Charles M. Stang, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), discussed the Center’s new initiative, “Transcendence and Transformation,” and introduced its first cohort of research associates and post-doctoral fellows: Matthew Dillon, Hadi Fakhoury, J. Christian Greer, Giovanna Parmigiani, and Meryl (Mimi) Winick.
The new initiative will study religious and spiritual traditions and practices—ancient and modern, global in reach—that aim for the transcendence of our normal states of being, consciousness, and embodiment, and the consequent transformation of individual, community, and society.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
[GUITAR MUSIC]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Transcendence and Transformation, September 23, 2021.
CHARLES STANG: Good evening, everyone. My name is Charles Stang, and I have the privilege and pleasure of serving as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. We're here this evening to launch a new initiative at the center, one we're calling Transcendence and Transformation or T&T, for short.
This evening is an opportunity for me to say a few things about the initiative and then to introduce five scholars. One research associate and four postdoctoral fellows, who will speak in more depth about their own work and how it aligns with T&T. This will serve to introduce some but not all of the public programming that T&T will support over the course of the next year, including speaker series, reading groups, and conferences. This is the first of what I hope will be a four-year initiative to coincide with my second term as the center director.
Allow me to highlight two upcoming events. More details for which can be found on the center's events page or soon in the chat function. As always, the best way to keep abreast of everything we do at the center is to join our weekly mailing list. For the foreseeable future and certainly for this semester, our public programming will remain online-- Zoom webinars, such as this one.
Exactly one week from today, on Thursday, September 30, we'll be hosting Steven Benally and Sandor Iron Rope, who will discuss the Native American Church and the Sacrament of Peyote. This is the first event this year in our ongoing series on Psychedelics and the Future of Religion.
The following Monday, on October 4th, we'll be hosting Joy Dixon from the University of British Columbia to discuss the Emergence of the Modern Concept of the, quote unquote, "Divine Feminine." This is the first event in a new series we're hosting under the banner of T&T-- one on The Divine Feminine and its Discontents. So please do join us for those two events.
Before I go any further, I wish to acknowledge and thank our many supporters, without whom there would be no T&T Initiative. First and foremost, I wish to thank Elizabeth [? Revere ?] and Brian [? O'Kelly, ?] whose generosity has made all of this possible. I know you're out there. And so I want to say without you, we'd still be on the runway. I'm so grateful for your openness, enthusiasm, generosity of spirit, good humor, and acuity of mind and heart. And I look forward to evolving this initiative in continued conversation with you both in the years to come.
I would also like to thank Anton Bilton, Dave Bronner and the Dr. Bronner's Family Foundation, and Cody Swift and the Riverstyx Foundation for their support of T&T, especially for programming around Psychedelics and the Future of Religion.
We have an hour and a half together this evening. But I think we'll conclude early. Due to the format, we're going to forego our usual Q & A portion. Now, please allow me to say something about the substance of this initiative. I will start with a quote from Henry Corbin, the 20th century French philosopher of religion, about whom you will hear more from Hadi.
Corbin writes, quote, "Theology must become, or become once again, a science of experience, a science whose interest concerns most directly the destiny of each individual person. A science of life." I suspect Corbin is speaking of science in the German sense of Wissenschaft-- the rigorous pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship that includes, when in English, we would call the sciences and the humanities.
To say that theology or more broadly, the study of religion, needs, once again, to become a science of life, of experience, and of the individual, is obviously something of a provocation. Our individual lives and experiences are precisely what we are often asked to bracket in science in the pursuit of knowledge that alleges to be rigorous and objective. And the individual-- well, individualism is often maligned today as a modern invention, the champions of reason over other ways of knowing, sovereign free will over contingency and necessity, atomized libertarian politics over collective action and contemplation, and, of course, the endless consumption and consumerism of capitalism.
No doubt all those things are true. But so is this-- none of these critiques can or will dispense with the individual, with the person, with the unique life and experience of each and every one of us, because the person is not a modern invention. Whatever it is, it's real. It's singular and multiple at the same time, and it has an enormously rich theory and practice behind it and out in front of it. One that goes way beyond the modern West and includes all places, all positions, and all persons-- not just human ones.
The center's initiative on transcendence and transformation is meant to explore the way forward. Under the banner of T&T, we will study religious and spiritual traditions and practices-- ancient and modern, global in reach-- that aim for the transcendence of our normal states of being, consciousness, and embodiment, and the consequent transformation of individual, community in the world. We affirm the existence of the sacred. We insist that there are different levels of reality, seen and unseen, and different modes of access to them.
We will investigate what might be called metaphysics and mysticism by which is meant the traditions across time, people, and place that have cultivated practices of transcendence and transformation, and have articulated, sophisticated an scaffolded worldviews to make sense of those practices and experiences. These, quote unquote, "spiritual exercises" are often termed ecstatic.
That is, they usher us outside our accustomed states of being and understanding and invite us into new relationship with ourselves, our fellow humans, and our more-than-human neighbors, including the Earth's mineral, plant, and animal life, but also those beings we name spirits, angels, demons, and gods-- visible and invisible, real and imagined, malevolent and benign.
We will take seriously, but not literally, reports of extraordinary experiences of the sacred and the changes such experiences elicit in our minds, souls, and bodies. We will pay our disciplined inquiry with an openness to the archive of such experiences-- ancient and modern. We will explore different ontological and epistemological frameworks for interpreting such experiences appreciatively and critically. We will avoid and critique dismissive or reductive frameworks which, in my opinion, too often predominate in the academy.
Now, as it's fitting for the Center for the Study of World Religions, we will study the traditions of transcendence and transformation in those so-called world religions. But we will also carefully attend to those traditions excluded by that framework, including indigenous traditions and those that have been, for better or for worse, grouped under such categories as animism, paganism, shamanism, and folk religion, to name only a few.
Those of us in this initiative are committed to the study of these traditions and practices for their own sake, but also as a resource for contemporary religion and spirituality. We will attend to the ways elements of these traditions and practices are continually disassembled and reassembled for contemporary use. Well, it often goes into the name of syncretism, especially by so-called seekers-- those who identify as spiritual but not religious. And we will explore sensitively, but also sensibly, the thorny history and politics of such borrowing and recombination-- what today is often labeled cultural appropriation.
To speak of transcendence in the contemporary academy is transgressive. And to understand why, we should linger for a moment over that Latin preposition "trans," as in transcendence, transformation, and now, transgression. Trans means, at its most basic level, across or beyond. And it implies movement-- movement from one place to another, from one state to another, across something like a threshold, a line, or a boundary; whatever differentiates here from there, this from that, one from another.
Many contemporary thinkers are wary of transcendence because they think it implies a particular movement, namely an escape-- an escape from the thorny realities of our here and now to some fanciful refuge, disembodied, unencumbered by the weight of history and its horrors or its beauties. They regard the escape as escapist.
And they're certainly right that transcendence has been marshaled to justify our flight from our bodies and their demands on us, from other people and our responsibilities to them, from the Earth and how we have grossly mistreated it. It appears to them as a metaphysical version of the billionaires launching themselves into space in their rockets, leaving us in this wounded world behind, changing their location but not changing themselves one atom or inch.
This is decidedly not what we invoke when we speak of transcendence. We are committing ourselves to the trans in transcendence and transformation. Movement across and beyond, a dialect of stability and instability, an to stretch ourselves and others, to explore ourselves and others, and to embark on an adventure into this world and into others. For when we worry, that transcendence might be an escape from our here and now. I want to ask whether we should be so confident we know our here and now, or in the plural, our heres and our nows?
Perhaps the first thing to be transcended is that very confidence, in hopes that we might discover other ways of being here and now. Rather than a flight from the body, for example, might transcendence be a flight into the body, or at least other modes of embodiment we are not accustomed to perceive? I am convinced that we are individually and collectively much more than we typically take ourselves to be.
And that the urgent task is, first, a kind of imminent transcendence crossing the very proximate thresholds of our accustomed states of being, consciousness, and embodiment. Maybe, maybe that will open up onto new horizons of the then and the there. Or, again, in the plural, the thens and the theres.
But we're not there yet, or are we? As if we knew what time was or is. But let's start here and now, recognizing that both here and now, like us, have always been much more than we've let them be.
It's now time for me to introduce this evening's real stars-- the T&T team. These five scholars represent the core members of the T&T research seminar, which we'll meet throughout the year to read and refine our individual and shared research projects, as well as to engage contemporary scholars whose work, we think, aligns and deepens the work of T&T.
If these five scholars are the starting lineup as it were, we are pleased to have a very, very deep bench. A team comprised of faculty, staff, and students who, together, constitute a fellowship of inquiry and experience. I will introduce them now all at once and very briefly in no small part because they will each go on to introduce themselves and their research. And rather than appear at every juncture to introduce the next speaker, I'll introduce them all now and ask them to pass the mic as it were to the next speaker. I will return at the end of their presentations to make a few concluding remarks and to remind you of some upcoming events.
So without further ado, I invite the panelists to turn on their video. There they all are. Hello. So this evening's five speakers are, first, Giovanna, Giovanna Parmigiani. She is the research associate of the T&T Initiative. She's an Anthropologist of Religion, especially of Contemporary Paganisms, with her field work centered in Salento in Southern Italy.
She's also a lecturer on Religion and Cultural Anthropology here at Harvard Divinity School where she is teaching a wildly popular course on Magic in the Contemporary World. Giovanna is hosting a year-long speaker series called Gnoseologies: Transcendence and Transformation Today, about what you will soon hear more.
Matthew J. Dillon is the newest member of our community, and the first of our four Postdoctoral Fellows. Matt did his PhD at Rice University and their Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism program or GEM. He is a historian of religions with a focus on mystical and gnostic currents in Christianity. And his current research traces the afterlives of apocryphal Christian scriptures, philosophies, and mythemes in American religions and culture.
The remaining three T&T Postdoctoral Fellows were all here in some capacity last year and all residents at the center. They each helped develop and mature the thinking behind this initiative which, you could say, was in incubation last year. Now, with the support of Elizabeth, and Brian, and others, we're ready to hatch.
Hadi Fakhoury is our second T&T Postdoctoral Fellow. Originally from Beirut, Hadi comes to us by way of Montreal, where he did his PhD in McGill School of Religious Studies. Hadi's research has two loci. First, the relationship between philosophy and religion in the thought of the German philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. And second, the philosophy and spirituality of Henry Corbin, the influential 20th century French scholar, philosopher, and comparative theologian, whom I quoted earlier, and on whom Hadi and I are organizing a conference in May of 2022, entitled Adventures in the Imaginal.
J. Christian Greer is our third T&T Postdoctoral Fellow. Christian is an alumnus of HDS, and he did his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in their Department of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents. Christian's research addresses popular culture and religion, radical politics and religious activism, ecological spirituality, and finally, drugs and religion, especially what he calls psychedelic spiritualities.
Christian is organizing a weekly in-person reading group, entitled Modern Psychedelic Spiritualities in Historical Contexts Explorations in the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library, a library just currently housed at Harvard.
And finally, Mimi Winick, our fourth T&T Postdoctoral Fellow. Mimi was here last year as a Research Associate in the Women's Study in Religion Program, and she stayed on to take part in this new initiative. She received her PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University, and her research for T&T focuses on how prose literature fosters sustained experiences of transcendence and transformation both in individuals and in communities of readers. Mimi and Hadi are organizing the speaker series and reading group on the Divine Feminine and its Discontents, about which you'll hear more shortly.
So thank you for your patience, as I've droned on. Thank you for your interest in this initiative. And thank you for being bigger than we are told we are and for leaning into that. I'd now like to invite Giovanna to take the stage, as it were. Giovanna.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, Charlie. Good evening and welcome. My name is Giovanna Parmigiani, and I'm very pleased to be the Research Associate at the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at the CSWR this academic year. As Charlie just noted, I'm also a lecturer in Religion and Cultural Anthropology at Harvard Divinity School where I teach courses in The Anthropology of Religion and Magic, on Sensory and Medical Anthropology, and The Study of Religion, and an Earth-based Spiritualities.
I am a socio-cultural anthropologist, and I received my master's degrees in Italy where I come from, at the Universita degli Studi di Milano, and in the UK at the London School of Economics. I got my PhD instead from the University of Toronto, and I worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow here at Harvard.
My research develops at the intersection between women's studies, religion, and politics. And my fieldwork is based in Southern Italy, in the area called Salento, the southeastern fringe of the Italian Peninsula or the hills, so to speak, of the Italian Boot. All my work stems from my intensive presence in the field. I spent more than four years in the last 10 doing participant observation among women's groups in the Salento area.
Feminist activists first, a new age on Pagan practitioners then. As a matter of fact, one of my interests here at the T&T Initiative and more in general is exploring the possibilities and limitations of ethnography as a research method, and inquire the dimension of transformation, and possibly of transcendence embedded in this practice for both ethnographers and interlocutors.
My first book is titled Feminism, Violence and Representation in Modern Italy and focuses on the political practices of Italian feminists in reference to gender violence and femicide. That is to say, the killing of women by the hand of men for the fact of being women. I read their activism around representation as an ethical and anesthetic practice. I focus on the importance of the census in political activism and more broadly on the political dimensions of imagination. Understood here the, quote unquote, "embodied minding."
In my second book, titled The Spider Dance, that I focus on the re-appropriation of pizzica, a traditional dance used in Salento until the 1960s and 70s, to heal from a malaise allegedly caused by the bite of tarantula spiders. In particular, I look at how the phenomenon that I just described-- that now disappeared, that goes by the name of tarantismo-- has been reclaimed and transformed within Pagan spaces, becoming a commonly used healing and magical practice.
I have proposed a reading of magic that puts at the forefront specific non-linear ways to experience time and temporality and suggests that different experiences of time and temporality can foster well-being. Here at the T&T Initiative, I am working on my new project on magic and populism, entitled Magic and Populism in Southern Europe, Lived Religion, Materiality, and Gender, in which I examine the connection between magic-- understood here as a participatory consciousness-- and populism.
I recently published on the topic of conspiracy theories-- a new age spirituality during the COVID 19 pandemic-- and I will continue to explore the role of non-rational ways of knowing in contemporary politics and spirituality. This topic is very current. I'm sure that many of us are grappling with the similar issues lately, from no-vaxxers to QAnon, from fake news and the role of social media and memes in political activism. Many of us read the news and probably feel, so to speak, a bit disoriented sometimes.
For this reason, I will host a series of lectures within the T&T Initiative based on my work but open to all-- academics or not, formal students and students at heart, practitioners and skeptics. It is called Gnosiologies, and it will take place on selected Wednesdays throughout the year at lunchtime over Zoom. Well, the title Gnosiologies, I know, may sound a little bit obscure. The focus of the initiative is not. It addresses actually a very real topic, so to speak, for many of us.
It addresses ways of knowing that are often labeled as non-rational. Traditionally referred to as Gnosis in Westernists philosophical and religious traditions-- hence, the title of the series-- and often understood in [? counter-opposition ?] to science, these ways of knowing are becoming more and more influential in contemporary societies, popular culture, and academic research.
What is the place of spirit possession, divination, and experiences perceived as out of the ordinary in our lives? How can we study and approach these types of phenomena? What is their place in our society? What is their place in academia? Going beyond dichotomies, such as body and mind, ordinary and extraordinary, reason and experience, and matter and spirit, this series will help scholars of different disciplines and practitioners interested in exploring and expanding the boundaries of what counts as knowledge today.
I am very pleased to announce that I will host speakers, such as Anthropologist, Dr. Susan Greenwood; Professor [? Yvonne ?] [? Shiro, ?] and Professor Sabina [INAUDIBLE] in this series among others. I will also organize collaboration with my students here at HDS, a Q&A on Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Paganism, A New Age Spirituality. A very important topic to explicitly address both in academic and in non-academic contexts.
I end this brief introduction by inviting all the HDS students interested in being more involved in the organization of these events to be in touch with me, and by encouraging all the persons who want to explore these topics to follow the series, the other T&T series, that my colleagues will introduce shortly, and the work of the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative more broadly. Thank you. And I will pass the mic to our Postdoctoral Fellows. Matt, please, introduce yourself.
MATTHEW DILLON: Greetings. So before I dive in, I want to thank you all for attending this event, in this launch event. I am enormously excited by what we are doing under this initiative. And I really hope that excitement radiates from your screens tonight. I do have a PowerPoint. So I'm going to do a little screen share here.
And so I want to convey my projects in terms of my story. Because as Charlie remarked in the introduction, T&T is concerned with examining the person. It's something much more extraordinary than it's commonly suppose. And I like to think that intuition has guided my work.
So I'm one of those strange birds who got interested in mysticism while still teenager. Reading authors from the Beat Generation, listening to metal opened the doors of perception to meditation, ritual magic, and the study of altered states of consciousness and energy. I became sensitized. At a young age, you see, popular culture is a vital site of transcendence and transformation and that carries into all my work to this day.
When I went off to college, I decided to major in Psychology and Philosophy, as we weirdos all want to do. By happenstance, I found myself in the philosophy department that had enough courses in Mystical Philosophy, Jewish Kabbalah, Islamic Sufism, Philosophy of the Afterlife, and much, much else that I could actually major in Comparative Mysticism. So I went down the rabbit hole.
Now once in Wonderland, I became fascinated by the ways in which monotheistic traditions articulates the divine human-- that is, the intuition that we, as human beings, are fundamentally divine or can be divinized ourselves through ritual practices and radical experiences. So I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Depictions of Adam Prior to the Fall in the Zohar kabbalistic text, and The Works of the Andalusian Mystic, [INAUDIBLE] as spaces in which within monotheistic mystical texts are divinity whose understood and then [? coded. ?]
And so as I was finishing up my degree, Rice University had just pioneered the program, that Charlie mentioned in the intro here, the Gnosticism, Esotericism and Mysticism concentration or GEM. And this was the first of its kind, not only in the United States but in the world. A PhD concentration devoted to the study of the heretical, the mystical, and the extraordinary. And then from comparative, historical, and philosophical perspectives, it doesn't get much better than that.
So I went there, and I was going to pursue that gnostic Adam project I was just describing. And to do so, I was working in two very distinctive worlds. I spent half of my time working with leading expert in early Christianity and Gnostic religion, April DeConick. And with her, I learned to read Greek, Coptic, and to analyze all that literature, and it sits in London. And the rest of the time, I was devoted to the study of American religions, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of GEM with Jeffrey Kripal, who's well-known within this T&T sphere.
And I started to recognize that the individuals that I was studying with GEM and American religions were reading all this ancient heretical Gnostic mystical literature, and they were interpreting it and commenting on it in these really radical and imaginative ways. And so kind of by happenstance, I became a receptionist. And I analyzed the inception, impact, and transformation of ancient Gnostic thought and scriptures in American religions and culture.
So my first book, The Kingdom is Within You, The Lost Gospels and Post-Christianity in America is an expression of this project. I chart the religious reception of the Nag Hammadi Codices, pictured here, which contain 53 scriptures, including works such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocryphon of John, and the Gospel of Philip. That all arise from the period of Christian origins, which were rediscovered in a Kashmir Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. And I chart that religious [? research ?] and today within traditional Christianities, new religions, new media, the arts, and among seekers or the spiritual but not religious.
So I argue that The Lost Gospel's function is a return of the repressed Christian memory in America-- that is, they open up a debate about Christian symbol within the Christian origins-- Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the canon, and the Gnostics. And in so doing, foment debates over who has authority within Christianity today.
Moreover, I found that many of the pivotal figures in this history had become disillusioned with traditional conciliar Christianity, and they yearned for a more mystical feminist and progressive form of Christianity, and they would find it in The Lost Gospels. Whether or not it's there in the Nag Hammadi is a big part of the actual book itself.
So The Lost Gospels give figures like Elaine Pagels, Stephen Buhler, and Rosamonde Miller, priests within the major denominations of the Gnostic church in California, and [? JJ ?] Berg, the opportunity to reinterpret the symbols of Christian memory in a way that better aligns features of postmodernity, such as humanism, individualism, feminism, sexual liberation, et cetera, et cetera. And if this is of interest to you, the book is under contract with University of Virginia's American Spirituality series, and you can expect it in your hands and ready for your eyes in a little over a year.
So as I was finishing this project and wanted to return to the Gnostic Adam project, which has been with me for so long, one of my former advisors recommended Charles Stang's own, Our Divine Double. And this book really made something clicked for me in that it recognized the import of image and likeness discourse. So Genesis 1:26, in talk of the [INAUDIBLE] Adam and divine human, but it opened the space for moving beyond that to a more comparatively robust symbol-- the divine double.
Now, this double encompasses a notion of selfhood, conceived as a false or limited conscious self and its divine counterpart, which are united in a deeper unity. And ancient Jewish and Christian sources notice this identity in duality results in demonization and ultimately salvation.
So my second project, tentatively titled Electric Soul, Psychology, Technology, and the Divine Double, will chart the afterlives of this important idea in the 20th century West. More specifically, I will show how religious, psychological, and technological discourses converge as contemporaries theorized this form of self-knowing.
The book will focus on case studies of six individuals who had [? unbidden, ?] which is important to me, and extreme experiences of intrapsychic [INAUDIBLE] that drove them to formulate new models, that James would call a multiplicity of self. And those are Carl Jung, L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame, Paramahansa Yogananda, Elijah Muhammad, Jane Roberts, and David Icke.
Now, each of these cases negotiate their experiences of the double with contemporary psychoanalysis or neuroscience in ways that attempt to elude reductive explanations. At the same time, each of them turns to technological discourses in order to explain the shift from one mode of being into another. So, for instance, Elijah Muhammad and David Icke, turn to the idea of genetic manipulation to explain how we have forgotten our divine double. Others, like Jane Roberts, reimagine the double as a kind of non-local media transmitter and receiver.
But ultimately, each of these cases articulates a new mystical metaphysics that negotiates their experiences of the double with the technological imagination-- what the world is, and what it could become.
So thank you very much for your time. Please keep an eye on the website for all the happenings here, and I am very happy to hand the mic to my dear friend and colleague, Hadi.
HADI FAKHOURY: Thank you very much, Matt. I just would like to share some slides. All right. Well, hello, everyone. My name is Hadi Fakhoury. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative. I received my masters from the Institute of Islamic Studies and my PhD from the School of Religious Studies, both at McGill University, Montreal.
My main area of research is the philosophy of religion, mainly the philosophical investigation of the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions. My project at the CSWR is titled, Towards a Hierology, Henry Corbin and the Reorientation of the Study of Religion. It focuses on Henry Corbin, a 20th century French philosopher, theologian, and pioneering scholar of Islamic philosophy. Corbin is an altogether unique thinker. If his home discipline is Islamic studies, the breadth of his learning, intellectual dialogues, wide ranging influence, and goals, mean that his work transcends narrow disciplinary confines.
Through his work, Corbin sought to mediate between modern European philosophy and traditional Eastern intellectual traditions. He did so through creative translations across different intellectual, religious, and linguistic idioms, thereby paving the way for thinking about and engaging with traditional texts in a modern secular and pluralistic context.
Corbin's reception has far too long been unjustly confined to the domain of specialists who have been exclusively concerned with assessing his scholarly contributions to the study of Islam, and who have failed to recognize the originality and enduring value of his ideas. Therefore, the reception of Corbin needs to be reoriented to widen his relevance and allow fresh critical engagements with his works.
At the core of my project is the premise that Corbin is best understood and studied as a Gnostic philosopher in his own right, as an original comparative theologian, and as a powerful theorist of mystical experience. By looking at pre-modern visionary accounts through a phenomenological lens, Corbin affirmed their metaphysical reality and rehabilitated their perennial meaning. Thus, he challenged secular approaches that either negate the sacred or relocated to an unknowable transcendence.
My project thus seeks, one, to move beyond reductive, partial, and hostile readings that characterize Corbin as an undisciplined visionary who ignored scholarly principles. Two, to bring Corbin out of his relative obscurity in the annals of modern Islamic studies and present him to a broader academic audience. Three, to shed new light on Corbin's [INAUDIBLE] based on extensive cutting-edge academic [INAUDIBLE] archival research and forward to inspire a new generation of scholars in various areas to discover and engage with Corbin.
The project has three goals. First is the publication of a bilingual, in French and English edition, of previously unpublished writings by Corbin. Two, hosting a conference on Corbin at the CSWR. And three, publishing an edited volume of proceedings from this conference.
The first goal of my project, i.e. the addition of his early writings, addresses a major gap in Corbin's scholarship by shedding light on a previously overlooked and extremely obscure period of his career, namely his six years in Istanbul between 1939 and 1945. The book will make publicly available for the first time previously unknown writings by Corbin, which until now have only existed in manuscript form.
It will show that far from being isolated from external influences, Corbin was deeply immersed in the study of Eastern Christian theology during this period. Moreover, these writings contain the first expressions of ideas that would characterize Corbin's mature thought. The book will offer a much needed contextualisation of Corbin and will be an invaluable contribution to Corbin's scholarship.
How would contemporary orthodox theologians-- Greek, Russian, and Romania-- shape Corbin's thought? What were these writings intended to achieve, and why did Corbin never publish them? To what extent do these ideas-- the ideas expressed in these early texts-- anticipate his mature views? These and many other questions will be the focus of a lengthy introductory study. By making available new and atypical writings by Corbin, the book will enable a reevaluation of his thought outside of the strict confines of Islamic studies.
Second, I am organizing with Charlie a three-day conference, entitled Adventures in the Imaginal, Henry Corbin in the 21st Century. The conference is scheduled to take place in May 2022 here at the CSWR. To allow a far-reaching dissemination of Corbin's ideas, this broadly themed conference-- the first in the English-speaking world-- will bring together old and new scholars from wildly different fields. Several eminent scholars in various areas-- anthropology, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among others have already agreed to participate. We would like to encourage novel, critical, and creative approaches too, and appropriations of Corbin's work.
What might a fresh engagement with Corbin's work reveal today? How do new sources and developments in scholarship change our understanding of him and his legacy? How can we continue and expand on his approach to the study of religious texts? What are we to make today of his efforts to reintroduce ancient theories of the active imagination, or what he called "the imaginal" into modern thought? How does his interest in the imagination differ from the contemporary resurgence of interest in the imagination? Finally, is his appeal to the figure of Sophia and the Divine Feminine still relevant today?
The conference will take up these and other questions in hopes of re-establishing Corbin's legacy for the 21st century. This event will not exactly conform to the format of a traditional academic colloquium. Indeed, in addition to scholarly presentations we are putting together a special panel on Corbin and the arts for each of the three conference days. The goal of this panel will be to showcase Corbin's wide-ranging legacy in arts and letters and to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations. Some of the events, which have already been planned for this panel include the staging of a play, a musical concert, and an art exhibition. Stay tuned for details.
Third, I will coedit with Charlie a volume of proceedings based on this conference. This book will be the very first edited volume in English on Corbin and a much needed one. This conference and the volume of its proceedings will launch Corbin's studies in a North American academic environment. These three projects, I believe, will stimulate a much needed reorientation of Corbin and his distinctive, though underappreciated, contribution to the study of Iranian and Islamic mystical currents and their spiritual legacy to humanity.
In addition to my work on Corbin, I'm preparing this year a book on the 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Schelling was an important intellectual source for Corbin and indeed one of the major philosophers in the Western tradition. My book will offer a study of Schelling's later philosophy of religion through an analysis of an important but overlooked work from his later period, namely his treatise on monotheism. My book will also include the first English translation of Schelling's work.
Finally, this year, I am organizing with my colleague and friend, Mimi Winick, a speaker series and accompanying reading group on the theme of the Divine Feminine. My interest in this theme stems from two areas. Mainly, first is my interest in Russian Sophiology, a philosophical and theological current beginning with the 19th century mystical philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov, and developed by his Russian and non-Russian successors, including Corbin. This lineage foregrounds the biblical figure of Sophia who represents the wisdom of God and enables the mediation between God and his creation.
My second interest are influential theories of matriarchy and patriarchy and their historical genesis in the work of the 19th century Swiss jurist and anthropologist, Johann Jakob Bachofen. Our series on the Divine Feminine will explore these themes among many others in a comparative and critical context. I will be [? notably ?] hosting two events on Sophiology, it's German and Russian sources, and an. Event addressing the topic of goddess worship in pre-Islamic Arabia.
I thank you for your attention and look forward to being part of this initiative. And now I hand over the mic to Christian Greer, my colleague.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: Thanks so much, Hadi. Hi, everyone. I'm J. Christian Greer a Postdoc Fellow in the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at CSWR. In addition to earning an MDiv at Harvard Divinity School right here, I received my MA and PhD in Esotericism from the History of Hermetic Philosophy department at the University of Amsterdam.
I'm happy to say that I have three exciting projects in the works here at the CSWR. The first is Angelheaded Hipsters, Psychedelic Militancy in Cold War America, my first book manuscript. This book offers a new framework for interpreting the impact of psychedelic substances on post-war American culture.
It does this by tracing the fundamental role of psychedelics' churches, fellowships, and sex as they played in the rise of hip culture, from the hipsters of the 1950's Beat Generation to the hippies of the 1960s and then the return of the hipsters in decades hence. This research concerns the complexities, contradictions, and assumptions that shaped the North American counterculture. The book is under contract by University of Oxford Press and like Matt's book, it should be available in about a year.
The second project is also a book, though an edited volume instead of a monograph. I am now in the initial stages of composing the Handbook of Psychedelics and Religion, a major volume of contributions that covers the intersection of psychedelic substances and religious traditions across time and space. Co-edited with Christopher Partridge, the Handbook of Religion and Psychedelic Substances offers a dispassionate interdisciplinary analysis of drug-induced religious experience and the ritual use of psychoactive substances, thereby challenging the widespread tendency of scholars of religion to neglect the profound impact that psychedelics had had on global religion.
To be sure, the use of psychedelic substances is relatively well-known in the history of religion, from references to soma and the Indo-Aryan hymns of the Rig Veda to modern occultism and the contemporary sacramental uses of peyote in the Native American church, ayahuasca in Santo Daime, and marijuana in Rastafarianism.
Moreover, in the modern period, particularly since the mid-19th century, there has been a widening stream of individuals in the West who have interpreted their experiences on drugs in explicitly spiritual terms. This, of course, is not surprising in that, certain naturally-occurring alcohol cause a chemical reaction in the brain. The effect of which is an alteration in the user's perception, mood, and thought processes.
It would be unusual, therefore, if the often profound altered states experience were not in some ways interpreted as spiritually significant. That said, the social climate for researching, the interface between religions and drugs, has been extremely hostile in the last half century primarily due to government prohibition and the war on drugs campaign.
This handbook, then, provides an authoritative introduction to the religious interpretation of the psychedelic alteration of consciousness. Finally, I'm also leading a reading group here at Harvard Divinity School, entitled Modern Psychedelic Spiritualities in Historical Context Explorations in the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library. This reading group meets every Wednesday from 4:00 to 6:00 PM.
Now, it's no secret that the psychedelic Renaissance has been gaining momentum since the early 2000s, bringing together research scientists, pharmaceutical corporations, therapists, non-profits, neuroscientists, government regulators, and investment bankers, the re-emergence of research into psychedelic substances. It has been hailed as a turning point in the treatment of mental illness, neurological brain imaging, as well as the potential flashpoint for the wellness industry.
Presented as a Renaissance, this new wave of scientific research is premised on the disavowal of the psychedelic counterculture that preceded it. According to prominent advocates of this rebirth, American culture is only now emerging from a Dark Age, roughly half a century long where little significant research was conducted.
Now, as we shall see in this reading group, this is far from the truth. The reading group problematizes the rebirth or Renaissance narrative of the psychedelic Renaissance by analyzing the underground researchers, the spiritual communities, and new religious movements that have spent the last 70 years engaged with psychedelic substances. And here, I'm thinking particularly of lysergic acid, that would be LSD; psilocybin, that would be magic mushrooms; or dimethyltryptamine, that would be DMT.
Now, special attention in this group focuses on the diverse modes of expression for psychedelic spirituality. And rest assured, there are many, many, many, different expressions. For example, you might know the back-to-the-land communitarianism or the movement of underground chemists that have been working over the last seven years. Possibly you know about politically militant [INAUDIBLE] across the spectrum, from left to right. Or maybe technologists or futurist cooperatives that use psychedelics. Or, of course, musical collectives-- the Grateful Dead, you know, Fish.
Well, each of these class meetings is organized around a lecture that I give and that's followed by a group discussion. And in addition to these sessions, I have scheduled regular class visits to the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library, LSD, which is now held at Harvard University. As it is the world's largest private collection of material on the alteration of consciousness, it's hard to overemphasize the significance of this archive for the study of psychedelic spirituality. Well, here, we will take the opportunity to explore the holdings, of course, but perhaps more importantly, record and upload video clips of focusing on key items in this archive.
Now, the students who complete this directed study or this reading group will gain a solid understanding of, one, the historical context and currents that gave rise to the psychedelic interpretation of mind expanding drugs. Keep in mind there are more than one interpretation. We will just be looking at the psychedelic.
Two, students will also gain an understanding of the historical movement of psychedelic spirituality that have emerged in the modern period of US history. Three, students also gain an understanding of the implicit sexism, classism, and racism embedded within the shifting narratives of psychedelic culture from the 1940s to present. And finally, we will examine the political, cultural, and ethical issues that are currently animating the psychedelic Renaissance.
Oh, I should also mention that alongside this group, I'm also leading another seminar, entitled Psychedelics and the Sacred, with my dear friend, Dr. Erik Davis. Scheduled for two weeks, this upcoming winter, this intensive seminar provides students with an in-depth look at the invocation of psychedelics and religion, starting all the way back in antiquity and going all the way forward to today.
Once more, let me just say from the bottom of my heart, I'm overjoyed to be doing this work here with such a talented group of researchers. And finally, finally, finally, thank you for your attention. Right now, I'd like to pass the mic over to my friend, Mimi.
MIMI WINICK: Thank you, Christian. And thank you, everyone in attendance tonight. I too am thrilled to be here. My name is Mimi Winick, and I am a literary historian focusing on British and North American literature from the 19th century to the present with particular attention to religion, gender, race and how people have used these categories to shape their literary and scholarly practices.
In particular, I look at how these identity markers, as they developed in the context of 19th century empire, have shaped how people experience ecstasy and related states, such as mysticism, joy, transcendence in scholarship and literature. I posit that literary forms that depict religion, as a universal global spirituality, shape historically specific experiences of sustained transcendence and transformation.
[INAUDIBLE] my research questions and exploring this idea and argument center on how certain literary and scholarly forms and practices foster ecstasy and other transcendent states. And I'm especially interested in sustained or long-lasting versions of these ecstatic experiences-- what we might think of as enduring ecstatic states.
Most previous scholarship on transcendent experiences in literature has largely focused on more concentrated ephemeral forms in lyric poetry, the epiphany moment in novels, or film montage. By contrast, I look to longer prose forms in fiction and in scholarship focusing on duration rather than brief moments. Texts that do this, I argue, structure experiences of sustained transcendence that, for some, powerfully transform the world outside the text.
So I am, too, going to share my screen to talk a little bit about my first book project that looks at these questions, entitled Ecstatic Inquiry. In this project, I explore how the first generation of women theorists of religion in Britain took ecstasy as subject matter, scholarly evidence, and a form of scholarly practice in their studies of ancient Greek religion, medieval romances of the Holy Grail, and the early modern witch trials.
I argue that this cohort of women scholars-- Jane Ellen Harrison, Jesse Laidlay Weston, and Margaret Alice Murray-- all of whom were born in the mid-19th century and lived on into the first decades of the 20th with the zenith of their careers in that early 20th century moment.
I argue in this book that they created a major, largely unacknowledged tradition of feminist inquiry in religious studies that constitutes the keysight of the origins of later goddess spirituality movements. Their books, the most notorious of which, remains Weston's From Ritual to Romance, published in 1920. And mainly notorious because of the poet TS Eliot's references to Weston's book in his notes to The Waste Land, his famous modernist poem. And then his subsequent disavowal of his reliance on Weston 30 years later just before this image of him on the cover of Time magazine appeared.
And you could see he couldn't quite escape that Weston framing, which follows him in the Grail and feminized imagery that surrounds him on the magazine. So these figures and their scholarship were first praised as pathbreaking and then dismissed as pseudo scholarly, even as their work and their theories persisted particularly in popular culture, shaping imaginative literature, feminism, and new religious movements.
In my new project that I'm pursuing this year as a Postdoctoral Fellow on Transcendence in Transformation, sustaining transcendence through prose fantasies, I explore how prose literature catalyzes transcendent experiences, including forms of ecstasy among communities of readers. I start my study with the foundational text of comparative religion and exemplar of British imperialism, JG Frazer's The Golden Bough, originally published in 1890.
But my argument is basically encapsulated by the cover of this remarkable 1974 paperback edition from MacMillan, the original publisher of the book, that keeps bringing out these more inexpensive mass market editions. And I found this edition on the paranormal shelf in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, England. So as you may know, The Golden Bough is known for its erotic treatment of religion, especially Christianity, implying that Jesus Christ was just another, quote, "dying God," like Osiris, Adis, or Adonis and, therefore, a merely mythical rather than either a divine or a historical figure.
But for many readers, The Golden Bough affirms a sense of the supernatural or, at least, the mystical, evoked here in this cover, which suggests as fantasy or sci-fi novel with its high weirdness aesthetic of mixed classical and astronomical imagery evident in the Hieronymus Bosch style images of nude or toga clad people, mermaids, and sailors cavorting with unicorns and goats in a pastoral landscape, marked by columns and other structures made of marbled material that suggests both geologic and human, or perhaps extraterrestrial-made formations.
The Golden Bough's emphasis on commonalities in religious beliefs and practices among people living across wide expanses of space and time, though intended to reduce religion to a merely human rather than divine phenomenon, presented religion as a mysteriously universal human practice. The only explanation of which for many readers can be a powerful universal sacredness. For some of these readers, the book, with its vivid accounts of ritual and its theory of magic, even offered a practical guide to reviving ancient religions for modernity.
So further in this sustaining transcendence project, I look also at a, quote, "periodicals" of the early 20th century, represented here by an issue of The Quest, and I consider how their serial form might shape experiences of sustained ecstasy too.
Finally, I consider, what we might call, revisionist fantasy fiction, including The Mists of Avalon, a best-selling feminist retelling of The Legend of King Arthur; and works of so-called counter Lovecraft fiction that rework the notoriously racist and xenophobic fantasy horror of HP Lovecraft, the early 20th century American writer, and build new worlds out of his materials, offering contemporary readers a different sort of transformative experience.
So in closing, in moving from ecstatic inquiry to sustaining transcendence, I turn from writing about the role of a feminist spiritual practice in the genealogy of religious studies to writing of a wider range of writers and readers of literary texts concerned with religion, and how those texts seem to operate for them as catalysts for ecstatic and perhaps spiritual experiences.
Finally, as has been mentioned, as part of these projects, I am working with Hadi to coordinate a speaker series and reading group on the subject of the Divine Feminine and Its Discontents that looks at the history and questions the future of this popular but vexed concept for scholars and religious practitioners. And we'll be inviting historians, and photographers, philosophers, feminist theologians, and others to speak on this topic and both explore, as we mentioned, this dialectic of stability and instability of both of our key terms of divine and feminine.
Uniting these projects for me are the following questions. How is ecstasy related to mysticism historically, aesthetically, phenomenalogically? Can ecstasy be a sustained state rather than an ephemeral one? How has ecstasy been shaped by post enlightenment concepts of race, gender, and sexuality?
And what methods of inquiry might help us approach such a notoriously ineffable unspeakable condition? In my own work, I use methods from literary studies, formal analysis, archival research, as well as social science research, including surveys and interviews of readers to pursue these questions.
Ultimately, I hope to make contributions with this work to literary and religious studies, and to suggest how the historical work I do might illuminate resources for transcendence and transformation in scholarly work today. In this way, I'm interested in the potentials and perhaps the pitfalls of exploring the place of transcendental experiences in historical and contemporary scholarly practices in the context of the history of and crisis in the humanities.
To this end, my work intends not only to discuss artists, writers, and scholars but to seriously attend to the accounts of extraordinary experiences of readers and to consider how these relate to experiences of transcendence explored by my colleagues in the context of ancient religions, psychedelics, philosophy of religion, and new religious movements. And I'm very excited to be pursuing these ecstatic inquiries alongside this fabulous group of colleagues and in this wider community. Thanks very much.
CHARLES STANG: Well, thank you. Thank you, Giovanna, Matt, Hadi, Christian, Mimi. I'd like to invite you to turn your video on so everyone can have one last good look at you all. Thank you for your very clear and very compelling introductions of your individual and shared research projects, and I look forward to working with all of you over the course of this year.
As for the audience, I hope this evening has given you a small taste of the talent we have assembled as part of this initiative. I want to remind you once again to check out our upcoming events and, as always, the best way to stay abreast of what we're doing at the center with this initiative and with all our programming is to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
So thank you, panelists. Thank you, supporters. And thank you, audience. I look forward to seeing you soon. In the meantime, I wish you all the best for your own transcendence and transformation. Good night and goodbye.
SPEAKER 1: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions. Copyright 2021, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.