African American Female Mysticism: Nineteen-Century Religious Activism by Joy R (review)

Joy Bostic’s work offers unique insights into the lives of black women mystics of the nineteenth century. When most of us hear the word “mysticism” we picture cloistered devotees, desert mothers and fathers, anchorites, and others seeking and engaging the Divine in spaces that are safe and set apart. Bostic reminds us that the peculiar civic and social situation of African Diasporan women in nineteenth century North America necessitated a mysticism that was pragmatic, communal, transcendent, and holistic.

For black female mystics, nineteenth century Eurocentric separations of sacred and secular made no sense. Black communities knew that this carefully categorized worldview allowed the dominant culture to sing hymns at hangings and segregate their congregations while attesting to their love of neighbors. By contrast, African Diasporan, Native American, and other indigenous cosmologies treated the life space as spiritually animate and imbued with power that could bestow benefit or harm. The inexplicable characteristic of this power was its ability to “make a way out of no way” for marginalized women, and its accessibility to those who conjured and invited it through quest, prayer, and openness to the unknown.

Even children suffering alienation and rupture of family and community could tap into a mystical knowledge base encoded in stories, rituals, dance, and the aphorisms and warnings of Big Mama. When black women mystics experienced divine presence, they were personally and bodily affected, but more importantly, they were introduced to an alternate reality where they could connect to cosmic powers that far exceeded the authority of a malignant social order.

Bostic makes no attempt to limit the source of this power to a particular religious inclination or a static definition. Instead, she intrigues us with a discussion of “emancipatory mystical space” fluid enough to host incarnation, visitation, multiple dimensionality, and communal contemplative practices. In this betwixt and between constructive reality, the multivocality of black women mystics is amplified and hope unborn positions itself for entry into a waiting world.

Bostic allows the reader to catch a glimpse of these constructive realities through the lives of her exemplars, Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson. It is not enough to recount their numinous experiences as evidence of their participation in historical mystical traditions. She highlights the context, culture, deeply sedimented ancestral memory, and relationships of these women as the matrix for mysticism. While the experiences of the women differ, it is apparent that they are engaging the same source described by mystics through the ages. I interpret Lee’s, Truth’s, and Cox’s experiences as a creative exchange with ineffability that manifests naturally and supernaturally. Their first person testimonies weave together visions, visitations, ritual action, divine interventions, and the ability to exercise personal, moral, and social agency in the material world. Moreover, their mystical experiences opened liminal and generative spaces that were healing, inclusive, empowering, and intimate.

When Bostic refers to her exemplars as “mistresses of liminality” one can appreciate the intimacy of their experiences and the power that they derived from fully embodied divine/cosmic entanglements. Black female mystics engaged and mediated the lure of the divine in bodies denigrated and marginalized by myriad categories of oppression. During divine encounter, worlds constricted by race, gender, gender identity, and class expanded the sacred personal, but also the cosmological and infinite, options of black women mystics. Each engagement with “magical spirituality” and revelation inspired leadership, courage, and community empowerment.

Bostic identifies this impetus as “the work of constructing emancipatory identities” with the potential to “subvert the hegemonic forces of systemic oppression.” Here she illuminates a seldom-recognized reality: liberation is fed by spiritual as well as socio-political tributaries. There are certain realities that are immutable, whether the century is nineteenth or twenty-first: justice seeking requires deeply rooted spiritual resonances and connections to the moral arc of the universe. As much as we would like it to be otherwise, powers and principalities do not respond to our political maneuvering or our liturgical...