[page 55] “The magician longs to see...”
Myth and magic have always been an intrinsic part of Twin Peaks lore. From overt textual allusions to Tibetan mysticism through to subtle gestures in the direction of hermetic tradition, from the scarlet curtains that adorn the infamous Black Lodge to the spectacular landscape of Las Vegas with its iconic cavalcades of illusion, magic is everywhere in the world of Twin Peaks.
The four essays that comprise this section meditate on the meaning of mythic structures and magical iconographic in Twin Peaks: The Return. Unpicking the dense intertextual tapestry of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s iconic TV show, as well as its various cinematic and literary supplements, these thoughtful pieces illuminate the ubiquitous strains of mysticism that permeate the Twin Peaks universe.
Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott’s endlessly inventive piece, “‘My grandson does magic!’: The Legacy of Conjuring in Twin Peaks: The Return,” charts the various manifestations of sleight-of-hand tricks and performance magic in the third season of Twin Peaks. Tracing the first references to performance magic to the original two seasons of Twin Peaks, Ashton-Lelliott draws parallels between the amputation of MIKE’s arm and the famous “Sawing a Woman in Half” trick popularized by stage magicians in the 1920s. From here, she follows various instances of dismemberment and decapitation across all three seasons of Twin Peaks, arguing that these unsettling spectacles, as well as other forms of conjuring, play with audience expectations. Magical performances, Ashton-Lelliott explains, thus serve as a “foreboding element,” frequently anticipating some ominous future event. Moving from stage magic to ceremonial magick, Jeremiah Beaver’s “The Scarlet Woman: Diane, Cameron & Sex Magick” argues that sex in The Return functions as a ritualistic act, akin to the rites [page 56] developed by occultist Aleister Crowley. With reference to Crowley, his fellow occultist Jack Parsons, surrealist artist Marjorie Cameron, and the occult archetype of the Scarlet Woman, Beaver frames the sexual encounter between Diane and Cooper as a ritual intended to lure the malevolent entity Judy, or “Jowday,” through some sort of interdimensional portal.
In “The Perils or Power of Looking Back? The Return and Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice,” Karla Lončar unravels the tangled intertextual references that bind Twin Peaks, particularly in its third season, to the mythic motif of Orpheus and Eurydice. Lončar argues that while it is possible to determine echoes of this ancient tale in The Return—especially in the moving sequence where Cooper turns back to glance at Laura, whom he was leading by the hand to safety, and finds that she has vanished—references to Orpheus and Eurydice appear across all three seasons. Drawing on feminist readings of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, the essay considers how this archetypical narrative adumbrates issues of control, power and abjection. John Thorne’s essay “Ten is the Number of Completion: Laura Palmer as the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu” likewise turns to mythology, in this case Hindu mythic structures, in hopes of wresting meaning from Lynch and Frost’s enigmatic TV series. Echoing argumentative strands developed by Franck Boulègue in his book The Return of Twin Peaks (2017), Thorne positions Laura Palmer as the tenth avatar of Vishnu, a being whose function is to bring about the end of the dark age so that a new age can be reborn from its ashes.
Together, these four essays grapple with the byzantine mythic frameworks informing Lynch and Frost’s creative vision, inviting the reader to think deeply, and magically, about the complex layers of meaning embedded within the eighteen episodes of The Return.
MLA citation (print):
Corcoran, Miranda. "Magic and Mythology." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 55-56.