RR Patreon Excerpt Tier 3- Tommy Cowan: Research Updates on Burroughs, Cutups, Gender, Alchemy & Transformation

Tommy Cowan is currently a PhD student in the Literature, Media, and Culture program at Florida State University. His primary interest is the confluence between literature and esotericism, including how literatures/texts are conceptualized as esoteric ritual, and the reception/transmission of literary esotericism as an intellectual tradition. He received his MA in Religious Studies from University of Amsterdam (2019), graduating Cum Laude. His 2019 master’s thesis centers around spirituality and esotericism in the works of American author William S. Burroughs. He is also an Associate Editor for Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. As this discussion was centered on research updates, we cover a range of topics- but highlighting a few here: We start with Tommy’s research on Burroughs that grew out of Tommy’s work with Florida State University’s archive complied by Professor Bucher. Just a head’s up – our discussion is mature in nature, so listener discretion is advised, as they say. We cover two of Tommy’s papers- one that deals with sexual hanging as something that Burroughs was trying to read in an esoteric sense; the other deals with the tension between Burroughs’ misogyny and his ‘feminine’ coded texts, which leads into a related topic of transgenderism and alchemy, and circling back to sexual metaphors with brief tangents into Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy and David Lynch’s atomic bomb scene in Twin Peaks: The Return. After all that, we move on to the concept of ‘normative esotericism,’ as Tommy is looking at ways in which esoteric philosophies and thought reinforce hegemonic normative culture. Lastly, Tommy talks about his new research into how animals enter into symbiotic relationships with plant and fungi substances, plus how we can analyze our own relationship to entheogens. Check out my Patreon page for the full interview! https://www.patreon.com/RejectedReligion