Channeled Apparitions: On Visions that Morph and Categories that Slip

Abstract

This paper examines apparitions that morph into embodied or channeled entities through a comparison of JZ [Judy Zebra] Knight (b. 1946), who claims to channel a 35,000‐year‐old spirit‐warrior named Ramtha, and turn‐of‐the‐last‐century case studies of spirit possession and multiple personality. Considering visions as arising, like dreams, from internally rather than externally generated percepts and both as grounded in fluctuating states of consciousness, allows us to analyze the range of perceptions that arise without external stimulation of the senses, the extent to which they morph into other unusual states, and, in cases where this happens, the factors that seem to encourage this. In Knight's case, her ability to see and then embody Ramtha most likely rests on a combination of personal abilities and contextual factors linked by an openness to implementing suggestions from self and others.

Keywords:

• Channeling
• Spirit Possession
• Multiple Personality
• Visions
• Suggestion
• Knight, JZ [Judy Zebra] (b. 1946)

Notes

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2. Michael G. Kenny, “Multiple Personality and Spirit Possession, Psychiatry 44 (1981): 337–58.

3. Michael F. Brown, The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Michael W. Cuneo, American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (New York: Broadway Books, 2001).

4. Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

5. Kenny, “Multiple Personality,” 346–47.

6. Kenny, “Multiple Personality,” 347–54.

7. Kenny, “Multiple Personality,” 240–45.

8. JZ Knight, A State of Mind: My Story (New York: Warner Books, 1987), 9.

9. Knight, State of Mind, 9. Subsequent references to specific pages appear in the text in parentheses.

10. Stanley Krippner et al., “The Ramtha Phenomenon: Psychological, Phenomenological, and Geomagnetic Data,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 92, no. 1 (1998): 1–24. On the TAS, see Auke Tellegen, The Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (Minneapolis: National Computing Systems, 1977); on the DES, see E. M. Bernstein and F. W. Putnam, “Development, Reliability, and Validity of a Dissociation Scale,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 174 (1986): 727–35; on the BQ, see Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

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16. Hartman, Boundaries, 111–29.

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18. Hartman, Boundaries, 139.

19. Krippner, et. al., “Ramtha Phenomenon,” 14–15.

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21. Jess Stearn identifies him as Mark Burnett, a dentist with occult leanings (Jess Stearn, Soulmates [New York: Bantam Books, 1984], 119).

22. The idea of a lost continent of Atlantis goes back to Plato, while the idea of Lemuria dates only to the nineteenth century. Theosophists Helena Blavatsky and William Scott‐Elliott developed the idea of Atlantis and Lemuria as lost continents from which humanity emerged. The idea passed from the Theosophists into the occult and New Age movements. It is presupposed in the 1970s pyramid power literature that Knight apparently read before being exposed to the ideas of Edgar Cayce, Blavatsky, and others by Lorraine Graham. See G. Gordon Melton, Finding Enlightenment: Ramtha's School of Ancient Wisdom (Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing Co., 1998), 185–86; on pyramid power, cf. Wikipedia, entries for “Pyramid power” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power [accessed 27 October 2008]) and “Patrick Flanagan” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Flanagan [accessed 27 October 2008]); The Skeptics Dictionary, “Pyramidiocy” (http://www.skepdic.com/pyramidiocy.html [accessed 27 October 2008]); and G. Patrick Flanagan, The Pyramid and Its Relationship to Biocosmic Energy (Glendale, CA: Pyramid Products, 1972); and also by Flanagan, Pyramid Power: The Millennium Science (Santa Monica, CA: DeVorss, 1973) and Beyond Pyramid Power (Marina del Rey, CA: DeVorss, 1975).

23. Brown, Channeling Zone, 70–92, quotes pp. 84, 87.

24. Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars, 12, 173–74, 176–77.

25. Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars, 308.

26. Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: The Hunt for the Real Miss Beauchamp, with an introduction by Charles Rycroft (1905; reprint, New York: Oxford, 1978), 361.

27. Prince, Dissociation of a Personality, 361.

28. Prince, Dissociation of a Personality, 362–64.

29. This is a variant on the mirror‐gazing practices popular then and now used by researchers to induce anomalous experiences. See Devin Blair Terhune and Matthew D. Smith, “The Induction of Anomalous Experiences in a Mirror‐gazing Facility: Suggestion, Perceptual Personality Traits and Phenomenological State Effects,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 194, no. 6 (2006): 415–21.

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31. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM‐IV, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 765–68.

32. DSM‐IV, 767.

33. Henry Sidgwick et al., “Report on the Census of Hallucinations,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 10 (1894): 25–422; R. P. Bentall, “The Illusion of Reality: A Review and Integration of Psychological Research on Hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 83.

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36. Hobson, Dream Drugstore, 44–48.

37. Brown and Oakley, “Integrative Cognitive Theory,” 174.

38. Henry Szechtman et al., “Where the Imaginal Appears Real: A Positron Emission Tomography Study of Auditory Hallucinations,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95 (1998): 1956–60; Erik Woody and Henry Szechtman, “Hypnotic Hallucinations and Yedasentience,” Contemporary Hypnosis 17, no. 1 (2000): 26–31; and “Hypnotic Hallucinations: Towards a Biology of Epistemology,” Contemporary Hypnosis 17, no. 1 (2000): 4–14; S. J. Blakemore, David A. Oakley, and C. D. Frith, “Delusions of Alien Control in the Normal Brain,” Neuropsychologia 41, no. 8 (2003): 1058–67; Richard A. Bryan and David Mallard, “Seeing is Believing: The Reality of Hypnotic Hallucinations,” Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003): 219–30.

39. V. J. Walters and David A. Oakley, “Does Hypnosis Make in Vitro, in Vivo?: Hypnosis as a Possible ‘Virtual Reality’ Context in Cognitive‐Behavioral Therapy for an Environmental Phobia,” Clinical Case Studies 2 (2003): 295–305.

40. Chi‐yue Chiu et al., “Motivated Cultural Cognition: The Impact of Implicit Cultural Theories on Dispositional Attribution Varies as a Function of Need for Closure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 2 (2000): 247–59.

41. This literature is summarized in Ann Taves, “Where (Fragmented) Selves Meet Culture: Theorizing Spirit Possession,” Culture and Religion 7, no. 2 (2006): 123–38.

42. S. Kallio and A. Revonsuo, “Hypnotic Phenomena and Altered States of Consciousness: A Multilevel Framework of Description and Explanation,” Contemporary Hypnosis 20, no. 3 (2003): 111–64.