The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived ( Read more... )

It has been drawn to my attention that I got the genders of incubus and succubus reversed in a comment recently relating to demon sex.
The devil in female form of a succubus tempts human men in order to steal their seed; and then takes the form of an incubus (with massive ice-cold phallus) to deposit same in human women.
Oooops.

This entry was ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Witch, which is good, but somewhat heavy going, because it's taking on a lot of scholarship and debates and controversies covering a WIDE geographical range and a HUGE time-scale and is thus dense and chewy. It's (this is Hutton, after all) not about some Universal Unified Field Theory of the Witch Throughout History (bless ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Murder in the Dark, interesting entry in the series - bringing in back-story that even our protag doesn't know.
Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017): lovely, and full of things to ponder.
Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement (2018): bit of a let-down - sequel to Dear Committee-Members, ( Read more... )

Dept of Yayfulness: a new book by Ronald Hutton, this time on witches: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.
And, Dept of Cults and the fears generated within enclosed communities: An account of the writer’s own life and her father’s in the Exclusive Brethren, and the chaos and freedom that followed the decision to walk ( Read more... )

‘Mother of modern witchcraft’s personal collection to be displayed for the first time.
And this, which seems related in terms of the discovery/invention of tradition: The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga, and what work that idea of long tradition is doing.
And from the Department of SRS Woowoo: Sex Dust - 'an etheric potion from the ( Read more... )

In a listserv discussion of the trope of spinster as crazy cat lady:

Someone cites Kipling's 'The Cat Who Walked By Himself' from The Just-So Stories as an exemplar.

(They also consider this carefully crafted piece of narration 'accidentally hilarious'.)

Characterising the Woman as a spinster.

Er: did they not notice that one of the ways Cat ( Read more... )

This person is 'internationally recognized in the field of sexology and erotology'. I would suspect that 'as a complete plonker' has been omitted from the text.

I also guess that it may signify, if this person 'has presented [their] work at scientific conferences throughout North America and Europe', that their presentation upcoming on the ( Read more... )

Yet again, this surfaced on one of the listservs.

But, an interesting twist, apparently in France in the C19th some docs did employ vaginal stimulation to treat neurasthenia (okay, would like to see some citations on this, but I wouldn't rule it out, because, hey, Charcot and his hysterics, it's a different medico-cultural context). And, ( Read more... )

Via one of my academic listservs today (not the one on which brangling and brouhaha are the current order of the day), review of Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Shamanism and Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010).

According to the reviewer, the author is making a case that Isobel Gowdie was not merely being falsely ( Read more... )