Astrology is everywhere these days. In our digital age, astrological symbols and concepts have never been more popular, or as diverse in their applications. As ancient divination practices are being actively revived and synthesized with elements of modern philosophy, astronomy, psychology, and alternative spirituality, we are compelled to ask: What does it mean to reproduce classical meanings and metaphysics in modern contexts? How do occult traditions of the past align with contemporary social ethics and values? This panel brings three professional astrologers in conversation with a cultural anthropologist to discuss the growing popularity of astrology, considering these and other questions. We will examine the “timeless” nature of astrology while also asking if there are limits to the universality of ancient knowledge systems.

In the past decade, artists, curators, and art historians have been increasingly exploring performative and installation work tied to spiritual manifestations. The retrieval of Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic belief systems and cosmogonies has been at the heart of this discussion as the art world becomes more decolonized, decentered, and polyphonic. This revamped spiritual turn in the arts signals an interest in building new, interconnected epistemologies with healing practices as a central source of concern. This conversation, with two leading figures in the Caribbean art world, will highlight how ritualistic and collective acts can provide us with tools to build more sustainable relationships with nature and with each other.

The house has long been an ideal locale for horror. The home is intended to be our primary space of security and control, a reflection of our identity and values. The single-family detached house, synonymous with family and domesticity, has long been considered the intrinsic domain of women. But what happens to the home when the traditional patriarchal family structure is challenged, and the predictable stability of the house becomes unreliable? In this talk, Leila Taylor, the author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, will look at supernatural spaces in film and literature, the image of the witch’s house, and how the home of the single, childless, autonomous woman became symbols of both enchantment and dread.

Before Joseph Smith was the American prophet who claimed to have translated The Book of Mormon, he was a seer and magician who used occult tools to search for treasure supposedly buried in the hills of upstate New York. While the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tends to underemphasize the folk-magic elements of Joseph Smith's biography, there are some people, both inside and outside of the Church, who not only see magic and esotericism as an important aspect of Smith's religious career but even see magic as a part of their own contemporary practices. Join us as anthropologist Jon Bialecki guides a roundtable discussion on the role of magic in historical and contemporary Mormonism and some of the tarot decks recently crafted.

A lecture by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh (Stanford University).

Enslaved people in the United States used materials and evinced cosmological ideas that challenged, expanded, and transcended Western European epistemological understandings of “religion,” even as said practices were presented as foils to the category. As a category deployed by researchers and a range of practices wielded by enslaved practitioners in the U.S. South, conjure names a collection of practices rendered opaque both in terms of its scholarly imprecision and its deliberate obfuscation of bondpeople’s complex inner lives by its practitioners. Often presented as base, violent, and problematically sensual due to its ties to foreign “magic,” outsiders’ renderings of conjure served as justification for American enslavement and masked the violence of slaveholding religiosity, while reifying the one-dimensionality of “slaves” in American discourses. At the same time, this historical racist stereotyping and vilification of bondpeople’s religions has often yielded a historiographical reluctance to theorize the ways religion and violence intersected in the religious productions and understandings of the enslaved. The result is often an equally one-dimensional rendering of enslaved communities. Reflecting upon the “dangerous magic” of categories like conjure in the study of religion and slavery, the presentation examines what violent practices reveal about intimate and communal conflict in the lives of southern enslaved people and the limitations of methodological categories when impeded by centuries of epistemic and historical violence. Through an examination of the case of Josephine, an enslaved woman accused of poisoning her slaveholders and killing their infant child, I explore the ways bondwomen weaponized ritual knowledge and racialized fears of Black women’s ties to harming protocols to respond to gendered forms of violence in the slavery era.