Term now familiar in Western mystical psychology: 16th-century Spanish Carmelite St. John of the Cross (whose writings reveal much Qabalistic understanding) used it to describe the intense desolation which characterized the eighth of his ten stages of spiritual ascent, corresponding to the experience of Binah, the Third Sephira.
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Steele Alexandra Douris, author of the new Spirits, Seers & Séances.
Those of us who enjoy the interplay of the seasonal and the spectral can learn a lot from the Victorians, whose celebrations...