Friends,
So, onto the second suit of my blog: the air, intellect, spades, the hot and wet blog (incidentally, the last one was, to omit the obvious, the suit of diamonds, the cold and dry blog). I am presently undergoing a shift in academic and intellectual focus towards "religion and media." I will be turning my thought towards questions of how media shapes religious subjectivity. This sounds, I know, one part meaningless, one part trivial, and three parts unstable. I did, after all, change my academic focus halfway through Emory to focus on the occult, and I largely chose my present program because it provided a real opportunity to study magical things like I just couldn't in a Jewish Studies program. Why would I change again right now?

Well, the first reason is easy: I do not think I am actually making a change, just seeking legitimation for the kind of work I was doing anyway. You see, I don't think occultism has ever become a cultural force because of individual enlightenment, the action of invisible masters, mass hysteria, or the accidental emergence of coherent and/or ancient traditions. As far as I can tell, the heritage claimed by contemporary occultists only makes about fifty years of sense, a hundred and fifty if you really want to be generous. This is to say only that the Tarot cards, alchemy, and kabbalah of contemporary occultists would be unrecognizable to those ancient wisemen to whom they are attributed. If we can allow that much, the shifting (and perhaps arbitrary) *content* of occultism, though, there are some similarities along The Tradition worth noting.

As far back as Ficino and Pico Della Mirandola (use your Wikipedia, goddammit, that is what Jesus put it there for) in the fifteenth century, that is, since the emergence of Hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah and arguably well further back, those few we want to call occultists seem to have been consistently wealthy, populist, syncretists with a predilection for chartmaking. "Occultism" seems to be an index for what I would call "tabular syncretism," the effort to put everything, including teachings of religions which one's contemporaries (and maybe even one oneself) find reprehensible, into elegant schemata. Big charts, they make big, big charts. And usually think that the making of big charts that contain all truth will reform society (not to be dismissive, of course, because in some cases it has at least a little).

This is important because this perspective on occultism makes its history dependent on certain technological and social conditions: Occultism happens all of the time, but more occultism happens when technology empowers the creation of big charts, and occultists are noticed and remembered when religious people come into new kinds of contact and kind of freak one another out. Occultism answers the question: What are those people talking about, and how are we still right? And it thrives through new media.

For instance, the afore mentioned protoccultists were writing where the popularization of movable type meets the creation of Spain (big issues with Jews, Muslims, and the Classical philosophers they sometimes got to talking about). Victorian Occultism cannot be separated from the newspaper boom and the opening comparisons of anthropology. So, I think the issue is a media issue, and I think what I am studying is about media.

And the truth is, I am really only studying the occult because it is (really cool and) the best platform I have found for asking questions about the ways that religions sculpt personhood. Modern occultism, at least, is to the study of religion as large print editions are to the study of John Grisham. I mean, it is not so tough to ask "What are these people doing and what needs are they trying to fulfill?" when what they are doing is writing their desires in rhyme on pieces of paper and burning them. And it is not so hard to ask how that changes people's subjectivities when they report those desires fulfilled (or denied) in ways their neighbors rarely recognize.

And, of course, given the social reform component that is rarely if ever absent (I cite Reuchlin for the Jews, Eliphas Levi for the destitute, and Aleister Crowley for sexual deviants), I study occultism because I think that it is only as bad as everything else; I think occultism is not such a bad place to start, frankly. Knowing my alignments and my favoritisms, once, a best friend wrote on a to-do list I had foolishly left unguarded, "Buy Cauldron, pull rabbit out of hat." I think, if no religion is convincingly truer than any other, occultism is more socially responsible and more readily adaptable to strange situations than most.

So, what the hell am I going to do now? Am I going to write papers about the Jews in the DaVinci Code, the elemental systems in Final Fantasy games, and those tacky sites on the internet that sell spells that are guaranteed to work or double your money back? Am I going to play religious videogames and listen to Christian rock music? In five years will I be an expert on Magic Cards?

Yes. Hows about them apples?

The big challenge now is twofold: I need to learn a great range of basic stuff like Post-Structuralist film criticism (I am reading Deleuze on film [I] presently. Agh.), and works on religion and popular culture in America (books about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and Catholic kitsch), and other fun stuff like that. I am very excited, really, that there is a decent chance I can do this well. A musical troupe that deeply influenced my childhood (really) said, "There is only one thing I know how to do well, and I've often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well[.]" So I am doing religion and media now. Send me the Madonna.

Cheers,
Vincent