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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harkins, Angela Kim, 1973-

Series:

Ekstasis (Walter de Gruyter & Co.) ; v. 3.

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

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Thanksgiving Psalms--Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Thanksgiving Psalms.

Dead Sea scrolls.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (336 p.)

Place of Publication:

Boston : De Gruyter, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

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

ISBN:

9786613939975

9781283627528

1283627523

9783110251814

3110251817

OCLC:

811962806