In this complex historical study informed by cognitive psychology, Ann Taves explores the “revelatory events” from which originated three quite different “spiritual paths”—the Church of Latter Day Saints, Alcoholics Anonymous, and A Course in Miracles. Since not every revelatory event gains much traction in the world, Taves seeks to understand the process by which these particular events precipitated social formations that span the globe and have endured over time. The answer, she believes, lies in a set of social variables, specifically “what [the] interacting subjects viewed as emerging [from the revelation] and how they decided to act on it” (6).

This is a rather bloodless claim, and indeed, Taves's very careful, taxonomic language and methodology (the book contains not merely an appendix on method but also seven charts reconstructing the historical documentation of the events in question) is both a feature and a bug of the project. Such dispassion, however, is warranted given the fine line that Taves tries to walk. For her aim is not simply to recount the founding events of these three organizations—that work has been done, both by devotees and debunkers. Taves makes it plain that she is neither of these and instead works respectfully in a gray middle ground trying to understand “the processes whereby [regular people] came to believe that something had been revealed by or via a suprahuman source” (1).

To get at this, the book's first, tripartite section reconstructs the revelatory event that sparked each new movement using what Taves calls “real-time documents”—accounts created contemporaneously with the event itself (10). She then traces the evolution of the event across successive accounts, paying detailed attention not merely to how word choice and narrative structure shift over time but also to how the status of the various narrators—and their own self-concept—changes as the account of the event is publicized and/or published. Concluding the story of each group is an analysis of its organizational and institutional growth (during which the narrative of the original event evolves still further), a maturation process shepherded by the original witness, as well as by the “founding teams” (the intimates of the original witness) and “first followers” of the path eventuating from the revealed information (282).

These careful reconstructions reveal the palimpsestic nature of the three organizations—each one composed of layered accounts—but Taves's claims go beyond that. Rather than static and discreet, the layers in these palimpsests are dynamic, with each overlay affecting the constitution of the ones below and above it. This poststructuralist approach to historical sedimentation foils the reader who wants to drop a definitive pin on just when and where Joseph Smith got (or fabricated) those golden plates, Bill Wilson had (or made up) his “white light” experience, and Helen Schuchman heard (or dreamed) the Voice of Jesus. In Taves's account, there are no primal scenes.

Instead—and this is where Taves's claim that she is not a debunker rings the tiniest bit hollow—there is human cognitive, narrative, and creative capacity of a sort not often encountered in everyday life as well as the will to put them to work to solve real world problems. In the book's second half, Taves turns to brain science on creativity to explain the three revelatory events, the response to the events by the original witnesses, and the adaptation of the events by the three groups. This section of the book is heady, grounded as it is in cognitive psychology research on the workings of the “default mode network” (260 passim)—the part of the brain's information processing system responsible for non-volitional thought. Drawing comparisons between Smith, Wilson, and Schuchman and the subjects of various studies on schizophrenia, hypnosis, and trance states, Taves unpacks the workings of brains that have unusually porous boundaries and heightened abilities to suspend self-censorship. Such “skilled perception,” she argues (269), gives individuals what Joseph Smith's uncle called “eyes to see things that are not and . . . the audacity to say they are” (52)—in other words, a cognitive capacity for “revelation.”

Building on this interpretation, Taves uses a similarly brain-science-driven “social identity approach to creativity” (224) to understand the mental processes that founding teams and first followers go through as they orient their own lives around the new knowledge generated by the revelatory event and the individual who provides it. Rather than devolve to explanations like “mass delusion” and “captivated by charismatic cult leader,” the social identity approach focuses on the ways that group members creatively and actively renegotiate their sense of themselves and of the group in light of information provided to the original witness to the revelatory event. Their collaboration in this regard is essential, as Taves points out: “Without group recognition, the individual claimant is likely to be perceived as eccentric, if not crazy” (239). Group recognition paves the way for the publicizing of the revealed information and the elaboration of institutional practices (church-building, publishing, study groups, etc.) that will disseminate it for the greater good.

Cognitive psychology, then, allows Taves to produce not merely a history of three spiritual paths, but a “naturalistic” (e.g., science-driven [xi]) explanation of how modern people build complex global organizations grounded, counterintuitively, in the experience of supranatural phenomena. To true believers, the elaborate and patient explaining she does will probably sound like “explaining away.” To the rest of us, Taves offers a much-needed way of respectfully splitting the difference between science- and faith-based claims. By “highlighting the role of skilled perception,” she argues, we may yet find ways “to acknowledge that some people may perceive . . . possibilities through insights or inspirations that seem to come from beyond the self” (269). In a world of increasingly polarized truth claims, we need more work like Taves's that attempts to understand, rather than simply to dismiss, “the other.”