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Posts tagged ‘Spiritualism’

1. 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 Phil Hine in Book reviews, Gender, History, Occult, Pagan

   Tags: Dion Fortune, Golden Dawn, nineteenth century, Spiritualism, Theosophy

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2. Pan: A Clergyman’s Redemption in Margery Lawrence’s How Pan Came to Little Ingleton

   ‘Oh great god Pan, I know Thee! – I thank Thee – I bless Thee . . . Thee and all Thy People great and small – for indeed, indeed beneath the mantle of the God whose name is Love, is there not room for all in His world to shelter?’

   I’ve only recently begun to read the magical fiction of Margery Lawrence (1889-1969), and admittedly, am wondering why I have never encountered her before, as the more I read about her, the more fascinating she sounds. A prolific author, she wrote over thirty novels and short story collections. Curiously though, there seems to be a dearth of critical scholarship analyzing her work.

   I have yet to find a full biography of Lawrence, but here’s what I’ve managed to cobble together from various sources.

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   October 28th 2021

   Posted by Phil Hine in Occult, Pagan

   Tags: Pan, Spiritualism

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3. Occult gender regimes: Polarity and the spirited body – II

   In my last post in this series I examined the relationship between spiritualism and the rapid growth of communications technology in the nineteenth century. This time round, I’m going to focus on the notion of “female passivity” in terms of Spiritualism, and its relationship to wider cultural discourses of the period. Just as spiritualism took off at the same time as the rise of the telegraph, it also was contemporaneous with the growing tensions over women’s role and influence – the so-called “Woman Question”. Continue reading »

   

   December 12th 2010

   Posted by Phil Hine in Gender, History, Occult

   Tags: bodies, nineteenth century, polarity, Spiritualism

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4. Occult gender regimes: Polarity and the spirited body – I

   In the early part of the nineteenth century, electricity was thought to be the force most likely to prove the existence of the elan vitale or life force of Naturalphilosophie. Schelling, at the turn of the century, for example, proposed that heat, light, magnetism and electricity were all byproducts of a single universal life force. The arising of electrical models allowed polarities to be discovered within organisms – and between discrete classes of persons. Thus maleness or masculinity was assigned to the positive pole, and femininity to the negative. The gendering of electricity and energy continued in the nineteenth century, particularly in respect to medical theories and the notion of “nervous energy”, and the rise in popularity of Spiritualism. Continue reading »

   

   September 3rd 2010

   Posted by Phil Hine in Gender, History, Occult

   Tags: bodies, nineteenth century, polarity, Spiritualism

   3 comments »