ISSN 0029-5973
19 papers in the library · 492 citations · publishing 1995-2026
Numen January 8, 2026 Hannah Lucas
Abstract This article examines hand mnemonics as technologies of ritual practice in the medieval world, comparing an unstudied tenth-century Chinese Buddhist mnemonic from Dunhuang (Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Pelliot Chinois 3835) with Latin Christian “meditation hands” from thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Europe. Through phenomenological analysis of their attentional protocols – or...
Numen April 1, 2024 Daniel M. Stuart
This article takes as its starting point a repertoire of protective texts and practices articulated as ritual therapeutics in the early twentieth century by the well-known Burmese scholar-monk, the Ledi Sayadaw. Through an exploration of meditation-practice, meditation-teaching, and meditation-performance contexts in postcolonial Burma and India, I demonstrate the ways in which such texts and...
Numen December 12, 2023 Julian Strube
Different understandings of “esoteric” are the main subject and the demarcation line of several fields of study. However, the history of this term is either neglected or distorted by specific historiographical paradigms. Tracing European writings on China and Japan from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this article demonstrates that “esoteric” language was central to scholarship on...
Numen December 12, 2023 Lukas K. Pokorny, Franz Winter
This article introduces the special issue “Euro-American Esoteric Readings of East Asia.” First, the genesis of the special issue is explained, after which working definitions of the key terminology are given, namely, “East Asia,” “Euro-American,” “Western,” and “esotericism.” Next, the rationale of the special issue as well as short synopses of its five contributions are presented. The article...
Numen May 31, 2023 Matei Iagher
Abstract This article examines the genealogy of the concept of “transconscious,” a key notion in the work of Mircea Eliade. It argues that the “transconscious” is the inheritor of a long psychological tradition in the study of religion, namely that of the religious faculty. The first section looks at the religious faculty in the work of Max Müller and some of his German post-Kantian precursors,...
Numen June 4, 2020 Bas J.H. Jacobs 7 citations
Abstract Although many new agers believe that enlightenment is the end goal of spiritual development, the importance of this concept has largely been overlooked by scholars until now. This article contextualizes the concept of enlightenment historically. After a detailed description of what the new age concept of enlightenment entails, it traces the origin of the concept to the late...
Numen April 20, 2020 Dave Vliegenthart
The disenchantment of reality has bankrupted conventional sources of meaning for many people in modern Western cultures. This has led a growing number of figures and groups to search for alternative sources of meaning. Typical of their quests for meaning is the entanglement of secular and religious discourses. Since the twentieth century, scholars have studied the social configurations of these...
Numen January 30, 2018 Roberto Serafim Simões 1 citation
O período antigo do ioga emerge em meio a uma sociedade indiana estratificada e influenciado por religiões como o samkhya e o hinduísmo bramânico, sistematizando-se como um dársana ortodoxo hinduísta por meio da escritura antiga Ioga Sutras (IS) alguns séculos antes de era cristã. O IS explica tanto as causas do sofrimento humano quanto a promessa de uma boa vida iogue, baseando-se na teoria...
Numen January 30, 2018 Catón Eduardo Carini
El presente artículo se centra en indagar en la historia de la organización budista internacional Vipassana Meditation. Primero, realiza un recorrido por el desarrollo del budismo en Asia, haciendo hincapié en su afincamiento en Birmania. Luego, explora las trayectorias vitales de los líderes religiosos que formaron la mencionada organización y analiza los principales rasgos de la cosmovisión...
Numen January 30, 2018 Otávio Augusto Vieira
O presente artigo apresenta a meditação vipassana, também conhecida como meditação do insight ou analítica, como ensinada incialmente por Sidarta Gautama e transmitida pela tradição de S.N.Goenka. As técnicas de meditação da atenção plena (anapana-sati), analítica (vipassana-sati) e do amor compassivo (metta), assim como a filosofia prática de Buda são transmitidas durante o retiro de silêncio...
Numen September 28, 2017 Thomas Michael 8 citations
Abstract The article examines various options that scholars have explored in their efforts to construct a history of shamanism. Recognizing Eliade’s promise that such a history lies in the near future, the article then explores the important ways in which this has been undertaken. It specifies four such ways: with prehistoric rock art, the origins of cultural myths, memory studies, and...
Numen September 28, 2017 Feng Qu
Abstract: The hypothesis of ancient Chinese shamanism popularized by K. C. Chang in the 1980s has long been one of the central problems in the study of Chinese archaeology. By examining the structures that constitute Chang’s shamanic framework, this article argues that the problem centers around two major issues. The first is that Chang follows a tradition in Chinese academic historiography of...
Numen January 13, 2016 Henrik Bogdan
In the spring of 1946 L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Parsons performed a series of magical rituals with the aim of incarnating the Thelemic goddess Babalon in a human being. Hubbard’s cooperation with Parsons, known as the Babalon Working, remains one of the most controversial events in Hubbard’s pre-Scientology days. This article sets out to describe the content of the magical rituals, as well as...
Numen 2011 Thomas A. DuBois 35 citations
Recent research on the topic of shamanism is reviewed and discussed. Included are works appearing since the early 1990s in the fields of anthropology, religious studies, archaeology, cognitive sciences, ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, art history, and ethnobotany. The survey demonstrates a continued strong interest in specific ethnographic case studies focusing on communities which make...
Numen 2011 Homayun Sidky 13 citations
This paper is based upon five years of ethnographic research among the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, and extensive interviews with the medium of the State Oracle of Tibet and other spirit mediums. It investigates the nature of the oracular phenomenon and its place in the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology as well as the socio-political role of the Tibetan State Oracle, or Nechung. The...
Numen 2002 Peter Antes
AbstractThe starting point of the paper is the historical fact that people who have special forms of religious experience such as seeing saints, angels, gods or goddesses can always say whom they saw. They never met anyone totally unknown to them. The question is why. The answer that the paper proposes and invites to discuss is that having experience means to identify what is happening with...
Numen 1997 Todd Gibson
AbstractHistorical treatments of the shaman have often been crippled by dubious and untestable assumptions on the nature of shamanic religion. Anthropological investigations in their turn have seldom dealt with historical issues in any depth. The first part of this contribution attempts to point out the advantages and dangers involved in applying an anthropological perspective to historical...
Numen 1995 Robert H. Sharf 395 citations
Abstract The category “experience” has played a cardinal role in modern studies of buddhism. Few scholars seem to question the notion that Buddhist monastic practice, particularly meditation, is intended first and foremost to inculcate specific religious or “mystical” experiences in the minds of practitioners. Accordingly, a wide variety of Buddhist technical terms pertaining to the “stages on...
Numen 1995 Karen-Claire Voss, Antoine Faivre 33 citations
Abstract The term “esotericism” refers here to the modern esoteric currents in the West (15th to 20th centuries), i.e. to a diverse group of works, authors, trends, which possess an “air de famille” and which must be studied as a part of the history of religions because of the specific form it has acquired in the West from the Renaissance on. This field is comprised of currents like: alchemy...