Mystics and Mysticism

Abstract

Mystics and mysticism became a topic of interest to scholars of religion in colonial Latin America beginning in the late 1980s, particularly among those focusing on women’s spirituality. Because women were prohibited from participating in other aspects of Catholicism, including pronouncing on matters of doctrine, private, individual contemplation of God unmediated by male intercessors became an important form of female religious expression. This was evident from the High Middle Ages in Europe through the entire colonial period in Latin America. Those who engaged in this form of spirituality often sought “mystical union” with God that they experienced though ecstatic raptures and visions. These were often facilitated though severe forms of bodily mortification (fasting, sleep deprivation, and self-flagellation). Evidence of mystics’ connection to the divine was sometimes manifest in their supernatural abilities to perform miracles, to see the future, to levitate, and, paradoxically, in episodes of demonic possession as well. While some scholars initially viewed such acts as evidence of women’s acceptance of their inherently less intellectual and more corruptible nature in comparison to men, in recent decades, many scholars following Caroline Walker Bynum’s lead in the European context, see mystics as figures marginalized from traditional sources of Church power who nonetheless used their bodies, their imaginations, and their social standing within their communities to claim power and spiritual authority. In both Europe and the New World, mystics threatened the Church because of the alternative access to divine power they represented. Scholarship on mystics in Latin America has focused on such topics as the influences that important medieval and Reformation era figures like Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila exerted on New World figures but has also examined how local contexts—the dynamics of race and gender, interactions with indigenous religions, and the emergence of creole patriotism—affected the production of mystics. Historians and religious scholars have also examined the confluences and divergences between those mystics whom the Catholic Church ultimately sanctioned (including Teresa, although even she came under severe ecclesiastical scrutiny) and those deemed heretical. The latter group importantly included the sect of alumbrados that emerged in Spain simultaneous to the Lutheran threat, and that was prosecuted by the courts of the Inquisition there. Witnesses and officers of the Inquisition then imported their knowledge of the same deviancy into Spanish America in the last decades of the sixteenth century and prosecuted this heresy in Mexico, Chile, and Peru.