ABSTRACT
This chapter examines religious and medical interpretations of unusual subjective experience and deals with a case of late eighteenth-century deliberate self-harm. The use of dreams and visions, on the one hand, and the label of insanity, on the other, to promote a secular cause or to discredit political and religious opponents are contrasted with the exploitation of mental illness in mitigation by persecuted religious heretics. Examples are drawn from sixteenth-century Madrid, counter-reformation Italy and South Africa in the 1920s. Visions, trances, possession and Messianic beliefs have been construed in various historical periods in either secular or religious terms. Both possession and madness caused the destruction of order, the devil wreaking havoc on the cosmic scale, insanity causing chaos within the individual; loss of ‘reason’ meant erosion of the soul. Psychiatric labels have been used to discredit the religious innovator and the political radical, while on other occasions the prophet has evaded his secular or ecclesiastical persecutors by invoking madness.
