SUBLUNAR SPACE - dream

Acid Chthomunism

2026-10-26T08:00:00+01:00

The final part where we emerge out of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. In the second part we pulled the red thread through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor. In the third part we descended into the plague years and came back up with a direction. In the fourth part we dug through the solar empire, hit the ground, and gave it a name. Now it is Tuesday.¹

Enough with the overthinking, let's get our hands dirty...

The Tuesday Problem

Part four ended on a confession: an ontology does not tell you what to do on a Tuesday, the most average day of the week. That's how the thing above likes its days. The Hong Kong based cybernetics philosopher Yuk Hui describes the machinery as "a reduction of the contingent to the most probable", and the contingent itself as "the least probable, or even the improbable".² So here is a working definition for this whole part: a ritual is a small improbable thing, done on purpose, on the most probable day.

Yes, back to rituals! It's a magic blog, remember? During the dungeon crawl I came up with a few of them. Some tested, some not, others are things I already did and reframed. Most of the rites described here can be done as one-offs, but all of them are well suited for repetition. Do them as they suit you. Nothing in this part asks for more than a tired person has on a Tuesday.

Mark Fisher knew the catch: "The reason we feel overwhelmed is that we are overwhelmed."³ Let's not pretend that one person can fix anything. Fisher was clear about that too: "No individuals can change anything, not even themselves." These rites are done alone but never for one. The one doing them is a crowd, and the Morning Roll rite below counts it.

Poet, philosopher, and psychologist Bayo Akomolafe wrote: "Most of us are caught in the habit of thinking of escape as a way towards the sacred."⁴ Which reminds me...before we begin, a few rules:

None of what follows is supposed to be an escape, nor a strike, nor a refusal. A boycott just feeds the thing you boycott. It's just Tuesday and we're going to do something wyrd with it.
None of what follows asks you to believe, join, or buy anything. Despite the PGM-heavy content you won't even need the heart of a hoopoe, a ball of dung rolled by a beetle, or the eye of a corpse that has died a violent death.⁶⁹ I promise.
The rites don't add up to a plan, and they don't pretend to.⁷⁰ They are, as the famous archetypal psychologist James Hillman will tell us in a minute, practiced, but not practical.
The magical tradition has always borrowed shamelessly, and this blog is no exception. But borrowing from living traditions, or from knowledge others paid for with their bodies, demands more care. From the Anishinaabe Honorable Harvest and from Johanna Hedva's general strike of the sick, we borrow only the shape, and say so. The decorations are still our own: circle, name, materia, the dead, "add the usual", but all turned upside down.

Three sections follow, one for each direction these rites point: the way down, the thing above, and the ground below.

The Way Down

The PGM are full of the underworld, but they mostly bully its dead up to the surface. Apart from PDM XII. 21-49, where a sick man speaks as Horus, who "went forth from the necropolis of Wen-nefer",⁵ there is only one spell in the papyri in which the sorcerer speaks of a first person descent into the underworld. You say it at a crossroads, and then you turn around and run, because that is where she appears...⁶

I have been initiated, and I went down into the underground chamber of the Dactyls, and I saw the other things down below, virgin, bitch, and all the rest.⁷¹

That is the whole credential: you have been under, and you came back to tell it. Two more rules before we start.

The first rule is James Hillman's. The guy who wrote the book on the dream and the underworld and then forbid us to use it:

To put the underworld into practice betrays the dream, which is not practical, as we have learned. We go through its exercises, not to become practical, but to become practiced.⁷²

The second rule is a warning from the Sibyl in Virgil's Aeneid. Aeneas asks her about the way down, and she answers:

Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.⁷³

So every rite below ends with a way back. Don't skip it. A descent without a return is how you get ghosts.

I. Season of Dust

It is a kind of mysticism that can only be expressed in the dust of this planet.⁷⁴

(Proceed with caution depending on your level of dust mite allergy)

Pick a surface you normally keep clean (if you do): a shelf, a plate, a window pane. Wipe it clean, snap a photo of it, and tell the people you live with to not touch it. That is the ritual for the next "season": you do nothing. I know some of you will want to wipe it on day seven. Don't!

Dust in homes is composed of about 20–50% dead skin cells.⁷ What about the rest? The artist Dane Mitchell has kept a Dust Archive since 2003 and lists what turns up in it:

from fungi to the bones of animals, bits of modern tire rubber, poisonous lead, long banned pesticides, dangerous molds and bacteria and countless micrograms of human skin."⁷⁵

This is the dust to dust of part four, made visible. Even the things above us are held up by it: a cloud, says theologian Catherine Keller, is billions of droplets and crystals, "each folded around a bit of dust".⁸

While the surface in your home collects dust, you also need to collect dust. Whenever you visit a grave, a ruin, a threshold, any place that fits this series, brush the dust off your shoes into a container, like an envelope or a jar. PGM VII. 478-90 opens a dream request with exactly this: "dirt from your sandal."⁹ One pinch per place, but don't take from a protected or sacred site, or from a grave without asking.

On the last evening, snap the surface again and zoom in. The original spell burns the sandal dirt with resin and a white dove's droppings, as an offering to the Bear. You can do anything between that and passing the container through incense smoke. Say:

Send up to me tonight the daimon of this night, to tell me what the dust knows. I have kept this for a season and I give it back.

Then go to bed on freshly made sheets, the closest you will get to "a newly made bed of rushes." When you wake up and had a dream write it down before you speak to anyone.

Now give the dust back. Scatter it at a doorstep or a gate, or into the soil of a pot, and say:

Dust you are and dust you were. Return.

Wipe the surface once with a damp cloth and rinse the cloth outdoors. The wipe is the way back, as the Sibyl asked. Don't ever expect to win against the dust: "Resistance to decay is both futile and fertile."¹⁰

II. Dead Letter

In ancient Kemet people left letters to the dead in tombs. The Anastasi handbooks are witness to one: a man called Neilammon addresses the daimon of a deceased person as "image of the gods" and says that he knows "the necessity of death which has happened in your case".¹¹ Then he asks for his accusers "be ill for their whole life".

I don't know about your personal curse needs, but let's just try to keep this one nice, shall we? Pick one of your dead, someone you knew or an ancestor you only know by name. Write them a letter by hand, on paper. Say that you know what has happened. Ask to be heard. Tell them what has happened since their time, briefly, like you would tell a random neighbour over the fence. Ask one question and then make a promise: pick something they did, or might have done, a dish, a walk, a phrase, the way they folded a towel (?), and promise to keep doing that exact thing on a regular schedule. Read the letter aloud at the grave, or beside one candle if there is no grave to go to.

Daimon of the dead, [Name], image of the gods: I know what has happened. Hear me, and not them. I will [promise]. Now return to your own place. I thank you.

Then bury it in the earth of the grave or the soil of a plant. Put the promise with a date in your calendar. Then wash your hands, eat something, and on the date in your calendar, do the thing.

Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret, who studies how people mourn, says that a memorial works when it holds "open actual space for ongoing living and working in the face of threatened absence", which she calls commemoration as prolonging actively.¹² The opposite of a monument where the dead stand still is a ritual habit where they keep walking.

III. The Cold

There are two ways down, Hillman says. The night sea journey builds heat inside the hero and brings him back in better shape for the tasks of life. The nekyia, the descent to the dead, takes the soul into a depth for its own sake where it goes "to a zone of utter coldness" and has no return in that sense.¹³

In the morning fill a cup with water and put it in a dark place: the basement, a cupboard, under the sink. PDM xiv. 395-427 calls this water "which the sun cannot find" and uses it for the dead.¹⁴ After dark take the cup outside. Deliberately wear a little less than you need, enough to feel the cold. This is a good season for it. Stand still for 10 whole minutes.

Pour the water out onto the ground for the dead. The old formula hopes for them in refrigerio et in pace, in coolness and in peace.¹³ Then say a real betrayal out loud, in simple words, one you would rather disown:

This water has never seen the sun. I give it to the cold ones. I have betrayed [X]. I do not ask to be forgiven. I stand here.

Hillman: "We can meet Cain, Judas, and Lucifer by being aware of our own desires to be false and to betray."¹³ This is not about excuse, resolution, or forgiveness. The zone of coldness is where things are not made better.

Just stand there until the time has passed. Then go in and warm up. Don't carry the betrayal in as a lesson.

IV. The Zone

The zone is the place you would never go to. This blog has been walking into it since 2019, by quantum geomancy aka. randonauting: you let a random number generator pick a coordinate near you and go there, whatever is there.

Every day is planned from above, by habit and by the map. Yuk Hui's walk to the café for his morning coffee is what Aristotle called automaton, running into the friend who still owes him money is tyche, chance.¹⁵ The random point is a dose of tyche taken on purpose. It comes from below, out of the noise, which anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson called "the only possible source of new patterns".¹⁶

Get a point within walking distance. The original app will do it as well as dice or coin tosses deciding on your next turn. Before you set off, say Leibniz's question out loud: dic cur hic, "Say, why here?" Philosopher Isabelle Stengers turns it into a practice:

Slow down, let yourself be affected by the hic, this situation to which you are about to respond or react in this way.⁷⁶

When you arrive, greet the place before you do anything else. David Abram, with whom this blog has walked before, says that "each land has its own psyche, its own style of sentience".¹⁷ So introduce yourself to it. Name what feeds it: a river, a drain, a road, a bus line. Say how you came. Ask if you may stay.

I came here by chance and on foot. I am [NN]. Whatever feeds you, I greet it. May I stay a while?

Then look for what is off. A hatch, a stain, a void, a path leading nowhere, a smell. In Reza Negarestani's theory-fiction, "every hole in the story indicates a gate".¹⁸ Follow the wrongness down as far as you are allowed, but do not trespass and do not break anything open. And draw no conclusions.¹⁹ You are there to be affected by the place, not to decide what it means.

Before you leave, stamp once on the ground with your foot to send a message downward, to the ones below.²⁰ Say thank you as you stamp. Then ask dic cur hic again, at the edge of the place, and answer it this time. Go home by a different route,²¹ and tell someone what you found.

V. The Day Under

When the pandemic sent everyone home, the artist and astrologer Johanna Hedva pointed out that "the world's ableism has always been a thing, it's just now getting closer to those who normally don't feel it". Take to the streets, as writer and researcher Elisa Adami sums Hedva up, "will always exclude those bodies who are too sick to get out of bed". Their revolution is a different one: "a general strike: stay at home, refuse to work, refuse to go to school, refuse to shop, refuse to pay rent."²² Adami adds in a footnote that "the right to refuse is also based on privilege".²² This rite joins their strike for one day, from a bed we can still leave.

Taken on purpose, a day in bed is a small katabasis: you choose to go down, and you know you will come back up. Down there time stands still. The Greeks avoided the name of the god of that timeless place and called him Plouton, wealth, because it is from there that all gifts emerge.²³

Choose a day, or even better: let the papyri choose it for you. PGM VII. 155-67 is a calendar of the thirty days of the moon, with the hours when divination may be done and a list of days when it may not:

the 3rd, the 6th, the 9th, the 16th, the 17th and the 25th.⁷⁷

Take the next one. Then stay in bed. That is the whole rite.

The hard part is the clock in your head, keeping score the moment you lie down. The dominant reading of any time not spent producing, researcher Alexandre Baril writes, is wasted time, "slow and unproductive and not living up to the norm".²⁴ Refuse this. Do not book the day as a loss, do not make it up, and please do not call it "self-care!"

Open the day with a release formula:

Let every bond be loosed, every force fail, let all iron be broken, every rope or every strap, let every knot, every chain be opened, and let no one compel me, for I am ⁷⁸

If you do the strike on a day you were supposed to be at the office and fear a superior will notice, add this part from PDM xiv. 451-58, seven times:

I am carrying the mummy of Osiris, and I go to take it to Abydos, to take it to Tastai, and to bury it at Alkhah. If he, NN, causes me trouble, I will throw the mummy at him.⁷⁹

The rite ends the next morning, and getting up is part of it: this is the way back the Sibyl asked for. Before you do anything else, put your feet on the ground and say:

I have been initiated, and I went down ... and I saw the other things down below.⁸⁰

The Thing Above

In part two I called capitalism an artificial egregore, run and maintained "by mere humans, powerful but not at all omnipotent, with flaws, holes, and predictable patterns." In part four the same mechanism turned up at every scale, the mere human included: a we that feels its way into an I every morning.

Here is the good news: anything that only exists because someone keeps feeding it has soft spots, and they are always the same three: what it eats, when it feeds, and the moment it pulls at you. The first two rites below target exactly those. The point is not defeat but to stop holding it up. Just don't forget what's holding you up.

Mark Fisher, who had no time for hope, put it like this: "what we need is confidence and the capacity to act."³ That's what these rites are meant to grow, slowly, to change how you stand toward the thing above.

I. Grimoire

A grimoire is mostly a list of habits: what a spirit looks like, what it eats, which hour belongs to it, what sends it away.²⁵ The PGM keeps one for Hermes in a spell for favour and sustenance, which ends with a little olive-wood baboon of the god set up "in the middle of the workshop". It reads like a field guide:

I also know what your forms are: in the east you have the form of an ibis, in the west you have the form of a dog-faced baboon, in the north you have the form of a serpent, and in the south you have the form of a wolf. Your plant is the grape which is the olive.⁸¹

Write one like this for the thing above you. Don't start with capitalism, pick one of its organs, the one whose notifications you answer: the one social platform you're mostly hooked on, or your landlord, employer, the bank.

Its forms: how it looks at work, at home, on the phone, in the news.
What it eats: attention, rent, data, time.
What it promises you in return, and what you were actually after: rest, company, entertainment, safety.
When it feeds: the hour the notifications come. What it fears: the day you did not log in. What sends it away.
Add the name it goes by⁸², "the App", "the Market", "the Public Office".
Then, its true name: the legal entity, the address, the people who own it.⁸³³

PGM LXXIX. 1-7 does this in a single sentence, a charm spoken three times: "I am the soul of darkness, ABRASAX, the eternal one, Michael, but my true name is THOOUTH, THOOUTH."²⁶

If the thing seems to not have a shape at all, simply name what it came out of. A Demotic spell wakes a mummy-spirit by calling it after the primeval waters: "'great image of Nun' is your true name."²⁷

Now read the whole entry aloud once, to the thing itself: to the screen, mailbox, building. Say the true name three times, somewhere it can be heard.

I know your forms. In the morning you are [X], at night you are [Y]. You eat [my hours]. You promise me [rest]. Your hour is [8:15]. You are called [the Platform]. Your true name is [company], owned by [names]. I know you, and now you know that I know.

Keep the page. And ask one thing of the two names: what can you do with the true one that you couldn't do with the first? A name is something you can act on and that's where Fisher's confidence begins.

II. Morning Song

There is a PGM spell for making a place prosper.²⁸ You mould a three-headed statue out of wax, wrap it like Osiris, house it in a little temple of juniper wood at moonrise, and feast with it all night, "singing to him all night long the names written on the strip". Then, every day after: "sing the same spell when you get up in the morning, before you open [your shop or temple]." Read from below, that is part two's argument but written hundreds of years ago: the thing keeps going because somebody sings to it every morning.

Watch your own mornings and find your own "morning song": what's the first thing you do for a thing above, before you have done anything for yourself? The first app, the first swipe, the first message you send. It may be the one from your grimoire. Often it's another one. Who is that first song usually for?

Pick a timeframe, a week or a month, and do not sing it. Do not announce it. A thing that lives on your attention also feeds on your boycott.²⁹ Simply state:

I did not sing to you this morning. You will have to feed yourself.

Keep a record: one stroke for every unsung morning. Note what died because you did not sing, and what survived. What surprised me was how short the list was. YMMV, but I doubt it. More importantly, notice what filled the gap. Old habits rarely leave an empty space for long.

The thing above will still pull at you during the day: the thumb on the app at the bus stop, the reply at eleven at night. For those moments, keep one line by heart, an arrow prayer or word of power, your own. Say it under your breath before you act. It won't stop the pull, but it gives you a moment to breathe and choose what comes next.³⁰

III. The Evening Turn

A cornerstone of the western magical tradition is a timetable: it tells you which planetary days or days of the moon to use and which to leave alone, gives every hour of the day its animal or demon, and sometimes even names a fever by the hour it arrives.

The oldest clock is the sun. A clock is a solar instrument of power. The church has used it since the 14th century, railways and factories since the 19th. And since roughly 2010 it's the thing in your pocket that counts your streak.

At sunset, turn around, look away from the sun. Remember with quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli that "it's not the sun that's moving but the Earth that's spinning", and see "our entire planet, and ourselves with it, rotating backward, away from the sun".³¹ This is the daily exercise: the day did not end because the light left, it ended because the ground you stand on turned its back.

Speak as Geb, the earth, watching his father's solar boat from the ground:

Let me see the bark of Phre, he going up and going down in it, for I am Geb, heir of the gods. I am the opener of earth, who came forth from Geb. Hail!⁸⁴

Stand as the ground at sunset. You are what stays put while the boat goes by. In a reversal of PGM XIII. 824-34³² do the following:

Facing East, away from the setting sun:

Both hands on your head, inhale deeply and for a full outbreath vibrate "Ō", for Saturn. Gather the day's thoughts.
Hand on your heart, inhale deeply and for a full outbreath vibrate "Ü", for Jupiter. What you felt.
Both hands on your stomach, inhale deeply and for a full outbreath vibrate "O", for Mars. What you took in.
Turn and face South, lifting both arms wide, palms up, inhale deeply and for a full outbreath vibrate "I", for the Sun. The day at its full height.
Turn and face West, toward the setting sun, holding both hands out in front of you, palms up, inhale deeply and for a full outbreath vibrate "Ē", for Venus. Offer it to the passing sun.
Turn your palms outward and push gently away from you, inhale deeply and for a full outbreath vibrate "E", for Mercury. Send it on.
Turn and face North, bend over to the earth, touching the ends of your toes, inhale deeply and for a full outbreath vibrate "A", for the Moon. Stay there. Set it down.

Then come up slowly and say, with Horace, Today I have lived.³³ Then sing something, anything. A held vowel or hummed melody will do, too. A song, Augustine noticed, is how we know time at all. Rovelli goes further and says it is time.³⁴

When your song is over, do what the sorcerer does when the gods rush in: put a finger to your lips and say "Silence! Silence! Silence!"³⁵ The silence after the song is where the day completes. A day closed this way is a finished occasion. It does not roll over into tomorrow's count.

Some traditions never let the sun start the day. "There was evening and there was morning, one day", says Genesis, and the Jewish day begins when the sun has gone. Athens counted from sunset to sunset, and the Gauls counted nights, not days.³⁶ The day begins in the dark, underneath. What you just did is both the end of a day and the first act of the next.

The Ground Below

PGM VII. contains a page of "table gimmicks" for a host who wants to show off: eggs that look like apples, a trick to stop the cook lighting the stove, and this one: "To make bronzeware look like it's made of gold: Mix native sulfur with chalky soil and wipe it off."³⁷ With a straight face, Betz's footnote crowns it as the moment that "shows the beginnings of alchemy". The old alchemists would have caught it with a drop of acid. Isabelle Stengers: "gold is what resists all acids, with the exception, since the eighteenth century, of aqua regia." That is where the acid test gets its name from.³⁸

This section works the other way round: on what yields. Put a bit of chalk or limestone in a saucer and pour some vinegar over it. It fizzes. Limestone is made of shells and skeletons, and that is the lives it began with, going back into the air. This is the acid in the sense part four uses it.

I. Morning Roll

So far we talked about the thing above, out there. Now let's turn it around. Part four found that you are an egregore too: a we "of cells, microbes and perished moments. The French Martinist Robert Ambelain wrote that whoever joins an egregore "becomes one of its constitutive cells".³⁹ Turn that around: to the crowd below you, you are the thing above.

If you cut the wing off a fruit fly, keep it in the dark, it will go on glowing to a 24h beat for days, with no brain to tell it to.⁴⁰ Your liver has its own clock, so do your pancreas and your muscles, and the gazillions of bacteria in your gut change shifts while you sleep: you go to bed with a whole civilization and wake up with another.⁴¹ None of these clocks are synced to the dial on the wall or the stars in the sky. They only read: food.⁴²

Begin before the first bite and the first word. The magical papyri wrap a working in two silences: you rise and speak to no one until you have said your piece, and you go to sleep "without speaking to anyone".⁴³ The Mithras Liturgy, which this blog has worked with before, opens with a greeting to the operator's own composition:

Spirit of the spirit, fire in the fire of me ĒYĒIAEĒ; Water of the water in me, O O O A A A E E E; First earthly essence of the earthly essence in me, YĒYŌĒ; Perfect Body of me.⁸⁵

Then greet the rest of your company. Not your literal organs but constituencies: the microbes in your gut, the cells that died in the night, the dead whose words will come out of your mouth today, the hours that have already perished into you, the places you stood, the stone of the walls around you, which, if it is limestone, "begins with lives over".⁴⁴ Donna Haraway's favourite example of a body is a microbe in the gut of an Australian termite, Mixotricha paradoxa, which "is not one, not five, not several hundred thousand, but a poster critter for holobionts."⁴⁵ The same counts for you.

A broken Coptic litany has the grammar for it: "I am Kat son of Kat, whom Kat has borne... I am the [breath] of night."⁴⁶ There the speaker claims to be a god. Here the same grammar names what holds you up from below, so that your name comes at the end:

I am the ground, whom the dead have borne. I am the gut, whom the ground has borne. I am the dead, whom the living have borne. I am today, whom yesterday has borne. And my name is [NN]. 'Hearing' is my name; 'hearing' is my correct name.⁸⁶

Let the first bite open the day and the last bite close it. Everything after the last bite belongs to the night, and the night belongs to the cells, who use the fast to take out the trash, digesting their own damaged parts and recycling them,⁴⁷ the dust to dust of part four. When the body asks for sleep in the afternoon, give in to it.⁴⁸ An hour was a season before it was a 24th of a day: the Greek Horai, the Hours, were goddesses of budding and ripening, dancing in a circle.⁴⁹ And when you sleep, the crowd takes the night shift. "Sleepers are workers," says Heraclitus.⁵⁰

II. The Shrinking Word

Among the PGM amulets there is one that is just a Greek word for a throat complaint, written out fourteen times, losing its first letter on every line, "cutting the uvula / utting the uvula / tting the uvula", down to "la", down to "a".⁵¹ The illness is eaten away letter by letter on the page until perishes.

Write the name of something you are done with at the top of a sheet of paper. Not a person. The Letter already says what we do with those. On the line below, write it again one letter shorter. Keep going until one letter is left, and then write the empty line. Now take the page to a compost heap, if you have one, or a plant pot, or a patch of ground, and bury it. Don't just tear up the paper or burn it. The heap matters. Say:

[Word]. [Wor]. [Wo]. [W]. Take it apart. Give it to whoever can use it.

Heraclitus, dying of dropsy, is supposed to have buried himself in a cowshed in the hope "that the noxious damp humour would be drawn out of him by the warmth of the manure".⁵² It didn't work for him, but he had the direction right: it's the heat of a crowd at work, and whatever you put into it is taken apart by many hands and handed on. Donna Haraway: "I compost my soul in this hot pile."⁵³

One optional addition, from Stengers. "To unmake is a rather easy undertaking", she says, and unmaking "may even remain blind" to what it destroys; to regenerate, on the other hand, is slow, "step by step".⁵⁴ So instead of leaving the hole empty, put a seed in. The word will be gone when the plant comes up.

III. The Sealed Jar

I recently started to keep water kefir. If you have never seen it: a jar of sugar water on the kitchen counter with a cloth over it, and at the bottom a handful of rubbery grains that look like wet, translucent gravel. Every two days you strain the liquid off, bottle it with ground up fruits (I prefer pears and candied ginger flakes), seal it and then feed the grains fresh sugar water.

The grains are neither plant nor animal. They are a settlement: lactic acid bacteria, acetic acid bacteria and yeasts, living together inside a polysaccharide they build themselves.⁵⁵ You cannot make them. Every grain in every jar on earth came out of somebody else's jar, and when yours multiply (they will) you give the surplus away, or put it on the heap. A holobiont you can hold in a spoon.

Any ferment you can keep alive in your kitchen will do for this rite, and they come in two families. The inherited ones, which you can only receive: water kefir, milk kefir, kombucha and its honey-and-green-tea cousin jun, or a sourdough starter, a vinegar mother, an heirloom yogurt. And the wild ones, caught from the vegetables and the air: sauerkraut, kimchi, brine pickles, a ginger bug, bread kvass. The first family carries the lesson of the jar: a culture is a gift. The second carries the Zone's: what comes up uninvited from below, out of the noise. The PGM's one fermentation recipe is a wild one: Before a lamp divination you put fresh bean flowers in a glass bowl and "seal its mouth with clay very well for twenty days in a hidden, dark place", and what you find when you open it is used for seeing.⁵⁶

So keep one. Feed it on a schedule, and notice that this is a morning song that feeds you back. If you opt for water kefir, note how much its taste varies after every strain. Sour, sweet, flat, fizzy: it will be different every time, because the weather changes. Acknowledge your taste sense as Stengers means it, as "discerning between what nourishes us and what poisons us".⁵⁷ Leave the bottled batch for two more days. This second ferment is the sealed vessel. Open it over the sink, because a sealed ferment that nobody burps goes off like a grenade. A very sticky one. Ask me how I know.

Now drink it, and name the hour. PGM VII. 643-51 is a spell said over a cup seven times that ends by naming the moment the wine goes down "into the guts" of the one who drinks it.⁵⁸ Most of what you swallow passes through as a guest.

At whatever hour you go down into the guts, go down as a guest. I was given you. I pass you on.

IV. Ground That Isn't Yours

In part four I wrote we would come back to "Soil ≠ territory". Here we are:

Adopt a patch of ground you do not own and cannot own. The tree pit on your street, the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road, the corner of a shared yard that nobody has claimed. Visit it regularly. Learn what already grows there before you add anything. This is how I found most of my mugwort and motherwort when I still lived in Berlin. When you take something (a leaf, a seed, a cutting) do what the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi Nation, calls the Honorable Harvest: "Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first." Never take more than half, and give something back.⁵⁹ When you plant, plant what the patch did not ask for and see what it does with it. Stengers' weeds are the model here:

What we hold against so-called weeds is their capacity to transform the damage wrought by human intervention into opportunity.⁸⁷

The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris (PGM IV.) starts its grandest initiation on exactly this kind of ground. The magician is sent "to a place from which the Nile has recently receded, before anyone walks on the area that was flooded"⁶⁰

PGM IV. 286-95 clarifies to not pick a plant without telling it why. The spell also compells the plant that the earth which bore it "will no longer be watered" if it does not do the requested work for the magician.⁶¹ Turn the threat round. Promise to water it.

I am picking you, such and such a plant, with my five-fingered hand, I, [NN], and I am bringing you home and I will water the ground that bore you. This ground is not mine. I am a regular visitor.

If your back aches afterwards, rub it "with earth and vinegar" and say the Name three times.⁶² It will probably not fix your back but it will remind you of this whole section in one line: dirt, and something sour.

You Are Not Plastic

Everything so far has yielded: the word, the sugar, the ground. Before we go back up, one more thing that won't yield. And it ain't gold. Somewhere in the room you are in is at least one piece of plastic that will outlast you: a bottle, a comb, your phone case, the non-stick coating on your frying pan. Plastic is oil, and "Fossil fuels are the planetary archive of putrification and cumulative decrepitude", as Benjamin Bratton puts it. "Oil is Meat."⁶³ It is the oldest dead in the house and no acid will ever touch it. Some of what it is made of is "known as 'forever chemicals' for their highly persistent nature".⁶⁴

Over a little olive oil PGM LXI. 1-38 says: "You are the olive oil; you are not the olive oil but the sweat of Good Daimon, the mucus of Isis, the utterance of Helios, the power of Osiris, the favor of the gods."⁶⁵ This ladder up to the gods needs to be read from below. It's a list of everything the oil has gathered into itself, and the gods are what the oil is made of. So pick the thing up once and say what it is made of. Then put it back and keep using it until it breaks. Stop pretending that you and it are made of different dead.

You are plastic; you are not plastic but plankton, ferns, a seabed, the hands that made you. You will outlast me. I know what you are.

From Underneath

We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify us.⁸⁸

The Sibyl's rule still stands: the way back up is the labour. So let's climb, and count what we are carrying. In part three I said that nobody should return from a katabasis empty-handed, and two parts later our hands are actually dirty. Praxis. Or rather: Process.

The title of this part is the clunky placeholder of the fancier term Hypogearchy and it is here for the last time, as a headstone. None of these words are needed. Bury them with the paper. The Daodejing has the better line about what is actually down there: "It is capable of being the mother of the universe; I do not know its name."⁶⁶

Beatrice Searle, a stonemason, wrote of her own trade that "a cathedral mason has chosen to defend the cathedral, but not to honour the stones. [...] Stones do not endure. They do not resist. They succumb. They yield."⁶⁷ That's the whole series in two sentences. The solar empire of part four is the cathedral, and we are its stones, kept in check by masons. Left alone, stones don't hold anything up for long. They yield to acid. Every rite in this part deliberately exposes us to that acid, letting it dissolve us a little and return us to circulation, just as it does everything else. "To be truly terrestrial", Reza Negarestani says, "is not the same as being superficial."⁶⁸

In part two I asked for "more haunted and numinous modes of endurance". Here is what I meant, now that I can say it. Endurance has nothing to do with not yielding. The stone yields and is still here. So are we, and we are not alone in it: a self assembled from below is haunted by construction: the dead, the microbes, the hours, the places. That is the haunted part. The numinous part is that none of them terrify us.

Cover photo by James St. John, Attribution 2.0 Generic license ↩
Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019, ch. 4, §36, "Tertiary Protention and Preemption". ↩
Mark Fisher, Abandon hope (summer is coming), k-punk, May 12, 2015. ↩↩↩
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on Slowing Down in Urgent Times, Atmos ↩
PDM XII. 21-49. ↩
All PGM and PDM references in this part are to Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1992. ↩
van Bronswijk, J. E. M. H. (1981). House Dust Biology for Allergists, Acarologists and Mycologists. J. Bronswijk. ↩
Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement, Columbia University Press, 2015, ch. 1, "The Dark Nuance of Beginning". ↩
PGM VII. 478-90, PGM IV. 1323-30. ↩
Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker (eds.), Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, punctum books, 2012. ↩
PGM LI. 1-27 ↩
Vinciane Despret, as reported in Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press, 2016, ch. 7 ↩
Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, ch. 6, "Ice" ↩↩↩
PDM xiv. 395-427 ↩
Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019, Introduction, §3, "Contingency and Finality": "Even when I walk out of my house this morning, as is my routine, I will go to the épicerie next to my house for a coffee before starting writing, or I may see a friend who owes me money from a long time ago and suggest he return his debt. Aristotle calls the first case automaton, often rendered automatic; the second case tyche, meaning chance or luck." ↩
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 416 ↩
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Pantheon, 2010 ↩
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, re.press, 2008 ↩
Bratton, "Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia", in Leper Creativity. ↩
PDM Suppl. 117-30 ↩
The Romans had a god for turning back, Rediculus, from redire, to return. Festus ties his name to Hannibal, who turned back from the gates of Rome in 211 BCE; his temple stood outside the Porta Capena, and "travelers leaving the city would pray at the temple before embarking on the Appian Way." Pliny the Elder (Natural History X.60) has a talking crow buried in the field of Rediculus beside that road. See Wikipedia: Rediculus. Beatrice Searle adds that "the offerings he liked best of all were carved footprints" (Stone Will Answer, ch. 14), but gives no source for it. ↩
Elisa Adami, "The Underlying", 2020, p. 134, after Johanna Hedva, "Sick Woman Theory" (2016) and "Get Well Soon!" (2020). ↩↩
LD Deutsch, Time, Myth and Matter, Sacred Bones Books, 2024, "Pluto and the Mythic Dimension" ↩
Alexandre Baril, "'Doctor, am I an Anglophone trapped in a Francophone body?' An intersectional analysis of 'trans-crip-t time'", Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 10.2, 2016; summarised in Karin Ljuslinder, Katie Ellis and Lotta Vikström, "Cripping Time", Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 22.1, 2020, p. 36. ↩
PDM xiv. 62-92 ↩
PGM LXXIX. 1-7; the same text in PGM LXXX. 1-5. ↩
PDM Suppl. 40-60 ↩
PGM IV. 3125-71 ↩
Yuk Hui puts it in systems terms: sabotage "will never do any harm to the system since it is only a contingent event for ameliorating the system". His way out is not to stop but to build something else. Even Gilles Grelet, who preaches total refusal, concedes that "the world absorbs that which breaks with it. Absorbs it: not just annulling it but feeding on it, using it to eternalise itself" (Theory of the Solitary Sailor, Urbanomic, [0.2]). Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019, ch. 5, §42. ↩
Yuk Hui: the machine "has already anticipated what the options will be: In this case, freedom means choice. This precisely means that it is a reduction of the contingent to the most probable. The contingent is possible, but it is not the most or highly probable. The contingent is the least probable, or even the improbable." Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, ch. 4, §36. ↩
Rovelli, Part I, ch. 1, "Loss of Unity". ↩
PGM XIII. 824-34, from the "Eighth Book of Moses". In the papyrus the speaker turns east, north, west, south, then to the earth, the air and the sky, saying the seven vowels, and ends with both hands on the head. Read as the tones of the seven planets (the Theoria post quotes the tones of the seven spheres as the source of the vowels' names), in the usual Hellenistic order from the Moon to Saturn, the papyrus ascends the planetary scale. Three things are encoded in the reversal, and none of them is tied to the others. The vowels run down that scale, from Saturn to the Moon. The turning follows the sun's day, clockwise: East for dawn, South for noon, West for dusk, North for night, with the Sun's own vowel falling at noon. The hands give the day away: gather, lift, offer, send, set down. You end bowed to the ground, facing North, where the sun is at night, and where the axis stands that the whole sky turns around, the sun included, like everything else. Five of the gestures (hands on the head, on the heart, on the stomach, held forward, and the bend to the toes) come from the papyrus; the raised arms and the push away are this essay's. ↩
Horace, Odes III, 29; epigraph to Rovelli, Part III, ch. 12. ↩
Rovelli, "The Sister of Sleep", after Augustine, Confessions XI. ↩
PGM IV. 475-829 (ll. 556-85) ↩
Genesis 1:5. In the Jewish count the day runs from sunset or nightfall, and Shabbat begins on Friday at sunset. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2.77, says the Athenians reckoned from sunset to sunset and the Babylonians from sunrise to sunrise. Caesar, Gallic War 6.18, says the Gauls reckon time by nights, and Tacitus, Germania 11, says of the Germans that night seems to lead the day. In the Islamic count the day also begins at sunset, and the months begin with the crescent seen after sunset. ↩
PGM VII. 167-86 ↩
Isabelle Stengers, Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse, trans. Thomas Lamarre, University of Minnesota Press, 2023, ch. 4, p. 116. ↩
Robert Ambelain, La Kabbale pratique (1951), quoted in Mark Stavish, Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny, Inner Traditions, 2018, ch. 3. ↩
Panda, Satchin. The Circadian Code. Rodale, 2018, ch. 2, "Every Organ Has Its Own Clock" ↩
Panda, ch. 9, "The Gut Microbiome Is Circadian". ↩
Panda, ch. 3, "Your First Bite/Sip of the Day". ↩
PGM XXII b. 32-35, PDM xiv. 117-49, PGM VII. 619-27 ↩
Beatrice Searle, Stone Will Answer, Harvill Secker, 2023, ch. 4. ↩
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016, ch. 3, "Sympoiesis". ↩
PGM III. 633-731 ↩
Panda, ch. 11, on autophagy peaking several hours after the last meal. ↩
Panda, ch. 4, sidebar on napping. ↩
Deutsch, Time, Myth and Matter, "Myth + Models of Time & Timelessness" ↩
Heraclitus, fragment B75, quoted in James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, Harper & Row, 1979. ↩
PGM CXX. 1-13; Also PGM XVIIIb, XXXIX, LXXXVIII. ↩
Diogenes Laertius IX.3, quoted in Paul Bishop, Terence Dawson and Leslie Gardner (eds.), The Descent of the Soul and the Archaic: Katábasis and Depth Psychology, Routledge, 2023, ch. 2, p. 35. ↩
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016, ch. 2. ↩
Stengers, Making Sense in Common, p. 179. ↩
Laureys and De Vuyst, "Microbial species diversity, community dynamics, and metabolite kinetics of water kefir fermentation", Applied and Environmental Microbiology 80.8 (2014); Gulitz et al., "The microbial diversity of water kefir", International Journal of Food Microbiology 151 (2011). ↩
PDM xiv. 140-46 (cf. 829-34) ↩
Stengers, Making Sense in Common, p. 154. ↩
PGM VII. 643-51. ↩
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013, "The Honorable Harvest", p. 183. The guidelines in full, which she says "are not written down, or even consistently spoken of as a whole": "Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever." ↩
PGM IV. 26-51. ↩
PGM IV. 286-95. ↩
PGM XIII. 244-47. ↩
Benjamin H. Bratton, "Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia", in Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker (eds.), Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, punctum books, 2012. ↩
Jemma Woolmore, These Relations Are Forever, MFA thesis, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2024, pp. 11-15, on PFAS. ↩
PGM LXI. 1-38 (= PDM lxi. 159-96); Also PGM VII. 643-51, XXXVI. 333-60. ↩
Daodejing, ch. 25, in Hyo-Dong Lee, Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude: A Comparative Theology for the Democracy of Creation, Fordham University Press, 2013, p. 46. ↩
Beatrice Searle, Stone Will Answer: A Journey Guided by Craft, Myth and Geology, Harvill Secker, 2023, ch. 6. The elided sentence: "Because a cathedral demands that the stones endure." ↩
Negarestani, quoted in Robin Mackay, "A Brief History of Geotrauma", in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, punctum books, 2012. ↩
PGM II. 1-64, PGM I. 222-31, PGM I. 247-62, PGM VII. 628-42 ↩
"'just putting it out there into the universe' that the accumulation of apps, horizontal care networks, trickster hacks, and workarounds, or the emergent intelligence of ethical tech, local communities, transitional delinking, or very intense acts of subjective expression will add up to a better outcome is not a serious position but rather a sign of beleaguered melancholia." Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, Verso, 2021, ch. 19, "For Planetary Competency". ↩
PGM LXX. 4-25 ↩
Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. Harper & Row, 1979, ch. 6, "Praxis". ↩
Virgil, Aeneid VI.126-29, translated by John Dryden (1697), Project Gutenberg ↩
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1, Zero Books, 2011, the last sentence of the book. ↩
Laird, "The 'Us' in Dust", n. 37, on Dane Mitchell's Dust Archive, begun in 2003. ↩
Isabelle Stengers, Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse, trans. Thomas Lamarre, University of Minnesota Press, 2023, ch. 3, "Dare to Speculate", p. 72. ↩
PGM VII. 155-67, cf. VII. 272-83 ↩
PGM XIII. 288-96 ↩
PDM xiv. 451-58 ↩
PGM LXX. 4-25 ↩
PGM VIII. 1-63 ↩
Naming the thing above is also unnaming it. Catherine Keller, on how new names work: "by a recurrent unnaming of a prior name." Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, Columbia University Press, 2015, ch. 1. ↩
Thacker, "Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans", in Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker (eds.), Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, punctum books, 2012. ↩
PDM xiv. 805-16 (cf. 295-308) ↩
PGM IV. 475-829, the "Mithras Liturgy", first prayer. Evola, Julius, and Ur Group. Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus. Simon and Schuster, 2018. ↩
PDM xiv. 1163-79 ↩
Stengers, Making Sense in Common, p. 124. ↩
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997, the end of "The Open Boat"; also the epigraph to "Before" in Keller, Cloud of the Impossible. ↩
Panda, ch. 3, "When (and How) You Wake Up Is the Most Important Event of the Day". ↩

Restless Liburnian Spirits

2020-08-21T21:00:00+02:00

On the Croatian island of Pag, four years ago today was my serpent dream that I often refer to as my "switch" event that broke my materialist mindset. Retrospectively I have to admit it already had started a bit before that, but nevertheless it is safe to say that this day played a central role in my magical coming of age.

In summary it was a nightmare turned lucid, a dream nested within a dream, with a fuzzy threshold to wake reality, out-of-body elements and most importantly it had a meaningful symbolic climax: I was shown a shield emblazoned with a vivid red serpent on fire, staring at me.

This serpent has haunted me for weeks and inspired many in-depth research rabbit holes into at that point rather unknown fields of occult knowledge. I started practicing kundalini yoga, meditation, got eventually hooked on the western esoteric traditions and especially their Helleno-Kemetic sources.

On this same day a year later I found myself standing on the highest mountain of the island of Pag, reciting my first Headless Rite, Greek hymns to Agathosdaimon and invoking the Four Kings and initiating myself from freshman armchair magician to fully operand sorcerer.

Fast forward yet another year, again on Pag, I obsessively hunted down the remains of an altar in honor of the local pagan serpentine goddess Heia, syncretized with the Roman goddess Bona Dea.

My job at a local electronic music festival reoccurred annually, so last year at the same time I was also on Pag. I celebrated my magical anniversary and revisited some of my favorite places, but most importantly I made real-life contact with a woman who used to work at the local archeological museum. I had already emailed her the year before, asking for help in my research on the altar.

I visited her in her garden and she was happy to give me a lot of hints what other interesting places to visit on the island. Unfortunately it was the second last day of my stay so I only managed to visit one of them: a newly discovered ruin of a church on a nearby hill.

After I had left Pag we stayed in touch and things got a bit weird. She turned out to be a spiritually minded, magically interested and quirky witch type lady with shadow people and ghost encounters and I felt comfortable enough to disclose my whole magical journey that was so intimately connected to this island. She seemed genuinely excited about it and had some very interesting things to say about the house I had had my serpent dream at three years before:

Several years ago the owner of the house, who runs a construction company, took a few fine stone ornaments from a wall next to the smaller church here in town. The entire square was an enormous basilica with water well, inside walls and so on. Behind the church a famous reliqary from the 4th century was found and some other precious and rare findings. On the right of the basilica there was a graveyard. Now, there were some wild building interventions around those walls and this guy took away some tombstones!! I remember wanting those stones here in our museum but he secretly took them away in the dark of the night and under protection of our local sheriff mayor so I couldn't do anything but alert the Conservation institute. But they also didn't do anything.

This blew my mind. The construction tycoon had stolen sacred stone ornaments from a graveyard and used them to decorate the house he rented out to tourists and in which I stayed every year. The same house I woke up in when I had my weird dream!

One of the main features of the local archeological museum is the entrance to an underground Roman acqueduct entirely carved in stone by hand and over 1 kilometer long with an average width of 60 centimeters. The lady had another story to share that stuck with me:

I used to close the museum and go into the aqueduct as far as I could. The air begins to get fouler the deeper you go inside. It was always interesting to go forward but getting back was kind of creepy. It alway felt as if a Roman cohort was breathing down my neck!

It inspired me to think that maybe the football-armored zombies from my dream might actually have been Roman soldiers misinterpreted by my subconscious.

Anyway, Pag is surely haunted. I am sad that due to the Corona restrictions my annually recurring job got cancelled for this year. This is the first in seven years I can't be there. It would have been nice to celebrate my magical anniversary and to catch up with my new friend and listen to some more of her stories. Coincidentally (or not) she wrote me this week inviting me and my family to come visit, but unfortunately that collides with our plans for this year.

So visiting an ancient and enchanted olive grove from antiquity and hearing the story about the local priest with stigmata who could bilocate will have to wait until some other day.

I will be back for sure. Maybe next year? Just the gods know.

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!

Nematodal Nightmares

2018-10-28T12:30:00+01:00

I stumbled over a note in my favorite writing tool the other day. It is a report on a dream I had around February or March of this year. It was the second weirdest dream experience I've ever head besides the one that started my path of re-enchantment. What struck me now was that in retrospect it has some elements in it that could almost have been pre-cognitive. I am sticking with 'almost' because they are also quite 'archetypical' nightmarish themes.

Anyways, if you are like me and find it boring and meaningless to listen to other people's dream reports, stop right here. If you are into stories of semi-lucid dreams with sleep paralysis and where the borders to the awake state dissolve in an uncanny way, read on.

I am sitting at a kitchen table in some place, looking at my phone. It looks like an old 90s phone with greenish LCD display, but it has smartphone features. I realize that whatever I look at on the phone disappears. The letters of text disappear one by one. Suddenly I receive a text message with a threat. I don't recall what it said. I am checking the phone's task manager that shows me all open apps. There is an unknown task I cannot remove.

On the kitchen table in front of me I suddenly see disgusting worms appear whose skin is so transparent that you can see the red blood inside of them. I kill one of them with my hand. I kill several of them, anxious and disgusted.

I receive a text message telling me how many worms I have killed and the question why not dare try to get rid of all of them? Checking the task manager again I notice that the annoyingly persistent app is called "NematOne".

I am in a larger room with my family. My cat starts behaving weirdly and is very aggressive. The room feels strange as if something evil is present. My wife T. also behaves strangely and her voice is different than usual. I ask her if she feels like she is getting possessed or losing control. She looks at me, nodding and saying "yes".

I want to do the headless rite but I realize I forgot all the words. Instead I imagine having the "voice of god" and I put all my energy into this intention and start yelling "Dybbuk Tse!" (Hebrew exorcism "!דִבּוּק צא" for "Evil spirit go out!") with a roaring and echoing voice and it seems to have an effect. I continue doing it with more and more effort and the evil presence seems to retreat.

I ask T. if it helped but she says she doesn't think so, "because of the black matter at the ceiling". I look up and there is a lump of what looks like a nest made of black spiderwebs on the ceiling, oozing a black substance.

I freak out and my dream becomes lucid and I instantly notice that this place does not look at all like our apartment and that we should leave A.S.A.P! There's one of the creepy worms on the floor. It scares me and suddenly it turns into a mouse that runs off. Did I do this? The cat immediately chases after the mouse.

The room turned into an unusually long hallway which we are walking through. There are a lot of doors on both sides and we are heading towards the exit all the way at the end of it. Hearing a strange buzzing sound from behind I turn around and see a black mantis or locust like insect jumping and flying towards me. It lands on the floor right next to me and I call the cat to take care of it. The creature takes another leap into the direction to which we are trying to walk, trying to outrun us but the cat is after it.

I enter a room through one of the doors on the right side of the hallway and it's the bathroom in the house I grew up in. My daughter E. is standing in the shower and her skin is rainbow colored and she has a really evil look on her face. It completely freaks me out and I think this dream is too weird and I want to wake up.

I open my eyes, but I am completely paralyzed and I feel that something pulls me back into the dream. I panic and try harder to wake up. I open my eyes again, I can even see the light coming through the window curtains in our bedroom and I can feel my head resting on the pillow, but I have the sensation of being very forcefully pulled down from behind towards the mattress. Completely unable to resist it I drop back into the dream.

I am in the hallway again. I tell T. that we need to get out of here but that I am unable to wake up. I try to open my eyes again, but the pull is still there.

T. is there in the hallway with our daughter who now looks normal, but the feeling of evil in the room is still present. T. asks me "what is her birthday?". I reply "what? why?". She says "if you remember her birthday, it means you are not dreaming". I try to remember her birthday. Numbers get all juggled up in my head and I can't grasp any date in my mind. It seems to slip away. I manage to concentrate very hard. Slowly and with a lot of effort digits appear and fall into place. I got it!

I open my eyes and I can still feel the pull, but I am forcing myself to move, to roll over, to really wake up. It seems to work. Still feeling unusually numb I am finally awake, my daughter's birthday clearly in my mind.

I dared to use the term 'precognitive' in my introduction because of the feeling of being in a semi-familiar place that is not home and an evil presence that haunts it. Exactly like the story of our recent move to a new home that was haunted by a "poltergeist". Also the presence of the worms reminded me of a recent ongoing issue that our daughter was suffering from a parasitic nematode infection for a few weeks which always gave me the creeps thinking about it.

Ankhor

2017-07-30T18:00:00+02:00

I walked home from the pediatrician with my daughter today and I had a sudden realization.

In the face of the feverish headless Horus vision from last week one of the words of the scarred French demon from my other dream suddenly falls into place: it wasn't ARCHON or ANCHOR.

It must have been ANKHOR, ANKH HOR, ˁnḫ ḥr, ancient Egyptian for "Horus Lives"

(A quick online search revealed that there even was a person of that name

Opus Apus

2017-07-26T18:00:00+02:00

I was visiting my parents over the weekend in my hometown together with my wife and daughter for my mom's birthday. We spent the afternoon doing a picnic at a beautiful green clearing on one of the foresty hills just out of town and had an extended dinner out on the terrace at my parents house. Right after dinner my dad got stung into his upper lip by a wasp while taking a sip of his wine. It was the first time in the 74 years of his life that he got stung by an insect. But this was just the beginning of weirdness to come.

The next morning dad asked me to come to the street in front of the house with him. He found a bird in the middle of the road that looked hurt and he didn't know what to do with it. It was quite small, a bit larger than a sparrow and with a tiny hooked beak like of an owl. I gently took the animal with a paper towel and brought it to our back yard for further investigation. According to its beak shape, feather color and surprisingly short legs it was a young swift (apus apus). I called an animal rescue number and did a bit of online research and found out that swifts are a type of bird of prey that spends most of its life in the air - up to ten months straight. Their legs are too short for them to be able to easily take off from the ground. Dad kept telling me to put it back to the street "because it will die anyway" which I refused to do and I waited for my sister to arrive and fed some water to the poor bird.

After some more phone-calls to vets by my sister (it was Sunday and no animal shelter was open) and attempts to feed it some flies and more water we put the swift into a cardboard box and put it in a dark and quiet place. My sister had arranged to bring it to some "lady specialized in caring for wild birds" in the evening.

In the early afternoon we all went for a walk into the forest up on the hill in walking distance from where my parents live. I felt oddly anxious when we left the house and my skin felt weirdly sensitive but i didn't worry too much about it. We reached the top of the hill where the forest opens up to beautiful farmland with a few grazing cows and ancient apple and pear trees. I had instant memories of feeding white horses with clover and fruits as a child. We walked past a group of young cows and a beautiful bull with a ring through his nose. I had never noticed cows can be so beautiful.

As we started heading back downhill I started to feel weak and lightheaded and I had to sit down several times to not faint. I told the others I needed a moment alone and they continued walking home. I sat on a bench next to the footpath and closed my eyes. The sound of wind rustling the leaves in the trees was quite meditative and I felt like my head wad humming from the inside and I became a bit dizzy. I slowly walked back home thinking that I'd need to do something about my blood pressure.

At home I had a coffee and a piece of cake and felt slightly better until a sudden very heavy tiredness overcame me and forced me to lie down. That's when I felt the fever taking over.

In a half awake and half asleep state, feeling hot blood pumping through my head the nightmarish visions crept in from the edges. Scenes of a medieval dungeon that seemed too familiar.

As a child around seven or eight years old I remember I watched a TV show that had caught my attention randomly zapping around after school. It was a story in a medieval setting told from the point of view of a prisoner in a dungeon. He gets visited by a guard handing him food and another time by a priest praying with him. He is being told that he will be picked up at six o'clock. In the last scene the church bells toll six and the narrator is being dragged through the dungeon hallway into the open where an executioner with an axe is waiting on a scaffold. Screaming and fighting he is beimg decapitated — all shown from his point of view.

I was terrified by what I had watched and quite traumatised. For a quite long time (years?) I had an irrational fear of "six o'clock" to a point where I didn't want to go to bed or be awake or wake up around that time. Fortunately this obsessive anxiety faded in my early teens. I never thought about it again for decades until now…

…lying in bed, shaken by waves of fever, I had a vision of this last scene from my childhood nightmare. I was being dragged through the same hallway and half awake I heard the church bells through the window toll six o'clock for real and I was in a raging fear. I cringed, sweating in my bed as I was dragged up to the scaffold where the executioner was waiting. My visions slowed down and started looping repetitively. A staccato of images, the axe being raised. I screamed in my dream and as the images repeated themselves faster and faster to an infinitely blurry freeze-frame the fear suddenly faded and I knew I had to let go. I knew I had to give in and embrace death. It was an almost joyful moment of peace and as I was losing my head the vision suddenly changed and I saw a bird of prey rising up in slow motion. It was a swift spreading its wings, gliding towards me, staring me in the eyes. I felt blissful and I heard and saw the words around me:

I AM HORUS!

…I heard the front door of the house slam shut and woke up. I was sweating. I knew immediately that my sister had just left the house with the cardboard box sheltering the swift bird to bring him to the animal lady. The last sound of the church bells faded and I sat in bed feeling nothing but awe. Horus? Why Horus?

Sceptical sidenote:

I have been researching about "Akephalos" in the "Stele of Jeu" text from the PGM V some weeks ago and what it has to do with Osiris (but no mention of Horus). And yes there is a sub-species of Apus Apus called "Apus Horus" but I didn't read much into it until after this experience because it seemed irrelevant at that point for my research about helping the poor bird. Was it all my fever boiled brain wildly associating things as the clock tolled six? (although i didn't know it was six until after the dream)

Synchronicities:

reading later about Apus Horus revealed that it doesn't build its own nest but dwells in nests built by bee-eaters!
reading later about the Osiris myth revealed that after Set killed and dismembered Osiris and after Osiris came back to life with the help of Isis to create their son Horus he went to the underworld forever. But he appears in this world in different forms. One of them is a young bull.
the night after this experience I had fever with crazy dreams too. But nothing even close to the visions before. The next morning I felt very good but I suddenly strained my neck and was suffering a lot of pain in the back of my neck for two days.
I later learned by coincidence that the day I had this vision was the 23rd of July, which marks this year's heliacal rise of Sirius. In Ancient Egypt this event marked the start of a new 360 days long year after five epigomenal days of celebrations of the birth of Nut's children Osiris, Set, Horus the Elder, Isis and Nephthys.

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.

The Serpent Seal

2017-05-01T18:00:00+02:00

Last August I went on a business trip together with my friend and colleague J. and in the first evening we were invited to a dinner buffet by our customer where we enjoyed great seafood and white wine.

Back at the studio apartment where we stayed J. went straight to bed but I felt slightly tipsy from the wine and spent another hour playing around with my portable audio synthesizer before going to bed. My small room had just a queen size bed, a small table and a closet and there was this weird little door next to the table that led to a dark and empty but quite large storage space behind the wall. Somehow it made me a bit anxious and I put the table in front of the door and went to sleep.

I had an amazingly vivid dream in the morning. I was chased by a group of Zombies in full American football armour and I was with a friend trying to figure out what to do. There was a barbecue grill and we decided to throw lance sized meat skewers at the attackers. Suddenly my friend transformed into a zombie too and started throwing skewers at me. The football zombies learned from him and also attacked me with the skewers I had thrown at them. At this point my dream became lucid and I was able to stop the time in a Matrix like effect and the skewers stopped in front of me in mid-air.

The scenery changed to a dark solemn room made of stone, kind of like in a medieval castle and in a dramatic light and soundscape I was presented a large iron shield with an emblem on it that was alive and moved. It was a large red serpent ablaze in flames, rising up in a double S shape staring at me with bright red eyes. The only feeling I had at this moment was that this was of incredibly great importance.

(sketch i drew right after waking up)

Suddenly I was in my hometown on the street and I could see the football zombies again, still far away but heading towards me. There were also three yound midget girls in dresses with creepy faces that came towards me. I freaked out when I realized I no longer had control over this dream and I wanted to wake up.

I jumped up in bed, happy that it had just been a bad dream and while details from it were already rapidly fading from my memory I saw the serpent shield before my inner eye, clear and bright. I got up from bed and stumbled out into the hallway heading towards the bathroom. I walked by J.'s door that was open a crack and I could catch a glimpse of her foot sticking out of her bed. I opened the door to the bathroom and went inside. I locked the door and when I turned back around towards the toilet it was gone.

Instead there was a staircase leading downwards. I was shocked and slowly aproached the stairs that went in a right angle spiralling down in a square like manner. I slowly walked down the steps and it was quite dark. I waited until my eyes adapted to the twilight and I saw a large hallway of some kind of abandoned floor in the building. There were a lot of spiderwebs and everything covered under thick layers of dust and rubble. I saw a stray cat or rat rushing by. Then I noticed a strange movement in the shadow and saw what looked like reflection of light in a pair of dark eyes. I freaked out and realized that nothing of this made any sense and that I was still stuck in a dream. I really wanted to wake up.

I opened my eyes and I was still lying in bed. But I couldn't move. I was completely paralyzed. Panic. I could see myself lie in bed unable to move.

But I was still down there on this creepy staircase in the dark and the eyes were gone. Shit. Panic. I ran upstairs back to the light into the bathroom. I jumped through the hallway into my bedroom.

I woke up so quickly I almost fell out of bed. My heart was racing. Am I awake? I was able to move normally. I sat on the edge of my bed trying to make any sense of what had just happened and I was very thirsty. I got up and went out into the hallway heading towards the bathroom. I walked by J.'s door that was open a crack and I could catch a glimpse of her foot sticking out of her bed. Oh my god I thought. Total déjà-vu. I opened the door to the bathroom and everything seemed normal. I sat down on the toilet and drank a lot of water from the tap and when I closed ny eyes I could see the shield with the fiery serpent seal.

Sceptical sidenote:

there was wine involved and the strange small door and the liminal space behind probably influenced my dream. Our apartment was across two floors with steep stairs leading from the kitchen and livingroom up to another floor with bath and bedrooms. Also I think I remember I saw a dead lizard or snake on the side of the road the day before. That doesn't explain why the serpent in my dream was burning though and why it was so out of context of the rest of my dream. But it was a dream, so I guess anything is possible. But the sleep paralysis and dream in a dream with out of body sensation couln't have been just from the wine. Otherwise I definetly would want to buy some bottles of that.