While this issue’s theme of “prophecies” in contemporary art emerged organically in our team discussions, given the phenomenon’s revival in artistic practices, it is a rather difficult topic to treat in this editorial. This is because writing about prophecy stirs up all the prejudice and imagery inherent in the complex history of Western faith. Keeping the magazine’s intellectual tradition in mind, I have relied on certain censorial and compensatory reflexes to avoid the daunting “traps” of universalism—that every mystical or religious belief system holds dear—and the absurd. (Is it naive to believe in the occult occassionally?) These academic habits quietly shaped my writing to establish a comfortably safe distance from the subject at hand, blurring its shape and contours. Yet, in retrospect, my sense of reserve and discomfort around the occult and various “pseudo-sciences” has revealed more about prophecies than it might have obscured.

Divinatory practice, inevitably, flirts with the nonsensical and the unknown and is drawn toward poetic and subjective forms of expression. Any attempt to frame it in a rationalizing discourse fails to communicate the part of eternity that is the basis of all prophecy’s radicality, with all due respect to skeptics (and to myself). In Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents, Federico Campagna notes that the position of prophetic speech, at the threshold of history and reason, is precisely what makes it unique and fruitful. Rather than predict the probable continuation of a current state of affairs, prophecy relies on

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