Professor Kozlowski Lectures

Today we take a break from the Blake-ian tradition of magic to visit a gang of magicians who deliberately rejected the post-Renaissance magical tradition in favor of the older traditions they preferred. In Tolkien's work, as well as that of the other Inklings, magic was rarely something that humans could wield or control, and was instead something fundamental to the world itself. Using the story of Beren and Luthien from The Silmarillion (and Tolkien's poem, Mythopoeia) as our guide, we'll see how Tolkien understood magic, and how it differs from the other magicians in our study.

Today we take a brief detour from the History of British Magick to discuss the New Wave of Science-Fiction - a topic I couldn't include in the class proper, but which seemed like a relevant subject to the study nonetheless. We'll briefly go over some of the history of science-fiction leading up to the New Wave, talk about some of the most prominent writers of the movement, and conclude with a discussion of Zelazny's Lord of Light, by popular demand.

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Today we discuss the Beat movement of the American 1960's and '70s. Like many of our subjects, the Beats were informed by Blake, magic, and the occult; like many of our subjects, the Beats were political revolutionaries; like many of our subjects, the Beats went on to influence many more contemporary art movements and ideas. But the Beats - and especially William S. Burroughs in his essays "The Invisible Generation" and "The Electronic Revolution" - were also conscious of the power of mass media in their own time, and offer a fascinating glimpse of the power of mass media in ours.

We venture down the rabbit hole of modern art criticism with a shallow dive into the history, inspirations, and major figures of the Surrealist movement - and I subject you to some naked fanboying over some of my favorite artwork.

Related readings include Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, Nadia Choucha's Surrealism and the Occult, Nerdwriter's video on Un Chien Andalou, and some good old-fashioned wikipedia trawling for weird surrealist artwork.

Today we discuss some of the most dangerous purveyors and practitioners of occult philosophy - Hitler's Nazis. Using the Extra History series on Nazi Occultism, Hitler's Monsters by Eric Kurlander (and its proof-of-concept essay), and several other perspectives by Umberto Eco, Dan Olson, and Lindsay Ellis, we'll discuss how the Nazi party grew out of pervasive unscientific and border-scientific thinking, occult philosophy, and wonky mythology, and turned these ideas into a powerful propagandistic engine that continues to influence us today - even as those same ideas undermined the Nazis' success in reality.

EDIT: Sorry about the inconvenience - I think the upload cut out around the 1:23:00 mark for some reason. I've re-uploaded the original file. I don't see any evidence that Spotify is censoring me on this one, but we'll give it another shot and see if I get any more trouble. The episode is supposed to be just about 1:39:00, and Spotify currently registers it at that length. If it cuts out prematurely again, you have my blessing to blame Spotify.

Today we discuss the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the secret magical society that included such luminaries as W. B. Yeats, Dion Fortune, and Aleister Crowley, who went on to shape the twentieth century's perspective of magic, despite the organization imploding spectacularly after barely two decades of operation.

Among our sources today are the Extra History video on Crowley and the Golden Dawn, Crowley's "Auto-hagiography," The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Francis X. King's Modern Ritual Magic, Ellman's summary of his final interview with Crowley in the Partisan Review 1948, and snippets from both Ellman's Yeats: The Man and the Masks and Foster's Yeats: A Life.

Professor Kozlowski concludes his discussion of Goethe's Faust, Part One by discussing the fall of Gretchen/Margareta, and touching briefly on the conclusion of Faust, Part Two for the sake of closure.  He managed to do all this without breaking into tears - this time.

Today we discuss the influence of William Blake on the 20th Century. By tracing the development of some of Blake's artistic choices, ideas, and themes through the 19th century and into the 20th, we will hopefully see how many of the preoccupations of William Blake, many of which were revolutionary or unusual in his work, would develop into commonplaces of our own time and culture.

Today we tackle one of the most controversial figures in the history of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche. By examining his ideas in the prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra, "The Four Great Errors" in Twilight of the Idols, and his thoughts on "Peoples and Countries" in Beyond Good and Evil, we hope to lay bare many of the preoccupations and assumptions of the late Romantic era, discuss the development of these same ideas since Blake explored them in his prophecies, and set the stage for our discussion of the twentieth century in the weeks to come.

CW: Poetic imagery of blood and gore, ravishing, and apocalyptic discussion

Today we discuss the works of William Blake that don't usually make it into anthologies and undergraduate curricula - namely "America: A Prophecy," "The [First] Book of Urizen," and "Laocoon" (as well as one EXTREMELY popular poem from the deleted preface to "Milton: A Poem", and Pseudo Ossian's "The War of Inis-Thona," for context). These works begin to describe the greater mythological project of Blake's, which extends all the way to his masterpiece: "Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion". These are trying texts, but reflect a dramatic shift in the acceptable understanding of Christianity, the understanding of a poet's role in society, and the artistic priorities of art in the 19th century.