New Books for 2023
Announcing two new books for 2023 – Queering Occultures and Acts of Magical Resistance.
Archive for the category ‘Queer’
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On the “third-nature” – IV
Thus far in this series, I have been examining early Indian textual sources for glimpses of how persons of non-normative sexualities or gender presentations were represented. For this post – as I promised at the end of the previous installment – dealing with ‘changes of sex’ – I will examine a text from a much later period, a 16th-century Tamil version of the Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa, featuring the famous Queen Sīmantinī. The Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa is a section of the Skanda Purāṇa, that has been dated to between 700 -1150 C.E.
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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.
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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.
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On the “third-nature” – I
Over on Twitter, I’ve been doing a series of threads examining early Indian texts of various kinds and how they present matters relating to non-normative sexualities and gender presentation, as a preamble to getting around to the tricky concept of “third-nature” (tṛtīyāprakṛti) in classical sources. In this series of posts, I will expand on my necessarily brief Twitter comments. It is complex stuff at times, but I shall strive for conciseness.
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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 UpanisadWhat makes a god ‘queer’? How – and perhaps more importantly – who makes that identification, and when does it become canonical?
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Introducing Mary Butts: Storm Goddess
“I have a weakness for Queer Street, and people who have that are soon past being astonished at anything.”
“Imaginary Letters”, Ashe of Rings and Other Writings“These weeks I have been hindered wanting a formula. These books an occultism with their bastard words, credulities, falsities on facts, emotion & aesthetic falsities, inwardly revolt me. The symbols save when they were purely numeral & abstract, seemed but poor correspondences. Then I came back on a sudden turn. I remembered Prolegomena & the others, the profoundest study of my adolescence – mystery cults from Thrace to Eleusis. I remembered the Bacchae. There are my formulae, there my words of power. I am rereading the Prolegomena – it reels off before me in plain script (all the more because it was written by a woman, with no magical thesis to prove). There I shall find the way.”
Journal entry, 21 April, 1920Sometimes the pieces I’ve scheduled to write for this blog just don’t seem to come together. What seemed like a good idea two months ago now seems flat and lifeless. My enthusiasm for ‘x’ essay has flown the coop – and anyone who’s been reading enfolding regularly will know that I have several not-quite-finished series of posts left hanging around. I’ll come back to them one day, or so I keep telling myself.
The fallback plan is to go through my numerous ‘writing’ folders and see what pops up. The other day I found a collection of jottings and related files in a folder labeled “Mary Butts 2013”. Looks as though a mere eight years ago I’d planned on writing something about Mary Butts, a novelist and magician whose life and work has been a long-time interest of mine, and whom I feel could do with more recognition and attention by contemporary occultists. Hence this post, a short introduction to the life and literary career of one of the twentieth-centuries most flamboyant occult practitioners, of whom composer Virgil Thomas said she was able to “stir up others with drink and drugs and magic incantations” calling her, “the storm goddess.”
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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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Pan: The vengeance of the wild in “The Music on the Hill”
“I’ve been a fool in most things,” said Mortimer quietly, “but I’m not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I’m down here. And if you’re wise you won’t disbelieve in him too boastfully while you’re in his country.”
The Music on the HillOne of the aspects of writing for a blog I enjoy is that I don’t have to intently focus on any one topic for a prolonged period – I can just hop to and fro between areas of interest as the mood takes me. Sometimes though, this produces a considerable ‘gap’ between posts. So it is, after a nine-year pause, I return to the subject of Pan.
Throughout the Pan-themed literature of the early twentieth century, there runs a common theme: that the lure of Pan promises a return to a rural idyll – a nostalgia for both wild landscape and reunion with natural life. A distinctly antimodern turning away from the industrialized world, and the restrictions and regulations of polite society. Pan both guards and beckons into this wild terrain, opening up vistas of possibility beyond the ordered world of civilization. Yet the encounter with Pan can be terrible too; the call to encounter the wild is profoundly disturbing, and the unwary trespasser into Pan’s domain may get more than they have bargained for. Continue reading »
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Bona Shamans
With apologies to the shades of Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, and Hugh Paddick.
I’ve been doing Pagan workshops for some time now but recently attendance has dropped off. It’s as though Pagans aren’t interested in finding out about the role of the semicolon in the 300 laws of witchcraft anymore. So I thought I’d catch the current wave and reinvent myself as a Shaman. Picking up a copy of “Mystic Muscles” – I buy it for the gardening section – I saw, between notices for Aura Massages and Tantric Hand Shandy therapy, a small advert for Bona Shamans of Islington. So I thought I’d pop along and see what they could do for me. Continue reading »