Presented at the 2021 Conference of the Society for Science Literature and the Arts

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Since its inception, the science of energy, or “energetics”, has informed the researches of occultists and philosophers, serving as a guiding model and metaphor for the creation of new concepts of the uncanny, the other-worldly, the ontological, and the ethical. Magical and metaphysical thinking have, in turn, informed the science of energetics, serving as forerunners, presaging unexpected findings and paradigm shifts. This paper investigates the energetic tropes that permeate the varied discourses that characterize magics and metaphysics, and it investigates the forms of magical and metaphysical thinking that permeate the scientific discourse of energetics.

To this end, this presentation engages with five forms of energetic agency and five kinds of energetic agents: conduction and the conductors that channel energy; transduction and the transducers that transform energy; resistance and the resistors that dissipate energy; capacitance and the capacitors that intervene between conductors to store-up energy; and lastly, inductance and the inductors that convene (or coil) conductors around them to store-up energy. This presentation attends to the magical and metaphysical shadows of these five energetic agencies and agents, and then turn to the ways in which scientific characterizations of these energetic agents and agencies have shaded magical and metaphysical thinking.