Esoteric Futures is dedicated to the study of magic, esotericism, and related currents of the occult. Dating to antiquity and extending into the present, magical practices like divination, animist and pagan cosmologies, and panpsychist conceptions of the nonhuman world span every culture and period. While the story of Western modernity is often cast as the decline of magic and religion in the birth of the sciences, in fact modernity has always been magical. The magical traditions of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Cabala were crucial to the development of Renaissance humanism; mystical initiation societies like the Masons were instrumental in spreading Enlightenment values and democratic practices; Black and indigenous traditions survived as syncretic currents the traumas of settler colonialism, imperialism, and enslavement. Nor have the occult sciences ever been very far from official scientific innovations. They were a part of the invention of the rocket, the discovery of phosphorus, and the conception of cybernetics; constituted one of the early uses of photography, telephony, and electronic music; formed part of the framework of psychoanalysis and sexology; and have informed environmentalism through figures like James Lovelock and Lynn Magulis’s Gaia Hypothesis.

Despite this wide influence across contemporary cultural and technological forms, and the more than fifty years of revisionist scholarship that has worked to demonstrate it, the study of magic remains isolated in disciplinary pockets and too frequently sidelined or exoticized when taken up elsewhere in the university. Occult Natures research collective seeks to encourage the study of the occult in many different disciplines, to furnish the occult as a model for meaningful engagement between scholars across the disciplines, and to connect researchers with the artists, practitioners, and community members whose knowledge comes from experience with living traditions. We wish to do so through new course curricula for undergrads, a new PhD minor for graduate students, lecture series with faculty from around the country, and public facing, interactive, and non-hierarchical events that draw on the community’s esoteric societies. The collective’s most experimental and innovative ambition is to theorize an occult method for humanistic inquiry that would address the occult as a subject in order to develop magic as a way of thinking about many different subjects.