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

The early modern Hermetic Occult revival invited its participants to acknowledge unseen agents in their world. Occultism embraces a complex network of supernatural agency through its engagement with apocryphal demonologies extending out of older pagan traditions. In this paper, I interpret 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. 

Historic and contemporary occult metaphysics engage symbols as tools that emphasize and interact with invisible non-human entities. Actor-network-theory provides the framework to understand those signs as actors in social assemblages. However, without the philosophy of Charles Peirce, those signs never escape their materiality. Peircean semiotics provides a framework for discussing the signified concepts that are entailed by any signifier. For Peirce, the "secondness" of a sign is the "eminently hard and tangible" component that mediates a relation to a "thirdness": that which is represented (Peirce, 1888). Through Peirce, it can be posited that any material sign entails the reality of its meaning. This augments Latour's ANT so that material signs ("secondness") and immaterial meanings of signs ("thirdness") both need to be accounted for as actors in assemblages. This configuration, read into Agrippa's philosophy, affirms the ontic realism of the occult agents reified in occult signs. It further demands that sociologists of religion account for both sign and signified in actor networks.

Agrippa’s  system of symbol magic describes a sort of ecosystem of signs, whereby specific signifiers–stars, planets, glyphs, and dates–co-entangled with signifieds–gods, spirits, humors, and elements. In this paper, I characterize this ecosystem of signs as an actor-network that contains human and non-human agents, including occult symbols, and their distorting supernatural meanings. Following Latour, agency is afforded to all the actors in this networks so that signs–and their meanings–emerge as agents in a ecosystem. The ecosystemic nature of this actor-network model demands special attention. It is here that I am able to transition into a discussion of the environmental and ecological efficacy of occult semiotics.

The biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll advanced a model of semiotics that understands all ecological actors as signs that are mediated through the sense organs and physical apparatuses of their neighbors. Uexküll describes an organism's umwelt as this constellation of signs it receives through its senses about its environment. For Uexküll, all ontology becomes an ecological ontology that arrives as signs in an umwelt (Uexküll, 1940). Within our umwelt, we encounter only the signs of our ecosystem. I propose that occult environmentalists can merge Agrippa’s occult ecosystem of signs into Uexküll’s signs of the ecosystem. In this arrangement, signs, sigils, plants, animals, and places all inherit a common ontic agency. They all become actors in a common ecosystem. 

In Uexküll's philosophy, meaning becomes decoupled from the human experience. Ecosystemic agents are all the time meaning and being meant to each other. The chorus of meaning sprawling through the universe includes and invites human participation, but does not depend on it. Certain ancient signs, bearing even more ancient meanings, may well precede humanity, and certainly do not require us to emerge in inter-species umwelten. The networks of meaning that facilitate fundamental inter-species interactivity (like predation, parasitism, and symbiosis), are the very same networks of meaning that convey occult signification once occult signs are materialized. The effect is a collapse of the occult symbol into the indexes and icons of the natural world. The forces and agents encoded in occult semiosis emerge as reified but invisible members of a biological narrative extending into the deep pre-history of time. The power of magic signs is that they are open, ambiguous, and cryptic. In their ambiguity, they gesture less to concrete cultural meanings, and more to ambient external ecological phenomena. Sigils, signs without clear meanings, are hungry for context, interpretation, and relationally. As such, the the cryptic glyph reveals configurations that otherwise fail to find representation in human symbolic canons.

Ultimately this paper aims to offer a high-level model for understanding semiosis in the material world. Expanding on occult traditions, the strength of this proposed model is that it accounts for invisible actors alongside more evident ecological actors. By understanding materialized signs as ontic agents, this occult ontology broadly reifies polytheistic agency in and among ecological systems. Certain elements of this thesis disrupt monotheistic metaphysics and promote idolatrous relationships to the material world. For these reasons, the framework I propose is rare in academic theology. However, this way of thinking about agential supernatural signifiers as embedded in ecosystems explains how ancient and modern esoteric metaphysical traditions interact with myths, divinities, and spirits.