Reading List, March 2023

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Image: Cienna Smith

Rasa → Śāntam (शान्त) Peace, tranquility. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: perpetual white Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green

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Archetype → Lover

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Love defies the ego’s instinct to selfishly survive. Love attunes you to another being, and through that experience, it attunes you to yourself with renewed devotion.

This month’s newsletter is curated around the storytelling archetype of the lover. We borrowed the lover archetype from the psychology theories of Carl Jung. It’s an interesting archetype that helps us typify personalities that seek connection through intimacy, attentiveness and enjoying experiences. To those with a dominant lover archetype, experiencing the object of their affection means everything. Profound expressions of love are the signature trait of the lover. We use the lover archetype in stories; sometimes as characters we make—like Kavita—and other times as brand personalities that we create stories for. We find the lover archetype driven to make decisions through passion, and always looking to fill their vast capacity to experience, and of course, to love.

But, stories involving the lover archetype are not limited to learning to love another or the self; this archetype also connects to spiritual love and ecstasy. This story about Kavita was designed to induce two rasas (a state of mind caused by emotions)—śringāra (sensuality) and śāntam (tranquillity).

This reading list will take you through the ideas, incidents, people, films, music and research that inspired us through the making of this story.

March 2023

• When the incredibly talented English musician Ratan Devi—whose real name was Alice Ethel Richardson—married the prolific Sri Lankan writer and philosopher Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the couple seemed to form a creative powerhouse. But, their promise was short-lived after they formed a friendship with the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley who was dubbed the ‘wickedest man in the world’ at the time. The couple got involved with Crowley’s sex rituals exploring the connection between sexual arousal and altered states of mind, ultimately leading to the destruction of their relationships, exposing the danger of the practice at inexperienced hands.

  1. 2023, Ed Holland, The singer and the mystic; Love, Music, and Magick in 1910’s New York. Medium.

  2. 1929, Magick in theory and practice by the Master Therion (Aleister Crowley). Crowley, Aleister. Lecram Press, Paris.

• Madhura bhava and Veer bhava: In some sects of Hinduism, fostering an amorous relationship with the divine is considered among the accepted forms of worship. Madhura bhava and veer bhava, meaning the state of sweetness and the hero-state, are documented and instructed in various texts of Hindu devotion, detailing poetry, rituals and even warnings for practitioners.

  1. Pujya Dr. K.C. Varadachari - Volume 8.

  2. 1927, Triveni Journal. Dr. P. P. Sharma. Madhura Bhakti in Devotional Poetry.

  3. Kularnava Tantra. M. P. Pandit. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.

• Sometimes, humans form sexual fixations with inanimate objects. Often, these objects resemble a glorified version of the human body—like sex dolls, mannequins or statues—and other times, they are objects that spark more abstract desires. Characterized by sexual or romantic attraction focused on particular inanimate objects. Individuals with this attraction may have strong feelings of love and commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation.

  1. Objectophilia. Wikipedia, retrieved March 2023: Object sexuality or objectophilia is a group of paraphilias characterized by sexual or romantic attraction focused on particular inanimate objects.

  2. 2022, In Love With A Chandelier, Objectum Sexuality. OMG Stories. Youtube.

• 2018, Ulrich Pfistere. Divine ecstasy and eroticism in catholic art. München: In Catholicism—and similarly in most other religions— moments of religious rapture or elation, of prophetic inspiration or overwhelming emotion are thought to lead to ecstatic states while encountering divine sublimity. This short paper analyzes the idea through some of the most beautiful works of European religious art capturing divine ecstasy.

• 2016, Madhura-rati. Hare Krishnas: Krishna is known as a god who accepts his devotees as lovers. Madhura-rati, or attachment in conjugal love, is described as the conjugal relationship experienced between the Godhead and the devotee in Krishna worship. Conjugal love is divided into two classifications-namely, dutiful love as husband and wife and amorous love as lover and beloved.

• 2006, Divine Intoxication & Rumi. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. Ascent Magazine: Rumi’s poetry touches on every dimension of the love between God and the mystic. This is one of the reasons that makes Rumi’s mysticism so attractive—it’s not simply the beauty of his language but also the emphasis on exalting affections. The lover he writes about is often unnamed and remains between divine and human.

• Maithuna. Wikipedia, retrieved March 2023: Maithuna is an idea of spiritual union in tantric practices that involve both physical and metaphysical union, usually without any release of sexual fluids. Tantric teachers and practitioners describe it as a penetration of sexual energy, in which the two opposing forces, the masculine and the feminine, transfer and come to a balance; a sexual union of the subtle bodies.

• 1981, Under Pressure. David Bowie and Queen. EMI Elektra Records: ‘Because love’s such an old-fashioned word, and love dares you to care for the people at the edge of the night, and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves.’ The song is considered among the greatest musical productions of all time, and a twentieth-century anthem for universal love.

• Anandamyi, Wikipedia, retrieved March 2023: Anandamayi was an Indian saint whose spiritual path was defined by the practice of love and joyfulness, known as the path of Bhakti (trans. Loving devotion). Her name—chosen by Ānandamayi herself during the self-initiation into a spiritual journey—translates to ‘joy permeated’. Anandamayi pointed to love as a path to understanding, and joy as a viewpoint toward truth.

• 1969, My sweet lord. George Harrison. All things must pass. Apple records: George Harrison's ‘My sweet lord’ stands alone in the history of rock music for going against the secular grain as a full-on love song to the almighty. It was written by Harrison in the aftermath of his spiritual awakening following The Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh, India, in 1967 when they were learning from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The song captures what the musician felt as an overwhelming desire to be in union with god—an idea with roots that can be traced back to the eastern concept of monism which talks about being one with the only truth in the world. Peppered with blissed-out hallelujahs and Haré Krishna utterances, the song captures the idea of loving the divine in a way that was not limited to a single religion.

• 1981, The essence of Yajnavalkya Smriti. Translated and interpreted by V.D.N. Rao, Mumbai: Yajnavalkya was a Vedic sage from c.700 BCE. He recorded observations of his philosophical explorations with remarkable lucidity and he was often overwhelmed by the sheer weight of this knowledge deeming it impossible to originate from his human mind. Therefore, he attributed this knowledge and works to the feminine icon of knowledge—Saraswati. He harboured a lifelong devotion to the goddess, writing hymns of praise to express his bhakti (devotional love) for her. But he considered his intellectual pursuits to understand the human mind and use that knowledge to structure society as the ultimate homage to the goddess of knowledge, and the only way in which he could truly ‘see’ her.

• 2017, Longing for the Beloved. Mirabai Starr. Parabola: There is a longing that burns at the root of spiritual practice. This is the fire that fuels the spiritual journey for some. Romantic suffering seems central to this kind of devotion. Throughout history, there have been holy lovers who swear by the glorious sweetness that lies on the other side of yearning, when the boundaries of the separate self momentarily melt into the one reality.

Reading List, November 2022

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

-

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Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow. Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green

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Archetype → Utopian

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“I know, I know a place in the sun by the fountain of time,

where the air is kind.

I know, I know, because I hold it in my secret pocket—

a dream taken from between sleep and wake, never to be forgotten.”

There’s something acutely human about the idea of paradise. Other beings like animals and plants don’t seem preoccupied as we humans are with this idea of a place of never-ending peace and happiness. Perhaps, in the sense that they don’t question or compare the perfection of their reality, they never left promised land. Even children unacquainted with life’s harder facets or long-range worries remain in this blissfully innocent dream.

But, not all adult humans lose sight of utopia. Some of us hold on to the dream through the grind and still find ways to return to paradise through textures, tastes, sights, smells, stories, places, or people. These natives of promised land are known as the ‘innocent’ or ‘child’ archetype in Jungian psychology. When we use this archetype in storytelling to construct characters, we find it more appropriate to deem it ‘utopian’ to avoid biases. The utopians’ strength is their inextinguishable optimism. Their charm is their innocence. The core desire driving this archetype is returning to paradise—whether it’s something they held and lost, or have only dreamt of. This is the archetype that we used to construct Tanya’s character in this monthly story.

Complementing Tanya’s character, we chose the moods of wonder and beauty for this story. Moods like wonder (adbūtha rasa) and beauty (sringāra rasa) are storytelling tools that we’ve adopted from the eastern performance theory of Rasa, which describes nine elemental moods for all works of art.

This reading list will take you through the ideas, incidents, people, films, music and research that inspired us through the making of this story.

November 2022

• 1944, Gamperaliya. Martin Wickremasinghe: One of the most iconic stories that communicate the timeless narrative of losing paradise in South Asian literature is Gamperaliya. It captures the story of changing times through a southern village going through a cultural and class system upheaval.

• Translating between garden and paradise: Gardens have been used as models of paradise for as long as human civilization goes. After the beginning of agriculture, humans seem to have bridged their sense of separation from nature with fantasies of paradise that translated to gardening over time.

• 1955, Orson Welles interview excerpt. Persistence of Cinema: Welles talks about how his innocence of the film craft and naive optimism about what a camera could capture in cinema led to one of his greatest successes as a new director.

• 2009, Panpsychism in history, an overview. David Skrbina: Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness doesn’t stop at living things, that it did not develop to meet survival needs, nor that it emerged when animal brains evolved to be complex enough. Instead, consciousness is inherent to matter—all matter. Stones and stars, electrons and photons, and even quarks have consciousness.

• 2021, The Conscious Universe. Joe Zadeh. Noema Magazine: The radical idea that everything has elements of consciousness is reemerging and breathing new life into a cold and mechanical cosmos.

• Love and erotic expression are perhaps the most widely explored emotions and experiences in all types of art forms throughout the world. Sringāra rasa ( the aesthetic mood described as romance, love, and beauty) is sometimes known as the mother of all rasas and has remained one of the most popular rasas of all time. It has two base points—union and separation.

• The 43 Group led by Lionel Wendt was at the forefront of Sri Lanka’s modernist movement, depicting Ceylonese life at the time, and bearing witness to the culture of this country with great artistic truthfulness. Their work, depicting people, moments, fantasies, landscapes and everyday life played an important role in refreshing Sri Lanka’s reputation as an island paradise.

• 2022, Picturing Paradise, the hereafter in art and religion panel discussion with Pujan Gandhi, Amy Landau, Ben Quash, and Melissa Raphael: Our cultural and devotional imagination is enriched by the ongoing attempts artists make to visualize the invisible, and in this symposium, historians and curators specializing in Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian and Islamic art will account for the diversity of these beliefs about paradise through the lens of art both historic and contemporary. Scroll down to watch the video recording (documentation) of this online event.

• 1993. Expressionist utopias: paradise, metropolis, architectural fantasy. Benson, Timothy, O. Frisby, David. Calif, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• 2011, Alison Carroll: Gauguin And The Idea Of An Asian Paradise: Paul Gauguin not only offered the world a fresh view of itself but also suggested that there may well be places where paradises existed. That place was the South Seas. Much inspired by Gauguin’s example, many artists sought out Southeast Asia as their paradise.

• 2021, Within the Known: Wonder That Comes from Understanding. Amanda Vick: Is understanding contradictory to wonder? There are two sub-moods of the Adbhuta Rasa (the mood of wonder) in the eastern Rasa theory. The first includes wonder that occurs when there is a lack of understanding of an experience that could be understood. The second sub-mood comes from not understanding experiences that cannot be understood. What is the possibility of understanding leading to or supporting experiences of wonder? To explore the concept of wonder, thirty interviews were conducted in this study.

• Paradise is reflected in Islamic art and culture in distinctive ways with remarkable ideological continuity in the Muslim world. The concept of paradise, a part of the Islamic cosmos, is put forth in the Quran through ayat or "signs for men possessed of mind". The term used to describe Paradise often is Jannat or gardens. The Islamic garden mirrors this idea of paradise.

• 1808, William Blake. Illustrations for Paradise Lost: As a poet and artist, William Blake had a highly personal response to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). He produced books inspired by the poet, designs for Milton’s Comus (1801), as well as pencil sketches, paintings and three sets of illustrations of Paradise Lost. These are archived in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Huntington Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

>> Read the previous reading list