The location of mysticism in religion

An important variable among mystical practices is the extent to which mystical experiences and ideologies are integrated into the religious tradition or broader spirituality of the practitioner. In Christianity, for example, mysticism may be practiced from late adolescence onward, but it is pursued chiefly by monks and nuns who form communities apart from their coreligionists. Their mystical experiences are pursued in private.

Christianity is not alone in segregating mysticism from its mainstream religious practice. In Hinduism, Yoga is pursued by adult males of the Brahman (priestly) caste after they abandon their families and retire to become forest dwellers. In Buddhism, Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha (c. 6th–4th century bce), rejected the Upanishadic belief that all things are a single substance that is God and instead advanced the concept of anatta (Pali: “non-self”). His rejection of the identity of atman and brahman coincided with his renunciation of the caste system and his introduction of an egalitarian model of community, the sangha. Because all is unreal, unreliable, and an illusion (maya), caste and the Hindu divinity of the self may be dismissed as fallacies.

The performances of shamans and Daoist priests, by contrast, are almost always conducted for the benefit of an audience. Shamans’ séances are devoted to healing their coreligionists, ending famines and adverse weather, finding lost articles and people, and so forth. Daoist priests perform highly varied rites on behalf of their coreligionists. Although shamans and Daoist priests occasionally experience private ecstasies, they are primarily professional ecstatics whose mysticism is a component of group religious activities. Practices that laypeople witness in nonmystical states are conducted in alternate states of consciousness by these professional ecstatics. Although vision quests, in which individuals seek to interact with a guardian spirit, are sometimes pursued by laity in religions that have shamans, the layperson gradually improves at the practice, ultimately attracting a following and becoming a professional.

Mysticism has influenced other religious traditions as well. The Kabbala, a school of Jewish mysticism that dates from the late 12th century, had an important impact on the subsequent development of Judaism. From the 12th through the 14th century, Kabbalists interpreted Jewish practices in a new light and so transformed them into mystical rites and customs. In the Iggeret ha-Kodesh (“The Holy Epistle”), for example, sexual intercourse in marriage was interpreted as a theurgical practice in which masculine and feminine hypostases (aspects) of the divine were brought into conjunction through appropriate meditations during sexual activity. Beginning in the 15th century, Kabbalists devised original rites of mystical character, some of which found their way into common Jewish usage. Most famously, the song “Lekhah dodi” (“Let Us Walk, My Love”), which greets the arrival of the feminine hypostasis, was composed by mystics in the town of Ẕefat in Upper Galilee. Its popularity led to its inclusion in the standard prayer books of Jews internationally.

Like the Kabbala, Sufism was grafted onto a religion (Islam) that was previously nonecstatic. The earliest Sufis were ascetics rather than mystics, and the earliest Sufi mystics were isolated individuals. As the movement grew in size, however, its social organization developed in two directions. Some individuals formed and belonged to Sufi orders, which are formal organizations that teach and perform specific approaches to Islamic mysticism. Less formally, however, groups of ordinary people—who may be acquainted, for example, through a local mosque—spend an hour or more together at a time, engaged communally in learning, prayer, and meditation.