Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Occult”

Episode 182: Providence of Evil: On Robert Eggers' 'Nosferatu'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 10:30:00 -0500

In this episode, JF and Phil examine the myth of the vampire through the lens of Robert Eggers' latest film, Nosferatu, a reimagining of F. W. Murnau's German Expressionist masterpiece. Topics covered include the nature of vampires, the symbolism of evil, the implicit theology of Eggers' film (compared with that of Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula), the need for shadow work, as well as the power of real introspection and self-sacrifice.

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.
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Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Robert Eggers (dir.), Nosferatu
F. W. Murnau (dir.), Nosferatu
Mel Brooks (dir.), Dracula: Dead and Loving It
Francis Ford Coppola (dir.), Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
David James Smith, “The Archaeologist Couple who Unearthed a Field Full of Vampires”
Robert Eggers, The Witch
Richard Strauss, Salome
Weird Studies, Episode 156 on “The Secret History”
Rudolf Steiner, “Lucifer and Ahriman”
Richard Wagner, Ring Cycle

Episode 179: The Final Frontier, with Lionel Snell

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 11:45:00 -0500

One of the great rewards of "weirding" the world is learning that boredom may be a kind of ethical transgression—the world is simply too strange to allow for it, and if you're bored, you're at least partly to blame. Few have put this notion to the test as rigorously as Lionel Snell, whose work as a magician celebrates the wonders of everyday events, from a walk in the park to a moment of car trouble. Unlike the pursuit of the extraordinary that often defines occult practice, Snell's approach reminds us of the magic in the mundane. In this episode, Snell, also known as Ramsey Dukes, shares the insights he's gained over his decades-long career as one of the leading figures in contemporary magical theory and practice.

For an exclusive Vimeo link to Aaron Poole's film Dada mentioned in the intro, go to Instagram and send @aaronsghost the direct message "movie link please".

REFERENCES
Ramsey Dukes, Thundersqueak
Weird Studies, Episode 141 on “SSOTBME
Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
John Crowley, Little, Big
Arthur Machen, “A Fragment of Life”
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Max Picard, The Flight from God
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Henry Bergson, Matter and Memory
Russell’s Paradox

Special Guest: Lionel Snell [Ramsey Dukes].

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 172: Head Over Heels: On the Hanged Man of the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:30:00 -0400

The Hanged Man is arguably the most enigmatic card in the traditional tarot deck. Divested of any archetypal apparel – he is neither emperor nor fool, but just a man, who happens to be hanging – he gazes back at us with the look of one who harbors a secret. But what sort of secret? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the card that no less august a personage than A.E. Waite, co-creator of the classic Rider-Waite deck, claimed was beyond all understanding.

The musical interludes in this episode are from Pierre-Yves Martel's recent album, "Bach." Visit his website for more.

REREFENCES

Welkin/Gnostic Tarot
Sally Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey
Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
Yoav Ben-Dov
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Richard Wagner, ”Sigmund” from Die Walkure
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Star Wars
John Frankenheimer (dir.), The Manchurian Candidate
Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot
MC Richards, “Preface” to Centering
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Alan Chapman, Magia

Episode 167: The Hand of Ithell, with Amy Hale

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a British painter, poet, and occultist, long identified as a pioneer of the Surrealist movement in the UK. While her work is increasingly recognized for its mystical themes and innovative use of automatic techniques, deeply influenced by her esoteric studies, it also inspired extensive research on its broader cultural and spiritual contexts. Amy Hale, an anthropologist, folklorist, and author, has dedicated much of her career to exploring Cornwall, the fabled region of southwest England that became Colquhoun’s spiritual home. Hale’s book, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully, published by Strange Attractor Press, offers a profound biographical study of Colquhoun, examining the historical and spiritual forces that influenced her work. In this episode, she joins JF and Phil to discuss Colquhoun, Cornwall, and the transformative power of research and writing.

REFERENCES

Amy Hale, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully
Agnes Callard, I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is
Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking Special Guest: Amy Hale.

Episode 161: Scene of the Crime: On Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's 'From Hell'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:30:00 -0500

Listener discretion advised: This episode delves into the disturbing details of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and may not be suitable for all audiences.

Serialized from 1989 to 1996, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell was first released in a single volume in 1999, just as the world was groaning into the present century. This is an important detail, because according to the creators of this astounding work, the age then passing away could not be understood without reference to the gruesome murders, never solved, of five women in London's Whitechapel district, in the fall of 1888. In Alan Moore's occult imagination, the Ripper murders were more than another instance of human depravity: they constituted a magical operation intended to alter the course of history. The nature of this operation, and whether or not it was successful, is the focus of this episode, in which JF and Phil also explore the imaginal actuality of Victorian London and the strange nature of history and time.

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

Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark, and Clemente Jesus Navarro Yanez, “Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency”
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell
Floating World, Edo Japanese concept
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
John Clellon Holmes recordings
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Collection
Yacht Rock, web series
Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
Colin Wilson, Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict
Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on “Mumbo Jumbo”
Charles Howard Hinton, mathematician
J. G. Ballard, Preface to Crash
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

Episode 125: Strange Brews: Weird Studies Live at Illuminated Brew Works

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 10:00:00 -0400

On May 23, 2022, Meredith Michael joined JF and Phil for a live recording at Illuminated Brew Works, a craft brewery in Chicago, Illinois.The occasion was the launch of Weird Studies Black IPA, the fruit of a collaboration with IBW brewmaster Brian Buckman and his team of beer alchemists. The game plan was to talk about potions, but the final conversation ranges over a number of topics including singularity and repetition, time and eternity, alchemy and ritual, Okakura Kakuzō's The Book of Tea, cooking and pickling, and the cultural phenomenon Phil calls "weedhead sh*t."

Purchase the Weird Studies Black IPA from Beer on the Wall or visit the Illuminated Brew Works website.

Buy 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

Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
Oscar Wilde on absinthe
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History
Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon
The Suzuki Method
Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice
David Cronenberg (dir.), Scanners (1981)
Lars von Trier (dir.), Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Alan Watts, Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen
William Shakespeare, Macbeth Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 124: Dark Night Radio of the Soul, with Duncan Barford

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 May 2022 10:15:00 -0400

For several episodes now, Phil and JF have been circling what St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul, that moment in the spiritual journey where all falls a way and an abyss seems to crack open beneath our feet. When it came time to go there in earnest, they could think of no better guide than Duncan Barford, host of the excellent Occult Experiments in the Home podcast. As a master magician, long-time meditator, psychotherapeutic counsellor and writer on spirituality and the occult, Barford is uniquely endowed with the tools, experience, and language to discuss even the most difficult spiritual topics with wisdom and warmth. A Virgil for any Inferno.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack: Volume 1 and Volume 2
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

Occult Experiments in the Home, Duncan Barford's excellent solo podcast
Duncan's other website, focusing on his work as a psychotherapeutic counselor
Duncan's books on Amazon US

Weird Studies, Episode 67 on Hellier
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Judgement
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Dogen’s Bendowa
Tibetan Book of the Dead
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel
Spinoza, Ethics
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

Special Guest: Duncan Barford.

Episode 122: Spirals and Crooked Lines: On the Star Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 11 May 2022 11:15:00 -0400

The Star is one of the most iconic of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck. It is also one of the most ambiguous. A woman is shown emptying two urns of water onto the parched ground. She is flanked by nascent plant life. Shining above her are those nocturnal luminaries whose "eternal silence" so frightened the philosopher Blaise Pascal at the dawn of modernity. Are the stars pointing the way to a brighter future, or are they stars of ill omen, warning us of what lies ahead? And what does that little bird in the background signify? In this episode, Phil and JF try to get to the bottom of the starry heavens, only to find out that starry heavens have no bottom.

Click here to purchase tickets to the Weird Studies beer launch at Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago on May 23.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack
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

REFERENCES

Our Known Friend (Valentin Tomberg), Meditations on the Tarot

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot

Pink Floyd, “Astronomy Domine”
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Heimarmene, Greek goddess of fate
Weird Studies, Episode 121 on Mandy
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Samuel Delaney, Dahlgren
J R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols
Weird Studies, Episode 103 on the Tower
Weird Studies, [Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune]
Joni Mitchell, “Ladies of the Canyon”

Episode 108: On Skepticism and the Paranormal

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 10:30:00 -0400

Modern skeptics pride themselves on being immune to unreason. They present themselves as defenders of rationality, civilization, and good sense against what Freud famously called the "black mud-tide of occultism." But what if skepticism was more implicated in the phenomena it aims to banish than it might appear to be? What if no one could debunk anything without getting some of that black mud on their hands? In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the weird complicity of the skeptic and the believer in the light of George P. Hansen's masterpiece of meta-parapsychology, The Trickster and the Paranormal.

REFERENCES

George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal

James Randi, stage magician and paranormal debunker
Michael Shermer, American science writer
CSICOP, Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer
Rune Soup, Interview with George P. Hansen
Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
Wouter Hanegraaff, Dutch professor of esoteric philosophy
Shannon Taggart, Seance
Society for Psychical Research
Weird Studies, Episode 44 on William James’s Psychical Research
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Robert Anton Wilson, American author
Aleister Crowley, Magic Without Tears

Episode 77: What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 10:30:00 -0400

"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away." This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the reasons (or unreasons) explored in this discussion, which lasers in on just one of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck, that of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the world, yet stands outside it. The Fool is an idiot but also a sage. The Fool does not know; s/he intuits, improvises a path through the brambles of existence. We intend this episode on the Fool to be the first in an occasional series covering all twenty-two of the major trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles.

REFERENCES

The Fool in the tarot
St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians
Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Plato, Phaedrus
Weird Studies episode 60 - Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot
Till Eulenspiegel, folk figure
Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears
Weird Studies episode 75 - Our Old Friend the Monolith: On Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
Weird Studies episode 76 - Below the Abyss: On Bergson's Metaphysics
Rider-Waite Tarot Deck
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
G. W. F. Hegel, German philosopher
Ramsey Dukes, Words Made Flesh: Information in Formation
George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
Punch and Judy, British puppet show
George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Phil Ford's lecture on Death in Venice (Patreon exclusive!)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Hal Ashby (dir.), Being There
Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa, The Way of the Tarot
Frank Pavich (dir.), Jodorowsky’s Dune
Tarot of Marseilles
André Breton, French surrealist artist

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 53: Astral Jet Lag: On William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 09:00:00 -0400

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. You would think that a novel about the early Internet's effects on the collective psyche would feel dated today. But Gibson's insight into the deeper implications of digital culture and soul-rending consumerism are such that we are still catching up with Cayce Pollard, the novel's protagonist, as she journeys into the hypermodern underworld, searching for the secrets of art, time, and death. In this episode, JF and Phil read Pattern Recognition as an exploration of the attention economy, an ascent of the all-seeing pyramid, a subtle rewilding of postmodern culture, and a handbook for the magicians of the future.

REFERENCES

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Malcolm Gladwell, "The Coolhunt"
Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Future Shock
Weird Studies Episode 30 -- On Stanley _Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut_
Weird Studies Episode 50 -- Demogorgon: On _Stranger Things_
Austin Osman Spare, The Focus of Life: The Mutterings of AOS
Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

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 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0400

The plan was to discuss the introduction to Aleister Crowley's classic work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1924), a powerful text on the nature and purpose of magical practice. JF and Phil stick to the plan for the first part of the show, and then veer off into a dialogue on the basic idea of magic. Along the way, they share some of the intriguing results of their own occult experiments.

REFERENCES

Photo of JF's "large sum" cheque
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
The Gospel According to Thomas
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
Erik Davis, "Weird Shit"
I Ching, The Book of Changes
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
The Shackleton Expedition
Grant Morrison on how to do sigil magic
Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason"
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness