Since the inception of what can be considered “comparative mysticism,” the field has largely privileged mystics and mystical traditions whose examples have been culled primarily from the “major world religions” – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as representing “theistic” mystics, and Hinduism and Buddhism as either “monistic” or “non-theistic” mystics. While this early-mid 20th century typology has been contested, definitions of “who counts” as a mystic have mostly been the purvey of 21st century scholars who have begun to question the boundaries of the field including the very definitions applied to its subjects. This panel questions the qualifications one must possess in order to be considered a mystic, and presses how far beyond the categories of traditional “world religions” might the term apply. In doing so, this panel “troubles” the category of the mystic, particularly who counts as one, and where one might locate – or re-imagine – a comparative study of mysticism today.
Contemporary scholars of religion have frequently linked mysticism with the desire for and pursuit of experiential knowledge of the divine. The term mystic, derived from the Greek μυω, meaning hidden, secret, or allegorical, is often used to describe a set of texts and devotional techniques oriented around a specific subset of contemplative thought and practice. However, scholars also recognize that mysticism is a capacious category. Niklaus Largier’s recent text, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses, begins with the premise that mystical practices have been continuously reinvented across the centuries. Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic production he explores how mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation, affects, and thoughts. This paper places his concept of the ek-static threshold in conversation with contemporary writing on trans spirituality to explore how differential and unrepresentable presences and forms of life might facilitate alternative ways of being.
This paper explores modern, kabbalistic sacred sexuality as a means of seeking from the body, which is both the vehicle and the destination. By analyzing a series of interviews with its modern teachers, I show how practitioners cultivate physical and emotional limit experiences to achieve powerful, altered modes of embodiment. In their own words, they often describe rituals that combine elements of psychology, bodywork, religious ritual, and kink - theorized as a mode of participation which rearranges and alters self, personal relationships, society, and the cosmos as a form of trans-embodied, transpersonal, empowered psychology. In my analysis, I use modern theories of transpersonal psychology to argue that the limit experiences of kabbalistic sacred sexuality become a mode of participation in psychological and cosmological structures that move and transform in multiple domains at once, while centered in the body. In this way we approach the question of not only who is mystic, but what and where it is.
This paper contextualizes Jung’s early occult investigations through the wider historical landscape of the emerging trans-Atlantic intersection of “psychology and religion” in the early 20th c. After locating Jung’s personal experience and subsequent theoretical model of the unconscious as contingent upon his own “occult origins,” I will then turn toward Jung’s mysticism of “the Dead,” by way of his own “channeled” text, “The Seven Sermons to the Dead.” Comprising the final segment of The Red Book, Jung’s “Seven Sermons” challenge historical notions of “who counts” as a mystic, what mystical praxis entails, and the pivotal role of the imagination (or, “imaginal”) in what can be considered a unique melding of cataphatic and apophatic approaches to mystical consciousness.
Scholars such as Alton Pollard, Rachel Harding and Kofi Opoku have long written about Africana mysticism and mystical culture as a core aspect of Africana religiosity. Within Africana traditions, communion with divinity solidifies practicing communities. This communion is a means of communication, affirmation, healing and wellness, integration, vital union and transformation on individual and collective levels. The body is the primary site for divine visitation or communion between the visible (living human) world and the invisible (spirit) world, but aesthetical practices and material items also support these processes. In this paper, I will explore how structures of Africana mystical culture that are critical to comparative discourses on mysticism permeate Black popular culture and performance in ways that demonstrate the multivocality of divinity, the central role of the body, and the generation/solidification of Black vitality.