Phil Legard

Simon Bradley and Phil Legard discuss their continuing work on location-based public events chiefly concerned with personal responses to place. They explore how their methods enable the development of public events that allow for a distributed construction of meaning that is shared between artist and attendee. Arising from these concerns Simon and Phil’s current work considers strategies involving fragmented narratives, embodied narratives, sonic art and locative media for the creative delivery of oral history within a philosophy that assumes the codependence of memory and place.

This chapter outlines a theoretical model of ‘Creative Seekership’ derived from the study of occulturally-situated music-makers. Here, occulture is considered a highly mediated cultural sphere, providing music-makers with resources which may leveraged as part of an ongoing process of seeking spiritual truths and creative inspiration. Within the context of the Creative Seekership model, the chapter also outlines three forms of practice often employed by such music-makers, which connect creative absorption to the sense of a porous self-world boundary between the practitioner and the transpersonal forces which direct their work. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for applying these concepts to other areas of occulturally-embedded creativity beyond music.

Sound and music have always played a profound role in ritual - especially in those of the magical variety. Whether consciously performing a ritual or going about more mundane business, we immerse ourselves in sound and music daily - it often provides us with an emotional and aesthetic baseline, and it becomes profoundly embedded in our sense of our sense of self identity. This talk explores how music was used by the milieus associated with chaos magick in the 80s and 90s. It is a journey not only through industrial music, neofolk and electronica, but through the instrumentalisation of music toward magical ends - particularly in the form of auditory sigils and pathworkings.

A public talk based on a section of my PhD Thesis. The talk has been delivered at several venues (Folklore Centre, Todmorden; Viktor Wynd Museum, London; Clarke Foley Community Centre, Ilkley, etc): “All those dark Victorian cellars and storm-blasted moors seemed to create a hotspot for UK magick at that time…” – Peter Carroll The moors of West Yorkshire have plenty of antique folklore: giants, fairies, apparitions, and hermits have been enduring fascinations, particularly since health-tourism sprung up around towns such as Ilkley, enchanting the minds of those who came seeking novel therapies like hydropathy.However, in this talk Phil Legard turns from the myriad tomes on local folklore and their well-inscribed tropes, towards more contemporary manifestations of the weird on the moors: to UFOs, the Great Old Ones, cloaked spectres, entheogenic witches sabbats, serpentine goddesses, and the adventures of chaos magicians, psychic questers, pagans, and neo-antiquarians amidst the gorse and standing stones. Phil’s account of Rombald’s Moor in contemporary occulture draws extensively on the zines and small press publications of the 80s and 90s to vividly describe a landscape of contemporary enchantment in the heart of Yorkshire.

This paper presents findings from my PhD studies on esoteric musicianship. In methodological terms, my research draws from the ethnographic, sociological, and cognitive turns within contemporary esoteric studies, to develop an inter-disciplinary approach to analytic autoethnography. The focus of this autoethnographic study was my own work between 2001-2013 as Xenis Emputae Travelling Band: a project which sought to evoke the genii locorum (“spirits of place”) of the Yorkshire landscape through musical practices deemed esoteric or mediumistic: particularly the employment of imaginative listening during the devising and production processes, and the discursive situation of improvisation as a form of “channelling.” One consequence of this study is a proposed model for esoteric creativity which describes the relationship between the appraisal of experiential and affective states, and their subsequent development into musical “paths of practice.” An analysis of the creative processes involved in elaborating experiential knowledge into paths of practice also suggests a number of domains in which the boundaries for the study of musical esotericism may be expanded. While the musical structure of a work should be considered alongside historic, cultural, biographical, and discursive contexts, it is also useful to examine whatever subjective domains we may be able to access. Partridge has emphasised the importance of developing an awareness of affective space in the study of religious/esoteric music, which my work complements through an application of Weinel’s representational-affective framework. This approach is particularly suited to describing the phenomenological process of creating music in a contemporary production setting – that is, one dependent on the use of recording technology and audio workstations, rather than through notated composition. The findings from this research suggest further approaches to studying the significance of representational-affective domains within the creative processes and reception of other musical forms associated with esotericism, such as ritual ambient and black metal.

This chapter presents two practitioner accounts by co-authors Theo Gowans and Dave Procter concerning place - real and virtual - and the contemporary Leeds noise scene. These accounts are prefaced by an analysis of the present scene’s heritage from The Termite Club: particular attention is paid to how discourses around the ethos of noise in Leeds have shifted since the Termite Club ceased its activities, primarily as a consequence of the venues in which these performances now take place.

This thesis explores the theme of ‘creative seekership’ within contemporary esotericism. Creative seekership, as presented here, deals with the ways in which artistic practices are employed in the pursuit of esoteric knowledge and experience. Such practices are often attributed magical or esoteric significance by artists, ritualising their cultural productions, and emphasising the already-blurred boundaries between art and magic. The concept of creative seekership is developed over the course of this research to construct a holistic theoretical model that demonstrates the embedding of creative practices in the subjectivities of experience, the interpretive and discursive frameworks of knowledge, and the broader horizon of ‘occulture’ and its cultural milieus. This work is unusual in that creative seekership is studied through the application of autoethnographic research methods. This autoethnographic research concentrates on examining creative seekership through accounts of my own music-making from the late 1990s to early 2000s. While scholars engaged in ethnographic work in contemporary esotericism studies have become increasingly visible in their own research, the implications of ‘insider scholar’ or ‘complete member researcher’ identities in autoethnographic research have been under-explored – primarily as a consequence of the academic boundary work with which the field was engaged until the 2010s. This thesis, therefore, takes the opportunity to explore the possibilities of developing a form of ‘analytic autoethnography’ in accord with the scholarly and interdisciplinary perspectives that have been established in esotericism studies over the last three decades. Here, the practice of autobiographical writing is approached from a ‘grounded’ perspective, allowing theoretical models to emerge from hybrid compositional and analytical processes. The outcome of this process presents scholars not only with a theoretical framework for analysing creative seekership in contemporary esotericism, but also demonstrates how autoethnography may contribute to the field of esotericism studies as a plausible methodology for future researchers.

At ESSWE9, Bernd Christian-Otto launched the RENSEP initiative by asking what methodologies might enable contemporary scholars to re-negotiate the traditionally perceived boundary between academics and practitioners. One question asked was whether autoethnography could be such a viable approach. There are certainly a growing number of scholars, such as Olivia Cejvan (2021, 2023), Cavan McLaughlin (forthcoming), and myself (2024) who have begun to explore how autoethnography might be integrated into their research. This contribution will examine the breadth of autoethnographic approaches that have recently been applied in esotericism studies, paying particular attention to how discourses on rationality are negotiated by scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners. The study of discourses around rationality have profoundly shaped esotericism studies, yielding influential ideas such as esotericism being the Enlightenment’s ‘waste-basket category’. A similar dialectic of rationality versus irrationality has also played out in esotericism studies itself since the 1990s. For example, Hanegraaff’s formulation of ‘Western Esotericism 2.0’ addressed the ‘religionist’ perspectives of earlier scholars, superseding them with an empirical and historiographic project founded upon a neutral ‘methodological agnosticism’. When Hanegraaff subsequently proposed ‘Western Esotericism 3.0’ – an open and interdisciplinary phase of the esotericism studies programme – he further cautioned against the potential of ‘esoteric (or krypto-esoteric [sic])’ agendas re-entering scholarship. In this respect, scholar-practitioners – particularly those pursuing autoethnography – may feel they are treading a discursive tightrope: how do they negotiate their status as dual-identity researchers? How do they integrate their experiences in ways befitting the empirical standards of scholarship and what tensions exist there? Beyond these fundamental methodological concerns are also subtle factors which may deeply affect their identity, such as how to navigate the potentially disenchanting effects of prolonged work in scholarly paradigms. This contribution intends to open up discussion on these themes, as well as providing tentative suggestions for developing autoethnographic practice in esotericism studies.