Politics And The Occult

Author : Gary Lachman
Publisher : Quest Books
ISBN 13 : 0835630080
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Politics and the Occult written by Gary Lachman and published by Quest Books. This book was released on 2012-12-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gritty business of politics is not something we usually associate with the occult. But esoteric beliefs have influenced the destiny of nations since the time of ancient Egypt and China, when decisions of state were based on portents and astrology, to today, when presidents and prime ministers privately consult self-proclaimed seers. Politics and the Occult offers a lively history of this enduring phenomenon. Author and cultural pundit Gary Lachman provocativly questions whether the separation of church and state so dear to modern political philosophy should be maintained. A few of his fascinating topics include the fate of the Knights Templar and the medieval Gnostic Cathars, the occult roots of America and the French Revolution in Freemasonry, Gurdjieff and the swastika, Soviet interest in UFOs, the CIA and LSD, the Age of Aquarius, the millenarian politics that inform the struggle with Islamic terrorism, fundamentalism, and more.

Author : Alan Ramón Clinton
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820469430
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mechanical Occult written by Alan Ramón Clinton and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technology and spirituality formed uncanny alliances in countless manifestations of automatism. From Victorian mediums to the psychiatrists who studied them, from the Fordist assembly line to the Hollywood studios that adopted its practices, from Surrealism on the left to Futurism and Vorticism on the right, the unpredictable paths of automatic practice and ideology present a means by which to explore both the utopian and dystopian possibilities of technological and cultural innovation. Focusing on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, Alan Ramon Clinton argues that, given the wide-reaching influence of automatism, as much can be learned from these writers' means of production as from their finished products. At a time when criticism has grown polarized between political and aesthetic approaches to high modernism, this book provocatively develops its own automatic procedures to explore the works of these writers as fields rich in potential choices, some more spectral than others.

Author : Tessel M. Bauduin
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135137902X
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Surrealism, Occultism and Politics written by Tessel M. Bauduin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surrealist discourses on identity, gender, sexuality, utopianism and radicalism.

Author : Erica Lagalisse
Publisher : PM Press
ISBN 13 : 162963588X
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Occult Features of Anarchism written by Erica Lagalisse and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century anarchists were accused of conspiracy by governments afraid of revolution, but in the current century various “conspiracy theories” suggest that anarchists are controlled by government itself. The Illuminati were a network of intellectuals who argued for self-government and against private property, yet the public is now often told that they were (and are) the very group that controls governments and defends private property around the world. Intervening in such misinformation, Lagalisse works with primary and secondary sources in multiple languages to set straight the history of the Left and illustrate the actual relationship between revolutionism, pantheistic occult philosophy, and the clandestine fraternity. Exploring hidden correspondences between anarchism, Renaissance magic, and New Age movements, Lagalisse also advances critical scholarship regarding leftist attachments to secular politics. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork within today’s anarchist movements, her essay challenges anarchist atheism insofar as it poses practical challenges for coalition politics in today’s world. Studying anarchism as a historical object, Occult Features of Anarchism also shows how the development of leftist theory and practice within clandestine masculine public spheres continues to inform contemporary anarchist understandings of the “political,” in which men’s oppression by the state becomes the prototype for power in general. Readers behold how gender and religion become privatized in radical counterculture, a historical process intimately linked to the privatization of gender and religion by the modern nation-state.

Author : Isak Niehaus
Publisher : Pluto Press
ISBN 13 : 9780745315584
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Witchcraft, Power and Politics written by Isak Niehaus and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2001-05-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an extraordinary contemporary account of witchcraft and witch-hunting in the modern world. A powerful ethnographic study of witch-hunting in 1980s South Africa – a period of rapid social change – this book demonstrates the extent to which witchcraft must be seen, not as a residue of ‘traditional’ culture but as part of a complex social drama which is deeply embedded in contemporary political and economic processes. Isak Niehaus provides the context for this fascinating study of witchcraft practices. He shows how witchcraft was politicised against the backdrop of the apartheid state, the liberation struggle and the establishment of the first post-apartheid regime, which all affected conceptions of witchcraft. Niehaus demonstrates how the ANC and other political groups used witchcraft beliefs to further their own agenda. He explores the increasingly conservative role of the chiefs and the Christian church. In the process, he reveals the fraught nature of intergenerational and gender relations. The result is a truly insightful and theoretically engaged account of a much-studied but frequently misunderstood practice.

Author : Peter Geschiere
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813917030
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Modernity of Witchcraft written by Peter Geschiere and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many Westerners, the disappearance of African traditions of witchcraft might seem inevitable wuth continued modernization. In The Modernity of Witchcraft, Peter Geschieres uses his own experiences among the Maka and in other parts of eastern and southern Cameroon, as well as other anthropological research, to argue that contemporary ideas and practices of witchcraft are more a response to modern exigencies than a lingering cultural custom. The prevalence of witchcraft, especially in African politics and entrepreneurship, demonstrates the unlikely balance it has achieved with the forces of modernity. Geshiere explores why modern techniques and commodities, usually of Western Provenance, have become central in rumors of the occult.

Author : Elizabeth Otto
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262381028
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Haunted Bauhaus written by Elizabeth Otto and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-12-20 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

Author : Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780814731550
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Sun written by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2003-07 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unpredictable Constitution brings together a distinguished group of U.S. Supreme Court Justices and U.S. Court of Appeals Judges, who are some of our most prominent legal scholars, to discuss an array of topics on civil liberties. In thoughtful and incisive essays, the authors draw on decades of experience to examine such wide-ranging issues as how legal error should be handled, the death penalty, reasonable doubt, racism in American and South African courts, women and the constitution, and government benefits. Contributors: Richard S. Arnold, Martha Craig Daughtry, Harry T. Edwards, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Betty B. Fletcher, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Lord Irvine of Lairg, Jon O. Newman, Sandra Day O'Connor, Richard A. Posner, Stephen Reinhardt, and Patricia M. Wald.

Author : John Michael Greer
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1644112590
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The King in Orange written by John Michael Greer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Details the magical war that took place behind the scenes of the 2016 election • Examines in detail the failed magical actions of Trump’s opponents, with insights on political magic from Dion Fortune’s war letters • Reveals the influence of a number of occult forces from Julius Evola to chaos magick to show how the political and magical landscape of American society has permanently changed since the 2016 election Magic and politics seem like unlikely bedfellows, but in The King in Orange, author John Michael Greer goes beyond superficial memes and extreme partisanship to reveal the unmentionable realities that spawned the unexpected presidential victory of an elderly real-estate mogul turned reality-TV star and which continue to drive the deepening divide that is now the defining characteristic of American society. Greer convincingly shows how two competing schools of magic were led to contend for the presidency in 2016 and details the magical war that took place behind the scenes of the campaign. Through the influence of a number of occult forces, from Julius Evola to chaos magicians as well as the cult of positive thinking, Greer shows that the main contenders in this magical war were the status quo magical state--as defined by the late scholar Ioan Couliano--which has repurposed the “manipulative magic” techniques of the Renaissance magi into the subliminal techniques of modern advertising, and an older, deeper, and less reasonable form of magic--the “magic of the excluded”--which was employed by chaos magicians and alt-right internet wizards, whose desires coalesced in the form of a frog avatar that led the assault against the world we knew. Examining in detail the magical actions of Trump’s opponents, with insights on political magic from occultist Dion Fortune’s war letters, the author discusses how the magic of the privileged has functioned to keep the comfortable classes from being able to respond effectively to the populist challenge and how and why the “Magic Resistance,” which tried to turn magic against Trump, has failed. Showing how the political and magical landscape of American society has permanently changed since the 2016 election cycle, Greer reveals that understanding the coming of the King in Orange will be a crucial step in making sense of the world for a long time to come.

Author : Peter Staudenmaier
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004270159
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Between Occultism and Nazism written by Peter Staudenmaier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Staudenmaier’s study Between Occultism and Nazism examines the controversial history of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophist movement in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as a case study in the political significance of esoteric and alternative spiritual groups.