Cambridge University Press eBooks
December 31, 2025
Ariel Glucklich
Chapter 6 outlines three embodied systems – schema, image, and global – in order to explain the nature of systemic dissonance in the human body, along with the signal generated by this dissonance. The chapter discusses a number of religious cases of embodied dissonance, including spirit possession in India, body modification in the United States, the Hindu Kavadi practitioner in Southeast Asia,...
Everyday Mysticism
October 24, 2017
Ariel Glucklich
This chapter examines the nature of religious experience, comparing Buddhist, Hindu and Christian examples with the school at Neot Smadar. The key is making and unmaking of conceptual maps of reality and attaining states of true presence.
Everyday Mysticism
October 24, 2017
Ariel Glucklich
The topic of religious experience is explored in its academic setting and a number of Neot Smadar conversations are discussed in detail. The chapter shows that the concept of emptiness plays a major role in how religious experience figures in Neot Smadar.
Oxford Handbook Topics in Religion
May 5, 2015
Ariel Glucklich
Abstract: This article considers a broad selection of mystical writings to identify in ecstatic mystical experience two fundamental dimensions: a feeling of self-transcendence and an extremely high level of positive affect. The article argues that pain is instrumental in promoting both experiences and is therefore extremely pervasive among mystics who report ecstatic states of consciousness. A...
The End of Magic
May 15, 1997
Ariel Glucklich
Abstract: Westerners who arrive in Banaras, a city in India, to conduct research, study music, or just live among Indians, waste no time in shedding the outer signs of their Western identity in favor of kurtas and pajamas. During the past century, the phenomenon of magic, which is dispersed more widely than even religion, has been attacked from various quarters. On the one side have been the...
The End of Magic
May 15, 1997
Ariel Glucklich
AbstractWhat is magic? What does magic do? Why do people believe in magic in the face of experience? After living in the Indian city of Banaras and making several trips to tribal areas in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Orissa, the author of this chapter discovered a surprising fact: magic is rarely a simple matter of belief. Few magicians and clients in Banaras ever ask themselves why their...
The End of Magic
May 15, 1997
Ariel Glucklich
AbstractPhenomenology and system theory are the foundations of the “magical experience.” They offer a way out of the body/mind impasse. Magic, taken as an experience rather than as a doctrine, is the very consciousness of an overall interactional system that defies the logic of composite parts. The philosophical and anthropological underpinnings of this claim can be found in part in the...
May 15, 1997
Ariel Glucklich
AbstractThis book offers a new approach towards the definition and understanding of magic. Basing the analysis in the Indian city of Banaras, where magic is a familiar part of everyday life, it reviews the major theories that have explained (or explained away) magic over the last century. It argues that all of these theories leave out something critical, namely what it calls “magical...