Working on slides for my talk at the conference referenced by @UFO_Rabbit_Hole below, excited! Here's the description for my talk, "The Forge of Vulcanus: Plasma Physics & Premodern Protocols for Self-Cultivation" “What is accomplished by fire is alchemy … and he who governs fire is Vulcan.” — Paracelsus This talk presents and advocates for the retrieval of certain premodern noetic “protocols”—practices of psychophysical hygiene and cognitive exercise undertaken for the acquisition of wisdom—that reflected an understanding of knowledge as a self-implicating (participatory) process involving communion with various non-human intelligences (NHI). Such practices were largely eclipsed by the ostensible bracketing out of subjectivity characteristic of modernity’s scientific method. Today, however, both plasma cosmology—which suggests that more than 99 percent of the observable universe is an ionized, “fiery” matrix that even our thoughts and feelings can interface with—and contemporary accounts of protocols practiced intuitively by NHI contactees (as documented in connection with UFO/UAP phenomena by D. W. Pasulka and others) invite a renewed appraisal of these practices. Techniques that once animated mystical and alchemical traditions seem to be spontaneously reappearing today in the more sci-fi register of modern contact methods, suggesting that the revelations yielded by these seemingly disparate domains share a participatory logic. Drawing on this convergence and ideas from the philosopher and alleged clairvoyant, Rudolf Steiner, the presentation sketches speculative bridges from premodern religious experience to an emerging “global cosmism”: a worldview in which the human being is not a passive observer but—in being shaped by, and in turn shaping, the luminous plasma matrix undulating between stars and surging through the electric currents of our own beating hearts—is instead an instrument and participant in the divine forge-craft of Vulcanus.