“Seek Pain, seek pain, pain, pain!” – Rumi

          In cultures across the globe and throughout time, people have been inflicting painful body rituals on themselves as a method of exploring religious experience. What are the religious and psychological motivations for such actions? It can be suggested that pain within ritual context fulfil certain psychological needs in humans. What are these needs and do such rituals affect them? Does the use of pain reflect a love of endorphins, a deeper experience or a psychological imbalance? This paper seeks to discuss ritualised self-inflicted pain and explore potential answers to these questions.
          Pain is a broad category within religious ritual and is perhaps the most taboo in Western society. Despite this, rituals involving pain can be found cross culturally in many different faiths from around the world, often among ascetics. Some are inflicted by others, many are self-inflicted. One well-known example of religious masochism is the piercing performed during the Plains Indians’ Sundance (Bolelli). Other examples could be found in the practices of Hindu yogis like Kavadi and fire walking (Wulff 89), Christian flagellants, Muslim Shi’ite self-injury (Esposito 113) and body scarification among African tribal religions. There is Buddhist lore of Zen students achieving enlightenment after being injured by their masters (Horgan 134). All of these actions share a common thread of valuing pain as important to religious experience.
          On a biological level, all pain is virtually the same. What takes place in the body is universal among humans, though reactions are often heavily dependant on the context (Glucklich 15). The American Medical Association describes pain as an “unpleasant sensation related to tissue damage” (11). When a human feels pain, the body will release adrenalin into the blood stream, raises heart rate and respiration, as well as flooding the blood stream with sugars and redistributing blood within the heart, lungs and limbs and away from organs (71). This is known as the “fight-or-flight” response, evolving in humans as a means of survival (70, 72).
          However, there is more to the experience of pain than the physiological responses by the human body. There is evidence to suggest that the feeling of pain is often minimised or completely ignored if there are more pressing circumstances present. This is often the case with soldiers who experience severe injuries and report feeling no pain until they are removed from danger (Wall 137). The importance of context suggests that the mind plays a large role in the way pain is felt and interpreted (Glucklich 52). This can also be seen by comparing the reactions of car accident victims and soldiers who experience the same injury; research shows that the accident victim will often report higher levels of pain and emotional damage, while the soldier will account much less pain and view it in the positive context of a “lifesaver” (59, 88).
          Ascetics have long acknowledged the value of placing pain in the appropriate context. It is exactly the psychological effort of placing their sufferings into a context they feel is relevant and important that many can endure their self-injury (or even natural pains). Catholic Saint Maria Maddalena is one such example; for much of her life, Maria inflicted severe torture on herself in an effort to “transform her mind into an instrument of Jesus.” However, when Maria become severely ill, she found the pain of her illness unbearable until she learned to place that, too, into a context of value that brought the pain meaning and made it “desirably sweet” (Glucklich 83).
          To fully understand the value of pain within body ritual, one must examine the models by which pain has been historically used within ritual. Despite the fact that pain is, on a biological level, always the same (c-fiber excitation), people have used within many different paradigms of faith.
          Ariel Glucklich outlines five relevant ways in which pain is approached within a religious context. The Juridical model describes ritual pain that is approached from the perspective of punishment. Glucklick offers the example of the flagellant, hurting themselves as penance for their sins. He also suggests that this pain has the advantage of removing fear of punishment from a greater source (God or karma) or one’s own guilt. (16-21). The military model is compared to a battle against an enemy. Though most would view pain as the enemy, Christian and Muslim writers often have viewed the embodied soul as the enemy. From this, pain actually becomes the weapon by which the enemy is fought; hurting the flesh is used to liberate the soul. John Calvin was one famous Christian theologian who held to this perspective. Ascetics who subscribe to this psychology of pain highly value the pain they wreak on themselves, and often natural pains they may suffer from. Simeon the Stylite, a Catholic saint, is said to have literally tortured himself to death for love of pain (23-24). There is athletic pain, which involves using pain as a tool for training the body as common with yogis (24-25). A magical model for pain is characterised as a transformative occurrence often experienced by mystics (25-28). Lastly, Glucklick discusses psychotropic/ecstatic pain, which is used to stimulate euphoric states or altered levels of consciousness, which he also attributes to ascetics of various religions (30-31).
          It is vital to understand the way our bodies react to pain to understand why people have historically used it as a tool for religious and mystical experience. Ralph W. Hood Jr., a sociologist who has conducted experiments on the body under stress, has suggested that the mind can turn stress in the body into bursts of ecstasy, in an effort to temporarily relieve the tension. Simply reversing the norms that the body experiences – causing the body to act and feel sensations that are not common within daily life – can create a temporary high within the individual that can bring a feeling of transcendence (Ellwood 141).
          Endorphins also play a heavy role in pain-induced religious experiences. Feeling a sensation of pain, the body reacts by secreting a pain-relieving chemical that can also induce feelings of euphoria. Research shows that during periods of prolonged physical activity (including pain) within humans, there is a physiological response of an increased heart rate, lowered blood pressure, reduction of stress hormones and release of these endorphins. Together these can create an altered state of conscious and a temporary “high” (Wulff 88). The attraction of self-inflicted pain ritual may be closely tied to this.
          Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili classify the pain method of religious experience as “bottom-up.” In this method, the religious experience being sought is achieved by “exploit[ing] the arousal component of the autonomic system, which triggers the body’s fight-or-flight response, causing adrenaline to be pumped into the bloodstream, boosting heart rate and respiration” (Horgan 74). In Robert Ellwood’s polarity of techniques in mystic experience, pain falls at one end of the “Hard-Easy” class, as it often involves going through physically difficult and strenuous experiences in order to reach the goal (86).
          It is important to note that the association with physiological reactions within the body and mystical experiences does not imply that reducing these occurrences to purely physical states is an accurate representation. It would be logically fallacious to assume that because altered brain states can be simulated or induced within the laboratory through pain usage (or, more frequently, meditation or drug use), that there is nothing “beyond” those states. It is possible that these altered physiological states simply make the mind more receptive to the metaphysical. William James himself argues strongly against this assumption of medical reductionism (15). Likewise, Andrew Newberg also emphasises that an experience cannot be judged solely by the neurological event that may be its basis; having a measurable biological difference does not invalidate any such experiences (Horgan 82).
          From aforementioned models, one can see the various perspectives by which pain is viewed within a religious context. But what value does pain bring to those who use it within their rituals? There are several primary values that mystics and users of pain ritual have claim: for emotional release, for relief of guilt or payment for sins, as a means of self-sacrifice, or to experience an altered state of consciousness or connection with the divine.
          Often pain is used as a way to achieve a great emotional release, as the stress on the body from the pain can produce emotional responses that might not otherwise have been accomplished. A Lakota man suffering from many problems and accompanying depression tells of his experience receiving chest piercings at the Sun Dance ceremony, “I felt pain, but I also felt that closeness with the Creator. I felt like crying for all the people who needed my prayers. . . it brought tears to my eyes” (Glucklich 148).
          Another value found within religious pain is that of relief of guilt or pre-emptive payment for sins done wrong, which falls with the aforementioned juridical model. Many psychoanalysts, including Freud, share a similar perspective towards pain usage (Glucklich 86). This is often the reason found within the motivations of Christian saints and martyrs. In some instances, punishing the body can be viewed as a way for the person to “pay” for their committed sins, serving to both relieve guilt and anxiety towards the justice they believe will be served at death. Obviously, this can hold a positive psychological value to the person who chooses to inflict pain on themselves for this reason (17).
          Pain is also can be used as a mode of self-sacrifice. Sacrifice for one’s religious community, God, ancestors or religious figure has the value of a surrendering of the ego and symbolically showing one’s appreciation for the object of their action. This can be clearly be seen within the act of the Sun Dance of the Plains Indians, who pierce and tear their flesh as an act of physically honouring one’s ancestors and communities (Bolelli), as well as with the Muslim flagellants who injure themselves in mourning for Hussein and the massacre at Karbala (Esposito 113). Cal Jung sees this sort of self-sacrifice as a constructive surrender of the ego (Glucklich 84), but it can also be seen as a positive way of strengthening the ego and revitalizing the essential goals of the person as a whole (109).
          Lastly, pain is frequently used as a means of achieving a mystical experience, either a connection with the divine or an altered state of consciousness within oneself. This form of pain is found in both the magical and psychotropic models of pain. This can be (and often is) achieved by using pain to over-stimulate the senses to cause a change in level of consciousness (Wulff 75). This can be seen in many ascetical practices and also within the contemporary movement paradoxically named “modern primitivism” which often uses painful body ritual for spiritual or psychological advancement (Pitts 125). Through the use of pain, an over stimulated body will react by releasing chemicals such as endorphins that can lead to altered physiological and psychological states (Ellwood 141). It is here that people often may experience a connection with the divine or an altered mental state within themselves.
          While self-inflicted pain within a religious context is not a common topic for writings within psychology, one can find writings discussing pain using object-relations theory and from the psychoanalytical view (particularly Freud and Jung) and William James’ functionalist perspective.
          Freud and Freudian psychoanalysts hold the perspective that self-inflicted religious pain is the ego’s reaction to feelings of guilt, stimulated by issues entrenched within the superego.” Glucklich gives the example of the Christian mystic who wears a corset embedded with nails; Freudian psychoanalysts would see this as evidence of a psychological conflict of trying to repress the seductive nature of flesh (41). Freud’s interpretation sees self-inflicted pain as serving a negative function or role within the religious person’s life (89). From this perspective, the function of pain is the appeasement of the psychological struggle to deal with the relations between the ego and the superego, often in the context of religious guilt of a sexual nature. Masochists of this nature are very often associated with sexuality within psychoanalytical writings, eroticising pain as a means of controlling guilt (86). Though Freud did not, Carl Jung differentiated between pathological neurosis and self-sacrificial forms of religious pain, the former being destructive and the latter being a positive surrender of the ego (84). Later psychoanalysts expanded their evaluations of the use of pain to extend past sexual feelings to other cultural issues. The focus shifts to viewing the object as a means of affirming self-worth or an extension of one’s identity (101).
          Object-relations theory, an offshoot of psychoanalysis, also provides a similar means of exploring the function of religious masochism. This theory views human psychology as a world of relationships, rather than drives. From this perspective, common objects can become what is called a “self-object,” an extension of one’s self-image (Glucklich 103). In this aspect, one finds the value of pain within the tools used in religious self-hurt from the relations by which they are associated. The nail-studded corset may be associated with the mother, for example, or the razor blade with the father. The symbolism of an object when used to inflict pain may act as a tool for affecting one’s cognitive self-identity (104).
          William James, a forefront in American psychology, viewed self-inflicted religious pain from a functionalist perspective. James offers several theories on the usage of pain in religious context. He supposes it is possible that they are due to pessimistic feelings about the self, a way of escaping later suffering in the afterlife, or even the result of a distortion of the senses that allows the body to interpret pain as pleasure (252). Though James is critical of the usage of pain as excessive (304), he also believes that it can serve a role within religious faith. James believes that conversion experiences in religion are most common when the body or mind experiences a dramatic event; he writes that the “sick soul” has the greatest prospective for experiencing a connection to the divine (Glucklich 127) and cites cases with experimental psychology in which there is a large association between painful activities and spiritual experiences (128).
          It is evident that self-inflicted pain has been frequently used within religious contexts and often with great value to the practitioner. Use of religious pain has been demonstrated to have a variety of motivations, from the religious explanation to that of the psychologist. Neither science nor religion can tell whether self-inflicted pain is something simple, like neurosis or endorphin addiction or a complex and intricate mechanism for altering one’s consciousness or even making a connection with a greater reality. While there are few answers and many questions remaining, this information brings up many valid points and provides for a future of interesting exploration into the psychology of religion.