“I praise the circle of deities innate within the body, an elevated assembly continually present, the end of everything, vibrant and the essence of experience.”dehasthadevatacakrastotra
For this post, I want to discuss some “Tantric” themes which relate to embodiment – in particular, whilst stressing that Tantra constitutes an embodied practice, I also want to point towards a key difference between South Asian and “western” esoteric epistemologies – that underwriting Tantra’s embodied practice is what might be called an embodied theology. Continue reading »
One of the consequences of the mind (theory)-body(practice) divide in contemporary approaches to magic (and more widely, spiritual development in general) is the notion that the spiritual/magical is set apart from the material/everyday world. There is a pervasive belief that materiality (and the concerns that relate to it) is a burden to be overcome; that development requires that the concerns of the body be transcended. This kind of discourse tends to privilege abstracted knowledge over bodied experience. Yet all practices (including those understood as inwardly turning, such as meditation or visualisation) involve our bodies. Continue reading »
This morning, descending the pristine stairwells of the office, I’m hit by a blast of smells from the restaurant on the ground floor. Continue reading »
Last Saturday, wandering into Treadwells whilst on one of my pre-xmas rounds I had an enlivening conversation with Ellie and Suzanne – mainly about what Suzanne’s recent (9th December) “Interview with a witch” evening was like. One theme that we batted around was that it’s fairly common for occult books to present information such as theories, correspondences, rituals, etc;, but still people appear to find it difficult to practice this information – to make it meaningful within their day-to-day lives. Continue reading »
