Book Review: Ghosts of the British Museum
It is perhaps not surprising to discover that the British Museum, founded in the eighteenth century at the former mansion of the Duke of Montagu, has more than its fair share of ghosts.
Continue reading »
Archive for the category ‘History’
-
-
Book Review: The Subtle Body
I’ve been intending for a while to do some writing on the various tantric presentations of the ‘subtle body’. Before doing so, however, I’m going to review Simon Cox’s recent book, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2022, Hbk). This is an important work that sheds much light on how the concept of the subtle body took off in the English language, and the many twists and turns taken in developing a concept that has become a staple of contemporary esoteric practice and thought.
Continue reading » -
New Books for 2023
Announcing two new books for 2023 – Queering Occultures and Acts of Magical Resistance.
Continue reading »
-
Tantra’s Primordial Past: The Aryan Invasion Theory – I
As a follow-up to the series of essays on Theosophy and Race, and the Red Flags posts, I will now turn to a more complex and contentious subject, generally known as the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ (AIT). How does this relate to the tantras? The origins of the tantras, according to some authors, can be traced to an ancient people, peaceful, agrarian, and goddess-worshipping, who were invaded and suppressed by patriarchal, warlike Aryans. Their cities were destroyed, and their tantric practices were driven underground or preserved, in secret by occult adepts. This narrative draws on the Aryan Invasion Theory.
Continue reading » -
The Puzzle of the Pasupati Seal
Back in 2020, I briefly discussed the notion sometimes encountered that Tantra is thousands of years old – that it predates the Vedas, Buddhism, and Jainism. To illustrate the post, I used an image of the infamous Pasupati Seal that is often pointed to as evidence of Tantra’s antediluvian origins. So for this post, I’m going to take a closer look at the Seal and its tangle of interpretations.
Continue reading » -
Book Review: Cloven Country
You don’t have to travel far in Britain to find that the Devil has left his mark on the landscape. He has raised dykes, built bridges, causeways, and chimneys; left boulders, bolts, and dug ditches. He is the haunter of woods, the president of ghoulish feasts in graveyards. This is the territory, and its associated folklore explored by Jeremy Harte’s Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape (Reaktion Books 2022, 296 pages, Hardback, illustrated).
Continue reading » -
Book review: City of the Beast
As a subject for occult biography, Aleister Crowley seems to get the lion’s – or perhaps the beast’s would be a better term – share of attention. Phil Baker’s new biographical study, City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley (Strange Attractor, 2022) is something special though. Described as a ‘biography by sites’, City of the Beast explores Crowley’s life via his relationship with the city of London, a place where he spent much of his adult life.
Continue reading » -
On the “third-nature” – III
Continuing this series on non-normative sexuality and gender presentation in early Indian sources. This time, I will examine a couple of examples from medical (Āyurvedic) literature. Early Āyurvedic texts have much to say about how persons exhibiting non-normative sexual behaviors and presentations come about.
Continue reading » -
Theosophy and Race V – Some general observations
I began this series on the relationship between the Theosophical movement and race in order to contest the popular view that it is through the writings of Theosophical authors – Madame Blavatsky in particular – that the concept of the ‘Aryan’ passed into Nazi ideology. In the first post in this series, I outlined the ‘birth’ of this concept in the work of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. In the second post, I discussed how the concept of the Aryan was entangled with nineteenth-century racial science. The third post outlined how the notion of the Aryan was taken up in India, and the fourth, how Blavatsky and Olcott’s notion of India’s shared Aryan roots led to a brief alliance with the Ārya Samāj until both organizations discovered that their notions of who could be ‘Aryan’ were quite distinct.
Continue reading » -
On the “third-nature” – II
In the previous post in this series, I examined the representation of non-normative sexualities and gender presentations in the Code of Manu and the Kamasutra. This time, it is the turn of ‘queer’ Buddhist anxieties. Again, this is an expansion of a Twitter thread earlier in the year.
Continue reading »