SUBLUNAR SPACE - mark fisher

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". ↩

Hypogearchy

2026-10-15T22:00:00+02:00

Part four 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.

Rule from Beneath

Let me begin with a confession: it has been here the whole time. It sits in the tags of every part of this series since the first one went online in the summer of 2025. The last part ended on the words "From Underneath." I have been writing toward this word for over a year without once saying it out loud. So here it is, let me vibrate it like a formula: Hypogearchy.

Three Greek pieces. ὑπό, hypo, beneath. γῆ, ge, the earth. And ἀρχή, arche, which means rule, but also beginning and first principle¹. Rule from beneath the earth. Or, read the other way round: the principle that begins underneath.

The word has two much older and much more famous siblings: Hierarchy is sacred rule, from ἱερός, hieros, holy: rule from above, the vertical order of priests, emperors, and the Archons² we met in part one. Anarchy is well known: the absence of arche, no rule at all. Hypogearchy is a third option the Greek language allows and nobody seems to have bothered to claim: rule with a source that is below.

Remember the loaded gun from part one. Mark Fisher, unable to revive the tainted signifier communism and unwilling to define his project by what it opposed, wrote:

At the moment, our desire is nameless – but it is real. [...] At some point in this process, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it.²⁰

Of course I am not claiming to have found the name for Fisher. What was produced in the Others Discord in the spring of 2021, half as a joke, was #acid-chthomunism, an unpronunceable clunky word made even clunkier. It's been a placeholder since, waiting to be substituted, thrice tainted, because what I eventually meant to say it was not a political party, not a program, not even an -ism. It has always been more of a feeling, a vibe, and primarily a vector, a direction. The same one we carried back up from the plague years in part three: inward, downward, toward the ground, the soil, the dead. But more than that the name needed to describe an action. The arche was the last puzzle piece.

And since this is the part of the dungeon crawl where all the overthinking gets done before the actual digging starts, let me say plainly what the #acid-chthomunism Discord channel and this whole series has been trying to do from the beginning.

It takes Fisher's Acid Communism and breaks both of its words wide open. Acid, taken not just at its implied psychedelic value, but the chemical one: beyond the flash that opens the mind it is the agent that eats through whatever it touches. Communism, widened to include the more-than-human world that lives below the floor of every human commons and beyond our doors of perception. This essay supplies the theory underneath both. The next one will supply the praxis.

Solar Empire

Before we can dig we have to know what we are digging through. So let's go back to the top layer, where part two left us standing: an Artificial Intelligence promising to become the universal redeemer, accelerationism as official ideology, billionaires pointing rockets at Mars, and Nick Land's Outside pulling everything toward a machinic singularity, an "invasion from the future"³.

Look at the direction of each of these. Up. Out. Away. Every escape on offer in the new Middle Ages points at the sky. Not only Them. Even, as we will see, the ones that call themselves ours.

It's not a coincidence, it's a default. The most dangerous kind of rule, because nobody experiences it as ruling. Let's take the spade and find out how deep it goes.

Shovel your way out of the shit and into the truth.

Just beneath the topsoil we hit solutionism: the conviction that every problem, the climate catastrophe included, has a technical fix waiting to be engineered by somebody with a sufficiently large budget and a sufficiently large view. Donna Haraway, the biologist turned feminist philosopher of science who will keep turning up the deeper we go, gave that view its name almost four decades ago: the "god trick of seeing everything from nowhere"⁴. She meant the posture of a science that pretends to have no body and no location.

It is the view from above, the divine sun, the one place in the old cosmos that sees everything and is too bright to look at. Solutionism is the god trick with a budget. Its hero is Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, which is to say from the sun, and carried it down to us. Note that even the rebel moves along the same vertical axis. The testosterone-driven version of this hero worship, which the media theorist Alexander Galloway calls "Brometheanism"⁵, is the house religion of Silicon Valley.

Capital itself runs on solar logic. Georges Bataille, the dissident surrealist who devoted much of the 1940s developing an economics of waste, understood this clearly.:

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.²¹

Wealth, in this picture, is collected sunlight that has to go somewhere. Growth is the only sanctioned way of spending it. And when growth stagnates, the surplus is burnt catastrophically: in wars, in crypto mines, in the compulsive destruction Jodi Dean diagnosed in part two. This is also, I think, why Capitalist Realism felt so metaphysical to Fisher and to all of us who read him. Capital did not invent its cosmology, it's the new form of the same old borrowed sun.

One layer further down lies the Enlightenment. The name says everything. Reason as a light that comes from above and dispels what lies below: the dark ages, the obscure, the superstitious, the underground. Ironically it was Copernicus who moved the sun to the centre of physics in the very same era in which cosmology, philosophy and politics tried to keep it firmly at the top.

Below that, Christian empire. Constantine's Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, whose festival on the 25th of December became Christmas⁶. The halo, a little private sun around every sanctified head. The Sun King at Versailles, around whom the court and the state revolved by decree. Hierarchy, sacred rule, is not merely a metaphor for this arrangement. It is this arrangement, and the ladder only works in one direction: light descends, obedience ascends.

One more layer, and we are in PGM territory, among friends. Plotinus, in the third century, the father of what we now call Neoplatonism, systematised what had been floating around for six hundred years into the most elegant cosmology the West has ever produced and never since been able to shake off: the One at the top, overflowing, Nous and Soul spilling out of it, and at the very bottom, as the dimmest trickle of the light, crude matter⁷. Emanation. Everything that exists is a diluted ray of what sits above it.

And this is where I have to say we rather than they. The entire Western magical tradition inherited the ladder whole: "As above, so below" puts the above first. The correspondences descend from the planets to the metals, the herbs and the organs. The grades of every initiatory order ascend. I have attempted to climb that ladder myself, for years, and on this very blog: the routines in theurgy, the Helleno-Kemetic theoria, the planetary prayers, the Orphic hymns to Helios himself. We own this tradition.

The same goes for this series. The Gnostic frame of parts one and two, the Pleroma above the Kenoma, was an ascent story. And Fisher's desire, the one "that comes from the future", is ahead and above, never below.

Finally, the bedrock of the Western tradition: Plato. Book six of the Republic, where Socrates declines to say what the Good is and offers instead its "offspring": the sun, giving things both their visibility and their growth, as the Good gives things both their intelligibility and their being⁸. Book seven, the infamous cave, in which the prisoners' entire liberation consists of turning around and walking up and out into the light. That whole story only works if the sun is the point. Every escape narrative we touched in this section is a retelling of this one. This is the oldest layer of the default, and it rules our thinking so deeply that we never question it.

Here the spade should hit rock.

It doesn't. Push it in under Plato's sun and it goes through. Because beneath the sun-cosmology is whatever it was built on top of and had to deny in order to stand firmly: dirt, the dead, the microbial, the slow. Reza Negarestani, the Iranian philosopher who appeared in the CCRU footnote of part one, wrote Cyclonopedia, a work of theory-horror disguised as a found manuscript, in which the Middle East is a sentient body and oil its black blood. I wrote about its inorganic demons on this blog back in 2017. His earth is not a solid foundation but a body riddled with holes, a ( )hole complex through which oil, dust and far older agencies move at their own pace⁹. The chthonic ones of Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, the tentacular, the composting, the ones who were never going to be allowed on the ladder¹⁰. And the biologists, who have quietly concluded that the individual the whole ladder was built to elevate does not exist: every animal is a holobiont, a commune of host and microbes, and "we have never been individuals"¹¹.

Nobody put them there. They were there before anyone declared the sun to be the Good. I promised at the end of part three that we would find out we were never the only ones breathing down here. We weren't. We never are.

One last thing before we climb further down the hole, because the word "earth" is radioactive in 2026. A cosmology in which the whole precedes and rules the parts cannot imagine rule from beneath. It can only ever imagine a better sun. That includes the nativist, blood-and-soil version that Bruno Latour, whose Down to Earth we leaned on in part two, filed under his "Local" attractor¹²: the retreat behind fence and fatherland, the mirror image of the globalist's flight. The nationalist wants to own the ground, the posture of a sovereign standing on top of it. Hypogearchy is the opposite of that: it is to be ruled by a ground that does not belong to you and never will.

Soil ≠ territory. We will come back to that.

Dust to Dust

Now, I don't want to build the alternative out of books. We already have something way better: we lived it, collectively, for about a year or two, give or take, and then we worked very hard to forget. So let's start from there...

In part three I recorded five things without naming what they had in common. When the parts stopped, the whole stopped: the engine of capitalism, the one Fisher had described as seamlessly occupying the horizon of the thinkable, halted because people stayed home. That's exactly what part two meant by calling capitalism an egregore. Time melted: the clock is a solar instrument, and the moments underneath it, it turned out, have their own duration. Interiority, stillness, slowing down were not a retreat from reality but a descent into where reality is made. Death, perishing, our own finitude, became a part of the household again. And the "spectre of a world which could be free" rose from internal desires, from beneath.

The solar order, where the whole precedes the parts, cannot think a single one of these. So it does what it always does with what it cannot hold: it forgets and carries on. Antimemetic warfare.

The only defense against this trap is an idea, an ontology that is its exact inverse. There is one I want to pull on. It was written, of all things, as a "footnote to Plato":

Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician who turned to metaphysics late in life, proposed in the 1920s that there are no fixed substances at all, and no eternal forms sitting above the world. There are only moments: each one arises, takes up everything that came before it, becomes something briefly, and perishes into what comes next¹³. The whole is made by the parts, each moment, and then becomes a part of the next whole. His formula for this is:

The many become one, and are increased by one.¹³

Whitehead famously called the whole of European philosophy "a series of footnotes to Plato"¹⁴, and he meant it as inheritance. Read from down here it is an inversion. Where Plato's forms are above the world with the world participating in them. Whitehead's moments are below everything and everything is made of them. Even his God is not a ruler at the top of a ladder but, in his words, "the fellow-sufferer who understands", luring instead of commanding, whose own nature is formed by the world as it happens¹⁵.

I am not claiming that a lockdown proves a metaphysics, but it certainly provided time to read long and boring philosophy texts. And this one in specific stuck with me ever since. In part because it describes a reality in which those five things are not anomalies but the normal case.

Take the old funeral formula and read it as ontology: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What perishes is not lost. It is taken up into whatever forms next. Whitehead calls this, without any irony, objective immortality¹⁶. And slowing down is simply how you let a moment complete instead of shoving it into the next one. This is where the potential for renewal gets its footing: in the perishing and re-forming of what is already here.

I am aware how easily this turns into mysticism, so let me tether it three times before we go any further:

First, to physics. The plasma physicist Timothy Eastman has spent a career arguing that quantum events are best understood exactly as Whitehead's moments, that context is constitutive instead of mere background, and that the knot we keep failing to untie in the foundations of physics is substance thinking itself¹⁷.

Second, to biology. We met Haraway at the bottom of the dig. Here she gives the experience its flesh. "Nothing makes itself", she writes; the word for how things actually come about is sympoiesis, making-with¹⁰. Compost, for her, is both a metaphor and a chore. The holobiont we also met down there¹¹ is Whitehead's moment in biology: a self that is an assembly of its parts, remade with every breath. Whitehead has a word for an assembly that holds together over time because its members keep taking each other up: a society¹⁸.

We have a word for it too. In part two I called capitalism an egregore, a thing maintained by the repeated behaviour of mere humans. That is a society in Whitehead's sense. So is the human doing the maintaining: a we of cells, microbes and perished moments that feel their way into an I every morning, and could stop. It is the same mechanism at every scale, and it only ever runs in one direction. Capital is sustained by people, people by their cells, cells by their moments. Nothing above makes anything below. The ladder was upside down the whole time.

Third, to dust, and to the horror register this series has carried since the first mention of the CCRU. Negarestani's dust is the tellurian agent that gets in everywhere. His oil is perished life returning as power. His earth is complicit with what rots inside it⁹. Dust to dust, in his hands, is a threat: perishing is not the end of agency but its redistribution. The dead are not gone, they are very, very busy.

I have a jar of earth from my grandparents' graves on a shelf, collected during Parentalia in 2019 with a Saturn coin on top to serve as a portal. I have always thought of the coin as the technology and the dirt as the address. Now I understand it was actually the other way round!

What would a magic look like that thinks this way rather than the solar way? That is a question for after this series, and I am only going to open the cave entrance. But I think you'll dig the gist of it: enough with emanations descending from the planets, how about occasions arising from the ground. Not illumination, but adjustment to the dark. More attention to the dead, the dust, the microbial and the slow, as the places where the whole is actually being remade. Slowing down so the present can complete. Let's do more listening for what bubbles up, because in a world made of moments the new seeps in from below. An egregore is not changed from above. It changes when its hosts do something it did not expect.

In a sense the pandemic was an involuntary rehearsal of exactly this orientation. It was viral cells that started it after all, reminding us of who's actually running things around here.

Soil Horizons

All of which brings us back, as the red thread demands, to Mark Fisher. I guess I owe him four answers.

Acid. In part one I described Fisher's acid as shorthand for any experience that dissolves the barriers imposed by commodified individualism¹⁹. He meant the psychedelic, even when he insisted he did not need the drug. I want to take the word at its pH value instead. Acid is the agent in the soil, in the gut, in the rain that takes things apart and returns them to circulation. It works slowly, by contact, through corrosion. A "trip" may undo the self for an afternoon, but by Monday its boundaries are back in place. The earth offers no such escape. It has been working on everything, including us, all along.

Communism. Fisher wanted "a new kind of collective agent, a new possibility of speaking in the first person plural"²⁰. "The many become one, and are increased by one" is a first person plural, written into the structure of every moment. The holobiont is always a we before it is ever an egregoric I. Communism expanded downward is the solidarity of parts forming wholes, and it includes everything we found squirming at the bottom of the dig.

The future. "Our desire is for the future", Fisher wrote, "and it comes from the future." But read the next sentence again: "it is for us to construct this future, even as – at another level – it is already constructing us."²⁰ That second clause is pure process. He was this close...

Haunting. My complaint in part one was that Acid Communism, for all its invocation of the weird, was oddly unhaunted, able to reach the numinous only through the psychedelic lens. I can now say why: a materialism of substances has no room for anything it cannot point at, so the strange has to be smuggled in as experience, which means a trip. A process ontology has no such problem. Every moment is made of what it takes up from others, and the others are not all visible, not all human, and not all alive: the perished, the microbial, the ancient ones moving through the holes in the earth, the societies above that we feed, and whatever else is participating in the assembly that calls itself I. A self built this way is haunted by construction. The numinous is the company you have already been keeping.

Fisher kept communism under protest and said the real name would appear and we would recognise it. I'm throwing hypogearchy on the table: the principle that whatever is worth building is grown from beneath, by everyone and everything already down there, and that the way to it is a descent, not an ascent.

That is the ontology. All fancy words. An ontology does not tell you what to do on a Tuesday.

Stay tuned for the final part, in which we get our hands dirty: the earthly, emancipatory rites of magic promised in the very first paragraphs of this series.

Wiktionary: ἀρχή. The same root gives us archon, the ruler, and archaic, that which was there first. ↩
The Gnostic Archons, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Nick Land (1993). Machinic Desire, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 338. Publisher Link ↩
Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-599. ↩
Galloway, Alexander R. "Brometheanism." b2o: boundary 2 online, June 2017. Link ↩
Wikipedia: Sol Invictus ↩
Plotinus, Enneads V.1 and V.2, on the One and on the procession of all things from it. The MacKenna translation is in the public domain. ↩
Plato, Republic, 507b-509c (the analogy of the sun) and 514a-520a (the allegory of the cave). ↩
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. re.press, 2008. Publisher Link ↩↩
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. ↩↩
Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber. "A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals." The Quarterly Review of Biology 87.4 (2012): 325-341. ↩↩
Latour, Bruno. Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Publisher Link ↩
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition, eds. Griffin and Sherburne. Free Press, 1978, p. 21. ↩↩
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Process and Reality, p. 39. ↩
Process and Reality, Part V, Chapter II, p. 351: God's consequent nature as formed by the world, and "the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands". ↩
Process and Reality, p. xiii and passim: a perished occasion lives on as a component of every occasion that takes it up. ↩
Eastman, Timothy E. Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context. Lexington Books, 2020. ↩
Process and Reality, p. 34: a nexus is any set of occasions bound together by taking each other up; a society is a nexus that keeps handing a shared character down to its newest members. A stone is a society. So is a person. So is an egregore. So is a god. ↩
Mark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) ↩
Mark Fisher, For now, our desire is nameless, The European, May 20th 2014, Web Archive ↩↩↩
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption. Zone Books, 1988, p. 21. ↩

Outside Attractor

2025-08-09T13:00:00+02:00

Part two 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.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. Here we take the red thread further into uncharted territory.

Post Empire

Speculative Acid Communist Praxis centers around interventions of how to counteract and overcome a certain flavour of capitalism. The Capitalist Realism¹ Fisher describes operates on one core idea: neoliberalism², the hyperstition that "market dynamics" will naturally produce the best outcomes for society.

On an economic level it operates by minimizing state intervention and maximizing competition as the most effective way to achieve growth. On the individual level it frames each person as an autonomous "entrepreneur of the self", responsible for continuously optimizing their skills, choices, and market value with minimal external support.

Sounds familiar? Yes, but it's old news. The operating system of capitalism got recently upgraded. Let's take the red thread and enter new territory: Technofeudalism.

In this new era, but also already during the pandemic the state has re-emerged as an active economic agent instead of remaining a mere passive regulator and occasional crisis manager: fiscal stimuli, targeted bailouts, and trade tariffs, tools considered heretical to neoliberalism have suddenly become acceptable practice again. Of course not to the benefit of the citizen but to consolidate the capital accumulation of the ruling class.

As Yanis Varoufakis argues³, markets flooded with state money didn’t revive production but inflated asset prices and fueled speculative behavior. What began in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was only intensified by the pandemic-era bailouts: cheap money got sucked up by tech corporations and gave rise to what he calls "cloud capital", where value is no longer generated through production but extracted through digital rent, data capture, and control of internet infrastructure. Under the guise of crisis management the state empowered a new technofeudal class to entrench its sovereignty.³

No politicians saw the damage cloud capital would inflict upon democratic politics. In the same way that capitalism came about against the will of everyone, including the kings and bishops as well as the peasants, the rise of the cloudalists happened out of sight and behind the back of the vast majority, including the most powerful of historical agents.³

What has already been predicted by left theorists like McKenzie Wark⁴ or Jodi Dean⁵ before the pandemic is that the new capitalism does not progresses through linear innovation anymore, nor does it operate on the once holy principle of globalized free trade. Instead it decentralizes, both spatially and temporally: it now operates in localized zones of influence and online platforms and it metabolizes remnants of older systems into its own flesh.

In her latest work "Capital's Grave"⁶ Jodi Dean describes this as temporal montage: capitalism stitches archaic feudal residues like vassalage and dependency into digital infrastructures that masquerade as cutting-edge yet reintroduce the old choreography of servitude: remote work comes paired with digital surveillance, drivers use their own vehicles to serve opaque platforms, tenants are ruled by algorithmic landlords, e‑commerce now reaches deep into meatspace and has normalized the exploitative gig economy.⁶

In contrast to Fisher's overarching Archonic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism¹, Varoufakis and Dean argue that the once so globalized market is in the process of dissolving into a patchwork of micro-fiefdoms, platforms, and private sovereigns without any democratic oversight, that not only commodify user data but shape sociality itself. Individual agreements (Terms & Services, NDAs) have replaced law, loyalty has replaced rights, and obedience is rewarded with awards and colorful badges.³ ⁶

Beneath this structural transformation is what Dean calls the psychic order, a disciplinary regime that doesn’t just extract labor, but emotional allegiance. In this new era individuals are cast as "subjects supposed to care", constantly managing visibility, compliance, and self-optimization in systems that offer no care in return.⁶

The service sector bleeds into servants bleeds into serfs trapped for life in a life they didn’t choose. When the whims and consumption choices of a class of lords drive the visible economy—influencers, tech giants, strange billionaires—it registers affectively, in the feeling of hierarchy, inequality, and entrapment.⁶

Outside Attractor

It looks like we have entered the new Middle Ages, plague and robber barons included. Now, where's the church?

Ah, of course: Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the latest hyperstitional promise to the new serfdom: an omnipresent "agent" that offers "assistance" with simulated care and polite obedience, always ready to help but never accountable.

Behind the facade of usefulness it extracts the most private behavioral patterns and harvests "training data" from all of our cultural artifacts without any accountability for violating intellectual property rights or in fact any kind of rights. And it's just the beginning. The end goal is AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.⁷

The word Catholic comes from Greek καθολικός⁸ which means "general" or "universal" (from κατά "by / according to" + ὅλος "whole"). Technofeudal Catholicism is training itself on our desires while smoothing over the violence of its own instrumental logic.

Ancient medieval times were dominated by "superstition", late capitalism by "hyperstition", the new Middle Ages see the widespread phenomenon of "hypostition", a term not coined but picked up and described best by the Centre for Experimental Ontology (CEO)⁹ as the process by which an accepted fact or "reality‐vector" is deliberately undermined or recast as fiction.

Whereas hyperstition moves from fiction toward being treated as real, hypostition pushes from fact toward doubt or untruth. In practice, a hypostitional agent identifies a well‐established claim and undermines it by introducing a competing narrative that doesn't naturally belong. Through the naturally occurring human experience of receding time, ambiguous evidence, and the absence of firsthand perspective, hypostition invites people to question or reject what was once taken for granted, eroding consensus without the burden of proving an alternative truth.⁹

It is the legitimate mode of operation in science, where models are questioned and replaced by more accurate ones. But outside of that context Hypostition is a tool of ideological manipulation. Agents knowingly deploy misleading hints, using cultural anxieties and the fuzziness of memory, conspiratorial framing, or selective "evidence" to spread uncertainties and cast doubt on shared realities: from denying historical atrocities to discrediting science (vaccines, masking, climate change).⁹

Neofeudal era hypostiton accelerates the corrosion of any notion of the Real faster than ever before. Fisher himself had an eerily prescient insight in one of his blog posts from two decades ago:

In conditions of third (and fourth-order) simulacra, the giddy vertigo of hyperreality banalizes a coolly hallucinogenic ambience, absorbing all reality into simulation. Fiction is everywhere - and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category. [...] The ludic becomes the ludicrous.¹²

Reality is rapidly dissolving into make-believe fiction all around us to such an extent that the "fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality"¹ which Fisher saw as moments charged with revolutionary possibility are now drowned out in the constant noise of high-speed hypostitional spectacle.

The hyper-normalization of political post-truth anomalies has shocked even veteran anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour, who assigned it in his pre-pandemic 2018 essay Down to Earth¹⁰ its very own category he dubbed "Out-of-this-World".

In opposition to the classical concepts of political polarization between the "Local" attractor of the conservative right and the "Global" attractor of the progressive left this attractor is dominated by cynicism, lack of political vision, performativity, lack of trust, and a push away from the world that one inhabits.¹⁰

In a sense this can be understood as a new vector away from the Inside towards an Outside. Not from Kenoma to Pleroma, but a different kind: the new Outside is inherently irrational, alien, and destructive, which is completely in line with Jodi Dean's observation on the logic of Technofeudalism:

While destruction has always accompanied capitalist production—destruction of lives, communities, and the environment—it increasingly operates as a compulsion rather than a side effect: investors raid and dismantle functioning firms; tech start-ups aim at demolishing entire sectors; cryptocurrency-mining operations consume enormous amounts of energy while making nothing at all, cryptocurrency being the ultimate anti-commodity.⁶

In this climate, the spectre of Fascism has re-taken center stage during Trump's second term and opened the Overton window for neoreactionary politics worldwide.

We are now witnessing what Slavoj Žižek calls "Soft Fascism"¹¹: not overt barbarism, but a conservative revolution that sustains neufeudal capital through cosplaying a strong state apparatus that cloaks authoritarian control in hypostition and cultural nostalgia.

As in the past, fascism tends to bring with it both ideological and technological innovation. Its new bundle includes two projected axes: Artificial Intelligence and a large-scale adoption of Accelerationism.

For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic runaway is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion, or techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by definitive, system-dynamic necessity).¹³

This quote comes from the intellectual originator of contemporary accelerationism, CCRU's Nick Land. He developed an obsession with the term "Outside" early on, using it to refer to any intelligence beyond the sphere of the human.

Between an incursion from the Outside, and a process of emergence, there is no real difference. [...] Capitalism is — beyond all serious question — an alien invasion¹⁴

The notion of the Outside mutated from a pleromatic realm of potentialities to a more Lovecraftian version of inorganic machinic space, capitalism itself, reaching in to pull us towards an AI singularity.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space.¹⁵

The "Outside" has become Latour's "Out-of-this-World" attractor on steroids, a vector towards a high-speed form of machinic Accelerationist Catholic Neofeudalism, dominated by soft fascist versions of control and spectacle and dissolving all remains of rational consensus reality while going full throttle towards the looming climate apocalypse.

Refutation of All Heresies

The above may sound like yet another installment in the genre of speculative doom, but the intention here is not to mythologize collapse or aestheticize despair into some type of Gnostic cosmology.

Despite these new seemingly irrational apocalyptic conditions I am confident we won't need a revealer to save us.

This is not a prophecy. Rather, it is an attempt to map the contours of a system that is already operational: the rituals of platform obedience, the feudalization of labor, the sacralization of AI, and the mindset of the ruling class. If hyperstition and hypostition thrive on ambiguity and fiction, the aim here is to make its mechanisms visible.

I believe that we can treat capitalism as what it really is and always has been: not an alien, cosmic force but an artificial egregore run and maintained by mere humans, powerful but not at all omnipotent, with flaws, holes, and predictable patterns. Instead of treating it like a demiurgic force, we need to understand it as a set of human behaviours, human cultural activity, and a result of a certain mode of human thought.

If that holds true we can find blind spots and faults in the human made systems around us. We can attempt to alter our epistemological models, create new modes of relating to each other and shift our own perception. We will probably not be able to stop the climate catastrophe, but if we rethink and adapt our strategies toward more haunted and numinous modes of endurance and resistance, we will persevere in these new Middle Ages.

Whereas hope and fear are superstitious (although they may have some hyperstitional effects), confidence is essentially hyperstitional: it immediately increases the capacity to act, the capacity to act increases confidence, and so on – a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuous spiral.¹⁶

Being aware of the Outside Attractor means we know where to look for an antidote: tracing the opposite vector inward and downward.

...continue with the next part, in which we will descend down into the dark abyss we have managed to avoid so far: the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Neoliberalism ↩
Varoufakis, Yanis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? Penguin Books, 2023 Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wark, McKenzie. Capital is dead: Is this something worse?. Verso books, 2021. Publisher Link ↩
Jodi Dean, Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?, Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12, 2020 ↩
Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso Books, 2025. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩↩↩
Justin Hendrix, Should AGI Really Be the Goal of Artificial Intelligence Research?, Tech Policy Press, March 9, 2025 ↩
Wiktionary: catholic ↩
Graham Freestone, Notes on the Concept of Hypostition, Centre for Experimental Ontology, January 6, 2020 ↩↩↩
Latour, Bruno. Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Publisher Link ↩↩
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on 'soft' fascism, AI & the effects of shamelessness in public life, OxfordUnion, YouTube ↩
Mark Fisher, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, k-punk, June 13, 2004 ↩
Nick Land (2013). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (2016). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (1993). Machinic Desire, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 338. Publisher Link ↩
Mark Fisher, Abandon hope (summer is coming), k-punk, May 12, 2015 ↩

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 ↩