In the 14th-century, a visionary girl is to become an Anchoress, a walled-in recluse, so that she can live in the Virgin's house forever. Over time she awakens to her own sensuality and explores her own female, earth-based spirituality.
The screenplay is partly based on accounts of an historical female anchorite, Christine Carpenter, who was walled into her anchorhold in a village church in Shere, Surrey, in southern England, in 1329. The story revolves around the girl's mystical visions of the Virgin Mary, the local reeve who wants to marry her, and the priest who walls her into his village church and his dislike of her mother, a midwife whom he regards as a witch.
Gnawa: Music and Beyond. Jacques Willemont, dir.; Viviana Pâques, scientific direction. Produced by Espaces, 2012; DVD includes English and French versions, both have Arabic with English or French subtitles; color, 58 mins.
Jacques Willemont's documentary Gnawa: Music and Beyond explores the history, symbolism and ritual practice of Morocco's Gnawa traditions. The Gnawa are a population brought to Morocco from West Africa through a history of trans-Saharan slavery. In some ways mirroring syncretic traditions that grew out of trans-Atlantic slavery, like santaría in Cuba or condomblé in Brazil, the Gnawa fused West African religious and musical practices with Islam to create a musically-driven sacred healing ceremony called a derdba. Following an animal sacrifice, this all-night event moves through a series of spirits who possess adepts through trance. Willemont and his team draw upon years of interview footage to explore both how this ritual works and what its various components mean. To this end, the film relies heavily on interviews and analysis by Viviana Pâques, a French scholar of Gnawa music who provided scientific direction for the production. The film aims to demonstrate what can be a clandestine practice in Morocco by sharing a wealth of footage from these interviews with Pâques (who passed away in 2007) and from a recorded ceremony.
Structurally, Gnawa: Music and Beyond is built around the Gnawa ceremony as it has existed in Morocco for generations. To do so, the film layers three central types of content. Interview material with Al Ayachi, a ritual leader called a moqqadem, sits between documentary footage and interviews with Viviana Pâques, who presents an interpretive analysis based on her three decades of work with Al Ayachi and the Gnawa. Partly because of this structural choice, the film presents dual focal points: it aims to preserve and share the secret knowledge held within Gnawa ritual practice while it presents the importance of deep interpretive symbolism as studied by anthropologists like Pâques. She has been a central figure within the study of Gnawa music and ritual, most notably through her two books on the topic, L'arbre cosmique dans la pensée populaire et dans la vie quotidienne du nord-ouest africain (The cosmic tree in Northwest African popular thought and daily life [1964]), and La religion des esclaves: Recherches sur la confrérie marocaine des Gnawa (The religion of slaves: research on the Moroccan brotherhood of the Gnawa [1991]).
In the immense conglomerate of African fusions which we can explore today we find a wholly unique case: the Gnawa. The approach to the Gnawa’s musical expression, of profound social and religious implications, reveals to us not only an extremely rich cultural heritage but also one of the chapters that would have greatest effect on the development of North African societies during the last 500 years: slavery.
The term Gnawa refers to the brotherhood groupings (and, by extension, to their manifestations) of a minority ethnic-religious group of sub-Saharan origin but with an important presence especially in Morocco and, to a lesser extent, in Algeria and Tunisia, where they are known as Diwan and Stambali respectively. There is no unanimity on seeing the Gnawiya as a Tariqa or Sufi religious path in the way that some of those more rooted in the Maghreb can be, such as the Qadiriya, Issawiya or Hamdushiya, among others, with which, however, it shares an organisational structure and ecstatic and possession rites, in what are considered the limits of Islamic orthodoxy. The establishing of these syncretic expressions took place over several centuries, during which the animist ritual substrate gradually adapted to Islam, with variations which depended both on the geographic area and the social environment to which the different black communities had to adapt themselves.
The Origins
The origin of the Gnawa, a word that seems to come from the Berber term agnaw/ignawen (dumb) in reference to their ignorance of Arabic and Berber must first be found in the diverse contingents of black slaves who between the 11th and 13th centuries were taken to the Maghreb strip from the Kingdom of Abyssinia, which occupied a strategic position in the caravanserai routes, and from the old Kingdom of Ghana (which today is part of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal). The traditional slave trade from the great Sudan intensified because of the conquest at the end of the 16th century of part of the Songhai Empire carried out by the Sultan of Morocco Ahmed Al-Mansur, a trafficking that continued until the early 20th century.
The descendants of these slaves, together with other free emigrant black peoples who arrived through the caravanserai routes, mixed with the local population and formed a group that despite its diverse origin acquired its own identity thanks to the figure of Sidi Bilal, the first slave of Ethiopian origin freed by Mohammed and who was the first Muezzin of Islam. These communities would also be known by other names in reference to their geographical origin (Sudani, Bambara), their social status (Ousfan, slaves), their religious affiliations (Bilali) or some of their practices of origin (Bori, in reference to the dance of possession practised by the Hausa taken to Tripoli). The large concentration of the black community in cities such as Marrakech and Essaouira (formerly called the port of Timbuktu) was because both cities had been important slave markets connected to the trans-Saharan route.
A human approach to the mystical secrets of India. Documenting the sadhus as had rarely been filmed on many peculiar occasions. A charismatic character is the thread of the story revealing a hidden side of these sacred Hindu sects; "children sadhus".
Shooting locations: Himalayas valley, Uttarakhand, North India.
The Baul or Bauls (Bengali: বাউল) are a group of mystic minstrels of mixed elements of Sufism and Vaishnavism from Bengal region, comprising Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley. Bauls constitute both a syncretic religious sect and a musical tradition. Bauls are a very heterogeneous group, with many sects, but their membership mainly consists of Vaishnava Hindus and Sufi Muslims. They can often be identified by their distinctive clothes and musical instruments. Lalon Shah is regarded as the most celebrated Baul saint in history.
Although Bauls comprise only a small fraction of the Bengali population, their influence on the culture of Bengal is considerable. In 2005, the Baul tradition of Bangladesh was included in the list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
Ignored during his lifetime, the artist and poet William Blake is now a literary institution. How did this reversal come about? How did a republican, dissident printer, who was considered insane by his contemporaries, become transformed into an icon?
The author Peter Ackroyd, Blake’s latest biographer, is the guide as this program explores late-Georgian London: a world of political ferment and religious dispute, where the winds of revolution were blowing across the sea from America and France and a mad king sat on the English throne. The program examines Blake’s artistic achievement and assesses his continuing appeal.
In this moving and profound program, Colin Wilson shares his personal struggle in dealing with states of panic and depression. His attempt to cope with these difficult experiences has led him to explore states of extreme lucidity and self-control.
Colin Wilson (1931-2013) was one of the most prolific writers in the English language. His novels include The Mind Parasites, The Philosopher's Stone and Sex Diary of a Metaphysician. Other major works include A Criminal History of Mankind, The Occult, Mysteries, Religion and the Rebel, The New Existentialism, New Pathways in Psychology and The Outsider--his first and most famous book.
As part of the Dark Paradise exhibit curated by Yin Shadowz and the Applied Mythology Project at LAST Projects Gallery in Hollywood in Oct./Nov. 2015, a diverse group of women come together to discuss "Art As Ritual" in today's world, exploring the topic from various perspectives including depth psychology, folklore, popular culture and the occult, mysticism, social justice, and inequity. The panel explores the archetype of the new perennialist, the postmodern search for authenticity in expressive culture, the role of magic in everyday life, living one's life as art, the role of ritual in art-making practices, and inequity of space for creative exploration. Panelists include Jennifer Selig, professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute and author on depth psychology and archetypal studies; Sabina Magliocco, professor at CSUN, ethnographer, and author on folklore and the Neopagan revival; Tanja M. Laden, founder of PopCurious, writer and biographer of Marjorie Cameron,; Maja d'Aoust, practicing white witch, artist and speaker on esoteric studies; and Rochelle Martin, Chicana artist. The panel is moderated by co-curators Kristin Trammell and Meagan Boyd.
Miki Cohen is a 58-year-old Israeli attracted to Sufi mysticism and the writings and philosophy of Rumi. We follow him to Kony, the resting place of Rumi in central Turkey and the religious centre for his followers, as he becomes the only Israeli granted access to the inner sanctum of the whirling Dervish order of Islam.
Art and the unconscious
as specific categories were formed at the same time, in late the 18th
century. They have haunted each other since then. Something in art seems
to be wide open, even conditioned by the unconscious, no matter how
often artists and art critics try to keep art in place as perfectly
intelligible. And the unconscious seems to be best understood throught
art - even Sigmund Freud admitted that.
Between 1906 and 1922, the
Swedish artist Hilma af Klint made over one thousand secret paintings.
According to her, spirits werde guiding her hand in a very literal way.
Ever since her secret work was shown in 1985, she has been considered as
a test case to the sources behind early abstract art. But it is even
more in- teresting to take her at her own word, and enter the
unconscious world she is showing us.
Gertrud Sandqvist is Professor
in the Theory and History of Ideas of Visual Art at Malmä Art Academy,
Lund University, Sweden. She has been a board member of the National
Foundation for Swedish Culture of the Future since 2003. Since 2007 she
has been chair of the steering committee of KUNO, the network
organization of all Nordic Art Academies and she is a member of the
international board of Maumaus-escola des artes Visuales, Lisbon.
Gertrud Sandqvist writes extensively on mainly Nordic and Eurpean
Contemporary Art.
La Montaña Sagrada (The Holy Mountain, reissued as The Sacred Mountain) is a 1973 cult film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky who also participated as actor, composer, set designer, and costume designer. The film was produced by The Beatles manager Allen Klein of ABKCO after Jodorowsky scored an underground phenomenon with El Topo and the acclaim of both John Lennon and George Harrison (Lennon and Yoko Ono put up the production money). It was shown at various international film festivals in 1973, including Cannes, and limited screenings in New York and San Francisco.
The film is based on Ascent of Mount Carmel by St. John of the Cross and Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal, a student of G.I. Gurdjieff. In particular, much of Jodorowsky's visually psychedelic story follows the metaphysical thrust of Mount Analogue such as the climb to the Alchemist, the assembly of individuals with specific skills, the discovery of the mountain that unites Heaven and Earth "that cannot not exist" and symbolic challenges along the mountain ascent. Daumal died before finishing his allegorical novel, and Jodorowsky's improvised ending provides a way of completing the work (both symbolically and otherwise).
Daniel A.I.U Higgs, Interdimensional Song-Seamstress and Corpse-Dancer of the Mystic Crags was born in the Harbor City of Baltimore, USA in the early-mid sixties of the previous millenium. Having begun singing 25 years ago, he is perhaps best known as the singer and lyricist of the band Lungfish, which is now, as it often has been, quasi if not entirely defunct. Presently, the music Daniel manifests proceeds without the blessing/curse and help/hinderance of collaborative influence.
Daniel currently has three solo albums available, "Magic Alphabet" on Ian MacKaye's Northern Liberties imprint, "Ancestral Songs" on Holy Mountain and "Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot", the new book/cd and LP on Thrill Jockey.
Pete Owen-Jones, a vicar in a Sussex parish, is dissatisfied with some aspects of his faith and sets off on three extreme pilgrimages to China, India and Egypt to explore Zen Buddhism, Hinduism and ascetic Christianity. Pete feels that the Church of England is too much a faith of the head, and not enough a faith of the soul, the heart or even the body. He now sets off on a quest in search of a more physical and mystical path to enlightment. Pete says: "What I'm looking for is a spirituality that is absent from western Christianity. A spirituality I know exists in the extremes of world religions. "I hope to enter worlds where rule book and doctrine are replaced by an individual relationship with God and where the attainment of enlightenment is won by hardship, privation and pain. I have to become an extreme pilgrim." Pete travels to India and joins the Mela, the huge Hindu pilgrimage that draws to the Ganges.Pete meets a Guru who agrees to take him under his wing and teach him how to become a Sadhu – an Indian holy man. He then sets off on a journey across northern India to the mountains in search of the Hindu road to spiritual bliss
