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Centering African Diasporic traditions, the margins of mainstream mystical traditions, and the intersection between mysticism and psychedelics, the essays in this volume offer several diverse and unique, contemporary approaches to the study of mysticism. In a time when the word mystic" or "mysticism" appears as often in popular and even scientific settings as it does in academic or religious discourse, a critical study of these terms and traditions becomes ever more relevant. This volume challenges normative notions of who counts as a mystic, and questions the definitions and interpretive frames underlying the field of comparative mysticism itself. This is an important text for students and scholars of comparative mysticism, and those interested in what traditions, texts, communities, rituals, persons, and practices have been marginalized in the development of what "counts" as mysticism" today.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: Mysticism & the Margins (of Consciousness): Rounding Out the Edges of a Discipline.- Part I. From the Hip-Hop Underground to the Margins of the Mainstream.- Chapter 2. Demystifying Whiteness in The Way Underground: An Autoethnographic Essay.- Chapter 3. The Many Conversions of Jean Toomer.- Chapter 4. Listening to the Bigger Story: The Dagara Spiritual Technology of Divination on Turtle Island.- Chapter 5. Wild Ecology: An Ecoerotic Reading of Thoreau s Nature Mysticism.- Chapter 6. From My Flesh, I See God: Spiritual Pregnancy and the Boundaries of Kabbalah.- Chapter 7. Action, Praxis, and Compassion: Traces of Engaged Mysticism in The Philokalia and Tibetan Buddhism.- Chapter 8. Mystics (In)action: Mirza Ghulam Ahmad s Political Organization and the Misrecognition of Mystics in Modern Islam.- Chapter 9. At the Edge of the Page: Thomas Merton s Marginalia as Hermeneutical Mysticism.- Chapter 10. Transcending Methodologies: Interpretive Affect and Textual Intimacy in Elliot Wolfson s Mystical Hermeneutic.- Part II. Mysticism and the Psychedelic Reformation.- Chapter 11. Scholarship at 95mg of Ketamine: Psychedelics as Mirror and Lens.- Chapter 12. Tales from the Frontier: Theories of Religion on the Borderlands of the Psychedelic Renaissance .- Chapter 13. Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: R. Gordon Wasson and the Complex Origins of Psychedelic Scholarship on Mysticism.- Chapter 14. Psychedelics and Mysticism: Mapping a Cultural Approach to Mystical Consciousness.- Chapter 15. Psychedelic Buddhism: Making Sense of an Emerging Mystical Tradition.- Chapter 16. Is Canned Mysticism Compossible? Centripetal and Centrifugal Mysticism: When Does Vision Meet Practice?.
About the author
David Odorisio (PhD) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Psychology, Religion, and Consciousness program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA. David is the editor of four volumes, including Thomas Merton in California: The Redwoods Conferences and Letters (Liturgical Press, 2024), and co-editor of Depth Psychology and Mysticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). David presently serves as the Co-Chair of the Mysticism Unit for the American Academy of Religion.
Summary
Centering African Diasporic traditions, the margins of mainstream mystical traditions, and the intersection between mysticism and psychedelics, the essays in this volume offer several diverse and unique, contemporary approaches to the study of mysticism. In a time when the word “mystic" or "mysticism" appears as often in popular and even scientific settings as it does in academic or religious discourse, a critical study of these terms and traditions becomes ever more relevant. This volume challenges normative notions of who “counts” as a mystic, and questions the definitions and interpretive frames underlying the field of comparative mysticism itself. This is an important text for students and scholars of comparative mysticism, and those interested in what traditions, texts, communities, rituals, persons, and practices have been marginalized in the development of what "counts" as “mysticism" today.
