Introduction: Comparing Foucault: Cultivations of Gnosis and Technologies of the Self

Abstract

The essays gathered here were originally presented at a session on “Care of the Self in Esoteric Traditions” at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 2016. The papers concern different religious cultures and time periods, but are bound together thematically by their attention to the ritual crafting of experiences of gnosis in tandem with attention to Foucault’s ideas about technologies of the self. Their interest derives indeed from how closely linked the experiences of gnosis are in the texts under examination to an idea of the crafting of particular selves in transit from one state of being to another: from, for example, a sinful self to a self rectified in the eyes of God; from an ordinary unmagical self to a conjurational self; or from a self that is still a nov-ice to an adept self, with powers acquired through experience simultaneously ritual, intuitive, and supernormal.