Many have argued that the completion of the Erie Canal changed the fate of the nation, paving the... more Many have argued that the completion of the Erie Canal changed the fate of the nation, paving the way for westward expansion, industrializing the North, spreading new religious ideas, facilitating the movement of enslaved people to freedom, but also transporting freed people to enslavement and forcibly removing Indigenous people from their lands. Its builders hoped for many of these things (for better or often for worse) and they celebrated its opening with an elaborate, month-long aquatic celebration. The festivities included a flotilla of barges, steam galleys, and other boats that sailed from Buffalo to New York City and were met along the way by local parades, ceremonies, and fireworks. As described in Cadwallader D. Colden’s 1825 Memoir, the opening celebrations culminated in the “Wedding of the Waters,” in which Governor DeWitt Clinton poured the waters of Lake Erie from a wooden cask into the New York Bay, mingling them with those of the Atlantic. Afterward, he dramatically pronounced, “It is done!,” a phrase borrowed from rituals of alchemical marriage. This was not the first ceremony for the canal, nor would it be the last. The ceremonies were based on masonic capstone rituals and performed as locks were completed along the canal, and they have been reenacted many times up to the present day. Most reenactments of the celebration are centered on the pronouncement—“It is done!”—and the choice of vocabulary is important, for the ritual really did get things done: it acted as a mirror for the community performing it and a projection of their hopes and ambitions. The Wedding of the Waters expressed those hopes and ambitions by enacting a combination of scientific and religious discourse within the ritual structure of a religious wedding; in this way they imagined and then performed a new, expansionist vision of a prosperous American future. The writers of the ritual understood all of this— engineering, architecture, and expansion—as a realization of the human creation in the divine image and a continuation of the divine creation process. This public ritual, then, was instrumental, intended to reflect ourselves as we are, to conduct “an experiment in alternate visions of the world,” and ultimately to realize those visions.
This chapter explores the utopian function of medieval and early modern kabbalistic sex magic rit... more This chapter explores the utopian function of medieval and early modern kabbalistic sex magic rituals in the thirteenth-and fourteen-century Sefer ha Zohar (Book of Splendor) and in three works by the kabbalist Moshe Cordovero, who lived from 1522 to 1570 in Ottoman Palestine. These works narrate a divine creation process that begins with an androgynous deity who creates by means of differentiation. This differentiation is imagined through gendering, and these kabbalistic texts articulate rituals that utopianize this primal androgyny and work to restore it. It focuses on two interlinked rituals: domestically performed practices of sacred sexuality and those of Gerushin (exile, divorce) which are walking meditation rituals meant to sexually unite separated elements of the divine, performed while wandering through the countryside. Both of these are based in a kabbalistic cosmogony narrating creation by means of divine separation into ten gendered aspects or sefirot, which then create the universe by means of sexual reproduction. As a result of this separation, one of the sefirot, the feminine Shekhinah, is exiled and separated from her husband, Tiferet. 1 Her state of exile mirrors that of the Jewish practitioners of sex magic rituals, and so when they act for her, they also act for themselves. 2 Kabbalistic sex magic rituals are thus aimed at
This article explores the ritual functions of medical and mythical embryologies in Jewish ritual ... more This article explores the ritual functions of medical and mythical embryologies in Jewish ritual texts from late antiquity to the present. Together these sources tell three stories that show the development of participatory models of ritual efficacy. The first is the integration of medical embryologies into Jewish ritual practice. The second is that of a growing collaboration between human and divine in reproduction, and in prayer, through shared experience, shared embodiment and affect, and mutual mimesis that together constitute a powerful methexis. These in turn grant increased access to power. The third story is the growing maternalization of the divine, which in turn amplifies human-divine collaboration and inter-embodied participation in pregnancy. Thus from the period of late antiquity to early modernity, we see the ritualization of embryologies, remythologized to articulate an emerging theology of divine maternity and of inter-embodied human-divine participation in reproduction.
Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicat... more Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sep 11, 2015
Medieval and early modern Jewish works of self-improvement share a set of conventions identifying... more Medieval and early modern Jewish works of self-improvement share a set of conventions identifying them as a genre. They all imagine the ideal self as a microcosm for a divinized cosmos, and they instruct their readers to conform to the ideal by means of ritual cognition, affect, ritual practice, and social action based in Jewish law. They also assume existence within a community so that material care for others was crucial to ideal selfhood. Contemporary kabbalistic self-help retains the microcosmic model, but some of its authors substitute psychotherapeutic and economic discourse for religious discourse, minimizing requirements for social action, maximizing the power of affect and ritual cognition, and valuing the attainment of personal desire. Other authors, however, use psychological discourse to emphasize the importance of social justice. Thus contemporary writers of kabbalistic self-help adapt and reformulate this earlier genre to different ends, depending on their use of religious, psychotherapeutic, and economic discourse.
This project examines representations of conversion in the twelfth and thirteenth century romance... more This project examines representations of conversion in the twelfth and thirteenth century romances, the Old French Floire et Blancheflor, Aucassin et Nicolette, and Flamenca. In these works, the figure of the convert is used to articulate and elaborate internal social concerns. The twelfth century was less a time of the ‘rise of the individual’ than a time of the individual thought in relation to others. In this way, understanding the self depends both on the 'other' to whom the self relates and the framing of that relation. These works position the native self in relation to the Saracen other, probing their relation through the structures of religious conversion. The framework of religious conversion provides a vocabulary to express and examine cultural difference, cultural absorption and assimilation of new knowledge and technologies of Arabic culture. Temporal history in turn consists of both nativist, monoculturally formulated histories and more relational models formulated with a view toward articulating a more cosmopolitan, interrelated view of culture and as such, the self. The literary treatments of conversion were used to probe the problematics of these discourses.
In the past 60 years, the study of Jewish mystical thought has blossomed. Once the exclusive aren... more In the past 60 years, the study of Jewish mystical thought has blossomed. Once the exclusive arena of a select and traditionally educated few, it is now the most rapidly expanding field in Jewish studies. We are still compiling the canon of kabbalistic texts—many languish in archives, unedited, unpublished, and hence, mostly unknown. Even the most important collections of medieval kabbalistic manuscripts have yet to be correctly identified or fully cataloged. Little by little, scholars in the field are becoming better able to account for these works and make them available to readers. However, in the rush to produce printed texts, the graphic elements of the manuscripts have been largely ignored. The manuscripts contain a rich tradition of graphic representation that remains to be cataloged and analyzed. The study of kabbalistic manuscripts, and in this the study of its diagrams, is largely neglected. This is attributable to two prevalent trends in the study of Jewish mysticism. The first is the conventional textual orientation of Jewish studies, which is in turn based on the common misunderstanding that Jewish culture is iconoclastic, forbidding visual representations such as those found in kabbalistic diagrams. The second is a tendency among both orthodox scholars of kabbalah and its popularizers to treat it as a divinely received and therefore ahistoric tradition.1
This paper theorizes the role of humor among the alt-right, focusing on the ritual handbooks on m... more This paper theorizes the role of humor among the alt-right, focusing on the ritual handbooks on meme magic. These handbooks use humor to describe a form of ludic ritual that parodically, but also seriously, engages in intellectual, affective, and effective modes of worldmaking, enacted through the pre-existing forms of chaos magick. Consistent with the practice of chaos magick, these ritual handbooks craft a purposefully indeterminate symbolic power to make real changes in the material world. In this way, they work on an effective poetics of reversal, confusion, and destruction to articulate and enact their patriarchal, misogynistic, violently heteronormative, and white supremacist ideals.
In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology under... more In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.
Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of... more Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of kabbalistic dreamwork. She is best known for her "Waking Dream" technique, teaching it in her garden in Jerusalem in the last decades of the twentieth century. The technique is based in her 'Kabbalah of Light' which draws from kabbalistic and psychoanalytic discourses and methodologies, consistent
Sexuality is at the center of the kabbalistic cosmos, structuring interactions between the sefiro... more Sexuality is at the center of the kabbalistic cosmos, structuring interactions between the sefirot human and divine. Thus medieval kabbalists innovated rituals of sacred sexuality to act on that cosmos. This essay first describes these earlier rituals, and then examines their changing functions in two 21st Century American self-help books, The Kabbalah Book of Sex and Other Mysteries of the Universe by Yehuda Berg, and The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life, by Shmuley Boteach. These American Jewish writers adapt older models to engage American discourses of individualism, capitalism, gender, and pleasure.
This article examines the constitution of astrology in four Hebrew works, two written before and ... more This article examines the constitution of astrology in four Hebrew works, two written before and two after the emergence of Islam. It argues that there is a significant difference in both form and substance in pre and post-Islamic works. In all cases the works strive to nativize a cosmopolitan tradition, and to integrate partially theorized or decontextualized concepts. The pre-Islamic works use a cosmopolitan model of astrological medicine that they particularize by means of remythologizing and an appeal to experience. The post-Islamic works differ from each other and from the pre-Islamic works in their use of Islamic discourse to authorize their views, and in terms of their relation to earlier texts.
This essay explores religious cosmopolitanism in three Iberian texts from the eleventh and twelft... more This essay explores religious cosmopolitanism in three Iberian texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries: Ibn Gabirol’s penitential poem, Keter Malchut (Kingly Crown, written before 1050), Bahya Ibn Pakuda’s ethical treatise, Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub (written in Arabic in 1080 and translated into Hebrew in 1161–80 under the title Hovot ha-Levavot, or Duties of the Heart), and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive, Son of Awake, written in Arabic in the 1160s). Each of these texts discusses the use of the body and its senses to perceive and experience the truth of divine creation, and in this use, attaining salvific knowledge.1 They all employ highly conventionalized descriptions of the body to establish it and its senses as a ladder to the divine. In this way, textual description of the body provides a model for contemplation, which in turn functions as a mode of ascent. This contemplative model of ascent is based in a cosmological map derived from the monotheized Neo-Platonic2 and Neo-Aristotelian philosophical traditions.3 These cosmological models often present the human body as a microcosm, and the apprehension of human perfection as a path to apprehending divine wisdom. In beginning with the human body as a microcosm, one can think about cosmos, and this thinking about the cosmos is also a means of traversing it to approach its divine creator.4
Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of kabbalis... more Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of kabbalistic dreamwork. She is best known for her "Waking Dream" technique, teaching it in her garden in Jerusalem in the last decades of the twentieth century. The technique is based in her 'Kabbalah of Light' which draws from kabbalistic and psychoanalytic discourses and methodologies, consistent
Many have argued that the completion of the Erie Canal changed the fate of the nation, paving the... more Many have argued that the completion of the Erie Canal changed the fate of the nation, paving the way for westward expansion, industrializing the North, spreading new religious ideas, facilitating the movement of enslaved people to freedom, but also transporting freed people to enslavement and forcibly removing Indigenous people from their lands. Its builders hoped for many of these things (for better or often for worse) and they celebrated its opening with an elaborate, month-long aquatic celebration. The festivities included a flotilla of barges, steam galleys, and other boats that sailed from Buffalo to New York City and were met along the way by local parades, ceremonies, and fireworks. As described in Cadwallader D. Colden’s 1825 Memoir, the opening celebrations culminated in the “Wedding of the Waters,” in which Governor DeWitt Clinton poured the waters of Lake Erie from a wooden cask into the New York Bay, mingling them with those of the Atlantic. Afterward, he dramatically pronounced, “It is done!,” a phrase borrowed from rituals of alchemical marriage. This was not the first ceremony for the canal, nor would it be the last. The ceremonies were based on masonic capstone rituals and performed as locks were completed along the canal, and they have been reenacted many times up to the present day. Most reenactments of the celebration are centered on the pronouncement—“It is done!”—and the choice of vocabulary is important, for the ritual really did get things done: it acted as a mirror for the community performing it and a projection of their hopes and ambitions. The Wedding of the Waters expressed those hopes and ambitions by enacting a combination of scientific and religious discourse within the ritual structure of a religious wedding; in this way they imagined and then performed a new, expansionist vision of a prosperous American future. The writers of the ritual understood all of this— engineering, architecture, and expansion—as a realization of the human creation in the divine image and a continuation of the divine creation process. This public ritual, then, was instrumental, intended to reflect ourselves as we are, to conduct “an experiment in alternate visions of the world,” and ultimately to realize those visions.
This chapter explores the utopian function of medieval and early modern kabbalistic sex magic rit... more This chapter explores the utopian function of medieval and early modern kabbalistic sex magic rituals in the thirteenth-and fourteen-century Sefer ha Zohar (Book of Splendor) and in three works by the kabbalist Moshe Cordovero, who lived from 1522 to 1570 in Ottoman Palestine. These works narrate a divine creation process that begins with an androgynous deity who creates by means of differentiation. This differentiation is imagined through gendering, and these kabbalistic texts articulate rituals that utopianize this primal androgyny and work to restore it. It focuses on two interlinked rituals: domestically performed practices of sacred sexuality and those of Gerushin (exile, divorce) which are walking meditation rituals meant to sexually unite separated elements of the divine, performed while wandering through the countryside. Both of these are based in a kabbalistic cosmogony narrating creation by means of divine separation into ten gendered aspects or sefirot, which then create the universe by means of sexual reproduction. As a result of this separation, one of the sefirot, the feminine Shekhinah, is exiled and separated from her husband, Tiferet. 1 Her state of exile mirrors that of the Jewish practitioners of sex magic rituals, and so when they act for her, they also act for themselves. 2 Kabbalistic sex magic rituals are thus aimed at
This article explores the ritual functions of medical and mythical embryologies in Jewish ritual ... more This article explores the ritual functions of medical and mythical embryologies in Jewish ritual texts from late antiquity to the present. Together these sources tell three stories that show the development of participatory models of ritual efficacy. The first is the integration of medical embryologies into Jewish ritual practice. The second is that of a growing collaboration between human and divine in reproduction, and in prayer, through shared experience, shared embodiment and affect, and mutual mimesis that together constitute a powerful methexis. These in turn grant increased access to power. The third story is the growing maternalization of the divine, which in turn amplifies human-divine collaboration and inter-embodied participation in pregnancy. Thus from the period of late antiquity to early modernity, we see the ritualization of embryologies, remythologized to articulate an emerging theology of divine maternity and of inter-embodied human-divine participation in reproduction.
Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicat... more Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sep 11, 2015
Medieval and early modern Jewish works of self-improvement share a set of conventions identifying... more Medieval and early modern Jewish works of self-improvement share a set of conventions identifying them as a genre. They all imagine the ideal self as a microcosm for a divinized cosmos, and they instruct their readers to conform to the ideal by means of ritual cognition, affect, ritual practice, and social action based in Jewish law. They also assume existence within a community so that material care for others was crucial to ideal selfhood. Contemporary kabbalistic self-help retains the microcosmic model, but some of its authors substitute psychotherapeutic and economic discourse for religious discourse, minimizing requirements for social action, maximizing the power of affect and ritual cognition, and valuing the attainment of personal desire. Other authors, however, use psychological discourse to emphasize the importance of social justice. Thus contemporary writers of kabbalistic self-help adapt and reformulate this earlier genre to different ends, depending on their use of religious, psychotherapeutic, and economic discourse.
This project examines representations of conversion in the twelfth and thirteenth century romance... more This project examines representations of conversion in the twelfth and thirteenth century romances, the Old French Floire et Blancheflor, Aucassin et Nicolette, and Flamenca. In these works, the figure of the convert is used to articulate and elaborate internal social concerns. The twelfth century was less a time of the ‘rise of the individual’ than a time of the individual thought in relation to others. In this way, understanding the self depends both on the 'other' to whom the self relates and the framing of that relation. These works position the native self in relation to the Saracen other, probing their relation through the structures of religious conversion. The framework of religious conversion provides a vocabulary to express and examine cultural difference, cultural absorption and assimilation of new knowledge and technologies of Arabic culture. Temporal history in turn consists of both nativist, monoculturally formulated histories and more relational models formulated with a view toward articulating a more cosmopolitan, interrelated view of culture and as such, the self. The literary treatments of conversion were used to probe the problematics of these discourses.
In the past 60 years, the study of Jewish mystical thought has blossomed. Once the exclusive aren... more In the past 60 years, the study of Jewish mystical thought has blossomed. Once the exclusive arena of a select and traditionally educated few, it is now the most rapidly expanding field in Jewish studies. We are still compiling the canon of kabbalistic texts—many languish in archives, unedited, unpublished, and hence, mostly unknown. Even the most important collections of medieval kabbalistic manuscripts have yet to be correctly identified or fully cataloged. Little by little, scholars in the field are becoming better able to account for these works and make them available to readers. However, in the rush to produce printed texts, the graphic elements of the manuscripts have been largely ignored. The manuscripts contain a rich tradition of graphic representation that remains to be cataloged and analyzed. The study of kabbalistic manuscripts, and in this the study of its diagrams, is largely neglected. This is attributable to two prevalent trends in the study of Jewish mysticism. The first is the conventional textual orientation of Jewish studies, which is in turn based on the common misunderstanding that Jewish culture is iconoclastic, forbidding visual representations such as those found in kabbalistic diagrams. The second is a tendency among both orthodox scholars of kabbalah and its popularizers to treat it as a divinely received and therefore ahistoric tradition.1
This paper theorizes the role of humor among the alt-right, focusing on the ritual handbooks on m... more This paper theorizes the role of humor among the alt-right, focusing on the ritual handbooks on meme magic. These handbooks use humor to describe a form of ludic ritual that parodically, but also seriously, engages in intellectual, affective, and effective modes of worldmaking, enacted through the pre-existing forms of chaos magick. Consistent with the practice of chaos magick, these ritual handbooks craft a purposefully indeterminate symbolic power to make real changes in the material world. In this way, they work on an effective poetics of reversal, confusion, and destruction to articulate and enact their patriarchal, misogynistic, violently heteronormative, and white supremacist ideals.
In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology under... more In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.
Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of... more Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of kabbalistic dreamwork. She is best known for her "Waking Dream" technique, teaching it in her garden in Jerusalem in the last decades of the twentieth century. The technique is based in her 'Kabbalah of Light' which draws from kabbalistic and psychoanalytic discourses and methodologies, consistent
Sexuality is at the center of the kabbalistic cosmos, structuring interactions between the sefiro... more Sexuality is at the center of the kabbalistic cosmos, structuring interactions between the sefirot human and divine. Thus medieval kabbalists innovated rituals of sacred sexuality to act on that cosmos. This essay first describes these earlier rituals, and then examines their changing functions in two 21st Century American self-help books, The Kabbalah Book of Sex and Other Mysteries of the Universe by Yehuda Berg, and The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life, by Shmuley Boteach. These American Jewish writers adapt older models to engage American discourses of individualism, capitalism, gender, and pleasure.
This article examines the constitution of astrology in four Hebrew works, two written before and ... more This article examines the constitution of astrology in four Hebrew works, two written before and two after the emergence of Islam. It argues that there is a significant difference in both form and substance in pre and post-Islamic works. In all cases the works strive to nativize a cosmopolitan tradition, and to integrate partially theorized or decontextualized concepts. The pre-Islamic works use a cosmopolitan model of astrological medicine that they particularize by means of remythologizing and an appeal to experience. The post-Islamic works differ from each other and from the pre-Islamic works in their use of Islamic discourse to authorize their views, and in terms of their relation to earlier texts.
This essay explores religious cosmopolitanism in three Iberian texts from the eleventh and twelft... more This essay explores religious cosmopolitanism in three Iberian texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries: Ibn Gabirol’s penitential poem, Keter Malchut (Kingly Crown, written before 1050), Bahya Ibn Pakuda’s ethical treatise, Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub (written in Arabic in 1080 and translated into Hebrew in 1161–80 under the title Hovot ha-Levavot, or Duties of the Heart), and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive, Son of Awake, written in Arabic in the 1160s). Each of these texts discusses the use of the body and its senses to perceive and experience the truth of divine creation, and in this use, attaining salvific knowledge.1 They all employ highly conventionalized descriptions of the body to establish it and its senses as a ladder to the divine. In this way, textual description of the body provides a model for contemplation, which in turn functions as a mode of ascent. This contemplative model of ascent is based in a cosmological map derived from the monotheized Neo-Platonic2 and Neo-Aristotelian philosophical traditions.3 These cosmological models often present the human body as a microcosm, and the apprehension of human perfection as a path to apprehending divine wisdom. In beginning with the human body as a microcosm, one can think about cosmos, and this thinking about the cosmos is also a means of traversing it to approach its divine creator.4
Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of kabbalis... more Algiers and Jerusalem) was "a physician, thinker, and natural healer, 1 and a pioneer of kabbalistic dreamwork. She is best known for her "Waking Dream" technique, teaching it in her garden in Jerusalem in the last decades of the twentieth century. The technique is based in her 'Kabbalah of Light' which draws from kabbalistic and psychoanalytic discourses and methodologies, consistent
In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology under... more In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice.
Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life.
Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.
This project examines representations of conversion in the twelfth and thirteenth century romance... more This project examines representations of conversion in the twelfth and thirteenth century romances, the Old French Floire et Blancheflor, Aucassin et Nicolette, and Flamenca. In these works, the figure of the convert is used to articulate and elaborate internal social concerns. The twelfth century was less a time of the ‘rise of the individual’ than a time of the individual thought in relation to others. In this way, understanding the self depends both on the 'other' to whom the self relates and the framing of that relation. These works position the native self in relation to the Saracen other, probing their relation through the structures of religious conversion. The framework of religious conversion provides a vocabulary to express and examine cultural difference, cultural absorption and assimilation of new knowledge and technologies of Arabic culture. Temporal history in turn consists of both nativist, monoculturally formulated histories and more relational models formulated with a view toward articulating a more cosmopolitan, interrelated view of culture and as such, the self. The literary treatments of conversion were used to probe the problematics of these discourses.
is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throu... more is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
While the Talmud famously forbids sorcery, Jewish history is full of examples of what many today ... more While the Talmud famously forbids sorcery, Jewish history is full of examples of what many today might refer to as "magic." In this episode, host Erin Phillips and guest scholars Sara Ronis, Marla Segol, and Michael Swartz take us on a spellbinding journey to discover magic's role in Jewish history as they discuss Jewish magical rituals and artifacts, angelology and demonology, and the evolution of magical practices in Judaism.
Episode Guests
Sara Ronis
Sara Ronis is Associate Professor of Theology at St. Mary's University, Texas. She is the author of Demons in the Talmud: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia.
Marla Segol
Marla Segol is a Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. She researches Kabbalah, Jewish Magic, Modern Esotericism, religious cosmopolitanism, and the history of the body and sexuality. Her most recent book is Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy.
Michael D. Swartz
Michael D. Swartz is Professor of Hebrew and Religious Studies in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on the cultural history of Judaism in late antiquity, rabbinic studies, early Jewish mysticism and magic, and ritual studies. His most recent book is The Mechanics of Providence: The Workings of Ancient Jewish Magic and Mysticism.
Public Lecture Gender Insitute at the University at Buffalo, 12/6/17
This paper explores the contemporary practice of sacred sexuality. In researching it I sought out... more This paper explores the contemporary practice of sacred sexuality. In researching it I sought out and interviewed community teachers of sacred sexuality to understand if and how they were using kabbalistic discursive or ritual models for sacred sexuality. I purposely sought teachers who operated through the Meetup platform, which is a grassroots site for organizing local activities around particular interests. I did not seek out Jewish women teachers (in fact-I sought those unaffiliated with institutional religion) but I found them just the same. Similarly, these Jewish teachers do not consciously use Jewish mystical rituals, but they use them nevertheless, combined with a wide variety of other sources. In conducting my interviews, I learned first, that many innovate rituals independent of a single mythological tradition, but engaged instead with different powerful discourses from inside religious traditions and from outside them. Second, I learned that they assign to sex magic rituals a therapeutic function, intended to act on individuals, groups, and society as a whole. Finally, I learned the innovators of these rituals intend them to heal in several different ways: to revise shaming narratives (often religious) about sexuality and the female body, to intervene in insufficient or harmful psychotherapeutic models for healing, and to revise medical models with inherent gender biases. At the same time, they use kabbalistic models of sacred sexuality to repair a bi-gendered cosmos. Thus these Jewish practitioners are enacting Jewish mystical models (combined with many others) which they sometimes do and sometimes do not conceptualize as such.
A Panel on “Exclusive Knowledge in Medieval Kabbalah” with Marla Segol, Jonathan Dauber, Jeremy B... more A Panel on “Exclusive Knowledge in Medieval Kabbalah” with Marla Segol, Jonathan Dauber, Jeremy Brown, and Hartley Lachter
Uploads
Papers by Marla Segol
This was not the first ceremony for the canal, nor would it be the last. The ceremonies were based on masonic capstone rituals and performed as locks were completed along the canal, and they have been reenacted many times up to the present day. Most reenactments of the celebration are centered on the pronouncement—“It is done!”—and the choice of vocabulary is important, for the ritual really did get things done: it acted as a mirror for the community performing it and a projection of their hopes and ambitions. The Wedding of the Waters expressed those hopes and ambitions by enacting a combination of scientific and religious discourse within the ritual structure of a religious wedding; in this way they imagined and then performed a new, expansionist vision of a prosperous American future. The writers of the ritual understood all of this— engineering, architecture, and expansion—as a realization of the human creation in the divine image and a continuation of the divine creation process. This public ritual, then, was instrumental, intended to reflect ourselves as we are, to conduct “an experiment in alternate visions of the world,” and ultimately to realize those visions.
This was not the first ceremony for the canal, nor would it be the last. The ceremonies were based on masonic capstone rituals and performed as locks were completed along the canal, and they have been reenacted many times up to the present day. Most reenactments of the celebration are centered on the pronouncement—“It is done!”—and the choice of vocabulary is important, for the ritual really did get things done: it acted as a mirror for the community performing it and a projection of their hopes and ambitions. The Wedding of the Waters expressed those hopes and ambitions by enacting a combination of scientific and religious discourse within the ritual structure of a religious wedding; in this way they imagined and then performed a new, expansionist vision of a prosperous American future. The writers of the ritual understood all of this— engineering, architecture, and expansion—as a realization of the human creation in the divine image and a continuation of the divine creation process. This public ritual, then, was instrumental, intended to reflect ourselves as we are, to conduct “an experiment in alternate visions of the world,” and ultimately to realize those visions.
Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life.
Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.
Episode Guests
Sara Ronis
Sara Ronis is Associate Professor of Theology at St. Mary's University, Texas. She is the author of Demons in the Talmud: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia.
Marla Segol
Marla Segol is a Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. She researches Kabbalah, Jewish Magic, Modern Esotericism, religious cosmopolitanism, and the history of the body and sexuality. Her most recent book is Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy.
Michael D. Swartz
Michael D. Swartz is Professor of Hebrew and Religious Studies in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on the cultural history of Judaism in late antiquity, rabbinic studies, early Jewish mysticism and magic, and ritual studies. His most recent book is The Mechanics of Providence: The Workings of Ancient Jewish Magic and Mysticism.