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Also by Jules Evans
Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Jules Evans, 2017
Extract from ‘Four Quartets’ reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
(Faber & Faber, 2001) © T.S. Eliot (1944); © Valerie Eliot (1979).
Extract from ‘Anthem’, Stranger Music reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Canada Limited © Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music (1993).
Extract from ‘The Guest House’, Rumi: Selected Poems reprinted by permission of
Penguin Random House © Rumi/Coleman Barks (2004).
The moral right of the author has been asserted
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 867 1
eISBN 978 1 78211 877 0
Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
To my brother, Alex,
and to Frederic Myers and Thomas Traherne,
two English ecstatics who deserve still to be in print.
Contents
Introduction: Welcome to the Festival
List of Illustrations
Ecstasy also had a central role in classical culture – this vase painting (right) shows a maenad filled with the god Dionysus. © The Trustees of the British Museum
In Christian culture, ecstasy is interpreted as an invasion by God, though it could also be demonic possession or human imagination.
Two examples from Caravaggio – above, Saint Matthew and the ecstasy of creative inspiration. Below, Saint Paul and the ecstasy of sudden conversion.
Hogarth’s ‘Enthusiasm Delineated’ (c.1760) mocked the unbridled emotionalism of Methodist services. © The Trustees of the British Museum
A late-19th-century photo from the Salpêtriére clinic in Paris showing a hysteric patient in ecstatic attitude. Western psychiatrists often interpreted spiritual experiences as symptoms of mental pathology. © Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
A 19th-century Methodist camp meeting in the US. © Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum
Rock and roll secularized the ecstasy of charismatic Christianity and brought it to the masses. This is the audience at a Beatles concert in Plymouth in 1963. © Mirrorpix
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) imagined ecstatic encounters with extraterrestrial intelligences. Directors including Kubrick have used cinema to explore altered states and provoke them in the audience. © Warner Bros
Shakespeare’s theatre offered a playful, sceptical space for ecstasy (this is Vivien Leigh as Titania in a 1937 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). © Photograph by JW Debenham. Courtesy of the Mander and Mitchenson Collection at the University of Bristol
Casper David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ (c.1818). © bpk | Hamburger Kunsthalle | Elke Walford
Extreme sports have also been embraced as a means to ecstatic experiences in nature – the image below is from Werner Herzog’s 1974 documentary about a ski-jumper, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. © Deutsche Kinemathek – Werner Herzog Film
The Romantic counter-culture explored ecstatic experiences through poetry, free love and intoxicants. Above is a frontispiece by William
