A six-week seminar on imagination as a world-making force. As institutions falter and AI absorbs routine work, the visionary traditions — magic, prophecy, artistic practice — become survival skills. We study Blake, Corbin, Rimbaud, the Imaginal and the Daimon. Each participant develops a creative project through practices that interrupt habit and recover creative agency.
All sessions will be recorded and made available for replay.
Sundays 1-4pm EST
Wednesdays 2-4pm EST
Why do symbols move people more deeply than facts? Modern societies expected politics to become a matter of expertise and rational administration; instead we have witnessed the return of myth, charisma, and spectacle as central political forces — often accelerated by the newest technologies. The contemporary Right has integrated occult and supernatural currents in ways its opponents have so far refused: Trump, raised in Norman Vincent Peale's church, has applied Peale's techniques of self-programming and "positive thinking" to his political project with remarkable consistency. Any alternative will need to reckon with the mythic currents running beneath political discourse. We explore psychopolitics, propaganda, and narrative warfare.
What is magic once we remove superstition and fantasy? We approach magic as the disciplined use of attention, imagination, symbol, and will, and explore the daimon — through Socrates, Yeats, Hillman, and Steiner — as vocation, inner guide, and the organizing principle of a life. Patrick Harpur describes daimons as autonomous agents of the intermediate realm: shape-shifting boundary-dwellers who have appeared as fairies, angels, and gray aliens, matching the expectations of each era, and who rupture rationalist certainty precisely by refusing to yield scientific proof.
Why have poets so often associated inspiration with madness, possession, and altered perception? A distinction must be drawn between madness — arational states of altered awareness — and insanity, which can apply rigorous rationality to spiritually deranged ends, such as dismantling the planetary ecosystem for short-term profit. Against that rationalized insanity we cultivate the regenerative power of visionary states, drawing on Artaud, Rimbaud, Longchenpa, and Ginsberg.
Can language become an instrument of revelation rather than description? We examine prophetic speech and the Logos tradition through Heidegger, Steiner, Owen Barfield, and Georg Kühlewind, whose Becoming Aware of the Logos argues that consciousness and cosmos are a living text: modern humanity mistakes crystallized, finished thoughts for the dynamic process of thinking itself, and what is required is a shift to "living thinking" — tracing our thoughts back to the moment of their creation, before they harden into categories.
In my books 2012: The Return Of Quetzalcoatl and How Soon Is Now? I framed our converging crises not as terminal doom but as a planetary rite of passage — a collective death-and-rebirth process meant to shatter the illusion of our separation from the biosphere. The evidence of this trial surrounds us: climate destabilization, fragile supply chains, fragmenting social trust, an epidemic of anxiety and burnout. Individually the initiation demands ego-surrender; collectively it demands cooperative structures built on mutualism, local resilience, and a participatory relationship with the living Earth. We explore crisis and renewal through Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, Evan Thompson's neurophenomenology, the Burroughs–Gysin cut-up method, and Jodorowsky's psychomagic.
If, as Boehme intuited, the divine life is play, then our creative work need not justify itself by worldly outcomes to carry deep satisfaction, meaning, and joy. We are, each in our own way, the universe in the never-ending process of becoming aware of itself, moving through chaos, order, collapse, and renewal. What does it mean to complete a vision in an age of distraction?