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Something I find fascinating – and at times infuriating – is how a great many people claiming to be advocates, teachers, or representatives of “authentic” Tantric lineages or practices continually recirculate tropes that effectively erase any recognition that Tantra has any historical or cultural specificity. Continue reading »
“in view of the indelibility that is characteristic of all mental traces, it is surely not surprising that even the most primitive forms of genital worship can be shown to have existed in very recent times and that the language, customs, and superstitions of mankind today contain survivals from every phase of this process of development.”
Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo Da Vince, 1910
Before I move onto an examination of Edward Sellon’s anthropological and “phallic” works, I want to first discuss the wider context of phallic theories of religion in the nineteenth century. Continue reading »
Interest in witchcraft seems to be at an all-time high at the moment, and over the last few years, there has been a steady stream of books examining the history of witchcraft in its various manifestations. The latest work I’ve had the opportunity to read is Thomas Waters’ Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times (Yale University Press, 2019, Hdbk). Continue reading »
With apologies to the shades of Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, and Hugh Paddick.
I’ve been doing Pagan workshops for some time now but recently attendance has dropped off. It’s as though Pagans aren’t interested in finding out about the role of the semicolon in the 300 laws of witchcraft anymore. So I thought I’d catch the current wave and reinvent myself as a Shaman. Picking up a copy of “Mystic Muscles” – I buy it for the gardening section – I saw, between notices for Aura Massages and Tantric Hand Shandy therapy, a small advert for Bona Shamans of Islington. So I thought I’d pop along and see what they could do for me. Continue reading »
Copies of Mike Magee’s new book Yakṣiṇī Magic can now be purchased from my Twisted Trunk website. There are only two copies left, so act fast!
And so to Edward Sellon; libertine, atheist, orientalist, anthropologist, pornographer. For this post, I’m going to focus on Sellon’s pornographic productions and then will turn to his anthropological excursions in the next post. To some extent, this is a repeat of the approach I took in my first two essays on Edward Sellon (here and here) but I shall endeavour not to repeat earlier material too much. Continue reading »
Here’s a short extract from my new book, Hine’s Varieties: Chaos & Beyond which deals with how I became engaged with Tantra as a subject and a means of practice. It’s a section of the introduction to three essays in the book which deal with tantra-related themes. Hine’s Varieties: Chaos & Beyond is available direct from Original Falcon Publications as both print and ebook. Continue reading »
Following on from the previous post in this series, I will now examine the activities of the Anthropological Society of London and its “inner cabal” – The Cannibal Club. Continue reading »
I have for some time been interested in how representations of India – particularly those related to sexuality – emerged out of the Colonial period and went on to influence twentieth-century stereotypes of India in a wide variety of ways. The ready association made between Tantra and sex, for example, is something I would argue, has its roots in this period, as does much of the romanticism about India as a land of enlightened sexuality. It is this interest that led me into a murky territory which is sometimes called ethnopornography – a shadow zone where a piece of erotic writing can disguise itself as a scholarly work – or a scholarly work can be read as erotica. Where the body of the native is portrayed as alluring or threatening – sometimes both, and colonial territories become both zones of sexual adventure and hearts of darkness. Continue reading »
In the previous post in this series, I briefly sketched out the orientalist position on yoga & yoga powers before outlining how the extraordinary abilities attributed to yogis became associated with stage magic and deception. Now I will take a look at how yoga powers were represented in the writings of the leaders of the Theosophical Society. Continue reading »
