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The point I was trying to articulate in the last post is closer to this. When then shaman travels to other worlds, these worlds may well be accretive formations of pneuma based on his environment. The spirits are the local animals etc. These worlds are real and can be travelled to. The point of pneuma as a theory is that the accretions once made are not simply accessible by one individual, they have autonomous existence. Nevertheless these shamanist upper and lower worlds are accreted to certain vectors in the shaman’s world. These worlds do no whisper sinister secrets or at least if they do, the shaman knows what to listen to and what to avoid. The point being there is wisdom and power that is beneficial to the community in these worlds.

Writers like Rickert and Kingsley identify presocratic thinkers like Parmenides as half shaman, half priest type figures. They represent a transitional stage that still has access to the other world, before Plato placed reason as the source of wisdom. Thought in this way, Parmenides did not think his writing up, he accessed his ideas from the other world, and, if we are to believe Kingsley, inaugurated the west itself through the ideas he accessed through visions. The connecting wisdom then became lost and we are now adrift (I am not commenting on the correctness or otherwise of this pronouncement).

The Lovecraftian connection is that the realm of strange shining cities and books of odd symbols is the same place the shaman and the presocratic priest/shaman accessed. The King in Yellow’s home is exactly such a world. The ‘weirdness’ of these worlds possibly comes from their (as stated) being accreted to ideas outside of religion. That is, their presentment as places of other dimensions or worlds that are simply absolutely other gives them a feel that no living hermeneutic category understands adequately (other than weird).

When the Gods are real, the Gods can manage these realms. When they are not, then alien forces appear. As the alien forces appear it becomes harder to access them as sources of wisdom, for they may appear as strange and terrible and sinister as Hastur himself.

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This Tooth is called Being or in the Hyperqabalah it is the node ‘Triebnegesin’. It is the feeder node for the yestertooth of Eskatology (Daagolenyfo).

Lovecraftian is an adjective for a whole family of phenomena. Some earlier than Lovecraft himself. One example of this being Chambers’ famous ‘The King in Yellow.’ One way in which we an look upon this set of weirdness is its ability to disengage from the conventional take on monsters (fairyland creatures, dragon like creatures and devils/demons, the undead). These forms may be revisited but they are reappropriated under new guises. It is a phenomenon that many of us may have experienced to see some fantastic world or city in a dream and feel that this has some reality to more than a mere dream. Whilst this may or may not be true, our inability to frequently visit such places at will means they still fall under the category of dream, no matter how luminous and interesting they may have seemed.

What Chambers’ Lovecraft, Machen etc did was to facilitate the perception of these worlds as real, persisting dimensions that push up against our own. The inhabitants of which look, from the human perception, like something extremely sinister (though by their own standards they may well not be so).

Of course we cannot answer any question regarding the reality of such worlds. Hypersitition can solidify such inventions and project them back into history. What we rummage here for a is a comment on a sort of sideways movement that either accesses them or creates them.

This somehow all ties to the pluralistic spirituality talked about elsewhere. The systems all have some kind of interaction with a pre-intellectual awarenesss. Access to this awareness is a wellspring from which a certain different kind of intelligence persists. Buddhism clearly acknowledges the existence of the spirits as things one may meet on the way, however they are their powers are said to be distractions to the true way.

This again is not the discussion here (the trueness of one way). The point is fading from me as I write. The word rivulets returns to me, every time I go through the process. There are flows in the pneuma, great accretive structures either real of archetypal that move laterally to a vertical axis towards and away from ‘enlightenment’, which itself is just one possibility.

In the lateral flows are created or exist strange worlds which may feed back into our own (hyperstition). The experience of a book like the ‘King in Yellow’ is one that I feel some empathy with. Like, many I have seen a book not dissimilar to this in dreams -though I would not consider it sinister, but rather very strange. This book is related to the Hyperqabalah. There is no claim of universal importance here, only an observation of the way in which the other world interacts with this one through strange feedback loops.