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Posts tagged ‘nineteenth century’

  1. Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – II

    Continuing with my review of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism from March (part 1).

    As editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction, the women profiled in this collection (for the most part British, living between the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) lived at a time when women’s involvement in the esoteric was becoming more visible, as was women’s involvement with other social movements. These women saw esotericism – in varying degrees, as a route for both personal and social transformation.

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  2. Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – I

    The scholarly focus on women in Western Esotericism has, as editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction to Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), often been framed as marginal or secondary to studies of male occultists. This new book then is a welcome and much-needed corrective to that lacuna. Divided into four sections, the contributions cover women both well-known – Dion Fortune, Pamela Colman Smith, Florence Farr, and Doreen Valiente, to the more obscure (at least to me), such as Eleanor Kirk and Colette Aboulker-Muscat.

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  3. 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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  4. 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 »

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  5. Book Review: The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick

    I have to thank David Southwell for sparking my interest in the Indian Rope Trick. In 2019, I was preparing a lecture on the relationship between Yoga and Magic for Treadwells Bookshop (see Yogis, Magic and Deception – I) and was reading an early draft to David. He pointed out, quite rightly, that of all the Yogic feats I had mentioned, I had omitted the most famous of them all – the Indian Rope Trick! Continue reading »

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  6. Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – IV

    “in view of the indelibility that is characteristic of all mental traces, it is surely not surprising that even the most primitive forms of genital worship can be shown to have existed in very recent times and that the language, customs, and superstitions of mankind today contain survivals from every phase of this process of development.”
    Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo Da Vince, 1910

    Before I move onto an examination of Edward Sellon’s anthropological and “phallic” works, I want to first discuss the wider context of phallic theories of religion in the nineteenth century. Continue reading »

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

    And so to Edward Sellon; libertine, atheist, orientalist, anthropologist, pornographer. For this post, I’m going to focus on Sellon’s pornographic productions and then will turn to his anthropological excursions in the next post. To some extent, this is a repeat of the approach I took in my first two essays on Edward Sellon (here and here) but I shall endeavour not to repeat earlier material too much. Continue reading »

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  8. Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – II

    Following on from the previous post in this series, I will now examine the activities of the Anthropological Society of London and its “inner cabal” – The Cannibal Club. Continue reading »

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

    I have for some time been interested in how representations of India – particularly those related to sexuality – emerged out of the Colonial period and went on to influence twentieth-century stereotypes of India in a wide variety of ways. The ready association made between Tantra and sex, for example, is something I would argue, has its roots in this period, as does much of the romanticism about India as a land of enlightened sexuality. It is this interest that led me into a murky territory which is sometimes called ethnopornography – a shadow zone where a piece of erotic writing can disguise itself as a scholarly work – or a scholarly work can be read as erotica. Where the body of the native is portrayed as alluring or threatening – sometimes both, and colonial territories become both zones of sexual adventure and hearts of darkness. Continue reading »

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  10. Yogis, Magic and Deception – II

    In the previous post in this series, I briefly sketched out the orientalist position on yoga & yoga powers before outlining how the extraordinary abilities attributed to yogis became associated with stage magic and deception. Now I will take a look at how yoga powers were represented in the writings of the leaders of the Theosophical Society. Continue reading »

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