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One of the most important things phenomenology gives us is the understanding of how the ancient accretions/egregores/archetypes form in certain ways. One of the most obvious examples being the Sun’s descent and re-emergence from the underworld. There are various accretive layers there. In the vector field (the putative pre-conceptual realm) there is a region which we call the sun. This region was historically imprinted with the status of a God.

This is interesting as we cannot mean that this accretive formation (of pneuma) is erroneous, as this would presuppose that the modern scientific concept of the sun is exhaustive of it, when of course it’s possible that we might discover that structures like planets had some form of sentience and could indeed be considered Gods (have that grammatical game applied to them). So the vector region withholds its absolute truth. In the ancient mode the Sun is a God and it descends into the underworld. Here phenomenologically beyond the horizon is literally the underworld and the Sun descends into it. There is the vector region of these phenomena and the accretive structures imposed upon them.

Nowadays we see the Sun as continuously present in a different sense. The planet spins and creates the illusion of the Sun setting. When the Sun’s descent is literally perceived, the pneumious accretion formed creates in the pneuma the underworld itself. Though again note, the things we call the underworld are different related vector regions. Unlike in the God-sun/science-sun difference, here the structure of reality is more radically accreted differently to the solid spatio-temporal continuity of the modern world. The phenomenological appearance of the descent creates a whole world of mythology in the pneuma i.e. of tales that similarly form (struggle against the dark and re-emergence).

Since the accretions are not just psychological but real (potentially active in altering what we call physical solidity), there is then a feedback between the projected accretions and their worship. They appear in dreams, they communicate, the answer requests. Thus they solidify as particular forces, though still are actually accretions of quasi-necessity projected onto the vector regions that suggest these stories.

This fleshes out the picture from my previous post which suggested that the word of the sacred might be too challenging, too against the values of that alliance of morality and reason that the west lives in. I am not saying this is wrong. But if it isn’t wrong (whatever that might mean), if the Western model persists and it cannot return to the old ways —for they are too terrible for it to bear- then it has but two choices: to attempt the re-accretion of more reasonable deities that can mirror it or if it survives it has the prospect of forming what might be called a ‘second centre’.

That is, a new centre where reason has built a wall that does not fail, but apart from various small breakthroughs, keeps the howling madness away and forges in the pneuma an attempt at pristine world of the fake Apollo (not Kingsley’s Apollo). The second centre is that thing so many people fear, it is the absolute cut off from nature and the dominance of it by humankind, reason and morality. I do not present the second centre as desirable or otherwise, only as an actual unsuspected actual option that preserves the occult geology in its description yet in its enactment would cover it over nearly perfectly.

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For those of you who don’t know Peter Kingsley it seems his message is fairly straightforward. Humankind has become cut adrift from its sacred source with devastating psychic isolation, nihilism, madness and general doom as its consequence.

Fleshed out a bit more it’s that the presocratic philosophers should never have been conceived as primitive proto-thinkers paving the way for Socrates et al. Rather they need to be reconceived as incredibly powerful shaman-priest type figures who received their wisdom from ecstatic type interactions with the other world.

This makes sense (though I can readily confess to my inability to judge his scholarship adequately), not least because it fits perfectly with the speculative work that I was previously doing with Emanuel Magno. In this we came to conceive of the allness as the reticulum of a-spatiotemporal light fibres. This was the nagual, the other world that Castaneda spoke of. It is the one boundless one of pure immanence.

Accepting the possibility of accessing the reticulum through practice grants the Laruellian one its correctness -radical immanence- yet also makes it not simply non-philosophically true but also practically so. The ontological war (philosophical decision) exists at the level of pneuminous accretions, where no philosophy can deliver any decisive win. All philosophers are simply agents for the ideas, striving for the cracks in the enemies theoretical stronghold.

Beyond the chatter of the accretions, down below the vector field is the reticulum, the umbratic. To accept this kind of mysticism is stop thinking of this as an epistemological limit for this is only true from an ordinary level of reality. In acceptance there is the understanding of the insane rhizomatic underpinning of all things: the folds are the synchronicities and the rest of the strange phenomena. Materiality conceived as a solid spatio-temporality is literally false. The reticulum is not a philosophical idea but an actuality only accessible through rigorous practice. The synchronicities etc are merely foothills.

Kingsley says that there was a time when those who are trained in accessing the reticulum were trusted to bring the word of the gods back to us and that we would revere it (oracles). His claim further is that founding ideas of healing and logic amongst others came from this place and then were covered over with the gloss of human creation.

This maybe so, there is so much to enjoy and agree with in the general account. However the problem arises about how a to re-establish the word of the other world and how to adjudge it. Even if it were desireable, it seems almost impossible to conceive how the reticulum readers could re-establish themselves as the determining agents of society. Furthermore how are we to trust this word nowadays? Of course the two points seem entwined. For those with access to the reticulum to be trusted with power we must have learned to respect the word of the Gods.

But the hindsight of chaos magick and my own pneuminous accretive theory brand of it do not particularly help to re-establish such trust. Such theories unashamedly reduce the Gods to vast accretions of pneuminous energy, produced by complex feedback systems between the archetypal seed and the worshippers. Their status as aggregates of primal drives, natural phenomena and cultural projections render them dubious sources of reliable wisdom.

The truths they might speak might indeed found a stable society, however the values they might speak could be so contrary to many we have come to hold as progress that we would (and should) reject them outright. Where does this leave us? Are we now true Prometheans cut adrift by our own desire for equality and reason? But Kingsley’s point is likely true, that the cutting of the sacred source is dangerous. Where does this leave us? Can we get beyond these ancient gatekeepers? Isn’t that what Christianity already tried to do and yet found itself equally Patriarchially etc accreted.

I wrote before about a design a god project. I am not certain of this but maybe a fit for purpose accreted deity (or deities) to serve as access to the reticulum is what we need. This though seems partially paradoxical without the greatest hubris. How can we bring our own God to be? Surely the reticulum must supply the God somehow. I know how poorly looked upon Heidegger is and yet I cannot help but hear his words here when he speaks of the God to come, the one who has yet to show his face.

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This curious poem/document was sent to the CEO and is certainly worth our publishing. It was created by one D Seth Horton. He explains its nature below (slightly paraphrased).

“Here are a series image-texts that are all centered on the U.S.-México border, which can be related to your recent interest in Carlos Castaneda given that his work was situated in the borderlands.

The text is sourced from various U.S. Customs and Border Patrol documents.  In terms of composition, I deleted most of the original material until I was left with the poem that had previously been hidden within the bureaucratese.  To be clear, I added no words, punctuation, or capital letters to the body of these poems, nor did I change the original word order in any way.  Instead, I simply erased what was in the way and then moved the words that remained into appropriate line breaks. 

Other than my drawing, the images all come from the National Archives.

In case readers are interested in comparing “my” texts against the original source material, I have included notes at the end of my submission with all the necessary details.”

Biography

 D. Seth Horton’s work has appeared in more than forty publications, including the Michigan Quarterly Review and Glimmer Train. Two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His latest book is a forthcoming collection of stories set throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands entitled, On a NASA Flight to Heaven (TCU Press, 2024). He currently teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Virginia. 

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It is well known now that that the paranormality of zones of dereliction functions by means of the so called vacuum effect. This eponymous vacuum is something of a misnomer though the point is well taken. A given vector region may be conceptually (pneuminously) imbued with the multi-story car-park accretion. The community continually reinforce this accretion by their pneuminous interactions with it. However when lack of finance and minor structural damage render the car-park closed, the accretion begins to crumble.

The rapid decay of pneuminous accretions creates a vacuum like effect. The previous perpetual reinforcement of these structures has suddenly stopped. They do persist but are immediately weakened and it is this fairly rapid collapse that attracts certain other powers to fill the gap. It is not properly understood why these forces are attracted to decaying pneuminous regions though the clue may be in exactly such a notion.

There is some speculation that the accretions themselves, as they decay, release their latent energy which in turn is attractive to various of the beings that inhabit the pure pneuminous realms. In this way it might analogous to how bacteria and fungi are attracted to decaying matter, or possibly like carrion feeders are attracted to dead creatures. The scale cannot be currently determined.

Whatever the attraction, research has revealed that sudden lack of attention to objects gives the same depleted pneuminous effect which attracts certain forces. Interestingly it also confirms that whilst the accretion initially decays rapidly, at least 50% of it is forms a deep structure which is extremely difficult to remove from the vector region to which it is attached. This remaining amount breaks down extremely slowly over time. Whether the beings that attracted come only for the rapid release or for the slower breakdown (or even if different types come for different breakdowns) is not understood.

The aforementioned paranormality of these regions then is generally understood to be a product of the beings that come to inhabit the absence left by the accretion decay/withdrawal. Human experienced interactions may be accidental or may be intentional attempts by the beings to feed on the pneuminous structure of the unfortunate human or to simply warn them off from interfering with their activity. Humans of course do not usually come into contact with such beings as much of their world is under constant pneuminous reinforcement which prevents such entities from manifesting (in any significant manner).

There may be other factors involved though. General energetics have long since held that places that have ‘good’ energy are often extremely harmonious in appearance. A beautiful woodland glade of dappled light and humming life is said to have good energy and the fact we find it so beautiful is a reflection of this general energetic state. Given the nature of pneuma, this must entail (for any creature that has some sense of beauty) a kind of positive feedback loop. For example, the system (glade) is extremely positive to the encountering organism, that is, it is in itself already positive in a sense. The aesthetic appreciation of the organism for the system then accretes these kinds of positive pneuminous structures onto the system (beauty etc.). This pneuminous accretion only serves to enhance the region to more beautiful/positive level. This effect may be only slight but we know it to be real and it might be more than slight.

Zones are not known for bringing about perceptions of beauty, often being considered ugly eyesores by many inhabitants of the town/city/region where the zone is. However the growing appreciation of zonal regions as having their own aesthetic qualities worthy of attention could, theoretically, undermine some of this negative attitude towards them. This attitude change, disrupts the insufficient dichotomy of good energy/bad energy. Stagnancy and dereliction have certainly been thought of as forces inimical to humans, however the re-perception of zones as being imbued with a certain wonder places a spanner in the works of a ‘place with bad energy’.

To be clear we illustrate here only a theoretical possibility, however it is still worth discussing. If the feedback mechanism between accretion and the underlying nature of the vector region is significant (i.e. if the beauty etc accretions are making the place more positive to any significant degree) then the perception of the zonal regions as interesting, awesome even beautiful themselves, will significantly alter their sometimes hostile nature.

This speculation then involves that the beings that are attracted to the zones are not simply there to feast upon the decaying pneuma, but are also there by virtue of the negative accretive qualities that are accreted to the regions. An alteration (admittedly one would need nearly everyone to adopt this attitude) in the accretions that form on zonal regions would then potentially significantly alter the energy of the place itself.

We are (culturally) extremely familiar with the positive energy of harmonious places and negative energy of unpleasant ones. Even, the beautiful place that houses poison is a comprehended trope. However the zonal energy transmuted through the positive gaze is not a common idea. Even currently interested people still are fascinated largely because of the negativity, because the places are creepy and strange; this make the re-perception only partial. The alchemical transformation of such a proper reperceiving might bring about a rarely encountered form of energy. Similarly the beings attracted to zones would be of a different order. Owing to the speculative nature of the enquiry, possible functions of such an energy are not yet even guessable, however research in zonetology is always progressing.

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There are only two modes of activity. One takes place within the strata of concepts/culture and the other other also partially does so but strains beyond it and possibly achieves this. Most activity in general takes place in the regular home of what I called above the ‘strata of concepts/culture’. I don’t mean anything esoteric by this, but I do mean something very broad. Whether a scientist, a writer, a carpenter, a gardener or a cleaner, your activities, your aims fall within this realm. Indeed just in your day-to-day existence, all of your quasi-conscious and conscious (though I am always wary of using this word since reading Gurdjieff) activities fall under this mode. The mode is purely directed within the accretions. It works with them. It may try to work out new, hitherto unidentified vector regions (science) or it may work with existing accretive structures, absorbing them, mildly mutating them as we do in our interactions.

Even many of those who believe they work closer to the edge, work purely within the accretive structures. Indeed many people interested in esoteric/occult matters only work within the accretive layers without attempting to escape them. Here probably is the only point of this writing. Nothing you engage in, in any occult quasi-activity (like numerology) escapes the accretive layers or does anything significant to alter your relation to them. You might obtain results. Results are a different kind of phenomenon. Results enable the practitioner to question the state of reality by means of the question ‘what ontology is compatible with my results not being reducible to a solid-world materialist/psychologist type explanation?’ Results are an invitation not a real result.

In this way results are openings, but they are in many ways only accidental openings. They may encourage more playing with systems. This may trigger more results either synchronisitic or intentional. It is real but it means nothing. All such activity is still within the accretive realm. The only activities that are otherwise are the practical attempts to move beyond it. These are the thought stopping, personality disabling, pattern breaking practices you read about in all the literature on this matter.

Phenomenology comes so close to some of these. Phenomenology unearths the vector field, the transcendental backdrop into which the accretions embed themselves, but then it returns to the accretive world to show how it is constituted. The second activity seeks the vector field unrelentingly. The vector field is the wellspring of sorcery. No one can say how long it goes down before disappearing into umbratic depths.

Poetry, art and music are interesting cases. Poetry rearranges the accretive field to present disclosures of a certain depth. This is a kind of result which might hook someone into seeking the vector field. Art in representational mode is simply the skillful display of the visual accretive field. However its other faces (more abstract forms) can facilitate something like an encouragement to perceive the vector field. Music, without words, can effect something similar, can give an insight into a heuristc pure[r] perception.

All of these experiences though, without motivation, are accidental results which are rapidly overtaken by the establishment of the accretive field.