American Civil Mysticism
Oxford Scholarship Online November 23, 2017 Michelle Sizemore
A largely overlooked tradition of mysticism in post-revolutionary U.S. society, termed civil mysticism, involves nonsectarian practices of transcendence that engender the people through political and social rituals like maypole ceremonies, presidential inaugurations, and literary pilgrimages. The chapter elaborates on civil mysticism's conditions and techniques, emphasizing the sacred interval of ritual with its embodied practices, sensuous objects, and cognitive states. Drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Maypole of Merry Mount" and other nineteenth-century depictions, it argues that civil mysticism managed the democratic representational conundrum of being plural at the same time as being one.