A Male Colonization of a Female Visionary Body: The "Montanist" Prophetess in Tertullian's On the Soul 9,4

The male control over female authority in early Christian religious experiences and practices is the focus of this article. Religious practices from the Roman Imperial world offer examples of the employment of psychotropic practices as means of modification of the body. A clear example of the connections between psychotropic (i. e. ritual) “inputs” and visionary “outputs” (i. e. first-person descriptions of the otherworld) is described in the account concerning a Montanist “sister” as it is reported in Tertullian’s On the Soul 9,4. According to this text, a woman – the Montanist “sister” – claims to have lived a psychotropic experience which is however put into writing by the male members of her group. By doing so, these members aim at offering to their audience a further psychotropic written platform for other processes of inner chemical mutations. This process thereby explains the re-appropriation by male members of the group of psychotropic elements in order to colonize a specific female experience. Is it then possible to separate the female psychotropic experience of the Montanist sister from the male textualized version, this paper asks? Is it possible to describe different gendered models of psychotropic experiences, even though they often emerge as colonizing male discourses? Is it possible, to reconstruct specific gendered models of visionary experiences starting from texts where male actions and perceptions are dominant?