Weird Studies

Best known as the wife and partner of Timothy Leary, Rosemary

Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire, a memoir about her experience with autoimmune encephalitis. Her second book, The Great Pretender, which investigated a seminal study in the history of mental health care and diagnosis, was shortlisted for the the Royal Society's 2020 Science Book Prize. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Photo from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at UCLA, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Susannah Cahalan, The Acid Queen

Weird Studies, Episode 189 with Jacob Foster

Marion Woodman, Canadian feminist author

Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & '70s

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Eric Davis, TechGnosis

Lutz Dammbeck, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet

Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography

Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

Blanche Hoschedé Monet, French painter

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

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In this episode, JF and Phil paddle into the marshlands of Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 masterpiece The Willows, a tale Lovecraft once called the finest weird story of all time. They explore how a narrative in which almost nothing happens can conjure a cosmic dread more potent than a legion of monsters, and how Blackwood’s genius lies in revealing the spiritual

Photo by Derek Dye, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows”  

Weird Studies, Episode 55 on “The Wendigo”  

SCTV

Algernon Blackwood, “The Psychology of Places” in The Lure of the Unknown

Weird Studies, Episodes 14 and 15 on Stalker

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Sue Clifford and Angela King, England in Particular

Michael Dames, Pagans Progress

J. G. Ballard, English fiction author

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In this episode, JF and Phil are joined by Jacob G. Foster—sociologist, physicist, and researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Santa Fe Institute—for a conversation about their recent collaboration in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Their co-authored essay, “Care of the Dead,” explores how the dead continue to shape our cultures, languages, and ways of being. Together, they discuss the process of writing the piece and what it means to say that the dead are not gone—that they persist, and that they make claims on the living.

The article is available here: https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/154/1/166/127931/Care-of-the-Dead-Ancestors-Traditions-amp-the-Life

**References**

[Peter Kingsley,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kingsley) English writer 

Weird Studies, [Episode 98 on “Taboo”]) https://www.weirdstudies.com/98) 

John Berger, “12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead” in _[Hold Everything Dear](12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead)_ 

Bernard Koch, Daniele Silvestro, and Jacob Foster, ["The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change”](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/659bt_v1) 

Gilbert Simondon, _[Imagination and Invention](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781517914455)_ 

William Gibson, _[Neuromancer](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780441007462)_ 

[Phlogiston theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) 

George Orwell, _[1984](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780451524935)_ 

HP Lovecraft, [“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cdw.aspx) 

Weird Studies, [Episode 187 on “Little, Big”](https://www.weirdstudies.com/187) 

[John Dee,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee) English occultist 

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, _[The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780195320992)_ 

Robert Harrison, _[The Dominion of the Dead](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780226317939)_ 

Gilles Deleuze, _[Bergsonism](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780942299076)_ 

Elizabeth LeGuin, _[Boccherini’s Body](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780520240179)_ 

Elizabeth LeGuin, [“Cello and Bow thinking”](http://www.echo.ucla.edu/cello-and-bow-thinking-baccherinis-cello-sonata-in-eb-minor-faouri-catalogo/) 

Johannes Brahms, _Handel Variations_ 

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In this continuation of their non-linear journey through the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the ninth Arcanum: the Hermit. Walking through darkness with his lantern and staff, the Hermit invites us to break from the collective and seek a direct relationship with the Real. This is the card of the seeker, the misfit, the sage, and the wanderer. As tends to happen in these tarot episodes, the hosts take the opportunity to range across many topics, connecting the Hermit to Jung’s Red Book, the Desert Fathers, angels and demons, the I Ching, contemporary politics, and more.

Support us on Patreon

Order Christian Bunyan's Weird Studies poster here.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.

Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast,Cosmophonia.

Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

Find us on Discord

Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau

REFERENCES

Carl Jung, The Red Book

Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker

Samuel Beckett, Irish writer

Emily Dickinson, American poet

Temptation of Saint Anthony

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

Weird Studies, Episode 103 on the Tower card

The Gnostic Tarot

Nigel Richmond, Language of the Lines

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

John Minford, The I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot

Wolfgang Petersen (dir.), The Neverending Story

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John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and history, the real and the fantasy, memory and imagination. Little, Big is also a book that JF and Phil have been planning to discuss for as long as Weird Studies has existed. In this episode, they are joined by writer and scholar Erik Davis to explore the enduring charms and mysteries of one of the greatest—and most underrated—American novels of the late twentieth century.

Order Christian Bunyan's Weird Studies poster here.

Support us on Patreon.

REFERENCES

John Crowley, Little, Big

Special Guest: Erik Davis.

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In this episode, JF and Phil continue their conversation on the wedge, their figure for the epistemological divide between approaching reality from the heart and exploring it with the mind. As the discussion unfolds, the wedge begins to reveal itself not as a rigid binary but as a spectrum—one that stretches from ultimate thickness to ultimate thinness. Could thinking, then, may be the art of navigating this epistemic gradient, seeking the sweet spot where the self meets the world, each on the other's terms?

Visit Weirdosphere for more details on Erik Davis's upcoming course, The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick.

Support us on Patreon.

REFERENCES

Weird Studies, Episode 155 on ‘The Unbinding’

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"The Wedge" is a key concept for Phil and JF. When exploring weird phenomena—from artworks to ghosts, and everything in between—one tends to emphasize one or the other "end" of the event. At the thin end of the Wedge, the focus is on subjective experience: how it felt, what it was like, and its personal significance. At the thick end, the emphasis shifts to what actually happened, independent of how it was experienced. Though their roles sometimes switch, Phil generally thinks from the thin end, while JF approaches things from the thick. In this episode, they begin unpacking the implications of the Wedge for making sense of reality’s stranger aspects.

Header image by SavidgeMichael via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Weird Studies, Episode 184 on David Lynch

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Due to scheduling conflicts and a series of unforeseen events, JF and Phil have had to push the release of the next official episode of Weird Studies back by one week. To tide you over, we're unlocking a bonus episode previously available only to our Patreon supporters. It serves as the perfect preface to Episode 184, which will be released on February 26, 2025. Apologies for the delay, and thanks for your patience.

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David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have delved as deeply into the strange, the beautiful, and the terrifying as Lynch, and few have had as profound an influence on Weird Studies. His films have long been a touchstone for JF and Phil's discussions on art, philosophy, and the nature of the weird. To honor his memory, they decided to devote an episode to Lynch's work as a whole, with special attention paid to Eraserhead—the nightmarish debut that announced his singular vision to the world. A study in dread, desire, and the uncanny, Eraserhead remains one of the most disturbing and mysterious works of American cinema. In this episode, we explore what makes it so powerful and how it connects to Lynch’s larger artistic project.

To enroll in JF's new Weirdosphere course, It's All Real: An Inquiry Into the Reality of the Supernatural, please visit www.weirdosphere.org. The course starts on Thursday, Feb 6, at 8 pm Eastern.

A video for the piece For David Lynch is available on Pierre-Yves Martel's YouTube channel.

REFERENCES

David Lynch, Eraserhead

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Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is one of the great novels of the twentieth century and a prime example of literature that transforms the deeply personal into something universal. For Phil and JF in this episode, the novel serves as the foundation for a discussion on spiritual journeying, the ideal of enlightenment, and the challenge of living in an ensouled universe.

Sign up for JF's new Weirdosphere course on the supernatural, starting on February 6th, 2025.

Purchase tickets to the Weirdosphere screening of Aaron Poole's Dada on February 1st, 2025.

Support us on Patreon.

REFERENCES

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

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