Reading with an "I" to the Heavens : : Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions / / Angela Kim Harkins.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• VerfasserIn: Harkins, Angela Kim,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2012]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages , 3
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (324 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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