Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Keynote topic:

Through a Dark Prism: US Military Occult Research and the Cultural History of Rationality

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard; as well as Third Century Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. He is the author of award-winning The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), as well as the award-winning Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), all published by University of Chicago Press. A fourth monograph, “The Genealogy of Genealogy,” is currently under contract.

In 2021, something called “the Gateway Experience” went viral on social media. This was in reference to a declassified set of US military documents from the 1980s, which described a technique to “alter consciousness and ultimately escape spacetime.” The oddity, even for those aware of the Stargate Project and US research on remote viewing is that the group behind the “gateway experience” adopted artifacts and rituals from the occult milieu of the period—including magic wands. This talk will examine some of the history of the occult military industrial complex, up to the Gateway project. By doing so, my larger objective is to destabilize entrenched narratives that dismiss magical beliefs and practices as inherently irrational or as expressions of “alternative rationalities.” By historicizing the categories of “belief” and “rationality” and demonstrating how their supposed universality is rooted in Cold War history, the talk will explore how these constructs were produced, regulated, and mobilized within a specific epistemic and cultural framework.