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  1. Book Review: Cloven Country

    You don’t have to travel far in Britain to find that the Devil has left his mark on the landscape. He has raised dykes, built bridges, causeways, and chimneys; left boulders, bolts, and dug ditches. He is the haunter of woods, the president of ghoulish feasts in graveyards. This is the territory, and its associated folklore explored by Jeremy Harte’s Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape (Reaktion Books 2022, 296 pages, Hardback, illustrated).

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  2. Reflections: On Lovecraft, landscape and urban wonder

    I was recently asked to write something about what were the main influences that shaped my short book on Cthulhu Mythos magic – The Pseudonomicon. Reflecting on this was difficult at first, as some of the ideas that went into it had been rattling around in my head since the early 1980s. My first experiments with Lovecraftian Magic were enacted in 1980 or thereabouts, so trying to think back to that time was a challenge, to say the least. At this time of my life, I was studying for a degree in the Behavioural Sciences – a joint honors degree that encompassed Psychology, Sociology, Social Policy, and Philosophy at what was then Huddersfield Polytechnic. I’d been interested in the occult for about three years at this point and was still dipping my toes into actual magical practice in any sustained or coherent way. Some of the ideas and suggestions for Cthulhu Mythos magic in The Pseudonomicon were shaped by my dissatisfaction with how Lovecraft’s themes had been treated by other occult authors. Yet at the same time, those authors had an influence on me, insofar as they at least opened the way to the connection between fictional horror and magical experience.

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  3. One from the vaults: Occultism: A Postmodern Perspective

    Other projects have turned me away from my usual writing schedule for enfolding, so this month, here’s an essay from “the vaults” (found on an old archive drive). Written in 1988 and no doubt dated, I still find points of relevance to contemporary occultism. I hope you do too.

    “Our world is so crowded with marvels and miracles that they have become commonplace to us; especially when we no longer see ourselves as miracles. We swim through the world, deafened by the buzz of machines and the flicker of the Videodrome, our senses are dulled from the information overload. Yet, shifting to another position, we suddenly find that the world is magical.”

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  4. Book review: City of the Beast

    As a subject for occult biography, Aleister Crowley seems to get the lion’s – or perhaps the beast’s would be a better term – share of attention. Phil Baker’s new biographical study, City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley (Strange Attractor, 2022) is something special though. Described as a ‘biography by sites’, City of the Beast explores Crowley’s life via his relationship with the city of London, a place where he spent much of his adult life.

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  5. Announcing Kālī Magic

    Kali Magic by Mike Magee

    Kālī Magic brings together Mike Magee’s decades of experience in translating and elucidating tantrik texts. The first section—Sadhana—explores the ritual worship of Kālī through mantra, her various aspects, and her yantras. The second section—Tantras—includes new English translations of the Mātṛkābheda, Toḍala, and Yoni tantras, plus two Kālī Upaniṣads and abstracts of ten tantras related to the worship of the goddess. With a comprehensive bibliography and glossary of key terms, Kālī Magic will be of great value to devotees and scholars of the goddess alike.
    322 pages, illustrated by Jan Bailey, Foreword by Phil Hine.

    “An exceedingly valuable resource for those brave enough to plumb the liturgical details of Kali worship. Thematically organized while consisting substantially of translations from Sanskrit scriptures, this is less a how-to guide than a survey of major tantric ritual components as presented in medieval sources. Three newly translated tantras and summaries of ten more round out the book, alongside copious illustrations and a lightly but helpfully annotated bibliography. Dive in!”
    Joel Bordeaux (International Institute for Asian Studies/Leiden University)

    Kālī Magic is available from Amazon.

  6. 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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  7. Theosophy and Race V – Some general observations

    I began this series on the relationship between the Theosophical movement and race in order to contest the popular view that it is through the writings of Theosophical authors – Madame Blavatsky in particular – that the concept of the ‘Aryan’ passed into Nazi ideology. In the first post in this series, I outlined the ‘birth’ of this concept in the work of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. In the second post, I discussed how the concept of the Aryan was entangled with nineteenth-century racial science. The third post outlined how the notion of the Aryan was taken up in India, and the fourth, how Blavatsky and Olcott’s notion of India’s shared Aryan roots led to a brief alliance with the Ārya Samāj until both organizations discovered that their notions of who could be ‘Aryan’ were quite distinct.

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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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