Everything in the soul is secondary, and there can be no question of having within it an access to the supernatural world that we cannot get through the public world. They quickly led to a public demand for the identification of a mystical tradition and a canon of writers in each of the other major religious traditions, and this was soon done for Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, and at least attempted in the more difficult case of Buddhism. During that period there was a considerable elaboration of discourses about subjectivity, both by the introspective and literary psychologists and also by novelists and other imaginative writers. The reason why mysticism not only is but has to be a kind of writing is that only in writing, only in secondariness, can one thus do several things at once in such a sweet and disarming way. Secondariness is much more complex and powerful than the old appeal to a primary and founding experience.
Mysticism is protest, female eroticism, and piety, all at once, in writing .
Indeed, unless mysticism were a literary tradition of veiled protest, we'd never have heard of it. The theory of mysticism that I am proposing should now be clearly in view. According to the Modern view of mysticism, as we have seen, the mystics first had great and ineffable experiences, in states of consciousness that were prior to and out-side language, and then they subsequently tried to put into inadequate words what they had experienced. I reject that theory. The Modern idea of the mind as an inner theatre, and of experience as a show seen by an audience of one, is itself a secondary cultural and literary creation.