Skip to navigation | Skip to content
With a two-part lecture series on the left-hand path later this month at Treadwells Bookshop 25 July and 8 August, I thought I’d share some personal observations on my previous identification with the LHP.
Continue reading »Continuing my review of Professor Madhu Khanna’s new edited volume of essays, Studies on Tantra in Bengal and Eastern India (Springer 2022). The first part of the review is here.
Continue reading »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.
Continue reading »
New from professor Madhu Khanna is her edited collection Studies on Tantra in Bengal and Eastern India (Springer 2022). This collection brings together both established and emerging scholars in its focus on tantric influences across a region encompassing the states of Assam, Bihar, Bengal, and Nepal. This is a rich field for exploration, as Madhu Khanna points out in her introduction. The diverse religious currents of the region, ranging from Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism to Tantric Śākta streams coexisted and cross-fertilized each other. The essays in this collection demonstrate the myriad ways in which adaptations and dialogue between religious traditions influenced and shaped Śākta tantra in Bengal.
Professor Khanna was one of the first contemporary scholars to produce a comprehensive examination of Srikula with her Ph.D dissertation – The Concept and Liturgy of the Śricakra Based on Śivānanda’s Trilogy (Oxford University, 1986) – and her publications include Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity (1994), Rta, The Cosmic Order (2004), and Asian Perspectives on the World’s Religions After September 11 edited with Arvind Sharma (2013). She is a former director of the Centre for the Study of Comparative Religion and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, co-creator of the Centre for Indic and Agamic Studies in Asia (CIASA) and a founding member of the Tantra Foundation, New Delhi. A review of the compendium of tantric ritual manuals she edited in 2014, Śāktapramodaḥ of Deva Nandan Singh can be found here.
Continue reading »In a recent essay, I posed the question – How do we learn to be magicians? Is it simply a matter of reading books, studying with a teacher, doing practices, and taking on particular beliefs and attitudes? My answer was to reflect on my early dive into the world of the occult in which I introduced the term reflexivity. In this post, I will discuss the concept of reflexivity and propose that it should be accepted as a core occult practice.
Continue reading »Words have Power.
Imagine a setting. You’re in a restaurant or a café perhaps, enjoying a quiet conversation with friends. Suddenly a stranger walks up to your table and without any opening or introduction, begins to offer a commentary on some conversational topic. You’d be slightly taken aback. Alarmed even. Who is this complete stranger who has suddenly, for no apparent reason, taken it upon themselves to intrude into a private conversation?
Continue reading »I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new edition of my book exploring the early passage of knowledge about chakras into Western Esotericism. This new edition collects the material originally published as a series of 4 chapbooks in 2018, and I’ve added some more information about the early tantric traditions.
Continue reading »
As a spin-off from the last couple of posts outlining tantric ritual procedures, I thought I’d turn to a more complex issue and tackle the concept of the ‘subtle body’ and how it is used in tantric practice. The term ‘subtle body’ is immediately familiar of course – it has a long history of usage in Western esotericism, from Aristotle to Aleister Crowley and beyond. Sanskrit terms such as lingaśarīra, sūkṣmadeha or sūkṣmaśarīra– often used to refer to the subtle body – was popularized in Western esotericism by the writings of H.P. Blavatsky and other Theosophists, drawing heavily on the work of Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Max Muller. André Padoux points out that this conflation of terms is a misnomer, as the sūkṣmadeha or sūkṣmaśarīra, in actuality, refers to that entity that migrates from body to body after death and lacks any shape, visualized components or affective qualities.
Continue reading »How do we learn to be magicians? Do we just pick up a book or two, do the exercises and rituals, and take on the beliefs and perspectives that ‘feel right’ to us? Maybe do an online course with a teacher whom we have come to respect? Go on social media and engage constructively (or not) with other practitioners. Join a small group or a large magical organization? It is not, I feel, a simple process. Well at least, it was not a simple process for me. I was not initiated by fairies at the bottom of the garden, as one of my friends says he was. I did not have a magical granny or the memory of a past life being a high magus in Atlantis. I did not receive messages from a spiritual master on the Inner Planes. I did not experience a sudden spiritual awakening or a summons by a goddess.
Continue reading »One day in 2020, I ambled into my study and turned on my computer, and … nothing. My heart skipped a beat. I felt a sense of dread steal over me. Checking the startup options, I saw that not only had the SSD drive on which the operating system lives failed but also one of the disks in my RAID array had gone too. It was a palpable shock. All that was on the computer – work in progress, layout jobs for clients, photos, games, videos, half-sorted digital libraries … gone. More than that, I was cut off from the wider world of social media and the internet, extended knowledge repositories, news, friends; and the full panoply of digital life in networked culture.
Continue reading »