Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting 2009 — New Orleans

Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity — Sunday 9am Session

Frances Flannery, James Madison University

Ascents, Apocalypses, and Neuroscience: Moshe Idel and the Study of Religious Experience

This unit/section is of an interdisciplinary nature. It was organized to provide a forum for scholars researching a wide variety of topics in biblical studies using diverse methods drawn not only from biblical studies but also various other fields, including anthropology, archaeology, sociology, neuro-biology, and neuro-psychology.  These diverse approaches are bound together in one endeavor: to take seriously the articulation of ancient authors’ experience of the divine [see Francis Flannery, et al., eds., Experientia, Vol. 1, SBL, 2008]

This endeavor has to be rooted in texts – but it doesn’t end there.  We must go beyond the text, but always be rooted in it. We are attempting to study the people who wrote these texts and had real religious experiences. Don’t be limited to just the text – these authors put ritual/experience into their texts. Why would they do this? Why preserve ritual in texts?

These experiences are not just obviously real but also powerful and transformative for those experiencing them.

Moshe Idel’s study of ascent (see Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, Central European Univ. Press, 2005) helps contribute to this section’s goals.

The Goals of this Section:

1. Beyond fields – Idel traced ascents across many fields and traditions – using a broad ranging approach – he approaches Jewish kinds of mysticism
2. Beyond text (yet rooted in texts) – analyze using comparative materials – looks at individual accounts of ascent, then draws modest conclusions (ascent of soul/spiritual body) – allows accounts to stand for themselves, not commenting too much on, not judging – pays attention to technique and practice – study of Abilafia, esp. sensory experiences
3. Beyond a single methodology – use interdisciplinary methodologies (also employing sociology, anthropology, neuro-psychology, etc.) – Methodological eclecticism

• • Theological approach
  • Historical approach (anthropological, archaeological, sociological)
  • Psychological approach
  • Textual literary approach
  • Comparative religions approach (Eliade, Chicago group)
  • Ritualistic/ technical
  • Phenomenological approaches
  • Cognitive approaches (human creation in religion, structuralism, social memory)
  • Perspectivism – opposite of comparative religions (compare differences)

Idel has made great contribution to ritualistic studies. See his Ascensions on High. He talks of how rituals are related to cognitive aspects of religion or related to bodily experience — mind and body, tradition and rationality. The whole religious experience involves all of these.

When working towards this endeavor, there is a need for coherence among techniques

Idel used neuroscience to examine the kabbalah – especially the experience of seeing a second body or seeing one’s own body and a second body. TPJ (temporoparietal junction)– seems to be the part of the brain that is stimulated during these experiences. Brain stimulation is related to ritual, which is related to technique, which is related to mystical expression. There is a relationship between these.

It appears that a reduction in oxygen to brain can produce some of these feelings/perceptions described.

All this helps make a coherent case for mystical experiences as actual human experiences. We can know that humans produced these texts and that they shared the same physiology as we do.  Mysticism is not just symbolic language.

4. Beyond [Gershom] Scholem –- ecstatic kabbalah is not just “symbolic” –- The Myth and Ritual School should be called “Myth and Symbolic” school.  We can now see that its not all symbolic –- we emphasize connectivity between human and God, not a symbolic gap between mankind and Deity. Idel emphasized the experiential aspects of ritual – allegories, divine names, and experiences in Kabbalah.  He argues that the performative aspect of kabbalah has been virtually ignored  – its not just an abstract system. We have been looking in the wrong place to understand kabbalah.

We may conclude that mysticism is not an irrational enterprise.  Its  not really ineffable.

5. Beyond Semeia 14 – [SBL publication by John Collins] that gave definition of literary genre called apocalypse — but this is not sufficient definition for apocalypticism as the  performative aspect is often lost in analyses.  Daphna Arbel (Beholders of Divine Secrets: Mysticism and Myth in the Hekhalot and Merkavah Literature, Albany NY: State University of New York Press 2003) emphasizes the experience of entering presence of God.

We can move beyond Semeia 14. Idel’s methods for mysticism should be applied to apocalypticism –- apocalyptic texts should be seen as having an experiential underpinning. The religious experience of the authors should be taken seriously. Social memory – what is author experiencing when he/she speaks as Enoch? Is eschatology really the central point?

Apocalypticism should be subset of the visionary genre –- it emphasizes connectivity to divine world and overcoming the gap between divine and mundane.

(As always, I am responsible for the contents of these notes. They should not be taken to represent exactly what the presenter said verbatim.)

[For more from this presenter, see Frances Flannery-Dailey, Dreamers, Scribes, and Priests: Jewish Dreams in the Hellenistic and Roman Eras (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, 90; Leiden\Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004).