SassyCon 2026

In challenging times, personal or collective, cultivating courage is essential. Christine Cunningham Ashworth will share empowering practices to help you develop inner strength and maintain calm in turbulent situations, and will share the herbal protection blend she prefers as a backup boost.

Today’s discourse about Artificial Intelligence focuses on marketing and automation, centering the impact of technology on capitalism, labor, and privacy. But if we look back at the last half-century of developments in the fields that gave us this technology, we see a number of cutting-edge thinkers offering new ways to understand the relationship between technology and consciousness. Transhumanism, Autopoiesis theory, and the artificial life movement are just a few examples of radical approaches to life and consciousness that emerged from highly scientific and technological fields, only to be sidelined. However, these “radical” views in transhumanism and neuroscience have surprising overlap with core elements of hermetic and esoteric philosophies. In this talk I will focus on two specific ideas that have emerged from scientific fields – “autopoiesis” in evolutionary biology and the “closest continuer view” (CCV) in transhumanist philosophy – and I will examine their relationship to creative visualization, energy work, and past life exploration. By looking at these examples, I hope to motivate further inquiry into the broad overlap between theoretical ideas in transhumanism and neurophilosophy and the exploration of personal magickal practice.

Curious about Hades, the Host of Many, Ruler of the Underworld? In this presentation, Jamie will share both well-known and obscure bits of Hades' mythos, introduce you to the magic and mysteries of the Underworld, and deconstruct some of the common misunderstandings about this enigmatic god from Greek mythology. We'll also discuss how to approach a working or devotional relationship with Hades, and engage in a guided trance journey to the Underworld. Your host on this adventure, Jamie, is a dedicated priestess of Hades, and author of Hades: Myth, Magic and Modern Devotion.