Peer Review and the Limits of Mystical Phenomenology: Gatekeepers of the Sacred. A Case Study in Epistemic Gatekeeping

The present article uses two anonymous referee reports on a neurophenomenological theology manuscript as a case study in the methodological tensions between conventional peer review and first-person mystical phenomenology. The aim is not to contest a particular editorial decision, but to examine how review practices may implicitly privilege third-person, analytic, or agnostic-definitional frameworks when confronted with scholar-practitioner testimony. Close reading of the reports reveals that both referees, independently and in good faith, demanded that the paper adopt epistemic postures incompatible with its methodological tradition, without recognising this demand as itself a philosophical position rather than a neutral standard. The paper further identifies a genuine tension in the reviewed manuscript, that between phenomenological description, theological interpretation, and metaphysical claim, and argues that acknowledging this tension strengthens rather than undermines the case for first-person contemplative methodology. A secondary observation is that both reports display textual characteristics consistent with AI-generated or AI-assisted prose, including uniform structural templates, an absence of individual scholarly voice, and convergence on canonical references unlikely to be a specialist's first reach. This raises a further irony: the gatekeeping of first-person mystical scholarship may itself be delegated to a system constitutively incapable of first-person experience. The article concludes with a positive argument for open preprint repositories as structurally fitting venues for this kind of scholarship, and proposes a more adequate peer review model for contemplative and mystical-phenomenological work.