Seven Mansions Inside a Single Crystal Castle

Teresa of Avila wrote The Interior Castle in 1577, describing the soul as a castle made of a single diamond or clear crystal, containing seven concentric sets of mansions, or moradas, that a person moves through on the way to union with God, from the outer mansions of basic prayer and the struggle against sin to the innermost mansion where Teresa describes a spiritual marriage between the soul and God. Each set of mansions corresponds to a recognizable stage of prayer and inner development, and Teresa draws throughout on her own extensive first hand experience of mystical states, describing specific psychological and spiritual phenomena, locutions, raptures, states of absorption, in careful, almost clinical detail rather than in purely poetic language. She wrote the work under the explicit obedience of her confessor, a common circumstance for women's theological writing in this period, when a woman describing her own mystical experience without ecclesiastical sanction risked serious suspicion from church authorities. Teresa repeatedly cautions the reader that the mansions are not simply floors climbed in strict sequence, since a soul can move back and forth between states, and she insists that no stage of prayer, however advanced, excuses a person from ordinary practical charity toward others.