Singing the Same Old Song of Songs (and different): Ritualized Sexuality in Medieval Kabbalah from Orthodoxy to Heterodoxy

The Song of Songs is key to articulating the sefirotic cosmology of kabbalah, its conceptions of the human body, its kinships, its relationships cosmos and divine, and its capacity to act on both through ritualized sexuality. Over time, these kabbalistic interpretations of the Song of Songs are used to innovate ritual performances that push orthodox, nomian conceptions of the power of the body past its limits and into heterodox antinomian practices that led to widespread condemnation, litigation, and punishment of practitioners. At the same time, and by similar strategies, each iteration is grounded in its time and place and in dialogue with the discourses and practices of its neighbors. In this essay I examine these synthetic interpretations and ritual performances in kabbalistic texts from the 13th to the 17th Centuries to show how they are all part of a cumulative orthodox tradition leading from sacred sexuality to self-sexuality and heterodoxy.