WhiteFeather Hunter PhD – The inaugural Jake Stratton-Kent Memorial Lecture

Lecture Abstract

ARCANUM SANGUINIS: OCCULT BLOOD
Science and medicine underwritten by witchcraft and magic

WhiteFeather was this year’s featured artist and curator at the Museum, presenting the full season exhibition. Arcanum Sanguinis: Occult Blood (April 1—November 1, 2024) presented historical artifacts and symbolic objects together with contemporary artworks, including laboratory-based biological art, also known as bio-art. The exhibition, based on onsite research conducted at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic during October 2022 and March 2024, served to construct a visual narrative of overlaps between the medicinal goals of folk magic, alchemy, and its descendent, biotechnology. These overlaps were made more explicit through the lens of feminist and queer art that explores how the gendered/sexed nature of witchcraft persecution and the medicalized (mis)treatment of bodies are historical bedfellows. During this lecture, WhiteFeather will focus on some aspects of research unique to an independent occult archive such as the museum, while also providing illustrated highlights of obscure themes presented in the exhibition: namely, the ritual reanimation of ancient alchemical protocols, moral corruption as biopolitics, bodies/fluids as ambivalent power, and the anorgasmic goals of tech-evangelism.

Biographies

Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter is an internationally recognized Canadian artist and researcher, holding a PhD through SymbioticA International Centre of Excellence in Biological Art at The University of Western Australia. Her recently completed doctoral research was a feminist negotiation of science biocultures by using ‘taboo’ body fluids, such as menstrual blood and menstrual stem cells, in tissue engineering protocols; this also included investigating witchcraft as performed resistance to medicalized control over women’s and other bodies. Her most recent project, Sentient Clit—The Pussification of Biotech is an exploration of 3D-bioprinted clitorises embedded with menstrual stem cells differentiated to neurons, to produce synthetic clitorises that respond intelligently to stimuli. WhiteFeather has exhibited artwork and published her research throughout North America, Europe, Australiasia, and Asia, and is regularly invited to work at prestigious international biolabs, most recently the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, the DZNE German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases at Charité Berlin, and at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at University of Lisboa.

Scarlet Imprint was founded by Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech in 2007 with the aim of advancing the practice and study of magic and esotericism for a new generation. They have brought a unique energy and vision to small press occult publishing and book arts, and inspired many others to do the same. 

Peter is a writer and magician, and an ardent advocate for liberty, life and love. He was born and raised in Cornwall, the wild Atlantic surf forming him as much as his passion for the written and spoken word. His first book, The Red Goddess, inspired a resurgence of interest in the goddess of Revelation, Babalon. His second, Apocalyptic Witchcraft, returned witchcraft to the wild and to poetry, but, importantly, situated the craft in the present, in the crisis of ecological and spiritual collapse we now face. In many ways taking up the torch from the libertarian Thelemite John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons, the subject of his most recent book, The Two Antichrists, Peter continues to challenge orthodoxy as he engages with the history and future of the western occult and magical tradition. The second part of his seminal work on Lucifer will be published early next year.

Alkistis is a dancer and writer, whose obsession with the body, both carnal and subtle, has led her to pursue an ever-evolving inquiry into the nature of incarnation and the flesh. Her practice is grounded in ankoku butō, the dance of utter darkness, a radical performance form and philosophy created by Hijikata Tatsumi in Japan during the 1960s and 70s. At the core of her dance, her magic and mystical practice, is the spiritual transformation of the body and consciousness through movement.