I was recently talking with a Christian about the matter of the resurrection of the famous Nazarene and the subsequent witnessing of his risen body wandering ’round Jerusalem. One chief disagreement between this gentleman and I was that, to him, it seemed ridiculous that one or more people should have hallucinated, let alone fabricated, the risen Christ, whereas I viewed, and yet do, both the former and the latter as entirely more plausible than a desert preacher rising from the grave to utter a few more of his not very helpful platitudes to a not very receptive population.
I said to this Christian, as kindly as I could, that group hallucination is very possible, and very likely occurred in this particular case, if such a case has not been totally fabricated. He demanded that it was not likely, and that, thus, the only explanation for the events in that old Jerusalem town, amongst the blooming of the spring flowers and the Roman occupiers dreaming of returning home and abandoning their Hebraic harlots, is that they occurred just as the four Gospelists contradictorily claim they did. To cure him of this folly, or at least distract him with something new, I said he ought to read Gustave Le Bon’s great study of The Crowd, or the ‘public mind’—Psychologie des Foules (literally Psychology of Crowds). Considerably to the Christian’s credit, he did not become high-toned but, rather, promised that he would read the book. Well, whether he made it to chapter two of the first book is no present matter to me, for that chapter is, either way, most germane to the development of this brief essay’s general idea—that group hallucination is entirely possible and could reasonably be offered as an explanation for various of the events given to us by the various scriptures of the world (from which events I select a rather famous one). I shall thus include a relevant excerpt here:
The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversions that events undergo in the imagination of a throng. The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed…. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.
The ways in which a crowd perverts any event of which it is a witness ought, it would seem, to be innumerable and unlike each other, since the individuals composing the gathering are of very different temperaments. But this is not the case. As the result of contagion the perversions are of the same kind, and take the same shape in the case of all the assembled individuals.
The first perversion of the truth effected by one of the individuals of the gathering is the starting-point of the contagious suggestion. Before St. George appeared on the walls of Jerusalem to all the Crusaders he was certainly perceived in the first instance by one of those present. By dint of suggestion and contagion the miracle signalised by a single person was immediately accepted by all.
Such is always the mechanism of the collective hallucinations so frequent in history—hallucinations which seem to have all the recognised characteristics of authenticity, since they are phenomena observed by thousands of persons.
…
The following fact is one of the most typical, because chosen from among collective hallucinations of which a crowd is the victim, in which are to be found individuals of every kind, from the most ignorant to the most highly educated. It is related incidentally by Julian Felix, a naval lieutenant, in his book on “Sea Currents,” and has been previously cited by the Revue Scientifique.
The frigate, the Belle Poule, was cruising in the open sea for the purpose of finding the cruiser Le Berceau, from which she had been separated by a violent storm. It was broad daylight and in full sunshine. Suddenly the watch signalled a disabled vessel; the crew looked in the direction signalled, and every one, officers and sailors, clearly perceived a raft covered with men towed by boats which were displaying signals of distress. Yet this was nothing more than a collective hallucination. Admiral Desfosses lowered a boat to go to the rescue of the wrecked sailors. On nearing the object sighted, the sailors and officers on board the boat saw “masses of men in motion, stretching out their hands, and heard the dull and confused noise of a great number of voices.” When the object was reached those in the boat found themselves simply and solely in the presence of a few branches of trees covered with leaves that had been swept out from the neighbouring coast. Before evidence so palpable the hallucination vanished.
The mechanism of a collective hallucination of the kind we have explained is clearly seen at work in this example. On the one hand we have a crowd in a state of expectant attention, on the other a suggestion made by the watch signalling a disabled vessel at sea, a suggestion which, by a process of contagion, was accepted by all those present, both officers and sailors.
It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced by hallucinations unrelated to them. As soon as a few individuals are gathered together they constitute a crowd, and, though they should be distinguished men of learning, they assume all the characteristics of crowds with regard to matters outside their specialty. The faculty of observation and the critical spirit possessed by each of them individually at once disappear.[1]
So, we learn from the wealthy examples given to us by the great French lumière that group hallucination is indeed as common as the earth I stand upon, which is mere urban soil. And with this knowledge of Le Bon’s we can freely wonder amongst ourselves—and perhaps do! Amongst the fresh questions we may hear between our now less hollow heads are two which are louder than any others, which I shall now name.
The first: Is it likelier that one of God’s personalities, after coming down from the firmament and establishing himself as one of the many insignificant, featherless bipeds in Jerusalem who were nattering about the approaching end times and having himself crucified, rose as an undead man and visited his faithful, or that the followers of an ordinary human preacher, profoundly grief-stricken after losing the steward of their group madness, indulged in another religious hallucination together after he had gone?
And the second question we are given by the Le Bonian chorus ringing between our ears: Later, is it likelier that these same followers, remaining grief-stricken and growing madder, beheld another of God’s split personalities come down to them in the form of ‘tongues like as of fire,’ or merely hallucinated again, perhaps even because some bird or other creature threw itself through an open window and, being struck just right by the light coming through with it, and stirring the dust artfully, inspired so profound a serenity within the worshippers beholding it that they collectively hallucinated what they desired to hallucinate—namely, their peculiar new God delivering a fresh word to them and causing them to babble in one-hundred or more undiscernible ‘tongues’? Perhaps even there was one disciple—it is not my business whom the reader should like to imagine as this disciple—who first hallucinated, stood, and cried, ‘It is the Lord!’ (in tongues: ‘Hazbuah tir el!) and truly believed it. Taking into account the great commonness of group hallucination, both within and without cults, we may say that in both cases we know that latter to be likelier. This work of Le Bon’s, amongst his others, gives any reader of it a responsibility—this namely: to pay greater attention to the truly scientific facts of human life and social psychology. It is hence an easy and happy read for all naturalists. And it is the responsibility of the latter group to politely tell—and only when asked—those who choose to believe in something more than the natural that their wonderings about the seemingly impossible can perhaps be answered by such works as Le Bon’s.
Notes
[1] This excerpt is from the anonymous translation into English of The Crowd, Book I, Chapter II, Part II, published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1896, after its French publication in 1895. It’s available at the Internet Archive as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.