Book Project updates
Delinquent Elementals, the Pagan News collection co-edited by Rodney Orpheus and myself, has now been set for release by Strange Attractor next May, so fingers crossed!
As for Wheels within Wheels: Chakras and Western Esotericism, I’m hoping to get that one out sometime in January. My next release for Original Falcon, Yoginis: Sex Death and Possession in early Tantra – hopefully within the first quarter of 2024 if I stop adding stuff to it. A few other possible projects are stacking up too, but at present, I am unsure as to which ones will move forward.
In the meantime, there’s always Acts of Magical Resistance, available directly from Amazon in print and digital formats. Plus of course, Queerying Occultures from Original Falcon Press. Queerying is by far the best book I’ve written so far, by a long shot. I often find it difficult to read my writings - sometimes it takes a couple of years before I can bear to read a book I’ve written. Not Queerying though. I’m immensely proud of this book and very grateful to all those who helped it come together. If there’s one thing I’d like to be remembered for, it’s this one.
Influences: Escape Attempts
No Kenneth Grant this time. Instead, I want to return to the subject of non-occult books that have inspired the development of my magical thought.
In 1978 I left home to the bright lights and temptations of the city of Huddersfield (an unlikely Shangri-La, admittedly) where I took a joint honours B.Sc in the Behavioural Sciences at the Polytechnic. It was a mix of a course. Over the three years, I studied Psychology (from William James to Carl Rogers); Sociology; British Social Policy, and Philosophy. One of the books I read in that period, that was to prove highly influential to the development of my ideas about magic was Stan Cohen and Laurie Taylor’s Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life. Cohen and Taylor explain, in their introduction, how the idea for the book took shape as they researched how prisoners coped with the boredom of long-term confinement. The main theme of Escape Attempts is the examination of the various practices and strategies we resort to to carve out spaces of resistance; spaces where a sense of self distinct from the commitments of work or family life might flourish. How we distance ourselves from routines through hobbies, holidays, and scripted escape routes, searching for a chimeric ‘real’ self that lies beyond. Day-dreams and fantasies, the scramble for new sexual experiences, fiction (Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man gets some discussion – some of my earliest ‘chaos’ rituals involved playing around with dice), psychotherapy, and, even Aleister Crowley’s madcap life are examined. Escape Attempts enlarges on one of my favorite quotes from Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:
“Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks”.
Revisiting the book now, much of it feels dated and overly simplistic, yet at the same time I think Cohen & Taylor offer a healthy dose of skepticism toward the very notion of escape; a move towards a much-needed critical reflexivity at the various attempts to get beyond the boundaries of paramount reality, only to find that nothing lies beyond.
Here’s an essay from 1988 that takes up some of the perspectives I gleaned from Escape Attempts. Occultism: A Postmodern Perspective. Escape Attempts’ fingerprints can also be discerned in ‘Fracture Lines’ - an essay that appears in my 2019 collection of essays: Hine’s Varieties: Chaos and Beyond.
Escape Attempts can be borrowed at archive.org
New Blog Posts
I’ve managed to get some blog writing done this month. A review of Simon Cox’s brilliant book, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy, plus some thoughts on agency, magical results, and changing perspectives on ‘Chaos Servitors’. Most recently, some reflections on how I began my journey into a world of magic.
Current reading
I’m slowly making my way through Alastair Bonnett’s Off the Map: Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places, and What They Tell Us About the World (Aurum Press, 2015). If, like me, you have an interest in odd places across the world, you’ll probably like this book. Even if you are only looking for a new site for a Call of Cthulhu adventure (my first thought when I spotted the book in a community library box). The chapters are short, but deal with a wide range of strange places, from non-existent places (Sandy Island, off the coast of Queensland, except it isn’t), to underground or dead cities, and interstitial sites that exist between borders. Bonnett also explores small places: fox dens, and Alan Sonfit’s Time Landscape in New York.
On that note, I should mention Darmon Richter’s recent announcement for Nument, a new project for memorializing protests in the virtualized landscape of Google Maps. Check out Darmon’s Substack newsletter for more details.
Also on my shelf (well, on my iPad) is Loriliai Biernacki’s The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2023). As you might guess, this is more heavyweight reading, but I’ve been looking forward to this book for some time. Biernacki’s central premise is that the panentheism of Abhinavagupta, an eleventh-century tantric, can help us reformulate our relationship with matter. She’s injecting non-dual tantric philosophy into the current wave of thought sometimes labeled the New Materialism. Other thinkers associated with New Materialism include Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Vicki Kirby, and Manuel DeLanda. I haven’t managed to get very far with The Matter of Wonder. It is one of those books I find necessary to take regular breaks from.
So what’s this New Materialism stuff all about? Here’s an apt quote from physicist Karen Barad:
“Eros, desire, life forces run through everything, not only specific body parts or specific kind of engagements among body parts. Matter itself is not a substrate or a medium for the flow of desire. Materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative reconfiguring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening.”
from New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies
The New Materialists are calling time on the materialism of Descartes and Hobbes, questioning the all-too-familiar notion of the division between mind and matter, the mechanistic understanding that so heavily shapes how we act in the world. They argue, instead, that matter itself is lively; it exhibits agency. As Jane Bennett points out, “The machine model of nature, with its figure of inert matter, is no longer even scientific. . . . Yet the popular image of materialism as mechanistic endures.” New Materialist thought rejects the idea of special human privilege among so many other species on the planet. It is pushing back against the notion of human exceptionalism, with all its implications. Karen Barad has strongly critiqued the concept that there are two distinct kinds of entities - "representations, and entities to be represented". For Barad, drawing on physicist Niels Bohr, the primary epistemological unit is phenomena - a constellation of components acting on, in, with, or through each other. In other words, objects only come ever to be in a relational, intra-active process. It will be interesting to see what happens when New Materialist thought hits contemporary occultism head-on.
I do find it difficult to read some New Materialist writing, but I am excited to read how Biernacki approaches these themes, adding Abhinavagupta (who is also not easy to read) to the emerging currents.
That’s all for now. More in the New Year.