Speaking as an Indologist, it is certainly the case that writers on religion can pick and choose pieces of traditions as artists use pieces of tile to create mosaics, but they need to clarify what they are doing. Equating tantra and sexuality, for instance, has caused much confusion. The obvious problem with this approach is that it can end up justifying errors as new forms of interpretation, losing track of the original idea in the process. They are entitled to make their own interpretations of traditions and use them. When there are errors in understanding traditional Indian ideas, Djurdjevic argues that magicians are not Indologists, and do not have to know India’s languages and history to put these ideas into practice. The use of South Asian ideas can be found in the writings of the British occultists who are the focus of this book.

It is his argument that both Western and Eastern occultism are based on analogical thinking and correspondences, and that Western esotericists have not limited their spiritual seeking to Western sources. In this book, he discusses yoga and tantra as forms of esotericism, and shows the influence of yogic ideas in the works of several major figures of the modern British magical tradition: Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth Grant, and Dadaji Mahendranath. Gordan Djurdjevic’s book deals directly with this little-studied area. However, it may also be due to the lack of sources on Asian magical traditions and their influence on Western occultism people may not know that there is a longstanding link between the esotericisms of the East and the West.

This may perhaps be due to some visceral dislike of Asian religions, a response to the foreign that we see in some of our colleagues in theology. I remember a meeting of the Association for the Study of Esotericism in which the panels on magical traditions from Europe and the Ancient Near East were packed with people, while those that dealt with Asian concepts of magic and the. The field of esotericism has long been marginalized in religious studies, and within esotericism the study of Asian religions has been even more marginalized.

Bengali tantra sadhana books