Episode 66: On Diviner's Time

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2020

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the paper discussed in this episode, Phil Ford coins the term "diviner's time" to denote a particular feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has engaged in divinatory or magical practice, namely the feeling that it all means something, that the universe, with all its chaos and randomness, nevertheless contains -- or is itself -- a kind of music. This episode goes deep down the rabbit hole as Phil and JF try to wrap their heads around conceptions of time, causality, and meaning that are very different from our usual understanding of those terms. REFERENCES Phil Ford, "Diviner’s Time" (Patreon exclusive) Karl Pfeifer (director), Hellier Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux" E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande Jung, "On Synchronicity" Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns Grant Morrison on chaos magic, the occult, and sigil creation Austin Osman Spare's sigil theory Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners William James's essays in psychical research: bibliography Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency Toronto World Youth Day 2002 Crowley, Magick Without Tears Leibniz's concept of pre-established harmony Matthew Segall on the Greek concepts of time, "Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos" Richard Lester (director), Hard Day's Night Freud, "The Uncanny" Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History Charles Taylor, A Secular Age Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, this is Phil Ford.
0:51.9	This week on Weird Studies, J.F. and I are talking about a piece of writing I've been working on, called Diviners' Time.
0:58.5	Regular listeners of Weird Studies know that these little introductions we do before most of our shows usually include a pitch for our Patreon.
1:05.9	But in this episode, it's almost like the whole show is a Patreon pitch.
1:10.6	Diviners' Time started out as a talk
1:12.4	that I gave at a tuning speculation workshop. Then last year, I revised my talk for a meeting of the
1:18.0	American Musicological Society and then posted it on the Weird Studies Patreon, where it became the topic
1:24.2	of a lively discussion between JF, myself, and our brilliant and unpredictable
1:29.0	patrons, and this, in turn, kicked off a new round of revisions. So this is the first essay
1:35.3	of written that developed within the distributed intelligence of Patreon. Patreon sometimes
1:40.7	seems to be nothing more than the tin cup that content creators are expectantly
1:45.4	shaking at passers-by in hopes of getting someone to chuck a couple of dimes their way. But it can
1:50.9	also be a collaborative medium for artistic and intellectual work. Or at least it can be if you have
1:57.1	a community of listeners as smart, original, and engaged as ours.
2:01.6	If you want to read Diviner's Time in its entirety, you'll have to join the Weird Studies Patreon.
2:06.6	This episode summarizes it pretty well, so you certainly don't have to.
2:11.6	However, for the benefit of those of you who might be on the fence about whether to invest an hour and a half of your life listening
2:17.7	to this show, here's a quick introduction. Imagine that you ask the E Ching, what can I expect to
2:23.9	happen this week? And you get hexagram 16, line five, persistently ill, and still does not die. You
2:31.3	might recognize the line, perhaps you've gotten it in other readings, but you don't yet
	...

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