Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In this paper, the author considers an ethnographic example of a radical form of participant knowledge, common across mystic traditions, that suggests that the divine Being and the human Being are simultaneously 'known' through processes of divinization, a sharing in the divine nature.

Paper long abstract

Anthropology in its simplest etymological terms, is a study of the human. Humans, themselves caught up in never-ceasing processes of change, are entangled within continually unfolding human and other-than-human relations. Perceptual knowledge of this field of relations (as well as discourses and practices that make sense of such perceptions) help orientate humans amongst this world of 'things'. Similar, repeated experiences lead to gradually increasing confidence in the inherent qualities or characteristics of any particular 'thing' (e.g. the warmth of the sun). For humans consciously entangled within relational fields that include the divine, repeated and similar experiences lead to gradually increasing confidence in the inherent qualities and characteristics of this particular Being. Various mystic traditions, however, suggest that true knowledge of the divine is limited by an epistemological mechanism. The divine is only known through relational processes of becoming, where true knowing (of) is only yielded through becoming (like), in other words through processes of divinization. Such moments (of divinization) might be fleeting and ephemeral and yet they appear to simultaneously reveal not only the inherent qualities of divine Being, but also the potentialities of human Being. This paper focuses on one (auto)ethnographic example, an experience where the divine Being and the human Being are simultaneously discovered as kind.