The Hekhalot literature is a bizarre conglomeration of Jewish esoteric and revelatory texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, produced sometime between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages and surviving in medieval manuscripts. These texts claim to describe the self-induced spiritual experiences of the "descenders to the chariot" and to reveal the techniques that permitted these magico-religious practitioners to view for themselves Ezekiel's Merkavah as well as to gain control of angels and a supernatural mastery of Torah. Drawing on epigraphic and archaeological evidence from the Middle East, anthropological models, and a wide range of cross-cultural evidence, this book aims to show that the Hekhalot literature preserves the teachings and rituals of real religious functionaries who flourished in late antiquity and who were quite like the functionaries anthropologists call shamans.
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Descenders to the Chariot,
This review is from: Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism) (Hardcover)
In this book Davila has located the practitioners who produced the Hekhalot literature in a specific time and place and to some degree in a specific social context. We know when and where at least some of them lived and worked. We do not know any of their names for certain yet, but we have learned the names of some of their clients and neighbors, of those personal lives we have caught glimpses. Davila has also set these practitioners in an illuminating cross-cultural context by comparing them to a particular type of magico-religious functionary: the shaman and, more specifically, the shaman/healer. Although much about them remains obscure - and much always will - our lens for viewing them has gained a sharper focus and we have, so to speak, a few snapshots of them at work. We can now speak of the descenders of the chariot not only as literary constructs but as real people, the people behind the Hekhalot literature.
Contents The Hekhalot Literature 1 Mysticism, Magic, and Shamanism 25 Becoming a Shaman 55 Shamanic Ascetic Techniques 75 Initiatory Disintegration and Reintegration 126 The Otherworldly Journey 156 Control of the Spirits 196 The Hekhalot Literature and Other Jewish Texts of Ritual Power 214 Locating the Descenders to the Chariot 257 Conclusions 306 Bibliography 313 Indices 325
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