Occult Geographies

Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres:
Scientific knowledge, political trust, and religious vision

at the margins of the modern
Adrian J. Ivakhivi
Abstract
Along with other forms of enchantment that put in question the notion of a
‘disenchantment of the world,’ popular fascination with occult, paranormal,
mysterious or ‘Fortean’ phenomena takes many and varied forms in today’s
global world. Drawing on theorists of modernity including Latour and
Luhmann alongside a Whiteheadian understanding of life as process, this
article examines the geographies of such phenomena as ghosts, zombies,
conspiracies, and ‘Earth energies’ in light of their relationship to the
separation of the onto-epistemic systems of science, politics, and religion.
While contemporary theory has brought sufficient attention to power and
desire as factors in the shaping of socio-spatial relations, the study of such
Fortean phenomena suggests that more attention needs to be paid to
imagination or ‘imaginality.’ The growing interest in affect and 'non-
representational theory' are laudable moves in this direction, but the gap
between representational and psychological (including psychoanalytical)
theories will remain inadequately bridged without a more refined
understanding of the imaginal. This paper proposes a reading of these
'modern marginalia' as processual constructions aiming toward the ideals,
respectively, of knowledge, trust, and vision or ultimate truth.
0. Introduction
It has commonly been thought that Enlightenment modernity ‘disenchanted’
the world and that, in its wake, religion, superstition, and all manner of
wonder and enchantment have been forced to retreat to the margins.
Increasingly, however, scholars have questioned this disenchantment
narrative and recognized that religion, wonder, and enchantment exercise a
popular fascination that shows little sign of abeyance (Bennett, 2001; Bruce,
1992; Dube, 2002; Josephson-Storm, 2017; Landy and Saler, 2009; McEwan,
i
Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources, University of
Vermont, Burlington VT 05405.
116 Adrian J. Ivakhiv
2008; Meyer and Pels, 2003; Partridge, 2005; Pile, 2005; Saler, 2006; Taylor,
2007). This article examines the geography and spatiality of Enlightenment
knowledge practices by focusing on the margins of knowledge associated with
phenomena considered to be occult, paranormal, anomalous, or mysterious.
Among such ‘Fortean’ phenomena —so named after early twentieth-century
anomaly and mystery seeker Charles Fort— I will include beliefs about
extraterrestrial visitors, angels and apparitions, ghosts and zombies, sightings
of unknown biological species, mysterious Earth energies, forgotten
civilizations, and conspiracy theories —in other words, the panoply of ‘weird
phenomena’ commonly judged to be ‘unexplained’ and featured in such
venues as the magazine Fortean Times and the 1990s television series X-Files.
While mainstream opinion often holds these areas to be marginal in value if
not entirely valueless, these phenomena carry an allure and fascination that
have made them popular not only among subcultures of aficionados,
believers, and advocates. I wish to suggest here that it is this fascination that
contributes to the quest for knowledge, trust, and vision in a world that is
always in process, motion, and ‘quest.’
Any examination of these phenomena falls into a paradox of classification
in that the terms used to describe them, and even the presupposition that
they make up a single field —that poltergeists, unidentified biological species,
government conspiracies, and visiting extraterrestrials are all of the same
category of object— delimits their ontological status in a particular way. Are
they enigmas, anomalies, real phenomena the nature of which has simply not
yet been determined? Or are they popular fallacies, cognitive illusions,
trickeries of con artists or ravings of lunatics? Does their study represent
legitimate or alternative science, para-science, pseudo-science, or some mix
of these categories?
Instead of assuming a single response to these questions, I will suggest
three heuristic categories or ‘dimensions’ by which to examine and situate
them in relation to three organizing systems, in Niklas Luhmann’s (1995)
sense, of modern onto-epistemology: specifically, to science, politics, and
religion. Forteana constitute a part of the scientific impulse insofar as they are
framed within an ‘economy of knowledge,’ an economy concerned with what
is, what is not, and the means of distinguishing between the two; they engage
with the realm of politics when they are framed within an ‘economy of power-
knowledge,’ focused on questions of trust and authority —on who can or
cannot be trusted, and on which knowledge is authorized as legitimate and
which remains illegitimate; and they enter into the mode of religion insofar as
they concern an ‘economy of meaning’ or of ‘sacred power-knowledge’ where
the predominant question is what is ‘really real,’ true with a capital ‘T,’ and of
‘ultimate concern’ (Tillich, 1957). While current social theory commonly
grapples with the first two of these categories, the third points to a dimension,
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 117
that of the visionary or spiritual imagination, that has not been engaged with
the same rigor. All three, however, point to a processual understanding of
each of these categories, whereby each involves the taking of phenomena as
objects of ‘prehension’ (Whitehead, 1978) toward the aim of the construction
of an ideal: respectively, the ideal of knowledge, for humans as knowers of a
reality that can, with effort, be known; the ideal of trust, for humans as
negotiators of a reality that would otherwise remain obscured by powerful
interests; and the ideal of ultimate truth, for humans as potential knowers of
and participants in a divine or sacred reality.
I will look at these three dimensions in turn, in part to underline the
parallels between them, but also to suggest that they may constitute a
sequence of progressively deepened engagement with a reality that remains
always dynamic, opaque (in part), and ungraspable. I will also propose some
generalizations about the ‘geographies’ of each, that is, of the ways they have
been distributed in space or, more properly, in time-space (May and Thrift,
2001). This will allow for their historical contextualization within the
unfoldment of a modernity and postmodernity that has been variously
theorized by a range of thinkers including Latour (1991), Luhmann (1995),
Foucault (2001), Habermas (1987), Jameson (1991), Lefebvre (1991), Polanyi
(1957), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Gare (1995), and Griffin (1988, 1997).
Since I will not be able to cover the entire range of Fortean phenomena, I will
focus my comments, in the first category, on the appearance of ghostly,
mysterious, or otherwise anomalous entities; in the second, on conspiracy
theories involving unusual or occult sources of agency; and in the third, on the
movement that has developed around so-called Earth mysteries, including
power places, crop circles, and mysterious telluric energies. My observations
will remain generalized —a meta-anthropology of advanced modernity
(Latour 1991) rather than an ethnographically particular and localized analysis
of any specific phenomenon or belief. In the process, I hope to show the
cultural relevance of Fortean phenomena for understanding processes by
which scientific knowledge, political trust, and religious or spiritual ‘vision’ are
sought in the time-spaces of today’s postmodernizing world.
1. Economies of knowledge: The distribution of light and shadow

At the most common level of thinking about Fortean phenomena, they are
matters of fact or fiction, the known versus the unknown or that known to be
untrue. Particular lake monsters or extraterrestrial visitors either exist or they
do not. The category ‘knowledge’ is taken to be self-evident: we know what it
means to know something, and we know something when we have clear
empirical evidence of it. Forteana are those phenomena that have not been
conclusively proven to be real. Viewed less generously, they are assumed to

be unreal unless and until proven real. Viewed more generously or open-
mindedly, they are granted their own space, an ambiguous, suspended
middle-realm we might call ‘parascience’ as in the science of the possible but
not yet proven, fields of endeavor that share in the modalities of science but
whose precise relationship to science is uncertain or unstable. Cryptozoology,
parapsychology, and ufology —which Henry Bauer (2001: 14) has called the
“‘Big Three’ subjects” in anomalistics— provide paradigm cases of such
epistemological border zones. Each has developed its methods and protocols,
its scholarly societies (the International Society of Cryptozoology, the
Parapsychological Association, the Center for UFO Studies) and journals (e.g.,
Cryptozoology, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Journal of UFO Studies) which
attempt to bring scientific respectability to their fields, but whose legitimacy
remains underdetermined. At the far end of the spectrum from the skeptical
perspective is that which sees these phenomena in the most generous light
possible, either as simply real in themselves or as largely real in one sense or
another. So, for instance, ghosts and poltergeists might be thought of as
energetic remainders or ‘soul remnants’ of their physical and human
forebears, but not all claims of ghosts, or Nessie sightings, or crop circles are
necessarily admitted as genuine.
There is, then, an economy of knowledge and of reality that works on two
levels: (1) only certain things are real and others are not; in this sense, it is
reality itself that parses out the difference between the two categories; (2) our
knowledge of what is real can be less or more complete, and the line where
that knowledge ends can be located along a continuum represented by reality.
In this second sense, the economy of knowledge is parsed not by reality itself
but by the present limits of knowledge. Reality is in principle decidable and
determinable; or as Donald Rumsfeld might have (infamously) put it, there are
known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and our task is
to bring more of the latter into the former categories. Erring on the side of the
known, professional or self-proclaimed ‘skeptics’ such as members of the
Committee for Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP,
publishers of Skeptical Inquirer) and the Skeptics Society (publisher of Skeptic
Magazine), portray Fortean and parascientific knowledges as forms of failed
reason or unreason, antitheses or primitive precursors to Enlightenment
reason, to be cast off as humanity moves forward on its ascent to knowledge.
In their hands the Enlightenment narrative takes on a normalizing
prerogative, calling for a policing of boundaries to hold the forces of
superstition and unreason at bay.
Ironically, however, one need only look at the immense resources of
reasoned argumentation, scientific fieldwork and analysis, and other
paraphernalia of science applied to establishing the veracity of paranormal
claims by parapsychologists, cryptozoologists, and others, to see how

eminently scientific much of their research appears. When cerealogists (who
study crop formations) deride crop circlemakers as ‘hoaxers’ rather than
artists, they uphold the same boundary between the genuine and the false as
do professional skeptics (Roberts, 1999). When magician James Randi
challenges psychics by offering a prize to any who would successfully
demonstrate their powers under his controlled conditions, or when, on the
other side, Georgina Bruni challenges crop circlemakers to duplicate a “Julia
set” design on film (Irving and Bruni, 2002), the two sides speak to the same
truth-claims and position themselves on the side of reason and their
opponents on the side of preconception and faith (cf. Gieryn, 1983; Hess,
1993; Miles, 1999). Similarly, as Knight (2000) argues, when critics of
conspiracy theories, like Pipes (1997), Robins and Post (1997), or Showalter
(1997), portray conspiracy thinking as a “mysterious force with a hidden
agenda that takes over individual minds and even whole societies”, they “end
up replicating the very mode of paranoid thinking they seek to condemn” (7).
On the science-nonscience continuum, Fortean endeavors are often seen
as forms of incomplete, premature or proto- sciences, or ‘wild’ frontier
sciences which are untamed, prone to error until a more consensually held
paradigm emerges. For an open-minded observer not engaged in these
debates, this position may appear a reasonably agnostic one. Yet decades of
detailed and painstaking work by parapsychologists suggests not that the
phenomena they study are real or unreal, but that the methods they employ
—the same rigorous scientific methods successfully employed in more
respectable fields— leave too much latitude for maneuvering and not enough
exactitude to determine a convincing answer to the questions being posed.
They are undecidable (Matthews, 2004), but their indeterminacy carries
lessons —which is the main point pursued and insisted upon by researchers
in the field of ‘anomalistics,’ that is, the interdisciplinary study of scientific
anomalies, not just as mysteries to be solved, but as part of a social process of
claims-making and counter-claiming, evidence presentation, theory
development and adjudication (Bauer, 2001; Truzzi, 1998).
To understand the geography of anomalous phenomena at this level of
inquiry, we would have to ask where they occur and how these places relate
to the places where knowledge, science, and reason are found or produced.
Fortean phenomena, in this light, are located out of the spotlight of reason.
The spotlight metaphor suggests that enlightenment, when it occurs, does not
occur all at once but unfolds in increments, lighting up proximal spaces
before it reaches distant, less frequented spaces. Darkness remains at the
margins, in liminal places, in poorly mapped backwoods and backwaters,
deep forests and distant mountain ranges (where we might find Bigfoot or
Yeti), at the bottoms of lakes and oceans (where Nessie dwells), in cemeteries
and zones associated with the dead, or in racially coded slums of Third World
cities (where human-beast hybrids like Chupacabra might lurk). As the Earth
becomes more fully mapped and the lifeworld increasingly colonized, the
spaces of Fortean play are pushed to the margins and, ultimately, to outer
space. In her ‘dark history of fairies, hobgoblins, and other troublesome
things,’ historian Diane Purkiss (2003) writes:
Human nature seems to abhor a blank space on a map.
Where there are no human habitations, no towns, where villages
dwindle into farms and farms into woods, mapping stops. Then
the imagination rushes to fill the woods with something other
than blank darkness: nymphs, satyrs, elves, gnomes, pixies,
fairies. Now that we have mapped every inch of our own planet,
our remaining blank spaces lie among the stars. Unable, like our
forebears to tolerate space uninhabited, we have made with our
minds a new legion of bright and shining beings to fill the gaps
left by our ignorances. Aliens are our fairies, and they behave
just like the fairies of our ancestors. (3)
Anomalous space, then, is uncharted space in which reason has not yet
been purified of its ‘others’ —magical thought, imaginative fantasy, and
superstition. Purkiss’s analysis extends from the ancient Mediterranean world
to the present and examines fairies, nymphs, and other folkloric beings
alongside their less sanitized relatives such as vampires, poltergeists, and
aliens. The liminal status of such beings makes them analogous to spirits and
other entities found in the narrative and ritual of indigenous societies (cf.
Mageo and Howard, 1996). Collectively, Purkiss suggests, they are associated
with transitions —of life (birth, initiation, death), time (midday, midnight,
changes of season), and space (liminal areas between civil space and wild
terrain) —and with the remainders of the past, of ancestors and of ‘unfinished
business’, that do not fit comfortably within the everyday world. They are
“Janus-faced, ambiguous,” “gatekeeper” figures (Purkiss, 2003: 4) whose
appearance responds to the boundary anxieties of the times. So they appear
at one time as dark-skinned child-stealers and abductors, at another as
mechanically grey-skinned biological experimenters, impregnators and
genetic thieves, and at a third as radiant “space brothers” heralding a new age
of cosmic brotherhood. They reveal anxieties about otherness onto which are
projected differences of race, gender, and species. Even at their most
mundane, as in cryptozoologists’ fascination for unknown creatures such as
Nessie or newly discovered species of giant squid, they can be seen as a way
of addressing anxieties about species extinction or the disappearance of
wilderness (Dendle, 2006).
But this is getting ahead of ourselves. It is true that cognitive and
existential uncertainty is unlikely to disappear anytime soon —the mysteries
of death and of outer space, to note just two examples, will continue to haunt
and compel the human imagination. But the arbitration of reality, as seen
from within this economy of knowledge, is primarily about the ongoing
discrimination and articulation of the real from the unreal. This first level of
examination fits comfortably within an empiricist and realist ontology. Its
shortcomings can be seen from a range of post-positivist and non-realist
critical perspectives. In a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading, for instance, this
economy of knowledge consists of the articulation of the symbolizable real —
the real as constructed by society— but not the actual Real, which forever
eludes symbolization. In such an understanding, language and the symbolic
can never get us at the Real, and the world of identities (Oedipal and other
kinds) will always remain a social construct that papers over a gap in our
being, a construct haunted by a world that is ontologically primary but forever
inaccessible except in our dreams and nightmares. Analogously, in a
Whiteheadian, process-relational understanding, the arbitration of reality as
an ‘economy of knowledge’ is always subject to the elusiveness by which that
reality reconstitutes itself at every step of the way.
2. Economies of power-knowledge:
The distribution of trust and suspicion
More common than either a psychoanalytic or a process-relational reading,
however, is one which takes suspicion of authority as its motivating premise.
Viewed through a hermeneutic of suspicion, truth is always truth-in-quotation-
marks, since some have more say in defining it than others. The economy
here is one of trust: we cannot trust every source equally, and, in times of
systemic political instability, there is no longer any common ‘we’ since
subjectivity is shaped in part by shadow and suspicion. Knowledge can be
revealed or concealed, censored, stigmatized, marginalized, and forbidden; it
can be rendered legible or opaque. Beyond official knowledge is the realm of
unauthorized, illegitimate ‘knowledges,’ claims, rumors, speculations,
dissensions. Revelation occurs through leaks, rumors, and betrayals, and is
perpetually being obscured by falsehoods, the production of ‘fake news,’ and
the spy-versus-spy tactics of insurgency, counterinsurgency, ‘false flag’
operations, and the like.
This is of course the realm of conspiracy theorizing. Conspiracy theories
give lie to the notion that all alternative modalities of thought constitute
disavowals of Enlightenment modernism. Like Enlightenment thinking in
general, conspiracy theories are founded on a hermeneutic of suspicion that is
common to all forms of critical theory; but unlike it, they reject any faith in a
readily attainable enlightenment. The world is too complex and fraught with
uncertainty, its shadows conceal mischievous agents working to prevent
enlightenment from dawning. Yet if conspiracy theory risks pushing the

hermeneutic of suspicion into a methodological paranoia, it relies on an
ultimate faith in exposure: once the dark forces are held up to the light, their
true nature will be revealed. Conspiracy theory, as Jodi Dean puts it,
“demonstrates the constitutive antagonism between transparency and
revelation,” that is, the transparency supposedly promised by modern science
and a democratic public sphere and the revelation that that public sphere may
itself be “invested in specific lines of authorization and subjection” (Dean,
2000).
Recent conspiracy culture, Peter Knight (2000:3) has argued, is
characterized by “a cynical and generalized sense of the ubiquity —and even
the necessity— of clandestine, conspiring forces in a world in which
everything is connected.” This interconnected world can be read as an artifact
of modern communications technology, with the World Wide Web as its
emblem (and cybernetics its predecessor) and networks, connectivity, and
viral risk its key metaphors. But it also bears uncanny resemblance to a world
that long predated the Internet. The popular success of The Da Vinci Code
(Brown 2003), along with earlier novels like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s
Pendulum (1988), suggest a historical analogue for conspiracy culture in
European occult cosmologies, which had been premised on the mysterious or
invisible interconnectedness of all things in the universe —plants and planets,
bodily fluids and stars— and which flourished widely before their overcoming,
as the modernist narrative has it, by science (Berman, 1981; Couliano, 1987;
Vickers, 1984; Yates, 1979).
As anthropologists of globalization have shown, tropes of conspiracy and
suspicion can be found throughout non-Western responses to Westernization
(Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993; Geschiere, 1997; Graumann and Moscovi,
1987; Marcus, 1999; Silverstein, 2002; Stoller, 1995; Taussig, 1987; West and
Sanders, 2003). West and Sanders (2003) argue that a global diversity of
occult cosmologies —systems of belief, both local and translocal, which
perceive themselves to be surrounded by “a world animated by secret,
mysterious, and/or unseen powers” (6)— are flourishing in a world that
increasingly touts both global interconnectedness and transparency as its
guiding lights. These conspiracy cosmologies are responses —reflections,
refractions, inversions, and kaleidoscopic refigurings of actual and imagined
power relationships structuring an increasingly complicated global world. As
Fredric Jameson puts it, “Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping
in the postmodern age” (1991: 38). The information-saturated postmodern
media universe, with its ubiquitous eye in the sky of satellite surveillance,
confers a paranoid modality to postmodern life, and Jameson reads the high-
tech paranoia of the cyberpunk and conspiracy genres as “degraded”
attempts “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system,”
the system of world capital (1991: 38; cf. Flieger, 1996, 1997). His readings of
conspiracy films in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson, 1992) show a
prescient sense for the decade of The X-Files, a series which first appeared a
year after that book was published. As a political fantasy about the
labyrinthine workings of an unmappable and highly secretive system of global
domination, with its individual cases of Fortean phenomena woven into a
tight web of conspiratorial intrigue, X-Files represents a barometer of popular
occultism, especially if the word “occult” is taken at its literal meaning of
occluded knowledge, knowledge that is hidden or underexposed, and which
may be brought to light only through painstaking and clandestine
investigation.
Conspiracy thinking, or more broadly the attempt to weave together
whole-cloth cosmologies in resistance to dominant and official narratives, has
taken on new contours in the era of neoliberal globalization. Comaroff and
Comaroff (2003) argue that conspiracy narratives “presume the eclipse of
middle-order social institutions, of conventional sites of production and
power, of a collective sense of morality, sociality, and history” (297). It is in
such boundary-blurring contexts that icons of threatening otherness such as
vampires, zombies, and alien abductors appear. In Steve Pile’s (2005)
analysis, the figure of the vampire has haunted the imperial and colonial
imaginary, for both colonizer and colonized, and now lurks in the global
imaginary of trans-boundary flows and circulations. Vampires embody the
risks of the body, blood, mortality, intimacy, the circulation of shadowy
agents infiltrating across borders and boundaries. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for
Pile, represented the encounter between center (London) and periphery
(Transylvania) in the nineteenth century expansion of Europe and of the
British empire through the development of railroads, shipping, and industrial
capitalism. For Marx, capitalism itself was vampiric, penetrating into and
cannibalizing land and labor in its process of capital accumulation, while for
racists vampires represent the risk of the pollution of blood, racial purity, and
sexual miscegenation and violation. Both cases mark an anxiety around
identity and the self-other boundary.
Zombies are similarly double-coded, often marking white anxieties about
non-whites, primitive religious practices, slaves, or totalitarian societies, but
also representing the colonized’s fear of possession by mental and economic
colonizers (Warner, 2002). Comaroff and Comaroff (2002) argue that the
zombie re-emerged in South Africa in historical conditions of economic
disruption, when domestic and communal production practices have been
disrupted by distant market forces and labor has been commodified and
subjected to competition and predation by poorly understood new forms of
wealth (795). In the post-liberation South Africa of neoliberal economic
deregulation, with unemployment hovering at close to 50% (790) and migrant
laborers from neighboring countries scapegoated for the high unemployment,

the popularity of zombie tales marks a “process of fervent speculation, poetic
elaboration, forensic quest” in response to a “seismic mutation in the
ontological experience of work, selfhood, gender, community, and place”
(798-9).
In western societies, alien abduction narratives are today’s border
violation stories, “everyday transgressions of the boundaries demarcating the
limits that define reality. As such,” Jodi Dean (1998) writes, “in the
demystified societies of the present they provoke skirmishes with arbiters of
the real, with science, law, and the press” (163). Where the space of common
discourse, the public sphere, has become irreparably pluralized, its borders
blurred by a “kaleidoscopic jumbling together of partial and fragmented
visions of reality” (135), “common sense” is lost and we are left only with
“particular” and often incommensutable “senses” (24). Alien abductions, in
this context, register the ontological insecurity of a world perceived to be
borderless and unprotected.
The figures of these transitional beings populating conspiracy culture echo
anxieties associated with the ‘authorized entry only’ zones of science and
technology. The mysteries of genetic experimentation and of military and
surveillance technologies become, in alien conspiracy cultures, narratives of
alien implants, government-alien conspiracies harnessing human genetic
material to breed alien races, and so on. Fears of scientific experimentation
and resulting ecological collapse figure in the X-Files as unexplainable goo
coming from the ground, viral outbreaks triggered by scientific experiments,
uncanny biological hybrids, mysterious residues or side effects of creepy
shadow-government experiments —all very alien yet deeply embedded in our
brains and bodies. Paranoia today encompasses perceptions of conspiracy,
collusion, hidden agency, trauma, catastrophe, victimization, surveillance, risk
and its uneven distribution, racial profiling and scapegoatism, racial and
territorial boundary blurring, disease and infestation, all of it contributing to a
lingering sense of epistemological or ontological doubt, a “panicked” sense
“that normality is not normal anymore, that ‘somebody’ has done something
to the way things used to be, [. . .] that we have been —changed” (Harding
and Stewart, 2003: 260).
The geographics of this economy of power-knowledge, then, take on
multiple contours to the extent that the world is not flat and intervisible but is
curved and striated with the warp and weft of power, translucency and
hiddenness, trust and suspicion. The most extreme form of ‘other’ space is
‘grey’ space, space under erasure, which has literally been blacked (or whited)
out —what we might call out of the picture space, zones that no longer appear
on maps because they have been concealed and fenced off from official
knowledge. Here we find the Dreamlands and Area 51s (Nevada’s Area 51,
the officially unacknowledged military facility near Groom Lake, is perhaps

the paradigm case of such a zone, and is one to which conspiracy hunters
flock), the Roswells and Bermuda Triangles, militarized zones and systems of
state terror premised on the ‘disappearance’ of political undesirables (such as
Argentina’s desaparecidos), and so on (Gordon, 1997: ch. 3; Paglen, 2006;
Patton, 1998).
More ubiquitously, fences and borders demarcate the spaces that have
been blacked out to people for whom they are barriers. Even as modernity
touts its vision of transparency and enlightenment, the world remains
structured by barriers and bottlenecks —barriers to knowledge and to
passage, atopias and aporias. The geographics of the economy of power-
knowledge mirror the uneven geographies of the global political economy,
within which some have the power to move and participate in global flows
and circulations while the movements of others are monitored, bounded,
administered, regimented, checkpointed, channeled, open and closed
according to opaque systemic needs. Gates and thresholds are the markers of
this geography: thresholds, as Pile (2005: 174-5) puts it, are “not simply
open” but are “porous,” permitting certain movements but not others, acting
as much as “points of departure as sites of meetings or passing-by.” To those
who perceive boundaries as prisons, what is on the other side is rendered
selectively visible, displayed and marketed through mass media as well as
phantasmagoric rumour and oral narrative, such that they become spaces of
positive and negative imagination, utopian projection and dystopian
suspicion.
If there is any location that transcends this bottlenecked economy of trust,
a space of perfectly transparent representation, it would be the space of the
watchers, the eye in the sky of satellite surveillance and monitoring. But the
structures of panoptic observation, once they are set in motion, provide no
ultimate haven even for agents in their own ranks (as the fictional Fox Mulder
and the real ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame would both attest). Even the
ostensible freedom of liberal democratic capitalism must protect itself from
enemies both imagined and real. The covert detention facilities or ‘black sites’
of the global security space of the ‘war on terror,’ the Guantanamo Bays, new
gulags, and drone launching sites, are just the outer edges of a network of
surveillance that polices itself internally and externally. Surveillance cameras,
like the bureaucratic systems of rationality and efficiency they are meant to
serve, aim for transparency but breed secrecy and paranoia, treating sources
of suspicion of their own power as conspiratorial (cf. Marcus and Powell
2003).
Ontologically, at this level of the ‘economy of power-knowledge’ there is
no way to proceed without recognizing the multiplicity and heterogeneity of
‘truths.’ Where, in its relation to science, spectral space was found at the
outer, uncolonized edges of the known world, in relation to politics it is at the

border zones between worlds, at thresholds, crossroads, and transition points.
Where ghosts traditionally inhabit graveyards (thresholds between the living
and the dead) and haunted houses (thresholds between present inhabitation
and that of the past), today’s ghosts, vampires, and abducting aliens work in
the blacked-out spaces behind closed doors, fences, and border points. In the
groping toward a global social order, disparities of power and wealth
necessitate such borders, fences, and blacked-out spaces; the quest for trust is
one that can hardly be satisfied under such conditions.
3. Economies of the sacred: The distribution of chaos and order

Where the transition from the first (scientific) to the second (political) levels
takes us through the passage-point of trust, that from the second to the third
(religious) deepens this passage: from trust in the presenters of the facts to
what we might call foundational trust, a matter of faith or skepticism in the
foundations of modernity or of the cosmos writ large. Where political trust
could, in principle, be regained with the shadowy forces being exposed and
brought to light, at this foundational level light and darkness would have to be
reversed altogether and a restitution brought about through a revolutionary
upheaval, a transformation of cosmic proportions. Where conspiracy theories
show the occult imagination at work, weaving together disparate threads to
make scattered sense of them but remaining immanent to the given reality,
flourishing in its nooks and crannies, at this third level these threads become
fully woven and constitute an imminent alternative to the dominant order,
ready to overthrow it and reconstitute reality anew. Such a transformation
would lead to a liberation from a state of enslavement or illusion, the
restoration of some prior state that had been upended in the creation of the
current common world, or the instauration of a future that has only been
presaged, intimated, but which is to be born like a phoenix out of the ashes.
Profanity here would be replaced by sanctity, division and severance by
renewed wholeness, the passing and illusory by the real and eternal.
Here we enter the arena of prophetic and revolutionary discourse as
represented by hopes for a millennial transformation which can take many an
ideological form (evangelical Christian, Islamist, fascist, nationalist,
revolutionary Marxist or Maoist), by neo-Gnostic visions of liberation from the
all-encompassing ‘matrix’ or a global cleansing (as in the Heaven’s Gate space
cult), by New Age channelers’ prophecies of galactic reconcordance, New
Paradigm visions of a collective transformation through psychological
liberation and renewal grounded in a transpersonal or collective unconscious,
or the eco-rapture of Gaian Earth spirituality, wherein humanity rediscovers
its green heart and its kinship with trees, whales, and all of nature. Here is the
‘politics of ontology’ as the late Harvard psychologist and alien abduction
theorist John Mack described it (Dean, 1998: 57), a politics premised on the
possibility of simultaneous individual and collective emancipation and
‘healing.’ While the forms of agency involved in the struggles over the
previous two levels of knowledge were primarily human —the nonhuman
figuring as shadowy trickster figures at best— here agency comes from
beyond, out of a cosmic commonwealth that transcends the currently
dominant system. It may be the collective unconscious, an organized
collectivity of space brethren, the revolutionary proletariat led by the party or
leader, or some other salvific or remedial force that speaks to individuals in
the form of dreams, visions, or occult transmissions, but it is believed to be
trustworthy to a degree that, at our second level of analysis, seemed
inconceivable.
The geography here is therefore not one of marginal spaces nor of blank
spaces, blacked-out and silenced spaces, but of openings, portals to alternative
worlds that underpin the known universe and are thought to be guiding it to a
r/evolutionary leap of some sort. All that is left for us to do is to tap into them.
In the literature of New Age channelers, for instance, the Earth is portrayed as
redolent with invisible and mysterious, but psychically perceivable activity,
filled with ‘energy portals’ and ‘interdimensional doorways’, dissemination
points, stargates, spiritual presences and alien beings. In the tradition of post-
1960s countercultural representations of sacred places, on which recent New
Age literature builds, we find geographic tropes of ‘networks of light’, an
‘Aquarian conspiracy’ of spiritual communities (Ferguson, 1987; Spangler,
1977; Sutcliffe, 2003:65ff.; Thompson, 1974), monumental landscapes
associated with natural ‘power’ or with the spiritual authority of ancient
civilizations (as at Stonehenge, Macchu Picchu, the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, or
the imagined civilizations of Atlantis, Lemuria, Hyperborea, Shambhalla). It is
no accident that many such places are located away from major urban
centers, and that the cultural sites are associated with civilizations imagined
as an ancient alternative to the ‘disenchanted’ and dispirited modern West.
Such a neo-Romantic and often neo-Orientalist (Bartholomeusz, 1998;
Mehta,1991) projection of Earthly power is found in the movement dedicated
to so-called ‘Earth mysteries’ (Devereux, 1992; Heselton, 1991; Ivakhiv,
2005). Before examining this movement more closely, however, it would be
useful to summarize the argument so far, as I have made a jump of sorts
between the second and third ‘levels’ that requires further commentary.
4. Modernity and its ghosts

The first two of the three levels or dimensions outlined thus far —the
scientific and the political— reflect the products of what Bruno Latour (1991)
has called the ‘modern constitution,’ a tacit agreement by which Nature and
Society have become identified as separate realms, to be studied,
represented, and managed differently: in the first case dispassionately by the
objective natural sciences, in the second incorporated into the subjective
politics of interest as these are governed by modern systems of political, legal,
and philosophical representation. Meanwhile, religion was separated from
both science and politics, becoming a matter of belief in the unproven and
unprovable (while science took care of the empirical and provable) and a
private and individual affair (while politics took care of collective issues in the
public sphere). In the process, a “bracketed” God “could descend into men’s
hearts without intervening in any way in their external affairs” (Latour, 1991:
41, 33; and see Latour 2013). Other spheres, such as those of art (as the
realm of individual creativity) or the economy (that of exchange relations),
have similarly been carved out in ways that grant each autonomy from the
others and that keep each free of the impurity and corruption that would arise
through their mixing. The picture, in Latour’s terms, is one of simultaneous
‘purification’ and ‘translation.’ As each system has been separated from the
others through a series of translations, displacements, and delegations, each
is granted its own proper space, its requisite institutions, procedures, and
operational spaces (laboratories and journals for science, representative
democracy for politics, the marketplace for economy, churches for religion,
galleries for art, courts for law, schools for education, hospitals and clinics for
medicine) and its standards of disciplinary judgment (objectivity or veracity
for judging science, ‘beauty’ for art, ‘justice’ for law, health and normality for
medicine, etc.) by which the world is deterritorialized of its previous relations
and reterritorialized into those appropriate to a smoothly functioning
modernity.
In this narrative anthropology of modernity, we have proceeded from a
state of pre-modern messiness to a clean separation of spheres. And yet, as
Latour (1991) argues, “we have never been modern”: ‘nature’ and its
scientific spokespersons have always been cultural products, just as culture
remains ecologically embedded, and their interrelation not only consists of
hybrid relations but actively produces new hybrids. Similarly, the political —
the space of the polis, where issues of power and decision-making are worked
out— and the religious, the space of belief and devotional ritual, have and
continue to be intermingled in various ways. Art, or aesthetically impacting
forms of expression, has throughout history been infused with religious
impulses, political intent, or scientific knowledge. Economic interactions have
been integrated into social life such that the exchange of objects may have
encumbered its participants to social obligations or political expectations. And
human identities or subjectivities have in the past been inextricably entwined
with places, landscapes, and material ecologies. The modern separation of
spheres has been a work in progress and remains subject to reversion back
into the messiness still found in those places less ‘enlightened’ and
modernized than the West. Modernity is thus mapped both temporally, as
proceeding from a hybrid, primitive, and/or corrupt past to a purified and
enlightened present (or future), and spatially, as generated in Western
metropolitan centers and permeating outwards to their wild peripheries.
This modernity rests on the premise that its guiding ideals —of knowledge
and enlightenment (economy 1), political and representative transparency
(economy 2), and emancipation (economy 3, minus the religious thematic) —
are natural and obvious. These are not seen as sacred ideals, since sanctity
has been relegated to the realm of religion and therefore to unprovable
individual beliefs. But where alternative knowledges, political systems, and
emancipatory ideals are suggested, these are easily derogated through an
association with religion and/or pre-modern beliefs and practices, such as
those of magic, superstition, and the occult (Styers, 2005). Moderns do not
want their politics, knowledge, or economic relations to be corrupted by
spirits or ghosts.
If we take reason to be not simply the application of mental operations,
but an entire configuration of discursive and material techniques that
redistribute power and desire across space, then we must examine
Enlightenment modernity as a spatial phenomenon premised on the principle
of bringing the world to the light that dispels shadows. In the light of, and in
the name of, Enlightenment reason, land and territory have been subjected to
and enclosed within geographical mapmaking and the system of practices
that enables the administration, parcelization and distribution of these spaces
for the good of the collective subject of modernity —the productive individual
and/or the sovereign state. Progressively, land and lifeworlds have been
enclosed, assimilated, and incorporated into a modern regime of power-
knowledge, disenchanted of previous enchantments and libidinal
investments, disembedded from previous socialities and relationalities
(Carter, 1987; Cosgrove, 1984; Harvey, 2006; Lefebvre, 1991; Mitchell, 1988;
Polanyi, 1957; Scott, 1998). Problematic, blurred and hybrid relations have
been eliminated as land and space have been encompassed within a grid of
legal institutions and regulations, figural and as well as literal lines and fences
providing clear title deeds to their owners and reducing their meanings
primarily to their exchange value. Yet this new striation of space, as Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) would call it, involves a simultaneous ‘smoothening’ for
the flow of capital and its intermediaries. It is at once deterritorialized and
reterritorialized along different and more global lines. This colonization of

lifeworlds brings lands previously unowned or held in common through
traditional networks of obligation and exchange into the single political-
economic grid of modern capitalism, premised on the principles of property
ownership, commodity exchange, and legal-juridical control.
Modernity has been described as a “consciousness of radical temporal
rupture” (Pels, 2003: 30; Habermas, 1987). The quintessential modernist
gesture, even in the arts, has been the “repetitive erasure of preceding
moments,” the ceaseless re-enactment of tabula rasa (Venn and Featherstone,
2006: 463). Modernist space is premised on a clean slate purified of any
historical claims and counterclaims: it is pure object, natural and given, to be
turned into personal (or collective) property through the Lockean (and
Marxian?) principle of productive labor. And yet, ever since the enclosures
and dispossessions that established colonial, imperial, and modernist space,
land and property have been haunted by ghostly remainders: by the land
claims of indigenous populations, rooted in traditions of communal land
management and sacred relations with nonhuman and spiritual beings; by the
resistance of peasant and subsistence-based groups; by ethnic territorial
claims, kinship and tribal relationalities, histories of blood and belonging
written into the landscape; and by the underground remainders, and
reminders, of spectral pasts —bones and ruins which can turn up at any
moment, invoking intermingled human-natural histories which perpetually
threaten to obscure and obstruct the free play of commodity exchange and
property ownership and development. If the Enlightenment drew a line
“between reason and its more shadowy others —magic and witchcraft,
irrationality, superstition, the occult”— reason has remained “haunted by
what it excludes” (Buse and Stott, 1999: 3, 5). The modernist purification of
magic and modernity, as Pels (2003) puts it, is “constantly being betrayed by
the translations and mediations needed to relate the two” (32; and see Latour,
1991; Styers, 2004).
Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstructing the binary oppositions of
modernity becomes pertinent here. Where popular scientist Carl Sagan
devoted his last book to the celebration of science as ‘a candle in the dark’ of
the ‘demon haunted world’ (1997), a world haunted by the residue of
imaginative unreason, Derrida’s late political writing circled around the notion
of ‘hauntology,’ by which he suggested that the haunting, like the ‘h’ grafted
onto the French noun ontologie, while silent is not eradicable (Derrida, 1993).
Rather, it represents an illimitable residue of undecidability permeating the
known and the modern, one that is neither present nor absent, neither
reducible to presence (the real) nor to absence (the imagined) (Buse and Stott,
1999: 10). The anomalous is unsettling not because it opposes the real, the
known and the normal, but because it evades and scrambles the binaries
real/unreal, known/unknown, and normal/deviant. In such an uncanny state,

“one can never be in possession of a place,” since claims to possession are
undercut by counter-claims addressing, soliciting, and implicating them, if in
an inscrutable and incommensurable language (Gelder and Jacobs 1998: 138).
Ghosts and all manner of hauntings thus represent unfinished business,
the lingering traces of past traumas and injustices, anxieties around property
relations, around our debts to the dead (ghosts) or to our dependents
(changelings and abducted children), around the threshold between the
personal/familial and social worlds, between ‘freedom’ and the enslavement it
was built on, wealth and the dispossession that made it possible (cf. Gordon,
1997). Rural landscapes as well as urban ones are inhabited by the ghosts of
the past (Bell, 1997; Read, 2003). As Edensor (2004: 834) points out, even
quintessentially modern spaces such as cities, with their ‘wild zones,’ edge
lands, industrial ruins and marginal sites, are full of “spaces of surplus
materialities and meanings” which “swarm” with the ghosts of the past, the
“spectral interstitial residue” (Stewart, 2002: 356) of memory, and of present
longings for transgression and disorder. In an economy of knowledge, such
specters are a matter of empirical evidence. In an economy of power-
knowledge, they become a matter of claims and counter-claims, an ever-
present reminder of debts, dependencies, and infinitely regressing
calculations. In an economy of sacred power-knowledge, they become a
matter of profound contestation, where the antagonists are situated on an
incommensurably bifurcated playing field from which each casts her spells
and enchantments. The alternative movements that have grown around the
notion of ‘Earth mysteries’ in the last three or four decades represent one
such form of contestation, which ties together a concern for Earth’s ecology
with a thoroughgoing critique of modernity and hopes for an overturning of
the latter in favor of a new covenant with the former.
5. Earth mysteries and life energies in late capitalism

The ‘Earth mysteries’ movement takes much of its impetus from a vision of
the Earth’s hauntedness not so much by ghosts as by science and visionary
reason. In The View Over Atlantis (1969), one of the books that launched the
movement, mystical luminary John Michell deconstructed the modern
worldview, for his readers, by positing that today’s secular, rationalist, and
utilitarian science is no science at all compared to the ‘sacred’ science of the
ancients. Synthesizing such previously disparate Fortean fields as the study of
ancient architecture and sacred geometry, numerology, pyramidology,
Chinese geomancy, and Alfred Watkins’ evocative notion of ancient ‘ley
lines’, Michell presented an alluring narrative of a glorious past whose

fragments haunt and inspire his readers:
A great scientific instrument lies sprawled over the entire
surface of the globe. At some period, perhaps it was about 4000
years ago, almost every corner of the world was visited by a
group of men who came with a particular task to accomplish.
With the help of some remarkable power, by which they could
cut and raise enormous blocks of stone, these men erected vast
astronomical instruments, circles of erect pillars, pyramids,
underground tunnels, cyclopean stone platforms, all linked
together by a network of tracks and alignments, whose course
from horizon to horizon was marked by stones, mounts and
earthworks. (Michell, 1969: 69-70)
In Michell’s version this universal civilization was led a male elite of druid-
like geomancer-engineers. In archaeologist Marija Gimbutas’s (1991)
matricentric version of a similar alternative prehistory, the central role is
played by a peaceful agricultural civilization of Neolithic Goddess worshippers
which allegedly dominated much of Europe before the arrival of horse-riding,
patriarchal Indo-European warriors. The two visions have been combined in
literature (as in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series of visionary novels)
and in more recent New Age and ecospiritual writings, in which the Earth is
Goddess (Gaia) and the recovery of ancient sciences, more harmonious and
holistic than ours, is believed to be spurring the transformation of partial,
mechanistic, and destructive sciences into new forms by which we are to
regain the rightful spiritual relationship between people and nature. It is such
a restoration of order that is believed to herald the end of thousands of years
of —take your pick— empire, patriarchy (Eisler, 1987; Sjoo and Mor, 1987),
‘dominator culture’ (McKenna, 1992), agricultural civilization (Quinn, 1991),
reptilian conspiracies (Icke, 1999), or collective amnesia (Cope, 1998; Leviton,
2002).
Earth mysteries discourse has taken on an increasingly detailed
geographical texture as its followers’ cultural capital and mobility have
increased. Richard Leviton’s The Galaxy on Earth: A Traveler’s Guide to the
Planet’s Visionary Geography (2002), an encyclopedic synthesis of this line of
thought, draws on ideas from several religious and mystical traditions;
scholars including Mircea Eliade, Gerschom Scholem, James Lovelock, and
Doris Lessing; and New Age cosmological theories and speculations about the
‘galactic connections’ between Earth and stellar constellations and galaxies.
Leviton sees the entire galaxy, including the astrological meanings ascribed to
the planets and star clusters, reflected in the Earth’s geography, and
advocates ‘responsible sacred sites tourism’ —travel to sacred sites with
spiritual intent, to ask Gaia ‘where it hurts’ and find out what should be done
in response —as a means of contributing to ‘planetary detoxification.’ For
writers in this genre, the ‘power places’ of New Age and ecospiritual
pilgrimage constitute an alternative, counter-modern geography that reverses
the valences of modernity’s centers and margins (Ivakhiv, 2001, 2003, 2005).
This form of pilgrimage falls into a longstanding tradition that includes the
nineteenth century Romantic canonization of areas such as England’s Lake
District and New York State’s Catskill mountains, the American West and its
national parks, and other repositories of sublime nature. Resistance to
modernity’s encompassments and disenchantments has occurred repeatedly,
among Romantics, gothic novelists, folklorists and Herderian nationalists,
Spiritualists and mystical occultists of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and counterculturalists and New Agers of the 1960s and 1970s
(Hutton, 1999; Löwy and Sayre, 2001; Owen, 2004). In turn, they feed and
interact with local and ‘essentialist’ movements celebrating pre-modern or
‘traditional’ cultures in the developing world.
All of these, however, emerge dialectically within a capitalist modernity
that has itself become more flexible and accommodating of the symbols and
affects of cultural resistance. Spirituality is easily commodified, places
signifying resistance have become places of spiritual tourism, manifold forms
of libidinal investment and enchantment once considered subversive have
become incorporated into and mobilized by consumer culture (Carrette and
King, 2005) . In the resulting hybrids, voices of counter-modern and anti-
global or anti-imperial resistance mix with the flows of new globalisms, new
tourisms, and neo-primitivisms. New Age pilgrimage presumes an
infrastructure and ‘power geometry’ (Massey, 1994) that accommodates the
movement of westerners to and between the locales where non-westerners
play hosts to the desires of their guests. For this reason, New Age spirituality
has been described as the ‘spiritual logic of late capitalism,’ even while it
pursues counter-modern, romantic and non-capitalist goals (Hanegraaff, 1996;
Heelas, 1992; Ivakhiv, 2003; Mikaelsson, 2001; Urban, 2000). To see how this
tension is worked out within the discourse of ‘Earth mysteries,’ it would be
useful to examine more clearly the central role played by the notion of
‘energy’ in this discourse.
Like complexity, flow, and connectivity, ‘energy’ is part of a grab bag of
metaphors that have proliferated in the wake of the past century’s
technological and communications revolutions. Energy metaphors have
helped shaped contemporary ecological science, though they have been partly
supplanted by chaos and complexity metaphors (Worster, 1994a). Both serve
among the discursive frames of ‘soft’ and ‘fast’ capitalism (Agger, 1989; Luke,
1998; Thrift, 1997, 1999). Much New Age discourse reflects a desire to tap
into the ‘energy’ of the Earth and to channel Gaia’s energy flows. In part, this
idea of Earth energies is a modernization of the notion of ‘ley lines,’ which
Alfred Watkins conceived in the 1920s as ancient merchant paths connecting
features of the archaic British landscape (Ivakhiv, 2005). Energy metaphors

worked their way into New Age discourse from the spiritualist and
metaphysical movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but
also from scientific developments of the cybernetic, televisual, and (now)
digital eras. Like other quasi-scientific jargon, they are intended to grant New
Age discourse a semblance of authority, while their ambiguity makes for a
polysemic applicability to anything and everything. Alternative medical
traditions, from Chinese acupuncture and martial arts to alternative western
systems such as polarity therapy, Reichian bodywork, and Reiki, conceive of
the body in energetic terms: a healthy body is one in which the flow of life-
energy is unimpeded. If the Earth is identified as the living body of Gaia, then
it seems reasonable to suppose that life-energy flows through ‘her’ body and
that there will be places, chakras or energy centers, where the energy is more
concentrated than elsewhere —Gaia’s erogenous zones, so to speak.
At the same time, the energy metaphor provides a flexibility that allows it
to become readily incorporated into the flow of capital. Energy suggests a
convertibility, whereby one form of energy can be transformed into another.
In a not atypical example of such a conversion of energies, New Age
pilgrimage leaders Suzanne McMillan-McTavish and Glen McTavish (1994),
founders of Sacred Sight Journeys International, recount their several-year
mission to complete a “circuit” of “transceiving stations” that would “unite
the Americas on the ley lines (earth's energy grid).” Having completed several
dozen of these ‘stations,’ the couple moved to Arizona, where Glen got a real
estate license to sell vacation interval ownerships. “Glen's mission now,” the
couple recount, “is to move large amounts of financial energy and real estate
(earth energy) around to create the physical spaces for Suzanne to anchor the
Light for Spirit to move into.” Earth energy thus becomes real estate, which
becomes financial energy, all in an invisible circuit of flows and
transformations.
Another case of alternative ‘energy’ discourse, that of Wilhelm Reich’s
orgone energy, can provide an instructive example of the ways the three
dimensions of Forteana overlap and interact with each other. A psychological
and scientific pioneer, Reich is often considered to have been Freud’s most
radical student, a political and sexual revolutionary well ahead of his time. His
theory of body armoring, according to which cultural influences shape and
mold bodies to repress and channel libidinal impulses into social structures of
obedience and compliance, has become part of the discourse of therapeutic
‘bodywork’ and influenced radical thinkers as diverse as Marcuse, Foucault,
Deleuze and Guattari, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and Paul
Goodman. Reich’s notion of life energy, which he termed ‘orgone,’ paralleled
and predated many other energy-based forms of alternative medicine. At the
level of the economy of knowledge, Reich’s scientific efforts to establish
orgone as a physical and measurable energy, his development of ‘orgone

accumulators,’ ‘cloudbusters,’ and other technical means to harness this
energy, all constituted a parascience —the scientific study of something that
may be real or illusory. His obsessive efforts to develop these technologies,
coupled with his difficulties working within the psychoanalytic and Marxist
establishments— resulting in expulsion from both the International
Psychoanalytic Society and the German Communist Party, with his book The
Mass Psychology of Fascism more predictably being banned by the Nazis —
lent an urgency to Reich’s activities. Ultimately, this urgency transmogrified
into a conspiratorial paranoia that, in the end, seemingly proved its own case.
Reich developed a messianic idea that his orgone discoveries would liberate
all of humanity, but that they also threatened all powers-that-be. He became
convinced that he was being persecuted not only by the FBI (which
investigated him due to his Communist and immigrant background) and the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (which prohibited the sale of orgone
accumulators beyond the state of Maine, where he had settled), but also by
Communist spies and extraterrestrials. Accused of contempt of court for
violating a court injunction against moving his orgone accumulators across
state lines, the unrepentant Reich was ultimately sentenced to two years
imprisonment, his books burnt —a drastic measure, by any account— and his
orgone accumulators destroyed by FDA agents (Sharaf, 1983). He died in a
federal penitentiary in 1957. What began as an experiment in science —or
pseudoscience, according to detractors— thus traveled the full route through
occult conspiracy (accurate or otherwise) to liberatory, messianic mission. The
data on Reich remain difficult to reconcile to this day: the fact that hundreds
of his books were burned suggest that he wasn’t merely mad or criminal, but
that his ideas were thought to constitute a danger to someone or other; but if
so, that would lend credence to his suspicions about the system of control
that they threatened. Like similar cases in the field of anomalistics, that of
Reich may in the end remain undecidable, resting as it does in a space of
incommensurable worldviews which maintains a frisson of fascination for any
who endeavor to explore it.
The common element underlying the many forms of alternative ‘energy’
discourse, from Earth energies to orgone fields, is the notion of a network of
bio-organic relations that are productive, that are at some level accessible to
us, and that underlie the sedimented husk of social, political, or other
structures, providing the power in potentia of dramatic and liberating change.
This network model shares ontological characteristics with models that are
flourishing in academic and intellectual life today, including chaos and
complexity theories, nonlinear dynamical systems and network theories, self-
organizing and emergent structures, and related forms of ‘non-
representational’ thinking (Thrift 2008). Hayles (1990, 1994), Terranova
(1996, 2004), and others have shown that these are shared across a range of
cultural strata, from elite and professional cultures to popular and subcultural
arenas. Thrift (1997), for instance, documents a shift in dominant metaphors
in corporate managerial discourse from more “scientific” forms of
administrative management to a view of management as a form of speedy,
constant adaptation and adjustment, “surfing” and “going with the flow”
within a larger environment that is fast-moving, “fuzzy,” and unpredictable.
Such shifts should not be surprising; indeed it has been argued that nature
always takes on the hues and features of the technologies used to mediate our
relationship to it (Williams, 1980). To recognize this tells us little about the
political functions new metaphors are made to serve; they are, at the very
least, multivalent and pliable. As such models are extended into spheres of
everyday life and of the biopolitical governmentalities adjudicating them, the
questions that remain to be asked are: what are the implications for
knowledge of new metaphors such as that of nonlinear complex networks?
What are the implications for politics and the economy of trust? What are the
implications for the foundational grounds of shared meaning? Seen a certain
way, these metaphors may appear to herald a liberation from the strictures of
modern epistemology, yet it is far from clear what they are liberating us into.
6. Conclusion: Imaginality and the promises of spectres

For believers in one or another Fortean phenomenon or parascientific
endeavor, the virtue of pursuing Forteana is taken for granted. Viewed
scientifically, they can provide us with new, heretofore unknown knowledge.
Viewed politically, they offer the possibility of new revelations —the opening
up of knowledge that had been suppressed by the powers that be— and
therefore a powerful, effective, and equalizing knowledge. Viewed religiously,
they proffer a knowledge that can emancipate the soul and provide
restoration and renovation, allowing for the overcoming of a social order that
has lost its meaning. For scholars, the virtues of studying such phenomena
can also be outlined according to these three dimensions of science (or
epistemology), politics, and religion. Epistemologically, they tell us about the
nature of knowledge and about the changing boundaries between different
kinds of knowledge practices. Politically, their study can tell us about
changing configurations of trust and suspicion, transparency and paranoia,
within a reconfiguring global ecumene. Finally, their study can inform us
about changing notions of the sacred and secular, about the globalization of
religion, and, in the case of Earth energies, about the role of Earth, nature,
power, and energy as tropes within changing religious, national, and global
imaginaries.
With respect to the geography of Fortean phenomena —that is, both the
occurrence/appearance of such phenomena and their social salience and
pursuit— these phenomena tell us several things about the time-spaces of
modernity. Insofar as modernity is the pursuit of enlightenment and
knowledge, this pursuit occurs in a spatially and temporally uneven world and
produces its own unevennesses, creating geographies of temporal and spatial
displacement within which certain sites, peoples, nations, and activities are
empowered while others are deprivileged, rendered less-than-modern and
relegated to the past. The space of modernity, however, remains haunted by
its others, its purified arenas perpetually threatened by infection and
corruption from its wild edges. Secondly, insofar as modernity is the pursuit
of transparency, the systems it sets up to make possible that transparency
generate their own occlusions, concealments, and erasures. In eliminating the
barriers of traditional societies, modernity sets up new lines of authorization
and subjection, facilitating certain flows while bounding, enclosing, and
suppressing others. But it is precisely in, or around, those epistemological and
political border points and conflict zones that alternative knowledges grow.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Fortean phenomena point to the
role of imagination as an important dimension of social and cultural life, one
which should be treated alongside the dimensions of power (or power-
knowledge) and desire, both of which are now fairly ubiquitous in social
theory. Perhaps the better term here is ‘imaginality’ —the human capacity to
produce images by which to shape relations, give forms to bodies, channel
desires, and configure sensory data into narratable and visualizable patterns
and motivating suasions. Insofar as modernity is the pursuit of a rationalized
world, disenchanted and disinvested of occult, hidden, and sacred forces, its
uneven enactment produces countervailing forces which draw desires,
symbolic discourses, visual-sensory orientations, bodily comportments and
practices, into new and oppositional alignments. To the extent that modernity
is premised on a disavowal of imaginality, with imagination rendered at best
a pale copy of reason and at worst its stark opponent, the recognition of the
unevenness and injustice associated with Enlightenment reason serves as a
catalyst for movements we moderns recognize as religious and sacred. This,
in part, is why the disenchantment and secularization of the world has hardly
proceeded as Weber and others had imagined it would.
Imagination, then, is productive, motivating, and formative (that is, form-
generating); it is not the opposite of objectivity, truth, and reality, but is
constituent in the production of these categories and their opposites. The turn
toward ‘affect’ in recent social theory is in part a move in the direction of
recognizing the potency of the imaginal (e.g., Massumi, 2002; Clough, 2007;
Thrift, 2008; Ivakhiv, 2013, 2018); arguably, it reflects an advancement of
psychoanalytically oriented analysis into an engagement with embodiment,
sensation, physiological response, and collective subjectivities. There remains

a wide berth, however, between socio-theoretical approaches premised on an
individually and psychoanalytically conceived notion of subjectivity and those
focusing on textual and visual representations and meanings. Within that
terrain there is much room to develop an understanding of imaginality as the
production of animating, bodily and sensorially engaging, affectively charged
images and forms, capable of organizing, shaping or ‘channeling’ desire and
affect into particular relationalities.
In a process-relational understanding, as I have argued elsewhere (Ivakhiv,
2013), images are the forms by which we process (or prehend, to use
Whitehead’s term) the world. In imaging, we give ourselves to those images
so that they carry us and the world into novel alignments. Seen in this light, a
new set of guiding metaphors, such as the metaphorics of energy, networks,
and connectivity, should be seen as neither good nor bad, but rather as an
imaginal ordering, rooted as it is in technical, discursive, and material
developments, capable of being put to use toward divergent ends. A closer
examination of imagination, or imaginality, in the geographies of ‘occulted’ or
deprivileged knowledges can tell us much about the reserves available for
critiquing the world as well as remaking it. I hope to have made the case here
for such an examination by situating these ‘knowledges’ within the larger
story of modernist purification (including the disciplinary separation of onto-
epistemic systems) and hybridization that Latour and others have begun to
tell about modernity and its ambiguous aftermath.
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Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres:

Scientific knowledge, political trust, and religious vision

1. Economies of knowledge: The distribution of light and shadow

conclusively proven to be real. Viewed less generously, they are assumed to

claims by parapsychologists, cryptozoologists, and others, to see how

enlightenment from dawning. Yet if conspiracy theory risks pushing the

laborers from neighboring countries scapegoated for the high unemployment,

the officially unacknowledged military facility near Groom Lake, is perhaps

outer, uncolonized edges of the known world, in relation to politics it is at the

3. Economies of the sacred: The distribution of chaos and order

4. Modernity and its ghosts

reterritorialized along different and more global lines. This colonization of

real/unreal, known/unknown, and normal/deviant. In such an uncanny state,

5. Earth mysteries and life energies in late capitalism

lines’, Michell presented an alluring narrative of a glorious past whose

features of the archaic British landscape (Ivakhiv, 2005). Energy metaphors

orgone as a physical and measurable energy, his development of ‘orgone

6. Conclusion: Imaginality and the promises of spectres

sensation, physiological response, and collective subjectivities. There remains

Gieryn T F, 1999 Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line

Sanders T and H G West, eds. 2003 Transparency and Conspiracy:

Williams R, 1980, “Ideas of Nature” I Problems in Materialism and Culture:

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