This article examines how religious experience is articulated through genre in the poetry of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mawlawī shaykh Neshāṭī (d. 1674), focusing on the striking contrast between his ghazals and non-ghazal compositions. While Neshāṭī’s qaṣīdas, mathnawīs and other formal genres employ an explicit and direct religious language—addressing God, the Prophet, sacred figures,...
With the rapid advancement of science and technology in the early 21st century, the idea of improving human morality through various technological means emerged in Western scientific discourse. This idea subsequently acquired the stable name ‘moral enhancement’. One of the key arguments in support of this idea was the thesis of humanity’s inability to adequately utilize the achievements of...
Bidel Dehlavi, one of the most prominent poets of the Indian style, views existence through a deeply philosophical and mystical lens. His poetry embodies spiritual experience and metaphysical contemplation. A striking feature of Bidel’s worldview is the presence of paradox—not merely as a literary device, but as a means of expressing the mystical perception of truth. Through apparent...
Abstract This chapter surveys the trajectory of dybbuk possession in world cinema over the past nine decades, from Michał Waszyński’s 1937Dybbuk to contemporary horror films and documentaries. In Jewish tradition, the dybbuk is the soul of the dead that enters a living body. Popularized by S. An-sky’s modernist drama The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (1914), the dybbuk has evolved from a figure...
The review article of the book by James Braid, "Neuropnology or the rationale of nervous sleep, considered in connection with animal magnetism," is intended to draw attention to the treatise of the outstanding surgeon and hypnologist of the 19th century, who was the first to color the physiological interpretation of the previously mystical method of hypnosis under the monopoly of Mesmerists....
This artistic, practice-led research explores the potential of generative AI to reinterpret and visually communicate Persian Spiritual Wisdom and its storytelling traditions within a contemporary, AI-driven short film. The central inquiry asks how AI technologies can serve as visual tools for producing symbolic, culturally grounded imagery that enriches narrative structures (McCormack et al.,...
Hazrat Shah Niaz Ahmad Barelvi (1742–1834) was a distinguished Sufi saint, poet, and scholar of the Indian subcontinent, and the founder of the Niazi Sufi Order. Associated with the Chishti, Qadiri, Nizami, Sabri, and Naqshbandi orders, he played a vital role in preserving and transmitting the spiritual heritage of Sufism during the eighteenth century. His khanqah in Bareilly emerged as a...
William Butler Yeats is one of the literary pillars of twentieth century modernism. He was interested in the mystical and mythical elements of the dominant cultures of the world. Accordingly, he interpreted history in a context that broadly negotiated with magic, the occult, theosophy, alchemy, astrology, mythology, mysticism, and religion. He was not attracted to any specific culture, even...
This thesis embraces the disciplines of philosophy, art history and practical theology. It is concerned with the ways in which artists have endeavoured to express the numinous or point towards the Transcendent through landscape painting. The Transcendent is described as that recognition in mankind of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining a scientific knowledge of an order...
While Western theology typically locates omniscience in a personal Creator-God, Indian philosophy presents a notable spectrum. This article traces the dialectical arc of omniscience (sarvajñāna) across major Indian philosophical traditions, arguing that what appears as an epistemological question—“who knows everything?”—is ultimately an ontological puzzle about the nature of consciousness...