The Occult – Edited by Jeff Howard and Simon Poole

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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