Research field 03 · Ritual Space
States of consciousness, trance and transformation
Ritual spaces shift attention, body feeling, sense of time and self-reference. This field orders the terms for such states and clarifies what a single word like trance conceals.
Which modes of experience does a ritual space work with, and how can they be distinguished without losing them in a vague notion of trance?
Core thesis
The ritual space does not produce a single state. It is a container for changes of state: music, body, rhythm, group, space, sensory perception, expectation, symbolism and social roles can together change how people perceive time, body, self and world.
A single word like trance conceals that very different modes can appear within the same course: focused absorption, bodily activation, collective synchrony, the giving up of control, ecstatic intensification, calm integration or a culturally framed experience of possession.
The research therefore moves away from a blanket notion of trance towards a spectrum: altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness, absorption, dissociation, flow, suggestion, entrainment, set and setting. For my work this shift is central, because it makes intense experience describable without mystifying it or pathologising it prematurely.
Why “trance” alone is too narrow
Trance is a historically heavily loaded term. It can mean possession, absorption, rhythmic movement, exhaustion, suggestion, ecstasy, absence or deep gathering. Depending on the discipline, the same situation is read differently: ethnologically as possession trance, psychologically as dissociation, in musical terms as absorption, performatively as flow or religiously as being seized.
This is exactly why the project needs precise language. More useful than the yes/no question of trance is a dimensional reading: which dimensions change? Does attention narrow or widen? Is the body activated or calmed? Is control given up or increased? Does an individual experience arise, or a collective state? Is there bringing back and integration?
This conceptual work guards against two shortcuts. One shortcut would be glorification: as if every intense state were automatically spiritual, healing or deep. The other would be reduction: as if everything could be broken down to arousal, brainwaves or rhythm. The ritual space lies between these two poles.
A conceptual cartography
The terms are not closed drawers. They form a mobile field in which qualities of experience overlap. For the website a cartography is therefore more useful than a rigid taxonomy: what helps to read a concrete course more precisely? How a state is interpreted — as possession, dissociation, flow or being seized — also depends on cultural and ontological frames; different interpretations of the world classify the same experience differently.
ASC / Non-Ordinary States
Umbrella terms for marked, mostly temporary changes in perception, body feeling, thinking, affect and self-reference. Useful as a frame, but too broad for detailed analysis.
Trance and ecstasy
Here trance denotes an inward-turned, often half-conscious or unconscious expanded state. Ecstasy means rather a conscious, outward-directed expansion, intensity and transgression.
Absorption
A deep binding of attention to sound, movement, image or action. This term explains why repetition can condense perception and act as a bodily-mental deepening.
Dissociation
An altered connection between self, body, perception and memory. It can be pathological, everyday or ritually framed; what matters is context, control, after-effect and interpretation.
Flow
Becoming absorbed in an activity with high structure, skill and feedback. Important for music and performance; compared to possession trance, agency is more strongly retained.
Set and setting
Inner disposition and outer frame: expectation, space, group, safety, symbolism, language, light, smell, roles. The same sound works differently when the frame is different.
EEG and measurement
EEG describes the brain's electrical activity in frequency bands: beta for awake, focused activity, alpha for relaxed wakefulness, theta for the edge of the threshold, drowsiness and deep absorption, gamma for high integration. State changes can additionally be studied via breathing, heart rate, skin conductance, observation and questionnaires.
Crisis and discharge
Rouget distinguishes ritual courses that aim at a crisis, discharge or visible shift of control from quieter, crisis-free forms of gathering. Both directions belong to the steering of states.
- Vertical axis: top ecstasy / expansion of consciousness (outward, conscious), bottom trance / dissociation (inward, unconscious).
- Horizontal axis: left loss of control, right gain of control.
- Examples: meditation and flow top right, ecstatic rituals top centre, possession trance bottom centre.
Model after Ruth-Inge Heinze, as presented in Petzold 2011.
For this project the main distinction lies on the axes conscious/unconscious and contraction/expansion. Trance can denote gathering, withdrawal, a shift of control and an unconscious or half-conscious change of state. Ecstasy means opening, transgression, conscious intensity and expansive aliveness.
Rouget's separation of trance and ecstasy remains important as an intuition, because it marks different directions of experience. Visible movement is one possible marker among several: there is moving trance, still ecstasy, contracted movement and expansive stillness.
More recent research on states reads trance, absorption, flow, meditation, hypnosis, dissociation and substance-induced experiences as overlapping clusters on a continuum. They differ in attention, ego dynamics, bodily activation, affect, control and cultural interpretation.
For ritual spaces this openness is decisive. An emotional crisis can become the threshold of an expanded state when it is held by group, role and bringing back. Other rituals work precisely through calm, evenness and contemplative stabilisation. Substances can produce intensification in Western club, rave or psychedelic-therapeutic contexts; in this research they remain a contextual factor.
Seven axes of state change
In the research manuscript this becomes a multidimensional cartography that describes a state through the axes along which it moves. These axes are especially helpful for the website because they make visible why music, body, group and atmosphere belong together.
- Attention: focused and narrowed, as in absorption and flow, or wide and unbounded, as in mystical experiences of unity.
- Affect: calm and collected, or highly intense, euphoric, shattering, ambivalent.
- Body: gathering and contraction, opening and expansion, stillness, dance, rotation, breath, voice, exhaustion.
- Symbolism: reduced and secular, or densely framed by colours, scents, entities, myths, names and roles.
- Control: agency is retained, partly given up, or in the extreme collapses.
- Sociality: individual immersion, or collective synchrony through singing, clapping, dancing and witnessing.
- Ego dynamics: self-intensification, self-forgetting, ego dissolution or a later reordering.
Material finding: the Gnawa Lila
The Lila (also Derdeba) is the night-long ritual of the Gnawa. My own fieldwork on it showed early on that state changes do not arise from a single sonic stimulus. They are prepared, intensified, marked and brought back. Music, dance, colour, incense, social role and ritual order act as a connected setting.
The Lila is a particularly strong example because it combines several modes of experience in one course. It contains hypnotic uniformity through repetition and ostinato, ecstatic intensification through tempo and movement, culturally framed possession through the relationship to the mluk, and social stabilisation through group, Maalem and Muqaddema.
On this reading the Lila is less a single state than a choreographed movement through a space of states. For ritual space it is precisely this course that is decisive: entry, intensification, shift of control, witnessing and bringing back.
- The Maalem steers music, tempo, transitions and situational response.
- The Muqaddema knows colours, scents, props and bringing back.
- The group sings, witnesses, stabilises and carries the intensity.
- Trance is a socially organised process and involves more than inner experience.
- Possession is a cultural grammar and must be read in context.
- Bringing back is a safety-relevant part of the ritual with its own function.
Sources
- Arystan Petzold: Musik und Trance (2011). Starting point for trance induction, multi-factor logic, the Gnawa Lila, tempo course, Maalem and ritual setting.
- Arystan Petzold, research manuscript 2026: Trance, ecstasy and consciousness. Basis for the multidimensional cartography of attention, affect, body, symbolism, control, sociality, ego dynamics and the axes conscious/unconscious and contraction/expansion.
- Arnold M. Ludwig: “Altered States of Consciousness” (1966) and Charles T. Tart: Altered States of Consciousness (1969). Classic foundations for ASC as a field of research.
- Ruth-Inge Heinze: Trance and Healing in Southeast Asia Today (1988). Foundational reference on shamanism and trance; a model for a graded classification of altered states of consciousness, used in Petzold 2011 as a frame of reference.
- Gilbert Rouget: Music and Trance (1985). Foundational for music, trance and possession; important today, but not to be read as a rigid either/or of trance and ecstasy.
- Erika Bourguignon: Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change (1973) and I. M. Lewis: Ecstatic Religion (1971/2003). Anthropological foundations on possession, culture and the social function of trance.
- Tellegen & Atkinson: “Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences” (1974), Ruth Herbert: Everyday Music Listening (2011), Judith Becker: Deep Listeners (2004). Important lines on absorption, listening, music and trancing.
- Csikszentmihalyi: Flow (1990), Seligman & Kirmayer (2008), Vaitl et al. (2005), Gosseries et al. (2024), Cardeña et al. (2025), Fort et al. (2025). Psychological, clinical and more recent taxonomic reference points for research on states, continuum models and overlapping clusters of states.
- Hartmut Rosa: Resonance (2016) and The Uncontrollability of the World (2018). Philosophical reference point for resonance, control and the limit of full controllability.
- Deborah Kapchan: Traveling Spirit Masters (2007). Important for Gnawa, the cultural grammar of possession and the tension between local practice and global circulation.
Open research status
More recent research provides better concepts, measuring instruments and neurophysiological models. Laboratory studies can isolate individual components: absorption, rhythm, suggestion, breath, movement, neural coupling. The ritual context additionally requires ethnographic description, experiential accounts, source criticism and artistic practice.
For the project this means: the limits of the measurable are not the limits of the real. Measuring instruments are forms of control; ritual effect cannot be made fully available. In Hartmut Rosa's terms, it is precisely this uncontrollability that is a condition for resonance to arise. An open question remains: how can bringing back and integration be reliably shaped in secular formats?