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Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock (San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2010) by Vere Chappell is a welcome contribution to a growing body of literature related to Craddock (1857-1902). After a long period of neglect, the life and writings of this amazing woman are finally emerging from obscurity. Continue reading »
Our community benefits from questioning what gender and/or sexuality are doing in a given context. Asking is simple, but the answers often reveal themselves to be complicated, and loaded with values and assumptions in ways that are not initially apparent, particularly when the subject in question is related to religion. For modern religions, like modern Paganism, there are no common, sacred documents that enshrine assignment and treatment of gender and sexuality, or the values encoded by the handling of these issues, which means that we must find our own way of expressing these values in meaningful ways for our community. As different groups under the wide umbrella of modern Paganism find themselves presenting ritual and religion in public, this can cause those chosen ways to be exposed and discussed publicly, which opens them to public criticism, because these manifestations can affect members of our community in ways not anticipated by organisers. Continue reading »
For this next installment of what’s turning out to be a fairly slow-moving series I’m going to briefly review some of the features of dividuality which have emerged out of ethnographic accounts of personhood in Melansia, with particular reference to the work of Marilyn Strathern and Edward LiPuma. Continue reading »
“metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
In a post last year I made a brief mention of Lakoff & Johnson’s groundbreaking work on embodiment & metaphors in relation to understanding tantric terms. This is a theme I want to expand on in 2011, so for the first post in this series, I’m going to discuss some thoughts I had after reading A.K Ramanujan’s famous essay “Is there an Indian way of thinking”. Continue reading »