Queer(y)ing Chaos Magick
On Thursday, 23 November Patricia MacCormack and I will be presenting Queer(y)ing Chaos Magick at Treadwells Bookshop.
Queerying posits the subject – the self, the person, as unfixed, unstable, fluid, and perpetually becoming. It is a commitment to difference and diversity; complexity over simple assertions; open-endedness over prescriptive solutions; lived experience over abstractions. It is a refusal to be trapped in boxes or borders; a joyful, unruly wilfulness. Permission to be uncertain rather than expert; to embrace indeterminacy. Daemonic atavism, art, philosophy, and literature all feed the queerying of chaos as ritual, practice, and theory.
Patricia MacCormack is an Australian scholar who lives and works in London, England. Currently, she is Professor of Continental Philosophy in English and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophers including Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Serres, Luce Irigaray, and concepts such as queer theory, teratology, body modification, posthuman theory, animal rights, horror films and antinatalism. Her most recent book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene.
This will be both an in-person and digital attendance event. Booking details
Wheels within Wheels: Chakras and Western Esotericism
The next Twisted Trunk release will be Wheels within Wheels: Chakras and Western Esotericism. This book brings together the four booklets I originally published in 2018 based on the series of lectures given at Treadwells Bookshop exploring how the concept of chakras trickled into Western Esotericism and New Age thought. I hope to have this book released and available on Amazon before the end of the year.
Kenneth Grant and Tantra - a pause
I’m taking a break from my explorations of Kenneth Grant’s representation of tantra – I’ve been occupied with writing new material for the Wheels within Wheels project. Some correspondence with Michael Staley of Starfire Publishing has confirmed though, that Grant’s main source for information on the tantric traditions was the works of Sir John Woodroffe. This in itself is interesting, and although Woodroffe is recognized nowadays as the ‘father’ of contemporary Tantric studies, there has been relatively little attention to his influence on Western esotericism’s entanglement with the tantric traditions. Although Woodroffe was critical of Theosophical interpretations of tantra, he is known to have included prominent Theosophists such as Annie Besant and Alexandra David-Neel in his social circle. He also makes the occasional remark that seems to indicate that he is sympathetic to occult concepts and ideas. I’ll be taking a closer look at the many facets of Sir John Woodroffe – High Court Judge and secret tantric initiate in Wheels within Wheels.
Not being obsessive about Kenneth Grant in any way at all I did spend some time cross-checking some of the sources he cites in discussing the 'secretions' emitted by the Suvasini. In some of his books he gives a very specific reference: p146 of Havelock Ellis' Studies In The Psychology Of Sex Vol. 3. I checked. That page in that volume says nothing about female genital secretions but seems to be mostly discussing Roussea’s fondness for flagellation.
Turns out that Grant meant p146 of Studies In The Psychology Of Sex Vol. 2. Here’s what Ellis has to say:
“The secretions of the genital canal and outlet in women are somewhat numerous. We have the odoriferous glands of sebaceous origin and with them the prepuce of the clitoris which has been described as a kind of gigantic sebaceous follicle with the clitoris occupying its interior. (Hyrtl.) There is the secretion from the glands of Bartholin. There is again the vaginal secretion, opaque and albuminous, which appears to be alkaline when secreted but becomes acid under the decomposing influence of bacteria, which are, however, harmless and not pathogenic. (Gow, Obstetrical Society of London, January 3, 1894.) There is, finally, the mucous uterine secretion, which is alkaline, and, being poured out during orgasm, is believed to protect the spermatozoa from destruction by the acid vaginal secretion.”
So far I have not located Gow's original paper in the proceedings of the Obstetrical Society of London.
In the meantime, I’ve started an occasional series of essays on the historical progression of the Śrīvidyā tantric tradition. The first part, focusing for the most part on the early phase of Śrīvidyā: the Nityā Tradition is here.
That’s all for this newsletter. Thanks for reading.