Set and Setting: Magical Spaces and Places

The Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic invites special panel presentation proposals regarding the role that location plays in operative esoteric, occult, and magical practice. This panel will be included in Area events at the 46th annual conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, held this February 19-22 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This panel asks presenters to examine the ways in which locations influence, are determined by, determine, or characterize practices that qualify as esoteric, occult, and/or magical, whether in their original primary context or in representation and reception in popular media and entertainment across genres.  Relatedly, this panel might examine the ways in which space and place are themselves conceived, constructed, and utilized within esoteric, occult, magical, mystical, and preternatural worldviews.

This might also extend to mythic places, whether of received traditions in their manifold reinterpretations and adaptations, or of fictional, subjective, personal, and other imaginal and imagined locales. Spaces, metaphorical or literal, also offer a wide field of potential inquiry, including the liminal, transitional, peripheral, desolate, forbidden, otherworldly, alien, and mystically transcendent, from the ultimate Interior Center to the absolute Elsewhere and the unfathomable Outside.

The extension of such locations into fantastic worlds, secondary worlds, and the “paraworlds” of fictions and metafictions that utilize known places in novel ways adds extensive multilayered depth to the range of possible explorations, as does the projection of symbolic realities onto familiar (whether experientially or conceptually familiar) places. R’lyeh and Leng, Agartha and Shamballah, Mount Doom, Silent Hill, the planet Barsoom, and the planet Vormir share a common quality, but differently; the Delphi of myth, the Oxford of His Dark Materials, the Shangri-La of Lost Horizon, and the Los Angeles of Lucifer Morningstar both are and are not the Delphi and Oxford and Tibet of history and the Los Angeles of the present moment.  The addition of virtual spaces first imagined as cyberspace and metaverse, the augmented realities of entertainment and enhancement, and the increasingly pervasive accessibility of the nonlocal, all extend these depths to heights of increasing abstraction.  The means of accessing magical spaces and places also continue to unfold, shamanic access to the axis mundi extended into the "set and setting" of the entheogenic journey, itself a reification of the manifold means of magical travel across traditions, dimensions, planes of existence, altered states of consciousness, and nonordinary realities.

Please direct 200-500-word abstracts, optionally accompanied by CV, to the Area Chair for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic at SWPACA, Dr. George J. Sieg, at georgejsieg@gmail.com by November 14. The Area Chair will also provide the main EOM Area CFP on request by email, as well as any other information desired.  Due to the proximity of the deadline, please feel free to phone the Area Chair directly on (505) 440-2105 with any time-sensitive questions.