Mysticism comes from a Greek verb meaning to shut your eyes and mouth
The Greek root múō meant to close or conceal, and its offshoot mystikos described an initiate into secret rites. A mystic was originally someone let in on a hidden ceremony. Only much later did the word come to mean an ecstatic union with God, and scholars now doubt even that.
In the ancient mystery religions, the initiate, or mystes, belonged to a select group that could be joined only through ritual. Ana Jiménez San Cristobal found the word linked to bakchos, a special grade of Orphic initiate devoted to Dionysus, a connection first seen in Heraclitus. A passage in Euripides' Cretans describes such an initiate living ascetically, renouncing sex and avoiding contact with the dead. The related noun mysterion, root of the English mystery, meant a secret revealed only to insiders, and in the New Testament came to mean God's once-hidden purpose now disclosed. The Latin Vulgate often rendered it as sacramentum.
Christians long used other words. Until the sixth century, the practice now labelled mysticism went by contemplatio or theoria. The phrase unio mystica emerged in the 13th century for the spiritual marriage or rapture reached through prayerful contemplation of God, and in the 19th century Romanticism reframed that union as a religious experience yielding certainty. William James (1842–1910) cemented this reading, treating personal experience as more fundamental than theology or church institutions.
Recent scholarship unpicks the picture. The scholar McGinn prefers presence to union, since many mystics never spoke of merging with God, and consciousness to experience, since the goal is new ways of knowing and loving rather than a sensation. In Advaita Vedanta union makes no sense, because the self has always been identical with Brahman. Dan Merkur points to traditions aiming at nothingness rather than oneness, citing Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius, Kabbalah and Buddhism.
Peter Moore calls the term problematic but indispensable, and notes it has become shorthand for anything vague or occult. Some scholars see it as a post-Enlightenment invention with Christian overtones and no real equivalent elsewhere. Broadly understood as a path of personal transformation, though, it spans Christianity, Judaism, Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Western esotericism, and since the 1970s researchers have stressed insight, such as Buddhist awakening, as much as ecstasy.
Source: Mysticism
