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…
Category: Psychology & Consciousness
The Myth of Persephone and the Cycle of Creativity
Rembrandt, The Rape of Proserpina, 1632 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) In typing up my life journal from 1993 to the present, I’ve been coming across hundreds of thousands of words that I forgot I ever wrote. Some of these take the form of excursive, semi-extemporaneous mini-essays. Here’s one of them. I won’t be including…
Horror Fiction and the Awakening and Evolution of Consciousness
In the introduction to The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult — an anthology of classic horror stories that deal in one way or another with the named subjects — Lon Milo DuQuette, who also edited the book, relates his boyhood experience of awakening for the first time to both a love of richly…
Dreams, Waking Reality, and the Purpose of Your Life
In A Course in Demonic Creativity, I recommend reading your life like a dream or a creative narrative (a novel, a movie) to discern symbols and themes that can serve as clues to your overall life pattern, your purpose, your creative calling, your destiny and life mission as embodied in the concept of the daemon…
A Psychic Invasion from Above and Below: Our Present Cultural Apocalypse
As someone who rode the apocalyptic wave of the aughts and 2010s very hard, I find it striking to note the uncanny, almost clinical precision with which mythologist and author Michael Meade, writing back in 2012 about trends that were then becoming visible, forecast and diagnosed the deep mythic-psychological apocalyptic eruptions of 2020-2021: Often apocalyptic…
How to Handle the Cult of Optimism: Thoughts from Novelist/Screenwriter Matthew Specktor
Here are some sage and sobering reflections from Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine and Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, in response to an interview question about how to maintain realistic expectations amid the contemporary cult of optimism and positive thinking: INTERVIEWER: Today the cult of…
On the Vivid and Autonomous Inner Lives of Dream Characters
Fascinating stuff from the always excellent online magazine Psyche, with insights of value for both fiction writers (who often find their characters “coming to life” in strange ways) and psychonauts both natural and psychedelic (who often encounter autonomous-seeming intelligences and entities in inner space): My fascination with dream characters began while I was in college….
Above the Fray: Is There an Unconditioned Truth beyond Time and Culture?
This week a colleague, having read some of my essays involving esoteric and weird religious and philosophical matters — which will appear in my forthcoming essay collection (title reveal: What the Daemon Said) — remarked that he wondered why those who vaunt Eastern or other perspectives don’t realize that these may be just as time-…
Our Fruitless Conspiracy to Forget the Furies
William Barrett concluded his masterful 1958 study and interpretation of existentialist philosophy, Irrational Man, with words that still give me a shiver of recognition whenever I revisit them. What he says marked me as deeply when I first read it in the early/mid-1990s as the discovery of Ligotti’s fiction did a couple of years later….
The Hidden Horrors of Meditation
David Kortava in Harper’s Magazine: At the time [she signed up for a meditation retreat in rural Delaware], Megan’s life was in flux—she had just gone through a breakup and decided to move to Utah, where she planned to work on an organic farm. Ten days of meditation sounded restorative, a way of turning the…