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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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The Pneuminous Calendar is an attempt to synthesize various occult accretive structures in a temporal model. It combines reaccreted pneuminous Gra-Tree into this model. The Gra-Tree as shown below has letters attributed to paths. These letters are also the numbers 1-22.

In addition to this each letter/number has been sigilised into a form that attempts to encompass the general accretion of each vector region (path). A number of other attributes exist for each path. These can be seen below in the table about the hyperqabalah (which is also another facet of the same system).

In addition to these, the ogham also supply a tree correspondence to each day/path/letter/number. Animals/birds have also been added:

a: Scots Pine, Bear, Lapwing

b: Birch, Deer

d: Oak, Hedgehog, Wolf, Tawney Owl

e: Poplar, Aspen, Beaver

f: Alder, Toad

g: Ivy, Sycamore, Magpie, Bull

h: Hawthorn, Goldfinch

i: Yew, Dog

j: Linden, Goose

k: Hazel, Squirrel

l: Rowan: Duck, Snake

m: Rose, Bramble, Mouse

n: Ash, Woodpecker, Crow

o: Gorse, Lilac, Snail, Spider

p: Pine, Goldcrest

r: Elder, Sparrow, Bryony

s: Blackthorn, Blackbird

t: Holly, Horse, Hawk

u: Horse Chestnut, Heather, Hare

v: Beech, Lion, Dandelion, Bee

w: Apple, Chicken, Bullfinch

z: Willow, Swan

The calendar then is formed of repeating sections of these cycles of 22. In the context of the calendar, each one of these cycles is known as a mouth and each mouth has 22 ‘teeth’ (days). There are 16 mouths in a year. These are named:

Plan, Who, See, Towards, Strive, Fix, Serve, Wait, Find, When, Devote, Shelve, Free, Foresee, Hide, Seek

Festivals occur between every two Mouths.

Festival:Cyclops Opens (Start of year)

Mouths: Plan, Who,

Festival: Eris Rises

Mouths: See, Towards

Festival: Inpass

Mouths: Strive, Fix

Festival: Somer

Mouths: Serve, Wait

Festival: Fe[a]te-Will

Mouths: Find, When

Festival: Sol

Mouths: Devote, Shelve

Festival: Pneulight

Mouths: Free, Foresee

Festival: Thanotalia

Mouths: Hide, Seek

Festival: Cyclops Closes

A pdf of the Mouths and Teeth with the festivals shown can be found here though it does not feature the Mouth names.

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One of the most important things phenomenology gives us is the understanding of how the ancient accretions/egregores/archetypes form in certain ways. One of the most obvious examples being the Sun’s descent and re-emergence from the underworld. There are various accretive layers there. In the vector field (the putative pre-conceptual realm) there is a region which we call the sun. This region was historically imprinted with the status of a God.

This is interesting as we cannot mean that this accretive formation (of pneuma) is erroneous, as this would presuppose that the modern scientific concept of the sun is exhaustive of it, when of course it’s possible that we might discover that structures like planets had some form of sentience and could indeed be considered Gods (have that grammatical game applied to them). So the vector region withholds its absolute truth. In the ancient mode the Sun is a God and it descends into the underworld. Here phenomenologically beyond the horizon is literally the underworld and the Sun descends into it. There is the vector region of these phenomena and the accretive structures imposed upon them.

Nowadays we see the Sun as continuously present in a different sense. The planet spins and creates the illusion of the Sun setting. When the Sun’s descent is literally perceived, the pneumious accretion formed creates in the pneuma the underworld itself. Though again note, the things we call the underworld are different related vector regions. Unlike in the God-sun/science-sun difference, here the structure of reality is more radically accreted differently to the solid spatio-temporal continuity of the modern world. The phenomenological appearance of the descent creates a whole world of mythology in the pneuma i.e. of tales that similarly form (struggle against the dark and re-emergence).

Since the accretions are not just psychological but real (potentially active in altering what we call physical solidity), there is then a feedback between the projected accretions and their worship. They appear in dreams, they communicate, the answer requests. Thus they solidify as particular forces, though still are actually accretions of quasi-necessity projected onto the vector regions that suggest these stories.

This fleshes out the picture from my previous post which suggested that the word of the sacred might be too challenging, too against the values of that alliance of morality and reason that the west lives in. I am not saying this is wrong. But if it isn’t wrong (whatever that might mean), if the Western model persists and it cannot return to the old ways —for they are too terrible for it to bear- then it has but two choices: to attempt the re-accretion of more reasonable deities that can mirror it or if it survives it has the prospect of forming what might be called a ‘second centre’.

That is, a new centre where reason has built a wall that does not fail, but apart from various small breakthroughs, keeps the howling madness away and forges in the pneuma an attempt at pristine world of the fake Apollo (not Kingsley’s Apollo). The second centre is that thing so many people fear, it is the absolute cut off from nature and the dominance of it by humankind, reason and morality. I do not present the second centre as desirable or otherwise, only as an actual unsuspected actual option that preserves the occult geology in its description yet in its enactment would cover it over nearly perfectly.

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For those of you who don’t know Peter Kingsley it seems his message is fairly straightforward. Humankind has become cut adrift from its sacred source with devastating psychic isolation, nihilism, madness and general doom as its consequence.

Fleshed out a bit more it’s that the presocratic philosophers should never have been conceived as primitive proto-thinkers paving the way for Socrates et al. Rather they need to be reconceived as incredibly powerful shaman-priest type figures who received their wisdom from ecstatic type interactions with the other world.

This makes sense (though I can readily confess to my inability to judge his scholarship adequately), not least because it fits perfectly with the speculative work that I was previously doing with Emanuel Magno. In this we came to conceive of the allness as the reticulum of a-spatiotemporal light fibres. This was the nagual, the other world that Castaneda spoke of. It is the one boundless one of pure immanence.

Accepting the possibility of accessing the reticulum through practice grants the Laruellian one its correctness -radical immanence- yet also makes it not simply non-philosophically true but also practically so. The ontological war (philosophical decision) exists at the level of pneuminous accretions, where no philosophy can deliver any decisive win. All philosophers are simply agents for the ideas, striving for the cracks in the enemies theoretical stronghold.

Beyond the chatter of the accretions, down below the vector field is the reticulum, the umbratic. To accept this kind of mysticism is stop thinking of this as an epistemological limit for this is only true from an ordinary level of reality. In acceptance there is the understanding of the insane rhizomatic underpinning of all things: the folds are the synchronicities and the rest of the strange phenomena. Materiality conceived as a solid spatio-temporality is literally false. The reticulum is not a philosophical idea but an actuality only accessible through rigorous practice. The synchronicities etc are merely foothills.

Kingsley says that there was a time when those who are trained in accessing the reticulum were trusted to bring the word of the gods back to us and that we would revere it (oracles). His claim further is that founding ideas of healing and logic amongst others came from this place and then were covered over with the gloss of human creation.

This maybe so, there is so much to enjoy and agree with in the general account. However the problem arises about how a to re-establish the word of the other world and how to adjudge it. Even if it were desireable, it seems almost impossible to conceive how the reticulum readers could re-establish themselves as the determining agents of society. Furthermore how are we to trust this word nowadays? Of course the two points seem entwined. For those with access to the reticulum to be trusted with power we must have learned to respect the word of the Gods.

But the hindsight of chaos magick and my own pneuminous accretive theory brand of it do not particularly help to re-establish such trust. Such theories unashamedly reduce the Gods to vast accretions of pneuminous energy, produced by complex feedback systems between the archetypal seed and the worshippers. Their status as aggregates of primal drives, natural phenomena and cultural projections render them dubious sources of reliable wisdom.

The truths they might speak might indeed found a stable society, however the values they might speak could be so contrary to many we have come to hold as progress that we would (and should) reject them outright. Where does this leave us? Are we now true Prometheans cut adrift by our own desire for equality and reason? But Kingsley’s point is likely true, that the cutting of the sacred source is dangerous. Where does this leave us? Can we get beyond these ancient gatekeepers? Isn’t that what Christianity already tried to do and yet found itself equally Patriarchially etc accreted.

I wrote before about a design a god project. I am not certain of this but maybe a fit for purpose accreted deity (or deities) to serve as access to the reticulum is what we need. This though seems partially paradoxical without the greatest hubris. How can we bring our own God to be? Surely the reticulum must supply the God somehow. I know how poorly looked upon Heidegger is and yet I cannot help but hear his words here when he speaks of the God to come, the one who has yet to show his face.

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This curious poem/document was sent to the CEO and is certainly worth our publishing. It was created by one D Seth Horton. He explains its nature below (slightly paraphrased).

“Here are a series image-texts that are all centered on the U.S.-México border, which can be related to your recent interest in Carlos Castaneda given that his work was situated in the borderlands.

The text is sourced from various U.S. Customs and Border Patrol documents.  In terms of composition, I deleted most of the original material until I was left with the poem that had previously been hidden within the bureaucratese.  To be clear, I added no words, punctuation, or capital letters to the body of these poems, nor did I change the original word order in any way.  Instead, I simply erased what was in the way and then moved the words that remained into appropriate line breaks. 

Other than my drawing, the images all come from the National Archives.

In case readers are interested in comparing “my” texts against the original source material, I have included notes at the end of my submission with all the necessary details.”

Biography

 D. Seth Horton’s work has appeared in more than forty publications, including the Michigan Quarterly Review and Glimmer Train. Two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His latest book is a forthcoming collection of stories set throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands entitled, On a NASA Flight to Heaven (TCU Press, 2024). He currently teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Virginia.