Episode 183: On Hermann Hesse's 'Siddhartha'

Episode 183: On Hermann Hesse's 'Siddhartha'

Author: SpectreVision Radio January 22, 2025 Duration: 1:21:47
Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is one of the great novels of the twentieth century and a prime example of literature that transforms the deeply personal into something universal. For Phil and JF in this episode, the novel serves as the foundation for a discussion on spiritual journeying, the ideal of enlightenment, and the challenge of living in an ensouled universe. Sign up for JF's new Weirdosphere course on the supernatural, starting on February 6th, 2025. Purchase tickets to the Weirdosphere screening of Aaron Poole's Dada on February 1st, 2025. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Herman Hesse, Siddhartha Christopher Theofanidis and Melissa Studdard, Siddhartha Gustav Holst, The Planets Richard Wagner, Parsifal G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Colin Wilson, The Outsider Adam Kirsch, “Herman Hesse’s Arrested Development” Dogen, Genjakoan Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the heart of Weird Studies, a podcast from SpectreVision Radio, you’ll find long-form conversations between Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel. Their discussions aren’t simple reviews or straightforward analyses; instead, they wander through the tangled undergrowth where art and philosophy meet, giving generous time to concepts that resist easy understanding and to creative works that fracture our ordinary sense of the world. This podcast deliberately lingers in that ambiguous space, treating the “weird” not as a genre but as a particular mode of experience-one that reveals the cracks in what we comfortably assume is real. Each episode feels like joining a deep, meandering dialogue between two friends who are both deeply knowledgeable and endlessly curious, covering a vast terrain that includes literature, film, music, and esoteric thought. It’s a show for anyone who suspects that the most profound truths are often found in the shadows, the anomalies, and the strangely beautiful. As part of the SpectreVision Radio network, which specializes in content that explores the uncanny edges of creativity, Weird Studies builds a unique community of listeners who are eager to think differently. You won’t find pat answers here, but you will encounter compelling questions and a shared sense of exploration that makes each installment a distinctive journey.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 230

Weird Studies
Podcast Episodes
Episode 141: Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

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What better way to ring in the New Year than with a freeranging discussion of the dreaded thirteenth arcanum of the tarot? Of all topics, surely death needs the least introduction. Or does it? To those of us who inhabit…
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We recorded this episode in early December for our Patreon subscribers, but as it's the closest thing to a Christmas special we're ever likely to make, we thought we'd slip it into everyone's stocking this year. In it, w…
Episode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal' [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:30
What Evil Dead 2 is to the Baroque, Sunn O))) is to Brutalism. Or more like: if the likening of Evil Dead 2 to the Baroque felt like a stretch in episode 136, the brutalist bona fides of Sunn O)))'s drone metal are incon…
Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:05
Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common entertainment. Her 2001 work The Secret Life of Puppets is in many ways the…
Episode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic' [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:33:11
In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, the philosopher Federico Campagna argues that we moderns have exhausted the reality system we devised at the dawn of our age, a system he calls Technic. Technic has on…
Episode 133: On Weirding, and the Virtues of Unknowing Everything [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:04
With the term "weird studies" gaining currency inside and outside academia, Phil and JF thought it was time to discuss the philosophical method they've been developing on the podcast since 2018. Borrowing a term from Eri…