The discovery that two events, symbols, thoughts or texts, while so utterly separated by time and space that they could not “really” be connected, seem, nevertheless, to be the same or to be speaking directly to one another raises the possibility of a secret interconnection of things that is the scholar’s most cherished article of faith.

I had just such a thrill this morning.  It began after reading Geoffrey MacDonald’s story about the thriving spiritualism market in Salem, Massachusetts, where — side by side and with remarkable comity — witches and evangelicals offer services for those who believe the world is populated by all manner of spirits that can be propitiated in one way or another:

Every October, an estimated half-million visitors flock to this city that hanged witches in 1692 and wholeheartedly accepts them in 2010. Amidst the costumed revelry, pagans and Christians say they sense genuine hunger for spiritual depth and strive to help tourists embrace their respective traditions. And in this festival atmosphere, both sides make a point not to vilify the other.

What appears to be a kind of Christian-Wicca syncretism may seem incongruous but it makes sense, given their shared assumptions about the myriad spirits that invisibly operate on everything:

Paying customers were lined up outside witch houses and psychic parlors when 20-year-old Casey Sholes of Willimantic, Conn., finally stumbled across a place offering dream interpretations for free.

Inside, two interpreters at “The Vault” assured the aspiring nurse that despite her weird dream, the Creator has blessed her with special talents and a heart for the elderly.

It wasn’t until she got up to leave that she learned she had just gotten a spiritual reading from Christian evangelists inside a church.

“I didn’t even notice that this is a church,” Stoles said, leaving the former bank building that’s now home to a congregation called “The Gathering.”

Founded 12 years ago, “The Gathering” has become so friendly with local witches that the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel cut its ties and funding, according to Pastor Phil Wyman.

The line between Christianity and witchcraft has always been thin (with many border transgressions), a fact which is on commercial display in Salem.  Though it might be easy for non-evangelical Christians to dismiss this connection as a product of the charismatic imagination, which sees good and evil spirits as real and pervasive forces working on every aspect of daily life, this would be a mistake.  Catholics — they of possessions, exorcisms, saints, rosaries, and transubstantiation — are much in evidence:

Visitors from near and far ask for disciplined direction in matters of love, health and money. Laurie “Lorelei” Stathopoulos, who describes herself as a high priestess of witchcraft, called advice-seeking Catholics “my best clients” at her store, Crowe Haven Corner.

“They come in, they get readings, and they still stay Catholic,” she said. “Their religion has had its ups and downs, so they’re quite confused. They’re not looking for a new religion, but they’re looking for a little more hope and stability … They don’t want to go the church (for advice), but they’ll come to me.”

While reading MacDonald’s article I was of course thinking about Africa, that vast continent where indigenous beliefs mingle so freely and easily with Islam, Catholicism, and evangelical Christianity in particular.  Then — bam — the coincidence that brings so much thrill: I journey over to Slate, where Johann Hari reviews V.S. Naipaul’s new book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief.  Hari is quite up to his task:

There is a great thudding taboo in any discussion of Africa. Western journalists and aid workers see it everywhere, yet it is nowhere in our coverage back home. We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t know how to. We smother it in silence, even though it is one of the most vivid and vibrant and violent parts of African life. We are afraid—of being misunderstood, or of sounding like our own ugliest ancestors. The suppressed topic? The African belief in spirits and spells and ancestors and black magic.

Where do these beliefs come from? What do so many Africans get out of them? Can they be changed? These are questions that are asked in Africa all the time, but we are deaf to the conversation. It’s not hard to see why. The imperial rape and pillage of Africa was “justified” by claiming Africans were “primitive” and “backward” people sunk in a morass of voodoo, who had to be “civilized” in blood and Christianity.

This “civilizing process” was of course greatly aided by Christian missionaries working closely with European colonial governments.  While various forms of state sanctioned Christianity took considerable root, these efforts pale in comparison to the spiritual movement now sweeping the continent: charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity.

Those familiar with indigenous African beliefs on the one hand and evangelical Christianity on the other are hardly surprised by this.  Both bodies of belief have this in common: the world is heavily populated with spirits who affect everything in it.  People can use a variety of techniques to control and direct these spirits.

Africans themselves do not see much difference between the prayers, intercessions, and exorcisms that evangelicals use to control these spirits, and the rituals used by witch doctors to accomplish the same things.  Neither do I.

As I have mentioned in several previous posts, one of autism’s effects is a lack of “theory of mind.”  This in turn renders autistics unable to conceive of supernatural agents, gods, or spirits.  It therefore comes as no surprise that autistics are not religious.

None of this, however, prevented an evangelical in Indiana from attempting to cure autism with an exorcism.  The Courthouse News Service reports:

Uyesugi told the grandma that her grandson “could be cured of his autism by having ‘the demons’ cast out of his body.”

She told Uyesugi to go ahead, and he performed the exorcism with help from Aaron Raby, who restrained Jacob while Uyesugi assaulted him, the insurer says.

During the exorcism, Uyesugi “repeatedly struck [Jacob] on the chest, commanding ‘the demons’ to leave [Jacob's] body,’” according to the complaint.

Uyesugi also “put his hand down Jacob’s throat, claiming that ‘demons’ were inside causing Jacob to vomit blood,” the insurer says.

And he struck Jacob in the face while Aaron restrained him, according to the complaint.

A Monroe County jury convicted Uyesugi of felony battery and criminal confinement.

Glad to see he was convicted and will be pondering his delusions from jail.

Elsewhere in evangelical world, exorcisms to cure homosexuality are all the rage.  Over at Details, Matt Mcallester has posted a disturbing article titled “Deliverance: The True Story of a Gay Exorcism.”  Ironically, it is these Pentecostals who are ill and in need of a cure.  Another case of inmates controlling the asylum.

Research performed in the 1980s at Denison University by the late anthropologist Felicitas Goodman led to a theory that glossolalia was a trance state caused by rhythmic discharges from the reticular formation, an area of the brain stem that plays a role in sleep and dreams. Goodman believed that this represented an alternative neural pathway for language, but more recent research has cast light on activity in other areas of the brain.

In 2006, Andrew Newberg and associates conducted the first functional neuroimaging study of cerebral changes during the act of glossolalia. In the study, published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, Newberg and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania managed to run single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scans to measure regional cerebral blood flow in the brains of five people during episodes of active glossolalia.  Newberg, the director for the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, discovered that activity the frontal lobes decreased, including activity in the brain’s primary language processing centers.

As noted elsewhere in the blog, I have serious doubts about the practice of imaging brains in an effort to identify localized regions of activity and interest.  It is not like the rest of the brain is disengaged or shut down, and using questionable statistical techniques and false coloration to specify small areas of heightened activity does not tell us much about what is happening inside the brain.  It is akin to high-tech phrenology.

The more interesting studies of “speaking in tongues” have been done by linguists, who uniformly conclude that the utterances of those under the thrall of the spirit resemble no known human languages, and fail to display any of the aspects of universal grammar identified by Noam Chomsky.  These words, in other words, appear to be gibberish, or languages spoken in another part of the universe.  You can find one such study here.