SBL paper 2015

MY PAPER PROPOSAL for the 2015 Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Atlanta has been accepted by the Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity Section. This is welcome news, but not a surprise, because the paper is part of a planned session on shamanism to be held jointly with the Religious Experience in Antiquity Group. Here is the abstract:

Hekhalot Mysticism and Jewish Shamanism: Where Do We Stand Now?

In 2001 my monograph Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature was publish by Brill. The Hekhalot literature is a corpus of Jewish mystical texts composed mainly in Babylonia and Palestine in the Geonic era, but which drew on traditions from late antiquity and perhaps earlier, and which continued to be shaped when transmitted to Europe in the Middle Ages. The texts present Tannaitic rabbis as practitioners of a form of mysticism (“Merkavah mysticism”) in which they undertook ritual and ascetic practices that led them into visionary states in which they could ascend to heaven to see and participate in the angelic liturgy around God’s throne-chariot (the Merkavah) or call down angels from heaven who could reveal the secrets of Torah and other mysteries to the practitioners. The meaning of this literature was and is debated, with some taking it as entirely fictional exercises in scriptural exegesis and others arguing that it (also) described an actual visionary praxis. Descenders to the Chariot presented a case for the latter viewpoint. In this volume I drew on anthropological data concerning Siberian, Inuit, Native American, and Japanese shamans, as well as the anthropological theoretical literature on shamanism, to argue that the descenders to the chariot — the practitioners described in the Hekhalot literature — displayed significant parallels to the shamans of other cultures and could be profitably compared to them. I argued that like shamans, the descenders to the chariot (1) were elected at least partly through their heredity; (2) engaged in a recognizable complex of ascetic and ritual techniques that promoted altered states of consciousness; (3) endured an experience of initiatory disintegration and reintegration; (4) traveled to a multi-tiered otherworld via a world tree or world ladder; (5) focused much of their efforts on the control of helping spirits; and (6) served their human community by various means. I found an especially useful typology of practitioners in the work of Michael Winkelman and concluded that the descenders to the chariot were very similar to his “shaman/healer,” a type of shamanic practitioner found in complex agricultural and pastoral societies. My central conclusion was that the instructions and rituals in the Hekhalot literature were recognizably of the type used by shamans to generate visionary experiences and that the visions described in the Hekhalot literature were of the type reported by shamans. Although the literature is pseudepigraphic and the illustrative stories it tells are fictional, it is a literature of instruction that preserves rituals that were used by actual magico-religious practitioners.

In the fourteen years since the publication of this volume a number of scholars have engaged with the arguments and conclusions of Descenders to the Chariot. The purpose of this paper is to review the responses, along with my own reflections, and evaluate where the case for the Hekhalot literature as the literary residue of a quasi-shamanic intermediary movement stands today.