Results by title

50 books match the query 'Mysticism' and 5 start with s

cover of Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism, and the Origins of Jewish Modernity

Sabbatian Heresy

Writings on Mysticism, Messianism, and the Origins of Jewish Modernity

Edited by Pawel Maciejko

Brandeis University Press, 2017

The pronouncements of Sabbatai Tsevi (1626–76) gave rise to Sabbatianism, a key messianic movement in Judaism that spread across Jewish communities in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The movement, which featured a set of theological doctrines in which Jewish Kabbalistic tradition merged with Muslim and later Christian elements, suffered a setback with Tsevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666. Nonetheless, for another hundred and fifty years, Sabbatianism continued to exist as a heretical underground movement. It provoked intense opposition from rabbinic authorities for another century and had a significant impact on central developments of later Judaism, such as the Haskalah, the Reform movement, Hasidism, and the secularization of Jewish society. This volume provides a selection of the most original and influential texts composed by Sabbatai Tsevi and his followers, complemented by fragments of the works of their rabbinic opponents and contemporary observers and some literary works inspired by Sabbatianism. An introduction and annotations by Pawel Maciejko provide historical, political, and social context for the documents.
[more]
cover of Satan and His Daughter, the Angel Liberty: Selected Verses

Satan and His Daughter, the Angel Liberty

Selected Verses

Victor Hugo

Swan Isle Press, 2018

Victor Hugo spent years in political exile off the coast of Normandy. While there, he produced his masterpiece, Les Misérables—but that wasn’t all: he also wrote a book-length poem, La Fin de Satan, left unfinished and not published until after his death.

Satan and his Daughter, the Angel Liberty, drawn from this larger poem, tells the story of Satan and his daughter, the angel created by God from a feather left behind following his banishment. Hugo details Satan’s fall, and through a despairing soliloquy, reveals him intent on revenge, yet desiring God’s forgiveness. The angel Liberty, meanwhile, is presented by Hugo as the embodiment of good, working to convince her father to return to Heaven.

This new translation by Richard Skinner presents Hugo’s verse in a unique prose approach to the poet’s poignant work, and is accompanied by the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon’s haunting illustrations. No adventurous reader will want to miss this beautiful mingling of the epic and familial, religious and political.
[more]
cover of Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History

Sensible Ecstasy

Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History

Amy Hollywood

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism.

What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.
[more]
cover of Spirit and Folk: Jewish Mysticism and the Struggle for German Nationhood

Spirit and Folk

Jewish Mysticism and the Struggle for German Nationhood

Amir Engel

University of Chicago Press, 2027

A study of the twentieth-century construction of a Jewish mystical tradition by German Jewish intellectuals.

For most of European history, the notion of Jewish spirituality was unthinkable—buried beneath a pervasive desire to understand Judaism as uniquely material and Christianity as uniquely spiritual. In Spirit and Folk, Amir Engel tells the story of how a group of Jewish intellectuals, seeking greater involvement in political life, worked to invent a mystical tradition for Judaism amid the existential crises of twentieth-century Germany.

Beginning with Martin Buber in 1900 and ending with Gershom Scholem in 1942, Engel traces the rich debate among thinkers both well-known and forgotten about the need to imagine and construct a uniquely Jewish mystical tradition from historical religious sources. This quest and the tradition that emerged, Engel argues, developed in response to one of the most volatile questions of the last century: can Jews be Germans? The invention of Jewish spirituality, Engel shows, was not only a religious innovation but also a political gambit—a demand to be accepted as equal contributors to the German national project.

[more]
cover of Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion

Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom

Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion

Hugh B. Urban

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A sweeping cultural history of our yearning for psychedelics to free us from both modern life and traditional religion.

In 1957, Life Magazine published an article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about a Mexican healing ritual centered on an obscure psychedelic: Psilocybe mushrooms. Readers raced to experiment with the drug for their own spiritual, therapeutic, and recreational purposes until a psychedelic wave swept the nation. Today, though psilocybin has been transformed from a sacred fungus into a pharmaceutical product, many people still turn to the enigmatic mushroom to encounter profound spiritual experiences without the baggage of traditional religion.

In Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Hugh B. Urban examines the alluring promise of mysticism without religion. With psychedelics, one need not fast, flagellate, or even worship a god to encounter the transcendent; a carefully timed ingestion of psilocybin will suffice. But, Urban argues, stripping the trip from its religion came at a cost: the erasure of Indigenous culture and the eventual commercialization and scientification of the psychedelic underground. Urban shows that psychedelic mushrooms, far from the fringe or countercultural margins, have been central players in shaping American attitudes toward religion and science over the last century. He argues that our love affair with the intoxicating fungus reveals a deep frustration with a disenchanted world, desire for meaning beyond religion, yearning for nature amid ecological crisis, faith in science to save us, and the relentless power of capitalism to turn everything into commodities.

[more]