Two forthcoming Strange Attractor events:
Towards a Progressive Magic
A night of magical resistance with Dr Amy Hale (Atlanta, US), Phil Legard & Hawthonn (Leeds, UK).
Thursday 30 May, 7-10.30pm
Tickets £10
At The Horse Hospital, London
As much of the world takes an awkward lurch towards right wing authoritarianism, underground and fringe cultures, organisations and scenes are becoming increasingly attuned to the attempts by radical right wing groups to infiltrate and coerce their members.
Tonight's presentations discuss how, and why, contemporary magical cultures have become attractive territories for recruitment and expansion by far right organisations. We will also learn to recognise such entryism in action, and how to stop it.
Dr Amy Hale's presentation will help to identify some of the frameworks and assumptions present in occult subcultures that allow for entryism by far right political organisations. Amy will discuss how ideas of tradition and nature are exploited, and how the discourses of free speech are deployed to create and justify platforms for radical, intolerant politics in an occult milieu.
Phil Legard asks what if practitioners of esotericism were to accept – or at least entertain for a moment – a constructivist, rather than transcendentalist, magical paradigm? Such an acceptance can lead to another form of practice, which acknowledges the way in which esotericism is inseparable from the historical, social and economic fabric of our lives and which – rather than denying the viscerality of ritual and experience – uses them as tools to question the traditions and assumptions of the esoteric worldview, leading to a fluid and reflexive "critical magick".
The talks will be followed by a live performance by Leeds-based musical duo Hawthonn (Layla & Phil Legard) in their first London appearance.
"A deeply consuming listen. Let it into your ears and the modern world is stripped away." (The Quietus, #18 in albums of the year 2018)
More details on the evening can be found at the Horse Hospital site
Advanced booking recommended - you can buy tickets here
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Please join us in celebrating the publication of
High Weirdness by Erik Davis:
25 June, the Horse Hospital, London
7.30-10pm
£5 (deductible from a purchase of the book)
Featuring a presentation by Erik Davis,
Followed by Erik Davis, Daisy Campbell and Roger Luckhurst in conversation.
The first book in a very long time that’s given me the feeling of discovering a secret truth.
— Douglas Rushkoff
Even if I was tripping I couldn’t imagine a better guide to the outer limits than Erik Davis.
– McKenzie Wark
Straddles high scholarship and hipness… an important milestone in esoteric studies.
– Victoria Nelson
A study of the spiritual provocations found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic worldview out of the American counterculture of the seventies. These three visionaries changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their own writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America during one of its most surreal eras?
In High Weirdness, Erik Davis examines the writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own extraordinary, life-changing experiences. Along the way, Davis maps the uncanny lattice of culture and consciousness that characterized America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social change. What results is a new theory of the weird that illuminates the seventies, while providing for a renewed engagement with reality during our own highly weird times.
Erik Davis is the author of High Weirdness, Techgnosis, Nomad Codes and others. He is considered America’s leading scholar of the strange.
Daisy Eris Campbell is a writer actor and theatre director. She recently adapted Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger for the stage
Roger Luckhurst is the author of Corridors: Passages of Modernity (2019) and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015). He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London.
Copies of the special edition of High Weirdness are available directly from our web site
The standard HB edition can be found at all good booksellers.