Constructivism, by contrast, emerged as a reaction against this perennialist consensus. In the late 1970s and 1980s, scholars increasingly questioned whether cross-cultural mystical similarities reflected genuine commonality or merely the imposition of Western interpretive categories. The watershed moment came with Steven T. Katz’s influential 1978 essay ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’.
Katz’s central argument attacked the very possibility of unmediated experience. Echoing the discoveries of Kant, he made the simple claim that all experience – mystical or otherwise – is inescapably mediated by conceptual structures. The mystic does not encounter a “pure” experience and then subsequently interpret it; rather, the mystic’s concepts, theological doctrines, and cultural frameworks actively constitute what is experienced.
Katz developed this through meticulous textual analysis. He examined how Christian mystics, shaped by Trinitarian theology and Christ-centred devotion, described encounters with a personal God. In the Bible, we see that Yahweh presents himself to prophets and prayerful figures through angels, corporeal stand-ins, killings, injunctions to wars, and dwellings in heavenly courts. Katz then contrasted these with Buddhist descriptions of enlightenment – experiences characterised by the dissolution of personal identity, the cessation of desire, and the realisation of non-self (anatta). These were not, Katz insisted, the same experience described in different vocabularies. The Christian was trained to seek communion with a personal God; the Buddhist was trained to realise emptiness and non-self. These different teloi, these different ultimate aims, shaped the structure of what was experienced long before interpretive language entered the picture.
Perennialist ideas have made their way into science. The dominant research paradigm uses questionnaires like the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ-30), which operationalises Stace’s perennialist framework, measuring unity, transcendence of time/space, ineffability, noetic quality, sacredness, and positive mood. Studies then correlate MEQ scores with therapeutic outcomes in psychedelic research.
But this creates circularity. Researchers use perennialist-derived instruments, find evidence for perennialist categories, then claim to validate perennialism. Here, the MEQ presupposes what it purports to discover: that mystical experiences across contexts share common dimensions. Alternative constructivist measures (like Hood’s Mysticism Scale with its “religious interpretation” factor) yield different factor structures, suggesting measurement shapes findings. Moreover, quantifying mysticism through questionnaires treats fluid, ambiguous, context-embedded processes as discrete, measurable, comparable objects. The MEQ asks subjects to rate statements like “Experience of unity with ultimate reality” on Likert scales. But this assumes a number of odd things: that subjects recognise what “ultimate reality” means, or that unity experiences can be put on a scale (as opposed to being discrete categories), or that people entirely remember what they experienced. Each assumption is philosophically contestable, and pales against a reality in which many participants are desperate for their own ‘mystical experiences’ to please researchers or achieve relief from years of distress.
Perennialism may seem inclusive. Yet behind its cloth of science and psychological categories, it can create new forms of chauvinism. What we define as the “common core” of mystical or religious experience is fundamentally shaped by the theorist’s own preferences. Why, for example, construct the common core around Indian Vedantic notions of non-duality and bliss (as in much perennialist thought), rather than Christian experiences of union with a personal God, Sufi intoxication, or the Sublime as understood in Western Romanticism?
Bill Richards, the Johns Hopkins psychedelic researcher, has received criticism from Jules Evans and Rick Strassman for his dogmatic assertion that mystical experience is a “mountain with many paths leading to its ineffable peak,” with the dialogical encounters characteristic of Judaism and plant shamanism found more in the “foothills”. In 1927, René Guénon, a French theorist who has influenced extremist thinkers like Julius Evola and Steve Bannon, conceived of the perennialist ‘core’ as an explicitly elitist phenomenon, one accessed by a spiritual aristocracy of the “Primordial Tradition”. The “crisis of the modern world,” for Guénon, stems from the loss of sacred hierarchy and the “usurpation” of the sacred by the profane or rational-empirical.
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