This transcript is of a conversation between the CEO’s Balthazar Schlep and Lis who has been experimenting with various sorcery techniques. We do not recommend emulating Lis’ experiments at home.

Lis is italicised to differentiate the voices.

CC is Carlos Castaneda. DJ is Don Juan.

I mean to be fair to standard Thelemite or otherwise practice they all want inner silence, but equally they use words to direct acts. Sorcery seems to bypass words entirely. Let’s think: if pneuma was real real, then it seems to me sorcery is playing in unaccreted pneuma. Where maybe the nagual would be the umbratic?

Do you think the following of a magickal writing system, like the Qabbala underlying Thelema, is a marker of the difference between the occult and sorcery, maybe? With sorcery having no writing system because it prevents the apparatus of recording to actualize? (Very Derridean)

It seems a fair distinction.

The nagual as the umbratic would make for something very cool aesthetically. I just want to say this is the case, but caution makes me want to think some more

Yes I don’t think it’s right.  It is good aesthetically, but it doesn’t fit, as it was the pneuma that altered the umbratic which played the role of underlying structure. Maybe this just doesn’t work here. The pneuma umbra thing was specifically designed for a very human magickal interaction description and we seem to be way out of that here.

Maybe nagual is a category distinct to a sum-property of an object, its identity. Maybe nagual is itself the perspective of the pneuma in its interaction with something that from the tonal perspective is incoherent (the umbratic). And that’s why one becomes a nagual, yet it was already there (negative form). This would make it still pneuma, but in a freer state of accreting. Which would be like a Spinozian hierarchy of being. So the umbratic, in this case, is like a zone of the vestigial encounters events and acts of naguality (and similar states). But pressed against the tonal, so it’s pitch-black incoherent and inorganic from this perspective.

What you say would seem to fit with the notion of sorcery dealing with unaccreted pneuma: unaccreted pneuma is the nagual? Though I’m not sure I have quite got your take on the umbratic here, it seems to me to be what DJ labels the unknowable. To be a Nagual would also fit with this I think insofar as its a maximally unaccreted person

Yes for both. I think it makes sense for example that the unknowable is like the eagle itself. The nagual can experience the unknowable differently from the tonal, like a second-attention vs first-attention thing. That’s why I mean that maybe the nagual understand the umbratic better because interaction is maximized. Exactly, and that’s why impeccability is the most important rule, because as sorcery opens the individual more, it puts the body in contact with more generated energy and so the expenditure always increases. So much that DJ says that even to cook an egg he needs all his attention, because the umbratic has invaded the world through him once he nagualized. Sorcery indeed has the potential equal or superior to philosophy and indeed is like an experimental ontology possible beyond fiction.

I suppose though this will always be a problem i.e.  no matter how out there with Laruelle or whatever people get, most academics/thinkers don’t have serious truck with any of this. They dip their toes in the occult or they metaphorize Lovecraft. You can’t bring these pearls back to them which sadly is also why the sorcery thing is correct again —that only some people will get it. I suppose another reasonable question is ‘why would you want to mess with this stuff?’ This that your live in is reality, this is all the reality you need. And this is true, sorcery is pretty useless in a way. Having said that, and I don’t know how much you want to go down this road, I wonder if you could get that potential IOB to ‘do’ something?’

I’m pretty sure it’s not even a question of my want (with regards to ‘messing’ with this stuff) in a straightforward way. Meeting this thing is like seeing the circuitry of your life so far and understanding that there were always tracks that I deviated as part of the plan all along. Something opposite to how ontology thinks. The accidents are above in the hierarchy of realness. As if a species is an iterative error of cell-replication in a simulation of cancer, and the individual that sees this is the true product and we just happened to, despite being unspecial, crash into.

Yes you’re right, I cannot put the investigation even if down if I wanted to. It gnaws at me.

This is amazing because it’s like we finally have a tool to talk about the impersonal individual

Again, another failure of the other nonsense (speculative realism/ooo) totally achieved here. Thinking in terms of this circuitry and the Castaneda-updated accretive model, the outside is accessible

Yes. The transcendental critique is still correct, but it describes a historical condition rather than a telos or final state.

Yes the Kantian subject is a contingency itself.

It is not absolute, like Newtonian mechanics. It’s local. Exactly.