This seminar has a simple aim: to understand the nature of mystical experience — what it is, what it does, and why it might be the most under-acknowledged tradition in Western thought. Mysticism is not a religion and not a doctrine. It is a tendency within existing religions: intimate, affective, visionary, embodied, and substantially maintained by women. In its attempt to articulate religious experience in thought, mysticism borrows heavily from philosophy while cheerfully undermining its procedures. What results is a strange philosophy of contradictions, confessions and enigmas. We will read it closely, and we will try to understand it from the inside — because mysticism is not something one believes but something one does. The seminar moves through five topics. First, my Mysticism (NYRB, 2024), which will occupy the opening five weeks: a movement from woe to weal, dereliction to delight, through the great medieval texts, especially those written by women — Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, Margery Kempe, Angela of Foligno — alongside Dionysius and Eckhart. Second, the Eleusinian Mysteries: the well where Demeter wept for her stolen daughter, the staged underworld from which Persephone ascended before the initiates, and a secret kept for two thousand years, which we will not break. Here we consider ritual, holy play, and the suspicion that theatre finds its sacred beginnings in the Mysteries. Third, R.D. Laing’s sane schizoid: madness as inner voyage, breakdown as possible breakthrough, the mystic and the schizophrenic as neighbours. Fourth, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s creature as creation gone wrong, a being aching for a love it is refused. Fifth, music, where mystical experience survives: we will listen, closely, to the music you love. The path is the point; nobody arrives.