Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 2001 - Body, Mind & Spirit - 412 pages
William Blake once wrote that "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Inspired by these poetic terms, Jeffrey J. Kripal reveals how the works of scholars of mysticism are often rooted in their own mystical experiences, "roads of excess," which can both lead to important insights into these scholars' works and point us to our own "palaces of wisdom."

In his new book, Kripal addresses the twentieth-century study of mysticism as a kind of mystical tradition in its own right, with its own unique histories, discourses, sociological dynamics, and rhetorics of secrecy. Fluidly combining autobiography and biography with scholarly exploration, Kripal takes us on a tour of comparative mystical thought by examining the lives and works of five major historians of mysticism—Evelyn Underhill, Louis Massignon, R. C. Zaehner, Agehananda Bharati, and Elliot Wolfson—as well as relating his own mystical experiences. The result, Kripal finds, is seven "palaces of wisdom": the religious power of excess, the necessity of distance in the study of mysticism, the relationship between the mystical and art, the dilemmas of male subjectivity and modern heterosexuality, a call for ethical criticism, the paradox of the insider-outsider problem in the study of religion, and the magical power of texts and their interpretation.

An original and penetrating analysis of modern scholarship and scholars of mysticism, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom is also a persuasive demonstration of the way this scholarly activity is itself a mystical phenomenon.
 

Contents

Roads of Excess
1
Eyeing the Burning Wings Analyzing the Mystical Experience of Love in Evelyn Underhills Mysticism 1911
33
The Passion of Louis Massignon Sublimating the Homoerotic Gaze in The Passion of alHallaj 1922
98
The Doors of Deception R C Zaehners Ethical and Erotic Challenges to Monistic Experience in Mysticism Sacred and Profane 1957 and Discordant C...
156
Writing Out of the Light at the Center Reading Agehananda Bharatis Tantric Trilogy 1960 1965 1976
207
The Mystical Mirror of Hermeneutics Gazing into Elliot Wolfsons Speculum 1994
258
Palaces of Wisdom
305
Notes
331
Bibliography
377
Index
391
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

References to this book

About the author (2001)

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the Vira I. Heinz Associate Professor of Religion at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, published by the University of Chicago Press, which won the American Academy of Religion's Best First Book in the History of Religions Award.

Bibliographic information