The Gnostic Garden: Kabbalistic Motifs in a Modern Jewish Visionary

Abstract

After relating a dramatic near-death experience of a Houston woman named Elizabeth Krohn, this essay explores some of the themes of her near-death experience, particularly the invisible presence of a being of unconditional love in a paradisiacal garden and various direct transmissions of some traditional religious convictions. The essay then discusses some of the obvious New Age contexts and features of the visionary event and of the subsequent convictions, after which it calls into question these same assumed modern influences with a simple thought experiment. The essay then addresses some of the metaphysical complexities of the soul and soul-time in modern kabbalah as explicated by the contemporary historian of modern kabbalah Jonathan Garb and ends with another final intervention. The result, overall, is a comparative reflection that affirms and performs the traditional phenomenological and historical methods of the study of religion but also calls into serious question the adequacy of these methods and the limiting, even blinding, nature of their philosophical assumptions.