Les femmes mystiques

Throughout history, numerous women - be they religious, secular, visionary, prophetic, philosophers, writers, artists,... - spoke of mystic experience with the Complete Other. Through their life and writings they continually reminded us that mysticism is an inner and at the same outer path, a way of the being in search of transformation, called to the infinite presence. They looked at the world from a new perspective, and were ever ready for transfiguration. They learnt to see and inhabit the dimension of the real, where the humanity of God and the divinity of man are to be found. This work, the first of its kind, brings together mystic women from across the whole world, from Antiquity to the modern day: from Thérèse d'Avila, Hildegarde de Bingen, Madame Guyon, Marie of the Incarnation, Thérèse de Lisieux to Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum and Emily Dickinson, in the West, and from Râbi'a al-Adawiyya, Yeshe Tsogyal, Mîrâ Bâî to Mother Teresa and Amritanandamayi, in the East. Figures from within and outside all religious traditions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism and Shamanism, the currents of theosophy and occultism, not to mention agnostics and atheists.