Ecstasy

Mark and I had a good relationship, however, we also had many bumps in the road and sometimes those bumps become mountains that you can no longer climb up or even try to. MDMA (or Ecstasy) melted the mountains so you could see the one you Love on the other side. It didn’t resolve the problems; it simply removed them completely. I saw Mark for the first time again. I saw him like the moment I first laid eyes on him seven years prior, actually I probably saw him even more clearly and more beautifully than I had ever seen him before. I absolutely had no doubt that he loved me completely and I him. It wasn’t based on what we did or didn’t do for one another; it was simply deep and abiding Love.

This document is in three parts. The first is some experiences I’ve had as a musician which give me some insight into how emotion & magic arise in musical performance. The second part contains a few statements by listeners. The third part is a list of passages by various performers that I’ve collected from various sources over the years.

Dopo le prime indagini eseguite dal gruppo francese guidato da Henry Joyeux, neI 1985 è un gruppo di medici italianì a cimentarsi con i veggenti di Medjugorje, alla rierca di una validazione e di una spiegazione scientifica deIle loro presunte estasi.
Ma anche questa volta i risultati non sono esaltanti. I dati ottenuti, raccolti in un apposito dossier, non accrescono significativamente (per la loro modestia, e per i dubbi sulla correttezza delle rilevazioni) la conoscenza scientifica del 'fenorneno Medjugorje’, nè fugano i dubbi sulla auenticìtà deIle estasi e suIIa sincerità del veggenti.

The events around the Mauerfall provided conditions for encounters between Detroit techno producers and a nascent Berlin scene celebrating a new – short-lived – openness. Cemented in Berlin’s Wende era, techno reached across decades-old geopolitical barriers between divided Berlin and the Fordist heartland of the American Dream. This essay argues that the music brought together enthused communities to live out energetic experiments in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. In Berlin, displaced Cold War identifications met the placelessness of Detroit techno’s utopian-dystopian form. Detroit techno and re-unification met on this territory, where a social imaginary of radical difference strongly appealed, and experiments with social forms seemed possible. The music had long explored a placelessness that left behind earlier struggles, connecting it with the “transitional” experience of the Wende. Berlin’s nascent club scene became the place to play out Detroit techno’s alienated relation to identity. The article foregrounds alienation within Detroit techno and techno’s break with the past via Afrofuturism. In Berlin, Detroit techno becomes a trace of the future in a setting dedicated to the future’s exploration.

Este artículo se propone analizar, en el marco del proyecto de investigación
Pistas electrónicas: djs, música y baile, las relaciones entre
música electrónica y consumo de éxtasis a partir de considerar que las
mismas constituyen técnicas del placer que permiten procurarse ciertos
disfrutes e intensidades ligados a la interacción de los cuerpos en movimiento.
En primer lugar, se traza un breve panorama histórico de la
droga conocida como éxtasis y sus diferentes usos. Luego, se describen
algunas características de la música electrónica de baile, sus géneros,
la función del DJ, etcétera. En tercer lugar, se analizan las formas del
placer e interacción que surgen de la conjunción entre baile, música
electrónica y droga. Finalmente, se indican algunas ideas que permiten
comprender esos placeres como una suerte de neo-hedonismo, cuya
principal característica es producir desplazamientos en la experiencia
corporal y sexual

The Cold War’s end infused electronic music in Berlin after 1989 with an ecstatic intensity. Enthused communities came together to live out that energy and experiment in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. This techno-scene became an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant) within an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams). Techno parties held out a promise of freedom while Germany’s re-unification quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany, this article adds to accounts of ecstasy by considering it in conjunction with melancholy, arguing for an ambivalent description of ecstatic experience – and of emotional life more broadly.

The Cartesian view of the world influenced anthropological studies of ritual and spirituality. Spirit possession studies in particular suffer from this Western idiosyncrasy, because many anthropologists who write about possession argue that possession cults and rituals are " just " traditional performances for treating psychosomatic illness brought about by disharmonies in the social order. A spiritual reality, as perceived by the participants of religious rituals and shamans is in principle excluded. This reduction of the psycho-social aspects of spirit possession ignores a "transcendent reality," where physical and spiritual experiences can be an expression of individual and culturally specific reality. In this article, I analyse the various anthropological perspectives on spirit possession and compare the epistemological approaches on " ritual reality " with the indigenous terminology for states of possession of Korean Hwanghaedo-shamans from Seoul. The Hwanghaedo tradition of Korean shaman is particularly ecstatic and moments of spirit possession exist in many variations. For this reason, the analysis is focused on this tradition.

https://en.unipress.dk/udgivelser/a/ascending-and-descending-the-acropolis/

This chapter discusses one of the ancient Greek rituals associated with maenads, during which the participants left their homes and the city to worship Dionysus at the mountains. While historians of religion and archaeologists are becoming increasingly aware that the movement of worshipers must have played an important role in their ritual experience, archaeological finds are not available for every ritual. The ritual at the mountain is one such ritual. The chapter therefore turns to the so-called “early” sources on maenadism from the fifth century BC, both literary and visual, and the analysis assumes that these sources form part of the Athenian imaginary, they belong to the realm of representations. The first part describes the structuring of space in the Bacchae, while the second moves back in time to the first third of the fifth century BC and to a small group of Attic vases. Just as the study of archaeological space has proven informative in tracing the worshipers’ experience in a sanctuary, the consistent representation of this mountain space as related to movement, dancing and an altered state of consciousness could also shed some light on the ritual experience of maenads in the Athenian imaginary.

Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.

This article explores the meaning of taharrur (self-liberation) in an emerging Palestinian rave scene in Israel, which includes dancing to electronic music and consumption of illicit drugs. While identifying how the Israeli state enforces soft power on its Palestinian citizens by producing complicit and resistant Palestinian subjectivities, the article explains the connection between Palestinian nationalist and social religious moralities towards the ravers' unproductive pleasures. Shaped by the liberal discourse of individual rights in regard to pleasurable activities, taharrur is described by Palestinian ravers as an act of disengagement from both Israeli state biopower and conservative moralities in their own society. Drawing on Bataille's work, the article argues that the potency of excessive pleasure lies in extreme sensual acts of self-loss, the endurance of risk, and involvement in illicit activities to claim internal feelings of authority. Based on literature on play, sociality, and the experience of ecstasy in raves, I further argue that an intended process of subjectification occurs when ravers reduce their individuality to the rhythm of the group and external agency of drugs, to transgress their subject position and conjure a reality in which self-liberation can be momentarily felt. This experience may

È estatico ogni discorso che, costruendosi nel linguaggio e col linguaggio, rappresenta nondimeno una fuoriuscita da esso, un bloccarsi della semiosi, un venir meno delle distinzioni che fondano il senso. Trattasi dunque di un’impostura? Dell’evocazione impossibile, fra le maglie dell’immanenza, di una dimensione trascendente nella quale e verso la quale la prima si sfaldi, perdendo la consistenza di strutture e opposizioni? Rispondere affermativamente sarebbe forse semplicistico, sarebbe considerare l’estasi come puro effetto ottico, come sorta di trompe-l’oeil mistico. In realtà, come ogni trompe-l’oeil, anche l’estasi rinvia a qualcosa di più della propria semplice rappresentazione. Essa rimanda ai pregiudizi inconfessati di un’ideologia semiotica, alla trama nascosta, al negativo segreto che regge tutta la concezione moderna del senso e del linguaggio. Il discorso mistico, che corre parallelo e invisibile, spesso represso, a volte perseguitato, lungo tutta la storia delle religioni, esprime allora questo dubbio: e se il senso non fosse distinzione, separatezza, dualità? Se l’immanenza articolatoria che lo viviseziona non fosse che illusoria? A questo punta ogni racconto dell’estasi: al sospetto che i fondamenti della modernità, anti-mistici per definizione, non siano altro che una delle possibilità dell’umano, e che una storia non detta, in filigrana, si dipani accanto e sotto al moderno come traccia sbiadita di un altro percorso, di un altro modo d’intendere e di dire.

The paper focuses on embodied mystery experiences of initiates in ancient Greek mystery cults. Four main questions are addressed: what kind of experience was considered the core of Greek mystery initiations, how was this experience attained, in what way did it influence the life of the initiates, and what real-life experience could prompt the idea of mystery initiations.
Mystery initiation may be defined as ersatz-death, a rehearsal of the real one.  Modelled as it seems on near-death experiences, these rites comprised alterations of the initiate’s state of consciousness. For trivial events to be remembered by the mystai as revelations, they were brought to a state of heightened sensitivity and perhaps also suggestibility. The knowledge of life and death thus acquired was a holistic and ineffable sensation, rather than a learnt doctrine: in Aristotle’s words, the initiates were “not to learn anything, but rather to experience and to be inclined”.

Mad women running on top of the mountains without the supervision of their husbands, ingestion of mind-altering concoctions, ecstatic nocturnal dancing to the rhythm of the frame drum, ritual sexuality, these and more are the ingredients composing the early worship of Dionysus.
This chapter examines the role of women in the Dionysian cult: Who were the maenads, what happened during their women-only rituals, but also what was the reaction of their contemporaries and which were the most accredited interpretations of contemporary scholars on their legendary legacy.

Τhe title of this paper, "Parmenides the Pythagorean", has not been invented by the author, it has been "discovered" in ancient sources and constitutes a quotation.  In his description of Elea Strabo calls Parmenides and Zeno ἄνδρες Πυθαγόρειοι. In 1892 John Burnet has replaced this ancient perception of Parmenides with a new one, "the father of materialism". The physicalist interpretation of Parmenides' concept of  being (which derives from the late 19th century positivist reaction to Hegelianism and German idealism in the historiography of Greek philosophy) involves unsurmountable difficulties. What might be the purpose of a «theory» that the real world is a changeless mass of dead matter? Why was it presented as a divine revelation? Why would Dike, the personified Justice and concomitant of Zeus (a religious notion for any Greek in archaic times), hold this strange object in the "bonds of limit" and what would happen if she released it? Why did the real materialists of the ancient world, the Epicureans like Colotes, ridicule Parmenides as immaterialist? How  could Plato (who scorned materialists) find in it extraordinary βάθος and proclaim its author μέγας? How could all ancient philosophers (who had in their hands the complete text of Parmenides) from Plato to Plotinus be mistaken about the nature of Parmenides' being? The followers of Burnet's physicalist interpretation avoid even to pose, let alone to answer these question. In our view there is only one possibility to make philosophical sense of Parmenides ' poem: to take seriously the ancient tradition of his Pythagorean background  and to interpret his metaphysics as idealistic monism or immaterialism. The sphere of Being described in the Aletheia is not a lump of dead matter, but the divine Sphairos of the Western Greek philosophical theology (cf. Xenophanes and Empedocles), conceived as pure Nous (Mind) which is the only true reality. The identity of Being and Mind is explicitly stated by Parmenides in fr. B 3, Zeller's and Burnet's interpretation is grammatically impossible and never occurred to any ancient reader. "What-is", conceived as a sphere of divine light endowed with consciousness,  is also the invisible "Sun of Justice" (the Sun that «never sets»), an archaic idea known to Heraclitus and imitated by Plato in the allegory of the Sun in the Republic. Night (the symbol of body and corporeal matter) does not exist, it is an empty name resulting from a linguistic mistake of mortals who misnamed the absence of light as a separate substance.  The Kouros of the Proem is not Parmenides himself, but an Apollonian image of his venerated teacher Pythagoras whose soul  ascended to the celestial temple (oracle) of gods in a winged chariot and received there an oracular revelation from Aletheia herself, a great gift to humanity that liberated men from the veil of ignorance and fear of death. The first part of Parmenides' poem was not just an exercise in speculative metaphysics concerned with problems of motion and plurality, but a handbook of philosophical theology and practical psychology with ethical and political implications: the attributes of the divine absolute are paradigmatic for the personality of an ideal citizen abiding to law (Dike) and a warrior who has no fear of death and pain, since he knows that his soul is  immortal and his body is just a «shadow of smoke” (σκιὰ καπνοῦ). The immobility of the divine Sphere is not a physical theory, but a psychological paradigm of the ataraxia and tranquillity (hesychia) of the wise who has eradicated all passions: in Greek psychology pathos is commonly conceived as kinesis of the soul.  Strabo's remark that the laws established by ἀνήρ Πυθαγόρειος Parmenides ensured the military victories of poor Elea over her enemies is not phantastic at all: the Pythagorean/Eleatic warriors had no fear of death, like Zeno of Elea who was tortured by the tyrant and died as a hero or like the Samian admiral Melissus who fought against the Athenian empire. Incidentally, what kind of inspiration could these heroic characters (as well as the lawmaker Parmenides) receive from the strange theory that the real world is a mass of lifeless matter? Melissus (a professional military man) explicitly states that the Eleatic being is incorporeal and feels no pain. The opposition of the “two roads”, as well as the third road of the "two-headed" thinkers, is not just theoretical or methodological: it is a history of Greek philosophy as perceived by a Pythagorean in the early fifth century BC. The “road of being and Truth” is the divine philosophy of Pythagoras, the “road of non-being” and falsehood is the naturalistic monism of the Ionians (rejected by Pythagoras), and the “two-headed” guys are the Heracliteans who try in their pantheism to combine the Pythagorean theory of the divine cosmic mind with the Ionian naturalism and who admit the identity of being (mind, light) and non-being (body, night), as well as the "reverse road" of the interchange between cosmic opposites (παλίντροπος quoted verbatim from Heraclitus). Heraclitus attacked Pythagoras for his metaphysical dualism and accused him of stealing alien wisdom, Parmenides defends his teacher, ridicules Heraclitus and follows the orthodox Pythagorean view according to which Pythagoras received his doctrine of the immortal soul directly from the gods, and not from the barbarians.
  This article, inter alia,  proposes three new readings of Parmenides' Proem and identifies as a neglected verbatim quotation from Parmenides in Proclus the poetic words "The Maiden of the High Gates" (Νύμφη Ὑψιπύλη) which refer to the philosophical Pythia of Parmenides, the goddess Aletheia and probably come from the last verses of the poem. The "High Gates" are the "Gates of Day and Night", the destination of Kouros' flight. This quotation alone refutes all "katabasis" interpretations of the proem. The gates are located "high in the sky" (αἰθέριαι), not in the netherworld. It is methodologically incorrect to  interpret Greek philosophers on the basis of presumed "parallels" from Greek poetry (Hesiod in this case) since the general world-view of the philosophers is "toto caelo" distant from that  of the poets, as a result of which the same words and phrases often have different referential meaning.

The question of freedom has been a present and constant concern since the inception of the occidental philosophical tradition.  Yet after a certain point the manner in which this question is to be asked has been canonized and sedimented: do humans (subject) have the capacity (predicate) for free and spontaneous action?
The third antinomy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I argue, demonstrates the necessary failure, the perpetual aporia, of continuing to discuss whether humans conceived of as subjects possess the predicate freedom. I argue that if we do not want to fall either into the Third Antinomy, we must steer away from thinking of freedom as a predicate of a subject and reconfigure it as an experience or a comportment. 
Following suggestions from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Being Singular Plural, and The Experience of Freedom, my dissertation argues that re-thinking of freedom as an experience simultaneously requires a re-thinking of identity, in terms of ecstasy, ek-stases, or ex-position, and accordingly a re-thinking of the activity of thinking itself.  Nancy cites Schelling and Heidegger as the thinkers who have made an attempt to think about ecstasy seriously as a fundamental ontological fact about the constitution of things.
This reconfiguration of the constitution of things as either parts of organic structures (Schelling) or beings in a world (Heidegger), demands that we recognize how our identities are perpetually being constituted in all of our acts of relating with the world.  We are constituted and constituting by our engagement with the things that environ us, and this environing is active and alive.  If this is accepted as an ontological fact, this requires that we reconsider what it would mean to think, as all of our engagements with the world would be creative—both of ourselves and of what it is that we encounter.  This would also mean that the meaningfulness of all things is wildly contingent, in fact necessarily, so.  Accordingly, I defend that freedom, as the experience of possibility through our awareness of this contingency due to the lack of an origin, emerges for us in the experience of thinking.

Following F. Nietzsche, Apollo and Dionysus are often regarded as opposites. The two brothers shared however the same temple at Delphi, considered by the Greek as the umbilical center of the world and the most sacred place on earth. The cults of both gods were focused on actions of women in the state of possession: the Pythia, in the grip of Apollo, uttered prophecies inspired by the god, and the thyiads, known as maenads elsewhere, on alternate years roamed the mountain forests, following the call of Dionysus. Gender misbalance among Dionysus’ rapturous worshippers probably reflects the proclivity of women in patriarchal societies to channel their suppressed psychological tension through ecstatic rites, and the dominance of female prophets as instruments employed by the Greek gods to announce their will to the mortals can be explained as a result of responsivity of women to manipulation of consciousness. However, the intersection between Apolline prophecy and Bacchic ecstasy at Delphi suggests a link between the female votaries of the two gods. This paper presents an overview of the evidence on ecstatic cults of Apollo and Dionysus in Delphi, compares ancient testimonies with insights into the anthropology and neuroscience of alteration of consciousness, and suggests that the proximity of the two cults ensued from their deep multi-dimensional connection.

This article traces the trajectory of Baudrillard’s thought on simulation so as to critically compare this concept to the reigning definition of media events (Dayan and Katz, 1992). The present study begins by mapping the relevance of Baudrillard’s work to various subfields within communication, then excavates overlooked categories and under-theorized quantities related to media events within Baudrillard’s work, such as "audiences," "masses," the "individual" and the "social.” In conclusion, Baudrillard’s 1983 essay “The Ecstasy of Communication” (in Foster, 1983) serves as a thought-provoking counterpoint to the idea of media events in its emphasis on networked, fluid and schizophrenic communication. ‘Ecstasy’ remains an important touchstone for an alternative form of communication in a world of increasingly networked beings and hyper-mediated events where the line between consumption and surveillance is getting hazier by the day.

This study describes a fully automated procedure using alkaline hydrolysis and headspace (HS) solid-phase microextraction (SPME) followed by on-fiber derivatization and gas chromatographic (GC)–mass spectrometric (MS) detection of amphetamine, methamphetamine, methylendioxyamphetamine, methylendioxymethamphetamine, methylendioxyethylamphetamine, methylendioxyphenylbutanamine, and
methylmethylendioxyphenylbutanamine in human hair
samples. Ten milligrams of hair is washed with deionized water, petroleum ether, and dichloromethane. After the addition of
deuterated internal standards the sample is hydrolyzed with sodium hydroxide and directly submitted to HS-SPME. After the absorption of analytes for an on-fiber derivatization procedure the fiber is directly placed into the HS of a second vial containing
N-methyl-bis(trifluoroacetamide) before GC–MS analysis. The limits of detection are determined between 0.01 and 0.17 ng/mg. Absolute analyte recoveries are in the range between 0.3% and 7.5%. Linearity is proven over a range from 0.1 to 50 ng/mg with coefficients of correlation from 0.998 to 1. In comparison with conventional methods of hair analysis, this fully automated HS-SPME–GC–MS procedure is substantially faster and easier to perform without using solvents. It uses minimal sample amounts and has the same degree of sensitivity and reproducibility.

In tutte le rassegne dedicate alla fenomenologia estatica nell’ebraismo si ritrova, puntuale tributo a un luogo comune, l’osservazione preliminare secondo la quale i resoconti autobiografici ebraici intorno a esperienze estatiche sarebbero molto rari. In effetti, se si tiene conto della diffusa pratica della pseudepigrafia, si osserva che tali resoconti, appena dissimulati, sono legione e risalgono già all’epoca tardo-antica, se non si vuole rifarsi alle visioni archetipiche del profeta Ezechiele, anche se si intensificano e si diffondono a partire dal XVI secolo. Anche quanti, come Moshe Idel, hanno messo in rilievo la centralità delle tecniche e dell’esperienza estatica nella corrente cabbalistica dominata dall’influsso di Abraham Abulafia, hanno preferito trattarla come un’eccezione, piuttosto che come la regola. Nel mio contributo si tenta di offrire una spiegazione a questa singolare cautela storiografica, esaminando brevemente una delle costanti che emergono dai resoconti estatici ebraici: l’autoscopia o visione di sé, che implica la questione, decisiva ma sommamente complessa, del rapporto instabile e tendente alla dissoluzione tra soggetto e oggetto nella visione estatica. In retrospettiva, si prenderà in esame l’ottocentesco Trattato sull’estasi (quntras ha-hitpa‘alut) di Dov Baer di Lubavitch, tardo ma originale esempio di riflessione sui modi e sui gradi dell’esperienza estatica al suo tramonto.

Zusammenfassung: Dieser Beitrag soll aufzeigen, dass eine chthonische und eschatologische Dimension der dionysischen Göttlichkeit in verschiedenen Riten und Kulten des Gottes nachgewiesen werden kann und dabei keinesfalls mysterienexklusiv ist. Dazu soll der archäologische Befund, der Dionysos mit dem Jenseits und eschatologischen Hoffnungen in Verbindung bringt, vorgestellt und untersucht werden. Darauf aufbauend soll belegt werden, dass diese jenseitige Dimension sich sowohl in Riten mit privatem Kern, hier am Beispiel der Oreibasia, als auch in Kultfeiern des öffentlichen Festkanons, wie den Anthesterien, zeigt. Abschließend soll dann Dionysos' Funktion in den eleusinischen Mysterien untersucht werden.

Abstract: This paper aims to show that a chthonic and eschatological dimension of dionysiac divinity can be found in various rites and cults of the god and that this is not exclusive for the mysteries. Recent archaeological evidence connecting Dionysos with the afterlife and eschatological expectations will be introduced and analyzed. This dimension manifests itself in rites with a private intent (e.g. the Oreibasia) as well as public celebrations of the festival calendar (e.g. the Anthesteria). An analysis of Dionysos' function in the eleusinian mysteries concludes the overview.

Jonatan Meir, “The Politics of Printing the Book Sefer Likutei Tefilot"

This essay discusses one of the more astounding books produced by Bratslav Hasidism – Likutei Tefilot, composed by R. Nathan Sternharz of Nemirov between 1822 and 1827. Notable enough for its content alone, the book also established a whole new genre in Bratslav literature, a fact requiring examination of the book’s genesis, the context of its printing, and its primary goals, as well as the controversy that erupted around it. The new Bratslav theology that emerged upon the death of Rabbi Nahman at the end of 1810[, and which was articulated in Likutei Tefilot,] carried with it a number of ramifications for the small group that had begun to gather around the tsadik, including the eruption of disputes, both internal and external, over [the role and character of] Rabbi Natan of Nemirov. This is a particularly obscure chapter in the history of Bratslav Hasidism, which as a whole remains under-explored by modern scholars; a careful examination of the initiation and crystallization of Bratslav Hasidism in its early stages will shed light on the movement as it exists today in all its diversity, both ideological and social.

Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trance-like scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as tremendous event that exposes performers and audience to experiences of transgression.

By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga, I address in this paper a question that is frequently asked about the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in fields such as the history of religions. Eliade’s interest in Yoga showcases his own personal spiritual quest, of course. But it is also informed by his earlier readings of, and reflections on, two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade, these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Eliade’s thoughts on Yoga and religion then took different paths, reaching their full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the twofold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer plays a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase in his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in terms of understanding the further developments of his ideas on history of religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.

Dionysian choreia is inextricably tied to extreme emotions. Descriptions of the choreia of female and male choruses that are akin to Dionysian choreia abound in ancient Greek drama. These descriptions aim at the emotional involvement of the audience. Nonetheless, sensory methodology has been never applied into the emotional experiences of this mystery cult as it appears in ancient Greek theater. This paper focuses on the descriptions, and especially the self-descriptions, of the acoustic and kinetic part of the choreia of several choruses of Greek drama-such as Aeschylus' Edonians, Euripides' Bacchae and Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria-and reflects on the multiple senses through which the members of these choruses and the audience could experience Dionysian cult. It is also possible that the dramatic poets engage in the literary discourse of 5 th century B.C. and inscribe in the choreia of these Dionysian choruses the poetics of ecstasy, an emotional and cognitive state seen as the recognition of truth and not as a state of madness. Ecstasy in these contexts is a blessed experience provided by Dionysus, the god of theater.

«BEING OUTSIDE-ITSELF» IN SCHELLING AND HEIDEGGER The author of the article framed the question of the possible relevance of the treatment of the Schelling's philosophy in the context of a phenomenological one. Thereby, he points its problematic character, referencing Husserl's treatment of German idealism after Kant (including the thought of Schelling) as the romantic idealism. At the same time, he also states the influence of Schelling on the few phe-nomenologists who made their careers after Husserl. The article's author reviews the concept of the «being outside-itself» or «ecstasy» in Schelling and Heidegger (as one of the phenomenologists) for the further concretization of the theme. The ecstasy in Schelling is the new name for the idealistic intellectual intuition, by which a singular subject loses its own position as subject and thereby gets to the position of the absolute subject. The absolute subject is one which cannot be an object already. Schelling identifies the ecstasy understood in this way with the wondering as philosophical initiation in Ancient Greece. Such ecstasy leads to unknowing knowledge in Schelling's words. The concept of being outside-itself means the structural element of being of human Dasein, i.e. of temporality in Heidegger. This philosopher thinks that a human being is always already outside itself ontologically, before any intuition both sensual and intellectual. The human subject is not closed in on itself, for then it has to transcend from its immanence to the outside. It is always outside itself, it is ecstatic. In its ecstasies, it is always in the world, instead of being inside the world and other people. Heidegger bases his critique of the traditional metaphysics of the subject on such understanding of the ontological structure of Dasein, i.e. of the true «subject». In conclusion, the article's author states that the approaches to the problem of being outside-itself of both mentioned philosophers are in principle, quite different. Schelling tries to rehabilitate the subjectivity by the reduction of the singular subject to the absolute one. On the contrary, the finitude of human Dasein is the necessary condition of its being in Heidegger. The ecstasy is interiorization in Schelling, but it is exteriorization, which has been always already realized, in Heidegger. However, the author of the article also pinpoints a certain isomorphism of the treatments of ecstasy in both thinkers. In the different ways they attempt to overcome the crisis of the understanding of the subject as closed in itself, create the conditions of this isomorphism.

El cuerpo y lo femenino son conceptos muy vinculados en los diferentes discursos existentes durante periodo moderno. Se interpreta que las mujeres están más condicionadas por su propio cuerpo, lo que, especialmente en el discurso eclesiástico, las dotaría de una mayor imper-fección. Esta «inevitable» condición, sin embargo, pudo ser aprovechada por muchas mujeres religiosas, algo que se manifestó de forma espectacular durante el Barroco mediante el fenómeno de la mística. Entre estas mujeres destacaremos a la Beata Inés de Benigánim, una monja valenciana del siglo XVII cuyo caso nos permitirá profundizar en la relación entre lo corporal, lo femenino y lo espiritual a través de fenómenos como los éxtasis, las mortificaciones o las reliquias.

„Die ungute Gleichzeitigkeit des Bedürfnisses allein zu sein und dessen mit andern zusammenbleiben zu wollen – ein Gefühl, das in der tieferen Müdigkeit zum Vorschein kommt und dem man nachzugehen hätte – steigert sich.“  Das notiert Walter Benjamin am Nachmittag des 28. Januar 1928 im Anschluss an einen Haschisch-Rausch. Benjamin hat mehrfach mit Cannabis und Meskalin experimentiert und seine Erfahrungen in unterschiedlichen Textformen dokumentiert. Anders als die Lebensphilosophie, die den Rausch feiert, bleibt Benjamin äußerst aufmerksam für die heiklen und komplexen Verhandlungen von Individualität und Kollektivität, die sich an der Position des Berauschten abspielen. „Ekstasis ist ursprünglich immer vollkommene Einsamkeit“, schreibt Ludwig Klages in 'Vom kosmogenischen Eros' und behauptet, dass diese Einsamkeit „den ergänzenden Pol in sich selber trägt“.  Benjamins Nachdenken über den Rausch setzt hingegen gerade in dem Moment ein, da die Lockerung der Selbstkontrolle, wie die Droge sie bewirkt, das Individuum dazu nötigt, sein Verhältnis zu den anderen neu zu organisieren.

Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

From Anthropology to Sociology, many of the historically minded Social Sciences and Cultural Studies have been interested in the subjects of ecstasy, trance and intoxication for a quite a long time. This article seeks to assemble ideas and outline perspectives for researching the history of ecstatic and/or intoxicated bodies. It draws on approaches from the history of drugs in modern societies and proposes combining them with genealogical and praxeological accounts. The authors argue that these research tools can be fruitful for an integrative approach that can analyze the body history of various forms of ‘Rausch’, such as drug experiences, religious trances, sexual ecstasies, or similar feelings during sports or violence under a common denominator. They want to encourage body historians to focus on the practical production of ecstasies and intoxications and out them even more into the foreground of their research interest. From this angle, the discourses and practices of ‘Rausch’, their embeddedness in socio-technical contexts, and the collectives and self-relations they formed and transformed in the 19th and 20th centuries can be analyzed as techniques of modern body politics.