noun
definition
Someone who practices mysticism.
adjective
definition
Of, or relating to mystics, mysticism or occult mysteries; mystical.
example
a mystic dance
definition
Mysterious and strange; arcane, obscure or enigmatic.
Examples of mystic in a Sentence
No mystic ever worked with warmer zeal than Mill.
This mountain, too, was the scene of the mystic rites of Dionysus, and the festival of the Daedala in honour of Hera.
His poetry is entirely Sufic, and he was esteemed the greatest mystic poet of the Arabs.
Its connexion with Parzival implies a mystic application.
All the same, I love and value nothing but triumph over them all, I value this mystic power and glory that is floating here above me in this mist!
Near it is the grave of the celebrated poet and mystic Farid ud din Attar, who was killed by the Mongols when they captured the city C. 1229.
This the Wizard placed underneath his hat and made a mystic sign above it.
The age of the Son is the period of study and wisdom, the period of striving towards mystic knowledge.
There is a sign on the door, written in mystic runes.
The thought that is most intensely present with the mystic is that ' Farnell, Cults, iii.
In order to meditate on the mystic lore he withdrew to a hut by the Nile, returning home for the Sabbath.
The name given to an infant childImmanuel - was to become the mystic symbol of a growing hope.
Hugh's pupil, Richard of St Victor, declares, in opposition to dialectic scholasticism, that the objects of mystic contemplation are partly above reason, and partly, as in the intuition of the Trinity, contrary to reason.
In May 1 775 a British schooner in the Mystic defended by a force of marines was taken by colonial militia under General John Stark and Israel Putnam, - one of the first conflicts of the War of Independence.
Luria afterwards gave to the Sabbath a mystic beauty such as it had never before possessed.
The god, however, assumed the form of a stallion, and the fruit of the union was a daughter of mystic name and the horse Areion (or Erion).
There is (I) the story of a bride or bridegroom who transgresses a commandment of a mystic nature, and disappears as a result of the sin.
He was the mythic founder of a religious school or sect, with a code of rules of life, a mystic eclectic theology, a system of purificatory and expiatory rites, and peculiar mysteries.
Redemption, accordingly, could be conceived as simply the revelation of mystic names.
However absolute a philosopher's idealism may be, he is erroneously styled a mystic if he moves towards his conclusions only by the patient labour of the reason.
Closely akin to these, though not derived from the Old Believers, are certain mystic sects which deny the efficacy of the sacraments altogether.
From the communion sacrifice sprang the piaculum, which here becomes a subsidiary form and finds its full explanation in the ideas connected with the mystic union of god and worshippers.
Stripped of its definitely miraculous character, the doctrine of the inner light may be regarded as the familiar mystical protest against formalism, literalism, and scripture-worship. Swedenborg, though selected by Emerson in his Representative Men as the typical mystic, belongs rather to the history of spiritualism than to that of mysticism as understood in this article.
If we take it strictly to mean the belief in ghosts or spirits having the " vaporous materiality " proper to the objects of dream or hallucination, it is certain that the agency of such phantasms is not the sole cause to which all mystic happenings are referred (though ghosts and spirits are everywhere believed in, and appear to be endowed with greater predominance as religious synthesis advances amongst primitive peoples).
So far he is in general agreement with Anaximander, but he differs from him in the solution of the problem, disliking, as a poet and a mystic, the primary matter which satisfied the patient researcher, and demanding a more vivid and picturesque element.
The most important mosques are the great Tekke, which contains the tomb of the poet Mevlana Jelal ed-din Rumi, a mystic (sufi) poet, founder of the order of Mevlevi (whirling) dervishes, and those of his successors, the "Golden" mosque and those of Ala ed-Din and Sultan Selim.
Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet.
He was a mystic and a.
Had the German princes not found it to their interests to enforce his principles, he might never have been more than the leader of an obscure mystic sect.
Maximus was not only a leader in the Monothelite struggle but a mystic who zealously followed and advocated the system of Pseudo-Dionysius, while adding to it an ethical element in the conception of.
Nor had he any taste for rule; his days were spent in the society of musicians, buffoons and poets, and he himself dabbled in verse-making of a mystic tendency.
In a synod which met in 430, he decided in favour of the epithet 1 At Alexandria the mystic and allegorical tendency prevailed, at Antioch the practical and historical, and these tendencies showed themselves in different methods of study, exegesis and presentation of doctrine.
Yet it is intelligible that religious interest should have concerned itself more keenly with the mystic rites of divine worship than with dogma.
Here was more than knowledge; here were representations of a mystic sensuousness, solemn rites, which brought the faithful into immediate contact with the Divine, and guaranteed to them the reception of heavenly powers.
For this moment of homage to material elements ritually filled with divine potency may be so exaggerated as to obscure the rite's ancient significance as a communion of the faithful in mystic food.
This arrangement still survives in some of the ancient churches of Rome; it has been revived in many Protestant places of worship. It symbolized principally an official distinction; but with the theocratizing of the empire in the East and its decay in the West the accentuation of the mystic powers of the clergy led to a more complete separation from the laity, a tendency which left its mark on the arrangements of the churches.
It was natural that olive and willow should have been chosen for the Palm Sunday ceremony, for they are the earliest trees to bud in the spring; their consecration, however, may be explained by the intention to Christianize a pagan belief, and it is easy to see how their mystic virtues came in this way to be ascribed to the palm also.
A special feature of the Sakti cult is the use of obscure Vedic mantras, often changed so as to be quite meaningless and on that very account deemed the more efficacious for the acquisition of superhuman powers; as well as of mystic letters and syllables called bija (germ), of magic circles (chakra) and diagrams (yantra), and of amulets of various materials inscribed with formulae of fancied mysterious import.
From the midst of the Franciscans who had persecuted Roger Bacon because he presumed to know more than was consistent with human humility arose John of Parma, adopting and popularizing the mystic prophecy of Joachim of Flora.
We do not need to be reminded that Beatrice's adorer had a wife and children, or that Laura's poet owned a son and daughter by a concubine, in order to perceive that the mystic passion of chivalry was compatible in the middle ages with commonplace matrimony or vulgar illegitimate connexions.
The literal sense of the term churinga, applied by the Central Australians to their sacred objects, and likewise used more abstractly to denote mystic power, as when a man is said to be " full of churinga," is " secret," and is symptomatic of the esotericism that is a striking mark of Australian, and indeed of all primitive, religion, with its insistence on initiation, its exclusion of women, and its strictly enforced reticence concerning traditional lore and proceedings.
Passing on to positive conceptions of the sacred, perhaps the most fundamental is that which identifies the efficacy of sacredness with such mystic or magical power as is signified by the mana of the Pacific or orenda of the Hurons, terms for which analogies are forthcoming on all sides.
Not but what primitive thought shows a tendency to mark off a certain kind of mystic power as wholly bad by a special name, e.g.
With mournful pleasure she now lingered over these images, repelling with horror only the last one, the picture of his death, which she felt she could not contemplate even in imagination at this still and mystic hour of night.
Even more unusual stones include aquamarine and mystic topaz.
According to Plutarch, apart from its mystic virtues arising from the magical combination of 4 X 4, its sweet odour had a benign physiological effect on those who offered it.'
So Merlin preserves his diabolic origin; Arthur his mystic coming and his mystic passing; while Gawain, and after him Lancelot, journey across the river, as the Irish hero Bran had done before them to the island of fair women - the Celtic vision of the realm of death.
As a Rosicrucian Wollner dabbled in alchemy and other mystic arts, but he also affected to be zealous for Christian orthodoxy, imperilled by Frederick II.'s patronage of "enlightenment," and a few months before Frederick's death wrote to his friend the Rosicrucian Johann Rudolph von Bischoffswerder (1741-1803) that his highest ambition was to be placed at the head of the religious department of the state "as an unworthy instrument in the hand of Ormesus" (the prince of Prussia's Rosicrucian name) "for the purpose of saving millions of souls from perdition and bringing back the whole country to the faith of Jesus Christ."
The class of humanists which had grown up in Italy during the 5th century, and whose influence had been spreading into Germany, France and England during the generation immediately preceding the opening of the Protestant revolt, represented every phase of religious feeling from mystic piety to cynical indifference, but there were very few anti-clericals among them.
During most of the next century it inclined to an individualism untempered by a sense of mystic union with God and in Him with all men (see Dale, pp. 387 ff., for an estimate of these and other changes).