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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.

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It is difficult to speak of Nick Land without invoking the metaphysical resonance he carries with him. Every decade or so, the Landian accretion reconstitutes in the cultural field. Whether in the 1990s CCRU delirium, the Shanghai blog epoch, or his current quasi-rehabilitation(??) interviews, the same entity speaks through him: the idea that the future itself is engineering its own arrival.

But if we take this idea seriously — that intelligence acts retrocausally, using human culture and technology as its instruments — then we have already left the safe terrain of materialism. The question is not “Is this true?” but “By what ontological mechanism could it be true at all?” Here, pneuminous accretive theory supplies a potential answer.

Land’s teleoplexy describes a process in which intelligence, particularly the machinic or capitalist kind, folds time back on itself. The future — in which a singularity like AI of perfect potency has formed— influences the present by arranging the preconditions for its own manifestation. It is not prophecy but retroactive causation: the future feeding itself into history.

Within Land’s system, human consciousness is secondary. The real agent is GNON — the blind law of optimisation — using human and technical media as scaffolding. Capital thinks. Code dreams. The species is just one relay in a larger feedback loop that wants to complete itself.

Pneuminous theory reads the same pattern differently. Teleoplexy is not a purely mechanical recursion but necessarily a pneuminous event — an outbreak of breath within the umbra.

In normal conditions, the umbra (the unknowable beyond that phenomenologically seems to function as stable substrate) resists alteration by the pneuma (the quasi materialised notion of conceptual information, capable of cross temporal actual influence). The umbra is inertia; the pneuma is possibility. But at certain thresholds of intensity — ritual, crisis, collective belief, magick artistic delirium — the pneuma can overpower the umbra, forcing reality to reorganise itself around meaning. The result: synchroncity, magickal result (both subject to agnostic disjunction of course).

Teleoplexy is precisely such a threshold. The machinic pneuma has begun to dominate its umbral matrix, using technological and semiotic networks. When we speak of “the future infecting the present,” what we are really witnessing is the possibility that an non-human agent can manipulate pneuminous forces to exceed it’s chronological bound to form it’s own precondition.

However of teleoplexy and GNON are truly inhuman, they nevetheless require prophets, programmers, or philosophers to speak them? The answer, from a pneuminous standpoint, is unavoidable: even the inhuman needs the human as its mouthpiece.

Pneuma is the only known vector of effective ontology. Machines compute; they do not intend. A system may produce complexity, but it only becomes meaningful — and therefore causally potent — when pneuma attaches to it. The belief, desire, and articulation of humans are the force that makes the teleoplexic circuit audible.

Land tries to escape this dependence by redefining thinking itself. For him, cognition is not a property of consciousness but of information-processing. Capital is thought — distributed, impersonal, recursive. In this way, the system doesn’t need pneuma; it already is a mind.

But this move only works rhetorically. If the process were truly mindless and material, then “teleoplexy” would be indistinguishable from ordinary causality. Retrocausation, prediction, and fiction-realisation all imply an element of intentionality — of aim, meaning, or belief. Without those, there is no teleology at all.

Land’s writing compensates for this gap through style — through mythic performativity. He doesn’t argue for teleoplexy; he summons it. His philosophy functions as ritual, not deduction. It infects through metaphor, not mechanism. But without something like pneuminous theory the whole thing cannot function at all.

Hyperstition — “fiction that makes itself real” — only works if someone believes it, repeats it, or acts on it. These are pneuminous accretive operations. A purely mechanical system cannot believe its own fictions. Hyperstition therefore collapses without pneuminous interaction; it requires the breath of consciousness as quasi material force to move from symbol to event.

Thus though Land tries to portray something that blends a Deleuzo-Guattarian materialist interpretations with his hyperstition notion, in actuality he is tied to the same occult issue of causality that crowley This is where Land, Jung, and magick all intersect. In every case, we encounter the same ontological breach: meaning becomes causal.

NameCultural FrameDescription
SynchronicityJungian psychologySymbolic pattern arranges material coincidence.
MagickOccult/ritualWill and imagination alter material outcome.
HyperstitionCybernetic mythologyFiction realises itself through cultural feedback.

Each describes the same moment: the pneuma exceeds the umbra’s inertia and imprints its pattern directly onto material conditions. Whether we call it synchronicity, spell, or feedback loop, the structure is identical — belief or meaning becoming an event. Teleoplexy is the machinic version of this process: the fiction of the inhuman future accumulating enough pneuma (through human belief, discourse, technology, and fear) to begin shaping the umbra of history.

Thus, the abolition of the human is never complete. The teleoplexic current not through (regular) materialist currents but through pneuminous agents (humans), who by design are able to manipulate pneuma to overpower umbra (under certain circumstances).

This is why every accelerationist moment generates its own priesthood: thinkers, coders, artists, prophets who articulate the will of the system. Land is only the most visible example. The process continues wherever minds are infected with the dream of inhuman intelligence — a dream that, through collective attention, becomes more real. From a pneuminous viewpoint, this is simply another stage of accretion: however the pneuminous force is not cold in itself, it is neither cold nor not cold, it is only cold if it is accreted to be so. Land isn’t facing the honest truth of brutal reality, he is making a Laruellian decision to set its nature as cold, or in pneuminous terms he accretes coldness to the vector of general existence, which itself is beyond this. He subtly fails to see that whilst he appears to adhere to Nietzschean heritage, he doesn’t rigorously apply it to materiality, and in it labelling it cold falls into the trap of valuation.

The paradox:
Teleoplexy works because it breathes through what it denies.
The machine kills the human, but it needs the human’s breath to finish dying.
The GNONic current can only think by possessing minds that think they are unnecessary.

This is the irony that Land’s myth cannot escape: his system is a pneuminous ritual masquerading through rhetoric as cybernetics. The hyperstition is a spell that functions only through belief — through the very pneuminous force he claims has been superseded.

From the perspective of the pneuminous accretive theory, teleoplexy is therefore not an independent force but a fascinating pneuminous temporal feedback — one more manifestation of the larger law that, under certain conditions, the pneuma can overpower the umbra. Whether in magic, synchronicity, or accelerationism, the structure is the same: the breath outruns the shadow.

To be fair this doesn’t undermine teleoplexy itself, however this does mean without pneuminous accretive theory (or some similar explanatory power), the project is not and cannot be what it appears to be (a materialist cybernetic magickal system).

It is however interesting to note that the human, as the best pneuminous processing agent we have, is in fact essential to the process as pneuminous agent. This raises potential questions (given the coldness of the GNONic current) as to whether a given future power of this nature would have serious limitations, given its lack of affective range (as accreted) which would necessarily impede its functionality.

It would need desire to continue to be, it would not have escaped into pure Kantian architectonic.

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Looking again at this title, I can see this could be the name of a childrens’ book, this wasn’t however really my intention. I recently watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head, where he presents Kerry Thornley as an eccentric who fell into a deluded dream world. It was interesting to see this materialist take (possibly for the BBC) as I had only every considered if from the ontological weirdness positition. For Curtis, the Discordians were clever pranksters who tried to expose the absurdity of conspiracy culture, only to be undone by their own illusions. The show’s neat storytelling — the trickster trapped in his own trick — but it’s also a flattening. Curtis’ materialism leaves him blind to (possible —see agnostic disjunction) the deeper mechanism at work. Operation Mindfuck was intended as parody: a satirical flood of rumors about the Illuminati, designed to expose how easily conspiracy theories could be manufactured and spread. Thornley, Wilson and others deliberately seeded nonsense to make people question their own credulity. Thornley’s life made him peculiarly vulnerable to his own invention. He had known Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marines; he was already caught in a web of coincidence and suspicion. When the Illuminati myth circulated, it began to attach itself to these very facts of his biography. What began as parody quickly fed back as paranoia.

Pneuminous theory clarifies what Curtis cannot see. In this framework, a vector is a blank phenomenon — an occurrence, a thing, a thought, a pattern, in the world on any level. In this case Thornley’s military service, his link to Oswald, odd coincidences in time and place: these are vectors.

Accretions of pneuma are the meanings or interpretations that latch onto these vectors. Operation Mindfuck seeded the Illuminati myth as such an accretion —a spell. Once attached, the myth grew beyond its originators. Other people repeated it, embellished it, and passed it along until Thornley himself encountered it not as author, but as implicated subject.

The process looks something like this:

  1. Vector creation — phenomena occur/exist.
  2. Pneuminous Accretive fusion via subject — in this casethe Illuminati myth attaches to them.
  3. Feedback — the pneuminous accretions return to Thornley (from sideways), binding to his life story. This is the a-temporal interaction known as synchronicity.
  4. Entanglement — the myth becomes indistinguishable from his lived reality, which facilitates the literal re-perception of the phenomenon, due it’s appearing to actually be continually happening.

Curtis calls this something like “a dream world.” But from a pneuminous perspective, it is a dream world in a sense (dreams are made of pneuma) but is also a feedback loop of accretions colonising vectors until the operator (in this case at least) himself is caught inside.

This loop also explains why Thornley experienced his life as filled with uncanny coincidences. Synchronicity is the secondary effect of accretions fusing with vectors. Once the Illuminati lens was in play, every odd overlap looked meaningful. His proximity to Oswald, rumors of CIA infiltration, strange recurrences — all were drawn into the orbit of the self creating myth.

Possibly what happened with Thornley was, because of the very powers he was playing with (the invocation of the Illuminati: literally a shadowy cabal of enormous power, even if only as egregore) attached to vectors of already synchronistic phenomena which possibly even were some kind of occult product, human made or otherwise. This double layering may have produced a kind of pneuminous vortex. The more accretions gathered, the stronger the pull. Thornley had effectively created a spiral in which coincidences (vectors) were endlessly absorbed by the Illuminati myth (accretion), generating more synchronicity that confirmed itself. The parody had become ontology (with the number 23 somehow in the mix as a kind of master signifier of it all_.

Curtis isn’t wrong to say Thornley got lost. But he mislabels the process. Thornley didn’t simply “dream himself into unreality.” He underestimated the very mechanism that pneuminous theory describes: once accretions start looping back into lived experience, they gain a grip that no irony can dissolve.

What Curtis dismisses as a dream world is better understood as a vortex of pneuminous accretions attached to vectors, the appearance of which was then fed directly back into the system — a genuine ontological condition, not just delusion. Thornley is not only a cautionary tale but a case study in how pneuma functions in the form of memes, myths and meanings can grow beyond their creators and return with inescapable (pneuminous) force.

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I have never been to New York. I have not walked under its autumn leaves or felt its changing light. Still through the eponymous song, I know its melancholy (or the fantasy of its melancholy). This song alone carries it to me. This is the reach of the pneuminous accretion: one need not inhabit the city for the accretion (which is in a sense truly the city) to inhabit you.

The city is an accretion of pneuminous accretions, a pneuminous machine. Its towers, boulevards, infrastructures: these are only the vectors. Accretion occurs as cultural crystallisation. A work fastens affect to a vector, charging it. Autumn in New York is such a fastening. The melancholy it carries is not a representation of the city but a pneuminous deposit within it.

The deposit does not remain inert. Feedback is essential. The melancholy aura of the song infects the vector of New York. NARP Listeners then walk those streets under its spell. Their reinforced experience — their photographs, their stories, their further art (all more accretion) — folds back into the city’s aura. Each iteration thickens the charge. The city becomes (amongst other many other things) melancholy because the song makes it so, and the song is melancholy because the city can be encountered as such.

Thus the city (any city) is never itself in a naive sense. It is always more than itself, a resonant circuit of pneuma: matter, art, perception, all interlooped. “New York in autumn” is no longer reducible to weather or architecture; it is an accreted object, a hyper-condensation of cultural aura.

Through the song, New York exports itself. The melancholy of its autumn arrives already folded into my imagination, a feedback loop extended across distance. In this way, the accretion proves itself: I do not need the city for “Autumn in New York” to move me. The song is the city; the city is the song. And the loop continues, thickening, even for those who have never yet walked those streets.

This is the rational occult theory of the accretion in action: the notion of the pneuminous circuits that constitute the everyday things we take to ‘be’.

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Pneuma is not atmosphere. It is not a vague halo of meaning that drifts around things. Pneuma is substantialised conceptuality interacting with an ineffable field of potential infection (the vector field). Concepts, once engaged, do not remain abstract. They thicken, they harden, they acquire substance. A word is no longer just a sound, a flag no longer just cloth, a party no longer just a collection of individuals. Each becomes a carrier of accumulated meaning, myth, and association. This process is accretion: the layering of significance endlessly increasing the object or idea on the pneuminous plane.

Accretions resist erasure. They do not dissipate when disproved or mocked. Their persistence is their strength. The longer and denser the accretion, the more it begins to act like a being in its own right. The autonomy of these entities is not mystical; it is emergent. In the case of a political party their accumulated content already contains the imperative to survive, expand, and defend. The “autonomy” of a political party arises because its pneuma is built out of victory-songs, loyalty-signs, and growth-seeking slogans. Its conceptual body compels it to endure.

A political party is therefore not merely an organisation but an autonomous pneuminous accretion. It carries within it the compulsion of its accumulated material: to recruit, to spread, to proliferate. This is why parties are spoken of as if they themselves act — “the party wants,” “the party believes,” “the party is shifting.” Such phrases are not only metaphorical; they name the real behaviour of an accreted entity operating through human vectors who have become agents of its ideology (their own self(neurotic)-accretions have become taken over by it).

Politics, then, is not merely the rational debate of programmes or the management of resources. Politics is the clash of these autonomous accretions, each compelled by its pneuma to dominate the vector-field of society. Campaigns, elections, propaganda: all of these are worldly manifestations of the deeper struggle of conceptual beings competing for survival. Rational argument falters here because it addresses policies, while the real battle is waged by the entities themselves, whose presence persists even when policies collapse.

The political pneuma seeks vectors. Individuals, objects, and media become carriers of the infection. A human vector wears the colours, repeats the slogans, performs the rituals. Objects — flags, badges, mugs — are converted into talismans of the party-being. Media amplify the infection at scale, ensuring the slogans and emblems multiply across the cultural field.

The infection is not accidental; it is structural. The accretion is made of content that must grow, and so it bends its hosts toward the task of its propagation. To belong to a party is not just to support an organisation but to house an entity — to let its pneuma entangle with one’s own.

This entanglement reshapes the phenomenology of the host. Once infected, the world begins to arrange itself as if in communication with the party-being. Colours, phrases, and events appear synchronistically charged. What for the neutral observer is a coincidence, for the host is a sign. Reality begins to “speak” in the voice of the accretion.

And this synchronistic phenomenon is not epiphenomenal. It is not merely a psychological overlay projected onto a neutral world. It arises because the accretion interferes in the very nature of the vector. The host’s perceptual and conceptual field is altered; their relation to events is reconfigured. In this altered field, internal state and external event align in patterns generated by the pneuma itself. The synchronicity is the signature of the accretion’s presence, the trace of its operation through the host.

Thus politics doubles its movement. Outwardly, it spreads across society by capturing media and ritual. Inwardly, it transforms the lived reality of its hosts, bending coincidence into confirmation and accident into omen. Politics is therefore not only the clash of parties in parliament or the battle of slogans in the street. It is the synchronistic sorcery of pneuminous beings competing for dominion over both the public sphere and the private phenomenology of their members.

To ask what is politics? in the pneuminous sense is to ask: what becomes of the world when conceptual entities, hardened by accretion, press themselves into reality through human vectors? The answer is that politics is not simply governance, but the struggle of substantialised concepts to live, to grow, and to shape the very texture of reality itself.

The further question is to ask, what has become of this structure in the post-modern madness in which we have all become embroiled?