Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring the anomalous, the luminous, and the numinous. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
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Episode 188: Pioneers of the Untimely: On the Hermit Card in the Tarot
Épisode 188
mercredi 9 avril 2025 • Durée 01:22:59
In this continuation of their non-linear journey through the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the ninth Arcanum: the Hermit. Walking through darkness with his lantern and staff, the Hermit invites us to break from the collective and seek a direct relationship with the Real. This is the card of the seeker, the misfit, the sage, and the wanderer. As tends to happen in these tarot episodes, the hosts take the opportunity to range across many topics, connecting the Hermit to Jung’s Red Book, the Desert Fathers, angels and demons, the I Ching, contemporary politics, and more.
Support us on Patreon
Order Christian Bunyan's Weird Studies poster here.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast,Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau
REFERENCES
Carl Jung, The Red Book
Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker
Samuel Beckett, Irish writer
Emily Dickinson, American poet
Temptation of Saint Anthony
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Weird Studies, Episode 103 on the Tower card
The Gnostic Tarot
Nigel Richmond, Language of the Lines
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
John Minford, The I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom
William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot
Wolfgang Petersen (dir.), The Neverending Story
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Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis
Épisode 187
mercredi 26 mars 2025 • Durée 01:34:13
John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and history, the real and the fantasy, memory and imagination. Little, Big is also a book that JF and Phil have been planning to discuss for as long as Weird Studies has existed. In this episode, they are joined by writer and scholar Erik Davis to explore the enduring charms and mysteries of one of the greatest—and most underrated—American novels of the late twentieth century.
Order Christian Bunyan's Weird Studies poster here.
Visit Weirdosphere for more details on Erik Davis's ongoing course, The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick.
Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
REFERENCES
John Crowley, Little, Big
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Eric Davis, interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack
David Lynch (dir.), Lost Highway
America, “The Last Unicorn”
John Cooper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality
Lord Dunsany, Irish novelist
Special Guest: Erik Davis.
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Episode 180: The Player: On the Magician Card in the Tarot
Épisode 180
mercredi 20 novembre 2024 • Durée 01:22:27
The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itself, or the individual who has mastered the art of manipulating the cards to divine their meanings. Yet, the Magician is a profoundly ambiguous figure. From one perspective, he is the Magus, piercing through the illusions of ceaseless becoming to glimpse the hidden depths of reality. From another, he is all surface without depth, a carnival huckster ready to empty your coin purse while you’re transfixed by his crystal ball. In this episode, JF and Phil continue their on-again, off-again journey through the major trumps with a discussion of the card that—deservedly or not—proudly calls itself Number One.
Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
REFERENCES
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Weird Studies, Episode 24 on “The Charlatan and the Magus”
Weird Studies, Episode 109 and Episode 110 on The Glass Bead Game
Weird Studies, Episode 179 with Lionel Snell
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneology of Morals
Louis Sass, Modernism and Madness
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
Participation mystique
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Leigh Mccloskey, Tarot Re-visioned
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Episode 96: Beautiful Beast: On Jean Cocteau's 'La Belle et la Bête'
Épisode 96
mercredi 14 avril 2021 • Durée 01:21:03
Jean Cocteau's visionary rendition of Madame de Beaumont's fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," itself the retelling of a story that may be several millennia old, is the topic of this Weird Studies episode, which proposes a journey down lunar paths to the crossroads where love and death intersect. Drawing on Surrealism, myth, and the occult, Cocteau's 1946 film transcends the limitations of media to become a living poem, a thing that is also a place, a place that is also a mind. This conversation touches on the genius of the child, the mysteries of Eros, the monstrosity of consciousness, and the sorcery of cinema.
Photo by Ivan Jevtic on Unsplash
Click here to register for JF's upcoming course on art.
REFERENCES
Jean Cocteau (dir.), La Belle et la Bête
Jaques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
Sergei Diaghilev, Russian impresario
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (dir.), Beauty and the Beast
David Thomson, Have You Seen?
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Johannes Vermeer, Dutch painter
Philip Glass, La Belle et la Bête (opera)
Game of Thrones, Television series
Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress Card
Weird Studies, Episode 94 on the Moon Card
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Episode 95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's 'The Fifth Child'
Épisode 95
mercredi 31 mars 2021 • Durée 01:26:18
Doris Lessing's uncategorizable oeuvre reached strange new heights in 1988 with the publication of her short novel The Fifth Child. The story couldn't be simpler. In the England of the 1970s, a couple determined to live out a dream that many of their generation have rejected -- the big family in the old house with the pretty garden -- conceive a child that may or may not be human. From that moment on, the boy, their fifth, becomes the alien force that will tear their dream to pieces. Profoundly ambiguous and unsettling, The Fifth Child is a weird novel that raises questions about parenthood, family, and the impenetrable depths of nature.
Header Image: The Changeling by Henry Fuseli (1780)
Additional music: "Fast Bossa Nova: Falling Stars" by Dee Yan-Key
REFERENCES
Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
Doris Lessing, Shikasta
M. R. James, weird fiction author
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
David Icke, conspiracy theorist
Deros, underground beings from the fiction of Richard Sharpe Shaver
Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch Renaissance painter
Weird Studies, Episode 86 on “The Sandman”
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf
Louis Sass, “The Land of Unreality: On the Phenomenology of the Schizophrenic Break”
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Richard Thorpe (dir.), The Wizard of Oz
Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz
Weird Studies, bonus episode on Adventure Time
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
Doris Lessing, Ben in the World
Roman Polanski (dir.), Rosemary’s Baby
Richard Donner (dir.), The Omen
Donald Cammell (dir.), Demon Seed
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Episode 94: All is Mysterious: On the Moon Card in the Tarot
Épisode 94
mercredi 17 mars 2021 • Durée 01:15:19
"Here is a weird, deceptive life." Thus does Aleister Crowley describe the meaning of one of the most sinister and spectral cards in the tarot. In this episode, Phil and JF continue their ongoing series on the twenty-two major trumps with a deep dive into the hopelessly enigmatic world of Arcanum XVIII: The Moon. After a brief chat about Voltron and professional wrestling, your hosts start on the lunar path beset by traps and illusions, in hopes that their half-blind perambulation will lead to startling insights.
Image by Damien Deltenre via Wikimedia Commons.
References
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Colin Wilson, The Occult
Eliphas Levi,_ French esotericist
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Weird Studies, [Episode 86 on The Sandman](weirdstudies.com/86)
Plato, Republic
Antoine Faivre, scholar of esoteric studies
Wouter Hanegraaff, historian of philosophy
Alastair Crowley, Book of Thoth
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis
Peter Kingsley, historian of philosophy
St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul
J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Weird Studies, Episode 93 on Charles Taylor
Algis Uždavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth
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Episode 93: Living and Dying in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and Disenchantment
Épisode 93
mercredi 3 mars 2021 • Durée 01:28:05
In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world after the Renaissance, namely the secularization of the society and soul of Western humanity. What does it mean to live in an age where religion, once the very matrix of social existence, is relegated to the realm of private and personal choice? What defines secularity? Are modern people really as "irrelegious" as we make them out to be? In this episode, JF and Phil squarely train their sights on a question that continues to haunt them, with Taylor as their Virgil in what amounts to a descent into the ordinary inferno of modern unknowing.
Header Image by Pahudson, via Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
Weird Studies, ep 71: The Medium is the Message
Penn & Teller, Bullshit
René Descartes, Meditations
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons
David Foster Wallace's essay on David Letterman
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History
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Episode 92: Glitch in the Matrix: A Conversation with Rodney Ascher
Épisode 92
mercredi 17 février 2021 • Durée 01:27:56
With his latest film, a meditation on what it means to believe we live in a computer simulation, Rodney Ascher has once again placed himself among the most innovative and visionary filmmakers working in the documentary form today. While the "Simulation Hypothesis" has been a hot topic ever since The Matrix came out in 1997, it is Ascher's ability to suspend judgement, training his camera on the experience of believers rather than the value of their beliefs, that makes A Glitch in the Matrix such a unique and significant exploration, a strange work of "phantom phenomenology."
Weird Studies listeners will recall that Phil and JF devoted an episode to Ascher's films -- most notably Room 237 and The Nightmare -- back in the early days of the podcast. In this episode, Rodney Ascher joins them to discuss his cinematic vision, his take on the weird, and his thoughts on what is real and why it matters.
REFERENCES
[Rodney Ascher](www.rodneyascher.com), American filmmaker
-- [A Glitch in the Matrix](www.aglitchinthematrixfilm.com)
Jay Weidner's theories on Kubrick
Buddhist idea of the the Arising and Passing Away
[Dungeons & Dragons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons%26_Dragons), tabletop roleplaying game
James Machin, _Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939
Magic Eye pictures
Parmenides, Greek philosopher
Wachowskis, The Matrix
Alan Moore, "Superman: For the Man Who Has Everything"
Conway's Game of Life
Joshua Clover, The Matrix (BFI Film Classics)
Jonathan Snipes, American composer
Clipping, experimental hip hop band
"Shining" romantic comedy recut
Michael Curtiz (dir.), Casblanca
John Boorman (dir.), [Point Blank](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062138/?ref=fn_al_tt_2)_
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
Special Guest: Rodney Ascher.
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Episode 91: On Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi'
Épisode 91
mercredi 3 février 2021 • Durée 01:24:32
In this episode, Phil and JF explore the vast palatial halls of Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi. Set in an otherworld consisting of endless galleries filled with enigmatic statues, Piranesi is the story of a man who lives alone -- or nearly alone -- in a dream labyrinth. As usual, our discussion leads to unexpected places every bit as strange as Clarke's setting, from Borge's infinite library and Lovecraft's alien cities to Renaissance Europe, where the art of memory was synonymous with wisdom and magic.
SHOW NOTES
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
Joshua Clover, 1989: Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About , The Matrix (BFI Modern Classics
John Crowley, Little, Big
Christopher Priest, The Prestige (+Christopher Nolan's screen adaptation)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
JF Martel, "The Real as Sacrament" (forthcoming?)
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
Plato, Phaedrus
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel"
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione
Maurits Cornelis Escher, Duch artist
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Gyrus, North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos
Emerald Tablet, foundational Hermetic text
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Weird Studies ep. 42 - On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien
Giovanni colleague?
Allen Ginsberg, "America"
Rodney Ascher, A Glitch in the Matrix
Walter J. Ong, American philosopher
Weird Studies ep. 71: The Medium is the Message
Thomas Ligotti, "The Night School"
Thomas Aquinas, Christian philosopher and theologian
Erasmus, Christian philosopher
Marsilio Ficino, Christian philosopher
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Episode 90: 'The Owl in Daylight': On Philip K. Dick's Unwritten Masterpiece
Épisode 90
mercredi 20 janvier 2021 • Durée 01:10:36
Weird Studies has so far devoted just one show to Philip K. Dick, and that was way back in April 2018, with episode 10, "Adrift in the Multiverse." Last fall, as another foray into Dickland began to feel urgent, Phil and JF talked about which of his books they should tackle. The answer that seemed obvious was VALIS, the semi/pseudo-autobiographical masterpiece that constitutes PKD's most explicit attempt to make sense of the theophanic experiences that altererd his life in 1974. But then Phil suggested The Owl in Daylight, a novel on which PKD worked feverishly in the last years of his life but left unwritten. And sure enough, reviewing and analyzing a book that doesn't exist proved to be the best way of getting to the heart of Dick's incomparable oeuvre.
SHOW NOTES
Gwen Lee, What if Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick
The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, volume 6
Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Secondary qualities, philosophical concept
Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings
Burt Bacharach, American musician
Philip K. Dick, "The Preserving Machine"
Jorge Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"
The Good Place, American television series
Philip K. Dick, Valis
Weird Studies, Episode 78 on John Keel's 'Mothman Prophesies'
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
Weird Studies, Episode 73 on Carl Jung
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