Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions

Over the course of his twenty-five-year career, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s study of religion has had two major areas of focus: the erotic expression of mystical experience and the rise of the paranormal in American culture. This book brings these two halves together in surprising ways through a blend of memoir, manifesto, and anthology, drawing new connections between these two realms of human experience and revealing Kripal’s body of work to be a dynamic whole that has the potential to renew and reshape the study of religion.
            Kripal tells his story, biographically, historically and politically contextualizing each of the six books of his Chicago corpus, from Kali’s Child to Mutants and Mystics, all the while answering his censors and critics and exploring new implications of his thought. In the process, he begins to sketch out a speculative “new comparativism” in twenty theses. The result is a new vision for the study of religion, one that takes in the best of the past, engages with outside critiques from the sciences and the humanities, and begins to blaze a new positive path forward. A major work decades in the making, Secret Body will become a landmark in the study of religion.
 

• The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained Is Real
• Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe
• Catafalque (2-Volume Set): Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
• John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World
• Comparing Religions
• The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
• The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition
• What is Sufism? (Islamic Texts Society)
• The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge
• Alone with the Alone