Welcome to Unfoldings #3
New: Acts of MAGICAL Resistance
In the last newsletter, I said I was going to release a free pdf on Magic for resistance to political oppression. Well for various reasons, not least of which is that writing is now my main income stream, I’ve decided to release it as a booklet, available from Amazon as a print or ebook. Acts of Magical Resistance is a review of some of the ways that magic has been deployed in political activism and protest in the UK since the 1980s. Where possible, I’ve drawn on my own experience of this work, and given some examples of rituals and events that I’ve participated in. I discuss various approaches to magical resistance and provide some examples of the intersection between magic and politics in previous centuries. With colour illustrations of flyers, posters, book covers, and a cartoon by Lawrence Burton, I hope this small contribution will be of use to anyone interested in magical activism against the gathering dark.
If you like my work, then please consider purchasing Acts of Magical Resistance.
Book Launch: Queerying Occultures
I’m pleased to announce that there will be a book launch for Queerying Occultures on Thursday 6 July from 7pm at Treadwells Bookshop. Booking details.
Also in the pipeline:
I’m still busy with a number of other projects – the Delinquent Elementals collection I have been working on the Rodney Orpheus will hopefully be published before the year’s end by Strange Attractor. Delinquent Elementals is a collection of content from Pagan News, a monthly Pagan ‘zine that Rodney and I created and edited (along with various other people) between 1988-1992. We started it just as the UK’s “Satanic Panic” kicked off – which gave us something to write about. So as well as a collection of essays, interviews, practical tips, and offbeat humor from the pages of Pagan News, Delinquent Elementals also charts the rise of the Satanic Panic and how various people responded to it.
Also, underway is Yoginīs: Sex, Death, and Possession in Tantric Traditions. This will be an expanded edition of a little booklet I self-published back in 2018 based on a lecture I did at that year’s Glastonbury Occult Conference. It’s an introduction to the Śaiva tantric traditions, with particular regard to themes of possession and the Yoginīs – the fierce female spirits that inhabit the tantric world. Yoginīs will be published by Original Falcon Press. I’m hoping to get it done before the year is out. Here’s a sample of what’s in store from one of the chapter introductions.
“The world of the early tantras is intensely animist - spirits are everywhere. Their sinuous shapes emerge from trees, and fathomless eyes peer from the depths of rivers and lakes. Ghosts and demons lurk in dangerous places, all too ready to fall upon the unwary traveler or unwise magician. A mispronounced mantra or an inadequate offering can bring fearful vengeance from a slighted spirit. Very often such beings are female - powerful and beautiful, yet at the same time, full of danger. From them can be won magical powers, great secrets, wealth, and fame. But attempting such alliances places humans in great peril. These female spirits are quick to anger. They inflict disease and madness; they slip into the bodies of the unwary through their shadows; they drink blood and tear at human flesh. They steal children in the night or tempt ascetics from their meditations with their lithe and twisting forms.”
Bubbling under is Wheels within Wheels. This will be a slightly expanded edition of the four chapbooks I published in 2018 tracking the genealogy of the passage of knowledge of Chakras into Western Esotericism. I’m going to collect the four booklets into one volume, add some stuff I didn’t get time to cover in the original Treadwells lecture series, and publish it under my own Twisted Trunk imprint via Amazon. I’ll probably use Maria Strutz’s artwork for the second book in the series as part of the cover. Her lovely linocut, used for the cover of the second booklet in the series, is based on a diagram in a book by Sri Sabhapati Swami - more about him below. Here’s a 2018 chat between Jacob Kyle of Embodied Philosophy and myself about my chakras research.
Over on my enfolding blog, I’ve started to write about Tantra again. There are two posts concerning the Kleshas (afflictions) that for some years were a key element of my practice and a short piece on the issue of whether or not tantra is a religion. If you’re interested in things tantric, check out the two books by Mike Magee that I have published under my own Twisted Trunk imprint - Yakṣiṇī Magic and Kālī Magic.
New Interview: Queerying Occultures
The latest interview is a lovely chat about Queerying Occultures with Darragh Mason Field on his Spiritbox channel.
Queer Dharma
In 2021 I wrote a very long essay for the “queer dharma” issue of a peer-reviewed journal, Tarka, (published by Embodied Philosophy) building on two blog posts I’d written in 2014. It was a frustrating and exhausting project, as not being an academic I am unused to the peer-review process and what seemed like an endless round of requested edits and clarifications – all the while sticking to a strict word count. At the time, I was so exhausted that I never really made many references to the essay since it was published. On re-reading it recently though, I do feel that it deserves a wider readership, so here it is – The Perils of Becoming a Gopi.
Influences: IMPRO
Last year, I started doing some long Twitter threads on some of the non-occult books that have shaped my ideas and practice. One of these is the late Keith Johnstone’s wonderful book, IMPRO.
In the mid-1980s, as part of a diploma in Occupational Therapy (a career I never pursued), I studied drama therapy. This opened me up to the vast world of theatre and acting, and I immediately twigged the cross-over between magic and the theatre. I read Artaud, Jarry, Grotowski, Stanislavki, the ancient Greek Dramas (Aristophanes’ The Frogs is a particular favorite), and the ideas of contemporary directors such as Lindsay Anderson and Peter Brook. Brook’s first production was Faustus, in 1943. According to his biographer, Michael Kustow, Brook sought out the magical advice of Aleister Crowley when he was staging the play.
But the book that had the most influence on me was IMPRO. I had a lovely conversation with Devin Person in a 2021 interview about our mutual love of Johnstone’s work.
IMPRO is a collection of reflections, tricks, and observations that can, as Johnstone eloquently puts it "make the world blaze up again". After a reflexive and engaging romp through his own life, from childhood to teaching actors, Johnstone explores the production/maintenance of social status through interactions - and how to play with it. Then there's the section entitled "Spontaneity" which explores creativity/uncreativity not so much as opposites but as different intensities, improvisations, and how to get people doing it. There's also a really good discussion about "trance states" opening with Johnstone saying "How do we enter trance states? I would prefer to ask, how do we stay out of them?" He's really good at that kind of provocation.
There's a warm-up exercise I think might have come from Johnstone (I did a short course he was running) where you get people to imagine that they are looking at a bookshelf and then to pick out the book they've written, and start reading it. I generally find that people can manage a page or so before they realize what's going on and snap out of it. But what comes out is sometimes fascinating.
There’s something else though, which I’ve only just come to realize. Up until that point, most of the books on magic I’d read were written in a didactic style and there was little sense of the author’s own presence or experience in the text. I really loved the way that Johnstone situates himself in the text – reflecting on his own life experiences and how they shaped his approach to practice. IMPRO is a deeply autobiographical work, and I think his style started to shape the way I wrote about magic, putting myself into the text - although that took a while to really flower.
Johnstone’s book was particularly useful for me in exploring the uses of masks in magic, and in thinking through some approaches to possession work. IMPRO’s fingerprints are all over Condensed Chaos, and also my so-called “shamanic trilogy” which preceded it. I did a lot of mask work based on Johnstone’s ideas in the eighties and one day I might even get around to writing it up properly. At one point I was thinking of doing a small book on working with masks but never found the time – bits of it ended up in Condensed.
When I started running magical workshops/courses in the early 90s, I used to repurpose a lot of acting (and drama therapy) exercises as “magical” techniques. Things like shifting one’s attention to different parts of the body – for example, imagining you’ve got an elephant’s head and how would that make you walk differently – can be helpful in teaching people to prepare for possession work and invocation. There’s a “touching hands” exercise – originally from a psychiatric drama group where you get people to pair off, close their eyes, and explore each other’s hands. Simple, but I remember one guy telling me very honestly that he’d been nervous exploring the hand of a gay man, and that also this was the first time he’d touched another man’s hand that wasn’t a handshake or a slap.
It’s amazing how really simple things like that can open up someone’s world in unexpected ways. Hold that thought.
New books by Friends
Sacred Animals
One of my oldest friends, Gordon “the toad” MacLellan has just re-issued a revised edition of his 1997 book, Sacred Animals. Gordon is one of the UK’s most respected environmental educators. Books that examine magic and animals are a very popular genre. So what’s different about Sacred Animals? First off, it’s very down-to-earth. Secondly, Gordon explores how to celebrate animals through a wide variety of approaches - from the pleasure of just watching them as they go about their lives, to dancing, masks, making costumes, and face painting. “Here you will find out how to appreciate the courage of mice and the excitement of bumblebees, the elegance of beetles and the subtlety of foxes.” It is a wonderful book, chock full of Gordon’s distinctive illustrations and evocative poetry.
Sacred Animals is available from Green Magic Publishing. Here’s Gordon chatting with Darragh Mason Field on his Spiritbox channel.
Like a Tree Universally Spread
Back in 2018, when I was researching material for my four-part lecture series on the genealogy of representations of the chakras from India to the West, I began corresponding with Keith E. Cantú. Keith introduced me to the writings of Sri Sabhapati Swami, who seems to have dropped off the radar for the most part as one of the key persons involved in the dissemination of chakra knowledge to the West. His writings were for a while, an influence on the Theosophical Society (until Blavatsky and Olcott fell out with him). Max Muller mentions Sabhapati’s work favorably in his Six Systems of Indian Philosophy. More significantly, however, Sabhapati was a major influence on Aleister Crowley – his Liber S.S.S for example (S.S.S - Sri Sabhapati Swami). Crowley was the first Western esotericist to come up with practical exercises with chakras, and he draws heavily on Sabhapati’s work in doing so.
Keith and I have continued to correspond, and he is one of the many scholars I am in contact with who are very willing to share their work with non-specialists such as myself. I am eternally grateful for their kindness and generosity. Keith has a new book, Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga coming out soon from Oxford University Press.
Here’s an interview with Keith discussing his work on Sri Sabhapati Swami.
Keith’s dissertation Sri Sabhapati Swami and the “Translocalization” of Śivarājayoga can be accessed here.
Thanks for reading!