He who hates us and whom we hate, here I cut off his neck!

(Taittiriya Samhita 1.3.1.1 c) [i]

 

In the landscape of a mainly culturally Christianised ‘West’ (and in an increasingly Westernised ‘East’), mysticism is discussed as a category encompassing truths transcending rational comprehension. Current methodologies in the study of mysticism have turned the attention to previously neglected areas, such as ethics and legitimacy in talking about the mystic Other, its ‘truths’ and the clashes between social and individual experiences in mystic contexts. Shared public discourses – rather than experience per se – have been debated as signifiers of mysticism (e.g. Sharf 1998, Campbell et alia 2010) while other studies have suggested that in order to understand mysticism it is necessary to distinguish between personal mystical experiences and esoteric teachings (e.g. Kripal 2001, Bocking 2006, Bergunder 2010). Both critical approaches provide a different perspective on key-concepts like individuality, tradition and culture. Yet they also imply a focus on agency. Moving from agency and related concepts – action, body and ritual, their uncertain boundaries and resulting landscapes – I will discuss how performance studies can inform the study of mysticism. In particular I will borrow from film culture and Marxist theory in order to elucidate how public visual narratives often contribute to a critical re-enactment of mythological discourses through what can be defined as ‘engaged mysticism’. In doing so the paper wishes to contribute to the current debate on the study of mysticism and to integrate it in the larger framework of cultural studies through ritual theory and folklore studies.

Yet if – to remain in film culture – selling ‘the lives of the others’ [ii] (anthropologically speaking) is accepted, doubts on the ideological stances behind it are legitimate. By arguing mystical experiences are extraordinary only for those beyond the cultural arena of engaged actors, I shift the focus of current approaches to practice. Mysticism will be discussed as one of the many practical ways to seek the divine, but not only. When disengaged by faith through an analysis focussed on praxis (and the selected and progressive break of ritual parameters), mysticism appears as a ritualised performance constructed to achieve – in private as well as in public – practical matters and setting a process aiming at healing and restoration, in their broadest meaning. In other words, mysticism pursues a radical political action that aims to correct the imbalances generated by religious competitiveness and sustained by theological totalitarianism. The paper ultimately wishes to draw the attention on ways ritual creativity, rather than hybridity, informs mystical practices and make thus possible for performers to negotiate individual and collective solutions in the most convenient way.

 

Dissenting bodies and ordinary desires.

Ritual is core to mysticism. Within mystical contexts, rituals seem to confirm the need to resist a socially constructed uneven system where some human beings are superior to others and some gods are above humans, or other deities/spirits. Yet notwithstanding their exclusivist nature and reliance on internal hierarchies, mystical practices have been popularised by global theologies and the capitalist market as levellers while mystical teachers/practitioners – irrespective of their religious or cultural background – have increasingly gained the status of pop icons, thus incrementing the proliferation of global merchandise. Gurus, Sufis, Cabbalists, Tantrikas, (neo-)shamans, etc. are admired, loved and even worshipped because they show an alternative and more appealing system is possible. As the socialism theorised by Gramsci, where emphasis is laid on community agency as a polyphonic organism culturally developed to own and regulate the means of production, distribution and exchange, mysticism – a product of culture itself – provides a way to escape the hegemony of constructed ideologies. Mystic rituals, however, have been advertised as a liberation tool for the wrong reasons. While contemporary popular culture has increasingly draw the attention of the public on spiritual liberation, in this article I wish to promote a reading of mysticism as a radical set of performances conceived, developed and transmitted to control the body so as to get rid of the causes at the origin of its political oppression/aggression. Mysticism is so discussed as a practice of resistance aiming to counter the impact of the Church on bodies.

I say ‘body’ instead of ‘soul’ on purpose. It is the body with its bones, muscles, veins, nerves, sweat, tears, blood, excretions, sexual fluids, vitality and mortality which is the subject of mystical activities. Not the soul or the spirit, often too much of a blurred concept to mystical performers, even well educated ones. The concepts of mind, spirit and soul are socio-cultural consequences of bodily constrains and may vary consistently with latitude. Conversely, the aesthetic performances of rituals that I inscribe in mysticism are ordinary physical experiences through which individuals and the community learn how to deal with uneven aspects of life. [iii] Mysticism is about learning and teaching. In other words, mysticism is a performative and/or ritualised discipline with a pedagogical intent. Whether we are talking about a guru imparting esoteric knowledge to a disciple or an individual having visions or hearing a message thence variously transmitted (through actions, text, art, theatre, music, cinema, etc.), mysticism is a pedagogical process. [iv] There is always something tangible to get as mystical practitioners (learners) have all practical aspirations. Regardless of the chosen path (traditional teachings, devotional practices, individually developed schemata or a University course), mystic trainees are performers. They do something. More often they make something. [v] On commenting on body and knowledge, Pierre Bourdieu observes that:

 

Bodily hexis, a basic dimension of the sense of social orientation, is a practical way of experiencing and expressing one’s own sense of social value. One’s relationship to the social world and to one’s proper place in it is never more clearly expressed than in the space and time one feels entitled to take from others; more precisely, in the space one claims with one’s body in physical space, through a bearing and gestures that are self-assured or reserved, expansive or constricted (‘presence’ or ‘insignificance’) and with one’s speech in time, through the interaction time one appropriates and the self-assured or aggressive, careless or unconscious way one appropriates it. (2007: 474)

 

The stillness, madness, frenzy, sexual arousal, anorexia, etc. of the bodies of engaged mystical ritualists are absolutely normal, when in context. The idea of classifying mystical experiences as ‘altered states of mind’ is thus patronising. More than forty years ago Michel Foucault warned us that the relation between soul and body as commonly understood is hegemonic. ‘Mystical practices’ or ‘mystical states’ are often extraordinary only for those beyond or outside the cultural arena of their actors. Conversely we should focus more attentively on the transition from the body-for-others (religion) to the body-for-itself (mysticism) (Sartre 2003: 330). During my research on the gajan festival in West Bengal and Bangladesh (Ferrari 2010), I had the occasion to witness practices like the carak puja, better known as ‘hook-swinging’. This has been variously described in both colonial and post-colonial academic literature as a ‘self-torture’ (iron hooks are inserted in the flesh of the performers’ back who hangs suspended on a platform 5 to 10 meters tall) leading to trance and mystical states. Though I witnessed several cases of ‘possession’ and ‘ecstatic’ behaviour, hook-swingers participate to the ritual for practical outcomes: to fulfil a vow, to honour a particular deity, to expiate guilt, for fun, money or bravado (young girls giggling from below are always very keen to stare at young performers). Every action, including the most dramatic acts of self-hurting, is perfectly ‘normal’ to both hooks-swingers and their audience.

My current research on disease, possession and healing rituals in India confirms this. Mystical experiences – including the use of esoteric knowledge – are the pathway to achieve practical matters and setting a process aiming at the healing and restoration of the body, what threatens or affects its functioning, and the world and time surrounding it. The uneven condition which performers variously experience in their ordinary lives is overcome through ritual action and the total participation of their bodies. Although such performances can be linked to certain aspects of the philosophy of praxis theorised by Gramsci (the ‘critical’ act’ and the ‘becoming’ as political tools), I dissent with Gramsci and certain Marxian anthropology in that I look at the individual break of socially constituted patterns (ritual) as the resolution of the uneven complex experienced within history. I also object Bourdieu when he implies that the ‘mystic’, the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘prophetic dream’ only belong to the charismatic leader who inevitably fells pray of the ‘flight of thought’ thus ignoring the constraints of the worldly reality (Bourdieu 1991: 38). Both the charisma of mystics and its desideratum result from the progressive set of actions embodied by ordinary people as a consequence of worldly reality. (Ironically Bourdieu falls in a Pascalian, and Marxian, paradox: I am not treated as a king because I am actually one. Rather I am a king because others treat me as such. Cf. Pascal 2000: 2: 86.) When the body acknowledges unevenness, the crisis of the ‘I’ manifests itself and affects its presence in the world on a historical plan (malaise). Normative religions – through exegetical discourses and their interpretation of ritual – offer recognition and validation of the crisis only at a metahistorical level (myth), a dimension that is invariably presented as conducive to one form or another of ‘salvation.’ Entangled in this frame, the ritualist either accepts or rationalises the system that is perceived as uneven. In actual facts, the body is condemned to stay within the limits of the institutionally established ‘sacred’ in a position of perpetual dependence. The mystic, conversely, knows how to overcome the system. The administration of the physical crisis – including fake ones – is decision, a deliberate performative choice between the way of meaning and the way of non-meaning (Derrida 2007: 76), or the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and not-reason (Foucault 2007: xii), the existent and its existing (Levinas 1987: 51).

Such dialectic generates reasonable hopes, a physical feeling discussed as ‘desire’s passive counterpart’ (Crapanzano 2004: 100). The crisis leading to mystical experiences (rupture) is caused by a set of actions triggered by a physical perception of the negative and pursuing a radical signifying process. Sartre expressed this condition when he wrote that: ‘Desire is a lack of being. As such it is directly oriented toward the being of which it is a lack.’ (2003, 596) In other words, human condition – especially in societies where churchical systems advertise rules to obtain ‘the Thing’ (paradise, liberation, etc.) as the norm – is inevitably bond to a crisis because the survival of theologies depends on the balance between what to give in order to let the audience not to get there and how to reassure the public that ‘the Thing’ is actually achievable. Mystics are thus a social necessity.

But faith, belief and ethics, with their socially constructed (and imposed) rules, are actually a burden to mystics (cf. Urban 2003a: 363). [vi] As Marx informs us, the crisis is endemic in the capitalist system. It is part of the accumulation mechanism because development depends on the accumulation of capital and the exploitation of resources, including labour. Mysticism and the crisis at its origin can be interpreted likewise. As societies depend on religious or religion-validated powers, systemic risks are inevitable. Mystical experiences are the natural response of ordinary oppressed people who find in the crisis the way to resolve an uneven complex.

 

Mystic praxis, uneven development and counterculture.

Maybe there ain’t no sin, maybe there ain’t no virtue.

It’s just what people does.

Casey, The Grapes of Wrath (by John Ford, 1940)

Ethnographic work does not end when leaving the field. Post-modern ethnography, with its strong emphasis on self-reflexivity, allows a proliferation of discourses on and around the rhetoric and the contents of a text (Tyler 1986). Moving from my fieldwork experience and the study of mystical performances in South Asia as popular and entertaining practices, I find a parallel in the representation of mysticism in one of the most popular Western means of communication and entertainment, i.e. cinema. But the representation of mysticism in Western pop culture suffers from two methodological errors. First emphasis is invariably laid on the personal experiences of the narrator, who often is not a validated teacher but tends to be a discussant in a position of power. Second it is presented as a paranormal quasi-unattainable religious dimension. Approaching mysticism through performance studies and ritual theory could therefore be helpful.

Ritual theory disengages mysticism from faith and belief, and the ethics derived from them. Most of all it disengages mysticism from theology – the heaviest of all burdens. Not all mystics are theologians, orthodox believers, or spiritual persons. Non-believers or people with little religious commitment but the one deriving from their cultural background can be defined as (occasional) mystics. After all, ritual is grounded on praxis and action is the most common way to communicate and experience. I thus suggest to analyse mysticism as ritual practice resulting from folklore.

Folkloristics (the academic study of folklore) is deeply concerned with performances which privilege micro-ethnographies where the object of study is discussed as artistic (aesthetic) communication. But like mysticism, folklore is not an empirical category. It only exists in academic environments. Folklore includes events that are both informative and performative (Korom 2006: 10). In a nutshell, folklore is the study of the actions of a selected group of people for a selected audience, human or not. Religious folklore, and the rituals contained in it, is therefore a shared public discourse which is informed by the dialectic of personal and collective experiences incessantly shaped by the ‘noise in the channel of communication’, a concept identified by linguist Jurij Lotman as the fundamental motor of cultural change (1972: 96-99). Mysticism, traditionally a secret body of performances and a consequential product of folklore, needs the ‘noise’ but tends to reject footlights. It is an ordinary everyday event that belongs to both performers and spectators. [vii] Gramsci noted this in his Prison Notebooks when he says that: ‘Folklore can be understood only as a reflex of the lifestyle of a people, even though it often persists when conditions are modified to a greater extent.’ (2007: 89) Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino developed Gramsci’s thought further and interpreted religious phenomena such as mystical experiences among subaltern classes as ‘progressive folklore’. This is defined as a conscious proposal of the people against its own subaltern condition, a way to comment or express in cultural terms their struggle for emancipation (de Martino 1951).

 The concept of ‘progressive folklore’ is extremely useful in this stance. Mysticism as an aesthetic performance is a powerful signifier owned and regulated by individuals and the community in all its multiform representations. But this does not happen in reality. The study and the presentation of mysticism is informed and constructed by the personal narratives of engaged intellectuals, from both the inside and the outside. This has contributed to the rise of an independent folklore (Kripal 2001: 3; Kripal 2007: 108-110). We are in front of a methodological dilemma generated by the transition from fieldwork to refined products (films, music, documentaries, academic books and fiction). By forgetting that mysticism is often built on an exclusivist practice justified by external hegemonic processes, eventually we witness another form of what Gramsci called ‘asymmetrical relationship of lack and excess’ or ‘uneven development’. The result of such tragic equation is that – as in Marx’s old claim that production creates the need for consumption – the superstructure (from theological authorities, to scholars, writers, musicians and film directors) needs the ‘mystic’. Just like capital cannot abide a limit but is more likely to turn it into a barrier which it regularly transcends (i.e. borders are for the subaltern only), so mystic radicalism is condoned by accepting some of its fashionable or appealing aspects. At first we witness the inclusion process: a certain degree of interpretation is (apparently) possible. Then, with the domestication of neo/reformed-mystic traditions and the promotion and liberalisation of what is interpreted as egalitarianism, the superstructure counters in the most effective way the revolutionary stances of mystic teachings and nullifies their ultimate defence, i.e. secrecy and hierarchy.

But what about the relationship – asymmetrical indeed – between normative religion and mysticism? In a recent lecture, David Harvey has noted that the crisis of capitalism in contemporary society can be discussed by exploring five ‘genres:’ 1) human frailty; 2) institutional failures; 3) obsession with false theories; 4) cultural origins; and 5) failure of policies (Harvey 2010). Quite likely, official theologies (like normative forms of capitalism) exist because of their hegemonic position, which in turn is validated by the argument that human nature is fragile and fallacious (in other words, needy). As neither can we reach (or be like) God nor we can get Paradise without adhering to the norm, religious power implements alternative solutions to deceive and control: dogmas. Besides conveniently qualifying and regulating the Thing, dogmas and norms also establish boundaries so as the notion itself of ‘not getting there’ is not perceived. [viii] The history of mysticism is consequently a history of hegemonisation and resistance. The mystic is the subaltern, even when it serves the power or when - with its intrinsic transcendence of social values and religious ethics - it can be perceived as an exploitative or ‘evil’ philosophy. [ix]

A good example to illustrate my reasoning is the 2007 Zack Snyder’s movie 300. At the end of the film, the Spartan army is ready to take revenge on the Persians after the heroic resistance of Leonidas and his men at the Thermopiles. In his speech at Plataea, Dilios (a fictional character adapted from Herodotus’ Aristodemus) exhorts the Spartans and other free Greeks and says: ‘This day, we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine.’ These words struck me since the first time I saw the movie. Mystical practices as performed by the Persians, a self-portrayed paradise and a multi-cultural colonising superpower, are considered by the Spartans to be complementary and functional to illegal occupation, dominance and slavery (actual and cultural), and opposite to reason. In fact, the key to the success of the Persians is represented in the movie by Xerses’ secret alliance with the ephors, Spartans corrupted leprous and inbred priests who act against Leonidas’ decision by controlling and conveniently interpreting the oracle (an exploited virgin) and so dooming Sparta to defeat. The rule of reason and freedom advocated by Leonidas, conversely, suggests a radicalisation of rationalism, or in socialist terms the drastic adoption of revolutionary Leninist praxis in a Marxist context. As discussed by Žižek (2001: 115), Sparta here is Really Existing Socialism, a society coping with its structural failure and in desperate need to assert and self-validate its existence. But what about the presence of the ‘official mystic’ in state structures? On the one hand, the ephors are the secret state police acting for the common good (the sacrifice of the pars pro toto, i.e. Leonidas and the 300). In this case Spartan society is not so radical as it would appear. (If a secret police is necessary then resistance is foreseeable.) The mystic ephors have to soothe the Other and eventually knee to the Other’s hubris recognising their subalternity and making the ‘ideal’ possible even if it’s already in pieces. On the other hand, the ephors act in revenge. They represent counter-revolutionary stances that aim to vindicate bourgeois ideals suffocated by the revolution (Sparta’s ideals). Mysticism in this case is used through folklore (the Carneian festival) to achieve yet another political agenda emphasising current and structural hegemony.

So not only is mysticism the subaltern. It also is counterculture, a tradition that radically counters the surrounding normative conservationism (Kripal 2007a: 108) and, at the same time, is forced to radically reflect on the quite likely possibility to be violently challenged (Kripal 2007b: 95). Yet as it happens to all counterculture products in the globalised capitalist market, mysticism too becomes a commodity fetish sold to the system for a number of purposes, be it a new social project or more mundane ventures (film industry, web sites, commercials, but also university courses, conferences, publishing enterprises, governmental and non-governmental organisations, etc.). Eventually, in order to understand the causes at the origin of the domestication of the mystic (and its effects in popular culture), mysticism needs to be recontextualised as revolutionary discipline while its study needs to reflect on the developments and transformations within the sphere of cultural production inherent to religion (Morton 2007: 174).

 

Mysti(c)fication and theological totalitarianism.

And if all of the teachers and preachers of wealth were arraigned

We could see quite a future for me in the literal sands.

(The Doors, Whiskey, Mystics & Men, 1969)

 

Normative religious prescriptions control ritual so as to ensure an acceptable (safe) response to dogmas. In other words, churchic power wants us to enjoy as little as possible. This mechanism is safeguarded by the promotion of certain practices which are presented in popular culture as ‘mystical’ and transgressive when in fact they respond to precise market strategies. [x] In fact, the mystic goes beyond the realm of the ‘permitted’ and suggests alternative pleasures are actually achievable. It results that, to borrow from the chemistry jargon that pits the literary universe of Primo Levi, religion and mysticism are ‘enantiomorphous’, identical but specular. While identity is defined by the context (a system that justifies diverse teleological interpretations through the institutional ‘sacred’), specularity stems from the role attributed to action. In the spheroid graph opening his The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology (1997: 3), Levi recapitulates his human experience as an Auschwitz survivor, a chemist, an acclaimed post-Holocaust author and an atheist. The book is an interesting experiment in that it is purposely built through the words of the Other to describe a past (history) which re-enacts itself in order not to grant liberation or pleasure per se but to ensure the possibility of resistance in history, thus actualising myth (metahistory). The teachings conveyed by Levi through his discussants validate my analysis of mysticism as counterculture and its domestication in popular culture. In particular they validate my idea that when human experience crosses the limits of pain and pleasure marked by the superstructure, it eventually achieves consciousness, [xi] which is nothing but the secret knowledge imparted by culture and history and elaborated by human beings in culture and history (folklore). Eventually theology and its actualisation, religion, appear for what they are: totalitarianisms that work for my own good, even if it is against my will, as opposed to mysticism which may end in the same direction but emphasises and encourages self-determination and emancipation. In a Marxist frame, mysticism represents the strategy of action that featured many cultural revolutions and – where this was not historically or culturally possible – found its application in counterculture.

I will now recur to three examples from film culture to clarify this. The first is taken from the Italian spaghetti western tradition which flourished between the 1960s and the 1970s, a troubled historical setting for political and cultural revolutions. The second is from the nihilist 1990s US film culture, a period marked by the Berlin Wall fall and the collapse of Existing Real Socialism. The third is a 2008 BBC production adapted from a 1977 Elie Wiesel’s drama on the Holocaust.

In what is probably his most overlooked film, A Fistful of Dynamite (1971), director Sergio Leone includes a significant opening quote from Mao Zedong: ‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence […].’ Mysticism too is insurrection and violence. The mystic objects the system by crossing norms and going beyond the Manichean ethics of ‘either good or evil’ advertised by theological systems. In Leone’s film, Juan Miranda, a Mexican peone, leads a life beyond order and law for practical outcomes (temporary gratification) but eventually, and reluctantly, becomes a hero of the Mexican Revolution. Until the end of the film, his life is made of ordinary violence, from rape to homicide. All this serves the purpose to vindicate – often in a grotesque way – the misery of his condition and the lack of the possibility of redemption due to his innate subalternity. What makes the difference between Juan-the-criminal and Juan-the-revolutionary is the absence of purpose in his transgressive actions. Meaning is provided by the mastermind: former-IRA revolutionary and explosives expert Sean Mallory. Mallory teaches Juan the ultimate truth, gradually and in culturally acceptable terms. Eventually, through Sean’s self-sacrifice, Juan transcends the common notion of robbery and murder and grasps the essence of ‘revolution’. His actions are no more pleasure masked by social vengeance. In front of truth, Juan acknowledges the possibility of dissolution and, in the last scene of the film, he asks: ‘What about me?’ Like revolutions, mysticism has to be violent: towards the system, towards the audience, towards history and, most of all, towards the performers and their bodies. From the ecstasies of St Teresa of Ávila to the first flight experience of a Lakota shaman, from the austerities endured by sadhus, sufis and bhikkhus to the pain experienced by Jesus and Muhammad, the body is the object of challenging actions. By breaking their flesh, bones, muscles and tissues (actually or symbolically), mystics express their will and actualise a political agenda. Mysticism – to quote Jim Morrison, another 1960s mystical icon – literally ‘breaks on through to the other side’.

The second example is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and the ominous Ezekiel 25: 17 passage pronounced by gangster Jules Winnfield (played by Samuel L. Jackson) before every execution:  

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

What makes this made-up Bible-style material interesting is Jules’ final statement:

I been sayin’ that shit for years.  And if you ever heard it, that meant your ass.  I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker ‘fore I popped a cap in his ass.  But I saw some shit this mornin’ made me think twice. Now I’m thinkin’, maybe it means you’re the evil man. And I’m the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here, he’s the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.

 

Besides soteriological readings of Jules’ exegetical exercise (Conrad 2006: 130), what is remarkable here is the absence of doubts behind the possibility to exert choice. Jules is not suggesting an interpretation of the religious norm. He has already chosen deviance as his only possibility. He learned this from his experience, from his being in that particular history and from the distortions caused by it. What Jules does is to escape norm, to contravene ritual. Jules’ choice is inaugural as in Derrida (2007: 12) because it provides him with a new landscape of consciousness. A knowledge that – despite being heresy for the outsider society, both criminal and bourgeois – will install him in a alternative historical course functional to his revelation and his new sets of needs. [xii]

Such process is not new. Normative interruption was known as a marker of adharma in ancient Vedic texts. As a matter of fact, the Vedas provide men with some powerful ‘cold-blooded shit’ (mantra) to discern illusion (maya) and disperse ‘those who attempt to poison and destroy’ their righteous (dharmic) asses. [xiii] But does the Vedic man have the choice to obtain the pleasure principle through alternative paths? Hardly. But he was trying real hard: ‘One should constantly mutter that which is destructive of ignorance and which begins with patagam [Rg Veda 10.177]. This hymn is indeed destructive of illusion [mayabheda] and repels all sort of illusions.’ (Rg Vidhana 4.115 in Patton 2005: 137). Coming back to Pulp Fiction, it is not the choice not to kill that makes of Jules a new (some will say ‘good’) man. It is the effort made to oppose his superstructure (gangster lifestyle) as well as his ‘dismissive attitude towards the “liberal” notion of freedom.’ (Žižek 2001: 114).

The final discourse pronounced by Rabbi Akiba, a fictional character played by Sir Antony Sher in God on Trial, [xiv] provides the material for my last example. Rabbi Akiba, a mystic healer rabbi, is one of the prisoners held by the Nazis in an Auschwitz block during WWII. While waiting for selection, captives decide to put Adonai on trial for breaking the covenant with the people of Israel by allowing the genocide of the Jews. After hearing in reflective silence different prisoners defending and accusing God, the rabbi, a melamed who is believed to be divinely inspired, says:

We [the Jews] have become the Moabites. We are learning how it was for the Amalekites. They faced extinction at the hand of Adonai. They died for his purpose. They fell as we are falling. They were afraid as we are afraid. And what did they learn? They learned that Adonai, the Lord our God, our God, is not good. He is not good. He was not ever good. He was only on our side. God is not good. […] What had they [the Egyptians, the Amalekites and the enemies of Israel] done to deserve annihilation? What could they have done to deserve such wholesale slaughter? What could they have done that was so bad? God is not good. When he asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham should have said no. We should have taught our God the justice that was in our hearts. We should have stood up to him. He is not good. He has simply been strong. He has simply been on our side. When we were brought here, we were brought by train. A guard slapped my face. On their belts they had written ‘Got mit uns’, God is with us. Who is to say that he is not? Perhaps he is. Is there any other explanation? What we see here: his power, his majesty, his might, all these things that turned against us. He is still God, but not our God. He has become our enemy. That is what’s happened to our covenant. He has made a new covenant with someone else.

 

The mystical melamed reinforces my idea of mysticism as a set of breaking actions directed towards an uneven system. In this case the rabbi deflects his closeness to God and secret (mystical) knowledge to express dissent (radical rupture) in practice. He condemns God who is found guilty of breaking the Covenant. Such resolution is informed by a life spent in closeness to God (he is addressed as the ‘Living Talmud’) and the awareness that an epochal event is allowing iniquity. In his 1987 essay, ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz’, German philosopher Hans Jonas said that by mere permitting human freedom, God himself has abdicated to power (Jonas 1987: 11). That freedom is the possibility to exert mysticism, a revolutionary performance that allows the acknowledgement of the oppression wielded by the superstructure on the body of the subaltern. Deleuze’s idea that ‘[t]he situations and revolutionary attempts are generated by capitalism itself and they are not going to disappear’ (in Virno 2004: 18) confirms why mysticism can be examined as a social revolutionary phenomenon, creative rather than hybrid, triggered by the ritual crisis, an aesthetic performance enacted by highly motivated performers (cf. Marx and Engels 2007: 125).

To conclude, the representation and advertisement of the mystic in contemporary popular culture should make us reflect on the need to study and teach mysticism as a product refusing ‘both the fetishization of the difference and the dangerous hegemonies of identification and conflation.’ (Kripal 2007b: 96) The focus on body and personhood, as both subject and object of ritual deviance, is to be considered more sensitively if one wishes to locate the nature of mysticism as a social phenomenon arising from uneven development. In addition to questions about the cultural and historical features of the actor (Who breaks the rules? What about his/her gender and sexuality, social status, religious background, language, personal stories, etc.?), it will be good practice to also consider why breaking rules, how rules are broken, when to break rules, for whom or on whose behalf to break rules and finally what rules can be broken and what cannot. [xv] Moving from the Marxian assumption that history results from the tension between the constructions of contingent occurrences and myth (meta-history) – the interaction of human will and collective praxis theorised by Gramsci – it appears that those breaks are invested with powerful meaning. By causing rupture in the pre-ordained sequence of events sanctioned by religion and by choosing alternative ways to achieve and administer pleasure, the mystic makes history.

 

Conclusions: normative capitalism and mystical politics.

Capital […] demands not a transcendent power but a mechanism of control that resides on the plane of immanence.

(Hardt and Negri 2000: 326)

 

Mysticism as both a pop-icon and an academic category has been inevitably exploited by personal narratives of engaged sympathisers, often in a position of power (coercion), and by the expectations of a domesticated public (consent). Methodologically, the problem is thus to disengage the study of mysticism from a compromising situation of hegemony. Bourdieu denounced in his Pascalian Meditations ‘academic fallacy’, a concept based on the universalising principle of a particular case and the forgetting of the social conditions which make it possible. In the case of mysticism, internal and external elites have created a self-tailored logic, a personal mythology and a genre. Back in 1979 Levinas suggested in Time and the Other that: ‘If the other could be possessed, seized, and known, it would not be the other.  To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power.’ (1987: 90) But hegemony is not a concept that describes a particular form of power, as many anthropologists argue. Rather, it is a way of analysing how power is produced and reproduced. How knowledge is obtained and transmitted. Or as I previously mentioned, how the developments and transformations within the sphere of cultural production inherent to religion affects the subaltern. I have thus suggested to interpret the mystic as the subaltern and to study mysticism through performance studies (ritual and folklore). Not only this will give us a privileged position over issues of subalternity. Also, by focussing on body, practice and its aesthetic transmission, it will be possible to further investigate the aetiology of mystic practices and mystic traditions as revolutionary systems resulting from the uneven implementation of social classes and religious norms.

By anticipating Edward Said’s concept of ‘worldliness of the text’, Gramsci suggests that different readers can generate alternative readings of a text according to changing circumstances but the text itself has an independent existence separate from its readership. Eventually the mystic text – whether a film, a Buddhist Tantric scripture, a Sufi interpretation of the abjad, a Hindu mantra, orally-transmitted shamanistic practices or rituals involving consumption of drugs, self-mutilation, fasting, meditation, etc. – has in itself the power of the powerless, as resistance initiatives are themselves embedded in local experiences of wider capitalist programmes. As Morton (2007: 199) puts it: ‘One cannot afford to impute a singularly translational logic to the domains of hegemony and resistance at the expense of local context and texture’.

I will conclude this article with a quotation from my recent fieldwork in Varanasi, India (Spring 2009). I was chatting with a very well-educated shakta sadhu in the Bengali quarter of the city. He himself a Bengali living in one of the many ashrams of Varanasi, the sadhu was telling me of his youth in Kolkata as a politically engaged student attending Communist rallies between the 1960s and the 1970s. With my background in Bengali studies and a lively interest in both Hindu mysticism and socialism, we started to get along. One day, while talking about capitalism, capitalists and bourgeoisie (bhadralok), he told me: ‘Mysticism is like socialism: they don’t understand it, so they can’t take it away from us. This is our strength but also our weakness.’ I’m still reflecting on such words. Only now I seem to understand what he implied. Classifying activity (in this case, classifying mysticism/socialism) as a human universal is a problem which is very much alive in the academia. As it has been theorised by Gramsci and more recently developed by folkloricist Frank Korom (2001: 6): ‘It is impossible to gaze our ethnographic “I” and maintain a neutral position after having conducted fieldwork! […] Our work is always political, whether we like it or not.’ (cf. Ginzburg 1998: xxiv; Golding 1988: 553; Lincoln 1999: 208-209; Chatterji 2003: 592). Even further, our work is also aesthetic and creative. Hence a methodological dilemma: If the relation with the Other does not arise from ethics or cultural differences, but from economic and political asymmetries (Sax 2009: 20), how can we classify ‘mysticism’? I tried to demonstrate that mysticism is a radical practice ideologically constructed against what mainstream religions present as norm and validate through text. Mystics do what ordinary believers are afraid to do and at the same time they are the perfect excuse to justify the inevitable social distortions resulting from the norm. They are radical in the sense that they are ‘not afraid to pass to the act, to assume all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realizing [their] political project’ (Žižek 2001: 4). But like all revolutions, mysticism presents its own risks, namely fragmentation and globalisation. This is why mystics quite often find themselves in competition. Gita Mehta in her Karma Cola tells us that: ‘In the ashram the guru was known to be God. Some of the ashram inmates were aspiring to become God.’ (1993: 28) With reference to the administration of symbolic capital, Verter has observed that antagonising mystical traditions ‘[…] seek to improve their position vis-à-vis their competitors in the only religious marketplace to which they have access.’ (2004: 190) The same phenomenon happened to the Marxist ideals of the 1960s and the 1970s whose fragmentation and erosion is still fresh in my informant’s mystical mind. Accepting and empowering an understanding of mysticism as the repetition of cultural creative actions triggered by the crisis generated by uneven development is thus a resource. Such methodology will permit to respond to the deterritorialising dynamics of theology, the institutional norms of the superstructure, and capitalist discourses.

 

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Filmography and Discography

300. Directed by Zack Snyder. Hollywood: Warner Bros, 2007.

God on Trial. Directed by Andy de Emmony. London: Hat Trick Productions, 2008.

The Grapes of Wrath. Directed by John Ford, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1940.

The Matrix. Directed by Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. The Matrix. Hollywood: Warner Bros, 1999.

Pulp Fiction. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Burbank, California: Miramax Films, 1994.