Page 59 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

44 Mattijs van de Port

to religious knowledge than this lengthy, time-consuming path and
adepts told me that they were instructed, time and again, not to be curi-
ous, not to ask questions, not to sneak to one of the city’s libraries to read
ethnographies, not to try to run ahead of time, quemando etapas (skipping
stages). Knowledge would come to them when the time was right for it.
Giselle Binon-Cossard, a French anthropologist who became a priestess,
explained it thus:

In Candomblé it is believed that nothing done in a hurry turns out right. By
asking, people will only understand this much of a certain notion but they
will not assimilate it. It is only time that will make knowledge sink in. Let’s
say, it is as with French wine: it gets better by decanter [. . .]. Intellectually it
is the same thing. Things have to get to rest. You learn, but then you leave
it at that. And when it has ripened you go back to it, structuring it, balanc-
ing it out. (Binon-Cossard, in Silva 2001, 44)

William James’ classic description of mystical states as ineffable, noetic,
transient, and passive helps to clarify the specific quality of this knowl-
edge. With ineffability, James means that the experiential knowledge of
the mystic defies expression. Its “quality must be directly experienced; it
cannot be imparted or transferred to others” because “[n]o adequate report
of its contents can be given in words” (1904, 371). Adding to the ineffable
the “noetic” quality of mystical states, James sought to highlight that while
mysticism is a state of being, and the mystic’s experiences are insights
“unplumbed by the discursive intellect,” these experiences are nonetheless
to be understood as knowledge. “They are illuminations, revelations, full
of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as
a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time”
(ibid.). The notion of “transiency” signals the fact that mystical states can-
not be sustained for long: they fade out, after which their quality can but
imperfectly be reproduced in memory. James stressed that transiency does
not imply that mystical states are merely interruptive. “Some memory of
their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance.
They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recur-

rence” (372). “Passivity,” the fourth quality attributed to mystical states of
consciousness, expresses that “although the oncoming of mystical states
may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations . . . 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” (ibid.).
Inarticulate yet deeply meaningful, inseparably linked to experiences in
the here and now, mystical states do not lend themselves for remediation.
Immediacy is their alpha and omega. To cast this knowledge in texts, images,