Mysticism and Rebel Mystics in the Book Religions

Abstract

Mysticism denotes phenomena related with Divine experience. In religion it is perceived as a state in which a person seems to have passed beyond the normal parameters of human life and neither behaves nor expresses him/herself in the manner generally considered correct and acceptable in cultural or religious terms. I will approach the central theme of this paper from an ecumenical and multi-faith point of view. It entails demonstrating through the lives of certain figures, by no means conventional ones, that female mysticism in the three big monotheistic religions contains a good degree of rebelliousness and transgresses, more or less openly, traditional doctrine. But it also goes beyond the platitudes of mystic experience itself.