Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock, written by Vere Chappell, with a forward by Mary K. Greer, will be released in December by Weiser Books.

Not just a biography, in Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic the author has compiled  “the most extensive collection of Craddock’s work including original essays, diary excerpts, and suicide letters”.

The keywords associated with this book are hot: “Sex, Magick, Aleister Crowley, Orgasms, Erotic Dances, Angelic Beings, Revolutionary Activism, Liberation, Persecution, Defiance, and Suicide.” Intense.

From the book’s description on the publisher’s website: Continue reading »

I have to call out Barbara Moore for a recent essay in the Llewellyn Journal titled “Gender and Age in Tarot Cards“.

Longtime readers can probably guess where this is heading, sexism in occulture is something we’ve looked at before, and in Moore’s essay it rears its ugly head once…more. (Sorry.)

Moore begins by acknowledging that, in her view, tarot is based on archetypes which are “not too many steps removed from stereotypes”, and further,  “our” (I’ll deal with this in a sec) “history and our culture [sic] have created stereotypes of masculine and feminine behavior, energy, and characteristics”.

We then get the typical (read: sexist) breakdown of these characteristics:

A female figure represents what we think of as feminine qualities, such as nurturing, passiveness, receptiveness, and integrated worldviews. A male figure represents what we think of as masculine qualities, such as leadership, assertiveness, activeness, and linear thinking. We know that actual men and women have a combination both feminine and masculine qualities.

If you acknowledge upfront that this has no basis in reality, why continue to perpetuate stereotypes? It quite simply doesn’t make any sense.

Further, “our” history and culture also includes things like feminism, gender equality and evolving gender studies. This has had a far greater impact on my life than outdated notions that I should be regarded as (mystically!) passive. To ignore that “our” society’s views on sex and gender have changing significantly over the past two hundred years is a disservice to all of us.

I reject this interpretation of “feminine” and “masculine” qualities in the tarot. If, for example, the Emperor is to represent some of the qualities identified above, such as leadership, assertiveness and linear thinking, I think we can do quite well with this as it stands without introducing some inaccuracy about this being (esoterically!) “male” behaviour.

What is really lost by reading this way? And how much more is gained?

Saturday Signal: sifting the signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

i09 is a fun blog – their tagline is “We come from the future”, which seems to mean they’ll cover anything science, sci-fi, and other geek stuff of that ilk.

A recent post titled “Jupiter became king of the planets by devouring a ‘Super Earth’” caught my eye because, well, it’s a great title, and it seems the planets’ names were more appropriate than the ancients may have realized:

New discoveries suggest Jupiter and Saturn learned a lesson from their mythological namesakes, “eating” any planet that opposed them.

For more on this check their source, NewScientist.

More cool news? Check out “Neptune will soon complete its first orbit around the sun since its discovery in 1846“. And by “soon” they mean yesterday. They come from the future, but Pluto’s far, it takes time for news to reach us. Forget it. Happy (Earth) birthday, Neptune!

With that, here’s your occultural linkage for this week.

• Jack Faust has a new blog, still called Dionysian Atavism but now located on its own shiny domain at eldritchinfluence.net. He writes well and with a depth and breadth that’s unusual in occultural blogging. See “The Tradition of Secrecy” for a recent gem.

• Christina‘s piece on Enfolding.org titled “Letter to a Young Gay Man on Celebrating Beltane” is excellent. She writes, “Maybe you, like me, have no call to create an internal heterosexual nuclear family with wedding bells, bride and groom” and then sets the record straight: “Beltane is and was the joy of desire of the body fulfilled in sex.” Hear, hear.

• Ryan Hurd writes about “Lucid Dreaming as Shamanic Consciousness” for Reality Sandwich. Using films such as Avatar and Inception as a launching point, he discusses our desire to become “Conquistadors of Consciousness”, and what that looks like in different cultures, on drugs, and what it all means.

• Johnny Rapture suggests a re-purposing of public space in “Public Statues, Pagan Shrines“, on his blog The Great Tininess offering specific suggestions with some great pictures. Sounds like an excellent idea.

• Mark Vernon, on the Guardian.co.uk, discusses the new etchings on display at Tate Britain in “William Blake’s picture of God“. A fascinating portrait of Blake’s thoughts on gods and religion.

As always, if you come across anything nifty, please share it in the comments, or if you use delicious tag it “ahrfoundation” and we’ll take a look. Thanks!