Occult Artifice, Esoteric Intelligence, and Magical Generation

The Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association invites paper presentation proposals for a special panel investigating intersections between artifice, intelligence, generation and generativity, and esoteric, occult, and magical practices and worldviews.

The capabilities of creating life, creating intelligence, and creating intelligent life hold a fascination and allure that cuts through and across worldview categories and the genres through which they are popularly represented in secular fiction, religious text, and traditional mythology alike.  Whether physically formed, fashioned, molded, or crafted by divinity, demonic or diabolical agencies, or the tricksters beyond and between, the narratives concerning the mystery of human origins have provided inspiration and counterpoint for narratives and endeavors concerning human as the origin of new created life, sometimes gifted with intelligence, sentience, and even sapience. 

From myths of Prometheus to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, from Galatea to Her, and from the alchemical homunculus to that of Faust and Frankenstein and the Tleilaxu gholas of the Duniverse, such accounts have been adapted and readapted, and aspirations to achieve the seemingly transhuman power to create novel beings have been alternately exalted, vilified, demonized, and deployed as cautionary warning of human hubris.  To the extent that such endeavors are considered by some worldviews to trespass into the sacred or spiritually hazardous, such evaluations have also invested attempts to modify, enhance, and improve existing life with the same numinosity, and the apparent capability of human beings to voluntarily extinguish other species (or attempt to refrain from doing so) itself can inspire moral and cosmic dread.

Beyond such material creativity, esoteric, occult, and magical worldviews are already replete with accounts of practitioners calling spirits, daemons, and intelligences into being and diverse manifestation, whether through prepared vessels and vehicles, into amulets and talismans, into incense smoke and pools of blood, into already living beings, and into their own unborn children, the latter providing the inspiration for the concept of the “Moonchild” and the misadventures of Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, and L. Ron Hubbard concerning the attempted incarnation of the Scarlet Woman of Revelation, Babalon, into human form.

The human conception of intelligence, mind, and will as distinguishable in whole or in part from its apparent embodiment, physicality, and materiality affords seemingly endless variations on the potential combinatorics of the creation of novel awarenesses and novel forms, and so entertainment fiction and esoteric, occult, and magical literature is correspondingly replete with manifold spectra of such narratives, with the metagenre of transhuman speculative fiction extending through and between more circumscribed tropes of the numerous categories of “replicant” in science fiction, the fabulous races and subraces of fantasy, and the monstrosities of classic and cosmic horror.  The uncanny character of artificial, and even of novel, life might be regarded as a distinguishing feature of the “weird” parent genre of the foregoing, as well as its continuity through cosmic horror into the new weird.   The contemporary emergence of generative-predictive large-language-model “Artificial Intelligence” offers still more new possibilities for esoteric, occult, and magical conception and representation.  While many of the ways in which these particular systems can be remixed with all of these established tropes are obvious (and can probably be elaborated on indefinitely by these systems themselves), other possibilities remain obscure – occult, even – and thus far unguessed, much like the apparent intelligences that might be their successors.  Perhaps most esoteric are those ambiguous creations and simulations arising in paranoid fictions such as those of Philip K. Dick in which boundaries between the natural and the artificial, past and present, reality and simulation are perturbed, and subsequent fictions such as the cosmic horrors of Peter Watts in which they are rendered irrelevant.

On the way between here and there, the Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic intends the creation of at least one special panel to explore these and related speculations as engaged by primary sources and inspired fictions (and metafictions) alike.  Please direct all proposals and inquiries to the Area Chair, Dr. George J. Sieg, georgejsieg@gmail.com by November 14, and call (505) 440-2105 with any time-sensitive questions.