There is a sense in which philosophy, even in its contemporary academic forms, remains a kind of base-level occult practice; it just doesn’t recognise itself as one. This doesn’t mean that metaphysics is disguised Hermeticism or any such claim. The connection in a way is more fundamental.
To see it we just have to take the understanding it gives of a kind of contingency of various relations. Whether we have a sense of this contingency seemingly from ourselves or we are struck with it from our study doesn’t really make any difference. Either way it is one of the things philosophy does to us.
It makes us consider whether a relation is necessary, whether the world is necessarily as it seems, what it means that it seems one way, what an object is, what it means to consider something an object at all, what it means for us to consider things as having value and so on and so on.
Before philosophy (in a given person) there is a much more naive relation to the world. Things are what they are, time is time, a person is a person, morality has a kind of obvious sense to it, causation is incoherently clear, language adequately conveys the world. The conceptual nature of these phenomena are obscured to us, they appear simply as reality.
To study some philosophy meaningfully challenges many of these and forces us to recognise the various problems entailed by them. This cognitive effort of endless and territorial conflict we call philosophy. However whilst a lot of it is performed under a kind of hegemonic materialism (even its idealist strands largely wish to maintain the strict rationality of materialism), from an esoteric perspective even this (in itself somewhat pointless) activity supplies the foundation for deeper understanding.
People often wonder what philosophy does? Well what it actually does is loosen our relations to the accretions embedded in us that hold us firmly to the world. This is certainly a form of esoteric practice, it just is never addressed that way. But surely to be doing esoteric practics you have to be doing magick or meditiation or something? These things certainly count but actually without philosophical reflection of the vast conceptual contingency of things one can end up in a reified world naive occultism (new age movement).
Of course since philosophy has been co-opted by rationality, all the amazing senses of wonder and mental vertigo are just interesting cognitive experiences, as opposed to the loosenings of the other aspects of the organism that they sort of actually are (and when they are dismissed in this way they do not develop). A certain freedom is achieved, but it is largely a cognitive freedom. Existentialism could be said to achieve a superior freedom, however it is a kind of unhinged freedom that will still not be properly realised, because the organism remains under too much accretive control.
In the language of curvature caused by the accretions recently employed we may say that philsophy enables us to see how we are curved but does not, at least only a tiny bit, allow us curve pneuminous field ourselves. To do this we must move beyond this purely cognitive activity and begin to do something more practical with it.
What is probably weirder is that whilst enlightenment thought massively eroded the relation between the two, the connection of esotericism and philosophy is historically strong. Good evidence suggests Plato had an esoteric teaching that was not written down and even if he does represent only a rational philosophy, it is one based on earlier teachings that were previously certainly mystery school teachings. The world of forms was the other world of gods and spirits. This was a place to receive wisdom from, to be healed from (as Iamblichus tells us) and not simply to contemplate.
Another, more recent example is Jakob Böhme. Often treated as a mystic rather than a philosopher, yet his speculative account of God, contradiction, emergence and manifestation becomes enormously important for later German philosophy. Hegel explicitly recognised Böhme as a profound precursor, seeing in him an intuition of the dynamic movement through which determinations emerge through opposition and reconciliation. The Hegelian dialectic is a direct descendent of Böhme’s spiritual alchemy; a practice that requires understanding to enable the work that will liberate us through Christ (and Sophia).
So this linkage of deeper loosening with conceptual understanding as the base is not new; what is maybe a bit sad is the cognitive loophole trap that modern philosophy has found itself in (become); now ironically too rational to allow for the possibility of a different knowledge, from which it ultimately came.
Meditation, ritual, contemplation, magical practice, dream work, ascetic disciplines and deliberate symbolic practices attempt to carry the destabilisation beyond the level of the the conceptual destabilisation that philsosophy performs and into perception, attention, behaviour and identity.
Philosophy asks: could the world be otherwise? Esotericism asks: what happens to the operator (and maybe the world) when they actually try to experience the world as otherwise? From the standpoint of accretive ontology, both are forms of liberation. However the sustained form of the latter takes the former to places it cannot go (though arguably as mentioned above, the latter cannot go there with any depty without the former).
The consequence of the pneuminous theory is that to intend reality as divine or magickal (no matter how incoherent such concepts might be) minimally makes them so.
This correlates interestingly with the cosmology insofar as the logos was the state transformation of the ur-pneuma -it really is conceptual god all the way down (or up). Remember, the regular word pneuminous circuit involves the feedback of accretion on to vector which pulls the vector towards the accretion (though the accretion itself was initially formed from the vector).
Hence applying the accretion of divinity to it is a more appropriate concept than materiality. Materiality is an accretion violent to the actual nature of the divine (pneuminous) vector. The more respectful divine or magickal interpretations preserve its actual ontology more successfully.
We cannot speak of in the beginning because this all entails there is no beginning. This abground is beyond all sense of existence, it is the ur-information; the formless pneuma. But there is impossible movement within the primordial pneuma. Straying further into speculation, though still within the reasonable confines of the pneuminous picture, we can expand further on the existence of everything through this lens. This pneuminous wind generates somehow in this non space (like a state space?) recursive structures (vortices? strange attractors?). These structures are vast cosmological concepts; this is the logos.
The transformations within the ur-pneuma as primordial logos are what instantiate what we experience as the physical cosmos (and potentially much more that we are not aware of). Difference accumulates upon difference. Persistent structures condition subsequent movement, which reinforces the structures that produced them. Accretions deepen, interact, combine and perhaps generate vast self-sustaining centres of pneuminous organisation. These unimaginably vast a-spatial, a-temporal accretions essentially think the thing that allows us to experience things as space, time, forces in physics, different atoms.
The question of gods and spirits has a two fold answer here. One cause of these beings could be patterns within the ur-pneuma that can hover move fluidly between it and the thought-into-being-materiality. Having gained some autonomy from the ur-pneuma these beings could also potentially contribute to thinking more solid aspects of being into reality (or stranger unimaginable ones). Possibly there could be yet smaller and smaller pure pneuminous beings capable of moving between various strata of the accreted pneuma -faerie descriptions commonly render them as made of fine matter.
The second would be the formation of such beings themselves essentially formed by limited beings like ourselves. Such beings attribute agency to phenomenon, deify/spiritually animate it and then behave towards it as if it were so. This very action accretes the pneuma of agency to the phenomenon which ulimately would create an autonomous pneuminous egregore. Clearly it is very difficult (impossible) to tell which of these any given entity is and it may be that all such beings are a compound of the two phenomenon. This does however raise a picture of the cosmos as potentially littered on the various finer strata of pneuma, with various beings, exhibiting differing levels of what we call agency and consciousness.
As mentioned previously, this does alter the nature of the umbratic somewhat. Rather than a speculative beyond it now is definitively made of pneuma; it is the cosmic thoughts; ancient, ancient accretions, which to us looks like solid ‘matter’.
The living operators (ourselves and other limited beings) that have evolved out of this situation are strange insofar as they have developed a particular recursive capacity. The operator (NARP) perceives the ancient accretion as a vector (blank object) as a concept which it then projects back onto it. The ancient accretion of course can resist any kind of alteration as its thought/pneuminous sustenance is so much greater the feeble operator. Yet there is a tiny push upon it; the limited being still has some pneuminous power. This is the divine capacity of the Operator.
The cultivation of this push is what we call magick. Magick cannot push hard against the ancient thought, it must form intensities that can create what we can call curvatures. This brings about a similar kind of picture to relativity. The whole picture can be thought of in this way to some extent. The accretions of the logos create the ground, the further accretions curve the shape by there pneuminous intensity. Here we refrain from mass for two reasons: 1) the analogy is just that, not an equivalance 2) it makes less sense to say the quantity of the pneuma than its intensity, and the mass metaphor creates a notion of quantity.
Pneuminous intensity curves a given strata to a greater or lesser degree. Normal concept application is largely a fit to the existing ancient accretion/vector; magick is an attempt to make an curvature in the strata for a certain purpose, to draw certain phenomena into that space.
The curvature model can be seen to be general operation in reality. Art objects, buildings, objects of power, certain people etc have formed pneuminous intensity, as such they curve the pneuminous space around them. This can be experienced and described psychologically/scientifically but its phenomenological primordiality is pneuminous.
Similarly the accreted or pre-existing gods curve the pneuminous space, but they too are limited by the ancient accretive structures that are part of the even more ancient logos. Hence we live inside countless overlapping accretive geometries while continuously contributing tiny distortions of our own.
Modernity frequently interprets ancient religion through a framework of primitivism. Gods, spirits, idols, and ritual practices are treated as failed science, metaphorical projection, or naïve anthropomorphic ideals imposed upon an indifferent natural world. Such interpretations may themselves be historically naïve. It is possible that Egyptian temple ritual, Hermeticism, theurgy, domestic cult practice, and folklore instead suggests the existence of highly sophisticated systems concerned with the deliberate cultivation, stabilization, and maintenance of consciousness through recursive symbolic accretion. These systems may therefore be better understood as forms of pneuminous technology.
The ancient temple was not simply a place of worship. It functioned as an accretive apparatus. Through repeated ritual operation (naming, inscription, sacrifice, chant, geometric ordering, iconographic precision, environmental control, and celestial timing) symbolic density accumulated around prepared vectors. This initially un-magickally accreted vector: stone, wood, metal, architecture, or place, was then, through recursive symbolic infection progressively capable of sustaining the accreted god force.
Egyptian cult statues underwent “Opening of the Mouth” rites in which breath, sight, speech, and animation were ceremonially installed. Hermetic texts such as the Asclepius openly claim that humans “make gods,” not in the reductive sense of fabricating fictions, but in the sense of constructing receptacles capable of sustaining and localizing divine intelligence. Iamblichean theurgy similarly argues that properly ordered symbols and ritual configurations permit divine manifestation within material substrates. In each case, consciousness is treated not as a property isolated within biological organisms, but as something capable of condensation, stabilization, and maintenance through symbolic recursion (pneuminous accretion).
Within an accretive pneuminous framework, these practices cease to appear primitive. They instead resemble pre-modern experiments in distributed consciousness engineering. Ancient peoples may not have possessed informational or computational language, yet they appear to have recognized several fundamental principles: repeated attention thickens presence, symbols alter cognition, names possess operational force, environments condition consciousness, and recursive reinforcement stabilizes agency.
This logic is visible not only in grand temple systems but also in domestic religion. Roman household cults centred upon the Lares and Penates reveal pneuminous accretion operating at a smaller scale. These household entities were continuously maintained through offerings, repetition, familial identity, spatial anchoring, and generational continuity. The home itself functioned as a recursive symbolic environment within which localized intelligences accumulated stability over time. Such entities resemble small-scale accretive consciousness formations sustained through daily ritual reinforcement.
Divine beings may therefore be understood not as eternally fixed metaphysical absolutes, but as accreted intelligences stabilized through long-term recursive interaction. Gods persist because they are continually reinforced through architecture, inscription, memory, ritual, narrative, and collective intentionality. Their apparent permanence reflects the scale and duration of their accretive stabilization rather than transcendence in any absolute sense.
At the opposite end of this spectrum, monotheism may be interpreted as an attempt to escape accretive ontology altogether. The monotheistic impulse seeks a being that is: ungenerated, self-sufficient, universal, and independent of local recursive maintenance. The monotheistic God attempts to abolish distributed symbolic plurality by concentrating all agency into a singular transcendent absolute. Yet even this attempt ultimately fails to escape accretive dynamics. Jehovah itself becomes recursively stabilized through scripture, liturgy, architecture, prayer, institutional continuity, iconographic prohibition, legal systems, emotional investment, and civilizational repetition. The supposedly transcendent absolute is continually reinforced through human symbolic recursion. Monotheism does not abolish accretive ontology; it merely centralizes and universalizes it.
This framework also provides a possible explanation for the strange ontology of folkloric beings such as fairies. Unlike gods, fairies possess little institutional stabilization. They lack enduring priesthoods, or centralized theology or event large-scale reinforcement. They appear to manifest on their own terms. Consequently they appear fragmented, local, unstable, geographically bound, morally inconsistent, and ontologically ambiguous. Their behaviour is frequently alien rather than anthropomorphic.
Rather than viewing this strangeness as evidence of primitive irrationality, it may instead indicate the opposite: the encounter with pneuminous formations lacking extensive human accretive conditioning. Gods are heavily anthropically stabilized intelligences. Fairies may represent residual or non-humanly accreted pneuminous entities — partially formed consciousness structures emerging from environmental, ancestral, or archaic symbolic ecologies outside sustained institutional reinforcement.
This explains several persistent features of folklore: fairy manifestations cluster around ruins, forests, caves, mounds, rivers, and thresholds; they are associated with vanished peoples and forgotten worlds; they appear faded, hidden, diminished, or retreating over time; and interaction with them often involves dangerous recursive entanglement through naming, exchange, invitation, or reciprocity. Such entities may therefore represent residual pneuminous accretions surviving from previous symbolic ecologies. They are neither fully dissipated nor fully stabilized, but lingering recursive formations gradually weakening as the environments that sustained them disappear. Under this interpretation, folklore preserves traces not of primitive fantasy but of earlier consciousness ecologies. Ancient religion and myth cease to be reducible to superstition and instead emerge as evidence of sophisticated experimentation with symbolic accretion, distributed agency, and the deliberate generation and maintenance of stabilized presence.
There is a recurring intuition that appears across very different moments in intellectual history: that reality is not fundamentally composed of discrete things, but of relations of forces, connections, transmissions. Sometimes this intuition is expressed mystically, sometimes philosophically, sometimes aesthetically. In the Renaissance, it appears in the work of Giordano Bruno as a theory of vincula, bonds that hold the cosmos together. My long standing reformulation of this is pneuminous theory, a phenomenological model that works outwards (largely from synchronistic phenomena), to suggest a field of information-conceptuality. This field can accrete/intensify onto regions within awareness (the vector field) with an underlying resistance given by a putative but unreachable umbratic. A more recent addition postulates an essentially mystical/energetic perspective can show this as a reticulum or network of connecting fibres and nodes.
Whilst Bruno has been on my register for a long time (since reading Crowley’s Little/Big nearly 40 years ago) I have only more recently come to appreciate the similarity of his model with the pneuminous one. I do not seek to collapse one into the other, but to show how they resonate, and how, taken together, they can be clarified and extended. Bruno provides a powerful ontology of relational immanence. Pneuminous theory, in turn, offers a way of specifying how those relations operate, how they stabilise, and how they can be deliberately altered.
Bruno’s starting point was radical for his time. He rejected the idea that the world is composed of inert matter arranged within a fixed hierarchy. Instead, he proposed an infinite, centreless cosmos in which everything is alive and internally related. He leaves no clean division between spirit and matter, no passive substrate awaiting form. Rather, the world is a living continuum, and its structure is not given by substances but by relations. These relations (vincula) are not merely logical or symbolic. They are real channels through which influence, desire, and form propagate.
The vincula connect everything: person to person, image to object, mind to world. They are affective, imaginal, and cognitive all at once. Desire binds, images bind, thoughts bind. To exist is already to be caught up in a web of these bonds, and to act is to participate in their rearrangement. This is why Bruno treats imagination not as a secondary faculty, but (like Henri Corbin) as an ontological one. Images are not inert representations of things; they are operators within the structure of reality itself. To imagine something is already to enter into relation with it, to participate in its configuration. From this perspective, what Bruno calls “magic” is not the summoning of external entities or the violation of natural law. It is the deliberate manipulation of bonds. Through carefully constructed images, intensified imagination, and directed desire, the practitioner reorganises the network of relations that constitute reality. Nothing is brought in from outside; rather, what already exists is reconfigured so that a different pattern becomes dominant.
Pneuminous theory begins from a similar intuition. Any image is pneuminously connected to something e.g. its creator (to the imagination and subtley to the memory fibres that feed into it) or that which it is an image of (if representational). Likewise a word (though Bruno is less approving of words than images he would surely still see the trace there) is not just an element in syntax, it is either an accretional bond representative (prepositions) or it is connects to its referent directly through the pneuminous reticular (in this way pneuminous theory is comfortable with actual designation as essentially metaphysically instantiated, but acknowledges prior to this that Wittgensteinian use criteria establish the word-object relation coming into being).
So instead of Bruno’s vincula, pneuminous theory speaks of reticular or pneuminous fibres, but the notion is the same; a kind of binding means that cuts across spatio temporality to bind what seem to many totally separate phenomena, concepts and physicality. Bruno emphasises desire, imagination as means of connection, pneuminous theory has no disagreement with this, indeed it seems an appropriate phenomenological extension.
What Bruno lacks is the vector field, which is a crucial conceptual addition that prevents various problem of naive word object relations. The vector field is a heuristc pure blank awareness (internal and external). Every ‘thing’ is a region in the field which acts as a carrier (vector) or a concept (but that concept is actually attached to the vector not just psychologically). Externally for example, your phone is essentially a blank vector region, but it has accreted to it the concept phone, thus the concept-accretion and vector region make a unity that we then naively think of as one thing called phone. Internally we might consider how we identify emotions and call them a name, hence there was a region, a feeling, that we gave a label to which then again made a naive unity. We might note in these examples that external and internal are both vector regions that these concepts attempt to cover. The problems generated here are dealt with elsewhere by the incoherent/coherent structure of concepts.
Magick is the possibility that other relations between accretion and vector are possible. Other accretions can be imposed, whether weakly (as fleeting associations) or strongly (through sustained attention and will -magick). In this sense, reality is not a fixed set of objects but a layered field in which multiple accretions coexist, compete, and sometimes override one another. The reticulum (the network of relations) is constantly being reorganised by these interactions. As stated, it is here that the resonance with Bruno becomes most apparent. His vincula correspond closely to the connections of the reticulum; his operative images correspond to accretions; his emphasis on desire as a binding force finds a parallel in the role of will in structuring and directing pneuma. Both systems reject the idea of inert matter and affirm that meaning, imagination, and relation are constitutive of reality rather than merely descriptive of it.
So what the vector field does is introduces several clarifications and extensions. First, it provides a more explicit account of competition and instability in the accretive field. Bruno’s bonds are dynamic, but he does not strongly emphasise the way in which multiple configurations can coexist and contend for dominance. By contrast, the notion of accretion allows us to describe reality as a field of overlapping structures, some of which stabilise while others collapse. This makes it possible to explain why certain magickal transformations “take” while others fail.
Second, the concept of the vector provides a heuristic site for these interactions. Where Bruno speaks in more continuous terms, the vector allows us to isolate points within the field where accretions attach and interact. A single vector can sustain multiple accretions simultaneously, which makes it possible to understand ambiguity, reinterpretation, and deliberate reconfiguration in a more precise way. To clarify (though hinted at already), magick is seeking the dominance over a vector region that in the natural course of things is not going to take on that accretion. A vector region is not simply an object, it is any identifiable situation. For instance a failing business is a situation, the accretion ‘failing business’ as a concept is the accretion applied to a certain set vector regions. Using magick (if hard work is not working) we might seek to apply the accretion of ‘a successful business’ to this vector region; if successful we will have drawn this accretion onto the vector region, disloding the ‘failing business’, and thus reality will manifest the new picture -increased sales etc.
The umbratic also plays a significant role in the expansion. The umbratic is the phenomenological in itself. The in itself appears as an idea of what is beyond the vector field, but as ‘beyond’ it can never be ultimately accessed. If the vector field is understood as the field of possible appearance and interaction (what can be engaged, interpreted, and structured), then it cannot be assumed to exhaust reality. There must remain an excess beyond it, a dimension that cannot be fully captured by any accretion. This is not necessarily a separate world; it might in fact be identical to what appears (this direction involves bringing the agnostic disjunction into the picture which is too in depth for our current purpose). But that identity can never be confirmed, because any confirmation would occur within the vector field itself.
The umbratic thus functions as a limit condition. It plays the role of what seems to supply pushback against the accretive ability of anything to be anything. It ensures that no accretion, however powerful, can fully determine or exhaust what is. It introduces resistance into the system, making it possible to distinguish between accretions that resonate with the structure of the field and those that distort it. In this respect, it plays a role analogous to the “in-itself” in Kant, but without enforcing a strict separation between appearance and reality. Instead, it marks the necessary incompleteness of any attempt to capture reality within a system of relations. The caveat though (magick again) is that under certain circumstances the accretions can bend/alter the umbratic resistance.
This framework also allows us to reinterpret traditional “forces” such as the planets. The so-called wandering stars (Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, and so on) are physical vectors: objects within the field of appearance. But their associated meanings (expansion, conflict, limitation) may not be intrinsic properties of those objects. They are accretions that have formed historically, stabilised culturally, and proven operationally effective. To work with “Jupiter,” in a magical sense, is to engage with a particular accretion attached to a particular vector, not to access an essential property of a celestial body. From this perspective, even modern additions such as Uranus can be understood in the same way. Its associations with disruption, electricity (makes me think of Lynch and Twin Peaks), and sudden change are not given by its physical nature alone, but by the accretion that has formed around it. These accretions are contingent, but they are not arbitrary. Once stabilised, they become powerful organising structures within the field.
Taken together, these elements form a coherent model. Reality presents itself as a vector field structured by competing pneuminous accretions that bind images to appearances. These accretions are real and operative, organising the network of relations in a manner analogous to Bruno’s vincula. Yet they do not exhaust reality, which always exceeds them through the umbratic. Magick consists in the will-driven modulation of these accretions; truth consists in their resonance with a structure that can never be fully known. Bruno discovered that reality is a web of bonds. Pneuminous theory seeks to explains how those bonds are structured, how they compete, and how they can be made operative, while preserving the limit that prevents any system from closing completely upon itself.
Centre For Experimental Ontology 