This panel explores new approaches to the study of mysticism and the arts, with an emphasis on non-human, more-than-human, and transhuman mysticisms, particularly as expressed in visual art, music, film, and science fiction. Topics to be considered include plant mysticisms, new materialism, science fiction, and multi-species mysticism.
What are we to make of accounts of paranormal communication between human beings and plants? In this essay, I read firsthand accounts of such communications, which are common, even in cultural contexts that have no traditional framework to explain or account for them. The content of these accounts is diverse but consistent: most often, these experiences (re)establish plants as subjects of moral status and human ethical concern. “Unverifiable” as they may be, accounts of paranormal communication with plants suggest a radical contiguity between "enchantment"—to borrow Weber’s term—and ethics.
When we listen to a great song, says Nick Cave, “what we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it.” This audacity is the primary attribute of a comparative religious category I call “efficacious ritual song.” This category emerges from three autoethnographic ritual contexts: the Hindu folk practice of chanting for the dying; Jewish recitations for the dead in the pre-burial rite of tahara; and Shipibo Amazonian singing for healing non-natives in plant medicine ceremonies. In each case, song theurgically invokes a divine non-human agent to restore spiritual wholeness out of (psycho)somatic damage. This paper considers three interrelated aspects of efficacious ritual song: 1) its contextual mythological emergences from non-human materialities; 2) its ethnomusicological attributes, including methods of vocal masking; and 3) its protocols for calling forth divine non-human agents and vocally manifesting them: the human voice becomes acoustic flesh.
Completed more than two decades ago, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos quartet of novels—Hyperion (1989), The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Endymion (1995), and The Rise of Endymion (1997)—offers timely perspective on contemporary geopolitics by juxtaposing cruel excesses of self-serving powers with the life-giving value of human love. His imagining of a universal force of empathy, mystically experienced across the reaches of space, offers a welcome counterweight to current claims that “empathy is a sin,” while his elevation of environmental concerns speaks to cultural clashes over the nature of value and the value of nature. His vision of still-evolving humanity draws on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in projecting the potential transcendence of human limits, including through human and AI convergence. Humanity’s future, Simmons argues, depends on embracing forms of freedom that acknowledge the power of human connection while rejecting those that divide and oppress.
This paper details the profound impact of science fiction on NRMs, with a focus on the 1980s children’s cartoon Thundercats and how it has become fetishized, and even heralded, by NRMs based upon starseed ontology as a thinly disguised metaphor for an intergalactic feline race called the Lyrans. These starseed NRMs promote an intergalactic feline exogenesis, arguing that the Lyrans are the first bipedal beings, whom all sentient hominoid beings stem from. The more people start believing in Lyran starseeds the more they are acknowledging the uncanny similarities with their feline intergalactic ancestors and the Thundercats, questioning whether the cartoon was made consciously or subconsciously to mimic this Lyran ontology. In this paper I will analyze the specific correlation between fiction-based inspiration and these growing feline starseed NRMs, arguing that they offer an epistemological framework for a new creature theology, which promotes an intergalactic feline mysticism and ontology.
Thank you! It will likely include sung demonstrations of vocal/acoustic attributes