On ontological weirdness (Erik Davis)

[Magical Realist]

“In this book, I will argue that, at least under conditions of high weirdness, the causal relationship between cultural codes and “experience itself” gets twisted into a loop whose unstable and resonant dynamics actually drive the mode in question.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“After all, the encounter with supernatural agents brings us back to arguably the most archaic religious idea (or at least the most archaic idea of religious scholars): animism, the belief in, or communication with, otherworldly beings. High weirdness is weirdness animated.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“The first domain is aesthetic. The weird describes a peculiar domain of feelings and images associated with stories, spaces, atmospheres, and moods that relate to the uncanny, the fantastic, the perverse, and the macabre side of the supernatural. The weird here is essentially a genre—not just of cultural production, but of affect and possibility, of the visionary imagination and the experimental body. Books can be weird, but so can subcultural happenings. The second domain marks the weird as a space of deviancy, social or otherwise. Weird things are anomalous—they deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations, sometimes quite radically. In the human world, you are being weird or a weirdo when you refuse or transgress dominant behavioral and conceptual codes. Despite its numinous, supernatural ambience, the weird also hunkers down in the margins of the actual, as a centrifugal turn away from naturalistic or probabilistic or historical norms to which it remains, nonetheless, intimately tied. The third and most substantial sense of the weird is ontological.4 In this view, weirdness is a mode of reality, of the way things are or the way they appear to be (which may be just two sides of the same strange coin). Weirdness here is not simply an artifact of our bent minds but a feature of the art and manner of existence itself—an existence I believe we can still talk about directly, though perhaps always with a forked tongue. More than a genre, more than a psychological mode, the weird inheres in the loopy, twisty, tricksy way whereby things come to be.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies


“In encounters with high weirdness, culture becomes consciousness. Marginal and esoteric cultural narratives—particularly those wrapped up in conspiracy theories, extraterrestrials, occult forces, strange gods, and fantastic pulp fictions—intrude forcefully, uncannily, and sometimes absurdly into the texture of lived experience.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

Ever the shapeshifting and mercurial Trickster, the anomalous is always more a matter of form than of substance. Of structure more than of content. Students and practitioners of the occult already know this, inducing wild and surrealistic effects upon reality that often defy any rationality or belief system. Chaos magick in particular focuses on belief and consciousness in general as a tool more than as property of their mind. Any old trope or invoked character suffices, from Hermes to Bugs Bunny, as long as the adept provisionally believes in that mode of embodiment.

This is also why anomalous phenomena so stubbornly resists explanation and reduction to single linear meanings. It is all about the phenomenal appearance or imaginal experience instead of some objectively real in-itself thing. This is also why the same phenomenon clothes itself in the collective cultural myths of the geographical region it is occurring in. It thus has the twofold effect of getting under the experiencer's skin and of loosening up our ingrained need to obsessively connect the dots, opening us up to the realness of our own transrational and numinous unconscious as experienced presence and "otherness"---as a lived transformation of what we mean by consciousness and ultimately reality itself.

“Maybe we're just seeing a tiny corner of reality—the corner we want to see. But if somehow we could "turn" and look at what's behind us—we might see something so strange, we wouldn't understand it in a million years.”― Richard Sala, Delphine

[Image: images-2026-08-27-T134441-345.jpg]