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Archive for March 2013

1. Elizabeth Sharpe and “The Secrets of the Kaula Circle”

   Elizabeth Sharpe (1888-1941) is one of the “forgotten” writers on India of the early twentieth century. Born in Bangalore in 1888, she seems to have spent most of her life in India, with a brief trip to England in the 1930s. She wrote several books concerning aspects of Indian life, including at least one work on tantra; translated sanskrit texts such as the Siva Sahasranama; and had a passionate interest in the education of women in India. She is best-known for her 1936 novella, The Secrets of the Kaula Circle – a tale of black magic and left-hand tantric “orgies” which featured a recognisably unflattering portrayal of Aleister Crowley. Continue reading »

   

   March 27th 2013

   Posted by Phil Hine in History, Occult, tantra

   Tags: Elizabeth Sharpe, Kaula

   3 comments »

2. Lecture notes: On the Kamasutra – III

   In the first post in this series, I discussed the “discovery” of the Kamasutra by Richard Burton and its publication in the nineteenth century, and in the second post the western reception of Kamasutra and its incorporation into sexological discourse throughout the twentieth century. These two posts were useful for me to write, in that they enabled me to think about some future directions for exploring the relationship between representations of tantra and sexology/sex-therapy, which I may return to at later date, but in doing so, I realised some months later, that I hadn’t paid much attention to the actual content of the Kamasutra. So, for this third post, I’m going to take a cue from Daud Ali’s (2011) suggestion that, in examining the Kamasutra (and related texts) it is useful to move beyond the limited frame of viewing these texts as simply books about sex, and instead, approach them from a wider perspective – what Ali terms a “kama world” – wherein kama (sensual pleasure) “was not abstracted into a special, sui generis category in and of itself, but instead formed part of wider practices of aesthetic, material and ethical transformation.” Continue reading »

   

   March 19th 2013

   Posted by Phil Hine in Gender, History, tantra

   Tags: ethics, Kama, Kamasutra, sex

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3. “A thousand kisses darling”: Sex, scandal and spirituality in the life of Charles Webster Leadbeater – III

   This post examines Leadbeater’s return to the Theosophical Society, problems with the press and the “second scandal” – the court case over Krishnamurti. Continue reading »

   

   March 14th 2013

   Posted by Phil Hine in History, Occult

   Tags: Krishnamurti, Leadbeater, Theosophy

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