Kenneth Batcheldor was a British clinical psychologist who, during the final two decades of his life, investigated the paranormal through direct experiments in table-turning. The final fruit of that work was an essay, compiled from Batcheldor’s notebooks by Patric Giesler, entitled “Notes on the Elusiveness Problem in Relation to a Radical View of Paranormality.” Published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1994, it remained unknown to JF and Phil until Shannon Taggart called their attention to it quite recently. Since the theory Batcheldor presents here with admirable lucidity is deeply attuned to ideas they have been discussing on Weird Studies for nearly a decade, they decided to devote an episode to it. The core idea is by far the weirdest of all—in a sense, it is the weird itself.

Read Batcheldor's essay on the Weird Studies Patreon.

Visit Weirdosphere to enroll in Phil's upcoming 5-week course, "A Musical Tarot."

Pierre-Yves Martel's Weird Studies: Volume 3 will be available for preorder on March 13. Visit his Bandcamp page for details.

REFERENCES

K. M. Wehrstein, “Kenneth Batcheldor” in Psi Encyclopedia  

Kenneth Batcheldor, “Notes on the Elusiveness Problem in Relation to a Radical View of Paranormality,” ed. Patric Giesler, The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 88, no. 2 (1994): 90-116. 

Kenneth Batcheldor, “Contributions to the Theory of PK Induction from Sitter-Group Work,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 78 (1984): 105-122. 

George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal 

Quintin Meillassoux, After Finitude 

Joshua Ramey, “Contingency Without Reason: Speculation after Meillassoux” 

Kenneth Batcheldor, Videos of Table Tipping 

Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell 

David Lynch, Wild at Heart 

William James, The Principles of Psychology

Tom Cheetham, Imaginal Love 

A. Irving Hallowell, Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View 

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This is the first of three episodes on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to be released in the course of the next several months. Focusing here on The Fellowship of the Ring, our hosts discuss the first leg of Frodo's journey into darkness, paying special attention to Tolkien's prose style, his modernism, his commitment to a truly magical realism, and his penchant for the weird and the tragic.

Image: "Lothlorien" by Tessa Bronsky, via Wikimedia Commons.

References

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring  

Algernon Blackwood, English writer  

Weird Studies, Episode 204 on “On Fairy Stories” 

Peter Jackson (dir.), The Lord of the Rings 

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea 

Friedrich Nietzsche, History in the Service and Disservice of Life  

Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives 

Carl Jung, The Red Book  

Lord Dunsaney, The King of Elfland’s Daughter  

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto  

David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram”  

Steven Chow (dir.), Kung Fu Hustle 

Donna Tartt, The Secret History  

Lost Lakes, YouTube Channel 

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This episode was recorded before a live audience at Indiana University Cinema as part of Weird Academia, a series of events that brought much high strangeness to Bloomington, Indiana, in January 2026. The discussion followed a screening of Ken Russell’s 1980 cinematic fever dream, Altered States. In it, JF and Phil explore the weird intersection of mysticism, psychedelics, and institutional science, and they close with a brief Q&A with members of the audience.

Visit Weirdosphere to enroll in Phil Ford's upcoming course, A Musical Tarot.

References

Weird Academia and the Center for Possible Minds

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Roger Penrose, physicist and mathematician

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren

Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics and Matter & Memory

H. P. Lovecraft, American writer

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Clement Greenberg, American essayist

G. K. Chesterton, English writer

David Cronenberg (dir.), The Fly

Michael Garfield, podcaster, writer, musician

Weird Studies episode 205 on the Hierophant

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

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In this episode of Weird Studies, we turn to the fifth Major Arcanum, the Hierophant, symbolizing tradition, instruction, and the exoteric aspect of spiritual practice. Drawing on Meditations on the Tarot and other sources, we question the easy opposition between tradition and revolution, exploring instead how inherited forms can foster genuine inner growth, and how an interior revolutions may renew traditions from within.

To reserve seats for Weird Academia events, visit the website of the Center for Possible Minds.

References

Johann Sebastian Bach, F# minor Fugue from The Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 (played by Rosalyn Tureck) 

Richard Wilhelm (trans.), The I Ching

J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings

P. D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

Our Known Friend, Meditations of the Tarot

Plato, "The Seventh Letter"

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot

Dogen, Instructions for the Cook

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Weird Studies, Live at Illuminated Brew Works 

Franz Liszt, Hungarian pianist 

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria vol. 1 

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For Tolkien, fairy stories are not stories about fairies, but stories that take place in Faerie. And in doing so, they make Faerie present. They are not escapist fantasies but disclosures of a real mode of being and invitations to live in that mode. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the great writer’s radical claims about the nature of story, life, and reality.

Upcoming Events

Erik Davis and JF's six-week course on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick begins on January 20th. For details and to enroll, visit the Weirdosphere.

For information on the upcoming Weird Academia events in Bloomington (Jan 27-29), visit the symposium web page at the Center for Possible Minds.

Music in this Episode

"What a Load of Gnosis," from Weird Studies: Music from the Podcast, Volume I

"Springtime on Ganymede," from Weird Studies: Music from the Podcast, Volume II

References

J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy Stories” 

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea 

Franz Liszt, Transcendental Etude No. 4: Mazeppa (played by Lazar Berman) 

Dogen, "Instructions for the Cook"

Jeff Kripal, Mutants and Mystics 

Eric Wargo, From Nowhere

J.F. Martel, Review of “From Nowhere” for Journal of Scientific Exploration

Richard Wagner, Parsifal 

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To tide us over as we prepare for a new season of Weird Studies, here is an "audio extra," originally recorded for our Patreon supporters, wherein we discuss imposter syndrome, the eternal inadequacy of the intellect, the perils of playing with swords, and the role of trust in creation.

A new episode will drop on Wednesday, January 14th, 2026. Happy New Year to all.

To join our Patreon, go to www.patreon.com/weirdstudies

To enroll in the upcoming Moby Dick course starting on January 20th, visit www.weirdosphere.org.

For information on the Weird Academia conference in Bloomington, Indiana, visit www.possibleminds.org/weird-academia

Episode image: Caspar David Friedrich, Abtei im Eichwald (1808-1810).

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Back in episode 112, Phil and JF devised a gimmick for a show: randomly select one of the many aphorisms in The Book of Probes, a compendium of Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic quips designed by David Carson, and see what happens. It proved lively enough that they’re trying it again nearly a hundred episodes later. The resulting conversation touches the weird across a range of themes: tourism, the two kinds of truth, advertising, Kubrick’s marketing savvy, technology, orality versus literacy, and much more. A fitting feast for the mind as the year draws to a close.

From all of us at Weird Studies, happy holidays.

• Sign up for JF Martel and Erik Davis's upcoming course on Moby-Dick.

• Join Phil, JF, and composer Pierre-Yves Martel for Weirdosphere's Solstice Story Hour on December 21.

• For dates, venues, and the full slate of Weird Academia events in Bloomington this January, visit the Centre for Possible Minds website.

• To participate in the Weird Academia Colloquium, email organizers Emma Stamm and Michael Garfield at [email protected]

Header Image: NASA.

REFERENCES

Marshall McLuhan, Distant Early Warning Deck

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Plato, The Seventh Letter

Marshall McLuhan, The Book of Probes

Toronto School of Communication Theory

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Plato, The Republic 

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Jonathan Crary, 24/7

H. P. Lovecraft, The Color out of Space

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In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic classic, the tale that conjured the fog-shrouded London hellscape that has haunted the modern imagination ever since. Though written as a quick “Christmas crawler” to earn a bit of money, the novella has exerted an incalculable influence on art and literature. It also proved strangely prophetic, anticipating Freud and others who would soon make the fragmentation of the human psyche a defining concern of the new century.

"The human is two" is a recurring refrain in the work of the scholar of religious thought, Jeffrey J. Kripal.

References

Dan Ericson, Severance

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

David Lynch (dir.), Mullholland Drive

John Frankenheimer (dir.), The Manchurian Candidate

Galen Strawson, British philosopher

Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols

Jeff Kripal, How to Think Philosophically

Rouben Mamoullian (dir.), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Weird Studies, Episode 161 on “From Hell”

Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id”

Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics

Arthur Machen, “The White People”

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In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by independent scholar Peter Bebergal, author of Strange Frequencies, Season of the Witch, and other books on the intersections of culture, religion, and the occult. The topic is Frankenstein—not Guillermo del Toro's latest but James Whale's 1931 talkie along with its 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, both starring Boris Karloff. The conversation touches on Gnosticism, alchemy, modern techno-hubris, the Gothic, and much more.

Peter's new online course, Hacking the Invisible: At the Intersection of Technology and Magic, begins on November 20th, 2025, and runs for three weeks on Weirdosphere. Visit the Weirdosphere website for details and to enroll.

References

James Whale (dir.), Frankenstein

Tobe Hooper (dir.), Texas Chainsaw Massacre

James Whale (dir.), The Bride of Frankenstein

Justin Sledge, Esoterica

Henry Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics

David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

John the Apostle, The Apocryphon of John

Stuart Gordon (dir.), Stuck

Jennifer Kent (dir.), The Babadook

Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters

Thomas Paine, “The Age of Reason”

Jean Gimpel, Medieval Machine

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Originally released in 2018 but remixed for your listening pleasure, here's Phil reading Arthur Machen's classic weird tale, "The White People." Happy Halloween!

Machen's "The White People" was discussed all the way back in ⁠Weird Studies episode 3⁠.

Earlier this week, JF and Phil joined Conner Habib on his podcast to talk all about horror. It was a great conversation and we hope you'll give it a listen.

Image: Photo of doll from Auckland War Memorial Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.

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For their 200th episode, JF and Phil turn their attention to H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” a story foundational not only to modern horror fiction but to the very idea of the Weird. In revisiting this tale of forbidden knowledge and cosmic ambiguity, the hosts reflect on Weird Studies itself as a “slow piecing together of dissociated knowledge” that mirrors the work of Lovecraft’s own bewildered protagonists.

Image by Antoni Espinosa via Wikimedia Commons.

Upcoming Events:

Peter Bebergal teaches on Weirdosphere starting November 20, 2025

JF Martel speaks at Back to Haunt Us in East London on November 8, 2025

Phil Ford speaks at the Durations Festival in NYC on November 7, 2025

Phil Ford hangs out at Archestratus Books and Food on November 8, 2025

References

H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu 

Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia 

Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 

Phil Ford, “The Wanderer”

H. P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

Weird Studies, Episode 74 on Jung

Phil Ford, Jacob Foster, and J. F. Martel, “Care of the Dead” 

Weird Studies, Episode 110 on The Glass Bead Game 

Weird Studies, Episode 101 on Tanizaki 

Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy 

Weird Studies, Episode 156 on Donna Tartt 

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