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  1. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – II

    “The collective problem, then, is to institute, find, or recover a maximum of connections. For connections (and disjunctions) are nothing other than the physics of relations, the cosmos. Even disjunction is physical, like two banks that permit the passage of flows, or their alternation. But we, we live at the very most in a “logic” of relations. We turn disjunction into an “either/or. ” We turn connection into a relation of cause and effect or a principle of consequence. We abstract a reflection from the physical world of flows, a bloodless double made up of subjects, objects, predicates, and logical relations.

    Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Medical (1997)

    Continuing from the previous post in this series, here are some further explorations of D.H. Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan. Again, the main texts I’ll be drawing from are the novella St. Mawr and the essay Pan in America. Both the essay and St. Mawr were conceived in 1924, when Lawrence was living in New Mexico.

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    April 24th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  2. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – I

    “What were you talking about?” asked Mrs. Renshaw, simply curious. She was not afraid of her husband’s running loose.
    “We were just saying ‘Pan is dead’,” said the girl.
    “Isn’t that rather trite?” asked the hostess.
    “Some of us miss him fearfully,” said the girl.
    “For what reason?” asked Mrs. Renshaw.
    “Those of us who are nymphs–just lost nymphs among farm-lands and suburbs. I wish Pan were alive.”
    D.H. Lawrence, The Overtone (1913)

    I came to the works of D.H. Lawrence late in life, having been more or less put off his writing by Kate Millet’s fierce and funny taking to pieces of his infamous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her 1970 book Sexual Politics. Millet charged Lawrence with both misogyny and phallocentrism, so I admit, I didn’t look any further than that, and it’s only in the last decade or so, that have I begun to read Lawrence attentively. This post is the first of a two-parter examining Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan with reference to his novella St. Mawr and his essay Pan in America.

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    April 16th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  3. Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – VI

    In the third installment of this series, I examined the erotic writings of Edward Sellon. Now I will turn to his “anthropological” work – the two lectures delivered to the Anthropological Society of London (ASL) – Linga Puja: On the Phallic Worship of India and Some Remarks on Indian Gnosticism, or Sacti Puja, the Worship of the Female Powers and follow through with a look at some other works dealing with Phallic worship from the ASL.

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    March 19th 2021

    Posted by in History, Lectures

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  4. Jottings: Edith Nesbit and the Golden Dawn

    Shortly after completing my recent post on Henry O’Brien I started thinking about who would be a good subject for continuing my series on Pan, and Edith Nesbit came to mind as a possibility. Pan gets a walk-on part (although he is not named directly) in Nesbit’s 1907 children’s story The Enchanted Castle. I thought that might be a good starting point to look at Pan as a figure in Edwardian children’s literature, perhaps then going on to more well-known stories such as Barries’ Peter Pan and Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. What would also, I thought, make a look at Nesbit interesting is her connection to The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, so I set out, as a matter of first business, to find a reference confirming this. Continue reading »

    February 19th 2021

    Posted by in History, Occult

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  5. Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – V

    At the close of the previous post in this series I promised I would take a look at the work of Irish scholar Henry O’Brien, an early nineteenth-century exponent of the phallic theory of religion. Continue reading »

    February 13th 2021

    Posted by in History, Lectures

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  6. Book Review: Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide

    I was 26 when the Chernobyl disaster occurred, and I well remember my feeling of horror and incredulity as the scraps of information filtered through and friends speculated what effects it might have on the magic mushroom season that year. I grew up in the shadow of the bomb – the three-minute warning, “Protect and Survive” and the War Game. Many of us had half-expected something like Chernobyl was only a matter of time. Over the years I’ve become fascinated with Chernobyl, its history and the mythologies it has spawned. I have spent hundreds of hours exploring the virtual simulacra of the Zone in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R trilogy of games and the two free mods, Lost Alpha and StalkerSoup. These games owe as much to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel “Roadside Picnic” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting film “Stalker” as they do to any real events, but if there is any place on earth where the borders of the real and the imaginary might collapse, it is Chernobyl. Continue reading »

    January 15th 2021

    Posted by in Book reviews

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  7. Pan: The vengeance of the wild in “The Music on the Hill”

    “I’ve been a fool in most things,” said Mortimer quietly, “but I’m not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I’m down here. And if you’re wise you won’t disbelieve in him too boastfully while you’re in his country.”
    The Music on the Hill

    One of the aspects of writing for a blog I enjoy is that I don’t have to intently focus on any one topic for a prolonged period – I can just hop to and fro between areas of interest as the mood takes me. Sometimes though, this produces a considerable ‘gap’ between posts. So it is, after a nine-year pause, I return to the subject of Pan.

    Throughout the Pan-themed literature of the early twentieth century, there runs a common theme: that the lure of Pan promises a return to a rural idyll – a nostalgia for both wild landscape and reunion with natural life. A distinctly antimodern turning away from the industrialized world, and the restrictions and regulations of polite society. Pan both guards and beckons into this wild terrain, opening up vistas of possibility beyond the ordered world of civilization. Yet the encounter with Pan can be terrible too; the call to encounter the wild is profoundly disturbing, and the unwary trespasser into Pan’s domain may get more than they have bargained for. Continue reading »

    January 5th 2021

    Posted by in History, Pagan, Queer

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  8. Yakṣiṇī Magic available from Amazon

    Mike Magee’s new book Yakṣiṇī Magic is now available from Amazon.com as a print on demand paperback.

    Yaksini MagicYakṣiṇī Magic is the first extensive treatment of Tantric texts dealing with practices that relate to the Yakṣiṇīs, an ancient class of female spirit beings often described as “fertility deities” and said to inhabit wild places, plants and trees. Drawing on a wide range of tantric textual sources, many of which are presented here for the first time summarised into English, Mike Magee examines the various practices through which a tantric practitioner could propitiate these powerful, fierce and sometimes jealous female spirits. Yakṣiṇī Magic affords us a fascinating glimpse into this hitherto unexplored aspect of the tantric world. Continue reading »

    December 6th 2020

    Posted by in Announcements, tantra

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  9. Yogis, Magic and Deception – IV

    “The great classic of Sanskrit literature is the Aphorisms of Patajañali. He is at least mercifully brief, and not more than ninety or ninety-five percent of what he writes can be dismissed as the ravings of a disordered mind.”
    Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga

    Given the general disdain with which physical yoga was viewed at the turn of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley’s incorporation of yoga into Western Esotericism is all the more remarkable. (He’s also, by the way, the first western esotericist to develop practical exercises relating to the chakras.) However, in bringing elements of yoga practice into his formulation of magic, Crowley left a good deal out – including any suggestion that yoga practices could lead to the flowering of extraordinary abilities ranging from flight to being able to enter the body of another person. In fact, he seems to have been decidedly skeptical of the very idea. Continue reading »

    October 29th 2020

    Posted by in History, Occult, tantra

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  10. Yogis, Magic and Deception – III

    In the previous post in this series, I examined how the powers of yoga were represented in the writings of the leaders of the Theosophical Society, such as HP Blavatsky and William Quan Judge. For the next two posts, I will examine some of Aleister Crowley’s ideas about yoga and yoga powers. First though, I will take a look at Patañjali’s Yogasūtra – which is widely held to be the original source for Crowley’s take on Yoga – and show how the attainment of extraordinary powers is dealt with. Continue reading »

    October 12th 2020

    Posted by in History, Occult, tantra

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