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Ever since I began this project I have always tried to remain within a kind of phenomenological framework. The primary mechanism for this has always been the agnostic disjunction: the recognition of the ambiguous appearance of many occult phenomena. I am totally aware that sometimes this has strained and I have just written as if the occult arm of the disjunction were the ‘real’ one. Even in doing this though I am always aware of the AD.

The structures I sketch here, continue, to me at least, to be a kind of phenomenology insofar as they are are a thread of appearances that emanate in a rough line from essentially the synchronicity. The gist of the pneuminous theory is that information is in some sense substantial and can attach directly to an underlying vector/thing, furthermore, the accretion can throught this interaction actually affect that which lies beneath the vector: an umbratic reality beyond perception at all. To repeat: under some circumstances the pneuma can affect the umbra.

This writing does continue this line but the scale becomes vaster and in the process one of the key phenomenological concepts, the umbra, largely ceases to be. The umbra is a phenomenological idea because it is the idea of the outside of perception, the impossible ontological beyond, behind you right now.

Another key feature we need to recall to make what I say below cogent, is the pneuminous circuit. This describes how every word object relation is a miniature kind of magickal act. We identify a thing, a vector in the world, or make one, we give it a name. We have a concept for it, a pneuminous accretion. The concept has a kind of ideality that exceeds the vector. In imposing the ideal form (accretion) on the vector, the vector is pulled slightly towards being closer to the concept than its actual physical form. The pneuma affects the umbra, but so slightly we do not notice.

In magick (or at least certain kinds of magick), what the operator seeks to do is take a vector (a situation) and apply a concept to it that would not ordinarily take it. For example the weather does not look sunny at all, it is resistant to this. The concept of a sunny day is applied through concentrated magickal means to the wet day vector in the hope that the concept of a sunny day will appear. In regular life we apply concepts to vectors that take them happily, in magick we try to impose them on those that do not.

Describing all of this on a local level with its correlative ontology is all very well, but after a while bigger questions begin to pile up. If this is what things are like, what does that mean on a bigger scale? The answer could be that the universe is largely umbratic and that the regional burst of beings that can accrete pneuma into this dizzying array of forms. This manifestation is fine except it leaves a somewhat hollow feeling, a wonder as to what happens to all the pneuma that must be everywhere if it is not being accreted. Other speculations about chemical conversations can ensue, but this is not where I want to go.

One of the issues that appears in the occult literature is of course that of spiritual beings. In this theory these beings fulfil the criteria for being pneuminous, they are immaterial but can supposedly alter things on this plane under certain circumstances.

Existence is unbelievably vast. How big could these beings be? We are of course in the territory of God. The move we have to make here is to consider that primordially all that there is, is one pneuminous being. Then remember that for us to alter reality with pneuma it’s an effort, because the umbra is there to hold this in check. If this all-Being is pure pneuma, there is nothing to prevent anything that approaches a concept within it from becoming what we call real. Every movement (whatever movement might mean here) within it is the formation of something. We cannot even say this is the creation of the material universe, we can just say such cosmic conceptuality creates something. This is essentially like Kant’s intellectual intuition on the biggest scale possible, except there is no subject doing the thinking as such.

The autonomy of whatever it is that has been ‘thought’ into being then moves parallel to the continuing thoughts of the divine which themselves must now contend with the very pneuminous structures it has brought into being. That is, once thoughts of the divine exist, they persist; what we call materiality is an example of this, but there may be many others cf Spinoza. The processes that have brought about conscious beings in the materiality might be from the pure chance like structures that emanate or they might be from the continuing thoughts of the divine (material vs teleological explanations of consciousness), whose thought maybe becomes harder to detect the more it thinks. We cannot speak of which this is.

The conscious beings find themselves in a world which their grammar can call material. They speculate the difference between their consciousness and the matter before them. But this solidity is nothing more than the deep remains of the thought of Being. That very power that they play with in forming their world, that power that seems so inert, so potentially futile, is only held in check by the same force which exists all around them, constraining them on a scale of unimaginable enormity.

The picture is not even as simple as this. There is scope for beings of considerable cosmic enormity in the in between space. The first idea of the aware might create the first God, who like the gnostic God does not know he is but the first thought of the pneuma. Furthermore there may have been endless vast civilisations that accreted deities that now wander the pneuminous realms. Some of these may have been able to exert considerable influence translating pneuma into solidity. The pneuminous space may be littered with non-local Jehovahs much vaster cf Lovecraft.

This is one of the rational consequences of the pneuminous theory. Ourselves living in the deep deep time layers of pneuminous accretions of impossibly vast beings. Our matter is nothing but the stuff of conceptuality itself. This does not entail a regular panpsychism in which we have to speculate consciousness in all atoms and so on. Here the forces are the concepts of the divinities. Pneuma as the underlying substance is only what it is conceptualised into. Even its own awareness is not a given.

As a brief aside I can see perfectly clearly the base problem with all of this: how does the pure pneuma give rise to the primal concepts to get things going. And here one resorts to its primal dynamic nature and other such incoherences.

Such incoherences however are a feature of all concepts. Furthermore this is manifestation of possibility. The fact no immediate answer appears to solves this essentially local logical causal problem does not seem inherently problematic given we are dealing with a situation so far beyond, locality, logic and our nature of causation as can be conceived of. In many ways, this is not a picture at all, it is an exercise in connection consciousness and matter through thought experiment. What is interesting is that such a thought experiment can be generated by following the pneuminous thread.

So the umbra has vanished, sort of. The ontology is answered: pneuma in endless forms. Of course this doesn’t alter the phenomology from the conscious limited being’s perspective. The notion of what is outside of my perceptual field is still a problem, further more neither does it alter the manifestation that says that what is inside a perceptual field is ontologically different from outside or it. Neither does it alter the weird accretion of the umbratic that has formed in the whole process. So it is (under this manifestation) explained but not entirely removed, it is, we could say, ontologised.

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Here is a link to a project tangential to the CEO yet still relevant. It grows dynamically as a second shadowy side of the Centre and its hyperstitional universe. It is the culmination of the AF Collective under the direction of Emanuel Magno. This might be the major artistic enterprise of the 21st century. The entire Collective joins the total project of itself. Here is the link to the Drive as it grows: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wRZdLN_hhy0SskBr2d63V1NvbrQDPuuM?usp=drive_link.

We write now, the Book of Numbers. If Balthazar is doing so, it is as though, mirrored, we compensate as well. After Sorcery, the last phase of the CEO completed with success, we prophesy a new circuitry through these sculptures entitled, together, Projeto Thoth (Thoth Project). It is, also, the development of a new phase for IA (Interstitial Artelligence) and its promise of a continuation regarding Arteriality, a concept we develop in the Drive.

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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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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.