“Where does he live?” “What does he eat?” And, “If he’s invisible, how does one know he’s real?”
Usman T Malik, The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn
Tag Archives: real
Roll my hips, feel him deep and solid inside me, solid and real as space on acid, the shape of desire.
Mary Sativa, Acid Temple Ball
A Gresham’s Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real
Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle
The Genesis of Secrecy
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) by Frank Kermode, from Harvard University Press.
This volume of Kermode’s Norton Lectures addresses “some of the forces that make interpretation necessary and virtually impossible, and some of the constraints under which it is carried on.” (125) Although he uses various literary instances (notably Henry Green’s Party Going, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49), his central and recurrent case study is the gospel of Mark.
Kermode treats various important hermeneutic dilemmas, such as the determining influence of institutional readings, the difficulty in delineating between history and fiction, the chicken-and-egg relationship between plot and character, and the difference between meaning and truth. First and foremost, though, he explores the necessity of both esoteric and exoteric interpretation. He suggests that the notion of esoteric sense in text may be especially pervasive in Western literature due to the influence of the gospels.
This is a short volume, but one worth savoring by anyone whose sense of the real, the sacred, or the beautiful is invested in a text. And it communicates important ideas about the nature of secrecy and its effects. [via]
The Hermetic Library Reading Room is an imaginary and speculative future reification of the library in the physical world, a place to experience a cabinet of curiosities offering a confabulation of curation, context and community that engages, archives and encourages a living Western Esoteric Tradition. If you would like to contribute to the Hermetic Library Reading Room, consider supporting the library or contact the librarian.
Enchanted Feminism
Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco by Jone Salomonsen, part of the Religion and Gender series, the 2002 first edition paperback from Routledge, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.
“Many today feel the need to restore a magical, spiritual ground to human existence. One of the most visible responses to this need has been the rise of contemporary pagan Witchcraft, and one of its most interesting voices, Reclaiming. This community was formed over twenty years ago, by feminist Witch Starhawk and friends, to teach others about goddess spirituality and reinvented pagan rituals. It has since succeeded in developing an independent spiritual tradition, fostered partly by the success of Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance and other books, and now has sister communities throughout North America and Europe.
Enchanted Feminism presents the first in-depth study of this important community and spiritual tradition from a consistent gender perspective. In a unique interdisciplinary approach, Dr Salomonson adopts the perspectives of both social anthropology and theology to analyse the beliefs and practices of the Reclaiming Witches. Among many issues, she considers their spiritual search for the ‘Real’, their renunciation of patriarchal religions and attempts to build a new religious identity, their use of ritual and of feminine symbols for the divine, and their involvement with feminist-anarchist politics. The results of her research provide challenging and insightful reading.”
The Hermetic Library Reading Room is an imaginary and speculative future reification of the library in the physical world, a place to experience a cabinet of curiosities offering a confabulation of curation, context and community that engages, archives and encourages a living Western Esoteric Tradition. If you would like to contribute to the Hermetic Library Reading Room, consider supporting the library or contact the librarian.