to be identical with an impersonal absolute; and theistic mysticism, a loving union with a personal God.
Who was he arguing against?
Aldous Huxley above all, whose account of mescaline in The Doors of Perception claimed the drug produced experience comparable to that of the great mystics, and the perennialist position generally.
Did he take mescaline himself?
Yes. He describes his own session in the book, reports finding it silly and anticlimactic rather than revelatory, and uses the account as evidence against Huxley's interpretation.
Is his ranking of the types defensible?
It is the book's weakest element. He places theistic mysticism highest, which follows from his Catholicism rather than from his evidence, and the argument does not establish it.
What is the perennialist position?
That mystical experience is essentially the same everywhere and that doctrinal differences are later interpretations laid over a common core. Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is its best-known modern statement.
Did the book change the debate?
Substantially. It opened the argument that the constructivists later developed, that experience is shaped by the concepts an experiencer brings, and it made the assumption of a common core something to be defended.
Is his treatment of Indian material fair?
Contested. He knew the sources and read them through a framework in which the impersonal absolute of Advaita ranks below personal theism, which Indian scholars have argued misrepresents that tradition.
How is it written?
Sharply and combatively. Zaehner is an aggressive polemicist with a good prose style, and the book is far more entertaining than its subject would suggest.
Is it still worth reading?
Yes, as the founding statement of the case against a common core and as an unusually direct engagement between a scholar of religion and the psychedelic claims of his period.
Who should read it?
Readers interested in comparative mysticism, in the psychedelic debate at its origin, or in the question of whether experiences from different traditions can be treated as the same thing.
Same words, different events
Everyone who has read widely in this area has at some point felt the pleasure of recognition: the Sufi and the Zen master and the Christian contemplative all reaching for the same impossible thing, all defeated by language in the same way. That pleasure is real and it is not evidence. Zaehner's contribution, buried under a great deal of apologetics he had no business including, was to ask what happens if you read those passages as though the writers meant the specific things they said. The answer is that they diverge sharply, and that the convergence was partly supplied by the reader who wanted it.
Sources & References
- Zaehner, R. C. (1957). Mysticism Sacred and Profane. Oxford University Press.
- Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception and The Perennial Philosophy, the targets.
- Katz, Steven T. Constructivist essays on mysticism and philosophical analysis.
- Forman, Robert K. C. The perennialist reply on pure consciousness events.
- James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience, the tradition Zaehner works in.
- Modern clinical research on psychedelics and measures of mystical experience.