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      To see how innovative Transcendentalist discussions of mysticism were, to see why the birthday analogy is not too far-fetched, it is necessary to step back for a moment into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That mysticism should come to stand, in the second third of the nineteenth century, as the pinnacle of a universal and timeless religious experience was anything but an obvious development. Through the early decades of the eighteenth century, the English category of “mysticism” did not exist. The prevailing notion instead was “mystical theology,” and it signified a specific devotional branch within Christian divinity. In 1656, the lexicographer Thomas Blount, working off a Roman Catholic description of mystical theology from 1647, arrived at the following definition for his formative dictionary of “hard words”: “Mystical Theology, is nothing else in general but certain Rules, by the practise whereof, a vertuous Christian may attain to a nearer, a more familiar, and beyond all expression comfortable conversation with God.” Mystical theology, in other words, was a way of life that involved the Christian in a “constant exercise” of prayer, contemplation, and self-denial. And that was the heart of it: Blount's work contained no parallel entries for the nouns mystic and mysticism.9

      Added to these theological dimensions were exegetical ones. From the first centuries of Christian history forward into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among the most common associations for mystical were its connections to allegorical forms of biblical commentary. Scriptural texts, in this view, were not transparent, but contained hidden or spiritual senses behind the surface of the literal. To take a commonplace example from the eighteenth century: the passage in the book of Genesis saying “let there be light, and there was light” literally referred to the light of the sun but in its mystical senses pointed to the Messiah, grace, and the glory of God. These ancient forms of biblical commentary remained evident in as basic a compendium as Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopœdia (1738), which still foregrounded “the mystical sense of Scripture” as central to understanding the term's religious significance. Like Blount, Chambers also stressed “MYSTIC theology” and did not employ “mysticism” per se as a category. Through the early eighteenth century, the meanings attached to mystic and mystical were inextricably woven into a larger system of Christian theology, linked at the level of practice to a recognizable set of devotional and exegetical habits.¹⁰

      When “mysticism” emerged as an object of discussion in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was usually seen pejoratively. The concept initially crystallized within the eighteenth-century critique of Protestant enthusiasm–an attack aimed especially at taming the ecstatic extravagance that accompanied the rise of such high-flying movements as the Quakers, the French Prophets, and the Methodists. It was Henry Coventry (c. 1710–1752), a Cambridge wit and a relatively minor player in the larger world of the English Enlightenment, who first employed mysticism as part of a sustained critique of sectarian Protestant excitement. In a series of dialogues entitled Philemon to Hydaspes; or, The History of False Religion, the initial installment of which appeared in 1736, Coventry explicitly contrasted “the seraphic entertainments of mysticism and extasy” with the “true spirit of acceptable religion.” By the latter, he meant a wholly reasonable commitment to civic virtue, cosmopolitan learning, public decorum, and aesthetic proportion. Religion, rightly practiced, was a “manly, rational, and social institution,” and the “deluded votaries” of mystical Christianity had no place in that world of erudite conversations, moderated passions, and refined tastes. Coventry's understanding of mysticism was thus socially situated within debates about the fundamental comportment of religious people: were they to carry themselves with the genteel gravity of Cambridge divines and dons or the bumptious assurance of Quakers and Methodists?¹¹

      Coventry shared wider Enlightenment suspicions of false religion as a product of credulity, fraud, fear, and the ignorance of natural causes (for example, mistaking thunder for the angry voice of God or an earthquake for divine punishment). His dialogues tapped into all of those explanations at one point or another, and, in that sense, he was a secondary colleague of more famous and cutting philosophes such as Voltaire and David Hume. Still, his account of mysticism, though now completely forgotten, possessed its own edginess and originality. Probing for its erotic psychology, Coventry went further than the usual sexualizing of religious upstarts. That tack was epitomized in the prurience and wit of Jonathan Swift, who, in his Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), had richly satirized the “ogling” and “orgasmus” of Quaker spiritual exercises. Whereas Swift dwelled on the ease with which spiritual zeal fused with earthly lust, Coventry developed a more explicit theory of sublimation and projection to explain the amorous qualities of “mystical dissoluteness.” For Coventry, it was not the human emotions of fear and hope that explained the natural origins of religion—an explanation preferred especially by Hume. Instead, Coventry riveted attention on the unruly passion of love and the wildly illusory distortions that it produced.¹²

      Coventry was nothing if not direct on this point: The great source of all mystical experience is “disappointed love.” The frustrated passion is “transferred from mere mortals to a spiritual and divine object, and love…is sublimated into devotion.” That divine object is necessarily “an imaginary and artificial” contrivance, a mistaken substitute, a projection of the “wantonest appetites and wishes.” In working from the perspective of the passions, which were understood to be stronger and more predominant in women, Coventry marked mysticism as primarily female, with a spirituality of sublimated sexuality making up “the far greatest part of female religion.” He found such displacement of the sensual doubly sad; it was both a religious illusion and a loss of the genuine tactile pleasures of “connubial love.” What devout women really suffered from, one of his male interlocutors winked to another, was “the want of timely application from our sex.” Coventry's analysis fully anticipated the intellectual “fashion” that William James would later complain about in The Varieties of Religious Experience: namely, “criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life.”¹³

      Coventry helped bring mysticism into being in the Anglo-American world as a term laced with reproach. Misplaced sexuality, unintelligibility, pretension, and reason-be-damned piety were now among its chief associations. The Anglican bishop William Warburton (1698–1779), a contemporary of Coventry's, made those connections clear in his contemptuous conclusions about the ardent devotional writer William Law (1675–1752). Law's exposition of the rigors of piety, especially his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), had profoundly influenced such early evangelical luminaries as John Wesley and George Whitefield, and these dubious alliances already made him a marked man in Warburton's book. The perverse love that Law showed for mystical writers, particularly the German visionary Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), served to sharpen Warburton's suspicions to a knife's edge: “When I reflect on the wonderful infatuation of this ingenious man, who has spent a long life in hunting after, and, with an incredible appetite, devouring, the trash dropt from every species of Mysticism,” Warburton declared, “it puts me in mind of what Travellers tell us of a horrid Fanaticism in the East, where the Devotee makes a solemn vow never to taste of other food than what has passed through the entrails of some impure or Savage Animal.” Hard to put it more graphically than that: mysticism was seen as an excremental waste in the making of a learned, reasonable Christianity amenable to the forward march of the Enlightenment.¹⁴

      Another noteworthy aspect of the understanding of mysticism before its Transcendentalist embrace was the way that the learned worked to narrow its signification rather than enlarge it. The mystics, though sometimes seen as part of a stream that flowed back to the ancient church, were commonly presented as a small camp with a few exemplary members. They were bearers, in this view, of a sectarian spirit, not a perennial philosophy. At the head of the sect was a controversial band of seventeenth-century French devotional writers–Jeanne Marie Guyon, Antoinette Bourignon, and François Fénelon–known for their supreme dedication to an inward life of prayer and utter abandonment of the self to God. In William Hurd's New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Whole World: or, A Complete and Impartial View of All Religions, published in 1782, the “Account of the Mystics” was placed toward the end of his massive volume,

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