ABSTRACT
In exploring the convergence of space and mystical experience presented in the Life, this chapter endeavors to reveal new insights into the understanding and production of sacred space. As described in the Life of Symeon, mystical experience does not simply generate the emplacement of the body but brings about its transcendence: the ecstatic displacement of the mystic into a realm outside the limits of the body’s proper spatial location. And if the mystic’s rapture into overwhelming light brings with it a forgetting or loss of the self, then the body must also be forgotten. In studying the spatial dynamics put forward by the Life, in particular the abolition of spatial perspective in the ecstatic vision of the divine light, this paper has argued that accounts of such visionary experiences may have influenced, or at the very least encouraged, the depiction of space and spatial perspective in Byzantine iconography.
