"Walpurgisnacht"

Walpurgis Nacht

William James had a very strange experience on this date [July _] in 1898. He called it his Walpurgis Nacht. (Walpurgisnacht is the night before May Day, when spirits are said to walk the earth.)

It was a rare “marvelous”  mystical moment for James, strange by any account. But stranger still, to me, is the fact that the New York Times recently wrote a story about it and the place where it happened (on Mount Marcy in sight of Mount Haystack and Panther Gorge, in the Adirondacks) called “The Geography of Religious Experience”. It recounts the odd letter James wrote his wife about the episode:

“The moon rose and hung above the scene, leaving a few of the larger stars visible,” he wrote, “and I entered into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me… the thought of you and the children … the problem of the Edinburgh lectures [which would become Varieties of Religious Experience], all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis nacht.”

James didn’t have or report many (perhaps any) more mystical experiences of his own, if indeed this counts as one, but he was always willing to credit the testimony of others who did. Or at least, to extend the benefit of the doubt. There’s something very admirable in that, something much finer than a mere credulous “will to make-believe,” in Bertrand Russell’s sneering put-down.

But  I wouldn’t call the sort of momentous, amorphous, inexpressible experience he couldn’t find words for but still (like a poet) tried to communicate and point at, a religious experience. It was an experience, thoroughly human and natural (and debilitating, literally heart-rending in this instance). I’ll bet I’d have something like it myself right now, if I went and hiked a mountain. Especially if I’d hiked one the day before yesterday, and the day before that too, as James had. That wouldn’t diminish the exceptionality of it for me, but it ought to make me hesitant to  bring supernature into the account. Oughtn’t it?

Mountains and ecstatic philosophizing seemed to go together for James. That’s one thing he had in common with Nietzsche, who admired Emerson’s nature intoxication. You can keep your feet on the ground when your head enters the clouds. U@d 7.7.09

 

The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me…the thought of you [wife Alice] and the children...the problem of the Edinburgh lectures [which would become Varieties of Religious Experience], all fermented within me till it became a regular #Walpurgisnacht.”

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 1, 2021