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This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his interest in Celtic legend, Irish intellectual influences and conjunctions, and magical ritual and psychic research. The lecture considers Yeats' approach to death in his later work, concluding with his creation of a structured canon of work in the light of his own death and the work that he wrote on his deathbed.

This chapter looks at E.R. Dodds’s engagement with the paranormal. Dodds’s career in psychic research had three distinct phases: before, during, and after his tenure of the Oxford chair. His own paranormal beliefs, however, solidified early and remained consistent over his long career in the field. Telepathy was real, an innate part of human development, and a default explanation for other forms of clairvoyance and mediumship. On the other hand, disembodied intelligences—including demons, ghosts, and spirit guides—were a delusion. Though marginalized in modern histories of psychic studies, Dodds’s long and active association with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) made him a central figure in the history of twentieth-century paranormal research in Britain, and one of the most thoughtful and hard-nosed embedded observers of its journey from the Victorian parlour to eventual extinction in the laboratory environment he had spent his adult life advocating.

This chapter focuses on how radio waves served as the central medium for Frederick Du Vernet’s late style spiritual politics. Combining the innovations of radio technology with what psychology was newly revealing about the complexity of human consciousness, Du Vernet saw radio mind as opening up a new spiritual frequency for all. Based in part on the copious marginalia he left in his library of books focused on psychology, theology, and psychic research, including books by William James and Henri Bergson, the chapter tells the story of how he came to be convinced by the powers of telepathy as he grappled with debilitating illness. In a contrapuntal reading, the chapter parallels his “telepathic testimonies,” published in church and secular newspapers, with his letters to church and government officials in which he criticized the evils of residential schools for Indigenous children. Quoting the voices of Indigenous parents in his appeals to his Anglican colleagues in Toronto, Du Vernet highlighted the devastation wrought on parents and children when they were torn apart through the residential schooling system. At the same time that he wrote about the power of thoughts to travel across distance, he insisted on the importance of families in proximity.

Chapter 9 explores the connections between the Vienna Circle of positivism and the esoteric milieu. It shows how the founders of logical positivism, such as Otto Neurath, presented their philosophy as a kind of magical revival. It also demonstrates that other positivists—such as Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Kurt Gödel—had a pro-found preoccupation with ghosts and the paranormal. Taken as a whole, the book demonstrates how magic, like metaphysics, also haunts the beginnings of analytic philosophy. It also undoes notions of a dry and apolitical positivism, by describing positivist anti-metaphysics in terms of ideological critique.