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Archive for February 2016

  1. Book review: Modern Tantra by Donald Michael Kraig

    Donald Michael Kraig (1951-2014) was a highly acclaimed author and teacher – perhaps best known for his 1988 book Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons from the High Magickal Arts (published by Llewellyn Publications). His new book – published posthumously – is Modern Tantra: Living One of the World’s Oldest and Continuously Practiced Forms of Pagan Spirituality in the New Millennium (Llewellyn, 2015). It is available as a paperback, Kindle edition, and via Scribd subscription. Continue reading »

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  2. Chakras into the west: James Morgan Pryse’s “The Apocalypse Unsealed”

    For some time now, I’ve been idly collecting notes for a monograph – or perhaps a lecture or two – on the early twentieth-century European authors who played a role in shaping contemporary western discourse on the chakras; in particular, it’s reification into the ubiquitous seven-chakra schema reproduced ad nauseum in hundreds of contemporary new age, occult, and yoga texts, together with its increasing medicalisation.

    The obvious sources for much of contemporary chakra discourse are Sir John Woodroffe, whose translation of the Ṣaṭ-chakra-nirūpaṇa, entitled “The Serpent Power” appeared in 1918, and Charles Webster Leadbeater’s 1927 book, The Chakras. I also thought it would be interesting to take a look at Jung’s 1932 Kundalini lectures, and how he interpreted chakras in terms of individuation. A recent blog post by scholar-practitioner Christopher Wallis: The Real Story on the Chakras has rekindled my interest in this project, and I thought that – rather than posting about the “big three” mentioned above, I’d write about a rather less well-known author with a rather novel interpretation of chakras – James Morgan Pryse. Continue reading »

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