FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Jeff Howard: Playful Occultism

This seminar will explore manifestations of the occult in relation to play and games. This relationship will take a twofold form: the influence of the occult on games and the aspects of play in occult practice. Howard will explore case studies from the many tabletop and videogames that are influenced by the occult, arguing that one meaning of the occult involves games with hidden depth, analogous to what Doris Rusch would refer to as “deep games.” In some of these cases (especially solo role-playing games and LARPs), any sufficiently deep simulation of ritual is indistinguishable from ritual, causing the magic circle posited by early game studies scholar Johann Huizinga to break.  At the same time, Howard argues that many forms of contemporary magical practice can be understood productively through the lens of play, from the influence of Crowley’s chess games on his astral visions to the elaborate metaphorical systems of Andrew Chumbley’s Sabbatic Craft and Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Gnosis.

Occultism can be understood as a form of play because both involve worldbuilding, make-believe, the narrative interpretation of chance as fate, and an openness to free movement within a structure. Seeing occultism as play helps to liberate magical practitioners from the excessive solemnity that can inhibit magic when the practitioner strains too hard for results. Rather, a playful approach to occultism can open practitioners to spontaneous synchronicities that disrupt the stately decorum of ceremonial rituals, which Kenneth Grant refers to as “tangential tantra.” Such a view of occultism aligns with and extends chaos magician Lionel Snell’s concept of “the games layer”: a state of reality above all Platonizing model, in which any system of magic is adopted playfully as an arbitrary but elegant framework of rules within which graceful performance can occur.