Taking a cue from the 21st-century surge of popular interest in the occult and esoteric—particularly within feminist and queer communities—we join in emergent scholarly discussions about how esoteric knowledges inform the decolonial turn in literary studies and adjacent fields. As Nathan Snaza observes in his recent book, Tendings: Feminist Esotericisms and the Abolition of Man (Duke UP, 2024), the rise of interest in esoteric practices aligns with trending academic fields like new materialism, science studies, affect theory, and posthumanism. We follow Snaza’s impulse to “take (more) seriously and make (or keep) space for esoteric, nonscientific, spiritual knowledges [...] in our feminist, queer, decolonial, and abolitionist projects...” Turning to the aesthetic, the panel thinks across 20th- and 21st-century literature, visual art, and digital media shaped by esoteric wisdom, moving from Afro-caribbean and African American diasporic engagements with vodou, to anticolonial sympathies within the history of Anglo-European tarot, to contemporary American fiction’s portrayal of social media astrology.

Tracing the role of vodou imagery and folklore central to Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological text Tell My Horse (1938) and influential to her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to the work of contemporary photographer Deana Lawson, Dr. Victoria Papa examines how Hurston and Lawson’s aesthetic engagements with syncretic religion and ritual, such as spellwork and spiritual possession, challenge colonial frameworks of knowledge, experience, and subjectivity. While Lawson has noted Hurston’s influence in interviews, the synergy between the artists and their work has rarely been the subject of sustained scholarly examination. In conversation with Snaza's theory of endarkenment (a counter-epistemology to the enlightenment developed by and through the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter), Papa illustrates how Hurston and Lawson engage feminist esotericisms as portals through which the quotidian conditions of Black life are infused with everyday forms of magic that resist the possessive logics of whiteness.

Examining the tensioned history of the ever-popular Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck (1909), Theo Joy Campbell suggests that the deck’s appeal derives in part from its illustrator Pamela Colman Smith’s attempt to shape tarot into a more accessible tool by freeing it from gender essentialism and European provincialism. Campbell reveals Smith’s anticolonial sympathies and her desire to create a so-called “universal” deck with archetypal imagery that would decenter Greco-Roman symbolism. Yet, despite her ideals, Smith’s illustrations still rely upon European aesthetics and figures, evidencing the limitations, as Sara Ahmed has theorized, of “universalism.” Placing the Rider-Waite-Smith in conversation with two 21st-century decks—Lark Malakai Grey’s androgynous “Under the Bed Tarot” and Courtney Alexander’s Blackness-centering “Dust2Onyx” deck—Campbell sketches a lineage of efforts to (de)universalize the tarot.

Taking a literary and media studies approach, Dr. Anna Mukamal explores the intimate relationships between astrology and self-making in both Anna Dorn’s novel Exalted (2022) and the rise of social media astrology. In Dorn’s novel, literary characters use chart readings as counter-epistemologies of self-knowledge that challenge normative conceptions of identity; yet they also use them “to justify bad behavior.” Mukamal reads Exalted as a satire of the commercialization of astrology that extends Theodor Adorno’s well-known dismissal of newspaper horoscopes as irrational fodder for totalitarianism in the 1950s. Juxtaposing Dorn’s novel to current cultural practice, Mukamal shows how digital astrology communities can alternatively foster radical kinships between women/femmes, queer folks, and people of color, who use their horoscopes to understand themselves and each other in relation to structures of supremacy. Astrology’s foray into both the digital realm and contemporary fiction reveals a tension between astrology’s minoritarian possibilities and its fraught co-optation into capitalist schemas.

We plan 15-minute papers and a 10-minute response by presider and respondent, Dr. Rebekah Sheldon, who is currently working on two books on magic, esotericism, and the occult: a co-edited collection with Nathan Snaza, Esoteric Inhumanisms, and a monograph, We Sorcerers: Magic as Method. We reserve 20 minutes for questions and dialogue with the audience.