Ariel Glucklich
Biographic Data
| ID | 1380477 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ariel Glucklich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ariel |
| FAMILY NAME | Glucklich |
| SIGNATURE | GLUCKLICH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-1166-9614 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Religion evolving: Applying system theory to a case of blood libel
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author
Food, Desire, and Pleasure in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad
The Joy of Religion: Author response to commentaries
The Joy of Religion is a counterpoint work to Sacred Pain (Glucklich, 2001). In that older work from 20 years ago, I attempted to explain the widely distributed religious practice of self-hurting
A Search for Religious Experience
The topic of religious experience is explored in its academic setting and a number of Neot Smadar conversations are discussed in detail. The chapter shows that the concept of emptiness plays a major role in how religious experience figures in Neot Smadar.
Everyday Mysticism: A Contemplative Community at Work in the Desert
Everyday Mysticism is a close look at a school for the study of the self in the deep Israeli desert. The school, which was established in the community of Neot Smadar in 1989, assumes the external form of a kibbutz, but is a contemplative community for individuals who seek to become aware of the devastating effects of mechanical thinking. The author spent several summers working in the community and describes, as a participant, the way that conte…
At Work in Neot Smadar: Making Wine, Milking Goats, Learning the Lesson of the Bolt
This chapter looks at three work situations in which the author participated: winery, goat farm and garage. The chapter investigates the way that Self-inquiry shapes work and community in Neot Smadar.
Constructing the Art Center: Communal Project as Ascetic Practice
The most striking structure in Neot Smadar is the Art Center, which took over ten years to construct. This chapter looks at the process of construction, a project that tested the members of the community to the edge of their endurance.
Everyday Mysticism: A Contemplative Community at Work in the Desert
Virtue and Happiness in the Law Book of Manu
A cognitive analysis of sin and expiation in early Hindu literature
Self and Sacrifice: A Phenomenological Psychology of Sacred Pain
In a previous article published in this journal, I discussed the relation between the neurological system and some culturally prescribed forms of self-inflicted pain. I showed that the way humans experience and communicate pain depends on the cybernetic features of the peripheral and central nervous system. The body-self, our sense of coherent and embodied agency, was also discussed in its relation to neural function—Ronald Melzack's “neurosignat…
What's in a List: A Rule of Interpretation for Hindu Dharma Offered in Response to Maria Hibbets
The study of South Asian ethics presents a variety of problems for the comparative ethicist. This response focuses on one such problem relating to Hinduism: the pervasive use of nonsystematic lists as a source of ethical injunctions and guidelines. The author demonstrates how an indigenous hermeneutic may unpack a list that contains the gift of fearlessness among other gifts. The source of this interpretation is Purva Mimamsa, an ancient Indian s…
Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self
The preponderance of pain in human life ranks among the central problems for religious thought around the world. The problem of suffering, as it is often called, has been a compelling reason for abandoning faith. Given the depth of the dilemma that raw and inexplicable pain poses, it is surprising how pervasive voluntary pain has been among the religions of the world. Ascetics, mystics, and martyrs have sought and applied pain—in rites of passage…
The Association of Ideas: Bringing People Together
The rise of modern anthropology in England coincided, paradoxically, both with the new theory of evolution and with the popularity of spiritualism. Edward B. Taylor could not have been anything but shocked by the “duping” of such renowned figures as Alfred Russell Wallace or William Crookes. Magic was an exception to the evolutionary pattern seen in the religious and practical aspects of culture. Its survival in Victorian England testified to the…
The Strange Case of Alfred Wallace
In 1886, while visiting Boston on a speaking tour, Alfred Russell Wallace was taken by William James to a séance where several apparitions were expected to materialize. Wallace was not the only famous individual in England who was attracted by the lure of ghosts, but his passionate embrace of spiritualism may have been the strangest considering his career as a naturalist. The phenomena of spiritualism are related to the spirits' efforts to draw a…
Ghosts and People with No Boundaries
Individuality, as the distinguished French sociologist Louis Dumont has shown, is a modern Western notion we must avoid tagging onto Indians. Relationship and bonding are the basic facts of social and psychological life, and they find expression in whom one can marry, touch, or share food with. Even the religious ideas about the destiny of the individual—karma—is permeated by the reality of interrelationships. Karma demonstrates, on a philosophic…
New Science, Old Magic
Sociological and symbolical interpreters of magic singlemindedly ignore the occult questions that magic raises. The social sciences simply have no methods for inspecting extraordinary causal claims, which they regard as superfluous to the real purpose of magic. Any effort to verify or falsify occult claims would simply sidetrack the researcher from the proper manner of understanding magical phenomena. Hard scientists, who like to tinker with idea…
The Tools of Magic
The voices of magicians are rich with sacred power that is renowned as mantra. Magicians accept the fact that mantra encompasses manifest and hidden divine forces and holds recoiled magical efficacies that are released by experts. Magical sounds are hardly limited to India, of course. “Abracadabra” and “hocus pocus” have become synonymous with magic itself. Just as the mantra is ubiquitous in India, spells, charms, and incantations are everywhere…
Concentric Rings of Healing
There is nothing “magical” (occult) about magic, the claims of its practitioners to the contrary notwithstanding. Instead of taking the boasts of magicians literally, the sociology and the symbolism of magic have come to dominate academic interest. The only admissable hypotheses deal with social function or symbolic meaning. But perhaps a different set of speculations could also be considered. Assume, as a working hypothesis, that the earliest fo…
Systems, Mind, and Magic
Phenomenology and system theory are the foundations of the “magical experience.” They offer a way out of the body/mind impasse. Magic, taken as an experience rather than as a doctrine, is the very consciousness of an overall interactional system that defies the logic of composite parts. The philosophical and anthropological underpinnings of this claim can be found in part in the systemic thinking of John Searle in philosophy, Gerald Edelman in ne…
Introduction: What Is Magic?
What is magic? What does magic do? Why do people believe in magic in the face of experience? After living in the Indian city of Banaras and making several trips to tribal areas in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Orissa, the author of this chapter discovered a surprising fact: magic is rarely a simple matter of belief. Few magicians and clients in Banaras ever ask themselves why their magic works or what it means. Without belief, the supernatural as…
Animal Magic
No clear demarcation line separates humans from animals in Banaras, either in theory or in practice. Just as Americans speak English with little reflection on rules of grammar, so Banarsis interact with animals directly and without the intervention of a scientific system of classification. India's mythology is vast and vividly populated with an immense variety of animals. Still, the act of linking a particular animal to a given myth is seldom a c…
From Magic to Social Function
The beginning of professional sociology signaled the end of theories that explained magic as a mental phenomenon of the individual. The crude and often provincial evolutionism to which James Frazer subscribed gave way to a genuine science of society. Sociology showed no tolerance for armchair speculations on such things as “bad science” or “errors of reasoning.” Because magic clearly served social functions, a new generation of professional socio…
The End of Magic
For a variety of reasons, scholars of religions no longer find it useful to compare religion and magic. According to the worst misconception, magic compels natural or supernatural forces to obey human will, whereas religion acts by supplication to a god who may or may not respond. With the rise of symbolical interpretations of magic, this distinction has stopped making sense. If the magical act is a form of expressive speech, which is not compell…
Miraculous Powers and False Advertising
For a variety of reasons, the topic of magic has become dominated by speculation about supernatural causality and miraculous achievements and, following closely on the heels of these, mischiefmakers and scroundrels. Some magicians in Banaras boast about miraculous acts they have performed or cures they have effected. The magician's need to advertise locally, matched sometimes by a desire to impress a foreign scholar, is understandable. Miraculous…
The End of Magic
This book offers a new approach towards the definition and understanding of magic. Basing the analysis in the Indian city of Banaras, where magic is a familiar part of everyday life, it reviews the major theories that have explained (or explained away) magic over the last century. It argues that all of these theories leave out something critical, namely what it calls “magical consciousness”—a special state of awareness of magicians and their clie…
The Royal Scepter ("Daṇḍa") as Legal Punishment and Sacred Symbol
Karma and pollution in Hindu dharma: Distinguishing Law From Nature
Karma and social justice in the criminal code of Manu
Laws for the Sick and Handicapped in the Dharmaśāstra
Karma and social justice in the criminal code of Manu
Laws for the Sick and Handicapped in the Dharmaśāstra
Karma and pollution in Hindu dharma: Distinguishing Law From Nature
The Conception of Punishment in Early Indian Literature
The Royal Scepter ("Daṇḍa") as Legal Punishment and Sacred Symbol
Images and Symbols in the Phenomenology of Dharma
The sense of adharma
The Sense of Adharma
Addressing one of the most difficult conceptual topics in the study of classical Hinduism, Ariel Glucklich presents a rigorous phenomenology of dharma, or order. The work moves away from the usual emphasis on symbols and theoretical formulations of dharma as a religious and moral norm. Instead, it focuses on images that emerge from the basic experiential interaction of the body in its spatial and temporal contexts, such as the sensation of water …
The Sense of Adharma
The Association of Ideas: Bringing People Together
The rise of modern anthropology in England coincided, paradoxically, both with the new theory of evolution and with the popularity of spiritualism. Edward B. Taylor could not have been anything but shocked by the “duping” of such renowned figures as Alfred Russell Wallace or William Crookes. Magic was an exception to the evolutionary pattern seen in the religious and practical aspects of culture. Its survival in Victorian England testified to the…
The Strange Case of Alfred Wallace
In 1886, while visiting Boston on a speaking tour, Alfred Russell Wallace was taken by William James to a séance where several apparitions were expected to materialize. Wallace was not the only famous individual in England who was attracted by the lure of ghosts, but his passionate embrace of spiritualism may have been the strangest considering his career as a naturalist. The phenomena of spiritualism are related to the spirits' efforts to draw a…
Ghosts and People with No Boundaries
Individuality, as the distinguished French sociologist Louis Dumont has shown, is a modern Western notion we must avoid tagging onto Indians. Relationship and bonding are the basic facts of social and psychological life, and they find expression in whom one can marry, touch, or share food with. Even the religious ideas about the destiny of the individual—karma—is permeated by the reality of interrelationships. Karma demonstrates, on a philosophic…
New Science, Old Magic
Sociological and symbolical interpreters of magic singlemindedly ignore the occult questions that magic raises. The social sciences simply have no methods for inspecting extraordinary causal claims, which they regard as superfluous to the real purpose of magic. Any effort to verify or falsify occult claims would simply sidetrack the researcher from the proper manner of understanding magical phenomena. Hard scientists, who like to tinker with idea…
The Tools of Magic
The voices of magicians are rich with sacred power that is renowned as mantra. Magicians accept the fact that mantra encompasses manifest and hidden divine forces and holds recoiled magical efficacies that are released by experts. Magical sounds are hardly limited to India, of course. “Abracadabra” and “hocus pocus” have become synonymous with magic itself. Just as the mantra is ubiquitous in India, spells, charms, and incantations are everywhere…
Concentric Rings of Healing
There is nothing “magical” (occult) about magic, the claims of its practitioners to the contrary notwithstanding. Instead of taking the boasts of magicians literally, the sociology and the symbolism of magic have come to dominate academic interest. The only admissable hypotheses deal with social function or symbolic meaning. But perhaps a different set of speculations could also be considered. Assume, as a working hypothesis, that the earliest fo…
Systems, Mind, and Magic
Phenomenology and system theory are the foundations of the “magical experience.” They offer a way out of the body/mind impasse. Magic, taken as an experience rather than as a doctrine, is the very consciousness of an overall interactional system that defies the logic of composite parts. The philosophical and anthropological underpinnings of this claim can be found in part in the systemic thinking of John Searle in philosophy, Gerald Edelman in ne…
Introduction: What Is Magic?
What is magic? What does magic do? Why do people believe in magic in the face of experience? After living in the Indian city of Banaras and making several trips to tribal areas in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Orissa, the author of this chapter discovered a surprising fact: magic is rarely a simple matter of belief. Few magicians and clients in Banaras ever ask themselves why their magic works or what it means. Without belief, the supernatural as…
Animal Magic
No clear demarcation line separates humans from animals in Banaras, either in theory or in practice. Just as Americans speak English with little reflection on rules of grammar, so Banarsis interact with animals directly and without the intervention of a scientific system of classification. India's mythology is vast and vividly populated with an immense variety of animals. Still, the act of linking a particular animal to a given myth is seldom a c…
From Magic to Social Function
The beginning of professional sociology signaled the end of theories that explained magic as a mental phenomenon of the individual. The crude and often provincial evolutionism to which James Frazer subscribed gave way to a genuine science of society. Sociology showed no tolerance for armchair speculations on such things as “bad science” or “errors of reasoning.” Because magic clearly served social functions, a new generation of professional socio…
The End of Magic
For a variety of reasons, scholars of religions no longer find it useful to compare religion and magic. According to the worst misconception, magic compels natural or supernatural forces to obey human will, whereas religion acts by supplication to a god who may or may not respond. With the rise of symbolical interpretations of magic, this distinction has stopped making sense. If the magical act is a form of expressive speech, which is not compell…
Miraculous Powers and False Advertising
For a variety of reasons, the topic of magic has become dominated by speculation about supernatural causality and miraculous achievements and, following closely on the heels of these, mischiefmakers and scroundrels. Some magicians in Banaras boast about miraculous acts they have performed or cures they have effected. The magician's need to advertise locally, matched sometimes by a desire to impress a foreign scholar, is understandable. Miraculous…
Magic Explained Away
Westerners who arrive in Banaras, a city in India, to conduct research, study music, or just live among Indians, waste no time in shedding the outer signs of their Western identity in favor of kurtas and pajamas. During the past century, the phenomenon of magic, which is dispersed more widely than even religion, has been attacked from various quarters. On the one side have been the detractors who deny the very experience that practitioners claim …
The Magical Experience
Magical experience results from the way the participants—not just primitive hunters—are “linked” to their world. If no direct wiring (physiological link) can be found, then magic must be purely mental: a language or belief. But if the participants are “hooked up” through a natural equivalent to the fiber-optic wiring of a virtual reality machine, then magic is far more than a cultural artifact—perhaps a bridge between physiology and psychology. M…
Psychological and Symbolical Theories of Magic
Illness is a cultural concept that travels poorly across boundaries. Even simple notions such as moodiness and depression, not to mention complex ideas like schizophrenia or paranoia, are bonded to our Western views on the self and the person, on material causality, and on the nature of scientific explanation. Possession and exorcism lend themselves too easily to psychological interpretation. Sigmund Freud had a different kind of magical rite in …
Philosophical Issues
Do we consider certain phenomena magical because we think of the body and the mind as distinct and separate? It seems possible that the extraordinary power attributed to so-called magical healing would be accepted as commonplace if we were to let go of the centuries-old habit of separating body and mind. Many writers on new medicine, “quantum healing” and the rest, feel that this distinction should be dropped. But if we abandon dualism, what is t…
Philosophy (35 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Sociology (18 works) · MAGIC (telescope) (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Art (14 works) · Theology (14 works) · Religious studies (12 works) · Indian and Buddhist Studies (10 works)