Special Panel CFP: The Omniversal Occult

Multiverses, Alternate Timelines, and Parallel Realities of Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic in Popular Culture

The Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association invites proposals for a special panel or panel series for its conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this February 19-22, 2025:

Across all media of contemporary popular fiction, throughout (and often between and beyond) genres, the conception of various coexisting “worlds” has developed in frequency and complexity to become a consistent family of tropes.  These have come to include ideas of multiple “universes” of varying scale and relation, alternate and parallel timelines (often implying the possibility of in some sense navigating, traveling, or otherwise selecting between them), and ultimately the treatment of other “realities” more generally (other planes and states of being) as parallel worlds rather than merely “dimensions” of this one.  These and similar metaphors are increasingly deployed in the popular presentation of theoretical physics and cosmology, making them increasingly prevalent throughout popular culture in nonfictional as well as fictional configurations. This in turn has made them conceptually available to the presentation and representation of esoteric, occult, and magical worldviews and practices, reciprocally influencing the way these are conceived and depicted in fiction as well as the way that they are popularly explained and understood by some practitioners in addition to general audiences. The adoption of popular descriptions of contemporary scientific theory and speculation has been a characteristic feature of the modern occult revival throughout its history, and relationships between esoteric, occult, and magical practitioners and emergent fiction genres up to and including contemporary speculative fiction has already been explored in varying degrees of depth from diverse scholarly perspectives.  Popular science and popular fiction have both greatly influenced subsequent movements, including New Age thought, the psychedelic movement, contactees and various extraterrestrial-oriented experiences and worldviews, numerous conspiracisms, popular spiritualities, self-help and self-improvement practices oriented toward “manifestation”, and increasingly frequent examples of “reality selection”, “timeline selection,” “reality shifting”, and so forth. There has already been significant overlap between these ideas within explicit esoteric, occult, and magical practices, and their deployment in contexts of “operative metafiction” intended as a vehicle of subjective exploration and intention. Now the frequent fictional depiction of esoteric, occult, and magical figures and practices in the context of multiple coexisting realities appears to accompany a combination of genre-bending and mainstreaming that affords an opportunity to examine esoteric, occult, and magical worldviews throughout popular culture that is increasingly independent of the traditional tropes to which they have tended to be limited by prior conceptual constraints. This special panel (or series, given sufficient response) will examine these interactions and developments from any and all scholarly, disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary perspectives, and is open to proposals focusing on fiction, nonfiction, metafiction, and any desired combination of specific examples and broader trends and developments, including formal esoteric, occult, and magical praxis as well as popular reception, perception, and presentation.

To send a proposal, acquire further information about the conference, or request the general Call for Papers for the Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic, please contact its Area Chair, Dr. George J. Sieg, at georgejsieg@gmail.com by the proposal deadline, November 14.