Courses

The occult magician and the hacker/inventor both attempt to break open conventional ways of working with the forces that shape our lives.

Peter Bebergal will take participants through the history of how human beings have attempted to interact with the otherworldly using technology to ‘hack’ the machine of the universe. Stemming from a class originally given at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, this presentation will cover the legend of the golem, automata, and the uncanny valley; magic lanterns and natural magic; and spirit photography and electronic voice phenomena. Belief in the supernatural is not a prerequisite to enchantment. Technology has long offered means through which we can engage with our occult imagination.

This course starts November 20.

JM103: A Machine for Making Gods is more than an introduction to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It is an invitation to think with one of the truly original minds of the last century about the nature of time, life, memory, reality, and dream. More than perhaps any other philosophy, Bergson’s offers a sharp tool for cutting through the confusion, shallow “takes,” and outright illusions that bombard us today.

This course concluded in October 2025 and is now self-paced.

WS101: On Walking invites participants to explore walking as metaphor, spiritual practice, and embodied inquiry. As the course is drawn from years’ worth of Weird Studies episodes (at least all the way back to 2019’s “Green Mountains Are Always Walking”), it’s a journey Weird Studies listeners won’t want to miss.

This course concluded in August 2025 and is now self-paced.

MG101: How To Live In The Future invites participants to explore where maps break down and “reality” gets twisted by embarking on a psychedelic foray into evolutionary creativity and engaging in Wissenskunst (lit: “knowledge art”) at the edge of chaos.

This course concluded in June 2025 and is now self-paced.

ED101: The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick invites participants to read PKD’s 1964 Novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as a prophetic precog flash on our present metacrisis and as an oracle to provide an answer to the question, “What would Philip K. Dick have to say about the strange state of current affairs?”

This course concluded in April 2025 and is now self-paced.

JM102: It’s All Real gives serious philosophical thought to supernatural beings and otherworldly phenomena, by examining real-world encounters, exploring alternate metaphysical models better aligned with human experience, and engaging the conditions of the possible and the outer limits of reality. By the end, we may find ourselves in a new world inhabited by real, persistent entities.

This course concluded in March 2025 and is now self-paced.

MC101: Writing At the Wellspring goes beyond the typical writing or creativity workshop. Participants delve into the concept and experience of creativity as an inner collaboration with a separate force or intelligence within the psyche and examine ways to understand and navigate the tension between the drive to create and what can sometimes feel like an opposite impulse toward total stillness and inactivity that can accompany spiritual insight.

This course concluded in December 2024 and is now self-paced.

JM101: Whirl Without End explores the mystery of fairy tales, approaching them as the great, anonymous artworks that they are. The course covers their origins, structures, and functions, examining their power to generate and subvert meaning and order and contrasts the sanitized versions of fairy tales popularized by Disney with the darker, more complex tales recorded by folklorists like the Brothers Grimm. JM101 uncovers how fairy tales, often as uncanny and terrifying as any modern horror film, reveal profound truths about the human person, morality, and the cosmos.

This course concluded in October 2024 and is now self-paced.

In five joint lectures, Phil and JF cover Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Wilde’s Salomé, Montaigne’s “On a Monster Child”, Lyotard’s “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”, Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Strauss’s Salome, Oates’s “On Boxing”, Ballard’s Crash, Hickey’s “Formalism”, and Martel’s “Stay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the Truth of Extinction.” The throughline is an education in dreadful wonder.

This course concluded in July 2024 and is now self-paced.