Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a long tradition that underlines the intrinsic relation between imagination and religion, I propose a conceptual integration of different ideas related to the role of imaginative processes in particular religious experiences such as spirit possession and exorcism.

Paper long abstract:

Imagination and its most visible outcome, mental imagery, have always been a necessary presence in extraordinary religious experiences. What we perceive as visions, dreams or dissociative states appear as spontaneous experiences independent of the conscious thought. Such experiences are the outcome of a set of developed techniques for inducing states of enhanced imagistic activity for acquiring special religious knowledge; a cultural process described as the 'cultivation of mental imagery' (Noll 1985: 445).

The issue of 'training' religious imagery has not been raised until now in the context of the Eastern Christian tradition even though it is manifest in both its theology and practice. The ethnographic case I propose comes from my fieldwork in a male monastery in Western Ukraine. There, monks focused on a tradition of prayer that leads oneself to an experiential knowledge of God. Through their daily practice monks are cultivating a particular relationship to God that granted them access to divine power and mystical inspiration. I argue that the cultivation of imaginative practices should be regarded as a complex learning process involving cognitive, bodily-sensorial and social aspects at once. Moreover, I am interested to explore the creative potential of religious experiences, especially the capacity of some rituals to convert individual imagination into innovation.