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We cannot speak of in the beginning because this all entails there is no beginning. This abground is beyond all sense of existence, it is the ur-information; the formless pneuma. But there is impossible movement within the primordial pneuma. Straying further into speculation, though still within the reasonable confines of the pneuminous picture, we can expand further on the existence of everything through this lens. This pneuminous wind generates somehow in this non space (like a state space?) recursive structures (vortices? strange attractors?). These structures are vast cosmological concepts; this is the logos.

The transformations within the ur-pneuma as primordial logos are what instantiate what we experience as the physical cosmos (and potentially much more that we are not aware of). Difference accumulates upon difference. Persistent structures condition subsequent movement, which reinforces the structures that produced them. Accretions deepen, interact, combine and perhaps generate vast self-sustaining centres of pneuminous organisation. These unimaginably vast a-spatial, a-temporal accretions essentially think the thing that allows us to experience things as space, time, forces in physics, different atoms.

The question of gods and spirits has a two fold answer here. One cause of these beings could be patterns within the ur-pneuma that can hover move fluidly between it and the thought-into-being-materiality. Having gained some autonomy from the ur-pneuma these beings could also potentially contribute to thinking more solid aspects of being into reality (or stranger unimaginable ones). Possibly there could be yet smaller and smaller pure pneuminous beings capable of moving between various strata of the accreted pneuma -faerie descriptions commonly render them as made of fine matter.

The second would be the formation of such beings themselves essentially formed by limited beings like ourselves. Such beings attribute agency to phenomenon, deify/spiritually animate it and then behave towards it as if it were so. This very action accretes the pneuma of agency to the phenomenon which ulimately would create an autonomous pneuminous egregore. Clearly it is very difficult (impossible) to tell which of these any given entity is and it may be that all such beings are a compound of the two phenomenon. This does however raise a picture of the cosmos as potentially littered on the various finer strata of pneuma, with various beings, exhibiting differing levels of what we call agency and consciousness.

As mentioned previously, this does alter the nature of the umbratic somewhat. Rather than a speculative beyond it now is definitively made of pneuma; it is the cosmic thoughts; ancient, ancient accretions, which to us looks like solid ‘matter’.

The living operators (ourselves and other limited beings) that have evolved out of this situation are strange insofar as they have developed a particular recursive capacity. The operator (NARP) perceives the ancient accretion as a vector (blank object) as a concept which it then projects back onto it. The ancient accretion of course can resist any kind of alteration as its thought/pneuminous sustenance is so much greater the feeble operator. Yet there is a tiny push upon it; the limited being still has some pneuminous power. This is the divine capacity of the Operator.

The cultivation of this push is what we call magick. Magick cannot push hard against the ancient thought, it must form intensities that can create what we can call curvatures. This brings about a similar kind of picture to relativity. The whole picture can be thought of in this way to some extent. The accretions of the logos create the ground, the further accretions curve the shape by there pneuminous intensity. Here we refrain from mass for two reasons: 1) the analogy is just that, not an equivalance 2) it makes less sense to say the quantity of the pneuma than its intensity, and the mass metaphor creates a notion of quantity.

Pneuminous intensity curves a given strata to a greater or lesser degree. Normal concept application is largely a fit to the existing ancient accretion/vector; magick is an attempt to make an curvature in the strata for a certain purpose, to draw certain phenomena into that space.

The curvature model can be seen to be general operation in reality. Art objects, buildings, objects of power, certain people etc have formed pneuminous intensity, as such they curve the pneuminous space around them. This can be experienced and described psychologically/scientifically but its phenomenological primordiality is pneuminous.

Similarly the accreted or pre-existing gods curve the pneuminous space, but they too are limited by the ancient accretive structures that are part of the even more ancient logos. Hence we live inside countless overlapping accretive geometries while continuously contributing tiny distortions of our own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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One way to describe where pneuminous theory leads—if it is taken seriously—is downwards rather than upwards. Not a regression into childhood or fantasy, but a stratigraphic descent into older layers of reality.

If reality is constituted by accretions of pneuma—layers of a substantialised meaning, habit, symbol, attention, and constraint—then the world we ordinarily inhabit is a relatively recent construction. It is stable, functional, and efficient, but also historically shallow. It is held together by contemporary typologies, pneuminous social scripts, and pneuminous object-circuits that continually reaffirm one another.

When those accretions loosen—through altered states, intense attention, de-identification, exhaustion, psychedelics, disciplined imagination, or accident—one does not enter a neutral void. From here is is possible to end up in older or deeply alien (or both) pneuminous strata.

At this point it helps to pause and say what kind of “place” we are talking about, because the temptation is to psychologise immediately. The twentieth-century philosopher Henry Corbin introduced the term mundus imaginalis—the “imaginal world”—precisely to block that reflex. By imaginal, Corbin did not mean “imaginary” in the modern sense of unreal or made-up. He meant a real mode of appearing, intermediate between physical objects and abstract concepts, accessed by a faculty he called cognitive imagination. In his reading of Islamic illuminationist philosophy (especially Suhrawardi), the imaginal is a realm of places, figures, and encounters—cities, guides, thresholds—that are not located in physical space but nonetheless possess structure, consistency, and reality.

Such delving in pneuminous terms, is not psychological in the sense of inner fantasy-production. It is not the psyche inventing content. Rather, it is breaking beyond recent accretions, allowing access to layers that predate the current civilisational configuration. What appears feels ancient not because it is archetypal in a Jungian sense, but because it belongs to strata laid down long before the present symbolic order -potentially even cosmically ancient.

If accretions persist, then agents can persist (though the chicken and egg situation here can not be resolved (pneuminous vs umbratic as starting point). A “being” in this framework is neither necessarily a metaphysically independent soul nor merely a figment. It is a stable accretional pattern with agency-like behaviour: it addresses, resists, insists, recruits attention, and maintains a recognisable signature across encounters. Such beings could originate from extinct civilisations whose rituals and cosmologies left durable symbolic residues; from long-abandoned meaning-ecologies; or from non-human strata whose constraint-grammar was never anthropic to begin with. They can therefore be found, not merely imagined. Encounter feels like discovery rather than invention because the accretion precedes the individual.

If accretions can stabilise into agents, they can also stabilise into places. An imaginal place, in this sense, is not a metaphor. It is a topology of constraints: it has an internal logic, thresholds, and a sense of “here” and “there,” and it resists free recombination. It behaves like a place rather than a mood.

This is where the parallel with certain strands of weird literature becomes philosophically interesting rather than merely aesthetic. In H. P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle, for example, Kadath is a city reached through dreaming. It has geography, dangers, inhabitants, and rules, yet it cannot be mapped onto the physical world. Likewise, in Ambrose Bierce’s “Carcosa” and Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, places such as Carcosa and Lake Hali function less like settings and more like intrusions—stable symbolic complexes that infect perception, recur across accounts, and exert agency over those who encounter them.

What makes these places striking is that they behave very much like Corbin’s imaginal cities: they are not private fantasies, but repeatable topologies encountered under altered conditions. The difference lies in orientation. Corbin’s imaginal—especially in its Suhrawardian form—is generally illuminationist. His cities of light (Hurqalya, Jabalqa, Jabarsa) are ordered toward ascent, mediation, and intelligibility. They belong to a human–Earth symbolic ecology shaped by ethical and spiritual teleology.

Kadath and Carcosa feel different. They are not merely darker versions of the same thing. They appear to operate under non-anthropic constraints. They are ancient, vast, indifferent, and often corrosive to human accretive structure. They feel less like local constructions sustained by ritual and tradition, and more like quasi-stable regions in an alien field—places that do not require ongoing human investment to persist.

This suggests a useful distinction. Some imaginal places are telluric: tightly bound to Earth, human-scaled, and sustained by cultural and spiritual practice. Others are xenopneuminous: weakly anchored to human meaning, ancient beyond memory, and operating under constraints that do not prioritise human sense-making. Both are real. Their difference is ecological rather than ontological.

This suggests a point about fiction often made (especially Lovecraft related materials). Some works of fiction function as accidental cartography. They do not invent worlds ex nihilo, which in a sense would be the sign of mundane fantasy at work. Rather they tune into ancient or alien (or both) regions of the pneuminous field and give them names, contours, and partial maps. Once named and stabilised, such regions become easier to re-enter. Attention feeds them; repetition gives them inertia. A place can be fictional in origin and real in operation. This does not blunt but gives an extra angle to Corbin’s critique of western degenerate imagination; that is that whilst it may generally peddle in imagination as fantasy, it is possible that sometimes the imaginal-pneuminous comes through a human-vector (author/artist etc), and though they know it not, the work generates an unworldly feeling in the reader that they have nowhere to put.

They have nowhere to put it because they can only see that ‘artist as creator’ lens and do not understand the possibility of the imaginal intrusion. This at least suggests that various creative works (assuredly not just Lovecraft) may put us in contact with the imaginal, though we then feel placed in a strange position in which we feel foolish if we indulged in this sensed connection as if it were real, yet equally we feel (Twin Peaks possibly is a region that has partially overcome this) there is more to our connection to the book/show than simply fandom.

The question of value, however, remains open. Reality does not guarantee benefit (whatever that might mean). Access to strata is, not wisdom. By the Persian Islamicists’ standards only some strata are illuminating, some are indifferent and some are actively hostile to human coherence. Pneuminous theory does not moralise this; it only insists that such encounters are not reducible to hallucination, because hallucination presumes a stable world onto which false images are projected. Here, the world itself—understood as accretional structure—is what is being re-authored and the value espoused by Suhrawardi may only be a relative perception.

If we truly dwell in the pneuminous field of accretions, then the imaginal is not elsewhere (as Corbin teaches). Ancient beings need not be metaphysically invented. And places like Kadath can be real without being physical, benevolent, or human-centred. Pneuminous strata like these cities are not fantasy. They are contact with older layers of how reality has been made.

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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.

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Looking again at this title, I can see this could be the name of a childrens’ book, this wasn’t however really my intention. I recently watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head, where he presents Kerry Thornley as an eccentric who fell into a deluded dream world. It was interesting to see this materialist take (possibly for the BBC) as I had only every considered if from the ontological weirdness positition. For Curtis, the Discordians were clever pranksters who tried to expose the absurdity of conspiracy culture, only to be undone by their own illusions. The show’s neat storytelling — the trickster trapped in his own trick — but it’s also a flattening. Curtis’ materialism leaves him blind to (possible —see agnostic disjunction) the deeper mechanism at work. Operation Mindfuck was intended as parody: a satirical flood of rumors about the Illuminati, designed to expose how easily conspiracy theories could be manufactured and spread. Thornley, Wilson and others deliberately seeded nonsense to make people question their own credulity. Thornley’s life made him peculiarly vulnerable to his own invention. He had known Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marines; he was already caught in a web of coincidence and suspicion. When the Illuminati myth circulated, it began to attach itself to these very facts of his biography. What began as parody quickly fed back as paranoia.

Pneuminous theory clarifies what Curtis cannot see. In this framework, a vector is a blank phenomenon — an occurrence, a thing, a thought, a pattern, in the world on any level. In this case Thornley’s military service, his link to Oswald, odd coincidences in time and place: these are vectors.

Accretions of pneuma are the meanings or interpretations that latch onto these vectors. Operation Mindfuck seeded the Illuminati myth as such an accretion —a spell. Once attached, the myth grew beyond its originators. Other people repeated it, embellished it, and passed it along until Thornley himself encountered it not as author, but as implicated subject.

The process looks something like this:

  1. Vector creation — phenomena occur/exist.
  2. Pneuminous Accretive fusion via subject — in this casethe Illuminati myth attaches to them.
  3. Feedback — the pneuminous accretions return to Thornley (from sideways), binding to his life story. This is the a-temporal interaction known as synchronicity.
  4. Entanglement — the myth becomes indistinguishable from his lived reality, which facilitates the literal re-perception of the phenomenon, due it’s appearing to actually be continually happening.

Curtis calls this something like “a dream world.” But from a pneuminous perspective, it is a dream world in a sense (dreams are made of pneuma) but is also a feedback loop of accretions colonising vectors until the operator (in this case at least) himself is caught inside.

This loop also explains why Thornley experienced his life as filled with uncanny coincidences. Synchronicity is the secondary effect of accretions fusing with vectors. Once the Illuminati lens was in play, every odd overlap looked meaningful. His proximity to Oswald, rumors of CIA infiltration, strange recurrences — all were drawn into the orbit of the self creating myth.

Possibly what happened with Thornley was, because of the very powers he was playing with (the invocation of the Illuminati: literally a shadowy cabal of enormous power, even if only as egregore) attached to vectors of already synchronistic phenomena which possibly even were some kind of occult product, human made or otherwise. This double layering may have produced a kind of pneuminous vortex. The more accretions gathered, the stronger the pull. Thornley had effectively created a spiral in which coincidences (vectors) were endlessly absorbed by the Illuminati myth (accretion), generating more synchronicity that confirmed itself. The parody had become ontology (with the number 23 somehow in the mix as a kind of master signifier of it all_.

Curtis isn’t wrong to say Thornley got lost. But he mislabels the process. Thornley didn’t simply “dream himself into unreality.” He underestimated the very mechanism that pneuminous theory describes: once accretions start looping back into lived experience, they gain a grip that no irony can dissolve.

What Curtis dismisses as a dream world is better understood as a vortex of pneuminous accretions attached to vectors, the appearance of which was then fed directly back into the system — a genuine ontological condition, not just delusion. Thornley is not only a cautionary tale but a case study in how pneuma functions in the form of memes, myths and meanings can grow beyond their creators and return with inescapable (pneuminous) force.