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Rocky Dijon
You need to remember when Anita was born. The first half of the last century saw Eastern philosophy mixed in with the occult, Gnosticism, and mythology. Kenneth Anger and Manly P. Hall were learning from the works of Crowley and Sir Richard Burton (not Elizabeth Taylor's husband) and anything outside of the norm of Judeo-Christianity was seen as esoteric and by its very nature, exotic and even transgressive. Helena Blavatsky and the whole Theosophical movement were built on tying all these disparate elements together.
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AquamarineQuote
Rocky Dijon
You need to remember when Anita was born. The first half of the last century saw Eastern philosophy mixed in with the occult, Gnosticism, and mythology. Kenneth Anger and Manly P. Hall were learning from the works of Crowley and Sir Richard Burton (not Elizabeth Taylor's husband) and anything outside of the norm of Judeo-Christianity was seen as esoteric and by its very nature, exotic and even transgressive. Helena Blavatsky and the whole Theosophical movement were built on tying all these disparate elements together.
I hadn't thought of tying the Theosophists, Yeats, etc., into that--they were mostly late 19th-C, weren't they? Must take another look, but it was just jarring for me to see Buddhism mentioned in the same breath as the occult. They seem to pull in radically different directions.
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His Majesty
The book is ok and mostly a kind of compilation of all that's been said about her and by her and her associates etc.
It gets really tedious once it hits 1967 - 1968. The large section about Performance goes on and on.
One chapter for the last 40 years of her life.
Whilst reading you will get sick of seeing the word phlegmatic.