Ecstatic Religious Experience

This essay reappraises the origins of French Quakerism based on new archival research conducted on both sides of the Channel. It identifies 34 Quaker missionaries in 17th- and early 18C France, sheds new light on the French reception of Quakerism and suggests possible connections with non-violent, charismatic movements in Languedoc.

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.

Keywords: embodied spirituality, dance, feelings, altered states, other ways of knowing, direct, immediate and reciprocal experience and expression of spirit, and spirit beings, change and action.

This article describes dance as a moving spirituality through the case study of a specific practice called Movement Medicine. It addresses how a danced spirituality differs from other forms of spirituality, such as meditation and contemplation, and attempts to explore some of the aspects that make dance a unique medium for an embodied, lived and creative spirituality. 'Feel good feelings', as well as emerging from difficult emotions encountered on the dance floor, generate a sense of meaning which is translated to taking sustainable, socially just action. Through dance, different states of consciousness can be experienced through which 'other' knowledge is accessed and subsequently embodied. In these states, people can also meet and relate to spirit beings, and simultaneously express that relationship through the moving body. Finally, three qualities of dance are discussed, which contribute to concrete, lasting changes in existing life structures. My dance became a prayer, a dance with god and my heart expanded so wide. I was swept […] upon a river of love for god and for this life. It became a sacred dance for me […]. To dance is to know, for our body holds all the secrets and when we move […] we allow those secrets to emerge and come to consciousness. Our deep knowing is formed on the breath and freed as we move and breathe, listen and become present

In the moments following orgasm, it is common to enter a transcendent state and experience a brief loss of self awareness. Romantically referred to as La Petite Mort — this can be an ideal portal to a lucid dream.
Orgasm alters consciousness and acts as a powerful analgesic, it has been associated with the deactivation and activation of certain key brain regions. Some regions are responsible for modulating the perception of our relationship with reality. In the deep sense of peace that unfolds throughout our body post-orgasm, we are in a unique position to practice the art of lucid dreaming without falling asleep.

The suppression of the Bacchanalia in Rome 186 BCE was the first major religious persecution in Europe. The essay provides a new analysis, referring to the political theory of Eric Voegelin. It shows that the suppression was a reaction of the Roman commonwealth to a cult which challgenged the meaning of political existence within the republic. Ultimately, the Bacchanalian affair is a collision of two types of religiosity, the political religiosity of the public cult and the orgiastic and apolitical religiosity of the Bacchic underground. Both types are based on particular religious experiences, the experience of gods preserving and fostering the political community and the experience of a god promoting the fulfilment of bodily desires. As the essay shows at the example of Euripides’ Bacchae, the worship of Bacchus-Dionysus had always represented the apolitical dimension of human existence; already in the ancient myths the “alien god” appears as the enemy of rulers and politicians. Finally, this reconsideration of the Bacchanalia helps to understand why the early Christians were likened to the Bacchants.

Ancient Greece was unique in its attitude to alteration of consciousness. Various altered states of consciousness were commonly known: initiates experienced them during mystery rites; sacred officials and enquirers attained them in the major oracular centres; possession by various deities was recognized; and some sages and philosophers practised manipulation of consciousness. From the perspective of individual and public freedom, the prominent position of mania in Greek society reflects its openness and acceptance of the inborn human proclivity to experience alterations of consciousness, which were interpreted in positive terms as god-sent. These mental states were treated with cautious respect, but never suppressed or pushed to the cultural and social periphery, in contrast to many other complex societies, ancient and modern.

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.

One of the more astounding books produced by Bratslav Hasidism is Liqquṭei tefilot (1822–1827), composed by R. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, which established a whole new genre in Bratslav literature. This article discusses the book's genesis, publication, and primary goals, as well as the controversy it generated. The new Bratslav theology that emerged after the death of Rabbi Naḥman led to disputes, both internal and external, over the role and character of R. Nathan. Examining this particularly obscure chapter in the early history of Bratslav Hasidism sheds light on the movement as it exists today in all its diversity, both ideological and social. Keywords Bratslav Hasidism – Hasidism – Jewish mysticism – Kabbalah

Full Article
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/1477285x-12341269;jsessionid=1n5j66dblsols.x-brill-live-03

Modern Pagan religions use ritual to bring about ecstatic states excluded from mainstream religious experience by the Protestant Reformation, but present in vernacular forms of religiosity.  In so doing, they may also appropriate techniques and ideas from other cultures which preserved the link between religion and ecstatic states.

- ‘Our greatest blessings come to us by way of mania, provided it is given us by divine gift,’ – says Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. Certain forms of alteration of consciousness, considered to be inspired by supernatural forces, were actively sought in ancient Greece. Divine mania comprises a fascinating array of diverse experiences: numerous initiates underwent some kind of alteration of consciousness during mystery rites; sacred officials and inquirers attained revelations in major oracular centres; possession states were actively sought; finally, some thinkers, such as Pythagoras and Socrates, probably practiced manipulation of consciousness. These experiences, which could be voluntary or involuntary, intense or mild, were interpreted as an invasive divine power within one’s mind, or illumination granted by a superhuman being. In ancient Greece, these mental states were treated with cautious respect, and in contrast to the majority of complex societies, ancient and modern, were never suppressed or pushed to the cultural and social periphery.

For my Music Honors thesis at Skidmore College, I compared the cultural, psychological and musical contexts in which music-induced trance states occur. I surveyed the current body of literature on the subject from the fields of ethnomusicology, neuroscience, anthropologyl, religious studies, psychology and musicology. To investigate further, I interviewed gamelan musicians from Bali (where ecstatic trances are regular features within Agama Hindu Dharma religious ceremonies), shakuhachi musicians and scholars (who use their instrument to practice a specific type of Zen Buddhist meditation known as suizen), electronic musicians (including inventor of FM synthesis John Chowning) and classical musicians to assess the cultural relevance of such states and the psychological mechanisms behind them.

In the deep, dark forests and in the lush green valleys, worshippers of Dionysus celebrate the eternal cycles of death and rebirth, symbolized in the sacred mask of the wild god. Drunk and intoxicated, wearing the mask of Dionysus, the actor is at once the shaman and the priest. Channeling the presence of the fearsome divinity, he drinks the sacred wine and eats the raw flesh of his prey. In this eternal moment, he becomes one with the god and the beast residing inside of him. Within Ancient Greek culture, the sacred rites of Dionysus have been appropriated and transformed to theatre performances. The shaman became the actor, the participants became the audience, the sacred altar became the stage. From myth as a ritual performance emerged the theatre of tragedy, in which the undying spirit of Dionysus, majestic and terrifying, speaks to us even today.

The sensual bedroom epiphany of the Fury Allecto, by which Amata is driven into a Bacchic frenzy, resembles the initiation ritual of the cult of Sabazius, a "sacred marriage" in which a metal snake was dropped down the front of the initiand's clothes. This Thraco-Phrygian deity had a small but persistent presence in the Roman empire (attested in the army as early as the first century BC, and also at Pompeii), and was frequently identified with Dionysus. Virgil seems to have known of this cult and integrated it into the symbolic economy of the poem, in which feminine, sensual, oriental (including Phrygian) and ecstatic elements are opposed to the masculine self-control of the protagonist and his descendants.

Inspired prophecy and divination by signs involve different activities and require different abilities on the part of their practitioners. A re-examination of ancient sources demonstrates that the idea of the supremacy of direct prophecy cannot be dismissed as a Platonic invention.  Moreover, modes of prophecy are far from being a modern construal: they were already perceived as such in the second millennium BC. Ecstatic prophecy, difficult to achieve and dependent on the will of the gods, was open-ended and difficult to manipulate. Hence, most experts regard direct divination in Mesopotamia as peripheral to traditional divination by signs: it is the reverse correlation in Greece that requires an explanation. To discard the dichotomy between direct and indirect prophecy is to strip Greek culture of one of its unique characteristics.

While Greeks called the ecstatic musical mode ‘Phrygian’, there is no evidence of high-arousal musical performances in Phrygia, and the musical characteristics of this mode were distinctively Greek. The image of wide-ranging excited celebrations practised in Phrygia seems to have existed only in the imagination of the Greeks and Romans. This paper suggests that the uneasiness felt by some Greeks facing high-arousal cults was assuaged by attributing them foreign origin, which was often fictitious. By culturally dissociating themselves from the ecstatic practices, the Greeks resolved the cognitive inconsistency between their self-perception as citizens of the decorous civilized world and their surrender to the irresistible allure of high-arousal cults and music. These false attitudes allowed cognitive consonance and attained the status of indubitable truth. Upheld throughout antiquity, they persuaded many modern scholars, who still mistakenly consider the Phrygian musical mode as an Oriental borrowing.

Poesia, estasi e stati non ordinari di coscienza
in «Cognitive Philology» vol. 9 (2016)

http://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/cogphil/article/view/14034/13768

Il contributo sviluppa una riflessione su quei particolari stati di coscienza che identifichiamo come ‘estasi mistiche’ e sulle caratteristiche che, secondo gli studiosi, esse hanno in comune con la condizione propria dell’ispirazione poetica. Una digressione sulla scienza della coscienza evidenzia come sotto la definizione di ‘stati alterati di coscienza’ si raccolga un insieme eterogeneo di fenomeni nei quali rientrano quelli estatici e mistici. Sia nelle pratiche estatiche che nella creazione poetica la ripetizione di certi suoni o parole sembra essere un elemento importantissimo per il raggiungimento di una specifica disposizione mentale ed emotiva. Attraverso lo studio dei testi è possibile incrementare la conoscenza e la comprensione di tali meccanismi: in questo modo la ricerca filologico letteraria apporta nuovi strumenti e sensibilità ad una scienza che sta ampliando i propri metodi di investigazione.

1. Geralmente nascidas e/ou implantadas nas áreas pobres das cidades onde, por questões de ordem sociopolítico-econômica, a paisagem urbana é mais decadente, as religiões de grande adesão popular desenham no espaço geográfico as linhas que tramam a configuração religioso-cultural da sociedade. Dentre esses universos de fé, pentecostalismos e religiões de matriz afro (cada núcleo de crenças com suas riquezas simbólicas particulares, embora culturalmente entretecidas) escrevem, nos corpos e nas experiências de seus adeptos, o sentido de vida e existência que lhes animam os dias. É isso que abordaremos brevemente, aqui: a experiência mística que os religiosos vivem no próprio corpo, nesses dois grupos sociais. Pela presente reflexão, visamos também compartilhar alguns pontos de uma etnografia em curso (2015~), recuperando alguns momentos da pesquisa de campo empreendida entre os anos de 2012 e 2013 no mestrado, ocasião em que observamos que as formas expressivas recorrentes em alguns pentecostalismos – especialmente os mais periféricos – revelam o corpo como fronteira semântica (sobretudo durante o cântico coletivo de canções específicas, os corinhos de fogo), locus da experiência religiosa, espaço onde os sentidos seriam afetados pelo sagrado e, a prática ritual, legitimada na sinestesia do grupo. Os paralelos cênicos e experienciais entre certos pentecostalismos e as religiões afro-brasileiras, sobretudo o candomblé e a umbanda, também irrigam as intenções desta breve análise. Palavras-chave: Etnografia religiosa. Expressão gestual. Pentecostalismo. Corinhos de fogo. Religiões afro-brasileiras.

2. Born and/or established in the poor areas where, due to socio-political and economic matters, the urban landscape is more decadent, the religions of big popular adherence design in the geographic space the lines that weave the cultural-religious configuration of society. Among these universes of faith, several Pentecostalisms and religions from African matrix write, through the bodies and the experiences of their believers, the meaning of life and existence that animate their days. That's what we'll briefly analyse here: the mystical experience that these people live in their own bodies, in these two religious groups. Through this brief analysis, we also want to share some points of an ethnography in progress (2015~), recovering some data from our fieldwork, undertaken between the years 2012 and 2013 during the Master degree, moment in which we observed that the expressive gestures of the believers, recurrent in some Pentecostalisms

Werner Herzog’s films are well known for their visionary character. His visions, however, turn out to be of a peculiar kind, in that they aren’t mere fantasies that simply steer clear from reality, but aim at grasping it at a deeper level. From this point of view it’s rather significant that from the very beginning of his career as a filmmaker Herzog has switched between fiction films and documentary films. Even more interestingly, he has never accepted these classifications and has always tried to work beyond them, overcoming the boundaries of genres. The resulting interweaving of fiction and documentary triggers multiple philosophical consideration on the nature of experience and reality and of its representations, especially within the framework of the digital era. Herzog’s works appear, thus, a cutting edge and intriguing meditation on the role and possibilities of art, and establish themselves as a reference point for the most experimental practices of contemporary documentaries and art films.

In a small South-Tyrolean village, in the early 1830s, mroe than 40,000 people gathered in less than three months to witness the ecstasies and the stigmata of a young girl, Maria von Morl. Hundred of booklets were writtena bout her and all the most prominent European people travelled only to have the occasion to see the wonders of this girl who renacted every week in her very body the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. Among the illustrious visitors, Antonio Rosmini, priest and philosopher, whose accounts about the prodigies of Maria von Morl are collected and illustrated in this essay for the first time.

Dans les réserves de Montaigne à l'égard des expériences mystiques, se lit une opposition entre deux manières d'envisager les vertus passives : la mystique suppose une passivité de la perte de soi, et la sagesse épicurienne développée par Montaigne une passivité de la préservation de soi. Par le regard critique qu'il porte sur les histoires d'extases, qu'elles concernent Socrate ou un prêtre chrétien, Montaigne revendique des vertus d'une « médiocrité » désarmante, que cette étude tente de replacer d'abord dans l'histoire de la philosophie renaissante, puis dans les débats sur la mystique au tournant des XVIe et XVIIe siècles.
Mots-clés : extase, néoplatonisme, délire, plaisirs, santé.

Abstract for upcoming Black Metal Theory Symposium IV: Mors Mystica: Mycelegium


For this symposium I will present a mycelegium: a portmanteau of florilegium and mycology - "mushroom-cutting" - to illuminate an entheogenic path toward Mors Mystica by comparing descriptions of psychedelic experience and mystical death, corrupting and overcoming them within a symbolic framework that conceptually represents the growth of fungus out of [its own] dead matter.

The mycelegium is a florilegium of fungus, mouldering corpses of concepts spawning new thought from death and permanence as slime spontaneously grows from rotting interstices, subterranean fissures, and grave gaps - greening the black to bursting - always exceeding its boundaries, spores coating and corrosive, spreading on infinite source - decay - yet motionless, the Worm in quiescence, meditating like a corpse.

From fresh moldings to immanent infestation we will borrow from the mushroom the ability to feed on putrescence in order to flourish in a world choking in death. We will overlay and contrast its biological autopoiesis with the functional decay of the thalamus under psilocybin influence (engendering non-dualistic thinking as a side-effect), and gather evidence of this blackening of shared reality that coincides with the accessibility of the death-experience at the intersection of the theoretical, the psychedelic, the mystical and the metallic.

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.

This book examines the nature and significance of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. As a result, our understanding of enthusiasm is largely influenced by the hostile discourse of Augustan moralist and early Enlighteners. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in, how did they operate as a community and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book aims to answer these questions by concentrating on the notorious case of the French Prophets. It demonstrates how the understanding of enthusiasm evolved around 1700, designating anything from a religious fanaticism to a social epidemic and even a bodily disease. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, looking at this multifarious issue from a successively social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on extensive archival research, it sheds new light on the reality of enthusiasm away from the hostility of Enlightenment discourse.

The paper is focused on the Pythia, in particular, on the mode of her functioning. Various factors of religious, psychological, and physiological nature prepared the Pythia for her duty. The personality of the Pythia was of crucial importance, and a candidate for the role of the god’s mouthpiece was chosen carefully. She was probably a woman whose propensity for alteration of consciousness was already observed by members of the community during the ecstatic Dionysiac celebrations of the thuiades. The lifestyle of the Pythia rendered her particularly responsive to the complex induction process to which she was exposed during the preliminary ceremonies leading to the prophetic trance. The accumulated interaction of all these factors enabled successful induction of the Pythia into a state of possession by Apollo – prophetic mania. Apollo’s and Dionysus’ joint tenancy in Delphi reflected the profound connection of the divine half-brothers in cult, epitomized in the Pythia’s personality and behaviour.