How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

40. I really cannot stress these historical and intellectual roots enough. The study of religion is a combination of Enlightenment reason and Romantic imagination, even though the latter has been occluded in recent decades. This is one reason I focused so on the figure of William Blake as actual inspiration in two of my early books, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). To speak in contemporary terms, I really do think the historical roots of the gnosis of the superhumanities lie here, in English Romanticism and German idealism. Hence, also, the importance of the imaginal symbol of revelation in this line of creative writing and thinking.