Queerness and the Occult with Alex A. Jones, beginning October 18

October 18, 25, and November 1

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, while 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, they 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.

Readings provided include Ivo Dominguez Jr., Sylvia Federici, Michel Foucault, Peter Grey, Phil Hine, Genesis P. Orridge, Harold Roth, Austin Osman Spare, Susan Stryker, Luisah Teish, Linn Tonstad, among others.

The format for this course is Zoom (live, interactive). All sessions will be recorded, providing the flexibility for participants to engage at their own pace. Participants will have streaming access to recordings on the instructor’s website for one year. Late registrants receive access to all recordings.

Course Outline

The Witch, the Devil, the Monster (Promotional Lecture, date TBD)

Having been called evil, unnatural, and deviant, queers have often made allies of the witch, the devil, and the monster; through such inversions, oppression can be transformed into empowerment. This lecture explores identification with the monster as a refusal of restrictive notions of both “Nature” and “God.” Through a brief history of demonology and witch-hunting, we’ll examine the power dynamics of orthodoxy and heresy, and contemplate the diabolical as a symbolic and political tool for liberation.

Queerness & the Occult (Oct. 18)

What is the occult, and what might it mean to queer it? This module introduces occult traditions as systems of transformation, and frames queerness as both personal metamorphosis and a pressure upon social norms. We’ll move across spiritual, material, and temporal ideas of transformation, using Saturn to think with constraint, rupture, and re-formation. We’ll emphasize elemental and astrological frameworks that exceed binary either/or thinking, touching upon transgender and intersex figures in ancient religion.

Counter-Rational Knowledge (Oct. 25)

Why do queer people love astrology? Here we consider the question not as a stereotype, but as a way of asking what kinds of knowledge are allowed to matter. The Age of Reason marginalized intuitive and bodily traditions to realms of superstition and occult belief, and here we will re-incorporate astrology, dreamwork, and fairy tales as queer forms of knowledge that foreground relationality and subjectivity. This module will invite participants into altar-work and dreaming practices as foundations for exploring liminal planes of knowing.

Erotic Mysteries (Nov. 1)

Sex becomes part of the occult when it is understood as a practice that has been policed, prescribed, and explored in secret. This module turns toward the sacred and liberatory aspects of sensuality in occult traditions, exploring the idea of Eros and its relation to spiritual mysteries. We will look at the figure of the angel as a visionary point of contact between the human and the cosmic, looking to demystify (remystify) “sex magick” through emphasizing the ethical dimensions of embodied contact with a universe that it innately alive.

Alex A. Jones is a scholar of art, ecology, and occult theories of knowledge. 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. Jones is a co-founder of the Queer Ecologies Research Collective and is currently studying for a PhD in the History of Science.