This book examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (= Thanksgiving Hymns) in light of ancient visionary traditions, new developments in neuropsychology, and post-structuralist understandings of the embodied subject. The thesis of this book is that the ritualized reading of reports describing visionary experiences written in the first person "I" had the potential to create within the ancient reader the subjectivity of a visionary which can then predispose him to have a religious experience. This study examines how references to the body and the strategic arousal of...

This series will publish monographs and collected essays on topics concerning religious experience in antiquity. Volumes in this series will address a diverse array of religious experiences and movements, and particular expressions of religious experience, such as ecstatic trances, magic, healing, prophecy, divination, and dreams, as well as other phenomena that contribute to the scholarly exploration of religious experience. Methods will range widely, encompassing contemporary sociological, anthropological, and psychological approaches to religious experience, as well as historical...