SUBLUNAR SPACE - archon

Capitalist Kenoma

2025-07-31T18:00:00+02:00

Part one of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

#acid-chthomunism

In the midst of the raging pandemic in the spring of 2021, I had just finished reading two of Mark Fisher's books. At the time his harsh critique of life under capitalism struck me not only as depressingly pessimistic, but as too overcredited and reified, as I witnessed this very system begin to crumble under a viral insurrection that exposed the fragile fiction of normalcy we had all taken for granted.

I shared my thoughts with my fellow weirdos in the well-guarded Discord sanctuary known as The Others, where we discussed how the materialist mindset so dominant on the Left leaves little room for the kind of transcendental experiences needed to escape a worldview obsessed with being trapped in reality.

This led to the creation of a dedicated channel to continue our conversation about the potentials of progressive occultism, post-colonial forms of spirituality, and more earthly, emancipatory rites of magic for these end times of perpetual crisis, climate change, and fading empire. As a chthonic nod to Mark Fisher's concept of 'Acid Communism', I named the channel #acid-chthomunism.

Four years on, I'm finally carving out some time to distill our collective vibe into a series of magical‑realist political essays, probably with some segways into metaphysics. Not because I've suddenly found extra hours in the day, but because the growing urgency to counter this insane mind virus of an accelerationist, AI‑driven post‑truth dystopia that has emerged from the rubble of the pandemic's rift in our timeline.

My gratitude goes out to The Others, especially Dan and Ed, for their ongoing valuable input and engagement.

Before we begin our dungeon crawl let's tie the red thread to what had started our conversations in the first place: Mark Fisher's magnum opus "Capitalist Realism" and his hope for "Acid Communism."

Capitalist Kenoma

Mark Fisher was a British cultural theorist and critic, best known for his blog k‑punk, unequaled in his poignant rhetoric and commentary on neoliberalism's hollow promises and culture under late capitalism. He was part of the infmaous CCRU¹ and gained a reputation for linking topics from rave culture to corporate bureaucracy with reflections on depression and mental health.

In his magnum opus Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?², that was kind of a defining text for a disillusioned Millennial generation, Fisher coined the term "capitalist realism" to describe the pervasive belief that capitalism is not merely the dominant economic system but "seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable". Drawing on Soviet "socialist realism"³ he articulates the ambient depression and sense of impossibility that marked the post-2008 cultural and political landscape. Fisher shows that at its core Capitalism operates by exorcising "the spectre of a world which could be free"⁴, by erasing the very conditions that might make alternatives conceivable. He also lays out in painful details how market logic reshapes everything from education, healthcare, and culture.

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. [...] In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

Fisher's harrowing diagnosis of a capitalist reality so totalizing that it shapes our perception and enforces conformity makes it seem like an almost metaphysical condition. It is strikingly reminiscent of how Gnostic myths describe the world as a false and flawed prison matrix ruled by an evil Demiurge⁵ and his Archons⁶. Although Fisher never explicitly invokes Gnosticism, the structural parallels struck me enough to run with this trope and dare a closer comparison.

Just as the Gnostics saw no way out of the material cosmos without salvation, the common contemporary sentiment that "there is no alternative" feels like an Archonic⁶ decree, closing off our political imagination before it can even begin. By pathologizing systemic injustice as individual failure, capitalism conceals the collective roots of our suffering, just as Archons⁶ in Manichaean⁷ or Sethian⁸ narratives insist that the soul's entrapment is inevitable.

In the realm of culture, Fisher draws attention to the collapse of genuine novelty into endless pastiche and ironic detachment. Corporate pop, blockbuster cinema, and hip start‑up aesthetics all recycle the same safe tropes, offering the illusion of choice while reinforcing a single marketable worldview.

Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled "alternative" or "independent" cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. "Alternative" and "independent" don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.²

This mirrors the Gnostic notion that Archons⁶ can simulate transcendence, pseudo‑visions of freedom that ultimately serve the Demiurge's⁵ ends.

The reification of capitalism as an all‑encompassing, omnipotent, godlike force does feel Gnostic. Yet, unlike the ancient Gnostics, who developed coherent methods of spiritual liberation, thinkers such as Mark Fisher and others in the influential Freudo‑Lacanian‑Marxist lineage⁹ adopt an obsessively materialist, psychoanalytic approach to the relationship between humanity and capitalism.

This trope is also present in Guy Debord's "Spectacle"¹⁰, Hardt/Negri's¹¹ as well as Tiqqun's¹² "Empire", and Mumford¹³ or Latouche's¹⁴ "Megamachine". Despite their claims of rational and materialist theory and praxis many of their analyses seem very much like religious eschatology, minus the salvation. Here an example from Tiqqun:

Empire is the kind of domination that knows no Outside, that has gone so far as to sacrifice itself as the Same in order to rid itself of the Other. Empire excludes nothing, substantially; it only precludes that anything present itself as other, that anything escape the general equivalence. ²⁵

Like his comrades in spirit Mark Fisher certainly put his finger into the collective wound of alienation and nostalgic longing for a lost past or unattainable future that haunts everyone who has been on similar trains of thoughts. There is a kind of romance attributed to the politization of despair and the affect of seeing things "how they really are".

The skeptical stance of metacognitively observing "the big picture" can be an quite seductive aesthetic but it would be negligent to ignore fact that it is also a symptom of depression. There is a danger in the reification of estrangement both individual and collective because it mutates into a demonic thoughtform that pulls its host into a downward spiral. In Gnostic cosmology as in Capitalist Realism the imagined and lived doom and gloom narratives become more and more real.

It is tragically ironic because it was the CCRU¹ itself that introduced the term "hyperstition"¹⁵, showing how fictional narratives infiltrate and reshape actual reality: invented names, stories, or rumors become treated as if they were real, and in doing so exert tangible influence.

Ultimately Fisher's work "Capitalist Realism" seeks to reveal the systemic flaws of capitalism, and it does so in very eloquent and captivating ways, but it also operates as catalyst of the hyperstition it seeks to counteract: by mythologizing capitalism it naturalizes and reinforces its grip on our collective imagination.

Towards Pleroma

To follow our thread, let's take Capitalist Realism a bit further and continue to map its central thesis onto the Archonic⁶ prison structure from Gnostic myth. This confronts us with the question of how to actually attain liberation and gnosis¹⁶.

In Capitalist Realism Fisher establishes a secular version of Gnosis¹⁶: collective critique and experimentation, building communal practices to dissolve the capitalist frame and reviving forgotten languages of solidarity and care.²

Where Gnosticism offers the promise of salvation through mystical insight and the guidance of a revealer like Sophia¹⁷ or Christ, Fisher posits a hyperstitional meme: despite reservations about the wording he dubs it "Acid Communism."⁴

If we are no longer to define ourselves negatively, by our opposition to Capital, what will be the name of our positive project? I don't believe that the old signifier communism can be revived for this purpose. It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the 20th century. At the moment, our desire is nameless – but it is real. Our desire is for the future – for an escape from the impasses of the flatlands of Capital's endless repetitions – and it comes from the future – from the very future in which new perceptions, desires, cognitions are once again possible. As yet, we can grasp this future only in glimmers. But it is for us to construct this future, even as – at another level – it is already constructing us: a new kind of collective agent, a new possibility of speaking in the first person plural. At some point in this process, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it.²⁶

It's heartbreaking that Fisher's own lost battle with depression prevented him from fully bringing this idea to life before his premature passing in 2017. Judging from his late fragments⁴, drafts, and lectures¹⁸ it becomes clear that his vision was to recover a revolutionary potential from the countercultural experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, an era fundamentally characterized by collective joy, communal experiences, and a belief in the possibility of radical social transformation.

For Fisher, the acid in Acid Communism is not merely a nod to psychedelics, but a shorthand for any experience or cultural form that dissolves the barriers imposed by commodified individualism and points toward a more fully social existence.

In his brilliant commentary¹⁹ on Acid Communism Dr Gregory Marks writes:

Acid Communism unites weird experience with collective becoming, to shatter the old forms of perception and cognition and bring about something other. We cannot expect to go through this process unchanged. The collective desire of Acid Communism transforms the very sense of time and space upon which our atomised and alienated selves are predicated. Yet there is a joy in dissolving into this new mass becoming, which destroys the categories that previously bound us.¹⁹

Even when "the weird" is brought into the conversation it is striking how oddly "unhaunted" Acid Communism is. It really feels like there is a longing for some transformative high strangeness while being stuck in a materialist mindset where the only way to conceptualize the numinous is through the psychedelic lense. I know because I've been there myself most of my life.

The part in his book where Fisher comes closest to the notion of metaphysical gnosis is when he invokes Lacan:

For Lacan, the Real is what any "reality" must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.²

Based on Lacan's Real²⁰ and also Kant's notion of the Noumenon²¹ the CCRU¹ established the term "Outside" in many of their works to describe the unknowable ontic reality beyond what human intellect can grasp with its psychophysiological and epistemological faculties of knowledge.

In Gnostic cosmology the incomplete and false material world is usually referred to as the 'kenoma'²², while the complete and true world of abundance from which we are separated is called 'pleroma'²³.

The enigmatic lure and hopeful ambiguity of Acid Communism as a hyperstitional thoughtform is a powerful magical tool. I do like the emotions and the ideas the term evokes and I love its experimental approach to "consciousness raising"²⁴ as a tool to map out the Capitalist Kenoma from the inside in order to imagine a Pleromatic Outside.

But I have doubts about its proposed implementation...

An Acid Communist Praxis as imagined by Fisher and his adherents might admittedly have had a small chance of pushing towards Pleroma in the era before the pandemic.

As might have the idea of just ridiculing the paranoid neo‑Gnosticism of Capitalist Realism as pessimistic hyperbole like we did during the pandemic.

But times have changed dramatically...

...continue with the next part, in which we will pull the red thread beyond the neoliberal kenoma, through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective of theorists and artists at the University of Warwick associated with figures such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or Reza Negarestani who explored cybernetics, philosophy, science fiction, rave culture, internet culture, and occultism. They produced an impressive body of work that blurred the boundaries between theory and fiction. ↩↩↩
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Socialist Realism ↩
Mark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) ↩↩↩
The demiurge (Greek demiurgos, “craftsman”) is the being who created the world in Gnosticism. The Gnostics identified him with the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostic scriptures portray him as ignorant, malicious, and utterly inferior to the true God who sent Christ to earth to save humankind from the demiurge’s evil world. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
In Gnosticism, the archons (from Greek arkhon, “ruler”[1]) were malevolent, sadistic beings who controlled the earth, as well as many of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humans. They assisted their master, the demiurge, with the creation of the world, and continued to help him administer his oppressive rule. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Manichaeism ↩
The Classic Gnostics ("Sethians"), Gnosticism Explained ↩
Wikipedia: Freudo-Marxism ↩
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967, Full Text on marxists.org ↩
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. ↩
Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Vol. 28. MIT Press, 2020. ↩
Mumford, Lewis. "The first megamachine." Diogenes 14.55 (1966): 1-15. ↩
Latouche, Serge. "La société moderne face au défi technologique: la mégamachine et le destin." ETUDES INTERNATIONALES-QUEBEC- 29 (1998): 669-682. ↩
Delphi Carstens, Hyperstition, 0(rphan)d(rift>) archive, 2010 ↩
“Gnosis” is a special, mystical kind of knowledge to which the Gnostics claimed to have privileged access. Gnosis, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
Sophia, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Mark Fisher, Matt Colquhoun, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, Repeater Books, 2021 Publisher Page ↩
More Than This: Notes on Acid Communism, The Wasted World, December 16, 2018 ↩↩
Jacques Lacan: Real, No Subject - an encyclopedia of Lacanian psychoanalysis ↩
Wikipedia: Noumenon ↩
Wikipedia: Kenoma ↩
Pleroma, Greek for “Fullness”, is the name the Gnostics gave to Heaven. The Pleroma and the Aeons, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Consciousness-Raising is a tool of the Women’s Liberation Movement and is sometimes called “telling it like it is.” In C-R, women answer a question using examples from their personal lives, then the group uses these personal testimonies to draw conclusions about the political root of women’s so-called “personal” problems. Source ↩
Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program, pg. 37, Semiotext(e), 2011 ↩
Mark Fisher, For now, our desire is nameless, The European, May 20th 2014, Web Archive ↩

Drinking the Kool-Soup

2021-04-20T12:00:00+02:00

This article is a personal critique and call out of the popular chaos magic brand Rune Soup of which I have been a premium member for three years and enthusiastic about for even longer.

v.1.4

I owe a lot of my belated magical coming-of-age to the writings of one man: Gordon White, the charismatic author and chaos magician behind Rune Soup.

From the very beginning of my confused journey into enchantment I had to do a ton of research to make sense of the reality outside of my thus far materialist atheist paradigm. Whatever esoteric topic I was looking into back in the days I dismissed a lot for various reasons but always ended up reading blog posts on Rune Soup. The unapologetic approach to an animist worldview in combination with an undogmatic and open-minded embrace of practical magic really resonated with me. Within a short period of time after having discovered it I listened to the whole archive of podcast episodes, read all of GW's books, and eventually became a Premium Member of the franchise.

The All Red Flags

In the beginning of my membership I really liked the courses, the Q&As, the bonus materials, and the initial lively discussions on the member forum, but I have to admit I was kinda low key annoyed at Gordon's occasional political rants, especially when they seemed like naive interpretations of complex circumstances in European politics (e.g. "Brexit is a Royal op") or his blunt simplifications about the even more difficult situation in the Middle East and his ever growing obsession with US politics. I always brushed it aside as mere ignorance or fad. The political side of Rune Soup was mostly tucked away in Gordon's now defunct geopolitical The All Red Line newsletter and his Archonlogy and Chaeconomica blog series and I was able to separate all that from the magic he was teaching.

Having immersed myself in Helleno-Kemetic magic for a few years now I cringed a bit at GW's PGM course because besides the actually quite well laid out history part the practice lacked quite some rigor for my taste and largely ignored the necessary devotional aspects that is clearly part of this "tradition". After my long and intensive research on the Egyptian Decans I also found the year-long Decan Walk ritual quite off-putting. It seemed like a cherry-picked mishmash of ritual fragments topped with total lack of respect towards the deities involved, but again: I brushed it aside. It's Chaos Magic after all, am I right? Perhaps just a disagreement in style.

As membership numbers rose throughout the years so did the number of discussions on the forum and the questions in the Q&As. I followed the community aspects less and less because of redundant content, some annoying "me, me, me!" tendencies and seemingly rising culty behaviours of some of the members. Again I brushed it aside. Instead I spent more and more time in the Rune Soup communities on Discord which had more valuable discussions and a more healthy overall vibe to them.

I didn't really enjoy most of the content put out in the later courses. They seemed more and more meandering and less and less praxis oriented. I also got more and more annoyed about the lack of citations and attributions. The fact aside that GW always decorates his presentations with stunning digital artworks that he never credits, also much of the content in the courses seemed to be just less coherent regurgitacion of other people's work. (Dr. Skinner's books in Grimoires and PGM, Camelia Elias in the Tarot course).

When the Mansion Game was launched mid 2019 I decided to quit my membership, because the whole thing seemed chaotic and incoherent and nobody seemed to care about obvious flaws like naively mixing tropical and sidereal astrology. No, quite the opposite: criticism was not appreciated and any incoherence was waved off referring to the core principles of Chaos Magic.

It stopped suiting me, so I quit. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with disagree on technicalities. I could have just left it at that, but I still felt like a Soupie. I continued listening to the podcast, read the blog, attended our local meetups, occasionally dropped into the Discord channels.

Then the pandemic hit and everyone seemed to have lost their wits. And it was more and more difficult to ignore...

Literal Rune Soup

I don't know whether it has to do with the fact that GW got depressed from suddenly not being able to travel anymore, something he had obviously enjoyed a lot in the years before, or if it was something else...

Maybe the things that unfolded during the pandemic just made obvious what had been hidden behind a professional marketing facade. In retrospect, many of the tendencies had been there already before. Even GW says so. But that's not all:

I don't know if my memory is skewed but it seemed to me that suddenly the once for years so seemingly optimistic and empowering GW who didn't even fear taking it on with Decans or dragons drifted off into a cynically and smugly presented worldview of what could be summarized as alt-right conspirituality.

He was one of the first in the occult community who bought fully and openly into all of the Covid-19 'Plandemic' conspiracy theories and didn't shy away from sprinkling his thoughts (flipping from "zee koronawirus" being fake, manufactured in a lab, to being an op to implement a global digital currency and restrict personal liberties) throughout his podcast, blog posts, and most detailed in a long and disturbing premium member video presentation called The Vertical Line of which some slides eventually leaked to the public.

And you have to love when someone calls doctors struggling to keep people alive during a pandemic "cowards and sheep." Also, of course Melinda Gates and her globalist pals want to kill black and indigenous people. pic.twitter.com/kqTO4wqmHG
— Michael M. Hughes (@michaelmhughes) January 15, 2021

Despite years of preaching animism and kinship with the more-than-human world, teaching aspiring wizards to become "invincible", and relying on magical skills when mundane solutions fail, GW suddenly spoke about deep state conspiracies and neoliberal technocratic overlords pulling strings to imprison us in a digital control grid with a fake virus "plandemic". And worst of all: apparently there is nothing we can do about it, because "solutionism" is obviously part of the problem. Full-on gnostic despair!

I remember back in the days in his Magical Geography course GW was talking about "staying with the trouble" and the need to do our shadow work with racism, colonization and white supremacy - yet suddenly he repeatedly referred to Black Lives Matter as an op, started using terms like "shitlib" and waved other Trumpist "virtue signals", picked up right-wing accelerationist jargon and embracing questionable figures like Joseph P. Farrell, Alison McDowell, Catherine Austin Fitts, a more and more radicalized Martin Armstrong, and recommending alt-right media sources (Tim Dillon?). Was this the Chaos Magic logic of "belief as a tool" applied to politics? I found all of this development quite disturbing. There was no way to brush anything aside anymore.

There’s really not much regular people can do at this point but arm themselves and try to be economically self sufficient. Every major institution is against you and will let you die.
— Tim Dillon (@TimJDillon) July 14, 2020

I don't remember who said or wrote it. It went along the lines of:

how the Joe Rogan of Occulture suddenly turned into the Alex Jones of Occulture

It's funny but unfortunetely also true...

Anyway, despite the obvious differences in political leaning my post is not (only) about that. It's (mainly) about preaching one thing and then turning around and doing something different while repeating the word "coherence" like a mantra to your disciples. This was not the Rune Soup anymore that I had signed up for years ago.

What Magic is This?

To me personally, despite all the anxieties, the virus pandemic felt somehow deeply spiritual and almost like a global Saturnian purge, with all the horrors and virtues such an idea evokes. Having been a fan of GW's animist "flow model" thinking I was hoping he would address some insightful ideas on viruses as agents, or high level ruminations about this obvious "hyperobject" transversing our reality in 2020, a "virus on a mission", or how we are being reminded by the more-than-human about it's real existence, how we could embrace this time of change to do better magic, for our own healing, the healing of others, about changing the world, about making fucking solarpunk real!

Nothing! Nada! Just antivax rants about Bill Gates and the dangers of 5G! Are you fucking kidding me?

Worst of all, this ongoing right wing conspiracy babble seemed to seep into everything Rune Soup related.....wait...now that I am writing this I have to chuckle. It has become literal Rune Soup: right wing spirituality infested black goo creeping into the brains of some of its Premium Members. Or is it the other way around?

"At this point in the timeline" I cannot but see RSPM as either a gnostic doomsday cult or an alt-right echo chamber, or both.

Yeah there's the nice sounding phrase "Mutual Flourishing" being thrown around lately, but it seems to be either all about becoming gnostic permaculture preppers or using that phrase as marketing for creating a new Leonormand deck, an endeavor he also likes to call a little "sanctuary-making gambit". No marketing is even needed. It's a product already sold. The Premium Members will probably happily pay whatever for it, funding GW's new cult leader lifestyle. How mutual is the flourishing really?

Exiting the Vampire Castle

There is part of me that thinks maybe there is a magical explanation for what's happening with Rune Soup:

Somehow I am not really surprised GW is drifting off. Some of his "tech" has been quite disrespectful towards the spirits he "works" with. He used to jokingly refer to it as "bullying" but that's literally what he has been doing and teaching. It's a typical utilitarian "chaos magic" attitude that might have pissed off quite a few in the more-than-human world.

Also, in Western esoteric systems the spirit world is all about kingship, structures, hierarchies. Maybe when you regularly align yourself with that logic which is unavoidable when following systems of spirit interaction in this tradition, it becomes a habit to "subconsciously" think in those patterns. When you then start to form a hierarchical system in the material world (community, cult), in some sense mirroring the spirit logic, you might get the full attention of certain types of entities and ideas that fuel authoritarian logic even more.

Too far fetched? Too superstitious? Might be an influence, but certainly does not account for the big picture. It feels too systemic and all too human.

"When you squint down at it" RSPM in fact reveals itself as a quite neoliberally operated and marketed conspirituality brand rather than the resilitent animist in-group of operand solarpunk magicians it likes to present itself as... and despite years and years of GW ranting against exactly that: neoliberalism.

In her essay "Comrade" Jodi Dean sharply summarizes the logic of neoliberalism - that uncannily resembles the pattern I experienced around Rune Soup in 2020 and ongoing:

There is individualized self-cultivation, self-management, self-reliance, self-absorption, and—at the same time—impersonal determining processes, circuits, and systems. We have responsible individuals, individuals who are responsibilized, treated as loci of autonomous choices and decisions, and we have individuals encountering situations that are utterly determining and outside their control.

Instead of ethics and economics, neoliberalism’s displacement of politics manifests in the opposition between survivors and systems. The former struggle to persist in conditions of unlivability rather than to seize and transform these conditions. The latter are systems and “hyperobjects” determining us, often aesthetic objects or objects of a future aesthetics, things to view and diagram and predict and perhaps even mourn, but not to affect.

Survivors experience their vulnerability. Some even come to cherish it, to derive their sense of self from being able to survive against all that is stacked against them. [...] For them, the fight to survive is the key feature of an identity imagined as dignified and heroic because it has to produce itself by itself.

If you need more convincing, someone pointed me to this article the other day: Here's what the journalist Matthew Remski wrote in his analysis of the general phenomenon of "conspirituality" on Medium:

As social media becomes dominant, personal branding constellates around the archetype of the singular hero or “thought leader” who changes the world, one post or workshop at a time. But the influencer’s goal is not really social change. It’s “disruption”. Aspirational wellness content that can be spiced up with disruptive “transgression” becomes highly valued in a competitive landscape. This provides the template for the conspiritualist influencer: the solitary hero promising unique and personal salvation for body and spirit in times of crisis.

No, thanks! I am not only done with Rune Soup, I feel like I need a shower to wash it off.

I’m officially parting with RSPM. I’ve been really struggling with the direction of the membership over the past year and took the time to write down the things that didn’t sit well with me. Feel free to read it if you feel called to do so. pic.twitter.com/yUtM5EUfZE
— adam (@madamlehman) January 15, 2021

Fortunately I found out I was not the only one who felt like this. After a public Twitter callout of Gordon's politics by Michael M. Hughes and a less pleasant shitstorm that followed there was a spontaneous initiative started by some disenchanted Soupies to get together to mourn, kvetch, and heal, and to move on and build something new. This initiative has the fitting name The Others. I joined them and I am glad I did. Feels like a new home, warm and welcoming, and full of energy to integrate the present and move into a magical future, to fix Omelas instead of walking away from it.

Postscriptum

I honestly hope this whole mindfuck is just a dark episode of a person having difficulties to cope with the current situation and trying to make sense of the uncertainties. It is very understandable and I empathize. I wish GW the energy and wisdom to get himself back out of this mess, realize and reflect on what he is doing. It is just unfortunate to drag hundreds of paying followers into this. I know it's all voluntary and stuff, yet there's also group dynamics.

If you are a RSPM yourself, and some of the things I wrote resonated with you, feel free to reach out.

If you think I should not have published this but written GW a private email instead: there's nothing to "resolve" here. It's a few years too late for that. Plus, from some friends experiences there doesn't seem to be much acceptance of criticism from his side anyway.

Why publish it in the first place and not just keep it to myself you ask? Because I felt the need to write it down and stand up against it. And not in the shape of a Twitter shitstorm.

If you find my accusations unfair and hyperbolic, my apologies. They come from a hurt place. If you disagree and feel this post is slanderous or just ridiculous, please understand that this is my personal opinion and experience and I tried to express it in the fairest way possible.

If you believe Covid-19 is fake and Bill Gates wants to cull humanity, leave me the fuck alone.

Daimonic Scrabble

2019-05-01T22:00:00+02:00

A confusing article I wanted to get out on Mayday. I will probably elaborate further in the near future

"The bird rights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas." [1]

On Mayday two years ago during a holiday in the French Provence with extended family I had a strange dream in which a scar faced demon gave me three words:

GOD ANKHOR SOLEX

I did not know what to make of it and these words puzzled me for a long time.

The meaning of God was self-evident. I suddenly understood Ankhor ("Horus Lives") during a walk with my daughter two months after. But Solex remained an unsolvable riddle...until exactly two months ago.

I was hanging out in the Charm the Water Discord chat and someone there was trying to figure out the meaning of a word he got in a dream. I was reminded of my aforementioned dream. Aaron suggested to use gematria and I checked the isopsephic (Greek gematria) value of the Greek spelling of SOLEX: ΣΟΛΕΞ.

It is 365!

My mind was blown and a lot of associations rushed through my head. Obviously, 365 days of a solar year, but specifically 365 is also the isopsephic value of one of the most powerful magical names: the seven lettered ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ or ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ! The megas archon and ruler of the 365 spheres of the Gnostic Basilides, the "the power above all, and First Principle" according to Epiphanius.

Many things have been written about Abrasax (I recommend this and that), but the most significant piece I found was by Carl Gustav Jung in his neo-gnostic work "Septem Sermones ad Mortuos":

"Hear Ye: I begin with nothing. Nothing is the same as fullness. In the endless state fullness is the same as emptiness. The Nothing is both empty and full. One may just as well state some other thing about the Nothing, namely that it is white or that it is black or that it exists or that it exists not. That which is endless and eternal has no qualities, because it has all qualities.

The Nothing, or fullness, is called by us the PLEROMA. In it thinking and being cease, because the eternal is without qualities. In it there is no one, for if anyone were, he would be differentiated from the Pleroma and would possess qualities which would distinguish him from the Pleroma." [...]

"There is a God about whom you know nothing, because men have forgotten him. We call him by his name: ABRAXAS. He is less definite than God or Devil. In order to distinguish God from him we call God HELIOS, or the Sun.

Abraxas is activity; nothing can resist him but the unreal, and thus his active being freely unfolds. The unreal is not, and therefore cannot truly resist. Abraxas stands above the sun and above the devil. He is the unlikely likely one, who is powerful in the realm of unreality. If the Pleroma were capable of having a being, Abraxas would be its manifestation." [2]

Abrasax is the all-uniting god, he is above the benevolent god and the malevolent devil, beyond concepts like morality, sin, good, and evil. In a most Jungian psychoanalytical sense he represents the Principium Individuationis, the individuation of a subject in reconciliation with its own shadow.

Hermann Hesse used this neo-Gnostic Jungian image of Abrasax in his coming-of-age (auto-)biography "Demian" where the protagonist Sinclair chases after the meaning of a god named "Abraxas". (This was one of my favourite books as a teenager, but I completely forgot that Abrasax was part of it)

A powerful paragraph in the book that makes this Jungian understanding of the god very clear is the following:

"You consider yourself odd at times, you accuse yourself of taking a road different from most people. You have to unlearn that. Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak, surrender to them, don't ask first whether it's permitted or would please your teachers or father, or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that. That way you will become earthbound, a vegetable. Sinclair, our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world. Abraxas does not take exception to any of your thoughts, any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he will leave you once you've become blameless and normal. Then he will leave you and look for a different vessel in which to brew his thoughts." [1]

I admit, it might seem quite a stretch to claim that SOLEX equals ABRASAX just based on the isopsephic value they share, but let me add a few more pieces of the puzzle. Take the recent synchronicities and adventures following my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter and the fact that the word ANKHOR as "Horus lives" was also significant during another synchro-mystical visit to my hometown.

My ongoing individuation, current readjustment of my relationship to my parents and also my progressing magical journey are all tightly tied together.

In some of the old Gnostic texts Abrasax was seen less as "god above god" but more as a powerful "archon", ranking even below the demiurge Yaldabaoth. Initially the two different concepts seem to contradict each other and are very confusing, but when you try to leave dualistic thinking and rational logic behind and view everything from further above, when you "squint down" onto it - to borrow a Gordonism - from a more irrational, magical "daimonic perspective", these contradictions slowly dissolve and metaphysical borders can get blurry.

Two years ago, when I received the three words, I was confused and I agonized over their meaning. I wanted to know the one real message that was encrypted. After waking from the dream I did not even remember if the second word was ANKHOR or rather ANCHOR, it could even have been ARCHON. Today I do not even want to sharpen the blurriness anymore. Why not take all of them?

It is the same with SOLEX. Yes, it has a strong connection to ABRASAX. But it also contains SOL, the sun; and EX, Latin for "out". But that seems to be precisely why I received SOLEX and not ABRASAX. Because it is "all of the above":

GOD, ANCHOR, ARCHON, HORUS LIVES, SUN OUT, ABRASAX, 365

It was a daimonic message, not a rational one. It makes sense to me now. It is full of Christian, Gnostic, and Egyptian meaning. I can't really explain why in a way it makes sense. It just does. It's beautiful. And it took two years to reach this point. Individuation. Embracing the blurriness.

Happy Beltane!

Ochre Archons

2017-05-12T18:00:00+02:00

My extended family who lives scattered across Germany and partially in France had a holiday gathering in a small medieval town in the Provence last spring. We were 13 people who stayed in a large three floor holiday house with swimming pool and mountain view. We went for hikes and sightseeing trips and had amazing food.

But we had a small poltergeist problem. I was the only one who heard it and of course nobody really believed me. It usually happened in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep. The sound of small feet in sandals or loose leather shoes dragging along the floor and something else being dragged behind, maybe a rope or chain or something like that. I woke up and heard the footsteps right above my head. My wife, daughter and I were sleeping on the ground floor and the room above was part of the livingroom and part of the kitchen.

The first night I didn't think much of it because the house was full of people and someone probably got hungry in the middle of the night. The only weird thing was the dragging sound.

The next morning I asked everyone about it but nobody admitted the nocturnal trip to the kitchen.

The next nights I could hear it again, sometimes just a few steps, at other times it went on for a few minutes and one time I could even hear chairs being moved.

Again, nobody heard anything, nobody did anything. There was a theory that it might be the next door neighbor, but I didn't think so because the sounds clearly came from above.

Oh and we had those occasional power failures where a safety fuse snapped and needed to be switched on again. This happened everyday too. But it was an old house and we had electric heaters that might have pulled too much power. Who knows.

One night I had a vivid dream of which I unfortunately forgot almost everything except a bald demon with a heavily scarred face who gave me three words, spoken and written. With every word the scars on his lips morphed into the shape of the spoken word itself. The words were:

GOD ANCHOR SOLEX

When I woke up I wrote them down immediately but as it is with rapidly fading dream memories sometimes, the words became blurry and I am not sure anymore if the second word was ANCHOR or ANKOR or ARCHON or ARKON.

I have been wondering about this message ever since and what it's supposed to mean.

GOD is quite clear. SOLEX is a famous French motorized bicycle company. Unlikely that it's important. It could also be made up from SOL the sun and LEX the law. Or EX as in "out of". Or backwards for XELOS (ZELOS?). The ARCHON ZELOS? But my brain tells me it was ANCHOR. It is yet to be decyphered. Any hints are highly appreciated.

(the demon looked a bit similar to this face)

Another notable incident from this trip was a hike I did with my baby daughter. I had her strapped onto my chest and I had planned to do a 90min hike around the forest near the village. Unfortunately we got lost in the middle of the forest in an area that consisted of steep hills with canyons and caves made of soft red sand baked together. The ancient Romans had already dug up the sand in this area for producing ochre tints for coloring fabrics. The disorientation did not only add almost another hour to our hike but I also saw strange demonic carvings in some parts of the valleys and even a creepy fetish sculpture with a sheep's skull.

There was also supposed to be an ancient Roman altar somewhere around the village dedicated to Mercury. But I never found it.