People adopt conspiracy theories not only because of cognitive or emotional weaknesses but also as an aesthetic practice. During Italy's COVID-19 lockdown, the relationship between New Age spirituality and conspiracy theories, termed conspirituality, illustrates this. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's thought and studies of contemporary Paganism and Western esotericism, the article argues that conspiracy-believing expresses dissensus by a community of sense seeking full acknowledgment and legitimization of their participatory or magical way of inhabiting the world, rather than mere visibility.
Between 1989 and 2009, South Korean Buddhism was reshaped by a wave of American and European Buddhist influences, including well-educated Western monastic residents featured in Korean media and translated bestsellers by authors like Thich Nhat Hanh and Jack Kornfield. This transnational exchange sparked a sudden growth of interest in vipassanā meditation as an alternative to traditional Kanhwa Sŏn practice and led to the emergence of Buddhist psychotherapy as an academic field. The influence changed how Koreans practice Buddhism, perceive their own history and identities, and provided a new rhetorical strategy to defend Buddhism against Korean evangelical Christianity by leveraging the perceived prestige of Buddhism in the West.
Whitewater paddling constitutes religious experience, and non-Western terms often best describe this experience. Many paddlers articulate their experiences using Asian or indigenous religious language as opposition to existing norms of what constitutes religious experience. Investigating the sport as an aquatic nature religion provides opportunity to revisit existing categories. As a lived religion, whitewater kayaking is a ritual practice of embodied encounter with the sacred, mediated through the body's performance in the water. This sacred encounter, with its risk and danger, illustrates Otto's equation of the sacred with terrifying mystery and provides a counterpoint to norms of North American religiosity.
Though Eros and magic have long been connected in Western esoteric traditions, a substantial body of literature on sexual magic emerged only in the nineteenth century. This article examines the rise of sexual magic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the context of Victorian-era American and British discourse on sexuality. Focusing on the teachings of Paschal Beverly Randolph, Aleister Crowley, and Pierre Bernard, and following Michel Foucault, the author argues that this literature was part of a broader Victorian explosion of discourse on sex, particularly its deviant forms. Sexual magic both reflected and subverted mainstream Victorian sexual values, while these figures also foreshadowed the modern American obsession with sex and its liberation.