by on

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.

by on

When Plato tells the story of Theuth in the Phaedrus, the god offers his invention as a gift to humankind. King Thamus declines, with the warning that writing will “implant forgetfulness” and give only “the appearance of wisdom.” The common accusation against AI writing—that it weakens thought, produces imitation rather than understanding, and severs authorship from the living speaker—is the latest form of the same worry.

Derrida’s famous reading of the Phaedrus reframes Thamus’s fear. Writing is not simply a tool added to speech; it is a supplement, both addition and substitute. It appears to aid memory, but only because speech itself is already dependent on spacing, iteration, and deferral—the conditions Derrida names arche-writing. The supplement therefore exposes that the supposed origin (the speaking, remembering subject) was never self-sufficient. Writing does not corrupt presence; it reveals that presence is already trace.

From a neurological perspective, writing does of course literally re-wires the brain. It recruits visual and spatial circuits that oral culture used differently, redistributing the part of the labour of memory from the hippocampus to the page. In this sense, Plato’s complaint is empirically true: writing does change us. But the change is not necessarily degeneration—it can be seen as the exteriorization of the same operation that already structures memory internally. Derrida’s arche-writing here meets Clark and Chalmers’s “Extended Mind”: cognition and recollection extend into the environment through inscriptions that function as parts of the cognitive loop. The notebook, the screen, or the archive is not outside the mind but part of its system of traces.

What AI systems do is generalize this exteriorization. They no longer merely store traces; they process and generate them. The writing machine remembers, recombines, and returns language to us in new configurations. In functional terms it is another layer of the extended mind: a dynamic tertiary retention, in Stiegler’s phrase, that supplements human thought. As alphabetic writing once externalized static memory, AI writing externalizes and increases memory as process: it actively constructs what we call ideas. This extension into process suggests a greater difference than there may actually be. The same structure of the supplement recurs: the aid that threatens to replace, the prosthesis that transforms what it extends.

Each stage—speech, writing, AI—alters neural, social, and cultural patterns, yet none of these abolish the structure of arche-writing itself. The trace remains the constant; the embodiment of the trace shifts. The human, then, is not displaced by technology but continually re-inscribed by it. The history of media is the history of arche-writing writing itself through new substrates—from mouth, to hand, to code. The question is not whether AI will change us (it will) but how we will inhabit the new spacing it opens in the field of memory.

But this is too simple. The notion that the same phantasy or concern exists between speech to writing and writing to AI writing is valid, yet to reiterate Plato was empirically correct in a sense and likewise expressions of concern are likewise correct, because it will alter the human. The issue concerns what it is exactly we think a human is. From a materialist perspective there is little issue here; likewise from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective (which is not necessarily materialist) there is also a lack of problem here —humankind simply extends its becoming other possibilities.

This thinking more concerns the phenomenology of the human as it takes itself to be in an incoherent coherence as opposed to its deconstructed coherent incoherence. The incoherent coherence is that of a being of a certain autonomy, possessing its own thoughts and feelings. To place these outside of it have a sense that undermines its sovereign importance. This tension is what is felt (currently) and brings the AI anxiety; literally a threat to perceived human ontology.

There is one more issue, which arguably is more potent than the above. This is that Derrida actually misreads or at least flattens Plato. Derrida treats Plato’s notion of memory more as a cognitve function, but arguably Plato means by anamnesis something much more spiritual. If the Platonic memory is more akin to Bruno’s art of memory, then Plato warns against the loss of a channel further back into being in an unambiguously magickal form. Neural rewiring in this sense is ontologically more than simply a change of cognitive functioning. Likewise then, the more recent shift in which process itself becomes externalised, can be seen as yet more damaging still to this access. From that perspective, every exterior inscription—whether written or algorithmic—is a distraction from the inner act of remembering the Good. If Derrida and Clark show that thought is always already technical, Plato reminds us that it may also be more than technical: a form of recollection that no prosthesis can perform on our behalf.

Without an absolute moral register, we cannot privilege the inner motion or the outer motion. The problem is thus ethico-ontological: the choice concerns not only what we ought to do, but what we choose to be. Ethics comes into play here in the sense of a choice, where we must consider from various angles which one constitutes what we wish to be—the autonomous subject whose access to Being is internal and effortful, or the re-inscribed human whose becoming is always already mediated by the technical trace. The history of media is the history of this ongoing ethical negotiation over the very boundaries of the human self.

by on

A stairwell with, as before, a grey hard floor. The diagonal structure he had perceived was a rising staircase which he was now partially underneath. Beyond it stood large glass windows, through which sunlight shone. Around him stood trolleys, off white book trolleys (or so it seemed to him). The lad turned around, nothing but wall behind him, no trace of the dark stair. ‘Well’ thinks the lad ‘maybe I’m still sat on the stair, maybe I fell to my doom, or may as be I’m still at home dreaming in my old mum and dad’s house in the fen, however, true as all these might be, equally true is I’m here so let’s see what’s what.’

The lad took a step forward. All remained as it was. He pinched himself, he held his breath. These things all confirmed he was as real as could be told. He peered up the stairs and saw that several flights stretched upwards with the external wall being constructed of glass for the whole ascent. He looked further around and saw a corridor led away from the stairwell towards a black fire door with a large tubular handle. Suddenly there was a noise and the door pushed open.

A man walked through, full figure, slightly red face, dark trousers and a shirt (no tie). ‘Ah!’ says the man ‘Are you the new assistant?’ The lad is taken aback for sure ‘I’m not sure sir.’ he says ‘Were you expecting a new assistant?’ ‘Well of course we were expecting a new assistant, I’m just not sure I expected to find one lurking in the stairwell.’ ‘I do apologise sir’ says the lad ‘Call me Emanuel’ says the man ‘sir, is too formal. Or just call me Well, for that’s what most folk do.’ ‘I’m pleased to meet you Well, my name is Alex.’ ‘Nice to meet you too Alex, will you be straight to it or would you care for a bite to eat first?’ ‘If it’s all the same to you Well, we’ll get straight to work, for I’ve only just had a bite on the stair just now.’ and in saying this, he thought how curious it was that it was indeed on the stair that he ate, except that it was not the same stair, but the stair in the darkness, where he possibly still was.

‘As you will Alex, follow me.’

So Alex followed Well, not up the stair but down the corridor towards the dark double door away from the stairwell. This lead down a second corridor for some ten metres, then turned right, carried on and came to a room sized clearing where steel lift doors faced out whilst above them the numerical register of their level flickered from digit to digit. Facing the lifts were more black double doors. Well proceeded through these also and lead Alex to a massive dim room with stark metal girders vertically set through it at intervals. The room hummed and buzzed with noise of electrical machines. A long wooden desk could be seen to his left; it ran along the side of the massive room and seemed to have some kind of operatives behind it, though they could not be clearly made out because the light was poor. What was also visible were books, many many books.

They were piled up along the desk in great stacks leaving only some places by which the desk operatives could peek out. They were also on the floor behind the desk, stretching behind it and away into seemingly more rooms that extended out the back of the desk into what could be assumed to be offices, presumably for the operatives. ‘Have you shelved books before Alex?’ said Well ‘No sir, I mean Well, that I have not.’ ‘Not to worry, for it’s easy work but long and tiresome.’ So Well took Alex over the the books and told him what he must do.

Well explained that the building they were in was the library of a grand learning establishment. The students and professors were forever borrowing the books, but so quickly did they read them that they returned them almost immediately. Sometimes they returned them before they even left the building. This made for a vast amount of work for the operatives and their assistants (of which Alex was now one) who must tirelessly take the books off the students and the professors, process them and then get them back to the shelves as quickly as possible.

The books were all coded by a system of letters and numbers which was quite difficult to follow on account of the letters being of a different alphabet to that in which most of the books were written. The numbers were normal but only played a secondary, some would say almost superfluous role in determing where the books would be placed. The relevance of the numbers could be determined by the quantity of letters. If there were sufficient letters to determine the location of the book, then one could ignore the numbers, however if there were not enough letters then then numbers must be consulted to disambiguate the precise location that the book was to shelved in. The system was imperfect, yet it was the best system available and hence it had to be worked with.

Alex grasped the rudiments of the system in a short while, which impressed Well and even though a rudimentary grasp of the system was inadequate for a totally accurate shelving of the books, Well felt that a partially accurate shelving of the books was better than no shelving. This would come with the additional bonus that if the books were poorly shelved then when the students and professors went to retrieve them they would not find them in the correct locations and would be slowed down in the their borrowing. Well seemed to fantasise about a system which he called ‘organized disarray’ in which the whole library might be slightly off kilter in its correct positioning of the books, thus permanently slowing down the relentless borrowing of the items and even putting some of the patrons off from attending at all.

by on

In the Tractatus Pneumatologico Philosophicus there is a small section entitled ‘Mystery’.

It reads:

“Mystery is the manifestation of existence as incoherence. Mystery gives rise to
phantasy; if existence were not inherently mysterious phantasy would not arise.
Reality too emerges out of mystery as the phantasy we decide is not phantasy. This
is reality. Mystery is incoherence, hence all phenomena are mysterious. They submit
to the accretion of the pneuma to be rendered incoherently coherent.”

This small term has received no other treatment so far, however now it seems that it presses for a greater expansion of its use. What does the above passage mean? The term phantasy is a precursor to the more recently developed manifestationism -the competing of plural ontologies. A phantasy is a viable reality (it has criteria to support it) that is not the dominant one. The way the Tractatus expresses it is that the solid world of consistent being is reality, where ‘reality’ just means the dominant model. A phantasy could be the dominant model, it is not out and out lunacy (a fantasy). A phantasy is on an agnostic disjunctive par with the current reality, it is just that certain forces currently hold this one model in power (as reality) rather than another.

Incoherence is a reference to the notion within TPP that all concepts reveal themselves in two manners: incoherent coherence and coherent incoherence. A concept in its regular being-encountered is the former, that is we take the concept as coherent without questioning it. Any analysis of any concept will show its edge of collapse and we are capable of knowing this, hence the concept then becomes coherently incoherent.

Mystery is different insofar as it is pure incoherence. Mystery here is posited as the ground that renders the agnostic disjunction possible. If phenomena were not able to be understood through many different ontologies there would be no mystery, just the comprehension of things in the way they actually are. As such mystery has a transcendental quality to it.

Mystery is not just a theoretical description. Mystery is an exhortation to remind ourselves that we potentially know very little about what is going on in this world. This is at least in part Heidegger’s issue. Pure facticity insofar as such a thing is possible reveals the astonishing presence of the world. No matter how convincing science and technology become we need to try to keep the mystery in sight. This at least is Heidegger’s point. This returns me to a theoretical place that I frequently find myself. The human as the dweller in the world responds to the mystery. Heidegger means that this creature, this dweller could be lost and what will remain will be still biologically human but will not be such a dweller. In this instance mystery, whilst not utterly lost, will be essentially lost. The layers will be so great that it will not be possible to contact it. Everything will have its explanation. The choice is whether we want to retain this dweller who has access to mystery or become what lies beyond it?

The philosophy here is less gloomy about the possibility of loss insofar as the agnostic disjunction in relation to encountering phenomena like synchronicity mean it is always going to be possible to interpret certain phenomena as mystery. What is probably true is that it may become harder to sustain the interpretation, to choose the ‘other corridor’ of the AD.

There is it would seem an alliance between ‘mystery’ and occult interpretation of phenomenon. This is confusing insofar as mystery seems to be intended as a phenomenon that enables the agnostic disjunction rather than one that is actively on one side of it. However when faced with an occult event we can either rationalise it (suck it back into the regular world) or accept that the world is much much stranger than we took it to be. The former side plugs into the explanation world that strives towards coherence, the latter acknowledges immediately the pure incoherence of the world. Of course occult ontologies exist, but they always bring the incoherence to the fore. Explanation through metaphysics, as Kant noted, is not really explanation, it’s just speculation.

What of accretive theory then? Isn’t it an explanation? Yes it is. It tries to be the best rational fit for accepting the agnostic disjunctive second arm. One might say in this respect it tries to remove mystery. It might provide some illumination, but the acceptance of accretive theory just does exactly what any occult ontology does (except without the dogma): it brings the incoherence to the fore. All accretive theory says is that if the synchronicity can be said to be ‘real’ then the concept (the pneuminous accretion) has been capable of altering the normal solidity (the umbratic). It’s easy to write this but to try to process what it must be for this to be the case does indeed bring the incoherence to the fore. Accretive theory cannot tell you and does not try to tell you how this happens, only that it does.

The problem of animism (as previously discussed) suggests the kind of problematic situation in relation to mystery. If the world is capable of responding in the manner like accretive theory suggests, then to get it to animistically respond one would likely need to invest in it in an active way in order for it to do so. If one continues to treat it rationally like ‘stuff’ it will not respond. The stuff perception is so strong that of course one does not want to treat the wind and rocks as if they are alive but of course as soon as someone is experimentally brave enough to do so they then face a second problem as soon as they feel the animistic world interacting with them. That is, they then encounter the agnostic disjunction in relation to the interaction. The sense that ‘this is just madness’ is almost overpowering and for good reason. They may well be right. But the safety net of rationality is never strong enough to absolutely dismiss the possibility.

The ‘what is it?’ is mystery and mystery is the ally of occult ‘explanation’. ‘Reality’ is surrounded.

 

 

 

by on

The Centre for Experimental Ontology looked at magickal effects through the schema of the pneuminous theory in a particular way. That is, the pneuminous accretions were concept-stuff (pneuma) stuck together by NARPs -self aware accretions. The nature of existence was theorised to show the appearance of a duality: a solidity inferred by pneuma, perpetually held in a beyond, the umbratic. The ‘explanation’ of magick, such as it was, was the transcendental move that the apparently ineffective pneuma could in fact, under certain circumstances alter this umbratic solidity, the result being some sort of rupture like effect (synchronicity, spell efficacy etc.).

As a strict phenomenological epistemology we believe this still holds. It never says this is how things are, it just says if you accept the reality of such things then this is the most rational ontology -to avoid being bogged down in dubious, precise competing metaphysical models (Kabbalah, Theosophy etc.). The further complicating factor comes in the manifestation of detail. Of course one is in speculative land here, a speculation that is based on the premise of the actuality of something like magick obtaining, so really the territory is  really quite ridiculous. Yet equally it is not so. The appearance of magick is strong (it is inerradicable) and so the phenomenology of its explanation is only one step behind it, it appears almost with it, it is conjured by it, to save the phenomena from its Kafkaesque or Lynchian abruptness -which we only find tolerable in these settings, and even here we frequently attempt to work out the back story. The territory is preposterous and reasonable at the same time. It is a problem we -as children of the enlightenment- feel we should not bother with, and yet it nestles its epistemological problems happily alongside those of Descartes’. It gives succour to his rigorous level of questioning -it makes it relevant.

The previous explanation of the relation between pneuma and umbra has itself been cloaked in darkness. This is a necessary step for there is no available knowledge of such a putative relation between two categories, which are admittedly phenomenological. However there has always been a certain path trodden amongst the manifestations (competing ontologies). It was admitted a long time ago that there are not two possible options for the manifestation of magick but three -though the agnostic disjunction always suggests just two (the solid and the mutable). The third is the passed-over option of pre-determined harmony. This option has received little treatment and will not receive a good deal today, though it is worth noting that it does tread a reasonable middle ground, by acknowledging actual metaphysical connection between phenomena whilst retaining an unmutable integrity. There are curious lines of connection, but there is no alteration of umbra by pneuma through action of the will as such.

It is this notion of the solid integrity of the existence that raises its head today. As mentioned, the pneuminous theory entails that the putative solidity (as held together by the umbratic), whilst generally extremely reliable, can be on occasion, completely restructured by the force of pneuminous accretions. The system is layered such that the basic pneuminous field prevents direct umbratic access, we have a kind of access to a vector field. This is the ‘given’. It can be inferred to exist (transcendentally) and can be half perceived with phenomenological viewing -by stripping away all conceptual layers that you can. The accretions form around regions of the vector field, these regions are our things. Magick is simply the application of a concept to a region of the vector field that does not invite it. If the concept is applied to the region with sufficient force, it may give way and adopt the nature of the concept rather than the usual route -which is that it determines it.

This picture implies a highly volatile, almost incomprehensible reality in which umbratic resistance is to a greater or lesser extent, giving way to the weight of the pneuminous forces. The notion of any human friendly coherent integrity is totally missing. This lack of coherence, is not a worry to the system. If this is the description, then this is simply where the phenomenological trail leads, we are not here to adjust the result just because it seems utterly bizarre. There is however an option which seem a little less frustrating. The previous option seems to have a hidden sense of a single world to it. It is not stated overtly but it is most obvious by the omission of any statement that suggests multiple realities. The onus is on the accretions ability to alter the umbratic and hence what we call reality. The essential ability of the conceptual accretion to do something, to exert an affect can only be jettisoned by the acceptance of inert (to pneuminous influence) reality or predetermined harmony and these possibilities are not what we are discussing here.

So if reality, in a singular sense, is not twisting and turning around us in relation to the way in which various accretions are attached to various NARPs, what is the other option? As may have been guessed from the above comments, the alternative manifestation of how the magickal effect is achieved, is simply to say that we move from one reality to another. This somewhat banal sounding answer shows itself as the simple opposite to the incoherent unity which can be dispensed with by this simple move: the one is in fact the many. The notion then would be something like this: potentially we move between multiple near identical looking realities all the time. Pneuminous accretions that autonomously activate in relation to a NARP causing synchronistic like phenomena do not do so by altering a single reality. Rather it occurs by causing a kind of hopping between various realities, dragging the NARP to the reality tunnel where a certain phenomena is actually happening, one where the accretion (merely idly pondered in one) is actually attached to vector. One can think of the 23 in this way. The 23 accretion, when tapped, pulls people through a variety of realities in which it appears physically (on the clock, on the train ticket, on the door your visiting etc.). A more active magick i.e. in which a desired pneuminous structure attempts to be imposed on a vector to alter it, will, if successful move us as close as it can to whatever reality stream most closely resembles this outcome, we of course will never know we have travelled thus.

This model, whilst in one sense as outlandish as the single warping reality, in which NARPs and other powers vie for dominance of the territory, has a vague sense of greater sanity. In this model the regular integrity of reality is retained, at least in those phenomena that do not directly display rupture. The discussion of what adjustments we may or not need to make to the model to deal with direct rupture, is for another time.