Finding aid/40 topics

Topics Index

Every subject heading used in the archive, with the entries filed under it.

alchemy 3 entries

The art of transformation, read as chemistry, as allegory and as both at once.

apocalypse 12 entries

The end of the world as an idea: revelation, catastrophe and the long habit of expecting both.

avant-garde 3 entries

Art that set out to break the rules of art, and what the breaking cost.

book history 1 entry

How books were made, guarded, cursed and lost.

chaos magic 2 entries

The late twentieth-century practice that treats belief itself as a tool.

cinema 2 entries

Film as rite, as spell and as a congregation in the dark.

collecting 1 entry

The cabinet, the shelf and the habit of keeping strange things.

conspiracy 2 entries

Conspiracy theories read as folklore: their structure, their pleasures and their costs.

dark humor 10 entries

Jokes told at the graveside, and why they help.

decay 9 entries

Decline as a process rather than an event, in institutions, landscapes and meanings.

expenditure 2 entries

Waste, sacrifice, the gift and the festival: what a society does with what it cannot use.

gnosticism 3 entries

Ancient myths of a flawed world, a lesser creator and a saving knowledge.

grimoires 2 entries

Books of magic: their structure, their borrowed authority and their life in manuscript and print.

grotesque 4 entries

Art that joins the comic to the monstrous and refuses to resolve the two.

hermeticism 4 entries

The tradition gathered around the legendary Hermes Trismegistus: mind, cosmos and correspondence.

horror 3 entries

Fear made into entertainment, and what each age chooses to be frightened of.

irony 4 entries

Saying one thing and meaning another, as a style, a defense and a trap.

left-hand path 3 entries

Traditions that prize transgression, individuation and the refusal of dissolution.

mail art 1 entry

Art made for the postal system and against the gallery.

manifestos 2 entries

Texts that announce a position and dare the reader to disagree.

metamodernism 2 entries

The swing between irony and sincerity that followed the postmodern decades.

new religious movements 7 entries

Small, new and marginal religions, described without the vocabulary of panic.

nihilism 1 entry

The claim that nothing has value, in its political, philosophical, cosmic and ecstatic forms.

out of print 13 entries

Books and pamphlets that left the shelves before they found their readers.

pessimism 6 entries

The philosophical case that existence is not a gift, argued without despair.

post-industrial 8 entries

What remains when the work leaves: emptied towns, repurposed mills and the moods that settle there.

postmodernism 7 entries

Suspicion of grand narratives, the play of surfaces and the culture of the copy.

prophecy 5 entries

Dates set, dates missed, and what believers do the morning after.

satanism 3 entries

The adversary as symbol and as religion, from accusation to self-description.

simulation 3 entries

Copies without originals, and the suspicion that the map has replaced the territory.

spiritualism 2 entries

The seance, the medium and the long attempt to hold a conversation with the dead.

strange news 2 entries

Reports too odd for the front page and too well attested to ignore.

tape culture 3 entries

The cassette underground and the networks that formed around home duplication.

the sublime 3 entries

Awe mixed with dread before things too large to picture.

theosophy 2 entries

The movement that promised an ancient wisdom behind all religions, and its long cultural afterlife.

transgression 5 entries

The deliberate crossing of limits, and what it was supposed to reveal.

translation 2 entries

Texts brought into English for the first time, with notes on what was lost on the way.

underground press 8 entries

Publishing outside commerce: small presses, collectives and distribution by hand.

western esotericism 6 entries

The family of currents that scholars group under a single contested name.

zines 4 entries

Self-published, photocopied, stapled and mailed: print outside the trade.