Sacred pain : hurting the body for the sake of the soul / Ariel Glucklich.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Glucklich, Ariel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pain--Religious aspects.

Pain.

Ritual--Psychology.

Ritual.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (289 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2001.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Why would anyone seek out the very experience the rest of us most wish to avoid? Why would religious worshipers flog or crucify themselves, sleep on spikes, hang suspended by their flesh, or walk for miles through scorching deserts with bare and bloodied feet?. In this insightful new book, Ariel Glucklich argues that the experience of ritual pain, far from being a form of a madness or superstition, contains a hidden rationality and can bring about a profound transformation of the consciousness and identity of the spiritual seeker. Steering a course between purely cultural and purely biological

Contents:

Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; ONE: Religious Ways of Hurting; TWO: Pain and Transcendence: The Neurological Grounds; THREE: The Psychology and Communication of Pain; FOUR: Self and Sacrifice: A Psychology of Sacred Pain; FIVE: Ghost Trauma: Changing Identity through Pain; SIX: The Emotions of Passage; SEVEN: The Tortures of the Inquisition and the Invention of Modern Guilt; EIGHT: Anesthetics and the End of ""Good Pain""; Conclusion; Notes; Selected Bibliography; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.

ISBN:

0-19-983949-2

1-281-52901-X

0-19-803040-1

OCLC:

609831514