Dates: Sundays, January 29 - February 26, 2023
Time: 1 - 3 pm ET
$175 (Patreon Members) / $190 (Regular Admission)

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

This five week class will lead us through historian of religions Jeffrey J. Kripal’s book Mutants and Mystics, which sets out to locate the extraordinary or fantastic elements of popular culture and science fiction in the actual paranormal experiences of the artists and authors themselves, including (now) those of the mutant reader and viewer.

The book offers an account of how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science. Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby’s cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick’s futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore’s sex magic and Whitley Strieber’s communion with visitors—Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives.

Expanded consciousness, the author argues, found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi—incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops and vast intergalactic intelligences—and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions. Moving deftly from Cold War science and Fredric Wertham’s anticomics crusade to gnostic revelation and alien abduction, Kripal spins out a hidden history of American culture, rich with mythical themes and shot through with an awareness that there are other realities far beyond our everyday understanding.

Kripal will also bring the material up to date through his most recent interactions with film makers and writers in his new book, The Superhumanities: the superhuman evolutionary vision of Friedrich Nietzsche; the psychic-psychedelic scholarship of William James; the mestiza or “mixed” consciousness of Gloria Anzaldúa; the Afrofuturism and “God shaping” of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed religion; the precognitive Gun Island of Amitav Ghosh; the precog model of creativity of Eric Wargo; the time-traveling memoir of John Philip Santos; and the psilocybin-inspired “ontological insurgency” of Rachael Petersen. Mutants and mystics, indeed.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the Associate Dean of the Faculty and Graduate Programs in the School of the Humanities and the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He also helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and sits on numerous advisory boards in the U.S. and Europe involving the nature of consciousness and the sciences. Jeff is the author of ten single-authored books, including, most recently, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022), where he intuits an emerging new order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories, cultures, and futures. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction for the University of Chicago Press collectively entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. His full body of work can be seen at http://jeffreyjkripal.com. He thinks he may be Spider-Man.