Queerness and the Occult with Alex A. Jones, beginning January 3

January 3rd, 10th, 17th, 2027

Sundays, 2pm Eastern

Admission: $145 ($125 for Patreon Members. To become a member and enjoy exclusive discounts, click here.)

This course will be conducted through Zoom, ensuring a convenient and interactive learning experience for everyone. Additionally, to accommodate the diverse schedules of our participants, all classes will be recorded. These recordings will be made available to all participants, providing the flexibility to engage with the course material at your own pace.

This online course links queerness to occult lineages of transformation, fluidity, the non-binary, the monstrous, and the erotic. We’ll move across alchemy, tantra, ritual and chaos magic, sketching a constellation of modern queer occultists. Each module grounds theory in practice, touching on tarot, dreaming, altar-work, and image-making as trans-historical disciplines for continued exploration. 

“Queer” and “occult” both name what is disavowed by Western rationalism—forms of life and knowledge deemed improper, unnatural, unreal, or dangerous. Rather than fixed entities, “queer” and “occult” are anti-essentializing terms for overlapping territories on the “bad” side of cultural binaries of good and evil, the natural and the monstrous, the real and the imagined, the rational and the insane. The course uses this shared position of exclusion as a starting point for thinking (and doing) esoteric work, transforming stigmatized forms of knowledge into tools, technologies, and aesthetics of survival.  

Annotated bibliography and provided readings include Luisah Teish, Susan Stryker, Austin Osman Spare, Harold Roth, Genesis P. Orridge, Phil Hine, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Federici, Ivo Dominguez Jr., Alkistis Dimech, among others. Readings are provided to deepen and expand on lecture topics; participants may engage at their own pace with readings based on personal interest. 

MODULE DESCRIPTIONS
The Witch, the Devil, the Monster | Preview Lecture, Date TBD (Fall 2026)

Having been called deviant, evil, and unnatural, queers have often made allies of the witch, the devil, and the monster. This lecture links identification with monstrosity to the refusal of restrictive definitions of both “Nature” and “God.” Through a brief history of demonology and witch-hunting, we’ll expose the power dynamics of orthodoxy and heresy, considering the diabolical as a symbolic tool for transforming opression into empowerment. 

Queerness & the Occult | January 3, 2027

What is the occult, and what does it mean to queer it? This module introduces occult traditions as minority beliefs, magick as capacties for transformation, and queerness as both personal metamorphosis and pressure upon social norms. We’ll map elemental and astrological frameworks that evade binary either/or thinking, emphasizing the classical planet Saturn as an avatar for patterns of constraint and rupture across spiritual, material, and temporal planes. 

Counter-Rational Knowledge | January 10, 2027

Why do queer people love astrology?Taken as more than a stereotype, the question asks what kinds of knowledge are allowed to matter. The Age of Reason relegated intuitive and bodily traditions to the fringes of occult superstition; here we will re-incorporate astrology, dreamwork, and the veneration of numina (spirits, divinities) as queer forms of knowledge that foreground relationality and subjectivity. The module will invite participants into altar-work and dreaming practices.

Embodied Mysteries | January 17, 2027

This module turns toward the sacred and liberatory aspects of embodiment, exploring erotic mysteries found in sensual, entheogenic, and affective experiences. We will dwell on sexuality, which enters the occult on one hand as a mystical technology of ecstasy, and on the other as a set of practices policed, prescribed, and explored largely in secret. We’ll de(re)mystify the idea of “sex magick,” emphasizing the ethical dimensions of embodied participation in a living world.

Alex A. Jones is a scholar of art, ecology, and occult theories of knowledge. Jones is a co-founder of the Queer Ecologies Research Collective and is studying for a PhD in the History of Science at Princeton University. She is a recipient of the 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and the 2024 Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation Grant for Writing on Sculpture.