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  1. Unfoldings: A Substack Newsletter

    I’ve started a Substack Newsletter – Unfoldings – for those who want to be informed of my various projects – upcoming lectures, new books, and Twisted Trunk publications. Whilst there will be some crossover with enfolding, the newsletter will mostly feature different content to what I post here – observations, reflections, ruminations and passing fancies. Sign up using the link below.

  2. Reflexivity as Occult Practice – I

    In a recent essay, I posed the question – How do we learn to be magicians? Is it simply a matter of reading books, studying with a teacher, doing practices, and taking on particular beliefs and attitudes? My answer was to reflect on my early dive into the world of the occult in which I introduced the term reflexivity. In this post, I will discuss the concept of reflexivity and propose that it should be accepted as a core occult practice.

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  3. Don’t be a Dipshit

    Words have Power.

    Imagine a setting. You’re in a restaurant or a café perhaps, enjoying a quiet conversation with friends. Suddenly a stranger walks up to your table and without any opening or introduction, begins to offer a commentary on some conversational topic. You’d be slightly taken aback. Alarmed even. Who is this complete stranger who has suddenly, for no apparent reason, taken it upon themselves to intrude into a private conversation?

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  4. New for 2024. Wheels within Wheels: Chakras and Western Esotericism

    I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new edition of my book exploring the early passage of knowledge about chakras into Western Esotericism. This new edition collects the material originally published as a series of 4 chapbooks in 2018, and I’ve added some more information about the early tantric traditions.

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  5. Tantric Subtle Bodies – I

    As a spin-off from the last couple of posts outlining tantric ritual procedures, I thought I’d turn to a more complex issue and tackle the concept of the ‘subtle body’ and how it is used in tantric practice. The term ‘subtle body’ is immediately familiar of course – it has a long history of usage in Western esotericism, from Aristotle to Aleister Crowley and beyond. Sanskrit terms such as lingaśarīrasūkṣmadeha or sūkṣmaśarīra– often used to refer to the subtle body – was popularized in Western esotericism by the writings of H.P. Blavatsky and other Theosophists, drawing heavily on the work of Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Max Muller. André Padoux points out that this conflation of terms is a misnomer, as the sūkṣmadeha or sūkṣmaśarīra, in actuality, refers to that entity that migrates from body to body after death and lacks any shape, visualized components or affective qualities.

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  6. On Becomings

    How do we learn to be magicians? Do we just pick up a book or two, do the exercises and rituals, and take on the beliefs and perspectives that ‘feel right’ to us? Maybe do an online course with a teacher whom we have come to respect? Go on social media and engage constructively (or not) with other practitioners. Join a small group or a large magical organization? It is not, I feel, a simple process. Well at least, it was not a simple process for me. I was not initiated by fairies at the bottom of the garden, as one of my friends says he was. I did not have a magical granny or the memory of a past life being a high magus in Atlantis. I did not receive messages from a spiritual master on the Inner Planes. I did not experience a sudden spiritual awakening or a summons by a goddess.

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  7. On Agency and other matters

    One day in 2020, I ambled into my study and turned on my computer, and … nothing. My heart skipped a beat. I felt a sense of dread steal over me. Checking the startup options, I saw that not only had the SSD drive on which the operating system lives failed but also one of the disks in my RAID array had gone too. It was a palpable shock. All that was on the computer – work in progress, layout jobs for clients, photos, games, videos, half-sorted digital libraries … gone. More than that, I was cut off from the wider world of social media and the internet, extended knowledge repositories, news, friends; and the full panoply of digital life in networked culture.

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  8. Book Review: The Subtle Body

    I’ve been intending for a while to do some writing on the various tantric presentations of the ‘subtle body’. Before doing so, however, I’m going to review Simon Cox’s recent book, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2022, Hbk). This is an important work that sheds much light on how the concept of the subtle body took off in the English language, and the many twists and turns taken in developing a concept that has become a staple of contemporary esoteric practice and thought.

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  9. Tantric Ritual Procedures – II

    Following on from the previous post in this occasional series, here’s a look at an example of bhūtaśuddhiḥ – the purification and divinization of the body. This practice is a core component of tantric daily practice, and examples are found both in scriptures and ritual manuals of the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava traditions. There are also similar practices in tantric Buddhism.

    In bhūtaśuddhiḥ practice, regions of the body are homologized with the five elements, tattvas and kalās. What follows is a condensed description of bhūtaśuddhiḥ compiled from Śaiva texts such as the Kāmikāgama, Īśānaśivaguradeva, and Somaśambhu-paddhati. There are very similar accounts of this rite in both the Jayākha Saṃhitā and the Laksmī Tantra, two texts of the Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra.

    This essay will appear in my next Twisted Trunk release: Wheels within Wheels: Chakras and Western Esotericism. I’m hoping to have it published before the end of the year.

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  10. Intensities: Bodying Yantra

    What does the Śrīcakra mean to me? What part does it play in my own practice? As you might know from reading my Unfoldings newsletter I have been devoting some time to discussing Kenneth Grant’s representation of Tantra. Grant has a great deal to say about the Śrīcakra, and going over Grant’s take on it, plus referring to various tantric scriptures, as well as what scholars have written, prompted this short post. In doing so, I want to get away from scripture or analysis.

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  11. Srividya: the twists and turns of a tantric tradition – I

    In the last two issues of my Unfoldings newsletter, I have been engaging in an in-depth analysis of Kenneth Grant’s representation of Tantric mysteries in his books – using his 1999 book, Beyond the Mauve Zone as the main reference point. In support of this series of essays, I thought it would be helpful for those reading the essays to attempt a general overview of the historical development of the Tripurāsundarī traditions, known nowadays as Śrīvidyā. In this first post, I’m going to focus on the roots of this tradition – the Nityā.

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