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Postulating there is no deity setting actual rules for existence (other than deities which are themselves vast hoary accretions, or potentially powerful pneuminous beings not of our creation, either of which would not be an ultimate being) what can we say about the ethical status of the accretions? Does this question even make any sense?

We believe there is some kind of commentary can be made on this topic, though it is difficult given that all human existence is a priori accretive (if we accept the theory). All the ideas in your ‘mind’, all the stuff you can see and hear, even yourself are all accretions of the same conceptual substance -pneuma. The commentary requires a kind of wondering. The wondering is something like this: is it possible that attaching too many accretions to the self (the neurotic accretion or NA) is in some sense negative? Again this is tricky because of the issue of value. In an ethical void, whether we exist as pneuminous beings bound up with endless threads to endless other accretions or whether we minimise the lines of connection seems to matter little. However there is the matter of the functionality of the organism. Is it possible then that weighing the NA down with endless accretive layers impairs its functionality?  This doesn’t really seem unreasonable.

Using our the recently developed D&G plug-in we can say that extra accretions are formed through intensities. Emotional attachments, patterns of behaviour, these are how it happens. Keeping things, holding onto feelings, being fixed in routine. If accretive theory is correct then these kinds of actions are creating actual accretions of pneuma that themselves accrete to the NA. Some kind of affect, some kind of will makes this happen.

It is easy to note systems like Buddhism eschew attachment (many religions touch on this kind of aspect) and in that sense encourage forming as few a lines as possible. What we find interesting is the tension between the poles of maximum and minimum accretive attachment. A truly minimal engagement with excessive accretions is often the aim of occult systems. The notion is that the accretions encumber the ‘energy body’ and thus reduce its capacity to be effective. This, in its harshest form, could involve separating oneself from even other persons in order to free oneself from the bonds both of our attachment to them and of their ability to pneuminously restrain us through their perception. At the other end of the spectrum is the pneuminous hoarder. Some NAs don’t know how to let go of anything , either emotionally or physically. Pneuminously these are near identical. A physical thing is just pneuma attached to a vector, it is the pneuma we are in contact with, not the vector. ‘Physical thing’ is just one more concept (accretion) itself, admittedly a deep grammatical one. Unbound pneuma (the contents of the mind) is just that, pneuma unbound to the vector field plane that gives rise to physical grammar. Emotionally charged accretions, either bound or unbound can be astonishingly powerful and the NA may feel it cannot separate itself from them. Artifacts, memories, places all can be accretively bound by intensity. Extreme cases of being wedded to endless accretive structures can be reasonably said to impair the well-being of the organism.

But in the middle of this spectrum, isn’t this where ordinary human existence lies? Accretive formations are a regular part of existence that humans generally manage to negotiate without lapsing into the hoarding pole -the other pole is generally perceived as less problematic and certainly not something one is likely to lapse into. What is interesting to speculate about in this regard is the role of capitalism in relation to our accretive relations. Mass production, endless improvement and easy replacement arguably have a negative impact on what could be seen as positive accretive relations.  Whilst it can be seen as unhealthy to be excessively attached to appliances, furniture etc, it is possibly better to have some kind of intensity attachment to such things as opposed to viewing them as purely disposable. Disposable is fine if the disposability can be dealt with, however we can see that this has not really worked out.

The point is that a certain kind of keeping things is not unhealthy attachment even if it can resemble it. Disposable and/or mass produced things mirror each other in their encouragement of the non-special. The keeping of and passing on things imbued with intensity is an important part of being-human. By this I again refer to something like the notion of Heidegger’s human. The human of the disposable is the post-human. The fantasy of freeing oneself from stuff (unless one is embarking on an occult path) is largely exactly that. You free yourself from stuff in order to passively accept the disposability of stuff. You cannot give someone a phone and expect it to be particularly meaningful. No one will keep it to pass it on.  But things like vases, plates, cutlery, rooms, tables these should be allowed to grow old (for humans to be humans -if they want to be humans) and be passed on.

In this sense capitalism gives the worst of both worlds. It generates attachment to stuff, desire for stuff. The accretive attachment becomes to ‘buying’ itself and the ephemeral status/feeling the stuff may bring. Capitalism gives no freedom from attachment to accretions like the sorcerer requires, attachment is still horribly present. But equally, valuing the stuff is lacking, for there is so much more where it came from. The attachment of affect at the level of what I have called being-human is missing.

Viewing things through the eyes of accretive theory can help to redeem some of the capitalist dehumanising. This is so because accretive theory says that the things gather what happened to them. Not just in their cracks and knocks but at the pneuminous level. Things accrete like we (NAs) do, it is a double process. Just as I become attached to it so it does to me and when I am gone my interactions with the thing are still there accreted to it. Disposability/mass production helps to develop the attitude that the things are all the same. Each thing has embedded in it its story in the pneuma.

None of this says what anyone should do. It merely describes certain relations under various conditions.

 

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Accretive theory seems to have a similar feel to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The way I see it is that accretive theory has very little to disagree with in what D&G say except that accretive theory has a strong sense of having something overtly correlate like about it, whereas D&G’s work does not. The pneuminous accretions are a correlate, they are all we have access to. Every description of non-human existence is mediated by human created accretive structures. These pneuminous structures are formed by humans but they not bound only to them. In accretive theory, the conceptual stuff (pneuma) is attached first to a layer called the vector field (unconceptualised perceived existence) and through this to the umbratic -that which is outside of perception.

In D&G language an accretion is largely a molar entity. Why? Because there need to be actual entities that can be named, that can be designated. Why? Because the appearance of magick is ineradicable (see agnostic disjunction). Wittgenstein’s later work is almost flawless. You can fill in more details but the premise is pretty cast iron. This is the click that people get and become Wittgensteinians: ‘meaning is use’. This pithy phrase provides all the machinery you need to understand in principle what’s going on in language. A word can only mean what it means in its use context. There is no designation as such. Words meaning objects is an illusion that confuses us endlessly.

This is perfectly fine unless you introduce something like magick into the picture. If the agnostic disjunctive argument works then the grammar of magick cannot be ignored and magick needs designation in the strongest sense possible. If I want to interfere with some individual, magick is expected to be capable of making this interference by possibly using only their name. Of course systems sometimes require body matter e.g. hair, but the name should be really sufficient. How can magickal acts tell who we mean? If this occurs then it must travel from the operator through the name (as part of that accretion) to the individual (vector) by the sheer fact that the operator knows who they mean by that name. It might not be the name, it might just be a mental image of likeness, yet still the connection is necessarily still their just by virtue of the fact that the operator knows who they mean. Image in this instance is also part of the accretion, to see such an image is as real a connection as if the person were right there because it is all the same accretion. Accretions mean designation is metaphysically real and that in  a sense objects really are certain objects. Of course it is possible to start using an object as something else, this process layers the pneuma of the new concept over the old one, yet it will not eradicate it, the pneuma of the old concept is still there: a saucer now ashtray, still has the saucer accretion hiding in there.

D&G also provide the useful term intensity. This can be used in relation recent ruminations on the will to give a way of describing why a magickal act does something where an idle thought does not. Magickal acts bring about a certain intensity. This intensity is the power the operator seeks in order to impose a new accretion onto a vector -as this is what magick is, the imposition of new concepts onto vector regions which may already be inhabited by more original accretions.

Now just because accretions behave like molar entities does not mean that the magickal thesis has eradicated meaning as use. It has not. The meaning as use relation is still always in operation and represents the ground from which the accretions form. Use relations reify into fixed accretions. Use relations are more akin to molecular becomings as opposed to the accretive molar. This relation is reflected in the epistemological characterisation of things as either incoherently coherent (accretion as molar entity) and upon analysis coherently incoherent (the bleeding edge of becoming).

Magick creates opportunities to create strange becomings in a very literal sense. It may be that D&G already acknowledge occult interaction however this conclusion seems far from clear -there are differing interpretations to their occult references. Pneuminous accretive theory says that all conceptual attachments to vectors are essentially magickal. Regular objects are accretions attached to vectors that perfectly fit the rules for their use. Hard things of various sizes made of certain substances (more accretions) take the concept stone. The stone accretion is applied to the vector and reflects back onto it making the vector in a minute way more like the accretion. This is just the regular action of the accretion upon the vector.

Magick occurs when an accretion is applied to a vector that would not normally take it. Intensity draws a pneuminous line (of flight) from one accretion and attaches it to the alien vector forming something new, not just in the mind of the operator but literally at the pneuminous level (which is partially independant from the operator). Their must be an intensity or the pneuminous line will not be drawn out. In this way I may have an umbrella purely and for the fun of it want to attach the concept of octopus to the umbrella. In this strange instance I must use some form of repetition of ritual to attach the octopus accretion to the umbrella. Now clearly the becoming-octopus of the umbrella is not in a sense in which the umbrella can participate by intensity itself, however their will be some interaction and the greater I try to forge the line of connection the more the umbrella will be (incoherently) wedded to the octopus accretion. Likely results will be some form of synchronicity regarding cephalopods around the umbrella but the actual nature of the whole assemblage of myself, the octopus-umbrella and its usage is really impossible to determine.

As confessed maybe this possibility is already inherent in D&G’s work. If it is though it certainly isn’t unambiguous. Accretive theory though is explicit that pneuminous lines of attachment are not simply psychological but represent points of actual connection between accretions, these in turn may alter what we call physical reality.

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This  note forms part of an ongoing discussion at the CEO regarding a number of issues regarding accretive ontology. One such issue involves the possibility of an accretive typology of sorts. No doubt there will be more on this in the future, this whole discussion though seems to have unearthed a general movement towards recognising pluralities within the system.

What seems interesting as a possibility is to try to push the occult descriptions much further than the usual synchronicity area to see if anything can be gained from doing so. Let us consider animism with a serious eye. Animism fits well with accretive theory. The concepts of being alive are accreted to the various things such that they do indeed respond in certain ways. We cannot say what ways such things would be. What we do hit upon here is the modality of attaching significance to plant, stone, river etc behaviour as if it has volition. Such a belief requires connecting phenomena together in certain ways e.g. considering the swaying of plants in the wind to be part of their movement and stronger still than that, that such movement might be discernible as communication or some other kind of action. The wind itself could be viewed in such a way, the wind as a being with a volition.

Such perceptions are only possible under choosing the first arm of the agnostic disjunction ‘magick is real’ or ‘magick isn’t real’. However this choice is not as simple as the synchronicity option. In the case of the synchronicity the phenomena is overtly there as something strange. The event itself raises the issue. After the event we will decide whether reality can really do that in the strong sense (pneuminous accretive intervention) or if really it is just coincidence.

In the case of such animistic interpretations we do not have the same strong reason to make such a choice. There is nothing to prompt any upheaval of our regular interpretation of the inert unresponsive nature of things. To make the choice to do so seems insane and yet we have to be aware that the same issue with reality holds sway. Since we do not have an absolute understanding of reality we cannot say that inanimate things definitely cannot respond in some way. This of course isn’t really much good, it might be true but we have no grounds on which to believe it. The grounds however can come if one makes an experiment to treat the things around as if they were in some sense animate. Such a belief needs something like accretive theory to keep it from descending into indefensible nonsense. Accretive theory at least can give good grounds why anything can be imbued with some form agency if we attribute it to it. If then, we make an experiment of seriousness to treat things as if they had an, albeit incoherent, sense of life, then likely enough we will get some kind of synchronicitous or other like phenomena that seem quite remarkable.

At this point the agnostic disjunction can kick in with greater force to suggest that maybe there is something to animism (or accretive theory at least) because now we have an interference level phenomenon to substantiate it. Of it is a disjunction, we can still opt out. But now the appearance will be such that the strange phenomenon (whatever it was) may well be exactly what it would look like if animism were real, hence the appearance of the regular world and the newly discovered animistic one become equal. The discovery is something like a conditional proof in which we had to assume the truth of animism in order to make its possibility visible. Of course as soon as we do make any kind of acceptance then many ontological problems kick in. Given our habituation e.g. how it that wind and plants are not just contingently connected? How did the lake make the fish leap out at the correct moment to our talking to it in way that seemed beyond chance?

For these things to be actually strange and not just psychological projection we again need something like an accretive theory. This does not tell us the mechanics of how things work, for it is only a phenomenology, but it does say that a reversal occurs in such instances. That is, where normally the concept is determined by the vector, in these circumstances, the concept  (pneuminous accretion) manages to reach into the umbratic and alter it such that at the level of perception the (ambiguous) incredible is perceived.

Make no mistake this does unambiguously assume reality is much stranger than it seems. Such an acceptance seems to imply local reality fluctuations are perfectly reasonable that are often totally undetectable to others.  It also has the infuriating implication that many strange phenomena will not display themselves unless engaged with. This of course would seal the sceptics opinion as it would be literally impossible for them to enter such a world.

Note, none of this is an endorsement of animism or any other stance for that matter. All it says is that the appearance of the phenomena generate ambiguities which are not often impossible to close down (agnostic disjunctions). Animism is interesting because it does not suggest itself in the same way that synchronicity can appear as spontaneous rupture. Few would infer animism from synchronicity, but probably synchronistic phenomena would occur as a result of engaging with animism.

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The will is a difficult issue in accretive theory insofar as when we consider magickal acts we associate them with the application of the will. Predetermined harmony/psychological reducibility concerns aside, the phenomenology of magick would seem to entail that the will seeks to alter events to its nature. Elsewhere we have used the definition: ‘to apply a concept to a vector that would not naturally take it’ to define magick. That is, there exists the status quo (a vector region (the how things are) with a description which suits it attached to it) which we are unhappy about. As a sorcerer we create a new concept (the idea of how we would like things to be), we then attempt to apply this concept to the vector region in order to try to replace the current situation with a description (concept) of our own.

The issue here is that in order to replace the current description we seem to need an extra element: will. The will is not what we want (though conceivably we could will to augment it itself), the will is how we want. The differentiation between magickal acts and regular ones is largely going to turn on the application of the will to alter the description. We may often dislike the description of the (a) situation but in regular life often either accept the unpleasantness or seeks to change the situation from within the regular rules of reality. For example, if I do not like the table being dirty I can change the description by cleaning it. In doing so I have used my will and my physicality.

In magickal acts we seek to ask the accretive powers to impose themselves upon a situation without our necessarily doing anything other than the magickal ritual itself. We might following such a request, notice a favourable circumstance arise which then requires our action to realise the full description alteration, but this too would (if we were in a mode that accepted this kind of thing as real) be taken as a response to the request.

The act of ritual is supposed to focus the will in order to connect with the possibility of altering the description. This is how magick shows itself. Something like the conceptual substrate (pneuma) postulated in a lot of the work on this site is necessary for any kind of chaos magickal picture. It may or may not have a further underneath (the umbratic), though the phenomenology would suggest there is such an extra. This picture seems to us sound, except that is for the will itself. Is the will then an extra element that emerges from beings of a certain complexity? Or can it be reconciled more obviously into the pneuma insofar as to see something as willed for is to add an extra conceptual layer to it i.e. when I see something I want, that I want it is part of the concept of that thing/situation.

There seems to be something to this latter account, except we driven to a certain kind of vector field explanation. In its simpler version the vector field is the transcendental realm of stuff behind perception. Different regions of it are given different names, objects, smells, etc. So there is a vector and concept or pneuminous accretion which is plugged directly into the vector. But here we are forced to recognise a different kind of vector region, a kind of affective vector region by which we would say of this feeling we call ‘anger’ ‘joy’ and so on. These affects are the regions, our culture gives us their names. Note that in accretive theory there is a feedback mechanism that makes the object more like the accretion (concept). Once formed, the accretion is attached to the vector. By means of a low level magickal effect, the attached accretion seeks to make the vector region more like itself pure ideal nature. The effect is negligible, but it is there. With respect to the affects, this will no doubt be in evidence and may be exemplified by the reification of the emotions. That is, the naming of the emotions, the attaching of accretions to these vector regions, will make them more like their ideal forms and reduce emotional variation in general.

But again the will is not so easily trapped. We look upon a thing as desired and to us that thing evokes this sense of longing for this thing. There is definitely an attachment going on there in such an instance. The desirableness is attached to the thing -not in ourselves, though it comes from us. But a kind of passive desire does not entail the will has been engaged to obtain said thing. Even on an ordinary level we might long for something and never act upon this desire. So desire is neither a necessary or sufficient condition for the engagement of the will (for I might desire something and not will it and I might will something yet not desire it).

This points to a certain sense of the will being, both in its magickal and non-magickal application a kind power that we may bring to bear to alter the description that is in some sense possible to abstract from the affects. This does not undermine the application of the vector notion to the affects but it does slightly undermine the relevance. The question then remains ‘what is the vector that the concept will is applied to?’ if it is not an affect. It would seem to be its own kind of force. An internal directedness that may manifest either as a call to a series of actions in regular reality that seek to bring something about, or the idea that the application of the will by means of a certain magickal concentration (for want of a better term) may bring about an alteration in the description of a situation that is more in line with with the one willed. Such a situation may well be desired and indeed often is, however it seems to us that there is a certain uncoupling of will and desire necessary to get at the grammatical sense we are after.

This revealing does indeed seem to indicate that as a component of a magickal phenomenology, whilst still a concept and as such an accretion, the will is a kind of special case of that which must be presupposed for active forms of magick. It is the means by which we tap the accretions when we seek to alter regular solid reality.

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Herbal medicine has a great deal of magickal thought in it. Untangling such thought from actual herbal actions is one of the missions of modern evidence based herbal medicine. However as per the agnostic disjunction the possibility shows itself that magickal interventions cannot be discounted no matter how strange the consequences may seem. The idea repeatedly dealt with by myself on this site is that conceptuality can be treated as a kind of substance that can be seen to be attached to all the regions of existence that we conceptualise. This idea is simply the extension of a chaos magickal ontology into regular philosophy. That is, if conceptual entities can be created then regular conceptual entities are not likely to be of a different order. The substantialisation means that the concept substance can seen as attached to an underlying, what we call ‘vector’ -called so because it plays host to the concept. Elsewhere on the CEO site the concept substance is referred to as pneuma and the sticking together of various concepts accretion (since all concepts are necessarily multiplicities).

It follows from this possibility that there may be accretions of pneuma attached to some vectors, which when examined from a scientific position appear nonsensical. Herbal medicine supplies an excellent example of this kind of thinking in signatures. The doctrine of signatures says that plants which in some way resemble an organ/body part/fluid may be considered as useful for treating the same part in the human. So in applying the accretive theory to this we would say that concept of that plant having a connection to that organ/part/fluid (all of which are also accretions plugged into vectors) is embedded onto the concept of that plant.

Such conceptual attachment is of course usually considered inert and any truth behind signatures is attributed either to chance or that the signature was attributed after the herb was known to be efficacious for a given complaint. These are perfectly rational responses, however all we wish to consider here is the interesting possibility that conceptual attachments due to signatures which have no healing function vector to attach to are actual as pneuminous accretions and hence potentially magickally effective. For example, if I have a plant that looks like kidneys and historically has been used for kidney complaints, then the kidney treatment concept has become attached to the plant (vector) and at a magickal level may well be effective all the way up until a scientific analysis removes this concept from the vector (because it had no actual healing constituents in it), after which it will be much less potent.

What is interesting in this notion of attachment is that, since the pneuminous accretions are not inert they may have potential other interactions with the vector (in this case the plant). Speculatively the idea is  that long term accretive attachment of a relatively consistent concept attributed to a vector over large periods of time could create a relation between accretion and vector that would be totally real at what we naively call a magickal level and yet utterly invisible.

A herbalist whom I respect very much says of the plant Iris that it is a facilitator of liver function which is the ‘the house of the ethereal soul or deep unconscious connecting principle’. Is this actually true? What do all these terms really mean? Does it make sense to ask if this is true? If we do not allow for something like the formation of contingent accretions then we would need a kind of spiritual objectivity/better understanding of the way the body interacts with the deep mind to be able to assess this statement. They add further that Iris as meaning the Goddess who used rainbows as bridges between the worlds is linked to the plant for precisely this reason i.e. that soul principle of the liver connects to the deep unconscious, Iris the plant is this bridge. The rich conceptual (accretive) attachment to the vector (the plant we call Iris) may all be metaphor that hints at actual processes.

However if the concept is not inert then there may be a more complicated feedback system going here. These principles of ethereal/unconscious connection through the liver could themselves be accretive structures projected onto a certain occult understanding of the body; embedded in a tradition such structures could function in an autonomous and real manner, literally forging the connection to the unconscious in the liver by the projection. A process of reifying accretive structures over the body vector, feeding back into the body through the pneuminous. The plant contains let us say some real physiological liver action, the vector of this healing action has accreted to it: the Goddess, the messenger, the rainbow bridge. The active pneuminous level of conceptual reality is plugged into the plant vector and its liver action. The magickal associations, the connections to the Goddess (herself and accretion) are (unless a kind of spiritual realism were true) totally contingent yet equally they have been there so long that it becomes hard to tell where vector stops and concept begins.

Of course this is speculation, yet equally that we live in a web of such deep historically constructed vector-accretion webs is only what is entailed by accepting the most rational version of magickal actuality.