In a recent essay, I posed the question – How do we learn to be magicians? Is it simply a matter of reading books, studying with a teacher, doing practices, and taking on particular beliefs and attitudes? My answer was to reflect on my early dive into the world of the occult in which I introduced the term reflexivity. In this post, I will discuss the concept of reflexivity and propose that it should be accepted as a core occult practice. What is a core practice? It’s common to find occult authors making a distinction between beginner and advanced practice. You begin with the easy or basic prac ..read more

Words have Power. Imagine a setting. You’re in a restaurant or a café perhaps, enjoying a quiet conversation with friends. Suddenly a stranger walks up to your table and without any opening or introduction, begins to offer a commentary on some conversational topic. You’d be slightly taken aback. Alarmed even. Who is this complete stranger who has suddenly, for no apparent reason, taken it upon themselves to intrude into a private conversation? Yet, of course, this is an everyday occurrence on social media. Social media platforms encourage this. It’s what they’re set up to do. It is entirely no ..read more

How do we learn to be magicians? Do we just pick up a book or two, do the exercises and rituals, and take on the beliefs and perspectives that ‘feel right’ to us? Maybe do an online course with a teacher whom we have come to respect? Go on social media and engage constructively (or not) with other practitioners. Join a small group or a large magical organization? It is not, I feel, a simple process. Well at least, it was not a simple process for me. I was not initiated by fairies at the age of nine, as one of my friends says he was. I did not have a magical granny or the memory of a past life ..read more

One day in 2020, I ambled into my study and turned on my computer, and … nothing. My heart skipped a beat. I felt a sense of dread steal over me. Checking the startup options, I saw that not only had the SSD drive on which the operating system lives failed but also one of the disks in my RAID array had gone too. It was a palpable shock. All that was on the computer – work in progress, layout jobs for clients, photos, games, videos, half-sorted digital libraries … gone. More than that, I was cut off from the wider world of social media and the internet, extended knowledge repositories, news, fr ..read more

I’ve been intending for a while to do some writing on the various tantric presentations of the ‘subtle body’. Before doing so, however, I’m going to review Simon Cox’s recent book, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2022, Hbk). This is an important work that sheds much light on how the concept of the subtle body took off in the English language, and the many twists and turns taken in developing a concept that has become a staple of contemporary esoteric practice and thought. The Subtle Body traces the genealogy of the concept of the subtle body, beginning in late antiquity ..read more

In the first post in this very occasional series, I discussed the assertion, often found in many popular books on tantra, that it is “many thousands of years old” and linked it to the notion of the authentic archaic. More recently, I have examined the Pasupati Seal, which is often drawn upon to support these assertions. For this post, I’m going examine another “Red Flag” – the widely-held view that tantra is not religious in character. I first addressed this contentious issue back in 2010 (see this post) but I want to return to it and say more about how this assertion is constructed and reinfo ..read more

In the previous post in this series, I outlined how I began my practice with the five kleśas as presented in the AMOOKOS practice manual, Tantra Magick. Now I want to turn to an examination of how the kleśas are dealt with in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras (YS). Before doing so, however, I want to give a brief introduction to the philosophy that underpins the Yoga Sūtras. Yoga’s Dualism Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras is rooted in a dualistic philosophy, drawn from the Sāṅkhya philosophical school – although there are some differences. Sāṅkhya posits two fundamental and ontologically distinct principles – pu ..read more

“The five kleshas must not be regarded as petty foibles, weaknesses or minor failings or amusing defects which can be considered for a short moment and then dismissed and forgotten. They form the foundational obstruction in Twilight Yoga as in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.” Dadaji The Exegetikos I was first introduced to the Kleshas (kleśāḥ) when I was initiated into AMOOKOS 1 in 1986, and under the direction of my mentor, Vishvanath, began to work through the grade papers of the Order, as detailed in the book Tantra Magick. They are: Ignorance Ego Revulsion Attachment Clinging to Life The five ..read more

“Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. Virginia Woolf, “How one should read a book”, The Second Common Reader, 1925. How do we go about reading an occult book? It seems like an obvious question to ask, but thus far, I have yet to see any attempt to explore this issue in any depth. This is strange, given how much occult books are part of contemporary oc ..read more

You don’t have to travel far in Britain to find that the Devil has left his mark on the landscape. He has raised dykes, built bridges, causeways, and chimneys; left boulders, bolts, and dug ditches. He is the haunter of woods, the president of ghoulish feasts in graveyards. This is the territory, and its associated folklore explored by Jeremy Harte’s Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape (Reaktion Books 2022, 296 pages, Hardback, illustrated). The Devil of these sites and stories is not the all-powerful master of darkness; he is often easily discouraged or outwitted. An old woma ..read more