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There is a sense in which philosophy, even in its contemporary academic forms, remains a kind of base-level occult practice; it just doesn’t recognise itself as one. This doesn’t mean that metaphysics is disguised Hermeticism or any such claim. The connection in a way is more fundamental.

To see it we just have to take the understanding it gives of a kind of contingency of various relations. Whether we have a sense of this contingency seemingly from ourselves or we are struck with it from our study doesn’t really make any difference. Either way it is one of the things philosophy does to us.

It makes us consider whether a relation is necessary, whether the world is necessarily as it seems, what it means that it seems one way, what an object is, what it means to consider something an object at all, what it means for us to consider things as having value and so on and so on.

Before philosophy (in a given person) there is a much more naive relation to the world. Things are what they are, time is time, a person is a person, morality has a kind of obvious sense to it, causation is incoherently clear, language adequately conveys the world. The conceptual nature of these phenomena are obscured to us, they appear simply as reality.

To study some philosophy meaningfully challenges many of these and forces us to recognise the various problems entailed by them. This cognitive effort of endless and territorial conflict we call philosophy. However whilst a lot of it is performed under a kind of hegemonic materialism (even its idealist strands largely wish to maintain the strict rationality of materialism), from an esoteric perspective even this (in itself somewhat pointless) activity supplies the foundation for deeper understanding.

People often wonder what philosophy does? Well what it actually does is loosen our relations to the accretions embedded in us that hold us firmly to the world. This is certainly a form of esoteric practice, it just is never addressed that way. But surely to be doing esoteric practics you have to be doing magick or meditiation or something? These things certainly count but actually without philosophical reflection of the vast conceptual contingency of things one can end up in a reified world naive occultism (new age movement).

Of course since philosophy has been co-opted by rationality, all the amazing senses of wonder and mental vertigo are just interesting cognitive experiences, as opposed to the loosenings of the other aspects of the organism that they sort of actually are (and when they are dismissed in this way they do not develop). A certain freedom is achieved, but it is largely a cognitive freedom. Existentialism could be said to achieve a superior freedom, however it is a kind of unhinged freedom that will still not be properly realised, because the organism remains under too much accretive control.

In the language of curvature caused by the accretions recently employed we may say that philsophy enables us to see how we are curved but does not, at least only a tiny bit, allow us curve pneuminous field ourselves. To do this we must move beyond this purely cognitive activity and begin to do something more practical with it.

What is probably weirder is that whilst enlightenment thought massively eroded the relation between the two, the connection of esotericism and philosophy is historically strong. Good evidence suggests Plato had an esoteric teaching that was not written down and even if he does represent only a rational philosophy, it is one based on earlier teachings that were previously certainly mystery school teachings. The world of forms was the other world of gods and spirits. This was a place to receive wisdom from, to be healed from (as Iamblichus tells us) and not simply to contemplate.

Another, more recent example is Jakob Böhme. Often treated as a mystic rather than a philosopher, yet his speculative account of God, contradiction, emergence and manifestation becomes enormously important for later German philosophy. Hegel explicitly recognised Böhme as a profound precursor, seeing in him an intuition of the dynamic movement through which determinations emerge through opposition and reconciliation. The Hegelian dialectic is a direct descendent of Böhme’s spiritual alchemy; a practice that requires understanding to enable the work that will liberate us through Christ (and Sophia).

So this linkage of deeper loosening with conceptual understanding as the base is not new; what is maybe a bit sad is the cognitive loophole trap that modern philosophy has found itself in (become); now ironically too rational to allow for the possibility of a different knowledge, from which it ultimately came.

Meditation, ritual, contemplation, magical practice, dream work, ascetic disciplines and deliberate symbolic practices attempt to carry the destabilisation beyond the level of the the conceptual destabilisation that philsosophy performs and into perception, attention, behaviour and identity.

Philosophy asks: could the world be otherwise? Esotericism asks: what happens to the operator (and maybe the world) when they actually try to experience the world as otherwise? From the standpoint of accretive ontology, both are forms of liberation. However the sustained form of the latter takes the former to places it cannot go (though arguably as mentioned above, the latter cannot go there with any depty without the former).

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The consequence of the pneuminous theory is that to intend reality as divine or magickal (no matter how incoherent such concepts might be) minimally makes them so.

This correlates interestingly with the cosmology insofar as the logos was the state transformation of the ur-pneuma -it really is conceptual god all the way down (or up). Remember, the regular word pneuminous circuit involves the feedback of accretion on to vector which pulls the vector towards the accretion (though the accretion itself was initially formed from the vector).

Hence applying the accretion of divinity to it is a more appropriate concept than materiality. Materiality is an accretion violent to the actual nature of the divine (pneuminous) vector. The more respectful divine or magickal interpretations preserve its actual ontology more successfully.

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We cannot speak of in the beginning because this all entails there is no beginning. This abground is beyond all sense of existence, it is the ur-information; the formless pneuma. But there is impossible movement within the primordial pneuma. Straying further into speculation, though still within the reasonable confines of the pneuminous picture, we can expand further on the existence of everything through this lens. This pneuminous wind generates somehow in this non space (like a state space?) recursive structures (vortices? strange attractors?). These structures are vast cosmological concepts; this is the logos.

The transformations within the ur-pneuma as primordial logos are what instantiate what we experience as the physical cosmos (and potentially much more that we are not aware of). Difference accumulates upon difference. Persistent structures condition subsequent movement, which reinforces the structures that produced them. Accretions deepen, interact, combine and perhaps generate vast self-sustaining centres of pneuminous organisation. These unimaginably vast a-spatial, a-temporal accretions essentially think the thing that allows us to experience things as space, time, forces in physics, different atoms.

The question of gods and spirits has a two fold answer here. One cause of these beings could be patterns within the ur-pneuma that can hover move fluidly between it and the thought-into-being-materiality. Having gained some autonomy from the ur-pneuma these beings could also potentially contribute to thinking more solid aspects of being into reality (or stranger unimaginable ones). Possibly there could be yet smaller and smaller pure pneuminous beings capable of moving between various strata of the accreted pneuma -faerie descriptions commonly render them as made of fine matter.

The second would be the formation of such beings themselves essentially formed by limited beings like ourselves. Such beings attribute agency to phenomenon, deify/spiritually animate it and then behave towards it as if it were so. This very action accretes the pneuma of agency to the phenomenon which ulimately would create an autonomous pneuminous egregore. Clearly it is very difficult (impossible) to tell which of these any given entity is and it may be that all such beings are a compound of the two phenomenon. This does however raise a picture of the cosmos as potentially littered on the various finer strata of pneuma, with various beings, exhibiting differing levels of what we call agency and consciousness.

As mentioned previously, this does alter the nature of the umbratic somewhat. Rather than a speculative beyond it now is definitively made of pneuma; it is the cosmic thoughts; ancient, ancient accretions, which to us looks like solid ‘matter’.

The living operators (ourselves and other limited beings) that have evolved out of this situation are strange insofar as they have developed a particular recursive capacity. The operator (NARP) perceives the ancient accretion as a vector (blank object) as a concept which it then projects back onto it. The ancient accretion of course can resist any kind of alteration as its thought/pneuminous sustenance is so much greater the feeble operator. Yet there is a tiny push upon it; the limited being still has some pneuminous power. This is the divine capacity of the Operator.

The cultivation of this push is what we call magick. Magick cannot push hard against the ancient thought, it must form intensities that can create what we can call curvatures. This brings about a similar kind of picture to relativity. The whole picture can be thought of in this way to some extent. The accretions of the logos create the ground, the further accretions curve the shape by there pneuminous intensity. Here we refrain from mass for two reasons: 1) the analogy is just that, not an equivalance 2) it makes less sense to say the quantity of the pneuma than its intensity, and the mass metaphor creates a notion of quantity.

Pneuminous intensity curves a given strata to a greater or lesser degree. Normal concept application is largely a fit to the existing ancient accretion/vector; magick is an attempt to make an curvature in the strata for a certain purpose, to draw certain phenomena into that space.

The curvature model can be seen to be general operation in reality. Art objects, buildings, objects of power, certain people etc have formed pneuminous intensity, as such they curve the pneuminous space around them. This can be experienced and described psychologically/scientifically but its phenomenological primordiality is pneuminous.

Similarly the accreted or pre-existing gods curve the pneuminous space, but they too are limited by the ancient accretive structures that are part of the even more ancient logos. Hence we live inside countless overlapping accretive geometries while continuously contributing tiny distortions of our own.

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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.