A magical grimoire from the future; an Anthropocene Hypertext

Mutations: Art, Consciousness, and the Anthropocene revives the need for imagining better worlds and using our imaginations as both a radical divinatory and political act. By putting words to the page through literary, political, and artistic creation, we generate instances, mutations, of these new worlds—realizations of the future latent in the present. This is an image of a counter-culture deeply engaged in the world, not defining itself by being against the present, but for the future. This anthology, then, builds a rhizomatic manifesto of consciousness culture—and how else could it be, but through a rhizome, a networked array?

Mutations invites a resurrection of the utopianism of the late 60s and the experimental institutions of the 70s, in our invocation to imagine a reality beyond capitalism—an occultism, a mysticism, for the Anthropocene. These emerging visions of the future promote transformations of worldview, remix past, present, and future mythologies, unleash new possibilities of aesthetics and philosophy. Contributors to this book find their home in liminality, engage in acts of “meta-cognition,” and are kin to the utopian project of spiritual and material emancipation. This book is a call for an approach to fashioning the future that is as mythopoetic as it is ecological, as mystical as it is political.

We are seeking a radical, integral multiplicity of voices in an emerging consciousness culture—voices that dwell in age of climate crisis and political upheaval. The response to this ecological age is to take leaps ourselves. Mutations is an activity, a performance, and an instance itself of the kind of thinking and being-in-the-world we might describe as “planetary.” As believers of the power of the radical, written word to transform, alter, and most importantly to commune, we recognize that writing together is an act of culture creation, and an invitation for both readers and writers alike to participate in the planetary thought of tomorrow.

Featuring:

¶ the non-human turn

¶ philosophy and metaphysics

¶ magic in the anthropocene

¶ integral consciousness and Jean Gebser in contemporary culture

¶ planetization and Teilhard de Chardin

¶ planetary culture

¶ astrology and climate change

¶ decolonizing spirituality

¶ magic and digital culture

¶ postmodern mysticism

¶ bioregional animism

¶ evolution of consciousness and the non-human world

¶ ‘mutation’ as concept and metaphor

¶ cyborgs and companion species

¶ virtual reality and a post-geographical world

¶ liminality and aesthetics

¶ post-materialism

¶ art and the anthropocene

¶ Gaia Hypothesis and super organisms

¶ new economics, cryptocurrencies and gift economies

¶ mystical anarchism and utopia

¶ histories of the future

¶ thinking ‘beyond’ civilization

¶ science fiction as radical futurism