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With three distinct gold globes, the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque dominates the Marrakesh horizon. Legend tells that one day during the month of Ramadan, the wife of Youcoub El Mansour (c. 1160- 1199) ate three small grapes. In penance, she melted down all her jewellery and moulded them into these three great gold spheres. …
Rabbi Yitzchak Luria ben Shlomo Ashkenazi (1534-1572), also known as the ‘Ari’ or ‘Lion of Safed’, was taught by the influential Rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570). Known for instigating a new school of Kabbalistic thinking in Palestine known as Lurianic Kabbalah, Luria himself writes very little, and his work becomes known through its reference …
Continue reading "Exile in Kabbalah: A Visit to The Old Tzfat Cemetery"
During the summer of 1914, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916) was stabbed in the stomach by a 33-year-old peasant woman named Chionya Guseva, outside his home in Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River in the Tobolsk guberniya (now Tyumen Oblast), Siberia. A former prostitute, Guseva purportedly screamed 'I have killed the Antichrist!'. Rasputin, near dead, was chased …
Continue reading "In Rasputin’s hand: Images of the Mad Monk"
The text below was published in the broadsheet 'Journal des débats' on November 6, 1803. "M. de Saint-Martin, who had founded in Germany a religious sect known as the Martinists, has just died at Aunay, near Paris, at the home of Senator Lenoir-Laroche. He had acquired some celebrity for his bizarre opinions, his attachment to …
At the start of the New Year, I had the pleasure of attending a traditional fire ritual known as 'The Burning of the Clavie'. The burning is an ancient Scottish custom still observed in the village of Burghead, a fishing village on the Moray Firth. The clavie is a collection of casks split in two, …
The ‘Othering’ phenomena is something that is clearly reproduced, reinforced, and experienced by people all around the world, regardless of their race, language, gender, class, nationality, or religion. In classrooms made up of truly diverse groups of children, what are the challenges faced by RE teachers and how do they tackle the ‘Othering’ impulse? With …
Continue reading "Teaching RE to Refugees: Hot-pants and Headscarves – The Dialectics of Identity."
‘That man over there is a snake charmer; we must do our very best not to pay him any attention’. I looked him right in the eye; right over my glasses I peered and being unable to avoid yet another vagrant holy cow, my guide, and I took an awkward step back. Smiling, he warned …
Continue reading "Travels in Rajasthan, India | 25.53° N, 73.13° E"
Since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, political debate in Scotland has continuously highlighted a commitment to the ideal of a ‘fairer society’ (Mooney and Scott, 2012, p.2). Perceived as something of a cornerstone in the grand narrative of Scottish national ‘identity’, this notion of ‘fairness’ is one often identified alongside that other …
Continue reading "Identity, Belonging and Justice: Learning to be Scottish"
Abstract: In the following paper I intend to illustrate the inherent importance of Plato’s 'Allegory of the Cave' in the Western Esoteric Tradition. Plato's Allegory has for centuries been read as representing the idea of a process in increased hermeneutical understanding; as a turn towards to the Sun, to the alchemical 'unus mundus', as it were - in other words, …
Continue reading "The Many Sacred Veils: Language, Text and Esotericism in Initiation"
'And did those feet in ancient time'..... A photographic essay from a recent trip to Jerusalem, Israel. These pictures were taken days before the escalating Israeli-Palestinian tensions turned into violence that killed six people: three Palestinians in street clashes in Jerusalem and three Israelis in a stabbing attack at a West Bank settlement. Three Palestinians …
Stewart Clelland 