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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 »
Festive greetings everybody! Continue reading »
The Pit is a short Lovecraftian piece I wrote some years ago which I’ve never managed to get published, and one of my friends suggested that I post it, so here it is… Continue reading »
The first four of the promised digitised editions of Pagan News are now available here on my archive website for downloading. The issues are: June 1988, December 1988, July & November 1989. Pagan News was fortunate, I suppose in retrospect, in that we started up just as the “Satanic Child Abuse” panic of the late 1980s started moving into the UK. The magazine’s news section deals with these developments, and other news items deemed to be of interest to pagan/occult folk. More pdfs will follow as and when I get time.
Last Saturday, wandering into Treadwells whilst on one of my pre-xmas rounds I had an enlivening conversation with Ellie and Suzanne – mainly about what Suzanne’s recent (9th December) “Interview with a witch” evening was like. One theme that we batted around was that it’s fairly common for occult books to present information such as theories, correspondences, rituals, etc;, but still people appear to find it difficult to practice this information – to make it meaningful within their day-to-day lives. Continue reading »
There are a number of issues relating to the practice of attributing western ‘meanings’ to Sanskrit terms. Continue reading »
I keep swinging back to a text which has had a massive influence on me – Berger & Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality – which develops Alfred Schutz’s “Common-Sense” interpretation of human action. Continue reading »
My old friend Dr Susan Greenwood of Sussex University has just had a new book published – The Anthropology of Magic – available from Berg. Hopefully I’ll get round to reviewing it in the not-too-distant future, but in the meantime, here’s an interview with Susan from the excellent Pagans for Archeology blog. Susan will be giving a lecture on her work at Treadwells Bookshop on the 14th April, next year.
When I first met Vishvanath (the guy who I affectionately refer to as my “guru” – knowing full well he squirms when I do this), we started a conversation about tantra (and everything else) which went on for a year or so. A conversation shaped through walks through local woodland and parks, in and out of pubs and each other’s rooms, criss-crossing the city night and day. It was the beginning of friendship; a forging of affinities. Continue reading »
There’s an easily observed phenomena on the contemporary occult scene – the recuperation of new scholarship into existing knowledge discourses. A new book comes out – and gradually it seems, its presentation shifts from “this is new stuff” to “we’ve always known this to be the case” – and eventually (thinking of my earlier post this month) – “this isn’t just out of a book, I’ve experienced it directly.” Continue reading »
