This paper historicizes the power of feelings of shock at the center of antinomian expressions of sacred eros from Sabbatian to modern New Age kabbalistic sex magic. Donovan Schaefer argues that feeling functions as “a mode of creating, transferring, and consolidating space, community, and power.”[1] Medieval kabbalistic myths and rituals of sacred sexuality cultivated an oceanic feeling, unifying the practitioner with the ten sefirot and divinity itself, in the contex of a particularistic society. However, the myths obscure the homoerotic and even incestuous relationships required to make them work. Early Modern Sabbatian kabbalists engage in a sort of emotional-theological edgeplay, creating a sense of sacred shock as they expose and expand these undercurrents with explicit images of homoeroticism and incestuous, necrotic, no-future models of generation. These new emotional repertoires of sacred shock powerfully enact new theologies of self, cosmology, and universalist models of kinship incorporating religious others.
