One role was still missing from the Freiburg ensemble we have portrayed in this series: that of the man who goes out into the field. Michael Schetsche supplies the theory, Ina Schmied-Knittel the population data – but Gerhard Mayer sits with shamans and magicians, drives out to haunted houses and analyses Europe's most famous anomaly artefacts in the laboratory. The psychologist from the IGPP is the field researcher of German anomalistics – and at the same time its most important organiser.
From the cinema to the frontier
Mayer studied psychology, sociology, philosophy and art history in Freiburg and took his doctorate in psychology on a subject that has shaped his eye: the reception of occult representations in film – the question of how the supernatural reaches our imagination via the screen. Whoever starts there knows once and for all that between the phenomenon and its image in people's heads stands a media machine. Today Mayer works in the IGPP's department for empirical cultural and social research; his topics include, alongside the fieldwork, the social stigmatisation of exceptional experiences and their biographical integration – the question of how people live on with what has happened to them, and what it costs them to speak about it.
The ethnographer: among shamans and magicians
Mayer's trademark is participatory closeness. For "Schamanismus in Deutschland" (2003) he surveyed the heterogeneous neo-shamanic scene and interviewed practitioners – with a double interest: the exceptional phenomena regularly reported there touch core topics of parapsychology, and the deliberate induction of altered states of consciousness makes the practitioners interesting for consciousness research. Five years later came "Arkane Welten" (2008): biographical interviews with contemporary magicians – their life paths, training routes, practices and their individual understanding of what magic is. Neither book is an exposé or an advertisement; they are ethnographies: taking seriously without believing along – listening without dismissing.
The investigator of hauntings: the Bender tradition with today's means
With his single-case investigations Mayer continues the tradition that Hans Bender founded with Rosenheim – only more strictly in method. His documented cases include the reconstruction of an alleged haunting in a Black Forest hotel and investigations of photographic anomalies; with colleagues he presented material analyses of the famous "Bélmez faces" – those face-like stains appearing since 1971 on a Spanish kitchen floor, long considered one of Europe's strongest haunting cases; the analyses sobered the case considerably. That the same researcher has also studied the ghost-hunting scene – the leisure-time ghost hunter groups roaming abandoned buildings with measuring devices – shows the reflexive programme: what is researched is always both, the possible phenomenon and society's handling of it. His methods volume "N gleich 1" systematises how anomalistic single-case studies can be conducted cleanly at all – the methodology to Bender's legacy.
The organiser: handbook, society, journal
Alongside the fieldwork Mayer holds the field's infrastructure together: he is executive director of the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik and since 2017 has headed the editorial office of the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik – the journal whose "dispute as a format" principle we have already portrayed. And he is first editor of the standard work "An den Grenzen der Erkenntnis. Handbuch der wissenschaftlichen Anomalistik" (with Schetsche, Schmied-Knittel and the IGPP's long-time scientific director Dieter Vaitl) – the complete inventory of what serious anomalistics knows, does not know and could know.
Context
With Mayer the Freiburg quartet that this series has introduced piece by piece is complete: Nahm researches the phenomena near death, Schetsche the orders of knowledge, Schmied-Knittel their spread – and Mayer goes to where the reports come from. His double profile of field researcher and organiser is no accident but a programme: whoever investigates single cases on site knows best why the field needs journals, methodological standards and handbooks. German anomalistics owes him both – its most interesting case documentations and a good part of the scaffolding that holds it together.
Sources: Career and research fields on the IGPP team page and in the GfA profile; Gerhard Mayer, Schamanismus in Deutschland. Konzepte – Praktiken – Erfahrungen (Ergon, Würzburg 2003) and Arkane Welten. Biografien, Erfahrungen und Praktiken zeitgenössischer Magier (Ergon, Würzburg 2008); Mayer et al., An den Grenzen der Erkenntnis. Handbuch der wissenschaftlichen Anomalistik (Schattauer, Stuttgart 2015); Gerhard Mayer (ed.), N gleich 1. Methodologie und Methodik anomalistischer Einzelfallstudien (Springer, 2019); on the Bélmez faces: Mayer & Kornmeier, "The Bélmez Faces: An Investigation of a Supposedly Strong Case" (Journal of Scientific Exploration); on ghost hunting, the IGPP research project.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.