Toward an Occult Museology: The Museum as Spirit Laboratory

Watch a 19-minute conference talk exploring the concept of occult museology and the potential of museums as spiritual laboratories. Examine how traditional museology, focused on tangible sensory experiences, contrasts with numerous accounts of non-material and unexplained phenomena in museum settings. Learn about historical and contemporary examples of intuitive, psychometric, and magical experiences reported in major institutions like the Smithsonian and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Discover a proposed framework incorporating animistic and spiritualistic perspectives for studying these anomalous museum experiences. Explore how this reconceptualization could expand the role of museums in society and establish them as important sites for investigating spirit communication, mediumship, healing, and other unexplained phenomena. Delivered by Dr. Lois H. Silverman, Professor of Museum Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, drawing from her extensive research in museology, visitor studies, and the spiritual potential of museums.