Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Monsters, Fictional Worlds, and the Repressed Supernatural—A Talk with Victoria Nelson

Full transcript

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MATT DILLON: Greetings listeners, and welcome to the Pop Apocalypse. A podcast brought to you by the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. I'm your host Matt Dillon. And as I'm recording this, it is spooky season.

That means it's time for us to dress up in costumes, eat pounds of candy, and if you have a lawn, you're required by law I think to put an elaborate and very big inflatable ghost on it. Hopefully multiple ghosts, and all that stuff is fun.

But for some of us, myself included, spooky season means one thing more than any other, and that's it's time for horror, horror, horror. From Victorian ghost tales, to the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft, classical German expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or monster lore like Frankenstein, werewolves, vampires, right on up to contemporary masterpieces, like the show Twin Peaks. There's a certain shared love of horror that's an open secret among many of us who end up becoming scholars of the Gnostic and the esoteric.

In that way, it's a little bit like heavy metal, comic books, or role playing games, whether you play them on a board or on a screen. If right now you're a teenager and you're a big metal head and you're listening to this. Or if you're a bit older and you have your own teenager, who annoys you by listening to heavy metal, don't be all that surprised. If they end up growing up and deciding to learn Coptic.

And end up writing some sort of weird dissertation on magical acts and rituals from the fourth century. It's one of the trajectories of being a teenage metal head, I can assure you.

But why is that? More and more specifically, why does love of these seemingly profane genres like horror lead so many of us to an obsession with the sacred? Well, today's guest, Victoria Nelson, was one of the first, and to my mind still the most eloquent to answer why an obsession with horror and the monstrous is a way of engaging the supernatural.

More explicitly, and this is one of the theses of her fabulous book, The Secret Life of Puppets published in 2001. The return of the supernatural as it had become repressed with the rise of enlightenment materialism and the Protestant Reformation. Engaging the supernatural on its own terms had become unthinkable in a certain way, and it pops back up for us in our obsession with ghosts and the monstrous and in the cosmic type horror.

Secret Life of Puppets is one of the more celebrated books we've had over the last 25 years. It won a prize for comparative literature studies as sponsored by the MLA. And has been touted by contemporary writers of fiction like Neil Gaiman.

I won't go too much more into her actual thesis, I want her to be able to expound on that in the interview so no more spoilers. But suffice it to say, that The Secret Life of Puppets more or less created the field of esoterica and popular culture, today what those of us in the field call [? folk ?] culture.

And The Secret Life of Puppets as well as its successor, Gothicka published in 2012, well, there are about 10-- 20 years old at this point, they're not just historically important. They display an erudition and a hermeneutic sensitivity that remain a high water mark in the study of a culture.

So in this interview, Victoria guides us through her academic life, the twists and turns of her writing career, her approach to reading popular culture, the different mentalities behind criticism and fiction writing. Victoria is also a wonderful novelist as we'll discuss early in the interview. And close by talking about her collaborations with the spirit channel, Paul Selig. Without further ado, let's get spooky.

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And it is our profound honor to have the author Victoria Nelson on Pop Apocalypse today. Victoria, where are you coming from?

VICTORIA NELSON: Berkeley, California.

MATT DILLON: Berkeley, California. I'm so jealous. Berkeley, this time of year with the fog rolling in overnight, it's pure magic.

VICTORIA NELSON: It's a nice place to live definitely.

MATT DILLON: Not too bad. Not too bad. So I've taken to starting these shows with one sort of pat question. Because seeing as this podcast is technically part of Harvard Divinity School, I wanted to ask, what sort of relationship did you have to religion, if any growing up?

VICTORIA NELSON: I didn't have any direct connection because my parents did not raise my brother and me in any religion. However, both of them came from intensely religious Southern Baptist backgrounds in Arkansas. And I had an uncle on each side who was a Southern Baptist pastor and so they had rejected that religion once they left home and got married. But I certainly felt the atmosphere of it. And I mean I think unconsciously.

But anyway, so that was the background. And I did really resonate when I read Harold Bloom's, the American religion. This very prescient book, where he links Church of Latter-day Saints, Southern Baptists, and who are the other ones-- oh, boy.

MATT DILLON: Oh, got it. Yeah, he talks about Christian Science in that book. He has a sort of dismissive account of the new age, but nonetheless, he touches on it. It's been a while since I read it, but I do agree, it was such a sort of creative book right In the early days of trying to understand the Gnostic influence in America. And he went in a direction that nobody has since, which I really appreciate.

VICTORIA NELSON: And he also anticipated the kind of importance of it. Growing importance in American culture. But the interesting thing to me was this whole notion of the divine human. And that of course, was what I found myself really investigating in The Secret Life of Puppets. And so don't know if it was just kind of in my amniotic fluid or the atmosphere or what, but I certainly was taking up some of the kind of Gnostic under-- I would say hermetic underlying strands of that religion.

MATT DILLON: That makes sense. And it's interesting to hear you comment on that, given evangelical. Christianity can just sort of be the other for a lot of people who identify as mystical or Gnostic. But one of the things Bloom recognized and has become very obvious to me over the years, there's so much sort of extraordinary spiritual things happening within that train. No matter how you feel about what they think politically.

So it is interesting to hear that's part of your sort of spiritual [? deryni ?] as it were.

VICTORIA NELSON: And I also have to add since a fair number of my relatives are still very devout Christians and Southern Baptists, more or less. I really have an appreciation of through them of just how demanding it is to ethically live a religious practice every day of your life.

Not everyone does that in or out of religion. But I have a deep respect for the underlying precepts, and those who faithfully try to follow them. And having lived most of my life in a mainstream intellectual culture that does other religious belief, I feel I have a much more empathy than most people do who are identify with mainstream materialism. And perhaps that also factored into my interest in certain esoteric strands that I went on to trace.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, and speaking of which, so before we get into Secret Life of Puppets and Gothicka, both of which have won awards, gotten considerable accolades. Some of our listeners may be surprised that you never took the PhD. So what did you end up doing instead of going in and doing the whole PhD initiation? And how do you think taking that different route made your scholarly voice distinctive?

VICTORIA NELSON: First of all, I just say I regard The Secret Life of Puppets as an alternate universe PhD thesis. [LAUGHTER] Never would have written and been written or accepted in this climate.

Well, what happened to me was I had this weird childhood growing up on an old schooner in the Florida, Bayou Backwaters and was home-schooled until about the fourth or fifth grades. And then we moved back to California, and the education that I had gotten from this Calvert School correspondence course was so excellent.

And was already a year ahead, I skipped another grade with the result that I graduated from high school at 15, and graduated from Berkeley when I was 19, going on 20. And went to Toronto in medieval studies that was my chosen field. And the culture shock was so intense, from Berkeley in the '60s to what was then, and I'm not dissing Toronto now, never went back. But very old fashioned Victorian provincial city.

And my fellow graduate students, I just couldn't handle it. So I got my MA in one year, with a writing a huge thesis and orals and the whole 9 yards. Got out of Toronto, went to Cambridge, Mass for a couple of years. Hated it there-- [LAUGHS] now I just say-- as a Californian.

And on a whim, I went to visit some Berkeley friends for two weeks in Hawaii. And I loved it so much. I basically stayed for almost 10 years. And in that time, I got to have the adolescence, I didn't get when I was a teenager.

And even though I was actually teaching at the University of Hawaii as a lowly instructor. But basically, I was swinging from the vines being Sheena of the jungle, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Bar none.

So eventually, I came back to the mainland and I had to kind of front up to being a grown up again. When my scholarly impulses resurfaced in the '80s, I did think seriously about going back to graduate school because I was just entranced with scholarship again. But it had undergone a huge sea change since I'd been in school.

And critical theory was really sweeping the academic world. And I did really appreciate the rigor, the philosophical training, the continental influences that had been really sadly lacking in literary studies before. I never quite mastered it or got into it. And the other thing that happened was that I fell in love with Eastern European fantastic writing. The works of the Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and Kafka, and others.

And since I'd always been very interested in fantastic literature-- supernatural literature, this is like high art. Whereas back home in the US, it was definitely low brow. Be movie stuff. So I got into that. And I used my medieval training such as it was. And then embarked on this series of essays, that later eventually turned into The Secret Life of Puppets.

Had I actually gone back to school to get a PhD, I don't think I could have gotten away with anything, like what I wrote in The Secret Life of Puppets. And so I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful that I didn't try to do it the regular way.

For any prospective graduate students listening to this podcast, I mean sometimes people do write me and say, well, getting my thesis, I'm not happy here. What should I do? And it's such an individual decision. When you don't go forward to get a PhD, you are going to limit your prospects, because in many ways, it's kind of a union card.

On the other hand, the landscape has changed so otherly. That even with a PhD, you're going to have a lot of trouble. When I went to school, my tuition at Berkeley was $88 a semester, there was no such thing as three part time jobs, there was no such thing as student loans.

But students today, humanity students just face such a different world. And I'm just not sure what the tools are now to navigate it. So right now I would never presume to give anybody any advice about anything.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, it is a very individualized decision given the job landscape. But one of-- there's a lot of limitations that come with that and certain disappointment, but it also means in a sense we're free to just do whatever. Because there's no sort of checklist that you can check off in order to land here or there. It's like, hey, you want to get weird? Go ahead. Go get weird. You might as well enjoy your training so.

Yeah I can see going either way. But definitely, your work sort of opened up a lot of avenues for us, who are doing things like these podcasts and such.

Speaking of when I was planning and putting the sort of groundwork down to start this show, yours was one of the first names we had on the list because of Secret Life and Gothicka. You know, you're the sort of doyenne of this field. And so we were all set for that.

And then Neighbor George came out in December 2021 I believe. And I read it cold. I decided not to learn anything about it, and not knowing when it was written. And I was admiring, oh, look, how it brings to life all these ideas that we already saw in your theoretical works. And it was only after I finished that I realized, oh, my gosh. She wrote this in the '80s, early '90s, like before of Secret Life.

So there's a lot of different directions, we can go with this, but I want to start with an easy one. What compelled you to write this book? This Neighbor George. And I'm assuming it had something to do with your Eastern European influences, but if you could speak to that more deeply.

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, not in terms of Schultz, and so on not at all, because it's much more in some ways a genre novel than anything Schulz or Kafka ever did.

Coming back from Hawaii, I was determined to become to be a fiction writer, which had been writing over the years, but had gone dormant in Hawaii, but came back wanting to do that. I was writing stories. And I was living out in West Marin County in a little town called Stinson Beach.

And I decided I wanted to write a kind of mythic story. And that became the story I now call Bolinas Venus, which is this second story in the volume that includes Neighbor George. And I wanted to write about Stinson Beach and Bolinas are two little towns that are kind of yin and yang.

One inhabited by in the old days by macho fellows, rich and not so rich, who it's a very masculine culture. And Bolinas was a very feminine, new agey culture. So I wrote about this enormous woman, who mute woman who lives in a school bus up on Bolinas Mesa and how she pulls a very uptight straight Stinson Beach stockbroker into her force field.

And so it was a Venus story taking possession of someone. And this guy was very into just screwing young girls to put it baldly. And so when this enormous mute basically homeless Bolinas person starts following him around and stalking him. He just totally freaks out.

Anyway, long story short, he does fall under her spell, and it was very much a Venus conquering all story, with some echoes of Chaucer, my beloved Chaucer and his Wife of Bath's Tale. The Wife of Bath, as you might know, is this very adventure some older woman who's had a lot of men and a lot of husbands. And says that what women want most of all is basically to be in charge.

So anyway, so that there was that story that I've written. And for whatever reasons, believe me, it wasn't any conscious intention, whatsoever.

I wanted to write another story set out there in that very distinctive landscape, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in California. And I cast it kind of as a-- well, again, this is attributing more consciousness to my creative process than I ever had. I just I've always even-- and even writing, scholarly books like Secret Life of Puppets. I've just always followed my preference and put one foot in front of the other, and not thought about it that much.

So anyway, the story came out of a young girl who goes out there and to West Marin, where tragedy has struck and she's lost both her parents and she's out there in a kind of limbo between graduating college and going to graduate school. And into this vacuum comes this person.

What I did do deliberately was cast it as a kind of anti-romance novel. To use that word deconstructed romance novel, because the heroine loves reading romances, but she's very ashamed of doing it because she doesn't think it's intellectual enough for her Lacanian studies and so on.

But anyway, the actual encounter she has with this man is a bad vibe version of meeting the mysterious romantic hero and entering into relationship. So that was going on in my mind. What I also wanted to do was to make it non-generic, non-attributable. I didn't want it to be the devil, anything Christian. I didn't want it to be Native American, didn't want it to be druids or anything like that.

I just wanted this character who is not actually a man to come from a generic and ecumenical other world that wasn't at all described. And so that was quite determined that he wasn't going to have any kind of traditional attributes. And also, I can't even remember how this came about. I decided that all the characters had to have bird qualities.

They had to be part bird. And I think I waffled a bit about whether Dovey, the main character, gives them these names when she's writing the account or whether it's just inherent in the story. Forgive me, Matt. I revised it enough so that things are a little blurry in my mind about this.

But anyway, all the characters have bird last names that they're completely oblivious too. And they all have bird qualities. And birds have traditionally been messengers from beyond in all kinds of different cultures from Norse mythology, to Egyptian, to whatever.

And so in Dovey's case, she gets a messenger-- bird from this other state that isn't Oregon, even though his car license place has Oregon on it. And it's not a nice bird. And it is something that is forcing her to face truth-- the truth that at some deep level she knows about her childhood and her past.

So that's kind of how it unfolded. When my agent in those days took it around, the folks-- the high literary folks did not want to touch genre. This is like the early '90s. And the genre folks thought it was a little too high brow. [LAUGHS] So it almost took getting into a new century to get the kind of collective zeitgeist to the point where it could be both, not just one or the other.

Anyway, it completely failed to get a publisher. The other novel I had written that was quite attached to, didn't get a publisher. And so I was really stymied. And at the same time, I was back in Berkeley, I was going to all these great lectures on campus. I taught once or twice in the rhetoric department.

And I just thought to myself, there's something I'm trying to say, I'm not quite sure what it is. But now that I'm back in this world that I left, why not write about this in the terms that I had been trained to write in? So that was how The Secret Life of Puppets evolved very slowly as a series of essays.

And when I showed it to my-- the man who would be my wonderful editor at Harvard, Lindsay Waters, he said, well, great. But we don't do essays, unless you're really famous. So you have to make a real book out of it with chapters.

OK, so I went back and I just basically made a few cross references and said see chapter 9. See chapter 4. And by that means, I cobbled together a book out of what was there, basically a set of essays.

MATT DILLON: So a follow-up there, might be what was your intention? And what writers were you specifically modeling when you said about writing Neighbor George?

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, intention is an interesting word when it comes to the creative process. And what I think is that the tools that a person brings to critical analysis are not the tools a person brings to making something up on the page. So that one, I-- and I think many of the students I've worked with over the years, we don't sit down with a checklist of themes, writers were going to emulate overall intentions, nothing like that.

The creative process is really purely unconscious. And what comes out comes from a place that you don't really have that kind of control over. Those are the kinds of questions a critic asks when they look at a piece of fiction.

Now, once you've actually got it down on the page and you start going over it and revising it, then you might be thinking something like, oh, I was kind of copying so-and-so. Or oh, I guess this is really about such and such. And as I'm revising, maybe I should be thinking in terms of bringing that out a little bit more.

So it's not until you've totally finished what you're doing, including all the revisions that you have any notion of what your intention is at all. And I think way back in the pre-dawn era of the new criticism, there was even, they had a label called the intentional fallacy that it was possible for a critic to determine what an author's specific intention was.

So anyway, those are still proper words to use when you're looking at a text and you're not the one writing it and making an evaluation. So I leave it to others to fill in intention, influence, themes, et cetera, et cetera. I might have a dim idea of it by the time I've finished, but nothing is clear cut as a critic can bring.

As someone who writes in both modes who inhabits both territories, I always find there's a kind of a shifting of gears that has to take place when I go from one to the other, and particularly when I go from analytical, critical writing to intuitive, unconsciously-powered creative writing. Because sometimes find my language carrying over, and I'll be using these big words and I kind of have to translate it back down to the language of fiction. It's an interesting phenomenon.

MATT DILLON: Well, I have a follow-up there. How long does it take to flip back and forth between those gears? Is it something you can say, all right, today I'm going to be writing fiction, tomorrow I'll do analytical. Or do you have to stick with a longer range project and focus in on that before shifting over to trying to write a novel, let's say?

VICTORIA NELSON: I have to really stay in the one I'm doing, I can't just flip back and forth from one day to the next.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, that does sound hard. It would be a very drastic shift back and forth.

VICTORIA NELSON: And I often find in my students people who come out of an analytical background have-- they have to get out of their heads to start writing fiction and that's at all levels, including the level of language. But they can do it. It can be done. It's not impossible.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, and that makes-- this is just random anecdote. But it's well known that every-- not every, but many PhDs have somewhere a half finished novel. And it usually started coming out when they were trying to write their dissertation, and they were like, oh, I need to put certain energies elsewhere.

And it's almost always terrible for the exact reasons you point to that we're coming to it analytically, and we're already coming in with our idea of themes and everything. We've kind of predigested it before we can let it come out.

VICTORIA NELSON: No, I think it's actually a very positive impulse because you want to the analytical territory can be kind of sterile, and you want to be expressing yourself in a different mode. And it's a completely valid response. But I don't always say to my creative writing students. Is there's an old adage that your first novel is like your first pancake, you have to throw it out. And that's true wherever you're coming from.

MATT DILLON: Oh, that's funny. Yeah, I just had Whitley Strieber on and he had to do that with his first seven novels. So sometimes you really have to stick with it before something pops.

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, as Fritz Perls said, the organism operates by preference. So whatever mode you find yourself in, you shouldn't be lashing yourself for not thinking you ought to be doing the other one. It's all good.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, well put. Well put. So it's interesting to hear that backstory for Secret Life and for George. But as I mentioned in the question and I just would like to dig down a little bit deeper into it. It simply blew me away reading Neighbor George to see how this sort of theoretical idea was already there in a germinal form, the explained supernatural.

This as a part of the mind, there's an anamnesis in the book that allows her to exorcize George. There's this transformation of certain figures into god-like semi-divine beings primarily with the eagle. There's this demon or demon second person within her and then the other world that you spoke to.

So I know you're writing one essay after another. At some point while you were writing those essays, did you have any sort of eureka moment where you said, wait a minute, I was already doing this unconsciously and now I'm bringing it into a sort of conscious book. Or was it a little bit more fluid than that?

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, I think definitely the language of the birds chapter in Secret Life of Puppets was a direct result of writing Neighbor George and wanting to get into that whole realm a little more deeply. By the way, I knew zilch about birds when I wrote that. And it's only recently I've kind of gotten into it. [LAUGHS] I'm sure real bird fanciers will feel cheated by my lack of detail there.

I guess-- and the other thing I would just say is I wouldn't call them god-like or semi-divine beings at all in Neighbor George. The fact that Dovey's last name is Eagleton is merely a register of her own bird identity. And when she is fighting George in the climactic scene and she starts morphing and realizing to her horror that she has the predator instincts of a killer as well. That's just part of that whole kind of human other wordly shared identity. She's no god, and neither is George.

And in a larger sense when I wrote Neighbor George, I was very into and immersed in and part of the whole tradition of the evil, scary supernatural. It wasn't until I started doing my studies with The Secret Life of Puppets that I realized just what a narrow cultural construct that was that belongs to Euro-American culture that comes directly out of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution, which together sort of shrank the supernatural into for religious folk, for Protestant folk, the territory of the devil.

And for the scientism that grew out of the Protestant Revolution as superstition, it doesn't exist at all. And so the whole notion of the demonic supernatural really traces back to that. And as I think I went on to note in Gothicka, it's very telling that in all through the 20th century when you had exorcism or devil possession movies, it wasn't some-- you know I can relate to my own background. Southern Baptist preacher in a leisure suit who got rid of the devil. It was a full on card carrying, Roman Catholic priest with Holy water.

So that it sort of retained this Catholic echo element right down 300 years into the 20th century. Then what happens and we can-- maybe save that till we talk about Gothicka is by the end of the 20th century, it starts to shift.

So what I began to realize when I was looking at pop culture, and that's when I got this whole notion of the sub zeitgeist, the slightly less respectable underbelly of mainstream intellectual culture. Anglo American I would have to say much trying to really spread it out farther than that.

But this was the only place the supernatural was able to flourish in the 19th into the 20th century, with ghost stories, and supernatural stories, and the whole B movie realm, in which the classic conundrum is the main character sees something a unnatural, supernatural. And the big question is, is it real, or is that character imagining it? Is it real or am I crazy?

And the B movie answer, always is. You are crazy. It's real. And so this is the only place where people could express their belief or yearning for a transcendental or other dimension of reality other than just what's here in front of us with our senses and so on. Anyway, so that was all was what was exploring in The Secret Life of Puppets.

MATT DILLON: Wonderful. And so you already spoke to Gothicka, so I think one of the ways to bridge from Secret Life to Gothicka would be to talk about the android, the cyborg, the last two chapters of Secret Life. Because in that book, you examine the trajectory of the android in the sub-zeitgeist, as well as this idea that the other world becomes more thinkable with the internet and cyberspace and all that sort of speculation.

One of the things that it's hard not to bring a sort of Victoria Nelson lens to what's happening with AI these days. It's everywhere. The speculation is in the New York Times regularly. It can be apocalyptic, and it can also be sort of extraordinary.

And then the other world has been very much built out. You have both these massive online role playing games where people basically exist in them-- World of Warcraft, Second Life, and then the Metaverse, which never really popped but is an attempt to do that.

So do you read this current cultural obsession, with AI and virtual worlds differently or the same than you did in the late '90s?

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, I would back up just a tiny bit with that to say that in The Secret Life of Puppets I was exploring this notion of the divine human from antiquity classical times the worship of statues, which were literally regarded as drawing down the energy of this other world into the simulacrum. And giving the simulacrum the powers of that other world, which was a definite and fervent belief and carried through in Catholicism straight through to the Reformation and beyond.

So I was tracing this kind of manifestation of the belief in another world right through puppets, androids, cyborgs, avatars in the late 20th century. And I just would say Secret Life of Puppets ends on a dime in the year 1999. Gothicka takes up from there.

Anyway, and you see the same religious impulse in the depiction of the androids, cyborgs, et cetera, and in the whole notion of cyberspace, but it's very, very unconscious. Because all of the-- I shouldn't generalize, but it just seems to me that most of the cyber theorists I have looked at don't really have a humanist education.

They don't know that all of the inflated ideas they have about cyber theory, about simulacra, about artificial intelligence really are about 2,000 years old, at least. And are not totally connected to what to the actual artifacts, if I can call it that they're talking about, and I've always seen-- I mean this is what grew out of writing Secret Life of Puppets that there are two realms of knowledge-- the episteme and the Gnostic.

And to be very oversimplifying about it. So the one being the materialist fact-oriented, orientation to view reality. And the other being the more transcendental one. And people to their peril mix up these two very separate territories.

So on one hand, you have evangelical Christians saying that creation began 5,000 years ago. OK, that's using one territory to explain the other, which does not work. On the other side of that you get people like someone quoted in The Puppet book saying the discovery of outer space has canceled out any legitimacy to the story of Jesus Christ.

So again, that's using one territory to explain the other, and it doesn't work. So what I see in cyber theory and now in this current AI scare is a lot of what I saw before, which is a mistaking of categories and a projection of transcendentalism onto what is basically a material world situation.

So just as how a computer back in 2001 Space Odyssey suddenly gained these extraordinary powers over his hapless human pilot. And again, I say this without really any deep knowledge. But for me, it's always going to be a question of someone has to put the plug-in the wall. These things. All this doesn't really have agency.

And what if God forbid the magnetic fields of the Earth reversed, and we didn't have electricity anymore. Where would AI and all that huge amount of knowledge we have loaded into ether, what's going to happen to that? It'll be gone.

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MATT DILLON: Secret Life as you say ends on a dime. And then Gothicka basically covers the beginning of the 2000 up until I think it was 2012 when it came out. If I remember right. So and a lot happened. There was a big transformation there. So what is the sort of transformation and shift that you saw happening in that early 2000's?

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, what I saw was this amazing mainstreaming of the supernatural out of the pop culture sub-zeitgeist and into the more traditional collective, in terms of all of these fictional works that kind of swept everyone away Harry Potter, but then really primarily Twilight-- the Twilight series. And what was notable about it too were the number of spiritual and quasi religious groups that attach themselves to these fictional worlds that had already been happening of course in the 20th century with Lovecraft and Star Trek, and so on, but really became pronounced in the 21st century.

And more than that the brightening of the supernatural. That is it was no longer the evil, devil-driven dark world of horror. And even horror movies themselves morphed into a sort of brighter landscape so that the the bad supernatural characters were no longer so bad. They started to say shading but that has a different meaning now, meaning more nuanced.

So Neighbor George for instance is very much a product of the evil, supernatural of the 20th century. But what you see in Twilight that's so interesting is that the vampire, which is this traditionally-- I mean nothing good about that vampire. And now, here are these beautiful people, they're even vegetarian vampires. They unlike Dracula, whom Bram Stoker gave the attribute of dissolving in sunlight. Presumably his evil, couldn't stand the light of day.

So what happens to Stephenie Meyer's vampires is that they shine. They glow. They have this huge halo. And it doesn't take a genius to see this is the diamond or rainbow body of the Tibetan Buddhists. It's also the radiant body of the ancient Gnostics. The invisible sheath around the human body that both these practices believed in. And they're good.

And as the series progresses, and the main character becomes transitions into becoming a vampire herself. She basically does become a demigoddess and she's immortal, and they're all immortal. So this is a very different territory than 20th century vampires. I mean, they're still evil vampires around, but this is really a step forward.

And then you have all these other vampire series of relatable vampires. The villain, in a word the villain becomes the hero. That's the big trajectory. The object becomes the subject. That really started with Anne Rice when Interview with a Vampire, when for the very first time, ever the vampire was a first person narrator.

So you're automatically in the realm of the subject whom you identify with and not the other. So all of this is going on. And the supernaturalism kind of floods into more literary realms and more serious art film forms. And I just would say also with and as well as spiritual practice.

And this is the phenomenon of individual works of fiction being taken up as scripture. I did talk about it a little bit in The Puppet book because I guess what I was trying to identify is this tremendous yearning for the transcendental.

And people who aren't brought up in traditional religion, look for it without maybe even knowing they're looking for it. And so what are they reading that has anything transcendental about it? Well, it's fantasy, and horror stories, and so on. And so that I think is how the Lovecraft practices began, and then this went on with Twilight.

And again, Twilight is kind of peaked and receded. So I don't know what's going on now, but at its peak. People were actually practicing bibliomancy with Twilight. Out of the four volumes every morning you'd open up one of the four volumes and read what was there and take it as your practice. They also would take whatever a member of that vampire family you felt most akin to would be your talismanic god, just like Greek and Roman gods, earlier times in Western culture.

And the interesting thing there is as I mentioned in Gothicka, Stephenie Meyer is a practicing Mormon. And if you examine the theology of the Church of Latter-day Saints, you see a lot of these same things-- it's very Swedenborgian. A lot of it I think comes from Swedenborg. But it's also in the realm of what Bloom was talking about as the American religion.

And there is a belief among the practitioners of the Church of Latter-day Saints that humans can achieve a demigod status in the afterlife. And the Twilight vampires are basically living their afterlife on Earth, which is, again, that ancient divine human tradition.

So I would say, though, that I'm not-- since writing these books I have not been following these trends as closely as I used to. What I really got wrong in Gothicka was predicting in 2010-2012 that the superhero movies were on the way out. Little did I know what happened.

My theory back then had been that a lot of the incredible body armor and so on was reflecting the Iraq and Afghan wars, which were still very much going on and in the public consciousness.

I have a hard time figuring out why they have stayed so popular. I have to say I don't like them. That's probably why I wanted to predict to go away. I haven't seen enough of them to pull out what the common themes are, but I suppose the most obvious is having supernatural powers.

However, they're attributed to lightning or this or that or the other. And that in some ways has been what people wanted to see. I don't know what do you think, Matt.

MATT DILLON: I'm on board with you with what was happening in the 2000s to my mind still the greatest superhero movie is The Dark Knight. And that was an Iraq war statement, with the Patriot Act. He has to code into everybody's phones in order to find the Joker and everything like that.

And that one was about as good as it gets. I like you have never really tapped into the MCU or the Master-- pardon me-- Marvel Comic Universe and all those films, they are solid. But one of the things that struck me hearing you speak to them, when you think about Twilight and vampires. When you think about Jediism as it relates to Star Wars, there's no-- as far as I'm aware, sort of real religion of the MCU.

People aren't sort of going-- there's no sort of sacred interaction with the characters of the MCU in that way. So part of it is just it was a very well put together series of films that you feel like you're missing out if you're not part of all the sort of 30 film sequence.

Yeah, it just doesn't have the sort of gravity that some of the earlier films do, in my opinion. So going to say. And this is another question that I would have put forth but it sort of ties in here.

Well, it's interesting to see the ways in which people read the Twilight books or they read Tolkien in a way that sort of references them as sacred texts. More and more you just see this sort of bricolage, where it's less that they're dealt with as sacred in and of themselves, their sacred products of the imagination.

And so however the imagination comes out, whether that's in the beings of Lovecraft, whether it's the Jedi, whether it's Tolkien, or whether it's Christian Saints, the ways in which people interact with them are as figures of the imagination. It's sort of a chaos magic type approach to these materials--

VICTORIA NELSON: [INAUDIBLE] a good point.

MATT DILLON: --Which I like, but I should ask you. So having charted that 10 years ago, obviously, it's a fool's errand to try and figure out which way religion is going. But having seen this sort of brightening 10 years ago, do you see it going a different direction? This merging or confluence of the Holy and popular culture heading in some different direction by 2030?

VICTORIA NELSON: I'm not able to make that call. I really don't know. When I was writing Gothicka I was pretty convinced that the 21st century. And I still am. The 21st century was going to see a resurgence of religion and spirituality for good or ill.

And we certainly have seen that both in evangelicalism in other radical religious movements, they have not been particularly positive. And we have also seen it in a move from, quote, "religion" unquote, to "spirituality" quote, unquote. That spirituality is now the preferred term.

Even with some of my devout Baptist relatives. They see it as being less hierarchical and less orthodox. So I was feeling back then that there would be some sort of new religion waiting to sweep America, at least, just as the Church of Latter-day Saints in the 19th century Scientology, which is now rated an official religion. In case you didn't know that.

It's one of the outer space religions that rose up in the mid to late 20th century. So I'm not seeing it happen as fast as I thought it would. But I do think the 21st century will see a more encompassing religion that probably grows out of both fictional territory on one hand, and this very strong New Thought-- well, Swedenborgian, for want of a better word, religious impulse that's been around for thousands of years.

The notion of the divine within the human being's ability to achieve godhead, if not in this life then in the next life. And if any one of your listeners wants to look more into the development of this strain of Christianity but also other religions, you should take a look at Mitch Horowitz's book on New Thought.

The principle is an interestingly Dan Brown made it the great subject of his novel-- The Lost Symbol, which wasn't nearly as popular as his earlier Da Vinci Code and other books, but the whole premise of that was this whole thing of new thought which boiled down to its simplest terms and his words was mind over matter.

The idea that thoughts are our inner thoughts are what shape and create our reality. Not the other way around.

MATT DILLON: Absolutely. Yeah, the New Thought that's an incredibly important part of the trajectory there. Even William James early 20th century pinpointed New Thought is this is going to be a part of the next great religion. If not the great religion in and of itself. And it's also one of those ones that humanizes the sacred so that people can practice it no matter what their sort of flavor happens to be.

And I think you also see that a little bit-- or I hadn't thought about this before so I could just be off on a tangent. But the use of psychedelics in microdosing, this way of, oh, I don't want to have this sort of transformative otherworldly experience. I want to take just enough so that I'm functioning at my highest possible aptitude and enchant the everyday just enough.

So yeah, I hadn't put that together before. That's interesting.

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, that is interesting, Matt, because there has been this kind of muting down, I would say in the last 10 years of some of the trends that seem to be almost exploding before. And microdosing totally embodies that, not enough to lose your day job when you're trying to pay back your student loan and all.

I mean, there are many, many cultural and class issues involved. And I would also say just to keep going with that. There are many interesting strands also, for instance, in African-American religiosity and lesser known practices such as the one that Louis Farrakhan started and that my friend Marcus read has investigated that very much, it's part UFO religion, part New Thought, all these strands are working together.

I also see out here in California, the two California's Alta and Baja, my great grandfather was actually a Mexican-Californio who was born here before the California became a state. But at any rate, what I've heard for years in Baja is that people have been leaving the Catholic Church in droves for Evangelical religions.

And so there's just this feeling in the air that they want to change. They want something different. And huh, I'm blanking out, what's the name of the denomination-- they don't drink coffee, or the ones who believe the end of the world is coming-- [LAUGHS]

MATT DILLON: I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot of people who think the end of the world is coming. So that's Seventh-day Advent--

VICTORIA NELSON: Yes, Seventh-day Adventists are very big in Baja.

MATT DILLON: Interesting. I did not know that. Perhaps this is a good time then to segue into one of your other terrains. So in addition to being a scholar and a writer or a fiction writer, you also worked closely with one of today's most widely read channels, Paul Selig. And given all the ways that you've written about how the supernatural comes out in certain forms based on our cultural imaginary, I'm very curious how you interpret what Paul is doing. So yeah, please do.

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, Paul Selig was my program director in the graduate creative writing program at Goddard College when I first started there back in 2006. And at that time he was a playwright, a department head. He also taught at NYU. And he had a sideline of a sort of psychic mediumship. And up to that point I was very much a non-believer in psychic readings and all of that sort of thing.

But after so much contact with Paul and our residencies and so on, I just empirically began to subscribe to the notion that, in fact, we all exist in this energy. The single energetic force that encompasses the planet. And that some people that we all have an innate ability to tap into that. But some people develop it, and other people don't.

And I also learned that the abilities vary enormously. The world of psychics is the world of herbal supplements. You don't have any quality control. And some people are a heck of a lot better at it than others. Paul was pretty amazing.

In those first years 2006, 2009, he had a group that met in Manhattan at his apartment, sort of a psychic healing group. And he started channeling a spiritual teaching. And the forces that named themselves and the channeling, called themselves the guides. And it was a very coherent teaching. And he started recording it and getting transcriptions.

And while this was going on, he expressed a desire to write a memoir about some of his experiences, but he was having a lot of trouble. He had a lot of writer's block about getting going with it. So I as the author of a book on Writer's Block, said well, let's talk about it. Maybe let's set up a time, and maybe if you just start telling me your story, that will get the thing going.

So he called from New York to my house, here in Berkeley, and so we were just going to talk about this memoir. And the guide voice interrupted and said Paul is not going to write a memoir. He is going to write a 300 page book on a spiritual practice that will be 12 chapters long. He will channel and record it, and Victoria will be the witness, the listener, and this will take two weeks every day for one hour.

So that's what we did. It took 2 and 1/2 weeks. And I was going to go down to Iceland, to one of the private seminars that Jeff Kripal and Michael Murphy were running there. And I told Jeff about Paul and I said, you've really got to have him down there. He's really something.

And I told Paul, get the whole book transcribed, get a hard copy and bring it with you to Esalen. So that is what happened. And as it turns out, Michael Murphy's publisher at that time was Mitch Horowitz at Tarcher.

And Paul gave the book to Mitch. Mitch read it on the plane home and said, this is exactly what I'm looking for, and publish it. But then and I said to Paul, you wretch. The rest of us work years and years, not just to write the damn books but to get them published. [LAUGHS]

2 and 1/2 weeks of composition and a week of editorial. Anyway, so the rest is history. He's now done about 10 books in the series. Eventually, he left Goddard, and is now a full time psychic in Chandler.

At one point was going to write an essay about the trope of psychics in pop culture. Because it's very similar to the-- is it real or am I crazy thing of starting with what's the one with Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore--

MATT DILLON: Ghost

VICTORIA NELSON: Ghost. The psychic is always a fraud in this story. But then low and behold, what they deliver turns out to be the actual truth. So it's a complete and total trope. It went on to that, there was a series I think called-- it wasn't medium, it was something else.

Anyway, so that's the fictional version. But in the real life version, Paul has a good following now. He is a complete anti-guru. There is absolutely no authoritarianism orthodoxy, whatever in the teaching. He presents himself as a fellow student, not as master or leader.

And it's a very eclectic egalitarian teaching that draws very much from New Thought, in the sense in the adjuring you to create your reality through your thoughts, and not to be bound by history. There are elements of Buddhism in it. And I'm sure there are probably elements of other religions.

I have no idea where it comes from except that to witness him doing it is to be in/or of whatever force it is that's engendering this because the words the sentences, the paragraphs, the chapters are completely coherent. And they just pour out of him.

It very much I think falls in the path of a course in miracles, which as you probably know is a very popular new age of spiritual practice that was actually channeled by an atheist Jewish woman who said about. This all came out of her and she said, I don't believe it, but I know it's true. Words to that effect I think.

So yeah, so that's an example of the smaller spiritual practices that go on these days. It doesn't really fit the mold of the fictional scripture I was talking about. But certainly has its proponents.

MATT DILLON: Absolutely. Yeah, and you spoke to Helen Schucman in A Course in Miracles, Jane Roberts also in the Seth Material. There are a lot of-- there's a lot of not so great psychic channeled books. But then there are some Paul's, and A Course in Miracles, and Seth speaks that are coherent, they're profound, and there's something worth investigating there. And really taking seriously. So it's nice that to have a living exemplar of that around.

And so to come in for a landing here with our wide ranging talk, what are you working on now? What are you up to? What can people look forward to from Victoria Nelson over the next few years?

VICTORIA NELSON: Well, I've always been a slow study in terms of writing these books and getting them out. I am working on a draft of the novel that I mentioned to you, which I got the inspiration from a colleague of yours at Rice, Claire Fanger, the medievalist. She said, hey-- when I was working on Gothicka-- she said, hey, have you ever heard of Christina the Astonishing? The 12th century Belgian Saint? And I said no.

And she said, well, Christina died and went to purgatory and came back with superhero powers. She could fly, she could walk under water, she could nourish herself from her own breasts, and she had an indestructible mortal body. You could do anything to it and she wouldn't die. So I thought, well, even though I don't like superheroes, this is kind of an interesting situation.

And so I did imagine this future alternative Northern California world of pioneers where they can't remember the civilization before, they've kind of had to reinvent themselves, and they've reinvented a new religion. And my Christina decides to die and go to what she calls the world of light and love. I will admit that I've borrowed a bit from Paul's spiritual world when constructed this religion and this transcendental realm.

And she comes back with these powers, but they totally freak everybody out. The original Christina was going to-- it was supposed to be proving the existence of purgatory. That was her whole mission back on Earth. And this Christina is casting around like crazy for why was she sent back. What she's supposed to do.

And in the meantime, people just regard her as a total freak. And at one point she ends up in a place that is dimly remembered as the Fillmore Auditorium in the old San Francisco, and she discovers she's been put on stage as a freak show for these sadomasochistic Goths, who want to see her saw her arm off and do all these things.

And then another point, they try to execute her up north, in the sort of new version of Mendocino County in a battery-operated electric chair. So there's a certain amount of gore and violence, but also and I'm not sure where that came from in my psyche. But at any rate, she perseveres, she finally finds solace at the top of a 300 foot Redwood tree. That's kind of becomes her sanctuary. And her adventures continue.

So I'm working on that. I'm working on a screenplay of Neighbor George for a London production company. And I also have on the back burner a draft of a book I wrote about the psychology of binge reading, a compulsive reading with regards to genre in particular. I went into this a little bit in The Secret Life of Puppets.

Why do we read horror? Why do we read romance? Why do we read fantasy and sci-fi so compulsively? And compulsive reading is kind of a different experience in many ways. And so I've been engaged in trying to work out the psychology of that in each instance. I've always believed in regards to myself and others that anyone who compulsively consumes horror after their teenage years, probably has a little bit of childhood PTSD going for them.

And then romance, and so on, and so on. So I'm having fun with that I'm looking at some cohort of thriller writers in particular. So I just have that around between my projects and just keep putting one foot in front of the other without knowing at all where I'm going.

MATT DILLON: That's an exciting set of burners to be working on. I like to see where that is headed. Oh, wonderful. Well, that's as good a place to stop as we can find so. Victoria Nelson, thank you so much for coming on Pop Apocalypse today. And Godspeed with all your projects.

VICTORIA NELSON: Oh, thank you, Matt. It was really fun to talk with you.

MATT DILLON: Likewise. All right, take care.

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