Semiotica dello slancio mistico

The article proposes an abstract model of the mystical discourse. Stemming from an imaginaire that opposes unity and duality, mystical texts narrate the topological dialectics between these two poles through various types of ecstatic tales. The article analyses several of them, in the attempt to bring about a typology that challenges philological and historical criteria and develops along structural lines. As diverse phenomena as Castaneda’s mystical accounts and the Kabbalistic discourse, mystical “idiots” and Bukowski’s fictional heroes, and the fusional frenzy of metals in alchemy and that of moral principles in casuistry, are compared and contrasted in order to detect the main features of the semiotic ideology that underpins the ecstatic imaginaire.