Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda's Divine Revelations

This paper is an intellectual history of the self-published journals of the avant-garde jazz musician and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane, also known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. In these meditations, she received messages from realms beyond (turīya) and displayed them in sound and word. The journals also reveal an autodidact capable in Sanskrit and Hindi and an informed reader engaging with specific religious texts. In this talk, I am interested in Coltrane as Turiyasangitananda – that is, as a self-ordained monastic leader and an independent artist, thinking creatively at the nexus of metaphysical religion, modern Indian spirituality, and the Black radical tradition. Through a close reading of her book Divine Revelations (1995) and other ephemera from her Sai Anantam Ashram, I provide detail into the South Asian forms of knowledge that Turiyasangitananda molded into her “freedom dreams.”