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  1. Pan: A Clergyman’s Redemption in Margery Lawrence’s How Pan Came to Little Ingleton

    ‘Oh great god Pan, I know Thee! – I thank Thee – I bless Thee . . . Thee and all Thy People great and small – for indeed, indeed beneath the mantle of the God whose name is Love, is there not room for all in His world to shelter?’

    I’ve only recently begun to read the magical fiction of Margery Lawrence (1889-1969), and admittedly, am wondering why I have never encountered her before, as the more I read about her, the more fascinating she sounds. A prolific author, she wrote over thirty novels and short story collections. Curiously though, there seems to be a dearth of critical scholarship analyzing her work.

    I have yet to find a full biography of Lawrence, but here’s what I’ve managed to cobble together from various sources.

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  2. Book Review: Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return

    The resurgence of my interest in exploring the various representations of Pan has kept me alert to new treatments of the goat-foot god, and I was rather excited, only a few weeks ago to find, on Twitter, the announcement of a new book by Paul Robichaud; Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion Books 2021, Hardback, 344pp, 34 illustrations, 13 in colour). A quick message to the author, then an email to the publishers, and I had a review copy pdf ready for me to avidly read.

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  3. Theosophy and Race – II: Nordic Aryans

    In the previous post in this series, I briefly examined the influence of Sir William Jones, then followed through with Max Müller’s two-race theory of India, and his popularization (much to his later chagrin) of the term “Aryan” as a racial category. Continuing from where I left off, I will now turn to a brief discussion of how nineteenth-century race science deployed the concept of the Aryan.

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  4. Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – IV

    This is the last (for now) of my four mammoth Twitter threads commenting on Dion Fortune’s 1930 book, Psychic Self-Defence. This thread was originally posted on Twitter on 29 August 2021.

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  5. Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – III

    The third of my excessively long Twitter threads examining Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence, originally posted on 28 August 2021.

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  6. Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – II

    Continuing on from the previous post, here is a condensation of my Twitter thread originally posted on August 27, 2021. Here’s part two (see thread of 26 August) of my interrogative reading of Dion Fortune’s classic Psychic Self Defence, a book for which the phrase “paranoid reading” seems somehow appropriate (with apologies to Eve Sedgwick).

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  7. Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – I

    Over the last few days on Twitter, I have been engaged in a close, chapter-by-chapter reading of Dion Fortune’s book, Psychic Self-Defence (first published in 1930). I began this exercise after becoming involved in a discussion about the merits of ‘psychic hygiene’ and I posted a thread detailing my own experiences and perspectives on ‘psychic attack’. I thought it would be instructive to take a look at the content of  Psychic Self-Defence (PSD) in order to discuss the origins of the genre of ‘psychic defense’ texts, of which Fortune’s book, widely hailed as a classic, is one of the first.

    The reception of these threads has been very positive, and several readers have requested that I turn them into permanent posts here. I shall return to them periodically in an attempt to explore their various ramifications and lines of inquiry emerging from them. What began as a rather light-hearted exercise in critical commentary became increasingly complex as I began to look for supporting material with which to contextualize Fortune’s remarks.

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  8. Theosophy and Race – I: Orientalists and Aryans

    The East, formerly a land of dreams, of fables, and fairies, has become to us a land of unmistakeable reality; the curtain between the West and the East has been lifted, and our old forgotten home stands before us again in bright colours and definite outlines.

    Max Müller, 1874

    It’s frequently asserted that Nazi racial ideology came directly out of nineteenth-century esoteric movements – in particular, the writings of H.P. Blavatsky and other members of the Theosophical Society. This is an over-simplification of a complex subject, and one worth examining in detail. In order to do this comprehensively, I will first take a look at some of the background context – the ideas about race that were circulating prior to the advent of the Theosophical Society. I’ll begin with a brief examination of the term “Aryan” and its tangled historical trajectory prior to its adoption by Theosophists, focusing on the influence of two orientalist scholars, Sir William Jones, and Max Müller.

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  9. Pan: From Arcadia to Arkham – Panic terror and HP Lovecraft – I

    “Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the dreamer recognised from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the Avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe, and the Musaean Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men.”

    HP Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts, Poetry and the Gods (1920)

    Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is not an author that one might immediately associate with Pan, yet Pan is present in various guises throughout his fiction and poetry, perhaps more recognizably so in his earlier prose, and more menacingly in his later works. To begin this series of posts on Lovecraft and Pan, I will take a look at the appearance of Classical themes in Lovecraft’s early work, where the Arcadian ideal is, for the most part, untainted by terror.

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  10. Book Review: A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses

    Indian goddess traditions are of enduring and fascinated attention to scholars and esoteric practitioners alike, yet many of them are virtually unknown beyond the boundaries of regional traditions or have been ignored. An attempt to redress this lacuna is this new anthology, edited by Michael Slouber – A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond (University of California Press 2020, 374 pages, Illustrated). Featuring primary translations of the narratives pertaining to twelve relatively unstudied Hindu goddesses. In what sense are these goddesses “forgotten” though? It is certainly not that they are insignificant, but that they are rarely given space in surveys of Hindu goddesses, or that their local, regional character has been lost as the goddess has become identified with more popular forms. Moreover, the scriptural sources which are the basis of these goddesses’ stories have, for the most part, received little attention. These range from some of the less well-known Purāṇas, the early Tantras, and contemporary oral lore and performance.

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