When this magazine was being conceived, I told Jamie Thompson, my collaborator, that I hoped, for our first issue, to talk to Jeffrey J. Kripal, who is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Eight months later, I reached out to Professor Kripal, who immediately agreed to be interviewed for The Daughter’s Grimoire’s “Forest Issue,” and who has since been exceedingly gracious and generous with his time.
Kripal is a comparativist: a scholar who sets texts side by side and compares them. He is a professor of religion, who finds expressions of human spirituality in diverse places—sometimes in sources long deemed sacred and other times where no one has previously looked. (In Mutants and Mystics, he points out parallels between the fictional Xavier Academy of the early X-Men comic books – founded 1963 – and the real-world Esalen Institute – founded 1962). He is a former Benedictine monk—he spent four college years in seminary—who speaks, now, of the intellectual necessity of losing “at least two worlds,” and then choosing not to land in any one position. For his scholarship, he speaks to comic book artists and quantum physicists, charting bridges between seekers and scientists.
For years, I have admired Kripal’s output and felt an affinity for his discovery of sacred glimmerings in pop culture and not-always-reputed spiritual systems. Kripal makes deep and persuasive cases for possibilities that are excluded and unseen by a philosophy of rational materialism, in which the observing subject and perceived object are conceptualized as mutually exclusive. Using the world’s mystical literatures as a comparative data set, Kripal builds arguments that the seer and the seen—mind and matter—are not actually separate, and that so-called paranormal phenomena arise out of the essential interwovenness of consciousness and matter. He argues, further, that the direct, experienced awareness of this interwovenness—a mystical gnosis—reveals possible horizons of human development and understanding that are unsuspected by conventional or dogmatic belief systems.
Kripal is careful to distinguish his own work process from the subjects he writes about: he studies mysticism, but that does not mean his work draws on mystical processes so much as on constant effort. Slightly guardedly, he allows that he does trust that his books are already finished in the (or a) future, and that, in approaching them, he is also drawing them back toward his present working self, through his daily practice of writing. But he is not really given to such claims; rather, he is a deliberate, dedicated scholar. In his humility, steadfastness and faith in a process, I see traces of the monk he once was. The fruits of his scholarly efforts are books at once cerebral and vividly illuminating, full of the dazzling mental architectures that arise as he engages wonder, mystery and paradox with fearless intellectual rigor.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
—Max Scheinin
Max Scheinin: I want to ask you about a theme that plays out in your work, and that theme is story. My questions are about what story is to you, and what roles it plays in your thinking.
To begin, let me ask about your life as a reader. In your books, you speak of reading as a practice that is or can be sacred or paranormal, and there’s sometimes a suggestion, or an outright assertion, that stories have (or can have) magical power. So this sense of story as having the potential of magical power, and reading as a sacred or esoteric practice — how far back do these perceptions go for you in your memory? Do you remember them as early intuitions?
Jeffrey Kripal: First of all, let me start more to the present and work back to the past. My mentor in graduate school was a woman named Wendy Doniger. And Wendy – she’s an Indologist, a Sanskritist, and a scholar of mythology – she writes about myth. And I really think that it was from Wendy that I learned that you could make philosophical or intellectual arguments by telling stories. And if you read Wendy’s books, they orbit a central idea, but they don’t work in a linear or logical fashion – they sort of orbit around things. And you eventually get the idea in a really much more profound way by hearing the stories.
And in Wendy’s view, all cultures, particularly Hindu culture, which is her expertise, tell stories to make arguments, and it’s really in story that people hear the argument and inhabit or embody the argument in the fullest way. So I think I picked up this notion of myth as a story one lives inside of from Wendy, in the most profound way.
But I think it has taproots back into my childhood, in that – I remember being a little boy, and I remember – actually, one of the memories I have is playing with these little Disney figurines, they were about this big [gestures] – you got them from Jell-O boxes or something. And I remember distinctly that these figures had a kind of numinous or magical quality to them, at least for me as a little boy. I did not relate to them as pieces of plastic, I related to them as sacred beings – I know that sounds weird, but they really were special to me. And I saw their stories up on the screen, and in books, and there was a kind of myth-making going on all around me that I think I was internalizing.
I’ll just tell you another story – I’ve told this story many times. But I remember as a young child, I was probably about five or four, and I was having a lot of lucid dreams, in which I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn’t get out of the dream. I was always being chased by some kind of monster, it seemed like – I was always having trouble in my dreams. And the way I would get out of my dreams, was that I would cover my body with a sheet and I would tap my feet together three times. And it wasn’t until decades later that I realized I got that trick from The Wizard of Oz.
So what I’m trying to say is, I was already living inside these stories in a very dreamlike, embodied and waking way, all the way back as a little boy. And I think it was only later as an adult that I learned how to think about myth.
And I think about religion as essentially myth. And by that I mean, people inside of myth don’t know it’s a myth. They don’t know it’s not true for everyone: they’re inside the story. And they’re being told by the story as much as they’re telling the story – it’s an internalized kind of paradoxical thing inside that story. But once you step out of that story and you look at another religion, it has a whole other set of myths that are nothing like the set of myths that you were just in. And so it’s through this act of comparing different religions and different mythologies that one has this real head trip about, ‘Oh my god, human beings are always caught in this story, and there’s actually no way out’ – you just jump into another story. [Laughter].
MS: What were the seminal texts and authors and stories of your early life?
JK: Well, it depends on how early you’re talking about –
MS: What about these Disney films – which ones were most important to you?
JK: Well, I was born in ’62. So I think my first Disney film was probably Bambi. And that might sound cheesy, but it was deeply traumatic to a little boy, to watch the mother – or not watch the mother – get shot. That was a pretty intense Disney film, actually.
The other thing that was really influential on me as a little boy were dinosaurs, which I’m sure was not unique to me. But I was just so fascinated with dinosaurs, because they were essentially monsters that were real at one point. And you know, we had physical evidence for them, and so I was fascinated by all kinds of dinosaur movies and toys and – it wasn’t just Disney. Disney certainly held a part of my imagination, but it was dinosaurs that really held the other part.
And then when I became an adolescent, it was superheroes – I was a Silver Age Marvel guy in the late sixties and seventies, and just to riff on that a bit, I talk about this in the book [Mutants and Mystics, 2011], but I think what was so remarkable about Marvel in the sixties and seventies was that these heroes all made fun of themselves, and they mocked not only themselves, but their villains, and did things like fought the U.S. Army – I mean, it was pretty remarkable, if you think about it. And Doctor Strange was essentially on some kind of wild psychedelic trip the whole time. And these were really heady, heady things for a twelve-year-old or a ten-year-old. And I think they really had an impact.
And then there were other texts of course, later – The New Testament was a really big deal for me, The Bible as a whole, Lives of the Saints, the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Later, people like – I mean, the whole gamut of scholarship, from Max Weber to Louis DuMont, you name it, it just went on and on and on in graduate school, it was a kind of an intellectual feast.
MS: Through your life, was there ever a point of disenchantment with narrative and then a recovery of the enchantment?
JK: Oh sure – one of the things I poke my graduate students with is, I tell them they have no business being a comparativist until they’ve lost at least two worlds. And I mean that. And then I explain to them, if you’re still living in the world you grew up in, you think on some level that world’s sufficient. And if you’ve lost just one world, chances are you’ve just jumped into another. But after you lose that second world, you might jump into a third, but it’s very likely you’ll say – no, wait a minute, what makes me think this third world is going to be a whole lot better than the first or second world I was in. And it’s at that point that you become a real thinker, when you essentially refuse to land.
So I think disenchantment is actually integral to the process of becoming an intellectual. I don’t think you can become an intellectual without disenchantment.
