Tantra’s Metahistory II: The religion question
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 »
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Jottings: Possession
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 »
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queering Baphomet
“All the gods died of laughter to hear one among them proclaim himself unique!”
Pierre Klossowski, The Baphomet Continue reading » -
Haiti’s Terrible Earthquake is the Wrath of God, Says Tele-Evangelist
US tele-evangelist Pat Robertson has said, in a television interview over the last couple of days, “Something happened in Haiti a long time ago that people may not want to talk about… they got together a pact with the Devil. Continue reading »
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Must we love the Golden Bough?
What is it about Pagans and The Golden Bough? It seems like every time I open a book written by a Pagan or Magician, there it is, casting an inescapable shadow over the text, like the monolith in 2001. Continue reading »
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Pandora’s Pagan Paradise? Spoiler Alert – Avatar Review
Released in the same week as the Copenhagen climate summit (not an accident given its very deliberate environmental message), Cameron’s Avatar is alight with beautiful paradox Continue reading »
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Mandala bodies: a torrent of terminologies
To continue my examination of representations of mandalas, I will now turn to the problem of terminology – and how restrictive definitions of terms (a problem highlighted in this post) can limit one’s understanding of mandalas. In order to do this, one has to abandon the phenomenological representation of mandalas of which Jung’s presentation is an example (and as I hope to discuss at a later date, many occult/new age discourses are rooted in) which privileges individual “inner experience” over traditional/textual/cultural particulars and turn instead to matters of historical texts and their scholarly interpretation. Continue reading »
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Mandala bodies: Jung
I’ve wanted to get some thoughts hashed out on Mandalas for some time now, and following a post-xmas conversation with a friend that managed to encompass the acoustic experiments of Ernst Chladni, the philosophical speculations of David Hartley, Tibetan singing bowls, and the widely-repeated factoid that Dr. Hans Jenny produced an almost perfect Sri Yantra by having a test subject sing “Om” into his tonoscope, I thought that one way to approach mandalas would be to outline some of the ways in mandalas are represented – starting with Jung. onwards…
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Musings on banishing rituals
Over the years, I’ve seen people discussing banishing in terms of “Centering” or “Grounding” “Closing/Opening” and so forth, yet “banishing” – with its strong implication of an imperative command – to expel, or to drive away – forcefully – remains the ‘favourite’ term. Continue reading »
