After years of being acquainted with the Center for the Study of World Religions(CSWR), Anne Harley has returned to Cambridge this year to become a Visiting Scholar in the Transcendence & Transformation Initiative.  In the following discussion, Anne shares insights into her work and her current focus as a visiting scholar with the CSWR.

Anne D. Harley: My name is Anne Dorothy Harley and I'm currently a scholar in residence at the CSWR, and I’ll be here for this entire academic year (2023-24). I'm on professional leave from Scripps College where I normally serve as professor of music, teaching applied voice and interdisciplinary humanities, and particularly relevant here, I'm the director of a project I founded over a decade ago called ‘Voices of the Pearl.’ ‘Voices of the Pearl’ is a project dedicated to commissioning, premiering, and recording new pieces of vocal chamber music setting texts by and about esoteric female practitioners from all traditions (www.voicesofthepearl.org). I am spending a lot of my research time researching and finding texts about female mystical practitioners, and then work with classical contemporary composers to bring new musical pieces to audiences worldwide.

Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR): How did you first come to know about the Center for the Study of World Religions?

ADH: I think I first came to know about the center through my doctoral advisor at Boston University who has been a speaker here before; his name is Andrew Shenton and as in so many other situations he helpfully pointed out that (people at the center) are doing something that I might be interested in and vice versa. So, I applied three years ago before the pandemic and I was all set to come in 2020; then, boom, the pandemic hit and in conjunction with the director, I postponed my residency by  several years. I was so delighted to be able to finally come this year. The projects that the Center is catalyzing, both those from others and those that I'm leading this year, are so exciting and have so many connections to everybody here. From the moment I arrived this month, I feel like I've really arrived in a place of amazing synchronicity and productivity.

CSWR: Can you please tell us more about the research that you'll be doing here?

ADH: Well, the research that I'm hoping to do is already very much underway and has been underway for quite a few years. I'm going to be presenting two world premieres, the first of which will be presented this semester on December 12; it’s a new piece by Douglas Knehans on text by Enheduanna, a woman from the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. Enheduanna is for most people a new name, and actually was for me as well when I found her texts in 2012, via a reference in a music textbook.  Enheduanna is the world's first author whom we know by name. Perhaps because of that fact, she's also the world's first named priestess, the world's first named composer, and perhaps the world's first named astronomer. So, the texts that we are using for this particular commission are found in cuneiform on tablets and are among some of the world’s most ancient texts.

And just by a wonderful, marvelous coincidence, there was an exhibit last year at the Morgan Library in New York on Enheduanna which I attended. That’s where I met and spoke to the marvelous curator of that exhibit Sydney Babcock. As part of this semester's presentation (December 12), Sydney Babcock will be coming to our event to speak about Enheduanna and her significance, and specifically her importance in the art world. This is really a dream come true for me, because one of my main motivations in creating this series of commissions is to musically illuminate the lives of women who have led spiritual practices. In many cases, these women’s narratives have been set off to the side and are not known to mainstream societies. So this is a fantastic opportunity to focus on Enheduanna and to educate the public about her with the help of Babcock who is an internationally recognized curator who spent years bring the Enheduanna exhibit to the Morgan Museum last fall 2022.

CSWR: How will you be/are you engaging HDS/Harvard students and/or scholars and/or other Harvard entities?

ADH: There are so many ways! I've been really fascinated by the reading groups. I have joined all four of them as a way to learn how people in the discipline of religious studies think and speak theology about the world. In order to actively get to know this community, I’m attending all four reading groups that the CSWR runs this semester: Tillich, Enheduanna, Plant Consciousness, and Psychedelics. I’m gaining a much greater knowledge about the current debates that are going on at Harvard Divinity School which I think are representative in some way of a larger conversation that's going on nationally. Having a community form around studying the life of Enheduanna is incredible and allows me to ask more questions.

I think one of the most important ways in which I'm engaging with the Harvard community is by offering this transformational voice workshop fall and spring semester, called the “The Muscle of the Self: Using the Voice to Map Psyche.” The students in that small group have already undergone a really wonderful recognition about how atrophied parts of their voice can be enlivened. We focus on parts of their voice that they previously may have been socialized out of everyday use, and this is usually accompanied by a retrieval of parts of self, or a recognition of how the voice has been shaped by influences in our lives. I really look forward to the rest of the semester meeting with those students. The workshop is based on primarily two schools of voice work; the first one is Roy Hart Voicework which is based on the theater of Roy Hart, and the second tradition of voicework is Fitzmaurice Voicework which is based on the work of Catherine Fitzmaurice. These methods normally appear in the academic setting via actor training programs. In fact, I was first introduced to Fitzmaurice Voicework at A.R.T. (American Repertory Theater) here at Harvard many, many years ago and I've since become certified as a teacher of that work.

In this work, there are so many moments of intensified consciousness and by reteaching these practices in the context of a divinity school I am consciously looking, for the first time, to the connections to the spiritual in the work.

For example, because the breath is the foundation of the voice, we do a lot of work on the breath, and the breath, the pneuma is directly connected to the spirit is so many traditions. Many embodied practices which one might recognize probably from yoga or from meditation use breath work. Those practices as we use them in the voice workshop have a slightly different goal. But there are bridges that I'm seeing for the first time because of the context of teaching here and the conversations that I then have with participants after class. These sorts of exchanges are really helping me to understand the work in a new light.

CSWR: You are just beautifully leading the conversation into my next question; how is the CSWR specifically positioned to facilitate and/or enhance the work that you're doing?

ADH: It's a community of course and it's a dynamic community which changes every year which I am delighted to be a part of this year, and which has scholars and practitioners from all over the world all living together; some of them are living remotely but most of them are living in this little courtyard which is like a temenos in which all sorts of amazing things can happen.

For example yesterday I ran into an Assyrian scholar in the courtyard who's leading the Enheduanna reading group and we chatted about cuneiform and how as an Assyrian scholar and native speaker of Assyrian, cuneiform is the writing system she needs to learn so she's taking classes here at Harvard. But as soon as she's taught the actual alphabet, she'll be able to almost transparently understand what's on those tablets because she speaks the modern form of this Assyrian language, unlike her fellow students in that class who also must learn Assyrian cognates and Assyrian roots of the language. It was fascinating to learn about how history is taught in Iraq: scholars studying the Assyrian history of that geographic territory are often repressed by the government, and this ancient history doesn’t appear in textbooks. These are things that I did not know. Because of our conversations, which continue throughout the year, I will be able to tell audiences about the challenges to modern scholarship of Enheduanna and her culture.

Then, later in the afternoon I had tea with Swami Satchitananda Saraswati, from India, who is a resident here on a fellowship and is taking graduate level courses at HDS. We started out talking about the nature of education in India and comparing it to the kind of liberal arts undergraduate education that I'm teaching at Scripps College in the Claremont Consortium. I shared a little bit about the quadrivium and the trivium and the origin of the term ‘liberal arts.’  Then he told me about this contrasts with the way that colonialism has shaped education in India, and he gave me a short lesson in Vedantic scholarship and how it compares to the yogic scholarship I know a small bit about. Then we discovered we are both musicians! He pulled out his vina and offered to play a raga for me!  So these kinds of experiences are irreplaceable.

I'm really just so grateful to the director Charles Stang, for perceiving the benefits of connectedness for us all at the Center, and gathering us here, and also to my colleagues at the Center for generously sharing with me their lives and their studies.

CSWR: Is there anything you'd want to add about your research or work or engagement with the center or Harvard at large?

ADH: I think there's an overwhelming amount of opportunity here for people who are open to engaging with new forms of knowledge. I was kind of shy when I first arrived, about participating in discussions. But the staff here, including the director Charles Stang and the associate director Gosia Sklodowska have gone out of their way to make each of the scholars at the CSWR feel like they have something to bring to the conversation here. I feel tremendously welcomed.

This, in turn, has made it possible for me to consider a writing project that I hope to dedicate some serious time to. This work, anchored by a first-person narrative of female mystical experience, will focus on enlightenment processes in the female body, which is an understudied part of every tradition. There are many more extant narratives about male experience in most traditions. Not every tradition excludes female mystical experience, but for reasons I probably do not need to go into, the female mystical experience is much less known and the writings by or about those women who have taught those practices or undergone those mystical experiences tend to also be less known. The esoteric instructions are not specifically always directed to males, but they are generalized to the male experience; there is little if any attention paid to how menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation figure in the practitioner’s body.  You can point to this phenomenon in almost every tradition.

This attention to female lineages of esoteric practice is, I think, one of my contributions to the conversations at the CSWR, because there are many projects studying and preserving accounts of mystical experience here this year, and I am able to contribute some sources in Chinese that were perhaps not immediately to hand. The first place where I found specific detailed lineage of female teaching was in the Taoist Song dynasty in the form of two women, Cao Wenyi and Sun Bu’er, through the scholarship and English translations of Dr. Robin Wang (Loyola Marymount). In her scholarly translation and commentary of the The Secret Book on the Inner Elixir as Transmitted by the Immortal Sun Bu’er (Sun Bu’er yuanjun chuanshu dandao mishu), I first encountered instructions specifically directed to women undertaking enlightenment practices.  I'm looking to bring those more into the mainstream and maybe introduce some of those people to scholars here so that they can educate more people about those traditions.

I've been thinking about this aspect of my work at the CSWR since I arrived, because one of the premises of my musical project and collecting all of these texts by and about women who are involved in mystical practice from all different traditions and of the underlying assumptions that I've made: The mystical experience or the esoteric experience is a universal human legacy and specifically that it’s not confined to the male gender.

The other part of my project’s premise is that knowing about instructions directed to women from all traditions can helpfully educate women in any tradition, and particularly those operating outside of any tradition.  My hope is that in bringing this kind of universal claim on esoteric experience to those people here at the Center and perhaps to the public is that we might as a society come to understand that all religions share a root in direct connection to the divine. Regardless of religion, to experience this wonderful thing that I believe is a universal human legacy, this connection to awe and to the divine, has helped humans survive and live in harmony with our more than human cohabitants in the world.

This is very optimistic, of course, but if religious societies can understand each other as all coming from a similar valuation of this connection to the divine, even if they have sculpted the divine in different ways over the course of history, then might we work together across religious boundaries to help the world into a better place? Again, very optimistic. But could this ultimately really help people? I look forward to learning from those who have thought more about these questions at the CSWR this year.