Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: The Everyday Supernatural

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “The Everyday Supernatural,” a discussion of how folklorists and anthropologists view our belief in uneasily explained beings, forces, and experiences, with Benjamin Gatling, folklorist, scholar of belief and everyday religion, and associate professor of English at George Mason University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-everyday-supernatural .]

Profs and Pints debuts at Highline RxR bar in Arlington’s Crystal City with a talk that will both teach you and leave you thinking about your relationship with the unknown.

Have you ever wondered why people believe in the supernatural? Or where do such beliefs come from and what purposes do they serve?

On hand to offer answers will be Benjamin Gatling, who teaches a course on folklore and the supernatural, studies various cultures’ oral traditions, and serves as editor of Folklorica: the Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association.

You’ll gain an understanding of how the supernatural isn’t something strange or extraordinary. It’s part of the everyday lives of most people around the world, and it’s fundamental to virtually all cultural traditions. Here in the United States, three out of four people believe in some aspect of the supernatural such as astrology, telepathy, clairvoyance, or communication with the dead. About half attest to having personally had a mystical experience.

In discussing the nature of supernatural beliefs, Dr. Gatling will talk about how our experiences are inexact and ambiguous and how we operate on incomplete information. In many ways belief in the supernatural represents an affirmation that human understanding extends beyond empirical observation and that we live in an imprecise, infinite, irrational, and mysterious world.

The goal of folklorists and anthropologists studying such beliefs is not to prove or disprove them, but rather to understand various peoples’ lived experiences and gain insight on how individuals make sense of the uncanny around them. Dr. Gatling will talk about such researchers’ findings in terms of how such beliefs are expressed in dream interpretation or the stories people tell about encounters with ghosts or their relationship with the dead.

He’ll talk about visits to haunted places and touch upon subjects such as UFO sightings, encounters with the divine, and magic in our everyday lives. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A deck of 22 Tarot cards. (Photo by Roberto Viesi / Wikimedia Commons.)