Since 1969, the Alister Hardy Archive has collected firsthand accounts of religious experience from ordinary people. We studied 2,080 of them.
We categorized each account across 17 types of religious experience, from divine presence and mystical union to precognition and healing. Most accounts describe more than one type.
Divine presence, a felt sense of God, the sacred, or an ultimate reality, appeared in nearly half of all accounts, making it the most commonly reported type.
Light experiences (36%) and divine communication (36%) were nearly as frequent, suggesting the experience of light and the sense of receiving a message are central features of the phenomenon.
Philosopher William James identified four hallmarks of religious experience in his 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience: noetic quality, ineffability, transience, and passivity. We assessed all nine qualities he described across every account.
Framework: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Unlike contemporary awakening accounts where meditation and spiritual practice are common triggers, the Hardy Archive skews toward crisis and prayer. These are accounts from people who were not typically on a spiritual path, the experience arrived unbidden.
Spontaneous experiences (29%), arriving without any discernible trigger, are also frequent, consistent with Hardy's original finding that such experiences are more widespread than either researchers or the public had assumed.
In most accounts, the experience left a permanent mark. Faith was deepened or transformed in nearly half of all cases. Fear of death was reduced in a quarter. Meaning was restored in a third.
These are not descriptions of pleasant moments that faded. They are accounts of events that reorganized how people understood their lives, and in many cases, who they were.
In 1969, zoologist Sir Alister Hardy placed a newspaper notice asking people who had experienced "a presence or power beyond themselves" to write in. Over 6,700 letters arrived. Hardy believed religious experience was a natural phenomenon, as real and worth studying as any other aspect of human biology.
The collection is held by the Religious Experience Research Centre at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. We analyzed 2,080 accounts from this archive using AI-assisted tagging with human adjudication.
How we analyzed the accounts →Each dimension reveals a different facet of the accounts. Together they form a picture of religious experience that is richer than any single frame.