A posthuman context

In the late sixties the renowned philosopher Jacques Derrida (Reference Derrida1967) published Writing and Difference. Therein Derrida, (Reference Derrida1978, p. 405) most explicitly presented his view of différance (difference) as the negative force which haunts every text and charges communicative exchange with the play of subjectivity. For Derrida, communication is predicated on the unspoken opposite which demarcates meaning and also multiplies what is communicated with interpretative possibility and plurality until meaning-making itself is threatened. The play of différance deconstructs language and thereby institutes postmodern time as the rejection of metanarratives (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984, pp. xxiii, 3–4). This theory has dominated continental philosophy for recent decades, and is invoked in resistance to oppressive hegemony most often enacted through identity myths. This is the intellectual landscape which has given birth to a new philosophical movement known as posthumanism, which rejects the anthropocentric myth of “the human.” The ecological animist Akomolafe (Reference Akomolafe2025) succinctly defines posthumanism as an awareness that “The ingredients of the goings-on around us are not reducible to the choices and consequences of human actors and human sociality.” In this respect, posthumanism has given différance a thousand eyes and a thousand feet, as the animate and aggregate consciousness of the beyond-humans which participate in our social reality, deconstructing anthropocentric identity and problematising our contemporary (lack of) relationship to a sentient nature.

While postmodernism was imagined as a critique on the alienating forces of industrial modernism in the late 19th and 20th centuries which conspired in the production of the atom bomb (Schechner Reference Schechner1979, pp. 9–10); posthumanism is similarly predicated on a critique of humanism. Most particularly, posthumanism rejects humanism’s anthropocentric commitment to the privileged status of the human being at the centre of all powers – which has ultimately disenchanted the beyond-human environment as a site of moral disturbance. However, and somewhat paradoxically, this critique of humanism revives the thought of Renaissance thinkers who incited the wrath of the early Catholic Church insofar as Renaissance humanism went hand in hand with magical thinking and what Gare (Reference Gare2021, p. 3) has described as nature enthusiasm. This dualism is exemplified by humanists like Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake for charges equivalent to witchcraft, as well as celebrated philosophers like Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. This genre of humanism celebrated the orphic powers of shamanistic figures, who through cunning, art, or magic, were able to command beyond-human forces or to speak the mythic language of birds. Renewed interest in these personalities has produced excellent publications like Edward Wilson-Lee’s (Reference Wilson-Lee2025) The Grammar of Angels, which revisits the conundrum of beyond-human communication and its operation in intellectual and indeed occult history. Like many others, Wilson-Lee (Reference Wilson-Lee2025, pp. 86–87) narrates the Renaissance movement as a descent from the animist thinking associated with Oriental wisdom traditions inherited via Plato, who had “himself studied under the priests in Egypt” – the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus is attributed with the creation of the Emerald Tablet, which inspired Renaissance Hermeticism.

However, somewhere in the distance which has elapsed since the Renaissance humanists of the 14th–17th centuries, the social construction of the human being has transformed. Understandably, this occurred during a turbulent 500 years fraught with the traumatic experiences of the witchhunt, transatlantic slavery and colonialization, industrialisation and globalisation, which has revolutionised our understanding of experience, identity and relationship. The early humanist conception of the human as a magical being sewn into an ordered but miraculous nature composed of beyond-humans, has mutated into the modern view of a materialist being orientated by labour as master of a disenchanted nature. Peter Singer corroborates that “Throughout Western civilization, nonhuman animals have been seen as beings of no ethical significance, or at best, of very minor significance” (Singer Reference Singer, Calarco and Atterton2004, p. xi).

In The Eye of the Crocodile, the philosophical animist Plumwood (Reference Plumwood2012, p. 13) has crystallised this state of affairs as our modern, anthropocentric exemption from the food-chain; “We are victors and never victims, experiencing triumph but never tragedy, our true identity as minds, not as bodies.” However, it is through the food-chain that we come into transspecies contact with the beyond-human others that posthumanism invokes as an anthropocentric limit. The food-cain is thus presented as a posthuman predicament insofar as it enacts the tapestry of beyond-human relationships which animate sentient nature.

The term beyond-human can be attributed to the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s (Reference Kohn2013) hugely influential work How Forests Think. It developed from the influential thought of the ecophilosopher Abram (Reference Abram1996) who described the more-than-human in The Spell of the Sensuous. These trends were incubating in Donna Haraway’s (Reference Haraway1991) ecofeminist views, presented in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, whose celebrated chapter The Cyborg Manifesto is often cited as the genesis event of the posthuman movement. Referring to the plural agencies which compose the more-than-human or beyond-human, Haraway (Reference Haraway1991, p. 4) argues “‘Our’ relations with ‘nature’ might be imagined as a social engagement with a being who is neither ‘it’, ‘you’, ‘thou’, ‘he’, ‘she’ nor ‘they’ in relation to ‘us’.” This discourse can once again be traced back to Derrida’s legacy and is clearest in his essay (Reference Derrida, Calarco and Atterton2004, pp. 113–128) The Animal That Therefore I Am, where Derrida introduces the term animaux to describe the animal as a plural entity, or that which encompasses the beyond-human.

These trajectories created the conditions for How Forests Think, where Kohn (Reference Kohn2013) defends the necessity of a beyond-human anthropology and argues the forest is a sentient beyond-human agent constructed by the relations between species and across orders, enacted by the transspecies politics of the food-chain. Kohn developed these views following fieldwork among the indigenous Ávila Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Consequently, Kohn’s views echo indigenous ontologies which personify the systems of relations which animate a natural environment into a beyond-human deity. The music theorist Small (Reference Small1998, p. 103) summarises these worldviews concisely in Musicking,

The Polynesian god Tane, for example, is – not represents or symbolises but is – the proper relationship between humanity and the life of plants and the forest, and the Yoruba-American goddess Yemayá is that which connects us to the sea and its creatures. To worship Tane or Yemayá is to affirm and to celebrate the pattern of human connectedness to the life of the forest and the sea.

The indigenous deification of an ecology animates its ecosystem into a sentient being capable of regulating the social network, or food-chain, of its inhabitants – including human beings. Modelling this kind of mythopoetry as an ontological register, thinkers like Plumwood, among many of the writers discussed in this essay, thus argue that that we must “once again become ‘a culture of stories – stories that link our lives with the Great Life which some call Gaia, but all should call by names of their own devising.’” (Rose, Reference Rose2013, p. 106). In this regard Deborah Rose (Reference Rose2013, p. 106) tells us “[Plumwood] ended up calling for philosophy to ‘converge with much of poetry and literature’.” In the next section I will suggest that these stories are woven by the tapestry of relations the food-chain brings into being. This means that the food-chain and its politics lies at the heart of cultural practice and pedagogy – reviving this intimacy is a pressing posthuman task capable of restoring meaning to our symbolic practices.

Semiosis in the food-chain

The Australian academic Plumwood (Reference Plumwood2012, p. 5) gained popular attention after she was attacked and death-rolled three times by a crocodile. This near-death experience revolutionised her philosophical commitments, which became oriented around the importance of the food-chain as the site of meaning-making and negotiation between orders of agency, experience and consciousness. Inherent to this cosmology, was Plumwood’s (Reference Plumwood2012, p. 18) understanding of the human being as a participant in this ecological system of predation, sacrifice and gift-giving. In Plumwood’s thought, the human being thus loses their modern exemption from the food-chain as a privileged caste and is reconceptualised as prey for others. This operates on various levels; in predation and consumption, during decay of the decomposing body, but also through labour, most obviously enacted through our agricultural and stewardship practices reconceived “as food for others” (Plumwood Reference Plumwood2012, p. 18). In the same vein, in the Pharmako Trilogy, the North American ethnobotanist, Pendell (Reference Pendell1995, p. 91), developed an interesting conception of the War of the Poisons. The War of the Poisons posits that human beings are biochemically possessed by the plants we consume in forms as mundane as tea and coffee, and thereby recruited to their global campaigns in a territorial war of reproduction; much like the zombie ant fungus known to infect the brain and nervous systems of hosts, manipulating their behavior until they have essentially commandeered their bodies. The possessed ant is thereby compelled to a favourable location for spore dispersal, as the fungus spreads to more hosts during its reproduction cycle.

Pendell’s line of reasoning is descended from his mentor, the North American academic and mythopoet Norman O. Brown who understood history as theomacy, wherein history narrates the war of the gods, waged through the nature spirits that embody them. For Brown (Reference Brown1991, pp. 46–47, 97) this was enacted by what he described as History of Prophecy, as a “critical response to the ‘urban revolution’.” Today, this legacy can also be detected in the acclaimed work of the journalist Pollan (Reference Pollan2001; Reference Pollan2018), whose publications The Botany of Desire, or How to Change Your Mind has brought this discourse about the permeable boundaries of our domestic relationship to nature, to a popular audience. This wave of thought is linked to burgeoning research on mycelium sentience and its implications for our understanding of our place in nature.

The work of these writers, Plumwood, Pendell, Brown and Pollan, opens pathways to reconsider our status as prey for others and the various levels this can operate on, beyond physical predation. This means that our actions are entangled in a tapestry of life, and ultimately nourish others woven into the same ecology. Pendell poses the possibility that subliminal forces are directing our actions to this end, while Plumwood (Reference Plumwood2012, p. 13) also refers to the trickery of the crocodile that attacked her. This offers a worldview in which human beings are actually exempt from full knowledge and possessed by others to unknown ends through various levels of trickery, including the aesthetic and biochemical strategies of plants seeking to gain locomotion from others. This is a posthuman claim which deconstructs anthropocentric assumptions founded on the privileged status of the human being. Whereas, contrary to our modern self-image, perhaps we are the gifts being traded by beyond-humans, and the sacrifices they accept in a story that transcends anthropocentric narratives.

This context has been elaborated by Kohn (Reference Kohn2013, p. 97) as a multinatural perspective “which encompasses multiple perspectives”, and which acknowledges the beyond-human interests vested in the realities we construct as a social project. Kohn’s important contribution is to identify a discursive object in this multiplicity through which we, as beings of limited knowledge, can access beyond-human intelligence. Kohn thereby identifies the interface between alternate orders in this multi-species world as the sign. The sign is thus revived in Derrida’s terms as an ambiguous site of multiplicity, which is not defined according to a hegemonic (anthropocentric) narrative but instead, open to the play of meaning generated by intersubjectivity. However, the intersubjectivity defined by postmodern discourse has been relocated to a beyond-human community, where the agency of beyond-human others, including animals, plants, fungi, insects and even microorganisms, are capable of contributing to the construction of meaning which transcends any particular perspective. This multinatural perspective thus generates multinatural forms of meaning which become animate as something proximal to a posthuman conception of différance; but described by Kohn as beyond-human agency.

Beyond-human agency is thus predicated on the collective play of signs made by agents navigating the food-chain, whose interrelations in this fatal web of intimacy institutes a sentient system. Kohn (Reference Kohn2013, pp. 22–23) thereby refers to the predicament of a monkey on a branch which begins to shake; the monkey takes the shaking branch as a sign and must choose how to react. The monkey’s reaction is in turn interpreted by vested others, as a sign which limits the future and how it will be constructed, as well as the past and how it is interpreted – in this case, the efficacy of the approach of a predator (or not). These interpretive sequences begin to elaborate into a mobile, imaginative dimension which finally clothes the forest with the presence of the otherworld, instituting spectres of potentiality, possibility as well as memory, which collapse the experience of time into a collective dreaming. This tapestry finally becomes animate as the beyond-human sentience of the forest, composed of the collective imagination of its inhabitants and the realities they construct together. This tapestry is woven by the food-chain, as predators and prey hunt or evade capture through the creation and interpretation of signs that ultimately begin to subsume them.

In The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars, the biologist Lixing Sun (Reference Sun2023) describes how this dance of signs is rife with illusion, as organisms seek to outsmart competitors through trickery, misdirection and deceit. Indeed we can imagine that the shaking branch Kohn’s monkey was perched on, was actually disturbed by a passing herd of pigs; however misunderstanding this sign as the approach of a predator, the monkey leapt to another tree where in fact, a jaguar was watching and waiting. For Sun (Reference Sun2023, pp. 11–12), the arms race instituted by these fatal strategies of deceit have resulted in the spectacular diversity of nature, as well as the artistic and cultural practices that have generated religiosity among human beings; including the mythopoetic experience of beyond-human agency. Our cultural practices are arguably founded on our experience of the food-chain, and indeed, its deification. Central to this experience, is a multinatural perspective most clearly enacted during entrapment, when human beings discover the limit of knowledge and are thus exposed to the perspective of a beyond-human other. This experience is predicated on the loss of anthropocentric conceptions of selfhood, whereby we come into contact with the beyond-human other capable of tricking us. Plumwood (Reference Plumwood2012, p. 13) thus recounts her encounter with the crocodile who tricked her; “I leapt through the eye of the crocodile into what seemed also a parallel universe, one completely different to the rules of the ‘normal universe.’ This harsh, unfamiliar territory was the Heraclitean universe where everything flows, where we live the other’s death, die the other’s life: the universe represented in the food chain.”

Today the possibility of this kind of communication across orders has been relegated to the occult, where it is described in obscure terms like The Language of Birds and attributed to shamanistic persons able to understand the speech of birds. Looking inside one’s fridge, wardrobe, or cosmetics and medical cabinet today, it is not difficult to imagine why the possibility of interspecies communication has been exorcised from the modern worldview. It is interesting to consider what is at stake in the revival of these taboos, once pervasive to intellectual thought. Such a revival surely follows in the wake of the contemporary explosion of posthumanism.

Subsequently, in the next section, I will suggest that what is at stake in this discourse is the revival of the notion of the sign as a divinatory omen expressive of multinatural perspectivalism and capable of enacting a living relationship with nature. While this way of being has been denigrated by modern thinkers as superstitious or animist, posthumanism restores its integrity in a beyond-human view of the world.

Divination and natural order

The term animism was introduced by the anthropologist Tylor (Reference Tylor1871, pp. 423–425) in Primitive Culture, to describe the so-called primitive belief that “everything had within it a soul” (Rose Reference Rose2013, p. 96). Tylor argued that animism fails to distinguish humans from others and is thereby representative of a primitive stage in the evolution of religion. Consequently, in 1913 Freud published Totem and Taboo, which described animist belief systems as a form of omnipotence of thought, whereby the primitive is not able to distinguish themselves from their surroundings and thereby attributes themself with magical powers as the originator and interpreter of phenomena, and thereby able to divine the future through animate signs in the environment. Freud (Reference Freud1961, p. 74) compared omnipotence of thought to neurosis, and argued it was characteristic of a primitive form of subjectivity which is not sufficiently individuated from its surroundings and thereby vulnerable to transgressing the prohibition of incest upon which, for Freud, culture is constructed. Freud (Reference Freud1961, pp. 6–7) specifically characterised the cosmology of Aboriginal Australians as a superstitious form of neurotic, omnipotence of thought.

However, Abram’s (Reference Abram1996, p. 144–145) description of the indigenous conception of The Language of Birds and its divinatory orientation in The Spell of the Senusous demonstrates that something much more complex is going on. By showing that knowledge as well as language itself is derived from our embodiment in landscape, Abram (Reference Abram1996, pp. 22, 138–39) argues that landscape is articulate, expressive and in constant communication with us. The divinatory states associated with animist cosmology is thereby, simply a commonsensical expression of our intimacy with an animate environment pulsating with information, mediated through semiosis. Whereas Freud assumes that the so-called primitive subject views themself as the spider in this “web of living thoughts” (Kohn Reference Kohn2013, p. 78), as opposed to an other entangled in it, among others – and whose own subjectivity is derived from this entanglement and in so doing, becomes divinatory. Returning to Kohn’s monkey, perhaps we can imagine that it does not leave the shaking branch because some intuitive impulse forbids it. The accuracy of this intuition is an expression of the monkey’s entanglement in the web of relations of the forest, indeed their survival depends on the intimacy of this initiation, or their fluency in The Language of Birds. Birds become metaphoric of mobile signs swimming through the forest’s otherworld, as angelic messengers conjured by the animate potentialities of this collective dreaming.

Divination is thus descriptive of ecological intimacy, which situates the locus of narrative creation among beyond-human others. Struck (Reference Struck2016, p. 15) characterises divination as the aggregate of surplus knowledge entailed by “the quantum knowledge that does not arrive via the discursive thought processes of which we are aware, and over which we have self-conscious control.” This form of knowledge production has been performed throughout our long history of cultural evolution as divination, “for many millennia and across the whole Old World, from Eastern to Western Eurasia, and from the tip of southern Africa to the highlands of Britannia (Sturck Reference Struck2016, p. 4).” In Classic Antiquity, divination was associated with intuition, and non-linguistic forms of knowledge ultimately associated with our place in the living web of thoughts which animate our ecologies. This incorporates everyday premonitions as mundane as surplus knowledge about the weather, derived from familiar signs in our environments which we access through our bodies: smell, sight, or sound.

In this regard, Struck (Reference Struck2016, p. 36) associates divination with our primal identities as human-animals; “our creaturely selves.” Divination thereby “serves as an expression of our unique position within the cosmos” (Struck Reference Struck2016, p. 35) and depends on “developing an understanding of oneself as a member of the order of things” (Struck Reference Struck2016, p. 3). From this interrelation, described in the above sections as the food-chain, human-beingness emerges as a cultural practice concerned with preserving the human–animal and its divinatory knowledge.

The radical humanist Brown (Reference Brown1991) thereby developed his conception of the History of Prophecy as a narrative of the barbarian struggle for freedom through cultural resistance, in the face of state hegemony. Scott (Reference Scott2009, p. 236) has similarly argued in The Art of Not Being Governed that some indigenous populations have remained voluntarily illiterate in resistance to state incorporation. In place of literacy, these nations depend on oral memory and culture; upon which sophisticated rituals of divination are enacted. Central to these cultural practices is the status of music and its capacity to collapse modern conceptions of time, identity and space and to thereby establish divinatory experience through repetition. In this regard, music short-circuits administrative forms of language we have developed as part of the civilising impulse and revives and embodies our environments, bringing its alternate orders into harmony or more strongly, into beyond-human agency. In the next section I will argue that such harmonic states establish a Lucky Aesthetic capable of expressing a divinatory, multinatural perspective. I will argue that this possibility revives our cultural practices and grounds them in our relationship with a sentient nature as stewards interpreting and making signs.

Lucky aesthetics and multinatural perspectivalism

This discourse on divination is intended to demonstrate that our semiotic and cultural practices are derived from our relationship with nature, and in particular, the food-chain which contours it. This supports a view of language which is not constructed by a purely anthropocentric value system, but is oriented by beyond-human experience and communication which can be divined. It thereby offers forms of meaning which subsume our own experience.

In defense of this possibility, Abram (Reference Abram1996, pp. 111–112) critiqued the decoupling of language from experience in the natural world which was introduced with the invention of the Phonecian alphabet in the 11th century BCE. This trend matured into the Roman script we use today, whereby the word “dog” is represented by three letters totally abstracted from what it signifies. This is in contrast to the inherence of meaning in embodiment and context which is enacted by oral culture and memory, and also preserved by pictorial scripts including some Chinese ideographs (Abram Reference Abram1996, p. 111). Whereas, by orphaning meaning from context and assigning it to abstracted letters in the written alphabet, the intellect is dislocated to an anthropocentric order alienated from experience in the natural world, whereby meaning can only be constructed and understood by literate human beings describing objects of anthropocentric interest. In his seminal work, Of Grammatology, Derrida (Reference Derrida1976, pp. 44–46) consequently problematised the anthropological insistence on the development of writing as the litmus test of civilization, which denigrated illiterate cultures as primitive.

In extension of this, the philosopher Campagna (Reference Campagna2022) describes the intellectual realm instituted by modern literacy as the order of Technic, insofar as it has assisted the modern profusion of technology, but simultaneously, the deconstruction of meaning. In Technic and Magic, Campagna contrasts Technic to the order of Magic – operated by oral cultures which generate magical experience through forms of repetition and oral memory embedded in embodied experience and often signified in music. This way of being is identified in the western self-image among the Hellenic pagans and exemplified by the magician, Socrates as “he who does not write” (Derrida Reference Derrida1981, p. 50). However, our schism from the enchanted world of the Ancient Greeks has been ascribed to Socrates’ scribe Plato, who ushered in the ascendency of the written word by documenting Socrates’ thought in written records. The ascendency of (written) literacy in modernity is encapsulated in Baudrillard’s (Reference Baudrillard1988) theory of hyperreality in Ecstasy and Communication, in which simulation becomes mistaken for the real, ultimately instituting a self-referential system of language which Campagna has described as Technic (Reference Campagna2022, p. 18). Herein, meaning becomes increasingly defined according to location in a symbolic system as opposed to intrinsic value, resulting finally in the alienation of meaning altogether. This predicament is simply encapsulated by the difference in value between water and gold, while one is indispensable for existence and the other is not; their value in our symbolic systems is totally independent of this vital fact. However, at some point these floating castles will collapse into symbolic crises, insofar as we cannot drink gold or eat money.

Whereas the possibility of divination as a model of language oriented by beyond-human experience offers one solution to this hyperreal predicament, insofar as value is created in direct intimacy with the food-chain, as opposed to anthropocentric forms of symbolic meaning. It suggests that our environment is a site of constant communication mediated through signs, or indeed divinatory omens, through which we participate in the construction of a social reality of values, which determine a shared future. However this future must be inclusive of the others who assist in the creation of the beyond-human values which determine it; whereby the value of water is determined by an ecology of vested interests, as opposed to an anthropocentric outlook. This creation of beyond-human values is mediated through the sign as the interface of multinatural perspectivalism. In The Language of Birds Pendell (Reference Pendell1994) has described the possibility of multinatural signs as luck, insofar as lucky signs represents the collusion of alternative orders during ecologically harmonic states, which is productive of abundance. In this sense, a lucky sign is productive of abundance across vested orders in an ecology; the shaking branch had abundant meaning for the monkey perched on it, the predator who observed, the passing herd of pigs foraging in the forest bed, and the many others implicated in this scenario both living and dead.

The steward thus stands in the midst of the living web of thoughts that constitutes the beyond-human sentience of the forest. They are tasked to develop a multinatural perspective in order to divine lucky signs capable of signifying across orders of experience, in order to negotiate the vested interests of the forest’s inhabitants, both living and dead. For Plumwood, lucky signs thus function as a “gateway or door” for “[inter]species communication” (Rose Reference Rose2013, p. 98). This aesthetic negotiation regulates the life of the forest, facilitating more-than-human abundance and is capable of animating the forest as a beyond-human agent from which we derive living forms of religiosity and mythopoetry. In this paper, I have argued this practice is capable of reviving our cultural life by restoring its intimacy with nature; indeed we know the word culture is derived from the Latin colere, “to till,” ”to cultivate,” or “to take care of,” which also lies at the root of “agriculture” (Lewis & Short, Reference Lewis and Short1879, pp. 414–416).

But how can the steward be conditioned to recognise lucky signs? This problem is central to the emergence of posthumanism in the Environmental Humanities. In the next section I will suggest ritual practice offers one site of apprehension for a posthuman semiosis oriented by lucky signs. Ritual practice, and the artistic sensibilities it engenders, revives the meaning of the study of the arts and humanities, narrated by Brown’s (Reference Brown1991, pp. 46–47) History of Prophecy as “a critical response to the ‘urban revolution’ which spread outward from the ‘Nile to Oxus’ heartland beginning around 3000 B.C.”

Lucky aesthetics in ritual apprenticeship

In his landmark work, The Ritual Process, the anthropologist Turner (Reference Turner1969, pp. 94–105) defined ritual as an initiation rite which inducts the practitioner into a beyond-human order; achieved through the construction of a liminal experience of time described as communitas. Communitas subverts the modern experience of objective identity, allowing for beyond-human experience. This is achieved through ritualised strategies of subjective disturbance, most often associated with the hypnotic states that induce trance. Extensively, in Inquiry as Divination, Maclure (2020) posits a speculative method for divinatory inquiry based on Stengers (Reference Stengers2011, p. 519) view of “experimental verification that is akin to trance, because in it thought is taken, captured, by a becoming that separates it from its own intentionality.” In Animist Pedagogies and the Endings of Worlds, authors Rousell et al. (Reference Rousell, Ryan, Bauer-Nilsen, Lai, Burnard and Mackinlay2022, p. 263) thereby locate ritual practices at “the crossroads where multiple worlds intersect” and identify animist pedagogies through which “memories, epistemology, ontology, sound and affect, multiple physical materials with earlier lives (in trees, in the earth) and lives yet to come … all become joined, metabolised, knotted together in entanglements of sinuous threads” (Rousell et al., Reference Rousell, Ryan, Bauer-Nilsen, Lai, Burnard and Mackinlay2022, p. 277).

This emphasis on the “yet to come” which is made manifest in ritual, is consistent with Kohn’s (Reference Kohn2013, p. 33) animate view of semiosis as a “living sign process” capable of constructing the future. Ritual thereby initiates disciples into a divinatory understanding of how signs can grow to animate a beyond-human otherworld that weaves domestic life into its script. This animate potentiality is possible precisely because beyond-human semiosis is not oriented by anthropocentric narratives, but subsumes it. Encountering this beyond-human narrative is comparable to the plight of the monkey on the branch, which must understand the beyond-monkey play of semiosis that constitutes the life of the forest, and indeed its own. The ritual event consequently becomes one iteration of a grander narrative and is infolded in the living history of its enactment, much as a wedding is given meaning by the lives of those it binds.

This broader context highlights the repetitive nature of ritual, whose authenticity is often meticulously guarded by its own stewards and masters of ceremony. The repetition of an unchanged form allows for the emergence of difference through the particular cadences that individualise events, much as a neutral symbol can be used to divine the peculiarity of a context in magical practice. The repetition of familiar tropes during ritual functions in this respect, as the neutral symbols to which the imagination cleaves, unweaving itself during episodes of divinatory experience to reveal a beyond-human territory. In this regard, the shaking branch Kohn’s monkey perched on is a universal sign that is repeated throughout the forest, however this particular iteration in this particular context is what divines its meaning; was it shaking at dawn or dusk when predators are most active? Or midday when humans hike through the forest? Repetition is capable of collapsing time and functions in this respect like a kind of unworldly music. This music integrates difference into a mosaic social order constructed by multiple points across temporality, identity and space that collaborate in the construction of meaning; they weave a kaleidoscopic reality concerned with synthesising difference.

My experience of this kind of living culture was mediated through a decade long practice of the Afro-Brazilian ritual Capoeira Angola under the guidance of various mestres, most importantly, Mestre Marcelo Angola who founded the traditional group Angoleiros do Mar. There are various disputes over Capoeira Angola’s relationship to the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, however it is generally performed as a ritualistic game in street theatres that involve acrobatic, contactless combat between two players surrounded by a ring of people – as opposed to a religious ceremony. The roda (ring) is led by a group of musicians playing traditional instruments, and capoeiristas are entranced by clapping and traditional call and response songs and chants. These traditional songs enact the oral culture that surrounds the ritual and also mediate the appearance of orishas or beyond-human entities associated with ancestors and santos (saints). In my doctoral research Lucky Rituals (Holmes Reference Holmes2025, pp. 147–179), I have compared Capoeira Angola to the Northern Sudanese ritual Zār, as well as Haitian Vodou, which similarly institute beyond-human states through the experience of trance. Capoeira Angola and Vodou are modern rituals developed by the African Diaspora in the New World, in a cauldron permeating with indigenous and colonial influence. However their shared logic with the comparably older Zār, which predates the coming of Islam in Sudan during the 7th century (Boddy Reference Boddy1989, p. 26), trace a common premodern inheritance concerned with facilitating ecstatic states during trance, as well as “an elaborate hagiology and cult of saint veneration” (Boddy Reference Boddy1989, p. 26) which can be experienced as group possession. However, participation in this phenomena is founded on long-term apprenticeship, through which the capoerista is initiated into a beyond-human worldview that finally deconstructs their experience of subjectivity.

Such ritual practices depend on potent artistic skills employed during ritual performance to facilitate trance states: music, signification and mythopoetry. Artistic accomplishment in these areas enables the accomplished capoerista to experience divinatory states, thereby becoming a mandingueiro or mandinguera (witch or magician), capable of contributing to the construction of a prophetic reality inclusive of their human and beyond-human community. These skills are predicated on the powers of suggestion intrinsic to the animate logic of semiosis expressed by animals in nature, depicted by the plight of Kohn’s monkey. This supports a humanist view of art practice which locates these aesthetic sensibilities in the History of Prophecy, enacted by rituals like Capoeira Angola today. It is concerned with guarding the sovereignty of the human – animal in the face of symbolic hegemonisation.

The construction of a Lucky Aesthetics thus revives the divinatory potential of art practice as pedagogy, and furthermore, its capacity to mediate across orders. In this essay, I have suggested this potential has been disenchanted from modern western experience following the transformations associated with Industrialisation. However, outside this western paradigm, ritual practices are still performed (most often by indigenous communities) as a reciprocal process of symbiotic becoming. Indeed, new scientific research published by Schmidt et al. (Reference Schmidt, Goldberg, Heckenberger, Fausto, Franchetto, Watling, Lima, Moraes, Dorshow, Toney, Kuikuro, Waura, Kuikuro, Kuikuro, Kuikuro, Kuikuro, Kuikuro, Teixeira, Rocha and Perron2023) indicates that the Amazon Forest was created by indigenous peoples who managed its ecosystem, culturing its biodiversity over a millennia into the vast garden it has become today. Indigenous stewardship intentionally generated carbon-rich dark earth soils in the Amazon and cultivated diverse species for food and resources. As such, the Amazon has been in some respects, fabricated by human beings as a cultural project, which in turn, cultures us as human beings by animating our language systems with the lucky trace of the beyond-human other. As we create the forest, we ourselves are created in relation to a sentient nature, acting as a gateway for beyond-humans.

My formulation of a Lucky Aesthetics has been largely founded on my experience of animate semiosis during ritual trance in Capoeira Angola, properly understood as a beyond-human séance. How this understanding can be integrated into environmental education can begin with reassessing the meaning and nature of art-practice today, most particularly in the History of Prophecy. This invites us to remember that “ritual is the mother of the arts” (Small Reference Small1998, 105).