Brendan Thornton

Travel & Trance: A Phenomenology of Transcendental Pilgrimage in the Spiritual Baptist Faith

Abstract

This paper discusses the phenomenon of “travelling in the Spirit” among Spiritual Baptist Christians in Trinidad and Tobago. Spiritual Baptists do not merely talk about the spiritual world: they walk, swim, and climb through it, they measure its depths, chart its limits, and document its inhabitants; as a community, they work cooperatively to explore, map, and to verify it through the formal rite of “mourning,” a higher-consciousness-seeking ritual involving an extended period of prayer, fasting, seclusion, and deprivation. While on the mourning ground— an isolated room near or attached to the church—mourners, who are also called “pilgrim travelers,” through the cultivation of trance-like states, traverse the spiritual realm where they explore foreign landscapes and converse with gods, saints, and other beings who convey important messages and present them with gifts. Later, these expeditions are mapped by the “tracking” of Pointers—usually Leaders and Mothers of the church who are responsible for guiding pilgrims during the ritual—and recorded in summary reports given by mourners upon their return. By “giving their tracks,” that is, by giving an account of their spiritual journeys, pilgrims effectively serve as amateur cosmographers, cataloging the details of their experiences traveling the spiritual lands and revealing with each subsequent visit more of the mysteries that lie beyond the veil. Drawing on long-term comprehensive ethnographic research conducted in Trinidad and Tobago, this paper considers the role of supernatural pilgrimage alongside other modes of mystic self-transcendence in the church (including spirit mediumship, “catching power,” speaking in tongues, and astral travel) in constituting a novel phenomenology of Spirit that blurs hard distinctions between here/there, embodied/disembodied, human/divine, and for the faithful testifies to the tangible and thus incontrovertible influence of the spiritual dimension on their everyday lives. By comparing different genres of ecstatic practice employed by Spiritual Baptist churchgoers, he aims to contribute useful analysis and additional insight into the diverse modalities of spiritual engagement characteristic of Afro-Caribbean and other Black religious cultures.

Bio

Brendan Jamal Thornton is an anthropologist and associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His scholarship on religion and culture in the Caribbean has been published in Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Latin American Research Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the award-winning book Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida, 2016).