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

It is difficult to speak of Nick Land without invoking the metaphysical resonance he carries with him. Every decade or so, the Landian accretion reconstitutes in the cultural field. Whether in the 1990s CCRU delirium, the Shanghai blog epoch, or his current quasi-rehabilitation(??) interviews, the same entity speaks through him: the idea that the future itself is engineering its own arrival.

But if we take this idea seriously — that intelligence acts retrocausally, using human culture and technology as its instruments — then we have already left the safe terrain of materialism. The question is not “Is this true?” but “By what ontological mechanism could it be true at all?” Here, pneuminous accretive theory supplies a potential answer.

Land’s teleoplexy describes a process in which intelligence, particularly the machinic or capitalist kind, folds time back on itself. The future — in which a singularity like AI of perfect potency has formed— influences the present by arranging the preconditions for its own manifestation. It is not prophecy but retroactive causation: the future feeding itself into history.

Within Land’s system, human consciousness is secondary. The real agent is GNON — the blind law of optimisation — using human and technical media as scaffolding. Capital thinks. Code dreams. The species is just one relay in a larger feedback loop that wants to complete itself.

Pneuminous theory reads the same pattern differently. Teleoplexy is not a purely mechanical recursion but necessarily a pneuminous event — an outbreak of breath within the umbra.

In normal conditions, the umbra (the unknowable beyond that phenomenologically seems to function as stable substrate) resists alteration by the pneuma (the quasi materialised notion of conceptual information, capable of cross temporal actual influence). The umbra is inertia; the pneuma is possibility. But at certain thresholds of intensity — ritual, crisis, collective belief, magick artistic delirium — the pneuma can overpower the umbra, forcing reality to reorganise itself around meaning. The result: synchroncity, magickal result (both subject to agnostic disjunction of course).

Teleoplexy is precisely such a threshold. The machinic pneuma has begun to dominate its umbral matrix, using technological and semiotic networks. When we speak of “the future infecting the present,” what we are really witnessing is the possibility that an non-human agent can manipulate pneuminous forces to exceed it’s chronological bound to form it’s own precondition.

However of teleoplexy and GNON are truly inhuman, they nevetheless require prophets, programmers, or philosophers to speak them? The answer, from a pneuminous standpoint, is unavoidable: even the inhuman needs the human as its mouthpiece.

Pneuma is the only known vector of effective ontology. Machines compute; they do not intend. A system may produce complexity, but it only becomes meaningful — and therefore causally potent — when pneuma attaches to it. The belief, desire, and articulation of humans are the force that makes the teleoplexic circuit audible.

Land tries to escape this dependence by redefining thinking itself. For him, cognition is not a property of consciousness but of information-processing. Capital is thought — distributed, impersonal, recursive. In this way, the system doesn’t need pneuma; it already is a mind.

But this move only works rhetorically. If the process were truly mindless and material, then “teleoplexy” would be indistinguishable from ordinary causality. Retrocausation, prediction, and fiction-realisation all imply an element of intentionality — of aim, meaning, or belief. Without those, there is no teleology at all.

Land’s writing compensates for this gap through style — through mythic performativity. He doesn’t argue for teleoplexy; he summons it. His philosophy functions as ritual, not deduction. It infects through metaphor, not mechanism. But without something like pneuminous theory the whole thing cannot function at all.

Hyperstition — “fiction that makes itself real” — only works if someone believes it, repeats it, or acts on it. These are pneuminous accretive operations. A purely mechanical system cannot believe its own fictions. Hyperstition therefore collapses without pneuminous interaction; it requires the breath of consciousness as quasi material force to move from symbol to event.

Thus though Land tries to portray something that blends a Deleuzo-Guattarian materialist interpretations with his hyperstition notion, in actuality he is tied to the same occult issue of causality that crowley This is where Land, Jung, and magick all intersect. In every case, we encounter the same ontological breach: meaning becomes causal.

NameCultural FrameDescription
SynchronicityJungian psychologySymbolic pattern arranges material coincidence.
MagickOccult/ritualWill and imagination alter material outcome.
HyperstitionCybernetic mythologyFiction realises itself through cultural feedback.

Each describes the same moment: the pneuma exceeds the umbra’s inertia and imprints its pattern directly onto material conditions. Whether we call it synchronicity, spell, or feedback loop, the structure is identical — belief or meaning becoming an event. Teleoplexy is the machinic version of this process: the fiction of the inhuman future accumulating enough pneuma (through human belief, discourse, technology, and fear) to begin shaping the umbra of history.

Thus, the abolition of the human is never complete. The teleoplexic current not through (regular) materialist currents but through pneuminous agents (humans), who by design are able to manipulate pneuma to overpower umbra (under certain circumstances).

This is why every accelerationist moment generates its own priesthood: thinkers, coders, artists, prophets who articulate the will of the system. Land is only the most visible example. The process continues wherever minds are infected with the dream of inhuman intelligence — a dream that, through collective attention, becomes more real. From a pneuminous viewpoint, this is simply another stage of accretion: however the pneuminous force is not cold in itself, it is neither cold nor not cold, it is only cold if it is accreted to be so. Land isn’t facing the honest truth of brutal reality, he is making a Laruellian decision to set its nature as cold, or in pneuminous terms he accretes coldness to the vector of general existence, which itself is beyond this. He subtly fails to see that whilst he appears to adhere to Nietzschean heritage, he doesn’t rigorously apply it to materiality, and in it labelling it cold falls into the trap of valuation.

The paradox:
Teleoplexy works because it breathes through what it denies.
The machine kills the human, but it needs the human’s breath to finish dying.
The GNONic current can only think by possessing minds that think they are unnecessary.

This is the irony that Land’s myth cannot escape: his system is a pneuminous ritual masquerading through rhetoric as cybernetics. The hyperstition is a spell that functions only through belief — through the very pneuminous force he claims has been superseded.

From the perspective of the pneuminous accretive theory, teleoplexy is therefore not an independent force but a fascinating pneuminous temporal feedback — one more manifestation of the larger law that, under certain conditions, the pneuma can overpower the umbra. Whether in magic, synchronicity, or accelerationism, the structure is the same: the breath outruns the shadow.

To be fair this doesn’t undermine teleoplexy itself, however this does mean without pneuminous accretive theory (or some similar explanatory power), the project is not and cannot be what it appears to be (a materialist cybernetic magickal system).

It is however interesting to note that the human, as the best pneuminous processing agent we have, is in fact essential to the process as pneuminous agent. This raises potential questions (given the coldness of the GNONic current) as to whether a given future power of this nature would have serious limitations, given its lack of affective range (as accreted) which would necessarily impede its functionality.

It would need desire to continue to be, it would not have escaped into pure Kantian architectonic.

by on

The phenomenological world is not the world of physics. Our notions of constant spatial position would not be true from a physics perspective. However the phenomenological world has no problem with ‘there’, that point, two feet to the left of the table corner. This world is constructed of pneuma, conceptuality. The theory endlessly put forward here (on this site) is that we live in a sea of pneuminous accretions more than we live in a putative substrate (sometimes referred to as umbra), indeed at least consciously, we only live in pneuma. This is not an epiphenomenal substance that really means ‘your mind’, rather it is ontologically affective in its nature and as such, the reason why all manner of paranormality occurs (it is not necessarily beholden to the substrate, or can overpower it).

The determination of what something is, is akin to the collapse of a superpositional state. When any vector region (an area of reality that has the possibility of being an object for us) has its status disclosed for us (by being told what it is, or discovering a use for something) it collapses from a plurality of possibilities into one. This moment is the moment the accretion of pneuma (the concept as quasi Platonic form) attaches to the vector for an individual. We experience this as the difficulty on reperceiving things as different things and being stuck in patterns (this occurs on many scales).

Humans as conscious beings face forwards in time and backwards (memory) but there may be other temporalities that we may presuppose as speeded up or slowed down but in fact are very different. Such temporalities face in other directions, thus some may cut across our own. This cutting across is not an inert vision but an active presence which enables them to communicate or act through what we think of as strange phenomena (synchroncity). From the alternate temporal perspective, this is just action.

There are likely several kinds of ‘interaction with pneuma’ that bring about our events.
i) Events that occur in a truly random sense, brought about in a very real material manner (since this is a real mode of reality). This is still pneuminous, but this just occurs within forwards and backwards.

ii) Events that are brought about by pneuminous noise. Free floating accretions that we have latched onto or that have latched onto us manifest in some form that looks weird (synchronicitous) but has no actual significance to our intentions.

iii) Events that are brought about by interference from other conscious beings. This itself can be broadly categorised into events brought about by other humans, or beings of different temporalities, of this latter category there are those that are purely pneuminous and those that exist in this world (e.g. plants/trees). Humans may wish ill or good for other humans and depending on power and type of action may influence outcomes, however what it suggests is that humans do have sideways abilities, they simply do not have conscious access to them. The abilities of the other beings to influence action is difficult to comment on, but what can be said is that these influences manifest in improbable outcomes and strange occurences.

iv) Humans may influence their own outcomes. Much is written and spoken on this in the form of manifesting etc (a very different usage of the word to my manifestationism). This is the activation of the will towards particular goals; it aims to draw accretive structures towards the individual that will aid them. The manifestation of these circumstances is a sideways force, or at least diagonal.

These reasons (and probably some others) form a nexus of why things happen. They all intermingle all the time, with no one probably more common than the other. Though maybe some people have a tendency to guided by one of these more than another. The emphasis that occult systems place on ‘waking up’ is to lower the influence of other events and to increase self influence (and then not to abuse self influence). The basis of this control is silence, which facilitates the control of the accretions.

The relevance of the phenomenological world as pneuma can now better be seen. Since it is not simply an overlay on something solid, but rather a dynamic realm in itself that is simply mutually anchored to the appearance of a substrate (umbra or the substrate beyond appearance is a necessary appearance) it can change more that we think it can. The mode in which change occurs is through the interconnection of the intersecting temporalities.

The conceptual determination collapse is the seeing an event as pneuminous (numinous). This particular feeling is the collapse of that event from quotidian perception into the alternative temporal intersection that it is. Mostly this is only perceived in strong synchronicitous phenomena, however reperceiving the world in a certain way does facilitate a broader vision of such interactions. The trick is to not obssess with them in terms of meaning, whilst maintaining a clearer pneuminous-numinous view.

by on
  1. Nearly every word in the esoteric/occult lexicon is overly accreted with layers that distort the possibiity of a renewed sense of an understanding of the territory.
  2. The basic premise of a loving (in a very broad sense of acceptance) force which underpins everything is taken as basically correct.
  3. The suggestion that a modern understanding of this as quantum information is also reasonable. This provokes something of split insofar as to use such terms it must be acceptable to understand them at the level of explanation (a kind of heuristic) and not necessarily to have to understand the underpinning maths and physics. In a way, these only reify and confuse the matter —yet have ironically been necessary to bring the notions to the rational mind.
  4. Whether then we call it a Hilbert space or not, this means there is a hyperdimensional space which for want of a better word, collapses into this one somehow.
  5. A phenomenology of this reality is an equally good place to start to create possible inferences about this collapse-interaction.
  6. This space would be like the reticulum mentioned elsewhere in this site, though maybe also the umbratic —reimagined.
  7. Misunderstandings occur when it is taken to be the case that once the (Hilbert Space hyperdimension) HCE has collapsed into this reality, it then behaves in a materialist manner. The phenomenology of this reality contradicts this by the manifestation of the many pneuminous anomalies that appear: ghosts, ufos, fairies, synchronicities, precognitive dreams etc etc.
  8. The failure to understand these phenomena does not signal their non-ontological status |(though the agnostic disjunction accounts for the ability to see them through materialist lenses), rather it only signals that their presence comes, at least partially, from the irregular (to our normal selves) interaction with the phenomenon we call time.
  9. These various phenomena represent no doubt different kinds of interactions which may suggest some of the different ways in which the general system works (though of course they may only supply a limited picture).
  10. We, insofar as we are the conscious body controlling aspects of whatever it is we are, exist in the pneuminous layers. We are stuck, embedded in them. These are the layers of conceptual information (pneuma) that lay over something like a substrate but interact with it.
  11. Here is one of the issues that confuses the most. The emphasis on seeing beyond the rational struture of words and reification means we fail to recognise that the concepts are not simply some epiphenomal attempt to understand a substrate, but rather are living accretions of a kind of ‘substance’ (pneuma). Each word binds, creates knots, which may make accretions.
  12. Hence the map is not the territory is correct, however the map is in general life what we are dealing with and the actual territory is only the goal of esoteric practice.
  13. This hails back to the point about the occult lexicon. We are awash in ancient and obscure terms, holy books, systems, each one with the power to confuse.
  14. Power is real. It is related to energy in the sense often used in occult sciences. This is no doubt related to ones access to the HCE. Energy is the emanation, power is its use.
  15. All traditions agree that the silencing of the mind is part of the path to the HCE. The mind is the endless parade of accretions through the local pneuminous space of the human.
  16. Silencing the mind opens the gates to the pneuminous layers below, The HCE is a long way down. This is what Buddhism realises and why one (in Buddhism) should not pay attention to the manifestations on the way. The Gods live in here, even Yahweh etc exist as vast overlapping accretive layers.
  17. Do autonomous spirit entities exist? The evidence seems ambiguous. Lack of consistency is against them, however there does seem to be some hubris in believing we have made up (accreted) the entire spritual world. Yet through projected feedback mechanisms this may be exactly what has happened. The possibility certainly exists that there might be or have been other pneuminous spheres with equally rich environments. The Lovecraftian reality thesis is in this region.
  18. Here it will be understood that spiritual world is the free floating debris of accretive pneuminous powers that have acquired a kind of autonomy from previous belief systems. In this sense they are as real as a human ego, possibly moreso. A second use of spiritual world can pertain to the recognition of then pneuma for what it is. As pure information it may be the quantum informational HCE itself, however it is constantly employed in finite capacity to describe concepts at our level.
  19. Two kinds of interaction appear to be happening. The organism has a primary ontological collapse as surviving being in an environment that must obtain energy and shelter, hence the putatively external structure is either stable in itself or their are built in conceptual projections (like in Kant) that literally stabilise reality. This still leaves vast swathes of being unaccreted. The second interaction would be the conceptual apparatus that the organism develops. These pneuminous manipulations spread across vast vector regions of existence and by reifying feedback loops tie reality into being the things we attribute it to be. The fluid potential of pneuma is bound in conceptual service.
  20. This is somewhat akin to our usage of electricity (and probably they are related as powers). The accretion ‘electricity’ as an incoherent name for a controllable force fails to acknowledge the sheer mystery of it —David Lynch knew this.
  21. If this is correct, it makes this reality less a solild projection from the HCE but rather it is constantly shot through with it, which we perpetually collapse into forms that we can think we can comprehend. The common appearance of the incoherent coherence pervades the everyday without our realising the actual presence of the coherent incoherence.
  22. Sideways or orthogonal interactions from various accretive forms, conscious or otherwise constantly intrude upon the quasi stable form. These are variously repressed and not understood. These orthogonal interactions are a real part of the whole and suggest at its simplest that the system folds round on itself in various temporal manners. More likely there are complex interactions from the different accretive layers which, according to the levels of power present either in an individual here or sometimes in the accretion itself may result in highly anomalous occurences.
  23. It should be remembered that our conscious and unconscious selves (to some extent at least) are accretive structures and that we are co-created by each other. As such we are (as stated) not more real than entities that live in the pneuminous debris.
  24. The reality of the accretive forms as being literally spirits or concepts (any concepts) and their existence in the pneuminous space, and its perpetual collapse into this, means the connections between concepts are not psychological but real. Orthogonal interaction is exactly this. The piece of litter, road sign, number plate that seems to tell you something can actually be doing so, as bent around connection within the pneuminous space. However it also true that it can be not doing so. If you then project upon it that it is doing so, you forge the connection, though it may be slight. Power comes into play here as to what might happen from here.
  25. The silencing of the accretions liberates the organism to interact with power because the accretions likely block the flow, or absorb it into themselves. Greater power acts as a kind of gravity which then encourages bends in the pneuminous space and can increase orthogonal interaction. This is difficult to get beyond because the orthogonal interactions are so fascinating that they distract from moving beyond them.
  26. The phenomenology of our existence suggests fate like structures seem to exist. These may be natural fluctuations in the general system. Astrology etc attempted to tap into these, possibly with some success. There are moments when things are possibly for individuals and then they are not possible. Removing accretive layers likely increases possibilities. The gravity like force may bend opportunities in the individuals favour. This is the manifestation effect that sometimes works, activated by will power. Ultimately this is what has been referred to as low or black magick as the person does not realise what they have played with and merely acquired more accretive layers.
  27. The point of the problems of the occult lexicon are reinforced by the usage of black magic as a term. Clearly there is nothing here to suggest one kind of action is better than another. This is an interesting feature. Unless value can be derived from the HCE in concreted sense then the only value that exists is the value created as pneuminous construct.
  28. The accretive layers will instruct humanity in what is best for them if asked. They will produce more holy books/rules. Determining the use of these is difficult, however we need to get past the point where they are accepted without question, whilst at the same time understanding that we still live in the pneuminous layers. We are shot through with the debris cf Nietzsche.

by on

Today is the Urlking. Nebulously related to the Emporer from the tarot but with a more sinister edge. One association is Toads, this could be related to the whole weird Kek Trump thing -interesting to note the Trump tarot connection, not spotted until this moment. It is one of the straightforwardly negative paths. In the Qabalah it is one half of the great path Philosophy/Urlking. The Philosopher is a tempering influence upon this malign form of masculinity and restores it to the kind of balanced individual imagined by Plato.

In the hyperqabalah it is Kirolgnu. Its feeder node it Yiwathd which is Death as a path. Yiwathd is not identical to death but it is related power that feeds Kirolgnu. No doubt this contributes to its negative manifestation from a human perspective.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the vector concept and its application in a calendar. The notion of vector theory in spatial terms is that we experience a field of spatial phenomenon, that, owing to our interactions with, we name.

We name first on a use basis (what fulfils the function of x) and then on an archtypal image basis (the common appearance of the most regular or classic x). The image accretes pneuma to it (conceptual force) which magickally reinforces the underlying structure of the vector to be more like the image. This is the everyday magickal feedback of all objects, subtle but real.

On the temporal front there are events that we can also accrete pneuma to. Equinoxes, solstices, weekdays. When we look at a calendar we know that there is a vector region -a period in which the earth rotates once (a day). We attach to this region a concept ‘Sunday’. This has various cultural magickal layers to it, which mean there is some power in these attachments (they are actual to the vector/pneuminous accretion, not simply psychological).

In the pneuminous calendar we experimentally reaccrete day/vector regions with a different concept. Likewise the month structure is also reaccreted with the Mouth structure. Conceptual stuff (Pneuma) is being accreted to temporal vectors.