Abstract
Far from acquiring any skill in occult practices, or realizing whatever secret object their aims entail, this paper instead explores the challenges that these methodological systems present to the institutions that regulate knowledge, research, and reality. While often dismissed as strange, queer, archaic, and impotent, the indices of magic and the occult has been inextricable from positive science’s most triumphant discoveries. From Johannes Kepler’s science fiction pursuits, which placed him on Mars to measure Earth’s orbit, thus figuring planetary motion as elliptical, to the alchemical treatises of Islamic Egypt and the medical discoveries of Vedic India—esoteric methods remain especially vital as our experiential ground is ceded, ever steadily, to the technical. Associated with the vast realm of dreams, meditation, divination, the imaginal is a term that crosses various semantic and cultural borders, implying both the imaginary and the imagination, especially in their archaic meanings, as faculty or agency that not only translates experience, but that can also manifest phenomena. However varied its existence, the imaginal persists as a mythic if not mystic sphere that gives way to all manner of aberration—from impossible geographies and confusing temporalities, to odd impressions, arcane symbols and implausible beings. Regardless of how dubious these encounters may seem, they often suggest very practical concerns of a methodological sort: considerations both of access and prohibition, of conjuring and dispelling, and always in relation to an impossible knowledge. Here, the ends are never quite what they seem: preparation is certain, but it assures nothing.
Presenters
Patrick ScanlonPostdoctoral Associate Professor, University Writing Program, University of Florida, Florida, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Past and Present in the Humanistic Education
KEYWORDS
IMAGINAL, IMAGINATION, INQUIRY, METHOD, METHODOLOGY, MAGIC, ALCHEMY, OCCULT, FOLK
