BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition in Hindu Religion (2005) Gavin Flood    The Tao Te Ching: 81 Verses by Lao Tzu With Introduction and Commentary (400BC original - this edition 2006) Ralph Allan Dale Gavin Flood's The Tantric Body is a fairly dense academic text and not cheap, even if you can get it second hand, as I did, at a store like Treadwells. I am also not entirely convinced by Gavin Flood's almost obsessive thesis of the 'entextualisation' of Tantra in the body although, if accepted in perhaps a less intense form, he offers some deep insights into how the Tantric tradition relates spirit to matter. However, this is a five star text if only because of its value as corrective to the soft core 'namaste' tantric culture that has developed in the West as a form of partner guidance counselling for anxious middle class liberals who clearly have great personal difficulty either in escaping Judaeo-Christian habits of mind or in understanding the r

Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism & Nazi Survival (1992) Joscelyn Godwin   The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann & the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (1993) Isaiah Berlin   Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004) Mark Sedgwick    Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen (2008) Gary Lachman   Although published by Adventures Unlimited which tends not to be, shall we say, conventional in its authors (who cover conspiracy, lost worlds, free energy and what-have-you), Arktos is a serious and interesting account of polar mythology in popular culture, in the history of science and in esoteric lore. Joscelyn Goodwin provides an intelligent and often wry overview that remains well within scholarly standards. It is a valuable addition to that shelf in the library that is dominated by the work of Goodrick Clark (of whom more in a later review) and it is a useful guide to