1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910826164303321

Autore

Harkins Angela Kim <1973->

Titolo

Reading with an "I" to the heavens : looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the lens of visionary traditions / / Angela Kim Harkins

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Boston, : De Gruyter, 2012

ISBN

1-283-62752-3

9786613939975

3-11-025181-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (336 p.)

Collana

Ekstasis, religious experience from antiquity to the Middle Ages, , 1865-8792 ; ; v. 3

Classificazione

BC 8920

Disciplina

296.1/55

Soggetti

RELIGION / Christian Rituals & Practice / General

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [274]-301) and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Creating an Embodied Subjectivity for Religious Experience -- Chapter 2. The Imaginal Body as an Affective Script for Transformation -- Chapter 3. Progressive Spatialization: The Scripted Movement Out From Places of Punishment -- Chapter 4. The Thirdspace Terrain of the Hodayot: The Arousal of Fear and the Exegetical Generation of Texts -- Chapter 5. Paradise as a Place on the Threshold of the Heavens -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Subject Index -- Ancient Text Index -- Modern Author Index

Sommario/riassunto

This book examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (= Thanksgiving Hymns) in light of ancient visionary traditions, new developments in neuropsychology, and post-structuralist understandings of the embodied subject. The thesis of this book is that the ritualized reading of reports describing visionary experiences written in the first person "I" had the potential to create within the ancient reader the subjectivity of a visionary which can then predispose him to have a religious experience. This study examines how references to the body and the strategic arousal of emotions could have functioned within a practice of performative reading to engender a religious experience of ascent. In so doing, this book offers new interdisciplinary insights into meditative ritual reading as a religious



practice for transformation in antiquity.