An Experiment in the Superhumanities: Arts and Methods of the Improbable, Led by Jeffrey Kripal and Peter Skafish, Begins July 12
Six Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Saturdays, July 12, 19, Aug. 2, 9, 16, 23 (skips July 26), 2025
1 - 3 PM ET (NYC Time)
$155 Paid Patreon Members / 175 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
Modernity—the style of human thought that most drives the world today—has long relegated dreaming, magic, mediumship, divination, witchcraft, and other such practices to the very bottom of unrespectability, demeaning them as superstitions lacking in all epistemic power and technical efficacy. Such arts nonetheless have lived on within and at the margins of even the most modernized societies, and they have enjoyed occasional periods of resurgence and popularity. We are arguably today witnessing one such moment, as new media, the rejection of the authority of science, biomedicine, and government, and the celebration of amateurism are diluting the classically modern picture of the real, giving the curious and inclined room to explore unseen, “psychical” forces and entities.
Could intelligence, politics, and art, which we have long (and sometimes wisely) segregated from “impossible” practices, benefit from an engagement with them? This course, taught by historian of religions Jefffrey Kripal and cultural anthropologist Peter Skafish, takes the risk of answering that question through both intellectual reflection and direct experimentation. Developing Kripal’s point that our very notions of the human and thus the humanities would be thoroughly transformed were we to learn that the psychical and noetic are as substantial as the physical, he and Skafish will lead students through an experiment in practicing the methods of the humanities, such as cultural interpretation and historical analysis, in tandem with “impossible” arts of dreaming, intuitive knowing, and “psychic” reminiscence. Regardless of whether these arts are in touch with reality, their practice leads us to perceive, know, act, and create differently, including in relation to problems of such gravity that they seem unamenable to immaterial solutions.
Through readings ranging from David Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky and m. nourbeSe philip’s Zong! to the instructors’ books How to Think Impossibly and Rough Metaphysics and by practicing exercises designed by the likes of Pauline Oliveros and David Lynch, we will have a try—in French, an “essaie”—at thinking alongside and through such practices, by writing each week a brief text, i.e. an “essay,” about and in light our practice of them.
This course offers a unique opportunity to engage directly two figures in the current cultural “zeitgeist.”
Rice University professor Jeff Kripal is co-director of the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research the founder of the Archives of the Impossible, nineteen collections of materials concerning "impossible" phenomena, from UFOs and the remote viewing or "Star Gate" project to British mediumistic materials and American graphic novels.
Peter Skafish was a key participant in anthropology’s ontological turn, including through his translation and introduction of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, and he published recently Rough Metaphysics, a tour-de-force study of the unrecognized philosophy of the medium Jane Roberts and its broad intellectual implications. He is most well-known for cofounding the UAP research and policy organization The Sol Foundation and is currently writing a book on “nonhuman intelligence.”
Six Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Saturdays, July 12, 19, Aug. 2, 9, 16, 23 (skips July 26), 2025
1 - 3 PM ET (NYC Time)
$155 Paid Patreon Members / 175 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
Modernity—the style of human thought that most drives the world today—has long relegated dreaming, magic, mediumship, divination, witchcraft, and other such practices to the very bottom of unrespectability, demeaning them as superstitions lacking in all epistemic power and technical efficacy. Such arts nonetheless have lived on within and at the margins of even the most modernized societies, and they have enjoyed occasional periods of resurgence and popularity. We are arguably today witnessing one such moment, as new media, the rejection of the authority of science, biomedicine, and government, and the celebration of amateurism are diluting the classically modern picture of the real, giving the curious and inclined room to explore unseen, “psychical” forces and entities.
Could intelligence, politics, and art, which we have long (and sometimes wisely) segregated from “impossible” practices, benefit from an engagement with them? This course, taught by historian of religions Jefffrey Kripal and cultural anthropologist Peter Skafish, takes the risk of answering that question through both intellectual reflection and direct experimentation. Developing Kripal’s point that our very notions of the human and thus the humanities would be thoroughly transformed were we to learn that the psychical and noetic are as substantial as the physical, he and Skafish will lead students through an experiment in practicing the methods of the humanities, such as cultural interpretation and historical analysis, in tandem with “impossible” arts of dreaming, intuitive knowing, and “psychic” reminiscence. Regardless of whether these arts are in touch with reality, their practice leads us to perceive, know, act, and create differently, including in relation to problems of such gravity that they seem unamenable to immaterial solutions.
Through readings ranging from David Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky and m. nourbeSe philip’s Zong! to the instructors’ books How to Think Impossibly and Rough Metaphysics and by practicing exercises designed by the likes of Pauline Oliveros and David Lynch, we will have a try—in French, an “essaie”—at thinking alongside and through such practices, by writing each week a brief text, i.e. an “essay,” about and in light our practice of them.
This course offers a unique opportunity to engage directly two figures in the current cultural “zeitgeist.”
Rice University professor Jeff Kripal is co-director of the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research the founder of the Archives of the Impossible, nineteen collections of materials concerning "impossible" phenomena, from UFOs and the remote viewing or "Star Gate" project to British mediumistic materials and American graphic novels.
Peter Skafish was a key participant in anthropology’s ontological turn, including through his translation and introduction of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, and he published recently Rough Metaphysics, a tour-de-force study of the unrecognized philosophy of the medium Jane Roberts and its broad intellectual implications. He is most well-known for cofounding the UAP research and policy organization The Sol Foundation and is currently writing a book on “nonhuman intelligence.”
Six Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Saturdays, July 12, 19, Aug. 2, 9, 16, 23 (skips July 26), 2025
1 - 3 PM ET (NYC Time)
$155 Paid Patreon Members / 175 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
Modernity—the style of human thought that most drives the world today—has long relegated dreaming, magic, mediumship, divination, witchcraft, and other such practices to the very bottom of unrespectability, demeaning them as superstitions lacking in all epistemic power and technical efficacy. Such arts nonetheless have lived on within and at the margins of even the most modernized societies, and they have enjoyed occasional periods of resurgence and popularity. We are arguably today witnessing one such moment, as new media, the rejection of the authority of science, biomedicine, and government, and the celebration of amateurism are diluting the classically modern picture of the real, giving the curious and inclined room to explore unseen, “psychical” forces and entities.
Could intelligence, politics, and art, which we have long (and sometimes wisely) segregated from “impossible” practices, benefit from an engagement with them? This course, taught by historian of religions Jefffrey Kripal and cultural anthropologist Peter Skafish, takes the risk of answering that question through both intellectual reflection and direct experimentation. Developing Kripal’s point that our very notions of the human and thus the humanities would be thoroughly transformed were we to learn that the psychical and noetic are as substantial as the physical, he and Skafish will lead students through an experiment in practicing the methods of the humanities, such as cultural interpretation and historical analysis, in tandem with “impossible” arts of dreaming, intuitive knowing, and “psychic” reminiscence. Regardless of whether these arts are in touch with reality, their practice leads us to perceive, know, act, and create differently, including in relation to problems of such gravity that they seem unamenable to immaterial solutions.
Through readings ranging from David Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky and m. nourbeSe philip’s Zong! to the instructors’ books How to Think Impossibly and Rough Metaphysics and by practicing exercises designed by the likes of Pauline Oliveros and David Lynch, we will have a try—in French, an “essaie”—at thinking alongside and through such practices, by writing each week a brief text, i.e. an “essay,” about and in light our practice of them.
This course offers a unique opportunity to engage directly two figures in the current cultural “zeitgeist.”
Rice University professor Jeff Kripal is co-director of the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research the founder of the Archives of the Impossible, nineteen collections of materials concerning "impossible" phenomena, from UFOs and the remote viewing or "Star Gate" project to British mediumistic materials and American graphic novels.
Peter Skafish was a key participant in anthropology’s ontological turn, including through his translation and introduction of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, and he published recently Rough Metaphysics, a tour-de-force study of the unrecognized philosophy of the medium Jane Roberts and its broad intellectual implications. He is most well-known for cofounding the UAP research and policy organization The Sol Foundation and is currently writing a book on “nonhuman intelligence.”