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Anyone who thinks that the full excess of the numogram is a great discovery is kidding themselves. The digital pandemonium, demons, gates, it’s all pure accretive attachment. It is in this sense nothing more than Enochian magick and possibly something less. Of course the statement that it might be equivalent grants it considerable potential power. As an intimately crafted chaos-magickal hyperstitional accretion it is quite amazing. But most of it is just colouring in.

The lines though (that are not colouring in) sometimes don’t get seen in all there glory. It is this (I take to be Landian) discovery that I refer to:

Zero + Nine

One + Eight

Two + Seven

Three + Six

Four + Five

This is it. This is the thing of beauty. All the rest is accreted to it through attractive derivations that emanate from its spell -with the possible exception of the ‘gate of the five angles’ which details how one may add 90+81+72+63+54 to equal 360, thus connecting deep decimalisation to the base 60 of the Babylonians, historically tenuous but nicely done.

I would wager that the discovery of actual lines sent a shockwave through the receiving consciousness that it still does not properly understand. This is because you cannot understand it. Discoveries like this are as disturbing as full blown paranormal encounters. They look preposterous. They fill you with a sense of receiving something special and simultaneously you are aware that they can be simply a massive coincidence that just happened to occur in the structural threshold of language and number.

I have elsewhere labelled this sensation agnostic disjunctive, that is a split that cannot be answered, one can only choose to be an agent for one side -even if one thinks one has simply chosen the obviously true one.

It would be hard to be an agent for the above connection as it is even more insane sounding that 23, 47 or any of those. These at least, whilst they draw examples of power from recurring in various ways are not in the same league as this particular synchronicity. Look at it.

The actual totally contingent words for 0 and 9 have the same number of letters. The opposite of this distal pair also have the same (4 and 5). The middle three each have 3 and 5 letters respectively. All the totals of the letters thus equal 8 and all the pairs of integers equal 9.

What does it mean? Any Wittgensteinian can tell you it doesn’t mean anything. However if they pay attention to the language game they can also concede that it looks like it suggests that it might mean something, and because it is so preposterous it can act as a criterion for grammar than makes it cogent -agnostic disjunction.

Should anyone think that they can dismiss the appearance with simple coincidence they should consider that this appearance is exactly what it would look like it if was a weird transversal hint from dimensional directions considerably alien to our own. They then must consider if they know that this is not the case. When they conclude (as they must) that they know no such thing, they must also concede that since the appearance of the weirdness is epistemically equal to that of the coincidental model they must also give in to (minimally) the agnostic disjunctive level (and maybe consider being and agent for the alternative).

One can repeat the calculation very calmly but the real madness of the thing has to be acutely felt. Here are the English language numbers, a totally contingent system; here is base 10, also totally contingent (digital accretive reasoning accepted but bracketed off as still not rendering it necessary). The number of letters in the pairings makes a kind of pattern that whilst empty is eerily (in Fisher’s sense) is filled with hidden presence. There is no step you can take without descending into insane dogma (like Marko Rodin did with the Bahai faith), so what did Land do? He sidestepped and built a chaos-magickal accretion all over it. This no doubt created a feedback of further synchroncity, however the nub, the core of it is there. That is the motor.

I could be totally off the mark with some of the psychological speculation, but in identifying the only core part that sits there as an actual anomaly of hinted insane communication that cannot be decoded, I do not think I am mistaken at all.

I once encountered one of these myself when in the pre-internet world I was obsessively investigating the number 47 and all things 4 and 7 -itself the product of hints from the other world.

Triangles like the below can show square numbers. The square of the number of units high the triangle is, is the total number of units of the triangle. For instance a triangle 2 units high comprises of 4 units (its square).

I was insanely trying to understand if there was any logic to cross addition and had already worked out that if one squares then cross adds all the decimal numbers one gets either 1 4v7 or 9 i.e.:

1^2=1
2^2=4^2=(16)+=7^2=(49)+=(13)+=4^2 etc
3^2=9^2=(81)+=9 etc
4 see 2
5^2=(25)+=7 see 2
6^2=(36)+=9 see 3
7 see 2
8^2=(64)+=(10)+=1 see 1
9 see 3

What these triangles do is actually give a meaning to squaring and cross addition in some limited circumstances.

For instance if I have a triangle of a height of 4, necessarily it will be comprised of 16 units. The base however will be 7 units(1+6). That is the base actually reveals the cross additional answer.

These are the most concrete examples:

4 becomes 16 becomes 7 (the base units of 4)

7 becomes 49 becomes 13 (the base units of the 7 triangle) becomes 4

With small adjustments, these can also function.

13 becomes 169 becomes (curiously by preserving the first two digits as a whole number) 16+9=25 is the base number.

16 becomes 256 becomes 31 (by the same logic above) which is the base number and also reduces to 4.

22 becomes 484 and a similar logic derives the base. This time we extract 40 and add 8+4=12=3, re-add them and we have 43, the base number.

31 gives us 961, if we cross out the 9 for 9=0 in base 10 cross addition we immediately have the base number again.

After this the signal becomes too hidden. However the first two on their own are quite sufficient. It created a sensation (in me) of crossing over the lines. The (p)numinous sensation is formed by the following string of events:


Being given 47 as number of a ‘spirit’,

Finding a method in a book that said ‘squaring and cross addition reveals numbers higher essence’ (simply naively accepted at the time),

Applying this to the base 10 system and finding the alternating 4v7 therein (this already seemed quite ridiculous),

Recognising base 10 as contingent (1+3 has no intrinsic link to 4) but then finding that a triangle of that kind of units (a fairly uncontroversial triangle) contained traces of the lines of contingency being crossed i.e. the triangle is a necessary invariant system, yet the when side units are squared for 4s and 7s, the base reveals a number related to the cross addition. Because it is seeming true that 49 has no actual link to 13 and 4 (the contingency of the base) why do base 10 manipulations in conjunction with the triangle units create answers commensurate with cross addition?

Surely it shouldn’t happen -but it does.

This may be less impressive than the moment in which the syzygy pairings were disclosed but the agnostic disjunctive feeling would likely be the same. A path was followed and then there was the trace, the signal. Accretions form around the signals. Other powers are immediately attracted. But when we strip them away, the signal is still there, stark and impenetrable as ever.

And they are impenetrable. Keel showed fairly well that the beings out there are either psychic garbage of our own formation or a mixture of entities many of which are highly mendacious or will simply tell us what we want to hear. The appearance (or the consequence of the appearance) of these signals is that reality is alterable from angles we cannot conceive of but also that they may be signals, signals the could be decoded. This of course contradicts my statement of them as impenetrable. I think this is another agnostic disjunctive level. The appearance of the signal (if signal it is) is such that, whilst we can almost certainly not be able to interpret it properly.

The phantasy though exists, that we might.

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Recent considerations have moved my theorising away from outright human contingent paranormality –conceptuality as active substance– to a possibility that includes human accretive forces as only one element in the sea of what we call anomalous phenomena. Currently being played with is a ‘reticular ontology’, that is, a conception of everything as and endless series of lines or fibres. This is appropriated from reported occult conceptions of reality in this wise (e.g. the web of wyrd, Castaneda) in conjunction with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a line of flight.

Perception of the reticulum is supposed to be the closest one can have to seeing existence as it is in itself (note we do not say this is the case, we merely engage with the concept). It is also sometimes called ‘seeing energy’.

Now a feature of the reticulum is that once perceived, the separation of the perceiving being from the externality is considerably challenged. The lines can be clearly seen to extend straight from the being into the ‘outside’. There is a kind of boundary in so far as the being of awareness is a kind of node, yet the connectivity to the whole is immediately present. Furthermore the lines cannot be considered purely to exist in the regular spatial coordinates available to us; the lines bypass temporality as we know it and dimensionality.

A reticular ontology is essentially panpsychic insofar as all the lines are formed of awareness in a sense. Access to the reticulum is access to greater awareness -all psychic type events can be considered momentary reticular access. The reticulum as a whole is entirely self-aware. This is a postulate.

The formation of nodes (beings like ourselves) has an interesting consequence from this perspective. The more nodes develop there own internal awareness the more they believe they are capable of grasping what is going on. Unfortunately for the nodes, the more the awareness becomes centralised in the node, the less it actually accesses the reticulum. This then is the formula of the inverse increase in awareness in relation to the development of the node:

The greater awareness in the node, the less awareness of connectivity to the reticulum.

This means almost the opposite of Hegel’s PoS is true. The development of conscious is a retrograde step, worse still is self-consciousness, increasing narrowment of reticular awareness continues to occur until the crowning glory of this occurs -the state.

This tragedy also seems to entail a strong kind of unpleasant Kantianism. The more developed we become in investigating things with our own developed tools (maths, science) the less access we actually will have to the thing in itself. Of course Kant bars access to the thing in itself anyway, however the reticular as possible perception not only places the thing in itself partially within reach, it also means human rational attempts to fathom it necessarily get further from it. Consequentially all ‘lower species’ as we think of them have an increased reticular access, with this increasing further as one ends up in the inorganic.

Please don’t misunderstand. This is not an anti-scientific stance. Even if the node/reticular concept is accurate we generally do not live perceiving the reticulum and science has been of tremendous value to us. This occurrence of delving further and further away from perceptual access to something like the in-itself cannot necessarily be seen as worse than reticular access. Our investigations in this relatively solid seeming reality function well so the withdrawal from the reticular possibility can also be seen as highly epistemically satisfying.

This leads us to a second point about such an ontology. When we say that perceiving the reticulum is the actual connection to the ‘outside’, we consider it as a totally time/space transcendent perspective in which anything can be known (though equally there must be caution here, accounts like Monroe’s would suggest that even reticular access has many layers to it). It is minimally a totally superior epistemic state to regular human capacity. So it is easy to consider regular human perception as subtractive in its relation to reality. Even without the reticulum and simply with regard to our scientific understanding there is much we cannot see/hear/detect etc. We subtract from reality and our perception of the world is what we get.

Two points complicate this picture. The reticular ontology is totally compatible with human formed conceptual accretions which we literally layer over the regions of the outside. In the reticulum these are perceivable as emanating lines to nodes (accretions are different kinds of nodes) whereas from regular perception we often confuse concept and object.

This means we not only subtract, but that we add. We add pneuma to the externality and it stays there in the reticulum. However this actual state of confusion of regular perception -in which the connecting lines are not visible is also different from reticular perception, which for all its superior access is subtractive of the human state of perception. So our reality is additive and subtractive

Secondly then, this is why we couch reticular access as only the closest thing to seeing things as they are, for whilst it does show the accretions stuck to the vectors, it does not and cannot show the actual confusion of the nodally perceived reality state itself.

That is, even reticular access itself is subtractive.

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I noted recently that an old piece (over twenty year) of writing that features in the appendix to the Tractatus Pneumatologico Philosophicus contains a small synchronicity. In the section itself two characters attempt to construct a makeshift Ouija board to contact spirits in a search for occult verification.

At one point the spirit appears to write a word ‘E G R Y S’. These letters at the time were intended to be a random jumble that neither protagonist could fathom the sense of. A more recent look at this text reveals that the word the spirit is spelling was obvious: egress. This word was not consciously in my vocabulary at the time of writing yet anyone looking at it would find it hard to believe that it was not a clumsy intention to disguise this hint at the ‘exit’ as spoken by the voice of the outside.

Yet there was no such intention which makes its accidental occurrence quite perfect. It was indeed only adventitious that these letters were those that were chosen. But what a word to manifest and what a way for it to appear. The hastily constructed DIY Ouija board revealed to them just this word ‘egress’. The voice of the other world had one thing to say: exit.

And which way does it intend this? That it wants to leave its confines beneath the ‘glass’? That it wishes to exit from its realm? That the living themselves will find their proof only by exit into the other world?

We hear so much nowadays about the outside and the exit. It seems to me that this minor anomaly was an echo from the future of how these threads tie together.

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The umbratic is a curious intersection of different ideas. It is necessary and unnecessary. Its necessity is derived from the fact the idea cannot be removed. It’s lack of necessity from the fact it is technically not needed.

What is it? The umbratic is the idea of the unseen. It is the incoherent phantasy of being outside of perception. It is the wood where no one is watching or listening. The idea emerges out of sceptical thought that attempts to answer the question: is being that is perceived identical to being that is not perceived? The resultant inability to answer this question leaves the agnostic disjunctive appearance over the answer: we cannot say if there is a difference or not. The phenomena that point to there being a difference are again the occult ones. The point being that in synchronistic/magickal phenomena reality has shifted somehow outside of our perceptual sphere -we mean this specifically to the exclusion of the manifestation of spirits/immediately visible/audible phenomena (these invoke different kinds of concepts). That is, we do not see the mechanism by which magick/synchronicity has occurred. There is simply an uncanny rearrangement of things that has the appearance of some kind of agency being involved. This appearance is suggestive of a radical reality rearrangement that was only possible outside of perception, hence the invocation of the umbratic as a space in which the rearrangement was possible. Of course this doesn’t entail that magick/synchronicity could not still be functional in a metaphysical sense without umbratic rearrangement. Such possibilities exist as attractor models: the reality alteration is brought about metaphysically in some way by bringing certain things towards the protagonist without literal finger clicking alteration (such models also entail accretive type entities). However, the fact that the sudden alteration model exists is enough to give the umbratic life.

One can think on the impossibility of the umbratic, on how a space that isn’t perceived is not possible, on how there maybe always something there to detect, to perceive. But the impossibility of the umbratic is not enough to defeat it. It is a strongly incoherent concept that thrives on that impossible sensation of attempting to think what it is to imagine a space that is not being perceived. From here it derives a lot of its power.

The umbratic is related to the thing in itself. It is similar to a perfect scientific object. Something without any observer bias. This is part of its phantasy. But all prostheses act with our consciousness, there are no reports back from the umbratic.

We can try to do away with it. In the pneuminous theory we can imagine that there is only the pneuma, only the conceptual stuff. The umbratic, as mentioned, becomes unnecessary. But the appearance of the beyond the pneuma, beyond the vector field is still there, the phantasy of the outside, the absolute beyond the human security system. So a pure idealism always generates the idea of its beyond which it can never ascertain the validity of.

The umbratic gives the idea of structure. In the Tractatus this is how it is often mentioned. This association is related to the pure idealist issue. The appearance of the idea that there must be something behind the image invokes the notion that this part is what does the holding together. This is reinforced by the way in which the pneuminous level of concepts seems so easily detachable from the vectors. The pneuminous accretions can be unbound from the vectors and clearly perceived in the mind (a field of pure pneuma).

Does this mean the vector field and the umbratic are the same thing? No. Because it is possible to catch a kind of glimpse of the vector field. Phenomenological stripping down achieves something like this. But the vector field is still perceived being. It is like being without any accretions attached, or at least as best as we can achieve. However we can never be sure that there are not inbuilt structuring forces that mean the vector field itself is perceived as a limit, that is there is some kind of Kantian aesthetic holding things together even at this level.

The umbratic is darkness, literally. Darkness is where we cannot perceive so again the notion of the unperceived reemerges. This creates the curious identity between the space behind you and the space in the shadows. Seeing the shadow is the closest one can get to perceiving the umbratic. Of course a certain aspect of the shadow accretion means that it is totalised, that we simply understand it. But the ontological shadow is different from this. The ontological shadow reveals darkness to be the space in which the regular accretions of that shadow space are more prone to being taken over by different ones. That is, the umbratic is presupposed to be a structuring power that lies beneath the vector field. The accretions, the concepts, plug into the vectors, this unity makes our world of things. But the accretions exist unbound also and operate on their own unbidden by our conscious minds. The accretion has the power under rare circumstance to alter the umbratic. To do this is must alter an existing vector-accretion arrangement. In perception as it is happening, the feedback of the realness of the world enables the perpetuity of the solidity itself. But outside of perception it is different, outside the accretions imprinted on the vectors are in some sense still there, yet immediately there is a loosening. This loosening is what makes magick/synchronicity possible. This loosening happens in the darkness because ontologically the lack of perceptual ability facilitates the loosening of the solidity and interference from rogue accretions.

There is power in the shadow.

 

  1. Manifestationism
  2. Incoherence
  3. Phantasy
  4. Pneuma
  5. Accretive theory itself
  6. Design a god.
  7. Significance/Insignificance
  8. Designation
  9. Vector theory
  10. The Umbratic
  11. The Double
  12. The zone
  13. The numbers/the system
  14. NARP

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This has been written in response to reading Amy Ireland’s piece ‘Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde’. It does not deal with the entirety of the paper, we merely wish to point out that there are issues involved in such a picture that are potentially problematic for magickal ontologies. Amy’s paper explains how a Kantian epistemological picture, far from producing clarity, only results in a ‘distorted signal’ at least when we consider matters from the perspective of the outside. This picture is theoretically reasonable unless we actually consider magick to be a possibility.

What is magick? For our purposes let’s take it to be the ability to impose a concept (pneuminous accretion) upon a vector that would not ordinarily take it. Some unpacking there. Let us conceive of everything internally and externally, indeed the possibility of that distinction itself to be concepts imposed upon a pure undifferentiated field of what is. Concepts name regions of this vector field. We call it a vector field because it plays host to concepts and, in the strong magickal version, does so literally -the concept goes outside into the vector. Normally concepts have grown with vector regions and they work together as they have evolved. We call this vector ‘hammer’ because it fulfils this grammar successfully. We call this vector ‘sad’ because it too makes sense to us in consistently applied rules. Pneuma is just the term I use for a hypothetical but magickally transcendental stuff that forms concepts.

Magick says that you can take a concept (pneuminous accretion) out of one place and apply it to another and it will actually do something. That is, it will alter the vector region to be closer to the concept you desire it to be rather than the one it actually is. The love spell is a classic example. A wishes B to love him/her but B does not do so. This is the vector region which has the concept applied to it, B’s not loving A. A uses various magickal means to apply the concept ‘B loves A’ upon the vector region. If successful the pneuminous restructuring takes place which alters the vector field so that now B does in fact love A. This you will notice all takes place with a human or Narp field, even the vector field is still sort of empirically accessible -even only in a phenomenological fleeting sense. There also necessarily something else in play, this is the umbratic. The umbratic is the idea of the beyond -the outside. The umbratic may or may not be identical to what is discovered in the pneuminous realm. It shows itself as the idea of the thing in itself. Being outside of pneuma. The umbratic supplies restraint upon the pneuma. However what magick suggests is that under certain circumstances, the restraint can be breached and the pneuma can alter the umbra.

If you negate magick as a possibility then the Ireland/Land picture goes through perfectly reasonably. If however you entertain the possibility of magickal interaction then you have to rethink it. This is because under this possibility the pneuminous accretion (concept) is not some passive function, rather it is an active process that is plugged directly into the outside such that it actually can alter it. There are a two consequences to this that are worth going through. i) You have a version of Crowley’s ‘Every act…’ in that passive conceptuality is essentially still magickal, it is simply that the concept applied to the vector is perfectly appropriate to it. Hence by this logic, the hammer is actually made curiously more hammer like by the feedback of accretion onto vector (and hence into the umbratic). ii) The signal is primarily distorted by the Narp’s production of the vector field but active magick (conscious and unconscious -synchronicity) is reaching directly into the outside and restructuring the umbra with subsequent consequences for vector field -it will alter it. That is, you cannot think of the picture as being either a pure distortion of an outside signal (because even the outside is infected with the pneuminous inside) or a clarity -because it is also true that the umbratic is sufficiently alien that the signal -the vector field- can always yield novelty of a potentially terrifying nature.

Negating magick makes it a one way process in which we, as cut adrift lonely organic processors struggle to conceptually assimilate an awesome vastness. The possibility of magick does not entirely obviate this, but it does mean that whatever is going on, we are more directly plugged into an umbratic/outside than the strong insignificance picture suggests. Magickal type activity is still possible in the pure distorted signal model, however by making the outside utterly indifferent to our will, one ends up committed an essentially scientific magick. Under this mode, chaos magick is a futile activity that may only hit the mark occasionally by pure chance. Effective magick would be the realm of actual magickal geometry/symbols/sounds that genuinely activated parts of the outside in ineffable ways -a kind of Neoplatonism.

This does not sit particularly well with certain related aspects of this theory set. The numogram for instance is purely accretive or hyperstitional if you will. This makes good sense if you accept chaos magick and strong hyperstition (by implication). On this front the pneuminous accretion of the (p)numogram can exert ontological effects -synchronicity etc. However if we adopt the cut of from the outside model, then all such hyperstitions (unless you want to say they are the real ones as found in a scientific magick) are only of the weak type -effective at a psychological but not ontological level. Chaos magick and strong insignificance are not good bedfellows even though on the surface they look compatible. Chaos magick actually entails the possibility of weak significance -significance propped up by ourselves yet also external to us -a diy God. Strong insignificance can have a Spinoza like God but this renders all chaos magickal adventures in numerological like play utterly ineffective (apart from psychologically) and utterly pointless.