South Asian Rituals of Self-torture

The expression “South Asian rituals of self-torture,” chosen as the all-encompassing title of this bibliographic article, indicates a complex of inherently painful, injurious, hazardous, or, in any event, trying religious practices falling either within the domain of the mystic-ecstatic experience or within that of possession in both theistic (i.e., Hindu) and shamanistic (i.e., tribal) cult traditions of South Asia. Such practices, generally not observed within Brahmanical contexts, are also commonly termed “religious ordeals.” The English-language term ordeal is a modern reflex of Proto-Germanic *uz-dailjam, lit. “that which is dealt out (by the gods),” namely, “God’s judgment,” and it etymologically denotes an ancient mode of trial by divine judgment consisting of an arduous physical test a person charged with guilt could be occasionally forced to undergo; the result of the test was believed to determine that person’s guilt or innocence by immediate judgment of the deity. By introducing a shift in meaning that excludes from the definition of ordeal such judicial concepts as “guilt,” “trial,” “test,” and “judgment,” a number of historians of religion have used this term to designate self-torture rituals as a whole within diverse religious traditions. In the South Asian context, Hindu votive (or devotional) ordeals aim at purifying or healing the bodies and souls of devotees keeping a religious vow who have resolved to practice self-torture in order to enter into a spiritual communion with their own elected deity (by whom they are often considered to be possessed during their performance of the ordeal) so as to be temporarily identified with him/her. Whereas in theistic Hindu cults religious ordeals are performed in fulfilment of a vow and out of devotion to acquire the favor and power of a personal deity and, in certain cases, to become his/her oracles, in shamanistic tribal cults they are undertaken as rites of passage performed to authenticate a change of state in both the body and the soul of a sacred specialist (who can be variously a shamanistic figure, a medium, a diviner, or a traditional healer); the goal of the ordeal is, in this case also, the transcending of the profane human condition. In either case undergoing an extreme physical experience is equated with being initiated into a new and closer relationship with the divine, which is reflected in a person’s manifest ability to bear the physical discomfort caused by acts of self-torture while in a self-transcending or in a possession/trance state that is interpreted by both the actors and the audience as a radically transforming experience. Thus, the aim of both votive/devotional and shamanistic ordeals is achieved only when the vow-keeper’s or the shamanistic specialist’s indifference to self-torture is exhibited before an audience of devotees, and this substantial fact marks the difference between them and the individualistic, private penances involving self-torture carried out by Hindu ascetics. In this article, sections dealing with the diverse South Asian rituals of self-torture are organized in terms of both phenomenal typology and geographical area (the most parsimonious method for classifying them).

'A Hostile Environment': Failure of Composition in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn.

This essay examines the effects of incompleteness in Anna Mendelssohn’s poetry, when incompleteness constitutes a requirement to take the thought of the poem further, beyond and outside itself, especially in its refusal to be reconciled with reality as it exists. Taking composition to mean the integration of the materials of a poem into a whole, the argument seeks to show that Mendelssohn’s poems are not-whole, and do not construct a world, but on the contrary carry through an unappeasable criticism of the reality she lived, which is that of late twentieth-century Britain. Her work is in unremitting rebellion against language that covers over and permits misogyny, racism, class oppression, hatred of art, insipid living. She writes from a situation in which not-speaking is imposed, in which the speech organs themselves have been damaged and closed up. This condition carries a removal of the self from life, into a place of death. Another, contrary death, however, takes place in her poetry: that of the self that passes through a disintegration, which Mendelssohn places at the heart of ecstatic experience of life. She excoriates those who want to remove the extreme aliveness of lyrical language from life and poetry. The law is what gives permission to that suppression: her poetry repeatedly moves against the actions of the law as it deadens life and language. Mendelssohn’s poetry is an account, implacable and without resentment, of a life lived inside and against personal and historical suffering.

«Den verkliga festen, som är dödstyst»

Tranströmer’s prose poem Blåsipporna (“The Liverleafs”) is rather cryptic. By reading the text in the light of Kant’s theory of the sublime and by focusing on its mysterious and paradoxical aspects, this essay seeks to unveil the poem’s hidden eschatology. The poem’s transcendence is the result of the rhetorical and literary devices the poet is using to depict an ecstatic experience. Such an experience is beyond rationality, hence the wording’s irrationality. In addition, the poem addresses silence, as the experience of ecstasy can never be expressed by words. Thus, Blåsipporna is a piece of art and a sacred text at the same time.

The Paleotechnology of Telephones and Screens

This article argues that the essentials of the complex relationship between interiority and exteriority, and the mediating role of teletechnology, are already present in the interiors of Paleolithic caves. As philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone argues in The Roots of Thinking (1990), cave art emerged from the primal fascination with ‘being inside.’ Yet at the same time, these first interiors were most likely created to establish a form of communication with an exterior, the ‘augmented reality’ of the spirit world, made possible through rudimentary technological and biological extensions. It also required a specific use of the spatial qualities of these caves, both sensory and atmospheric. This complex hybrid constellation of interior space, the human body and (psycho)technology created a permeability between different human and non-human actors. According to prehistorian Jean Clottes in Pourquoi l’art préhistorique (2011), the ‘permeability’ between inner and outer worlds is indeed one of the concepts that are crucial to understanding the Paleolithic human outlook on the environment, and is a concept which is still relevant today. Ever since these animistic Paleolithic works of art, teletechnology reveals what philosopher and literary theorist Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei calls, in The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (2007), the ‘ecstatic’ side of the quotidian. In this article, I follow the traces of this animistic, ecstatic experience in literature, in Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-8) and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), and in cinematography, in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). The imagination of now outdated technologies creates a kind of anachronistic, defamiliarizing perspective that helps to grasp the animistic, mythical dimension of our daily domestic immersion in contemporary teletechnologies (from video chats to ASMR-videos). These anachronistic experiences we find in art allow us to better reflect on the ecstatic role of media-technology in relation to our spatial and psychological interiors, and the (psycho)technological conditions of contemporary dwelling in the interiors of the communication age.