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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.
Continue reading »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?
Continue reading »Continuing with my review of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism from March (part 1).
As editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction, the women profiled in this collection (for the most part British, living between the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) lived at a time when women’s involvement in the esoteric was becoming more visible, as was women’s involvement with other social movements. These women saw esotericism – in varying degrees, as a route for both personal and social transformation.
“Will the Bengalee worshipper of Shakti shrink from the shedding of blood? … The worship of the goddess will not be consummated if you sacrifice your lives at the shrine of Independence without shedding blood.”
Jugantar
“Mother, incomparably arrayed, Hair flying, stripped down, You battle-dance on Siva's heart, A garland of heads that bounce off Your heavy hips, chopped-off hands For a belt, the bodies of infants For earrings, and the lips, The teeth like jasmine, the face A lotus blossomed, the laugh, And the dark body billowing up and out Like a storm cloud, and those feet Whose beauty is only deepened by blood. So Prasād cries: My mind is dancing! Can I take much more? Can I bear An impossible beauty?” Ramprasād Sen
As Mike Magee’s new book – Kālī Magic – for my Twisted Trunk imprint nears completion, I thought I’d do a brief essay on the goddess Kali and her key characteristics – the most enduring of which is her fury.
Continue reading »As an aside from my series on armed yogis, I thought I’d take a look at some examples of Indian satirical plays that feature ascetics – particularly the so-called heterodox religions, such as the Jainas and Buddhists, but also some tantric (or at least proto-tantric) practitioners.
Continue reading »Continue reading »By constant practice the manifested universe
Lalleśwarī
gets merged in the universal self.
The world of name and form gets merged in the
vastness of the void as one homogenous whole.
This, O Brahmin, is the true doctrine.
“We place ourselves under your instruction. Perhaps, we may directly and indirectly aid you to hasten the accomplishment of the holy mission, in which you are now engaged; for our battle-field extends to India: from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin there is work that we can do.
Colonel Olcott, letter to Dayānand Saraswatī, February 18, 1878
You venerable man, who have learned to pierce the disguises and masks of your fellow-creatures. Look into our hearts and see that we speak the truth. See that we approach you not in pride but humility, that we are prepared to receive your counsel, and do our duty as it may be shown to us. If you will write us a letter, you will know just what we wish to know, and will give us what we need.”
In the previous post in this series, I gave a brief examination of one of nineteenth-century India’s reform movements – the Brāhmo Samāj, founded by Raja Rammohun Roy. For this post, I’m going to examine the Ārya Samāj, founded in 1875 by Dayānand Saraswatī. It is here that the Theosophical Society enters the picture – as the TS briefly allied itself with the Ārya Samāj, and it is arguable that Dayānand Saraswatī played a key role in the Society’s eastward turn.
Continue reading »The scholarly focus on women in Western Esotericism has, as editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction to Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), often been framed as marginal or secondary to studies of male occultists. This new book then is a welcome and much-needed corrective to that lacuna. Divided into four sections, the contributions cover women both well-known – Dion Fortune, Pamela Colman Smith, Florence Farr, and Doreen Valiente, to the more obscure (at least to me), such as Eleanor Kirk and Colette Aboulker-Muscat.
Continue reading »“We see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race.”
Kenshub Chandra Sen, 1877
In the opening part of this series, I examined the roots of the notion of the Aryans in the work of Sir William Jones and Freidrich Max Müller. In the second post, I briefly outlined the emergence of nineteenth-century racial science, and how the concept of Aryans became associated with white supremacy and racial hierarchies.
Aryan racial theory, as it developed, seemed to raise as many issues as it purported to solve. If Indians and the British shared a common ancestry, this threatened the belief that Indians were inferior to Europeans. The answer, for some, lay in a Darwinian notion of racial degeneration. This led to the notion that whilst the European Aryans had maintained their vitality, the Indian Aryans had degenerated, by intermingling with the aboriginal natives – weakening their bloodlines and adopting superstitions and primitive practices. In the pens of the European racial theorists, India’s Aryan past became a kind of golden age, from which India had sadly declined into superstition and idolatry. These ‘explanations’ had far-reaching consequences.
Continue reading »“To the One who, although nothing but a mass of consciousness, is yet solidified in the form of the world, to the unborne One who is proficient in the play of concealing his own Self, glory to this Supreme Lord!”
Paramārthasāra of Abhinavagupta, verse 1
A few days ago, my friend Gregory Peters tweeted a verse from Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka:
“No lunar day nor asterism, no fasting is prescribed. He who is engrossed in every day life becomes a Perfected Being by means of continual recollection.”
(chapter 29/v65, transl. John Dupuche)
My initial interpretation of this verse was: “residing in wonder as the ground state of one’s being”.
A question was posed in respect to this verse – what does “continual recollection” mean in this particular context? I thought I’d take the opportunity to tackle this – not without some reservations, as though have been reading Abhinavagupta’s works for nigh on two decades, I still struggle to articulate my understanding of his luminous wisdom. But this is important for me. Ever since I came to realize how central the experience of wonder is to nondual tantra, I have been struggling to articulate what this means for me. I may say that I seek to open myself to wonder in the ordinary and every day, to find enchantment and presence in small moments and encounters, but that is somehow not enough. So I’m going to take this as an opportunity to say more about wonder in tantra, both as a beginning, a practice, and a goal. But’s that’s going to have to wait.
Continue reading »