The Double Self in Religious Experience

An exploration of humanity's ‘double soul’ - divine and earthly - across cultures, from ancient trances to modern psychological insights.

The idea that humans have a double soul has ancient roots and can be found in most cultures and societies, including in religion and art. Phenomena such as ecstasies, trances, and out-of-body states have been observed and analysed in relation to the history of the double soul and its occurrence in different cultures. How can we understand these experiences? What is their significance for our understanding of how people view eternity and the secular world? Can they be explained in psychological terms?

The anthology The Double Self in the Religious Experience explores the idea that people have a double soul, part divine and part earthly. Some of our era’s most prominent historians of religion, historians of ideas, social anthropologists, and psychologists provide an in-depth analysis of the subject from a philosophical and historical perspective, as well as give an account of the situation today. The book includes previously unpublished texts on Hilma af Klint’s view of double souls.

Kurt Almqvist, CEO at Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit since 1999 and initiator of Axess Magasin and Axess TV as well as the yearly Engelsberg Seminar. 
Gerard Colas obtained a Ph.D. at Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris) for a thesis devoted toarchitecture techniques in selected Sanskrit texts. 
Jessica Frazier is a lecturer at Oxford University and the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. She explores philosophical themes of ontology, selfhood and flourishing across cultures. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies.
Pehr Granqvist is a Professor of developmental psychology from Stockholm University, Sweden. He has published a large body of international peer-review journal articles and chapters on attachment, religion, spirituality, and secularism. 
Isidoros Katsos is Assistant Professor of Theological Epistemology and Philosophy at the Divinity Faculty, National University of Athens. He holds a PhD in Human Rights, Ecology, and Cultural Heritage Law (Freie Universität Berlin, 2009); and a PhD in Philosophy of Religion (University of Cambridge, 2019), under the supervision of Rowan Williams. 
Gregory Shaw is Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, Massachusetts. He is the author of Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (1995 and 2014) and a number of articles on the later Neoplatonists and on Iamblichus in particular. 
Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. 
David Thurfjell is professor in the Study of religion at Södertörn university, Stockholm. 
Piers Vitebsky studied ancient languages before becoming an anthropologist, specialising in religion and ecology among Indigenous peoples of India and Arctic Siberia.