Two Article Tuesday: Sun Ra and Edgar Cayce

Over the weekend, I got a bit of reading done. Perhaps not as much or as systematically as I would have liked, but still reading none the less.

Article the First

The first piece I read as a study of oil as media that drew on concept of agential realism: Elia Vargas, “Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media,” Media+Environment 3 (1). This article came to my attention because the author, Elia Vargas, mentions Egar Cayce and his efforts to use his clairvoyant abilities to discover oil. More on this tomorrow!

Vargas argues that we should regard oil as an agent rather than as merely a tool for industrial activity (and capital deepening) or as a displaced environmental hazard introduced to the world through human efforts. For Vargas, who is an artist, oil is a medium through which our world is made and media have agential power. The ubiquity of oil, however, obscures its role in our world and blinds us to its material power.

In my simmering book project, I am trying to consider the relationship between photography and oil. Much like oil, the ubiquity of photography and its deep roots in certain epistemologies and methods makes it easy to see as an inert medium for an underlying material reality. Of course, archaeologists, artists, and media scholars have pushed back against this and argued that photography co-produces knowledge. 

Looking at oil in the same way is difficult because unlike photographs, its status as a medium is less clear because the influence of oil on our daily lives is less bounded. As Reza Negarestani argued in his Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) oil is complicit in our spiritual, economic, political, and historical lives. The way that oil takes solar energy and turns it into something that we can store, distribute, and concentrate. Oil produces light, it is the medium for anointing, and a vehicle for our transcendence.

A photographic survey of work force housing becomes a survey of oil as a medium for social and environmental transformation. Just as seeing the photograph allows us to unpack the agential authority of photography as a way of seeing the world, seeing oil becomes a way of understanding both our dependence and its ubiquity in our lives.

Article the Second

Anna Gawboy’s “Theosophy and the Esoteric Roots of Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism” in Marjorie Roth’s and Leonard George’s Explorations in Music and Esotericism (Rochester 2023) is the best study of the esoteric and theosophical roots Sun Ra’s thought. It connects not only his music, but more importantly the broadsheets produced by Thmei Research, Ra’s group of friends and thinkers in Chicago. Gawboy shows that the Thmei group modeled text in their broadsheets closely after passages in Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. There is a clear indication that Thmei Research showed particular interest in passages pertaining to Egyptian Orienatalism in Blavatsky’s work. Moreover, Gawboy traces the influences of esoteric thinking on Sun Ra’s speculative geographies and “UFO Spirituality” as well linking thinkers to his musical output and his writing.

What Sun Ra and his fellow travelers did that was distinct was to integrate Theosophical and esoteric ideas into their music and to their racial consciousness. As her conclusion argues, Theosophy proposed a “universal brotherhood,” Sun Ra and his fellow thinkers sought to extend this to include Black people.