This panel explores how esoteric models of nature, cosmos, and the nonhuman are attuned to ecological consciousness and the agency of the more-than-human world in ways distinct from institutional religious thought. The first paper revisits Algernon Blackwood's weird fiction of vegetal horror and Mary-Jane Rubenstein's pantheistic mysticism to uncover a plant consciousness that challenges dominant materialisms. The second paper evaluates Aldo Leopold's reliance on P.D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum to show how esoteric influences and the notion of the cosmos' hidden legibility were democratized in his land ethic. The final paper looks at Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Renaissance occult philosophy through Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory and Peircean semiotics to propose an ecosystemic metaphysics where magical signs mediate invisible agencies across nature and culture. Together, these papers retrieve esoteric religious currents to recover relational ontologies and immanent agencies that reimagine religion’s ecological role beyond the limits of dominant traditions.
This paper seeks to critically weave three discourses together: Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s interrogation of deployments of pantheistic monsters, critical plant studies through Dawn Keetley’s “tentacular ecohorror” alongside recent discussions of plant consciousness (Zoe Schlanger), and the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” to think through how plant horror might also reveal some contours of a vegetal mysticism needed to take plants seriosuly the present. And it will ask if such an immanent plant mysticism might help to reclaim a more complicated view of pantheism (e.g., Roland Faber’s ‘transpantheism’), panpsychism (e.g., David Skrbina), or new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett) in turn.
In this paper, I point to neglected esoteric currents informing and animating much of Aldo Leopold’s pioneering work in environmental ethics, especially currents relating to what we might call the legibility of the world. Building on Ashley Pryor’s work which uncovered Leopold’s debt to P D Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, I point to other elements of of Leopold’s resonance with Ouspensky and the esoteric tradition. In particular, I show how thoroughly Leopold and the Western esoteric tradition alike draw on a deeper tradition of reading the world’s hidden legibility. I suggest, moreover, that Leopold’s recapitulation of this esoteric tradition was also a work of democratization and emancipation, a making exoteric both of the world’s legibility and of a land ethic partially incubated in esoteric traditions but now brought into the great outdoors and offered to all.
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.