Scavenger Hunt

One of the best events at the Occult Summit is the scavenger hunt in the library. This year, we have over 30 objects hidden among the books and shelves. Finding them will require various skills: codebreaking, language, puzzles, and even musical. The "books" you find are item cards that teach the finder lost secrets and useful skills.

The hunt begins at 4 pm on Saturday.

Wandcrafting

Wands are perhaps the most iconic of all magi foci. They are assets in various ways. Their hand-feel can be evocative of the emotions needed to perform challenging magic. Their magical construction can provide unique resonance for particular kinds of spells or targets. They can be enchanted to carry spell-casting competencies beyond the wizard. Their precise design can aid in nuanced casting.

Plus they are cool looking.

Join Astor for a wand-making workshop delving into the nuances of wand design and construction.

Register for the Occult Summit here.

Songs of Rest

Music is one of the most universal of all magics. Nearly every supernatural community has talespinners and song singers of some variety or other. Music resonates in the material and spiritual world and it brings us into and through time as it ties our bodies together.

Join us as Serendipity explores ancient fae songs of healing and rest. Summit goers are welcome to join her in the production of this restorative music or simply sit and have its power rejuvenate them. Those who are burdened by paradox, ennui, banality, harano, mental illness or injury are welcome to attend and receive at least temporary reprieve.

Register for the Occult Summit here.

Stairway to Heaven: Using Logarithmic Functions to Expand and Shrink Astral Consciousness

Ever wonder what the inside of an electron is like? Or perhaps how the totality of the Milky Way galaxy looks like?

The universe is defined by a profound variance of orders of magnitude. The Planks Length is 10 to the negative 35 meters, while on the other hand the universe is estimated to be measured at 10 to the 26 meters. This means that there are 53 orders of magnitude in existence. That's a lot to wrap one's head around.

This building workshop has the goal of building an astral staircase that can be walked up or down to broaden or shrink the users perception of reality. Walking up one flight of stairs would expand the users relative size perception by 10 times. So for instance, walking up six flights would make someone seem like they were the size of the moon. Walking down 18 flights of stairs would put the person on the same scale as an electron. The staircase would be constructed in the astral plane to prevent the obvious paradoxical nature of manipulating that much mass. It would not allow the user to interact with the astral world as though it were huge or small, but rather merely reshape their perception of the universe.

Can it be done? We don't know! Come join us on March 1 and see what we can build.

Register for the Occult Summit here.

The Graceful Butterfly: An Odd Case for Practical Time Travel

Time travel is often considered the most dangerous of all magical, spiritual, and scientific of operations. While nearly every temporal ontology reflects on the possibility of dynamic temporality, nearly all also posit that it is nothing short of disastrous. Magi fear the paradox such actions might cause. Some foster the fear of time travel so much that they give a proper name the paradox that emerges from the misuse of time magic (they call him Wrinkle). There is strong evidence that this fear is well placed. Time travelers have been known to go missing and there is much theory about all the things time travel will mess up, often referred to as the Butterfly Effect.

And yet.

What if the solution was there all along. What if butterflies were actually the solution to sustainable time travel? This presentation makes the case that butterflies perfectly embody the concepts of alterity, fractality, and liminality that make them ideal magical foci for low-impact time travel. Join Alex Andria as he draws on the meditation of Zhuangzi (who was unsure if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or vice versa) to make the case about how blending Time, Spirit, Mind, Entropy, Prime, and Correspondence offers a viable path for benign time travel.

Register for the Occult Summit here.

Four Seasons of the Tuatha

This panel will take up the question of the seasonal magics of the fae. Some of the oldest magic practiced by changelings draw their power from the natural cycles of time. Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter are not merely times of the year for the fae. Rather, they are ideals, notions, and spiritual forces which are always at work. They correspond with other cycles (Dawn, Noon, Dusk, and Midnight, or Up, Over, Down, and Under).

Join us for a compelling talk and demonstration by practitioners of all four changeling arts as they consider the way that seasonal magic works and undergirds the world and Dreaming as we know it.

Register for the Occult Summit here.

Magic and Illusion: An Exploration of the Fundamental Underpinnings of the Cosmos

What is real? What is merely experience? How would we ever know the difference?

How are we to best understand what is an illusion that entraps our sense and commits us to things that are better let go?

Or is there even a difference between truth and illusion?

These questions and more to be answered by mystic, philosopher, and Buddhist monk, Gary.

Register for the 2019 Occult Summit here.