Peter O'Leary

Do you believe in wizards? Are you a wizard? Then pack up your talismans, fetishes, and gamelans into the mysterious little satchel you carry at your side and get ready for some incantatory magic. We will investigate the figure of the wizard as an archetype, a literary symbol, a vehicle for fantasy, and as a commanding reality while considering such things as A Wizard of Earthsea, the figure of Merlin, The Teachings of Don Juan, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, the figure of Harry Potter, Howl’s Moving Castle, Yeelen, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Jay Wright, and Hoa Nguyen, the spells of Maria Sabina and Anglo-Saxon Leechcraft, as well as some other things too secret to reveal at present, including the nature of esotericism. FYS I develops college-level writing skills and prepares students for FYS II and upper-level Liberal Arts courses. This is a studio writing class in which you will focus on writing as a process. You will formulate lines of inquiry, develop arguments, and use your writing to engage meaningfully with the material you read for and discuss in class. You can expect to compose and revise 15-20 pages in a variety of formal writing assignments. All of your writing can be revised. Peer review and one-on-one writing conferences with the teacher is something you can also expect.

In this course, students will propose and then begin to execute the composition of a long poem. Proposals will focus not only on quality of inspiration in subject and idea, but also on formal concerns (in what manner to write a long poem), and issues of feasibility. Our reading material will be several long poems written in English, each demonstrating formal and subjective concerns, including: Wordsworth?s two-part 'Prelude' (1799) (self and historical events as subject; blank verse); Whitman?s 'Song of Myself' (1855) (self as subject; free verse; serial form); Hopkins? 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' (1875) (catastrophe as subject; rhymed verse; serial form); Mina Loy?s 'Songs to Joannes' (1917) (love/passion as subject; free verse; serial form); Robinson Jeffers? 'The Roan Stallion' (1925) (violence/natural world as subject; blank-free verse; narrative form); H.D.?s, 'Trilogy' (1944) (war/catastrophe/esotericism as subject; free verse; serial form); Aime Cesaire?s 'Notebook of a Return to a Native Land' (1947) (post-colonialism/surrealism as subject; free verse/prose-poem; notebook form); Basil Bunting?s 'Briggflatts' (1965) (self/sex as subject; free/rhymed verse; seasonal form); Ronald Johnson?s Radios (1977) (Milton/cosmos as subject; poem-by-excision as form); and Anne Carson?s 'Glass Essay' (1995) (literature/break-up as subject; free verse; narrative form). The goal of the course is to have students on their way to completing their own long poems by the end of sixteen weeks.

Seven thunders! Seven seals! Blaring trumpets and clashing cymbals. A seven-headed hydra. A lamb on a throne of blood. Stars falling to earth. The beginning and the end. And an angel saying, “What thou seest write in a book.” The metaphors and the agitation of the Book of Revelation are intense. They draw from the deepest sources of the imagination: Awe at life, magical beasts and powerful forms, proclamations of power, and fears about life’s end. Written 1900 years ago, the Book of Revelation continues to feed the imagination. In this course, first we will read Revelation closely, looking at it in the context of the genre and meaning of apocalypse in the tradition of the Abrahamic religions. Second, we will read Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer, an uncanny novel about an ecological catastrophe that may be an alien invasion. Alongside, we will read Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, his discussion of the moral and religious flaws that have caused climate change. Third, we will consider “The Leftovers,” a television series that concerns the aftermath of a global, apocalyptic event that happens in the near future in which 2% of the world suddenly vanishes in a Rapture-like event. And throughout this course, we will consider the question: What will a modern apocalypse look like?

Esotericism refers both to a field of knowledge hidden from common view and a moral reality suggesting secrecy, occultism, danger, conspiracy, and vast quantities of arcane lore and revelation. This course introduces students to a basic theory of esotericism in relation to the active production of art in the context of the spiritual. The spiritual has a living context in art, visible in various forms of the visionary, the sacred, and the sublime, for which the doctrines of different esoteric disciplines, such as Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Astrology, and Alchemy, can serve as keys. The catalogue 'The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985' will serve as a master resource for this course, as well as selected readings from artists, scholars, and researchers, including Marsilio Ficino, Carl Jung, Antoine Faivre, Jeffrey Kripal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Arthur Versluis, Hermes Trismegistus, Evelyn Underhill, H.P Blavatsky, and Richard Tarnas, to name a few. Students will generate visual art on the themes of the class during the studio portion of the course; for the symposium portion of the course, they will produce several short informative essays about figures from the history of Western Esotericism, as well as a final research project, in the form of a personal essay, work of creative fiction, poetry, or drama, or an advanced horoscope, to be presented to the class.

Esotericism refers both to a field of knowledge hidden from common view and a moral reality suggesting secrecy, occultism, danger, conspiracy, and vast quantities of arcane lore and revelation. This course introduces students to a basic theory of esotericism in relation to the active production of art in the context of the spiritual. The spiritual has a living context in art, visible in various forms of the visionary, the sacred, and the sublime, for which the doctrines of different esoteric disciplines, such as Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Astrology, and Alchemy, can serve as keys. The catalogue 'The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985' will serve as a master resource for this course, as well as selected readings from artists, scholars, and researchers, including Marsilio Ficino, Carl Jung, Antoine Faivre, Jeffrey Kripal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Arthur Versluis, Hermes Trismegistus, Evelyn Underhill, H.P Blavatsky, and Richard Tarnas, to name a few. Students will generate visual art on the themes of the class during the studio portion of the course; for the symposium portion of the course, they will produce several short informative essays about figures from the history of Western Esotericism, as well as a final research project, in the form of a personal essay, work of creative fiction, poetry, or drama, or an advanced horoscope, to be presented to the class.

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A winter-bound planet’s denizens are androgynous with powerful predictive powers. An aberration? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure suddenly learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. Because of its relative narrative freedom, science fiction has been a place for some of the wildest, most outlandish, yet frequently astute speculation on the experience of religion that can be found in all modern literature. In this course, you’ll read some novels (by William Gibson, Frank Herbert, and Ursula K. LeGuin), short stories, (by Ted Chiang, Arthur C. Clarke, and Raccoona Sheldon), and view some films (2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Close Encounters), and study the work of some theorists of religion (Freud, Jung, Le´vi-Strauss, and Eliade). Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.

The mythic narrative that drives Gnosticism, that the creation of the cosmos was usurped by an evil Demiurge who enslaves all life to do his bidding but that true salvation lies outside the cosmos to be attained by the activation of interior, intuitive knowledge (gnosis), has informed traditions of rich speculation and resistance, from antiquity into the present. In this course, we will explore the historical ground of Gnosticism in detail, studying the early Gnostic scriptures discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, among them the gospels of Thomas and Mary, as well as the seminal foundational studies on Gnosticism by Hans Jonas and Elaine Pagels. We will also examine the historical and creative vectors of Gnosticism over the centuries, especially in the twentieth century, in which Gnosticism manifested in Jung?s analytical psychology, in novels and fiction such as Cormac McCarthy?s Blood Meridian and Jorge Luis Borges?s stories, in films such as The Matrix and The Truman Show, and, most recently, in Japanese manga, such as Eden: It?s an Endless World!