Episode 66: On Diviner's Time

In the paper discussed in this episode, Phil Ford coins the term "diviner's time" to denote a particular feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has engaged in divinatory or magical practice, namely the feeling that it all means something, that the universe, with all its chaos and randomness, nevertheless contains -- or is itself -- a kind of music. This episode goes deep down the rabbit hole as Phil and JF try to wrap their heads around conceptions of time, causality, and meaning that are very different from our usual understanding of those terms.

REFERENCES

Phil Ford, "Diviner’s Time" (Patreon exclusive)

Karl Pfeifer (director), Hellier
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux"
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
Jung, "On Synchronicity"
Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
Grant Morrison on chaos magic, the occult, and sigil creation
Austin Osman Spare's sigil theory
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners
William James's essays in psychical research: bibliography
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Toronto World Youth Day 2002
Crowley, Magick Without Tears
Leibniz's concept of pre-established harmony
Matthew Segall on the Greek concepts of time, "Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos"
Richard Lester (director), Hard Day's Night
Freud, "The Uncanny"
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age