Protestantism

Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke | Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

In 1927, Blind Willie Johnson sat down in Dallas, Texas, to record the endlessly enigmatic track “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”[1] In that moment—unbeknownst to either the musician or the sound engineer—the cosmic potential of gospel blues was unlocked. Fifty years after that 1927 recording session, Carl Sagan included Blind Willie Johnson’s track on the “Golden Record” that was placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft, a sonic artifact of human life launched into interstellar space, meant to ensure extraterrestrial life would know that at least some of us are capable of expressing the human existential condition with soul and grace. [2] 

The recording also marks another, less celebrated event: a moment of connection and transformation that can be plotted according to the coordinates of a theological cosmology. Johnson’s gospel blues does not merely draw inspiration from the Christian tradition but expresses and extends a particular current within it—a modulating signal that begins with Martin Luther’s “theology of the cross,” moves through radical Pietism and Protestant apophaticism, and resonates with the existentialized revelations of Christian theosophy and the cosmopoetics of Romanticism. What binds these disparate moments in the story of Protestantism is not a chain of direct historic influence but a shared theological grammar of divine hiddenness and ecstatic sorrow in which suffering is envisioned as a medium of divine revelation and spiritual transformation.

The title of Blind Willie Johnson’s remarkable song is borrowed from the opening lines of “Gethsemane,” a hymn written in 1792 by Thomas Haweis (1734–1820), a Church of England cleric with Methodist leanings and a key figure in the Evangelical Revival, an eighteenth-century Protestant movement emphasizing conversion and devotional piety.[3] Haweis’s verse evokes Christ’s agony in the garden on the eve of his crucifixion:

Dark was the night, and cold the ground,
On which the Lord was laid;
His sweat like drops of blood ran down,
In agony he prayed.

More than mere narration, Haweis was intent on crafting a song with the power to educate those who sang it spiritually. His hymn scripts a movement from affect to ethical instruction, from anguish to obedience. In this sense, “Gethsemane” dovetails with a broader Protestant concern for interrogating the conscience and catalyzing the revelatory potentiality of sorrow and inward tension. This sensibility reaches back to Luther’s theological emphasis on the coexistence of suffering and spiritual exaltation within the life of faith.       

Haweis and Blind Willie Johnson could not have come from more different cultural worlds, and the road from Gethsemane to Dallas was certainly long and winding. Although biographical information on the bluesman remains scarce, Johnson was likely familiar with the opening words of Haweis’ hymn through the conduit of the Baptist Church, an institution he once dreamed of professionally serving as a preacher.[4] In the hands of Blind Willie Johnson, however, the song becomes not only a pious reflection on Christ’s sorrow but a lived expression of suffering, vigilance, and hope. The hymn takes an implicitly apophatic turn in which the fixity of “letter,” meaning all doctrinal and didactic content, is stripped away to expose bare “spirit.” In place of articulated narrative or directive, the listener encounters moans, hums, and the voice of an undulating slide guitar that slips between notes—a wordless lament that simultaneously evokes the Passion story and human suffering through its very absence of narrativity.[5] In this gesture, spirit and flesh, the life of Christ and that of the musician, are woven into one. The space that the song opens is one in which the metaphysical and the mundane interpenetrate and blur. When considered in the theological tradition that shaped Johnson’s Baptist beliefs, the song evokes two central spiritual impulses within the Protestant sacred imaginary: (1) the search for divine presence in the unresolved tension between transcendence and immanence and (2) the connection between trauma and spiritual transformation. 

It was perhaps this sense of transcendence that the Methodist minister and theologian James Hal Cone sought to name when he described the blues as being capable of communicating a “deeper level of experience that transcends the tools of ‘objective’ historical research.”[6] Yet transcendence, in this context, does not imply a Platonic detachment from the world or emotion. As the American writer, literary critic, and scholar Ralph Ellison observed, blues music harbors an “impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”[7] Seeming to echo the Pauline injunction so beloved by early Protestants, it prioritizes spirit over letter; “Dark Was the Night” enacts a kind of “aural apophasis,” transmuting suffering into spiritual strength.[8] By stripping away the discursive, propositional content of Haweis’ text—its narrative cohesion, explicit theological framing, and linguistic mediation—Johnson effectively exposes a deeper and more immediate layer of affective resonance. 

In doing so, his performance intuitively deconstructs not only the semantics of Haweis’s devotional prose but also the very notion that the sacred must be mediated through linguistic or doctrinal form. Johnson enacts what might be called a kind of “narrative iconoclasm,” while he paradoxically creates a sonic icon: a space of sacred suffering suffused with ecstasy, resonant with Luther’s notion of the coincidence of “groans and rapture” (simul gemitus et raptus) as well as Luther’s theology of the cross (theologia crucis).[9]

At first glance, this sonic event, and the aesthetic-theological tensions it embodies, may seem to be an anomaly within the Protestant tradition. Protestantism is often portrayed as a tradition of critical suspicion, iconoclasm, and spiritual austerity rather than a site of aesthetic flourishing. Additionally, the Reformation is frequently cast as a decisive turn toward disenchantment—a rupture with medieval mystical modes of spirituality and a shift toward “logocentric” rationalization, quietism, and the suspicion of imaginal mediation.[10] And it is true that Protestantism, emerging as a revolt against sacerdotal authority, sought to dismantle the sacramental and iconographic cosmos of medieval Christendom by centering Scripture, conscience, and individual faith at the core of religious life. Yet, from the early days of the Reformation to the gospel blues music of Blind Willie Johnson and onward to postmodern counterculture, Protestantism has fostered rich, if often paradoxical, modes of seeking transcendence and transformation, drawing upon and simultaneously complicating Protestantism’s ambivalent relation to imagistic mediation. Despite the contestation by influential late-nineteenth-century schools of Protestant theology, many of these pathways to the divine might be understood broadly under the much-contested category of mysticism.[11]

Here, in the more mystical regions of Protestantism, transcendence, often defined as the utter otherness of divinity or the divine realms over and against the world of space and time, is paradoxically coupled with that which it is typically taken to oppose, namely the worldly, all-too-human realm of immanence. This tension gives rise to what could be called “immanent transcendence”: the blossoming of a sacred depth marked by a sense of otherness that resides within, rather than beyond, the sensorial and emotional textures of everyday experience.[12] This paradoxical formulation implies a co-constitutional relationship between the worldly and the otherworldly—a “glitching” of reality wherein the surface of the ordinary allows for the incursion of the numinous and the unanticipated.[13] 

This dynamic tendency toward glitching is at the heart of what I call “mesophysics,” a liminal mode of thought suspended between metaphysics and metaphor that grants ontological weight to imagination and aesthetic experience without reasserting the fixity of classical metaphysical scaffolding.[14] As a theological mode, mesophysics permits a fluid relationship between the faithful and the ultimate object of faith—the Divine—wherein the two are conjoined in a co-creative bond mediated by a sacralized imagination. 

Interpreted from this perspective, “Dark Was the Night” enacts a distinctively Protestant form of apophaticism—not the Neoplatonic via negativa of Dionysius, wherein initiates move vertically from the worlds of sensual and rational intelligibility into “the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence,” but an experiential negation of mediation itself.[15] It radically existentializes the biblical imaginary and incarnates it within everyday human experience. The result is a paradoxical sense of sacred presence that arises from absence and even abjection. In this light, Johnson’s performance dramatizes a recurring Protestant pattern in which an apophatic impulse that, rather than evacuating the sense of sacrality from the world, opens it to imaginal saturation, to experiences of transcendence and spiritual transformation rooted in this-worldly affect.[16] 

Protestant theology has often privileged absence, inwardness, and iconoclastic suspicion, but it has also given rise to voices, visions, and ecstatic outpourings. In the Protestant imaginary, absence and presence are locked in co-creative coupling. This doubleness—iconoclastic and visionary, inward and world-making—represents another productive glitch: a generative rupture within Protestantism’s metaphysical architecture that distorts without destroying, opening new channels for mystical and aesthetic transformation. In what follows, I trace this so-called mystical thread through Protestantism—a lineage that approaches text, world, and interiority alike as arenas for existential and imaginal transfiguration.

One of Martin Luther’s most frequently reflected-upon Scriptural passages is Isaiah 45:15: Vere tu es Deus absconditus—“Truly, you are a God who hides thyself.”[17] For Luther, the most dreadful among the multiple forms of God’s hiddenness was his inexplicable tendency to appear sub contrariis—“under the opposite appearance”—an idea at the heart of Luther’s theological imagination and the broader Protestant sacred imaginary.[18]

Luther insisted that “God cannot be God unless he first becomes a devil.”[19] In such a cosmos, speculative theology is jettisoned in favor of existential understanding, for only experience can illuminate the darkness of the divine. Revelation unfolds not as radiant ascent but through interior descent into the shadowy recesses of human finitude.[20] Far from the contemplative vision of divine reality envisioned in Neoplatonism and Eastern Christianity, the soul does not, and indeed cannot, ascend the Great Chain of Being; paradoxically, the soul’s only hope for transcendence is to be broken open by the weight of its own limitations. This early moment of Protestant theology seeds a model of mystical transformation as existential descent, a spiritual structure that deepens and modulates over time. Luther’s theology articulates what later thinkers call a “mesophysical” imaginary, a mode of knowing that arises not from speculative abstraction but from the lived tension between absence and encounter, rupture and reconstitution. 

In this sense, Luther’s apophatic vision is not a denial of mystical experience but is the mystification of experience itself. The mystery of sub contrariis, Luther writes, “teaches us that the goodness, mercy, and power of God . . . must be understood on the basis of experience.”[21] Even Christ’s incarnation underscores the paradoxical intimacy of absence and presence. This is amplified by the meditation of the cross, a symbol of torment and triumph, and Christ’s descent into death and hell at the very moment of his transcendence. For Luther, trauma and transcendence are interlinked: “We cannot go to heaven unless we first go to hell.”[22] 

There are even moments in Luther’s writing where he seems to explicitly distinguish the merciful nature of the revealed God from the inscrutable darkness of a divinity who, at least from a human vantage point, appears to act with cruelty and caprice. While Christ may weep over the perdition of sinners, the shadowy God hidden behind him seemingly chooses to abandon them to their fate.[23] Luther’s cosmos suspends human life in a near-unbearable tension between God and the Devil, between divine mercy and divine terror: The opposing forces of undeserved mercy and unrelenting terror are at times nearly indistinguishable.[24] As Blind Willie Johnson seemed to intuit: There can be no gospel without the blues because dissonance is a form of divine presence. 

Luther did not always harbor an aversion to classical mystical theologies of transcendence; in fact, St. Augustine exerted a strong influence on Luther.[25] As a young monk, Luther flirted with speculative mysticism of a Neoplatonic cast, expressing a desire to slough off the chains of this-worldly human finitude and transcend into a divinized state of heavenly being.[26] Luther even found aspects of Dionysius’ via negativa mysticism admirable—a vera cabala (“true Kabbalah”) that corresponded to his notion of Aufechtung, but he later qualified his view and attacked Dionysius’ Neoplatonic tendencies.[27] Ultimately, Luther grew suspicious of mystical theologies that he felt lacked the pathos of existential suffering. For all their resonance with his notion of divine hiddenness, figures like Dionysius and Eckhart seemed too metaphysically remote. For Luther, the transcendent disclosed itself not in harmony but through the dissonance of existential upheaval. 

The implications of Luther’s recasting of mysticism are subtle but significant. Though Luther resists what we might call the “classical” trope of metaphysical union, he anticipates a theological idea that more radical Protestant mystics later explore: the notion of a co-creative relationship between subject and divine presence in which faith is envisioned, not merely as receptivity to grace but as an agonistic yet imaginative mode of self and world transformation fueled by a mix of desire and despair. 

The uniqueness of Luther’s mystical vision, if we might deem it such, lies in his emphasis on lived inner ordeals over the classical goal of systematic mystical ascension. It is precisely this emphasis on existential struggle and experiential rupture that clears the ground for later Protestant rearticulations of mystical transformation. At the very outset of the Protestant story, then, we encounter a mysticism of negation that echoes earlier apophatic traditions while recasting the encounter with transcendence in ethical and existential rather than explicitly ontological terms. Here, transcendence is paradoxically found through embracing the ordinary, the abject, and the abyssal.

Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) was born into a Lutheran peasant family in the small town of Alt Seidenberg in Upper Lusatia, now Stary Zawidów, Poland.[28] His first major “illumination” (Erleuchtung) occurred in 1600, followed by a second experience in 1610 as well as subsequent moments of intense insight. By 1612, he had written Morgen Röthe im auffgang (Aurora), a dense, visionary text that reimagines God, humanity, and nature through a symbolic language drawing on alchemical, kabbalistic, astrological, and Paracelsian traditions. Although Böhme claimed the work was a private meditation on his illumination, Aurora circulated as a manuscript and soon attracted the ire of the local Lutheran pastor, Gregory Richter, who denounced Böhme as a heretic and helped impose a Schreibverbot, forbidding him to set pen to paper ever again. Böhme complied for several years but resumed writing around 1618–19, as the Thirty Years’ War began. During this period, he underwent a profound transformation from a humble tradesman into a visionary thinker whose writings both drew upon and challenged Lutheran orthodoxy. Böhme’s vision radicalizes Luther’s theology while developing an unorthodox yet distinctly Protestant account of transformation, articulating an experience of mystical rebirth (Wiedergeburt) rooted in yet transfiguring Lutheran theological presuppositions.[29]

            Like Luther’s theology of the cross, Böhme’s theosophy, his experimental approach to obtaining Divine knowledge, emerges from a confrontation with profound inner darkness.[30] Retaining the Lutheran emphasis on interior struggle, Böhme expands the frame: He is as concerned with the cosmos as the soul, seeking not to oppose inner and outer realms, but to dissolve the barrier between them. Rebirth begins with a painful but profound encounter with the sacred bond between human existence and the cosmos. In Aurora, Böhme recalls the intense melancholia that preceded his spiritual breakthrough.[31] Disoriented by a vision of the cosmos’s yawning infinity, he writes:

I considered the small spark of man and how he might be esteemed before God in comparison to the great works of the heaven and the earth . . . Because of this, I became completely melancholic and deeply troubled, and I could not take solace in any writings . . . as I gazed upon the great depths of this world, along with the sun and the stars, the clouds, the rain and snow, and considered in my spirit the whole of the creation of this world . . .  I found good and evil in all things, and love and anger in the unreasoning creatures as well as wood and stone, earth and the elements, in humans as well as in animals.[32]

In such passages, the infinite darkness of the unmoored universe reveals itself as contiguous with the author’s own boundless inner night. Böhme even read the “heathenish thoughts” that arose within him as signs of an all-pervasive infection of evil within material reality.[33] 

Yet what troubled Böhme was not simply the immensity of space, but the emerging scientific materialism that reimagined the world as measurable and controllable, thereby obscuring the presence of an unquantifiable Divinity. From a Böhmean perspective, while scientists may be correct within their own epistemological horizons, they remain ignorant of what Böhme calls Ungrund, a mystery at the heart of being that radicalizes Luther’s theology of hiddenness. The world, Böhme insists, conceals an unfathomable “depth,” a dimension that:

. . . has no human number, which cannot be measured by any means . . . and if some natural scientists and astronomers have taken it upon themselves to measure the depths with their compasses, their measurement is fantastical . . . simply a measurement of the outer comprehensibility . . . as if they had tried to seize the wind.[34]

This “depth that has no human number” expresses Böhme’s teaching of Ungrund, the realization that an unfathomable groundlessness traverses humans and nature. At the center of the Böhmean imaginary, Ungrund names a primordial and erotic “ungroundedness” that generates the paradox of a beginning that never recedes into the past.[35] Blurring epistemological and ontological registers, the privative “un” positions Ungrund in opposition to Grund—ground as reason, foundation, or cause. Quintessentially anarchic—that is, without origin (archē)—Ungrund names that which exists prior to telos and logos. In an anti-Aristotelian move, Böhme premises his project upon a form of “ontological anarchism.” Drawing upon Trinitarian imagery, he evokes this hyper-darkness as a triple knot of tenebrosity:

So, we find that the three are from eternity an unbeginning and unending band of longing, wanting, and desiring. One gives birth to the other. And if one did not exist, neither would the other . . . no one knows what this band is; in itself it is nothing but a spirit in darkness. And yet, it is not darkness, but rather a nothing, neither darkness nor light.[36]

The interplay of knowing and unknowing, as evoked by Ungrund, reveals the apophatic character of nature itself. Mystery is intrinsic to existence, rendering the world irreducible in its complexity. For Böhme, this anarchic abyss generates the sensible world as transcendence that assumes immanent form. Yet, this does not entail a posture of detached contemplation. Although often called a “visionary,” Böhme does not present a spectacle of transcendent divinity but seeks to articulate an affective imaginary grounded in embodied experience.

Böhme approaches the sacred as an embodied resonance with the world, a dynamic relational attunement rather than a withdrawal from material existence. To express this relationship, he develops a series of theosophical images in which God’s abyssal groundlessness flows into time and space through a sevenfold constellation of spirits and qualities. This process is paradoxically born from, and yet fully manifests as, the radiant figure of Sophia: Divinity in its “feminine” and mediating aspect. Throughout Böhme’s works, the Feminine Divine appears under many names such as Sophia, Venus, the Virgin, Luna, the Mother, or is abstracted as Magia or Matrix. Each manifestation signals an actualization or a “grounding” of a unique potential within Ungrund. Böhme’s Sophia manifests within, yet also as, the sense of connection and continuity between the inner and outer reality—spirit and materiality, the human and the other-than-human. She is the shimmering of transcendence within the physical world. Though Divine Wisdom personified, Sophia embodies an impenetrable mystery, offering awe as a form of non-objectifying knowledge. In her redeemed form, she appears as the Cosmic Virgin—the wisdom of wonder liberated from the rapacious clutches of detached reason (Vernunft).

For Böhme, this return to a this-worldly consciousness is necessary, for it is within our earthly body that “the generative mystery—the Mysterium—and its ‘secret knowledge’—das Arcanum—lie in great hiddenness.”[37] The term mysterium carries Eucharistic and procreative resonances; a Latinized Greek word for “sacrament,” the term evokes the sacramental mystery of the world. Yet in Böhme’s Mysterium Magnum, the Mysterium also names the generative matrix, the “mother” (Mutter) through which existence emerges from abyssal nothingness.[38] This “mothering mystery” is the revelation of Sophia, manifesting in sensual forms through what he calls the seven source spirits or Quellgeister, one of Böhme’s most difficult ideas. The term Quell semantically intertwines notions of origin, quale, and suffering,[39] presenting pathos as the primordial condition for the emergence of existence, a process that can be teased apart into seven interpenetrating “spirits” (Geister), “forms” (Gestalten), or “qualities” (Qualitäten). Through the interaction of these seven spirits “all things have been made and have arisen.”[40]

The spirits evoke an anti-mechanistic, though not purely naturalistic, vision of nature in which reality emerges within an ever-shifting field of relations rather than from a single cause. Immanence and transcendence appear locked in a co-creative embrace. The spirits composing existence are interdependent and unquantifiable.

All seven . . . are born within each other; each perpetually gives birth to the other. None is the first, nor is any the last, for the last generates the first just as the first does the second, third, fourth, and so on . . . for all seven are equally eternal and have neither beginning nor end . . . and none . . . exists without the other.^[41]

Böhme enumerates these seven “forms of the mother of all being” as desire (Begierde), bitterness (Bitter), angst (Angst), fire (Feuer), light (Licht), sound (Stimme, Klang), and body (Corpus, Menstruum).[42] The seven  Quellgeister not only map an interdependent ontology; they also present a vision of re-embodied and “ecologized” existence. They “unground” ordinary modes of being-in-the-world, returning perception to a preconceptual openness to alterity while suffusing nature with a sense of mystery. The image-concepts of Sophia and the Quellgeister seek to express a transformative experience that reveals sacrality within nature yet is not reducible to nature. Coupled with the teaching of Ungrund, they articulate an anarchic, nonreductionist apophaticism with ecological implications. Here, immanence and transcendence are again inextricably interlocked yet newly reconfigured. This resonance between world and self may be understood as a “mesophysical event,” the catalyzing of a mode of presence in which the soul encounters reality through imagination and emotion, opening itself to dimensions of existence that escape both scientific measurement and abstract metaphysics.

For Böhme, “rebirth” (die Wiedergeburt) names not merely conversion in a traditional Protestant sense, but a process of spiritual transformation envisioned as the generation of a new body, which is the “power-body” (Kraft-Leib) or “image-body.” [43] Through a kind of dialectical incarnation in which matter and spirit intertwine, the re-embodied subject gives birth to itself through a sacralized imagination, entering an enlivened world beyond the grasp of reason or empirical science. The reborn body reveals the regenerate subject’s true position in space and time, thereby collapsing immanence and transcendence. Realizing this vision, the reborn awaken to the fact that they are “already in heaven,” for, as Böhme writes, “the true heaven is present everywhere, even in the place where you stand and move.”[44] 

The Böhmean experience of rebirth arises through the conjunction of imagination (die Einbildung) and desire (die Begierde). Alongside Eucharistic imagery, baptism is collapsed into Böhme’s rite of rebirth within a constellation of sexual symbolism. Imagination is “soft and mild like water,” a form of the “watery tincture” thought to contribute to conception.[45 A fluid imagination thus signals new life as a fluid “soul-body” (Seelen-Leib). Yet this watery imagination must unite with its “masculine” complement, the “raw and dry” potency of desire.[46] Desire compresses imaginal possibility into essence; it “leads the abyss into ground and the nothing (das Nichts) into something.”[47] This union of feminine imagination and masculine desire expresses the generative life hidden within nature and the self. Böhme’s “subtle substantiality” (geistlich Wesen) names the continual incarnation of desire within the body of the world. Desire appears as a form of “magic” that actively “generates divine flesh,” while Sophia emerges as the generative matrix that allows for Ungrund to become “ground” without exhausting its mystery.[48]

In Böhme’s vision, transformation becomes inseparable from being-in-the-world, becoming-world, or world-becoming. Böhme’s theosophy, which echoes aspects of Luther’s re-envisioning of the mystical tradition, does not seek escape from the world’s messiness or to retreat into interiority. For although Böhme declares that “the world must be transformed into heaven,” he immediately adds that “heaven must be made into world again,” a chiastic formula crucial to his vision of rebirth.[49] While Böhme’s thought remains deeply marked by Lutheranism, its iconoclastic and apophatic impulses culminate paradoxically in a re-iconized world in which immanent transcendence appears through the sensual prism of the Quellgeister and the shimmering presence of Sophia. In this way, Böhme’s radical theosophy anticipates a constellation of distinctly Protestant esoteric, mystical, and aesthetically speculative traditions.

For Böhme, Sophia clarifies through mystery, evoking a mode of erotic knowledge that unfolds through sensation, longing, and embodied intuition. In this sensuous and symbolic cosmos, Sophia becomes the figure through whom divine presence is encountered in the world and by whom it calls forth desire—she is an imaginal figuration of immanent transcendence. Yet despite the dizzying originality of Böhme’s thought, Sophia, as the personification of Divine Wisdom and the feminine aspect of the Godhead, is rooted in a far older lineage. 

Her presence can be traced back to pre-monotheistic Mesopotamian figures and flows into the Judeo-Christian tradition via the enigmatic figure of the Hebrew Hokhmah, Greek Sophia, and Latin Sapientia.[50] Alongside late antique “gnostic” wisdom texts, Sophia appears throughout the wisdom literature of Proverbs, Baruch, Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon, but she especially captivates the mystical imagination in the soliloquy of Proverbs 8. There, she proclaims:

The Lord created me the beginning of his works, before all else that he made, long ago. Alone, I was fashioned in times long past, at the beginning, long before earth itself. When there was yet no ocean I was born.[51]

In Christian thought, Sophiology, which is the “serious and sustained . . . reflection on the figure and theme of wisdom . . . since the late Byzantine and high medieval era,” is most often associated with Russian Orthodoxy; in particular, it is associated with figures such as Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), Fr Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), and Fr Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944).[52] 

Although many of the key texts that feature Sophia lie outside the Protestant formal canon, there nevertheless exists an analogous but distinctively Protestant tradition of Sophiological speculation within its mystical and esoteric margins.[53] Protestant Sophiology, largely initiated by Böhme, found fertile ground in the writings of early modern visionaries such as Johann Georg Gichtel, Jane Leade, and Romantic figures like Novalis, each of whom carried Böhme’s insights into distinctive terrain. Sophia emerges as a cosmological principle and a spiritually sensuous beloved, a figure intimately linked to a sacralized vision of the imagination.[54] In this context, we encounter a visionary and erotic mysticism in which longing, love, and imaginal union become privileged pathways to the Divine.

These “Sophianic” writings trace a movement in Protestantism from the apophatic to the kataphatic, from the iconoclastic to the imaginally iconic—that is, toward a mode of visionary perception in which the sacred appears through symbolic form. This mysticism does not abandon the darkness of unknowing but draws upon encounters with sheer mystery that generate vivid experiences, sensual theophanies, and forms of divine–human interpenetration. If Luther’s theology of Anfechtung marks a descent into absence and an interior struggle largely bereft of visionary expression, theosophers in Böhme’s wake reaffirm an enchanted interiority in which the sacred appears not abstractly but in imaginal form as a visionary symbol, living image, and an embodied intuition.

 Yet, this turn retains distinctly Protestant dimensions including a commitment to the internalization of epiphany, a resistance to sacramental objectification, and a fidelity to inward struggle as the locus of divine encounter. Echoing Luther’s insistence on the terror and beauty of encountering the living God, this is not a mysticism of dispassionate speculation or otherworldly ascent but of inner fire, one that is personal and affective but nevertheless world-transforming. What begins as Luther’s inward turn becomes, in these Sophianic figures, an exploration of the “mesophysical”: a sacramental imagination that inhabits the liminal space between matter and spirit, metaphor and metaphysics. Here, the Divine is not merely contemplated but manifested—not as an external object but as a co-creative presence born of longing, suffering, and imagination itself.

Johann Georg Gichtel (1638–1710), a German theosopher born in Ratisbonne (Regensburg).[55] Having once belonged to the Lutheran community, Gichtel broke with Protestant orthodoxy in his early twenties and eventually became one of its fiercest critics, though he retained elements of Lutheran devotion, albeit refracted through a distinctly theosophic lens. A devoted reader of Jacob Böhme, Gichtel not only popularized his spiritual mentor’s work but published the first complete edition of Böhme’s writings in 1682.[56] 

Although he was deeply influenced by Böhme’s cosmology, Gichtel moved in a more ascetic direction, and his mysticism centered on a direct, affective, and sensuous knowledge of a highly personified vision of Sophia, catalyzed through the practice of celibacy, inner purification, and mystical union. As his biographer Johann Wilhelm Überfeld reports, Gichtel claimed to have experienced a visionary “wedding” with Sophia between the years of 1664 and 1706, during which the figure of Divine Wisdom gave herself to him in increasingly intense and erotic ways.[57] This union of Divine Wisdom and man, while heterodox from a Lutheran perspective, epitomizes a distinctly post-Reformation ethos: Gichtel rejected the institutional and ritual apparatuses of the Church in favor of an inward, experiential piety. For Gichtel, the body and inner consciousness (Gemüt) are sacral sites wherein the drama of salvation unfolds.[58]    

Echoing Luther’s emphasis on Anfechtung, the spiritual anguish and struggle that opens the soul to transformation, Gichtel embraced the alchemy of inner fire over contemplative serenity. In this, his God remained closer to Luther’s dynamic living presence than to the Neoplatonic idea of a silent impersonal ground of Being, a “holy majesty, revealed in the depths of the soul in the form of a sea of fire.” [59] For Gichtel, Sophia is at once the mirror through which God creates and God’s presence within creation, both immanent and transcendent. Unlike Böhme, whose theosophy retains a strong cosmological focus, Gichtel’s mystical drama plays out almost entirely within the theater of human interiority.[60] It is primarily within the body and, specifically, through the imagination that the cosmic forces of good and evil manifest, struggle with one another, and seek resolution. The stronger the ferocity of the inner fire, the more luminous the spiritual potential: 

And by virtue of such a strong desire of salvation from darkness, the fire grows stronger and stronger, and the brightness, as Sophia, becomes lighter. The struggle takes place so long within the wheel (of anguish), until finally the light triumphs and gains the upper hand over the darkness. From that . . . Paradise emerges.[61]

As in Luther’s notion of Anfechtung, suffering remains spiritually productive here. But in Gichtel’s theosophical register, it also becomes ontologically generative, opening a reciprocal channel between immanent and transcendent realms and their denizens; it is the force through which Paradise emerges. The inner fire then does not merely purify; it also feeds Sophia’s luminosity and participates in the restoration of the fallen cosmos by rekindling our prelapsarian environment. Thus, desire and suffering are not merely edifying existential experiences, but, in a sense, theurgical events.[62]

In this context, prayer is understood as a theophanic technology, a communing with the Divine that facilitates a conjugal union with the Divine and thereby manifests Sophia. Such manifestation occurs within the sacred space of the imagination through the force of erotic desire:

To Sophia, as the essential love, make yourself more united, more known; and while praying, focus your imagination on her, as you do on your wife, and give yourself over to her way of loving with your body, soul and spirit. You will find within your soul a great relief and sweetness, and an excellent strength in your prayer.[63]

 Echoing Böhme’s discussion of the Quellgeister, a full-blooded version of unitive or “bridal mysticism” takes root in Protestant soil with a deeply erotic—if spiritualized—sensuality, “and we daily taste, feel, see, hear and smell her friendly company, so much so that no man in love could be as friendly and united to his dear wife.”[64]

One of Gichtel’s most intimate and extraordinary visions occurred on Christmas morning, 1673, during a session of fervent prayer. While kneeling and pleading for God’s forgiveness for humanity’s spiritual weakness, Gichtel experienced what his biographer calls a “spiritual elevation” (im Geist erhaben war).[65] First, a black cloud appeared before him, a paradoxical manifestation of the hiddenness of the Divine and a prefiguration of future suffering.[66] Then, from within a second cloud, which was white, “the noble heavenly Virgin Sophia Jesu” emerged as a radiant and transfigured bride. She appeared to him “face to face” and speaking “mouth to mouth” as both a lover and divine companion. Gichtel’s long-nurtured intuition of the shimmering transcendence within the immanent realm had fully manifested in imaginal form with Sophia-Christ inwardly given as spiritual spouse.

For Gichtel, Sophia is at once a manifestation of Divine otherness and the innermost self, both Christ and bride, mediatrix and the radiant light generated by the fire of the soul. In his theosophy, these are neither metaphors pointing beyond themselves nor metaphysical absolutes; they are image-presences arising within and through the visionary imagination, carrying ontological weight without ontological fixity. In Gichtel’s work, the glitching of gender becomes one register of mystical pliancy, one of the shifting surfaces upon which the sacred discloses itself as relational, intimate, and mutable.[67] Sophia embraces Gichtel as her “man of fire” (Feuer-Mann), promising not only conjugal faithfulness and intimate companionship, but, in yet another glitching of the gendered corporeal imaginary, also to implant her “spiritual seeds” (geistliche Samen). From this moment onward, as Überfeld maintains, “she would never leave him alone again . . . nor abandon him in any painful cross, need, poverty, hardship, or in death.”[68] Theophany slips into bridal ecstasy that, in turn, becomes the mystical ground of a transfigured life of faith.

Gichtel’s visionary wedding performs a radical reworking of theological, erotic, and ontological categories. The soul no longer merely prostrates itself before the Divine but is reborn within a mystical economy of erotic fusion and interior transformation: “Just as no birth can come from the man without the woman, nor from the woman without the man, so without Sophia or Christ we can do nothing and bring nothing to birth.”[69] This vision of mystical androgyny does not erase difference but renders it fluid, for Sophia is simultaneously bride and Christ, woman and Logos, alterity and intimacy. Gichtel becomes not only Sophia’s husband but her dwelling place, not only her beloved but her vessel. Accordingly, there seems to be an implied Böhmean mirroring, an insinuation of the co-creative relationship between the believer and the object of belief.  Faith is no longer a propositional assent to the hidden God but signifies a visionary fidelity to an imaginal revelation of the Sophia who descends, embraces, and comforts. What begins in Anfechtung ends in the pains of a new birth: a radicalization of Luther’s existential faith, transformed through Böhmean metaphysics, filtered through the poetic eros of Gichtel’s devotional life. In Gichtel, we see the modulation of Protestant mysticism into a new register. His vision of Sophia is a template for a distinctively Protestant form of divinization that preserves the tension between finitude and infinity, self and other, and transfigures that very tension into an erotically charged field of spiritual creativity. 

English visionary Jane Leade (1624–1704) was a central figure in the Philadelphian Society—an English group for spiritual dissenters organized around the controversial Anglican priest, mystic, and astrologer, John Pordage (1607–1681). Leade was deeply influenced by the teachings of Jacob Böhme. If Gichtel offered a fiery, imaginal union with Sophia shaped by longing and theosophic eros, Leade expanded the register of Protestant Sophiology by explicitly linking Sophia to a maternal presence—the divine womb from which we must be reborn—as well as a radically personalized theologia crucis with gendered implications.[70] A prolific author, Leade recorded numerous theophanies beginning in 1670 and spanning several decades, during which she claimed to receive revelatory visions from Divine Wisdom; Sophia sometimes appeared as a luminous Queen and at others as a transfiguration of Christ. Her writings offer not only a rare female voice within the Protestant Sophiological tradition, but also a radical reworking of gendered subjectivity, divine-human identity, and suffering as an ontological engine of universal transformation.[71]

Leade’s visions are saturated with affective intensity and metaphysical fluidity. Yet she places particular emphasis on Sophia’s maternal and creative powers: Sophia is both a divine beloved—“who with her piercing fiery Arrow of Love had wounded [her] so deep”—and a “natural mother” through whose womb the initiate might be “brought forth after the manner of a spirit, being conceived and born again.”[72] In one of Leade’s key visions, Wisdom appears to her as a divine sovereign and proclaims that “I shall cease to appear in a visible Figure to thee, but I will not fail to Transfigure myself in thy mind: and there open the spring of wisdom and understanding.”[73] Theophany blurs into intimacy. The visionary does not merely witness Sophia as another, but she becomes her human vessel, mirror, and ground of manifestation.

In one of Leade’s most theologically charged visions, we encounter the full convergence of Sophia, Christ, and the visionary self. In a passage that stands as one of the most striking recorded mystical expressions of the crucified feminine, Leade recounts an experience of prayerful agony in which she sees herself as both wounded supplicant and divine victim: “While I was in my deep Agony, a Spirit of Prayer came down, which sent up mighty Cries and unutterable Groanings. Which, I did most sensibly feel, pierced and broke through the Gate of the Eternal Deep. So that my Spirit had admittance into the Secret of the pure Deity, where I had Audience, and free liberty to pour out my Grievances, shew my Wounds, and who they were that had pierced me. Every one’s Hand was against me, shooting their Bitter Arrows, adding weight and pressure to her, that was bleeding upon the Cross already, crying, crucifie, crucifie! In Dying, let her Dye.”[74]

Like Luther, Böhme, and Gichtel before her, Leade harnessed inner torment toward the goal of self-transformation. In her provocative vision, Divine Wisdom weaves a double knot of incarnation: Sophia becomes incarnate as Christ on the cross, while Christ becomes incarnate in and through the suffering body of the visionary, who in turn serves as both mediatrix and medium. As the slippages of perspective in her visions imply, Divine Wisdom reveals herself as the wounded Sophia-Christ, who is mystery manifest, a presence forever suspended between cosmic power and passionate self-sacrifice, at once impossibly ineffable and intimately knowable. Yet unlike Gichtel's experience of nuptial bliss, Leade’s vision presents suffering itself as Sophianic. In this ecstatic moment, she is drawn into union with the Divine and granted a painful corporeal cognition of God’s inner life.

In the tradition of Anfechtung, Leade models a mystical theurgy of suffering in which spiritual crisis serves as a site of metaphysical interpenetration and self-transfiguring revelation. Akin to Gichtel’s claim that he was embraced and inseminated by Sophia, Leade maintains that she is united with Divine Wisdom through the medium of spiritualized flesh. Yet here, the reproductive logic is more explicitly complex than in Gichtel: the visionary becomes not only the child of Wisdom but also Wisdom’s crucified twin, co-laborer, and birthing matrix. This radical mingling of affect, theology, and gender glitches the very categories it invokes. Leade’s mystical identification with the crucified Sophia destabilizes the binary between the receiver and the giver, the human and the Divine. More than merely an object for the focus of prayer, the impassioned Sophia-Christ of Leade’s vision also suffers with and as the visionary. Mysticism modulated into this key becomes a form of spiritual solidarity across ontological thresholds. Taken together, Gichtel and Leade reveal a visionary Sophiology rising from the ashes of Protestant iconoclasm. No longer fixated on the absence of images, these two theosophers use the imagination as the medium through which the divine reenters the world—suffused with eros, agony, and the promise of rebirth. In this light, Sophia is at once lover, mother, and the crucified body of divine wisdom.

A German Romantic poet, philosopher, and mystic, Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), better known by his pen name Novalis, led a brief but artistically fecund life that left a profound mark on the spiritual and literary imagination of modernity.[75] A polymath trained in law, geology, and philosophy, Novalis was shaped by the German Pietist tradition, early German Idealism, and the theosophy of Jacob Böhme, whose writings Novalis described as “a true chaos full of dark desire and wondrous life—a genuine, unfolding microcosm.”[76] Like Böhme, Novalis conceived of the cosmos as a living symbolic whole animated by spiritual forces that longed for reunion with the divine. Yet, Novalis tempered his mystical tendencies with a heightened poetic and literary self-awareness, subtly shifting the mode of Sophiology from theosophia to theopoetica.[77]

In doing so, he marks a significant transfiguration of the Protestant mystical lineage. Where Luther existentialized apophaticism, Böhme joined apophatic negation to visionary disclosure, and Gichtel and Leade developed a Protestant Sophiology of eros, agony, and imagination, Novalis reconfigured this inheritance through the self-conscious medium of poetry itself. While earlier theosophers encountered Sophia as an inner light or presence within nature, Novalis sought to incarnate Sophia, literally and poetically, in Sophie von Kühn (1782–1797), his fiancée-turned-spiritual ideal. While not moving out of a transcendental register, theosophy begins to yield to a theopoetic sensibility, wherein spiritual efficacy is relocated within the forms of language, art, and symbol. And yet, Novalis resists a full psychologization of the visionary realm. This movement toward theopoetics may be understood as an intensification of the mesophysical register. In this sense, Novalis stands at a threshold: both a mystic-poet within the theosophic lineage and an inaugural voice of its post-secular, theopoetic afterlife.

Despite his innovations, Novalis’s spiritual orientation, however idiosyncratic, remained tethered to the Protestant tradition in ways overt and subterranean. Raised in a Pietist household, Novalis matriculated at Luther’s University of Wittenberg, where he immersed himself in ecclesiastical history and theological study.[78] These early exposures, combined with his later engagement with Böhme, shaped his lifelong fascination with religious symbolism, the idea of inner rebirth, and the redemptive possibilities of suffering. 

Much has been written about Novalis’s intense devotion to Sophie von Kühn (1782–1797), his beloved betrothed who tragically died at the age of 15.[79] In Novalis’s writings following her death, Sophie was transfigured into a figure at once cosmic and intimate, whose radiant presence guided him into a world of luminous darkness. As his Hymnen an die Nacht (“Hymns to the Night”) reveals, Sophie is figured as a mediatrix of immanent transcendence. At once mystical bride, celestial beloved, and Christic figure, she hovers between presence and metaphor, between image and being. This poetic and idiosyncratically incarnationalist understanding of Sophia, however distinctive it may be, unfolds within the Protestant lineage traced throughout this entry. In Hymnen, the recurring presence of death, grief, and existential estrangement gathers and refracts multiple lineages: the Lutheran tradition of Anfechtung; the theosophic-Sophiological current flowing through Böhme, Gichtel, and Leade; and, as the later stanzas of the Hymnen reveal, a cosmopoietic rendering of the theologia crucis. For Novalis, the mystical-symbolic night revealed during his vigils at Sophie’s grave is nothing less than an ontological unveiling of the abyssal presence of the transcendent within the immanent, a darkness not merely haunted by but consubstantial with divinity. In this charged night, the departed Sophie is envisioned not merely as a memory but as a Christic-Sophianic presence that fuses Romantic poetics with mystical typologies. 

With its clouds of darkness yielding to hidden luminosity, Hymns to the Night’s apophatic imagery recalls but differs from the Neoplatonic trajectory of Dionysius the Areopagite. It resonates as a modern echo of the tradition mediated by Böhme and refracted through Romantic poetics. It is at the convergence between the apophaticism of antiquity and the literary sensibilities of emergent modernity that Novalis’ exploration of “the holy, the unspeakable, the secretive Night” begins.[80] Below, I trace Novalis’s symbolic figuration of Christo-Sophiology—a visionary composite that draws upon Protestant mystical and Romantic traditions—unpacking several key passages from Hymnen an die Nacht in conversation with the threefold classic mystical arc of katharsis (purgation), theoria (vision), and theosis (deification).

Read through the lens of the mystical trope of katharsis–theoria–theosis, Hymnen thus offers a Romantic theologia crucis inflected by Protestant affect, structured through mystical form, and transfigured by poetic self-consciousness. Novalis’ Sophiology is not doctrinal or metaphysical in any traditional sense but emerges as a symbolic and affective mode, a vision enacted in language, catalyzed by loss, and realized in aesthetic form. In this sense, Novalis occupies a liminal position, a hinge figure between the esoteric mysticism of early Protestant theosophy and its Romantic theopoetic afterlife.

The first movement of Hymnen an die Nacht opens in a baleful key as Novalis depicts himself  “shedding bitter tears” while standing “alone at the barren mound,” the grave of his beloved Sophie.[81] It is quickly revealed that the grave is the threshold for a descent into mystical-symbolic night. Through the language of abandonment and spiritual disorientation—“unspeakable fear,” “powerless,” “a mere wasted thought”—the poem configures divine absence as the paradoxical precondition for visionary encounter.[82]

For Novalis, this spiritual desolation entails a metaphysical unmooring in which the world that the light of day reveals, the immanent, gives way to darkness, the transcendent, and “with one stroke my birth’s bond ripped—Light’s chains.”[83] The severing of the Lichtes Fessel suggests not only emotional rupture but a destabilization of the immanent order that is dramatized through the imagery of rupture and descent, a loosening of the natal ties that bind the self to the rational daylight world and an opening of a Böhmean ungroundedness: “There early splendor fled and my sadness with it—mystery flowed into a new, ungrounded (unergründliche) world.”[84]

“Holy sleep” (Heiliger Schlaf)—as opposed to the mere “shadow” sleep that “fools” know—marks a consciousness attuned to intimations of the infinite that refracts through the finite.[85] Through this shift in perception, the grave mound is paradoxically revealed as a “dark womb” (dunklen Schoß).[86] In the language of the Christian mystical tradition, this stage of the poem’s narrative could be glossed as katharsis, a moment that mirrors the purgative phase, in which suffering is a prelude to vision.

In this newly unveiled hyper-darkness, an absence pregnant with presence, Novalis receives the vision, his “first and only dream.”

The hill became a cloud of dust—through the cloud I saw the transfigured features of my beloved. In her eyes rested forever—I took her hands, and my tears were a glittering and unrippable bond.[87] 

In the poem’s symbolic economy, Sophie, no longer merely mourned, is encountered as a theophany. Later in the poem, she is explicitly identified with “the heavenly Virgin in the kingdom of love,” a Sophianic figure who merges Marian, erotic, and Christic dimensions.[88] The imagery is again apophatic—veiled, dreamlike, suffused with clouds and shadows. But unlike the transcendental darkness of Dionysian mysticism, Novalis poetically presents a fecund and intimate night that bears the erotic and aesthetic signature of the Romantic imagination. The daughter of this Night is “creative love” (der schaffenden Liebe). The poem imagines Sophia as emerging from, and identified with, a fertile darkness that recalls the cosmic womb trope in Böhmean thought.[89] 

 Faith is no longer doctrinal but visionary, an erotic fidelity to a hidden reality within and beyond the material realm. It entails what Novalis calls “an unchangeable, eternal faith in the Heaven of Night and in the infinite Light, my beloved.”[90] For Novalis, Wiedergeburt, the rebirth of the inner person, is catalyzed not by the Law or moral purification but by the transformation of perception, by seeing the world inwardly transfigured through loss and love. As in Luther and Böhme’s own narratives of rebirth, Novalis’ vision of salvation is linked to both an existential and an epistemological shift—not the overcoming of darkness but the embrace of immersion within it. 

The erotically charged vision of theosis hinted at in the first hymn is poetically enacted and amplified to cosmic levels: 

Praise the world queen, the higher messenger of a holy word . . . now, I wake—for I’m yours and mine . . . you called the Night to life for me, — humanized me — consume my body with spirit fire, so I can mix with you more intimately, airily, and then the wedding night will last forever.[91]

Sophie-Sophia is poetically cast as both mystical bride and Christ-figure, and the sign of the cross appears and “stands inextinguishable” (Unverbrennlich steht das Kreuz), a kenotic sign of victory through mystical inversion.[92] After an initial bout of suicidal ideation, Novalis confessed to his diary: “What I feel for Sophia is not love but religion. Absolute love, independent of the heart-love founded in faith—such love is religion.”[93] 

In a laconic entry dated June 30, two words commemorate this theopoetic union: “Christ and Sophia.”[94] The poem stages a vision of theosis as intimate union—a poetics of co-dwelling within mystical darkness. Novalis’ unio mystica entails the re-inscription of life within a higher symbolic logic—a vision of reality in which transcendence is symbolically and poetically inscribed within the immanent order.

This entry traces a line between twin evocations of darkness. The wordless dark night evoked by the sliding tones of Blind Willie Johnson’s bottleneck guitar and the low, grief-soaked moan of his voice stretches into Novalis’ fecund nocturnal realm that reveals a transcendental depth unavailable to the denizens of daylight. Both artists index their explorations of darkness to the crucifixion narrative. The darkness hymned by Johnson and Novalis is cosmic as well as existential, invoking the supernatural eclipse described in the synoptic Gospels during which darkness covers the land when the incarnate God gives up his spirit. In both works, night does not pertain solely to the transcendental drama of sacred history: It is doubled, entwined with the harsh conditions of Black life in post-Reconstruction America for Johnson and enmeshed with the personal loss of Sophie Kühn for Novalis. 

In the intersections between cosmic trauma and human suffering, the transcendent and the immanent blur. And in that blurring, we glimpse a modulation of a sustained tone that reverberates throughout the history of Protestantism. This modulation can be traced diachronically, beginning with Martin Luther’s existentialization of theology and his radical claim that divine revelation often comes sub contrariis—hidden beneath the mask of its opposite. Within Luther’s theological grammar, Anfechtungen, the interior trials that tear the soul open, become paradoxical sites of grace. And from this logic, a resonant note emerges and echoes through the subterranean history of Protestant mysticism, a tone that is modulated in the hands of later thinkers—Böhme, Gichtel, Leade, and Novalis, in particular—across apophatic, aesthetic, and visionary modes of expression.

Jacob Böhme stands as the pivotal figure in this trajectory of Protestant mystical theory and practice. In his work, the existential trauma that Luther frames in terms of despair and faith is cosmically reimagined. The Ungrund, that abyssal hyper-darkness that precedes even God, is not merely a metaphysical postulate but an experiential one that marks the perpetual ontological rupture out of which divinity flows into the physical world. The apophatic despair that attends the experience of divine hiddenness blurs into kataphatic and even sensual revelation, which is itself a form of visceral vision.[95] Böhme’s theology marks the emergence of a radicalized form of immanent transcendence, a notion latent in Luther’s existentialized faith that Böhme renders in a cosmological register. For Böhme, figures such as the seven Quellgeister and Sophia are imaginal mediators of this emergence; they are shimmering traces of the divine that flicker beneath the skin of the world. 

In the writings of Johann Georg Gichtel and Jane Leade, Böhme’s theosophy is transposed into a more personal, affective, and overtly erotic key. While Sophia remains a cosmic principle, she is also envisioned as an indwelling Spirit and the feminine face of God with whom the soul may intimately commune. In Novalis, this current reaches a poetic and incarnational crescendo when Sophia becomes entwined with the figure of Sophie Kühn, who calls forth an erotic form of love grounded in a radicalized notion of faith, and night, in turn, through her, becomes the condition in which the soul can glimpse the infinite. Darkness no longer signifies the absence of divinity but its very mode of appearing.

What unites all these figures from Luther to Novalis is not a single theology or coherent doctrinal framework but a shared sense that the path to the divine winds through inner darkness, traumatic experience, and apophatic presence. For each thinker, the otherworldly calls forth as a depth within rather than beyond the world. This is the hallmark of mesophysics, a mode of theological imagination that neither clings to fixed metaphysical scaffolding nor dissolves into pure figurality, which allows for the emergence of meaning, presence, and revelation within the material, temporal, and affective, imparting a sense of significance that cannot be mapped via the dualistic coordinates of metaphysics and physics. In this imaginal and affective register, the spiritual legacy of Protestantism reveals one of its most distinctive modulations: the insistence that worldly woundedness is intimately bound up with both transcendence and spiritual transformation. Suffering can catalyze rapture, and the night in all its darkness shines forth as a guiding light. 

[1]  A 2022 remastered version can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud74hhPqISo. 

[2]  Carl Sagan et al., Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (New York: Random House, 1978). See also Johnathan Scott, The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record (London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2019).  

[3]  Thomas Haweis, in A Collection of Hymns for Public, Social, and Domestic Worship, 88; Basil Manly and B. Manly, The Baptist Psalmody (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1850), 124; Emily Hallowell, Calhoun Plantation Songs (Boston: C.W. Thompson, 1901), 31.  

[4]  Brad Smith, "Blind Willie Johnson's 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,'" 2. 

[5]  Smith notes that "In several instances during 'Dark Was the Night,' Johnson nearly breaks free of the wordless moans he has sung thus far and into actual speech. In verses 3, 4 and 6, I hear the words 'I,' 'well/will,' 'World/Word,' and 'Lord/load' fairly clearly. These attempts are another facet of the struggle that occurs within the song. Johnson's vocal delivery captures the mood of Haweis's text, in which Christ is cold, alone, and in agonizing torment." Ibid., 5.

[6]  James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 5.

[7]  Quoted in Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 557. Johnson's music does not neatly fit the standard definition of blues music, but due to its integration of sacred subject matter, I would argue that the approach to transcendence Ellison describes is even more evident in "Dark Was the Night" because of its gospel elements.

[8]  2 Corinthians 3:4–6.

[9]  Luther's notion of simul gemitus et raptus and his theologia crucis are discussed in more detail below. See Heiko A. Oberman, "Simul Gemitus et Raptus: Luther and Mysticism," in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, ed. Steven E. Ozment (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 126–34. For a concise treatment of Luther's theologia crucis, see Bernard McGinn, Mysticism in the Reformation (1500–1650), vol. 6 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2016), 8.

[10]  The connection between Protestantism and disenchantment, famously proffered by Max Weber, has come under sustained critique. See Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). For a concise definition of "logocentrism," see Ian Buchanan, "Logocentrism," in A Dictionary of Critical Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).  

[11]  Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (New York: Dover, 1961), 6:99. Mysticism is a contested term. In this entry, I employ the term to signify an experiential approach to knowledge of the divinity. For an insightful analysis of and counterargument to the idea that Protestantism heralded a historical break from mysticism, see McGinn, Mysticism in the Reformation, vii–viii, 1–15.

[12]  I employ the paradoxical formulation of "immanent transcendence" in a way that both intersects with and departs from prior uses. While the formulation bears some resemblance to Deleuzean models of relational and materialist immanence, it aligns more closely with Patrice Haynes's reconfiguration of transcendence in materialist terms, preserving transcendence without divorcing it from material embeddedness. My usage does not imply a uniform viewpoint among the figures I treat; rather, it gestures toward a shared conceptual grammar through which differing articulations emerge. For instance, whereas Böhme offers a more radically immanentized vision of the divine, Luther's understanding of transcendence remains tethered to classical iterations despite his existential reframing of theology. See Patrice Haynes, Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 1–9, passim; Levi R. Bryant, "A Logic of Multiplicities: Deleuze, Immanence, and Onticology," Analecta Hermeneutica 2 (2010): 1–20. 

[13]  I use "glitch" here in a broadly aesthetic and quasi-musical sense to describe disruptions within seemingly stable forms that unexpectedly disclose hidden depths, alternative once-latent patterns, or new modes of imaginative perception.

[14]  The mesophysical frame refuses dualisms implied by metaphysical/physical and transcendence/immanence binaries. Rather than treating these as mutually exclusive poles, the mesophysical frame views them as dynamically entangled dimensions of a reality in which the sacred emerges within material, affective, and temporal forms. It names a mode of theological and philosophical reflection that resists dogmatic closure and pure figurality; instead, it privileges the indeterminate, the affective, and the imaginal as sites of real, though non-totalizing, disclosure. As such, mesophysics offers a conceptual framework for understanding how thinkers such as Jacob Böhme envisioned transcendent meaning arising not apart from but within embodied, aesthetic, and temporal experience. It also implies a co-creative continuity between human and divine existence. While this mode of thought is not unique to Protestantism, I understand it as a latent tendency within Protestant traditions, emerging in Luther's existential religiosity, coming to explicit fruition in Böhme's mystical theosophy, and ultimately echoing into Romanticism, particularly in William Blake and Novalis.

[15]  Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 1.3, 997AB, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 135. 

[16]  I employ the term "imaginal" in a sense that reflects Chiara Bottici's pragmatist re-envisioning of Henry Corbin's concept to connote "that which is made of images and can therefore be the product of both of an individual faculty and of the social context as well as of a complex interaction between the two." Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 5. Bottici proposes that the term imaginal allows us to speak of the dynamic lived actuality of the imaginary, and thus to refrain from implying that the imaginary is simply the opposite of the real. However, in contradistinction to Bottici, I stress the multi-sensorial, affective dimensions of the imaginal that point beyond the strictly visual. On Corbin's usage of the term to name a dimension of reality between physical and mental being, see Henry Corbin, "Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal," Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1972): 1–33. For a nuanced argument in support of the hermeneutic value of Corbin's notion of the imaginal for the interpretation of Abrahamic mysticism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), xviii.  

[17]  See B.A. Gerrish, "To the Unknown God: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God," Journal of Religion 53, no. 3 (1973): 263–92; Bernard McGinn, "Vere tu es Deus absconditus: The Hidden God in Luther and Some Mystics," in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94–114.

[18]  For an incisive analysis of the two main forms of hiddenness that Luther addresses, see McGinn, "Vere tu es Deus absconditus," 94–99. On sub contrariis as a particular form of hiddenness, see ibid., 94–95.

[19]  Martin Luther, Luther's Works [American ed.], ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (Saint Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress Press, 1955–86), 14:31.

[20]  On the topic of Luther's complicated relationship to mysticism, Berndt Hamm argues that Luther decisively breaks with ascensional models of mysticism: "Instead of a person going upward to become even holier, Christ moved downward to the unholy sinner in a radical mysticism of descent." Berndt Hamm, The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation, trans. Martin J. Lohrmann (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 205.

[21]  Luther, Luther's Works, 7:175.

[22]  Ibid., 14:31.

[23]  McGinn, "Vere tu es Deus absconditus," 97.

[24]  Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 209–25.

[25]  McGinn, Mysticism in the Reformation, 23.

[26]  Sven Grosse, "Der junge Luther und die Mystik: Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach dem Werden der reformatorischen Theologie," in Luther und die Mystik, ed. Volker Leppin and Andreas Merkt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 187–235.

[27]  See Paul Rorem, "Martin Luther's Christocentric Critique of Pseudo-Dionysian Spirituality," Lutheran Quarterly 11 (1997): 291–307; McGinn, "Vere tu es Deus absconditus," 94–114; McGinn, Mysticism in the Reformation, 24.

[28]  For a thorough biography of Böhme organized around his intellectual development, see Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). The earliest account of Böhme's life, though perhaps more hagiographical than historical, was penned by his disciple Abraham von Franckenberg. Abraham von Franckenberg, "De Vita et Scriptis Jacobii Böhmii, oder Historischer Bericht von dem Leben und Schriften Jacob Böhmens," 5–31.  

[29]  For a sustained discussion of the influence of Luther's eucharistic theology on Böhme's ontology, see Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke, "From My Body Alone Do I Know This: Sacrament & Scripture as Technologies of the Self in the Work of Jacob Böhme," Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 6 (2021): 156–86.

[30]  For a definition of theosophy in this context, and its distinction from the later Theosophical Society, see Antoine Faivre, "Christian Theosophy," in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 258–63; and Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). I use the term here to stress the experiential and transformative dimensions of Böhme's search for knowledge of God over and against the logocentric approach implied by the term theology.

[31]  Jacob Böhme, Aurora oder Morgenröte im Aufgang, ed. Will-Erich Peuckert, vol. 1 of Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1955), I 19:9, 266.

[32]  Ibid., I 19:6–7, 265; I 19:5, 265.

[33]  Ibid., I 19:9, 266.

[34]  Ibid., I 7:8, 74; I 25:19, 370.

[35]  Jacob Böhme, Von den drey Prinzipien Göttlichen Wesens, vol. 2 of Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Günter Holzboog, 1988), II 14:62, 184–85. 

[36]  Ibid., II 14:62, 184–85. The term "das vnanfengig" seemingly stems from Paracelsus.

[37]  Jacob Böhme, Viertzig Fragen von der Seele (1620), vol. 4 of Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Günter Holzboog, 1960), IV 16:5, 96; Jacob Böhme, De Incantione Verbi, oder Von der Menschwerdung Jesu Christi (1620), vol. 4 of Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Günter Holzboog, 1957), V Part 2, 10:2, 178.

[38]  Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography, 197–98.

[39]  At the center of this German-Latin hybrid term is Qual, a meta-root that links Qualität (quality or essence) and Quell (source) with die Qual (suffering or agony) and das Quälen (tantalization). Within Böhme's vision of the secret heart of creation, the Quell of the phenomenal world and the sensations comprising the qualitative world, die Qualitäten, co-originate through an erotic exchange of mutual desire and suffering (quälen) as they continuously give birth to each other through the Unterscheidung — differentiation — imposed by the bodily senses.

[40]  Böhme, Aurora, I 9:41, 111. See also Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography, 73.

[41]  Ibid., I 10:2, 114.

[42]  Jacob Böhme, Von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen, vol. 14 of Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Günter Holzboog, n.d.), XIV 14:10–11, 196–97. Cf. Jacob Böhme, Erklärung der Vornehmsten Puncten und Wörter in diesen Schriften, vol. 20 of Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Günter Holzboog, n.d.), XX 8–9:25–80, 85–96.

[43]  Böhme, Viertzig Fragen von der Seele, IV 1:72, 44; IV 7:17, 76.

[44]  Böhme, Aurora, I 19:23–24, 268; I 19:48, 272.

[45]  Jacob Böhme, Von Sechs Theosophischen Puncten, ed. Will-Erich Peuckert, vol. 6 of Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Günter Holzboog, 1957), VII 5:10, 94.  

[46]  Ibid.

[47]  Ibid.

[48]  Ibid., VII 12–13, 94.

[49]  Jacob Böhme, Theosophische Sendbriefe (Freiburg im Breisgau: Aurum-Verlag, 1979), XXI 28:13, 104.

[50]  See Bernhard Lang, "Wisdom," in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. Van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 920–23. There is a longstanding and complex tradition within Jewish and Christian texts that presents divine wisdom as a quasi-entity, a sort of feminine aspect of or companion to God. For a brief overview, see John Meyendorff, "Wisdom-Sophia: Contrasting Approaches to a Complex Theme," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 391–401. This "Sophianic" tradition was developed in Russian religious thought in a unique way, drawing upon Böhme's writing. See David V. Zdenek, "The Influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian Religious Thought," Religion in Life 33, no. 1 (1964): 43–64; James Gail Sheldon, "The Orientation of Nicolas Berdyaev: His Relations to Jacob Boehme, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henrik Ibsen," PhD diss., Columbia University, 1969; Nicolas Berdyaev, "The Teaching about Sophia and the Androgyne: J. Boehme and the Russian Sophiological Current," in The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York: Collier Books, 1955), 34–62.

[51]  Proverbs 8:22–24 in the New English Bible.

[52]  For an overview, see Marcus Plested, Wisdom in Christian Tradition: The Patristic Roots of Modern Russian Sophiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

[53]  For an overview that includes a discussion of the Protestant iterations of Sophiology, see Arthur Versluis, Wisdom's Book: The Sophia Anthology (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2000), 1–26; Antoine Faivre, "Sensuous Relation with Sophia in Christian Theosophy," in Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 281–307; cf. Michael Martin, The Heavenly Court: Christian Theosophy and the Celestial Hierarchy (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2021), 2. While some of these texts remain outside the formal canon of certain Protestant denominations, they are often included in liturgical contexts.

[54]  For an interesting contemporary reflection on the connection between Sophia and the imagination from a Catholic perspective, see Michael Martin, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015).

[55]  For a seminal work on Gichtel, see Alain Gorceix, Johann Georg Gichtel: Théosophie d'Amsterdam (Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, 1975). For a discussion in English following Gorceix's seminal work, see Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 59–64.

[56]  The complete edition of Böhme's works published by Gichtel: Theosophia Revelata: Das ist: Alle Göttliche Schriften des Gottseligen und Hocherleuchteten Deutschen Theosophi Jacob Böhmens, ed. Johann Wilhelm Überfeld (Leyden: n.p., 1730).

[57]  Lennart Gard, "Epistolary Practices and Group Formation among the Eighteenth-Century Followers of Jacob Böhme: Johann Wilhelm Überfeld (1659–1731) and His Community of Rebirth," in Theosophical Appropriations: Esotericism, Kabbalah, and the Transformation of Traditions, ed. Julie Chajes and Boaz Huss (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2016), 283–98.

[58]  See Gorceix, Johann Georg Gichtel, 55, passim.

[59]  Quoted in Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 60–61.

[60]  Although Gichtel focuses much less on the "Book of Nature" than Böhme does, he maintains that the presence of Sophia courses through the "created world" and "everything that grows … the firmament, and likewise in herbs, flowers, their colors, odor, taste and virtues, also in metals of the earth and their tincture." Johann Georg Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, ed. Johann Wilhelm Überfeld (Leyden, 1722), 2896, 29 April 1701. Translated by Antoine Faivre, "Sophiana," in "Sensuous Relation with Sophia in Christian Theosophy," in Hidden Intercourse, ed. Hanegraaff and Kripal, 298.

[61]  Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, 2016, 16 March 1699. Translated by Faivre, "Sophiana," 299. Citations from Gichtel's Theosophia Practica are given by entry number and date. Unless otherwise noted, English translations of Gichtel are from Faivre's selection "Sophiana," included in his essay "Sensuous Relation with Sophia in Christian Theosophy."

[62]  "Theurgy" is a term notoriously difficult to define concisely. I use the term in accordance with Gregory Shaw's expansive definition. See Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 4, passim.

[63]  Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, 3635, 4 May 1708; Faivre, "Sophiana," 300.

[64]  Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, 1794–1795, 5 November 1709; Faivre, "Sophiana," 300.

[65]  Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, vol. VII (Überfeld's biography of Gichtel), 142–43; Faivre, "Sophiana," 301.

[66]  While Überfeld doesn't offer this interpretation, Gichtel does so in a more condensed account that links the vision of the "black cloud with many pains and hardships, that actually plagued [me] violently during the next twenty-one years." Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, 1798, 5 November 1709; Faivre, "Sophiana," 300.

[67]  Here "gender glitching" serves as a mystico-erotic undoing of binary personhood to open the horizons of selfhood to otherness, which I would argue can be seen as cultivating a specific form of immanent transcendence.

[68]  Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, vol. VII (biography of Gichtel by Überfeld), 142–43; Faivre, "Sophiana," 301.

[69]  Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, 2031, 27 July 1699. Translated by Arthur Versluis, Wisdom's Book: The Sophia Anthology (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2000), 134.

[70]  On the maternal aspects of Leade's vision of Sophia, see Willi Temme, Krise der Leiblichkeit: Die Sozietät der Mutter Eva (Buttlarsche Rotte) und der radikale Pietismus um 1700, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus 35 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 311–35.

[71]  Another interesting entry in the Sophiological canon that both overlaps with and radically departs from Leade's core concerns is Eva Margaretha von Buttlar. See Willi Temme, "From Jakob Böhme via Jane Leade to Eva von Buttlar: Transmigrations and Transformations of Religious Ideas," in Pietism in Germany and North America 1680–1820, ed. Jonathan Strom, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Van Horn Melton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 99–106.

[72]  Jane Leade, "The Laws of Paradise," quoted in Arthur Versluis, Wisdom's Book: The Sophia Anthology (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2000), 143. See also Arthur Versluis, Wisdom's Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 57–77; and Faivre, "Sensuous Relation with Sophia," 292–93. For a biographically contextualized account of Leade's thought, see Julie Hirst, Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005).

[73]  Jane Leade, "The Laws of Paradise," preface.

[74]  Jane Leade, A Fountain of Gardens Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure, vol. 1 (London: printed and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1696–1701), 66.

[75]  For a biographical study of Novalis, see William Arctander O'Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). For a more narrative but insightful approach, see Friedrich Hiebel, Novalis: German Poet, European Thinker, Christian Mystic, trans. George C. Schoolfield (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954).

[76]  Novalis, Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 3rd ed., vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Werner Kohlhammer, 1977), IV 322–23. On Novalis' reading of Böhme, see Carl Paschek, "Der Einfluss Jacob Böhmes auf das Werk Friedrich von Hardenbergs (Novalis)," PhD diss., University of Bonn, 1967; and Paola Mayer, Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jacob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature, McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999). On Novalis' interpretation of Böhme, see also Jac Roos, Aspects Littéraires du Mysticisme Philosophique et l'Influence de Bœhme et de Swedenborg au Début du Romantisme: William Blake, Novalis, Ballanche (Strasbourg: P.H. Heitz, 1951).

[77]  For a discussion of theopoetics as a poetic approach to divine matters, see Stanley Romaine Hopper, The Way of Transfiguration: Religious Imagination as Theopoiesis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992); and Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976).

[78]  Hiebel, Novalis: German Poet, European Thinker, Christian Mystic, 16–17.

[79]  Nearly all works on Novalis contain lengthy discussions of this life-defining relationship. For a sustained analysis of the intersections between the "real" and the "ideal" Sophie/Sophia in Novalis, see Regula Fankhauser, Des Dichters Sophia: Weiblichkeitsentwürfe im Werk von Novalis (Tübingen: Francke, 2003).

[80]  All citations from Novalis are taken from the bilingual edition: Novalis, Hymns to the Night, trans. Dick Higgins, 3rd ed. (Kingston, NY: McPherson and Company, 1988). I cite by hymn number and Higgins's pagination.

[81]  Novalis, Hymns to the Night, hymn 3, 17.

[82]  Ibid.

[83]  Ibid.

[84]  Ibid. I have slightly altered Higgins's translation by rendering unergründliche as "ungrounded" rather than "unplumbed," a move that, while perhaps not as conventionally poetic, amplifies the Böhmean tone.

[85]  Novalis, Hymns to the Night, hymn 2, 15.

[86]  Ibid., hymn 4, 19.

[87]  Ibid., hymn 5, 33.

[88]  Ibid.

[89]  Ibid., hymn 4, 18.

[90]  Ibid., hymn 3, 17.

[91]  Ibid., hymn 1, 13.

[92]  Ibid., hymn 4, 21.

[93]  Quoted in Friedrich Hiebel, Novalis: German Poet, European Thinker, Christian Mystic, 26; no original citation given by Hiebel.

[94]  Ibid., 26–27; no original citation given by Hiebel.

[95]  On Böhme's "visceral vision," see Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke, "Letting the Dark Have Its Day: Jacob Böhme's Ecological Esotericism & the New Speculative Realism," Correspondences 12, no. 1 (2024): 89–91.

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