Max Théon, drawn by Mirra
Théon was in many ways a latter-day Gnostic, an enigmatic occultist whose evolutionary and occult teachings were indirectly taken up by the Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo, and may have also had some influence on the metaphysics of both H.P. Blavatsky and, A Polish Jew, he travelled to London, France, Egypt, and finally Algeria, founding several esoteric groups along the way. He was known under several names, but we can refer to him as "Max Théon", the pseudonym he adopted while in Algeria. Théon and his knowledge is truly extraordinary. At the very least he was, and is, equal in importance in understanding the development of modern Western esotericism, to figures such as Blavatsky, Steiner, Crowley, Gurdjieff, and Alice Bailey. Yet this figure, who was active in Paris around the turn of the century (he apparently commuted between Algeria and Paris), has been until only very recently virtually unknown outside the Mother and Sri Aurobindo's talks!...   more »

Cool and Classic
Almost adjacent to the Notre Dame cathedral, across the Seine on the Left Bank in Paris, is a bookshop that could well have been an impressionist painting done by, say, Van Gogh himself. All the vivid colours are there and the dark lines that hold together the composition respond more readily to the imagination of the onlooker than to any classroom geometrical rules. Coming here is also paying homage to the Bard of Stratford-upon-Seine. The original Shakespeare & Co. was opened not far from here, near the Odeon theatre in this intellectual heartland of Europe, just after the First World War in 1919, by Sylvia Beach, a maverick American expatriate who had loved poetry, writers and France. The bookshop was an immediate success and attracted not only such luminaries of English literature as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but also French writers such as André Gide and the poet Paul Valéry, just to name a few for lack of space...   more »

THE Defence of India Act of 1915 was an emergency criminal law enacted by the British Raj to curtail revolutionary and nationalist activities in India during the First World War. The apparent intent was to prevent ‘terrorists’ from calling public meetings, publishing material inciting the people to revolt, disseminating revolutionary literature, and so forth. The act was designed to curtail actions by armed revolutionaries characterised as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’ with links abroad. However, the legislation was so wide in scope that it rendered “suspect all political activity that was even mildly critical of the British Government of India, and it put an effective end to whatever freedom of expression the Indian press had been allowed”. This act gave the government of British India special emergency powers to deal with German-inspired threats especially in Punjab. A special legal tribunal was established to deal with suspects who could be interned without warrant and had no recourse to appeal…   more »

The Ninth Gate was the film adaptation of The Dumas Club, written by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The central quest of the film and the book is… another book: “The Nine Doors To the Kingdom of Shadows”, also known as “De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis”, the "Nine Gates" for short. The book is written by one Aristide Torchia in Venice in 1666 and contains nine woodcut engravings rumoured to be copied from the apocryphal Delomelanicon, a book purportedly written by Lucifer himself. The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows is said to contain within its pages knowledge to raise the devil. The author was burned, along with all his works in 1667. Three copies are known to survive, one with Baroness Freida Ungern, one in the Fargas collection, and one last known to be in the possession of Enrique Taillefer, but recently sold to Boris Balkan. Whereas the latter characters will immediately be deemed fictional, more research is required to find out whether the book itself of the Delomelanicon is an invention of the author – or fact. In short, both are fictional, as is Torchia, the author of the Nine Gates. But such a quick classification of the core of the mystery would miss out on some major points of interest of both the book and the film...   more »

Those of us who support globalisation, who celebrate the way it has raised living standards and reduced poverty around the world, are forever worrying that there may soon be a backlash, a revival of protectionism and economic nationalism. We mutter angrily whenever politicians make nationalist noises… A year ago, the prime candidate for a protectionist backlash was the fount of globalisation itself, the United States. If anyone had said then that in the midst of the American presidential election the country would be suffering a recession caused by a financial crisis, most economists would have predicted a big upsurge in protectionism during the campaign. It is time to admit that this hasn’t happened. America is not becoming isolationist. In fact, globalisation is not under any serious threat at all, from either side of the Atlantic…   more »

Living in the United States can be just like living in India. Except for some sorely-missed necessities. I loved the U.S. the minute I landed… I loved where we lived, I loved the view, loved everything. Till, that is, I got into the bathroom…   more »

Leibniz was well-acquainted with the philosophies of Descartes, Gassendi, Malbranche, and Spinoza. Descartes thought that mind and matter are unrelated and independent of each other, and that in a living creature mind acts on the body through the medium of what he called ‘vital spirits’. Malbranche and Gieulincx (both of them pupils of Descartes) rejected the idea of vital spirits, and maintained that the mind and the body were only providentially parallel. Gieulincx supplied the famous analogy of the two clocks: By looking at a clock and hearing another, we may find that whenever one is marking four, the other is striking four, and we may conclude that the two clocks are interconnected. But actually they are parallel only through an outside cause. The clock-paradigm caught, as we shall see later, the imagination of Leibniz also. Spinoza said that neither is mind material (as held by the materialists), nor is matter mental (as held by the idealists); they are the two aspects of one and the same thing. Spinoza said that the ultimate reality is one. He was a monist: in fact, a pantheist, holding the view that God is the only reality and that this world is the creation of God out of himself. Spinoza’s monism was thus dialectical in nature, in the sense that consciousness and matter according to him, were two aspects of one and the same ultimate. Spinoza said that the ultimate reality can think and has extension in space. We intend here, at the cost of a digression, to say that the Spinozistic viewpoint of the ‘dialectical’ oneness of the ultimate matches perfectly well with the viewpoint of the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda where it was said that the one who was covered by a paltry sheath energized himself and expanded himself. It may be recalled that Sri Aurobindo described the ultimate as ‘Conscious Force’ which clearly shows that he was aware of the extra-consciousness part of reality, which according to him (and according to modern science), is more force-like than matter-like in its depth. Now, while we fully agree about the double aspect of the ultimate one, we do not think that the ultimate in its own being is extended in space. To have extension in space means to be plural and limited. Both are unimaginable about the ultimate in its own self. We would like to think that space itself is a creation. It is a creation immediately prior to or concomitant with the creation of physical objects in space. It may be mentioned that this is precisely what the Rishi of the Prashna Upanishad says in his explanation of the sixteen features of the ultimate…   more »

If the writing of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato had not contained so much truth about the human condition, his name would have been forgotten centuries ago. But one of his most famous stories—the cataclysmic destruction of the ancient civilization of Atlantis—is almost certainly false. So why is this story still repeated more than 2,300 years after Plato's death? "It's a story that captures the imagination," says James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York. "It's a great myth. It has a lot of elements that people love to fantasize about." Plato told the story of Atlantis around 360 B.C. The founders of Atlantis, he said, were half god and half human. They created a utopian civilization and became a great naval power. Their home was made up of concentric islands separated by wide moats and linked by a canal that penetrated to the center. The lush islands contained gold, silver, and other precious metals and supported an abundance of rare, exotic wildlife. There was a great capital city on the central island.   more »

…In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They're going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I'm not qualified to take sides, believe me. I'm just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We're in the middle of a scientific revolution. It's going to have big cultural effects.   more »

Passing Moments
Here is a set of poems selected from my book Passing Moments that was brought out by M/S Ultra Publications, Bangalore, India, in 2002, ISBN # 81-87544-03-1. These poems, totalling 49, were written during 19 June-18 July, 1998; another, a much longer narrative running into 40 stanzas, dated 18 August 1998, also followed generally the same style of composition but it has been kept aside from the present selection. While taking the opportunity of presenting these selected poems here I have touched them up lightly at places. But the important feature of this presentation is that of illustrations accompanying them. For this purpose I have capitalized on the Google Images quite extensively, Images with all their amazing variety and abundant creative excellence. But then at the same time there are also several limitations, they kind of putting rigid geometrical boundaries around what the swift and supple enthusiasm of inspiration can convey, they not seizing the much subtler and suggestive feeling of the poetic language. Yet it is believed that one can leap over this not really frozen sense of the image-phrases, even as they do possess a loaded multi-meaninged softness if one is insightful to see what lies behind them; the visual impact they provide can bring something of it when seen in inner association with what the hues and shades are trying to communicate. Perhaps in that respect the revelatory power itself can come out in another living and vivid language of sight and sound, each enhancing the sense more perceptively. But this is an attempt and I do not know how far it has succeeded or is going to be acceptable. In any case, I must express my silent but sincere gratitude to the numerous authors of the Images for this use of their works for my purposes, sometimes with free adaptations of their imaginative and artistic creations, a use which is not for any commercial gains. I hope in the process I’ve not infringed on any copyrights.   more »

Greens have brought much laughter to the world, but most of it has been at their expense. The British comedian, Marcus Brigstocke, says he struggles with this problem on a daily basis, more so since he increased his riffs on global warming in his routines following his 2007 Arctic voyage with Cape Farewell, an organisation that brings together artists and scientists to raise awareness of climate change. “It’s far and away the most difficult comedy subject IR 17;ve ever dealt with,” he says. “It’s tested me to the outer reaches of my ability as a writer.” Mr. Brigstocke is one of a small but growing number of comedians trying to wrestle some humour from climate change. Fellow British comic Rob Newman has been a committed environmental and political campaigner for many years. Recently he was at Hebden Bridge, northern England, doing stand-up at the town’s monthly Climate Chaos Kitchen on the subjects of peak oil and climate change…    more »

A new Salman Rushdie novel is always a big event, filled with the anticipation and the expectation of the momentous. It seems that Rushdie knows this — or maybe the disappointment of the last three novels has forced him to face this reality. So what does he do? He weaves the magic of storytelling, the expectation of the listener, and the hopelessness of the artiste all into his tenth novel, and let it be declared at the outset: it is an enchantment. In the way that once you enter a hall of mirrors, you see a multiplicity of reflections, so can you see a multiplicity of alter egos that are the loci of The Enchantress of Florence. You see Rushdie as a prestidigitator, a nimble-fingered writer able to produce dizzying tricks with the stroke of his pen/keyboard, much like Mogor dell’Amore, a yellow-haired, lozenge-coated foreigner who turns up at Emperor Akbar’s court, with a story to tell, and whose own identity is the final twist of his story-within-a-story...   more »

The first impression is of simple beauty: a tenor voice, cushioned by the ebb and flow of repeating cadences from the orchestra. The stage, enclosed in a curving wall of corrugated metal, evokes a prison: We will be trapped for hours in a world in which nothing happens. But as the music morphs from one pattern to another, the stage picture reveals new vignettes. Piles of wastepaper rise up rustling from the chorus as giant homunculi. A bird walks past on stilt legs. And the corrugated wall opens to admit the towering pale figures of giant puppets, doughy men gathering briefly, like monsters or magi, around the central figure of the singer before departing again as if they had never been, in an evening that moves forward like a dream. The Improbable theater company's production of Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night (11 April 2008), represents the kind of work the Met should be doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that new opera can indeed be a contemporary art…   more »

They say it was the mother of all cosmic explosions. The blast, which took place on June 30, 1908, in Tunguska, Siberia, also remains one of the greatest mysteries of the world. Russia is now organising an international conference in Moscow to mark the centenary of the explosion. The Siberian riddle has fascinated the world since an object entered the atmosphere over western China and whizzed north, leaving a 5,000 degree hot trail in the sky, to hit the banks of the Tunguska river. The explosion has exposed the fragility of mankind to a blitzkrieg from outer space. It has also led to a wide range of theories. A virtual search for an explanation in the company of scientists engaged in unraveling its mystique is revealing…    more »

An ancient Greek tomb thought to have held the body of Alexander the Great's father is actually that of Alexander's half brother, researchers say. This may mean that some of the artifacts found in the tomb—including a helmet, shield, and silver "crown"—originally belonged to Alexander the Great himself. Alexander's half brother is thought to have claimed these royal trappings after Alexander's death. The tomb was one of three royal Macedonian burials excavated in 1977 by archaeologists working in the northern Greek village of Vergina...    more »