The Serpent’s Gift
Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards
Preface: Digging Up My Library
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Serpent’s Gift
Faith, Reason, and Gnosis
The Premodern, the Modern, and the Postmodern
Toward a Gnostic (Post)Modernity
Medi(t)ations
Writing as Hissing
Autobiographical and Pedagogical Contexts
The Essays
1 The Apocryphon of the Beloved
Invocation
The Quest for the Heretical Jesus
“One Will Know Them by Their Roots”
From the Womb . . .
Sexual Healings: Dispelling the Demons of Abuse
Sexual Teachings
The Man Jesus Loved
The Woman Jesus Loved
The Secret
2 Restoring the Adam of Light
The Adam of Light Awakened by Her
The Fiery Brook
The Sacrilegious Secret of Christian Theology
Implications of the Method
The Historical and Intellectual Contexts
“Man Is God to Man”: The Virtues of Pluralism and Polytheism
Completing the Incarnation of Love (and Sex): Embodiment in Feedback’s Thought
The Sexuality of Numbers
The Cancer and the Cure
Toward a Mystical Humanism: A Gnostic Rereading
3 Comparative Mystics
The Rebuke of the Gnostic and the Oriental Renaissance
Comparative Mystics
Ramakrishna: Colonialism, Universalism, Mysticism
Doctrinal and Historical-Critical Analysis
Ramakrishna and the Comparativist
The Critical Study of Religion as a Modern Mystical Tradition
The Scandal of Comparison
Professional Heresy: The Gnostic Study of Religion
Interlude: Logoi Mystikoi; or, How to Think like a Gnostic
4 Mutant Marvels
Educational and Sexual Allegory
On Puberty and Powers
Denying the Demiurge
Toward a More Radical Empiricism
Dissociation and the Release of Nonordinary Energies
On Death as Dissociation
Real X-Men
On X-clusions and X-ceptions
Political Allegory; or, How (Not) to Be an X-Man
Conclusion: Return to the Garden
The Other Tree
The Forbidden Fruit
“When He Becomes Troubled, He Will Be Astonished”
The Flaming Sword and the Bridal Chamber
Notes
The Fruit of the Tree; or, My Gnostic Library before I Have to Bury It (Again)
Index
“In The Serpent’s Gift, Jeffrey Kripal provocatively advances a practice he names ‘academic gnosticism.’ Through such a method, he seeks to move beyond some of the obstinate binaries that have preoccupied, and sometimes thwarted, scholars of religion. This lively, accessible, and delightfully transgressive book also explores how the academic study of religion itself is implicated in, indeed emerges out of, some of the heretical subject matters it tries objectively to understand. In making conscious a culturally repressed, religious unconscious by means of his ‘mystical humanism,’ Kripal has once again succeeded in getting students of religion to think about (and with) old things in new and daring ways.”--Jeremy Zwelling, Wesleyan University
“A trickster-guide, Jeffrey Kripal lures his readers through mirrored doors and ironic tunnels into the inner chambers of the study of religion. There he conducts a disconcerting initiation. The mysteries of his religious studies are an antidote to the imperial certainty, the bombastic piety, of too much religion. This shimmering serpent gives with its fangs.”--Mark D. Jordan, Asa Griggs Candler Professor, Emory University
American Academy of Religion: American Academy of Religion Awards for Excellence
Short Listed
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Religion: Christianity | Comparative Studies and History of Religion
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
