Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Magic”

Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 10:30:00 -0400

John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and history, the real and the fantasy, memory and imagination. Little, Big is also a book that JF and Phil have been planning to discuss for as long as Weird Studies has existed. In this episode, they are joined by writer and scholar Erik Davis to explore the enduring charms and mysteries of one of the greatest—and most underrated—American novels of the late twentieth century.

Order Christian Bunyan's Weird Studies poster here.
Visit Weirdosphere for more details on Erik Davis's ongoing course, The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

John Crowley, Little, Big
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Eric Davis, interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack
David Lynch (dir.), Lost Highway
America, “The Last Unicorn”
John Cooper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality
Lord Dunsany, Irish novelist

Special Guest: Erik Davis.

Episode 180: The Player: On the Magician Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:15:00 -0500

The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itself, or the individual who has mastered the art of manipulating the cards to divine their meanings. Yet, the Magician is a profoundly ambiguous figure. From one perspective, he is the Magus, piercing through the illusions of ceaseless becoming to glimpse the hidden depths of reality. From another, he is all surface without depth, a carnival huckster ready to empty your coin purse while you’re transfixed by his crystal ball. In this episode, JF and Phil continue their on-again, off-again journey through the major trumps with a discussion of the card that—deservedly or not—proudly calls itself Number One.

REFERENCES
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Weird Studies, Episode 24 on “The Charlatan and the Magus”
Weird Studies, Episode 109 and Episode 110 on The Glass Bead Game
Weird Studies, Episode 179 with Lionel Snell
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneology of Morals
Louis Sass, Modernism and Madness
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
Participation mystique
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Leigh Mccloskey, Tarot Re-visioned

Episode 174: Magick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Phil and JF are joined by Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford – practicing magicians, podcasters, and co-authors of the newly released Baptist's Head Compendium: Magick as a Path to Enlightenment, a collection of essays and reports from their famous occult blog, The Baptist's Head. Duncan and Alan are accomplished practitioners with deep insights into the nature of magic(k). The conversation touches on a number of subjects, including the parallels between magic, mysticism, and religion; form and formlessness; the nature of truth; the primacy of devotion; and the quest to converse with one's Holy Guardian Angel.

To purchase The Baptist's Head Compendium at a 20% discount, go to http://www.spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk and enter the code given in the introduction to this episode.

REFERENCES

Occult Experiments in the Home, Duncan Baford's blog and podcasts.
Barbarous Words, Alan Chapman's Substack.
WORP FM, a ten-part podcast series with Alan and Duncan.
The Abremelin working
Illuminates of Thanatos (IOT)
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Buddhist Geeks, “The Great Work of Western Magic with Alan Chapman”
Aleister Crowly, John St. John

Special Guests: Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford.

Episode 170: Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's 'F for Fake'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 29 May 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illusion, magic, and ultimately, the search for truth. This is a film unlike any other, and it is arguably Welles's most important contribution to the evolution and theory of film aesthetics.

Join the Weirdosphere online learning community by enrolling in Phil and J.F.'s inaugural course, [THE BEAUTY AND THE HORROR](www.weirdosphere.org), starting June 20th.

RERERENCES

Orson Welles, F for Fake
Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2
Elmyr de Hory, art forger
Clifford Irving, American writer
Howard Hughes, American aerospace engineer
David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film
David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
Pauline Kael, Raising Kane
“War of the Worlds” radio drama
The Farm Podcast, “Horror Hosts, Films & Other Strange Realities w/ David Metcalfe, Conspirinormal & Recluse”
Orson Welles - Interview with Michael Parkinson (BBC 1974)
Geoffrey Cornelius, Cornelius
Victoria Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Sokal affair, hoax
Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration”

Episode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

One of the most surprising aspects of paranormal experience is how often it takes on a storylike form, unfolding exactly as you would expect it to in, say, a Hollywood horror film. Viewers of Karl Pfeiffer's film The Unbinding will get a sense of this in the early sequences of Greg and Dana Newkirk's latest occult adventure. The haunting comes on strong and takes rather familiar forms. But the almost too-good-to-be-true frights -- effective as they are in an almost fairy-tale way -- soon give way to a procedural that invites us to ponder the ethics and methodologies of paranormal investigation in the age of Global Weirding. What do we owe the Others we encounter? What do they owe us? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss some of the questions haunting this brilliant documentary from the creators of Hellier.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Planet Weird, The Unbinding
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”
Duncan Barford, “Magick Versus Content”
Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty

Episode 141: Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 10:30:00 -0500

Ramsey Dukes, also known by his real name of Lionel Snell, may be one of the most important thinkers on magic since Aleister Crowley. In the impishly-titled Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed (or SSOTBME for short), Dukes accomplishes something few writers on the topic have been able to do: he gives us magic without asking us to sacrifice anything that makes us sensible modern people. He makes magic seem like the most obvious thing in the world, and he does it without taking away any of its, well, magic. How he does it and what it means are questions that would take several episodes to unpack. In this one, Phil and JF begin the work by discussing how Dukes situates magic in an epistemic compass that also includes science, art, and religion. This set of tools is as essential to a holistic view of reality as the four suits in a deck of cards are essential to a proper poker game. In other words, when we lose magic, we lose a way of dealing with reality.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

REFERENCES

David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
Weird Studies, Episode 139 on Art Power
Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy
“Virtual” and “Actual”, as developed by Bergson and Deleuze
Pragmatism, philosophical school
Jack Parsons, American rocket scientist
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Episode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 22:00:00 -0400

In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, the philosopher Federico Campagna argues that we moderns have exhausted the reality system we devised at the dawn of our age, a system he calls Technic. Technic has one goal: to reduce all things to language by naming, tagging, measuring, and quantifying them, by turning every parcel of the physical and psychic universe into a "unit" defined by its position in the system. The result has been an erasure of the mere "suchness" of things, the singularity of things simply existing as they are. To replace a worldview that is now revealing its endemic nihilism, Campagna proposes Magic, a way of seeing that reestablishes a balance between the measurable and the ineffable. JF and Phil discuss Campagna's magisterial performance in this episode.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

SHOW NOTES

Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Bill Hicks, “Bit on Marketing”
Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time
Plotinus, Neoplatonist philosopher
Francis Bacon, Irish artist
Samuel Beckett, Irish author
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Weird Stuides, Episode 87 on Arthur Machen
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

Episode 131: Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

The historian of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal writes, "The world is one, and the human is two." The line captures the riddle of reality. What is it with our species? Equipped with an intellect able to grok the basic laws that govern the physical universe, we seem unable to wrap our heads around as simple a question as "What is real?". Recorded live before a learned audience at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) in August of 2022, this episode approaches the enigma by teasing the Weird out of the very idea of intellection. If the architects of DISI are right to say that mind, far from being confined to human skulls, enjoys wide distribution across nature, what might such ideas as magic, synchronicity, and prophecy tell us about intelligence and meaning?

DISI is a three-week interdisciplinary event held each year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The hosts are grateful to Jacob Foster and Erica Cartmill of UCLA for inviting them to speak at the institute.

**Header image: **Detail of The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

SHOW NOTES

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)
Earlier iteration of Jacob Foster's talk, "Toward a Social Science of the Possible"

Pauline Oliveros's Tuning Meditation
Norbert Wiener, American mathematician
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux"
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
Aristotle, Physics and Metaphysics
Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The World is One, and the Human is Two: Tentative Conclusions of a Working Historian of Religion"
Jeffrey Kripal on Weird Studies: episodes ## and ##
Aleister Crowley, See The Vision and the Voice and Magick in Theory and Practice
The "Unwritten Doctrines" of Plato
Plato, Republic, "Seventh Letter" & Phaedrus
Phil's prophetic dream report (Patreon supporters only)
H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (for description of Azathoth)
C. G. Jung, Synchroncity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Alchemical Studies & Mysterium Coniunctionis
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
New York Times article on 2022 UFO hearings

Episode 89: On Ishmael Reed's 'Mumbo Jumbo,' or, Why We Need More Magical Thinking

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 10:00:00 -0500

Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo is a conspiracy thriller, a postmodern experiment, a revolutionary tract, a celebration, and a magical working. It is a novel that, over and above prophetically describing the world we live in, creates a whole new world and invites us to move in. For Phil and JF, Mumbo Jumbo exemplifies art's creative power to generate new possibilities for life. It is also the perfect occasion for pinpointing the difference between the kind of magical thinking that fuels virulent conspiricism, and the more profound magical thinking which alone can save us from it.

**Image: **Albrecht Dürer, Two Pairs of Hands with Book

REFERENCES

Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
For more on Colin Wilson's concept of lunar religion, see The Occult
Weird Studies, episode 36: "On Hyperstition"
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Carl Van Vechten, American writer
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus!
MC5, "Kick Out the Jams"
Karl Pfeiffer (dir.), Hellier, webseries
Jasun Horsley, 16 Maps of Hell
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), SSOTBME
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Fats Waller, American jazz musician
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry
Weird Studies, episode 57 - "Box of Gods: On Raiders of the Lost Ark"
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

Episode 71: The Medium is the Message

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 13:00:00 -0400

On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision.

REFERENCES

McLuhan, Understanding Media
The Playboy interview
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Graham Harman, American philosopher
Clement Greenberg, American critic
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft
Brian Eno, British composer
Marshall and Eric McLuhan, The Laws of Media: The New Science _
Jonathan Sterne, _The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (editors), The Essential McLuhan
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America
David Fincher (director), The Social Network _
Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema I _and _Cinema II
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
Eric Havelock,_ Preface to Plato_
Walter J. Ong, American theorist
Plato, [Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato))_

Episode 67: Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On 'Hellier'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 11:30:00 -0500

On the night before this episode of Weird Studies was released, a bunch of folks on the Internet performed a collective magickal working. Prompted by the paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk, they watched the final episode of the documentary series Hellier at the same time -- 10:48 PM EST -- in order to see what would happen. Listeners who are familiar with this series, of which Newkirk is both a protagonist and a producer, will recall that the last episode features an elaborate attempt at gate opening involving no less than Pan, the Ancient Greek god of nature. If we weren't so cautious (and humble) in our imaginings, we at Weird Studies might consider the possibility that this episode is a retrocausal effect of that operation. In it, we discuss the show that took the weirdosphere by storm last year, touching on topics such as subterranean humanoids, the existence of "Ascended Masters," Aleister Crowley's secret cipher, the Great God Pan, and the potential dangers of opening gates to other worlds ... or of leaving them closed.

REFERENCES

Karl Pfeiffer (director), Hellier
Philip K. Dick, Valis
Weird Studies episode 12 - The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher
John Benson Brooks, American musician
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Thelema
Allen H. Greenfield, The Complete Secret Cipher of the Ufonauts
Secret cipher online tool
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Gematria
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Grant Morrison, The Invisibles
Genesis P. Orridge, American artist
Alex Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music
Helena Blavatsky, Russian theosophist
Annie Besant, British theosophist
Peter J. Carroll, British occultist
Kenneth Grant, British occultist
C. G. Jung, The Red Book
Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford, "Chinese Whispers: The Origin of LAM" in The Blood of the Saints
Richard Sharpe Shaver, American writer and contactee
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Occultist Paul Weston's blog post on Hellier
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque
Eric Voegeln, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Auguste Comte, French philosopher
Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History

Episode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 14:00:00 -0500

At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come. For Wilson, magic isn't the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a "science of the future." Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson's concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult.

REFERENCES

Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History
Rick and Morty, American sitcom
Colin, Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose
Colin Wilson, The Outsider
Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
Making Sense, episode 107: Is Life Actually Worth Living?
Peter Wessel Zapffe, Norwegian philosopher
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Emil Cioran, Franco-Romanian essayist
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Library of America collection
Joe Frazier, American pugilist
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Edouard Schuré, [The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions](Edouard Schuré, _The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religion
Weird Studies, episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"
Thomas Merton, American monk
Gary Snyder, American poet

Episode 60: Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 13:00:00 -0500

Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depends on whom you ask. With most, the dictum probably bears out. But there are those who can make out certain patterns in Ra's life and work, patterns that place him among the true mystics and prophets. Of course, these people already believe in mysticism and prophecy, but Sun Ra's total devotion to his myth does not leave much wiggle room on this front. He is asking us to choose: believe or disbelieve. And if you go with disbelief, you'll need to explain the sustained coherence and lucidity of his message, and the transformative power of his music. In this episode, Phil and JF take a look at Sun Ra's unforgettable film Space is the Place, interpreting it as a document in the history of esotericism, using gnostic thought and the tarotology as instruments to bring some of his secrets to light.

REFERENCES

Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Sun Ra: Brother from Another Planet_
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus and [Kafka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority(philosophy))_ (for the concept of minority)
Antoine Faivre, French historian of esotericism
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Eliphas Lévi, French occultist
Edward O. Bland (director) The Cry of Jazz
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History
Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
Stanley Kubrick, Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America

Episode 36: On Hyperstition

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 10:15:00 -0500

Hyperstition is a key concept in the philosophy of Nick Land. It refers to fictions which, given enough time and libidinal investment, become realities. JF and Phil explore the notion using one of those optometric apparatuses with multiple lenses -- deleuzian, magical, mythological, political, ethical, etc. The goal isn't to understand how fictions participate in reality (that'll have to wait for another episode), but to ponder what this implies for a sapient species. The conversation weaves together such varied topics as Twin Peaks: The Return, Internet meme magic (Trump as tulpa!), Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, occult experiments in spirit creation, the Brothers Grimm, and the phantasmic overtones of The Communist Manifesto. In the end we can only say, "What a load of bullsh*t!"

Header Image: Still from the 1920 German Expressionist film The Golem: How He Came in the World, by Paul Wegener.

REFERENCES

JF's notes on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
David Lynch (director), Twin Peaks: The Return
Phil Ford, "Garmonbozia" (work in progress, unpublished)
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition"
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition: An Introduction" (2009 interview with Nick Land)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
CCRU Archives
The occult concept of the egregore
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford, The Blood of the Saints
A. T. L. Carver, "The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of Kek"
Paul Spencer, "Trump's Occult Online Supporters Believer 'Meme Magic' Got Him Elected"
Colm A. Kelleher, The Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Sun Ra, Space is the Place

Episode 24: The Charlatan and the Magus, with Lionel Snell

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 15:00:00 -0400

As Lionel Snell, also known as Ramsey Dukes, observes in his seminal esoteric essay, "The Charlatan and the Magus" (1984), the series of trumps in a tarot deck doesn't begin with the noble Emperor or august Hierophant, but with the lowly Fool, followed by the Juggler. Trickery or illusion, Snell suggests, may not be the dealbreaker we've thought it to be in parapsychological investigation. It may even be a feature, not a bug, of the magical process. In this episode of Weird Studies, JF and Phil talk to Lionel Snell about trickster magic, and all we miss out on when we make rational truth the only measure by which we know reality.

Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], "The Charlatan and the Magus"
Darren Brown, Tricks of the Mind
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Phil Ford, “Birth of the Weird"
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], How to See Fairies: Discover Your Psychic Powers in Six Weeks
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], S.S.O.T..B.M.E.
John Keats, Negative Capability
Weird Studies, Episode 9: "On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick"

Special Guest: Lionel Snell [Ramsey Dukes].