Time Machines
A brief reflection on magical objects.
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Posts tagged ‘Practice’
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One from the vaults: the Yuggoth working
“They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the words have been spoken and the rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with their voices and the earth mutters with their consciousness.”
The Necronomicon, The Dulwich Horror, H.P. LovecraftThe Nyarlathotep Coven was a collective of magicians from a variety of backgrounds who came to work together to explore Lovecraftian magic.
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Speaking from Experience
Some reflections on speaking and listening following a discussion at the London Tantra Discussion Group.
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Gaṇeśa Upaniṣad
Gaṇeśa by Maria Strutz The Gaṇeśa Upaniṣad is one of the central texts of the Gāṇapatya Sampradāya, the groups of devotees for whom Gaṇeśa was the supreme divinity. These groups are thought to have arisen from the 10th century onwards, although there has been comparatively little written about them by contemporary scholars. The Gaṇeśa Upaniṣad belongs to the class of Hindu texts that are considered to be revelatory – śruti – “that which is heard”, and in some quarters, are held to be without ‘origin’. It is a manifestation of a particular ‘Truth’. Like other Upaniṣads, it is not merely to be studied as a written text, but to be spoken – the text not only functions as instructive scripture, but also as a performative liturgy – the act of speaking the Upanishad becomes a revelatory experience. This translation is by the late Mike Magee, and the footnotes are my own.
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Thoughts on Mudra
Another essay from the London Tantra Discussion Group wiki – this time, a reflection on mudras following a retreat the group held in 2002.
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Reflexivity as Occult Practice – I
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.
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Don’t be a Dipshit
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?
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Tantric Subtle Bodies – I
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.
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On Becomings
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.
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On Agency and other matters
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.
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