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Continuing from my last post in this series I will now turn to a brief examination of verse 7 of Anandalahari – which together with verse 8, provides a preliminary dhyana – a meditation/ritual image of the goddess. Continue reading »
“She who comes into being through the breath of life,
from whom the Gods all took their birth,
the Boundless Goddess of Infinity,
who enters the cave [of the heart] and dwells there –
This, I now declare, is that!”
Kath Upanishad, IV, 7-9
I’ve been involved in the UK Queer Pagan scene for a number of years now, but whenever I decide to try and write about this, I find myself reflecting on what for me is a core issue – what happens when “Queer” is placed next to Pagan? Continue reading »
For this Group Book Review, I’m going to review three books which focus on Indian Sadhus and Yogis. In popular texts, sadhus and yogis are frequently represented as disengaged from the world – socially isolated and in popular works on tantra, often portrayed as marginalised “antinomian” figures existing on the edges of Indian society. All of these books challenge these representations in various ways. Continue reading »
“Energy” is one of those words which has to do a great deal of work. It has become something of a generic term that gets used in multiple contexts, sometimes to the extent where any exercise/experience which gives rise to sensations or emotions is attributed to an impersonal ‘energy’ being present, moving, flowing, or being blocked, trapped, or stored. Continue reading »
For this post, I’m going to begin a brief examination of some of the themes present in verses 1-41 of Saundaryalahari – often referred to as Anandalahari – “wave of joy”. As I noted in the first post in this series, the Anandalahari is perhaps the most explicitly “tantric” half of Saundaryalahari providing cues for the dhyana (puja image) of the Goddess, Her mantra, yantra and her relationship to organising schemas of Cakras and Rays. For the present, I will concentrate on the first six verses of Anandalahari. Continue reading »
“The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.”
Michael Foucault
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Queer as a form of resistance to identification – a refusal to be categorised or reified into some kind of essential formation. Continue reading »
Last year fellow Treadwells-regular Ed Gauntlett lent me his collection of a classic British occult magazine, The Lamp of Thoth. In many ways, The Lamp of Thoth (LOT) was a significant milestone in the history of my own interest in the occult, and reading through the old issues – finding favourite snippets of writing I hadn’t seen for some twenty-odd years cast me into a wave of nostalgia and reflection. Continue reading »
Tantra is often (popularly) represented in western occult writing as though it were an “outsider” tradition in India, something on the periphery or marginal to the orthodox or “mainstream” forms of Indian religosity – and highly esoteric – something which can only be “decoded” with the correct keys or “initiated” understandings. This view, which I’ve recently argued (Treadwells lecture, October 2011) actually says more about western occultism’s self-representations than any tantric actualities, is something I’ve been trying to counter with much of the tantric-oriented writing I’ve been doing here on Enfolding. Although I’ve made occasional reference to the Saundaryalahari (“Flood of Beauty”) here a couple of times previously (see this post in particular), for this series of posts I’m going to examine this work in more detail, drawing in some of the themes I’ve been outlining in other posts. Continue reading »
Fiction isn’t really my forte, but I’m rather fond of this one. With both hands was written between 1989-1990, and published in Both the Ones – a magazine produced by Mal from TOPY Shefffield. Of the few attempts at magical fiction I’ve made, I consider this one to be the best. Set in Headingley (Leeds 6) it’s also the most directly autobiographical. Continue reading »
