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Consider the virtual/pneuminous. Here we are in the pure present (again the accretive problem arises) the virtual/pneuminous presses against us from both sides (the future and the past). Endless lines are drawn between all phenomena that might facilitate rupture like occurences.

Rupture like occurences are the synchronicities, the hauntings, Jung’s room crammed full of spirits so thick you can scarcely breath. This world is there, it is real, yet it hides behind the purely brilliant now, ever unfolding, ever receding.

Where are these lines? What do you mean? The lines are drawn in the pneuminous, in the other world, in the virtual. Maybe they are not drawn in it, but rather are it (then this line drawn is a key). Nodes and lines shimmering in the umbratic nothingness.

The rolling madness of pneuminous feedback layers endless complexity into the system. As the regions are named so they accrete; hammer, table, computer, seratonin, differential equation, on and on. Every accretion trying to solidify, failing at its edges. Not just these terms but vast abstractions like time, space, present, future.

Know that everything is formed in this way. Wittgenstein is a priori absolutely correct to say meaning is use. This truth is unassailable. However because reality is the way it is, it is also more than this. Each word exists in intensive use and extensive object . Open horizon, vertical structure. Every potentially ephemeral use summons the virtual hoard which accretes to it, affective and intellectual. When words are relatively simple like ‘table’ the accretions, the rules, whilst still swarming with affective virtuality and formal possiblity are much simpler than that of ‘time’.

Time too is an accretion. The word is a use word, its being exhausted by its use. And yet not, for the meaning of time as accretion is the bewildering morass of contradictory theories and overlapping similar uses that form this node. It is for this reason there are three different language games of time: chronos, aion and kairos. These being measured, numerical time (chronos), eternal time of future and past (aion) and qualitative heterogenous time (kairos).

What occurs that makes magick possible? Only the natural feedback that happens especially with beings that have complex conceptual breakdown of the vector field. Each identified region produces a contingent archetypal form, an ideal image of that kind of thing. This is the unbound pneuminous accretion. This unbound accretion is projected upon all the instances of this kind of thing encountered. The effect of this is to bring the phenomena more in line with the ideality (the pneuminous form). Magick imposes the ideal pneuminous accretion upon the empirical pneuminous form making it more like itself.

How can time become more like itself? As Bergson observed, chronos has come to dominate time, so that nearly all is perceived under this auspice. Mathematically measured time becomes our phenomenology. Time as accretion comes to mean this. Time is a vector region, whatever we can use the word time for is the use of time. What facilitates this grammar. The underpinning experience that makes the grammar of time possible. But when this grammar shifts to time as chronos, the accretion itself as it is embedded in the vector exerts that small but powerful effect upon it. The vector region that makes the grammar of time possible is made, in a subtle way, more fixed, more solid, like this incohehent chronological archetype.

One of the key ways emphasised to faciliate access to the other world is through our experience of temporality. Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari say this, but (Deleuze and Guattari especially) pull the punch. Intuition is a kind of act of imagination that can give access to reality other than our own but the occult significance of this is played down. Goethe understood it because he actually could do it. Elsewhere it appears as a myth. A fantasy whose literal reality the world of philosophy struggles to cope with -the pulled punches.

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This post references concepts found in this document.

This is a hard thing to write about for how can we restore the sacred if we cannot speak about it (a notion commonly said of the sacred)? There is no easy way round this. From our perspective the sacred applies to no particular feature of the vector field, rather it potentially covers all of it. The sacred then is obtained by something resembling a Wittgensteinian aspect flip rather than by some features of existence being discovered to be sacred.

The sacred then exists as an agnostic disjunctive feature of existence. It is possible to view everything as sacred and it is possible to not do so and there are no criteria to determine which is correct. Some vector regions (those we call synchronicities, visions, spirit encounters) suggest the sacred more than other regions. These regions though are merely more noticeable peaks that can facilitate the perception on the flatter regions.

There is no way round the fact that apart from for certain individuals, the perception of the sacred is hard won. This is the reason for the endless systems, all designed to, in different ways, hammer away at the accretive layers of ego and other unhelpful structures.

It must also be understood that though we use the word sacred here, there is a complexity to the issue. Modern science does have a way in which in can enfold both arms of the disjunction. The increasingly wide scope of neuro-typical possibilities make it entirely viable that experiences/perceptions of a spiritual kind are simply a product of differently wired brains. This interpretation folds the sacred back into a kind of nihilism as simply an evolutionary accident that has had significance attached to it owing to the quasi-value it has given societies through its strange and sometimes weirdly functional alterity.

A second complexity comes even if we accept that other aspects of existence are being accessed through alternative modes of perception. This is the possibility that the geography of the pneuminous is multiple yet is generally conflated with being roughly singular. That is, that the different systems/traditions do not access the same place, the roads do not all end up one unified spiritual field. This possibility preserves the reality of genuine magickal alterity but offers the possibility that the occult landscape is strangely varied and that the attempts to build bridges between different systems are entirely misplaced for they truly do not access the same places -though some may be similar.

The pneuma as we have described it generally is a kind of conceptual substrate that plugs into the vector field which cloaks the deep structure of the umbratic (outside of conceptuality). Usually the umbratic solidity remains, however under certain circumstances the structures of the pneuma (the accretions) warp and alter the umbra; this we experience as the anomalies.

The pneuminous system is essentially chaos magickal insofar as it considers the accretions to be potentially magickally effective yet contingent. Further more they are creatable; we can make accretions with acts of will and this can be done with magickal effect. The pneuminous system cannot do the work that facilitates the necessary shift in perception for anyone. People must use all the usual tools for themselves to do this.

However, it can help to faciliate the general scope of the sacred onto general reality, though realistically it can only do this when there is a degree of acceptance of the weird nature of this in the first place. This is achieved by the recognition that all conceptual perceptions are themselves accretions and as such tiny magickal feedback loops. These loops operate in the direction opposite to what we usually think of magick as doing, that is they attempt to keep objects being what they are -they make the vector regions more like the object that the vector region itself actually is.

The second way in which it attempts to do this is by the structures it offers for usage in the form of the reformed Gra-Tree Qabalah, the Pneuminous Calendar and the Hyperqabalah.

Of course these are contingent accretive magickal structures themselves yet they strive for a unifying inclusivity that is a new system itself (though built on others). The Gra-Tree Qabalah offers a unifying number/letter system that also tallies to Tarot, Hebrew and Ogham. The Calendar projects this onto the temporal plane, accreting to each day one of the paths of the Qabalah whilst utilising approximate solstice/equinox points more accurately that the current festival system.

If we accept the nature of pneuma we can can understand that the vector region we call ‘day’ can have concepts accreted to it beyond the empty Gods of Wednesday, Thursday etc. It’s not that these Gods are not real, it’s just that the accretive link is to their sacred potency is largely severed. When we choose to accrete pneuma on the vector regions, we forge the link that can be called sacred.

This general notion probably makes some sense of the notion that speech itself is sacred. Speech accretes pneuma to the vector region, this is the magickal act.

Is there a danger here that this quasi-scientific explanation robs the sacred itself of its sacredness? Maybe. This raises an interesting issue. If there was a true strong sacred, a God with an actual nature, then the pneuminous chaos magickal reduction would not do this version of the sacred justice. Indeed under this possibility it might even be the case that some features of existence are more sacred than others. Sacred is a word like any other. It has a use system in which it functions. Along side this ‘use system’ (it’s vector region) it accretes, the sacred is a pneumious accretion like all others.

Our usage of it has folded it back into immanent reality, one that is hidden by various natural but currently exacerbated tendencies in our nature. Whilst there is a certain abstract level in this analysis that removes hard-sacredness, there is not supposed to be anything abstract about it as such at all. The recognition that this is the nature of things, in fact is the call to the sacred. For with the perception of things in this wise comes the knowledge that conceptual attitude is not neatly sequestered in ones private head but rather part of the constant active formation of the world, the things and people themselves. The sacred of this kind opens ethical lines of consideration that can connect systems, time and being.

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“Are you or are you not?”

42mph = 67.5924kmh

Top speed of a camel.

Camel’s odd & uncanny legs make it capable of 42mph in short bursts.

The vulva of a Volvo.

Odd-legs indeed.

Sexy legs.

Stephen repeats… data, information.

The interrogator has had enough. She is ready to waterboard Stephen. “Are you the saboteur codenamed Agent Orange?”

“Orange you kinda sexy,” Stephen says with a gin-and-tonic grin.

Stephen knew that the Kraken would come after him. He had flown under the radar for far too long. All his life… he knew… he knew he was getting away with something. Never quite sure what. He was faking his existence. People would find out.

Stephen would be exposed. Stephen would be rearranged. 

“Bring the orange crush!” Lily-D yells.

“No!” Stephen cries.

A bucket of orange crush is poured over Stephen’s head. He cannot breathe. He cannot speak. He cannot think the thoughts he thought he could think. Stephen is a vegetable. A mineral. A fruit.

He inhales. Big mistake. Inhaling is a mistake. Simulated drowning becomes… beyond a simulation. Peace. Peace in death. Peace in life.

A piece of orange. What is language? Are you satisfied with your limit-experience?

Stephen’s mind-machine spins & spins.

Wittgenstein says: If an orange could speak, we could not understand it. 

Not true! Stephen understands everything. Every word the orange speaks. Every half-thought. Every gesture.

Investigation lamps. What are “investigation lamps”? The investigation lamps grow brighter & brighter. Like three suns in a triple-star system. 

Imploding & exploding. 

Breathe, Stephen. Speak the breath.

Stephen speaks “silently” to himself. Reflection. What a technology! Phonic signals. The alphabet.

What does Stephen say?

What can Stephen say?

[i]… [i]… I am a human being.

Are you sure?

What evidence?

May It Please the Court. My name is Stephen Steeplton. I apologize for the missing “e”. 

It was not my fault.

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The vector field is a transcendental plane or rather series of planes that act as an intermediary between the accretions and the umbratic. The vector field can be thought of as unaccreted pneuma. The physical vector field is that experience that phenomenologists often try to perceive as part of their systems: the Husserlian hyle, the pure sensation block that becomes differentiated into different things or as we will say with regard to the vector field, regions. It is that field[s] of existence that can be dimly be seen when try to pretend we don’t know that everything ‘is’ all the different things we see before us.

The most extreme visual vector field is the physical world as pure undifferentiated sensation, however the vector field has not entirely gone in effect on less abstract levels. True the spatio-temporal existence itself can be viewed as vector-field regions, however even when these are established, the effect is still present. When we enter a room and many of the devices in that room are unknown to us, these are now vector regions. They may have a broad scope accretion like ‘machines’ attached to them, but we may have no understanding of where one machine stops and where another ends. They exist in an unintelligible (incoherent) mass. Then the technician comes in and explains the machines, she gives me the names for the different regions and tells me what each one does. The concept (accretion) sticks to the vector. We say in this regard ‘this vector region was capable of taking this concept’ and mean that the word is appropriate to the thing.

The meaning of vector then is like that of a vector which carries a parasite, virus, bacterium. Vectors carry accretions and in the regular language of everyday life this is how language functions. Different regions of the vector field play host to different accretions. Many vector regions are capable of housing more than one accretion. A saucer is easily an ashtray. The vector region that takes the accretion ‘saucer’ easily also takes ‘ashtray’. Sometimes the vector region that takes the accretion ‘log’ can take the accretion ‘seat’. Found objects of unknown original usage still have their original accretion attached but it may then be covered over by a new accretion. The grammar of ‘really’ means ‘original’ but if the new accretion can be taken by the vector then it is just as equally this thing. This is all it means for something to be something.

Equally a different appearing object may house the same accretion. I might show someone an old device and ‘say this is a phone’ (this vector can house the phone accretion). They do not understand how this is true but then I show them that this is the case. They were trapped by the modern appearance of ‘phone’. Likewise the person from the past would not be able to respond to ‘pass me my phone please’ from an array of objects on the table. The black oblong lying next to my keys is a vector that they do not know is capable of taking the accretion ‘phone’. This highlights a feature of accretions in relation to vectors. In a given historical/cultural setting a given accretion is often attached to a vector region or range of similar vector regions that generate false essences. False essences are appearances that pretend to be what the object ‘really’ looks like. These contingent archetypes are often the way the accretion looks when one summons it to mind. Ideal forms like these are related to ‘incoherent coherence’, the apparent sense of definition which always masks the multiplicity of ways in which a thing might appear on three axes: the past, the future and the other (a different culture which might feature the same use-thing in a different form).

False essences as accretive images are the molar aspect of accretions as they struggle to maintain stasis against becoming. Furthermore as accretions exert a magickal effect upon the umbratic powers beneath the vector field, the act of trying to keep something in a particular form will have some effect. This is similar to the way in which false essences are related to the phenomenon of the double. The double is the way in which the accretion once attached to a vector, through the archetypal image (false essence) attempts to make the the vector more like the accretion than the original vector was. This is a process that necessarily goes on all the time.

Of course the vector field is not a purely visual/physical field. For this reason we can speak of the vector field having different planes that intersect, visual and physical being two such -as accretions might be visible without being physical and vice versa. The wind is a invisible region that is physical for example. Audible and olfactory can also be said to have their own planes. Some accretions cut across different planes, some exist on purely one. The planes themselves are of course also vector regions with accretions attached. The olfactory is an accretion that may be applied only to certain kinds of phenomena. However these vast accretions form planes by which a kind of heuristic may be employed. Smells can be learned. There are a myriad of smells in the world that we have often no knowledge of but could be understood. The undifferentiated or ill understood olfactory plane can have accretions applied to its regions. In sounds think of bird song, a twittering mass can be differentiated into individual refrains ‘does that sound take the accretion wood pigeon? No it is a collared dove’. The experiential world is filled with noises. The garbled noise of this plane too can receive greater accretive infestation. Vector regions can be analysed out and have accretions attached accordingly.

There is also the emotional plane. We have named the regions of the emotions. They can be named because the recur. There are rules for feeling and recognition. The regions are a fluctuating mass and their peaks and troughs are the accretions ‘happiness’ ‘anger’ ‘sadness’ etc. False essences occur here too, archetypal dominance is powerful and stasis of these natures encouraged. Small eddies of the emotional plane receive no accretion for their grammar is hard to capture. Sometimes we meet others who know these eddies and we name them together.

Possibly the most curious plane of the vector field is that of rationality. Does thought have a vector field plane? Of course ‘thought’ must have, for it is an accretion, it has a grammar. But the universal similarity of thought as accretion is even less reliable than the contents of the emotional plane, where at least physical displays are common as part of the attribution of the accretion to those regions (happy face, sad face). The action ‘I was thinking’ might be unspeakably different between different beings. But still there are operations of thought, logic for instance. Modus ponens as a concept, as an accretion is just one concatenation of thought that we do all the time. Incoherence does not destroy logic, it merely renders incoherent  the concepts that fill in the Ps and Qs. There is an action we can make that either fulfils the criteria to be called modus ponens or not, hence some kind of vector region exist for it. All logical sequences can have this said of them. What about maths? What is ‘plus’? A rule, an accretion that fits a vector of a certain action. As we explore this area it feels as if there is a suggestion that these mental actions are echoes of the physical plane. They are unbound accretions whose home is solidity.

What is language itself? A word is an accretion attached to a vector. There are the noises we hear between us by which we communicate. Every single word is an accretion attached to a vector. Every letter is an accretion attached to a vector. Scribbles, lines on a page. This symbol says ‘A’. See the symbol as vector region. It is nothing but lines, it plays host to ‘A’.

Everywhere a vector region, everywhere a host, everywhere an accretion.

 

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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.