Reading With an I to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot Through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle)

This book examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (= Thanksgiving Hymns) in light of ancient visionary traditions, new developments in neuropsychology, and post-structuralist understandings of the embodied subject. The thesis of this book is that the ritualized reading of reports describing visionary experiences written in the first person "I" had the potential to create within the ancient reader the subjectivity of a visionary which can then predispose him to have a religious experience. This study examines how references to the body and the strategic arousal of emotions could have functioned within a practice of performative reading to engender a religious experience of ascent. In so doing, this book offers new interdisciplinary insights into meditative ritual reading as a religious practice for transformation in antiquity. Introduction 11 I. The Proposal 14 II. Basic Orientation to the Qumran Hodayot 18 III. Traditional Scholarly Ways of Reading and Interpreting the Hodayot 27 Chapter 1 Creating an Embodied Subjectivity for Religious Experience 35 I. Religious Experience as Bodily Experience 39 II. Affective Experience as Bodily Experience 47 III. The Theoretical Post-Structural Framework of Performance Theory and Ritual Studies 56 1. Generative aspects of Ritual Performance 66 2. Embodied Subjectivity 70 3. The Radical Indeterminacy of Ritual Experiences 75 Conclusion 77 Chapter 2 The Imaginal Body as an Affective Script for Transformation 79 I. Embodiment Language and the Strong “I” 84 II. Emotions in Performance Studies 101 III. Performative Emotions in Religious Experience 108 Conclusion 120 Chapter 3 Progressive Spatialization: The Scripted Movement Out From Places of Punishment 124 I. Critical Spatial Theory: Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace 124 II. The Secondspace Terrain of the Hodayot 134 A. Spatial Orientation to the Collection TH+CH II 137 B. Places of Punishment and Entrapment: The Religious Geography of Terror in the TH 140 1. Entrapment and Enemy Attacks: 1QH X, 22–32 148 2. 1QH XI: Specific Allusions to Enochic Places of Punishment 151 3. Entrapment (1QH XII, 6-XIII, 6) 157 4. The Lion’s Den (1QH XIII, 7–21) 158 Conclusion 162 Chapter 4 The Thirdspace Terrain of the Hodayot: The Arousal of Fear and the Exegetical Generation of Texts 163 I. The Anthropologizing “I” and the Process of Actualization 166 II. The Role of the Emotions in the Generation of New Visionary Compositions 182 A. Neuropsychological Processes 184 B. Emotion and Memory in Performance Theory and Neuropsychology 192 C. Summary of the Neuropsychology of Emotion and Performance 198 III. Moving from Secondspace to Thirdspace Experiences: Performative Reading and the Exegetical Generation of 1QH XIII, 22-XV, 8 200 Conclusion 213 Chapter 5 Paradise as a Place on the Threshold of the Heavens 216 I. The Garden as Heterotopia 218 II. The Garden Paradise in the Hodayot 225 A. The Location of Paradise as a Place Above 228 B. A Glimpse of the Garden Paradise in 1QH XIII, 22-XV,8 230 C. The Well-Watered Garden Paradise in 1QH XVI, 5-XVII, 36 234 III. Moving On: The Spatial Progression in the Hodayot Scroll 254 IV. Entry into the Heavens 257 Conclusion 275 Conclusion 277 Bibliography 284 Subject Index 313 Ancient Text Index 316 Modern Author Index 328 This book examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns). The thesis of this book is that the ritualized reading of reports describing visionary experiences written in the first person 'I' had the potential to create within the ancient reader the subjectivity of a visionary which can then predispose him to have a religious experience. The author offers new interdisciplinary insights into meditative ritual reading as a religious practice for transformation in antiquity. Angela Kim Harkins, Fairfield University, CT, USA