Mysticism occupies a contested but indispensable position across the depth-psychology corpus. William James furnishes the field’s foundational taxonomy, proposing four marks — ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity — that allow the term to be used with scholarly precision rather than as a vague epithet. Rudolf Otto locates mysticism within the broader structure of the numinous, showing how even in Christian mystical traditions the tremendum retains a menacing, abyssal quality that resists rationalization. Karen Armstrong traces mysticism’s etymological kinship with myth and mystery to a shared Greek root connoting darkness and silence, arguing that monotheistic traditions periodically retrieve mystical modes whenever rational theology exhausts itself. Henry Corbin anchors mysticism in the imaginative faculty of the soul, reading Sufi and Ishraqi sources as testimony that mystical encounter is neither purely subjective nor crudely objective but belongs to a third, imaginal order. The perennialist debate — whether mystical experiences are universally identical or culturally conditioned — runs persistently through Campbell, Noel, and their interlocutors. Jung stands at the intersection of these streams: his alchemical and gnostic studies treat mystical symbolism as psychic data, while Evans-Wentz preserves the numinous charge of the term ‘mystique’ against rationalist dismissal. Taken together, the corpus treats mysticism as the site where psychology, theology, and phenomenology converge most productively.
I will do what I did in the case of the word ‘religion,’ and simply propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical
James establishes the canonical operational definition of mysticism by specifying four distinguishing marks — ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity — rescuing the term from vague reproach and anchoring it in phenomenological precision.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
There is a linguistic connection between the three words ‘myth,’ ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystery.’ All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.
Armstrong grounds mysticism etymologically and phenomenologically in a shared experience of darkness and silence, connecting it to myth and mystery as cognate modes of knowledge suppressed by Enlightenment rationalism.
, A History of God, 1993thesis
Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline.
James concludes his phenomenological survey by adjudicating the epistemic status of mystical states: they carry no compulsory authority but offer genuine hypotheses about the nature of reality that cannot simply be overturned.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a ‘privileged case.’ It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in ‘schools.’
James dismantles the presumed unanimity of mystical traditions, demonstrating that canonical mysticism is a curated sample that conceals deep internal variance across ascetic, antinomian, dualistic, and monistic currents.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
mysticism was often seen as an esoteric discipline, not because the mystics wanted to exclude the vulgar herd but because these truths could only be perceived by the intuitive part of the mind after special training.
Armstrong argues that the esoteric character of mysticism is epistemic rather than elitist: mystical truths require a trained intuitive faculty inaccessible to purely logical cognition, making second-hand mysticism fundamentally inadequate.
, A History of God, 1993thesis
in this inconceivable mountain of the supra-divine Where… there is a precipitousness of which all pure spirits are sensible. Here the Soul enters a secret namelessness, a marvellous alienation.
Otto demonstrates through Suso that Christian mysticism retains the tremendum element — abyssal terror, self-annihilation, and ‘marvellous alienation’ — showing that mystical union is never merely warm or optimistic but preserves a dreadful numinous charge.
, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis
Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings. As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, ‘where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself.’
James illustrates the dialectical structure of mystical language through Eckhart and Boehme, showing how the intellect employs negation as a passage toward a higher affirmation and how asceticism of the self functions as the moral correlate of this apophatic logic.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
the mystical states themselves are characteristically experienced in a state of passive receptivity, with a surrender of the personal will in favor of a radically receptive embrace of the divine influx: ‘The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.’
Tarnas, drawing on James, characterizes mystical states by their passivity and surrender of personal will, situating them within a broader Uranus-Neptune archetypal field that historically correlates with major developments in the phenomenology of religious experience.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
The mystical disciplines of Ishraqi mysticism help Muslims to feel at one with the world around them and to experience a liberating loss of the boundaries that hedge in the self.
Armstrong shows Islamic mysticism functioning not merely as private contemplation but as a transformative force capable of dissolving ego-boundaries in ways that historically energized social and political reform movements.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because that perception was not constant.
James presents a first-person phenomenological account of unitive mystical experience — the dissolution of the separate self into participation with a larger whole — illustrating the noetic and affective dimensions his typology theorizes.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
when Eckhart declares that ‘the eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me’… we do not find it altogether beyond our understanding to get at their meaning as far as the ideas are concerned which they try to convey in these mystical utterances.
Suzuki distinguishes mystical utterances in the Western tradition — where the identity of the soul with God remains conceptually intelligible — from Zen statements, whose irrationality marks a categorically different mode of mystical expression.
, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series), 1949supporting
just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things
James cites al-Ghazali to argue that mystical or prophetic perception constitutes a genuine cognitive faculty — analogous to understanding but surpassing it — that opens access to realities invisible to ordinary sensory or rational faculties.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
Some perennialists — Huxley, for example — contend that interpretations of mystical experience are the same universally. Others — for example, the philosopher Walter Stace — acknowledge that interpretations differ but argue that the experiences themselves are the same.
Noel maps the key fault line within perennialist treatments of mysticism — whether universality resides in the experiences themselves or only in their interpretations — a debate that directly shapes how depth psychology assesses cross-cultural mystical data.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting
Joseph Campbell is a perennialist because he is not merely a universalist — a necessary but insufficient prerequisite — but also a mystic. The ‘philosophia perennis of the human race’ is the mystical one-ness of all things.
The passage identifies Campbell’s perennialism as grounded in a personal mystical commitment to the oneness of all things, distinguishing this stance from mere comparative universalism and linking it to his reading of mythological symbolism.
, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting
‘mystique’ is just the right word to characterize the peculiar quality of ‘unconscious identity’. There is always something numinous about it.
Evans-Wentz, relaying Jung’s position, defends ‘mystique’ as the precisely correct term for the phenomenon of unconscious identity, arguing that the numinous quality it names is irreducible and that abandoning the word represents a capitulation to rationalist prejudice.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
it is impossible to prove God, there is no other answer than to ‘make oneself capable of God.’
Corbin frames the Sufi mystical path as a discipline of self-transformation rather than argumentation, in which the mystic must become adequate to the divine Word rather than seeking external proof of its reality.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding
James identifies a liminal region of the mind — a threshold zone haunted by mystical intimations — proposing that mystical states are continuous with, rather than wholly discontinuous from, ordinary conscious experience.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
Otto regarded Friedrich Schleiermacher as his most important precursor and the key figure in the philosophical rediscovery of the sense of the holy in the post-Enlightenment era.
Tarnas traces the genealogy of modern mystical phenomenology through a diachronic pattern linking Schleiermacher, James, Otto, and Jung, arguing that their convergent contributions emerged in correlation with a specific Uranus-Neptune astrological cycle.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
In order to perceive at all the mysteries deep within the soul, it is necessary to move away from ordinary activities and usual patterns of thought. What is needed is a state of consciousness or an attitude attentive to the eternal rather than the temporal.
Moore, drawing on Ficino and Kerenyi, argues that access to psychic mysteries requires a deliberate withdrawal from ordinary rational activity into a receptive, Saturn-governed state of consciousness analogous to mystical contemplation.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990aside
Throne Mysticism: An early form of Jewish mysticism, which focused upon the description of the heavenly chariot (Merkavah) seen by the Prophet Ezekiel and which took the form of an imaginary ascent through the halls of God’s palace to his heavenly throne.
Armstrong’s glossary entry on Throne Mysticism situates early Jewish mystical practice within the broader history of imaginative ascent traditions, providing a concrete historical instance of mysticism as structured visionary technique.
, A History of God, 1993aside
Strictly, Stace partly falls here, too: he distinguishes types of mysticism but then says that the similarities between one type and the other outweigh the differences.
This bibliographic note records the scholarly debate between Stace’s typological yet ultimately universalist treatment of mysticism and particularist critics such as Scholem and Katz, foregrounding the unresolved tension between perennialist and contextualist positions.
, The Power of Myth, 1988aside