Weird Studies

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming. This episode is a preamble to a five-week course of lectures and discussions starting June 20th on Weirdosphere, JF and Phil’s new online learning platform. For more information and to enroll in The Beauty and the Horror, visit www.weirdosphere.org.

REFERENCES

JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, the audiobook, with a new introduction written and read by Donna Tartt.
Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two
William Blake, “The Tyger”
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return
Anna Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness
Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”
Franz Schubert, “Death and the Maiden” Quartet
Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata in C major, D. 840
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

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.

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

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.

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The great American thinker William James knew well that no intellectual pursuit is purely intellectual. His interest in the "supernormal," whether it take the form of spiritual apparition or extrasensory perception, was rooted in a personal desire to uncover the miraculous in the mundane. Indeed, the early members of the British Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart (which James co-founded in 1884) were united in this conviction that certain phenomena which most scientists of their day considered unworthy of their attention were in fact the frontier of a new world, an avenue for humanity's deepest aspirations. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss two papers that James wrote about the first phase in the history of these research societies. James lays bare his conclusions about the reality of psychical phenomena and its scientific significance. The bizarre fact that psychical research has made little progress since its inception lays the ground for an engaging discussion on the limits of the knowable.

REFERENCES

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Frederic W. H. Myers, theorist of the "subliminal self"
Weird Studies, Episode 37: Entities
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka "Darwin's Bulldog"
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld
Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
James Randi, professional skeptic
Dean Radin, Real Magic
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Lionel Snell a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes, British magician
Changeling: The Lost tabletop roleplaying game
Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Joshua Ramey, "[Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux]("Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux")"
C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

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In this episode, JF and Phil are joined by Jacob G. Foster—sociologist, physicist, and researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Santa Fe Institute—for a conversation about their recent collaboration in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Their co-authored essay, “Care of the Dead,” explores how the dead continue to shape our cultures, languages, and ways of being. Together, they discuss the process of writing the piece and what it means to say that the dead are not gone—that they persist, and that they make claims on the living.

The article is available here: https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/154/1/166/127931/Care-of-the-Dead-Ancestors-Traditions-amp-the-Life

**References**

[Peter Kingsley,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kingsley) English writer

Weird Studies, [Episode 98 on “Taboo”]) https://www.weirdstudies.com/98)

John Berger, “12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead” in _[Hold Everything Dear](12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead)_

Bernard Koch, Daniele Silvestro, and Jacob Foster, ["The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change”](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/659bt_v1)

Gilbert Simondon, _[Imagination and Invention](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781517914455)_

William Gibson, _[Neuromancer](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780441007462)_

[Phlogiston theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory)

George Orwell, _[1984](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780451524935)_

HP Lovecraft, [“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cdw.aspx)

Weird Studies, [Episode 187 on “Little, Big”](https://www.weirdstudies.com/187)

[John Dee,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee) English occultist

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, _[The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780195320992)_

Robert Harrison, _[The Dominion of the Dead](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780226317939)_

Gilles Deleuze, _[Bergsonism](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780942299076)_

Elizabeth LeGuin, _[Boccherini’s Body](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780520240179)_

Elizabeth LeGuin, [“Cello and Bow thinking”](http://www.echo.ucla.edu/cello-and-bow-thinking-baccherinis-cello-sonata-in-eb-minor-faouri-catalogo/)

Johannes Brahms, _Handel Variations_

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Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences where none was previously thought to exist. In this episode, they are joined by the music scholar Meredith Michael – Weird Studies assistant, and co-host of Cosmophonia, a podcast about music and outer space – to discuss songs by Lili Boulanger, Vienna Teng, and Iron & Wine. Before long, this disparate assortment personal favourites occasions a weirdly focused dialogue on time, impermanence, control, (mis)recognition, and the affinity of art and synchronicity.

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
Iron and Wine, “Passing Afternoon”
Vienna Teng, “The Hymn of Acxiom”, (and here is the live version)
Lili Boulanger, Vieille Priére Bouddhique
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle Mozart’s Arrow
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable
Hector Berlioz, Fugue on “amen” from La Damnation du Faust
Slavoj Zizek, A Pervert’s Guide to Idiology
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Shepard Tone
Rudolf Steiner, The Influces of Lucifer and Ahriman

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

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