Skip to navigation | Skip to content
In a recent essay, I posed the question – How do we learn to be magicians? Is it simply a matter of reading books, studying with a teacher, doing practices, and taking on particular beliefs and attitudes? My answer was to reflect on my early dive into the world of the occult in which I introduced the term reflexivity. In this post, I will discuss the concept of reflexivity and propose that it should be accepted as a core occult practice.
Continue reading »
Words have Power.
Imagine a setting. You’re in a restaurant or a café perhaps, enjoying a quiet conversation with friends. Suddenly a stranger walks up to your table and without any opening or introduction, begins to offer a commentary on some conversational topic. You’d be slightly taken aback. Alarmed even. Who is this complete stranger who has suddenly, for no apparent reason, taken it upon themselves to intrude into a private conversation?
Continue reading »
As a spin-off from the last couple of posts outlining tantric ritual procedures, I thought I’d turn to a more complex issue and tackle the concept of the ‘subtle body’ and how it is used in tantric practice. The term ‘subtle body’ is immediately familiar of course – it has a long history of usage in Western esotericism, from Aristotle to Aleister Crowley and beyond. Sanskrit terms such as lingaśarīra, sūkṣmadeha or sūkṣmaśarīra– often used to refer to the subtle body – was popularized in Western esotericism by the writings of H.P. Blavatsky and other Theosophists, drawing heavily on the work of Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Max Muller. André Padoux points out that this conflation of terms is a misnomer, as the sūkṣmadeha or sūkṣmaśarīra, in actuality, refers to that entity that migrates from body to body after death and lacks any shape, visualized components or affective qualities.
Continue reading »How do we learn to be magicians? Do we just pick up a book or two, do the exercises and rituals, and take on the beliefs and perspectives that ‘feel right’ to us? Maybe do an online course with a teacher whom we have come to respect? Go on social media and engage constructively (or not) with other practitioners. Join a small group or a large magical organization? It is not, I feel, a simple process. Well at least, it was not a simple process for me. I was not initiated by fairies at the bottom of the garden, as one of my friends says he was. I did not have a magical granny or the memory of a past life being a high magus in Atlantis. I did not receive messages from a spiritual master on the Inner Planes. I did not experience a sudden spiritual awakening or a summons by a goddess.
Continue reading »One day in 2020, I ambled into my study and turned on my computer, and … nothing. My heart skipped a beat. I felt a sense of dread steal over me. Checking the startup options, I saw that not only had the SSD drive on which the operating system lives failed but also one of the disks in my RAID array had gone too. It was a palpable shock. All that was on the computer – work in progress, layout jobs for clients, photos, games, videos, half-sorted digital libraries … gone. More than that, I was cut off from the wider world of social media and the internet, extended knowledge repositories, news, friends; and the full panoply of digital life in networked culture.
Continue reading »Following on from the previous post in this occasional series, here’s a look at an example of bhūtaśuddhiḥ – the purification and divinization of the body. This practice is a core component of tantric daily practice, and examples are found both in scriptures and ritual manuals of the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava traditions. There are also similar practices in tantric Buddhism.
In bhūtaśuddhiḥ practice, regions of the body are homologized with the five elements, tattvas and kalās. What follows is a condensed description of bhūtaśuddhiḥ compiled from Śaiva texts such as the Kāmikāgama, Īśānaśivaguradeva, and Somaśambhu-paddhati. There are very similar accounts of this rite in both the Jayākha Saṃhitā and the Laksmī Tantra, two texts of the Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra.
This essay will appear in my next Twisted Trunk release: Wheels within Wheels: Chakras and Western Esotericism. I’m hoping to have it published before the end of the year.
Continue reading »For this occasional series, I’m going to provide some short notes on various tantric ritual procedures. Tantric rituals tend to follow a fixed sequence of actions (pūjā-vidhi) as set forth in the ritual manuals (paddhati) – often distillations of much longer tantric scriptures, giving step-by-step guides for practitioners.
Continue reading »During a recent interview in which I spoke briefly about my tantra practice, I was asked to give an example of a simple exercise. Here it is.
Continue reading »In the previous post in this series, I outlined the representation of kleśās within the Pātañjalayogaśāstra – a.k.a the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (YS). For this post I want to discuss a more complex issue – are kleśās “tantric”? This is something I have pondered, on and off, for some years. As I explained in the first post, I was introduced to kleśā practice through initiation into AMOOKOS, and the kleśās were presented to me by my mentor – with the support of the AMOOKOS grade papers (published, in part, in the book Tantra Magick) – as a core component of daily practice. As I said, I spent a decade or so using the kleśā schema as a means of self-observation and analysis. This was very fruitful. Perhaps it should have been enough. Gradually though, it began to dawn on me that the perspective underlying the kleśā practice was very different from that of the tantras.
Continue reading »In the previous post in this series, I outlined how I began my practice with the five kleśas as presented in the AMOOKOS practice manual, Tantra Magick. Now I want to turn to an examination of how the kleśas are dealt with in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras (YS). Before doing so, however, I want to give a brief introduction to the philosophy that underpins the Yoga Sūtras.
Continue reading »