MY PAPER "The Hekhalot Literature and the Early Jewish Apocalypses" has been accepted by the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group for the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Washington D.C. in November. Here's the abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between the Hekhalot literature -- the pre-Kabbalistic corpus of mystical texts that give instructions on how to ascend (or "descend") to God's heavenly throne-chariot and to compel the angels to grant revelations -- and the verifiably Jewish apocalypses of the early centuries C.E. and earlier. The article views the Hekhalot literature from the heuristic social-scientific model of the practitioner (the "descender to the chariot") as "shaman/healer" and examines the apocalypses to determine which elements of this model already existed in the earlier period and whether these indicate a genetic relationship between the apocalyptic visionaries and the descenders to the chariot.

The social-scientific model is the one presented in my book, Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature. You can read an early version of the thesis of the book in my 1994 SBLSP article, "The Hekhalot Literature and Shamanism."