Browsing by Author "Kripal, Jeffrey"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse In Early Pennsylvania
    (2022-04-18) Grieve-Carlson, Timothy Ryan; Kripal, Jeffrey
    This dissertation is the first full-length scholarly analysis of Johannes Kelpius (1667-1707), a transatlantic radical Protestant theologian from Transylvania who settled in Philadelphia in 1694. This dissertation reads the life and legacy of Kelpius to understand the Protestant reception of Hermetic literature in the seventeenth century and how this reception shaped the Protestant response to climate change during the same period. The dissertation goes on to explore Hermetic Protestantism in the Americas during the period, focusing on the areas of southeastern Pennsylvania where Kelpius and his colleagues settled at the turn of the eighteenth century. The final chapters turn to Kelpius’s contested and misunderstood legacy in American literature and history since his death in 1707, ultimately concluding that the transformation of environmental knowledge that Kelpius lived through rendered him incomprehensible to many of his later Enlightenment readers.
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    High Weirdness: Visionary Experience in the Seventies Counterculture
    (2015-11-18) Davis, Erik; Kripal, Jeffrey; Parsons, William; Wolfe, Cary
    This project interweaves two critical investigations into the history of religions in America, one theoretical and one historical. The theoretical investigation concerns the question of religious experience, and particularly how scholars of religion understand this category once we recognize that to label any experience “religious” already prejudices the phenomenon in question. Developing the work of Ann Taves, I call for a more fine-grained account of how forms of extraordinary experience come to be constructed as religious (or mystical, occult, etc.) through the creative assemblage of existing scripts and templates. However, using the ontological theories of Bruno Latour and Felix Guattari, this project argues that the constructionist account of religious experience does not necessarily negate the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of such experiences. In this sense, the project brings an ontologically rich understanding of constructionism into productive dialogue with the current of American religious experience initiated by William James. The scripts and templates associated with well-bounded religious traditions are relatively easy to identify. However, within the countercultural period, a wide variety of discourses—religious, psychological, occult, fictional, aesthetic, technological—compete and commingle as ways of shaping and understanding the myriad of intense, sublime, and profoundly weird experiences that, through psychedelics and the pursuit of a wide variety of “altered states of consciousness,” characterize so much countercultural life. Though most studies of the counterculture focus on the sixties proper, I am interested in tracking the construction of extraordinary experience into the seventies, when disappointed revolutionaries turned in droves towards gurus, self-help regimens, and proto-New Age spirituality. While analyzing some of the sociological dimensions of this influential cultural shift, the project principally investigates three symptomatic but singular intellectuals: the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the underground author Robert Anton Wilson, and the future psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna. Employing their own unique mix of esotericism, social science, irony and fiction, all three men wrestle with their own extreme bouts of “high weirdness” in ways that reflect critical mutations in American religious experience.
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    Outside: The Philosophical Methods of Nick Land
    (2024-04-09) Southey, Matthew; Kripal, Jeffrey
    This dissertation argues that Nick Land’s philosophical project involves two pairs of contradictions: he is a scientific esotericist and a Kantian Nietzschean. However, this is not a straightforward synthesis of opposites, nor a completely successful one. Land’s core motivation comes from his esoteric insights about the future, but he often frames them in a way that is amenable to a scientific age. Philosophically, he inherits the transcendental framework from Kant, and the insistence on nature from Nietzsche. Land is left with a transcendentalism that is esoterically porous to the outside, and a vision of nature that rejects human morals in favor of an absolute valuing of intelligence regardless of embodiment.
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    Psychedelics and Religious Insight: A Precedent in American Psycho-Spirituality from William James to Timothy Leary
    (2021-04-26) Storck, Connor J.; Ogren, Brian; Parsons, Bill; Kripal, Jeffrey
    The primary purpose of this thesis is to stress that there is a relationship between the texts one reads and the psychedelic experiences one may have. Reading texts has an effect on set and setting with respect to psychedelic experiences. Further, texts read—by figures like Timothy Leary—in the afterglow of a psychedelic experience can influence later integration of said experiences into one’s worldview. This thesis tracks this through the influence of mind-altering substances in the works of both William James (1842-1910) and Timothy Leary (1920-1996) in order to display James’ influence on Leary. James’ impact of Leary intellectually is critical because recent scholarship and changes in cultural and societal perspectives have led to a Psychedelic Renaissance in many disciplines from the clinical-therapeutic to the religious-spiritual. The paper covers select and relevant historical information relating to periods of the Anesthetic Revolution and the Long Sixties. I show how James came to experiment with various mind-altering substances and the results of those experiments. For this reason, the thesis also interacts with Benjamin Paul Blood, a figure whose work guided James’ thought towards the use of mind-altering substances. These mind-altering substances include nitrous oxide, diethyl ether, alcohol, chloroform, and peyote. I apply Leary’s theory of set and setting to better understand James’ Hegelian insights while on nitrous oxide. The thesis explicitly shows how James’ mystical hallmarks of noetic quality and ineffability were influential in Leary’s early psychedelic research. Further, I argue for the thesis that James set a precedent for the use of mind-altering substances for religio-mystical insight that was later expanded upon and entrusted to the masses in the form of Leary’s psychedelic projects. Evidence suggests that these theorists used psychedelics for insights akin to an anagogic interpretation of various works from Hegel to the Tao Te Ching. The conclusion of this thesis briefly ties in contemporary examples and suggests these trends will continue today in the wake of the current Psychedelic Renaissance.
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    Sacred Dominion: Anti-Catholicism and the Romance of U.S. Imperialism, 1820-1900
    (2015-04-23) Seglie, AnaMaria T.; Levander, Caroline; Waligora-Davis, Nicole; Kripal, Jeffrey
    “Sacred Dominion” argues that anti-Catholicism fundamentally shaped the development of U.S. imperialism. While current scholarship on nineteenth-century U.S. geopolitics tends to examine imperialism in terms of race, class, and gender, “Sacred Dominion” is among the first literary studies to take seriously religion’s crucial impact on U.S. empire-building. It argues that U.S. romance writers played a pivotal role in forging the alliance between anti-Catholicism and U.S. empire. Their works position westward and overseas expansion as safeguards against Catholic tyranny and anarchy. From the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the regional writing of George Washington Cable, this project demonstrates how romance writing constructed a dynamic partnership between Protestantism and U.S. geopolitics that continues to drive American foreign policy today. “Sacred Dominion” examines subgenres of romance to show how American writers relied on anti-Catholicism to imagine, justify, and contest U.S. imperialism. Beginning with those years long associated with the rise of Manifest Destiny and American Romanticism, this project illustrates how the alliance between anti-Catholicism and expansion underwrites antebellum works of romance such as George Lippard’s serials, Washington Irving’s histories, and even the novels of Hawthorne, an author whose obsession with Catholicism left an imprint on romances like The Scarlet Letter, not to mention his daughter Rose – a Catholic convert and nun. “Sacred Dominion” then charts the persistence of this romance tradition in the postbellum era. Turning to the work of a writer who made Mark Twain hate “all religions,” I examine George Washington Cable’s regional writing to demonstrate how anti-Catholicism mediated anxieties about the integration of religious and racial difference both at home and from abroad. The manuscript ends at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of Henry James and José Martí, illustrating how the early geopolitical foundations established through nineteenth-century romance set the tone for twentieth-century conceptions of U.S. internationalism. Tracing this romantic tradition across the eighty-year period when American literature emerged as a national canon and the U.S. emerged as an imperial nation, “Sacred Dominion” demonstrates how U.S. geopolitics and American romance were mutually invested in the nation’s Protestant origins and global future.