DiotimosReading Desk
Category

New Age

Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.

4 itemsCategory: New Age · newest first
  1. Feature

    A Rainbow Up the Spine

    The chart on the yoga-studio wall shows seven discs stacked from red at the base of the spine to violet at the crown, and it is usually captioned "ancient." This feature follows the colours back through the first English translation of the Sanskrit text that fixed the seven-chakra system, Sir John Woodroffe's The Serpent Power of 1919, and finds that the text has colours of its own, crimson, vermilion, rain-cloud, smoke, and moonlight, but no rainbow; the spectrum was added in the twentieth-century West. The piece explains where it came from, what the old text was for, and what the modern chart keeps and changes.

    New Age
  2. Feature

    The Word Karma Meant Before It Meant Payback

    "Karma" in everyday English means what goes around comes around: the universe keeping score. The Sanskrit word it comes from means "deed," and the two oldest texts in which it became a doctrine, an Upanishad and the *Bhagavad Gita*, use it to say something almost the opposite of the modern slogan. This explainer follows the word from its root, through the sentence in which it first became a law of moral cause, to the Gita's instruction to act without any concern for what comes back, and shows where the popular sense fits the sources and where it leaves them.

    New Age
  3. Research Note

    “As Above, So Below”: Following a Slogan Back to Its Source

    The four-word formula at the heart of much modern esoteric and New Age writing is usually presented as the teaching of an Egyptian sage older than Moses. Tracing it backwards, from a 1908 Chicago book through a Victorian occultist and Isaac Newton’s notebooks to a ninth-century Arabic treatise, shows that the saying is old, that its familiar wording is not, and that its meaning changed at almost every stop.

    New Age
  4. Research Note

    Does the Death Card Actually Mean Death?

    Modern tarot readers routinely say that card XIII signifies change and almost never a literal death, and they often credit that reading to A. E. Waite, designer of the best-known deck. Waite's own 1911 handbook turns out to say two different things in two different chapters, and following that split shows how the card's meaning was made, by whom, and how recently.

    New Age