The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science

The search for transcendence is by no means limited to the Faustian West or the major world religions. Indeed, tribal peoples around the globe practice diverse but related forms of the spiritual quest. In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary study, Torrance argues that the quest is rooted in our biological, psychological, linguistic, and social nature. The human being is as much animal quaerens - the questing animal - in scientific inquiry as in shamanistic flight. The quest, for Torrance, is the effort to transcend our given limits in pursuit of a goal that cannot be wholly known in advance. It is a search for visionary truths, which are then transmitted in narratives that provide metaphors for individual and social transformation. Drawing on thinkers as diverse as Bergson and Piaget, van Gennep and Turner, Peirce and Popper, Freud and Darwin, Torrance concludes that the spiritual quest is not a rare mystical experience but an expression of human impulses. In first exploring the foundations of the spiritual quest, Torrance demonstrates that human culture is not a static affirmation of an immutable past but a perpetually transitional process. He then examines variations of this activity in the myths and religious practices of tribal peoples throughout the world, from Oceania to India, Africa, Siberia, and the Americas. Torrance finds that, even in the seemingly fixed rituals of agricultural and ancestral rites, change and futurity find a place. The role of the unknown greatly expands in spirit possession through communication with the beyond. Yet nowhere, Torrance shows, is the creative tension between communal ceremony and individual aspiration more striking than in the native cultures of North and South America, and nowhere does the drive for transcendence attain fuller expression than in the vision quests of the Northeastern Woodlands and of the Great Plains. In concluding his richly varied study of the quest, Torrance theorizes that this fundamental human activity must be understood as a ternary relation, outside the binary oppositions of structuralist thought. Through this inherently transitional activity, humanity transcends the continual impasse of the given in search of what lies forever beyond. Shaman and scientist, medium and poet, prophet and philosopher, all venture forth in quest of visionary truths to transform and renew the world to which they must always return.