Why Mystical Studies Are Still Important Today

By Charles Kelly


Mystics can trace their roots to the most ancient of religions, many of which can have a surviving tradition, sect or denomination. A lot of methods for worship come also come from these and may be found in traditions, customs or cultural mores in a country who had them. In one sense, the virtues in these are founded on the rituals or ceremonies that they used.

It is mostly lost today, but it has become so much a part of cultures that the consciousness of a people merely practices them as natural. Mystical studies are partly sectarian impetus, and partly the search for those lost connections to the ancient sense of the divine. Human memories are short, and conflict can have erased the connections from tribal memory.

The shamanistic cults practiced a widespread kind of worship based on the physical aspects of existence. They worshipped nature and animals, practiced what have been denounced by the church as bizarre or savage rituals. One of these was the reign of kings who have everything during his lifetime, but was killed in the fields when the first white hair appeared on his head.

The ceremony of sacrificing kinds on fields was a fertility process, helping to make land more bountiful. If his blood is joined with the earth, the belief was that divinities became satisfied and would help the land become fruitful. When agriculture became more intensive and effective, there was need for a new mystic system for people.

This was a more philosophical kind of mystic view, and it came during the age of the Judaic fathers, or earlier. There would be more philosophical mystics later, founding the most enduring religions that are formally constituted today. These have created academic systems, and provided impetus for all sorts of advances in culture, the arts, science and technology.

More formal study on mystic records can also be very academic, an area where theologians and sociologists may study. These will have sanitized records that fit ideas on higher learning or consciousness that are attested to by axial religions. These are those that were founded on a thousand year timeline that transformed humanity, including Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

Practices considered base are often seen as throwback behavior embedded in racial memory, and these can include herd violence. But then, there is really no proved connection to the religions accused of being their cause. These studies will be those whose aim is to look for those elements of these practices that operate or are active deep in modern cultures.

The most cardinal of sins for the church, often connected to domestic practice or social mores that are weird but accepted. In these studies these could be the threads that lead to the darker history of former things which supposedly died natural deaths. Axial religions supposedly eradicated these but that is improbable when human ancestry is infected by them.

The most relevant study in mystical systems today is one that is based on contemplation and cleanliness. Vows for abstinence and penitence can also be relevant, but the studies themselves in the academic sense continue to shed light on dark corners of the human experience. And this always aims to achieve the highest sense of the divine for humanity.




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