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Archive for the category ‘Pagan’

  1. Book Review: Dreams of Witches

    Go on any pagan or occult forum or social media platform, and at some point, inevitably, someone will assert that contemporary Witchcraft was, more or less, “made up” by Gerald Gardner. This was the conclusion drawn by Ronald Hutton in his 1999 book, Triumph of the Moon. Over the last two decades though, the story has changed, thanks largely to Philip Heselton’s careful investigation of the New Forest Coven in his books, In Search of the New Forest Coven and Witchfather. Thanks to Heselton, many of the members of this bohemian group have been identified, in particular, ‘Dafo’, Gardner’s friend, lover, and magical partner for 15 years.

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    September 30th 2024

    Posted by in Book reviews, Occult, Pagan

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  2. Brands of Magic – I

    Some years ago, I was approached by representatives of a major marketing company who wanted to explore the possibilities of using direct magical techniques to promote a product. I cannot discuss this in more depth, as I signed a non-disclosure agreement. Suffice to say, I did not agree with what they wanted to do, and we parted ways on good terms. I did get some material benefit out of the affair. They rang my boss (I was working for a b2b media company at the time) and asked for a reference. My boss, alarmed at the idea that I was being head-hunted by another company, decided to reward me for my work with a present – a state-of-the-art (for 2000 anyway) laptop. I still have it.

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    May 3rd 2024

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  3. New Books for 2023

    Announcing two new books for 2023 – Queering Occultures and Acts of Magical Resistance.

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    July 31st 2023

    Posted by in Announcements, Gender, History, Occult, Pagan, Queer, tantra

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  4. On Reading Occult Books

    “Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices.

    Virginia Woolf, “How one should read a book”, The Second Common Reader, 1925.

    How do we go about reading an occult book? It seems like an obvious question to ask, but thus far, I have yet to see any attempt to explore this issue in any depth. This is strange, given how much occult books are part of contemporary occult practice. The effort and expense we go to acquire them, how we cherish them, and how books influence our trajectories and shape our ideas.

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    March 25th 2023

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  5. On the ‘Queering’ of Ganesha

    You create this world. You maintain this world. All this world is seen in you. You are Earth, water, Fire, Air, Aethyr. You are beyond the four measures of speech. You are beyond the Three Gunas. You are beyond the three bodies. You are beyond the three times. You are always situated in the Muladhara. You are the being of the three Shaktis. You are always meditated upon by Yogins. You are Brahma, you are Vishnu, you are Rudra, You are Agni, You are Vayu, You are the Moon, You are the Sun, You are Brahma, Bhur-Bhuvah-Svar.

    Ganesa Upanisad

    What makes a god ‘queer’? How – and perhaps more importantly – who makes that identification, and when does it become canonical?

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    July 15th 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Pagan, Queer, tantra

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  6. Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – II

    Continuing with my review of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism from March (part 1).

    As editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction, the women profiled in this collection (for the most part British, living between the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) lived at a time when women’s involvement in the esoteric was becoming more visible, as was women’s involvement with other social movements. These women saw esotericism – in varying degrees, as a route for both personal and social transformation.

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    June 30th 2022

    Posted by in Book reviews, Gender, History, Occult, Pagan

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  7. Pan: A Clergyman’s Redemption in Margery Lawrence’s How Pan Came to Little Ingleton

    ‘Oh great god Pan, I know Thee! – I thank Thee – I bless Thee . . . Thee and all Thy People great and small – for indeed, indeed beneath the mantle of the God whose name is Love, is there not room for all in His world to shelter?’

    I’ve only recently begun to read the magical fiction of Margery Lawrence (1889-1969), and admittedly, am wondering why I have never encountered her before, as the more I read about her, the more fascinating she sounds. A prolific author, she wrote over thirty novels and short story collections. Curiously though, there seems to be a dearth of critical scholarship analyzing her work.

    I have yet to find a full biography of Lawrence, but here’s what I’ve managed to cobble together from various sources.

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    October 28th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  8. Book Review: Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return

    The resurgence of my interest in exploring the various representations of Pan has kept me alert to new treatments of the goat-foot god, and I was rather excited, only a few weeks ago to find, on Twitter, the announcement of a new book by Paul Robichaud; Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion Books 2021, Hardback, 344pp, 34 illustrations, 13 in colour). A quick message to the author, then an email to the publishers, and I had a review copy pdf ready for me to avidly read.

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    September 17th 2021

    Posted by in Book reviews, History, Pagan, Queer

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  9. Pan: From Arcadia to Arkham – Panic terror and HP Lovecraft – I

    “Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the dreamer recognised from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the Avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe, and the Musaean Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men.”

    HP Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts, Poetry and the Gods (1920)

    Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is not an author that one might immediately associate with Pan, yet Pan is present in various guises throughout his fiction and poetry, perhaps more recognizably so in his earlier prose, and more menacingly in his later works. To begin this series of posts on Lovecraft and Pan, I will take a look at the appearance of Classical themes in Lovecraft’s early work, where the Arcadian ideal is, for the most part, untainted by terror.

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    July 16th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  10. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – II

    “The collective problem, then, is to institute, find, or recover a maximum of connections. For connections (and disjunctions) are nothing other than the physics of relations, the cosmos. Even disjunction is physical, like two banks that permit the passage of flows, or their alternation. But we, we live at the very most in a “logic” of relations. We turn disjunction into an “either/or. ” We turn connection into a relation of cause and effect or a principle of consequence. We abstract a reflection from the physical world of flows, a bloodless double made up of subjects, objects, predicates, and logical relations.

    Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Medical (1997)

    Continuing from the previous post in this series, here are some further explorations of D.H. Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan. Again, the main texts I’ll be drawing from are the novella St. Mawr and the essay Pan in America. Both the essay and St. Mawr were conceived in 1924, when Lawrence was living in New Mexico.

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    April 24th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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