Psychotropic Elements in Hermas’s First Two Visions: Between Experience and Culture

The second century Roman Empire, with its travelling and reading/writing practices and its growing array of con- sumer goods of these types, provides several opportunities to apply the emerging approach of neurohistory. The Shepherd depicts a cultural agent (i.e. Hermas) even more dependent on devices, practices, and rituals that shape or modulate brain-body chemistry, that of his own as well as those of his addressees. Paraphrasing what Daniel L. Smail has observed, Hermas appears as a cultural agent who is fearful of the boredom that ensues when the body is not being continuously stimulated. He lives in an everyday cultural context that alters his moods and feelings on a regular basis, and he offers his readers yet another way to alter and regulate their moods and feelings. Hermas’s account is primarily a text. According to contemporary academic debate, experiences matter even more. Because they are now taken to be important forms of symbolic communication within societies, experiences have assumed a more central position in political and religious history, so thus the relationship of experiences to texts has also changed. Following Catherine Bell on rituals and texts, experience is no longer imagined as the stereotyped activity of a script fixed by text, but as a form of individual expressive acting, for which the text can be understood to provide only architectural and spatial constraints. As such, texts may seem to be a kind of opaque mirror for the reconstruction of experiences. The Shepherd offers a useful example for analyzing how Hermas acts through psychotropic experiences and re-modulates them. If psychotropic experiences matter in society, their literary re-modulations must matter in texts. The Shepherd does not constitute a hermetically sealed realm. It participates in the wider culture and society in which it was created. In that space, Hermas’s account has a psychotropic dimension irrespective of the non-historical fictitious character in which these experiences are embedded. The Shepherd is inevitably part of a specific mode of re-modulating psychotropic experiences that we call religion.