Call for Chapters

Ecstatic experience has long represented one of the most fascinating and problematic frontiers of human communication. Visions, trance states, possession phenomena, mystical raptures, contemplative practices, meditative absorption, and transformative inner experiences all seem to inhabit the margins of ordinary language, generating a fundamental paradox: the necessity of expressing what appears, by its very nature, ineffable.

The edited volume Around Ecstasy: Communicating the Ineffable aims to investigate the ways in which profound interior experiences — religious, spiritual, meditative, or liminal — are narrated, translated, embodied, ritualized, and symbolically communicated across different historical and cultural contexts.

Rather than focusing exclusively on Christian mysticism, the volume seeks to promote a broader interdisciplinary reflection on the communicability of ecstasy and transcendence, examining the multiple strategies through which individuals and communities attempt to give form to experiences that resist conventional linguistic expression.

Particular attention will be devoted to themes such as bodily language, silence, metaphor, music, autobiographical writing, ritual practices, ascetic techniques, meditation, performative dimensions, and the social construction of spiritual experience.