This volume examines mystical experiences as portrayed in various ways by authors such as
philosophers mystics psychoanalysts writers and peasant women. These mystical authors have
throughout the ages attempted to convey the unsayable through writings paintings or oral
stories. The immediate experience of God is the primary source and ultimate goal of these
mystical expressions. This experience is essentially ineffable yet all mystical authors
either consciously or unconsciously feel an urge to convey what they have undergone in the
moments of rapture. At the same time they are in the role of intermediaries: the goal of their
self-expression - either written painted or oral - is to make others somehow understand or
feel what they have experienced and to lead others toward the spiritual goal of human life.
This volume studies the mystical experiences and the way they have been described or portrayed
in West-European culture from Antiquity to the present from an interdisciplinary perspective
and approaches the concept of immediate experience in various ways.
