This dissertation centers the Chicago years (1946-1961) of the avant-garde jazz composer and poet Sun Ra to recover the intellectual and institutional history of an overlooked African American religious culture that emerged in the wake of the Great Migration (c.1915-1970). Through extensive archival research, I bring into view a religious subculture rooted in the circulation of esoteric and occult materials, which I collectively call “black metaphysical religion.” My dissertation documents the vibrant traffic in the occult within and between the centers of black migration and shows that black metaphysical religion provided the fundamental terms through which the demand for another world became imperative.Sun Ra is an icon of the black radical tradition. Known for his otherworldly idiom, Sun Ra’s “music of the space age” sounded a critique of American racial regimes and expressed alternative possibilities for black life, famously concluding that “space is the place” of black freedom. Yet, while scholars have designated Sun Ra’s outer space sound and style as paradigmatic of black radicalism, they produce a picture of the musician as a charismatic figure with a singular perspective. Instead, I excavate Sun Ra’s archive and distill the collective labor behind the making of his otherworldly program. In the context of Chicago’s reinvigorated efforts to segregate the city under the postwar pretense of urban renewal, black metaphysical religion became an essential means through which working-class residents organized and expressed their desire for a more just world. Sun Ra’s aesthetic vision emerged from the everyday culture of black metaphysical religion and I connect his well-known idiom to the lesser-known peoples, places, and intellectual traditions that together made “space the place.” Centering black metaphysical religion entails a re-evaluation of migration-era African American religion. The effects of the Great Migration on African American religious cultures are most often measured by looking to established Protestant institutions, the rise of storefront churches, and the birth of gospel music. Alternatively, attempts to de-center the equivalence of African American religion with black churches have focused attention on a fixed set of smaller “black sects and cults.” Departing from both models, I draw on Sun Ra’s personal library, business records, album artwork, newspaper clippings, recordings, and more to show how black metaphysical religion reshaped the city and its sounds in heretofore unexplored ways. I locate the force of this religious subculture outside of recognized religious geographies. Black metaphysical religion moved through kitchenette apartments, bookstores, basements, prisons, and queer clubs. Following Sun Ra across the city and taking seriously his popularity among working-class residents uncovers an alternative account of the relationship between African American religion and social struggle in the twentieth century.

Toltec and Aztec Revitalizations are social and religious groups that practice Toltec and Aztec philosophies and physical disciplines (such as Danza) in accordance with Aztec aesthetics and with a belief in Aztec calendric practices and other forms of moral behaviors, through the study and interpretation of Mesoamerican history. This phenomenon speaks to ways in which the colonial project is challenged and even subverted. People practicing these Revitalizations inhabit in-between spaces which are hard to categorize within the parameters of the categories of race and religion. In Mexico, people in these Revitalizations are not classified as Indigenous in the census, even though they identify as such; at the same time, they are considered religious groups/organizations despite rejecting the category of religion within their groups. As a consequence of the mobility of people and ideas between Mexico and the U.S., Toltec and Aztec Revitalizations have served Mexican and Chicano/a/x people as a way to connect with what seems to be an “Aztecization” of an Indigenous identity. This dissertation explores how practitioners from Toltec and Aztec Revitalizations engage with different types of practices to form what I argue is a “racio-religious” identity. The primary method used in this dissertation to gather data around Toltec and Aztec Revitalizations practiced transnationally was ethnographic research in an institute for Toltec teachings in Chicago, Ill. Besides engaging in participant observation in the institute, I interviewed student-practitioners in Chicago and key teachers of Revitalizations in Mexico and Chicago. In addition, I used internal literature—that is, literature produced by members of the Revitalizations from the 1960s to the current day—to gain a historical perspective of concepts and internal vocabulary. This dissertation illustrates that through a set of practices and embodied knowledges (from Aztec Dance to everyday use of the calendar) practitioners of Toltec and Aztec Revitalizations reproduce “racio-religious” identities that embody racial and religious nuances, despite government classifications and the historical erasure of pre-colonial societies.

The academic study of exorcism is theoretically weak and limited because the scholarship is largely disjointed, partitioned into sets of case studies described, analyzed, and theorized according to specific cultures and histories. This thesis is an effort to fill the gaps in the literature, offering a comparative analysis of numerous case studies – organizing the eleven most prominent properties of the phenomena into a concise field manual (Section I), synthesizing the most frequently cited scholars into cohesive cultural and social commentaries (Sections II and III), and advancing the analysis of exorcism into a new theoretical direction with the presentation of five spatial dimensions (Section IV).

Exorcism is a highly ostensible phenomenon (physically recognizable). Across cultures one can identify patterns in the ways that people interact with and speak to each other and with their environment (objects, places, etc.). There are patterns in the individual maneuvers and orations of the participants; patterns in the social dynamics between the principals involved; patterns in the religious discourse that narrate the event or ritual; patterns in the overall structure that governs the “gameplay.” Exorcism is a “game” because it involves numerous “playable characters” (exorcists, recipients of exorcism, human spectators), “non-playable characters” (deities, angels, demons, ghosts, etc.), additional “game mechanics” (props, tools, equipment, intervals of time), and a clear “game objective” to use and occupy space. “Players” take culturally regulated turns to compete for space as a piece of currency, a capital to be gained and used against their human and non-human competitors.

The study of space is vital to the study of exorcism (and religion, more broadly). In a constant competition for territory, spaces are always muddled with traffic. Thus, this thesis examines exorcism’s “field of play,” how the principals involved mark and unmark space as their own; how the various social agents ritually interact with space; how spaces are created, warped, and dominated; how movement and activity within space are regulated; how spaces influence religious individuals and vice versa. In the end, whether exorcism manifests as a spontaneous event or as a prescriptive ritual, there is always a story being told in space (“game narrative”). This spatial analysis of exorcism then contributes to the study of how human beings religiously interact with space (with whatever is in their environment).

Sections II and III are devoted to examining the key “players” of the “game” (human and non-human alike) and their relationships with each other. Section IV serves as an unofficial “rulebook” for the “game” of exorcism (an extension of the field manual presented in Section I). Overall, this thesis argues that space is the best heuristic available to study exorcism phenomena; it provides scholars with a more comprehensive understanding of exorcism’s “game mechanics.”

For the scholar of American religion, exorcism remains sociologically intriguing because of its dynamism. This dissertation provides insight into how the practice of exorcism in different institutional and vernacular contexts shapes its ongoing popularity and how America’s postmodern culture enables new manifestations and mutations to emerge. I examine exorcism phenomena (as both practice and spectacle) through a discursive analysis, studying the use of exorcism discourse within various “communities of practice” – that is, within communities and situations where learning, even if institutionalized, remains “informal, fragmented, serendipitous, and situated in a set of social relationships and shared activities.” As such, this dissertation analyzes the exorcism discourse of established religious institutions, vernacular religious practice, the popular entertainment industry, and academia. Any study of contemporary Western exorcism should consider its relationship with popular media. News programs and media sites traffic “fringe” religious phrases and sensationalized images in order to generate public interest, excitement, or scorn. Contemporary practitioners and experts are interviewed in pursuit of “real life” representation and/or authenticity – providing the religious subject a platform to promote their practice or ideas. The entertainment industry franchises various segments of America’s popular religious imagination, producing dark supernatural content related to possession and exorcism phenomena and its adjacent areas of social conspiracy (e.g., Satanic cults). Academic scholarship is also marketed in ways that attract popular consumer segments as a result of exorcism’s association with mystery and controversy; the topic’s lack of rigid interpretation. The popular media consumption and reproduction of exorcism and Satanism is significant for a number of reasons. Popular media outlets reify “modern” self-conceptions of Western society and culture, rendering “premodern” content (e.g., ancient monstrosities, pagan cults, religious fervor) into mediatized entertainment and sensationalism. Popular cinema, especially, can act as a theological promotion of modern piety in a secular age, at once reifying the deviance associated with non-Christian iconography and the premodern powers that religious institutions still wield. Such popular Christian media also reifies Evangelical Protestant conceptions of “fringe” religious practice within trends of “Cathsploitation” (that is, doxa related to big institutions, bureaucratic structures, religious conspiracies, scary iconography, body rituals, clerical clothing, and the like). This dissertation also demonstrates that mediatization provides means to resist tenets of Western hegemony. This occurs through reactionary socio-political practices that challenge public Christian supremacy and through artistic reimaginings of exorcism discourse such that social frustration and political disenchantment are expressed. My thesis is, thus, twofold. First, the popular mediatization of possession and exorcism, observed in public practice, social media, popular news media, religious commercialism, and the entertainment industry, reflects a broader socio-religious American dynamic whereby “fringe” and marginalized content is exotified and sensationalized into a media spectacle, one that exploits the cultural attitudes toward and anxieties surrounding various oppressed, repressed, and/or liminal public identities. Second, due to recurrent demands for dark supernatural content within various sectors of American society, phenomena like possession, brainwashing, exorcism, and ritual abuse act as culturally available idioms for the creative expression of social subjugation; robust allegories wherein alterities are identified and confronted and suffering imbued with meaning. As a result, social misfortunes are attributed to the deliberate, often secretly planned, actions of malicious groups (human and supernatural). Various marginalized communities thereby appropriate this popular religious discourse in order to convey the American horror experience of a life spent on the margins of society. Thus, as a mediatized phenomenon, exorcism presents its consumers and creators with a methodology for revealing both society’s ruptures and insecurities – all that our civilization represses and oppresses.