Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul

by Ariel Glucklich

Why would anyone seek out the very experience the rest of us most wish to avoid? Why would religious worshipers flog or crucify themselves, sleep on spikes, hang suspended by their flesh, or walk for miles through scorching deserts with bare and bloodied feet?

In this insightful new book, Ariel Glucklich argues that the experience of ritual pain, far from being a form of a madness or superstition, contains a hidden rationality and can bring about a profound transformation of the consciousness and identity of the spiritual seeker. Steering a course between purely cultural and purely biological explanations, Glucklich approaches sacred pain from the perspective of the practitioner to fully examine the psychological and spiritual effects of self-hurting. He discusses the scientific understanding of pain, drawing on research in fields such as neuropsychology and neurology. He also ranges over a broad spectrum of historical and cultural contexts, showing the many ways mystics, saints, pilgrims, mourners, shamans, Taoists, Muslims, Hindus, Native Americans, and indeed members of virtually every religion have used pain to achieve a greater identification with God. He examines how pain has served as a punishment for sin, a cure for disease, a weapon against the body and its desires, or a means by which the ego may be transcended and spiritual sickness healed. "When pain transgresses the limits," the Muslim mystic Mizra Asadullah Ghalib is quoted as saying, "it becomes medicine."

Based on extensive research and written with both empathy and critical insight, Sacred Pain explores the uncharted inner terrain of self-hurting and reveals how meaningful suffering has been used to heal the human spirit.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Spirituality, Medicine, Paganism

288 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2001

About the author

Ariel Glucklich is a professor of religion at Georgetown University. He specializes in Hinduism and in the psychology and biology of religion. He is particularly interested in what motivates people to become and remain religious and the various ways that religion makes people self-destruct.

Glucklich is the author of several books on Hinduism, including The End of Magic and Climbing Chamundi Hill, which was translated into many languages. His most important book was Sacred Pain (Oxford, 2001), written to explain the voluntary use of pain in religious life.

Currently Glucklich is researching the likelihood that Iran and/or Pakistan will use a nuclear weapon against Israel or India. He is attempting to devise ways of thinking about undermining the culture of collective suicide that makes rogue states so dangerous. November 3 is the due date for his latest book, Dying for Heaven, which explores this topic in detail.

Future projects include a close look at young religious prodigies and perhaps a project on the amazingly eventful annual International Bible Quiz held in Jerusalem.

Reviews

[Steve Cran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pain is something we often shy away from at every opportunity. It is something to be driven away with pills and medication. We are afraid of pain. But this has not always been the attitude toward pain. In many religious circles ranging from Native American all the way through Christianity pain is embraced . Monks in monasteries will flog themselves , aboriginal tribes will pierce their chest muscles and be suspended by rope, Jews, Muslims and African Tribesmen will perform circumcision rights at various times during a mans life. While true the medical establish tries to evade pain, but this was not always the case. In earlier times pain was seen as something healing.

There are reason why people inflict religious pain on themselves. One reason is to atone for a sin. Better to punished now than in the afterlife. It could also be used to build empathy in a community members to their leader. Some will inflict pain in order to fight the body and egotistical desires. Sometimes pain will bring one closer to divinity and drive evil away. Pain as mentioned earlier is used in initiating ritual.
Pain has an integrating effect and a disintegration affect . Pain is used at times to allow the follower to be possessed by an entity.

The book has some strong points. I the first chapter that gave a thorough and understandable treatment of pain in the various religion. Chapter 4 related it well to possession and all the different aspect of personality thT come about or our through religious pain. The last chapter spoke of pain and psychology. Other than that I found this work to be very dry and uninteresting. I had to stay interested in. Too academic.

[Michi]

I dnf'ed this and decided not to give it a rating for a change, just because I feel like a low rating would be unfair - this isn't a bad book as such, it just wasn't at all what I was expecting or looking for. I was hoping for a more comprehensive and hopefully fairly easy to understand historical view of pain as used deliberately in a religious context, but this felt more like a book about the psychology (and maybe philosophy?) of pain with the occasional example. It is also EXTREMELY dense writing. I got a few chapters in and then found myself giving up.

[Dominique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, extremely thorough. Includes very useful concept of "embodied absence."

[Ellis Billington · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was some good information in here, and it was certainly a very dense book, but I don’t think it did quite what I wanted it to do. Personally, I would have liked to read more written accounts directly by and/or about the people participating in the pain rituals, and less Western psychoanalysis.

[Beth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was disappointed with this. Perhaps my disappointment is because I didn't find the book of any use to my current work. I felt that too much time was spent looking backwards to the likes of Freud and Jung, and not enough time situating the analysis in a useful cultural context. Instead, the search seems to be for a set of universal neuro-biological explanations of pain.