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Occult systems emphasise silence as important. Silence is identified not particularly with noise in the physical sense but rather the lack of conceptual interaction -mostly thought (accretions of pneuma). Hence one can be in a noisy environment and still tune into silence. Of course persons with highly developed concentration can be in talkative environments and still tune into silence; it’s just trickier.

Noisy here though simply means loud sounds, either natural or man made. Their possibility of inhibiting silence comes from their accretive nature (which of course is what thought and talk do). If we tune into our conceptual arrangement of the meaning of noises, we do not hear silence, we hear accretive noise.

Silence is about tuning out the accretions. Mystics may talk about the silence of existence. However some modern scientific revelations e.g. complex fungal networks point out the vast amount of communication that goes on in the seeming silent world. Complex chemical conversations take place all the time between organisms – is this not noise?

There are two points here. One is simply to say that we do not hear this noise and hence it does not impinge upon our silence. This though is somewhat anthropocentric, since what we are after is understanding the general silence of existence, it is however relevant as silence-to-us is a key factor (phenomenological).

The second is to say that thought/communication exists on a continuum that nevertheless has a threshold, after which the phenomena we have identified as accretions appears. Communication and thought develop in organisms. The more complex the conceptual system the more neurotic the organism can become. Noise is the development of accretions. The chemical conversations have not crossed the accretive threshold and hence do not fill the world with accretive chatter. Some animals’ (other than ourselves) thought and chatter no doubt is accretive, but equally may be interpreted as silence (just like our own chatter can be). However on an ontological level it contributes to the accretive interference that obstructs silence.

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Consider the virtual/pneuminous. Here we are in the pure present (again the accretive problem arises) the virtual/pneuminous presses against us from both sides (the future and the past). Endless lines are drawn between all phenomena that might facilitate rupture like occurences.

Rupture like occurences are the synchronicities, the hauntings, Jung’s room crammed full of spirits so thick you can scarcely breath. This world is there, it is real, yet it hides behind the purely brilliant now, ever unfolding, ever receding.

Where are these lines? What do you mean? The lines are drawn in the pneuminous, in the other world, in the virtual. Maybe they are not drawn in it, but rather are it (then this line drawn is a key). Nodes and lines shimmering in the umbratic nothingness.

The rolling madness of pneuminous feedback layers endless complexity into the system. As the regions are named so they accrete; hammer, table, computer, seratonin, differential equation, on and on. Every accretion trying to solidify, failing at its edges. Not just these terms but vast abstractions like time, space, present, future.

Know that everything is formed in this way. Wittgenstein is a priori absolutely correct to say meaning is use. This truth is unassailable. However because reality is the way it is, it is also more than this. Each word exists in intensive use and extensive object . Open horizon, vertical structure. Every potentially ephemeral use summons the virtual hoard which accretes to it, affective and intellectual. When words are relatively simple like ‘table’ the accretions, the rules, whilst still swarming with affective virtuality and formal possiblity are much simpler than that of ‘time’.

Time too is an accretion. The word is a use word, its being exhausted by its use. And yet not, for the meaning of time as accretion is the bewildering morass of contradictory theories and overlapping similar uses that form this node. It is for this reason there are three different language games of time: chronos, aion and kairos. These being measured, numerical time (chronos), eternal time of future and past (aion) and qualitative heterogenous time (kairos).

What occurs that makes magick possible? Only the natural feedback that happens especially with beings that have complex conceptual breakdown of the vector field. Each identified region produces a contingent archetypal form, an ideal image of that kind of thing. This is the unbound pneuminous accretion. This unbound accretion is projected upon all the instances of this kind of thing encountered. The effect of this is to bring the phenomena more in line with the ideality (the pneuminous form). Magick imposes the ideal pneuminous accretion upon the empirical pneuminous form making it more like itself.

How can time become more like itself? As Bergson observed, chronos has come to dominate time, so that nearly all is perceived under this auspice. Mathematically measured time becomes our phenomenology. Time as accretion comes to mean this. Time is a vector region, whatever we can use the word time for is the use of time. What facilitates this grammar. The underpinning experience that makes the grammar of time possible. But when this grammar shifts to time as chronos, the accretion itself as it is embedded in the vector exerts that small but powerful effect upon it. The vector region that makes the grammar of time possible is made, in a subtle way, more fixed, more solid, like this incohehent chronological archetype.

One of the key ways emphasised to faciliate access to the other world is through our experience of temporality. Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari say this, but (Deleuze and Guattari especially) pull the punch. Intuition is a kind of act of imagination that can give access to reality other than our own but the occult significance of this is played down. Goethe understood it because he actually could do it. Elsewhere it appears as a myth. A fantasy whose literal reality the world of philosophy struggles to cope with -the pulled punches.

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In ‘What is Philosophy?’ Deleuze and Guattari describe 3 ways in which we understand the chaos that we are and that surrounds us. These are Philosophy, Science and Art. The chaos of existence is filtered in each place by a different plane. Philosophy has a plane of immanence, science has a plane of reference and art has a plane of composition. Each of these planes in turn has a different types of structure.

Deleuze and Guattari seem to want to place magickal type phenomena on the plane of immanence. I am not entirely sure this is correct and I propose that magick be considered to be drawn on a different plane. It is true that magick, considered as an opening of ontologies by implication is drawn on the plane of immanence, however when magick is magick as craft and not philosophy it is drawn on its own plane. That is, an ontology that accounts for paranormality may be drawn on the plane of immanence precisely because doing so draws conceptual apparatus for this description.

Considering this matter this does seem to create kind of heuristic division in the analysis. Magick must be divided into naive and chaos magick. Naive magick accepts the system that it works with unreflectively as real, the spirits, Gods, incantations are the actual entities. Whilst chaos magick utilises belief to harness any given system, acknowledging that each system is a construct and not a real ultimate unit of spiritual reality. The former of these is not inscribed upon the plane of immanence whereas the chaos magickal underpinning is a redrawing of the plane of immanence, it is a conceptual (philosophical) alteration of the ontology of magick. As praxis though, neither of them is drawn upon the plane of immanence but rather they are drawn on an occult plane, that is nevertheless entirely entwined with the other 3 planes -and not of an especial transcendent nature.

The occult plane is laid over the chaos, as the others are, and acts as a filter, it shares a curious cross section of the traits of the others. It has the open endedness of the philosophical concept by having an infinitely receding causal structure, yet it strives for the coordinated nature of the scientific plane of reference —spells can be very specific in material, spatial and temporal co-ordination in their attempt for replicability. It also gathers affects and percepts in its construction (scents, sigils, visualisations) and its very nature accords to the description of art in that it finds the hidden language within language (divinatory, numerological practices). Despite this intersection of planes the occult plane still has its own essential feature, these we may call adepts.

The adept is a becoming that emerges between two or more phenomena whose relation is entirely undetectable other than by occult means. This becoming is one of endless potential that may be utilised by the sorcerer or may remain inert. E.g. We might form an adept between red things as a general adept structure. We might then seek to connect two red things through a magickal act and intensify the adept further. At a scientific level any discovered connection between the red things (frequency) here is not relevant, the red percept (and we do mean percept in Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, it is not just a perception) creates an adept in relation to another red percept. The adept itself could be called a pneuminous structure, it is through these structures that magick ‘operates’.

Let us consider the synchronicity as an example of adept formation. A person becomes, through a significant experience, attached to the number 47. They begin to experience the number in their lives in strange uncanny way. It (the number) seems curiously common and to appear in strange places that seem definitely out of line with their previous experience of reality. Because we are considering a paranormal compatible ontology here, we will bracket off the materialist coincidence model(1). These instances of the numbers’ manifestations are adepts. They are connected through the rupture event that attached the power/accretion to the particular person —this too was an adept. This is not psychological connection, this is a real connection, it is as if in the umbratic it was like a fungus of connecting mycelial threads; the fruiting bodies (the mushrooms) were the synchronicity (the adept).

None of this though should be conceived with the model of reality that we commonly hold, material, consistent, fixed. Adepts look like they do because they are ruptures in the solid; the proliferated pneuminous mycelial threads inserting themselves into a reality that might have been otherwise. The involved person is not deluded, they are more like infected. But the infection is related to what we call spritual. The infection can be used to learn the nature of things; it is the closest regular perception gets to seeing multidimensionality.

(1)This though is an incredibly complicated issue that crosses over the areas of an occult phenomenology and a metaphysics compatible with the phenomena being ‘actual’. That is, the same agnostic disjunctive issue in a sense raises its head. The adept as we define it, is justified in having its own occult plane whether or not there is anything occurring that constitutes magick/paranormality.

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Postulates of Magick

  1. A conceptual substance which we shall call Pneuma is real.
  2. Pneuma interacts with what can called a non-conceptual substance (umbra) in a manner not currently registered/understood by contemporary science.
  3. The pneuminous-umbratic relation usually reflects a solid, consistent world.
  4. The whole of experience is pneuminous.
  5. Certain acts of will can manipulate pneumious structures such that the solid consistency of the world can be altered (the umbratic is altered by the pneuminous).
  6. The appearance of these acts, which appears as ruptures in the solid-consistency worlds are, in almost all circumstances, automatically covered over by the solid-consistency of the world.
  7. This covering over is relative to differently formed solid-consistencies i.e. the influence of pneuminous forces can be accepted by the socius to a greater or lesser degree.

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One might easily mistake the pneuma itself for the fine matters of occult theory. There is a sense in which this is true however it is more correct to say that the fine matter is formed of pneuma. Pneuma is not an energy as such but rather the pure form of conceptuality, it is the experience of something as something. We experience pneuma in its bound and unbound forms. In what we call the physical world we see the pneuma as the objects, we see the concept attached to the vector which carries it e.g. there is a vector region stone such that the concept is capable of attaching to it; this is bound pneuma. When we perceive things in ‘the mind’s eye’ we see unbound pneuma. The concept conjures an archetypal (to us) version of it that we can perceive internally.The concept draws on its (local) history to create this image. It is in a sense pure conceptuality because unlike the physical version where we could strive to unsee it as that concept, in the bound case this is not possible.

Pneuma exerts an effect on the vector region it occupies. This is the strange feedback system that magick employs. We develop through a use relationship a concept. The concept becomes somewhat reified/has a certain nature/image attached to it. This pneuminous structure is then projected back onto the vector region which bizarrely makes the object (vector region) more like the archetype than the original. This is the everyday nature of magick, its effect is minute and only serves to make objects more like the objects we think they are.

It is easy to see from here how magick functions with pneuma. The everyday occurence of it is the application of conceptuality to objects which readily take the concept in its full shared social sense, whereas the magician seeks to apply concepts to regions that would not ordinarily take them. S/he does so by the application of the will (a complicated issue pneuminously in itself). In this way the conceptual set-up that the magician requires is applied to the vector regions s/he seeks to alter.

The fine energies of the world are a perpetual feature of occult discourse. All systems make some kind of mention of them. What the systems don’t do is agree on the nature/description of these ‘energies’. Colours, energy centres etc. differ between them. The reason for this though (in the pneuminous system) is fairly clear. The fine energies themselves are either entirely or largely pneuminous accretions.

Let us consider that in a given society there may be a tradition established in its shamanic history, in which certain visions have disclosed an energy body structure. This potent vision can be replicated and its wisdom passed on. What is this vision of? This is in a sense impossible to answer. However what we can infer is that there is in some sense a vector region or regions which give[s] rise to the concept to fine matter. This vector region though is not often visible to ordinary consciousness, its access is only given to those in altered states, or those who through whatever neurological wiring are capable of perceiving it and thus conceptualising it.

The problem of vector regions like these are that, unlike the vector regions of regular reality (which when perceived yield mutually communicable concepts), these ones, when perceived, do not necessarily yield perceptions that are sufficiently identical between perceivers to produce reliably communicable results. The results can be replicated, but often only under the tutelage of the elder, teaching the apprentice in a given tradition. In this instance, the apprentice is guided to perceive the other world under a certain set of pneuminous accretive structures, which, owing to their non-corporeal nature are often taken to be the ‘real’ nature of things.

In this way a whole world of spirits and energies can be accreted out of the altered forms of awareness’ abilities to perceive these vector regions. That is, our capacity for spiritual (as it is sometimes called) awareness comes from other parts of ourselves than regular consciousness. Sometimes it is called the body, this is probably fair. This bodily awareness perceives these other parts of the vector field and does its best to interpret them. Even though not cognitively conceptual like our regular awareness, it still has to perceive things as something. Maybe it is closer to seeing things as they really are and maybe it is just one different kind of hermeneutic. This is unanswerable.

If we say the bodily awareness does impose a certin conceptuality upon the these vector regions then we know the pneuma is present. And since such persons do make reports of such experiences in which they translate these phenomena into various, colours, glows, lights, feelings etc (all of which are pneuminous structures becaues they then become conceptual) we can say that these energetic experiences are also pneuminous accretions on vector regions. From here the same feedback like mechanism applies. When the vector regions are perceived as something (energy in the occult sense), by the same feedback mechanism described above, they become more like the energy pneuminously ascribed to them.

This pneuminous action itself can be thought of as an alchemical one i.e. the transformation of these primordial arisings of intensities (the lights, feelings etc.) into a more rareified occult energy, which is achieved by the very act of interpreting them in this wise. The visualisation/attempt to feel these energies as found in nearly all systems is precisely the creation of the fine energies by projecting the pneuminous (conceptual) form of fine energy onto the idea of an flowing light, or feeling of warmth etc. That is, the pneuminous projection escapes the realm of its actual perception (by the person who can actually perceive it e.g. the shaman) and is made available to humans without these abilities or who have not been placed in such states of awareness.

By tapping into the pneuminous accretion of fine energy, which primordially arose from the bodily awareness experience, the regular person can perform an imagined simulation of this, which through the accretion, still is capable to a greater or lesser extent of creating fine energies that are real and effective, straight out of the pneuminous accretion of fine energy. A person’s ability to concentrate and imagine their (the energies’) reality will indeed improve the potency of such energies, precisely because they are employing the feedback mechanism with greater efficacy. The improvement of the feedback mechanism is what is referred to as practice (in a given system). In this way, yes the practices are imaginary yet owing to the curious relation between the imaginary and the primordial manifestation of the fine energies, they are alchemically transformed into ‘real’ energies as described by the occult systems.