Occult
Love is an Empty Theme Park
Notes on this season of The Bachelor
For the past few months, my friends and I watched The Bachelor almost every week. We said we were doing this …
Navigating Happiness
Reaching past self-care
One of the threads linking so-called “global cities” together runs through their subway tracks. I always found it soothing to ride …
Outcomes
I am thinking of you every day. I love you. Do you remember when we planted a red gumball in the …
La Leyenda de la Llorona
Folkloric tales of the weeping woman and her wails
content warning: racial violence In the beginning, we sleep on the hot tongue inside some tropical animal. The sky blooms open …
Metastasis
On radiation, migration, and remembrance
content warning: cancer, state violence My mother has a list of rules. Never drink soy milk (the estrogen might interfere with …
Real Black Magic
Reclaiming Black indigenous spirituality
Black Girl Magic is more than a prominent Black Twitter hashtag, popularized in 2013. It is a real and growing movement …
Beneath the Surface
Imagining a future for the unclaimed dead on Hart Island
content warning: state violence On March 31, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio backed a ten year plan to close …
Desiring Big Brother
Consider a peculiar reversal—BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING has been replaced by watching Big Brother. YouTube commands: “Broadcast Yourself,” and we obey …
The Gilded Rule
content warning: racism, Nazism “Populists don’t need to be popular. They just have to take power by appealing to an exclusionary …
Glass Coffins
Body Worlds in the twilight of storytelling
“Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and …
Straps
Outcroppings from the botanical margin
Ashes to ashes—all dead in there? I’m at the Brown University Herbarium. Working. Looking at some specimens—dead plants, really. One hundred …
Spirit Resonance
There was once a cook who was much revered for his mastery with knives. Charged to cut up an ox, the …
Breath(e)
A conversation with Ronald Lewis of the Low Mountaintop Collective
Ronald Kevin Lewis is a theater artist, dancer, poet-performer, and child of god whose group, The Low Mountaintop Collective, is performing …
Forgive Us Our Trespasses
Joel Osteen, pastor of Lakewood Church, was midway through his Sunday morning sermon when seven men seated near the front of …
Sanctuary
Faith (and Lack Thereof)
I was the youngest evangelical you never knew. No, seriously! Bar those clerical prodigies you may have seen on television, spreading …
The Tutor Wears Prada
Education as Commodity in Hong Kong
On a Saturday evening in February, dozens of teenagers line up outside translucent glass doors. Some chatter with their neighbors. Others …
(Dis)remembered Cities
Ancient Indigenous Urbanism at Chaco and Cahokia
There is a hushed-up story of Native North America, of vast civilizations of enormous complexity and knowledge that spanned this continent …
Bernie Sanders and the Glass-Proof Elevator
The non-issue of a candidate's religion
If the 2016 presidential race has revealed anything about US politics, it has shown us how little remains off-limits. This, in …
Exorcisms Afoot
Renaming and Reclaiming Spaces of Power
What is peculiar about ghosts? They are the dead. But there is of course no consensus on what it really means …
Cult of the Kempt
Lawns of the Suburban Imaginary Under Threat
We mowed them shaggy at college rentals mid-town; tightened edges on the winding subdivision drives; begged the truck to keep speed …
Magic, Magyck, Magick
“Bring a small, empty tin-can and a pencil to beat it with,” read the flyer. “It will make an ominous and …
I'm Going Home
singing towards death from The Sacred Harp
We have gathered together to sing about death. The sun shines through the windows of the Providence Friends Meetinghouse, brightening the …
Filthy, Rich Scum
[start hero] [end hero] …
Unfinished Business
ghosts on camera
Time passes differently when you’re dead. An investigation into the temporality of death would make a great documentary, but until we …
Like a Man in the Desert
a woman drinking Jodorowski’s Dune
I will present you with some facts about the documentary film Jodorowsky’s Dune: Jodorowsky’s Dune, a 2013 documentary film directed by …
We Were So Grand In The Fish Gut Versailles
What is it like to live inside an egg? First there are the countless problems of the brittle porcelain calcium floor, …
Qui Sunt Hi
Hildegaard’s spectatorship and salvation
“Who are these who are like clouds?” Languorous and melismatic, rising and falling, the resonant, deep voices of men begin Ordo …
The Next Frame
The Italian renaissance got its name for a reason. Immense technological leaps and the consolidation of wealth and power resurrected archaic …
FEMININE | DIVINE | FEMININE
notes on the second card of Tarot’s Major Arcana
We find, on the Tarot card of the High Priestess, a woman, cloaked in a blue mantle, a white cross of …
Unresolved
an astrological opposition
When replicated in dozens of directions and multiple dimensions in the natal chart, highly charged poles approximate a circulatory system. The …
LIVING LUNAR: Horoscopes
Ever feel like your sign doesn’t quite fit you? When people read traits of your ‘scope to you, do you wonder …
Horoscopes 17 November 2011
Oh, love. It's all you need. Isn't that right, @YokoOno? Easier said than done, sadly. So while we proclaim to be …
Gaga-Scopes
Want us to figure out what your moon or rising sign is? Tweet @INDYOCCULT .CapricornGAGA: Money HoneyCapricorns are the most successful …
October Horoscopes
We're here for your monthly horoscopes! Do you want to know your moon sign, rising sign, or have other anxieties we …
Bou Jeloud
The contemporary rites of pan. …