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When women want to escape from exploitation, they do not merely destroy a few “prejudices,” they disrupt the entire order of dominant values, economic, social, moral and sexual. They call into question all existing theory, all thought, all language, insamuch as these are monopolized by men and men alone. They challenge the very foundation of our social and cultural order….Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One
One of the reasons that I was drawn to studying occultism in the nineteenth century was its relationship to the colonial enterprise – something which first struck me when watching Adam Hart-Davies’ 2001 BBC series What the Victorians did for us was how much of the Victorian enterprise was bound up with the drive to order the world – be it through colonial management and its practices (census-taking, fingerprinting, anthropometry), mapping, and the emergence of new disciplines such as sexology, anthropology, and comparative religion. Ordering – and thereby managing these emerging ‘territories’ underwrote the great projects of the Victorian age, and I began to think of Victorian occultism as another example of this trend. Continue reading »
One of the consequences of the mind (theory)-body(practice) divide in contemporary approaches to magic (and more widely, spiritual development in general) is the notion that the spiritual/magical is set apart from the material/everyday world. There is a pervasive belief that materiality (and the concerns that relate to it) is a burden to be overcome; that development requires that the concerns of the body be transcended. This kind of discourse tends to privilege abstracted knowledge over bodied experience. Yet all practices (including those understood as inwardly turning, such as meditation or visualisation) involve our bodies. Continue reading »
A while ago some friends and I, after an evening of lazy meandering conversations ended up discussing some of the topics on this blog, like possession and Baphomet and that set me off musing on past possessions. Continue reading »
It often seems to me that many occult representations of gender are rooted in nineteenth century formations, so I thought, for this post, it’d be interesting to examine some occult theories that emerged in this period – such as representations of the connection made between reincarnation, masculinity & femininity & the soul’s evolution, and the so-called “Uranian” temperament which emerged from various Theosophical sources in the late nineteenth & early twentieth century. Continue reading »
We shouldn’t be surprised that contemporary occult representations of gender mirrors and reifies the binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity central to western culture. One aspect of this that does interest me is how appeals to non-western cultural concepts are deployed to further legitimise this regime. Continue reading »
Over on Liminal Nation there’s an interesting discussion in progress on the subject of invocation and evocation, and various folk have opined that all this commanding and bullying of goetic spirits (threatening them with god-names and so forth) is kind of old hat nowadays, and that a bit of respect towards these much-maligned entities might work wonders. Continue reading »
I’ve just been interviewed (via email) by Christopher Blackwell of the Alternate Religions Education Network. The interview is part of the Networks’ Imbolc newsletter (which also features interviews with other interesting folk) and can be found here.
Is Tantra a religion? Sometimes asking what would appear to be a relatively simple question can open a wholly unexpected can of worms. Continue reading »
Some further musings on “possession” – nothing really thought through here – just some noodling around with ideas which I may come back to later. Continue reading »