Years ago when I was in high school I watched Epstein’s Le Tempestaire and it left a lasting impression on me. Around about the same time (or maybe a bit later), I found out about Finis Terrae, but I kept postponing watching it for years. A couple weeks ago this movie came back in my… Read More Jean Epstein’s “Finis Terrae” – To navigate one’s emotions

For quite a long time, I didn’t understand what makes Satyajit Ray’s movies feel like home to me and why they gave me what I would call a warm and unromanticised feeling of consistent, fundamental goodness and emotional nourishment. Initially I thought it may simply have something to do with my affinity for the Indian… Read More Satyajit Ray

“What is [the ceremony’s] real aim? Is it to drive out the genii (…)? Or is it to make them come? (…) To use Luc de Heusch’s terminology, is it exorcism or adorcism? This question, which is posed by so many possession cults, is by no means new (…) Michel Leiris makes the following observation:… Read More Trance, possession, the zār, the Self, the Other

In Recall Healing, one of the healing methods which hold emotional trauma as the root cause of illness, truth bears the possibility of healing. It claims that the more secrets we have, the sicker we are, where a secret is not so much something we know we hide, but something “we’ve forgotten that we hide.”… Read More Musings on “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” – truth, confession, healing, justice, and violence