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  1. Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – I

    Over the last few days on Twitter, I have been engaged in a close, chapter-by-chapter reading of Dion Fortune’s book, Psychic Self-Defence (first published in 1930). I began this exercise after becoming involved in a discussion about the merits of ‘psychic hygiene’ and I posted a thread detailing my own experiences and perspectives on ‘psychic attack’. I thought it would be instructive to take a look at the content of  Psychic Self-Defence (PSD) in order to discuss the origins of the genre of ‘psychic defense’ texts, of which Fortune’s book, widely hailed as a classic, is one of the first.

    The reception of these threads has been very positive, and several readers have requested that I turn them into permanent posts here. I shall return to them periodically in an attempt to explore their various ramifications and lines of inquiry emerging from them. What began as a rather light-hearted exercise in critical commentary became increasingly complex as I began to look for supporting material with which to contextualize Fortune’s remarks.

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    August 29th 2021

    Posted by in History, Occult

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  2. Theosophy and Race – I: Orientalists and Aryans

    The East, formerly a land of dreams, of fables, and fairies, has become to us a land of unmistakeable reality; the curtain between the West and the East has been lifted, and our old forgotten home stands before us again in bright colours and definite outlines.

    Max Müller, 1874

    It’s frequently asserted that Nazi racial ideology came directly out of nineteenth-century esoteric movements – in particular, the writings of H.P. Blavatsky and other members of the Theosophical Society. This is an over-simplification of a complex subject, and one worth examining in detail. In order to do this comprehensively, I will first take a look at some of the background context – the ideas about race that were circulating prior to the advent of the Theosophical Society. I’ll begin with a brief examination of the term “Aryan” and its tangled historical trajectory prior to its adoption by Theosophists, focusing on the influence of two orientalist scholars, Sir William Jones, and Max Müller.

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    August 23rd 2021

    Posted by in History

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  3. Pan: From Arcadia to Arkham – Panic terror and HP Lovecraft – I

    “Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the dreamer recognised from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the Avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe, and the Musaean Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men.”

    HP Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts, Poetry and the Gods (1920)

    Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is not an author that one might immediately associate with Pan, yet Pan is present in various guises throughout his fiction and poetry, perhaps more recognizably so in his earlier prose, and more menacingly in his later works. To begin this series of posts on Lovecraft and Pan, I will take a look at the appearance of Classical themes in Lovecraft’s early work, where the Arcadian ideal is, for the most part, untainted by terror.

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    July 16th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  4. Book Review: A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses

    Indian goddess traditions are of enduring and fascinated attention to scholars and esoteric practitioners alike, yet many of them are virtually unknown beyond the boundaries of regional traditions or have been ignored. An attempt to redress this lacuna is this new anthology, edited by Michael Slouber – A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond (University of California Press 2020, 374 pages, Illustrated). Featuring primary translations of the narratives pertaining to twelve relatively unstudied Hindu goddesses. In what sense are these goddesses “forgotten” though? It is certainly not that they are insignificant, but that they are rarely given space in surveys of Hindu goddesses, or that their local, regional character has been lost as the goddess has become identified with more popular forms. Moreover, the scriptural sources which are the basis of these goddesses’ stories have, for the most part, received little attention. These range from some of the less well-known Purāṇas, the early Tantras, and contemporary oral lore and performance.

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    July 13th 2021

    Posted by in Book reviews, Reviews, tantra

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  5. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – II

    “The collective problem, then, is to institute, find, or recover a maximum of connections. For connections (and disjunctions) are nothing other than the physics of relations, the cosmos. Even disjunction is physical, like two banks that permit the passage of flows, or their alternation. But we, we live at the very most in a “logic” of relations. We turn disjunction into an “either/or. ” We turn connection into a relation of cause and effect or a principle of consequence. We abstract a reflection from the physical world of flows, a bloodless double made up of subjects, objects, predicates, and logical relations.

    Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Medical (1997)

    Continuing from the previous post in this series, here are some further explorations of D.H. Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan. Again, the main texts I’ll be drawing from are the novella St. Mawr and the essay Pan in America. Both the essay and St. Mawr were conceived in 1924, when Lawrence was living in New Mexico.

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    April 24th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  6. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – I

    “What were you talking about?” asked Mrs. Renshaw, simply curious. She was not afraid of her husband’s running loose.
    “We were just saying ‘Pan is dead’,” said the girl.
    “Isn’t that rather trite?” asked the hostess.
    “Some of us miss him fearfully,” said the girl.
    “For what reason?” asked Mrs. Renshaw.
    “Those of us who are nymphs–just lost nymphs among farm-lands and suburbs. I wish Pan were alive.”
    D.H. Lawrence, The Overtone (1913)

    I came to the works of D.H. Lawrence late in life, having been more or less put off his writing by Kate Millet’s fierce and funny taking to pieces of his infamous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her 1970 book Sexual Politics. Millet charged Lawrence with both misogyny and phallocentrism, so I admit, I didn’t look any further than that, and it’s only in the last decade or so, that have I begun to read Lawrence attentively. This post is the first of a two-parter examining Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan with reference to his novella St. Mawr and his essay Pan in America.

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    April 16th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  7. Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – VI

    In the third installment of this series, I examined the erotic writings of Edward Sellon. Now I will turn to his “anthropological” work – the two lectures delivered to the Anthropological Society of London (ASL) – Linga Puja: On the Phallic Worship of India and Some Remarks on Indian Gnosticism, or Sacti Puja, the Worship of the Female Powers and follow through with a look at some other works dealing with Phallic worship from the ASL.

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    March 19th 2021

    Posted by in History, Lectures

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  8. Jottings: Edith Nesbit and the Golden Dawn

    Shortly after completing my recent post on Henry O’Brien I started thinking about who would be a good subject for continuing my series on Pan, and Edith Nesbit came to mind as a possibility. Pan gets a walk-on part (although he is not named directly) in Nesbit’s 1907 children’s story The Enchanted Castle. I thought that might be a good starting point to look at Pan as a figure in Edwardian children’s literature, perhaps then going on to more well-known stories such as Barries’ Peter Pan and Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. What would also, I thought, make a look at Nesbit interesting is her connection to The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, so I set out, as a matter of first business, to find a reference confirming this. Continue reading »

    February 19th 2021

    Posted by in History, Occult

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  9. Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – V

    At the close of the previous post in this series I promised I would take a look at the work of Irish scholar Henry O’Brien, an early nineteenth-century exponent of the phallic theory of religion. Continue reading »

    February 13th 2021

    Posted by in History, Lectures

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  10. Book Review: Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide

    I was 26 when the Chernobyl disaster occurred, and I well remember my feeling of horror and incredulity as the scraps of information filtered through and friends speculated what effects it might have on the magic mushroom season that year. I grew up in the shadow of the bomb – the three-minute warning, “Protect and Survive” and the War Game. Many of us had half-expected something like Chernobyl was only a matter of time. Over the years I’ve become fascinated with Chernobyl, its history and the mythologies it has spawned. I have spent hundreds of hours exploring the virtual simulacra of the Zone in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R trilogy of games and the two free mods, Lost Alpha and StalkerSoup. These games owe as much to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel “Roadside Picnic” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting film “Stalker” as they do to any real events, but if there is any place on earth where the borders of the real and the imaginary might collapse, it is Chernobyl. Continue reading »

    January 15th 2021

    Posted by in Book reviews

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