Occultism is prominently situated within metal music’s practices and its position has been evident since the genre’s emergence in the late 1960s. Commonly, pioneers such as Black Sabbath receive the credit for introducing occult themes to the genre; however, in the mid-2010s, Coven with their frontwoman, Jinx Dawson, made a resurgence and attempted to lay claim to heavy metal’s occult aesthetics. This article aims to investigate the lack of academic exploration of Coven’s work, through evaluating the current understanding of metal’s history with occultism, and examine how the metal genre defines itself, while limiting who can be recognised as pioneers. Additionally, this article interrogates Coven’s claims to metal’s occult aesthetics by analysing their use of the horned-hand gesture and the Black Mass. By doing so, a new appreciation for occult themes within early metal music will be gained, which sees the occult in metal as not merely a gimmick to achieve a level of shock value, but also a method of practicing esotericism.

Read Raising the devil horns: Coven and the Occult’s Influence on the Development of Metal Music

This article argues that procedural systems, such as the magic systems of the tabletop roleplaying game Invisible Sun, have the capacity to produce not only representations but enchantments. The article begins with an overview of the origins of tabletop roleplaying games, illustrating how their systems are ultimately rooted in two interleaved developments at the turn of the nineteenth century: the rise of hobbyist wargaming and the emergence of a new literary genre called the New Romance. It continues with a short history of magic in the fantasy game urtext Dungeons & Dragons and highlights key magic systems that followed in subsequent games, paying critical attention to the ways that each system has continued to uphold a hegemony of diegetic difference over procedural difference between distinctly unique forms of magic. It then analyzes Invisible Sun through a close reading of its magic systems, positioning the procedural, non-diegetic differences between them as a critical site of meaning-making central to the game’s project of (re)enchantment.

Read Rules for Magic: Procedural Enchantment in the Tabletop Roleplaying Game Invisible Sun

The article proposes an approach based on sound studies to highlight the affective and atmospheric dimensions of contemporary practices of paranormal investigation. To do so, it analyses Hellier, a 2019 independent documentary series, vastly popular among paranormal communities online thanks to its novel approach to the field and the peculiar methodology of investigation it portrays. Sound, and in particular an ecological approach to listening and sonic practices, is the main epistemological tool employed in the analysis of the case study. In this sense, the article aims at demonstrating how tracing the relationalities and interactions that sound mediates with and within the environment allows for a deeper understanding of the affective, embodied and pre-representational dynamics of the paranormal. Moreover, it will highlight the processes by which, in Hellier, everyday spaces, situations and events are progressively charged with the potentiality of the paranormal, through specific auditory interactions with place. Instead of focusing on why paranormal entities emerge and get represented, the fruitful resonances between pre-representational theories and sound studies that form the theoretical framework of this paper allow for a study on how certain processes, dispositions and practices can trigger specific sensations of agency that are charged with supernatural meaning.

Read The Atmospheric Forteanism of Hellier and the Role of Sound in Recent Practices of Paranormal Investigation

Read Mysteries of Birth, Blood, and Appetite: The Interplay, Role and Function of the (Oc)cult in Indie Games

“Without magic we are mindless robots, our choices are predictable,” says the prologue to Peter J. Carroll’s The Ouranos Rite, an occult operation that exemplifies both the methods and ethos of chaos magic. Carroll’s conflation of machines and predictability echoes Ada Lovelace’s claim from nearly two centuries prior, that the Analytical Engine, a direct ancestor of today’s computing machines, is incapable of originating or revealing anything truly new; it can only assist us in making available what we already know. Machines cannot surprise us, cannot generate novelty; and as Carroll’s statement suggests, there is something inherently magical, and perhaps even necessarily occult or hidden, about that ability. This image of the machine (Imago Machinae) as an essentially mindless or soulless automaton is deeply entangled with questions about whether living entities, and humans in particular, are merely biological machines, or endowed with some divine spark that grants us an aspect of our image of the divine (Imago Dei). Generative art is created in collaboration with autonomous systems to produce works that are not consciously determined by the artist. For example, in the 18th century several composers made music by rolling dice to select from a set of precomposed phrases, and in the mid-20th century John Cage composed music by drawing a staff on a sheet of paper and then placing notes where tiny imperfections occurred in that paper. The avant-garde artist George Brecht indicated two aspects of chance that may be involved in generative art: images originating in psychic processes at unconscious strata of the mind, and images derived from mechanical processes not under the artist’s control. I assert that these correspond to two broad categories of magical divination: signs received via dreams, clairvoyance, and automatic drawing and writing; and signs resulting from mechanical processes such as what randomize the positions of coins or cards, or that determine the courses of flying birds or floating tea leaves, or that shape the physiognomies of sheep livers or human hands. Although generative art predates computers, computers have become its chief instrument due to their ability to algorithmically generate and assimilate stochastic, chaotic, and other kinds of variety and render it in diverse forms and media. Such functions are employed also to add unpredictability to electronic games. In the same way that a cup of dice or deck or cards may be used for playing games or making decisions as well as foretelling fortunes or communicating with spirits, the technology that allows us to play and create with computers also enables us to divine with them, even venturing beyond simulation of known mantic designs to invent novel expressions of divinatory play and playful divination. This paper explores these themes through the lens of an actual, robotic performance of the Ouranos Rite, combining algorithm and ritual to examine the possibility of programmable, performing objects that transcend autonomous mediums of art to become numinous mediums of the daemonic and divine—the Imago Machinae reaching toward the Imago Dei.

Read Robotheosis: Art, Magic, Cybernetics

Read “’Black Candles Burn:’ Ghost’s Invitation to the Occult”

Associations between BDSM and the occult have created tensions for occultists and historically been ‘whitewashed’ by scholars. Published in 1997, Bitch Goddess: The Spiritual Path of the Dominant Woman (out of print), was a transgressive anthology of fiction, essays and poetry edited by Patrick Califia and Drew Campbell which subverted dominant occult narratives. Foregrounding perspectives of dominant women, Bitch Goddess challenged heteronormative and radical feminist notions of both female sexuality and occult practices. This paper discusses links between kink and the occult; charting the trajectory of ‘sacred kink’ prior to and in the twenty-five years since the anthology was published. I then revisit Bitch Goddess, reading its representations of women’s sacred kink practices through the lens of emerging scholarship. I argue that Bitch Goddess challenged the marginalisation of female occultists who are BDSM practitioners and feminists; and catalysed representations of ‘sacred kink’ as an important somatic technology for occult workings.

Read Kinking the Occult: Representations of Sacred Kink in Bitch Goddess: The Spiritual Path of the Dominant Woman

When we gaze into the night sky, the naked eye encounters stars that have perished nearly 900,000 years ago, when humans on Earth still resembled homo erectus (Antón 03). We look into space and see ghosts: phantom images in our present time. And yet, the farthest reaches of the universe were thrust into existence 14 billion years ago— its echoes carried by light are still traveling to see us in our lonely corner (Frank 20). The longer the Astronomer holds open the aperture of a camera or a telescope, the more voices of light she collects. In the pitch blackness of endless space, this practice becomes a scrying of the past. Similarly, the Necromancer holds open her subtle senses to the dead, collecting visions from airier, quieter voices the longer she waits. For both, the world of the dead quickly becomes not so distant, not so out of reach. The creatures encountered by the Astronomer, the corpses of self-immolated stars, are places where gravity reigns supreme, unwavering and unsympathetic—Death in its truest, most deterministic form. Listening to these spectres, evoking them to appear with esoteric instruments, and then dissecting their ethereal bodies are all a form of necromancy and a pursuit of that which lies beyond our human lives. Studying the life cycles and death throes of these ancient, alchemical engines teaches an immortal intelligence, not because death ceases to be, but because memory reaches aeonic magnitudes. The astrophysicist witnesses a metempsychosis — the transmigration of souls — in the whirling vortices of stardust that, for another brief moment, become a planet, an ocean, a puddle, or a person.    

Read The Yawning Grave: Sleepless Nights and Astrophysical Lights

This paper draws from Sianne Ngai’s work Our Aesthetic Categories to identify and discuss three different aesthetic categories of ghosts: cute ghosts, interesting ghosts, and zany ghosts. I examine the appearance of ghosts in three video games: the cute Wisp in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and its relation to acquiring rare and unusual items; the interesting puzzle givers of Little Nine and Dusky Ming in Genshin Impact; and the hardworking zany shades of Hades who, reflecting the game’s own thematic interest in continued effort, exist as eternal water-cooler gossips and workers in the Administrative Chamber in the House of Hades. In doing so, I examine the aesthetic experience these ghosts produce in their respective games, and use Ngai’s aesthetic categories of the cute, interesting, and zany to explore how the form and function of this occult being has evolved in the context of the Capitalocene.

Keywords: ghost, game studies, video games, Sianne Ngai, aesthetic, cute, interesting, zany, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Animal Crossing, Genshin Impact, Hades, Nintendo, Hoyoverse, Supergiant Games

Read Cute, Interesting, Zany Ghosts: Examining Aesthetic Experience of Ghosts in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Genshin Impact and Hades

Unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in Ahmed Saadawi’s novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), it is not only the body of the monster which is fragmented, broken and piecemeal. Rather, the source of horror in the novel is the brokenness of the city of Baghdad, torn apart by violence and war. In Saadawi’s text, when the creature made out of the body parts of bomb victims comes to life, we have a living palimpsest of the stories about the victims of the land. Frankenstein in Baghdad, therefore, situates the supernatural in the junction between the city and its people, scarred by war. In this paper, I will argue that Saadawi’s narrative of the supernatural interpolates and blends into the cultural and political history of the city of Baghdad in the period after the US invasion of Iraq. I will argue that the supernatural interacts with the memory of the city, piecing together its tumultuous past with the equally volatile and violent present. By doing so, I wish to show that the supernatural here is not merely a product of fantasy but an alternative method of recreating the history of a city riddled with the politics of violence.

Read Piecing the City Together: Studying Violence on the Land and the Body in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Jeff VanderMeer’s novels are constantly in dialogue with the changing face of the Anthropocene and his city novels, City of Saints and Madmen, Borne and Dead Astronauts, explore how cities might develop into supernatural entities through colonisation and extreme developments in technology, bioengineering, and ecology. The hostile bioengineering corporation, ‘The Company’, in Borne and Dead Astronauts, mirrors the current corporate endeavour towards ‘Smart Cities’, spearheaded by Amazon’s search for a city to host their second headquarters. Amazon promise the ‘ultimate upgrade’ to the public sector through their Smart City approach in return for seemingly unlimited access to people’s lives. Between Amazon’s proposed Smart Cities and VanderMeer’s supernatural cities, this paper will explore when and how the city starts to be reconfigured as a supernatural space through aggressive corporate colonisation and technological augmentation.

Read Stranger Than Fiction: Jeff VanderMeer’s Supernatural Cities and Amazon’s Smart Cities

The Covid-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions have highlighted revived demand in armchair travelling and a re-exploration of the urban environment. This article argues that reading urban fantasy literature as a special case of armchair travelling provides valuable insights into contemporary real-world spatial practices and socio-political discourses. By introducing supernatural elements to the mundane environment, urban fantasy frequently achieves a de-familiarising effect. It marks a significant shift in armchair travelling, as it moves the destination from exotic and idyllic far-flung places to well-known, grittier urban locations and can thus contribute to a re-enchantment with the contemporary metropolis. Whereas pre-existing definitions of urban fantasy stress the texts’ inside perspective on the city, this article analyses travel and displacement in China Miéville’s The City and the City to reveal a juxtaposition of inside and outside perspectives on the urban setting. It thus calls for a more nuanced definition of urban fantasy that accounts for this duality.

Read Supernatural Staycation: Armchair Travelling and Urban Fantasy Literature

Despite the tendency to associate narratives that focus on technology and their societal impact as within the genres of science fiction or dystopia, this common tactic ignores the supernatural nature of the technology presented within these narratives, and it is worth exploring the magical aspects of unobtainable technology in comparison with more traditional depictions of magic. This article examines the titular city of San Junipero in Season Three, Episode Four of Black Mirror (2011-) as one example of such unobtainable technology, and resituates it as a supernatural city akin to the versions of Hades presented by both Aristophanes in The Frogs and Homer’s Odyssey, chosen because of their status as predecessors to Christian theology, better illustrating the evaluation of San Junipero as supernatural rather than sacred. Further, the article compares the technological necropolis to Swift’s satirical Glubbdubdrib from Gulliver’s Travels, highlighting the importance of the ritual of necromancy to San Junipero’s status as supernatural city.

Read The Supernatural Necropolis of San Junipero: Technological Necromancy, Satire, and Frogs

This article examines myth-hunting in the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) videogame series as an expression of hypermodern folklore. GTA games, known for their open-world design and controversial themes, mimic major American cities. They are filled with 'Easter eggs', many coded as supernatural, such as ghosts, aliens, and haunted sites. Myth-hunters are players who seek these mysteries, documenting their discoveries online. This activity transforms gameplay into legend-tripping and tourism of mysterious sites. The ontological status of these Easter eggs—whether they're real, urban legends, or additions by developers—creates a unique form of digital folklore. Myth-hunting once a fringe ludic form, has recently been co-opted by the games’ developer who made it a key element of newer entries in the series. Accordingly, myth-hunting, once an autonomous player practice, is now regularly part of the publisher’s player-retention strategy, allowing for further extraction of value out of hypermodern folklore of a ludic variant.

Read Virtual Cities, Bigfoot and Eggs: Myth-Hunting as Hypermodern Folklore in the Grand Theft Auto Series

Focusing on nineteenth-century Calcutta as the literal and imagined literary space where the urban and suburban imaginaries collide, I hold Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Monihara’ [‘The Lost Jewels’, 1898] to be the first, concerted effort in pushing the urban Gothic well beyond the limits of the city. The cinematic adaptation of the same directed by Satyajit Ray [1961] will also fall within its purview. Delineating a space that is both material and metaphysical, the urban Gothic’s beating heart is often seen to reside in abandoned dwellings, calling forth an inspection into the private chambers and economies of vacant spaces, the birth of the modern subject, and the vagaries of capital.

Read Homebound: City and the Spectre of Accumulation in Tagore’s ‘Monihara’

The 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster led to the total abandonment of the city of Pripyat, a utopian Soviet atomic city. Pripyat’s abandonment inspired many re-imaginings of the city’s past and future in popular culture. One of the most enduring popular culture narratives of Chornobyl’s supernatural mythos is the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series, which fashions an alternative nuclear future filled with mutant creatures, supernatural forces, and a reactive virtual landscape. The game delivers a highly visual and bodily experience that renders the threat of radiation in a visceral and immediate way. The game opens a potent space in which players can confront nuclear anxieties and fears and cultivate a greater awareness of the costs of nuclear power. The experience of the virtual landscape imparts prosthetic memories of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster to players, who then become virtual tourists of a grim nuclear future.

Read Radioactive Ghosts and Psychic Anomalies: Exploring Pripyat’s Supernatural Topography in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Video Game Series

Nia DaCosta’s 2021 sequel to Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, Candyman, employs the trope of inversion to acknowledge and critique the story from an updated perspective. Since the action of the original film, the primary setting—the former Chicago housing project named Cabrini-Green—has undergone gentrification. In this article, I argue that DaCosta uses the inversion represented by gentrification as a leitmotif to highlight Candyman’s connection to the place where he was originally lynched and where he has continued to haunt the current residents. I conclude by considering how DaCosta uses the monster Candyman to address issues of toxic narratives and to offer a glimmer of hope that, as a final inversion, the monster might be deployed as a weapon against oppressive forces.

Read Space Inversion: Haunting Gentrification in DaCosta’s Candyman

In the mediated versions of American small town life from Forks to Mystic Falls, vampires live inconspicuously among humans – thanks to overcast skies or cast spells. The first-ever Turkish vampire series Yaşamayanlar [Immortals] (2018) takes a fundamentally opposed approach: Brimming with neon lights, Yaşamayanlar provides a very different experience of Istanbul than other exported television series – one that feels eerily close to mediated versions of New York, Berlin, or Los Angeles in the 1990s and early 2000s. Between dark alleyways and stroboscopic night clubs, the series paints a picture of Istanbul not just as dangerous and gritty, but – maybe more crucially – decidedly detached from the historical heritage of the city. This article argues that this re-imagination of Istanbul as a supernatural city is entangled with narratives of modernity, connectivity, and change. In other words: the supernatural does not only shape the metropolis, but the metropolis also shapes the supernatural.

Read Immortal Modernity: Negotiating Istanbul as Global Metropolis in the Turkish Vampire Series Yaşamayanlar

With the rise in narco activity, feminicidios, armed robberies, the disappearing of people, and State violence as daily occurrences, how can we begin to make sense of such an overwhelming amount of loss? Utilizing the graphic novel to its fullest extent, Augusto Mora’s Los fantasmas de mi ciudad (The Ghosts of My City) is a visually stunning (re)interpretation of the violence that plagues the urban cityscapes of contemporary Mexico. Forming part of a long literary tradition of fantastic stories based in Mexico’s most populated areas, Mora’s graphic novel follows the story of a teenage medium, Viridiana San Juan, and her friends as they attempt to record video evidence of the tormented souls that haunt their city, all the while navigating the violent reality that surrounds them daily. Through her desire to tell the stories of the souls that haunt her visions, Mora constructs a simultaneous and compelling critique of the historical, social, and political practice that has filled Mexico’s urban areas with ghosts and the nonchalant attitude that has made violence a normal part of everyday life. By making the unseen victims of violence become visible, the subjectivities of the city’s millions and millions of ghosts can be recognized and their narratives reclaimed.

Read Graphic Ghosts: Reimagining Urban Violence in Augusto Mora’s Los fantasmas de mi ciudad

Over the last two decades, geographers have revealed how revenant narratives inscribed in the fabric of urban environments work to haunt cities and their inhabitants, emphasising the role of social (Degen and Hetherington 2001), historical (Till 2005), and affective (Pile 2005; Holloway 2010) encounters with the supernatural in city spaces. This shared interest in spectral or ‘spectro-geography’ (Maddern and Adey 2008) provides a geographical response to the broader ‘spectral turn’ within the humanities that began in the late twentieth century (Luckhurst 2002). Existing geographical studies analyse spectrality from a predominantly figurative perspective, while frequently overlooking the significance of the supernatural in the physical production of urban geographies. Taking a literary geographical approach to supernatural Tokyo, this article (per)forms an analytic ‘legend-trip’ of the Japanese metropolis, exposing the ways in which place, narrative, and folklore amalgamate to produce the city as an ‘interspatiality’ (Hones 2022).

Read Revenant narratives/literary hauntings: on the spectral geography of the Japanese metropolis