Cailyn Hansen

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Updated: Oct. 25, 2025

Embracing the Occult; Rejecting the Rational: An open inquiry into esotericism, ritual, and the politics of knowing

This is a gathering, not a class; a temporary autonomous space for unlearning mastery and studying hidden lineages in community.

Description

"Embracing the Occult; Rejecting the Rational" provides participants with the foundation to understand core themes in esotericism while challenging common preconceived ideas around rationality and reason. The course begins with a primer on the study of esotericism and key themes around the Occult before exploring a range of Winter Solstice traditions. These traditions will be explored and analyzed through a critical lens while also providing students opportunities for practical application. It also covers the advent of Enlightenment and its disruption of esoteric beliefs. The course is also critical of the connection between fascism and the occult. Upon completion of this course, participants will be prepared to take further emic coursework in subjects such as witchery, tarot, alchemy, astrology, and magick; or etic classes like "History of Magick" and "Critical Epistemology: Exploring the 'How' to Knowing" which we encourage participants to make real.

Schedule

Sundays: 3pm to 5pm | Tuesday, Wednesdays, Fridays: 6:30pm to 8:30pm

Course Content

This eight-week, ten-session open gathering explores the hidden lineages of esoteric thought and their tension with Enlightenment rationality. We approach "the occult" not as superstition but as a set of world-making practices that resist mastery and restore relational ways of knowing. Each session blends reading, dialogue, and esoteric practice, culminating in a communal Winter Solstice ritual.

Session 1: Why (and how to) study esotericism?

This session we build methodologically what we (could) mean by esotercism in academic study. We also build a foundation for the esoteric as both thought and practice. We begin to explore specifics of the antagonism of capitalism with esoteric belief to motivate further study.

Link to notes

Readings:

  • Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy (Introduction)
      • Available at NYPL
      • Unfortunately, no public link available
  • Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Part 1)
      • Link in course materials
      • Unfortunately, no public link available
  • Helmut Zander, "What Is Esotericism? Does It Exist? How Can It Be Understood?"
  • Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment (Introduction)
  • Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Introduction)
  • Recommended: The Hermetic Library’s "What Is Esotericism?" reader

Session 2: What are the Occult and Cosmologies of the Hidden?

We explore multiple traditions of hidden, mystical, or relational knowing to expose how the very idea of “the occult” is culturally bounded and colonial in origin. Specificially, we place Western occultism in dialogue with Islamic and Sufi cosmologies to unlearn colonial hierarchies of mysticism.

Readings:

  • Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Introduction)
  • Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (Introduction + Chapter 2)
      • Situates Sufi poetics as living epistemology.
      • Public link
  • Amira el-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and Intelligent World of the Jinn (Chapters 1 thru 3)
      • Reframes "occult" cosmology through Islamic thought.
      • Public link
  • Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (Chapter 0)
  • Helena Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (excerpts)
      • Public link
      • Section 1
      • Section 2 (The difference between..., both)
      • Section 6 (The distinction...)
      • Section 8 (What is memory...)
  • Optional: The Occult Experience (documentary, 1985)
  • Optional: Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Introduction + ch. 3 "The Magic of the Technological")
      • Link in course materials

Session 3: Isn’t it all pseudoscience?

Explore and understand epistemic violence.

Readings:

  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff, "How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World"
  • Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (Introduction + ch. 18 "Realism and Instrumentalism")
      • Link in course materials
  • Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Introduction)
      • Link in course materials
  • Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective"
      • Link in course materials
  • Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "Epistemologies of the South"
      • Link in course materials
  • Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation ("The Great Caliban: The Struggle Against the Rebel Body")
      • Link in course materials
  • Optional: James Webb, The Occult Underground (on rationality and its shadow)

Session 4: Winter Solstice Traditions and their Origins

Ritual as archive; tradition as knowledge practice.

Readings:

  • Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (ch. 6 "The Winter Solstice")
      • Link in course materials
  • Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (ch. 1–2)
      • Link in course materials
  • Excerpts from the Poetic Edda (especially "Völuspá")
      • Link in course materials
  • María Sabina, selections from Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec
      • Shamanic poetics of healing, centering sound and speech as knowledge.
  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind (ch. 2)
      • Not explicitly "occult," but argues for the spiritual stakes of language, ritual, and oral cosmology.
  • Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (sections "Skywoman Falling" & "Asters and Goldenrod")
      • Indigenous ritual ecology and relational epistemology.
  • Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (ch. 1–2)
  • Optional: The Wicker Man (movie, 1973)

Session 5: Practicum

These sessions are laboratories of unlearning — we engage embodied, creative, and divinatory methods as legitimate modes of inquiry.

  • Journaling prompt: "What do you wish to conjure into or release from this season?"
  • Group ritual: Candlelight invocation of warmth, study, and refusal of mastery.
  • Recommended: Hermeneuticon Praxis
  • Optional: Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935, Hoodoo chapters)
      • First-hand accounts of Black Southern ritual practice; a counter-canon to Crowley and Blavatsky.
  • Optional: Trinidadian Obeah texts (compiled in Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah, 2015)
      • Present esotericism as anti-colonial resistance.

Session 6: Self-Reflection as Occult Method

Readings:

  • bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (ch. 1 "Engaged Pedagogy")
      • Link in course materials
  • Audre Lorde, "Poetry is Not a Luxury"
      • Link in course materials
  • Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (ch. 7 "La conciencia de la mestiza")
      • Link in course materials
  • María Lugones, "Toward a Decolonial Feminism" (2010)
      • Bridges self-knowledge and colonial epistemic rupture; excellent alongside hooks and Anzaldúa.
  • Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007, ch. 1–2)
      • A practice of remembrance and embodied history as occult historiography.
  • Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom" (2003)
      • Reframes humanism itself as a spell of colonial reason; pairs beautifully with Haraway.
  • Recommended: Carl Jung, The Red Book (visual section on Sol Invictus)
  • Optional: Christina Sharpe, In the Wake

Session 7: Enlightenment: The Decline of the Occult

Readings:

  • Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation"
      • Link in course materials
  • Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (excerpts)
      • Link in course materials
  • Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria (ch. 2 "Spectral Evidence")
      • Link in course materials
  • Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy (ch. 3 “Enlightenment and Exile”)
  • Optional: Esoterica episode "The Enlightenment’s Occult Shadow" (podcast)

Session 8: Fascism and the Occult: What’s the connection?

We will examine how occultism was both weaponized by fascism and reclaimed by feminist, queer, and decolonial movements.

Readings:

  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (Introduction + ch. 2)
      • Link in course materials
  • Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Fascism
  • Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment (ch. 8 "Occultism, Modernity, and Power")
      • Link in course materials
  • Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (1993)
      • Mystical anarchism through Sufi and heterodox currents.
  • Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1982)
      • Feminist pagan magick as collective liberation; a direct counter to authoritarian occultism.
  • Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (1997)
      • Hauntology as political methodology, pairing with Warner or Adorno/Horkheimer.
  • Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2017)
      • Ecstatic embodiment as epistemic insurgency against modernity’s control of spirit.
  • Optional: Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism" (short essay)

Session 9: Practicum and Final Project Prep

These sessions are laboratories of unlearning — we engage embodied, creative, and divinatory methods as legitimate modes of inquiry.

  • Recommended: Choose a personal or cultural solstice ritual to reinterpret critically or reimagine communally.
  • Optional: Tarot and the Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols (for symbolic structure)

Session 10: Final Project Presentations

Final presentations.

  • Reflection: "What knowledge did you unlearn?"

Reading Week: Solstice Gathering

Choose one of the following:

  • Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (2014)
      • Amerindian perspectivism as an anti-Cartesian ontology of relation.
  • Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro (posthumous essays)
      • Explicitly reclaims "spiritual mestizaje" as decolonial gnosis.
  • Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (2018)
      • Poetic speculative ritual as post-rational feminist theology.
  • Fred Moten, Stolen Life (2018, ch. "Blackness and Nothingness")
      • The para-rational as insurgent metaphysics.
  • José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009, ch. 1–2)
      • Queer futurity as mystical orientation.
  • Optional: Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk ("Seeing")