Introduction: What Happened to Ecstasy? Mysticism, Ecstasy, and the Constructivist Loop

Abstract

This chapter introduces the problem, the suppression of the study of ecstatic religious experience over the past decades. Both Religious Studies and Theology have avoided the topic by marginalizing states of mystical ecstasy, declaring them irrelevant, functions of a category “sunk in disrepute.” Yet according to a recent Pew research poll, almost 50% of Americans reported that they had a mystical or ecstatic experience. Part of the problem is the dominant Religious Studies methodology of constructivism, which limits ecstatic states to the imitations of texts. This chapter describes the “constructivist loop,” the major problem with this perspective. Such constructivist assumptions have limited the study of ecstatic and mystical states.