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Archive for March 2022

  1. 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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    March 31st 2022

    Posted by in Book reviews, Gender, History, Occult

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  2. Theosophy and Race – III: India’s Aryans – I

    “We see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race.”

    Kenshub Chandra Sen, 1877

    In the opening part of this series, I examined the roots of the notion of the Aryans in the work of Sir William Jones and Freidrich Max Müller. In the second post, I briefly outlined the emergence of nineteenth-century racial science, and how the concept of Aryans became associated with white supremacy and racial hierarchies.

    Aryan racial theory, as it developed, seemed to raise as many issues as it purported to solve. If Indians and the British shared a common ancestry, this threatened the belief that Indians were inferior to Europeans. The answer, for some, lay in a Darwinian notion of racial degeneration. This led to the notion that whilst the European Aryans had maintained their vitality, the Indian Aryans had degenerated, by intermingling with the aboriginal natives – weakening their bloodlines and adopting superstitions and primitive practices. In the pens of the European racial theorists, India’s Aryan past became a kind of golden age, from which India had sadly declined into superstition and idolatry. These ‘explanations’ had far-reaching consequences.

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    March 8th 2022

    Posted by in History

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