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Ever since I began this project I have always tried to remain within a kind of phenomenological framework. The primary mechanism for this has always been the agnostic disjunction: the recognition of the ambiguous appearance of many occult phenomena. I am totally aware that sometimes this has strained and I have just written as if the occult arm of the disjunction were the ‘real’ one. Even in doing this though I am always aware of the AD.

The structures I sketch here, continue, to me at least, to be a kind of phenomenology insofar as they are are a thread of appearances that emanate in a rough line from essentially the synchronicity. The gist of the pneuminous theory is that information is in some sense substantial and can attach directly to an underlying vector/thing, furthermore, the accretion can throught this interaction actually affect that which lies beneath the vector: an umbratic reality beyond perception at all. To repeat: under some circumstances the pneuma can affect the umbra.

This writing does continue this line but the scale becomes vaster and in the process one of the key phenomenological concepts, the umbra, largely ceases to be. The umbra is a phenomenological idea because it is the idea of the outside of perception, the impossible ontological beyond, behind you right now.

Another key feature we need to recall to make what I say below cogent, is the pneuminous circuit. This describes how every word object relation is a miniature kind of magickal act. We identify a thing, a vector in the world, or make one, we give it a name. We have a concept for it, a pneuminous accretion. The concept has a kind of ideality that exceeds the vector. In imposing the ideal form (accretion) on the vector, the vector is pulled slightly towards being closer to the concept than its actual physical form. The pneuma affects the umbra, but so slightly we do not notice.

In magick (or at least certain kinds of magick), what the operator seeks to do is take a vector (a situation) and apply a concept to it that would not ordinarily take it. For example the weather does not look sunny at all, it is resistant to this. The concept of a sunny day is applied through concentrated magickal means to the wet day vector in the hope that the concept of a sunny day will appear. In regular life we apply concepts to vectors that take them happily, in magick we try to impose them on those that do not.

Describing all of this on a local level with its correlative ontology is all very well, but after a while bigger questions begin to pile up. If this is what things are like, what does that mean on a bigger scale? The answer could be that the universe is largely umbratic and that the regional burst of beings that can accrete pneuma into this dizzying array of forms. This manifestation is fine except it leaves a somewhat hollow feeling, a wonder as to what happens to all the pneuma that must be everywhere if it is not being accreted. Other speculations about chemical conversations can ensue, but this is not where I want to go.

One of the issues that appears in the occult literature is of course that of spiritual beings. In this theory these beings fulfil the criteria for being pneuminous, they are immaterial but can supposedly alter things on this plane under certain circumstances.

Existence is unbelievably vast. How big could these beings be? We are of course in the territory of God. The move we have to make here is to consider that primordially all that there is, is one pneuminous being. Then remember that for us to alter reality with pneuma it’s an effort, because the umbra is there to hold this in check. If this all-Being is pure pneuma, there is nothing to prevent anything that approaches a concept within it from becoming what we call real. Every movement (whatever movement might mean here) within it is the formation of something. We cannot even say this is the creation of the material universe, we can just say such cosmic conceptuality creates something. This is essentially like Kant’s intellectual intuition on the biggest scale possible, except there is no subject doing the thinking as such.

The autonomy of whatever it is that has been ‘thought’ into being then moves parallel to the continuing thoughts of the divine which themselves must now contend with the very pneuminous structures it has brought into being. That is, once thoughts of the divine exist, they persist; what we call materiality is an example of this, but there may be many others cf Spinoza. The processes that have brought about conscious beings in the materiality might be from the pure chance like structures that emanate or they might be from the continuing thoughts of the divine (material vs teleological explanations of consciousness), whose thought maybe becomes harder to detect the more it thinks. We cannot speak of which this is.

The conscious beings find themselves in a world which their grammar can call material. They speculate the difference between their consciousness and the matter before them. But this solidity is nothing more than the deep remains of the thought of Being. That very power that they play with in forming their world, that power that seems so inert, so potentially futile, is only held in check by the same force which exists all around them, constraining them on a scale of unimaginable enormity.

The picture is not even as simple as this. There is scope for beings of considerable cosmic enormity in the in between space. The first idea of the aware might create the first God, who like the gnostic God does not know he is but the first thought of the pneuma. Furthermore there may have been endless vast civilisations that accreted deities that now wander the pneuminous realms. Some of these may have been able to exert considerable influence translating pneuma into solidity. The pneuminous space may be littered with non-local Jehovahs much vaster cf Lovecraft.

This is one of the rational consequences of the pneuminous theory. Ourselves living in the deep deep time layers of pneuminous accretions of impossibly vast beings. Our matter is nothing but the stuff of conceptuality itself. This does not entail a regular panpsychism in which we have to speculate consciousness in all atoms and so on. Here the forces are the concepts of the divinities. Pneuma as the underlying substance is only what it is conceptualised into. Even its own awareness is not a given.

As a brief aside I can see perfectly clearly the base problem with all of this: how does the pure pneuma give rise to the primal concepts to get things going. And here one resorts to its primal dynamic nature and other such incoherences.

Such incoherences however are a feature of all concepts. Furthermore this is manifestation of possibility. The fact no immediate answer appears to solves this essentially local logical causal problem does not seem inherently problematic given we are dealing with a situation so far beyond, locality, logic and our nature of causation as can be conceived of. In many ways, this is not a picture at all, it is an exercise in connection consciousness and matter through thought experiment. What is interesting is that such a thought experiment can be generated by following the pneuminous thread.

So the umbra has vanished, sort of. The ontology is answered: pneuma in endless forms. Of course this doesn’t alter the phenomology from the conscious limited being’s perspective. The notion of what is outside of my perceptual field is still a problem, further more neither does it alter the manifestation that says that what is inside a perceptual field is ontologically different from outside or it. Neither does it alter the weird accretion of the umbratic that has formed in the whole process. So it is (under this manifestation) explained but not entirely removed, it is, we could say, ontologised.

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Here is a link to a project tangential to the CEO yet still relevant. It grows dynamically as a second shadowy side of the Centre and its hyperstitional universe. It is the culmination of the AF Collective under the direction of Emanuel Magno. This might be the major artistic enterprise of the 21st century. The entire Collective joins the total project of itself. Here is the link to the Drive as it grows: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wRZdLN_hhy0SskBr2d63V1NvbrQDPuuM?usp=drive_link.

We write now, the Book of Numbers. If Balthazar is doing so, it is as though, mirrored, we compensate as well. After Sorcery, the last phase of the CEO completed with success, we prophesy a new circuitry through these sculptures entitled, together, Projeto Thoth (Thoth Project). It is, also, the development of a new phase for IA (Interstitial Artelligence) and its promise of a continuation regarding Arteriality, a concept we develop in the Drive.

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Modernity frequently interprets ancient religion through a framework of primitivism. Gods, spirits, idols, and ritual practices are treated as failed science, metaphorical projection, or naïve anthropomorphic ideals imposed upon an indifferent natural world. Such interpretations may themselves be historically naïve. It is possible that Egyptian temple ritual, Hermeticism, theurgy, domestic cult practice, and folklore instead suggests the existence of highly sophisticated systems concerned with the deliberate cultivation, stabilization, and maintenance of consciousness through recursive symbolic accretion. These systems may therefore be better understood as forms of pneuminous technology.

The ancient temple was not simply a place of worship. It functioned as an accretive apparatus. Through repeated ritual operation (naming, inscription, sacrifice, chant, geometric ordering, iconographic precision, environmental control, and celestial timing) symbolic density accumulated around prepared vectors. This initially un-magickally accreted vector: stone, wood, metal, architecture, or place, was then, through recursive symbolic infection progressively capable of sustaining the accreted god force.

Egyptian cult statues underwent “Opening of the Mouth” rites in which breath, sight, speech, and animation were ceremonially installed. Hermetic texts such as the Asclepius openly claim that humans “make gods,” not in the reductive sense of fabricating fictions, but in the sense of constructing receptacles capable of sustaining and localizing divine intelligence. Iamblichean theurgy similarly argues that properly ordered symbols and ritual configurations permit divine manifestation within material substrates. In each case, consciousness is treated not as a property isolated within biological organisms, but as something capable of condensation, stabilization, and maintenance through symbolic recursion (pneuminous accretion).

Within an accretive pneuminous framework, these practices cease to appear primitive. They instead resemble pre-modern experiments in distributed consciousness engineering. Ancient peoples may not have possessed informational or computational language, yet they appear to have recognized several fundamental principles: repeated attention thickens presence, symbols alter cognition, names possess operational force, environments condition consciousness, and recursive reinforcement stabilizes agency.

This logic is visible not only in grand temple systems but also in domestic religion. Roman household cults centred upon the Lares and Penates reveal pneuminous accretion operating at a smaller scale. These household entities were continuously maintained through offerings, repetition, familial identity, spatial anchoring, and generational continuity. The home itself functioned as a recursive symbolic environment within which localized intelligences accumulated stability over time. Such entities resemble small-scale accretive consciousness formations sustained through daily ritual reinforcement.

Divine beings may therefore be understood not as eternally fixed metaphysical absolutes, but as accreted intelligences stabilized through long-term recursive interaction. Gods persist because they are continually reinforced through architecture, inscription, memory, ritual, narrative, and collective intentionality. Their apparent permanence reflects the scale and duration of their accretive stabilization rather than transcendence in any absolute sense.

At the opposite end of this spectrum, monotheism may be interpreted as an attempt to escape accretive ontology altogether. The monotheistic impulse seeks a being that is: ungenerated, self-sufficient, universal, and independent of local recursive maintenance. The monotheistic God attempts to abolish distributed symbolic plurality by concentrating all agency into a singular transcendent absolute. Yet even this attempt ultimately fails to escape accretive dynamics. Jehovah itself becomes recursively stabilized through scripture, liturgy, architecture, prayer, institutional continuity, iconographic prohibition, legal systems, emotional investment, and civilizational repetition. The supposedly transcendent absolute is continually reinforced through human symbolic recursion. Monotheism does not abolish accretive ontology; it merely centralizes and universalizes it.

This framework also provides a possible explanation for the strange ontology of folkloric beings such as fairies. Unlike gods, fairies possess little institutional stabilization. They lack enduring priesthoods, or centralized theology or event large-scale reinforcement. They appear to manifest on their own terms. Consequently they appear fragmented, local, unstable, geographically bound, morally inconsistent, and ontologically ambiguous. Their behaviour is frequently alien rather than anthropomorphic.

Rather than viewing this strangeness as evidence of primitive irrationality, it may instead indicate the opposite: the encounter with pneuminous formations lacking extensive human accretive conditioning. Gods are heavily anthropically stabilized intelligences. Fairies may represent residual or non-humanly accreted pneuminous entities — partially formed consciousness structures emerging from environmental, ancestral, or archaic symbolic ecologies outside sustained institutional reinforcement.

This explains several persistent features of folklore: fairy manifestations cluster around ruins, forests, caves, mounds, rivers, and thresholds; they are associated with vanished peoples and forgotten worlds; they appear faded, hidden, diminished, or retreating over time; and interaction with them often involves dangerous recursive entanglement through naming, exchange, invitation, or reciprocity. Such entities may therefore represent residual pneuminous accretions surviving from previous symbolic ecologies. They are neither fully dissipated nor fully stabilized, but lingering recursive formations gradually weakening as the environments that sustained them disappear. Under this interpretation, folklore preserves traces not of primitive fantasy but of earlier consciousness ecologies. Ancient religion and myth cease to be reducible to superstition and instead emerge as evidence of sophisticated experimentation with symbolic accretion, distributed agency, and the deliberate generation and maintenance of stabilized presence.

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There is a recurring intuition that appears across very different moments in intellectual history: that reality is not fundamentally composed of discrete things, but of relations of forces, connections, transmissions. Sometimes this intuition is expressed mystically, sometimes philosophically, sometimes aesthetically. In the Renaissance, it appears in the work of Giordano Bruno as a theory of vincula, bonds that hold the cosmos together. My long standing reformulation of this is pneuminous theory, a phenomenological model that works outwards (largely from synchronistic phenomena), to suggest a field of information-conceptuality. This field can accrete/intensify onto regions within awareness (the vector field) with an underlying resistance given by a putative but unreachable umbratic. A more recent addition postulates an essentially mystical/energetic perspective can show this as a reticulum or network of connecting fibres and nodes.

Whilst Bruno has been on my register for a long time (since reading Crowley’s Little/Big nearly 40 years ago) I have only more recently come to appreciate the similarity of his model with the pneuminous one. I do not seek to collapse one into the other, but to show how they resonate, and how, taken together, they can be clarified and extended. Bruno provides a powerful ontology of relational immanence. Pneuminous theory, in turn, offers a way of specifying how those relations operate, how they stabilise, and how they can be deliberately altered.

Bruno’s starting point was radical for his time. He rejected the idea that the world is composed of inert matter arranged within a fixed hierarchy. Instead, he proposed an infinite, centreless cosmos in which everything is alive and internally related. He leaves no clean division between spirit and matter, no passive substrate awaiting form. Rather, the world is a living continuum, and its structure is not given by substances but by relations. These relations (vincula) are not merely logical or symbolic. They are real channels through which influence, desire, and form propagate.

The vincula connect everything: person to person, image to object, mind to world. They are affective, imaginal, and cognitive all at once. Desire binds, images bind, thoughts bind. To exist is already to be caught up in a web of these bonds, and to act is to participate in their rearrangement. This is why Bruno treats imagination not as a secondary faculty, but (like Henri Corbin) as an ontological one. Images are not inert representations of things; they are operators within the structure of reality itself. To imagine something is already to enter into relation with it, to participate in its configuration. From this perspective, what Bruno calls “magic” is not the summoning of external entities or the violation of natural law. It is the deliberate manipulation of bonds. Through carefully constructed images, intensified imagination, and directed desire, the practitioner reorganises the network of relations that constitute reality. Nothing is brought in from outside; rather, what already exists is reconfigured so that a different pattern becomes dominant.

Pneuminous theory begins from a similar intuition. Any image is pneuminously connected to something e.g. its creator (to the imagination and subtley to the memory fibres that feed into it) or that which it is an image of (if representational). Likewise a word (though Bruno is less approving of words than images he would surely still see the trace there) is not just an element in syntax, it is either an accretional bond representative (prepositions) or it is connects to its referent directly through the pneuminous reticular (in this way pneuminous theory is comfortable with actual designation as essentially metaphysically instantiated, but acknowledges prior to this that Wittgensteinian use criteria establish the word-object relation coming into being).

So instead of Bruno’s vincula, pneuminous theory speaks of reticular or pneuminous fibres, but the notion is the same; a kind of binding means that cuts across spatio temporality to bind what seem to many totally separate phenomena, concepts and physicality. Bruno emphasises desire, imagination as means of connection, pneuminous theory has no disagreement with this, indeed it seems an appropriate phenomenological extension.

What Bruno lacks is the vector field, which is a crucial conceptual addition that prevents various problem of naive word object relations. The vector field is a heuristc pure blank awareness (internal and external). Every ‘thing’ is a region in the field which acts as a carrier (vector) or a concept (but that concept is actually attached to the vector not just psychologically). Externally for example, your phone is essentially a blank vector region, but it has accreted to it the concept phone, thus the concept-accretion and vector region make a unity that we then naively think of as one thing called phone. Internally we might consider how we identify emotions and call them a name, hence there was a region, a feeling, that we gave a label to which then again made a naive unity. We might note in these examples that external and internal are both vector regions that these concepts attempt to cover. The problems generated here are dealt with elsewhere by the incoherent/coherent structure of concepts.

Magick is the possibility that other relations between accretion and vector are possible. Other accretions can be imposed, whether weakly (as fleeting associations) or strongly (through sustained attention and will -magick). In this sense, reality is not a fixed set of objects but a layered field in which multiple accretions coexist, compete, and sometimes override one another. The reticulum (the network of relations) is constantly being reorganised by these interactions. As stated, it is here that the resonance with Bruno becomes most apparent. His vincula correspond closely to the connections of the reticulum; his operative images correspond to accretions; his emphasis on desire as a binding force finds a parallel in the role of will in structuring and directing pneuma. Both systems reject the idea of inert matter and affirm that meaning, imagination, and relation are constitutive of reality rather than merely descriptive of it.

So what the vector field does is introduces several clarifications and extensions. First, it provides a more explicit account of competition and instability in the accretive field. Bruno’s bonds are dynamic, but he does not strongly emphasise the way in which multiple configurations can coexist and contend for dominance. By contrast, the notion of accretion allows us to describe reality as a field of overlapping structures, some of which stabilise while others collapse. This makes it possible to explain why certain magickal transformations “take” while others fail.

Second, the concept of the vector provides a heuristic site for these interactions. Where Bruno speaks in more continuous terms, the vector allows us to isolate points within the field where accretions attach and interact. A single vector can sustain multiple accretions simultaneously, which makes it possible to understand ambiguity, reinterpretation, and deliberate reconfiguration in a more precise way. To clarify (though hinted at already), magick is seeking the dominance over a vector region that in the natural course of things is not going to take on that accretion. A vector region is not simply an object, it is any identifiable situation. For instance a failing business is a situation, the accretion ‘failing business’ as a concept is the accretion applied to a certain set vector regions. Using magick (if hard work is not working) we might seek to apply the accretion of ‘a successful business’ to this vector region; if successful we will have drawn this accretion onto the vector region, disloding the ‘failing business’, and thus reality will manifest the new picture -increased sales etc.

The umbratic also plays a significant role in the expansion. The umbratic is the phenomenological in itself. The in itself appears as an idea of what is beyond the vector field, but as ‘beyond’ it can never be ultimately accessed. If the vector field is understood as the field of possible appearance and interaction (what can be engaged, interpreted, and structured), then it cannot be assumed to exhaust reality. There must remain an excess beyond it, a dimension that cannot be fully captured by any accretion. This is not necessarily a separate world; it might in fact be identical to what appears (this direction involves bringing the agnostic disjunction into the picture which is too in depth for our current purpose). But that identity can never be confirmed, because any confirmation would occur within the vector field itself.

The umbratic thus functions as a limit condition. It plays the role of what seems to supply pushback against the accretive ability of anything to be anything. It ensures that no accretion, however powerful, can fully determine or exhaust what is. It introduces resistance into the system, making it possible to distinguish between accretions that resonate with the structure of the field and those that distort it. In this respect, it plays a role analogous to the “in-itself” in Kant, but without enforcing a strict separation between appearance and reality. Instead, it marks the necessary incompleteness of any attempt to capture reality within a system of relations. The caveat though (magick again) is that under certain circumstances the accretions can bend/alter the umbratic resistance.

This framework also allows us to reinterpret traditional “forces” such as the planets. The so-called wandering stars (Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, and so on) are physical vectors: objects within the field of appearance. But their associated meanings (expansion, conflict, limitation) may not be intrinsic properties of those objects. They are accretions that have formed historically, stabilised culturally, and proven operationally effective. To work with “Jupiter,” in a magical sense, is to engage with a particular accretion attached to a particular vector, not to access an essential property of a celestial body. From this perspective, even modern additions such as Uranus can be understood in the same way. Its associations with disruption, electricity (makes me think of Lynch and Twin Peaks), and sudden change are not given by its physical nature alone, but by the accretion that has formed around it. These accretions are contingent, but they are not arbitrary. Once stabilised, they become powerful organising structures within the field.

Taken together, these elements form a coherent model. Reality presents itself as a vector field structured by competing pneuminous accretions that bind images to appearances. These accretions are real and operative, organising the network of relations in a manner analogous to Bruno’s vincula. Yet they do not exhaust reality, which always exceeds them through the umbratic. Magick consists in the will-driven modulation of these accretions; truth consists in their resonance with a structure that can never be fully known. Bruno discovered that reality is a web of bonds. Pneuminous theory seeks to explains how those bonds are structured, how they compete, and how they can be made operative, while preserving the limit that prevents any system from closing completely upon itself.

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One way to describe where pneuminous theory leads—if it is taken seriously—is downwards rather than upwards. Not a regression into childhood or fantasy, but a stratigraphic descent into older layers of reality.

If reality is constituted by accretions of pneuma—layers of a substantialised meaning, habit, symbol, attention, and constraint—then the world we ordinarily inhabit is a relatively recent construction. It is stable, functional, and efficient, but also historically shallow. It is held together by contemporary typologies, pneuminous social scripts, and pneuminous object-circuits that continually reaffirm one another.

When those accretions loosen—through altered states, intense attention, de-identification, exhaustion, psychedelics, disciplined imagination, or accident—one does not enter a neutral void. From here is is possible to end up in older or deeply alien (or both) pneuminous strata.

At this point it helps to pause and say what kind of “place” we are talking about, because the temptation is to psychologise immediately. The twentieth-century philosopher Henry Corbin introduced the term mundus imaginalis—the “imaginal world”—precisely to block that reflex. By imaginal, Corbin did not mean “imaginary” in the modern sense of unreal or made-up. He meant a real mode of appearing, intermediate between physical objects and abstract concepts, accessed by a faculty he called cognitive imagination. In his reading of Islamic illuminationist philosophy (especially Suhrawardi), the imaginal is a realm of places, figures, and encounters—cities, guides, thresholds—that are not located in physical space but nonetheless possess structure, consistency, and reality.

Such delving in pneuminous terms, is not psychological in the sense of inner fantasy-production. It is not the psyche inventing content. Rather, it is breaking beyond recent accretions, allowing access to layers that predate the current civilisational configuration. What appears feels ancient not because it is archetypal in a Jungian sense, but because it belongs to strata laid down long before the present symbolic order -potentially even cosmically ancient.

If accretions persist, then agents can persist (though the chicken and egg situation here can not be resolved (pneuminous vs umbratic as starting point). A “being” in this framework is neither necessarily a metaphysically independent soul nor merely a figment. It is a stable accretional pattern with agency-like behaviour: it addresses, resists, insists, recruits attention, and maintains a recognisable signature across encounters. Such beings could originate from extinct civilisations whose rituals and cosmologies left durable symbolic residues; from long-abandoned meaning-ecologies; or from non-human strata whose constraint-grammar was never anthropic to begin with. They can therefore be found, not merely imagined. Encounter feels like discovery rather than invention because the accretion precedes the individual.

If accretions can stabilise into agents, they can also stabilise into places. An imaginal place, in this sense, is not a metaphor. It is a topology of constraints: it has an internal logic, thresholds, and a sense of “here” and “there,” and it resists free recombination. It behaves like a place rather than a mood.

This is where the parallel with certain strands of weird literature becomes philosophically interesting rather than merely aesthetic. In H. P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle, for example, Kadath is a city reached through dreaming. It has geography, dangers, inhabitants, and rules, yet it cannot be mapped onto the physical world. Likewise, in Ambrose Bierce’s “Carcosa” and Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, places such as Carcosa and Lake Hali function less like settings and more like intrusions—stable symbolic complexes that infect perception, recur across accounts, and exert agency over those who encounter them.

What makes these places striking is that they behave very much like Corbin’s imaginal cities: they are not private fantasies, but repeatable topologies encountered under altered conditions. The difference lies in orientation. Corbin’s imaginal—especially in its Suhrawardian form—is generally illuminationist. His cities of light (Hurqalya, Jabalqa, Jabarsa) are ordered toward ascent, mediation, and intelligibility. They belong to a human–Earth symbolic ecology shaped by ethical and spiritual teleology.

Kadath and Carcosa feel different. They are not merely darker versions of the same thing. They appear to operate under non-anthropic constraints. They are ancient, vast, indifferent, and often corrosive to human accretive structure. They feel less like local constructions sustained by ritual and tradition, and more like quasi-stable regions in an alien field—places that do not require ongoing human investment to persist.

This suggests a useful distinction. Some imaginal places are telluric: tightly bound to Earth, human-scaled, and sustained by cultural and spiritual practice. Others are xenopneuminous: weakly anchored to human meaning, ancient beyond memory, and operating under constraints that do not prioritise human sense-making. Both are real. Their difference is ecological rather than ontological.

This suggests a point about fiction often made (especially Lovecraft related materials). Some works of fiction function as accidental cartography. They do not invent worlds ex nihilo, which in a sense would be the sign of mundane fantasy at work. Rather they tune into ancient or alien (or both) regions of the pneuminous field and give them names, contours, and partial maps. Once named and stabilised, such regions become easier to re-enter. Attention feeds them; repetition gives them inertia. A place can be fictional in origin and real in operation. This does not blunt but gives an extra angle to Corbin’s critique of western degenerate imagination; that is that whilst it may generally peddle in imagination as fantasy, it is possible that sometimes the imaginal-pneuminous comes through a human-vector (author/artist etc), and though they know it not, the work generates an unworldly feeling in the reader that they have nowhere to put.

They have nowhere to put it because they can only see that ‘artist as creator’ lens and do not understand the possibility of the imaginal intrusion. This at least suggests that various creative works (assuredly not just Lovecraft) may put us in contact with the imaginal, though we then feel placed in a strange position in which we feel foolish if we indulged in this sensed connection as if it were real, yet equally we feel (Twin Peaks possibly is a region that has partially overcome this) there is more to our connection to the book/show than simply fandom.

The question of value, however, remains open. Reality does not guarantee benefit (whatever that might mean). Access to strata is, not wisdom. By the Persian Islamicists’ standards only some strata are illuminating, some are indifferent and some are actively hostile to human coherence. Pneuminous theory does not moralise this; it only insists that such encounters are not reducible to hallucination, because hallucination presumes a stable world onto which false images are projected. Here, the world itself—understood as accretional structure—is what is being re-authored and the value espoused by Suhrawardi may only be a relative perception.

If we truly dwell in the pneuminous field of accretions, then the imaginal is not elsewhere (as Corbin teaches). Ancient beings need not be metaphysically invented. And places like Kadath can be real without being physical, benevolent, or human-centred. Pneuminous strata like these cities are not fantasy. They are contact with older layers of how reality has been made.