The mystical in the "afectos" of the Poetess del Castillo: a liminal experience

Abstract

The paper aims to account for the mystical experience expressed in the Afectos Espirituales by neogranadina Tunja poetess, Sor Josefa Del Castillo (1671-1742). This famous text, from the Hispanic American colonial era, can explore the mystical, not as a disease or as a production joy, but as a phenomenon that conceals the aesthetic reality. One of the objectives basically tries to answer what the mystical experience is as poeticised by Castillo in the Afectos Espirituales, taking liminality as a hermeneutical key based on the medieval and contemporary philosophical horizon. Hence, in the first paragraph, a brief sketch is presented on the neogranadine poetess; in the second, there is an effort to make an approach to the chosen hermeneutical method according to Dilthey, under the concept of liminality. In the third, there is the development of the concept of experience, based on Dilthey, within the mystique of “Afectos”. In the fourth section, the aesthetic reality is addressed under interesting concepts such as those presented by Bajtín, Ficino, among others, and the symbolic-poetic language. The article concludes with this aesthetic reality that permits the discovery of the sense of its symbolic-poetic creation and of its mystical experience with Marsilio Ficino´s Renaissance concept of "divine furor" which constitutes the poet´s mystical experience, whose poetry insinuates unknown key concepts to try to read from a different perspective the Colombian historical, cultural and religious way of thinking from colonial period to the present day.