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Religion and the Arts

ISSN 1079-9265

3 papers in the library · publishing 2008-2024

Papers

Magic in Art, Poetry, and Biography

Religion and the Arts March 27, 2024 Manon Hedenborg White

Marjorie Cameron, an artist, poet, and occultist, created poetry and illustrations in the 1950s and 1960s that creatively adapted ideas from Aleister Crowley's Thelema and Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology, particularly in her depictions of the Holy Guardian Angel. The article argues that for Cameron, art, poetry, and esotericism were inseparable, and that contemporary letters and biographical details are essential for interpreting her work.

Pranayama: Breathing from the Heart

Religion and the Arts January 1, 2008 Richard Kearney

A Western author recounts their apprenticeship with a yoga teacher in the Hindu pilgrimage town of Rishikesh, Northern India. The essay examines the convergence of Western and Eastern perspectives on spirituality, desire, the body, study, and breathing. It focuses on the encounter with Vedantin and yogic concepts of the "cave of the heart" as a sacred space for prayer, peace, and meditation.

Embodied Consciousness in Tantric Yoga and the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty

Religion and the Arts January 1, 2008 James Morley

Yoga and twentieth-century phenomenology share a significant congruence, but not because both seek transcendence from the world, as earlier comparisons claimed. By applying Maurice Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology to the Tantric stream of yoga, the congruence emerges in the opposite direction: immersion into the "flesh of the world"—the lived human body as a homology of the cosmos. Yoga may provide phenomenology with a somatic contemplative practice, while phenomenology may offer yoga a basis for theoretical articulation.