Dr Jason Lawton Winslade

Teaches:
Occultism in Western Theatre and Performance
Occultism in Popular Culture
Occult Media
Occultism in Cinema
Esotericism in Comic Books and Graphic Literature

Jason Lawton Winslade is an initiate in several esoteric traditions, including Hermeticism, Wicca, and the Academy, which led to his PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University in 2008. Since 1992, he has studied esotericism as both a scholar and a practitioner, combining his interest in ritual theatre, performance art, postmodern theory, popular culture, and ecstatic drumming and music. He concentrated on literature, theatre and film as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, and specialized in avant-garde theatre and Native American art and performance for his MA at the University of Michigan. For his graduate work in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, he examined anthropology, ethnography, post-structuralism, religion, and performance theory. His dissertation focused on Western initiation rites and their relation to texts, rhetoric, activism, and popular culture.

He has taught courses at several universities on rites of passage, mythology, folklore, occultism in media and politics, performance of literature, gender studies, and writing. For many years, he has taught seminars on occultism and popular culture, comic books, and a popular course on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

His publications have been on wide-ranging topics such as witchcraft on television, kabbalah and popular culture, initiatory practices in participatory theatre, reality tv and occultism, esoteric themes in comic books, and performance practices at Pagan festivals and fire circles. He has presented both scholarly and personal work in the form of academic papers, workshops and live performances at academic conferences, counter-culture festivals, and art and theatre festivals in the US and UK.

As a scholar and a performer, he is interested in performance and the esoteric in their myriad manifestations, whether that performance takes place on a stage, in a ritual space, online, or in everyday life. He rejects the notion that performance always implies an inauthenticity and is a firm believer in the notion of alchemical performance, that through performance modes like singing, music, drumming, dance, and theatre, practitioners can transform their work and their lives, particularly when done in a ritual space, like a communal fire.

Selected Publications:

(2010 “‘The Magic Circus of the Mind’: Alan Moore’s Promethea and the Transformation of Consciousness through Comics,” co-authored with Christine Hoff Kraemer in Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books, edited by A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer, Continuum Press.

(2009) “Alchemical Rhythms: Fire Circle Culture and the Pagan Festival” in Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, ed. James R. Lewis and Murphy Pizza, Brill Press, 241-279.

(2003) “The (Oc)cult of Personality: Initiating the Audience in The Edwardian Mysteries”, in Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance, ed. Susan Kattwinkel, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 199-212.

(2000) “Techno-Kabbalah: The Performative Language of Magick and the Production of Occult Knowledge,” The Drama Review 44.2, 84-100.