JLNobody,
Apparently Tennyson's mysticism, mystical insights/experiences might have been related to epilepsy.
Here's a note:........
from
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"Tennyson's "waking trances" began in adolescence, and as a young man he was diagnosed with epilepsy, which ran in the Tennyson family. British doctors of that era were reluctant to report epilepsy in respected families because they thought seizures arose from the genitals and masturbation was the cause of epilepsy! In fact, up until the nineteenth century, one of the extreme approaches to epilepsy was castration for men or clitoridectomy for women, which were thought to work by ending masturbation. Tennyson's doctor recommended European spas where the poet's epilepsy 'treatment' consisted of drinking large amounts of water, walking long distances in bad weather, and being submersed, wrapped in sheets, into cold baths.
Tennyson's seizures involved a loss of the sense of self. Describing these mystic visions, he wrote:
"All at once, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words." In his poem The Ancient Sage, he describes it this way:
"..and thro' loss of Self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark- unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow world."
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