Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism

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

Kripal, Jeffrey J.

Paperback

Comparative ReligionReligion General

ISBN10: 0226453790
ISBN13: 9780226453798
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Dec 1 2001
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.28
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Religion General

View All