An Ecosystem of Agential Signs: Occult Metaphysics, Actor-Networks, and Semiotics

This paper interprets the henotheism of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) and subsequent occult grimoire's through Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Charles Peirce's Logic of the Signs. ANT emphasizes the role of material mediators in revealing overlooked actors within social and ecological assemblages. Just the same, occultists like Agrippa, emphasize the use of certain magical signs (natural and symbolic) to reveal and manipulate invisible supernatural actors. I join ANT with Peircean semiotics to describe how signs behave as mediating agents within social assemblages. This occult ontology of signs helps to attend to invisible agencies that become embodied only in their material signification. Such a fusion of ANT with occult metaphysics permits a broadly ecosystemic framework for religious semiosis that materializes the supernatural across ecological and cultural spheres.