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Saved through the world or by escaping from it: Hellenic Tantra considered.

  When as a philosophy undergraduate, I found myself reading Plato for the first time, I noted a troublesome disconnect between the Plato that I was reading, and possibly fitfully understanding, and the confident nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators that accompanied this reading.  My Plato was the practitioner of therapeutic wisdom who aimed to convert your being through the devices of dialogue, storytelling, and myth-making accompanied by unambiguous references to embodied spiritual practices (gymnastics, corybantic dance, and so forth). The Plato of the commentators was a rational philosopher and a committed 'dualist' separating an 'ideal' realm of the good from the messy binding world of 'matter' from which we were presumed to want to escape in a fleeing ascent.  You could see where this dualist, binary Plato had come from for he (or better still Socrates) often creates separate images of contrasting worlds to elaborate his points but reading on you
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Edwin and Willa Muir: A Literary Marriage

One of my realizations reading this excellent double study of the marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir was that exception reporting (the world is going to hell in a handbasket) is a feature of not only news coverage (after all 99.99999% of the population of the United States were not murdered today) but potentially of biography too, built as it is primarily on letters, memoirs/memories and diaries. We tend not to record the everydayness of our contentments and quiet achievements but how our plans went awry, our anxieties over recognition gnawed, or our painful lumbago!  This is important here because Willa Muir especially has been caught between two tendencies.  The first was to downplay her own creative role in comparison with her husband. The patriarchial nature of the society in which she lived (and which continues) meant that her achievements, especially those secured together, most notably the translations from German literature - Kafka and Herman Broch especially - tended to be ascri

Merry Christmas

                                                             "Fireside" 1956 by Winifred Nicholson New Year Snow by Frances Horowitz For three days we waited, a bowl of dull quartz for sky. At night the valley dreamed of snow, lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings flailing the hills. I dreamed a poem, perfect as the first five-pointed flake, that melted at dawn: a Janus-time to peer back at guttering dark days, trajectories of the spent year. And then snow fell. Within an hour, a world immaculate as January’s new-hung page. We breathe the radiant air like men new-born. The children rush before us. As in a dream of snow we track through crystal fields to the green horizon and the sun’s reflected rose.   It is no surprise that Frances Horowitz's publisher, Bloodaxe, chose a painting by Winifred Nicholson to adorn the cover of her Collected Poems.  Both were attentive fathomers of particular places, then when attentively seen become translucent to glimmerings of transc

Changed in a Flash: Near Death and Comparative Religion.

Elizabeth Krohn was on her way into her local Reform synagogue to hear Kaddish said for her beloved grandfather, who had died a year previously, when, in the parking lot, she was struck by lightning. She finds 'herself' outside herself - her body lying on the tarmac, and after assuring 'herself' that her two young children are being cared for, thinking herself dead, she follows a golden light upwards and will spend 'two weeks' in heaven before deciding to return to her body, and as a transformed person, pick up the strands of a very different life, some of whose outlines she has seen in her altered state.  She returns confident that death is simply a gateway to another modality of life, that we are accompanied in our life by a 'celestial double' and slowly through a cycle of reincarnated lives will reach a transformed state where we become the celestial companion of another soul. This unfolds from our perspective in a linear progression but from an etern

A tragic tale of a modern spiritualist

  Helen Duncan became famous or infamous (depending on your perspective) as the last person in England to be tried under the eighteenth century Witchcraft Act. Not, one might suppose as a hangover, say in the dawning age of secularism in the mid-nineteenth century say but, in fact, in 1944.  The offense was the pretended conjuring of spirits (in a paid performance) at a séance in Portsmouth but why this act and not the Vagrancy Act, usually deployed for these purposes? Was it because Duncan was privy to secrets she might only know by psychic means - the destruction of a British battleship in the Mediterranean for example - at a time of heightened security in the lead up to the D-Day Landings?  She certainly became a martyr for the Spiritualist cause - and the aftermath of the case, imprisonment; and, a subsequent botched arrest may have shifted the landscape towards reform, the act's abolition and the seeing of pretended conjuring of spirits as simply falling within the ordinary le

Unidentified Flying Religions

  There is a network of highly capable scientists exploring UFO phenomena. They work anonymously and in secret lest their reputations be trashed for dealing with such a fringe subject yet their findings do percolate upwards and outwards in varied ways.  Two such scientists - Tyler a private scientist and inventor and James a public academic - accompanied by a religious scholar go to an alleged crash site in New Mexico with specially adapted metal detectors searching for debris. They find some and the academic, a molecular biologist, takes it back to be tested. The result is that it was not manufactured on Earth but what is more, it does not appear to have come from this universe. Not only extraterrestrial but from another dimension. At this point, the reader may be wondering whether I am describing a lost episode of the X-files but, in truth, I am reading a perfectly sober account of a trip undertaken by the aforementioned scholar of religion, D. W. Paskula, who has earned the trust of

Ventures to the Other Side

  Women artists have often, are often erased from the attention of art curators, critics, and historians but this phenomenon has been doubly so if the artist in question has appeared to be concerned with, or heaven forbid, guided by spiritual concerns, especially those seen as anomalous to the mainstream culture.  At the time of Christian sovereignty in the West, this might have been a perceived entanglement with the pagan, the natural world, and the magical. Christian dominance being supplanted in the nineteenth century by a growing scientific materialism, here the impermissible shifts to a perceived engagement with the magical, the paranormal, and any phenomena deemed impossible by the guardians of this 'scientism', not excluding those nestling in the art world temples of the rationalizing modern! Jennifer Higgie shows in her engaging, 'The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art, and the Spirit World' that this does a disservice not only to the women themselves but to