Kama Sutra - Two Miles High

Two Miles High

Kama Sutra

A collection of 27 posts

Kama Sutra Featured

Kama Sutra

A Spiritual Fable of Eunuchs and Orgasms

Dulac's Arabian Nights or Disney's Agrabah?

Above is Edmund Dulac's Arabian Nights (1907). Below is Disney's Agrabah in Aladdin - clearly an homage. Dulac was a French book illustrator whose heyday was in England in the years before World War I. He produced his whimsical flights of fancy for many books, including

Glass Onion

Glass Onion as a metaphor? Lennon's choice of an onion is hilarious, for glass has a long history as a metaphor. The glass metaphor was well known in Europe from the 15th-17th centuries, when sufferers imagined their body was made of glass and that it could shatter at

Guru Dutt

Guru Dutt (1925-1964) was "an Indian film director, producer, actor, choreographer, and writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of Indian cinema," says Wikipedia. When Jacques remarked that All the world’s a stage, he divided a man’s life into 7 ages, with acts

'Help!'

Indian immigrants poured into Britain between 1948 and 1962, when the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. For many in Britain, India was not the land they had oppressed for several hundred years, but the land of yoga and yogis, spicy food and strange religious and sexual practices. In

Hermann Hesse in 1927

Hermann Hesse in the Swiss Alps

Hesse moved to Montagnola on Lake Lugano in the Ticino canton of Switzerland in 1919 and he lived there for most of his life. Drawn to the cool mountain air and the remoteness, Hesse became Swiss by citizenship in 1924. Hesse is the world’s most widely read German-language author

Kama Sutra - Good Wives

Kama Sutra - Good Wives

What does the Kama Sutra say about a good wife? Sir Richard Burton’s Kama Sutra says: A virtuous woman, who has affection for her husband, should act in conformity with his wishes as if he were a divine being. Sir Richard Burton’s wife, Lady Isobel, wrote out her

Kama-Sutra - Timeline

* 1821 Sir Richard Burton born * 1842-49 Burton in India * 1857 Obscene Publications Act in the UK * Indian Mutiny * 1861 Burton marries Isabel * 1871 Burton transferred to Trieste * 1877 Herman Hesse born * 1883 Burton publishes The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana * 1885 Burton publishes Ananga Ranga, The Book of the Thousand Nights

Kama-Sutra Art

A sample of artwork and early temple carvings This one is from the Javanese-Hindu temple of Candi-Sukoh, Indonesia.

Kama-Sutra Today

Kama-Sutra Today

The Kama Sutra today is regarded as a pornographic sex manual, but Indian filmmakers and writers have tried to reclaim it from whence it was hijacked. Mira Nair’s film of 1996 (above) was well received: it was released theatrically in India in 1998, but it remains severely cut because

Kundalini

Kundalini in Sanskrit means coiled up like a serpent at the base of the spine. In many cultures serpents stand for the life force itself. Why does the poor snake have to have all these metaphors and sexual fables imposed upon it? Eastern and western, positive and negative, male and

Mandala

Mount Meru is the mythic five-peaked mountain at the center of the universe in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religions. It is represented below as a mandala (a "circle") and as a yantra (a symbol for meditation). What is interesting about this is that it reverses the traditional Sri

Moksha

Following the conflagration of World War I, Western philosophers struggled to come up with a prescription for spiritual resurrection in the West. Virility was very much on their minds and it's hard to avoid the sexual metaphors in their books. The most pessimistic, Oswald Spengler's Decline

Monte Verità

It all seemed to make sense... Old Europe’s empires were imploding and Christianity had lost its grip, industrialization soiled the landscape and people fled for the hills or for America. From around 1902 and for decades to come, Ascona would lure Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, D.H. Lawrence, Franz

Rajneesh/Osho on the Orgasm

Rajneesh (1931-1990), who took the name Osho late in life, was nicknamed the sex guru. He argued that one could not transcend sex without experiencing it thoroughly and consciously, which he proceeded to do as often as possible. “In orgasm, you come to this deepest layer of your body where

Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass As Imperial Metaphor

Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass As Imperial Metaphor

Philip Pullman's golden compass, subtle knife and amber spyglass (in His Dark Materials) all have an imperial nostalgic ring about them. The settings and storylines echo with the English eras of naval exploration and perhaps the Romantics - the 18th century into the early 19th. The devices themselves

Richard Gere Kisses Shilpa Shetty

In 2023, an Indian court finally cleared Richard Gere on obscenity charges 16 years after the infamous Shilpa Shetty kiss shown above. In 2007, Shetty and Gere attended an AIDS awareness event in Mumbai, where Gere kissed Shetty's cheek several times. Radical Hindus were infuriated, because kissing in

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam Photos

Meena Kumari Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman Guru Dutt Guru Dutt in the ruins

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is set in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and it is Bollywood's Citizen Kane. It traces a historical arc, from the turn of the 20th century, when the British Raj was at its tipping point, through 1962 when the film came out, when India was suffering

Sexy Sadie

"One sunny day the world was waiting for a lover She came along to turn on everyone Sexy Sadie the greatest of them all" When does satire become racism? This is Lennon at his most cutting and cynical best. Sexy Sadie was originally called “Maharishi” after the Maharishi

Sir Richard Burton at Miramare, Trieste

Sir Richard Burton at Miramare, Trieste

Sitting on the sea wall at Miramare Sir Richard Burton is churning the ocean and dreaming of Lakshmi above the waves. Drinking the halahala poison and caressing his bright blue throat. When the sunlight streams across the hills, Maximilian is on fire in Mexico and Carlota leans out her upstairs

Sotadic Zone

The Sotadic Zone as theorized in Burton's "Terminal Essay" to The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (1885). For Burton, pederasty and homosexuality were "geographical and climatic, not racial," meaning it could be found in all the red bits. "Within the

Stained glass windows at Chartres Cathedral

There is much to admire at Chartres Cathedral including its large stained glass windows with the rose imagery, famous for its cobalt blue tints. But controversy erupted in the 1970s - and it's still going really - once cleaning began. The windows, like most of the cathedral, were