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The Things We Do Not Talk About: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism

Submitted to Program Units
1: Mysticism Unit

David Odorisio, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Originally published in 2001, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism opened doors into the hidden lives of scholars of comparative mysticism. By way of his own “secret talks” – vulnerable, first-person reflections, interwoven between historical case studies – Kripal demonstrated a methodology with the potential to redefine insider-outsider debates through rigorous, transparent, and participatory self-reflexivity. This panel invites papers that challenge the norms of objectivity and subjectivity in scholarship, extend first-person narratives into academic discourse, and interrogate the borders and boundaries between self and other, human and more-than-human, and the intimate intersections of eros and the body as sites of mystical transformation and transgression.

Papers

  • Jason James Kelly, University of San Diego

    Hidden Nature: An Erotic Reading of Nature Mysticism

    Abstract

    For over twenty years Jeffrey J. Kripal’s classic work, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), has served as an enduring source of critical insight into the comparative study of mysticism. In this paper I extend Kripal’s comparative approach by placing his concept of “the erotic” in dialogue with nature mysticism. I claim that the erotic can enhance the way nature mysticism is addressed in contemporary ecological discourses because it offers a nondualistic lens of interpretation that can integrate the experiential knowledge of both body (nature) and soul (culture). Most significantly, I’m suggesting that constructing an erotic dialogue with the teachings of certain nature mystics, such as Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, underscores the hybrid and ultimately holistic significance of nature mysticism as a uniquely embodied esoteric movement within the history of American environmentalism.

  • Gloria Hernández, West Chester University

    Secret Lessons from Vrindavan

    Abstract

                This presentation addresses questions such as: Where do scholars of mysticism situate themselves, ontologically speaking, when writing words about words or events that point to that which cannot be described? What are the scholarly spaces, other than ethnography, to examine the transformations they experience in the process of learning and writing about mysticism? And what are the limits of those spaces in a mostly white academy which prides itself of objectivity? While such questions may invite larger interdisciplinary conversations, Hernández will address them using self-referential materials taken from the process of writing her book Savoring God. She will also refer to how her own positionality as a Latino woman in her early career influenced the writing process. This self-reflection, that can only be done post-factum (or post-writing), questions the limits between scholars’ subjectivity and the scholarly products in the disciplinary field of the studies of mysticism. 

  • Maximillian Wetter, Harvard Divinity School

    Transcending Methodologies: Comparative Mysticism and Textual Affect in Elliot Wolfson's Mystical Hermeneutic

    Abstract

    This paper highlights the mystical hermeneutic of Elliot Wolfson as a methodological bridge between the neuroscientific and textual study of mysticism by emphasizing the role of affect within mystical experiences and their textual analysis. Therapeutic and cognitive science of mystical states of consciousness have rightfully recentered the importance of affect within mysticism, an emphasis that has been lacking in the scholarly history of constructivism and perennialism. By setting in conversation Jeffrey Kripal’s *Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom* with the modern therapeutic model, this paper explores how Wolfson’s work demonstrates the necessity of scholarly self-reflexivity and empathetic engagement with the text for a phenomenology of mysticism to be illuminated. While these texts may report memory and reflect culture, they invoke affect, and it is the responsibility of the scholar to adopt a methodology that uncovers the affective states embedded within the text.

  • Rachael Petersen, Harvard University

    On Translating – and Being Turned On By – Gustav Fechner

    Abstract

    In this paper, I reflect upon my experience translating the mystically-inspired book Nanna, Or On the Soul-Life of Plant by the 19th century German thinker Gustav Fechner. Though Paul Ricœur describes translation as an openness to the other, a practice of extending “linguistic hospitality,” I recount my translation experience as one of seizure by the other in a way that blurred the boundaries between 1848 and 2024, plant and human, Gustav and me. And because language is formed in the body, translation meant embodied occupation; in short: my experience of translation is a fleshy and fully erotic affair. I will share how what seized my body, through the text of Nanna, was the same thing that seized Fechner to write it —the ever-reaching plant soul. I'll reflect on what is at stake for scholars translating texts inspired by mystical experiences, and how translation itself can be considered an ecstatic practice.

Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

2 Hours

Schedule Preference

Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Schedule Preference Other

Saturday, 12:30-2:30
Schedule Info

Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Tags

#mystical experience
#methodology
#translation
#erotic
#Mysticism
#ecology
#nature
#affect
#comparative religion
#reflexivity
#science and religion
#constructivism
#perennialism
#textual studies
transcendence
plants
mysticism

Session Identifier

A23-128