This article exposes the spiritual deception that underlies the New Age promise of an imminent “Age of Aquarius.” By retracing the intellectual lineage from Helena P. Blavatsky’s nineteenth-century Theosophy to Alice A. Bailey’s Externalization of the Hierarchy—with its timetable climaxing in 2025—the study reveals how esoteric panentheism, once confined to occult circles, has been secularized...
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,...
Al-QamarDecember 31, 2025(Hafiz) Muhammad Aslam Khan, Hafiz Mansoor Ahmad Corresponding Author, Muhammad Javed Iqbal
This study offers an analytical and interpretive exploration of Maḥmūd Shabistarī’s Gulshan-i Rāz within the dialectical framework of Islamic mysticism (taṣawwuf) and scholastic theology (ʿilm al-kalām). It seeks to uncover the epistemological foundations of Shabistarī’s thought and his method of Qurʾānic taʾwīl (esoteric interpretation), situating his mystical insights in conversation with...
This work seeks to explore the profound and often overlooked connection between two monumental pillars of Hindu spiritual thought. On one hand stands Omkāra, the sacred monosyllable, a cornerstone of vedic and upanisadic philosophy, particularly as expounded in the māṇdūkya upaniṣad. Om represents not merely a sound, but the entirety of existence, consciousness, and the ultimate reality,...
Psychedelic substances reliably occasion transient self-transcendent states, including mystical-type experiences, which are theorized to support salutogenic psychological change and long-term well-being. Despite growing interest in these phenomena, little is known about how acute self-transcendent states translate into enduring trait-level changes, or whether individual differences such as...
The article examines the history of the development and cultural influence of Sufism in Azerbaijan, from the early stage of the emergence of the mystical and ascetic trend in Islamic religiosity to its integration into social and cultural life and the modern situation. The initial manifestations of Sufism on the territory of Azerbaijan have been recorded since the 10th century, when figures...
This article explores the transformations of the idea of reincarnation and its anthropological significance in the context of Helena Blavatsky’s theosophical-philosophical legacy and contemporary humanities of the 20th–21st centuries. Reincarnation is examined as a universal law of spiritual evolution that transcends the boundaries of religious-mystical doctrine and assumes the status of an...
Este artículo analiza la representación y reconfiguración de la ayahuasca en relatos polacos difundidos a través de YouTube. Mediante un análisis cualitativo de testi-monios publicados entre enero y abril de 2022, se contrastan las experiencias de ciudada-nos polacos participantes en ceremonias en América Latina y Europa con las descripciones etnográficas del uso indígena amazónico. El estudio...
This article undertakes a comparative analysis of divine transcendence as conceptualized in the Neoplatonically-infused Christian mysticism of the Corpus Areopagiticum and the esoteric tradition of Jewish Kabbalah, with a primary focus on the Zohar. It argues that despite their distinct theological origins and historical contexts, both systems develop sophisticated apophatic theologies to...
Nikolay Raynov (1889–1954) developed a modernist literary corpus that combines orthodox and heterodox religious imagery grounded in mysticism, esotericism, and occultism. This article systematically examines Raynov’s parabiblical texts in cluded in Bulgarian school readers and anthologies between 1926 and 1942. His non-canonical writing reproduces canonical forms while subtly transforming their...