Here’s a necessary passage from George P. Hansen’s 1994 opus The Trickster and the Paranormal, which is a flatly necessary book (though one that’s oddly semi-obscure, for reasons that have long eluded me): [Anthropologist Larry] Peters recognized that the idea of creative illness, advanced by Henri Ellenberger in 1964, can be understood as a liminal…
Category: Paranormal
WHAT THE DAEMON SAID: Cover, TOC, and Publication Date
Today I received word from Hippocampus Press that my nonfiction collection What the Daemon Said: Essays on Weird Fiction, Film, and Philosophy is scheduled for publication on April 26. Preorders are available now. The beautiful cover is by Dan Sauer. Click to order. BLURBS: “For my money, Matt Cardin is the most interesting voice in…
The Ghostly Art: All Writing Is Haunted
Powerful insights from Ed Simon, Editor-at-Large for LARB’s Marginalia, in an essay for The Millions in which he not only traces a history of hauntedness in various key works of literature (by the likes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Morrison, Chambers, Lovecraft, and King) but relates a couple of his own genuinely weird personal encounters with…
Michio Kaku on the “terrible idea” of alien contact and the Buddhist Christianity of string theory
Two interesting excerpts from a recent Guardian interview with the famed Dr. Kaku in connection with his book The God Equation. On the prospect of meeting alien life: Soon weâll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and weâll have thousands of planets to look at, and thatâs why I think the chances are quite…
Teeming Links – August 9, 2019
Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
My spiritual autobiography: A video interview
In 2017 I published an enthusiastic review of Jerry L. Martin’s God: An Autobiography here at The Teeming Brain, and also at Amazon. The book presents Martin’s account of being an atheist who was hit with an unexpected experience of what presented itself as divine communication. Over the course of about a year, he found…
Richard Bach on Remote Viewing with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff (video)
In a video clip I recently stumbled across, Richard Bach describes his experiences as a subject in Targ and Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments at SRI in the 1970s.
My interview for the Weird Studies podcast
Recently, I was interviewed for the excellent Weird Studies podcast. The episode, titled “On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin,” dropped yesterday. You can listen to it with the player above or by clicking through to the site itself. Here’s the episode description: Neil Gaiman wrote, If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are…
An interview with Gary Lachman on occult politics, nihilism, and the dangerous potentials of the imagination
Just published here at The Teeming Brain: my interview with Gary Lachman on his new book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. As many Teeming Brain readers are already aware, Gary is a noted writer on occultism and esotericism who contributed to my paranormal encyclopedia a few years ago….
Possession, exorcism, and the daimon: A brief history
The word “daimon” has several possible meanings, but in relation to possession and exorcism it refers to a particular type of autonomous or autonomous-feeling force in the psyche that influences or, in some cases, dominates a person’s thoughts, actions, and feelings.