The Secret Body: Erotic & Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions by Jeffrey Kriipal

Something's happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear

This book continues my reading of Jeffrey Kripal, whose insights and speculations I find intriguing. This is my fourth book by Kripal that I've read, and each one has intrigued me. The Secret Body (2019) is unique because it serves as a summary of his work to date. It consists of a series of diverse essays with commentary about this personal and scholarly journey. As I mentioned in my review of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind & the Future of Knowledge, Kripal grew-up in a small town in southeast Nebraska, which is the middle nowhere by most people's reckoning. I grew up in southwest Iowa, on the other side of the Missouri River, which is a fraction less of a nowhere than southeast Nebraska. (But, of course, in growing-up, one thinks of one's home turf as the Middle Earth, the Center of the Known Universe.) Anyway, that someone from such a bland background could go on to have such adventures (of the mind) as Kripal has serves as a reminder of what we are capable of in our capacities to grow and experience the larger world. Indeed, another particularly personal source of enjoyment in reading The Secret Body comes from reading about Kripal's Catholic boyhood and upbringing. I'm about nine years older than Kripal, and I grew up (in part) in the pre-Vatican II Church, an even more exotic experience than Kripal's post-Vatican II experience. Vatican II "Protestantized" the Ameican Catholic Church in many ways. (For a spot-on account of the pre-Vatican II American Catholic experience see Garry Wills's Bare-Ruined Choirs (1972).) So although Kripal missed out on what I might label "the full Catholic experience," his faith nevertheless provided a formative experience that set him on his way to his intellectual adventures. Finally, also in a personal vein, Kripal describes his visits to his home town and family in Nebraska as an adult, academic scholar of religions. These visits constitute a trip to an outwardly familiar but also alien world, almost as alien (or exotic) as his experiences with Hindu culture and religion and his investigations of paranormal experience. Kripal recognizes both the goodness of the folks who live there and their stubborn insularity that has allowed politicians--and especially the Great Orange Menace (my term, not Kripal's)--to act to the detriment of those good folks. Again, Kripal's experience resonates with me. One needn't be a wild-eyed radical (I'm certainly not) to see that many of the attitudes held by these folks "are neither [as] pure, nor wise, nor good" as they would believe, and their attitudes and decisions also hurt those of us who share this planet with them. Kripal is justly blunt but loving in his critique. 

Kripal's scholarly journey provides the backbone of his book, and while it may seem an esoteric topic--well, it is. During the time that Kripal spent as a monk, he underwent Freudian psychoanalysis to deal with anorexia (disguised as ascetic holiness), and he came to the realization that the monastery was in some sense a gay institution, although homosexuality was officially condemned by the Church. Kripal describes his transformation after his successful psychoanalysis and his insight into the monastic life: 

By the end of that year, the analyst, the buxom women, and I had cured the anorexia. 

 And I was really hungry. I ate everything in sight. I gained about seventy pounds over the next few months. I was a new man at twenty-two. Suddenly, I was also a sexual being.  

The seminary community was a hotbed of psychosocial exploration, but which I do not mean anything explicitly sexual, much less genital. I mean that those years constituted a four-year initiation in the sexual roots of the spiritual life and the spiritual roots of the sexual life. The basic point is this; I came into my early psychological awakening and intellectual calling as a confused and repressed straight man in what was, more or less (mostly more), a gay religious community.

Kripal goes on to ponder the implications of all this, and he recognizes (among many things) the deep debt he owes to both Jesus and Freud for coming to a greater understanding of his world. Indeed, these insights into sexuality became the basis of Kripal's early scholarly work, which he pursued via a doctorate in comparative religions at the University of Chicago and that he parlayed into a successful academic career (he's been at Rice University of many years now). Each of Kripal's first three books deals with mysticism and sexuality. (I've read The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2008) and it's a duzzy--perhaps my excuse for not having reviewed it yet.) As you may imagine, some people don't like to think about the sexuality of Jesus or of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, and Kripal has drawn the wrath of fundamentalists in both the U.S. and India for his explorations and explications. And, of course, it's all fascinating. 

After becoming a persona non grata to Hindu fundamentalists, Kripal turned closer to home to explore what is often described as the "paranormal," and what he  has come to term the "super natural." This takes him into the world of Esalen (the counter-culture capital on the Big Sur), comic books, and UFOs, among other topics. And if you think that these topics are far from religion, then you haven't read enough Jeffrey Kripal. With each new topic, Kripal further explores and refines his thoughts as "the human as two." In fact, he develops twenty theses that he labels "gnomons," which Kripal describes as "a short aphorism and maxim . . . that [are] "gnostic" in nature," along with other enticing associations, including gnomes, those little creatures of the earth whose statues populate our gardens with their pointy hats. These brief statements provide a series of stations or markers that provide some conclusions or working hypotheses that Kripal has arrived at during the course of his investigations. He reveals each gnomon as his account progresses. But to be clear: this is not an intellectual biography as such. While Kripal includes aspects of his personal and scholarly biography along with way, he also includes a number of short scholarly articles he's written on various topics that highlight and explore his scholarly inquires. This interspacing of reminisces with articles written along his scholarly journal works well, each perspective casts further light on the other. 

As I reflect on this work, I'm struck by what a fun and exciting read this book provides. Perhaps Kripal's a little crazy, but perhaps not; perhaps his ideas are too out there; but perhaps not. I'm not sure if Kripal is chasing phantoms, and I suspect he'd be the first to suggest that the line between phantoms and "reality" is a thin, permeable line, which we can only intuit by extraordinary glances. In Kripal's persuasive view, we are "the human as two," with a whole lot going on that we as a species have been trying to understand and appreciate for our entire history. And it seems we're just getting going.