ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century discourse on the body turned to sciences such as biology to make the body into a knowable contraption. Spiritualists, Theosophists, and other new religious movements legitimized their religious experiences by grounding them within a scientific body. Religious experience became entangled with new scientific approaches to the mind, especially the up-and-coming discipline of psychiatry. Frederic Myers, Andrew Jackson Davis, Richard Bucke, and William James are just a few who begin to position religious experience within the scientific/psychiatric body. This chapter explores the relationship between psychiatry and new religious movements, focusing on how the body becomes theorized as something both scientifically knowable and simultaneously capable of unique religious experiences.
