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  1. 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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    August 23rd 2022

    Posted by in Book reviews, History, Occult

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  2. 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.

    August 1st 2022

    Posted by in Announcements, tantra

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  3. 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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    August 1st 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Queer

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  4. 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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    July 30th 2022

    Posted by in History, Occult

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  5. 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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    July 22nd 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Queer

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  6. 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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    July 18th 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Queer

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  7. 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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    July 15th 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Pagan, Queer, tantra

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  8. Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – II

    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.

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    June 30th 2022

    Posted by in Book reviews, Gender, History, Occult, Pagan

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  9. Kali: the Furious

    “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.

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    June 28th 2022

    Posted by in History, tantra

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  10. “The Antics of Drunkards” – ascetics and Indian Satire

    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.

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    May 5th 2022

    Posted by in History, tantra

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