Reading with an "I" to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions: 3 (Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle)

by Angela Kim Harkins (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2018

  $21.23

  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.