Synopses & Reviews
As recent domestic and geopolitical events have become increasingly dominated by intolerant forms of religious thought and action, the critical study of religion continues to find itself largely ignored in the public square. Caught between those who assert that its principal purpose is to reflect the perspectives of those who believe and those who assert that its only proper place is to expose these same worldviews as deceptive social and economic mechanisms of power, the discipline has generally failed to find a truly audible voice. Rejecting both of these conservative and liberal modes of knowing as insufficient to the radical subject that is religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal offers in this book another possibility, that of the serpents gift.
Such a gift hisses a form of gnosis, that is, a deeply critical approach to religion that is at the same time profoundly engaged with the altered states of consciousness and energy that are naively literalized by the proponents of faith and too quickly dismissed by the proponents of pure reason. Kripal does not simply describe such a gnosis. He performs and transmits it through four meditations on the sexualities of Jesus, the mystical humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach, the gnostic potentials of the comparative method, and the American mythologies of the comic book. From the erotics of the gospels to the mutant powers of the superhero, The Serpents Gift promises its readers both an intellectual exile from our present religious and sexual ignorance and a transfigured hope in the spiritual potentials of the human species.
Synopsis
“Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field.” With those words in Genesis, God condemns the serpent for tempting Adam and Eve, and the serpent has shouldered the blame ever since. But how would the study of religion change if we looked at the Fall from the snakes point of view? Would he appear as a bringer of wisdom, more generous than the God who wishes to keep his creation ignorant?
Inspired by the early Gnostics who took that startling view, Jeffrey J. Kripal uses the serpent as a starting point for a groundbreaking reconsideration of religious studies and its methods. In a series of related essays, he moves beyond both rational and faith-based approaches to religion, exploring the erotics of the gospels and the sexualities of Jesus, John, and Mary Magdalene. He considers Feuerbachs Gnosticism, the untapped mystical potential of comparative religion, and even the modern mythology of the X-Men.
Ultimately, The Serpents Gift is a provocative call for a complete reorientation of religious studies, aimed at a larger understanding of the world, the self, and the divine.
About the Author
Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor in and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University. He is the author of Kalis Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna and Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Preface: Digging Up My Library
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Serpents Gift
Faith, Reason, and Gnosis
The Premodern, the Modern, and the Postmodern
Toward a Gnostic (Post)Modernity
Medi(t)ations
Writing as Hissing
Autobiographical and Pedagogical Contexts
The Essays
1 The Apocryphon of the Beloved
Invocation
The Quest for the Heretical Jesus
“One Will Know Them by Their Roots”
From the Womb . . .
Sexual Healings: Dispelling the Demons of Abuse
Sexual Teachings
The Man Jesus Loved
The Woman Jesus Loved
The Secret
2 Restoring the Adam of Light
The Adam of Light Awakened by Her
The Fiery Brook
The Sacrilegious Secret of Christian Theology
Implications of the Method
The Historical and Intellectual Contexts
“Man Is God to Man”: The Virtues of Pluralism and Polytheism
Completing the Incarnation of Love (and Sex): Embodiment in Feedbacks Thought
The Sexuality of Numbers
The Cancer and the Cure
Toward a Mystical Humanism: A Gnostic Rereading
3 Comparative Mystics
The Rebuke of the Gnostic and the Oriental Renaissance
Comparative Mystics
Ramakrishna: Colonialism, Universalism, Mysticism
Doctrinal and Historical-Critical Analysis
Ramakrishna and the Comparativist
The Critical Study of Religion as a Modern Mystical Tradition
The Scandal of Comparison
Professional Heresy: The Gnostic Study of Religion
Interlude: Logoi Mystikoi; or, How to Think like a Gnostic
4 Mutant Marvels
Educational and Sexual Allegory
On Puberty and Powers
Denying the Demiurge
Toward a More Radical Empiricism
Dissociation and the Release of Nonordinary Energies
On Death as Dissociation
Real X-Men
On X-clusions and X-ceptions
Political Allegory; or, How (Not) to Be an X-Man
Conclusion: Return to the Garden
The Other Tree
The Forbidden Fruit
“When He Becomes Troubled, He Will Be Astonished”
The Flaming Sword and the Bridal Chamber
Notes
The Fruit of the Tree; or, My Gnostic Library before I Have to Bury It (Again)
Index