Conclusion: On Deictic Participation in/as Tending

The conclusion returns to the central concepts of the book—esoterism, the deictic, endarkenment, and tending—and uses those concepts to pose two questions about everyday practices. The first is addressed to people who engage esoteric practices; using “blood crystals” as an example, I propose that instead of thinking of these as “traditional” knowledges we take up “as is,” we instead attend to the complexities our deictic situations as we tend our worlds, aware of how our worlds impact other worlds. The second question is for people who move in spaces of pluriversal gathering, like universities, and I ask how we might learn to gather without disqualifying the worlds accompanying participants. I propose that we come to think of the primary task of pedagogy as precisely the deictically attuned generation of the terms of the conversation.