Lost Ecstasy, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018 Its Decline and Transformation in Religion Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism Series

This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion.  It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality.  She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects.  She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences.  Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.

June McDaniel is Professor of the History of Religions at the College of Charleston, USA.

Argues in favor of returning Religious Studies to the exploration of religious experience, especially ecstatic experience

Written from the perspective of an author who has done fieldwork in non-Western cultures

Includes ecstasy in a variety of contexts, including religion, sexuality, drugs, music, and violence