Published throughout the 1980s by the Sorceror’s Apprentice, the LOT was by eclectic, sometimes provocative, and above all, contemporary, providing a glimpse into current events and concerns in the occult/pagan scene of that period. Its contents ranged through every possible permutation of esoteric thought at the time, and in addition to the articles which might range from Abramelin to Chaos Magic. It also featured “contact ads”, Aunt Sally’s often ascerbic “problem page,” and something which the few other ‘zines of the time lacked – a sense of humour, expressed through cartoons such as Dave Brown & Dave Lee’s Arthur Micklethwaite: Yorkshire Zen Master and the continuing adventures of Arfur Wizard “the Mill-Hill magician”.

When I first became interested in the occult in the late 1970s I read anything and everything I could get hold of from my local library, which wasn’t very extensive, and was dominated by the writings of Madame Blavatsky. Inevitably perhaps, the first esoteric society I made contact with, was the Theosophical Society, and I went along to their Leeds lodge for the first time in 1978. There I fell into conversation with another attendee (the only other person present under the age of 50) and he pointed me in the direction of The Sorceror’s Apprentice in Burley Lodge Road – the first occult shop I ever visited. The “shop” with its blacked-out windows and visored door, had from the outside, a forbidding air, tinged with the kind of backstreet seediness associated at that time with sex shops. Soon I was a regular, visiting as often as I could and spending my student grant on acquiring a library. And it was in the SA one afternoon that I picked up a copy of The Lamp of Thoth.

It was through the Lamp of Thoth that I slowly gained an entry into the wider world of the British occult scene – indeed, until I began to hang out at the SA coffee shop – a lock-up across the road which held a table, a couple of benches and a coffee machine) where Sorcerer’s regulars could gather and discourse learnedly about matters esoteric – and read each new magazine, I didn’t have much awareness that there was an occult scene past the books I’d been reading. It was through the Sorcerer’s and the LOT that I first found out about the local pagan moot scene. It was through the “contact ads” in the LOT that I took a leap of faith and made contact with the Wiccan coven into which I was (eventually) initiated into, and the LOT was the first “occult” magazine that I began writing for. I received a very encouraging letter from LOT editor Chris Bray following an early article entitled “On the Dark Night of the Soul” which was published in LOT Vol 2 no.6. This early article can be found all over the web (for example, here) although it is now, through that strange processes by which articles make the leap from paper to digital, attributed to one Fra. Apfelmann, who originally transcribed it or uploaded it. This has been, I admit, a minor annoyance, so it was good to have the original magazine in which this article appeared to hand, so I could scan it.

The LOT was also an influence when Rodney Orpheus and I started to publish Pagan News in the late 1980s. Like the LOT, we wanted Pagan News to be eclectic, and not bound by any sense of there being a divide between pagans and occultists for example. Another feature of the LOT which I certainly was influenced by was “Golem’s Gossip”. “Golem” seemed to know everyone of note, and for me, part of the fun of reading the latest misdeeds to befall various luminaries was beginning to gain some degree of familiarity with those being lampooned. Golem’s Gossip ranged between reporting on various spats between Thelemites (particularly groups with a “T” in their acroynm) – for example in Volume 2 no.4 Golem reported on how a member of one such order was detained before London magistrates for possession of electronic incendiary devices – apparently there was some plot to destroy books in a warehouse belonging to Routledge Keegan and Paul. The column also kept readers updated on the activities of fundamentalist Christian groups, media abuse and various occult-oriented scams.

Golem and the LOT also shed much-needed light on more serious incidents – such as the very public declaration of one Barbara Brandolini (“spiritual leader and high priestess of the Church of the Silver Blade”) that she was going to purchase a chapel in the tiny village of Heptonstall and turn it into a “pagan temple” – a scheme which didn’t do pagans any favours at all. However, the most outrageous scandal reported by the LOT (to my mind) was the Galadriel Affair. From the first issue of the LOT, there was a regular contributor writing about various aspects of Witchcraft under the pen name of “Galadriel”. Galadriel’s first article basically pointed out that for the most part, “modern wicthcraft” was mostly made up – but that there was a hereditary tradition of which Galadrial was an iniitate. This article drew counter-responses from both Raymond Buckland and Alex Sanders. Undeterred, Galadriel followed trhough with an article in issue 3 of LOT claiming that those of the “hereditary clans” do advocate cursing enemies, and even more controversially in issue 4, with the claim that Galadriel’s clan practice both animal sacrifice (at feast times) and human sacrifice (actually a ritual form of voluntary suicide). This was strong stuff, particularly when you consider that this was 1981.

In 1982 the infamous (and now thankfully defunct) The News of the World newspaper ran a series “exposing” various British occultists as “Devil Worshippers” and so forth. In the 1980s, being “exposed” in the press as an “evil occultist” could well result in losing one’s job, having one’s windows broken, and lengthy public harassment. “The News of the World” was generally regarded as “the enemy” by many pagans and occultists. In LOT vol. II no.4 there appeared an article written by Stewart Farrar entitled “WHY GALADRIEL MUST GO” in which he makes a number of interesting statements about the News of the World exposes – and the role that he and his wife Janet played in them. It seems that the Farrars were so concerned about Galadriel’s articles in the LOT – the argument being that they were “bringing the Craft into disrepute” that they co-operated with the News of the World’s “sting” operation when the paper approached them for information about “Black Magicians” and in particular, assisted two journalists to gain the confidence of a couple whom they believed to be responsible for the Galadriel articles, by giving the journalists a letter of introduction, so they could pass themselves off as “genuine seekers” and asking the couple to extend Craft hospitality to them. Farrar claims in the article that he acted in this way not only for the good of the Craft in general, but at the behest of a number of “responsible Craft leaders and senior occult figures” (who needless to say, remained anonymous) and closed with:

Without toning down or apologising for our beliefs in any way, we must present a true image of the Craft, in all its multiform variety but essential unity. Anyone who muddies the waters must be netted – and fast.

The next few issues of the LOT saw a flurry of letters and strong editorial comment condemning Stewart Farrar’s actions – and Galadriel’s column continued to appear. None of the “Craft leaders” or “senior occult figures” that Farrar claimed to have the support of stepped forwards. If nothing else, this incident shows how much Paganism has changed over the last thirty years or so – were such a thing to happen nowadays one can easily imagine the furore that would explode across the Pagan blogosphere. Despite Farrar’s appeal to “unity” the Galadriel Affair highlighted the deep divisions in the UK occult scene – and the power of spokespersons acting on behalf of others. It was a pattern that was to repeat itself in the late 1980s with the onset of the “Satanic Child Abuse” moral panic, which also saw various occult authors – notably Gerald Suster – being “exposed” in The News of the World. (see here for a scan of Suster’s own account of the incident from Talking Stick magazine).

Saundaryalahari is widely attested to be one of the most famous and beautiful Sanskrit “hymns” praising Tripurasundari Devi as the Supreme Power. It has been approximately dated to the tenth century (possibly before). It is often divided into two sections; the first, comprising of verses 1-41, is sometimes called the Anandalahari – “Wave of Joy”. The first section can be said to be the most clearly “tantric” part of the text, providing dhyanas (visualised scenes of the Devi for meditation/ritual), Her Yantra and Mantra, and locating the goddess within various schemas (i.e. cakras and rays) and extolling the fruits of sadhana directed to Her. The second section is an extensive poetic meditation on the goddess, from her head to her feet.

Rich in insights and imagery, the Saundaryalahari not only contains references to familiar tantric and puranic themes, but also addresses the Devi directly; its core message being that contemplating the Devi in her diverse forms – as a Goddess, as present in oneself and the world – is the superior path. As Francis X. Clooney writes (2005, p156): “The hymn is itself a beneficient utterance; to hear it enables one to draw on the riches latent within it. Sankara’s extraordinary gift intends the widest possible audience: all those willing to look upon Her”.

Although it is ostensibly a “tantric” text of the Sri Vidya school, it can be approached (i.e. read) and interpreted in a number of ways. For instance, it can be approached/enjoyed purely as a literary work; read from a Bhakti (“devotional”) perspective, or treated as a ritual manual. Furthermore, the text can “speak” to – and thereby “produce” different (theological) identities. For example, the Saundaryalahari is often celebrated (helped no doubt by the popular attributation of authorship to Sankara) as an Advaitin text – an interpretation which is bolstered through several commentaries. It is not the case (as is sometimes assumed) that there is one interpretation of the text which is “superior” or more authentic than others, rather that the text lends itself to multiple interpretations and uses – and as a practitioner one can simultaneously appreciate the text as a aesthetic production, as a devotional work, and a set of coded ritual instructions or guidelines. In fact, I would say that the way Saundaryalahari is written implies such a pluralistic approach.

There are many English translations of the Saundaryalahari available – for example Sastri and Ayyangar (1948), Norman Brown (1958), & Francis X Clooney (2005). There is also an extensive commentarial tradition associated with the text (according to Pande, over thirty-five commentaries), one of the most well-known of which is Laksmidhara’s (16th century). The authorship of Saundaryalahari is popularly attributed to Sankara.
There is a great deal of scholarly debate around Sankara’s purported authorship, and some scholars have opined that this is (yet another) example of a tantric work’s authorship being attributed to a respected source; whilst others have suggested that Sankara was involved in some degree of tantric practice.

The vision of the Goddess
Saundaryalahari is directed at Tripurasundari Devi; She is the Supreme Power, the creator-sustainer-destroyer of the world. Gods such as Hari (Vishnu), Virinci (Brahma) and Hara (Siva) are players within her drama (I will have more to say about how the text presents Devi’s relationship with Siva in a later post). Devi is both the supreme transcendent power and is immanently present in the world – directly apprehendable to those who are willing to recognise Her presence:

“You are mind, You are air.
You are wind and the rider of wind,
You are water, You are earth,
beyond You as You evolve
there is nothing higher,
there is only You, and
when You transform Yourself by every form,
then You take the form of consciousness and bliss
as a way of being,
O Siva’s youthful one! (35)
(Transl. Clooney, 2005, p159)

At the same time, She is a beautiful, erotic woman, the embodiment of desire (Kama). The verses emphasise Her maternal (caring) and erotic (desiring) qualities – there is no direct reference to Tripurasundari’s exploits as a battle-goddess (which can be found in the Lalitopakhyana) nor is She identified with Kali or Durga, as occurs in the Lalitasahasramana. Saundaryalahari is not so much concerned with extolling the past deeds of Devi, but directly speaks to Devi in the present tense of who is speaking/reading the verses – and frequently addresses Her as “You”.

I noted earlier that the second half of Saundaryalahari is given over to a head-to-toe extolling of the beautiful body of Devi, overlaying her body with mythological themes and a profusion of rich natural metaphors – many of which are common themes in Indian poetics. This is a popular, formal Indian literary set piece called a nakh-sikh varnana – “toe-to-head description”. There is a convention that in the case of goddesses or gods, the poet’s/viewers eyes should first dwell on the divine feet and move upwards, whereas for human beings, the description may begin with the face and move downward. See for example, Keshavdas’ Kavipriya – ‘Handbook for Poets’, chapter fifteen of which discusses this convention:

“Keshavdas says,
Seeing the beauty of a goddess one should describe her from toe to head
But a mortal woman should be described differently: from head to toe.”

Saundaryalahari however, follows the descriptive course from the head of Devi to Her feet. Admittedly, I do not know if this literary convention is commonly inverted (or just ignored) in tantric-oriented poetics, but it could be interpreted as another literary device to underscore that the Devi is an embodied woman as much as She is the all-pervading Goddess – and that she is easily and directly approachable via devotion rather than ritual and ascetic practice.

The embodiment of desire
Just as the world is an emanation of Her beauty and her play (lila,) so too, to apprehend the world – through the modalities of the senses (vision, taste, etc), through speech, and through desire, the devotee can recognise the presence of Devi in all things, in each passing moment – and that very act of recognition is transformative. Just as Her body is homologised with the world/cosmos, it is through bodies that the encounter with the divine becomes comprehensible. She is the Source, the apprehension of, and the fulfilment of desire/bliss in every realm of experience. That Saundaryalahari presents Devi as both desiring and desired is not surprising if we consider the primacy of desire (kama) within the Hindu tradition. From the Vedas onwards, desire is a primary motivating force:

“It is a cosmic force, but not to be understood as a kind of blind energy or impersonal urge. On the contrary, the personal is so much included in the transpersonal element that kama is said to be the first seed of mind, the firstborn of the Absolute and thereafter the loftiest characteristic of all created beings, and more particularly of human beings. Kama is the driving force in any enterprise, the highest of all human qualities. There is one and the same urge stimulating the entire range of reality, one and the same energy pushing the universe to expand – and it is kama. … Kama is not a hankering after what is lacking in the individual; it is not an imperfection and thus a cause of suffering. Kama is not the proof that we have not yet arrived, that we are imperfect and enmeshed in unfulfilled longings and unsatisfied urges. Kama is, on the contrary, the perfection of expansion, the quality of creativity, the positive dynamism to be more….”
Raimon Panikkar (1995, pp242-243)

According to Saundaryalahari, Devi is the source of Kama’s power:

“he has no limbs
but carries a bow made of flowers, a bow-string of bees, five arrows,
his servant is spring, the mountain breeze his chariot;
thus armed,
O daughter of the snow-capped mountain,
still he obtains grace only from Your glance, and
by that conquers the world single-handedly.”(6)
(Transl. Clooney, 2005, p50)

Kama – the bodiless (“he has no limbs”) is destroyed by the burning gaze of Siva (as recounted in the Siva Purana and Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava) – and this narrative is recalled in a later stanza:

“O daughter of the mountain,
the mind-born one plunged himself into the deep pool of Your navel,
his body enveloped by the flames of Hara’s anger,
and from there rose a creeper of smoke:
people say it is Your line of down,
O Mother.” (76)
(Transl. Clooney, 2005)

- which implies that Kama has merged (or returned) into the body of Devi – again suggesting that the experience of kama is impelled by Devi (many of her epithets suggest this); that all desire emanates from Devi; in particular, through Her gaze or glance:

“Daughter of the king of the unmoving mountain,
To whom would the ridges between Your eye and ear not convey
The eagerness of the bow of that god whose arrows are flowers?
Your passionate glance travels sideways
From the corner of Your eyr and along the path of hearing,
And there it gleams,
Suggesting the mounting of an arrow.”(59)
(Transl. Clooney, 2005)

An earlier sloka illustrates the power of Devi’s glance to impell desire:

“If an old man,
unpleasing to the eye and impotent in play,
falls within the range of Your glances
then hundreds will run after him,
all the young women,
locks disheveled,
clothes falling from their breasts,
girdles bursting with force,
fine garments slipping down.”(13)
(Transl. Clooney, 2005)

A fairly common trope within tantric-oriented texts is that one of the fruits of practice for the male practitioner (and the majority of texts do reflect a male perspective) is that women will become attracted to him (Loriliai Biernacki describes this aptly as “James Bond Syndrome”). This verse is expressing something different. Some commentators have taken this verse to indicate that anyone (or anything), no matter how outwardly unattractive will – once favoured with Devi’s glance – become an attractor; become desirable. However, there is more. The “old man” can be interpreted as referring to Siva in his ascetic mode – and again stressing that Siva’s power to attract, ultimately, comes from Devi. Possibly, the verse is referring to the well-known narrative (see for example, the Linga Purana) wherein Siva seduces the wives of the Sages in the Deodar Forest.

The verse also higlights the speed and suddenness with which desire can flood a person; the power of a sudden and overwhelming infatuation which causes one to throw caution to the wind and no longer rely on the conscious self-presentation represented by fine clothes and coiffure. There is also a hint here of a larger theme within Saundaryalahari – that to be favoured by Devi; to open oneself to “the flood of beauty” is superior to all other paths and practices. The verse can also be read as a confirmation of the mutuality between a single, inert, absolute figure (the old man/Siva) – and dynamic multiplicity (the hundreds of running young women/multipleSaktis).

In the next post in this series, I’ll take a closer look at some of the themes present in verses 1-41 – the Anandalahari.

Sources
Loriliai Biernacki Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Douglas Renfrew Brooks, Auspicious Wisdom: The Texts and Traditions of Srividya Sakta Tantrism in South India (State University of New York, 1992)
Norman Brown, Saundaryalahari or Flood of Beauty (Harvard University Press, 1958)
Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Meera Kachroo, The Goddess and Her Powers: The Tantric Identities of the Saundarya Lahari (MA Thesis, McGill University, June 2005)
Govind Chandra Pande Life and thought of Śankarācārya (Motilal, 1994)
David R. Kinsley Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas (University of California Press, 1997)
Raimon Panikkar, The Vedic Experience (Motilal, 1995)
Pandit S. Subrahmanya Sastri and T.R. Srinivasa Ayyangar, Saundarya Lahari (Theosophical Publishing House, 1948)

Web Sources
Saundarya Lahari online translation by P. R. Ramachander

JEFF was an ex-scientologist, an unlikely shaman, but so it often goes. The face he turned to the world was that of a drifter; buoyed up by a peculiar brand of techno-terms and salad of mixed metaphors. Jeff would have the world think him a man of knowledge; forever hinting at secrets, conspiratorial asides and sidelong glances at his collection of occult books. He gathered secrets about him like a cloak, weaving them into the fabric of his clothes. It seemed at times, though, that the cloak weighed him down, dogging him with spectres of a dim and distant horror. In the first flush of the Age of Aquarius Jeff had sought out the masters, both living and dead. Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff, Alice Bailey. He’d done the lot, from meeting Aleister Crowley on the astral plane to sitting next to Kenneth Grant on the tube. Eventually, world-weary with accumulated wisdoms, he’d washed up on the shores of scientology, cooling his heels at East Grinstead Manor. And from there, through a trail of years, gravitated to Leeds Six. A basement case; a mute testament to the broken dreams of the Sixties.

I first encountered Jeff at a party, having slunk in on the standard friend of a friend story. There wasn’t much action and, not feeling up to worming my way into any of the tightly-knotted conversations, headed for the kitchen. Someone (it was Jeff) followed, the pentagram around my neck drawing him like a magnet. I watched him unfolding an introductory smile, and ran through the probable opening lines, marshalling my standby reactions. Was it to be drugs? Worth the words if there’s a score in the offing. Religion? Well my carefully-cultivated cynicism hadn’t been fed for a while. A lot would depend on whether he was a Christian or a sociology student. Sex? I doubted it. But by that time, blurred by alchohol and spurred by nagging loneliness, well, you know how it is.

As it happened, it was none of these.
“Are you into magick then ?”
I graciously assented.
“Are you any good?”

I shrugged, conveying at once that I was non-committal about such matters, unconcerned maybe …but yes, I thought I was good.
Jeff studied me for a while, then reached for his address book. Ripping off a page, he stuffed it into my jacket pocket. “You’d better be, ‘cos I’m going to kill you.”
And with that, he spun on his heel and stalked out of the room.

I was surprised by the speed of the exchange, and not a little bemused. I shook my head and resumed my trip to the kitchen. Finding an almost-virgin can of lager, I drank the encounter away, washing away the brief flutters of fear.
“Just another acid-head” I thought, at that moment feeling eyes running down my back. Deliberately, in my head a sinister puppet, I turned around, expecting to find the “Acid-head”. Instead, there was the flash of domino eyeliner, spiky black mop and a pink tongue, caught in the act of moistening purple lips. A surge of confidence swept through me, and eyes widening to maximum zoom, I stepped forwards and closed in.

***

I’m lost. Confused, no longer sure what’s happening. There’s an invisible barrier in front of me. I’m …trapped. The air is stuffy and heavy. It’s no good, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get out. I’m trapped. I can see light ahead, but it’s too bright. Vast shapes loom menacingly in the distance. It’s like being on the other side of a wall, but it’s so smooth. I can’t grasp a purchase no matter how hard I try. I just end up slithering down the sides. My teeth feel awful. My throat’s so dry it and there’s a lingering taste like chewed wood. My head’s buzzing so loud I can hear it rising and falling, like a thousand angry chainsaws. Across the barrier, a gigantic shape bends closer. A god, perhaps come to pull my wings off? There’s a muffled booming from the other side of the barrier. Is that how gods laugh? I can’t get out, I can’t get away. Caught like a wasp in a jar. When I was eight, I caught a wasp in a jar. It got out and stung me and since then I can’t stand to be in the same room as them. I’m trying to dig through the barrier, but my claws slide hopelessly across the glass. Catching a flicker of movement, I peer close to glimpse my own reflection. Understanding hits me like a kick in the crotch. I’m a wasp. I’M A WASP I’MAWASP I’MAWASPINAJAR OH GOD I HATE WASPS I’M A WASP I HATE THEM I HATE THEM I WANT TO GET OUT I’M A WASPWASPWASPWAZPWAZBWZBZBZBZZBZZBZZBzzzz……

And jerk awake, sweating, shivering, gibbering with fear. Oh god I’m so relieved. It’s so good to be awake. And then the fear comes again. I strain my ears, waiting for the tell-tale buzz that will announce the presence of my nightmare’s demon. Perhaps it was crawling into my ear as I slept – no, push that thought away. Waiting, but no buzzing comes, no rustlings against the curtain, no silhouttes inside the lampshade. Nothing.

The nightmare ruined my day, so I didn’t go out. There wasn’t much point. No letters, not my signing-on day, no pressing visits to make. So I stayed in bed reading and daydreaming. No one came to call. I was in a basement room so I didn’t feel intruded upon by the world. Briefly, I thought of going down the pub, but that took energy, and frankly, I didn’t have any.
That night, I was almost afraid of going to sleep. I was sure I would wake to find some yellow and black-banded horror perched on my pillow. The next day brought sunshine to Headingley, and the rays streaming into my room seemed to evaporate the nagging fear that hung in the air. It receded to the back of my mind and jostled for position with neglected bills and bank statements. Out of sight, out of mind. Or at least, conveniently forgotten.

Spring gave way to summer in fits and starts. For the most part, I was largely indifferent. I’d occasionally walk through the parks and common ground, but never felt bound to flee the city for nearby moors or rivers. Invitations to a Beltain Bop passed unheeded. Instead, I sauntered down to The Royal Park; sank a few pints and passed the time sitting with friends. But I couldn’t join in the table-talk. I felt so distant. Part of me was still trapped in a jar. Or perhaps I wanted to be like that.

I sat indoors reading a book. The same book. Over and over. Occasionally, the doorbell rang and I froze, heart pounding, till the caller went away. Once a fortnight I would put on my overcoat and make the trip into town to sign on, nodding hallo to people. Faces I vaguely knew but whose names had long eroded from my memory. Leeds town centre loomed oppressively around me, and it was always a relief to get back to my room. Fortunately the local shops provided all my needs, so I hardly had to leave Headingley at all. My room became the centre of my universe. My hub on the wheel of life. I was becoming invisible, or perhaps fading would be a better word. The worlds of magick held no mystery and my occult books gathered dust on the shelf. Scrupulously avoiding people, I felt no longer taxed by the neccesity to maintain a social front. Washing went out the window, likewise dental care, hairbrushing and eating properly. Yet I knew the merits of every asian-made samosa in the district. Custard and crisps took the place of cooked meals. And I fucked everyone I’d ever wanted to; alone each night in my bed.

***

The change came without warning. Three or four times a week, I had taken to walking down to the all-night garage for a three ­a.m. snack of sandwiches, chocolate, and juice. I enjoyed these night walks as there were fewer people around, and I could feel a faint nostalgia for the company of others. I slunk through the streets evading any imminent presences, yet drawn by the lights and closed curtains. In truth, I was beginning to savour being an outsider. Or a ghost.

On this particular night, waiting for my order to be filled, I felt a presence behind me. Someone else queuing, probably. Eyes on my back – perhaps some former friend, but of course I wasn’t going to make the first move. Picking up the plastic bag of junk food I turned to leave. A hand clutched my arm.
“I thought you said you were good.”
I turned to stare at the owner of the voice. A typical Headingley hippie – he didn’t look at all familiar.
“I’m killing you, you know. You’re trapped in my web.”
“What are you…I don’t understand…”
And then of course, I did.
“My name’s Jeff” said the hippie, “We met at Ruffle’s party. Don’t you remember?”
“Y-yes. I think so. I was rather drunk that night. Why have you … how have you done this to me?”
“Don’t you know? I thought you were the mighty magician?”
“You’ve put me in a pen – is that it? No wonder I don’t like
leaving this area. Everything …my thoughts … they’re clouding over. What time is it?”
He laughed. “You’re lucky you know what day it is.”
“Are you going to stop now?”
“Why should I? Look, it’s simple mister so-called magician. Either you die, or you fight to stay alive. Your choice. I’ll be waiting.”
I was rooted to the spot. Unable to move as he sauntered off into the night. And then my feet came free and I sprinted home as all the devils in hell were after me. In the opposite direction to Jeff.

***

Back home, I looked, really looked at the tip I’d been living in. Saw the dust, heaps of magazines, overflowing binliner and stale-smelling dishes in the sink. And the grey duvet cover … hadn’t it started off as white? I searched along the shelves and found some essential oil jars. The labels were faded but the oil went into a bath of hot water regardless. As did I. After a long soak (I had begun to avoid water), I returned, found the last of my clean clothes, and started a long-overdue spring-clean. Restoring order to the heaps of comics that had accumulated on the floor. Amongst them I found a couple of skin-mags and guiltily sneaked them into another tenant’s dustbin. Then to work. Rooting through boxes I assembled candles, incense, altar-cloth and other magical bric-a-brac. The charcoal discs were damp, so I gave my fragrancer a quick wipe and blasted the room with Rosemary Oil – ‘it banishes the parts other incenses don’t reach’. A feeble sally I know, but I needed to laugh my way back to some semblance of normality. I banished so hard my whole body tensed up as I viciously slashed the pentagrams into the air, hissing the words through clenched teeth, flooding the ether with the dazzling whiteness of Kether. This was better. I was alive again, and I was going to do my damnedness to make sure it stayed that way.
Jeff was trying to keep me in – keep me away from people; so it was to people I went. I crossed over into Woodhouse – only a few streets from the flat but I almost felt like an explorer braving the jungle for the first time. I plucked up my courage and dragged myself to a friendly-looking door. I was recieved graciously by people that I had neglected to visit for weeks; friends who I had pretended not to notice on the street; had played deaf when they rang the bell. They thought, so I learned, as apparently many other people did, that I had succumbed to a solitary street skag habit. They fed me. They fed me soup, bread and lentils; and better, they fed me with life. While my stomach was in shock from being crammed with food, I discovered what I had forgotten … what Jeff’s spell (if such it was) had caused me to forget; that I hungered too for attention, and affection. I talked for hours, amazed that I had let myself be turned away from the bright glow of company. So I stayed late, and, rather than go home, stayed the night. And in the night, I dreamed.

I dreamt of walking along a seashore; the crash of surf and hum of distant traffic mingling in my ears. There was a pier ahead of me, and as I drew closer to the barnacle-encrusted girders, a figure detached itself from the darkness.
“Well, at least you’re beginning to shape up.” It was Jeff. “But you can’t hide forever you know. If you want to play, you’ll have to play to win. Otherwise you’ll die.”
“Why are you doing…?” But he was gone.

Back home, I began to try and sort my head out. Apalled at the blank pages in my magickal diary, I set out a strict regimen of banishings, meditations, and yoga. But I still had no idea why this Jeff person was trying to kill me. Had I insulted him or rebuffed an advance? He claimed that we’d met at Ruffle’s birthday party, and my memory of that night was hazy, to say the least. All I could come up with were a few disconnected scenes, like a badly­ spliced home movie. Standing on the edges of conversations; drinking god-knows-what concoctions, and finally, under the kitchen table, necking with someone of indeterminate gender. I had no memory of Jeff at all. And then it occurred to me that he had given me a clue. Dreams. He’d made himself a key to the backdoor of my mind, and was sauntering in through my dreams. Whether I remembered them or not, he was in them, meddling and muddling my thoughts. That he could do this so apparently effortlessly, caused me to grudgingly respect him and, to loathe him. But he was not the only person who could juggle dreams.

Since I couldn’t consciously remember Jeff, I tried to recover the memory magickally. A sigil did the trick. After six nights of mumbling a meaningless phrase, I dreamt ‘true’ of that which I desired. I dreamt of Jeff. I returned, as an observer to Ruffle Bar’s birthday party. It was shot in slow-motion and sepia, with no sound. I saw me thread my way across the conversation-scarred living room, only to be accosted by a frayed-at-the-edges hippie; Jeff. Suddenly, I spotted the movement and mentally ‘paused’ my dream VCR. I ran it back again, and saw Jeff pushing a piece of crumpled paper into my pocket. Success!

So now I had another clue. Another search commenced; this time through my clothes. Finally I tracked down the garment in question – a black denim jacket, as yet un­laundered. Inside one of the top pockets, I found a crumpled, knot of paper. This turned out to be a page from an address book. A hastily-scribbled note read ‘Jeff Kirby, 221 Brudenell Terr, L6.’ Jeff’s address.

This gave me a few options. I could go and confront him directly; I could try and get some of the more menacing squatters that I knew to break his arms, or … I could try and counter­attack. The only question was, how? I knew that people like Crowley had fought magickal battles with legions of demons, but I had no idea about how this could be done. If I tried anything simple, Jeff would probably wipe the floor with me. Yet I had to do something decisive before his spell gnawed away my resolve to resist. I had to do the unexpected. But first, I needed to distract him. This proved to be simple. I sought out someone who knew someone else who lived in the same flats as Jeff, and inquired of them if “that weird hippie” worked or not. It turned out that he didn’t. Presumably, I thought, he spends all his time doing weird things to people like me. Well, if he wants to mess with my head, I’ll mess with his.

In the next week, Jeff had visit from the fraudulent claims squad, Drugs squad, had his dole cut off, and a whole string of people ringing his doorbell in the small hours. Small victories, but they all add up. My piece de la resistance was talking a friend into sneaking into into the house where Jeff had a flat late one night, and tying a piece of rope between his door handle & the stairwell.

Two nights after this, Jeff slid sideways into my dreams again. I’d been practising, and was learning to guard my back, so to speak. As he appeared, I snapped out of being passive dreamer into being an active participant. Pointing a crystal-tipped wand at him, I tried to zap him with the destructive power of Khamael. It worked, but he didn’t have the decency to stay zapped.
“Not bad work at all. You’ve covered your back and you’re learning about weaponry. Also, if you want to survive, you’ll have to occasionally resort to dirty tricks. Such a pity that it’s all in vain.”
With that, the dream cracked, I jerked awake. The wand that I had so carefully sanded down, lettered, and consecrated, had split
down the middle. My first thought was to blame it on its proximity to the gas cooker, but the coincidence was too much to brush away. Things were getting serious.

I was fighting to live, knowing with a sick certainty that if I didn’t, then I would either die, or end up in some semblance of living which was possibly worse. Until now, I had approached magick as though it was a psychological head-game. I’d had some interesting buzzes from meditation, and enjoyed pathworkings & drumming sessions with some other people at the solstices, but never had someone managed to demonstrate to me, so effectively, that magick was real enough to threaten my continued existence. Nothing I’d read or heard had prepared me for this, and so I was running on ingenuity and intuition. Know what? At times, I was enjoying it.

***

‘Got you, you bastard!’ I thought, lowering a borrowed camera. A long-range shot of Jeff entering his front door. A photograph and a sample of his handwriting – not much to go on, but perhaps enough. I started to grasp the situation, and wonder how I could turn it to my advantage. Jeff had obviously established a magickal link with me – a corridor through which he could reach into my mind. Maybe, I wondered, I could use that corridor as well. Hunted becoming the hunter, ‘n’ all that. So I read Kipling’s The Jungle Book, watched a video of The Company of Wolves, and saw in my daydreams, the figure of Jeff running, running through the streets of Leeds, panic-stricken and pursued by wolves. At first this was perhaps nothing more than a morale­booster. It kept Jeff’s spell from slithering back inside my head. I played with more sigils, and then I dreamt of werewolf time. The dreams came through stronger, and during the day, dogs began to howl when I passed them. There was a sense of something coming closer. What it was, I didn’t know, but whatever lay in store, I was going to meet it face to face. On two legs or more.

Gradually, I grew stronger. I knew that Jeff had tried to box me into a limited space and erode my sense of selfhood. I knew what the boundaries were. I broke them, one by one. I spent more time in town and out of town. I visited friends and invited people to come round. I flirted outrageously with the most unlikely people, and generally acted the fool. My self-important arrogance dropped away. In short, I learnt humility, and eventually, humanity. I began to wonder how much of Jeff’s spell was already lodged inside my head, waiting for a chance to spring out. Had he bound me using a web of lies that I had, for the most part, woven about myself? I looked around the flat – it was untidy, but not irretrievably so. I hadn’t done my daily meditation yet, but there was still time to fit it in. In short, I wasn’t yet perfect, but at least I was making an effort, and knowing that I was going somewhere.

This reviere was interrupted by a banging on my window. I walked upstairs and opened the main door. And stood staring. It was Jeff. Thoughts flickered wildly for a moment – a curse, a sarcastic put-down, a blast of psychic energy. I could even hurl myself at him and he’d fall backwards down the steps….

“Fancy coming out for a drink, then?” He smiled and held out both hands in a gesture of peace.
I looked at him, with his long hair, straggly beard and faded flared jeans. Suddenly he didn’t look fearsome any more. ‘Christ’, I thought, ‘I’ve been afraid of someone who wears flares!’ Then:
“Okay, why not?”
And off we went. Over the second pint he said “Consider yourself initiated.”
“Into what?” I said, suddenly suspicious again.
“Into yourself” he replied. “You needed to be goaded towards death so that you would begin to pay attention to life. You played at magick and you played at life. I only took away that which you hadn’t learnt to appreciate and which you thought you could get by without. That’s all.”
“So what happens now?”
“That’s up to you really. We’ll talk. I can’t teach you, but we can learn from each other. Come around some time.”

I did. He could sit for hours spinning tales of dreams, dope and dakini dancers. He could tell you the quality of an acid tab just by placing it on his fingertip. Like I said at the beginning, he drew secrets about himself. He’d done the seeker-of-wisdom trip to death. It gave him a kind of power, and he fed it further with other people’s credulity. He knew how to make the right moves to the right person at the right time. Not quite knowing how things would come out, but knowing that it was neccesary. He showed me death with one hand and gave me life with the other. Through knowing Jeff I came to know a whole lot more people. But I’ll never forget the first person he introduced me to – myself.

“What concerns Pan is fit to be sung before all mankind. Indeed his doings are most honourable.”
Lord Dunsany Alexander & Three Small Plays 1925

I ‘discovered’ the writings of Lord Dunsany in my early twenties, initially through reading HP Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature and, almost at the same time, coming across a collection of Sidney Sime’s illustrations of Dunsany’s fiction. Together, they put the hook in me, and after devouring The King of Elfland’s Daughter I was from that point on, always on the lookout for collections of his short stories. Back in 2000, I came across the anthology Time and the Gods from the Gollancz “Fantasy Masterworks” series and its never been far from my bedside since. One of my all-time favourite of Dunsany’s tales is The Beggars (online here)with its theme of finding the sacred and the mysterious within the outward signs of London’s industrial landscape:

And all the while the ugly smoke went upwards, the smoke that has stifled Romance and blackened the birds. This, I thought, they can neither praise nor bless. And when they saw it they raised their hands towards it, towards the thousand chimneys, saying, “Behold the smoke. The old coal-forests that have lain so long in the dark, and so long still, are dancing now and going back to the sun. Forget not Earth, O our brother, and we wish thee joy of the sun.”

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957) – the 18th Baron Dunsany was a man of many talents – poet, novelist, playwright (he has the distinction of having five plays running simultaneously); traveller (across Europe, Africa and India) and soldier (he served in the Boer War, was at the War Office in WWI and in the Home Guard in WWII). He ran for parliament (unsuccessfully) and had a reputation as one of the finest chess players of his day. His first major work of fantasy was The Gods of Pegana, published in 1905 to widespread critical acclaim. Over the next fourteen years he produced classics such as Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), The Book of Wonder (1912) and The Last Book of Wonder (1916). By 1916, according to S.T. Joshi (1995), Dunsany was one of the most critically acclaimed authors in Britain – and the United States (he made his first literary tour of the US in 1919). In 1909, his first play The Glittering Gate (the writing of which was prompted by Yeats) was performed at the Abbey Theatre. It was followed by King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior and The Gods of the Mountain, both in 1911.

Pan appears in three of the vignettes in Dunsany’s Fifty-One Tales (1915). Both “The Death of Pan” and “The Tomb of Pan” are concerned with pointing out that reports of Pan’s “death” are premature, whilst in “The Prayer of the Flowers” the flowers, lamenting the loss of the woods under the spread of “cancrous cities” are comforted by Pan – “Be patient a little, these things are not for long.” The encroachment of industrialisation over the natural (and fantastical) world – and the idea that nature looks forwards to the demise of industrial man – is a recurrent theme throughout Dunsany’s work. In “How Ali Came To The Black Country” this sense of conflict between industrial modernity and the retreat of the fantastical is made present: “Now it is clear,” said Ali, “that the chief devil that vexes England and has done all this harm, who herds men into cities and will not let them rest, is even the devil Steam.” The constraint of “devil Steam” will bring a return to romance: “And Ali said: “When we have cast this devil into the sea there will come back again the woods and ferns and all the beautiful things that the world hath, the little leaping hares shall be seen at play, there shall be music on the hills again, and at twilight ease and quiet and after the twilight stars.” Similarly, in “A Narrow Escape” the magician, about to curse London says: “”Let them all perish,” he said, “and London pass away, tram lines and bricks and pavement, the usurpers too long of the fields, let them all pass away and the wild hares come back, blackberry and briar-rose.”

The Blessing of Pan (1927) has quite a different style to Dunsany’s earlier work. There is no sign of the archaic, quasi-biblical style that Lovecraft refers to as “crystalline singing prose” familiar from works such as Time and the Gods. Gone is the sense of the blurring of the everyday with the fantastical – I’m thinking here of the story of The Bird of The Difficult Eye wherein the master thief Neepy Thang reaches fairyland via “the purple ticket at Victoria Station”. Although The Blessing of Pan is at its heart, concerned with the conflict between industrial modernity and the “romance” of nature, its unfolding throughout the novel is not overt – there is a quiet inevitability in Pan’s spreading influence over the community.

The Blessing of Pan is told from the perspective of Elderick Anwrel, the mild-mannered reverend of the community of Wolding. Anwrel is increasingly disturbed by a haunting, compelling tune played by a boy, Tommy Duffin, who has fashioned a pipe made from reeds. The tune, as the story unfolds, exercises an unwholesome influence on the population of Wolding – first the young women, then the young men, and then the other inhabitants – even Anwrel’s wife, are compelled to dance to the tune of the pipes on nearby Wold Hill, atop which is a megalithic site – the “Old Stones of Wolding”. Finally, Anwrel himself joins the people in their revelry, performing a pagan sacrifice. Anwrel is portrayed sympathetically – he is neither a bigot or a fool, but very much a part of the local community, and who is tormented over what is happening to his flock. Yet although Anwrel feels increasingly estranged from his community, this is not reciprocal – rather, the people of Wolding, if anything, are sorry for his lack of understanding. Towards the end of the novel, for example, he has an exchange with his wife:

“Augusta,” he said. No other words came to say to her.
“I stayed till you finished,” she said.
He looked at her and did not speak; so she spoke instead.
“I thought…” she began.
“What did you think?” he said at last.
“I thought you would have come too,” she said.
“I?” he asked.
“We all thought so,” she answered.
Was everyone and everything driving him to the old stones beyond Wold Hill? He remained silent.
“You wouldn’t come?” she asked.
“Never,” he said.
“It’s almost a pity,” she said.
“A pity!” exclaimed Anwrel.
“Only,” she said, “because they were thinking of sacrificing a bull. And you would have done it so well.”

Perhaps Anwrel’s flaw is that if anything, he places too much trust to others to resolve the problem of what is happening in Wolding – he places a touching (although entirely misplaced) faith in the worldliness of his superior, the Bishop; in the presumed Classical learning of The Reverend Hetley (who is entirely deaf to the music of the pipes) and the power of Saint Ethelbruda, who is credited with driving the last pagan out of England, and whose reputed resting-place he visits. The only person who seems to understand, is Perkin, a “crazed wanderer” although Perkin does not offer the kind of support which Anwrel desires. Perkin’s peculiar advice to Anwrel is “Keep your illusions, man; keep your illusions”. Perkin, through knowing “too much” has lost his illusions, and when Anwrel tells Perkin that it is Pan who is troubling him, he tells Anwrel that his illusions – if they are strong enough – will keep Pan out. But when Anwrel poses the question “But what if they’re weaker than he?” Perkin says: “…Pan was always friendly to Man. That’s you and me you know. We may have changed a lot this last two thousand years; but that’s you and me still. Why, I’d let him come nosing in.”

As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly plain that Anwrel knows that his “illusion” is his faith – and for that faith to be effective, it needs to be communal:

“But what shall I do? What shall I do?” cried Anwrel.
“Why, what does one need but illusions?” answered Perkin.
“They’re gone. I’ve lost them,” said the vicar.
“One can’t hold them all alone.” He spread his hands to the emptiness of his room. “I’ve none to help me now.”
“Plenty of friends over there,” said Perkin, pointing to Wold Hill. “Plenty of illusions.”
“But,” gasped Anwrel, “but they’re the enemy’s!”
“They’re yours if you want them,” said Perkin.

Dunsany’s satire is directed towards Anwrel’s superiors in the church. The novel opens with Anwrel pondering how to communicate to his superior his suspicions about the effects of the unearthly music – and who replies that Anwrel should merely take a holiday (he recommends Brighton as “particularly invigorating”). On his return, Anwrel finds that the situation has worsened – and he begins to suspect “what kind of power” in inspiring Tommy Duffin – the power of the God Pan. Later, Anwrel visits the bishop in person to air his worries – but receives a friendly chat about hobbies, whilst the bishop’s assistant reccomends encouraging the village boys to take up cricket. Similarly, the reverend Hetley, who stands in for Anwrel when he takes his vacation, is portrayed as being deaf to both the lure of the pipes and their effects on the community. Although Anwrel turns to Hetley for support – for Hetley is a “Classical Scholar” whom Anwrel hopes can give him advice about Pan – he too can only recommend “cricket” as a way of turning the young men of Wolding towards healthy pursuits.The church is too caught up in its own self-satisfaction and convention to even recognise what is going on in Wolding, let alone make any effective response.

As Pan’s influence grows over the people of Wolding, the daily routines and habits of life break down; a farmer no longer bothers to gather in his hay; the postman no longer brings the mail, and Anwrel’s maid neglects her cleaning duties. In one scene, Anwrel overhears the schoolmistress giving a lesson. It sounds to him as though she is saying “Egg, oh, pan, pan, tone, tone, Iofone….” but she is, Anwrel realises, teaching the children the phrase “ego Pan panton ton lophon Arkadiou basileus” (“I, Pan, the king of all the Arcadian slopes”).

Quite why Pan should select Wolding is never really made explicit. Anwrel has vague suspicions about his predecessor – the mysterious Reverend Arthur Davidson – spreading a malign influence, but he never really investigates this fully – there are vague hints that Davidson could have been an avatar of Pan – or Pan himself. Anwrel wonders why Pan has chosen Wolding for his attention, and Dunsany’s answer is that Wolding, unlike many other English communities, is less touched by the forces of modernity, such as factories and mining.

The novel climaxes on a Sunday, with Anwrel preaching to his parishoners in church. Tommy Duffin enters the churchyard playing his panpipes, and the whole congregation quietly tiptoes out. There is a delicious irony, particularly for a Pagan reader, in Anwrel’s sermon here, as he exhorts his parishoners to recall the “old ways” of their fathers – he doubtless intending to conjure a vision of Wolding’s Christian past – but he forgets, seemingly, that there are of course, older ways than Christianity. That night, Anwrel himself succumbs to the lure of the pipes, and sacrifices a bull at dawn with a paleolithic stone axe. Once more, he rejoins his community, and the people of Wolding, content in their recovery of the “old ways” sink into a quiet retreat from modern life, becoming increasingly self-sufficient – a kind of invisibility, broken only by visits of gypsies and the occasional world-weary wanderer who finds their way to Wolding.

Tommy Duffin’s curious music that lured one away from the present, and that then seemed to wake up old memories that nobody guessed were there, seems to have come at a time when something sleeping within us first guessed that the way by which we were then progressing t’wards the noise of machinery and the clamour of our sellers, amidst which we live today, was a wearying way, and they turned from it. And turning from it they turned away from the folk that were beginning to live as we do (chapter 35)

It’s clear, in The Blessing of Pan that Dunsany is firmly on the side of the return of Pan; but the novel, in its depiction of a conflict between the modern and the pagan, is without antagonism or any sense of overt challenge between the two. Christianity – or at least the mild-mannered Christianity embodied in Anwrel, is far too feeble to put up any kind of resistance to the lure of Pan. The only person who is challenged; who struggles – is Anwrel himself. His superiors in the church are heedless to any sense of “danger” and the people of Wolding only express vague misgivings which are soon lost in the music of the pipes. Anwrel, just before he performs the bull sacrifice at the stones realises this:

A fight, as he looked back now over all these weeks, had been fought by himself alone, a fight utterly vital to the Church, and one such as she had not had to contend in since the very earliest centuries. With any support he would have won. … And what had happened? His own bishop by kindness, by tact and by superior ability had merely avoided a scandal. Upon that alone he had concentrated. Then learning had failed him in Hetley. Then all that was busy and practical, in Porton. Then Heaven and Earth. He knew not which of these last had been the bitterer blow, Heaven, when Ethelbruda had failed him, or Earth, when all the simple folk that he loved had gone out of his church and over the hill to the enemy.

After Pan’s triumph, it seems that there is a tacit agreement that Wolding be left alone – it becomes a place where people don’t go – but not out of some vague, brooding sense of horror or malignity as one finds, say, in a Lovecraft tale, but just the feeling that it is somehow “queer”. We are left with Wolding’s continued existence according to the cyclic changes of season – “ploughing and sowing and harvest all went their round as of old … they seemed to find amongst silent unfoldings and ripenings, that are the great occasions of Nature, enough to replace those more resounding changes that are the triumph of man’s ingenuity, and which we have gained and they lost.”

Sources
Lord Dunsany, Alexander & Three Small Plays (GP Putnam & Sons, 1925)
Lord Dunsany The Blessing of Pan (Wildside Press, 2003)
ST Joshi, Lord Dunsany: master of the Anglo-Irish imagination (Greenwood Press, 1995)
HP Lovecraft Supernatural Horror in Literature

Lord Dunsany websites
Dunsany bibliography
website of the Dunsany family
Works of Lord Dunsany
Review of The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Sidney Sime websites
John Coulthart’s Journal – Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany
Sidney Sime on the Victorian web
Biography of Sidney Sime

“…there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground…”
Bulwer-Lytton, 1871, The Coming Race

The “occult” novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) had a tremendous impact on nineteenth century occult thought. Christopher Knowles & Joseph Michael Linsner (2007) call him, the “Stephen King of his era” whilst Joceyln Godwin (1994) considers his novel Zanoni to be the most important literary influence on Victorian esotericism. It is from Zanoni for example, that occultists borrowed the concept of “the Dweller on the Threshold” – the ordeal of facing the embodiment of fear before the adept can gain admittance to higher spheres.

The theosophist C. Nelson Stewart (Bulwer Lytton as Occultist, 1927) says that:

“If one were asked to name the book which more than any other provided a matrix for the building-up of modern theosophical philosophy in the English language, Zanoni seems the inevitable choice. Indeed, not only does a glance through the earlier literature published by the Theosophical Society never fail to reveal it as an oft-quoted book, but the advertisement pages show it being sold and translated as a kind of text-book.”

Various esoteric groups of the period claimed Bulwer-Lytton as an adept, and some contemporary authors (for example, Greg Bishop, in Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology ) have asserted that Bulwer-Lytton was both a theosophist and a member of the Golden Dawn. According to Christopher McIntosh (1998) Bulwer-Lytton was proposed and voted an Honorary Grand Patron of the Soc. Ros (Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia) in 1871, but this occurred without his knowledge. When he found out about this preferment, Bulwer-Lytton wrote to John Yarker expressing his annoyance, and Yarker sent an apologetic reply. “As far as is known Lytton never attended a meeting of the Soc. Ros.” (see also Godwin, 1994, p218 for further discussion). Westcott, in his 1916 pamphlet The Rosicrucians, Past and Present, at Home and Abroad states that:

“The late Lord Lytton, the author of “Zanoni” and “The Strange Story” who was in 1871 Grand Patron of our Society, took very great interest in this form of Philosophy, although he never reached the highest degree of knowledge: for public reasons he once made a disavowal of his membership of the Rosicrucians, but he had been admitted as a Frater of the German Rosicrucian College at Frankfurt on the main: that College was closed after 1850.”

For this post, I’m going to focus on Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel The Coming Race in order to highlight the emerging occult discourse which united the scientific advances in thermodynamics, social evolution and occult adeptship with the perfection of the will.

The Coming Race
The Coming Race (available online) explores themes which resonate closely with thermodynamics. The narrator, an independently wealthy American traveler, accidentally finds his way into a subterranean world populated by a race of beings who call themselves the “Vril-ya.” The “Vril-ya” have established a technological utopia, powered by “Vril” – an “all-permeating fluid” which is mastered through the training of the will, and which confers upon them tremendous powers of healing and destruction alike. The Vril-ya are ruled by a benevolent dictator, and their philosophy of society is presented as “no happiness without order, no order without authority, no authority without unity.” The Vril-ya have learned to master the passions that motivate crime or greed, and have a “natural instinct” for obedience. Their women are taller than the men, yet are “the most amiable, conciliatory, and submissive wives.” They are caucasian in appearance, with blue eyes and “hair of a deep golden auburn”.

The Coming Race makes many references to contemporary scientists and theories such as the luminiferous ether, and the heated debate over Darwin’s theories. Faraday is quoted in chapter 7:

“I have long held an opinion,” says that illustrious experimentalist, “almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.”

Vril and the Will
The narrator of The Coming Race, in describing vril mentions magnetism, galvanism, mesmerism, electro-biology and “odic force” as “the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest” – that these forms have “one common origin” and are convertible into one another and mutually dependent. Vril, directed through a vril-staff, can be used to heal, power machines, or for destructive purposes. Bulwer-Lytton explained Vril to his friend John Forster: “I did not mean Vril for mesmerism, but for electricity, developed into uses as yet only dimly guessed, which I hold to be a mere branch current of the one great fluid pervading all nature.”

Bulwer-Lytton’s concept of Vril develops out of a recurrent theme in his earlier works; the notion of the all-prevasive, connecting power of electricity is explored in Zanoni where the eastern sage Mejnour “professed to find a link between all intellectual beings in the existence of a certain all-pervading and invisible fluid resembling electricity, yet distinct from the known operations of that mysterious agency.” Similarly, in A Strange Story (1862) the physician Allen Fenwick performs experiments on inducing electrical currents via the exercise of will.

In a previous post in this series (Polarity and the spirited body – II) I examined some of the links between the capacity for mediumship and the notion of “passivity” (in particular, feminine passivity). In Isis Unveiled Madame Blavaksty makes a crucial distinction between occultism and spiritualism in that: “Mediumship is the opposite of adeptship; the medium is the passive instrument of foreign influences, the adept actively controls himself and all inferior potencies” and “One common vital principle pervades all things, and this is controllable by the perfected human will. The adept can stimulate the movements of the natural forces in plants and animals in a preternatural degree. Such experiments are not obstructions of nature, but quickenings; the conditions of intenser vital action are given. The adept can control the sensations and alter the conditions of the physical and astral bodies of other persons not adepts; he can also govern and employ, as he chooses, the spirits of the elements. He cannot control the immortal spirit of any human being, living or dead, for all such spirits are alike sparks of the Divine Essence, and not subject to any foreign domination.” (my italics) For Blavatsky then, the crucial distinction between spiritualism and “true occultism” is that Occultism is based on the “power” of a trained and perfected human will, awakened, strengthened, the “absolute ruler within his body” as opposed to the “passivity” of spirit mediumship. Again, this theme of developing the will in order to restrain the senses and “purify desires” is one than runs throughout Zanoni. In The Coming Race it is the use of the will which enables the advanced magical technology of the Vril-ya – not only does it have curative and destructive properties and powers all aspects of the Vril-ya’s industrial civilisation, it also enables the transmission of thoughts between individuals, and the rapid ascquisition of knowledge.

As Alex Owen (2004) says, the occultism of the late nineteenth century was “characterised by the will to both know and control the natural world” and that “total self-mastery and an indomitable will are the foremost prerequisities for magical Adeptship” (p6). She notes the relationship between the notion of self-mastery and the “bourgeois individualism” associated with the nineteenth century and points out that in this period, “occultism emerged at a time of growing uneasiness over what many perceived as the loss of personal integrity and authority in the face of an homogenizing mass society.” I would say that the occult concern with the will reflected wider cultural tropes concerning will-power, self-discipline, and correct behaviour. The Theosophical Society (and other esoteric movements in the nineteenth century) emerged during a period of social upheaval which saw the rise of various “social purity” movements (and there was a good deal of cross-over in membership of, for example, the Theosophical Society and various social purity campaigns in both the UK and USA). These movements stressed the importance of self-governance and moral regulation, often phrased in terms of developing “good character” which entailed practices of self-restraint and conformance to public virtues. “Character” was the visible, outward marker of inner, moral qualities, and the exercise of will-power in achieving self-control was central to this project. Hence social progress was rooted, ultimately, in the development of moral character. The idealisation of these virtues can be seen in theosophical accounts of the conditions for an aspiring occult “chela” – which stress the absolute necessity for “mental and physical purity” as well as courage, and a “calm indifference” to the vagaries of the world. Adepts were similarly idealised as being entirely selfless, and incapable, due to their evolved nature, of any kind of unchaste or immoral action (a belief which was severely strained through the successive scandals erupting around Charles Leadbeater from 1912 onwards). I think its clear from Blavatsky’s writing that for her, at least, occultism and morality were inextricably intertwined (see Tantra’s Metahistory III: The Left-hand Path – II for further discussion of Blavatsky’s view of Occultism & morality). An editorial in Lucifer (1889) reporting on the activities of one Hiram E. Butler (whose work had been favourably reviewed the year before) and his Boston-based “Esoteric Society” makes the following assertions: “The practice of mesmerism has always been discountenanced by the Theosophists, yet the literature on the subject has been utilized by Butler and his confederates, who have been teaching a bastard sort of mesmerism to their dupes, calling it ‘spiritual development’. The mesmeric force is simply sex-magnetism. In this simple statement is the secret of spiritualistic ‘mediumship’ as well as ‘mesmerism’ and ‘black magic’. It is also the secret of the invariable fall into vice and sexual degradation of fools who dabble in such things, whether they call it ‘mediumship,’ ‘mesmerism,’ ‘mental healing.’ or what not. … The whole thing is very, very vile, and the less people have to do with those subjects in that way the better for them. True occultism has nothing to do with the filfthy subject. … The ‘Esotericism’ of these specimens of Boston culture is identical with the voodooism of the negroes. It is called tantrika in India and is filfthy in the extreme.”

It might seem that I am straying somewhat from the focus of this series – the representations of gender polarity in relation to various “forces” and their wider cultural contexts – but I think that examining the emerging emphasis on the will in nineteenth-century occultism, together with notions of individual/social progress and evolution forms an important “bridge” to later occult theories of the body as an ecology of manageable forces – subject to laws and capable of being directed via correct “training” and discipline. Although initially, such “mastery of forces” is seen as a facility only available to occult adepts, the idea that one can manage and control the body’s energies, like other “occult powers” (such as astral projection) are subject to increasing democratisation throughout the twentieth century.

The Coming Race – with its themes of utopianism, racial superiority, enlightened vegetarianism and technological prowess was an alluring vision of the future, and ran to five editions in the first year of its publication. Like Zanoni, it too was highly influential on nineteenth century occultism – and in particular on Madame Blavatsky and other prominent Theosophists. Blavatsky writes: “The name vril may be fiction [but] the force itself is doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.” (quoted from Barkun, 2003) Similarly, in Isis Unveiled she names Vril as but one name amongst “an infinite confusion of names to express one and the same thing” – equating Vril to different forms of “sacred fire” as well as “the Akasa of the Hindu adepts; the Astral light of Eliphas Levi; the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the od of Reichenbach …. galvanism; and finally electricity” (1,125, 128-129). She also asserts (in The Secret Doctrine that Bulwer-Lytton derived the idea of Vril from ancient Indian writings dealing with “those terrible engines of destruction known to the Mahabharatan Aryans.” SB Liljegren’s monograph (1955) shows how much of a debt Madame Blavatsky’s writing owes to Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, particularly The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Zanoni.

Unsurprisingly, Vril is a popular topic circulating throughout theosophical writing from the late nineteenth century onwards, particularly when authors wished to make a link between occult forces and scientific discoveries – one example being that Bulwer-Lytton’s concept of Vril is a “foretelling” of the discovery of radium, or of atomic energy. As a trope, it allows the linkage between ancient “occult secrets” and contemporary scientific discovery, with the promise that in the future, humanity will have evolved enough (both morally and spiritually) to understand and utilise such forces wisely. Theosophists tended to be optimistic (no less than contemporary occultists) that orthodox science was on the brink of validating their beliefs and theories. The concept of Vril itself (guaranteed one kind of immortality by John L. Johnston’s “liquid life” beef extract – Bovril from 1886) was frequently claimed by occultists to have originated in “ancient writings” (a claim started by Madame Blavatsky) and often equated with akasa (often translated as a variant of “astral force”) particularly because the manipulation of this “force” was restricted to adepts. For example, W.J Colville, in Studies in Theosophy: Historical and Practical says:

“This subtle, all-pervading force is amenable to the control of a high order of intelligence only, and while universally present in nature, cannot be manipulated and utilized except by persons in whom the lower principle (homo) is subservient to the higher principle (vir.)”

Imagining utopia?
The idea of an advanced race preparing to replace humanity – the Vril-ya (descended not from apes, but from frogs) – also neatly dovetailed into theosophical theories of race and racial progression – which also reflected wider cultural concerns such as the enthusiasm for eugenics, education and moral improvement. Theosophist theories of racial development and progress were complex, and some Theosophists, such as Susan E Gay (see this post for related discussion) evisaged a future race that would reproduce via parthenogenesis. In The Coming Race, the narrator explains that the letter V “nearly always denotes excellence or power” and that “vril” equates to civilisation and the Vril-ya, “the civilised nations” as vril is the basis of their society and power (it has also been suggested that “vril” is a contraction of ‘virility’). This language was related to Indo-Germanic or Aryan racial theories (Bulwer-Lytton dedicated The Coming Race to Max Muller). Some scholars have suggested that Blavatsky saw in the Vril-ya a confirmation of her notion of “ascended masters”.

Anne Besant made a great deal of use of the theme The Coming Race in her writings. In one lecture (later published in 1917) entitled “The Coming Race” she makes an exhaustive analysis of racial types and features – including the notion that different races have different nervous systems: “If a Chinaman or a Japanese is wounded in battle, he has much more chance of recovery than one of the Aryan Race. The Red Indian, again, of America, who is also a fourth Race Man, will bear a wound that would kill any of you by shock, not by bleeding but by nervous shock, and he will recover from a wound which would kill a fifth Race man.” (see previous post). She proposes that the “Coming Race” will be typified by compassion, brotherhood and wisdom, and is particularly emerging in America, Australia, and New Zealand. Signs of “The Coming Race” include the birth of children with a “nervous system so delicately poised that it is always in danger of jar and injury.” She laments the conditions of cities such as London, but rather than wanting to “abolish” them says that “For, mind, that which is destructive to a delicate nervous system is the necessary stimulus for the evolution of a nervous system of lower and coarser type.” For those of a finer nervous organisation – and their children – she says the “best policy is to leave London for the country, and surround themselves and the children of the Coming Race with sweeter and better environments.” There is much advice in this essay how to prepare oneself for the advent of “the Coming Race” – by avoiding meat, alcohol, practising meditation and cultivating selflessness – ” the training of the life into expressions along higher lines.”

Sources
Michael Barkun A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California Press, 2003)
Annie Besant, The Coming Race (Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, 1917)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, David Seed (editor) The Coming Race (Wesleyan University Press, 2005)
Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Univ. Michigan Press, 2001)
Jox Dixon Divine feminine: theosophy and feminism in England (John Hopkins University Press, 2003)
Joceyln Godwin The Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY, 1994)
Christopher Knowles, Joseph Michael Linsner Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heros (Weiser Red Wheel, 2007)
SB Liljegren, Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels and Isis Unveiled (Harvard University Press, 1955)
Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (Samuel Weiser, 1998)
Leslie George Mitchell Bulwer Lytton: the rise and fall of a Victorian man of letters (Hambledon Continuum, 2003)
Alex Owen The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Betsy van Schlun. Science and the Imagination: Mesmerism, Media and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature (Galda+Wilch Verlag, 2007)

Online sources
Wikipedia entry Vril (accessed 11/05/2011)
Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer-Lytton: A Brief Biography
Image of Bulwer-Lytton from www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mclenan/41.html (scanned by Philip V Allingham)

“What you’ve done can’t be helped;
the day is almost over.
On a jeweled island
Siva sits in Siva’s house.
Contemplate Her always.
Prasad says,
Durga’s ambrosial name liberates.
Repeat it without ceasing;
drench your tongue in nectar.”
Ramprasad Sen (trans. Rachel Fell McDermott)

Reciting the “garland of names” of a deity (namastotra) has been a core part of my tantra practice for the last thirty-odd years, but until now, I’ve never tried to write about it. If I’m doing solo puja, (or sometimes, just walking around) I usually do mental or quiet recitation, but for group puja, I think doing a call-and-response works very well – where one person recites an epithet and all others present recite it back. This is fun, particularly if a verbal slip or the occasional humourous epithet elicits laughter. As one develops one’s own intimate relationship and understanding of a deva, one can of course, introduce epithets of one’s own (“salutations to the goddess who is fond of shopping”) but I admit I have a fondness (and a deep respect) for the traditional epithets from texts such as the Lalitasahasramana or the 108 Salutations to Ganesa.

If you read the 108 Salutations to Ganesa you’ll see that some of them recall various attributes associated with Ganesa (for example, “Salutations to him with ears like winnowing fans”) whilst some focus on the boons bestowed upon the devotee (“Salutations to the bestower of fulfilment”) and others relate to His mythology (“Salutations to the one with a single tusk” recalls the Puranic tales which explain why Ganapati only has a single tusk) or point towards Ganesa’s transcendent (limitless) form (“Salutations to the manifestation of the unmanifest”). Any of these epithets can be extended through contemplation on their meaning, and some namastotras have extensive commentaries interpreting and discussing them. (Sometimes, in group puja, as a prelude to the recitation of epithets, we like to relax a bit and relate some of the puranic tales which relate to the goddess or god who we are peforming puja for, which again helps bring some of the associations to the fore.)

Stotra -from the Sanskrit root stu – “to praise, extol, celebrate” is of course an ancient form of Indian literary genre, and the uttering of epithets praising a deities’ attributes, deeds and qualities, as well as requesting boons can be found in Vedic stotras, as well as in Epics such as the Mahabharata. From the period of the Vedas, it is speech which is considered to be the primary creative power – when the gods utter the names of things, they come into existence. As Jan Gonda notes: “Sacred words or words uttered in a ritual context as well as the names of the deities that represent them are not empty things; they have life and a highly characteristic power of their own, a decisive power, and the one who utters such words, or the divine name, sets power in motion.” (Pusan and Sarasvati, p34). From the Vedas onwards, there is a strong theme that reciting the name(s) of a deity will bring the devotee under that deity’s protection

The practice of namastotra is generally considered to be efficacious for anyone who desires to enter into a close relationship with a particular deity – reciting the epithets, attributes and deeds associated with that deity allows the contemplation of the diverse and multitudinous facets of that deity, and encourages inter-identification between oneself and the goddess or god – recalling the tantric idea that “to worship a deity, one must become a deity.” So in a sense, when one is reciting the epithets of a particular devata in puja, one is also addressing them to oneself. In tantric texts, the recitation of the garland of names is generally considered to be pleasing to the deity they are addressed to (and some texts give epithets that various goddesses or gods are particularly pleased by), and as a form of practice, to bring both material benefits via the favour of the deities being so addressed, the attainment of siddhi and liberation. For example, the Vaikrtika-Rahasya, (a section of the Devi-Mahatmya) after offering instructions for uttering the Saptasati-stotra of the Goddess, says that “A man should please the Goddess daily with this stotra; [such a] man wins dharma, artha, kama and moksa.” It’s hardly surprising that one of the siddhis frequently mentioned in tantric texts is that of eloquent speech! Stotras are also, to an extent, similar to mantras, insofar as they can be used to empower substances (such as ash) for use in healing or other magical acts. Generally, the greater the act, the more repititions are recommended by various texts.

A great deal has been written about speech in relation to tantra – I don’t want to go into such complexities at the moment, but a couple of good books for anyone interested are Andre Padoxu’s Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras (SUNY, 1990) and Guy L. Beck’s Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Univeristy of South Carolina, 1993).

Elisabeth Anne Bernard, in her monograph Chinnamasta: The Aweful Buddhist and Hindu Tantric Goddess (Motilal, 2010) makes an interesting link between the recitation of names (in this instance, Chinnamasta) and Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic theory of Rasa (some introductory notes on Rasa). Drawing on Abhinavagupta’s statement that a spectator to a play, in contemplating an actor’s depiction of a particular sentiment, becomes absorbed by it, she writes:

“…a sensitive reader can be affected by the repetitions of the names by sympathetically responding to her myriad manifestations, her paradoxes, her exploits, her limitless energy to protect, to help, to be kind, etc. One can become overwhelmed, forget oneself and experience the bliss of Chinnamasta. By reciting Chinnamasta’s names one can experience the bliss of Chinnamasta and unconsciously identify with Chinnamasta or experience her essence.”(p57)

She then goes on to discuss which of the nine rasas are dominant within the namastotra of Chinnamasta’s 108 names. However, interesting though that is in itself, I feel that Bernard’s comment about the (speaker) forgetting oneself through being overwhelmed with the myriad images and associations provoked through recitation is definitely something I have experienced in the performance of puja – sometimes to the point that it is sometimes difficult to continue, through the storm of associations and emotions evoked through chanting the names of the goddess. In a recent Kali Puja, incorporating the worship of ten Mahavidyas, I became so disorientated that I apparently performed two installations of Baghlamukhi into the Yantra! It has taken me a long time to appreciate how, just the simple recitation of a deities’ epithets – their immanent presence through the myriad forms of the world can propel me towards the direct experience of their transcendental vastness – and back again.
The continual inter-identification made (in this instance through repetitive speech acts – where the very act of speaking itself involves an inter-identification with the deity) between particular aspects or instances of the deity and one’s self as well as other constituent world-elements – and by extension, the deity-world as a totality via a seemingly endless web of homologies; can be thought of as a kind of possession, albeit a different form of possession than that which occurrs when one seeks to inter-identify with a particular instantiation (“persona” perhaps) of a deity. I’ll come back to this complex issue at some later date, but I thought I’d just introduce it here. (see mantra-bodies for some related discussion on speaking mantras).

Recitation can be done anywhere, and requires nothing more than a good memory, the willingness to extemporise when required, and occasionally, the fortitude to struggle through the feeling that the top of one’s head is about to unscrew!

First up is The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India edited by John Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulf. The edition on my bookshelf is from Motilal (1995) – a 400-odd page hardback, with four colour plates (it was first published back in 1982, from Berkeley). The book is divided into two main sections. The first half of Divine Consort provides a multidimensional analysis of Radha, the consort (or mistress) of Krishna, ranging from early references to goddesses within Krishna-oriented religosity, Radha-Krishna as divine duality in Jayadeva’s Gita-govinda; examination of Radha in Puranic texts, plays; through to representations of Radha in modern Hindi poetry. These essays shed much light on Radha and her relationality to Krishna, showing for example, that she is much more than a subordinate consort (see in particular Donna Wulff’s essay on Radha in relation to the 16th century plays of Rupa Gosvami and modern kirtan performances). C. Mackenzie Brown for example, examines the emerging theology of Radha in the Puranas, noting the influences of both Samkhya and Sakta theology, whilst Shrivatsa Goswami reflects on views of Radha from the perspective of the Caitanya Sampradaya and the aesthetic play of Rasa.

The second section of the collection features essays on a diverse range of Indian Goddesses – some of which are said to be “consorts” – others, considered to be “independent”. Highlights (for me) are Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s considerations of the power-plays within Siva and Parvati’s marriage, Thomas Coburn’s introduction to the Devi-mahatmya, Diana Eck’s examination of the Ganga as river/goddess; Edward Dimock’s “A Theology of the Repulsive: The Myth of the Goddess Sitala” (see this post for some related discussion) and Vasudha Narayanan’s introduction to the goddess Sri. There are also contributions from well-known scholars such as David Kinsley (Kali) A. K Ramujan (women saints) and Frederique Marglin (“Types of Sexual Union and their Implicit Meanings”).

The Divine Consort is an excellent anthology of essays. If there’s one central theme here, its the emphasis on the goddesses in relation – to other deities or to devotees – and its expression through the love-play of the goddess’ power. Something I’ve occasionally found in pagan or occult texts which mention Indian deities is that whilst there’s a strong focus on Siva or Kali, and much writing on either the (supposedly) “antinomean/transgressive” elements of Saivite tantra or goddess-focused Sakta tantra, the Vaisnava-Krishna-Radha oriented material, by contrast does not seem to be so “popular”. I do find this rather strange, as its in the Vaisnava or Krishna texts, poems and plays that one can find some of the most extensive theological expressions and considerations of the power of love, longing and erotic mutuality and union. For an introductory glimpse into the rich love-play of Radha, as well as a wealth of fascinating essays on the diverse aspects of goddess traditions and praxis in India, The Divine Consort is a good place to start. There’s a new version of this book out now, titled Devi: Goddesses of India (Univ. California Press, 1996) – however, only two of the essays from the edition I’ve reviewed here – the contributions of Diana Eck and the late David Kinsley are unchanged. Thomas Coburn, Donna Wulff and Vasudha Narayanan’s essays have been re-written, and there are seven new essays. The focus of this new edition has shifted somewhat too – whereas the contributors to The Divine Consort are mostly working out of textual analysis, this new edition is more oriented towards ethnographic accounts of lived practice.

David Kinsley surely needs no introduction – he was a major figure in the academic study of Indian goddesses, and a book published last year by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Sacred Geography of Goddesses in South Asia: Essays in memory of David Kinsley) hailed him as “the father of goddess studies” and many contemporary scholars have been deeply influenced by his work. I briefly mentioned his Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas in the Kali Group Books Review. This time around, its Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (University of California Press 1988, p/bk, 281pp) – also available for the Kindle or Adobe Digital Editions. This book, first published in 1986, is widely considered to be a “classic” work on Hindu Goddesses. The first chapter provides an overview of goddesses in Vedic literature, then there are chapters focusing on the more well-known Indian goddesses: Sri-Laksmi, Parvati, Sarasvati, Sita, Radha, Durga, Kali, and the Mahadevi. Kinsley also examines groups of goddesses – the Matrkas and the Mahavidyas. The final two chapters examine, respectively, the Goddesses and their relation to Sacred Geography, and “local” or Village Goddesses. There is also an appendix dealing with the Indus Valley Civilisation and the problems of extrapolating too widely about evidence for goddess worship from the little we know about it. The first chapter is a useful start for anyone interested in looking into the earliest textual evidence for goddesses in India, examining goddesses such as Vac, Ratri or Nirrti. The chapters on Sr-Laksmi, Durga, Kali, Parvati, etc., focus on textual and iconographic representations. For each goddess, Kinsley examines the development of textual sources, the progression of each goddesses’ mythologies, and examines festivals, and how each goddess relates to wider cultural values and expressions. Kinsley was one of the first scholars to examine in depth the relationship between goddesses and the land, and whilst its easy to take this kind of material for granted nowadays, its not hard to see how ground-breaking his work was in the late 1980s. In Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition he eloquently expresses the diversity and richness of Indian goddess traditions in a way that few others have matched. Its an excellent work, and one for numerous re-readings.

Finally, Lynn Foulston and Stuart Abbott’s Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices (Sussex Academic Press, 2009, p/bk, 16 colour images) manages to pack a great deal into its 292 pages. The first chapter provides an introduction to the theological concepts of Sakti, maya and prakrti – and provides an introductory look at “essentially benign” goddesses such as Sri-Lakmsi and Sarasvati – and “essentially fierce” goddesses such as Durga and Kali. Next, Foulston & Abbott review textual sources – beginning with the Vedas, and moving through to the Puranas, with particular focus on texts such as the Devi-mahatmya. Chapter 3 focuses on key themes in goddess mythology, such as the descent of Ganga and the events around the destruction of Daksa’s sacrifice (which I’ve been exploring in the “Sakti bodies” series). They also explore the relationship between local and localised pan-Indian goddesses. Chapter 4, in turn, examines Tantric goddesses – in particular groups such as the Yoginis, the Seven Mothers, and the Ten Mahavidyas, and also a brief introduction to Sri Vidya. The second part of Hindu Goddesses – “Practices” deals with issues relating to goddess worship, festivals, and pilgrimages; providing an introductory overview of major festival pujas to goddesses such as Durga and Kali; goddess temples and Sakti pithas; localised forms of goddesses such as Kamakhya and Minaksi; and looks at the diverse forms of practice, from devotional and tantric rituals to temple and home worship. The final chapter examines the relationship between “Mother India” and Hindu nationalism, and looks at some relatively “new” forms of the goddess such as Santosi Ma, AIDS-amma (see this post for some discussion of AIDS-amma) and Manushi Swachha Narayani – the broom goddess.

Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices has a much stronger emphasis than the previous two books on ethnographic accounts of goddess practice, and, whilst textual sources are not ignored, Foulston & Abbottt also give much insight into material culture and the relationship between goddess theologies and everyday life in contemporary India. If you’re after an introductory book on Hindu goddesses in all their diversity and glory, I’d recommend Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices highly.

“O twice borns! wherever the pair of feet and the other parts of the dead body of Sati had fallen, Mahadeva being attracted and out of deep attachment to Her stayed Himself, in all those places, assuming the shape of a linga.”
Kalika Purana 18:46

In the previous post in this series I briefly examined an element of a long narrative which expounds the relationship between the goddess and Siva. This narrative, known as the Daksha-Jyagya has many different versions, and is thought to have its earliest form in the Mahabharata. This time, I’m going to begin with that part of the narrative which concerns events after the Goddess attends Daksa’s sacrifice. Sati, in protest against the insult against Siva, and in many versions of the narrative hurls herself into the sacrificial fire and is burned to death. The (10th century) Kalika Purana however, has the Goddess “leaving the world” by her own yogic powers (yogagnina):

“The Daughter of Daksa having given her serious thought over the matter and remembering the terrible deeds of Daksa once again flew into a rage.
Then Sati, with eyes burning red in anger by adopting a posture of yoga closed all the nine doors in her body and made an indistinquished sound (sphota).
By that sound her spirit went out from her body by breaking the tenth door.
Then the gods in the heaven having seen her (Sati) dead, with eyes full of tears, made the loud exclamation of ha ha in sorrow.”
Kalika Purana 16. 47-50 (quoted in Foulston, 2004, p84)

Siva, mad with grief at the death of the goddess, carries the body of Sati off on his shoulder, and wanders around the world, stamping his feet and causing earthquakes. In some versions, the gods ask Vishnu to intervene, and Vishnu uses his discus to cut Sati’s body into pieces. In another version of the narrative, Brahma, Vishnu and Sani (Saturn) enter the corpse of the Goddess by means of yoga, and dismember it bit by bit. This latter element of the narrative, according to Sircar (2004) is a later addition to the main narrative, in texts such as the Devibhagavata and the Kalika Purana to explain the origin of the sakti-pithas.

The narrative of the dismemberment of the Goddess bears a similarity to earlier cosmogenic accounts of creations such as the Purusa-Sukta found in the Rg Veda (translation). The Purusa-Sukta expresses the simultaneity of unity in diversity (transcendence and immanence) found in the later Mahadevi narratives in the figure of the Cosmic Person who is sacrificially dismembered and gives rise to the world, the planets, all beings (both mortal and immortal) the seasons, all knowledge – and the social order – all sharing the same essence and interrelated.

Sakti-pithas: seats of the Goddess
Whatever the version of the narrative, the places where the parts of Sati’s body fall become pithas – (“seats” or “benches”) places of power where particular instantiations of the goddess are worshipped, sometimes accompanied by a form of Bhairava-Siva. There are various listings of Sakti-pithas, ranging from 4 to 108, and equally, a wide variation as to which part of Sati fell in which place. The circa-eighth century Buddhist Hevajra Tantra for example, locates four Sakti-Pithas: Jalandhara, Uddiyana, Kamarupa, and Purnagiri. (There are also similar pilgrimage spots for parts of Siva or Krisna). Over time, the four mathapithas (“great seats”) were joined by upapithas (“secondary seats”) although again, there is no agreement as to the exact distinction between a mathapitha and a upapitha. The Mahapithanirupana which Sircar (2004) dates as a late medieval text, gives the location of fourteen Sakta-pithas in West Bengal (see this article for further discussion). Occasionally, lists of pithas which are identified with different body parts of the dismembered Goddess are supplemented with places associated with the ten Mahavidyas. As I have indicated, there is no single authoritive listing of sakti-pithas; there are regional variations where local sites claim ownership of a body part of Sati, and it is possible that the 108 Sakti-pithas given in texts such as the Devibhagavata Purana are an attempt to connect many local goddesses to the Mahadevi. As Surinder Bhardwaj (1983) observes, this lack of an absolute opinion as to what constitutes the “holiest place” in India “underscores the basic differences between Hinduism on the one hand and Christianity, Islam and Judaism on the other.”

The Sakti-Pithas are pilgrimage centres, where the goddess reveals herself. They are sometimes located near bodies of water, and are frequently associated with natural formations which embody the goddess in aniconic form. Jalandhara for example, can be translated as “the place that bears (-dhara) the net or flames (jvala – flames or jala -net) of the goddess. Close to the town, in the Kangra Valley, is a cave wherein natural gas leaks from the rocks. The small flames produced by the gas are worshipped as the manifest form of the goddess Jvalamukhi – “(the goddess) whose mouth is made of flames” – and sometimes related to the fall of the Goddess’ tongue. Four of the Goddess’ toes from her right foot are said to have fallen at Kalighat in Southern Calcutta, and the Kali Temple there has a long history of association with tantric ritual and pilgrimage. Sanjuka Gupta (2003) says that the Kali statue there is decorated with an expensive sari which conceals the body of Kali, except for her face, hands and parts of her feet – and notes the temple’s association with the name carana-tirtha – “pilgrimage place of the feet”.

The most famous (and possibly the oldest) of the Sakti-pithas is Kamarupa, the abode of the goddess Kamakhya (translated by Biernacki (2007) as “the Renowned Goddess of Desire”), near the city of Guwahati, in Assam. In many texts, Kamarupa is the place where the yoni of Sati fell to earth, hence it is considered to be the most important of the Sakti-pithas. The Kamakhya temple, atop a hill called Nilakuta (“the Blue Mountain”) is strongly associated with tantric practices, and is one of the rare instances where there are statues of the ten Mahavidyas. In a cave underneath the temple, there is a yoni-shaped rock cleft, moistened by a natural spring. Between the seventh and eleventh day of Asadha (June-July) the goddesses’ annual period of menstruation is celebrated. Foulston (2004) describes this event: “…the monsoon rains swell the Brahmaputra River flowing under the temple. Because of the composition of the underlying rock it oozes out of the fissure in the yoni in a reddish stream. For the first three days, the temple is closed but is re-opened on the fourth day, when it attracts huge numbers of pilgrims and tourists alike.” Foulston writes that devotees wear red clothes during this festival, animal sacrifices are offered to the Goddess, and that the menstrual blood of the Goddess is thought to cure any illness (p193).

Biernacki quotes a seventeenth century Tibetan report of the Kamakhya temple: “there are so many witches (dakinis) and various kinds of demons and devils there that even a person who has fully mastered the Tantras can hardly stay there.” She also relates a story relating to the goddess Kamakhya – that each night, Kamakhya performs a dance for Her own pleasure, when the temple doors are closed. A priest named Kendukalai gains the favour of the goddess through his great devotion to her, and is allowed to watch the goddess dance. He makes the mistake of telling the king, Naranarayan, about this dance, and naturally the king wants to see the goddess dance. The priest arranges to have the king spy on the dance of the goddess through a crack in a wall, and Kamakhya – when she realises what is happening, strikes the unfaithful Kendukalai down dead, and curses the king so that he and all his descendants may never have the sight (darsana) of the goddess.

The Kalika Purana says that the goddess Kamakhya has a five-fold nature, and that Her five “secret forms” are Kamakhya, Tripura, Kamesvari, Sarada and Mahotsaha. It also states that Kamahya resides in a stone, and that “When a mortal person has touched this stone, he will attain immortality; if he is an immortal one, he will stay in Brahma’s abode; if he stays there, he will attain liberation.” (73) “The greatness of that stone, in which Kamesvari is present, is wonderful; iron when having come into contact with it in a secret place wil turn to ashes.” (74) The Kalika Purana contains extensive instructions for the five-fold worship of Kamakhya; each instantiation of the goddess having their own mantra, yantra, dhyana, and attendant saktis, yoginis, etc.

Pithas and Pilgrimage
Pithas are a particular instantiation of the Pan-Indian phenomena generally referred to as tirthas – crossing places. Originally, tirtha signified a river crossing-place, but is now used to refer to places where the qualitiy of sacredness is particularly intensified. Diana Eck (1982) writes that India is “engraved with traces of mythic events. It is a living sacred geography.” Moreover, it is a geography which is continually shifting and changing according to the shifting patterns of pilgrimage and the needs of devotees. Whilst the spiritual experience of darsan is a primary motivation for pilgrimage, there are indications that contemporary pilgrimage travel in India is becoming increasingly commercialised and commodified (see Kiran Shinde paper, link below).

A particular site can be taken as representing the cosmos in its entirety, and as Wilbert Gesler and Margaret Pierce note in their paper Hindu Varanasi (2000): “To many believers, as we noted, Varanasi represents or is a model of the entire cosmos, and any sacred place, found anywhere, can also be found in Varanasi.” Diana Eck refers to the quality whereby a particularly powerful tirtha can become paradigmic of all tirthas as “spatial transposition of place”: “One can readily apprehend that the Divine dwells with equal potency in many places. Here, however, the affirmation is that the place itself, with its sacred power, is present in more than one place” (1982, p40). This enables the merits associated with a sacred place which is remote can be acquired by visiting a site which is closer to hand (a point I will return to in the next post). In a later work (1997) she examines how these spatial transpositions are being reproduced by Hindus in America.

Amita Sinha (2006) in her paper on the Sakti-pitha Pavagadh (Gujurat) says that an estimated 2.4 million pilgrims visit this particular site each year. She points out that whilst the goddess is experienced in and through the landscape, it is her mythology that “anchors” her narratives to specific sites: “myths (for the pilgrim) constitute the living history of Pavagadh and aid in the fuller understanding of Kali’s divine nature.” She describes the 5km pilgrim path to the temple as a preperation for the culminative darsan of the Devi:

“The pilgrim is made aware of Dakshina-Kali’s … simultaneous transcendence and immanence through the landscape itself.” The location of the temple, at the top of the 830-meter high hill, signifies the “transcendence of the Devi” and the “pilgrim’s arduous climb to reach the pinnacle culminates in euphoria by arriving at what feels like the top of the world. … The wind at the top speaks of the Devi’s might and lends its name to the hill – Pavagadh – castle of the winds. The culmination of this landscape experience is the darshan of Kali, to see and be seen by her to receive her blessings, and partake of her grace.”

In the next part of this series I will examine how the sacred geographies of Sakti-pithas is interiorised and homologised with the human body in tantric texts.

Sources
Loriliai Biernacki, Renowned goddess of desire: women, sex, and speech in Tantra (Oxford University Press, 2007)
S M Bhardwan, Hindu places of pilgrimage in India: a study in cultural geography (University of California Press, 1983)
Mark SG Dyckowski, A Journey in the World of the Tantras (Indica Books, 2004)
Diana Eck Banaras: City of Light (Princeton University Press, 1982)
Diana Eck A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (Harper San Fransisco, 1997)
Lynn Foulston, Stuart Abbott Hindu goddesses: beliefs and practices (Sussex Academic Press, 2009)
WM Gesler & M Pierce, Hindu Varanasi (Geographical Review, Vol. 90, No.2, April 2000)
Sanjuka Gupta The Domestication of a Goddess: Carana-tirtha Kalighat, the Mahapitha of Kali in McDermott, Kripal (eds) Encountering Kālī: in the margins, at the center, in the West (University of California Press 2003)
K. R. van Kooij, Worship of the goddess according to the Kālikāpurāna, Volume 1 (Brill, 1972)
Amita Sinha, Cultural Landscape of Pavagadh: the Abode of Mother Goddess Kalika (Journal of Cultural Geography, Vol.23, Issue 2, 2006)
Dines Chandra Sircar The Sakta Pithas (Motilal, 2004)
Kiran Shinde Pilgrimage and the Environment: Challenges in a Pilgrimage Centre (accessed 1 November, 2011)

“…what is emerging now is the nondualistic understanding of “immanent” and “transcendent.” Long seen as opposites in Western cultural history, transcendence is coming to be understood as “beyond” but not “above” the material plane we can see in every day life. What science calls “complex dynamical systems” has illuminated in recent decades the extraordinarily creative, complex, dynamic processes going on at every fraction of a second within, around, and through every entity in the universe. Our minds will never be able to map the endless networks of what I call “relational reality,” so spirituality that seeks to commune with either immanence or transcendence now sees that they are not apart. This realization is not new to Eastern philosophy or indigenous cultures, of course; we were simply late coming to it in the modern West because of our dualistic and mechanistic worldview.”
Charlene Spretnak, Immanence as well as Transcendence

In September I attended Thorn Coyle’s lecture on Self-Possession at Treadwells Bookshop. She was talking about, very eloquently, I thought, two problems associated with transcendence – firstly, that transcendence, implies a kind of non-worldly retreat or withdrawal from the everyday, and secondly, something which she termed “transcendent thinking”, which she explains in her book Kissing the Limitless in the following way:

“…flashes of enlightenment or moments of grace may happen, but there is no foundation for them to rest upon, leaving people hungry for things beyond their ken. This is the cause of transcendent thinking: things will be better after I lose weight, or find a new job, or get the right partner, or go to heaven. In these scenarios, something always gets left behind. That something is often the seeker herself. With self-possession, seekers open to inclusive consciousness, a new concept that argues for the embrace of all parts of human existence into the fold of the spiritual quest. When all of life is included, all of life can aid what is known in magical esotericism as the Great Work of coming to know our own divinity and our life’s purpose.”

So, transcendent thinking if I’m reading Thorn aright, is a desire to acquire a condition out of which everything will be perfect, or at the least, the things which worry me now, won’t because I have achieved “x” state (new job, new lover, inner equilibrium, etc.). It’s a turning-away from the present to seek satisfaction in some imagined future condition. Not only is there a critique of the notion of transcendence here, but also, I think, how we think about progress, evolution and perfectability – but I’ll leave that for now.

There does seem to be, amongst some Pagans, an increased suspicion of the idea of transcendence – roving around the web I’ve noticed a tendency for some Pagan writers to stress immanance in opposition to transcendence – the latter being explained purely in terms of God as being distinct from the world – with the implication that transcendent experiences are a kind of moving-away from the world, a disengagement with the everyday or an escape from the confines of materiality. It’s hardly surprising, as from the early twentieth century onwards, there’s been a sustained critique of this kind of ontological transcendence from all quarters – theology (and thealogy) philosophers, etc.

In Starhawk’s writing for example, transcendence-as-seperation is inextricable with the production of existential feelings of seperation and alienation from the world. The “rupture” that “underlines the entwined oppressions of race, sex, class and ecological destruction.” (Dreaming the Dark) Alienation – that sense of being disconnected – stems from removing value from the world and projecting it onto a transcendent deity and a consciousness “modeled on the God who stands outside the world, outside nature, who must be appeased, placated, feared and above all, obeyed.” A consequence of this alienation is the endless search for an unattainable object of desire beyond and apart from the Self – which is what Thorn is critiquing with her phrasing of “transcendent thinking”. A further problem of the transcendent for Starhawk is what might be termed the disembodiment of knowledge – the pervasive belief that a transcendent “truth” can be obtained which is “beyond” human experience. This produces fundamentalist thinking – the urge to preserve unity through the control and nihilisation of others. “In the split world, spirit wars with flesh, culture with nature, the sacred with the profane, the light with the dark”.

There are echoes here, of Foucault’s critique of Western thought of the “subjection to transcendence” – that Western thought and institutions have come to rely on some “exteriority” which can be apprehended, revealed and interpreted and thus provide a foundation for action. Claire Colebrook explains:

“The most obvious and general form of transcendence (and the one described by Foucault) is truth. Instead of seeing what we say and do as productive of relations between ourselves and our world, we imagine that there is some meaning or truth awaiting intepretation, revelation or disclosure. (This is the disease described by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘interpretosis”.) It is this invention of truth that produces ‘priests’ (those who will lead us to the truth) and ‘asceticism’ (for we renounce our desires and enslave ourselves to supposedly higher ideals). More importantly, this whole process leads to nihilism: despair when that higher, truer world we imagined behind appearances turns out to be ungraspable.”
Gilles Deleuze Claire Colebrook pp71-72

Of course, Deleuze & Guattari go a lot further, critiquing more complex instances of transcendence such as the subject – the ‘I’ differentiated from the world. But I’ll leave that aside for now, although Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence is something I’ll come back to another time.

So there is this powerful critique of transcendence as being productive of alienation – the sense of being disconnected from the world of immanent relations, arising out of theology, Patriarchy, or post-Englightenment rationality. Increasingly, the emphasis on immanence is being presented as one of the core principles of contemporary Paganism, with transcendence presented as a feature of monotheistic religion – although of course this tends to overlook the transcendental influences on Paganism, or the presence of immanence in, say, the Christian tradition. Some writers are going so far as to deny that contemporary Pagans are at all interested in transcendental experiences – those “flashes of enlightenment or moments of grace”. Yet at the same time, there’s a pervasive idea running throughout contemporary Paganism that human beings need to “reconnect” with the immanent world – that most of the time, we tend to feel that we are “out of alignment” or “disconnected” – Max Weber’s “iron cage” and his notion of disenchantment seems to have triumphed. Or has it? It seems to me sometimes, that the very dominance of the proposal that we are disenchanted (broken in some way) – and that modern Pagan/occult praxis can be thought of as methodologies of re-enchantment (a reconnection with that which has been “lost”) almost begs questioning the idea of disenchantment in the first place. But I’ll leave that aside for now – but it’s worth thinking about how much are we broken? How far can reconnection go?

The reason that I’m raising this last point is that what’s common to those “flashes of enlightenment or moments of grace” is that they are, to varying degrees, temporary. I’ve been attempting to write about my own experiences of this kind in the “Intensities” series of posts. They can last for a few seconds or several hours. They often involve an intense feeling of union with whatever’s around me – grass, trees, sky, buildings, other people. There’s a loss of a sense of a body-boundary – a feeling of unitive, encompassment with “everything”. But of course, this does not last. There’s an afterglow, which slowly fades. But at the same time, something remains – the sense being- in-connection never quite goes away; the open-ness to wonder which can burst forth at any moment. It’s not an experience for “chasing” – which is also implicit in Thorn’s “transcedent thinking” – nor do I think such experiences necessarily provoke a major life-change in the way that “transendence” is often presented as doing. Rather, it’s something quite ordinary; a gradual (or sudden) intensification of consciousness as opposed to a cataclysmic rupture. I think of these states as transcendence-towards-immanence; there is, often, a feeling of going upwards (or downwards), but also, simultaneously, spreading outwards – diffusion throughout the field of awareness – vertical and lateral at the same time.

In the next post, I’ll examine some different approaches to transcendence, and some related issues.

Sources
Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (Routledge, 2001)
Thorn Coyle, Kissing the Limitless: Deep Magic and the Great Work of Transforming Yourself and the World (Red Wheel/Weiser 2009)
Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminine: The Reclaiming Witches of San Fransisco (Routledge, 2002)
Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Beacon Press, 1988)
Starhawk The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (Harper & Row, 1979)

Sharada Sugirtharajah’s Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (Routledge, 2003 – also available for Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle) examines how “Hinduism” has been defined and interpreted via Western categorisations from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sugirtharajah examines how western fascination with India has ranged from romantic admiration to outright ridicule, and how at the same time, Indian reformers drew upon orientalist representations in order to formulate a unified Hindu identity. Focusing on the work of two scholars – William Jones and Max Muller; two missionaries – William Ward and Nichol Farquhar and a western reading of the 1987 Sati case, Sugirtharajah ably demonstrates how Western constructions of Hinduism by orientalists and missionaries produced a Hinduism which, to a large extent, confirmed their own “theological and ideological suppositions”. Of the value of the postcolonial approach, she says: Postcolonial theory is useful in that it reveals the link between knowledge and power and between representation and mediation, and highlights homogenizing, essentializing and universalizing tendencies in varied discourses, reading and interpretative strategies.

Following a brief discussion of the historical usage of the term “Hinduism” particularly by orientalists to create the notion of a homogenised (and thereby managable) religion, the first chapter examines the work of William Jones and his attempts to reconcile Indian ancient texts with a biblical chronology; his poetic romanticisation of Indian deities (which nonetheless locks Hinduism into a primitive “pagan” past) and his desire to reshape and discipline Hindu laws along Justinian lines. Sugirtharajah then turns her attention to Max Muller, famous for his translation of the Vedas and pioneer of comparative religion and mythology.Sugirtharajah argues that Muller was instrumental in creating a “textual” Hinduism which was informed by nineteenth century ideas of evolution and comparative philology. Muller, like Jones and other orientalists, believed that contemporary Hindus had become detached from the original meanings of their religion, and that he could provide a “corrective” reading which would benefit both colonised and colonisers alike. Muller, locates India’s “greatness” in its remote past, and romanticises India’s static, timeless nature in the quest for European orgins and the rural idyll.

The third chapter focuses on the nineteenth century missionary William Ward and his relentless denunciation of Hindu religion and morals. Ward is of course, well-known also for his description of “tuntra” in his 1817 work (title) as “things too abominable to be revealed to a Christian public”. Unsurprisingly, Ward sees finds no coherence in Indian beliefs and practices, religious or otherwise, and he sees Indians as “effeminate” worshipping deities – “monsters of vice” – which “encourage immoral behaviour.” Sugirtharajah then turns to another missionary, the Scottish Nichol Farquhar, whose 1913 book The Crown of Hinduism argued for an “inclusivist” approach to Hinduism. So, rather than Ward’s blanket rejection of anything Hindu, Farquhar instead views Hinduism as “imperfect” – requiring its fulfilment in Christianity. Thus his inclusivism can only grant a secondary or lower status to Hinduism, and Hinduism only becomes meaningful when interpreted through the lens of Protestant Christianity.

The fifth chapter, Courtly text and Courting Sati examines the topic of Sati (“widow immolation”) by critiquing the work of a contemporary scholar, Julia Leslie – specifically, her essay “Suttee or sati: victim or victor” in Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women and prompted by the highly publicised death of an eighteen-year old woman, Roop Kanwar, in Rajasthan in 1987. The crux of Sugirtharajah’s argument here is that Leslie interprets this event using an eighteenth-century sanskrit text whose author, needless to say, sets a high value on sati. What is problematic here, according to Sugirtharajah is that by privileging such a brahminical text in creating an account of ideal Indian womanhood, Leslie ignores other accounts of womanhood (which don’t view women as subservient and passive) and unwittingly reinforces the notion that Hindu religion and culture is static and unchanging. This is a difficult, yet thought-provoking chapter.

The final chapter deals with how some features of orientalist representations of Hinduism continue to be replicated in postcolonial contexts: Ironically, Hindus are using more or less the very same tools used by Western scholars of Hinduism in order to clear up misconceptions and present a homogenized view of Hinduism. What is conspicuous is that Hindus living outside India are now drawing on the Western orientalist conception of religion as a unified category in order to make Hinduism intelligible to both insiders and outsiders. (p134). Sugirtharajah examines some features of movements such as ISKON and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in forging a universalised Hinduism. Sugirtharajah also points to some of the ideas which arise through the course of her book – for example, that the concept and theorisation of religion is itself problematic due to its Western Christian theological presuppositions – and in particular its bias towards textual sources:

Religion, to the ordinary Hindu, is not simply confined to texts or to a prescribed set of beliefs. It includes these aspects yet it encompasses a wide variety of other areas such as art, dance, music and folklore; post-Enlightenment scholars of religion, however, take little note of these non-textual domains. There is a marked reluctance to shift the focus from texts. Even a cursory glance at some of the current introductory material on Hinduism reflects a predominantly text-oriented approach. It is largely through the lens of brahminical textual and ritual traditions that Hinduism is perceived. In other words, textual Hinduism is given primary consideration. (p140)

What I found particularly useful was Sugirtharajah’s focus on the orientalist pursuit and production of knowledge (pace Said and Foucault) and how this is inextricably linked with colonial expansion and conquest – so that the translation of texts such as The Laws of Manu and Muller’s Sacred Books of the East were both supported by the East India Company in order to exercise more effective control over the Indian population, and that “intellectual conquest” (to use Muller’s phrasing) was as much a concern of Empire as economic and military power. Sugirtharajah’s discussion of the binary dichotomies deployed by the missionaries Ward and Farquhar in order to both categorise and establish a hierarchical difference between Christianity and Hinduism is also useful. Imagining Hinduism highlights important issues such as the difficulty that western-based scholarship has had with dealing with a highly pluralistic culture; the problems of ethnocentric bias; and the problems of unreflexively applying western categorisations in interpreting a different culture.

All in all, this is an excellent, thought-provoking book that I find myself continually returning to.