Call for Papers

ESOTERICISM, OCCULTISM, and MAGIC

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

Proposals for papers are now being accepted for the SWPACA Summer Salon. SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas in a variety of categories encompassing the following: Film, Television, Music, & Visual Media; Historic & Contemporary Cultures; Identities & Cultures; Language & Literature; Science Fiction & Fantasy; and Pedagogy & Popular Culture. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit https://swpaca.org/subject-areas/

Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic invites proposals relating to magical worldviews, practices, and representations, as well as consciousness transformation, the preternatural, the paranormal, hidden meanings, the power of transmutation, and related phenomena. Characteristic methods, beliefs, perspectives, paradigms and techniques include: arcane symbolism, imagery, and aesthetics; unseen forces, spiritual intermediaries, invisible agencies, nonhuman intelligences; synchronous patterns, non-ordinary causation, and anomalous processes. Examples of ideas and systems include Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Sufism, Tantra, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Satanism, witchcraft, sorcery, demonology, astrology, alchemy, yoga, shamanism, parapsychology, as well as psychic and paranormal phenomena, along with beliefs and practices relating to altered states of consciousness, overlapping with the study of mysticism and New Age spirituality, channeling, positive thinking, manifestation, reality shifting, the power of intention, numerology, guardian angels, and Ascended Masters. Esoteric, occult, and magical concepts, beliefs, and practices appear in every culture and civilization; contemporary media and popular culture have embraced them enthusiastically, yet at times have reacted against them. The impact of esotericism, occultism, and magic on genre formation/content and popular cultural perceptions has been profound.  Their themes and tropes continue to become increasingly prevalent throughout all media of popular entertainment, including arts, music, literature, film, television, anime, comics and graphic novels, as well as being nearly ubiquitous throughout interactive gaming of all categories and genres.  Beyond entertainment media, esoteric, occult, and magical concepts and content appear in online memes and frequently in fashion accessories and aesthetics.  Their popularity continues to inspire and provoke a variety of conspiracisms in reaction, along with various fads, trends, moral panics, witch-hunts, witch-crazes, and conspiracy theories.  Examples include demonic intelligences in "AI" chatbots, anti-occult-conspiracism in QAnon; adrenochrome confabulations, Illuminati paranoia, bloodline of the Holy Grail beliefs, Satanic Ritual Abuse scandals.  All reactions to, and polemics against, esoteric, occult, and magical content in popular culture, as well as projections concerning its presence, are therefore also suitable topics for this Area, as are political, religious, secular, scientific, and scientistic receptions of esotericism, occultism, and magic, along with instrumentalization of related concepts, beliefs, and practices in propaganda, intelligence, and information warfare.

Special themes and topics of interest proposed for the Summer Salon 2026: 

EOM and the personality; legal regulation of EOM; humor, parody, and satire; boundaries of magic, mysticism, and technology; technoccultism, cybermagic, and cosmotechnics; impossibility and Forteana; lies, fakes, frauds, forgeries, counterfeits, duplicates, deception, disinformation, and propaganda; confabulation, fabrication, imitation, and simulation; metafictional representations of EOM and as EOM praxis; EOM and/as genre; EOM and “influencers”, EOM and the media; immediatism; consumerism and consumption in and of magic, and also magic as consumption and as commodity/commodifiable; EOM and economics; the bureaucratic occult; demographics in and of magic; EOM and race; EOM and indigeneity, tribalism, indigenous futurism, and technotribalism; EOM and repetition, reproduction, genetics, heredity, ancestry, generational transmission, generational trauma; EOM and hacking; magic and engineering; EOM and architecture; EOM and materialist worldviews; gender; carnality and embodiment; EOM and ideology; EOM and geography, geopolitics, astropolitics, and “space”; egregores; crowd magic, “mass magic”, and EOM-concepts of “the masses”; EOM and the mundane/banal; EOM and therapy, psychology and psychiatry, behavioral conditioning, thought reform, and conversion; disgust, revulsion, dread, and paranoia in EOM; evil and maleficia; magical duels; dualism, nondualism, radicalism, extremism, and excess; values, virtues, and ethics in EOM; transhumanism, posthumanism, accelerationism, and neoreaction; EOM and the nonhuman, metahuman, and abhuman; cryptids, fungi, rhizomes, alternative biologies, ontologies, and ecologies.

All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at https://swpaca.org/app

For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general, please see the Summer Salon FAQs and Tips page at https://swpaca.org/faq-summer-salon/

Registration information for the conference will be available at https://swpaca.org/summer-salon/

Unfortunately, we are not able to offer any financial assistance for the Summer Salon.

Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Only one proposal per person, please; unfortunately, we cannot accommodate roundtables for the Summer Salon.  

If you have any questions about the Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic area, please contact its Area Chair, Dr. George J. Sieg, georgejsieg@gmail.com . If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@southwestpca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!