She Continues
In reading Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey’s The Brazen Vessel, I have found myself venturing off onto adjacent tracks from where they’ve been going in the collection. One section that especially caught my attention came in “The witches’ dance” where they write of the “contrariwise” movement of many pre-modern dances, which they associate with the […] … Continue reading…Witches’ Mirror
I have been making my way through Jeremy Naydler’s books on ancient Egyptian religion, magic, and cosmology. His Temple of the Cosmos is a compelling book, but I recognized that Naydler collapses distinctions between Old, Middle, and New Kingdom thought even as he expresses a teleological belief that Egyptian thought “matured” over time into its […] … Continue reading…Kings and Messengers
It is a commonplace that ancient Egyptian religion and magic—and the Egyptians themselves—were “obsessed” with death and the afterlife. After all, we have all these mummies and tombs and Books about the Dead and Osiris being reborn and so on. However, while we like to distinguish the physical world from the spirit world and often […] … Continue reading…Shadow Magic
And yet, as I reflect upon these topics, I feel like conceiving of these engagements with the Unconscious-Dreaming-Spirit World from a theatrical or aesthetic perspective misses the mark. Art is the road, or a royal on-ramp. In treating enchantment and magic as “aesthetic” enterprises, I wonder how much that keeps that which is imagined or […] … Continue reading…Living Enchantment