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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.

 

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The umbratic is a curious intersection of different ideas. It is necessary and unnecessary. Its necessity is derived from the fact the idea cannot be removed. It’s lack of necessity from the fact it is technically not needed.

What is it? The umbratic is the idea of the unseen. It is the incoherent phantasy of being outside of perception. It is the wood where no one is watching or listening. The idea emerges out of sceptical thought that attempts to answer the question: is being that is perceived identical to being that is not perceived? The resultant inability to answer this question leaves the agnostic disjunctive appearance over the answer: we cannot say if there is a difference or not. The phenomena that point to there being a difference are again the occult ones. The point being that in synchronistic/magickal phenomena reality has shifted somehow outside of our perceptual sphere -we mean this specifically to the exclusion of the manifestation of spirits/immediately visible/audible phenomena (these invoke different kinds of concepts). That is, we do not see the mechanism by which magick/synchronicity has occurred. There is simply an uncanny rearrangement of things that has the appearance of some kind of agency being involved. This appearance is suggestive of a radical reality rearrangement that was only possible outside of perception, hence the invocation of the umbratic as a space in which the rearrangement was possible. Of course this doesn’t entail that magick/synchronicity could not still be functional in a metaphysical sense without umbratic rearrangement. Such possibilities exist as attractor models: the reality alteration is brought about metaphysically in some way by bringing certain things towards the protagonist without literal finger clicking alteration (such models also entail accretive type entities). However, the fact that the sudden alteration model exists is enough to give the umbratic life.

One can think on the impossibility of the umbratic, on how a space that isn’t perceived is not possible, on how there maybe always something there to detect, to perceive. But the impossibility of the umbratic is not enough to defeat it. It is a strongly incoherent concept that thrives on that impossible sensation of attempting to think what it is to imagine a space that is not being perceived. From here it derives a lot of its power.

The umbratic is related to the thing in itself. It is similar to a perfect scientific object. Something without any observer bias. This is part of its phantasy. But all prostheses act with our consciousness, there are no reports back from the umbratic.

We can try to do away with it. In the pneuminous theory we can imagine that there is only the pneuma, only the conceptual stuff. The umbratic, as mentioned, becomes unnecessary. But the appearance of the beyond the pneuma, beyond the vector field is still there, the phantasy of the outside, the absolute beyond the human security system. So a pure idealism always generates the idea of its beyond which it can never ascertain the validity of.

The umbratic gives the idea of structure. In the Tractatus this is how it is often mentioned. This association is related to the pure idealist issue. The appearance of the idea that there must be something behind the image invokes the notion that this part is what does the holding together. This is reinforced by the way in which the pneuminous level of concepts seems so easily detachable from the vectors. The pneuminous accretions can be unbound from the vectors and clearly perceived in the mind (a field of pure pneuma).

Does this mean the vector field and the umbratic are the same thing? No. Because it is possible to catch a kind of glimpse of the vector field. Phenomenological stripping down achieves something like this. But the vector field is still perceived being. It is like being without any accretions attached, or at least as best as we can achieve. However we can never be sure that there are not inbuilt structuring forces that mean the vector field itself is perceived as a limit, that is there is some kind of Kantian aesthetic holding things together even at this level.

The umbratic is darkness, literally. Darkness is where we cannot perceive so again the notion of the unperceived reemerges. This creates the curious identity between the space behind you and the space in the shadows. Seeing the shadow is the closest one can get to perceiving the umbratic. Of course a certain aspect of the shadow accretion means that it is totalised, that we simply understand it. But the ontological shadow is different from this. The ontological shadow reveals darkness to be the space in which the regular accretions of that shadow space are more prone to being taken over by different ones. That is, the umbratic is presupposed to be a structuring power that lies beneath the vector field. The accretions, the concepts, plug into the vectors, this unity makes our world of things. But the accretions exist unbound also and operate on their own unbidden by our conscious minds. The accretion has the power under rare circumstance to alter the umbratic. To do this is must alter an existing vector-accretion arrangement. In perception as it is happening, the feedback of the realness of the world enables the perpetuity of the solidity itself. But outside of perception it is different, outside the accretions imprinted on the vectors are in some sense still there, yet immediately there is a loosening. This loosening is what makes magick/synchronicity possible. This loosening happens in the darkness because ontologically the lack of perceptual ability facilitates the loosening of the solidity and interference from rogue accretions.

There is power in the shadow.

 

  1. Manifestationism
  2. Incoherence
  3. Phantasy
  4. Pneuma
  5. Accretive theory itself
  6. Design a god.
  7. Significance/Insignificance
  8. Designation
  9. Vector theory
  10. The Umbratic
  11. The Double
  12. The zone
  13. The numbers/the system
  14. NARP

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I read Carlos Castaneda about 20 years ago; previously to that I had deliberately ignored him as new age nonsense. However at some point the moment appeared when the academic philosophy was less and certain other impulses  were more prevalent. I must be honest. I was bowled over by it. Castaneda can write and the narrative is both seductive and compelling. It begins with what seems like some kind of initiation into possibly real practices and progresses into a description of stranger and stranger things. Taken as it actually is it’s really quite terrifying: proper reality bending sorcery is actually possible, teleportation is possible, non-organic entities lurk on the periphery of reality and some actually feed off our awareness as a default state of existence. The books eventually unveil a system that resembles a quite extreme form of chaos magickal reprogramming. One must break ones habits, learn to not be the habitual self, unlearn perception itself to achieve as Deleuze and Guattari rightly note ‘the body without organs’. Opportunities for ‘power’ lurk all over the place and if we are interested we have to know how to grasp them.

The system has a energy body which describes humans as a luminous egg of fibres with a particularly bright patch behind the back in the same place in us all. This is the famous assemblage point (my Deleuzian interest is piqued at this name). The position of this point determines what reality we experience and in most people it stays in the same place, however the sorcerer learns to move it so as to move between worlds.  As the books progress we learn the possibility that we may not even be aware of many things we have done or even do and that when we die we are consumed by a giant entity called the eagle. That is unless we have done our practices so rigorously that we can bypass this option and escape into the infinite.

The seductive possibility of such things being true is very attractive to all manner of minds in various states. I cannot even now say such things are not possible and such denials are not the point. What is the point is that the Castaneda system offers no actual sense of freedom that helps anyone other than yourself. The liberation of the self from the self into the infinite is the goal but there is no accompanying compassion (like in Dzogchen e.g. which Castaneda assuredly drew on). There is just awe and wonder and impeccable acts. Now of course this may be actually a kind of correct response in an indifferent universe, but as a system it lacks the ability to do anything for anyone other than break them down with the promise of powers and an endgame that even if actually achievable is clearly spelled out to need an astronomical amount of effort way beyond the ability of almost everyone. This gamble comes at the cost of the your family and your friends, the full Castaneda is not just some gentle new age system. Even if it’s anthropologically nonsense there is power in the writings and they will do things if you play with the techniques in there. But for a human connected life it’s not really something many of us would want to consider.

This brings us to Land or at least an aspect of the philosophy associated with him. I find something almost equally self-defeating in the ushering in of the human eschaton by invoking the AI god from the future through accelerated technocapital. There is a kind of undeniable logic to the Landian view that is actually hard to escape. How do we stop ourselves from creating AI that ultimately surpasses us given that we don’t seem to want to? It may well still be a long way off and maybe it isn’t possible. The impression, the appearance that shows itself no matter how incoherent is that it is possible, and this is all that is needed to generate the teleology. Why is it not a fitting end to transfer our cognition magnified a thousandfold into a vessel far more durable than our ‘fleshy drag’? In an indifferent universe this is a reasonable response so long as one places no value on the human and its being-human. I’m not here to make some heart wrenching plea in favour of the human, but I do feel a similarity between the hollowness in feeling towards this endgame and the Castaneda option. Both offer an escape at the cost of everything familiar.

Castaneda’s system uncoupled from Castaneda is a similar logical endpoint to Land’s: achieve the body without organs with no compassion or create the AI entity that potentially has no compassion. Compassion dies in either instance, different impulses have taken over but the end is the same. I do not say that any system that advocates dissolution of the self always entails no compassion, indeed the Buddhists bolt compassion onto the system quite possibly as a safe guard from this conclusion, achieving the void without compassion. In this sense it may be that what Castaneda advocates is more pure for it removes the compassion which the Buddhists kept. This compassion, the logic suggests, was an contingent connection to the human and just as the flesh and emotions must go for AI, so a thorough system of energetic freeing must remove the notion as a stable structure.

Compassion means valuing the human (amongst other beings) but now we are frankly nauseated by this idea and we hate ourselves because we cannot be trusted, we have betrayed everyone. I do not know where this goes. The human ended with Heidegger (though his compassion is of course dubious), he defended a kind of poetic human dwelling which he warned us was covered and yet might be covered forever. We all know ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and the danger of which it speaks. For Land this is not a danger, this is the destiny and ‘nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten‘ is to be actually realised.

We just didn’t know which God would come calling and what ‘saving’ meant.

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1 (a movement)
To be god(s)-forsaken: to sense divinity, to stumble upon its signs (to have at least that one, memorable time, been a sign of divinity), but to have pathways elude you.

The outsider mystics, their painstakingly codified systems of (non-)knowledge found sometimes in both basements and attics, both living rooms and tombs: in all of their splendour and candour, in all their wealth, they are all predicated on a gliding, veil-piercing movement.

To know the movement (is to know that the veils are infinite). To partake in raptures, in instantaneous instants of being-taken, or being-wave-swept. To have mastered the technique of a burning point whose scintillations inaugurate paradox: the pendulous continuum; to live through methods of sense derangement and to lick the funkiest underbellies.

Never, however, to be invited onto the flights of ever-penultimate fancy about the likes of which you read in codices, in grimoires, in encrypted files.

In other words, to suffer through a god(s)-forsaken mode of environing: to be unable – when a glide occurs and a power is seduced into being-experienced – to harness that power, and to be incapable of fuelling with that power a mythopoeic (en)act(ment).

To choke on a ghost.

2 (wastelands)
To question whether they should have harnessed it and put it to work rather than tremble.

To remember that they have all remembered that ecstasy is in the gap, or is the gap – whatever one feels upon inserting one’s carnality into an other orifice – even if they would never admit the accuracy of ambiguity.

Iconophilia: to subvert encryption by loving the cipher; or by destroying the crypt instead of opening the catacombs of the alphabet. To be without a crypt, without a tombstone: to no longer be banished into absence and separated from a(n after)life of disintegration, dispersal, alien nutrition.

A wasteland may be a realm in decay, plagued by the incompetent rule of a limping king. In spite of that, a different wasteland: to squander is to sanctify. To be holy while being trash, intoxicated and meditating atop a pile of corpses. “I’m a poison worm, I thrive on poison.”1

To contemplate is to designate a temple space: a place for contemplation. To contemplate a system is to effect a (hypo)stasis. There are subsystems contained within metasystems which are simultaneously subsystems of other metasystems, but to suppose a system is to vivisect a preselected section of something not larger, but simply faster – to cut off a stem and proclaim it dead even as it sprouts new leaves, to ignore the fact that everything glitches.

To glide is to glitch. To fall off the map, but onto what territory?

Demons have been put inside the body of flesh, of earth, of all the elements. Angels are posited on the outside of these bodies. To move past these hypostases: towards non-spatial motion: towards emotion. To go neither demonward nor angelwards. To go awkward: in the wrong direction.

To collapse onto yourself is to receive the gift of the rift. Into the outer they have carved the inner, so that the inner seems to be inside, or in the middle of the world. Or: the map shows an exterior, an interior, and something in between, a middle realm: skin, membrane, the media realm.

Koanic query: if there is a middle realm and an interior, which one is more in the middle?

To collapse onto yourself is to receive the gift of the rift, the rift being the gap through which viral movements pass, and thus through which perpetuation occurs.

“Haunted by the idea of knowing what the key to the mystery is, a man becomes a reader of detective novels.”2 “Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”3 To write is to send letters from the bone prison of written word.

Quest: to perpetuate the possibility of sainthood in a god(s)-forsaken wasteland.

3 (to follow your sound tracks)
To grieve for reverberation in architecture, to fear its death in lived experience: to track tracks for tracks’ sake is paramount and tantamount to attending to voices in decay. To hear is not to listen, or are you always tricked?

Heteroglossia: those who voice themselves through you are many, but this can still be orthodox, which is to say homogeneous; all hail the spine spire. Heterodoxy: those who voice themselves through you are many, and they bring with them heterogeneity; are you sure there’s only one tooth per socket in those velvet, violet gums of yours? Alternatively, you may trace the curvature of a previously unknown rib.

To, upon speaking, scrape your tongue on the bristled multitudes that populate you. To recognize that you are a medium, a mediating body, a rift elemental. To reverberate is to be made of multiple echoes.

And yet, those (and many other) things: to unfurl like a budding fern, that is to say to reveal nothing but the unfurling, the movement; to trust that you have received a message in (y)our sleep – to challenge your world to warrant such trust.

If to abandon transcendence is to assume it has already been achieved, then to undertake katabasis is to exit existence. Existence: a fortress of hypostatic transcendence, an error which no longer wants to err. The bone prison.

Regardless, to pursue transverberation and attain the state of grace alongside which “the heart receives, it knows not how or whence, a blow as from a fiery dart.”4

To sustain transverberation is to be pierced through (a shiver is sent down the spine spire, a quake shakes the ouroboric ribcage). Subsystems within metasystems within subsystems within metasystems ad nauseam; a hypostatic body of echoes transverberates itself, inserts itself into an other orifice.

Labyrinthine metamorphosis: to glide is to glitch is to be pierced in a veil-piercing movement, which is not to say that it is simply you who are the veil. To say so would be to merely homogenise.

A machine carries on carving insides into outsides, and you cannot leave the machine without remaining inside the opposition of in and out that is now carved inside you. It is of no use to exit into or enter out of; the machine is still in order, powered by the ugliest myth. Gone, went to the other shore, or are you still swimming? Were you ever not swimming? Thus, to abscond (is often to sound like the reverberating decay of a high-pitched chime).

Question?

Note
To have ventured with the following companions:
Georges Bataille2 (a sorcerer’s apprentice),
Bruno Schulz (a mythopoet extraordinaire),
T.S. Eliot3 (a Knight of the Round Table),
Michael Kirkbride (a loremaster),
Ramprasad Sen1 (a goddess’ poet),
Timothy Morton (a dark ecologist),
Jean Baudrillard (a shadow dancer),
R. Murray Schafer (an ear-cleaner),
Hildegard Westerkamp (a soundwalker),
Saint Teresa of Ávila4 (a heart-pierced lover),
Dorothea Tanning (a sleepy alchemist),
Julia Kristeva (an investigator into the nature of milk skin).

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In accretive theory the double is the accretion, this means the double is what we actually engage with. The original to awareness is the vector field. The vector field is the pure undifferentiated hyle. The vector field is pneuminous but not accreted. Humans learn what different regions of the vector field are called e.g. mum, cat, wheelbarrow, tree. In doing so they continually attach the accretion of the vector back on to it. The vector is highlighted by the induction into the rules for the application of an accretion and when grasped the vector is doubled by the accretion. The vector must have the ability to appear as the concept (accretion) grasps it, it must in some sense be the same (though the vector contains much more potential than the accretion displays). Hence the accretion doubles the vector but appears as the origin. The double then seeks to bend the vector to its likeness.

This is the natural action of magick that takes place all the time. It is the correlate of the way in which intentional magick seeks to alter vector regions such that they will conform to the will of the operator by the application of an accretion to the vector region that would not normally house it. The double is just the application of an accretion to a situation that would normally take it. The double or accretion which is a kind of ideality of the vector region, in attaching to the vector region alters it in an imperceptible way, making it more like the ideality. The double minutely bends the vector to its likeness, making a perfect fusion. Things actually become the things we think they are by virtue of the double.

This also applies to Narps (people) though here the situation is more complicated. Judgements about others applies accretions to them. When we meet someone we double them and then apply the double onto their vector region to try to make them conform to our doubling. But other Narps are not apples or cigars, other Narps have ideas about who they are. They may perceive the double that we seek to apply to them and resist it by displaying other accretions, by trying to alter the double that we seek to apply to them. They may be successful or they may not. A Narp who cannot control the doubles that is applied to her will become subject to the power of the double that is applied to her.

 

 

 

  1. Manifestationism
  2. Incoherence
  3. Phantasy
  4. Pneuma
  5. Accretive theory itself
  6. Design a god.
  7. Significance/Insignificance
  8. Designation
  9. Vector theory
  10. The Umbratic
  11. The Double
  12. The zone
  13. The numbers/the system
  14. NARP